Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  Being at Arnos Grove was at its most interesting at the beginning of the experience, when everything was new. The two nearest shopping centres were Southgate and Palmers Green, both of them a journey away. These were typical suburban shopping centres, but I had never made use of such things before, and the novelty was stimulating. To Palmers Green we went on a bus, or, if we wanted to save ourselves a long walk, two buses. We preferred it to Southgate: there was a greater variety of shops, including a bookshop; two cinemas (one calling itself the Palmadium) as against Southgate’s one; and, not least, a theatre. All London’s theatres (except for the Windmill, which afterwards proclaimed ‘We never closed!’) shut down at the outbreak of war, and this one had been the first to reopen. It was small, called The Intimate Theatre, and had been founded in the mid-thirties by a very young John Clements, now a famous actor. He directed weekly repertory there, appearing in many of the plays himself. We went as a family quite often, though our primary allegiance remained with West End theatre. This had now got going again, bomb-damaged and blacked out – one or two of the theatres had been totally destroyed – but with a new spirit that was sparkling and alive with the defiant vitality of wartime. To get to the West End from our flat, all we needed to do was walk across the road and get on a tube that took us to Piccadilly Circus in twenty-five minutes – which was about the same time as it took us to get to Palmers Green.

  We went to the West End for other things too: on Sundays at leisure, as we had in the past, but also, now that there were two earners in the family, on shopping expeditions. One of these remains a treasured memory. My father felt he could at last afford a complete recording of a symphony or a concerto. Most of the symphonies he wanted occupied six discs, the concertos four or five. Long public consideration was given to what it should be. The choice came down to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony or Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. But still he could not make up his mind. So evenly attractive were they for him that he decided to buy whichever the rest of us preferred. So, with much prior discussion and a sense of family occasion, we went together to Imhof’s in New Oxford Street and spent an afternoon crowded together into one of the tiny booths listening to different recordings of both works. In the end we took a vote. The winner was Tchaikovsky, in the performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. We carried it home in triumph – metaphorically, you might say, brandishing it over our heads – and I got to know that symphony note for note before I heard most other symphonies at all. However, my father’s appetite for the Rachmaninov had been intolerably whetted, and before long he bought some of that too, though only the last movement, and in a cheaper recording: so I got to know that movement by heart before hearing any of the rest of the concerto.

  He was now acquiring so many records that storing them became a problem. He got a cabinet-maker in Hoxton to make a piece of furniture to his specification, with drawers just the right size for records, and designed to stand in a particular corner of our living room. There would have been no space for such a thing in our old home. Our new flat was preferable in every way, except for where it was. It possessed not only an indoor lavatory but a bathroom, and a modern kitchen. There were four other rooms, two of them quite sizeable: one of those was our living room and the other my parents’ bedroom. There was a middling-sized but still comfortable room for Joan, and a smallish one for me. The flat was in a corner of the building, on the second floor, and protruded in such a way that it had windows on three sides. This gave it a lot of light. It lacked amenities which today might be taken for granted – there was no central heating, and no lift – but in those days few people had either of these, and it did not occur to us that we should have them. In fact we thought of ourselves as well housed – except that my mother did not regard a flat, any flat, as a proper home. She thought of us as camping, albeit comfortably, after having been bombed out. In her view, only when we had a whole house, like Peggy and my grandparents, or the Toombses, would we have a real home.

  My grandparents having moved too, to Southgate, it was a journey of only a single stop on the tube for us to visit both them and Peggy. Family visits became a ritual Sunday activity. During the week my father and grandfather commuted by tube and bus to the family’s shop in Hoxton; and all of us went to the theatre by tube; so the tube was our lifeline. I thought of us as travelling on it by day to wherever our lives were, and coming back on it at night to sleep in a dormitory called Arnos Grove.

  My father, though he still worked in the shop, was no longer able to go there every day. He had been conscripted into ARP – Air Raid Precautions – by the branch called Heavy Rescue. Its job was to dig people out of the rubble of bombed buildings. In addition to the digging, he drove one of the trucks that carried away the injured and the dead, as well as the rubble. Carrying wounded in these circumstances called for driving with sensitive care for the injured in the middle of an air raid, usually over rubble, which was sometimes burning. The rescuers had found that if they waited until an air raid finished before they started doing their work, the death and suffering among the victims were appallingly increased, so they started at once, with the air raid going on around them. It meant digging in the dark, or in only such light as the raid itself provided. This rendered all the more grisly some of the things they uncovered – severed limbs, legless corpses, an eyeball, a tongue. My father worked at this throughout the Blitz, and the fact that his contribution to the war was humanitarian mattered a great deal to him, but he found it horrifying – not enough to make him ill, but enough to give him nightmares. He found it almost impossible to talk about.

  Because the work was so stressful, and nearly all of it at night, the rescuers were not on duty permanently but worked in shifts – twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off. This enabled my father to be in the shop in Hoxton every other day. This had been going on for months while my mother and I had been in Market Harborough, but he had said nothing about it in his letters.

