Life Without Armour : An Autobiography

Chapter One

An autobiography is bound to give details of more people than its author, even if only to mention the two who were responsible for him being born. With regard to my father, I have never been able to decide on the mental age at which he was stalled during much of his life. I am now well past the age of his death, over thirty years ago, yet recall that he sometimes seemed to have the mind of a ten-year-old in the body of a brute. He was short-legged and mega-cephalic, and what is certain is that given millions of years and a typewriter he would never have produced a Shakespearean sonnet. On the other hand, neither would I.

Much of the time he had the ability to conceal his backwardness, of which in some obscure dell of the mind he was indeed aware. His experience of the world helped, for he also had that self-centred kindness which brutes are said to possess, realizing that if he wanted affection from those around him he must show something similar to draw it out.

He often hit my mother, and an early memory is of her bending over the bucket so that blood from her cut head would not run on to the carpet. His way of atonement was to be helpful in a sentimental sort of way, but he became dangerously baffled when such gestures evoked revulsion. My mother decided early on that since it was his only form of truce she had better accept them, because not to do so could bring another squall of violence. She also knew that taking advantage of his sudden mellowing eased the pain of his existence and so, under the circumstances, she honoured the maxim that since you had made your bed you must lie in it.

The slow unrolling of age should have taught my father to know himself, and thus control his worst instincts. Unable to do so, he remained a menace to those nearby. I soon learned to think before I spoke, especially to people I feared, which included nearly everyone, a not unusual state for an infant. My father wielded the ultimate authority of the fist and the boot, tempered — if that is the word — by a fussiness which was only another form of self-indulgence, thus giving me an enduring disrespect for authority.

In those early days such black moods took up more of my father’s time than his genuine need to make amends, so my sister and I lived in continual apprehension of someone who, we sometimes felt, should have been kept on a chain. We responded to his moments of kindness with relief rather than affection, but there was no haven of trust in either of our parents. My mother wanted to ameliorate my father’s unpredictable rages, and suffered doubly because she could not, being unable even to protect herself. I recall her cry of protest, however, when my father was battering me — an infrequent event, for I soon learned to keep out of his way: ‘No, no, not on his head!’ I also experienced twinges of despair at my mother having met him and given me birth, though my spirit adapted speedily to something like that of a courtier in the cage of an orang-utan.

From the beginning my emotions were divided between hatred of my father and pity for my mother, but I occasionally realized that my father might be the way he was because he could not read and write. He was deeply ashamed when we children heard our mother shout in her anguish that he was a numskull unable even to decipher a street name or bus sign. The world thus seemed like a mystifying jungle, and I write about him because he was the first threatening force encountered on my coming out of the womb, though his presence was probably felt while I was still in it.

Apart from disturbances inherited, he was probably paying back what had been done to him since birth, indicating that he did not have the mental flexibility to control himself like a civilized person. The fact that I did not pass on such disadvantages to those who later surrounded me was because I identified, as who would not, with my mother’s sufferings, and not with an anger which could always be turned on to me.

My mother, Sabina Burton, was one of eight children (for all that such data are worth), daughter of Ernest, himself the youngest of ten children, and a blacksmith from generations of the trade. He had married Mary Ann Tokins, a barmaid of Irish descent from County Mayo, her grandparents having left with their six sons during the Great Hunger of the 1840s.

Christopher Archibald, my father, was the last and eighth child of Ada Alice, and of Frederick Sillitoe who had an upholstery business. Frederick was the son of Sarah Tomlinson and John Sillitoe, who was a tinplate worker in Wolverhampton. Ada Alice was the daughter of Mary Jane Hillery, and of Henry Blackwell who worked as a hosiery warehouseman in Nottingham.

My father might claim, in an amiable attempt to explain his outlandish surname, that there was an Italian far back in the wayward stepping stones of the family’s progress. Some thought he might be right, because of his black hair, before he went bald, brown eyes and sallow complexion, though I was to believe less and less in such stereotypes the further I got from him.

Sillitoe is an old English name, which gave much trouble to those Victorian specialists in family nomenclature, one writer suggesting that it may have originated in Iceland, and another stating that it came from North Yorkshire. Whatever the truth, it might be fair to say that my father had some of the oldest English traits. On my birth certificate he is described as ‘engineer’s labourer’. Since that was also my first job, I may have taken something from him after all, though exactly what it was I have never been able to decide.

When old man Sillitoe, the upholsterer, died in 1925 he left the proceeds of several slum houses in Wolverhampton to be divided between his eight children, none of whom had known he owned property. The eldest son, Frederick Wallace, a lace designer by trade, had a few years earlier hired a pantechnicon and loaded into it all the unpaid-for high quality furniture of his house, and gone to live in London, where he stayed twenty years. He changed his name and did not let the family know his address, which meant he could not be traced by his creditors nor found for the paying out of the inheritance. His share went to the others, thus tempering my father’s story of the exploit with the truth that what you gained on the swings you inevitably lost on the roundabouts.

Such a windfall did little good, though with the hundred or so pounds my parents buoyed up their lives for a few months. When all of it had been spent except forty pounds, my father got spare-time work on a high platform painting the outside of a factory. The bank notes were folded neatly into a cloth wallet in his waistcoat pocket, and when the platform capsized he lay injured on the ground, covered in paint. Waking up in the hospital, his first thought was for the money, but some angelic nursing sister had placed it safely on a locker at his bedside, a kindness he never forgot.

Chapter Two

I was born on 4 March 1928, under the sign of Pisces, in the front bedroom of a red-bricked council house on the outskirts of Nottingham, two miles north of the River Trent. On asking my mother many years later, for the purposes of horoscope, the hour of my appearance, she had no recollection as to whether it had been day or night.

