Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  II

  About the time he bought the Buddha, my father took up Pelmanism, joined the Freemasons and attempted, unsuccessfully, to record in short stories his experiences in the First World War. My mother had just prohibited him from playing golf, a game of which he was very fond. He was a natural games player; had been in the Tank Corps rugby team at the end of the war, and played tennis well. My mother had also enjoyed tennis in her youth, but she never played in my lifetime and disliked any activities that kept them apart.

  That same summer there was an occasion when my mother ran round the room after my father, dodging tables and chairs until she caught him and tickled him so unmercifully that they both fell to the ground, rolling about and laughing. Such physical exuberance was rare. For over forty years my parents were obsessively devoted to each other. They almost never spent a night apart. Yet sexual matters were unmentionable and also, my mother inferred, disgusting and unclean. She was very fastidious, and would actually shiver at any account of drunkenness or coarse behaviour. Perversely she had a number of such stories to tell, because her family had contained some notable drinkers. This was hard on my father, who liked a convivial pint. She often subtly discomfited him.

  My father won a scholarship to the local grammar school, became head boy and wanted to be a doctor, but his father, the factory worker, thought it safer to put him in a bank. Even as a very small child I knew my mother was superior – though it is hard to define precisely how I knew. My father was the more intelligent of the two and outwardly took all the important decisions. He was very patient. I cannot remember him making a critical or unkind remark about anybody. As a young bank clerk he had taught in a non-Conformist Sunday School and though he never went to church after the First World War, I think of him as a morally good man.

  My mother had taken on his job as a bank cashier as war service. When my father returned after the war and they met for the first time, she was suffering from a great loss. In 1914 she had become engaged to the dashing, well-to-do son of a mill owner. I know he was handsome because, years later, she showed me his photograph, taken that last summer of peace on the beach at Scarborough. He never came back, of course; though by an irony of fate he died after the war was over, on the North-West Frontier of India. In her sorrow my mother came to rely on the serious dependable young tank officer, two years her junior. It was a long time before they married, and I doubt if my father ever took the place in her heart of her first love. But she trusted him and he always did what she wanted.

  Their relationship withstood some harsh and bitter times. They were unlucky in that, meeting under the receding shadow of a terrible war, another even more devastating conflict dismembered their middle years, and in between they had the anxieties of bringing up a chronically sick child. That first winter of my TB fever, my grandmother was also ill with terminal cancer. At one period there were two full-time nurses in the house. In the midst of my ochre and magenta dreams I would hear my grandmother’s groans of protest at being turned over in bed in the next room. My hold on reality was so unstable that I sometimes thought it was another part of me that had split away and was moaning to return. It must have seemed to my parents an awful (and expensive) burden to bear. Yet they were never other than kind, loving and considerate. My father had come to regard my grandmother almost as highly as my mother did. Crisis steeled their reliance on each other.

  They grew together so that, over the years, even their writing came to look alike. Yet there was something stultifying in their affection. Outwardly so contented and inwardly so close, they fed on each other. They did not dare to look far aside. She was a woman of deep but narrow feelings, centred on the home and her immediate family. I remember thinking how dull their lives were when I was very small. Because of what I intuited from her I tended to look down on my father (though I loved him, too). I think I must subconsciously have wanted him to make more of a stand against her, but he never did. As I grew older I came to understand him better and admire him more. Then I threw the blame on my mother; not difficult to do as she looked at the outer world with a mixture of fear and gentle snobbery. Now I feel there was a tragic inevitability in their relationship. Once, later, when we were living in Canterbury and had a car, my mother slipped on the wet gravel drive as she was getting in and fell. My father, running round the bonnet to help her, slipped and fell as well. Neither was hurt, and watching, safely tucked up in rugs on the back seat, I thought, with the cruelty of childhood, that it was a funny sight. It was also symbolic; they were paralysed by their mutual concern.

  III

  So my father gave up golf, and eventually found in gardening the ideal activity he could share with my mother. He was an instinctively hard worker. Though he had never wanted to be in a bank, he stuck at it and became, at 33, the youngest manager in the Midland at that time. Banking was something my parents had in common. Her wartime experience as a cashier had given my mother a lively appreciation of money, and every evening they would discuss the problems and people he had encountered that day.

  Herne Bay was under two hours by train from London’s Cannon Street and in the 1930s was a growing dormitory area. Whole estates of flimsy bungalows, of mock-Tudor semi-detacheds, sprawled along the cliffs and grew over the fields that had once crowded so close to the town. ‘Jerry building’ was a phrase with which I was familiar long before I knew what it meant. There was something gimcrack and depressing about those characterless suburbs, where the gardens were still raw earth and weeds and the concrete ribbon roads had begun to slip and shift almost before they were dry, so that the wheels of my spinal chair would bounce over the asphalt strips that joined the sections.

