Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  Stephen introduced me to T.S. Eliot, and not only the invocations of London fog and genteel tea parties, but ‘Ash Wednesday’ and The Waste Land. I admired their mastery of language, but found them too cool and austere for my taste. I preferred the early Irish lyrics of W.B. Yeats. He was the first poet I heard reading his poetry on the wireless, probably in 1939. He read very fast, in an incantatory monotone. By that time I was under the spell of W.H. Auden and a poet I admired even more (probably because Stephen did): Stephen Spender. The Civil War in Spain came to occupy the emotions of my tutor’s generation. For me it was too far away. It was as hard to visualise violent death as passionate love.

  One poet I found very easy to resist was Shakespeare. Without the possibility of group reading, the theatrical language seemed ornate and difficult to follow. All that changed at Easter 1937 when my parents took me to London for a long weekend. We went to the British Museum, where I was greatly confused by the multiple endowments of the classical reclining figures of hermaphrodites. But there was no confusion in recognising the mastery of Laurence Olivier on the stage of the Old Vic in Coriolanus. His power, vanity, impatience and arrogance were overwhelming. I had never seen a great acting performance before; the human presence was a revelation. At the end, Olivier appeared haranguing a crowd of enemy Volscians from a balcony at the top of a double flight of stairs. Two of his enemies grasped his arms, while a third came up behind and stabbed him in the back. Olivier stiffened and then fell forward as the Volscians let him go. He crashed down both flights of stairs in the clangour of his golden armour, ending at the bottom completely covered in his scarlet cloak. A spectacular moment of theatre of the sort for which he was already famous.

  The other holiday treat was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The cinema in Regent Street had been transformed into the magic wood, the ticket office had been turned into a thatched cottage. Dwarfs took you to your seat. As to the performance, it would be a surprise if whoever is reading this hasn’t seen it. It was the first of Disney’s feature-length cartoons and remains one of the most tuneful.

  Equally unchanging is the restaurant where we had our final lunch of the holidays: the Criterion in Piccadilly. It was a favourite with my parents. When I visited it sixty years later, time had done nothing to dim the glamour of its gold mosaic arches. Perhaps its splendour was a little too much for me. The golds and greens and blues, the hurrying trays piled high, the gurgle of pouring wine and cheerful chatter of family parties swam together into an unexpected sob: ‘Just going back to school, is he?’ said the friendly, but observant waiter. I could not tell him that I was not going back, but about to start.

  How to educate me must have been a continuing problem for my parents. They never talked about it with me. In the summer of 1937 we visited Wootton Court Preparatory School. I remember the huge rhododendron bushes making splashes of purple on the lawn of what seemed a very grand house. It had been converted into a boarding school. I was to be the only day boy. This was a mistake. I might not have been strong enough to survive the rigours of sleeping away from home, but I had an even harsher adjustment to make in withstanding the animosity of over a hundred of my peers; envious of my (unsought) privileges and gloatingly able to exploit my all too obvious physical weaknesses.

  The year I spent at Wootton Court and the following two at St Edmund’s School, Canterbury were the most unhappy of my life. They coincided with an ominous darkening of the world scene. Though the focus of events might seem as far away as Spain or Africa or Asia, the repercussions could stir the stones in a small school in Kent. Many of the pupils at Wootton Court were no doubt undergoing this expensive private education (the headmaster had taught King George VI mathematics at Dartmouth Naval College) in order to get enough learning to enter a reputable public school. Some had been trying for several years. They were well into their teens, bored, loutish and discontented with their lot.

  I don’t remember being physically molested, although there was the threat of having your head pushed down the lavatory. Teasing was carried to a fine art and included complicated dares. The most common involved sexual display while the class was in progress. The erect penis was used to flip ink-filled pellets at another pupil. Or the desk lid would be slammed down on the victim’s organ. Some of the more daring boys would actually masturbate to an orgasm and toss the sticky emission at the victim. I never remember anyone being caught doing this sort of prank.