A sister, Peggy Eileen, had been born two years earlier, so apart from my birth meaning one more mouth to feed the event was little remembered as a special day. In our family nothing was made of such yearly commemorations, because to be reminded of your birth meant disturbing those senses which were only to be used in existing from one dawn to the next; or it may have been that no one could be bothered to devise a gift or obtain the cost of one; and if no one thought of your birthday you had the advantage of not having to bother about theirs.

A mutual accord never to consider the ritual caused the reasons for it to be forgotten, though my father kept a list of his children as we appeared, as well as the dates, in order to tell at a glance how old we were if an argument on the matter arose between him and my mother. He had her write the first names of each child on a separate scrap of paper, and then he copied them facsimile on to a clean sheet which, found after his death, showed most of the names misspelt.

A few weeks after my birth I became ill, though no one ever told me the ailment, except that it was necessary to get me to a doctor before I crouped myself into extinction. My mother could not go into the snowstorm because she also was unwell, so her more robust sister Edith, who already had five children of her own, wrapped me in a blanket, buttoned the whole thing under her coat, and strove a mile through the blizzard, reaching the doctor’s house in time to save my life. I have often wondered where my father was; he could not have been in a pub, because at that time he didn’t drink, but if at home why didn’t he put on his coat and face the weather?

Except for the house of my birth every place thereafter had the mangonels of slum clearance rumbling not far behind. One tiny cottage on a lane running parallel to the River Leen was flooded after a week of rain, and had to be abandoned. My parents did not remain within the decent confines of a council house because my father was laid off from his job, got into arrears with the rent, and had to find a cheap bug-ridden back-to-back in the middle of the city.

The pattern of their lives was punctuated by journeys with a hired handcart transiting what little they owned beyond the heavy tread of the bailiffs.

When the four of us lived on Alfreton Road an unemployed man sat by his window all day looking across at girls working their machines in Player’s tobacco factory, to contemptuous laughter from the women in the house. I also recall the crowded furniture in our single room, and two fishing boat pictures leaning against the wall, at which I frequently stared because the sails to my eye looked so wooden. They were a wedding present from my mother’s brother, and in future years were often pawned, until finally sold.

A boy younger than me, who lived in the same house, defecated along the corridor and on the stairs, and even in our room if the door was left open. The women tried to keep a check on him, but he always eluded them. His own mother (no father was around) was out all day at a lace factory. The quantities of evil-smelling excrement smouldering in his wake seemed enormous compared to his size and the amount of food he ate, and there was an often expressed wish that he would evacuate himself totally — shit himself to death — and free the house of his curse. The kid must have been an ongoing victim of mild dysentery, but he certainly deserved his sobriquet of Ka-ka, and was talked about in the family for years.

Early memories, vivid and enduring, are in no kind of order. My elder sister is dead, so can’t be asked about the places we lived in, but she was my patient mentor, instructing me in how to tie shoe laces and tell the time, and making sure to take my hand on crossing the road to school half a mile away. During our parents’ fights we calmed our natural distress by playing with Billy French and Amy Tyre around the common water taps in the open space before the houses of Albion Yard.

When I was ill at four years old my mother must have been so afraid that she fetched a doctor. Not wanting anyone to touch me, I retreated cursing to the end of the bed, like some delirious animal backing into a non-existent lair of the darkened room, maybe thinking they would take me away, or hating to have a stranger touch me. My mother, trying not to be angry, knew well enough how such foul words had come into my mouth.

My father was out of work except for a short period of employment at a tannery, or skinyard as he called it. Walking along the canal with my mother one Friday afternoon to meet him coming home with his wages was pleasant, because even a modest amount of money gave less cause for argument, and my parents were as content as they could ever be. My father pocketed the two pounds-odd, and dropped the small brown envelope into the depths of a nearby lock, almost the last wage packet any of us saw until the prospect of a war against Hitler’s Germany created a demand even for his labour.

The weekly dole for the eventual four children and two adults (we quickly became a family of six) was thirty-eight shillings a week, the equivalent of about forty pounds in today’s money. My mother and her sister Edith took me to an orphanage called Nazareth House, where it was known in the neighbourhood that the nuns gave surplus bread to first-comers.

Besides running up debts for food my father bought furniture on hire purchase, and sold the goods for cash before he had paid much on the instalments. He was sentenced to three months in quad at Lincoln for fraud. After eight weeks he came out looking healthier than when he had gone in, due to regular meals, rest from quarrelling, and decorating work in the open air which the governor had given him to do.

My father dwelt more gloatingly on the fact that his brother Frederick who had tried the same scheme so successfully had never been traced than on his own criminal act which had been such a failure, but which enriched my mother’s retaliatory epithets no end during their quarrels.

Chapter Three

Canvas bags of variously shaped wooden bricks emptied on to a polish-smelling floor were for us to build with. Even if I hadn’t heard the word I would have built: Doric, Ionic and fluted Corinthian columns topped by entablatures and architraves and set on the firmest foundations: a megalopolis worthy of Mussolini, but ruined in five minutes.

Naked into cold swimming baths up to our chins, but holding a bar at the shallow end and ordered not to let go or we would drown, seemed a purposeless immersion. This other world of neither good nor bad was a two-storey red-bricked institution surrounded by railings and backing on to a canal where horses pulled barges to warehouses along its banks. Fear of strange territory was diminished by the relief of being a few hours from home, lured into the mystery of writing, the slowly dispersing puzzle of reading, and that comforting surety of arithmetic. Another world must be a better world.

Each morning the teacher read about God creating the heavens and the earth, and every living thing, told the story of Abraham and Isaac, the voyaging of Noah’s family and all the animals in the Ark, of how the Israelites were troubled in Egypt, and of Moses leading them from the House of Bondage for forty years of wandering across the wilderness to the Promised Land. Saul and Jonathan in their deaths were not divided, and even the Mighty must fall.

