by Bryan Magee
Now I did in fact go on to do all these things. And the disconcerting truth is that from the time I read Fame is the Spur I saw this as the life path I was going to follow. I do not mean by this that the book became a point of reference for decisions or actions: I never thought of it in connection with any decision I made – in fact, after my teens I scarcely thought of it at all. But it caused me when I read it to form a much more specific conception than I had had before of the path I was going to follow in life. I am entirely certain that I did not do anything significant – did not marry my wife, or write my books – because I had read Fame is the Spur: that would be an absurd proposition in the light of the way things actually turned out. Also, before I became an MP, I did a great many things that Hamer Shawcross did not do – I served in the army, went to Oxford and Yale, trained in industry, worked as a music and theatre critic, earned my living in broadcasting. So the similarities are selective. Even so, the fact remains that I did see myself, in the very broadest of terms, as following a course in life that had been crystallised in my mind by the reading of Fame is the Spur. It must have corresponded to something deep inside me; and, that being so, I might well have followed such a course in any case. It could be that the only difference made by reading the book is that it put into my hands a partial sketch map of my future journey when without it I would have made the same journey without maps. Yet even that is something for a book to have done.
Because Jennings was my special friend I let him in on the secret that I was going to save the world. At first he believed me, and was awestricken. For a brief time he prepared himself to act as my St Peter, the leader of my apostles, my first pope. But then suddenly – he must have talked about it to someone else – he began to jeer at me. He addressed me in terms of derision as the greatest man who had ever lived. I felt betrayed. Here was the only person to whom I had fully divulged my secret, and this was how he reacted. He even made jokes about it in front of other people, and this cut me to the quick, because I knew that no one else would understand. In fact it was this, not anything he said to me directly, that brought to an end the friendship between us.
It was only about a year after this that Jennings left the school altogether, at the age of sixteen. All the boys at Christ’s Hospital sat the General School Certificate at fifteen or sixteen, usually in eight subjects; and on the basis of their performance, plus whatever judgement the school had formed of their abilities up to that point, an assessment was made whether they had a chance of getting in to Oxford or Cambridge. If the answer was no, they were asked to leave, to make room for a new boy. If the answer was yes, they stayed on till they were eighteen and took one of the college entrance examinations. In practice there were several things wrong with the way this system worked. One is that few, if any, of us took Higher Certificate. Another, related, is that it was rare for any university other than Oxford or Cambridge to be considered, which meant that large numbers of boys who could have got in to good universities left school at sixteen and received no higher education at all. More drastic still is that the school was a defective judge of ability: some of the ablest boys in my time were asked to leave before they were eighteen, including the two who were to become the most famous, Colin Davis and Bernard Levin. I was later to get to know Ian Trethowan: he had been at the school before me, and in due course became Director-General of the BBC, but he too had been made to leave early. Many such people bore lasting resentment against the school, which they saw as having misjudged them and handicapped them seriously in life. Perhaps Jennings did too; I do not know. I was never in the same class as him, so I have no idea what his academic work was like. It may have been poor. But he was intelligent, and quick, and had a marvellous feeling for language. The school let him down, I fear, as it did many. Because he and I had drifted apart before he left I never heard from him again. But he had provided me with almost daily stimulus and delight during a couple of the most formative years of my life.
Despite the unrealism of the fantasies I had shared with Jennings, the facts that I had passed puberty and was beginning to think meant that I was taking the earliest steps into becoming an adult. That whole period of my life constituted a turning point: I was beginning to find my feet and become an autonomous person. Perhaps not surprisingly, a contribution was made by the fact that the war had also passed its turning point. Everyone began to realise that the outcome had been decided in Russia, where the two biggest armies that the world had ever seen had been locked in combat on a one-thousand-mile front, the whole thing on such a scale as to make our battles in the West look like skirmishes. After the Battle of Stalingrad it was borne in on us that the tide of the war had now irrevocably turned, and that from now on the Germans were going to be on the defensive. There were bound to be years more of fighting, and millions more of dead, but the outcome could no longer be doubted. The difference this made to the psychology of the people of Britain was incalculable. Until then they had been defiant, defensive, grim, closed in, determined to endure whatever fate might have in store for them. Now they began to relax and open up, to become more sure of themselves, to look outward, then optimistically forward, and to think in terms of the future, a future in which everything would be getting better. They began to enjoy life – being on the winning side in a just war was exalting. Inevitably, I was caught up in this. I began to feel more confident about the world I was growing up into, and to look outwards into it more, and to start thinking excitedly about the future.
What we were all looking forward to immediately was the creation of a Second Front, so that the Russians would be carrying a less disproportionate share of the burden, and the Germans would have to fight a war on two fronts. A gigantic build-up was taking place in Britain for the invasion of western Europe, chiefly by the Americans but with England as their indispensable launching pad. Well over a million US servicemen were stationed in Britain – a fact which by itself made an all-pervading difference to the social life of the country. Some of this difference can be inferred from what were said to be the three main complaints against American soldiers: ‘They’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here.’