  That summer a new element was included. Two young men in their late teens were put in the top class. Ostensibly this was for thirteen year olds, but these youths were much bigger. And they were Italian. They had come (it was said) to learn English. The British press had published stories of the Italian air force having sprayed mustard gas on Abyssinian tribesmen. We never had the opportunity to find out the Italian youths’ attitude to this. The British bullies acted as though our Italians had done the spraying personally. They began throwing stones. Not immediately very violently, but it quickly got worse. In two days the boys had to leave.

  A few weeks later my parents and I were in a crowd of tourists being shown the splendours of Windsor Castle. Pacing alone and slowly along the battlements, wrapped in a romantic dark cloak, was an unmistakable figure. How had His Most Exalted Majesty, the King of Kings, the Chosen One of God, the Emperor Haile Selassie, Lion of Judah, Defender of the Faithful, got to be walking by himself on the battlements of Windsor Castle? There was no question it was him. Even my mother recognised him. We knew him and his picturesque titles (there were at least twenty more), because he had had to flee from Abyssinia recently when Italy completed the conquest of his homeland (with barbaric cruelty, the papers said). That was the reason why my schoolfellows had wanted to stone the Italians. If they had been told that the Lion of Judah had been just as brutal, slicing up the poor young Eyeties, they would have been equally delighted to stone him. Perhaps more so, because he looked so small and fragile that even a well-aimed pebble would have knocked him for six.

  Why had he chosen chilly England as his place of exile? I don’t know, but perhaps because he was a Christian (Coptic) emperor, the English king might have offered him accommodation in one of his grace-and-favour houses. There are a number of such medieval dwellings at Windsor, facing St George’s Chapel. This would have been an appropriate home as one of Haile Selassie’s ancestors – the euphoniously named Prince Alemayehu – is buried in the Chapel. He died while undergoing the rigours of English public school life at Rugby in 1879. The Abyssinian royal family, of course, claims direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.

  Later, I think the Emperor went to live at one of those sunny southcoast resorts beloved by deposed royalty: Bognor or Bournemouth or Brighton. One of the results of his sojourn was that we all got to recognise the Abyssinian national anthem. Every Sunday evening at 9 o’clock, during the early days of the war, while we were waiting to hear the latest heartening homily from Mr J.B. Priestley, the BBC played on the Home Service all the national anthems of our defeated allies. By mid-1941 this was a considerable concert honouring Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Albania, Hungary . . . Did it include Hungary at this early stage? At any event, some pundit decided to put in Abyssinia, because it looked as if we might be about to liberate it. It had, I remember, a very boisterous Sousa-like march, which turned into a romantic melody rather like Some Enchanted Evening. It did not at all evoke our tall leather-cloaked spear-carrying allies, but it did get the often rather mournful collection off to a rousing start. And the pundit was right: quite soon the small expeditionary force (which included my wife Georgina’s father, and my friend Joanna Drew’s father, and Laurens van der Post) had defeated a much larger Italian force. Its leader, the Duke of Aosta, was hiding in a cave in the mountains, and the Emperor was driving in triumph into Addis Ababa in an open staff car.

  This was later; when we saw the Emperor at Windsor he looked as fragile and bereft as I often felt. Growing up alone with very pr
otective parents had made me not only a coward, but a prig. Qualities I have not completely lost. I made one useful discovery at Wootton Court. For weeks I was shadowed everywhere by a cheeky lad who mirrored whatever I did. Often he would repeat something I had said over and over again until I thought I would go mad. Others would come and join in, making a taunting chorus that accompanied my attempts to find out what was our homework or some such essential part of school routine. Masters must have known this sort of thing went on, but condoned it as a part of life’s hazards. It gave ‘character’ to have to learn how to cope.

