say over the frugal supper table, ‘It’s been a lovely day.’ His aggrieved tone comes back to me. ‘It’s been a lovely day.’ On the horizon, black against the sinking sun, our first convoys – those convoys in which I would one day find myself – were setting out for foreign waters. The weather remained too calm for war to be real.
As that ominous season advanced towards winter, the bungalow crouching near the cliffs became more isolated. Over Bill fell a mood of hopelessness. The whitewashed store on the bay closed its shutters. Cars ceased to run along the coast road. Betty and I wandered about the strange wild place, among the gorse, imitating the shrieks of the seagulls overhead, much as Wordsworth’s boy ‘blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him’.
The wet Cornish season closed in. Rain pelted down, rushing to get to the centre of the earth. And when the rain abated, the Atlantic became angry, dashing with such force against the rock below the cliffs that spindrift cracked smartly against our window panes, gust after gust.
Before I was installed in a second public school, Bill and I made what I regarded as an epic journey. Setting out at four in the morning in our Rover, he and I, we drove all the way to Gorleston. It was dark when we started out from Widemouth. Roads had no cats’ eyes in those days. Our headlights were dimmed to meet blackout regulations. We arrived at the house in Bernard Road at about midday.
The Boxbaums had gone from next door. Their house, like others in the road, was closed up. A forsaken dog wandered loose in the street; Dennis Wheatley’s alarming novel Black August came to mind, like a vision of the near-future fulfilled. I still wonder what happened to the Boxbaums, in particular to that girl with the blue Aegean eyes. No doubt the Jewish community took care of them.
Bill packed everything into crates, in preparation for a removal firm to come and the house to be sold up for next to nothing. Nobody wanted to live on the east coast now. I helped him – or perhaps hindered, because he told me to take a walk and look at the sea. I made my way down to the front, where Betty and I had spent our most halcyon days.
In the few weeks of our absence a great change had overcome the town. The bandstand was locked, ‘for the duration’, as the saying went. Everything looked forlorn, with a more-than-mid-winter desertion about it. The lovely stretches of sand were empty. The shops we knew were almost all shut down; some had boarded up their windows with improvised shutters. Barbed wire was being unrolled along the promenade.
Bill and I started back to Cornwall before nightfall with Dot’s canary in its cage on the back seat. The canary sang all the way home. Retrieved from the neighbour, Tiny also accompanied us.
Two events on the journey remain in mind, my tongue-tied awe at being alone with my father at close quarters, and our stop for a cup of tea and cake in Oxford – my first sight of that venerable city. I was excited, and not only at the prospect of tea. The waitresses in the St Giles Café were so slow in coming to serve us that Bill, never a patient man, walked out after a minute or two. I perforce followed.
That was the last I saw of Oxford for ten years.
When I was sent to my new school on the fringes of Exmoor, Bill set about finding work. His nest egg from Dereham looked less generous now. He and Dot drove a long way in search of a viable property. He had always been good at property deals, but the war made values uncertain. A newsagent’s shop in Chard, Somerset attracted him. There was something in Wincanton. Mother liked the idea of a tearoom. Or perhaps a shop in Exeter?
Exeter had many beautiful old features. Some narrow streets were medieval, resembling the Shambles in York. A particularly interesting book shop stood beside the cathedral. Life continued there as normal; how else? Except that some public buildings were fortified by walls of sandbags.
At first, I hated West Buckland. The grounds on which the school stands were donated by a local landowner, the Second Earl Fortescue, in the 1850s. The Fortescue family still live near by and maintain their friendly connection with the school. WBS consists of a series of stone buildings, not unlike a prison in appearance (in the manner of most public schools), well suited to the rather bare landscape in which it was planted. The quads were of an amazing draughtiness, as the wind howled in from the Atlantic, past Morte Point, bouncing over Fullabrook and Whitefield Downs, clowning its way across the Seven Sisters, to arrive in time for morning parade outside the headmaster’s offices.
WBS was heroically uncomfortable. In those early months of the war, everything in the country was in confusion. The school shared in that confusion. Compelled to take on extra boys, many of them evacuated from London, it scarcely knew how to house them. I found myself deposited in an emergency form room with an emergency name, Lower IV A. The room, with its raked desks, had been a chemistry lecture room. The desks were open; nothing could be stowed away in them. Nor were there such luxuries as common rooms. After class, you stayed in the classroom. There was no privacy. The blackout added to the gloom. All around, the winds and rains of Exmoor prowled and hammered at the buildings.
I was completely uprooted. The distance between East Dereham and West Buckland was too great.
I wrote to Bill to say that I wished to be taken away. Answer came from my mother that I would have to stick things out. There was nowhere else to go. My sister, meanwhile, had been sent to a school in Bideford. That did not suit her. She also begged to be rescued. Probably she begged more vehemently than I. She was rescued.
But things sorted themselves out. I was also in the throes of puberty – a rather delayed puberty, it seemed. In the baths after rugger, hulking great dayboys sported clumps of pubic bush, sticking out dismally like Norwegian beards.
A few bubbles foamed from my pipeline, then, at last, the real thing, that phlegm-like substance which makes babies. Puberty is a time of anxiety for boys: will they ever, preferably next week, possess massive dongs like the dayboys, together with thickets of hair like the furze on Hardy’s Egdon Heath? Then, low and behold, the miracle happens! There it is, the new weapon, in the pink, sniffing inquisitively at the randy world … And many kinds of interesting childish thought are doomed: instead you start wondering how you can get hold of a girl, get a hand down her blouse and up her skirt – particularly up her skirt – and feel her all over, to check on the legends you are hearing from all sides.
It must have been about that time I recited, ‘Hush, hush, whisper who dares. Christopher Robin is counting his hairs.’
So there it was. Constant erections to set against the draughty dormitories, the meagre meals, the parades, the clanging of the school bell. Ask not for what the bell tolls: it tolls for your erection.
I grew to love West Buckland. Perhaps it was in my second term, the term when, even on bleak Exmoor, winter yields to spring. The lanes round about East and West Buckland burst forth in primroses, primroses trailing as far as Shallowford, about which Henry Williamson wrote, the hedges fill with birds’ nests, and the nests with eggs. Soon, rugger will give way to cricket.
At Framlingham, we were incarcerated within the grounds, as in a high-security prison. At Buckland, we could get exeats which allowed us to wander the countryside on Sundays. You dressed in your rugger kit, collected some rough-and-ready sandwiches from the kitchens, and off you went in twos or threes. Wild Exmoor! How free it seemed, how strange! Once, Bowler and I saw a stag up on the hills. Shallow streams, ideal for damming, meandered about. And there were pits, corries more correctly, full of pure spring water, paved with pebbles six feet down. We actually took dips in them. They were freezing. We splashed and shouted in agony. Coming out, we pulled on shirt and shorts and ran about howling to restore circulation, yelling and laughing at our own madness.
Beatings at WBS were euphemistically known as ‘dabbing’. The custom was to make no sound while the beating was in progress.
I grew to relish the Spartan aspect of WBS and the grittiness of playing rugger in the teeming rain. But wartime WBS lacked the contrasts needed to fill the bleak hours after prep: magnificent productions of opera and plays, films with talks by travellers, scientific demonstrations to excite intellectual curiosity, rich things. Our form was not alone in enjoying education, in seeking to acquire knowledge. Knowledge is to civilisation what DNA is to inheritance.
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