Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  Maconachie was particularly caustic about my dreams of glory.

  ‘That’s all a wank, mate. The thing to do is find a cushy billet and keep out of trouble.’

  ‘You don’t really mean that, after everything that’s happened to your part of London.’

  ‘I do, and how. I’ve had the war up to here. My war was being scared shitless in my granny’s cellar, night after night, in Brixton. Now I’m in it I’m going to have a soft time.’

  ‘I don’t see how it’s in our power to choose, any more than we know where we are going in the next few days,’ said Wyndham.

  ‘I don’t agree with that,’ said John. ‘After all, we’re only just in. There’s always ways and means of getting what you want. In my experience, the best is to walk straight towards it.’

  ‘You can do that if you like, mate. But if anybody asks me to volunteer for anything, my answer will be the same as the feller who, when he’d made his girl pregnant, was asked what steps he intended to take. “Bloody big ones,” he replied, and was never seen again.’

  Maconachie, with his crumpled anxious face, could always deflate us into laughter. But he meant what he said.

  ‘I don’t think it’s so easy to find a quiet corner,’ said John. ‘There’s danger everywhere. Even here. We’ve had a couple of raids, some chaps killed.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll find a place,’ said Maconachie with conviction.

  ‘It would be easier if you were an officer,’ murmured Wyndham. ‘We’re just pawns in the game.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ contested John. ‘Did being a brother of the King stop the Duke of Kent crashing?’

  ‘I saw him just a few weeks before he died,’ I said. ‘He came to Canterbury a couple of days after the Blitz. I was one of the reporters who went round with him.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘A bit of a ponce. He wore lipstick and yellow make-up.’

  ‘Effete bugger,’ said Maconachie.

  ‘No, they all do,’ explained John. ‘All the Royal Family. They think it makes them look better in photographs.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think it’s a shock for ordinary people when they meet them. Blue round his eyes and a black outline – might have been an Ancient Egyptian.’

  ‘Could as well be an Ancient Egyptian now, couldn’t he?’ said Maconachie. ‘Dead as Pharaoh, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ said John. ‘Death levels us all. Look at that general who was going to take over in the Desert. He was shot down on his way to Cairo.’

  ‘General Gott that was,’ said Wyndham.

  ‘He was doing what you said earlier, John,’ said Maconachie. ‘Stepping forward to take command. Fat lot of good it did him. He’d been better getting his men growing cabbages in Lancashire.’

  ‘He was said to be a jolly good tank general,’ I said.

  ‘Pull the other one, mate. We haven’t got a general that’s won a battle, except against the Eyeties. When we did have one that looked promising, that Wavell, we shipped him double-quick out of the way to India.’

  ‘The one who went out to replace Gott my father says is very good,’ I said.

  ‘How does he know?’

  ‘Well, this Montgomery was head of Southern Command. He was stationed near Canterbury. He made all the big-wigs under him go running every morning. Said they ought to be as fit as their men. Some of the other generals hated him.’

  ‘Sounds as if he’d got the right idea,’ said John.

  ‘Probably a nutter,’ said Maconachie. ‘There’s something about getting to be Top Brass. Turns your head to metal, too.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘you can’t say that about Rommel.’

  ‘Ah, but he’s a genius, isn’t he? There aren’t many of them around.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll find his match in this Montgomery,’ said Wyndham.

  ‘Garn,’ said Maconachie. ‘You mark my words. The days when a British general could mean anything are over. Only two things count in this war now: Russian manpower and American machinery. We’ll lose if the stuff isn’t made quicker than the men are killed off.’

  His conviction put a temporary chill on us.

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ said John quietly. ‘Individuals still count. Leadership counts. Look at Churchill.’

  Maconachie could change his opinion as fast as his tongue could wag.

  ‘You may be right, mate. Fact is, I hate generals ’cause not many of them come from Brixton.’

  Thin slices of ham with chips had been followed by small portions of synthetic almond tart and cups of tea, the consistency and colour of liquid mud. These could be our last moments together.

  ‘We must all meet after the war,’ said John. ‘Where shall it be?’

  ‘How about Veeraswamy in Regent Street?’ suggested Wyndham. ‘The food’s delicious and it’s fun. All the waiters wear turbans.’

