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"...and live again our school life blest"
The 'May blitz' was the last major effort by the Luftwaffe against Liverpool before they switched their attention to the Soviets who, having been 'the Red Menace' for twenty-four years, became within twenty-four hours "our gallant Russian allies". So we regarded them until Churchill's Fulton ("Iron Curtain") speech in 1946.
With the bombing over Dad decided he had had enough of living with his father-in-law and early in 1942 we moved back into town: off Lodge Lane: three up, three down, Edwardian yellow-brick, one cold tap, tin bath, "lav" at the bottom of the yard, minimal electricity. To light the kitchen Dad ran a looping, silk-insulated cable from a point in the living-room to a hook in the kitchen ceiling from which dangled a bulb. This arrangement worked until Mum boiled a Christmas pudding like a speckled football. The kitchen filled with steam and my left ear took a nasty little shock as it brushed past the wet silk of the cable. It was fine once the insulation had dried out.
The Christmas cake had marzipan made from soya. It tasted awful.
My sister and brother went to the parish school but 1942-3 was 'Scholarship Year' and daily I started for Twig Lane in Roby: 26 tram to the Victoria Monument, rubble all along the route where houses and buildings had been, shrapnel marks on every fragment of wall still standing. The old queen still stood in Castle Street though badly scarred. The Custom House was a burnt-out husk, South Castle Street was virtually flat on both sides and there were uninterrupted views in all directions except north.
Then came the 40 tram to Page Moss. That part of the trip was six miles in toto, every thoroughfare showing heaps of rubble. Clint Road air raid shelter to the right, sealed off with its dead. Grant Road very badly damaged where a stick of bombs had fallen its length. The tram ran parallel to Prescot Street, flattened when a convoy of ammunition lorries was hit.
Fares were paid by my parents, no passes in those days. We had school milk for a ha'penny a day and a school dinner for fivepence, real money. Even so, in spite of the myth that the nation had never been so well nourished, and the diet never so healthy, many of us were sent to a clinic at Alder Hey Hospital and classified "malnourished". Growing children evidently needed more fat and protein than the rations provided, or the authorities admitted.
Apart from the boxes of apples sent by Canada, God bless her, there were no other official extras except an allowance of sugar to make jam, thus preserving the fruit crop. I never grew much. This led to problems with bullying to which the response was unwarned, lightning counter-attack with all possible violence, followed by swift vacation of the scene. It worked.
Miss Nordoff was the Fourth Year teacher. She knew about Mental Arithmetic, I still do Carol Vorderman sums in my head. On English, Intelligence Tests and how to get Scholarships she was no slouch. 'Rufty Tufty', potato prints etc. went by the board. I wrote elaborate sentences to show that I knew what words meant, referring with glee to the plight of von Paulus, suffering with his whole Sixth Army, in Stalingrad, and the Eighth Army seeing off the enemy at Alamein and eventually "hitting him for six out of Africa", as Montgomery said. Now he was something new, a General who could win.
My mother sent me to the Scholarship exam with a boiled egg in me. My father had helped me for months with the Arithmetic and English. I was fortunate that in a time of almost cosmic disturbance I had a stable, loving family.
I was given me a Scholarship. I guess they couldn't bear the notion of any more contorted sentences.
I chose one grammar schools rather than the other because its reputed, instant, random violence seemed preferable to the cold, calculated, deferred violence of the alternative. That you were going to be hit, probably frequently, was not in question in the 1940s.
I remember September 1943 vividly. Italy surrendered and our old enemy, Marshal Badoglio, was suddenly our friend, with his miniature king, the obligatory Victor Emmanuel. Strange that the dynasty ended when they got an Umberto. We learned more Geography: Salerno, "a holiday with pay"; Anzio and Sangro, "they're just names, we only went to look for dames". The slaughter went on in Italy, "the soft underbelly", till May 1945:
"Look around the hill sides, in the mud and rain,
See the scattered crosses, some which have no name.
Heartache and toil and suffering gone,
The boys beneath them slumber on.