She read from her own black leatherbound King James’s translation of the Bible whose English, whether or not all parts were immediately understood, entered my soul for life. She intoned the Ten Commandments from Exodus and Deuteronomy over and over, so that if we couldn’t recite them at least we would always know what was right and what was wrong, whatever right or wrong we committed.

She tried teaching basic musical notation but, in her lighter moments, rather than be discouraged, played the latest Jessie Matthews song on the piano, head thrown back and voice tremoloing happily around the room. Who she was, I’ll never know.

Exotic and visionary biblical landscapes of mountains, a huge river, palm trees and bulrushes, and seas that fell back so that the People chosen by God to write the Bible could walk over on dry land, were different to the buildings and houses roundabout. Geography books described by simple word and picture such countries as Holland and Japan, Switzerland and India, pages turned with the firmest of infantile notions that as soon as I was able and old enough nothing would stop me going to such places. To the teacher I was no different from other smelly lumps of putty-flesh in the room, but though the diameter of my intake was little wider than a pinhole, what poured in was the purest gold.

Another moonlight flit landed me in a school opposite the church at Old Radford. The headmaster was a terror, and one day came into the class to find out how far we could count. A boy reached twenty, and a girl stumbled near to forty, but on asking me he had to call a halt when (thanks to my sister) I breached the hundred barrier, hardly knowing how close I was to my limit. He held up a penny for the achievement and, more amazed than pleased, my hand went out for the reward.

For some reason the Ancient Greeks featured prominently on the headmaster’s curriculum, and I relished accounts of the various bloody skirmishes at the Siege of Troy, as well as a coloured illustration of Hector and Achilles fighting outside the tall grim walls, their shields resembling giant carapaces. The ruse of the Wooden Horse was unsubtle enough to be understood and approved of, while the story of Alexander the Great was enjoyed because of the beauty of his horse’s name ‘Bucephalus’, repeated half a dozen times by the headmaster so that we would never forget it. At the same school we were taken by a woman teacher to a green dell by the church and taught to identify leaves and trees.

While about six, or maybe seven, my mother heard of a school for mentally backward children. A neighbour had described the healthiness of the regime, and the feeding that went on there, and by special pleading at the education office in town a place was found for me. The building backed on to a public park called the Arboretum, and I was provided with tokens each day for the two bus rides to get there.

On arrival we received a bowl of rich porridge, and halfway through the morning a beaker of hot milk, whose wholesome and steamy odour I still recall. After a midday meal, safari-like cots were brought out, and we were induced to sleep for an hour. Large spoonsful of cod liver oil were poured into reluctant gullets, and we had tea and sandwiches before going home. No lessons were given, and between bouts of sustenance we were allowed to run free about the playground. For a few months I turned myself into a train engine, puffing and shunting around imaginary marshalling yards, until it was realized I neither lacked intelligence nor was stunted in my growth. My mother was disappointed, but had done her best.

The infants’ and then the junior boys’ school in Radford on Forster Street turned out to be more permanent. It was a mischance indeed if anyone misbehaved under the guardian eye of Miss Chance because, though slight in build and with short fair hair (as I remember), she was a fierce hand with strap, stick, fist or even boot. We understood that her fiancé had been killed in the Great War, common with women teachers of those days. She once came to school with a pot of home-made jam, and gave it to a boy whose father was on the dole. On Armistice Day we were obliged to buy a penny poppy, and stand for two minutes’ silence at eleven o’clock.

Ada Chance taught me the importance of spelling. During the lesson she became the authoritarian little drill sergeant, her system rigid but effective. Beginning with the front of the class, of nearer forty than thirty children, we had to stand up in turn and spell a word which she called out.

‘Beautiful,’ she snapped at me.

‘Beautiful,’ I would repeat loudly. ‘Beautiful: B — E — A — U — T — I — F — U — L, beautiful. Beautiful: B — E — A — U — T — I — F — U — L Beautiful,’ and then sit down, giving place to the next boy. This went on for an hour every day or so, and by the end of the term, and from then on, I looked at any strange word until the correct spelling went into my brain, or I would reach for the dictionary under my desk if at all unsure.

Mr Smith, the peppery martinet of a headmaster, came into Miss Chance’s classroom to say he would shortly be sending the monitors around to collect money for the annual Christmas party. ‘Put your hands up,’ he said, ‘those who want a party for fourpence, a sum, I might say, which won’t provide anything very lavish.’

A few of us raised our hands. My father was on the dole, and it was doubtful that he would be able to part with even that sum.

‘Hands up,’ Smith went on, ‘those who think that sixpence would give a somewhat better style to the festivities.’ Most hands indicated agreement, though mine stayed down, as it did when he continued: ‘But eightpence would surely give us the best party of all,’ to which, after a while, everyone but me assented.

His eyes glittered with amusement. ‘Hands up, once more, those who can only pay fourpence?’

My single hand would have stayed raised for ever, because I was far more comfortable than I would have been after asking my father to give money which he would have felt tormented at not being able to provide. He and my mother were continually nagged by children who wanted, wanted and wanted but could not be given. What we yearned for was usually no more than what we needed, such as shoes or clothes, extra food or even, in our hopeful daydreams, sweets and toys but, except for a modest treat at Christmas, we couldn’t have those, either. A Christmas party at school was certainly not considered essential for our well-being and, aware of this to my backbone, it wasn’t difficult to hold out against the sarcastic blandishments of Mr Smith who, when he repeated the question, got the same answer.