  ‘That’s Indian, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I’ve never had Indian food.’

  ‘You may have too much in the next few months,’ said Maconachie. ‘How we going to know how to meet anyway?’

  ‘Just leave your name with the doorman. He’ll pass it on. I know him well,’ said Wyndham.

  ‘I wonder what adventures we’ll all have before then,’ said John, raising his tea cup. ‘Here’s to that meeting anyway.’

  ‘It’s probably years away,’ said Maconachie.

  ‘We may not recognise each other,’ said Wyndham.

  ‘Or want to know,’ said Maconachie.

  ‘What are you going to do, after it’s over?’

  ‘Me? Back to the barrow, I suppose. If this bloody rationing ever ends.’

  ‘Won’t it be marvellous,’ said Wyndham dreamily. ‘I can’t even imagine the lights. Do you remember Piccadilly, all those colours flashing and moving?’

  ‘One year my parents took me up specially to see them,’ I said. ‘I was about twelve years old.’

  ‘My mum and dad took me every Christmas to Regent Street. They used to have lit-up angels and things strung across,’ said Maconachie. ‘As a treat I’d look round Hamleys. That was a great toyshop, but too expensive for us. They’d buy me some little thing that had caught my attention without me knowing. Then it would turn up in my stocking.’

  ‘My parents used to take me, too,’ said Wyndham.

  ‘I’ve been there. It had the most amazing model trains,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose your childhood was spent in a bog, John,’ said Maconachie.

  ‘Not at all, there are some fine shops in Dublin.’

  ‘And theatres too, I’ve heard. But you wouldn’t go back?’

  ‘No, there’s no film industry to mean anything.’

  ‘How about you, Windy? What will you do?’

  ‘Not much choice, I’m afraid. Nose back to the balance sheets.’

  ‘You don’t like it in the City?’

  ‘The City’s all right. I’m not sure I’m cut out to be an accountant. It’ll get better as time goes on, I suppose.’

  ’ ‘What about you, Prof?’

  ‘Well, I’ll be up in London, too. I’m going to Guy’s to be a doctor.’

  ‘You, a doctor! Gawd help your patients!’

  ‘What do you mean,’ I said huffily.

  ‘No offence meant, mate, but let’s face it, you are likely to sew up the operation leaving the scissors inside.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ I said briskly. ‘Anyway, I probably won’t be a surgeon. My father wanted to be a family doctor.’

  ‘What’s what your father wanted got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t able to be a doctor, because they had no money, so his father put him in a bank. It was a white collar job, and safe. So my being one will fulfil his ambition, you might say.’

  ‘Seems a rum reason. My dad always wanted to be a millionaire, but that won’t help me to be one.’

  ‘My father’s a surgeon, in Cork, as it happens,’ said John. ‘It’s a
dramatic life, but I can’t be sure you’d be cut out for it, Mike.’

  ‘There is one thing.’ Maconachie’s spectacles glinted evilly. ‘You have to deliver babies, don’t you? They say there’ll be a baby boom after the war. Perhaps you’ll help to bring it down.’

  ‘You watch it, Mac,’ I protested. ‘Or some day I’ll prescribe gripe water for you when you’ve got an appendicitis.’

  Their ribbing flustered me. Medical studies seemed far away, and I had none of the confidence about mastering them that John seemed to have about his acting future.

  ‘I’ll be out of your clutches, anyway,’ he smiled. ‘I’ll be in Hollywood.’

  ‘You so sure you’ll get there?’

  ‘Of course. It’s the place for stars, and I’m going to be a star. Bigger than Errol Flynn.’

  He grinned with all his glittering even teeth.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going overseas,’ muttered Maconachie. ‘Australia perhaps.’

  ‘You mean, emigrate?’ asked Wyndham.

  ‘Why not? England’s all right for you lot, but it’s not so hot for my sort. Old Gidney goes on a bit, but he’s right. Things ought to change. Not that I suppose they ever will.’

  I could not imagine how things could change and be better. The England I knew, the orchards and farms and coastal towns of Kent, seemed perfect; and after the war, like Canterbury itself, must be restored and renewed and revitalised to continue, just as before. That was why we were fighting the war, wasn’t it?

