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CHANGE OF LIFE

Born 1933 I turned 6 ½ on 23rd August 1939. At that age memories are not meant to span a period of over 64 years and those that do are faint, but a handful of them live with one forever. Like the memory of a gang of schoolchildren in caps, scruffy scarves and what passed as School Uniform attempting to board a smoke-shrouded train at the end of a platform on what must have been Euston Station (just like those old black and white films of troops boarding trains to go to the front being seen off by their loved ones, but with the people involved being a generation younger).

Ironically Euston Station is situated less than a mile from where I had lived since birth in Phoenix Street. Phoenix Street borders the area known as Somers Town which infills the space between Euston’s platforms and the marshalling yards of St Pancras, and is where my father’s shop (a tobacconist and confectioner’s) was situated (as No 54, later to be redesignated 58 Phoenix Road). Our flat was situated right above the shop, in one of the blocks of ‘buildings’ which characterise the area, so I suppose we were considered first in line for Hitler’s bombs. I believe we must have been evacuated before war was actually declared – if not it was immediately after September 3rd – and I recall my mother, among the crowd seeing us off, being upset and telling me not to worry as I would not be away for long. Away where? As it transpired later that day even she could not know.

This uncertainty certainly communicated itself to the rest of us, but we were far too young to realise what was happening, and my parents (perhaps wisely) had told me nothing other than ‘it would not be for long’. It was like not being warned in advance about the School dentist until the drill hit the nerve. A positive aspect was that we were all together as part of the same class – brothers and sisters in adversity, as it were – but next we were lined up in a field in Burton Latimer, a village near Kettering, facing what was obviously a group of the local families who were picking out the children on either side of me, usually in two’s or three’s (I suppose according to how many they thought they could cope with). This went on until I was the only one left. I imagine I must have been the least prepossessing of the whole bunch, and I certainly must have looked frightened. I can’t remember actually being led away, only that all my friends had been taken away from me and that I had been taken away from my parents.

There was a School in the village and I remember being somewhat crestfallen when I learned that most of my classmates were attending it, or some attached establishment but (and can you imagine regretting not being able to go to School!) not only had I been taken off alone, but the house of my new ‘keepers’ was so far in the middle of the countryside that I could not make the journey to School and in consequence saw none of my classmates (as it turned out I was never to see them again).

I recall being confined to this lovely house and enormous garden unlike anything I had ever experienced (I had only been away from Somers Town for about two ‘days out’ before) and thinking back I suppose I should have considered myself in paradise. The family looking after me were kindness itself, yet I was completely on my own – none of my own family, no friends – and feeling lost in that rather panicky sense of a young child losing his parents in a crowd. I spent day after day in this lovely house and garden (unlike anything I had been remotely used to) feeling distinctly ‘inferior’ (and very tongue-tied) in the presence of these delightful (and quite differently bred) people whose kindness I felt was beginning to turn to pity for this cockney urchin to which I am sure they found it difficult to relate. I have one distinct memory soon after arriving of the family members muttering one to another that ‘Germany had invaded Poland’ in a way which indicated that it was a matter of some concern.

My sense of desolation must have increased rather than diminished as time passed because I started bedwetting and, with the shame that this induces to a child, I hoped that each time it happened would be the last but then it happened again. This might have been the catalyst to what happened next which was that I was told that my mother could bear being parted from me no longer and was coming to collect me, which she did.

Meanwhile the problem of our living in central London had apparently been resolved by my parents moving from the flat above the shop to Pinner, in Middlesex. This, paradoxically, was still an area within range of Nazi bombs, doodle-bugs and V2’s, but Pinner was my Father’s favourite venue for a trip out to the ‘country’ (a definition for which in those days Pinner arguably qualified) and I was to live there for the next 43 years (I can’t imagine now how he thought it was so rural as it is situated these days in the heart of suburbia). Our first ‘home’ there was as lodgers in the house of a family in a housing estate north of the village. This lasted for a few weeks before my father managed to rent a semi-detached house on the opposite side, which was where I grew up throughout the remainder of the war.

My parents had to travel to town every day to run the family shop and they left most mornings soon after seven, whereupon I would clean the kitchen after making my corn flakes (that’s how long they’ve been going – and the same brand too!) and, when the house looked tidy I would set off alone to walk to school about three-quarters of a mile away (imagine a seven-year-old being trusted to set off alone to do this now). This I mostly enjoyed until the time we learned that a land-mine had fallen en route and had all but obliterated the whole area between three adjacent roads with considerable loss of life. I remember when I eventually saw this bomb site (it was in the middle of a relatively trouble-free area) thinking that it was the most horrific scene of destruction I had so far witnessed.

