by Bryan Magee
I was in the house by myself, and I knew that the others would not be back for a long time, so – thrilling with excitement and terror – I went into the front room and started trying to play the piano. I found it impossibly difficult. I could get no music out of it at all, only sounds. I knew there would be no more chances, so I had a go at the zither instead – when I had seen Auntie play it, I had been struck by how simple it looked. I searched on it for the tune she had played, ‘Rainbow Valley’, and discovered it with an ease that amazed me. It excited me, too, and I played it over and over, first to get it up to speed and then at different volumes – loudly, softly, and then as loud as I possibly … Choi-oinggg-gggg!! A string broke. My heart stopped. My blood froze. Auntie’s words came back to me, and I heard her voice inside my head as if she were there. There could be no doubt about it. As soon as she knew what I had done she would throw me out, and I would never see the Toombses again.
My only thought now was to delay her finding out for as long as possible. The next person to play the zither would see what had happened, but the instrument was not played often, so it might be weeks before it was discovered. I fiddled the broken string into being as unnoticeable as I could make it, and put the instrument back in as unobtrusive a position in the room as I could find.
Ever since then I have had inner knowledge of what it is like to have a guilty secret. For several weeks I lived in permanent terror, almost unable to think of anything else. It dominated my life. Every time anyone went into the front room my throat tightened as if I were being strangled.
The person who discovered the broken string in the end was Kath. She asked me secretly if I had done it, and I said I had – by now she and I were heart-to-heart friends, and in any case she would know it had to be me. ‘Better not tell our mam,’ she said ominously. Several more weeks went by. Then, at last, Auntie saw it. ‘Ooh look, our Kath, one of the strings’s broke. Damn nuisance. We’ll have to try and get a new one. What a bother.’ Then nothing more was said. My relief was indescribable, not least because I was so incredulous. When I finally got used to the situation, and realised that I was not going to be destroyed by it, I came to feel that if that incident did not take me away from the Toombses, nothing was going to.
My closeness to Kath educated me as much as my school did. Not the least part of it had to do with sex – which no older person had ever talked to me about. She told me that the girls in the factory spent most of their time discussing boys, and sex, in very frank terms. She passed on to me, as being the only person she could talk to about it, the juiciest things they said. So I became especially well informed about such things, or so I imagined. I asked her all the secret questions that I had about sex, and she answered them to the best of her ability. I also confided to her my extravagant but secret ambitions about what I was going to do when I grew up, and years later she told me that these changed all the time but were always ‘very grand’.
My life with the Toombses fitted in happily with my life outside. I roamed around Harborough with gangs of cockney kids who would call to collect me at the back gate. We extended our wanderings further afield, as we became overfamiliar with our old pursuits, and more adventurous. In the end we were playing in woods and fields, building huts, and climbing trees. Some of the more enterprising boys began to catch rabbits, though I never did. We were becoming, without realising it, countrified. We even started gathering wild flowers, and taking them back to our homes to keep in water, a pursuit which in Hoxton would have been considered cissy. One of our hunting grounds for these was Dingley Dell, which contained standing pools of wild violets. We still, as we always had, fought over territory; and there was once a pitched battle between two gangs of boys over who was to have the violets.
A few days after this battle my parents came up from London to visit me, and the moment they arrived they jumped on me with inquisitorial harshness. I had, they said, just caused them the most appalling embarrassment. They had given a lift to a couple from Hoxton who also wanted to visit their son in Market Harborough, a couple they scarcely knew. No sooner had the car entered the town than a group of boys appeared ahead of them, playing in the street, and the couple shouted: ‘There he is! That’s him! Stop the car!’ My father pulled over, and his passengers called out to their son. The boy came across to the car with the most enormous black eye, a fruity one.
‘Good God!’ said his mother. ‘How on earth did you get that?’
‘Somebody hit me.’
‘Who?’
‘A boy called Bryan Magee.’
Paralysed silence inside the car. My parents, they told me, did not know where to look. The other parents could not think what to say. When my father eventually set them down, he promised to give me a giant-sized telling-off – which he was now doing.
‘You must have copped him a real fourpenny one to give him a black eye like that.’
‘Yes,’ I said with satisfaction. ‘I did.’
‘Why?’
‘’E pinched me violets.’
And so he had. After I had gone to all the trouble to gather a really big pile, and was cradling them in my arms, he tried to hijack them by hitting me in the face as hard as he could while my hands were full, grabbing the flowers out of my arms, and running away with them. I was after him like a greyhound, and caught him.
Another way in which we evacuees adapted our old ways to our new circumstances was by taking up competitive games that had not been available to us in London. The one I became most devoted to was conkers. A conker is a horse chestnut, and what you did was thread one on a piece of string and hold it dangling while another boy swung his against it, like a ball on a demolition crane, and tried to smash it. It was then your turn to try to smash his. Each tried to destroy the other’s. If you succeeded first, you added to the number yours had broken not only his but also the number his had broken too; so if yours was a twoer and his a fourer, yours became a sevener. We reached amazing figures. Boys not only went to obsessional lengths to find conkers that were unusually compact and hard, they specially looked for misshapen ones that had something like a cutting edge that could split an opponent’s conker; and they secretly baked these to make them harder. (This was illegal.) We often went climbing trees for conkers, and knew where the best ones were. Even if you weren’t in need of any at the moment, a good one was a valuable commodity that could be traded for something else.