  On my return from sick-bay, I had celebrated by stopping off at Skegness’s only bookshop. There I had bought a book by Lord David Cecil, The English Poets. It was one of a new series, Britain in Pictures, and with eight colour plates seemed good value at 2s 6d. Cecil, whom I had heard of as an Oxford don, began by saying:

  Every great nation has expressed its spirit in art: generally in some particular form of art . . . German music and Italian painting flourished, at most, for two hundred years. England has gone on producing great poets from the fourteenth century to today: there is nothing like it in the history of the arts.

  Nature placed England in the Gothic North, the region of magic and shadows, of elves and ghosts, and romantic legend. But from an early period she has been in touch with classic civilisation, with its culture, its sense of reality, its command of form.

  Yes, and the variety of language was matched by the infinite subtlety of the English climate; those endless gradations of light and shade, those sudden reverses, melodramatic shafts of sunshine, Ibsenian gloom of torrential rain, Celtic twilight of mists and mellow fruitfulness, soft dews of springtime, grandeur of autumnal woods and purple hillsides, feathery clouds of summer and towering Babylonian stormscapes of winter. And above all and around all, the sea; the sea that dashed against her shores on all sides and every mood, changeable as the spirit of man, more vast, more powerful. A constant corrective to arrogance and pride, a consolation to all merely human misery, a parable for every emotion, the highway to all the lands of the earth. Thrice lucky Englishmen, to be given this climate, this island, this glittering ocean home. I had never been abroad, but lying on a Kentish field in summer I knew I was in the best place on earth.

  Not for us the fierce contrasts of continental heats and iron frosts, the endless winters of the north, the barren deserts of the tropics. Our equable damps and cools had produced an equally temperate race, balanced but argumentative, judicious yet capable of passion: the stolid Saxon given a heady dash of Welsh rhetoric, Scots iron, Irish magic. A nation of shopkeepers, nature-loving country parsons, contentious dons, poetic cricketers, cheeky City chappies, women novelists, long-striding fair-skinned beauties, great actors, noble talkers, eccentric squires, philanthropists, iron-masters, robber barons, Puritan soldiers, breeding geniuses such as Darwin and Newton, James Watt and Faraday, Thomas More and David Hume, Boyle and Rutherford, Charlie Chaplin and Frank Woolley, Livingstone, Captain Cook, Nelson and Alfred the Great.

  Englishmen produced not only the Romantic Movement, but the Industrial Revolution; not only the bowmen who stood firm at Agincourt, but the sailors who charted the Seven Seas; the explorers and legislators of the greatest empire the world had ever known. The sun never set on the dazzling kaleidoscope of her peoples, enriched at home by embattled minorities seeking freedom from oppression, Huguenot refugees in the sixteenth century, Flemish Protestants in the seventeenth, Lithuanian and Russian Jews in the nineteenth, right down to the Poles and Czechs and Norwegian and Dutch and Free French of the present day. We might have had our dark Satanic mills, but we were also the outstanding bastion of freedom, the forerunner in the fight against slavery, in the defence of free speech, the development of justice and democracy. Unconquered for nearly a thousand years, we would come yet again to the rescue of captive Europe and liberate her from the tyranny of the new dictatorships as we had in the past from Napoleon and Louis XIV, and Catholic Spain.

  The meteor flag of England

  Shall yet terrific burn,

  Till danger’s troubled night depart

  And the star of peace return.

  The tricky thing was to get a hand to the flagpole without being frizzled by the sparks. Unthinkable to moulder these halcyon days in some cushy Home Counties billet; equally unpalatable to be thrust, a hapless pawn, into an outpost airstrip in Burma, easy road-building fodder for the encroaching Japanese. To create a bang not a whimper; that was all important. But how you do that at eighteen, when a ten-foot wall was nearly an insurmountable obstacle? It was obvious, I needed influence and a clear view of what to aim for: I had neither.

  An example of the general haplessness was upon us with the end of our course. Days of indecision followed while we waited for our posting. We had no idea where we would be going. Most of us were put to work on neighbouring farms. I had two days’ potato picking, back-breaking work in the enormous fields of Lincolnshire, where the end of the furrow curved away over the horizon. Then, returning with chapped hands and broken nails in the mid-October twilight on an open lorry, I heard we were to be off the following morning.

