Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  In 1939 we had expected an avalanche of bombers to devastate the English countryside immediately, but the eight months of phoney war had lulled us into a false confidence. Just as the victims of the Holocaust politely asked the German soldiers the way to go, so the inhabitants of the Kentish coast thought of ingenious means of repelling the expected invaders. A plump middle-aged friend of my mother’s had arranged a line of flatirons on a window ledge above her front entrance. She was going to drop these on the heads of the Germans as they came to batter in her door. The part of this counter-attack with which she was most proud was that each iron was tied to a length of stout string attached to a clothes rail so that it could be hauled back and used again on the second wave of Jerries. The grain of truth behind this fantasy was that Hitler was indeed planning an invasion on this part of the coast. Operation Neptune would have come into force in September and Canterbury should have been taken on the second day.

  We didn’t know this as a fact, but it seemed a likely supposition. If it had come, would we have given up the fight immediately like the inhabitants of Brussels and Paris; or would we have fought on to the bitter end like the people of Leningrad and other Russian cities? The way we stood up to the Blitz, and later the even more terrifying flying bombs, suggests the latter. It would have been goodbye Folkestone and Dover and all those charming villages of the Weald and ancient Canterbury. And probably, not so ancient Gills.

  III

  Where the road to Dover dipped into a woody hollow, our car was halted. A tall young officer stepped out of the trees, his right arm cradling a Bren gun. As my father drew us to a halt beside him, other soldiers jumped onto the road. The car doors were thrown open, rifles with nasty looking bayonets on them were poked at us. It was about a week after our excursion to see the soldiers returning from Dunkirk. There had been constant air battles overhead, and I suggested we might make another trip to see what was happening at the airfield at Hawkinge near Dover.

  The gleaming bayonets were a reminder that war was not an occasion to satisfy curiosity. The officer put it more sharply. We might be involved in an air raid or a parachute attack. All this coastal zone was now out of bounds to visitors without direct permission. (So it remained throughout the war; when coming on leave I had to produce evidence that my family lived in east Kent.) In June 1940 all this was an unsettling surprise.

  After a stern warning the officer let us through. There were indeed changes at the airfield. The newspapers had said that a new RAF plane, the Defiant, had gone into action. Not very successfully it would seem by the wrecked fuselages that scattered the perimeter. Indeed, the Defiant was quickly taken out of the front line. It was an attempt to install a four-gun turret and gunner into the shape of a single-seater fighter such as the Spitfire. Ingenious, but too ambitious. The littered airfield was a reminder that the supreme test of our aircraft, and the quality of our pilots, and indeed the character of us all, was upon us.

  At very short notice two weeks before, St Edmund’s School had amalgamated with Kings Canterbury, and left for wartime exile in Cornwall. As a day boy I did not go with them. That was the end of my school life, though of course I could not know it then. What was going to happen? My parents were decided by an order my father received from head office instructing him to commandeer a lorry, put the contents of the bank vaults in it and proceed with them to an address in the Midlands. This should not be done until my father was certain that the invasion had actually begun. Would Hitler tell him my father wondered? We had heard something of the chaos that fleeing refugees had caused in the war zone in France.

  The summer of 1939 my parents had taken a furnished bungalow in Morecambe. My father’s brother lived in Morecambe. His son, Douglas, another only child, was about eighteen months older than myself. We seemed to get on reasonably well. Rather than waiting for Hitler to make his move, my father packed my mother and me off to the re-rented bungalow.

  I spent the summer months of the Battle of Britain in a place as far removed from it as it was possible to imagine: the broad sweep of Morecambe Bay with its deceptively inviting, but treacherously quicksanded strand, its confident north country people, out for a last summer of seaside jollity before getting down to the job of putting Hitler in his place, its raucous funfairs with big dippers and hurtling, jamming Devil’s Rides, which could simulate the planes twisting and jinking in mortal combat, and the rifle ranges where Douglas and I might imagine we were getting the invaders in our sights.

