When morning school was over we would go to his house one day and mine the next where — always a fire to sit by in both — we would each dissolve a penny Oxo into a basin of hot water and mop it up with a slice of bread, sufficient nourishment till getting home in the afternoon for tea. There would of course be something for supper. Feeding at the dinner centre had been discontinued because my father had work, while Arthur’s, being a skilled carpenter, had never been unemployed. We must have been what Robert Graves and Alan Hodges meant in The Long Weekend (a social history of Britain between the Wars), when they referred to ‘the unkillable poor’.
Arthur’s mother did cleaning work for a Jewish family, and one day came home with a wind-up gramophone and some records the woman had given her, mostly selections from Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan, whose tunes we listened to for a while.
One of the teachers at school accompanied himself on the piano with the aria ‘Where e’er you walk …’ from Handel’s Semele, entrancing music which sent me home trying to sing it. Apart from the popular bands of Joe Loss, Henry Hall and Debroy Summers, little enough captivated me on the wireless, unless it was a snatch of something quickly drowned by oscillations as my mother swivelled the needle to another station.
The issue of ration books sharpened her mind regarding food, since she felt obliged to buy the amounts stated on the coupons. From then on, with a family of seven, there was no difficulty in feeding us. Cigarettes were not rationed, though they were sometimes scarce, and we children were quite willing to scour the shops, getting five here and ten there, to keep our father happy.
I bought sixpenny maps, coloured but schematic, none of them showing every name mentioned on the wireless, to follow what was happening in the war. This was not very much to begin with, though my interest in geography and anything military soon became an obsession. Deciding to write a history of the war, I listened each evening to the six o’clock news, for weeks taking down details of the day’s events, until the pile of notebooks and paper almost filled a cupboard.
Hurrying home, I cleared a corner of the table, and hoped no one would make a noise and cause me to miss something, which they usually didn’t because the news to my father was the next best thing to being in the cinema. I eventually gave up the task, daunted at the idea of going on till the end of a war which might last as near forever as would make no difference. It was also obvious that the Nottingham Evening Post was doing the job better, so my father used the paper to light the morning fire, though a map stayed pinned to the inside of my cupboard. The experience increased my dictation speed wonderfully.
The Germans conquered Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and then France, people wondering whether it wouldn’t be England’s turn next. Brick air-raid shelters were built in the street, and concrete barricades erected at main road junctions. For a while I made notes, with sketch maps, of the defences around the city, then stopped on realizing it was not the right thing to do. It seemed unlikely that the Germans would come, yet I hoped that if they did everyone would be issued with rifles from the age of twelve.
Silhouettes of German planes, especially those which could carry parachute troops, covered one sheet of a newspaper: ‘I’ll catch one on the end of my clothes-prop,’ foul-mouthed Mrs So-and-So called along the yard. ‘Right up his arse!’ In a few days I memorized the silhouettes, as had many of the boys at school, where there was as sharp a commerce in small arms ammunition as there was later to be in pieces of shrapnel. I accumulated two score of bullets in their feeding belt, and while playing around with them one day, several fell into the fire. My mother, as silent and cool as I’d ever seen her, pokered them out before they could explode, then made me give the whole lot to the police.
We followed the cricket-like scores of air battles further south, during a summer which turned out as good as the winter had been extreme. On our way to school the sky was filled with dirty orange puff-balls of anti-aircraft fire at a lone raider sloping overhead, and we heard the pattering fall of shrapnel for the first time.
My father boasted that because he had ‘swung the lead’ at his medical board for call-up he had been placed into a category that would never be conscripted. Or he said with some glee that he had been ‘too young for the last war, and too old for this.’ No one wanted the war, yet few complained, probably because it brought more work, as well as a kind of prosperity, and a sense of purpose in that peace was something everybody could look forward to.
Two of Aunt Edith’s sons were called up but promptly deserted, though by the end of the war she had them and two more on active service. My cousin Stanley Sillitoe enlisted in the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, and was killed in North Africa. Various uncles enrolled in the Home Guard, but my father even dodged the chore of fire-watching. When he showed amusement that Hitler, a mere house-painter, had become the leader of the German nation, my mother said: ‘Yes, and it serves the Germans right.’ My father delighted, as did I, in hearing Quentin Reynolds on the BBC taunting Hitler as ‘Mr Schikelgruber’, and listening to the homely postscripts of J. B. Priestley after the nine o’clock news.
Those who took a more intelligent look at the newspapers than most, and had been in the previous war, said that Germany would be so hard to defeat by Great Britain alone, that the conflict might go on for ever. If this was the case I would certainly be in it sooner or later, which gave something to look forward to, and not with trepidation either. Any goal was better than none, and to go to war seemed so much of an adventure that it turned into an ambition.
I took great interest in reports of RAF bombing raids over Germany, measuring the angles of their courses to various cities, the distances they had to go, and calculating the time needed to get there, thus increasing my facility with practical arithmetic. At the main bookshop in town I bought pamphlets on street fighting and elementary tactics, as well as a paper-covered book, Notes on Map Reading, published by the War Office. From it I learned about intervisibility, vertical intervals, horizontal equivalents and magnetic variation, as well as three different kinds of north and how to find the true one from sun or star, a whole new vocabulary. I memorized the approximate value of representative fractions, so that when by chance the teacher at school asked how many inches there were to a mile he was surprised at my right answer.
Familiarity with colloquial English lagged behind geographical knowledge. A newspaper headline: ‘Sailors on the Spree’ led me to wonder how any member of the Royal Navy could have got to Berlin at this discouraging stage of the war, it being hardly conceivable that some lucky and fabulous military operation had been launched without my knowing. On reading the article I came to understand the expression: a few sailors had been hauled before a magistrate and fined for being offensively drunk.
From the autumn of 1940, for about a year, the sirens signalled a possible air raid nearly every night. We soon got used to the bang and clatter of gunfire from batteries behind the nearby woods, and the peculiar lame-dog drone of Junkers, Dornier and Heinkel bombers, always hoping that they were not going to drop their loads on us.
My father worked at the Raleigh factory, almost next door, and was often on nights, so my mother and the five of us would sit in the Anderson shelter. We could not have been living in a more dangerous place had the Germans decided to attack a factory on full war production employing 10,000 people, but no bomb fell within half a mile, though it was machine-gunned by a low-flying plane one night.