by Michael Gill
V
It was this autumn that we got acquainted with one of the most lasting and unpleasant effects of the war: rationing. It was to continue for thirteen years. The majority of groceries were still severely limited when I got married in 1952. In 1940 and 1941 there were real shortages. Aunt Laura was a good north-country cook, but there just wasn’t enough. Even potatoes and beets were in short supply.
A new person appeared at the door. He would be a distant cousin or an old acquaintance of Tom’s. ‘Remember? We last met at Barnsley Horse Show in 1932.’ He just happened to be passing and wondered if we would be interested in buying a side of bacon. Yes, he had several. Let’s say the pigs met with a severe accident (wink, wink). And if that was too much, how about some choice Stilton? Of course, it wasn’t cheap.
And it wasn’t legal either, but the police had bigger things to deal with than black marketeers. Nor had we much money to spare for forbidden luxuries. One thing that is hard to visualise if you are growing up in the self-indulgent modern world of chocolate bars, and potato crisps and ice-cream cones, is the all-pervasive grasp of rationing. All those tasty snacks were unavailable or prohibited (one Mars Bar was all the sweets, chocolate and cream cakes allowed for one week). It must have been particularly hard on small children. I had been forbidden chocolate and other sweets throughout my years of illness, so the war rationing simply continued the austerity up to my twenty-eighth year (when rationing finally ended).
One result of this was that I still hate leaving food uneaten on the plate. Nor do I feel justified in munching a whole chocolate bar in one sitting. For almost the first half of my life I was accustomed to eating less than my stomach told me it wanted. Through much of this time food was not only scarce, but relatively unpalatable. An omelette made from powdered egg substitute was not the same as one that had been whipped up from a couple of fresh eggs. There was no point in making a fuss; we knew that through much of the war we were in a desperate struggle to beat the German U-boat blockade that was attempting to starve us to defeat. And after the war, in the heroic days of the first Labour government, there were more important issues than a return to gourmandising. (For most of the war and for years after, the maximum cost of a meal in any restaurant from Lyons Corner House to the Savoy Grill was five shillings – 25p in modern money). That had its advantages. If you were a poor student, you could still afford to impress your girlfriend by taking her to dinner at the Café Royal or the Apéritif in Edinburgh. Always assuming you could get a table, of course.
All this was just coming upon us in autumn 1940. In the meantime there was a more severe crisis growing in the foreground. Uncle Tom was going bankrupt. That seemed an impossible statement at a time when the government was desperate to cultivate every mouse-hole of ground; when special subsidies were available to farmers with initiative. Tom had a lifetime of experience on the land that had been tilled by his father and grandfather before him. Had any of them made a go of it? No.
It had been his mother’s money that had kept the farm going so long. Now that money had run out. What was he going to do about it? He had no idea. He drew his big armchair closer to the fire and buried his nose in the Yorkshire Post. There was nothing he could do. Somebody else would have to do summat. They did. Early in 1941 he received an eviction order.
Tom’s younger brother Clifford arranged a regular payment from Detroit to his favourite sister, my mother. She found a council house in a terrace in the nearby hamlet of Howden Clough. It was quite a pleasant place, high on rolling moorland. Most of the neighbours kept chickens. The neighbouring fields, much rougher pasture than those at Croft Farm, were successfully turned to arable land that very year.
If Tom had noticed he never let on. That sort of exploitation of his resources would have saved him from bankruptcy. Now he was supposed to be looking for work. Every day he walked to the Labour Exchange at Birstall, a mile or so away. When he came back in mid-afternoon the message was always the same: ‘Nowt today.’ He never worked again. His wife, my Aunt Laura, got a job cleaning and housekeeping for a widowed cousin.
VI
We must have moved to Howden Clough sometime soon after Christmas 1940. It’s a curious fact that I can’t remember a single wartime Christmas. ‘Peace on Earth and Good Will towards Men’ seemed singularly inappropriate in the midst of global destruction and there was little good cheer available when a week’s meat ration was one cutlet.