  Like Harvey, Douglas was an unlikely friend: heavily built, with long arms and a slouching walk that increased his somewhat simian appearance. He had an unhappy childhood to overcome. His father had an ungovernably violent temper. It was said that Douglas was the result of the only physical connection that his parents had managed to achieve. Like many women who grew up in Victorian times, his mother disliked sensuality of any kind. According to what my father told me much later, she actually developed some incurable infection of the womb. Douglas was born with asthma. This was not all my Uncle Bernard had to contend with. He had been a clever draughtsman and had advanced rapidly in the early days of aircraft design. In the slump of the late 1920s he lost his job. All that he was able to acquire was sales representative to a whisky distiller. He had to drive from pub to pub across Lancashire and the Lake District selling his firm’s brand. He was paid only a commission. Other job prospects would have meant leaving Morecambe, but this his wife Phillis refused to do. The seaside air was supposed to be especially favourable for sufferers from respiratory complaints.

  When all this got too much for Bernard he would find an excuse to take Douglas into the back yard and thrash him mercilessly with a leather strap. Douglas never cried, but he hated his parents with a sustaining hatred. To me, Douglas was tolerant and protective. He already demonstrated the determination to succeed that was to carry him to a directorship in ICI. I’ve suggested that he was far from graceful in his posture. He was bow-legged, with his feet naturally splayed apart. Yet in his teens he took up ballroom dancing and within a year had won a gold medal.

  Despite his unrewarding appearance, Douglas was seldom without a girlfriend. Later in the war, when Morecambe became the centre for the initial training of women in the Air Force, there was a surfeit of lonely and frightened young women wanting comfort, but even in 1940 he had a delightful level-headed grammar school girl in tow. I was allowed to accompany them on long walks. I can still remember the thrill of helping her over a stile, because then our hands touched. It was the first opportunity I had had since my cousin Carolyn’s visit four years before to probe female ways of thinking. I found them deeply attractive, stimulating and awe-inspiring – a view that has not changed much over the years.

  IV

  At the end of August my father came to visit us. The Battle of Britain was at its height. It was mainly fought over Kent. There was no saying when it was going to end or what would follow. Stories of escapes from casually dropped bombs were as prolific in Kent as accounts of mugging were later to be in New York. We were somewhat misled by the exaggerated figures of enemy losses that were published every day, but there was no sign of the German attacks flagging.

  My parents agreed that it would not be sensible to move the family back to Canterbury. Instead, early in September my mother and I went over the Pennines to the West Riding of Yorkshire. There on the hills above the valley of the Calder my Uncle Tom Taylor had the family farm. He was my mother’s elder brother. In his youth he had been a fine rider. Drink got to him as it had with his father. Any of the villagers finding an empty bottle in a hedgerow would murmur: ‘Ah, Tom Taylor’s been along here.’

  He was another example of an unhappy and frustrating marriage. His wife was a strong and cheerful woman. There were no children. When in the drink, Tom would sit in the stone-flagged kitchen, a loaded shotgun across his knee, threatening anyone who tried to get the whisky bottle from him. Eventually, well before my police-impersonating visit, his attacks of delirium tremens became
so violent that he gave up spirits more or less entirely. He slouched gloomily over his fields, cursing his cattlemen and the fate that had brought him such an inadequate inheritance. His younger brother, Clifford, had taken up their uncle’s offer of a share in their brick factory in Detroit. Tom could have gone, too, but he had no stomach for the Atlantic crossing.

