Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  Now here was someone I could picture shifting his half-smoked cheroot to the corner of his mouth as he growled in the time-honoured way of all newspaper films: ‘Hold the front page, you guys; here’s hot news.’ Just how hot it was going to be I mercifully could not imagine. Actually, Gussy did not smoke cigars, but he never had a cigarette out of his mouth. A perpetual trail of ash drifted down his greasy collar. His eyes were narrowed to slits and his shoulders shook to almost continuous paroxysms of coughing. It was not only the nicotine, but the poison gas he had inhaled in Mesopotamia in the First World War. ‘Sorry laddie, got to cough a bit, get some relief.’

  Reeling from side to side with each fresh outburst, he took me along a dark corridor into the oily, fumy, juddering bedlam of the works. Here some half-dozen grizzled veterans banged away at the hot slugs of type. Here the meandering thoughts of Mr Hews in his weekly leader came to a full stop, and Gussy disciplined the pomposities of the city council into a few pages of jerky shorthand. ‘Make sure you spell their names right; doesn’t matter what they say.’

  It was a world that Boz might have recorded. I was to start the next Monday. I thought I might be going to enjoy it. I underestimated. It was actually one of the best times of my life.

  III

  On the Monday morning I set off from our house at 8.45 a.m.: turned left out of our gate into New Dover Road, and walked for ten minutes or so past the large Victorian houses surrounded by the bare trunks of their trees, over the railway cutting, past the entrance to St Augustine’s Road with its modern, semi-detached houses; and then, following the curve of the road to the left, encountered the incongruous square brick shape of the telephone exchange, a terrace of early Victorian houses and the nouveau Regal Cinema. Across the cobbled open space of the cattle market and into St George’s Street, well named as the tower of the church elbowed its way masterfully onto what was now about to become the High Street. The big clock face on the church showed it was exactly 9 a.m. as I went into the inconspicuous office entrance to the Kentish Gazette on the opposite side of the road.

  It was a dingy little place, mostly taken up by filed copies of the Gazette and a dark-haired girl who was looking at herself in a compact mirror, busy blackening her eyebrows. She did not seem particularly interested in finding out why I had appeared. I shifted uneasily and eventually produced a mild copy of Gussy’s cough.

  ‘Well, boy, what do you want?’ she said snappishly. ‘Is it BMD or For Sale?’

  The questions would have been enough to floor me, but in delivering them she put down the compact and looked at me directly. My stomach, empty after a hurried breakfast, literally turned over. I had never seen such a beautiful person. And she must be working here!

  ‘I’m the new reporter,’ I said as grandly as I could.

  ‘Good Law, they must be robbing the kindergarten,’ she said turning into the back of the shop. ‘Hey Beez, see who’s here.’

  A plumpish, freckled girl of about the same age came bustling in from behind the ledgers. This was Joan Beasley, who looked after the business side of the paper.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked the heaven-sent beauty.

  Her name was Christine Wimsett, and it turned out that she registered all the Births, Marriages and Deaths – the BMDs – in the paper.

  ‘You might laugh, but it’s the small ads that make the money,’ she explained.

  I nodded seriously. I was not likely to deny anything she said. Just at that moment, with a tinkle and a crash, a tall curly-haired young man came in off the street lugging a bicycle.

  ‘Keith, here’s your new buddy,’ said Christine.

  ‘Am I glad you’re here,’ exclaimed Keith Webb. ‘I have to come all the way from Whitstable.’

  ‘Where are the other reporters?’ I asked, looking around apprehensively.

  There was a general hoot of laughter. Apparently there were no other reporters.

  ‘What about Gussy?’ I could hear the distant echo of his cough coming from the works.

  ‘Oh he only does the Circuit Judge cases – the important trials – and the local urban district council. All the rest will be you and me lad.’ Keith gave me a welcoming slap on the back.

  ‘Let’s see, it’s Monday today; that’s undertakers isn’t it?’ said Joan Beasley, generally known as Beez.