  When I came back to London in the early summer of 1941 the nightly raids had stopped, but no one could be sure of that at the time, so rescue workers, like pilots, had to stay at their posts. On my father’s invitation I sometimes dropped in on him at his ARP depot during the day. And I sometimes went with him to Hoxton, which was now in a pitiful state. A third of it had been physically destroyed. East London in general got the worst of the bombing, because the chief target was the docks, and the docks were in east London. Much of the slum housing of which it largely consisted was so flimsy that a building did not need a direct hit to be destroyed: it could all too easily be swept away by blast. Thus a well-placed bomb would demolish a whole street. In Hoxton several streets had simply disappeared. There were bomb sites everywhere, on which only the most rough-and-ready beginnings had been made to clear up. There were far fewer people around than before the war: the children had been evacuated, the young men called into the armed forces, and as many of the rest as could do so had left. A lot had been killed. Everyone knew people who had been killed – my family, being shopkeepers, knew more than most. For years afterwards I would still be hearing: ‘Don’t you remember So-and-So? He was killed in an air raid.’ The victim that I knew best was my grandfather’s favourite sister, known to us all as Aunt Rose – an almost picture-book sweet old lady, especially good with children.

  Because of all these things, Hoxton was something of a ghost town. But new figures were beginning to appear in it. The head villains of the razor gang that had lived in Hoxton before 1936 were coming out of prison. For years in the early thirties they had terrorised the racecourses of southern England, until their activities became a national scandal and they were lured into the notorious Battle of Brighton and swept off to gaol. Penal servitude ‘with hard labour’ meant what it said in those days, and the men, still young, came back fitter than they had ever been, hardened in muscle and mind, re-educated in crime by experience of prison, and impatient to resume their activities. The armed forces were determined not to have them,
so for reasons that were never stated they were not called up – though my father thought that some of them would have made good Special Operations commandos. Officialdom handed Hoxton back to them. They resumed most of their former activities, but without the racecourse terror. Rationing and shortages opened new worlds of possibility. The serious operators moved into the black market, and organised large-scale robberies, chiefly from the docks, but also elsewhere. Once they had secured control of both supply and the market their thefts were tailor-made to meet demand. They became rich beyond anything they would have dreamt of before the war. When rationing ended, some of them moved into legitimate business, usually out of concern for their families, especially their growing-up children.

  At first, before they became too rich to want our clothes, they came to our shop for their made-to-measure suits, as they had before. I met some of them, and found them unusually interesting: they seemed to think differently from other people, more independently. Being impressed by this, I was impressed all the more by the respect they showed to my father and grandfather, whom they addressed as ‘guv’, the accepted term of deference. This was because the shop had become known among them for not having allowed the children of local men in prison to go in rags. The respect this induced was real, and had nothing to do with smart suits. And it had a happy side-effect for us, in that it meant we were never burgled.

  The leader of the gang was now out too: Jimmy Spinks, known to everyone as Spinky. This was when I got to know him. I would lay a bet that he never in his life heard of Graham Greene, or knew that while he had been in prison a novel prompted by the Battle of Brighton had been published with the title Brighton Rock, and a leading character, Pinkie, with a version of his name. All this was unknown to me too, of course. In any case, Spinky’s actual character could not have been more different from Pinkie’s. He was the champion bare-knuckle fighter of the age, and the strongest-looking man I have ever seen: of only average height, but wide and hugely muscular. One of his colleagues described him as ‘built like a brick shit-house’. This exceptional body was always elegantly suited, and there was something soft and easy about his walk, like a cat’s, so that you could see just by looking at him that he could move very fast. His eyes surveyed you in a detached way, gleaming with low cunning. But the most striking thing about him, more than any of these, was the skin on his face. No one who saw it forgot it. It contained more razor scars than you would have believed could fit on to one face. It captured the story of pre-war Hoxton as no chronicle inscribed in any other medium could have done.

  I have no more to relate about Spinky than I have told in Clouds of Glory. I do not remember anything he said: people paid attention to his every word, not because he was a conversationalist but because what he said mattered. Even so, I do remember perceiving that – although he was back with us once more, richer and more powerful than ever – he was a figure of the past. His world was no more. And I think he knew it. But there was nowhere else for him to be, or perhaps, more importantly, nothing else that he could be.

  For me, too, Hoxton had lost its meaning. We no longer lived there. None of my friends were there, and I could find nothing to do. I was too young to help in the shop. No customer wanted to be waited on by an eleven-year-old, even an eleven-year-old who knew what to do. So I just hung around chatting to my father and grandfather when they were not busy, and shrank out of notice when they were. Eventually I became so bored that I asked my father if I could stop going. When he asked why, and I said it was because I was bored, he reacted as if stung. ‘It’s a good thing not all of us are bored,’ he said. ‘It’s not clever to say you’re bored.’ It had hurt him, I think, because I could opt out and he could not. Deep down he had always found being in the shop boring, but felt trapped in it and had to make the best of it. What hurt me was the implication that I was adopting a superior attitude, giving myself airs, when no such thought was in my mind. Even so, I stopped going to the shop, and this meant that I stopped going to Hoxton.