  Each evening on a weekday the owners of these new mansions would return from their labours in the City. Sometimes in summer I would be pushed out to watch them. At 7.15 the train would come in and dozens of sallow-faced men would pour out of the station. Dark-suited, bowlerhatted, each clutching an umbrella and a rolled-up copy of the Evening Standard, they seemed like a macabre army as they fanned out down the side streets, hurrying without a sideways glance towards ‘Mon Repos’, ‘Sea View’, ‘Uplands’ and their supper. Some residents were less prosaic. At least three of our neighbours went to prison for embezzlement – a term I understood as little as ‘appeasement’ and ‘sanctions’, which were soon to be in the wind.

  The London evening paper was dramatically responsible for increasing my knowledge of the world. You could buy the afternoon edition at Herne Bay station and in May 1930 my father bought it every day. A unique journey was under way. Amy Johnson was flying to Australia. Alone. Without radio. In a second-hand little plane with an open cockpit that had already flown thirty-five thousand miles. Amy herself had been flying for only eighteen months. In photographs she looked more sturdy than her Gypsy Moth.

  No woman had ever made such a journey. Each day the paper published a map showing where she had got to. I began to understand that the world was much bigger than I could imagine, when the distance between my fingers was over a thousand miles. Amy Johnson, with her pleasant North Country voice, seemed, as all those lone flyers of the 1930s were to seem, an augury of the future – a symptom that this great big world which I was being introduced to day by day in the paper was going to be encompassed. If an ordinary young woman could do it, others would. Perhaps I might one day. (When the wings of her plane were pierced by bamboo spikes in a forced landing in Java, she mended the holes with sticking plaster. What an adventure!)

  Occasionally, even in Herne Bay, I would catch a glimpse of someone whom I heard described as a real adventuress: a beautiful young woman with startling blonde hair and a big fur coat coming out of a shop would give me a smile or bend to pat Patch with jewelled hands. My mother would look flustered, her pace would quicken and her lips compress.

  ‘Why don’t you like her?’

  I never got a satisfactory answer, but later I knew. She was a local girl who had become a fan dancer in a London nightclub. There she caught
the eye of a maharajah who had installed her with her parents in one of the new bungalows on the sea front. He appeared only occasionally, racing through the High Street in a white Lagonda, but he constantly embroidered the dreams and anecdotes of the town. Envy and spite were not my mother’s vices, but distaste for sex was another matter. I was never allowed a long conversation with the Scarlet Lady, but I remember her kindly glance and vivid appearance, so out of keeping in those dowdy streets. What was the mystery about her? Something ominous that grown-ups knew and I did not; yet even lying in my spinal chair I was beginning to feel its stirrings.

  On Sundays my parents would often push me to the end of the pier. At three-quarters of a mile it was the second longest in Britain. I liked the alteration of sound once the land was left behind: the echoing clank of my parents’ feet on the slats; at first the cheerful cries of children playing on the beach coming up from below; the hum of land traffic fading under the approaching wash of the sea, endlessly varied as it broke on the metal struts and pillars; the reverberating passage of one of the two trams that ran up and down the pier, grinding slowly along to the insistent clang of a bell; finally to feel enveloped by the murmur of the ocean, the screech of gulls, the occasional hiss of an angler’s line. Peeping over the edge of my chair I could look directly down at the water through the gaps in the slats. Swirling, green, foaming and opaque, always racing forward and retreating, it seemed the opposite of the motionless world I inhabited. Away it stretched to a limitless horizon, fading into the blue of the sky. Beyond there was France, but those smudges heading west down the Channel would be going to more distant places, Brazil and Africa and Mandalay, unimaginable coasts and tropic shores. A bottle thrown with a message in it might float all the way to Treasure Island. It was as if the world were a vast drum of which the skin was the sea; sitting on the edge, were I to tap it the reverberations would go on forever. Crouching on my rug, Patch would snuff the salt wind and sneeze.

  Walking back along the front, past the Edwardian bandstand and the 1920s Pavilion where the Fol-de-Rols played in the summer, my parents would stop at the Italian ice-cream shop for a coffee. It came from a huge bubbling and hissing machine, very newfangled then. The proprietor was as cheerful as his brightly painted furniture. He seemed an innocent contrast to the ambiguous ruler of his country, about whom, I gathered, opinion was divided. People said he had drained the Pontine Marshes, a feat reminiscent of Thor’s in drinking up the sea. My friend the milkman said he should stick to his spaghetti – he looked as if he’d eaten plenty – and stop going on about them poor natives. These views didn’t affect custom at the ice-cream shop, even though the proprietor had pinned up a newspaper photograph of Mussolini skiing bare-chested in the snow. Tactfully he put it below the large framed photograph of our own old King that occupied the centre of the wall.

  I was allowed an orange water ice and my father would go to the paper shop next door for the Sunday Express, the Sunday Times and a comic for me. My favourite was Boys’ Magazine. I preferred it to Magnet and Gem – the schoolboy antics of Billy Bunter, Bob Cherry and Harry Wharton were as remote from my experience as life on the North-West Frontier and much less exciting. Boys’ Magazine was running a serial about a return to a lost world of giant animals, capitalising on the current success of King Kong.