After he had gone, Miss Chance called me to the front. ‘You did well,’ she said, turning to the rest of the class. ‘If you have something you believe in strongly enough, you must always stick to your guns.’ She gave me her personal prayer book as a memento, which was all she could find in her desk to spare. I lost it soon afterwards, but never discarded her advice, which was already as much in my blood as having been put there by circumstance.

Chapter Four

You moved under cover, tactically alert, because rival gangs might be roaming the fields between the railway and allotment gardens. A straggler was in danger, so you maintained all-round vision, noting the nearest escape route to lane or road. You were grown up, and it was serious, everyone an enemy until proved a friend. Unable to stop and find out, friends were few.

The first indication of peril was a stone colliding with your head, and I would go home with a blood-streaked face to terrify and anger my parents, till a wash under the tap showed only a graze. The game was to flee, and hide, and as often as possible make others do the same, to fight openly only when numbers were on your side. Cunning was the policy, and since this was my world I blended in well. You were a scout on the prowl (not a Boy Scout) going from A to B with a heavy stick in one hand and stones ready warmed in the other.

Sometimes, going through the door with more than a graze, my father would laugh as he dabbed at the blood and say there were worse things at sea, and that no matter how badly off you felt there was always somebody worse, which encouragement to stoicism fitted with the general conditions of life.

We lived on a street with houses behind and fields in front. In the alleys of the urban zone I would lose any pursuer. Fields and woods across the stream formed equally versatile territory, where the art of concealment became a habit, and camouflage was a current word: ‘Get out to that ’edge near the ’lotments, and I’ll stay ’ere on the railway. You’ve got to come to me across the field, and if I see you you’ll get a brick at your ’ead.’ Frank Blower, a few years older, devised tactical games and, holding a dustbin lid and a spear-headed railing high, looked to us like Goliath, with never a David and a bag of pebbles to slay him. We would have made good soldiers in an old-fashioned colonial war, rather than fodder for the trenches.

Every morning we four children, whether frost was hard on the ground, or flowers in bloom on recreation plots, walked half a mile to a ‘dinner centre’ for breakfast of three half slices of bread-and-butter and a mug of sweetened cocoa. At school during the morning we were given a third of a pint of milk, and went back to the dinner centre at midday for a meal of main course and pudding. This wasn’t too bad for the children — though we never thought we had quite enough to eat — but we were harrowed by the plight of our parents, whose suffering was obvious to any child. They couldn’t do anything about what was happening to them, and bitter internecine quarrels were the result.

In winter the pleasing music of rain pattering against the school windows lost some of its charm on knowing I would have to walk home afterwards with saturated feet and no coat. During holidays and weekends I spent days on the extensive rubbish tips by the canal, summer or winter, either idling (since it was more peaceful there), collecting wood for the grate at home, or looking for bottles to sell. I became adept at making fires: everything so difficult that on succeeding it seemed I had mastered an art. In the cold autumn rains a tatter might let me shelter in a lean-to, or stand by his blaze of tyres and old boxes. Occasionally I would bring a snack, otherwise it was a matter of going back to the house at dusk hoping to see a stewpot simmering on the hob.

Walking along high banks of refuse across the tips, Bernard Clifford and I threw pieces of broken bottle playfully towards each other. A jagged bit that sped with too much enthusiasm scooped a hole in my lower leg about half an inch wide, and equally deep by the bone. The surprise was such, at seeing dull grey flesh inside instead of red, that neither alarm nor pain was felt on the way home, though many trips were needed to the school clinic before a scar began to cover it.

What I had thoroughly done by this time was detach myself from my parents. They were my guardians, my protectors to a certain extent, and also the would-be providers of food, clothes and shelter, but beyond that — and what in any case was supposed to be beyond? — it was impossible to confide in them, or admire or respect them, or even trust them. Their mutual antagonism, their joint incompetence, their misfortune, and the too tangible anguish that came from both, embroiled me in their existence but eventually made me not only unable to love them but almost to consider them my own worst enemies.

Such necessities as food and clothing might not have been in the first line of priority had there been less violent disharmony in the house. What a child wants is probably an impossible combination: parents who will provide, who will chide but not bully and, if they loathe each other, keep their differences as far as is feasible to themselves. Should these conditions not exist it would still be unjust to blame the parents for whatever isn’t right, and in my case I soon learned not to, since it was clear that they were as they were, and could not help themselves.

Even while in their orbit I was not basically unhappy, because there was too much to learn about the world beyond, which seemed full of promise in that so little was known about it. In a kind of slow-burning lackadaisical way I was anxious to discover everything, but only at the rate at which my powers of intake would absorb it effectively with little or no prompting from anyone else.

Being an island unto myself gave less reason for discontent, and diminished the area of complaint. Ideally I would have liked not so much to be somebody else as to be in an entirely different place; meaning, with another and, to put it plainly, a better-off family. Since that could not be, the only thing was to keep going till something happened, though there was never much idea, beyond unwarrantable fantasies cooked up while roaming Wollaton Park looking for chestnuts with my cousin Jack, as to what that something might be.

In another sense my childhood was as perfect as could be arranged. I lived in the same town up to the age of eighteen, my parents never divorced, I did not go to boarding school, and I always had something to eat, as well as shelter, and clothes on my back. I am harrowed with compassion on seeing photographs of Jewish children plainly starving to death on the streets of Warsaw or Vilna during the Second World War. Many were more gently brought-up than me, before the German plague struck, and therefore their fate was that much more terrible, something never to be forgiven or forgotten. Their faces tell me that compared to them my early days went by in absolute paradise, though certain it is that my mother never needed to say: ‘Finish your meal, or I’ll send it to the starving children of China!’

The impossibility of abiding in however troubled the waters may in any case have been due to that unacknowledged urge of the deracinated formed in me even before birth. The map of the world became my talisman, the locality I was locked in having all the characteristics of a powerhouse which would one day lead me to more ease of living.

