hemisphere have gone. It is as if one stood on a different planet. Even the night sky seen from Mars would appear less alien: the Plough, Cassiopeia, and other constellations would look much the same from Olympus Mons as seen from our air-raid shelter. The distance between Earth and Mars is so short, if insuperable as yet.
At West Buckland, things settled down. The headmaster, Sammy Howells, was a master of sarcasm. He wore pince-nez and had a ginger moustache. The lapels of his suit were permanently discoloured by a W. D. & H. O. Wills’ product, Gold Flake cigarettes. Ciggies must have served him as dummy and mistress, and fumigated the perpetual pong of small boys from his nostrils.
To give the devil his due, he ran a tight ship in stormy times. Sammy was a brilliant teacher of English and in particular of English grammar. With his withering tongue, practised at dissecting the language, he could take any unfortunate boy apart. I relished those lessons, much as I feared Sammy. He took a particular dislike to me, calling me ‘The Comedian’. Sammy liked to be the one making the jokes.
It was noticeable that when he picked on one boy in the class, everyone else laughed fawningly, protecting themselves from the line of fire. They also professed to like him, for the same reason. I really hated Sammy. The old bastard died just before my first book was published. The smokes got him in the end. His lungs went. Poor Sammy Howells – a good headmaster, a brilliant teacher, a dedicated man, a shit.
One thing stands for ever to Sammy Howells’ credit. Whenever Winston Churchill was due to address the nation, Sammy had us all assemble in the Memorial Hall to listen to his speech. Listen we did to that great master of oratory, during those testing years the inspiration of our country.
Obtaining masters to teach was a wartime problem. Most of them had been called up into the Forces. Sammy engaged two conscientious objectors. One was a mathematics teacher, a Mr Coupland, immediately nicknamed, with cruel perception, Chicken Coupland. Coupland knew much maths but could not convey it. Despite furious beatings, liberally dispersed, he could not make us learn. I regret it; I never entered the world of maths, on which most sciences depend.
Mr Foster was a strange man, a refugee from somewhere. We tended to make fun of him. He was known as Mitabout Foreskin, a Bowler christening. Then he took us for a German lesson, and sang ‘Roselein’ to us in a beautiful tenor voice. From then on we were much more respectful.
‘Crasher’ Fay taught us German and English in the upper forms. Most lessons were enjoyable. It was the boredom after class, the lack of privacy, the noise that got to you. All well exemplified in Lindsay Anderson’s film of public school life, If …
The truth was that the hardships of wartime Buckland, together with the rigours of the climate – over eighty inches of rain a year, compared with East Dereham’s twenty-eight – formed a common bond between masters and staff. Once a term, a barber and his assistant would drive out from Barnstaple on rationed petrol and cut the hair of every boy in the school, working steadily all day, class by class. We went in to the torture chamber maned like lions, to emerge as criminals, scarred here and there by the hasty razor. Of course we laughed, unaware that similar shavings were taking place in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Some masters, some boys could not stand the rugged conditions. A brief visitant among the masters was an eccentric S. P. B. Mais, then quite a famous name, a popular broadcaster and writer. I knew his name from the pages of Modern Boy, for which he wrote spy stories. He walked about the school complaining, swaddled in sweaters, swathed in scarves. He taught maths in English lessons, algebra in geography, and anything in anything else. I was to meet him later in life. He left Buckland after one or two terms to write a grouchy little book about the place – a book banned by Sammy but adored by Sammy’s prisoners.
Certainly the place was remarkably cold and wet. Spartan was its ethos. After lights out in our house dormitory, the blacked-out windows had to be opened, the ones to the north, the ones to the south. Mid-ocean gales blew through the rafters, wafting Atlantic chill with them. Plumbing was rudimentary. Each of us had an enamel bowl, filled overnight with cold water. Many a winter’s morning we broke the ice before we could wash. I’m convinced this hardship was good for us, at least for those who survived.
Then came summer. We did not at that time appreciate the beauty of North Devon. But there were long evenings spent out on the playing fields, rehearsing cricket strokes, feeling both the sound and the motion of bat striking ball; or simply playing catch with friends, the leather pill flying high in the air as the shadows of the trees along the drive lengthened. We could also swim in the school pool, but the rule of nudity was never to my taste, concerned as I was with privacy and secrecy.
Once my parents had enlisted me in Buckland, they never visited the school again, although it was only eleven miles from the shop. At the end of term I might cadge a lift in a van to Barnstaple or else walk with others three miles down the valley to Filleigh station, there to catch a Barnstaple train. (Filleigh station has long since been closed.) From Barnstaple, one caught a bus up Sticklepath Hill to Bickington, where it stopped almost opposite our shop.
On one occasion, I returned from school, went upstairs, flung myself on an ottoman, and lay there reading in peace. The relief after the racket of school was considerable. Dot came upstairs from the shop, annoyed because I was so unsociable. I used to stay awake at nights, reading into the small hours.
Having exhausted all the astronomy books in the school library, I turned more eagerly to science fiction magazines, which in those days regarded astronomy as the queen of the sciences. In the fifties they were to become propagandists for space travel. Curious to think that today much SF finds its place less among the stars than inside computers, in games and thought-sequences that recycle old ideas in new form. Not, in fact, outward but inward.
SF magazines introduced me to the name of Friedrich Nietzsche. I went to the Barnstaple Atheneum and applied for membership. The old men were curious to find a fifteen-year-old in their midst. Sitting in a large leather chair, I read Thus Spake Zarathustra. There I came across that conception of the Übermensch which was enjoying such popularity across the Channel in Berlin.
Nietzsche’s ideas filled me with indifference, even when I encountered them, diversified, diluted, in the writings of such SF authors as Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, whose books enjoyed wide popularity. I marked myself down as the eternal underdog. This canine trail led upwards later, from underdog to Steppenwolf.
As for the Übermensch, they were part of the fantasies with which I, like many others, scared myself. To relieve the tedium of the bus ride from Bickington to Barnstaple, I would play the British spy travelling on a German bus. The innocent conductor, working his way along the aisle to sell us tickets, was the Gestapo Überleutnant, checking papers and passports. He would find me out. I would be captured and shot, and my body flung into the Rhine.
This drama so took hold of me that on one occasion I jumped from a moving bus as it crossed the Taw bridge, to go sprawling in the road. The conductor watched grinning from the back of his bus, but luckily did not fire at me.
At the Atheneum I became acquainted with the writings of a local Barnstaple author, W. N. P. Barbellion, author of The Journal of a Disappointed Man. The misanthropic Journal was more to my taste than Zarathustra. Barbellion is splendid on himself and on the War – even if in his case it was the Great War. He writes, ‘They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre hundred years? Consider the date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in AD 1915 – surely we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the whole globe and give the ball to the Boche to play with – just as an experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch?’
How could Barbellion foresee that within about twenty-five years after he wrote, the Boche were indeed intent on experimenting with the globe – and making a hell of it (aided and abetted by their allies the Japanese)? Did I but know it in AD 1942, they had already put the clock back by many centuries.
As for Barbellion on himself – to read him was to see myself in his sickly mirror.
‘I