  In the stories of my favourite writer, John Hunter, there was a recurring note of horror and pain, beyond the general bombast of such comics as Wizard. The arch-criminals would often employ evil demons, fit for a medieval fresco, that would spirit the drugged hero from his bed and flit with him held in giant claws, high above sleeping London, to a remote mountain eyrie, there to face interrogation, torture and death. Death never came to the hero, of course, but tortures were many, ingenious, described in detail and only escaped with agony. A typical example would have the naked hero, tied hand and foot, and weighted with corks, placed on his back in an empty bath. (Though this was being done by masked, chanting monks in Tibet, I imagined the bath to be exactly like mine at home.) A red hot grill was placed over the bath, which was slowly filled with icy water, straight from the Himalayas, lifting our hero inexorably towards the glowing bars. Would he first freeze or burn? Read next week’s thrilling instalment. It was those painful episodes that made me read Boys’ Magazine so avidly.

  The prevalence of such themes in boys’ literature suggest they fulfil some need. I doubt if girls have a similar taste. And in my case there were additional reasons. Decades later, in a general surgical ward, I noticed the most popular books were the novels of Ian Fleming. Their many accounts of torture and unpleasant death would seem inappropriate relaxation for advanced cancer patients, yet the opposite seemed to be the case. Perhaps it was a relief to read of miseries worse than one’s own, and to identify with a hero who, though apparently helpless, was usually able to master his dangers by his physical and mental adroitness. Perhaps; though what I remember of the long afternoons when I would lie resting in my spinal chair in the garden, was the pleasurable dwelling on the torments themselves and not how the hero might avoid them in the next episode. Maybe it was a way of communing with my own condition and making my weak, trapped, unnatural life more acceptable. Consciously I did not, of course, regard it in this light. I knew myself to be extremely fortunate to have such an unusual existence. Perhaps my unconscious was having its own back, seeping subversive thoughts into me through the icy water trickling along the back of the hero in the bath. I had given considerable thought, too, as to which part of his anatomy would first come into contact with the red hot metal. I had no doubt which it was and that added to the uncomfortable guilty pleasure.

  IV

  My parents employed a genteel maiden lady called Ruby Arnsby to take me for walks during the week. She was in her forties and lived with her invalid mother. For some reason her heavy application of powder, the cloying wafts of sweet scent which preceded her into the room, and the cooing way in which she would correct my homework, infuriated me. One day I showed her a series of drawings I had done. At this time I filled sketch pads with the adventures of heroes such as Tarzan drawn in comic-strip style. I told her this batch were of Odysseus on his voyages. Actually they showed a naked bearded man having awful things done to his penis. In one it had been hooked onto a pulley and line and he was being hauled towards the ceiling, though weighted down by a heavy stone. In another, he was strapped to the ground while a whole tug-of-war team hauled on a rope attached to the unfortunate part. In every case the effect was the same: enormous extension. I must have meant to shock her and I succeeded. My parents never referred to the incident, but Miss Arnsby was replaced by a young man.

  Jack Packham was the son of neighbours. A stills photographer with a film company in London, he had taken pictures of the young Gracie Fields, but lost his job in one of the endemic slumps in British films. He was twenty-nine, unmarried, a shy, gentle, melancholy person, and an indefatigable walker. Every morning he would call for me at nine o’clock and push me eight or nine miles before lunchtime. Sometimes we would go up through the village of Beltinge and along country lanes to the ruins of Reculver. Originally a marshy five miles inland, they now stood on a mound above the encroaching sea. Two gaunt towers with only a few coastguard cottages nearby, they were desolate and forbidding even in summer. The actual towers were of medieval flint, but some of the broken walls were Roman. Jack showed me how to identify the narrow bricks. The gloomy atmosphere had no effect on Patch, who went bounding across the stones and over the fields after the rabbits.

  This part of north-east Kent was mostly sheep land and quite empty. There were few private cars; once in a while a delivery van would go by. Very occasionally a pony and trap would jingle past; already a rare sight. Once we watched three men and a dog catching rabbits at a warren beside the lane. One of the men took a ferret out of his pocket and pushed it down a hole. Then they waited with concentrated intent. After a few moments a rabbit bobbed out of an entirely different hole. The dog was on it like a fla
sh; it was knocked on the head and popped in a sack. The ferret made its sinuous appearance from the original hole and was pushed down another one. There was something malevolent in the rapidity and silence of the whole operation. Sometimes there was no rabbit, and the ferret would come out wrinkling its whiskers and blinking sulkily.

  Often in winter we would see no one the whole morning. Jack would enliven the time by telling me stories. The Speckled Band, The Hound of the Baskervilles: he must have gone through all the Sherlock Holmes œuvre. He told me historical romances, too; I remember The White Company and Stanley Weyman’s Under the Red Robe and The Viper of Milan by Marjorie Bowen. The longer stories would take several days. He told them very well; quietly, with a sharp choice of phrase and dramatic pauses at moments of tension. He ransacked the local library for suitable material. Often he would embroider his narration with details appropriate to the countryside we were passing through.