My special friend for a good deal of this time was a boy called George Hall, not from Hoxton but from New Cross, though he had somehow arrived at the Edmund Halley. I had never heard of New Cross, and George told me that it was in south London, which I had been conditioned to regard as a place not to be taken seriously. To this day, whenever I see or hear New Cross mentioned there is a microsecond during which the thought of George Hall crosses my mind. I do not know if everyone’s mind works in this way, but there are scores, if not hundreds, of instances in which the connotations of a word have never freed themselves entirely from the circumstances in which I first encountered it; and a large number of these derive from this period of my life. Whenever I hear the word ‘tawdry’ I think of my father with me at Madame Butterfly; and the word ‘proceed’ brings back the sight and sound of Mr Burgess saying ‘p-p-proceed’.
George was a tough boy with a long, pointed, unusually determined nose and chin. His school cap (we were not required to wear them, but a lot of us did) was invariably askew, because when he put it on he picked it up by the peak and swung it up on to his head with a sideways sweep of the arm and then left it where it landed, so the peak was always sticking out to one side. He told me his father was a heavy for hire who worked the south London dog tracks, and he entertained me with funny stories about his old man’s adventures. We all, in our different ways, boasted about our fathers, and much of what we said was either made up or exaggerated: no doubt George was the same, but his basic story about what his father did rang true, and George certainly knew a great deal about it all. My father had taken
me to greyhound racing tracks innumerable times, and had pointed out to me people like George’s father, and explained to me what they did, and the tricks the criminal fraternity got up to; so I was already familiar in quite a bit of detail with the setting of George’s stories, and much in them fitted what I knew. I envied him for having these stories; and this led me to invent colourful ones of my own, about my own father, to tell to him in exchange. Although my father could do no wrong in my eyes, and I loved him and my grandfather with unconditional love, I had always felt that working in a shop was an un-macho thing for them to be doing – though I did not regard them personally as unmanly – so I now fitted them out with a few semi-criminal adventures.
I missed George when his family took him back to London, and I never heard of him again. None of us were letter-writers at that age, not even the girls, and none of us had telephones; so when childhood friends were separated there was no more contact. George’s place was taken for the remainder of my period in Market Harborough by a boy called Stanley, who lived in Coventry Road, not far from the school. He explained to me that he was Jewish Orthodox and therefore had to be billeted with an Orthodox Jewish family, but at first no one had known how to find one in Market Harborough, and his seemed to be the only one. I asked him what was different about being Jewish Orthodox, and he tried to explain their ways of eating and drinking; but he did not really understand them himself, and got in such a muddle that I never understood.
The war had a great effect on anti-Semitism in Britain. Before it, I had been used, as a normal thing, to hearing people make anti-Semitic remarks, even though there was no trace of this in my family. But once we were at war with the Nazis it became taboo – as someone put it, Hitler gave anti-Semitism a bad name. So whereas in Hoxton there had been a certain amount of anti-Semitism all around, the only time I heard an anti-Semitic-sounding remark in Market Harborough was from Auntie, who was the soul of kindness, and had probably never met a Jew. There was a visiting funfair in one of the fields, and I was there with some other boys when the man running one of the stalls cheated me over my change and then brushed all my protests aside. As a child I was powerless to do anything about it. When I got home I told Auntie, and she said: ‘He jewed you.’ Each time she told the story, the word came up again. ‘Did you hear, our Kath? Bryan got jewed at the fair … Yes, they jewed him out of sixpence’ … and so on. I had never heard the expression, but somehow knew it was not right. This must have been due to my father’s teaching, plus perhaps wartime propaganda beginning to have its effect. The massive public indictment of the Nazis that went on throughout the war concerning their treatment of Jews had the incidental effect of driving anti-Semitism very largely, though never entirely, underground in Britain.
In fact the war changed everything, and children adapted to it as if war conditions were normal – which for them they soon were: the blackout (a total absence of any light at all showing out of doors during the hours of darkness, not even chinks of light from windows), rationing of nearly all the basic goods of life, shortages of nearly everything else, queues, regulations, the fact that there were almost no young men around, so that you only ever saw middle-aged and old ones not in uniform. Because social activity was so focused on what everyone called ‘the war effort’, most other things went by the board, and were either underprovided for or ceased to exist. No services seemed to work as they should, and none could be relied on. If you complained, the reply was: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ You were expected to put up with things no matter how badly they turned out; and on the whole people did: if a train departed two hours late the passengers made a joke of it, and if it then went to a destination different from its advertised one they coped with the consequences of that too with a lot of jokey grumbling. Such things were expected to happen during a war, and it was considered unpatriotic to complain. As government slowly took over responsibility for everything, the inefficiency and muddle that are natural to bureaucracy became a normal part of everyday life.