When my father put up new wallpaper and gave me the scrag-end of a roll to play with I spread the white side up and, drawing a vertical line for the Greenwich meridian and a horizontal for the Equator, made a map of the world at which Ptolemy might have smiled, marking with red crayon as many British Possessions as could be remembered from the atlas at school.

The stronger the sense of place, and mine couldn’t have been more rooted, the more I wanted to know the rest of the world. One part of me was bound for ever to where I was growing up, but the other told me I had to know the whole world if my head was not at times to burst from sheer misery. Such a project could not be embarked on until the territory over which it was possible to walk from the front door of the house had been thoroughly mapped and understood. Heredity is the cause: circumstances only exacerbate — the phenotypical conundrum.

Chapter Five

A sure qualification for turning into a writer is to grow up with a divided personality, and perhaps that dichotomy was nurtured by spending as much of my childhood as possible in the country. In the city I went to school, and in the country I played. In the city my father was out of work, but in the country my grandparents kept chickens, and a prime pig was killed every year. In the city there was mildewed brick and oily asphalt, and often the unmistakable reek of horse turds squashed flat by passing motors, while in the country there was the sweet odour of berries and fresh grass, and a clean wind even welcome when driving the first drops of rain to my cheeks.

We lived in an odd kind of house on the edge of some back-to-backs, the accommodation consisting of a living room with scullery attached, a bedroom above, and an attic at the top where we children slept on one bed, and from whose single small window we could look out and see fields. My grandparents’ cottage was a mile away and, setting off with a stick and a sandwich across the narrow River Leen, every worry was left behind except that of getting to my destination with head unblemished.

Just as meat is most tender when close to the bone, and cheese the tastiest where the rats have started to nibble, so the country immediately beyond the packed houses seemed rich and strange. I treasured the quality of that silver mile as terra incognita, and walking down from the high railway bridge into a cornfield the smell was second only to that of baking bread on opening the door of the Burtons’ spotless cottage.

In early morning hedges were probed, trees walked around and sometimes scrambled up if the lower branches were within arm’s reach. Places of possible ambush were avoided, or danger invented to dispel boredom when the hour was too early for enemies to be on the roam. Bells tinkling so mellifluously on the still air, an archaic but not unfriendly tune, was the distant Sabbath call from Wollaton Church, in which my parents had been married.

My mother sometimes tried to persuade me to take the main road and go along the frequented lane by Radford Woodhouse, but I preferred the heavy dew soaking my plimsolls and short trousers as I pushed a way through nettles and Queen Anne’s Lace taller than myself. Birds were disturbed, plate-sized clusters of elderberries stained my hands, and toadstools made me wary. The route was surveyed as if new every time, laying out my own peculiar mental map, while salivating at the thought of breakfast when my grandmother let me in.

The cottage was on Lord Middleton’s estate, one of a group of three known for some reason as Old Engine Houses. It had neither gas nor electricity, and memories of the visual sort join with odours to re-create the topography: variations on stale lavender, lamp oil, strong soap and turpentine, wholesome smells no longer current but homely for that time.

The only items of modernity were a bicycle, and an enormous gramophone with a horn I could have crawled into, too weighty to lift. Records were heavier than they are today, easy to chip but fascinating to endlessly rearrange, awe for some reason felt when the word REX showed on their paper sleeves.

Cooking was done on a coal fire, in the kitchen-living room lit by a lamp above the table. For water my Uncle Dick took a yoke to the common well with its fairy-tale wooden hood on a rise beyond the garden, staggering back along the path with laden buckets slopping at the brim, and crossing the kitchen to set them down in the cool stone-smelling pantry.

Walking by his side from the well I heard him effing-and-blinding in no uncertain terms at the burden, most of the livid expletives meant for his father, and on realizing I was close enough to hear he smiled and said: ‘Don’t tell yer grandad, will yer?’ — then fell to effing-and-blinding again, repeating his injunction, and his cursing, several times before reaching the door.

Grandfather Burton, a tall blacksmith in his sixties, took to me because I ran errands, cleaned his Saturday night dress boots, and sometimes amused him by reading from the newspaper. His eye, he said with a wink, could not manage the small print, though I noticed it also failed to cope with the headlines, and a spark at the forge had blinded him in the other. He occasionally wore a black patch, and my aunts, who detested his caustic severity, referred to him when he wasn’t close as ‘Lord Nelson’ or ‘Old One-Eye’.

Though Burton spoke little, the pertinence of the words he did use formed lodgements in my brain and joined into a solid bridgehead of memory. Such expressions had more telling effect than my father’s because there was no threat behind them. If you were snatched you were perished with cold; clambed you were faint with hunger; mardy whining childishly and without much cause; windy cowardly — a vocabulary of county argot passed down through generations.

Regarding the discomforts of the senses or the body, everything was related, in the degree of its intensity, to buggery — which, I’m sure, he had never experienced in the common meaning of the word. It, whatever it might be, stank, itched, burned or chafed like buggery. As an indication of surprise he would say: ‘Well, I’ll go to buggery!’ I did not know what it meant, but Burton’s emphasis certainly made it clear as to his state of mind.

Not given to much humour, the apotheosis came when he sat stiff-backed in his Windsor chair by the fireplace, held out a hand with a finger extended, and said to me: ‘Nimrod, pull this.’

Ever suspicious, I held back, noting the glint in his good eye. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘pull it. It’s giving me gyp. If you pull it, it’ll mek me better.’

When I did so, and tugged with might and main, he let out a long splintering fart that almost tore the cottage apart. Another word learned, though the somewhat onomatopoeic tone needed in reproduction was not always available.