Being less than twenty miles from the south coast, Christ’s Hospital had Americans encamped all round it. Some visited the school – Jennings and I once guided one round. A heavy American military vehicle, having lost its way, once came clanking loudly up the Avenue, the officer in charge of it standing up and looking wonderingly around at this environment from outer space; but the headmaster, hearing the noise, came running out of his house screaming and waving his arms like a windmill, until the bewildered man and his vehicle went scuttling back to wherever they had come from. Some boys formed out-of-bounds friendships in the military camps, from which they would return at dead of night with armfuls of contraband, usually alcohol and cigarettes. One was given a loaded gun by some drunken Canadian soldiers (or so he said – he may have stolen it from them). There were British troops too, and their supremo, Field Marshal Montgomery, decided once to visit the school without notice. Since he was the biggest national hero after Churchill, a hasty welcome was scrabbled together for him, and the boys were summoned out of their classrooms to Big School so that he could talk to us. And there he was, up there on the dais, Monty, wearing his famous battle dress and his equally famous beret, telling us that it was our job above all to become good leaders. Leadership, he said, was the most important contribution that any individual could make to society, especially in time of war. Do you know, he asked us, to what our troops in North Africa owed all their wonderful victories? Brilliant leadership. That was the secret. They had had brilliant leadership. I could not quite believe that I was hearing this, because he had been the leader of our troops in North Africa. He was talking in a way that affronted everything his audience believed in, so much so that I thought at first I must be misunderstanding him. But everyone in Big School was feeling the same way, masters as well as boys. Having thought of him as a supreme hero we sat there looking at him wit
h stony-faced disapproval. The report of his visit that appeared later in the school magazine, written by a master, consisted of four lines.
Then at last came the day we had all been waiting for – D-Day, as we had been calling it. I was emerging from the chapel by myself (perhaps I had been at a singing practice) when I saw Corks scampering excitedly towards me across the empty lawns, his clothes flapping outwards, his tie flying over one shoulder, his face shining like a sun.
‘It’s happened!’ he shouted as he approached me. ‘It’s happened!’
‘What’s happened?’
‘D-Day. We’ve invaded France. Normandy.’
He was beside himself.
Should we be so pleased? I wondered. It was going to be a bloodbath.
I said something to this effect.
He bridled with surprise, and then with dismissive impatience. ‘Well, yes, it will be a bloodbath. Of course. But it’s got to happen if we’re going to win the war. And we’ve certainly got to win the war. So we can only be pleased.’ Off he scampered to tell everybody, still in a state of radiant excitement, leaving me standing there thinking, yes, of course, he must be right.
From then on everybody followed the news greedily, and talked about it every day. The aeroplane activity over our heads was like nothing there had been before: sometimes the whole sky was dark with gigantic bombers flying in close formation. In addition to this our home-front war continued on its way – later that same month, June 1944, the school itself was bombed. The Germans were using unmanned flying bombs, correctly called V-1s but referred to by everyone as doodlebugs. They made a distinctive chugging noise until the engine cut out, and then they began their long descent in silence until the explosion. When you heard one coming, the sound naturally got louder and louder until it was right over your head, and if it cut out then you were safe, because it took a long time to come down, still moving forward; but if it cut out while it was on its way towards you, you froze. The silence then was terrible. When you heard the explosion, however near and ear-splitting, you would be flooded with a sense of relief. I was so frightened of the V-1s that this relief was overwhelming. I would then feel guilty towards whoever the bombs had fallen on.
I do not think any of us heard the approach of the doodlebug that fell on the school, because it arrived at five o’clock in the morning. We were woken by an almighty explosion that brought glass from the dormitory windows shattering on to the floor all round our beds. The bomb had landed a couple of hundred yards from my house, beside the garages. Of course, if it had landed on our block it would have killed up to a hundred of us, but in fact it killed no one. It did, however, destroy all the masters’ cars, and when that became known it released a suffusion of Schadenfreude throughout the school. However, it also put the masters in a filthy temper for the rest of term.
By late 1944 the war had entered its endgame. Victory could not be far off – bound to come in 1945. Everyone’s thoughts started turning towards the new life that was about to open up in front of us. I could not imagine what it would be like to live in a country that was not at war, did not have bombing, blackout, rationing and the rest. I tried unsuccessfully to picture it. In an American magazine I read that it was not healthy for me to eat meat every day, so I should do my best to have at least one day a week on which I did not eat meat. The magazine fell to my lap, my gaze drifting out of the window. I was lost in wonderment. For five years there had been only one day a week on which I did eat meat, and then not much of it. Could there be people in the world who ate meat every day, and as much as they wanted? I found it unimaginable.
In fact the long process of returning to normality began before the war ended, and lasted for some years after it. For instance, the authorities were anxious to spread demobilisation over as much time as possible to forestall the mass unemployment that had followed the First World War, so they started releasing various categories of people from the armed forces while the fighting was still on, people who they could be fairly sure were not going to be needed to fight again. They started with the older men who had skilled jobs waiting for them to go back to. Masters who had fought in the war, and whom I had never met – I may have sighted one or two when they were visiting the school on leave – came back to us, still living in their uniforms until they could get enough civilian clothes together (clothes were tightly rationed). The first one I was taught by was Arthur Rider, who took us for French. He dealt with us quite differently from other masters. Though maintaining his authority with ease, he talked to us as if we were his equals. He was a colonel, and I assumed this must be how he was used to talking to his men. I suppose the point was that he treated us as if we were grown-ups, not children. No teacher had talked to me like this before. I was coming up to fifteen at the time, and I found it thrilling to be addressed as an adult.
