They got married and her new husband’s job on the Southern Railway took them from the Brighton depot to New Cross in South London. She told me years later that she couldn’t believe what she had done to her life: from being a local celebrity, playing at dances in the town and glamorous balls in Sussex country houses, she had become a wife living in a Victorian flat on his modest wages with two small sons in one of the poorer bits of South London. When we moved on to Welling it must have been a bit of an improvement, but the cultural desert of north-west Kent was no replacement for fun-filled, shameless, gaudy Brighton-on-Sea, home of the dirty weekend and chosen residence of so many glamorous figures since the Prince Regent built his pleasure dome: the glorious, dotty Indian Pavilion with its Dome, where she and various members of her family had frequently played.
Visits to Brighton to see both our parents’ families were always exciting. First, there was the journey, a thrill enough on its own: a suburban electric train to Charing Cross, with the wonderful stretch between New Cross and London Bridge where eight or ten lines ran parallel and your train seemed to race others into the station; the occasional steam engine might also roar or chug past; out of Charing Cross station into the Strand; onto a bus through Trafalgar Square, where you could twist your neck to see Nelson on top of his column; down Whitehall and soberly past the Cenotaph with its sombre meaning, much fresher then than now; motionless guards like your toy soldiers outside St James’s Palace; another opportunity to get a crick in your neck as we passed Big Ben and Parliament; along Victoria Street to another station, Victoria, part of our railway world; then the main event, a fifty-two-minute, non-stop ride on the Brighton Belle, our train: it took us back over the Thames for the second time, past the engine sheds at Battersea and Nine Elms, speeding through south London, into Merstham Tunnel and out into the ersatz Surrey countryside, really glorified suburbs, which developed into the Sussex Weald, proper farmland. The invariable exclamation from our parents, ‘Look. It’s the South Downs.’ This was the climax, the dramatic skyline of the Downs, the bare grassy slopes like a sleeping Gargantua rising out of the soft fields, always pointed out to us though we knew it by heart. I think Mum, in particular, felt she was arriving home when she saw the South Downs. The train dived under them in a tunnel and suddenly you were out into Brighton and the brassy seaside.
Dad’s mother lived in Stanley Road up the hill behind the fire station in an ordinary Victorian terraced house. It was only several minutes’ walk from the station, at the back of the town. His father, former chef at the Grand Hotel, was dead. Drink was involved somewhere. As a result, Dad, though not entirely teetotal, was a very light drinker all his life. On the other hand, Mum loved the whole social business of going out for a drink and ‘enjoying yourself’. This difference in their tastes did not help an already difficult relationship. At the top of our grandmother’s road was a children’s playground to which Jack and I ran as soon as we could. Aged four, I broke my arm there on a roundabout and was being carried back to Granny’s while somebody sped down the road to the fire station, where my father was chatting to a friend. I remember clearly, and it became family legend, that the messenger rounded the corner at the bottom of the road running flat out as Dad, also running flat out (back towards me), appeared in the same instant as if he were making a well-rehearsed relay takeover. He took me in his arms and sprinted back down to the fire station. It was a jolting, painful ride, I remember, though I am sure he held me carefully. The firemen tied my arm between two rulers as splints and put it in a sling. An ambulance arrived, bell clanging, to take me on another ride, this one exciting in spite of the pain, to hospital, where I was anaesthetised while my arm was set. I had it in plaster for a while, proudly, until it started to itch like mad.
It was the visits to Mum’s relatives that were the grand, sophisticated occasions. Indeed, it was one of them, her Auntie Molly, who had found the £
25
deposit to put down for our house. My great-aunt Molly was the pretty one of the three aunts who brought Mum and her sister up – their mother had been packed off to Canada after some sort of scandal and had a second family there. All three great-aunts (and my absent, possibly disgraced grandmother) had been suffragettes and were very much free feminist thinkers before the turn of the century. They were well educated, cultured and all spoke with beautifully clear Edwardian diction. ‘Off ’ was ‘orf ’ in their language and if they called themselves or someone else ‘a silly ass’ it rhymed with pass with no anatomical overtones. I remember one of them saying to me in answer to my enthusiastic endorsement of a children’s film, ‘Grown-up life’s not like that. Films and plays are too tidy. Life’s much more messy. We’re all silly asses in the end.’ The word that I thought I had heard from such lips shocked me so much that the remark’s content has stayed with me along with the pronunciation.
