Chapter Fourteen
Armageddons come and go, as did Stalingrad, a great Soviet victory. Germany must be booted into the dust, but when? I wrote to Stanford’s in London for a large-scale map of the Volga-Don area, and it came to me rolled in a cardboard tube. Nothing but the best was good enough, if I was aware of its existence, and if I could meet the price, which wages allowed me to do. Two shillings included postage and packaging, and the map was worth every penny. The scale was sixteen miles to an inch (I still unroll it from time to time) and Stalingrad was called Tsarytsin because the map was twenty years out of date, but the rivers and contours were the same as during the battle and those, I thought, would never change, though on going there twenty years later, when the place was called Volgograd, certain waterways had been added or enlarged. For the remainder of the war I followed events on maps in Baedeker guidebooks which could be acquired for little (at times nothing) in Frank Wore’s cornucopia-shop.
Orders occasionally came to the factory for a quantity of jacquards, superstrong sheets of cardboard used in the lace trade. Holes were punched in them according to the design, and I wondered if a few wouldn’t still be those of my father’s brother Frederick, who had long since disappeared to London. He had been back in Nottingham for some years, but wasn’t spotted by any of the family till after the war.
Each jacquard measured two feet by four and was put together on the same principle as plywood, but with paper and special paste. The antiquated machinery was in a dingier part of the cellar, and my job was to hump hundredweight sacks of alum and flour to a vat and empty them in, stirring to an even broth with the requisite amount of hot water to make the paste. Overalls and boots got caked with the stuff, and I would go home stinking like a pig.
The next stage of production was more agreeable. Several of us worked in the large and often sun-filled attics hanging hundreds of jacquards to dry in rows under steam heat. While they did, time was our own. Often two or three of us pulled ourselves up and down by rope on the goods hoist, till the strangulated shout of the foreman scattered us to the four corners of the factory.
I taught map-reading to George Meggeson, an army cadet sergeant swotting for his Certificate ‘A’, pencilling elaborate topographical maps with their conventional signs on reject jacquards, so that he could pass the latest in infantry tactics on to me. Sometimes we were called down to help despatch the jacquards, which task I did not much relish, but I learned how to make and tie a parcel.
Close to sixteen, I was earning over two pounds a week, but knew there was better money to be made. I had a girl to take out, and wanted to save. On a couple of occasions I worked double time during the holidays to help clean the flues of the furnace. Though the fires had been out for twenty-four hours the narrow space we crawled along like Tom Sweeps to push out the banks of soot was fiercesomely hot. Coming home from such overtime I was black from head to foot, but the extra hard-earned pound went into my pocket.
Between fourteen and eighteen every day seemed like three, every week like a year, every year a decade. After eight hours’ work, the long full evening until eleven or midnight was another day, followed by a third of dream-packed sleep. Two evenings a week were given to homework, mainly the study of navigation, and ATC lectures took up two more.
Friday and Saturday nights were spent with my girlfriend who worked at a clothing factory making army uniforms, and lived on a housing estate. At sixteen she was a tall, mature girl with a full bosom, and long brown hair worn in a neat fringe at the front. Our main entertainment was the cinema, or simply walking the streets, but there was real delight in the promise and comfort of being with her, and indulging in whatever trivial talk of the moment interested us. My first real love, she was trusting, passionate and generously willing, so that we were soon ‘going all the way’ on the living-room sofa while her parents were out, sometimes on Sunday night as well, for her father was an amiable coalminer who liked to sit with his wife over a few drinks in the pub.
Of the two items to be considered in sexual relations, the first was venereal disease, or a dose of the pox, as Bill Towle put it, but it was unlikely that any of us would catch such an affliction because we were young, knew each other, and stayed within the group. The second fear was that of getting the girl pregnant, and to avoid this I called every week at the chemist’s to buy a supply of Durex, it being assumed that those who did not take such precautions asked for all they got, and a bit more. As Arthur Shelton’s father said: ‘When you get married, a penny bun costs tuppence!’
On the remaining evening of the week I would go out with John Moult, another cadet, crawling the pubs and knocking back a pint or so of Shipstone’s ale. The headquarters of the squadron moved to a place three miles away, and on the long journey home Johnny and I would enliven the empty streets by a caterwauling of popular songs, or try to figure between us the names of the — as then — forty-eight states of the USA, or otherwise test each other on general knowledge. He asked me where Leonardo da Vinci’s mural of ‘The Last Supper’ was, and told me the church and the place when I admitted not knowing, his question coming back to me on visiting Milan and seeing it for myself many years later.
On Sunday afternoon we listened either at his house or mine to a half-hour programme of light classical music, thus becoming familiar with the names of at least some of the great composers. Neither of us found time to read anything except textbooks, and I was practising more advanced navigation at the table in my room, its surface littered with charts and drawing instruments. I learned what stars, planets and constellations were useful to navigators, the names of cloud formations in meteorology, as well as how to recognize every type of aircraft.
The sky, by day or night, became as important as the earth’s surface, and knowing what was in it widened my angle of sight. Most of my life I had glanced little above the treetops or eaves of houses, but now everything to be seen on looking upwards had a name. The glow of the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, took four and a half light years, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, to reach the earth, a fact which put our planet earth in its place, and the people who lived on it even more so, which might have been a depressing realization had it not also been so marvellous as to open my mind to all kinds of cosmic speculations.
At RAF Snitterfield, near Stratford-upon-Avon, I flew at night for an hour on ‘circuits and bumps’ (take-off and landing practice) in an Airspeed Oxford trainer. One such aircraft had crashed just short of the runway a few days before, killing both pilots, its sombre wreckage glowing in the lights every time we took off. Once our plane was airborne its manoeuvres were occasionally such that the dazzling multi-coloured pattern of the aerodrome lights seemed half the time to be in the sky, and when I finally stepped out on to the dispersal point a reflected glitter of the same design appeared above my head, suggesting that my senses still had some way to spin before the usual equilibrium came back.
I went on a two-hour ‘hedge hopping’ exercise across the fen country, also in an Oxford, and spent much time looking between the pilots’ shoulders, ostensibly to consult the map but also at approaching embankments, farmhouses and telegraph poles, wondering whether to duck or where I would run should we hit something. Visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace came as an anticlimax, especially as I had so far been no closer to his works than the prose rehashes of Charles and Mary Lamb.
At sixteen I obtained my ‘release’ from Toone’s plywood mill and became a capstan lathe operator at Firman’s small factory in the Meadows district, a two-mile bus ride and one-mile trek from home. The forty people who worked there started at eight in the morning, and I was glad to be back on a five-day week.