Growing Up In a War Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Copyright

  About the Book

  This utterely compelling memoir opens with a sceptical nine-year-old Bryan Magee being taught the facts of life. It goes on to tell the story of the Second World War as seen through a child’s eyes. He experienced some of the earliest air raids on London, and his family home was bombed. Like more than a million other children, he was sent away as an evacuee, first to a tiny village and then to a market town, where he lived with two remarkable and very different families.

  Growing Up in a War nostalgically evokes the atmostphere of wartime England, the community spirit of a society before television, where very few had cars or telephones. A kid from the East End, he won a scholarship to one of the country’s ancient public schools and found the Battle of Britain raging overhead. During the school holidays, he returned to London and the air raids, the doodlebugs and V2 rockets. Wartime London is brought vividly to life, the streets teeming by day and empty at night, the theatres opening before blackout, and even the cheap restaurants conquering the challenges of rationing.

  With the war over, Bryan’s school sent him to a Lycée in Versailles, and he explores the Paris of those post-war years. Then, back in England but still at school, he tumbles into his first love affair, with an older woman. The book comes to an end with his call-up into the army, and his unexpected posting to the School of Military Intelligence.

  About the Author

  Bryan Magee has had a many-sided career. In the 1960’s and 70’s he worked in broadcasting as a current affairs reporter on ITV and a critic of the arts on BBC Radio 3. At one time he taught philosophy at Oxford, where he was a tutor at Balliol College. His best-remembered television programmes are two long series about philosophy: for the first he was awarded the Silver Medal of the Royal Television Society, while the book which he based on the second series was a bestseller. From 1974 to 1983 he was Member of Parliament for Leyton, first as Labour, then as a Social Democrat. He is now a full-time author. His last book, Clouds of Glory, was awarded the J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography. His others have been translated into more than twenty languages.

  to

  Richard Cavendish

  GROWING UP IN A WAR

  BRYAN MAGEE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I WAS SITTING in a tree with Teddy Green, talking about what I was about to discover were the facts of life. At the top of it was an intertwining of branches that formed a wide-bottomed, broad-backed place to sit, like a throne; and whenever this was our tree for climbing, whichever one of us got there first took possession of the throne, while the other one sat astride a branch. It was a favourite place of ours. We would talk there for hours.

  Today I was in the throne. One of us had just told a dirty joke, and I was reflecting aloud that these sorts of jokes were funny all right, but it was such a pity we had to base them on a silly pretence about some ridiculous thing that grown-ups were supposed to do.

  Teddy gave me a look. He was a village boy, and was used to animals. The conversation went something like this.

  ‘It’s not silly. It’s true.’

  ‘Garn.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Can’t be.’

  ‘They really do.’

  ‘Gercha.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Corse they don’t.’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘Get away.’

  ‘I promise you.’

  And so on, for a long time. Why I ever did start believing him I don’t know. Perhaps it had something to do with his manner and expression (he did, after all, know) and something to do with our ages (I was nine, he ten) and the fact that I had for so long been familiar with the ideas, and the meanings of all those naughty words (since I was about five), although it had never occurred to me to take them seriously. When, after many refusals, I accepted the truth of what he was saying, there was still a sense in which I could not believe it. How could grown-ups, of all people, do such a thing? Children, perhaps, yes, but grown-ups … How could they do it for laughing, quite apart from anything else? Did they titter and giggle all the time they were doing it? Why did they do it, if they wished they didn’t have children? Come to think of it, it was a dirty thing to do, as well, joining up the things they pissed with. How could they want to do that? I was mystified. Enthroned at the top of the tree I gazed out over a wide, sunlit green field, awestricken by these revelations, struggling to take them in.

  No doubt Teddy and I went on chattering, but I have no memory of what we said. I remember only my thoughts, though I expect I was putting them into words. If this really was how babies were born then it must be how I was born. And that … no … yes … they couldn’t … they must … it meant my parents had done it!! The realisation was a thunderbolt. Never in my life had I been so gobsmacked. I tried to picture my mum and dad at it, and found this impossible. Yet I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t, so I was a sort of living proof that they had. They must’ve.

  In spite of my inability to conceive it, I arrived at the conclusion that my parents must have done it not once but twice – once for my sister and once for me. Of course, this was a very long time ago, and they had been different people then. Even so, it remained baffling beyond anything I had ever tried to get my mind round. And of course, there was the fact that they disliked one another, so that may have helped and made it easier for them. But I kept coming back to the question of why they did it. My mother had never wanted children, and she certainly wished she’d never had us. Perhaps it had been my father who wanted us. He loved us, that was for sure; but what a thing to have to do to get us!