  I was so unused to ragging of this kind that I was a victim far longer than I need have been. Eventually my tormentor, getting bored with his role as echo, came close to me and whispered mocking and unpleasant thoughts right into my ear. Perhaps it was his proximity that did it. Though thin and bony I was taller than him. Without any warning I took a step backwards and hit him as hard as I possibly could on the face with my open hand. The sound of the smack resounded down the corridor. He stopped in mid-sentence, looked at me for what seemed a long time, then ran away. I had no more trouble from him. This worked only because I was bigger than him. It would not have been advisable conduct to use against the gangling louts who had so far failed in life. As with the stoning of the Italian youths, they often worked in groups.

  They were responsible for the most unpleasant incident that happened in my year at Wootton Court. A number of boys had parents who lived overseas, many of them in the colonial service. Some of the unhappiest boys in the school were the youngsters of six or eight who saw their families only on their home leave every two years. Perhaps as a protection against the pain of such a loss there was an unwritten rule that parents when they did appear should look as dowdy and undistinguished as possible. One family completely ignored this sartorial convention. They would drive into the quadrangle in a canary yellow Rolls-Royce, mother in a silver fox fur, father in an astrakhan overcoat, chauffeur in yellow and black. Darling Roger, an ungainly lad of about eleven, would be whisked away for a chocolate cake tea on the Leas at Folkestone. This happened several weekends in succession.

  The first period on Monday was physical education. The whole school exercised in the gym to the Coriolanus-like ranting of the sports master. The standard attire was grey flannel shorts. After a cold shower we would all change back into uniform grey blazers and slacks. All that is except for Roger on this occasion. When he went to his locker it was empty. Even the shorts he had discarded before showering had vanished. The changing-room was next to the gym, which was a couple of hundred yards of open asphalt away from the main school house with its dormitories and clothes cupboards. No one had any spare clothes to offer Roger. He refused to run the gauntlet, but when matron and the assistant headmaster went down to the gym with his spare uniform, he had gone. Someone said they thought they had seen him lurking near the pavilion on the cricket pitch. Someone else could swear he had seen him flashing on the flat roof of the science block. Several others said it stood to reason he would be out on the main road thumbing a lift home to Golders Green. ‘Thumbing a lift? You mean waving a branch.’ ‘Waving something.’ ‘Nonsense, he’d be arrested for indecent exposure.’ ‘He’s too young.’ ‘It’s not the age, it’s the size that counts.’ ‘Well that’s all right then; he’s been circumcised.’

  One thing was clear: there would be no more school until Roger had been found. The sports master divided us into seven groups, each under a different master or janitor; even the lady music teacher had a party. I was with the assistant headmaster. He had rowed three years for Oxford in the boat race. He had shoulders like a barn door and two Irish setters that went bounding ahead of us into the wood. We were supposed to be keeping a long line just in sight of each other. The ground was so rough and the underbrush so thick that we were continually getting bunched up. In our raincoats and jackets we were finding it very hard going. I quickly became convinced that it would have been impossible for a naked Roger to have gone that way. At that very moment I saw him hiding behind a bush not more than twenty yards ahead of us. The dogs barked and dashed forward; we all shouted; Roger leaped away like an ungainly naked frog. We rushed after him. Regrettably, it was most exciting.

  It did not last long. Another group cut off his retreat. He was wrapped in a blanket, and matron doctored the myriad scratches and bruises he had got in the wood. That evening the yellow Rolls-Royce came for the last time to collect him.

  IV

  The year 1936, which began with the death of an old king, ended with the departure of a young one. Our American relatives had sent us clippings from Time and other journals about King Edward VIII’s affair with Mrs Simpson. Twice divorced, she was no beauty. That at least was the opinion of one who until recently had been having a hot romance with an American young lady. Admittedly she was about forty years younger than Mrs Simpson: so much the worse the luck of the King. I heard him make his abdication speech on my bedside wireless. It was on my thirteenth birthday.

  I don’t remember there being anything like the publicity which accompanied Prince Charles’s marital difficulties some sixty years later. Of course, television brought the protagonists into every household and would presumably have revealed the monumental stuffiness of the Duke of Windsor that was so immediately apparent when he was interviewed on TV in the 1950s.