In late summer I was awakened by the noise of harvest machinery from the field outside, and by sunlight coming through the bedroom window. My grandmother cooked the farmhands’ dinner, and Burton was given rights to wheat near the hedges that the combine harvester could not reach, his tall, shirt-sleeved, slowly advancing frame with the swinging scythe making an unforgettable picture of the grim reaper. The gleanings were winnowed and husked in the yard by my grandmother, who boiled them in the copper to mix with the pigs’ feed.

Darkness was a long time coming on Saturday evening when my grandparents had gone to the Admiral Rodney pub at Wollaton and left me alone in the house. The grizzling anxieties of the cockerels, the fussy grunting of discontented pigs, and an occasional yap from the wary dog in its kennel came to me as I sat in my shirt at the dressing table in my aunts’ bedroom, arranging cosmetic bottles in ranks like soldiers.

Beyond the cottage lay the Cherry Orchard, a large area not of fruit trees, but of scrubland backed by Robins Wood, where I imagined the famous Hood and his Merry Outlaws passing on their way from Staffordshire to Sherwood. I made friends with the children of a farmworker’s cottage called Cherry Orchard House, so close to the wood that their garden in spring was invaded by swathes of bluebells. Alma Ollington (or was it Amy? Maybe neither) came on pinafore wings to meet me as I crossed the open land, and we hid inside an enormous elm with the lower part of its trunk burnt out, pretending we had run away from home.

Aunt Ivy, another of my grandfather’s daughters, worked at Player’s factory, and being unmarried had a boyfriend called Ernest Guyler, who was to die of tuberculosis. A tall, thin, sprucely dressed man, he used to come up the lane to call on her. The first love of my life was the fair and stately Queen Alexandra, whose picture was on a card Ernest gave me from his cigarette packet before walking with Ivy towards the wood.

Ivy, and her sister Emily, who was also unmarried, would occasionally take down the long tin bath and set it under a plane tree between the back door and the coal house. Showing reluctance — to say the least — with regard to water, even after they had pulled my clothes off, I wriggled out of their grasp and ran away. They chased me around the yard, merrily laughing at the fun, as if I was one of the pigs that had found a way out of the stye. Cornering me by the poultry wire, they dragged me back to a lavish coating of White Windsor soap and the cleansing I certainly needed.

I sometimes shared the bed of Uncle Dick who, a tall handsome man with plenty of girlfriends, rarely came in till the middle of the night. On Sunday morning he cycled along the nearby canal selling permits to fishermen for twopence each, of which he was allowed to keep a farthing for his trouble. He took me on the crossbar in order to amuse himself by scaring me on steering close to the deep and forbidding locks.

Too scruffy a little prince in the house, my aunts went to buy me a new shirt, and I met them at the lane-end near the main road. They opened the paper and held it up, such a crisp bright yellow that I insisted on taking off my old one, which meant changing down to my skin, before going back proudly to show my grandfather.

The lane at the Burtons’ was a dead-end to motors, deliveries of groceries from the town usually by bicycle or a tradesman’s van. The insurance, rent or tallyman for this and that knocked on the door once a week and were invited inside to be paid, a different procedure to that at home, when a knock at the door was feared, and my mother would usually send me or Peggy to say that nobody was in. Peddlers who called at the Burtons’ got no response from my grandfather if he was about, though his wife Mary Ann, whose kindly Irish soul had survived intact, would buy something if she could, or offer a cup of tea if she could not.

One day she sent me home with a packet of fat bacon from the latest pig killed, to be used for cooking. Later that evening, feeling hungry, I went to the scullery and ate most of it, piece by piece, like an Eskimo. An hour later, climbing the ladder to the attic, I made such an indescribable mess on being sick that my mother hadn’t the heart to shout, nor my father to put the boot in.

Whatever family tensions there were at the Burtons’, and my mother told me there had been plenty, the place was a haven of peace and privilege to me. Drawing or reading, I disturbed no one, and rarely went home without a few pennies rattling in my pocket. Burton did not like my father because he had been to prison, and never asked after him, thinking his daughter an everlasting fool for having married such a man, though Burton had made her life too hellish to say no when my father had put the question.

Chapter Six

Progress in learning was measured by tests, a system I liked, as well as the approval on receiving high marks. Knowing my position in the hierarchy allowed me to measure progress to the top. The class was divided into ‘houses’, of Windsor, Sandringham, Balmoral and Buckingham, each competing for good conduct stars of red, yellow, blue and green, any stars gained to be fixed on a chart behind the door. I was glad when the House of Windsor, to which I had been assigned, accumulated them more rapidly than the others.

A smell that has not changed is that of ink, going drop by ritual drop from a large brownstone bottle into the white pot fitting flush with the top of the desk. The same odour was sniffed when the blackly-scaled steel pen nibs were wrenched off with a scrap of blotting paper and discarded for new ones. The accomplishment of ‘flowing handwriting,’ or ‘double writing’ as my sister called it, came easily, and on Miss Chance asking whether I could use my right hand she was told I had tried but found it impossible. ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘go on using your left.’

A great discovery was the list of foreign words and phrases several pages long at the back of the dictionary, an appendix not often seen these days. Hair cracks appeared in the window of my own language through which I looked at the world, splinters of Latin, French and Greek, such as nil desperandum, tempus fugit, hors de combat, lèse-majesté and ariston metron. Reading assiduously to myself, I copied and transposed them in an attempt to join several of the same tongue and make a sentence, usually with puzzling if not disappointing results.

Another source of words was maps, the place names of Central and South America introducing me to Spanish, and translated by using a Midget Dictionary which I had saved sixpence to buy. The game of hunting across the map for Buenos Aires, Rio de la Plata, Monte Video and Belo Horizonte was enjoyable, the accumulation of such words not so much an attempt to know another language, though the desire existed, as an attractive extension of my own, a kind of word travel to soften the imprisonment of not being able to move beyond wherever I could get to in a day on my own two feet. Such avidity for foreign names and phrases was also useful in oiling the machinery of my perceptions with rudimentary English.