  ‘Undertakers?’ I asked. ‘What have we to do with them?’

  ‘That’s how we find out who’s dead,’ said Keith.

  ‘Who’s dead?’ I asked.

  ‘By looking in their coffins,’ said Christine voluptuously. ‘And making sure they’re stiff and frozen.’

  ‘Why do I need to do that?’

  ‘So that you can interview them, for their obituary,’ exclaimed Christine.

  ‘But if they’re dead . . .’

  ‘You only need the obit if they are dead.’ Christine tossed her dark hair and I joined in the laughter.

  I could see that it was going to be very different from swotting up Milton.

  IV

  Storing his bicycle in the corridor that led to the works, Keith took me on a tour of the undertakers. As I remember, there were four or five of them – as different as cremation was from burial.

  Mr Herriot employed at least a dozen carpenters. His cavernous shed echoed with hammering, banging and sawing, almost drowning the screech of the green and red parrot that flexed its claws on Mr Herriot’s shoulder.

  He was immensely proud of the quality of his coffins. Each Monday he insisted on taking me round the works, pointing out the enduring beauty of the latest mahogany masterwork he was producing for some local worthy. ‘Nothing’, he would murmur, ‘will as much become him as his final resting place. Just lift the lid, laddie.’

  Unwillingly, I did.

  ‘See that: pure sateen cushions to support his head. I know what you are thinking, my young sir. He may not know where he is himself – though we very much hope he does. But even if the worst happens and he goes to another place – don’t let’s consider it. But even if it did so happen, his relatives won’t know for a long time. And they’ll be consoled in the meanwhile with the thought of that beloved head resting on that pure sateen, and the preservative powers of that mahogany come all the way from Burma. Only teak and mahogany can give you that guaranteed protection. Believe me, that protection is needed in chalky, porous soil like ours. Indeed it is.’

  On reaching such a climax, Mr Herriot would shake his head so violently that the gold rings in his left ear would tinkle and the parrot would rise from his shoulder with a startling screech. I would stumble off into the winding bustling streets, narrowly missing the bicycle boys, the waggoners, the platoons of soldiers, an incantation of rural deans, an imprecation of cattle drovers, basket-laden housewives and the fruit stalls that enterprising farmers had set up on the edge of the great bomb crater with its wild flowers fluttering on the slopes where my favourite bookshop had been.

  Visiting the undertakers, my regular Monday morning task, could be agitating when death was all around. But it could have its compensations.

  ‘Hey, come in and sit down. You’ve been visiting that disturbing Mr Herriot, hasn’t he Samuel? In our business it’s a great mistake to go metaphysical, isn’t it Samuel?’

  The brothers Samuel and Jon Jonson rarely disagreed with each other, probably because Jon did all the talking. I don’t think they were twins, though they always dressed alike in dark tweeds and bowler hats; an austere appearance which characterised their gloomy profession. They did all the work themselves, but still had time to relax and, when it seemed appropriate, to hand out a thimbleful of brandy.

  Halfway in size between the Jonsons and Mr Herriot was the carpenter’s shop and funeral arrangers of Meredith and Son. They could provide a horse-drawn hearse with black plumes and music for the procession; Mr Meredith employed an accordion player and a violinist. They often played and sang while hammering away at their latest assignment.

  Of course, my purpose in visiting them was
neither to discuss metaphysics, nor to drink brandy, nor to listen to a wistful air. I had to get the addresses of their customers; the people who had died in Canterbury during the previous week. Then, on Monday afternoon, I visited those addresses, interviewed the bereaved families and extracted from them the life story of the dead person. Usually it was a son or daughter, brother or sister, who stumbled through the catalogue of their relative’s brief life at my prompting.