On the other hand there grew up, alongside that, a community of purpose such as has never existed in Britain before or since. We were all in the same boat, each one doing his bit. ‘Doing your bit’ became a dominating idea in daily life, and it affected everyone’s behaviour. These sentiments grew more powerful as the war proceeded, but they were already strong enough by the end of 1940 to be obvious. When the government appealed to the population to hand over all the metal it could for the manufacture of armaments, people voluntarily gave up the railings in front of their houses, the fences from their back gardens, and all the pots and pans they could do without. I was not surprised that other families should give up theirs, but I did not expect us to give up ours. Kettles and pots that had not been used for years were winkled out of remote corners and piled up in the back room, and even stranger metal objects made their way down from the attic. When Auntie and Kath could think of nothing further they could spare they took up hammers and, to my astonishment, started bashing holes and dents in all the objects. When I asked why they were doing this they said it was so that no unofficial person would steal them and take them home to use himself. This was too good an opportunity to miss, so I grabbed a hammer and laid into the pots and pans with ecstasy.
The peak occasions of our lives were those when Winston Churchill spoke to us on the wireless. Everyone – family, neighbours, teachers at school, other children – would talk excitedly in anticipation beforehand, so there was a great buzz and build-up. When the moment came, the whole family would be seated round the radio, waiting. I remember staring at the set as that voice tromboned out of it. The language was direct and clear: even I understood every word. But the articulation was peculiar to this man: a bit of snarl, a bit of bark, a lot of bray, sometimes a rising inflection as if delivering orders under protest, sometimes a melancholic, throwaway fall – I became familiar with its musical patterns. The message was always the same: defiance. We were not going to give in, ever, in any circumstances: we were going to win this war, whatever it cost. In each speech there would be a sentence or phrase that no one afterwards forgot. But for days people would be discussing the whole speech animatedly, quoting extensively and approvingly, while phrases from it crept into other conversations. Churchill was visibly taking people over, galvanising them, putting backbone into them. And that was how I too reacted. I regarded this man as speaking for me. No other speeches I was ever to hear matched these in the significance they had for me at the time they were made.
I think I was in London, visiting my parents, when the Blitz began – there is often a problem with memory of knowing whether something was itself a beginning, or whether it was just new to me. I was there for part of it, and I think I was there when it started. It evoked surprise and yet not surprise: surprise because of the shock of its happening, and not surprise because it had been expected for a year. I found it hugely exciting: the whistling and screaming of the bombs as they came down, the sound of each one growing louder and louder as it fell, culminating in the satisfying explosion; the fact that, loud as they were, you could not see them falling but only hear them; the weirdly earth-shifting crunch of the anti-aircraft guns; the lordly searchlights sweeping the sky, occasionally picking up a plane and clinging to it, chasing it as it veered and ducked, and suddenly being joined by another searchlight that crossed it at the point where the plane was; the elephantine barrage balloons appearing and disappearing in their beams. I would nip out of doors to look at it all whenever I got the chance, with my mother chasing after me to shove me back in. I took it for granted that the bombs would not hit me. I knew I was untouchable. Later in the war, as I grew older and more self-aware, I became terrified during bombing raids. But at the age of ten I found them exhilarating, as if each night was Bonfire Night on an unsurpassable scale.
On the first couple of nights I was asleep in bed when the air-raid warning sounded. My parents dug me out of sleep and bundled me downstairs to the kitchen, where we bedded down. On subseq
uent evenings they tried to delay my going to bed in case there should be an air raid. In fact, once the Blitz began, London was bombed every night for several months; but at the time people did not know that this was going to happen, so to begin with they looked on it as a separate question each night. If the raid was late in coming, people would start to think there was not going to be one. I would become sleepy and fractious, and complain about being kept out of bed. This drew bitterly ironic comments from my parents to the effect that whenever they had wanted me to go to bed I had wanted to stay up, but now that they wanted me to stay up I was insisting on going to bed.
My father arranged for us to spend our nights in a beer cellar in one of the local pubs, a few hundred yards away. It stood by the bridge over the Regent’s Canal, at the bottom of Southgate Road, and was called the Prince of Wales. (Its sign was a head of the boy-king Edward VI, who, as a matter of fact, was never Prince of Wales.) Over the coming years I got to know the publican, Percy Buckhurst, well. He had a full moustache and a deep, carrying voice, and was fully in charge of whatever was going on – every inch the host: hail-fellow-well-met, firm, but genuinely friendly. He liked people, but had no illusions about them. Years later I discovered that his pub was one of two beside the canal in which recruiting was done every evening for jobs that might not be legal. I do not think he felt a need to break any laws himself – apart from the licensing laws, naturally – but he had a good idea what the people in his pub were up to. In this he resembled my father, who was an appreciative observer of life, and knew every trick of the trade, but was honest himself. The two were good friends.