  Instead I hung around in Palmers Green and Southgate, waiting to be told where I was to go next. My parents would go off to their jobs in the morning leaving me in bed. Once I was up, the first thing I would do, usually, was play some records. Then I would read the paper, the News Chronicle. I got to know Palmers Green for the first time, and went to the cinema there a lot in the afternoons. In the evenings my father taught me poker and chess, and took me to some memorable concerts. And the time passed.

  When, at last, the news came about what I was to do, it took a form that was as unexpected as the prospect had been of going to America.

  Perhaps surprisingly, some of the best public schools in Britain are in London itself – Westminster, St Paul’s, Harrow – and there are several others that are very good, including Mill Hill, Dulwich, Highgate and Merchant Taylors’. At most of these the London County Council maintained a small number of assisted places for boys from state schools who, it was thought, might benefit. A list of them arrived in the post for my father, with a letter inviting him to apply for me to go to one of them. Harrow, I believe, was not on the list, but all the others I have mentioned were, and several more. Typically of him, he showed the list to me and said: ‘Which of these would you like to go to?’ Typically of me, I had not heard of any of them, except for one. Typically of any eleven-year-old who has to choose a name from a list on which there is only one name that he recognises, I chose the one I recognised.

  In the streets of central London I had occasionally seen a boy wearing a dark blue coat from his throat to his ankles that was open at the front from the hips down, so that, visible beneath it, was a pair of grey knee breeches with silver buttons at the knee, and below those a pair of bright yellow stockings disappearing into the shoes. It was an amazing sight, I thought. The first time I saw it I asked what it was, and was told it was a boy from a school called Christ’s Hospital, where they wore this uniform, because of which the school was known as the Bluecoat School, and boys like this as bluecoat boys. Years later my family swore that when I was told this I said: ‘I’m going to go there.’ I find it not at all difficult to believe this, but I do not remember it. Anyway, I went there.

  In 1941 Christ’s Hospital was no longer in London, but it had been a conspicuous feature of the City of London’s life for three and a half centuries, and still retained extensive property there. It also preserved a special relationship with the City fathers, which is why it was part of the London County Council’s assisted places scheme. Its beginnings were unique. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s the question arose of what to do with the buildings. Some of these were enormous, for instance Greyfriars monastery in the City of London. At that time, when most adults died at quite a young age, a number of children without families lived like animals on the streets of London (as they do today in some other parts of the world). This became a social scandal, if only because of the child crime and prostitution to which it gave rise. The Mayor and the Bishop of London persuaded the King to approve a plan to sweep these children off the streets and into the now empty Greyfriars monastery, there to house, feed, clothe and educate them. The scheme went ahead, and the new school began in 1552 in vast, already old buildings, financed by City money. By this time Henry VIII had died, so it was his son, Edward VI, who signed the royal charter that officially founded the school in 1553. Although it was always thought of, rightly, as a school, it was launched with a full complement not only of teachers but also of beadles, caterers, nurses, a surgeon, and so on and so forth – a total institution, grand and imposing. It took in girls as well as boys, and gave them the best education by the lights of the day. When the children left they went out into widely differing social circumstances, depending on their sex and abilities. Among the boys the scholars went on to Oxford and Cambridge, still helped by the school, while many of the otherwise clever ones, being well educated, and already living in the City, got jobs there, again helped by the school and its benefactors. Quite a number became
rich, and helped the school in their turn. The less able were apprenticed to skilled trades. With the girls the future depended more on marriage, but on this side of marriage the abler ones became teachers of some kind, usually governesses, and the others companions or housekeepers.

  Many of the more ancient public schools began as charities, but only Christ’s Hospital remained true to the spirit of its original purpose. Because the others were such good schools the socially privileged wanted to send their children to them, and this had the paradoxical effect of turning charity schools into bastions of privilege. But with Christ’s Hospital ‘need’ remained the talisman word: unlike the others, it never took in the children of the well-to-do. Clearing the streets of a London teeming with abandoned children was a job that could be carried out only once, but the school continued to take in children in need of care and education, and became a godsend to families in the middle and even upper classes who had become impoverished. It gave their children first-rate schooling which they could not have afforded to pay for. Once established, it took in such children from all over the country, and from English families abroad. At each stage of its development it attracted the involvement of remarkable people. When most of the buildings were burnt down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, the reconstruction was supervised by Wren and Hawksmoor. At one point Wren, Pepys and Newton were governors together. Pepys persuaded King Charles II to found a new school-within-the-school, the Royal Mathematical School, to train navigators for his navy; and Newton wrote a textbook for it. More than a hundred years after this, Coleridge and Charles Lamb were boys at the school together (and were lifelong friends as a result). Soon after them came Leigh Hunt, who joined their circle. All three of these wrote about the school, and all spoke of its remarkable classlessness. As Leigh Hunt said: ‘More boys are to be found in it, who issue from a greater variety of ranks, than in any other school in the kingdom … the boys themselves (at least it was so in my time) had no sort of feeling of the difference of one another’s ranks out of doors.’