Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  Yet, unbeknown to us, a wind of change was rising that would blow through every corner of the globe. Its voice could already be heard in Germany, snarling and screeching in that language that seems so suited to invective. In our deceptively peaceful island it was still far away. More immediately shocking was the loss of those unique tones that sounded more like a border farmer than a monarch. ‘The King’s life is drawing peacefully to its close’; I heard that unforgettable announcement not in the bedroom where I had experienced so much sickness, but in a new house smelling of fresh paint and virgin dampness. We had moved in only the day before. My father had been transferred to Canterbury at short notice to replace a manager who was to go to prison for embezzlement (despite which he ended the Second World War a general).

  There was one companion who did not come with us to Canterbury. On the evening before my eleventh birthday Patch was run over by the local fire engine. That year my last two grandparents had died, but nothing had prepared me for such an agony of loss. A devoted friend was gone, who could never be replaced. Later I was to have two other dogs, but neither meant anything to me. You are lucky to have such companionship once in your life.

  3

  EXPECTATIONS OF LOVE

  I

  From our house in Herne Bay we could look down across the sloping fields to the clustered streets of the small town below, and beyond to the distant shimmer of the English Channel. It was appropriately named Highfields. It was the first house on that particular hill. (When I went back a few years ago I counted 276 houses on a checkerboard of new roads that covered the slopes.) It was right to be facing the sea, because Herne Bay was only just growing from a fishing village to a dormitory area for distant London.

  Our new house in Canterbury (it took about five months to build) was also appropriately named – Green Gates. The gates were green and they were overshadowed by a huge and ancient elm that curved protectively above them. There was a big beech tree with a swing in the back garden and lines of trees on both sides of the road. It was called the New Dover Road and it ran, straight as an arrow shot, from Dover, some twelve miles away, past our house, through Canterbury and on the sixty-five miles to London. It was the A2, the second most important road in Britain (the A1 was the Great North Road that linked London with Edinburgh). The Romans built it, hence its straightness. Despite its name, the New Dover Road had been there a very long time, as shown by the noble proportions of the trees. Many of the houses were massive Victorian or Edwardian mansions, largely masked by the surrounding foliage (this was to be an unexpected blessing later).

  When we sat down to breakfast, our dining-room faced onto the road. I looked forward to a daily performance by our neighbour opposite. At 8.05 a.m. precisely he would come down his gravel drive at a brisk pace. At the exact same spot between his gate posts he would turn and hold his rolled-up copy of The Times aloft in a gesture of romantic salute. A handkerchief would flutter from a first-floor window. The paper tucked once more under his arm, our neighbour would swing round and plunge rapidly down the road to catch the 8.30 to the City. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, this ritual continued. We could time our watches by his appearance, check the weather by his preference of overcoat or Burberry. So much of Canterbury appeared timeless and unchanging, there seemed no reason not to think the same of this sprightly social gesture. But it was not to be so: neither our neighbour, nor his house, nor the ancient city of Canterbury itself was to continue as they were for much longer.

  Looking back with all the benefit of hindsight at the three houses that contained my childhood, there seems an appropriate shift in perspective between each of them. Furthest away, largest and most mythical, is The House at Pitt Corner, Winchester, peopled by kindly deities like Bailey with his brass buttons and leather gaiters, but also by strange troglodytes such as the gypsies from over the hill. Everything was unexpected, answering to patterns that I did not fully understand.

  With Highfields there was a great increase in vision. The world looked at from that vantage place had a recognisable shape, though the humans in the scene were mostly far away. I had no companions of my own age. Books, invented games, my dog, occupied the foreground of my days. My illness made it necessary for me to be content with myself and I was.

  Green Gates brought me back into contact with a town that had been a centre of human endeavour for close on two thousand years. I was fit enough now to be a part of it, just as our house was. If I walked down our short gravel drive to the gate and looked left past the massive trunk of the elm, I looked directly at a magnetic centre that had drawn travellers from all over the world. For hundreds of years they had summoned fresh energy to complete their pilgrimage with the sight of the great tower that loomed above the line of trees that bordered the Dover Road. It was about half a mile from where I stood. Was it the rustle and flutter of the leaves that gave the pinnacles the illusion of floating like a stone flag above the earthly foliage?

  From whatever direction you approached Canterbury, the cathedral dominated your view. Far to the south it rose like a rock in the distance through the flowery foam of blossoming apple trees. Coming out of Blean Woods to the north, you looked down the steep slopes of St Stephen’s Hill to where it basked like a stone leviathan above the twisting clutter of the town. Wherever you walked in those narrow streets a turning would reveal a further dramatic perspective. Finally, the twin towers of Christ Church Gate, their newly painted angels displaying the heraldry of visiting kings, led you out of the tea-shop bustle of the marketplace into the calm of the Precincts. There the whole cathedral (of which you had seen many snatches) unfolded before you. How many times, feeling tired or impatient with the speed of my recovery, I limped to a seat and drank in the confident energy of those vaunting towers.