  I felt like a traveller on foot who finds a range of mountains springing up around him. Problems heaved up on every side, whichever way I looked. Everybody had been born the same way. So my parents had. And this meant that my grandparents had done it … And Norman Tillson’s parents … And all the boys’ parents at school … And everyone’s parents in the village … And everybody’s in Hoxton … Everybody’s … All the people that had ever existed since the beginning of the world. Obviously everybody who had ever had children had done it. And then, when the children grew up, most of them did it too; and then they had children themselves, and that’s how the world carried on – in fact it’s what the world was. Without it there wouldn’t be a world, or at least there wouldn’t be any people. It was a flabbergasting picture. The entire human world suddenly seemed phantasmagoric to me, grotesque.

  I wandered around lost in these thoughts for days. As incredulity faded, it gave way to curiosity. I was sharing a bedroom with a girl called Gwen, a cousin of the Pammie Ainsworth who had wheeled me about in a pushchair when I was two. Gwen, who was eleven, slept on a divan in the d
iagonally opposite corner of my bedroom. I realised now that my grandmother was keeping us as far apart as she could. These were the earliest weeks of the Second World War, and we were having to go to bed by torchlight because of the blackout. Gwen and I would always natter together in the darkness before falling asleep, and sometimes, after my grandmother had gone to bed, we would get up again and play by the light of our torches, which we thought were fun in themselves. Gwen was a whole year older than Teddy, so one night I asked her if she knew about this incredible thing grown-ups were supposed to do. She said she did. But did she realise, I persisted, that they actually did it? Yes, she said, she did know that. I found this disconcerting and encouraging at the same time. Why should you have to be grown up to do it, I wondered aloud – I mean, what would there be to stop the two of us doing it, right now? She said she couldn’t think of anything that was stopping us. Well shall we have a go at it, I suggested, and see what it’s like? She was game, in a way that gave me the impression that she had wondered about it already.

  The first thing we needed to do was get our pyjama trousers off. Then we used our torches to examine the situation. I found she had something I had never seen before, pubic hair, and this held me up a bit. I was familiar with pubic hair as an idea, because it came into the jokes, but it had never occurred to me that people actually had it. I had frequently seen girls of my own age showing off what was under their knickers, and none of them had it. I moved the torch in to a close-up, and examined the hair in detail, fingering it with fascination. It made such an impression that it is the only part of Gwen I now remember – I have only the vaguest recollection of her face. When I questioned her about the hair she told me that all girls got it at about her age – and then, she supposed, they must have it for the rest of their lives. This was another revelation – my grandmother … my mother … my sister … they must all have this hair. In some huge, secret way everything was turning out to be different from what I thought – and altogether more gamy.

  Eventually we moved on to the main agenda – or rather we tried to. My attempts to insert my penis into Gwen’s vagina were completely unsuccessful. We tried and tried, but it was impossible to get it in. She did everything she could to help, holding herself open with the fingers of one hand while trying to stuff me in with the other, but it was hopeless. My penis was a tiny little squashy thing that just flattened itself against her, while her vagina was dry and tight-lipped. It was as if we were trying to force a blancmange through a blocked keyhole. After trying and retrying, and re-retrying, we were flummoxed. How did people do it? Assuming they did, which we accepted, there must be some trick to it that we were missing. We were unable to think what it could be. It was all so hopeless that we never tried again. But the mystery went on puzzling me for quite some time. It was more than another year before someone (a seventeen-year-old girl) explained to me that erections made the difference. I had had erections, naturally, ever since I could remember, but only occasionally, and they had seemed to happen out of the blue, unconnected with anything else, like having a pain that then went away. It had never occurred to me to think of them in such a connection as this. In any case, they happened so seldom that I did not see how someone could expect to be having one just at the moment he needed it. Nor did I see, still, how he would be able to get it in to that tightly closed lock, even if he had one.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TOWARDS THE END of the 1930s it was obvious to most people in Britain that war was going to break out soon, and the only question was when. It was expected that Hitler would launch immediate air attacks against Britain’s cities. (The air attacks came, but not immediately.) So the peacetime government began making plans for the defence of the civilian population, organising air-raid shelters and gas masks, and preparing the evacuation of children from those cities most likely to be targeted. To anyone with low expectations of bureaucracy, the high quality of the planning was disconcerting. Within four days of the outbreak of war something like one and a half million children had been removed by train in good order from the most vulnerable cities, and were billeted with families in safe areas. The organisation of the evacuation was based on schools, not on individual children or residential areas: whole schools, together with their teachers, moved to small non-industrial towns, or to cities beyond the range of bombing, and carried on their activities in makeshift surroundings such as church halls and assembly rooms, or disused large buildings of other kinds.

  It was only because the civilian population had been put into a high state of preparedness beforehand that all this worked. There had been, inevitably, people who said that a Tory government was manipulating the population to prepare for a war it was planning; but this was the usual nonsense from what had become the usual quarters: few governments in history have tried harder to buy off aggression by appeasement than that pre-war Conservative government. The critics of what were in fact highly civilised and sensible precautions were only too often apologists for Stalin’s Russia, which at that juncture entered into an alliance with Nazi Germany, and was even then preparing a secret agreement with Hitler to divide up Poland and the Baltic states.

