boys in my dormitory. We were excited by the prospect of war, not because we wanted war – we were too sensible for that – but because it would be so great an event. Mr Jones, our house tutor, was listening to the news on his radio, in the room below. Infuriatingly, we could barely hear it. However, we heard enough to know that, for the present, Munich meant peace, not war. I remember my feeling of disappointment as the adrenalin rush slowed.
I remember my own eleventh birthday on 14 July 1939, as the last carefree day of that pre-war summer. A special cake was baked at Cholwell. It had a cricket field, in green icing, two sets of stumps, a bat and a ball, all edible and made from marzipan. It was the custom at Clifton Preparatory School for the boy whose birthday it was to distribute his cake, so it had to be quite a large one, enough for thirty boys. The mood was cheerful, our exams were over, and we had prospect of the long summer holidays and I also had the August cricket festival at Weston-super-Mare to look forward to.
But only a few weeks later, on my sister Elizabeth’s birthday, 23 August, hope was extinguished by the announcement of the Nazi–Soviet pact. With Stalin as Hitler’s ally, war had become inevitable; we all knew it, in Temple Cloud just as surely as in Westminster.
On 1 September, I went down as usual to the library in Cholwell to have my morning lesson with my father. Frank Cooper, who took orders for the local grain merchant, was discussing how many bags of mixed feed my father would need for the pigs. Fletcher interrupted him to turn on the nine o’clock news on the BBC. Germany had invaded Poland. Frank Cooper left, after a few sad words. He, too, had fought in the Great War, as it was still called. My father telephoned his next contact in the network of Air Raid Precautions. He used a First World War phrase, ‘The balloon’s gone up.’
Two days later, we listened on the nursery wireless to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast, as we had listened only less than three years before, to King Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast. Both broadcasts spoke of failure; in both there was a displeasing note of self-pity. I did not feel hostile to Neville Chamberlain, but I did not feel sorry for him either. I thought then, as I think now, that he had tried a policy of appeasement in all good faith; it had not succeeded because Hitler had always intended war. It was an honourable failure, but Neville Chamberlain’s personal disappointment was a petty thing beside the disaster which had fallen on the world. Chamberlain did not sound like a war leader.
I was still of an age when I was given supper in bed. I slept in the pink room on the south-west corner of Cholwell, with windows on one side looking down the drive and on the other looking out over Paul Wood. My supper consisted of bread and honey, a banana and a glass of milk. Later in that September, I remember listening to the evening news bulletin from my bed.
The Government was concerned that in 1914 there had been undue optimism about the length of the war, and talk of ‘the boys being home for Christmas’. They were anxious that this should not happen again, and put out an official forecast that this war would last for three years. I did not doubt that Britain would eventually win it. I assumed that the pattern of the First World War would be repeated, that eventually the United States would be drawn in, and that American industrial capacity would be decisive. I was, however, very interested in the question of how long the war would last, since I would have to plan my own life in terms of that expectation.
I remember doing a simple sum. Governments, I thought, are always wrong. If the Government thinks the war will last three years, it will be longer than that. It will probably last twice as long. I should, therefore, base my own planning on the war lasting for six years. I was now eleven years old. In six years’ time I should be seventeen. I should not be old enough to fight before the war was over.
This judgement proved to be correct – the war in Europe ended shortly before my seventeenth birthday and the war in Japan shortly thereafter. I had to do two years’ National Service, but that was in the peacetime RAF and I never regarded it as anything other than an interruption, somewhat unwelcome, in ordinary life. I do not think this attitude was unpatriotic. I was entirely prepared to join the forces. But I did decide I should concentrate on getting ahead with my school life, without thinking that I must prepare myself to be a soldier.
In fact, for the first six months, hardly anyone was doing any fighting, apart from the German invasion of Poland and the disastrous Russian invasion of Finland. At Clifton we made model aircraft out of balsa wood; the wings usually fell off mine. I remember being cold at Clifton, so cold that I used to go to bed with a torch battery in my pyjama breast pocket. I would short-circuit the battery, so that it would spread a little warmth over the area of my heart. There was also a certain amount of bullying.
One boy, in particular, was being bullied. He was a gentle, rather plump boy who came, I think, from Wales. I rather liked him. I remember discussing this with Bishop, another friend who was later killed, perhaps while still at school, in a cycling accident. I asked Bishop whether he did not think that we ought to do something about it. He gave me a political reply, based on the then unknown theory of the pecking order.
‘It would be no good,’ he said. ‘There are twelve boys in our dormitory. Each has a position in the order. “Y” – the boy who was being bullied – is twelfth. You and I are about eight and nine. We do not have the strength to intervene. If we do, we shall join “Y” in being bullied; it will do him no good and we shall then be bullied ourselves.’ I recognized the truth in Bishop’s logic and, I regret to say, accepted the realities of our political situation.
The winter passed. The spring of 1940 came and with it the German invasion of Norway, the attack on Belgium and the Netherlands, the battle for France, the fall of the Chamberlain Government, the appointment of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. While these great events were happening, one of the boys in our house had gone down with polio; it was a mild case and he survived with little or no disability. But we were all put in quarantine, and encouraged to stay outdoors. So I heard of most of these events, and Churchill’s early speeches as Prime Minister, sitting in the bright sunshine on Clifton’s Under Green, listening to a junior master’s portable radio.
In the West Country, life went on surprisingly normally during what we all knew was an ultimate struggle for survival. There was a German daylight raid on the docks at Avonmouth. A detachment of the Coldstream Guards, having just been taken off the beaches of Dunkirk, spent a few weeks at Midsomer Norton. We felt the safer for their presence. We all followed the daily scores of German aircraft shot down in the Battle of Britain. We now know that they were exaggerated. The fear of German invasion gradually receded. Throughout this time my basic expectation did not change. I thought we would win the Battle of Britain, I believed in Winston Churchill, I did not expect an invasion to succeed, I looked to the United States as ‘the arsenal of democracy’. I felt confident that we would win in the end, as we had in 1918 and 1815.
My American aunts sent a Western Union cable in June inviting me to go to America; it even, touchingly, promised that I would be able to continue with the classics. I was rather excited by the idea, which might well have changed my life. I would, in any case, have been at greater risk from torpedoes crossing the Atlantic, than from bombs if I stayed at home. My parents took the view that they were not entitled to send me, or my sisters, if the other people of Temple Cloud could not send their children. In any case they believed in keeping the family together. I am sure that they were right, but I have always felt grateful for the invitation.
We went back to Clifton for the autumn term of 1940. A new brick and concrete shelter had been built for us at the end of Under Green; it looked like an oversized public lavatory. Thirty boys from Poole’s House slept there every night, in bunks. I did not find it disagreeable; it was certainly warmer than the dormitory.
The German night attacks on the larger cities outside London started in November. Coventry was the first to be hit. Bristol came next. We were bombed in two raids, with a week between them. On the first occasion the bombs did not come very close to our shelter, though it was a noisy night and there were large fires in the central area. My parents, in Cholwell, could see the glow of the fires, and heard the bombers passing overhead. The Heinkel bombers had a particularly penetrating, intermittent drone.
The second night was more frightening. As the sirens sounded, the matron suggested that we should all say a prayer.