  You could feel the aches and anxieties of every day ironed away in their splendid confidence in human destiny made visible. Angels, saints, gods and devils, pinnacles and buttresses, spires and crenellations blended into a harmony which enveloped you as it reached out to absorb the whole town. For eight hundred years the cathedral had been a finger pointing the town towards God. The town had grown in its shadow. Many of its half-timbered houses, with their bulging upper floors almost meeting across the streets, were older than the cathedral’s Bell Harry Tower. The cattle market held twice weekly under the city wall, bringing its flocks and herds bleating and bellowing and befouling the High Street, probably went back before Christian times. On several occasions the cathedral was desecrated and burnt by the Vikings; yet it grew greater and more potent, despite the threat of Reformation and levelling priests.

  They had their descendants. A familiar figure striding down Butchery Lane on spindly gaitered legs, with a mane of white hair framing his nutcracker face, was the formidable Dr Hewlett Johnson. He looked every inch a Renaissance prelate, but his political predilections had made him known the world over as the Red Dean. Even more scandalous to the prurient citizens than his embracing Communism was his ability to enfold a new wife less than half his age and to produce a covey of beautiful daughters in his seventies. Brushing past him in the street gave the giggly thrill of touching a star.

  Sacred and profane were always mixed in this city of God. Walking along Broad Street in mid-morning you could be swept aside by the clangour of marching feet: three soldiers and a corporal of the Buffs marching to the cathedral as had the four knights of old looking for Becket. These military were not bringing death, but commemorating it; every day turning a page in the Book of Remembrance in their chapel and reading out the names of those who had fallen from Inkerman to Malplaquet, Rorke’s Drift to the Somme.

  Someone else who died a violent death when young, but not likely to be honoured in the cathedral, was the Elizabethan poet Christopher Marlowe. He is said to have been born just south of the cathedral, in the densely crowded area of Burgate Street. His atheist views were probably too much even for those free-thinking days and may have led to his death, apparent
ly in a tavern brawl, while still in his twenties. So I was told by the owners of a beautiful bookshop in Burgate. Two middle-aged ladies, Miss Carver and Miss Stanyforth, ran the shop, which sprawled onto several floors and across the road. This second shop, mostly novels and continental books, was the domain of Miss Carver. An impressive and somewhat formidable lady, upright, dark and handsome, she would often stand like a caryatid in her open door cupping a lighted cigarette in her slightly shaky hand. The third partner, Mr Adams, sitting by the desk under the stairs surrounded by order forms, would also be smoking, a curved meerschaum pipe. Heavily built, dark suited with a watch chain across his waistcoat and a gold chain drooping from his pince-nez, I found him difficult to converse with. Someone told me he was a cynic; someone else that he was in love with Miss Carver. I was not particularly interested in either proposition. What held me were rooms full of intriguing second-hand volumes at amazingly cheap prices.

  I find it difficult to explain how important this bookshop was to me. For about three years, the darkest period of my life, it was an anchor to civilisation. Buffeted and despairing of ever making contact with my peers, half-an-hour’s immersion in those dusty shelves would revive my hopes for life. It was not only the books. The ladies, especially little Miss Stanyforth with her wisps of hair that kept escaping from their bun, her gentle good humour and self-deprecatory laughter, always treated me, a gangling awkward schoolboy, as someone worth a serious conversation.

  For privileged customers there was a small back room with wickerwork armchairs where you could spend an hour engrossed in the conquest of Peru, before deciding it really wasn’t worth your half-crown. It was a good time for books. I remember going in one day and finding the whole window given over to some small orange-covered books. They were only sixpence each, but I didn’t like the uniformity of the Penguin covers. Miss Stanyforth explained it was a real breakthrough; that new books would be much cheaper. ‘But you have lots of hard-cover books that are only sixpence,’ I pointed out. ‘But these will be new books.’ Would that make the difference? I was not convinced; but I bought Ariel, André Maurois’s biography of Shelley (though I did not read it for many years).

  A book I both read and reread over half a century was Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. Phaidon had, I believe, just started to publish in England when this illustrated edition came out. I wanted it immediately; its brilliantly chosen pictures introduced me to a dazzling new world of beauty and vitality that I ached to join. It cost 7s 6d and was eventually given to me as a birthday present by my father in 1937. The range of its illustrations was to prove useful many times in my life, not least in filling in the gaps in the 1969 television series Civilisation, which I co-produced and directed, and in an earlier series on People of the Renaissance, which I produced under the guidance of Professor Leopold Ettlinger in 1960.

  II

  The year 1936 not only brought us a new environment, it also gave me a new tutor and new physical challenges. I was not yet thought fit enough to go to school, but some crack-pot persuaded my parents that I needed toughening up. So I was to ride and swim: two activities I never properly mastered, and hence did not enjoy (and still don’t). Hill-walking I did like, but there were few hills in east Kent. There were some fine woods. I could easily have been lured onto botany trails, but they were not within the interests of Mr Goldfinch, my new teacher. Female biology was more his line. With curly dark hair and bouncy charm, he preferred to while away our mornings with accounts of his nights; a subject grotesquely unsuitable for a feeble, feverish twelve year old, privately wrestling with the first stirring of his own sexuality. I felt as excluded and alarmed by Mr Goldfinch’s smirking exploits as by the nervy prancing of the sixteen-hand-high hunter I was supposed to mount.

