大象传媒

You ask for reminiscences of the war. I was 3 in 1939 when the war started. I do not remember anything about the Battle of Britain. On that day I was preoccupied by my fourth birthday and we were staying north of London away from the dogfights! But as I grew older I became very conscious of what was happening.

For example, when I was about 6 in 1942 bathtime was once a week. One night, as I was being dried, I asked my mother in that idle way children do, what would happen if the Germans invaded. She told me that I would probably be taken away and sent to Germany but that she would probably be allowed to keep my brother because he was under 5. Many might argue that that was a cruel thing for my mother to say, but it was the truth.

There was another far more likely possibility which I have never been able to talk about to anyone, and which affects me still. By then we lived under the flight path from Germany to Chatham dockyard and London. The threat from bombs was always greater than the threat of invasion. The wailing of the air raid siren sent shivers up my spine. The "all clear" always brought a feeling of relief as if I had been injected with a powerful sedative; it was the most blissful sound of my boyhood. But I was never certain whether I or my parents would be there tomorrow. I constantly wondered how I would cope if my parents, particularly my mother, were killed and I survived. I lived in constant fear of being orphaned.

Consequently, from that early age I started striving to stand on my own feet emotionally and learn to live without my mother in preparation for such an eventuality. I have been a bit of a loner ever since.

So terrified was I that for the last few years of the war I hallucinated the outline of a German bomber with a swastika, hanging in the sky above the house. Every time I steeled myself to look, there it was. It disappeared the day the war ended. I never told a soul. I simply handled the war by always trying to be as independent as I could and keeping my terrors to myself. Every one did in those days.

But all this was psychological. The closest the war ever actually came was when a tracer bullet crashed through the bedroom window during an air raid and sat sizzling on the sill. It was the only time in my life I went hysterical.

Neither was there reassurance from our bombers setting off for Germany. Every night it seemed, after I had gone to bed, wave after wave, droning slowly across the sky, with no escape from the noise under the bedclothes.

It is generally forgotten that about the only thing we did not know about Nazi atrocities during the war was the fact of the gas chambers. In the primary school playground, stories of these atrocities were common gossip. I would have been about 7 or 8. My interest in medicine and human psychology really started then when I asked myself what made people behave like that.

I became not only a loner but also a thinker, never anybody's man, kind, honest, decent, and immune to ideological indoctrination of any kind. I came to view human culture with the open-minded detachment of an anthropologist in an alien land. At the same time I am always secretly longing to belong.

I became a doctor, devoted my life to medicine and learned a lot about what made people tick, finding answers to many of the social problems of our times. But sadly, nobody wants to know.

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