improvement; shutting boys up in teenage monasteries was not the answer. WBS went coeducational some years ago, under Michael Downward, an enlightened headmaster. As one token of his enlightenment, Michael recently made me Vice-president of the school.
Bill settled on a property near Barnstaple, a corner shop up for sale. I felt sadness for my father, and disgrace for myself. What a comedown from H. H. Aldiss’s shop in Dereham! The Barnstaple shop was a small general store. It sold groceries, cigarettes and newspapers, and housed a sub-post office in one corner.
Bill applied himself to this new trade with dedication. He opened the shop out, incorporating a small storeroom into the design. When rationing began, a coupon had to be exacted for every tin of baked beans, every quarter-pound of sugar. All coupons had to be cut from ration books. Accounting had to be done every weekend. Dot ran the post office. Both of them worked day and night, with no time for their children. We lived in tiny rooms behind and over the shop.
The straggling village of Bickington proved friendly. The post office counter gave Mother an ideal conversation post. Her character changed; she became open and genial. The fears and suspicions of Dereham were things of the past. In no time, she was elected Chairman of the local Women’s Institute, and was a popular success. The tradesmen ate out of her hand. Throughout the war, we never lacked for food. Sometimes fresh salmon, poached from a local river, was on the menu.
Cockney evacuees came down from London. The Women’s Institute proved equal to the task, and welcomed them with a reception – tea and music. Among the evacuees was a splendid strapping blond woman, a Mrs McKechnie – plainly a whore, loud and rude, but that traditional thing, a whore with a heart of gold – with whom Dot became friendly.
When the first wartime Christmas came round, I asked Bill if we were going to go to church, as previously we had always done in East Dereham.
He regarded me almost with scorn. ‘No,’ he explained.
It was impossible to make new friends in school holidays. One was there for so short a time. Penny North and I had a pale affection for each other. Betty and I played together, two strange children who got in the way of Bill’s shop activities. We dressed up and made stinks with my chemistry set, yet never managed quite to blow anything up. When she was ill, I made her a book of stories and drawings, The Stock-Pot Book.
One advantage of the cramped house was that you could climb out of my bedroom window on to a narrow ledge, then to another ledge, and from that get down to the ground. At night, I could escape by that route and walk about the blacked-out village.
More interestingly, I could climb out of a rear window, work my way across a rooftop, and get to a skylight in the roof of a defunct bakery. Levering with a screwdriver, I managed to break the catch of the skylight, and so swarm through into the deserted rooms below.
Here I often stood, wondering, wondering. A certain dark-haired evacuee girl had caught my attention. I talked to her over the back wall and offered to show her my precious secret hideaway, but she would not take the bait, or show me her precious secret hideaway.
The bakery was rat-infested. The rats could get through into Bill’s store by the side of the shop and run along a beam at the far end. This store, freezing in winter, had a corrugated-iron roof. Bill developed a hobby. He would stand with his .22 in the kitchen doorway at one end of the store and shoot rats down at the other end, as they ran along the beam, like clay pipes in a shooting gallery at a fair.
Bill had retained his rifles through all our removals. As France fell in 1940, Italy, the Fascist Italy of Mussolini, entered the war against us. Everyone expected that Hitler’s next move would be to invade England. Bill handed me one of his guns.
‘We may have to defend the street. You never know,’ he said. ‘Keep it clean.’
The gun was mine. Later, I almost killed my father with it.
At school, we all joined the OTC, the Officers Training Corps, and wore uniform. I became a good shot. When we weren’t playing rugger or running round the countryside, we went on military exercises through the local farms. The romps were enjoyable, even in pouring rain, when we wore stiff gas capes. One learnt useful things in the OTC, how to read a compass, how to read a map, how to sneak into an out-of-bounds pub for a pint of cider.
The war was going depressingly badly. After the fall of France, Britain stood alone against the horrible black machine devouring the continent. Bill built an air-raid shelter outside the back door. Dot bought a wind-up gramophone to cheer us up when air raids were in progress.
Once, when a raid was on, we trooped down to the shelter and sat there for an hour or two by candlelight. The shelter proved to be rather damp. After that, Bill used the place as a bacon store, while Betty and I took over the gramophone, on which to play, among other favourites, ‘The Ferryboat Serenade’, ‘Elmer’s Tune’, ‘Green Eyes’, ‘The Hut-Sut Song’ and ‘The Memory of a Rose’.
We lay awake at nights, listening to Dornier engines, like an ischaemic event in the lower cerebellum, as Goering’s Luftwaffe flew overhead. The Dorniers came in squadrons, passing very slowly, throb-throb-throb … The distinctive noise rolled down our chimneys. Listening, you felt as an animal feels, hiding when hunters are near.
One night at midnight, Bill roused me from my bed and we walked up the village to climb Belmont Hill, from whence there was a good view of the surrounding country.
A glow lit the whole sky to the south.
‘Exeter’s getting it,’ Bill said.
Later, we drove to Exeter to witness the extent of the damage. Most of the city had gone. Rubble had been cleared away by then. Nothing remained. Nothing, except the cathedral, which stood alone on an unearthly flat plain. Here and there, as we drove, we passed an occasional lamp standard which remained upright. No living person was to be seen; those unburied had decamped to adjoining villages. The Germans had wiped the city off the map. In this surreal landscape, Air Marshal Hermann Goering had done Salvador Dali’s work.
The English, so tolerant, so enduring, so brave, during World War II, became a lesser race after the war. Exeter was rebuilt as an anonymous town, without that sense of style its old black-and-white buildings had conveyed. Little memory was retained of what it had once been. The Germans, Poles, French rebuilt their cities according to old plans and photographs, effecting smart restorations and canny improvements. British town planners held no such reverence for what had been, as they plugged the standard chain stores into the city centres. The English made no great protest at what was happening.
The blackout lent an enchantment to banal village streets. On more than one occasion, we climbed Belmont Hill to watch the Luftwaffe at their work of destruction.
Far distant, as if an angry planet were about to rise, a fan-shaped light would grow on the horizon. We stood silent on the hill to witness the raid on Plymouth. Even the burning of distant Swansea was visible. Hundreds of civilians died, and with them fabrics and traditions of an earlier age.
After witnessing the air raids we would walk back down the hill, and huddle in the little kitchen behind the shop while Dot made us cups of tea. By the time we were in bed, we would hear the Dorniers returning to Germany. Throb-throb-throb, down the chimney again.
On Belmont Hill stood a small public school, run by a regimental sergeant-major posing as headmaster. The dramatist John Osborne, four years my junior, was incarcerated there as a boy. He used frequently to come down to our shop to buy a packet of Player’s ‘Weights’, whereupon he became friendly with Dot. Growing sick of the sergeant-major, Osborne dotted him a punch in the eye, for which he was expelled.
One great advantage of the blackout was the darkness everywhere, allowing the stars and Milky Way to shine clearly. With my little Stars at a Glance in hand, I used to stand on top of our air-raid shelter and watch the constellations. How peaceful were those regions of fire – so different from Exeter burning. Surely in the marvellous beauty of the night sky lay some hope for humanity, war or no war.
Since then, I have stood in the Dandenong Hills in Australia and looked up at a different