  Fortunately, my American uncle and his wife came to visit us that summer, bringing with them their bewitching nine-year-old daughter, Carolyn. The contrast of this sparkling, freckled, wickedly cool, funny and sympathetic breath of Midwestern air to the lip-licking lubricity I got every day from my tutor was more than I could cope with. One morning I ran into my mother’s room when she was dressing, burst into tears and said I never wanted to see Mr Goldfinch again. I never did.

  What must have been a shocking surprise for my parents would have been alleviated by the practical judgements from my mother’s favourite brother. Clifford had a zestful enjoyment of life that was capable of lifting his sister out of her timid doubts about her own abilities. Rapidly moving with a powerful swing of the wooden leg he had acquired in the war, forthright in his opinions and profoundly fond of his little sister, he was well balanced by his wife Harriet. Elegant and sophisticated, with a long ivory cigarette-holder, Harriet had three times sailed around the world by the age of twenty-five. Unruffled in temperament, she was the most worldly-wise person I had met.

  Once Mr Goldfinch had been disposed of, it was probably at my uncle’s suggestion that my parents found a young working-class intellectual who had won a scholarship to Oxford. His poetry had already been published by Tambimuttu. He was a tremendous influence on me in all sorts of ways. So, more indirectly, but possibly even more deeply, was Carolyn.

  That summer, when war began in Spain, when our young and glamorous king, Edward VIII, visited the moribund pits in Wales and came away saying something must be done, when Jesse Owens dominated the Olympic Games as Hitler did the rest of Germany, when we sat and listened to the wireless dedication of the Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge with our fathers, both of whom had been so marred and changed by that war and were stirred to feel it might be going to begin again: that momentous summer was made incomparably more momentous by the discovery of companionship. It was as though all twelve years of my life had been spent on a desert island. Longing for company, I had lit metaphorical fires whenever a ship passed, but none had ever responded. Was my whole life to be passed alone? Then suddenly fate had produced this captivating Girl Friday. She was no savage, but infinitely more travelled and sophisticated than me, a native of that dazzling film fairyland, America.

  We spent hours and hours talking about every subject under the sun. Even her turn of speech, her choice of words, were piquantly different from mine. And, of course, though I could hardly see it, she felt much the same about the way I expressed myself and about the ancient walled city where I lived, the rolling landscape of fruit trees, woods and craggy white cliffs and red-sailed fishing boats. ‘Gee, it’s all like a movie,’ she would often say.

  So wrapped in mutual glamour the summer passed; rounders replaced cricket as the beach game. How did we move from childish knock-about to passionate embraces? I cannot remember, but we certainly did. We would lie, seemingly for hours on end, eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. After a life of austere loneliness I was wallowing in riches I could hardly understand. At the time it seemed inconceivable that our parents would not have sensed the change in us. How we walked everywhere hand in hand. How on trips in the car she would curl up on my lap, or lean her feather-light head on my shoulder. I consulted no one, but blundered from peak to peak. Decades later I asked her if she had told her parents. ‘Yeah, I told my mother.’ ‘And what did she say?’ ‘Keep your clothes on.’ Sound advice from a woman who came to maturity in the twinkle-toed twenties. I should also point out, what I have no doubt had been in Harriet’s mind, that undressed I would not have known what to do anyway.

  Kissing seemed the dazzling height of sensuous pleasure; capable of infinite subtle modifications. Most precious of all was the enwrapping tenderness of another youthful body, slender, taut and silky-smooth, loving and adventurous, gentle and trusting. This year I was reading much more poetry and these lines by Byron seemed appropriate for my feeling for Carolyn, even though she was only nine years old:

  She walks in beauty like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

  Thu
s mellow’d to that tender night

  Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

  . . . . .

  And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

  So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

  The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

  But tell of days in goodness spent,

  A mind at peace with all below,

  A heart whose love is innocent!

  That second verse certainly applies to my Carolyn. For many years my memories of those days of happiness coloured my hopeful expectations of love. Perhaps they have never entirely left me, rekindling with each fresh flame a memory of those days ‘in goodness spent’, and the love of the innocent heart.

  III

  My new tutor, Stephen Coltham, greatly extended my grasp of the world of books. From the novels of Walter Scott and G.A. Henty to Dickens – Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby – to the science-fiction stories and social humour of H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. In poetry I had long liked the rhythmic ballads of Macauley; Stephen brought me the harsher, more sensuous medieval romances of William Morris. They suited the bittersweet memories I had of that last summer.

  I was half mad with beauty on that day,

  And went without my ladies all alone,

  In a quiet garden walled round every way;

  . . . . .

  Came Lancelot walking; this is true, the kiss

  Wherewith we kissed in meeting that spring day,

  I scarce dare talk of the remember’d bliss,

  When both our mouths went wandering in one way,

  And aching sorely, met among the leaves;

  Our hands being left behind strained far away.

  Much of adolescence seems to consist of a sort of formless longing; a daydream of the unknown. Lyrical poetry can help to focus the questing senses and so to universalise what can seem a very lonely period.