  That is how it came about that in the summer of 1939 ordinary British families were discussing over their breakfast tables what action they were going to take when war broke out. Our family shop – which my grandfather owned, and worked in with my father – sold men’s and boys’ clothes. Since people were obviously going to go on needing clothes, it was assumed that the shop would continue trading. At the age of thirty-seven my father was unlikely to be called up early, and that was a blessing, because my grandfather would not have been able to run the shop by himself. If Dad were to volunteer, it was not likely that Grandad would be allowed to hire another able-bodied man to replace him. So the decision was reached that Dad would continue working in the shop until ordered by officialdom to do something else, at which point the family would reassess the situation in the light of whatever turned out to be the prevailing circumstances. But meanwhile, what about the children, my sister and me? The shop, which was where we lived, was in Hoxton, in the very heart of inner-city London, which everyone expected to be the most heavily bombed area. All the local schools were now forming plans to evacuate themselves on the outbreak of war, to as yet unknown destinations. Joan and I were automatically invited to go with ours. But there was nothing compulsory about all this. So should we go? If not, and our schools went, what would we do instead?

  These questions were gone over repeatedly. My parents decided quickly enough to send us away from London for our own safety, but they were uncertain on what basis to do that. In the end, differing decisions were made for the two of us. Joan, just now becoming a teenager, was at a good grammar school in Highbury, and it was decided that she should stay with it, because of the unlikelihood of finding a better school. At her age she would be able to manage if sent beyond the reach of visits by parents. But I was still only nine, and at a bog-standard elementary school round the corner from the shop, a school to which there was no reason for me to remain attached; so it was decided that there was no need for me to stay with my school. Perhaps it is worth remarking that these considerations, although they turned out to be less pressing than was thought, were by no means superfluous or unrealistic. Although the bombing did not begin until a year after the outbreak of war, when it came it demolished a third of Hoxton, which was one of the most heavily bombed areas in the country. The rooms in which we lived above our shop had their roof torn off by the blast from a direct hit on my school, which was totally demolished.

  My grandparents were now in their sixties, and had been planning to retire quite soon in any case to a cottage in the country. At least, my grandmother regarded herself as having made this decision: with this in mind she had rented one of three newly built bungalows in a tiny village called Worth, in West Sussex. She got it on the cheap because a speculative builder had been left with it on his hands. It was a mile or so outside Three Bridges, and two or thr
ee miles from Crawley. The way you got there was by taking a train to Three Bridges from Victoria. In those days Three Bridges was little more than a railway junction, Crawley was a small and charming country town, and Worth a single street. Various members of the family, including me, had already been there for weekends. I have memories of a longer stay over the Easter of 1939, when I recall my delight at the colourfulness of the birds, and my pride and surprise at being able to identify many of them from a set of pictures I had collected from my parents’ cigarette packets.

  The family decision was that, when war began, I and my grandmother should go down to Worth and live together there. It would be an already familiar home for me, within easy reach of London, in a place that my parents knew how to visit – whereas my school could well go to somewhere inaccessible. Worth had its village school, in which, we were told, all the children over eleven were taught in one room; but there was no junior school, so my father arranged that, like other Worth children of my age, I should go to school in Three Bridges.

  Actually, I and my grandmother travelled down to Worth the day before war broke out. My father’s sister Peggy had a friend, a secretary in Whitehall, who telephoned her to tell her that Germany was about to invade Poland; that Britain would immediately issue an ultimatum to Hitler to withdraw; that Hitler was expected to ignore the ultimatum; and that we would then declare war on Germany; and that all this was going to happen within the next few days. It did, but none of it was explained to me in advance, and I complained clamorously about being sent away from home when there was not even a war. My father, whom I trusted in everything, assured me that I could rely on war breaking out in a few days, and that it would be a good idea to go before the rush. So, at the age of nine, I left what had been my world until then, never to live in it again.

  Since birth my home had been my birthplace, 276 Hoxton Street. This street was both the main and the market street of a whole distinctive area called Hoxton, one of London’s Domesday Book villages that for centuries had nestled just outside the northern gates of the City. With the expansion of London after the Industrial Revolution it became the westernmost part of the East End; and by the time I came on the scene it was notorious throughout the country for its combination of poverty and crime. A report published when my grandparents were young adults had famously declared: ‘Hoxton is the leading criminal quarter of London, and indeed of all England.’ But for me it had up to now been where I felt I belonged. I was at home in it, it was the only place I knew really well, and I loved it. It was to be largely wiped off the face of the earth in the few years after I left: what was not destroyed by German bombing was swept away in the post-war slum-clearance programmes; so today almost nothing of the Hoxton I grew up in remains. What goes under that name now is a quite different place even physically, with mostly different buildings and even different streets, in which much of the population is black; and what were warehouses when I was there have been turned into lofts and artists’ studios.