Yet there was one general present given to us this winter: 113,000 Italians. Italy had entered the war on Germany’s side at the fall of France, and sent an army to North Africa with the intention of capturing Egypt. General Wavell, commanding a mixed force of British, Australian and Indian troops, had counter-attacked in early December with spectacular success. The collapse of Italy’s East African empire was followed by Haile Selassie’s triumphant entry into Addis Ababa.
Nothing so bright as this desert victory was to follow. In May, Hitler’s Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, parachuted into Scotland. The only senior Nazi who actively tried to end the war, he was the only one to be kept in solitary confinement for the rest of his life. Also in May, the German battleship Bismarck was sunk. But in April, Rommel and the Afrika Corps reversed the situation in the Western Desert; the British Expeditionary Force in Greece had to be evacuated; after a bitter close combat battle in Crete, the island had to be abandoned leaving thousands of our troops to their fate. All this early summer desperate battles were engaged on land, sea and air. They were like a prelude to the ultimate trial. On 22 June, Hitler launched a massive attack on Russia.
While writing this section, I ran into a northern neighbour, Myles Hildyard, at a Christmas party. Knowing that he had fought in Crete, I told him that for me as an adolescent this summer of 1941 seemed the absolute nadir of our fortunes. He agreed. He had spent months hidden by Cretan peasants in the mountains. Eventually a fishing boat stowed him away and carried him across the Mediterranean to Egypt.
Rommel’s reputation in Cairo was such that Myles’s commanding officer openly stated that if the British were beaten he intended to go south and set up a colony of English exiles in South Africa. Presumably the Royal Navy would have taken Churchill, the British government and the Royal Family to Canada.
Just to remember those awful times is deeply depressing. The year 1941 seems to be perpetually grey, sunless, dreary and apathetic. The sky over the moors was not even given the interest of clouds, but pallid heat, like looking through a featureless gruel. How well it was described in the journey of the evil spirits to Hell in Milton. Milton, who had lived through that most desolate and chilling of all conflicts – civil war. He understood the range of man’s beastliness:
Thus roving on
In confused march forlorn, th’adventurous bands,
With shudd’ring horror pale, and eyes aghast,
Viewed first their lamentable lot, and found
No rest. Through many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous,
O’er many a frozen, many a fiery alp,
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death –
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good;
Where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things . . .
6
COLD HANDS
I
It was the afternoon post early in January 1942 that brought a long, official brown-paper envelope slithering and twisting like a snake through the letter box. We all looked at it without moving. We all knew what it was.
‘Well go on then,’ said my mother. ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’
‘I know what it’s going to say,’ I muttered. ‘There’s no point in opening it.’
‘How can you possibly know?’ said my father reasonably.
‘I know I did badly. You’ve got to pass in everything. I know I did badly in geometry.’
‘Well if you’re so keen to find out you look,’ I said ungraciously.
So it was my father who announced to me that I had, in fact, passed the Matriculation Examination in all subjects taken and had therefore qualified for a place at London University or at any other equivalent seat of learning.
In the previous October I had taken care of what place that should be. I had attended a selection board at Guy’s Hospital, London, another awe-inspiring event, seated in an empty classroom facing five or six greysuited, friendly, but sharp gentlemen. They nodded approvingly when I explained that my father had always wanted to be a doctor, but had not been allowed to continue his studies, though he had been the head boy at his grammar school. He had passed on his unfulfilled admiration for the profession. Had I thought which branch of medicine I might want to specialise in? ‘I don’t think I do, sir. General Practice is what I favour.’ That produced a general warming of the atmosphere. GPs would always be needed; it was the backbone of the profession.