School was very different in Pinner. For one thing all my classmates seemed to come from what seemed to me to be ‘Upper Class’ families, which with my cockney accent I originally had some difficulty relating to. However, there is a chamelion in all of us, my life began to adapt itself, and I began to make one or two particular friends who invited me back to their beautifully kept houses to meet their (invariably kind) parents. I remember feeling too ashamed though to invite anyone back to our house (it seemed a hovel by comparison) until much later in the war when I had developed some confidence and independence. My parents had a small-town rather narrow-minded mentality which most of my friends’ parents seemed refreshingly free of and hardly spoke the same brand of English language. I suppose, to my own shame, I was becoming a little ashamed of my own parents, which was totally unfair to them as they doted on me and (I was their youngest child by 17 years) they loved me as if I was an only child. This was the norm then; these days children are considered favoured if they live with more than one parent at a time.

Meanwhile the war raged. Initially, conventional bombs and air raids, of which we had our share even on the north-west side of London, then the aforementioned land-mine and, towards the end of the war, V1’s then V2’s. Each time the tempo increased it become more frightening and the only place I felt safe was underneath a very solid-looking dining table awaiting the ‘all-clear’ so that, if the house crashed down in a pile of rubble, there would I be cocooned underneath, my only worry being whether anyone would know I was there or be able to get to get me out. I often wished I was grown up and in charge of my own destiny, like my 19-year-older brother away in the front line, instead of being so young and scared, and totally at the mercy of the unseen enemy.

I used after school to go to the back entrance of Pinner Station to await my parents’ return from town. They nearly always caught a particular train and I can’t describe how much I looked forward to that train’s arrival and my relief when the train door opened and they got out. (Perhaps that is why that climactic moment in ‘The Railway Children when the smoke clears and Rebecca chokes a cry as her father is standing there on he end of the platform never fails to move me to tears, and towards the end of my life to end up living now in the same village where the author lived when she wrote the book seems almost an act of fate).

One day, however, my parents failed to appear. I waited for train after train until there was virtually no-one alighting, and with an increasing sense of inevitability that I would never see my parents again. I knew there had been a bad air-raid and it grew dark so I thought I had better go home, not knowing quite what to do but I could not sit still and went back to the Station. The back entrance (much the nearer to where we lived) closed at 7.30 in the evening so I had to go round to the main barrier and wait there. Quite how it came about I cannot remember exactly but suddenly my parents were there, with the news that the shop had been hit by a bomb falling nearby, as they had discovered on their arrival that morning, so that everything had been affected by the blast. They had spent the whole day clearing the rubble and securing the premises and (no mobile ‘phones then) had no way of letting me know what was happening. My main memory of subsequent events is that the cat (which was my special favourite and much loved) was discovered three days later, shocked by the explosion, hiding under a pile of debris. We brought it home to Pinner where it was totally disorientated and survived just two months. Despite not being all that old and quite healthy he simply wasted away.

My main wartime memory subsequently was in 1944 when we all anticipated that the war would soon be over. Then one sunny day right overhead our house a descending V2 exploded in mid-air. Had it landed I would not have been writing this account. This was just about the time I took the 11-plus and I gained a free Scholarship to University College School, but my parents refused it on the grounds that they could not afford the train fare on the Metropolitan Line to Finchley Road. They may perhaps have thought I would be getting above myself if I attended UCS, but I ended up by receiving an excellent education at the local Grammar School instead.

I left School at 16 after sitting ‘Matric’ and my parents thought insurance was the thing to be in. I remember being taken by them for interview dressed in an open-necked shirt and feeling very self-conscious when everyone I saw around me there was dressed in a suit and tie, right down to the filing clerk (especially the filing clerk). To my amazement I got the job (in those days we might have been food-rationed but a decent job was not all that difficult to come by). My interviewer was an Actuary and he suggested to me that, as Maths was my strong suit, I might like to study to become an Actuary (I think they were short of Actuaries – when I eventually qualified the profession still numbered less than 1,000 Fellows).

Well, I now live with my second wife and our sixteen-year-old daughter in the sort of house my Burton Latimer family might not have felt out of place in. None of the things I have described would have happened to me if I’d grown up in Somers Town, at least not in the same way. Things might have been better, things might have been worse – but, one thing’s for sure, they would certainly have been very different. And I owe all this to Hitler – undoubtedly, he changed my life.

Haystack

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