  Yet there were just too many Taylors in the West Riding. I have a large family photograph taken in 1893 at the wedding of my greataunt Sarah Jane. There are more than fifty people in the photograph, all ultimately dependent on Taylor’s Mills (of which there were several). Like his father, Tom had only the profits of running the farm. It was too small to support anyone except the family of the farmer himself. Tom employed a foreman, a horseman, and two cowmen. He had four magnificent shire horses, about twenty-four dairy cattle, several pigs in litter, a dozen hens, a noisy cockerel, and a pony and milk float to deliver the milk to the neighbouring hamlets. It was one of the few things that Tom did himself. I would sometimes go with him: jumping off at each cottage, dipping the measure into the churn and filling up the jugs and bottles that had been left out.

  It had been decided that I should not go to a local school, but take a correspondence course that would prepare me to sit the London Matriculation examinations. One of the general examination halls where this could be done was at Wakefield. I registered there and settled into the novel business of being tutored by letter. I was taking courses in mathematics and geometry, English grammar and English literature, history, geography and French. There were a lot of books to master and a written examination every three weeks. It was not very interesting, but it filled up the time, and it gave me a goal. I had definitely decided that I wanted to go to university, thus fulfilling my father’s ambition for himself.

  Now I come to think of it, in the 1920s he had taken a correspondence course in banking and followed it up by being a tutor himself. Throughout my childhood in Herne Bay he would settle down to a paper-laden dining-room table and be marking and commenting for a couple of hours or so each evening. So, for the best motives, he threw me back on my own resources.

  So much of my life seemed to be spent in having conversations with myself or with one other: Jack Packham, or Mr Goldfinch, or Stephen Coltham. Now that dialogue was etherealised and came floating through space to land illegibly on my breakfast table. (Most of the tutors seemed to follow the university convention of writing in as tiny a hand as possible.) Instead of the lush hills of Kent there were the bare moors of the West Riding. Walking there gave you time to dream. And to mourn.

  To those taking part in it as passive victims, the Battle of Britain had no specific end. Some days the plane casualties reported (overoptimistically on both sides) were much higher than on other days. There was a general movement by the enemy towards massive night raids. Anti-aircraft defences were incapable of destroying night bombers on the scale that they could in daylight. But daylight bombing went on through the autumn. Much of it was casual and seemingly motiveless: a single German plane losing touch with its fellow, probably under attack from a Spitfire, jettisoning its bombs over any built-up area. Only, to us below, each ‘built-up area’ was home and loved ones for some.

  Our maid Dorothy continued to look after our house in Canterbury for my father. She did the same for his second man, Mr Harding. He, too, had sent his family off to relatives in the Midlands. Every morning Dorothy went down to do his washing and tidy and clean his modest three-bedroom house on one of the estates that my father and I had inspected for blackout the year before. Dorothy was notoriously dilatory at getting anywhere on time. One day in October she was an hour late leaving Green Gates. She had not yet reached the road where Mr Harding lived, when an unexpected bomb fell and destroyed his house completely. Ten minutes later and she would have been in it. That was shocking enough, but worse was to follow.

  On Friday 11 October, at about 11 o’clock, a group of Messerschmitt fighter bombers pursued by Spitfires dropped their bombs on Canterbury. The attack was a complete surprise. The first bomb scored a direct hit on the fur shop next door to my favourite bookshop. All the people in the furriers were killed; so was Miss Carver. I expect she had been standing in the doorway of her shop having a quiet smoke. My friend, Miss Stanyforth, was buried under books, but dug out alive. I wrote her a letter of condolence. It was the first really adult letter I had written. I thought of all the quiet hours I had spent reading in the back room. The charm of old Burgate, its connection with the poet Marlowe, now lost forever. And the gentle kindness of Miss Stanyforth herself. She replied, thanking me for all the support I had given the shop, and explaining that she had no heart to carry on and was going to live with relatives in the Midlands. I never saw her again.

  There was a surprise casualty at the furriers. The shop had been quite crowded. One victim was identified only through a severed hand with expensive rings on it. Only the hand was recovered, but it was sufficient. The costly rings had been presents from a maharajah. The owner was that scarlet lady who had so flustered my mother when she had petted Patch on my spinal chair. No doubt she had come in from Herne Bay to get her furs spruced up for the winter. Instead, she had been relieved permanently of all such anxieties.

