大象传媒

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IT HAD ALL THE APPEAL OF A SEA MONSTER - huge and distended with chubby, bloated ears. What better place for it to be anchored than on the Common, a stone鈥檚 throw from our flat in Lavender Gardens? We鈥檇 moved to Clapham in 1938, because my father had had enough of daily commuting from Brighton to Victoria and back, and by the time that magnificent barrage balloon appeared on Clapham Common in the summer of the following year, I was old enough to tie my own shoelaces. It is a source of lasting regret to me that I never actually saw the balloon go up, as it presumably did in the autumn of 1939,

We were soon to leave Clapham and travel north to join my father, whose office, the Charity Commission, had been uprooted from the classy ambience of Ryder Street in St James鈥檚, London, and resited in the Elms Hotel, Bare, Morecambe. He had only reached that distant resort with difficulty, because his train was snowbound at Crewe, where he and his fellow-passengers were regaled with Lancashire Hotpot. There was a picture in the paper at the time with my father beaming over his portion of Hotpot. By the time Mother and I reached Morecambe, there was no let-up in the had weather, and the Bay was full of iceflows. Several of my father鈥檚 colleagues, Londoners to the backbone, had brought toothpaste and the like with them, assuming that such commodities wouldn鈥檛 be available in the barren North.

This was the period of the so-called 鈥淧honey War鈥�, but it wasn鈥檛 long before the bombs started falling. One night I was dragged out of bed and hustled down to the cellar while German planes targeted Barrow-in-Furness on the other side of the Bay. One bomb fell on the golf course in Morecambe, and later on a mine was swept up onto the mudflats, hut apart from that, nothing untoward took place. I remained blissfully unaware that there was a real threat of invasion in 1940, and the fact that my father was in the Home Guard and spent one night standing on a little hill with a

庐fixed bayonet waiting for German paratroopers to fall from the skies, came across as musical comedy. I was oblivious of danger, and innocent of dread. After all, as far as I was concerned, the absence of cars and the clip-clop of horsedrawn traffic was what I was used to, and I saw nothing strange in the fact that the entire Bay was dotted with concrete posts to forestall enemy planes from landing. There was something oddly comforting about the unchanging rhythms of grey, marooned Morecambe. I well remember the poster on a hoarding at the bottom of our street, depicting a seal balancing a bottle of Guinness on its snout, watched by a startled zookeeper. The poster was there for the duration of the war, battered but unbowed by the wind and rain forever buffeting in from the Bay.

In 1943 we moved to another seaside resort, Llandudno this time, the authorities having decided in their wisdom that my father could have a crack at Death Duties for a change. It was while we were in North Wales that the Americans started to arrive and we kids learnt to approach these exotic giants with the time-honoured greeting of, 鈥淎ny gum, chum?鈥�. As a seasoned aficionado of Saturday Morning Pictures, I couldn鈥檛 get enough of listening to those marvellous honeyed accents. So they really did speak like that over there! I was also intrigued, if mystified, by their antics with local girls amongst the sand dunes, but my parents seemed reluctant to let me look too closely. No such embargo was placed on watching a ship sail by Great Orme鈥檚 Head towing a peculiar load, a load which later turned out to be a section of
Mulberry Harbour.

By 1944, we were back in Morecambe where I was sent to an excellent Quaker school in Lancaster. I鈥檝e only realised since that many of the staff were conscientious objectors, who were not deemed fit to teach in the state sector, and so had sought refuge with The Friends鈥� School. They were among the best teachers I ever had.

By this time, everybody knew that the tide had turned, and it could only be a matter of time before the war came to an end. I shall never forget the newsreels of Belsen, taken when that notorious concentration camp was 鈥渓iberated鈥� by our troops. How could people he as thin as that, and yet still be alive? And the answer was, of course, that most of them died. I also remember prisoners-of-war returning to Morecambe and being given tea and buns in the church hail. It was supposed to he a festive occasion, but they showed little zest for celebrating their release. I suspected then, and I know now, that they had undergone experiences, which, for the most part, they would never be able to talk about, least of all with those on the Home Front, who complained about how awful it had been to be deprived of bananas.

I remained in Morecambe until the summer of 1946 when we returned to bland Brighton, and I was left with a lifelong nostalgia for that north-facing, windswept coast overlooking the lone and level sands of the Bay; where the tide came in at the speed of a galloping horse; where a generous dole of rain kept lawns iridescently green; where - on bonny days - you could see the fabled Langdale Pikes; where the bus conductors looked and sounded like George Formby; where I spent my boyhood in the shadow of a distant conflict tearing the guts out of the old Europe.

I count myself fortunate to have grown up in a world stripped to essentials. But then I never went short. It鈥檚 when the essentials fail that the real agony begins.

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