大象传媒

A young boy, perhaps 5 or 6 years old walks slowly up the street, shoulders hunched. He is in school uniform, cap, blazer, tie askew, and short grey trousers. He is thin and scrawny, with pipe-stem legs above socks that have slid round his ankles. The boy, obviously asthmatic, walks up the path of a modest little semi and lets himself in through the front door. In the tiny kitchen, he finds half a crown on the table, which he takes down the road to the shops where he buys a couple of slices of boiled ham and a 4p cake, and returns home with his lunch. It is not always so; sometimes there is a tin of mock-turtle soup for him to heat up on the gas stove. He eats alone, for there is a war on. He turns on the wireless,his best friend, and listens to the news: The Americans are only 50 miles from Berlin, the Rusians even closer. He senses that the war will soon be over, and wonders what will be on the wireless when there is no more news to report.
David is an only child, a war baby, born within weeks of the outbreak of war; he has known nothing else. Mother is a full time barmaid, working both day and evening, while father is a merchant seaman away fighting the war. Neither happy nor unhappy, David stoically accepts the world as it is. He is and will be as much a casulty of this war as any participant, yet for his generation there will be no annual mark of respect, no fine words or parades, but he will be just as crippled as any old soldier leaning on a walking stick.
After eating his lunch, David will gasp his way the mile or so back to school, where his teachers, all middle-aged ladies, have promised a periodic air-raid practise in the afternoon. When this happens, all the children troop into the cloakroom, and sit on the floor with their hands on their heads. As the teachers fuss around, David wonders why they do not stay in their classrooms and hide under their desks, where he would feel much safer. It would by months before they had a man teacher, Mr. Williams, and before he started, the children would be briefed not to be frightened of him. He would be OK when you got used to him, but he would want boys to play football and other strange ideas.
After school, David would return home and have tea with his mother, then he would watch carefully and quietly as his mother got ready to return to work for the evening shift at 5.30pm. Sometimes, he may have a neighbour as a babysitter, or maybe his granddad, an old gentleman with a big tummy, and a waistcoat with a big gold chain across it. But more often than not, even at that tender age, he would be told that he would be alright by himself, and that if he needed anything, to knock on the wall to the lady next door, Claire Jones. He did knock on the wall once, and when she came round, he asked her for a glass of water. She gave it to him, but he never knocked again.
The years of solitary evenings were long and seemingly endless, especially when it went dark. David would sit motionless on the floor for hours, his back to the fire, which made him feel sick. But he knew beyond doubt that in the hall the Bogeyman was waiting; if David moved or made a sound, Billy Biggs would come and get him. Mother would return home around midnight, and it was only when David heard her reassuring step on the path that he would quickly run upstairs to bed and pretend to be asleep.
I was that little boy, and those memories are as vivid as yesterday. What would today be classed as gross neglect was then just a consequence of war, and thus unremarkable. No wonder then that I suffered from acute (and in those days untreatable) asthma, and although the emotional and sensory deprivation of those days has made me strong and self-reliant, I have never managed to achieve a close or loving relationship with another human being in my long life. Hitler has much to answer for.

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