  My mother and I had heard our first enemy bombs when we were in our reputedly safe haven of Morecambe that summer. Late one evening in July a plane passed low overhead, followed by three thumping crashes. We both knew instantly they were bombs and not fireworks. High explosives put pressure on the atmosphere unlike any other bang. No one was hurt. No significant Nazi war aims can have been advanced by churning up the sandy soil of the quiet Lancashire suburb of Heysham. It seems surprising that such a methodical people as the Germans should have vacillated so frequently in this crucial year of the war. The daylight attacks on our airfields and across the south of England were followed by night raids on the capital. On average two hundred planes a night bombed London every night from 7 September to 3 November. Overwhelmingly, the main pressure fell on the crowded tenements and Victorian terraces of the city and the docks. They seemed undaunted; London can take it ran round the world.

  Even Hitler, reviewing the course of the air war against England in February 1941, wrote: ‘The least effect has been that upon the morale and the will to resist of the English people.’ Would we have been capable of standing up to a continuing bomb attack of the kind that reduced Churchill to tears when he visited Peckham and saw the previous night’s devastation? I remember each day reading the news of the previous night’s blitz with a sense of anguish, like getting the latest report on a dangerously ill patient; even more, listening to the wireless news, feeling the tense ordeal that our great city was being subjected to, and wondering how long it could continue to take it.

  What difference would television have made? Presumably much of the devastation would not have been shown, as it would have been useful information for the enemy. Perhaps even more in those poverty-ridden days the people had less to lose and a solidity in shared frugality. Were those days really so heroic and self-sacrificing? Radio certainly brought us together. Television might have driven us apart, for inevitably it would have shown what a relatively small part of the country was bearing the brunt of the battle.

  It did seem almost a relief when Hitler turned his attention to Coventry on the night of 14 November. Other industrial centres and ports were attacked in turn. Early in December it was the West Riding. Dewsbury and Batley were the centre of the heavy woollen trade. (The Taylor family had profited greatly from the cold of the Russian winter during the Crimean War.) What possible harm in the long term could the destruction of a few bales of shoddy do to our war effort? This was total war of course.

  The air-raid warning was shortly followed by the fateful moaning of the German bomber engines. They were desynchronised to throw off the efforts of the RAF sound locators to track them. The counter-effect was to inform the people of Britain when the enemy was passing overhead. We had heard them a few nights before when
they were on their way to Liverpool. But this time they didn’t go away. One or two anti-aircraft guns went off. (At this stage of the war, firing ack-ack guns was as effective as clapping your hands at an advancing lion.) The bombers continued to circle. Uncle Tom and I went into the yard to have a look. It was a dark cloudy night. Suddenly a stick of bombs went off. They were not particularly close, but in my experience it is such a violent noise that it almost always makes you jump with fright.

  The Taylor farmhouse was built in the mid-eighteenth century and had a deep stone-lined cellar. As we had planned, Uncle Tom, Aunt Laura, my mother and I dutifully went down below. However, nothing much seemed to be happening and it was very cold in the cellar. Despite the entreaties of the women, Tom and I went outside. It was a most spectacular sight. One of the factories in Batley Carr must have been burning, though the tree-lined brow of the hill kept it from our sight. The sky, and especially the underside of the clouds, were lit by a flickering, brilliant red glow. Occasionally, something like a factory floor must have fallen in; burning fragments sailed up and even lit the windows of our farmhouse. Guns of the defenders were going off with flashes like sheet-lightning and sometimes in long lines like flaming ping-pong balls that must have been tracer bullets. I was quite entranced by these firework effects. The raid itself seemed to be rumbling off northwards towards Bradford. The next day we discovered that the nearest crater was just within our farm land, on the brow of Carlinghowe Hill, about a quarter of a mile away.