Just before the war ended, something occurred that was traumatic not only at the time but for ever afterwards. Advancing American troops, now sweeping through Germany itself, liberated a concentration camp at Buchenwald, near Weimar. It was the first of the extermination camps to be opened, and the revelation of what was inside simply flabbergasted the world: the prisoners like walking skeletons; the mountains of corpses; a whole organisation for applying the techniques of mass production to mass murder. People could not take it in: nothing like it had been known before (or, if it had, in the Soviet Union, the reality of it was to remain concealed from most people for a few more years yet). For me, as for the majority of people, the first I saw of it was on newsreels in the cinemas. Never to this day have I been so traumatised by anything I have seen. I could not look at the screen for most of the time. I felt faint, and sick. We had heard rumours of this whispered in our wartime propaganda, but reading scraps in newspapers was one thing, seeing larger-than-life moving pictures of it another.
The revelations of Buchenwald were followed almost immediately by those of Belsen, which was run by sadists who whipped and tortured their victims before killing them (and then made a lampshade out of the skin of one of them). The horror of it was overwhelming, and lay not just in the revelation of the facts but in the uncovering of an abyss. Here were human beings below anything one would have imagined possible, whether in the degradations they could suffer or in those they could inflict. Here was wickedness beyond believing, evil beyond understanding. At the time the experience was like being scalded, scorched, burnt inside oneself beyond endurance; and deep down something was being injured, permanently damaged, permanently altered. For many years I could not bear to talk about it, or read about it, or look again at any of those pictures – I was terrified of anything to do with it touching my mind. It had gone beyond what I could bear. Because I avoided it as much as I could, it was some decades before I realised that my personal experience of all this was widely shared.
The liberation of the concentration camps affected everyone’s attitude to the war. People forget this now, but the truth about those camps was not known until the war’s last few weeks. It brought home to us, in a way nothing else could possibly have done, the fact that we had been fighting a regime of unimaginable evil. A tidal wave of moral justification swept over us and lifted us up. Everything we had done – everything we had suffered all these years, and everything we had inflicted on others – was now justified. And the end, when it came only a couple of weeks later, brought an apocalyptic sense of triumph, the triumph of Good over Evil, an attitude all the more exhilarating because it was new.
When the news of victory came, everyone within the widest school community made automatically for the centre, so that we could be together. Then we all trooped in to our daily evening chapel – to find that the hymn, scheduled weeks or months beforehand, began:
The strife is o’er, the battle done,
Now is the victor’s triumph won.
I have never heard such singing. It was not so much singing as roaring from a thousand throats. It was animal-like, primitive, and it made us all delirious. Whether we then did it str
aight away or the following evening I do not remember, but all the boys swarmed up on to Sharpenhurst Hill, the highest point in our surroundings, and set fire to a condemned hayrick, producing an instant bonfire the size of a house. We made improvised guys of the Nazi leaders and burnt them as spectacularly as we could, and then completed hand-to-hand circles round the mighty blaze and sang our hearts out.
The feeling we had of a new age dawning was carried forward, for me at least, by the general election that followed immediately. In spite of the fact that we were still at war with Japan, once Germany had been defeated Britain’s wartime coalition government dissolved itself. The truth is that, as far as we were concerned, our war was pretty well over: we left it to the Americans to deal with Japan. So now came my first proper general election, the first one I was old enough to understand and care about.
Although I wanted the Labour Party to win, I was too ignorant to have clearly formulated expectations. People in general seemed to think it self-evident that the Conservatives would win because their leader, Winston Churchill, was idolised by most of the population. I shared in the general adulation, but did not want a Conservative government. And this turned out to be the view of the people as a whole. Not only did the Labour Party win an overall majority for the first time in history, it won by a landslide. The voters themselves were astounded. I was cock-a-hoop. Bernard Levin endangered his life by climbing to the top of Big School and attaching a red flag to its clock tower, thus inducing a life-threatening rage in the headmaster, who was only just restrained by his colleagues from expelling Levin on the spot. I was taken aback by the reaction of most of the adults round me. It was not so much that they did not want a Labour victory as that they were terrified by it. They thought it was going to bring a full-blooded socialist revolution in Britain. I, who actually wanted full-blooded socialism, knew perfectly well that it would mean no such thing; indeed that there would be no real socialism but only a few steps in that direction. Even so, when I expressed my pleasure at this modest prospect people got furious with me. Erskine-Tulloch said to other boys in our year that my attitude was insupportable, and that if I went on any longer about Labour’s victory he was going to beat me up. Rarely have I been so shocked. The thought that in my beloved England someone I knew, an actual friend, would beat me up because of his political opinions was beyond my comprehension. Given the nature of the war we had just been fighting it should not have been, and it was a much-needed revelation.