  At first I approached these interviews with dread. An emotional person myself, I could not imagine my appearance, notebook and pencil in hand, as being other than crass and repugnant to the bereaved family. But I quickly came to realise that I provided a symbol of the dead person’s importance. It did not matter that the Kentish Gazette had a purely local circulation. It was the name in print, included in capitals in the heading, with at least two paragraphs of life and achievements that was important. It visibly rounded off his story and gave it a terminal meaning. In this way I was like Mercury, the messenger of the gods, flying down to convey that all was well. (This was, of course, before the arrival of television and when the radio dealt with the dreadful daily events in a relatively distant and impersonal way.)

  I realised how important the visit of priest or welfare worker was. My function, however, was more than just condolence. Like Mercury, I had to connect this simple life with the remorseless flow of world events that was visible in much the same sized type a few inches higher up the newspaper page.

  Because death is a relatively rare event in family experience, there would be uncertainty in how to handle it. Quite quickly I learned how to deal with wives who said: ‘Would you like to see the body then?’ The answer had to be yes, otherwise you were spurning an offer to witness someone whose life had been of crucial importance to the person making the offer.

  So I saw a number of the dead, usually stretched out on the bed in the spare room, filling the space in the way the dead do, with a breathless hush that cannot be answered. Some relatives became unnaturally frivolous. ‘Feel his hand. Did you ever know anything so cold?’ One wondered where such conversations might end.

  V

  So much for Monday. Tuesday and Friday mornings there was the magistrate court. Keith and I would toss for which of us would cover which day. Despite my shaky command of shorthand, I enjoyed this close-up view of the law. It was an interesting way of seeing justice done at a grass-roots level. The principal Justice of the Peace was a squarely plump and decisive tradesman who owned the largest women’s dress and drapery store in the town. During the Battle of Britain he had stopped his car to watch a dog fight between two or three Messerschmitts and a lone Spitfire. The Spitfire was shot down. Mr LeFevre saw the pilot bail out and his parachute open successfully. Later in the day he heard that the pilot was his own son.

  The war only impinged obliquely on the magistrates. By far the greatest number of war cases in my time related to minor infringements in the blackout restrictions. After a while I noticed there was something familiar in these prosecutions of bicyclists, who were often accused, not of having too much light between their handle bars, but too little. Then I realised all the cases were brought by the same policeman.

  When I told Gussy he agreed at once. He explained that an ordinary policeman on the beat would not have much opportunity to distinguish himself. So it was common practice for him to bone up thoroughly on one aspect of his profession, then if he could not bring a charge for overlighting, he could probably accuse the evening pedaller of the opposite. At the end of the year the policeman could point to the number of cases he had successfully brought to trial and hope his zeal be remembered when promotion came around.

  Many of the matters that occupied the court seemed unnecessary and trivial. Thus I had to report on my own father being fined seven shillings and sixpence for failing to get a licence to keep a dog. (At the end of the thirties we had acquired a nervous little West Highland terrier called Jane.) This lapse was hardly likely to affect the war effort. On the other hand, matters of great pith and moment often seemed intractable.

  The most violent cases involved either coal miners or gypsies. Kent mines were exceptionally deep, dark and dangerous. The miners wanted to be paid commensurately more. The government had outlawed strikes during the war and proposed moving in Welsh miners. The fury of these hard, self-contained men from underground had to be witnessed to be believed.

  Equally aggressive in a more feline way were the gypsies. For centuries they had wandered across the southern counties halting to help in the seasonal fruit picking to the irritation and distrust of the local farmers. Now the government had forbidden such movement, as Kent was considered a potential war zone. To the gypsies it was an arbitrary attack on their ancient liberties. But were they so ancient?

  On Tuesday afternoon it was my task to go to the public library. There, neatly piled, were copies of every issue of the paper. It had been founded in 1709 and was thus the seventh oldest in the country. I had to choose excerpts from the issues of fifty years before (1892); one hundred years before (1842); two hundred years before (1742) and two hundred and twenty-five years before (1717). The further back I went, the easier it was to find analogies with the present day. In the mid-eighteenth century soldiers had to be marched in to quieten the rebellious miners. Gypsies found guilty of horse stealing were hanged from the gibbet on the Dover Road.