Was I aware that for the first three years, though Guy’s was a great hospital and at the forefront of medical knowledge, I would be engaged in academic studies: anatomy, biology, chemistry and physics? I was aware of that. ‘Don’t feel too worried about those chemical formulae, eh, Mr Gill?’ I thought I could manage them. Sympathetic chuckles and on to the last question. Medicine was one of the few university studies that gave exemption from military service until after the degree was taken. However, some young men preferred to go straight into the forces. A place would be kept for them when the war was over. Would I prefer to start next September or delay medicine until the end of hostilities? ‘The latter, sir.’
I had already sorted out my war service, I hoped. In the autumn of 1940, when we were still living on the farm, I had joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) the day it was launched. Three evenings a week I was squeezed into uniform (I was a gangling six foot one inch by now), marched up and down, taught to manipulate the Morse keyboard, studied aircraft recognition and learned to navigate by the stars. I did all this ostensibly because I wanted to join the Air Force when I was eighteen and a half. But I was following my father’s good advice that I was more likely to have control of my destiny if I knew clearly what I wanted. I wanted action and adventure, but not in some dusty desert foxhole, or freezing North Sea convoy. The Air Force fitted the bill.
There was one hitch. My eyesight. It wasn’t good enough for the exacting air crew medical. But being in the ATC meant that I knew what personnel were in demand. In late 1941 there was a drive to increase the RAF night-fighter strength. The Luftwaffe had shifted to night raids on Britain and the RAF was desperately seeking more effective ways of night-flying interception. A new aircraft, the Bristol Beaufighter, homed onto the enemy bomber by radar. There was a shortage of trained radar operators. The medical requirements were relaxed. After all, the only physical requirement was to be able to distinguish the blips on a radar screen. In the same autumn of 1941, when I had the interview at Guy’s, I saw a senior RAF liaison officer attached to the Air Training Corps. He reassured me on the continuing need for radar observers (he tactfully failed to explain that this was partly due to the Beaufighter’s high casualty rate in landing and take-off accidents). All I had to do was to express my preference when I was called up in 1942. My years in the ATC would ensure that I was drafted into the RAF in whatever branch seemed appropriate. It was almost certain radar observers would continue to be needed.
Now, patient reader, you may well ask why are you devoting so much time to something that never happened? You never did become a doctor did you? Or a radar observer in Beaufighters? No, and that is precisely why now I find it interesting to note down the path never taken and to recall the feelings and anticipations I had then. Feelings I tucked away and never looked at for fifty years and more. Would I have been a good doctor? No. I would have suffered too much for my patients. I would have been a dutiful family practitioner, worn out before my time; somewhat disappointed with life and consoling myself by reading philosophy in an escapist manner. And the radar observer? Probably dead at twenty.
I certainly never thought that. Growing up in the war made its risks seem no more than those from riding a bicycle in the blackout. Remember, this autumn of 1941 the war had already been under way for more than two years. And, apart from the Italian debacle in Africa, we had lost all along the line. Yet here we still were. In the concentrated night raids on London and other major cities that lasted from August 1940 to the end of May 1941, more than 43,000 civilians were killed and 51,000 seriously injured. Everyone knew someone who had died. Yet there seemed no failure of morale.
Perhaps it was the scattered nature of the bombing that reduced its effectiveness. The main target, London, was then the biggest city in the world. Hitler would have had to hammer at it night after night for years on end with the sort of weaponry that he had available at the time. (No doubt Teutonic efficiency would have produced something nastier quite quickly.) But, instead, he made his second great mistake. (His first was not to continue bombing the English airfields during the Battle of Britain.) That shrank to insignificance compared with the foolhardiness of attacking Russia on 22 June 1941.
At first it seemed to be a replay on a bigger scale of the Blitzkrieg on France of the previous summer. In one month, the German armies had fought their way over three hundred miles to the very gateway of Moscow. The effect on Britain was immediate. The nightly air attacks ceased. The long snoring notes of the German bombers passing overhead, slow and broken like an asthmatic sleeper, ended as abruptly as a change in position silences the epiglottal tremors. Clearly the searchlights of war had swung to the East.