They're the 'D-Day Dodgers' who stayed in Italy."
(In 1944 Lady Astor called the troops in Italy "D-Day Dodgers", thinking Italy a soft option.)
"Dear Lady Astor, you think you're pretty hot,
Standing on a platform, talking tommy-rot,
Your'e England's sweetheart and her pride,
We think your mouth's too bleeding wide.
That's from your D-Day Dodgers, in sunny Italy."
I started grammar school. The parlour in Lime Grove had books in it, among them poetry, Shakespeare, Classical Stories, Bell's 'Examples in Algebra' and something called 'Christian Politeness'. The last was not opened during my seven years in the school. I looked in it, of course, before I started and it dealt with presenting one's visiting card and figuring out what was for what at complicated table layings. In the event most of those who taught us had no more interest in it than we did. 'Christian Politeness', aimed at gentrifying the aspirant Liverpool-Irish working-class, even those with a Scots grandfather. Anyway, it was "on hold", "for the duration".
On 8 September we went for school uniforms: 27/6 for a coloured blazer which faded in weeks; 3/9 for a tie like the explosion we had seen from five miles away in Davidson's paint works in 1941; 5/6 for a virulent cap. Other bargains were P.T. vests which had house colour edging which ran, rugby jerseys (I used my first for five years) and white shorts. On 9 September school began and I spent six of the next seven years loathing it, finding only the last year enjoyable when they left us pretty much to ourselves.
I discovered the cinema and over three or four years saw many films for nothing, "doing my bit" as a cadet of the St John's Ambulance Brigade: 'Blue Skies' with Bing groaning "Moonlight becomes you, it goes with your hair...." to Joan Caulfield, never heard of before or since. I wonder what her talent was.
One suspects.
Bing sang "White Christmas" and much of the rest of the Irving Berlin canon in 'Holiday Inn', not in 'White Christmas'. "Every fule know that," as Molesworth says.
Evidently the tears evoked by "White Christmas" made Guadalcanal even more humid. Yes, we knew a lot more geography: the Solomons; New Guinea; Kohima; Imphal. One of Mum's cousins was a KOSB with the Chindits. Another was a Commando, killed at nineteen covering the attack on the big dock at St Nazaire. Another got hit by mortar splinters in Italy. "Had he his wounds before?". No, they caught poor Barney in the bottom. No sympathy, of course.
'The Magic Bow', a biopic of Paganini, featured snatches of Yehudi Menuhin violin solos mimed by Stewart Granger. I enjoyed a magnificent scrap in 'Waterloo Road', John Mills, awol Tommy, beating seven kinds out of Granger, greasy, spiv lover of his wife. At the time I missed 'In which We Serve', which has a similar sequence. I dislike it more year by year. It was Noel Coward propagandising for Dickie Mountbatten with whom he had been closely associated before the war, along with the Prince of Wales and Duke of Kent. It had nothing to say about why ordinary people were at war. The reputed remark at the royal wedding in 1947, that "This is what we were fighting for", is even more offensively irrelevant. Tell that to the Liverpool lads choked with oil as the "Kelly" sank.
We were not allowed to see 'The Outlaw' in which Jane Russell was the large star. I caught the first ten minutes of it on television last year. It was surpassingly awful, the worst sequence I have ever seen by a very long way.
The period threw up, that has to be the word, some desperately bad songs. Perhaps the worst was 'Slow boat to China': "Out on the briny, With the moon big and shiny...."
I remember one pure gem. Cole Porter, metropolitan, cosmopolitan, homosexual, did a spoof of the generic cowboy song, the joke misfired because he couldn't do anything badly and it became a huge hit — as the classic cowboy song, "Don't fence me in", sung by Bing and the Andrews sisters. The vocabulary is cod western, the lyric exquisitely contrived, listen to the rhymes:
"Just turn me loose, let me straddle my old saddle
Underneath the western skies.
On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder
Till I see the mountains rise." ("Cayuse", pronounced "Ka-yoose", = pony.)
The war went on forever. We were thrilled about the raid on the Dams, ecstatic on the Tuesday when D-Day was announced, downhearted when the V1s and V2s began, terrified that they had come for us when we had our first air-raid warning for years. A U.S. bomber had been abandoned by its crew but "George", the automatic pilot, had been left on. It flew from the bulge of East Anglia to the Irish Sea, causing panic everywhere until an obliging 'Spit' shot it down.
Arnhem, where a priest I served Mass for was killed, and the Battle of the Bulge were dampeners just when we thought it was getting close to the end.
We relished the hammering the Germans were taking. Nobody made them invade Poland, or anywhere else for that matter. Utter horror came with the reports of Belsen, untrammelled delight with the suicide of Hitler. Fear and loathing of that man had dominated all our remembered lives.
Victory in Europe was a surprise when it came. I remember that it was all over on 7 May but 8 May was V.E. Day. Life without war I couldn't imagine, nor had I to since it went on in the Pacific and we all knew the Japanese would not give up.
We had a V.E. party in the street with much letting off of lifeboat distress flares and not a lot to eat although some of the adults had had obvious access to overproof Navy issue rum. "Auntie" Minnie played the piano, lowered on to the pavement from her flat over the shop. Her husband went missing in the 'Aracaca' in 1941. Nobody ever found out what happened to the crew. Minnie never gave up hope, was "Auntie" to the whole of the street and brought up three boys by herself. The youngest, "Ludo", never knew his father.
Mike, fifth and last child of our family, arrived on St Swithin's day, 1945, after V.E. Day. It rained all that Sunday but we had orders to stay out until 5 in the afternoon, midwife's orders. Minnie helped out and adored his blue eyes and platinum hair. At Alamogordo, the atomic testing ground in New Mexico, they, too, brought forth a baby. It was delivered a day later, and far more noisily than Mike, on Monday, 16 July.
A diminutive 13 year old, I spent the dawn of the atomic age trying to explain why I hadn't done my Maths homework to a blue-black, large and volcanic Irishman who in his celibacy had no notion of the disruption a new brother could bring to one's academic arrangements. The following year a similar character, this time red-haired and bullet-headed, had charge of the Maths, another year of battering. Not for nothing was he universally nick-named "von Bock", even parents wrote to him as such. (The real one was a Field Marshal, commander of Army Group Centre in the invasion of Russia). Later we called ours "Cecil" because he whistled his sibilants.
When the bombs were used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki three or four weeks after Mike's birth we had no qualms of conscience. If anything, we disliked the Japanese even more than the Germans. On the other hand we knew some Chinese and liked them. The bombs ended the war which had stolen our childhood. They seemed cheap at the price.
The end of the war and membership of St John's brought me to a crisis in faith. We marched in the Victory Parade after V.J. Day and finished with a service in the church of St Silas in High Park Street: me, a Catholic, taking part in "the services and prayers of a false religion", "exposed to the danger of losing my faith". By definition, of course, only Protestants were bigots. Thank God for Sheppard and Worlock.
'Dicky' and 'Harry', later Headmaster, stood out from the mediocrity and violence of the school staff in general. They were intelligent, well-educated, humane and dedicated. They could really teach and they alone gave us the impression that they had vocations and cared about us. Both taught English and Latin.
School was, however, a wonderful preparation for life: arbitrary injustice; brutality; insistence on cramming all into the same mould; stifling of feelings; cult of games and physical fitness; even pseudo-public school resonances — school song about how we would forget present miseries "...and live again our school life blest"; school cry, indecipherable but vaguely Maori; traditions ("As from next Monday it will be a school tradition that....."); Rugby practice matches and house matches which would have been stopped these days with charges of "causing and taking part in an affray", or "assault with intent to commit grievous...". Physically they were more dangerous than anything we experienced in inter-school matches. Perhaps 'Christian Politeness' had a point and the aspirant, Scouse working-class did need gentrification. Perhaps we had good reason to release pent-up violence after six years of total war.

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