  Most of the controversy at the time turned on the behaviour of Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, and Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury. They had been determined to reduce the scandal by hustling off the King as quickly as possible and immediately bringing out his younger brother to replace him. The purpose of the King’s speech was to prepare us for that scenario. Unfortunately, Edward VIII (David) was rather a good speaker and gave his statement considerable passion. His successor, George VI (Bertie), suffered from a most debilitating stammer. His preoccupation with getting out the words meant there was no room for nuance or inflection. Over the years he became more adept at rolling with the impediment, but it remained a painful experience to listen through one of his radio broadcasts: like seeing a man playing hockey from a power-operated wheelchair.

  The new king also, though he could not know it at the time, walked into one of the most difficult of all reigns: six years of war followed by six years of austerity and then an early death. Yet he did his duty. He was widely admired and he showed the nation the face of fortitude and resolution which was expected of it. As a role model he had an enormous advantage over his wayward brother: his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Scottish, she was the first non-royal queen since Edward IV had fallen in love with Elizabeth Woodville. Her charm, humour and courage were noticeable even to self-centred youths like myself.

  She was to outlive her husband by many decades. We know now that she blamed his death on David’s selfishness. He, after all, had been trained from childhood for kingship. If only he had never been beguiled by that awful Mrs Simpson.

  But Mrs Simpson may have done the nation a great service by diverting David from the throne. His leaning towards fascism, his vapid upper-class friends, his failure to find an appropriate consort, and hence his inability to give his country a stable family image for it to live up to in this time of trial, made him an inadequate figurehead. Appropriately, he and the title invented for him – Duke of Windsor – survive in the style he used for tying his tie. As for Mrs Simpson, she was embodied in many rude limericks and children’s songs:

  Hark the herald angels sing

  Mrs Simpson’s pinched our King.

  Some of those blue verses were aimed at the Archbishop of Canterbury. He looked a figure of princely authority of the sort invariably questioned by the English northerner. Two years later I had the opportunity to judge him for myself. The motto of St Edmund’s School was ‘Sons of the Church’. It had been founded at the end of the eighteenth century to give a classical education to the sons of impoverished clergy. Over the years the link with the church had grown more tenuous, but it was a rule that al
l the boys had to be communicants of the Church of England. Every year, in December, the reigning Archbishop came to school personally to confirm the new boys, usually as in my case, at the beginning of their second year.

  Until my arrival at St Edmund’s in autumn 1938 I had not taken any active role in church ritual. Religion had no part in our family life. I have no memory of my parents ever going to a service. Nor did my grandparents. Now I had to attend every Sunday morning in term time. The school chapel was a handsome neo-Gothic building with beautiful stained-glass windows. I didn’t particularly mind the service, though I had been prohibited from ever singing at my first choir practice. The combination of my voice breaking and total tone deafness made the choirmaster and other clergy blanch.

  I didn’t think it was any more ludicrous than some of the sermons we had to sit through. One visiting missionary began by making a direct appeal: ‘Stand with me’ – the whole school stood; ‘Stand with me on the banks of the Ganges,’ he went on hastily.

  Attendance at such services was not sufficient preparation for the solemn act that was to commit me to God. I had to learn large chunks of the catechism. Worse than that, I had to recite them to our headmaster, Canon Henry Balmforth. He was a cold, prickly man with pale sandy hair and pale blue eyes that lurked behind gold-rimmed pince-nez. He expected perfection from his pupils. One reason for his being a Christian would have been that it allowed him to contemplate the most perfect being and hold Him up as a model for his erring students. One of his books was called The Christ of God. Such an intellectual – one might say aesthetic – approach to religion was very hard for boys to take at a time when living together through radical changes in their physical development. Their introduction to morality was largely through the ethics of the sports field: rough and ready, but real. It was easier to see God as the great games captain in the sky than as an all-pervading searchlight probing every aspect of your life. Take the headmaster’s two final sessions in my catechism, labelled personal hygiene. Was he going to recommend cold baths or demand to see that I had washed behind my ears?