  I loved working in the quiet musty-smelling library. As well as choosing items to fit the appropriate dates I also had to pick at random short paragraphs that would fill an unwanted gap on the page. In fact they were called ‘fillers’. Here is one I remember from the summer of 1776. German mercenary troops were being shipped off to Boston to put down the rebellious colonists.

  ’Tis said when the Hessians marched abroad, they was all crying drunk . . .

  I particularly like the dots.

  A much longer and more detailed account was given of a duel in (I think) 1722. It was fought with swords and one young contestant lost his hand. And lo and behold, there in a case nearby in the museum was the embalmed hand, looking very slight and fragile with the sword which it had once held beside it.

  Unless there was some unexpected news story to cover, Wednesday was a quiet day for the reporters. In the morning Gussy put the paper to bed. This was when the fillers came in useful. Mr McNally, the advertising manager, bustled about checking that the adverts were rightly placed. Keith and I retired to the reporters’ room on the first floor.

  In the afternoon the whole building shuddered and shook with the paroxysms of production. The front office was closed, presumably to stop any of the public wandering into the danger area of the works. The important thing for us was that it released Christine from her desk. She was supposed to type any business letters that Mr Hews required, but this seldom happened. Instead she would drift up to the reporters’ room and torment us. Usually Beez would join in. Keith would go out and buy a flagon of cider. From behind a pile of old news sheets we would pull out a battered portable gramophone. On it would go an equally scratched and chipped 78:

  Oh yes, let them begin the beguine

  Make them play . . .

  After a couple of glasses of cider we were in the mood to dance and dance we did.

  Outside the hustle of the busy High Street went on; below the whole building was convulsed with the grinding clamour of the printing press joined by the sympathetic hawking of Gussy. Did we care? We were dancing cheek to cheek with the most beautiful girl in town. Time stood still.

  When a Broadway baby says goodnight

  It’s early in the morning.

  VI

  I think it was probably my mother who first encouraged my interest in ballroom dancing. Sensibly, she will have seen it as an alternative to the games that I was not allowed to partake in at school. By the time we returned to Canterbury in November 1941 my enthusiasm had been further stimulated by my cousin Douglas’s terpsichorean triumphs.

  So it was with real determination that I went
for a couple of lessons a week to Miss Hanbury. If my timber-toed cousin could get a gold medal, why shouldn’t I? I practised the movements of the quickstep, the slow foxtrot, the waltz, the tango and the cha cha cha in front of the long mirror in my parents’ bedroom until my Victor Sylvester recordings were wearing out. I preferred the original American versions played by Artie Shaw or Duke Ellington, but Miss Hanbury insisted on the strict tempo of the King of the Ballroom.

  I obeyed Miss Hanbury in all things. In fact I soon found I was as preoccupied by Miss Hanbury as I was in counting the numbers of the chassé and the two-step. Miss Hanbury took her female pupils in groups, but boys singly. ‘Boys are so much more embarrassed at dancing with each other, and they have to take the lead in so many movements in ballroom dancing, it’s easier for them to learn face to face,’ she explained to my parents. Perhaps this was true but I wonder if she was aware of the effect she had on at least one of her pupils.

  I can recall a host of images from those lessons in the spring of 1942. She would be waiting, a cigarette in a long holder held between her slender fingers, smoothing with her other hand her simple silk dress. I suppose she was in her early thirties and I assume she only thought of me as a rather gauche and clumsy adolescent. Yet in her lessons I was principally preoccupied with battling with the unexpected sensual impressions she produced in me. I was aware of the perfume that came with the warmth of the body that was so agonisingly close in the slow foxtrot. My supportive hands told me that beneath the silk dress was only the ripple of firm skin and the single line of the brassiere strap. She could judge to perfection how near she could be to me in the long sweeping movements of the tango without actually touching. She never talked gossip or small talk, yet below the disciplined surface of the lesson, I was aware of a preoccupation in her to which I was not sophisticated enough to respond absolutely. What should I have done? I did not know, but remembered the lines in T.S. Eliot: