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  This must be carefully in order, as far as I can think it. · · I was six years old when the war started. The first I remember of it is connected with a haversack of light khaki material with thin brown leather facings. The thing I remember most clearly about this haversack is that it had one single pocket on the outside, facing away from me, and that this pocket was just the size to contain the square box of a Lyons’ Individual Fruit Pie, and that in this pocket there was indeed placed on this occasion a Lyons’ Individual Fruit Pie. The exact variety of the fruit filling escapes me. I suspect it was apple. The purpose of the haversack was to contain clothes and other things for a journey, and the Individual Fruit Pie was to sustain me on this journey. It was to be undertaken without my parents and was organised by the school I was attending at that time. I remember once going to school with my haversack and lining up with many other kids in pairs in King Street, Hammersmith, near the Regal: perhaps it was outside the Town Hall. But we did not go on a journey. Indeed, I do not know by what manner of transport they intended to convey us. I slept at home that night, and was allowed to eat my Pie as some small recompense for not having been sustained by it on the posited journey. This false start, I later understood, was one of several scares in 1938–1939. Perhaps this one was at the time of Munich. It would be easy to check: but not here, and it hardly seems important enough to worry about for my purpose. · · · · · When the war did start I was not, however, involved in the official evacuation. My father’s mother lived in Westminster, in a little terraced working-class house off Horseferry Road, and there was a pub she and my parents went to a lot. Indeed, I think my grandmother worked there as a cleaner and my mother as a barmaid, at various and several times. The landlord of this pub suggested to my mother that she look after his son, who was then about four, on a farm in Surrey where he had friends who were willing to take in the three of us. That is, the boy Timmie, my mother, and myself. There we would be out of danger. Why my father and grandparents were to remain in danger I do not know. Certainly my father had to work and his work—he was stock-keeper for a bookseller—was in London. · · This farm was just outside the village of Chobham, and it was more a smallholding than a farm really, about six acres, a brick bungalow with extensions in asbestos sheet and lath, a barn, various shack outhouses, two old bus bodies of which one was used for living and the other as a workshop: these grouped around a yard, with another barn a quarter of a mile away up a track. · · The bungalow was I remember comfortable enough to live in. There was a long glass veranda on the west side, and the lavatory had a thunderbox which the old man used to empty very early every morning, sometimes waking me. He and his wife, both over sixty, ran the place with the help of their son, some twenty-odd years younger. With his rather unwilling help, that is, for Jack was a buyer of props and scenery for a film company, and spent much of his time in London. He came down at weekends, often with a friend who ran a car business, Mister something, whose name either mad Em’ly or I mispronounced as Mitter, so he became Mitter or Mitt to me, and to others when talking of him to me. · · The yard was a good place for a child to be growing, I seem to think, now. The bungalow was on the south side, the barn on the west, and between them came the drive, through one right angle from the road a quarter of a mile away. Mitt stored several cars in the barn, at ground level, and the loft was full of film props and junk. A couple of wooden huts formed the northern side, full of small farm implements and having dusty shelves untidy with bottles and packets of Kruschen’s Salts, and de-worming agents. A track led next to these in the corner to the farther barn, and on the east side were a cart with its shafts trained upwards like twin wooden gunbarrels, and several more huts and a bus without wheels, engine, and a number of windows. Here lived mad Em’ly, whom I was not allowed to see: but occasionally I heard her talking. I watched her food prepared on an enamel plate and sometimes saw it handed in to her. She mumbled only partly intelligibly: dropped certain sounds in her pronunciation. I think she must have been mentally defective. · · Parallel at the back of her bus was another bus full of farm bric à brac: I remember particularly the moletraps, the gins, and being locked in there once by Mitt: for fun to him, but distressingly to me. Behind this again was the air raid shelter, down steps into a black trench smelling of earth, with slatted seats and a too-public lavatory. · · The farther barn was a curious place: chickens picked at grey grit and defecated whitely while four stagecoaches, carriages, stood around, intended once for some film, perhaps, but now slowly rotting, their painted panels cracking, their upholstery musty with the straw or hay stuffing bursting from it, their brass handles and catches bluegreen with verdigris: delicately spoked wheels, delicately lined panels, delicately curved shafts. · · · · · · · · Whenever I have read The Miller’s Tale I have set it in the courtyard of this farm, the old cuckolded carpenter, his wife, and the clerk high up in that barn amidst the dusty scenery, waiting for the Second Deluge: and the window at which the sneaky Absolon had his kiss so hilariously requited has always been for me a window of that bungalow. · · · · · · · · The pigsties were behind the sheds on the left of the track to the farther barn. The great pigs were feared by Timmie and me, particularly an enormous boar which slobbered with fat and whose slightest movement towards us was enough to send us dancing away from the low fletton wall over which we had been hanging. One Saturday morning they killed this boar. When the slaughterer came we children were gathered in the sitting room of the bungalow and made to sing at the tops of our voices while a lady played the piano with the loud pedal hard down. Either I knew at the time or discovered shortly afterwards that this was to drown any possible sound of the boar’s death squeals reaching us. I did not hear any sound: I have a very clear memory of There’ll Always be an England being one of the songs that were played and loudly sung. I did see the boar as meat. There was rationing, of course, then, and the part they did not have to surrender they salted down and hung to smoke in the huge fireplace of a cottage they owned some miles away. Jack did all this processing rather badly and unwillingly, and when we came to eat the bacon I remember it being almost inedibly too salty. The cottage was a place where I very much enjoyed being. It stood by a small brook in which I caught leeches as they clung to stones, and there was an old meatsafe on the outside wall where I kept them between visits. The cottage interior walls had on them many flintlock pistols, old duckguns, shotguns, carbines, perhaps an arquebus, and the like. One night some boys from an orphans’ institution not far away broke into the cottage when no one was there and stole many of these weapons. The police traced them easily back to their Home by the trail of footprints and discarded weapons and cartridge cases. · · · · · · · · It is very difficult to remember the order of any events at Chobham, but some of course I can date by outside events, not to say historically. Thus, my memories of aircraft dogfights: tiny black shapes occasionally flashing silver—but what would have been silver? They were not painted silver—sometimes followed by vapour trails as they went higher and once or twice excreting black smoke as they were hit and began a descent: these must belong to the summer of 1940, to the Battle of Britain. A Heinkel 111 crashed in a field not half a mile away, and we went to see it, all black and with a stubby transparent nose. Police would not let us collect souvenirs, but a village shopkeeper had a machine gun from it in his window, with a collecting box. Even nearer, a Hurricane came down on a piece of wasteland between the farm and some houses. When they had taken what was left, the pieces, away, I found a small flat fragment of aluminium embedded in the soil, with a nut and bolt through it. I was very pleased with this souvenir. I still have it somewhere. I do not know if it was the pilot of this particular aircraft who baled out, but one afternoon in that summer a parachute was seen coming down and people on the farm began to run to where it would land. My mother took me by the hand and we left the farm at the top end and crossed the brook in the next field
. I began dragging on my mother’s arm, fearful, terrified suddenly that the man would kill her. Yes, I remember that clearly: I was fearful for her, not at all for myself. We went through a hedge into a copse, and some hundred yards through we saw the man, his parachute bundled under his arm, walking away with half a dozen other men, walking quickly, in a buff flying suit, with leather helmet and boots. The men did not seem to be coercing him in any way, and though I have always believed that he was therefore a British pilot I have no other means of telling how I came to this conclusion: perhaps just that he no longer seemed to threaten my mother. I find it rather strange that I can remember comparatively little about my mother at this time. Certainly she was a good mother to Timmie and me, and perhaps it is an indication of that goodness that I have little outstanding to remember about her. She worked on the farm besides looking after us, but was not I think an official Land Girl. There was an official Land Girl at one time, at least, a lumpish girl in breeches. My father I hardly remember visiting us at all, though he must have done so quite a lot, perhaps even every weekend. Nor do I remember thinking that he must have been in danger in the London that often appeared as a fireglow lighting the sky to the east. We spent some nights in the air raid shelter, and these were dreadful: there were ants’ nests, and nightlights: I still associate the two. I would long for the All-clear to sound from the village, which would restore us to our proper beds. It did not occur to me that it was pointless being evacuated if we had to take shelter too, even down there in Surrey. · · · · · · · · I learnt at Chobham: not formally, for all I recall about St. Lawrence’s School was trying to start a Gang similar to the one I had been in at the London school: unsuccessfully, for the local kids were just not interested. But in other ways. I learnt to read very well: so perhaps this school did do something for me. And I can still remember that afternoon when, subjected to the frustration of feeling quite recovered from an illness but still not allowed to be up, I read my first story. It was in one of that kind of comics which contains both picture strips with speech-balloons as well as stories in words with a title illustration, and I read it out of boredom, in desperation almost, after exhausting all that the picture strips had to give me. It was a spy story with a boy hero who sent messages across the Channel by means of a petrol-driven and radio-controlled model aeroplane: a highly improbable story, I see now, but that afternoon I read it over and over several times, with infinite pleasure, delighting that I could now read stories. I learnt to ride a bike: Mitt used to sit me in the saddle and give me a good push off down the grass path leading to the farther barn. Every time I would crash, often hurting myself. But one time I suddenly found my balance and could ride a bicycle. · · I used to make model aeroplanes from kits, crudely, and knew the shape of many of the types then flying, both British and German. I knew quite a lot about the war in some ways: not about Fascism or the political ideas—not unlike many adults, I was later surprised by the concepts to which I had been unconsciously subscribing—but I could understand a certain amount of the adults’ conversation, and someone gave me a map of the Ruhr marked with bombing targets into which I stuck little flags with bombs pictured on them: at random. · · I learnt that alcohol made me drunk. There was in the barn across the courtyard a small barrel, perhaps it was a firkin, of port, kept there by the old man to thicken his ageing blood, or for some such euphemistic reason as they give to children. It had an enamel mug kept under an untight spigot, and Timmie and I used to drink the wine which had collected in it. One morning we helped the tap to leak more than it would have done in the normal way, and at lunch Timmie kept giggling and swaying about, and finally he fell off his chair. My mother immediately demanded of me, redfaced and hardly steadier, what we had been doing and I, giggling, told her. We were sent straight to bed, where we both slept soundly until well into the next morning. I do not think I had a headache at all, but I have never liked port since. My parents thought themselves rather enlightened about drink, I feel. They would always give me a taste of whatever they were drinking when I was a child. believing that if it were denied me then I should become a drunkard later. My dislike of port may have been partly established earlier than this Chobham tasting since, when on one occasion I was disappointed that the doctor prescribed no medicine for some illness I had, they faked a bottle with water, sugar and port wine to aid my recovery, psychologically, they presumably imagined. · · I also learned to swear at this time and in this place, apparently, and was punished for this, too. It was one of the times my father was at the farm on a visit, and both he and my mother overheard me say Fuck! as I was digging a little piece of land allowed to me as a garden. I think the word was addressed to a spade with which I had cause to be annoyed, why, I cannot remember. They stopped my shilling pocketmoney for a week. Associated in place with this swearing is a room nearby in which I had German measles: the places are in some way connected. The measles, all the worse for being in name at least attributable to the enemy, I do not remember at all, no pain, no inconvenience even, merely the fact of having them. But there was a picture in that room of a lady crouching her bare bottom over the rail of a liner whilst smiling, and underneath the words Every Little Helps. I could not see how this was meant to be funny, nor did it teach me anything new: I had already found out how ladies widdled. · · · · · · · · From boys on the farm adjoining ours I learnt something about the country. They took me fishing in the brook which wound deeply across their land and behind ours. Bullheads are all I remember catching: some people called them Miller’s Thumbs. We actually fished with bent pins on a cotton line, fixed to a peacane of bamboo: the classic boys’ tackle. They had airguns, the two from the next farm, though no pellets for them. But at least they made a bang, even without pellets. Their farm had long rows of greenhouses, and every so often sewage tankers with flexible trunks and a pump under the armpit would arrive to spread a foul layer of detritus upon the land to be ploughed in. They also tunnelled like troglodytes, these two, forming a fine pit for a headquarters, shored up with boards from chicken coops and lit in one case by a greenhouse frame. · · · · · · · · A girl called Sarah, of about the same age as I was, seven, at this time, taught me something about sex. That is to say, we learnt from each other. I learnt little more, really, than I had from seeing Dulcie’s. We used to expose ourselves to each other, Sarah and I, behind the air raid shelter. It was the difference that interested me, still, at this time. I think we did it two or three times, I don’t know why not more, perhaps because once my mother disturbed us when coming to the dustbins nearby, though she could have seen no more of us than our heads. Sarah would never let me touch it. I don’t remember whether she touched mine. I suspect not. Sarah was the daughter of two other refugees from London who were on the farm as guests of Jack, or the old couple, whichever. They did not like my mother and the two children she looked after, Timmie and me, and I see now that this was something to do with class. We were working-class, my mother and I, and the boy Timmie, as the son of a publican, was scarcely better. The newspaper these people, Sarah’s parents, read, which had a column in it called ‘London Day by Day’, I now know to have been the Daily Telegraph. Their dislike of us, their bare toleration of us, was certainly shared by Jack: my mother was in fact or virtually a servant. Let me think through that again, clearly: not a servant paid by him, not a servant to him unpaid, but just of the servant class, to him. At least, that is what my memory and my instinct insist to be the truth: to him my mother was to be treated as a servant. Perhaps I am wrong. The old couple bore us as they bore everything: our presence was merely one of the things which made life hard for them: life had always been hard for them, it seemed. Mitt was an exception: I don’t think he was exactly middle-class by birth, coming of farm stock, it’s difficult to say, but he was certainly so in wealth: I know him now to have been a dedicated motor engineer who worked hard and well for his financial success. Then I knew him as a kindly man w
ho yet often took too far his jokes on Timmie and me: in locking me in the bus, thought of that, and sending the credulous two of us off to hunt rabbits with a packet of Saxa in support of his assertion that they were to be caught by sprinkling salt on their tails. But Jack and Sarah’s parents: we feared their scorn, their contempt, their disregard of us, which was far worse than Mitt’s heavy handedness. Somehow Jack seemed too educated to be a farmer: and much of what he did, in his sporadic attempts to make a contribution to the War Effort, was amateurish and unsuccessful. A granary of corn was attacked by rats and went mildewed, clamps of beet and potatoes were penetrated by frost, the sows ate their farrow, chickens laid less than the national average, kohl-rabi and Indian corn were not exactly staple crops: in the top chicken run, however, Jerusalem artichokes grew tall and rooty, providing several meals for the gourmet Jack in the autumn evenings. · · · · · And I grew strong, and learnt, and was myself: whatever that means. · · · · · · · · Other memories are caught by the filter. I shall only think them, since everything must be considered, not discuss them with myself. I think I have the important thing. · · · · · · · · Jack taking dead and dying chicks from the light-bulb-warmed incubator, and burning them in the kitchen range · · cream and orange ferrets being slipped down rabbit burrows, and then the cries · · walking a mile along the country road into the village, the hedges all cow parsley, old man’s beard and wild dogroses, the seasons mixed all into one for me now, with Timmie, our gasmask cases banging against our thighs · · the rear wheel of my bicycle being buckled by Jack’s car backing over it (I had been made to believe that it was my fault for leaving it there: but see now this was an injustice done to me, that it was his carelessness that he passed off on to a child of seven) · · playing in one of Mitt’s cars which was stored in the barn, and finding a red light come on when a key was turned · · driving a caterpillar-tracked tractor for one memorable afternoon, harrowing the sun-brown soil till it was turned-brown damp · · watching an ARP demonstration of the method of dealing with an incendiary bomb by smothering it with a sandbag, information I always wanted to employ but never had the opportunity to · · seeing the old woman stand on a chair and reveal hidden in the roof a store of rationed goods, bought before the war or at least before shortages, tea and sugar and apricot jam with kernels · · the village kids, who threw stones at us, and at whom we threw stones · · the brickworks, vast landscape of smooth brickearth mountains and dusty cranes, catwalks, ladders and rectangular piles of finished bricks, amongst which it was an extreme pleasure for some reason to wander and clamber in our Sunday best until they chased us off · · clambering along the low walls and up on to the roofs of the pigsties, half thrilled and half terrified, to cockcrow on the ridge · · flying model planes from an upturned metal trough in the field, planes made by someone at Jack’s studios, and given to us, his only kindly act, as I remember: except perhaps for that in having us there at all.