  There was a typed movement order pinned on the entrance to the billet. I was to go to the Plotters’ School, Leighton Buzzard, whatever that might be. Wyndham was posted to the Clerical Reception Centre, Chipping Walden. There was no time for considered farewells. It was already 8 o’clock and we were to depart at 3.30 in the morning. A desperate scurry of packing, polishing and final cleaning followed. The billet had to be made as shiny as we had found it. We left the pictures from the Illustrated London News on the walls, by special permission from Corporal Barker. He said they looked cheerful and appropriate, as the next intake would be running up to Christmas.

  ‘Besides, it’ll remind me of you daft couple, my terrible twins,’ he winked, giving Wyndham a cuff on the chest.

  We were going to miss Corporal Barker. We were going to miss our little room with its dormer window looking on the phosphorous lines of the sea. For six weeks it had been our home, an intimate haven above the vast impersonal pistons of the war machine. We wondered how long the new occupants would find Piero della Francesca to their taste. We were even going to miss the comical peaked turret of our billet and the stubby curve of Trafalgar Avenue, with its abrupt termination in the gorsecovered dunes. For the last time, we formed up in the grey pre-dawn and marched away from the murmur of the shore line.

  This time, loaded though I was with all my equipment, I was able to carry my kit bag without assistance. It took three hours of short marches and long halts to reach the station. Every airman in the place seemed to be leaving, and in their wisdom the authorities had planned we should all reach the station at the same time. There was another very long halt on the road outside. We were given hot tea and a packet of sandwiches.

  Eventually, at about 8 a.m., names began to be called. Mine came up quite soon. I shook hands with Wyndham; we promised yet again to write. A wave to the others standing in their ranks and I shouldered the kit bag: a lumpy burden. Why
had I not learned to pack it neatly?

  ‘Hurry up, you there,’ shouted the NCOs down the long lines of the squads. ‘At the double, now; we haven’t got all day.’

  I broke into a rickety trot, stumbling under the weight. I was far back in the ranks and I could hear the hiss of the waiting train. I was sweating in my greatcoat, an unaccustomed covering, made more constricting by the webbing buckled over the top of it. Water bottle banged against one thigh, side-pack against the other, main pack sawed against backbone, bending under the kit bag. Some protuberance in it, jouncing against my ear, tilted my cap over my eyes and threatened to skitter it at my feet. Ramming it on my head, my free hand caught my glasses, slipping them down my nose. My exit from Skegness threatened to be as ignominious as my arrival.

  There was a muffled cheer as I reached the station entrance. Was it a farewell from my friends, or an ironic acknowledgement of my dishevelled appearance? No time to look back: far down between the slender metal pillars I saw Auerbach among those getting into the train. He was on his way to the officers’ training centre at Cosford. There was no one else I knew. I bundled into a crowded compartment of strangers, just as the train began its premonitory jerks and whistles. I leant back with a long huff of relief, nearly dislocating my neck on the sharp edge of the back-pack as the train surged away.

  What could I have put in it that was so rigid? The tin helmet was strapped on the outside of the pack as regulations demanded. Clumsily, I undid the shoulder braces and shrugged it off. Might as well be as comfortable as possible, on what I expected was going to be a long and tedious journey. How awful that after all that hanging about there had been no real chance to say goodbye to Wyndham. Now he had gone out of my life, perhaps forever, leaving not a trace behind. I should at least have asked for one of his paintings or drawings. I knew that in some ways he was the first adult friend I had, and I would have dearly loved a keepsake.

  Heaving the back-pack up onto the clothes rack, I paused. How had I ever managed to make it so square and neat? My packing was always a disaster; somehow it must have subsided into tidiness during the hours of marching and waiting. Hastily pulling out the flap and digging in an exploratory hand I pulled out a drawing of myself. ‘M. in the billet at Skegness’ it was captioned. You could see the Piero della Francesca on the wall. I was reading and looked rather too plump. Behind the drawing there was a wooden frame with a whole lot of watercolours pinned to it. It was Wyndham’s collapsible easel. I had the mementoes now, rather too many. I also had all his underwear, his shirts and his spare uniform and spare boots. By the same token he would have those that belonged to me. I had his back-pack and he had mine. We had obviously picked up the wrong ones in the flurry of leaving the billet. On the outside they were, of course, interchangeable. But in the contents . . .