Molly was a classical double bassist. After one local scandal and more than one
affaire
she married a prosperous furrier so was able to keep her two penniless sisters. The younger one was sweet, vague Auntie Clare, who played the violin and viola and had a lifelong
affaire
with an equally broke violinist. When he died he left her all his possessions, a cupboardful of violins, not one of them a Stradivarius. I enjoy using the period word ‘
affaire
’ for their love lives because that is the
mot juste
; it was listening to their gossip that I first heard it, voice lowered, second syllable slightly stressed, and wondered what it meant. The older penniless sister was crabby Aunt Millicent, a virgin I am sure, who had taught algebra and Greek at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and intimidated Mum and her sister throughout their childhood. They all lived in a grand, spacious Edwardian house,
47
The Drive, the best address in Hove, with the sea at the end of the road. Again we could feel special. Molly and husband – who used to hand Jack and me munificent half-crowns when we visited – occupied the main, sumptuous body of the house, Clare and Milly in the basement flat. The general conclusion among Mum’s all-female relatives was that she had married beneath her. Nevertheless, they showed sympathy rather than censure.
A cherished memory of Mum (of so many) is of her standing in the kitchen in Welling with Jack and me sitting at the table, the radio on, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov or Stravinsky or Ravel or Debussy or Tchaikovsky playing; she holding a cooking implement, waving her arms and hands about, a faraway smile on her face. She would undulate in her version of a harem-type dance, saying, ‘Listen, boys, listen. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? See? The Russians and the Romantics and the Moderns. Aren’t they lovely? Just listen.’ And I have, ever since.
The day before the Second World War started (it was a Saturday) Dad shovelled Mum, Jack and me off to safety in Portslade, near Brighton, to stay with Mum’s sister and family in another
1930
s house similar to our own. Great-aunt Molly probably paid the deposit on that one too, treating the sisters equally. Safety? We would have been right in the path of any invading Germans. Auntie Esme (a former cellist who had sailed to South Africa and back, scraping away) was married to Uncle Walter; they were a very happy pair; their children were our cousins, David, Audrey and Maureen.
I listened to the famous declaration-of-war broadcast by Neville Chamberlain at
11
a.m. on that first Sunday in September
1939
with Mum, Auntie Esme and Maureen. Something like panic reigned. Dad, Uncle Walter, Jack, David and tomboy Audrey had gone out for a walk on the foreshore (you could scarcely call the undistinguished bit of coastline at Portslade a beach). Would they be back before the Germans landed? Was our fear for them or for ourselves, left undefended at home? Maureen and I scuttered anxiously up and down the street looking for them, told to venture no further by Mum and Auntie Esme, who were peering out of the front door as all the church bells in the land tolled out their dreadful warnings. I saw the four of them some way off, strolling towards me in animated conversation, and ran anxiously up to them yelling, ‘Did you see any Germans?’ I was greeted with bafflement, then derision.
During the autumn of the Phoney War we cousins privately started the real thing between ourselves. We brawled incessantly. Auntie Esme and Mum, who were very close and loved their reunion, tried to ignore us, while Uncle Walter, tall, gangling, gentle Uncle Walter, decided to bring us all together with a cooperative project. Under his leadership we all embarked on the doomed attempt to build an air-raid shelter in the back garden. This trench, dug with so much effort into the solid clay that was under the garden, was always half full of water and was a glorious place to fight with our cousins and produce quantities of mud that horrified even our hardened mothers. Uncle Walter lived above the squalls and skirmishing in a quiet world of his own from which he tried, with no success, occasionally to remonstrate with an errant child. Dad was absent from Monday to Friday: ‘essential war work’ on the railway in London was the hushed, reverent explanation.
I remember one dispute that left me with a sense of the injustice of life. We were at table for a meal. Maureen, our youngest cousin, picked up a spoon and whacked me over the head with it. I could find nothing else to hand except a knife, so I picked it up and whacked her back, being careful even at my tender years to hit her with the flat and not the blade. It made no difference; Maureen yelled and retribution clattered about my ears as Mum and Auntie Esme joined forces to bombard me with outrage for using a knife on my little cousin. She got away with her attack scot-free – and cut-free too because of my unappreciated care.
One result of us children being herded together at bedtime was that I got my introduction to sex. Jack and I, having no sister, must have seemed pretty naive to our mixed cousins. One night we played the ‘I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours’ game. I cannot remember who suggested it but it certainly wasn’t me and I do not believe Jack would have dared to do such a thing. Anyway, we shyly pulled down our pyjama trousers and solemnly gazed at each other. Maureen, aged five, said, ‘Look,’ reversed herself, bent over, head upside down between her knees, eyes looking up at us through her legs, and gave us a grandstand view of her back bottom. Jack and I stared, fascinated as much by the gesture as by the sight before us. ‘Oh Maureen,’ said Audrey wearily, as though this happened frequently, but I felt a rebuke was out of place; Maureen’s action was daring, generous and stylish; she offered more than she was getting. Perhaps she was just being exhibitionist but I don’t think so. She became my favourite cousin.
We were – as was promised to the soldiers of the previous world war – home by Christmas. It was a relief to all of us, each family being mightily relieved to be rid of the other, though Mum and Auntie Esme were sorry to be parted again.
Back in Welling the Phoney War continued, a few months of a sort of pre-war existence, except that now there were shortages of everything that had been available even in a Britain barely emerging from the Great Depression. In anticipation of air raids barrage balloons hung above us over Shooters Hill golf course, great useless bags of gas that were supposed to deter low-level attacks and did absolutely nothing as far as anyone can remember. Occasionally one broke free and sailed away on the wind, trailing its cables, which hit the odd pylon or overhead electrical wire and created havoc and power cuts. The balloons always came down in the most inconvenient places, giving photo-opportunities to enterprising local reporters and the chance of a great deal of comedy business to the soldiers who were sent to retrieve them. Where possible the troops attached them to lorries and towed them back, followed by packs of cheering, jeering boys on bicycles.
Up in Oxleas Wood, a few hundred yards from our house, anti-aircraft guns, searchlights and rockets were hidden in the trees. The long menacing shapes of the barrels of the ack-ack guns poked up through the leaves and branches. The beams of the searchlights waved about hitting the underside of clouds or continuing to infinity as the Observer Corps trained on them at night. But when the rockets were fired the shattering whooshes and roars seemed to open the doors of hell. We cowered in our beds, aghast, our stomachs turning to water, even though we knew they were on our side, and pitied any Germans who would dare to come near. To have close looks at these alien, thrilling objects we children invaded those parts of the woods that were fenced off and marked ‘Private’ only to be good-naturedly driven off by the soldiers and chased with less amiability by the park keepers.
One of them caught us one day and gave us a severe lecture. ‘Before you kids came here nightingales sang in these woods. Where are they now, eh?’ I went home and reported this to Mum. Her mouth set in a hard line. Never one to take on authority directly, she put on her coat, went and found the keeper and harangued him on the subject of how much disturbance he thought regiments of soldiers created as they erected campsites and tested their guns in comparison to a few kids trying to creep about and not be caught. I don’t know what the keeper said in answer, if anything, but he still went on chasing us. It wasn’t long before those guns and rockets were in nightly use. No nightingales have since sung in Oxleas Wood to my knowledge.
Then in May
1940
, the Second World War broke out in earnest as far as Britain was concerned: the Germans attacked; their panzer divisions swept through the Low Countries and France; the British and French armies were brushed aside; the disaster-cum-deliverance of Dunkirk happened, and what I call my ‘other childhood’ began. Jack, aged eleven, and I, aged seven, became evacuees – vackies – and were carried off to another world.