This was obvious even to my mother (a very unwarlike person). It was decided that we would go back to Canterbury at the beginning of November. My mother and I would return to Wakefield for the ten days that I would be sitting my Matriculation Examination early in December. In the meantime, we would see how we related to being back in ‘Front Line UK’, as Kent was frequently called. One tempting difference in Canterbury’s favour was the fact that it had three cinemas, whereas there were none in Howden Clough. Occasionally we would make the bus journey to Leeds and go to a matinée at the theatre. That way I was able to appreciate the fragile beauty of Vivien Leigh in a revival of The Doctor’s Dilemma. It was the first stage play she was in after returning from the magic Hollywood years that began with Gone with the Wind and ended with Lady Hamilton and belated marriage to Laurence Olivier.
But now, back in Canterbury, we were basking in the thought of the silver screen. I remember we were arguing one evening – it was Tuesday 18 November – whether it was worth going to see Robert Taylor as Billy the Kid. I still had a hankering for the Western, but regarded Taylor more as a handsome profile than a plausible gunslinger. How would this Yank at Oxford stand up to the fire and brimstone of the six-shooter? A tremendous explosion temporarily dimmed the lights and reverberated away into the distance. Mother, father, and son – we looked at each other in frozen disbelief. We had heard nothing like it in the war. ‘That was a mine,’ said my father quietly. But how? ‘They must have dug their way into a coal mine,’ said my father. There were very deep mines in eastern Kent. But the thought of German commandos digging their way into them did not seem very likely.
My father went away to telephone. His role as an ARP warden gave him useful contacts. When he came back he looked both serious and somewhat relieved. It was a parachute mine apparently. Dropping silently through the evening air it had devastated its target. And its target was? The village of Sturry, some seven or eight miles away on the road to Herne Bay. Its charmingly winding main street was destroyed; some twenty or thirty people killed or seriously injured. Just recently I found a description of the raid: ‘One of the first bodies to be found was that of a small girl who had apparently been to the baker’s shop: her body was found in the street – and s
he was still clutching a bag of buns.’
I did not know that detail at the time. In any case, it seems more atrocious now looking down the long perspective of the years that the little girl lost. For what purpose was she robbed of all her expectations? What advantage was it to anybody that she died? I didn’t think such things in 1941. I was still alive and later in the week went to see Robert Taylor as Billy the Kid. He was tougher and harder than I expected. That was surely right. It was not called the Wild West for nothing, after all.
II
To someone just eighteen, the war itself, now in its third year, seemed simply part of the unquestionable given of existence. My father was just over eighteen when the First World War began. Perhaps each generation was going to be subject to this fiery initiation. Probably I was so anxious to get into the newfangled machinery of the air war because my father had got into the newfangled machinery of the tank war and behaved, I knew, with modest heroism. So I wanted to find some means by which I could modestly not fall too far behind his example.
He also found something I could usefully and enjoyably do in the six months that I was waiting for my call-up (eighteen and a half was the youngest age for conscription). My father had been told by the local newspaper owner that his staff were very short of reporters as all the young ones had been called up. Remembering my interest in creating bedside magazines, my father put my name forward.
So, early in January 1942 I found myself under the watery, pale blue eyes of Mr Hews, the proprietor of the Kentish Gazette. He seemed much more uncertain of himself than I was. His sentences wandered away into a maze of subordinate clauses. He found it excruciatingly difficult to tell me how little he was going to be able to pay me. He led me to think it was only going to be a few pence, and I was pleasurably surprised when he was at last able to murmur ‘Seventeen shillings and sixpence.’ (Half a pint of beer, I had just learned at my local, was ninepence.) Sensing that I was not displeased, he winced an apologetic smile and gratefully handed me over to the chief reporter, Mr Ovenden, or Gussy as he was universally called.