The language at home was different to that taught at school and found in books, richer in one way, yet inferior in others, English in the classroom seeming the equivalent of learning a foreign language which must be known so as to understand people and be understood by them on tackling the unexplored world beyond.

Verbal dexterity and fantastic humour were common between me and my friend Arthur Shelton, as it was with numerous cousins from Aunt Edith’s family. Later in life I took to the Yiddish brand as if born to it, for the poor share much in their twisting of language to reflect experience. Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker and Paul Robeson sang for us, while the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, the Dead End Kids, Charlie Chaplin and, later, Danny Kaye and Eddie Cantor made us laugh.

The ‘pictures’ were a solace and consolation, and it was a poor week if I didn’t get the few pennies necessary to take myself to a matinee on Saturday afternoon. Advertisement cards, collected from every local cinema and giving details of ‘coming attractions’, allowed me to mull in my vegetable way for hours over the exotic titles and names of stars in the hope of one day being able to see their films.

The names of the ‘kinemas’ were also exotic, far-fetched, yet within reach of understanding because none was beyond price or distance; outlandish names, one might have thought, but by constant use they became familiar and even homely: Scala, Hippodrome, Savoy, Ritz, Plaza, Elite, Grande — names to be surmounted, left behind, even scorned, but never forgotten because of the dreams they generated and the joy they gave when dreams and joy were cushions against despair.

The cinema, therefore, with penny comics, was one of my earliest influences. We roamed to find the best films if the nearest cinema was full or the programme did not inspire with its titles and outside photographs. One afternoon I subtracted myself from the group when a collective decision seemed intractable, and set off along the crowded road of a district only partially known, until coming across LENO’S PICTUREDROME, even dingier than the gang’s earlier choices, yet mysteriously beckoning because I was on my own. I paid twopence, and went inside. What was on?

The Last Days of Pompeii, and the happy finder was me alone, the only one in the family to see it, witnessing the cries of the trapped and fallen, descending blocks of temples weighty like iron, a startling occurrence catastrophically different to the feeble collapse of woodbrick palaces on the floor of my first day at school. This time, though I had not caused it, yet somehow wished I had been able to, I saw the earth opening like the crumbling lips of Hell’s worst animal to grab at heels, lions to beware of roaming from the arena, people running in panic and terror, all in the grainy form of ashy darkness that made it more sinister and exciting, a God-spun concrete-mixer chewing up such words in my brain as Armageddon, Eruption, Passion Dale and Earthquake: the end of the world, with knobs on.

In a corner, or suddenly across the middle, ran a pure white speckle against the black, of magician-like dolly mixture symbols — dots, triangles, squares and stars — so quickly as to make me doubt I had seen them, yet increasing the tension of everything still going on full tilt across the screen which by now had become a whole world that I was in yet not part of. Where was Pompeii, and why was it happening? The relief and entertainment was in knowing that you could be safe on your seat watching disaster overtaking others, caused by someone or something with, after all, no real name.

I made my way home as the lamplighter with his pole flicked on the gas as if to guide only me, reworking the spectacle time and again in order not to wonder what sort of food there would be on the table when I got there but hoping to find toast with real butter on it, and jam, and my parents at peace, though whatever violent mood they happened to be in could never match what I had seen in Leno’s Picturedrome.

Up the ladder and into the attic, my brother and sisters wanted a story when we got into bed, and the whispered rehash of dreadful occurrences viewed at the pictures, mixed with the murky imaginings of my sparked-off brain, mesmerized myself as much as them till the clutch of us were frightened into the relief of sleep, or bored enough to risk the takeover of dreams.

Chapter Seven

About the age of nine I went for a fortnight to ‘Poor Boys Camp’ at Skegness. I didn’t want to go, but willessly acceded after my mother’s effort to get me on the list. My cousin Jack had already been, and said it was marvellous.

‘I’m not a poor boy,’ I told him indignantly.

‘That don’t matter,’ he laughed, ‘as long as you enjoy it.’ Jack, a close childhood friend, was a year or two older. Small and wiry, with a half starved, exposed, yet mostly cheerful face, he was loved by his mother — my Aunt Edith — yet necessarily neglected because he was one of eight. We trawled the tips together looking for bottles to take back to the beer-off for a penny each, or for anything edible, or for scrap metals to be sold and the proceeds shared. At Goose Fair we tried to get rides for nothing, our bodies rubberized on rolling harmlessly off when the money-man held out his hand, or we searched for dropped pennies between the stalls. We roamed the parks looking for stray flowers to pluck out and try to sell. On spending cash at a sweetshop Jack would eat the best of what he had first, while I kept mine to the last.

A bus took two dozen of us to a large Edwardian house in a backstreet of the resort. My memory is almost null, mind cut down to absorb as little as possible, and endure it until the time came to return home. We were loaned mackintoshes, and grey felt hats which were soon reshaped to make us look like a gaggle of infant Bonapartes, going along the promenade under the charge of a bored young schoolmaster. We collected blackberries for the Home’s jam, were taken to a concert party on the pier, and passed rainy afternoons in a large mouldy-smelling hut at the end of the garden reading bound issues of Penny Dreadful magazines, or thumping on an out-of-tune piano. A boy taught me to play draughts.

Whether I came back any fitter is hard to say, though I was never unhealthy as a child. The experience faded into the mulch and was seemingly forgotten. In the midst of whatever happened on home ground the minutes went slowly enough, because all was being taken in. Everything was interesting, but my style of absorption bordered on the catatonic. Even so, every face was super-real, photographed in depth and never forgotten. Yorkie, sitting on the doorstep of his detached and larger house down the street, had a head like a piece of sculpture just out of the mould, jowled like a gigantic frog, a slender pipe either smoking or still between shapeless rubbery lips. Without apparent occupation, he always had tobacco, and was a mystery to everyone.

Neither did Mark Fisher work, a cheerful middle-aged man who was said to be going blind. Every day at five o’clock he cut several rounds of bread, spread butter on them, then set them down on the living-room dresser for his daughter Edna’s tea when she walked in smiling but dead-beat from the tobacco factory. Our next door neighbour was Mrs Hopps, who had brought her family down from Darlington so that her sons could get work at the Raleigh Bicycle factory. Whenever the wonderful aroma of baking drifted from her kitchen I played by the door till she came out and gave me a bun or pasty.

A woman wearing a red beret (signifying, everybody said, that she had no drawers on) stood by the entry leading into Peveril Yard, and a man would occasionally follow along that short tunnel to her house. Welsh Hilda, on her way to see a friend in the same yard, was a fat observant woman who, perhaps to torment us, opened a little snuff tin from her coat pocket to show the score of silver sixpences inside, before snapping it shut.

Eddie the Tramp was a brother of my father’s, and his cap and mackintosh stank rotten when he came into the house, which he rarely did, being uncertain of his welcome, though my mother was a little softer towards him. With no fixed address, he worked when he could as an upholsterer, but what money came from it usually went on booze. He had deserted in the Great War, but ended shell-shocked and captured on the Western Front.

We children liked him because if he had cash in his pocket he would treat us to comics and sweets, and amuse us by drawing German soldiers over and over again, and trying to teach us bits of French picked up in his army days. His definite vibrations of battiness sometimes exceeded even those of my father, though they rarely signified the same degree of violence. He would be diagnosed today as schizophrenic, but nobody cared about him then because no matter how much you helped (and his brothers and sisters did from time to time) he was too difficult to have in the house, and soon got rid of what clothes he was given for drink.

Books that filled a glass-fronted case in the Burtons’ parlour had been brought home by their eight children as end of term awards from Sunday and day schools over the years. I recall titles such as Beauchamp’s Career, The Lamplighter, John Halifax, Gentleman, and What Katy Did Next — to name a few. The sight of their several rows was more impressive than whatever wisdom or entertainment they might contain, but I liked the grim engravings of tragic shipwrecks, and the thumb-nail sketches of African scenery. It was thought I might tear their spines or desecrate the interiors with indelible pencil, but after giving my promise not to I picked out a boys’ yarn about smugglers called Dawn Raiders, and read my first novel seated on a mat under an oil lamp, daylight as yet too precious to spend with a book.

The BBC dramatized The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade, and The Count of Monte Cristo, each doled out in twelve weekly half-hour parts. My father had acquired a wireless on the never-never, paying three shillings a week when he could, against the ten guinea total. These serials were popular with the neighbours, as well as at Aunt Edith’s house, and during each thrilling instalment, the whole family transfixed, there was nevertheless a strong undercurrent of anxiety that the shopkeeper might walk in to claim his set back before the entertainment was finished.

When we could get a copy, the Radio Times was read from beginning to end, especially the advertisement strips extolling Horlicks or Golden Shred marmalade, those exotic foods with ambrosial-sounding names. One learned in the same magazine that The Count of Monte Cristo serial was based on a novel by Alexandre Dumas, so the long-term plan was formed of owning a copy in order to read what the serialization had left out, and to recall with the density of print some of the more significant episodes.

Mr Salt, whittling down his classroom collection before moving to another school, gave me my first book, History Day by Day. The compiler and publisher are forgotten, even supposing I noticed them, but two pages were allotted to each day of the year, one page having an account of the author or personage who was born on that date, and the other an extract from one of his works, or from a book about some notable event in his life. Among the latter was a description of the death of General Gordon at the hands of fanatical Muslims in the Sudan; of the butchery of women and children by Indian Army mutineers at Cawnpore; and of similar savageries at the Fall of the Bastille.

Alexandre Dumas was featured under the date of his birth on 24 July 1802, and facing a list of the main events in his life was an extract from The Count of Monte Cristo, the part where Edmond Dantès escapes from the dungeons of the Château d’lf — the cusp on which the fate of the hero turns. From being an unjustly imprisoned sailor he evolves into the sophisticated and powerful Count of Monte Cristo, enriched as much by the education received from the Abbé Faria, who was his prison neighbour, as from the fabulous treasure which the abbé tells him about, and which Dantès unearths from the island of his assumed name. Armed with wealth and knowledge, he relentlessly pursues the three men who put him into the fortress, and takes his revenge, but in the process losing all possibility of happiness.

My father both liked and hated to see me caught up by reading to the extent that I was no longer aware even of myself. While he enjoyed with a kind of pride seeing me do something no one else in the family cared for, it was at the same time hard for him to put up with such a reproach to his deficiency. He might threaten to fireback the book, or knock it aside if my mother was about to set the table for a meal. Far from discouraging me, because reading was the only activity which made my existence tolerable, his attitude may well have been an added spur, giving me more to thank him for in the long run than if he had left me alone.

By the age of nine, worn out with the unrelenting turmoil of emotion, it seemed as if half my life had already gone, and the idea of trying to kill myself was sometimes dwelt self-pityingly on. Either that, or there was the fervent wish that my parents would go out one day and fall under a bus. The utter unsuitability of one for the other — my father’s never-ending moods of depression, and my mother’s helpless weeping at his violence which was the only way he could free himself from them — seemed to fall even more heavily on the shoulders of Peggy and myself, not to mention Pearl and Brian. Their vitriolic bouts had a built-in conclusion of rough-and-ready armistice which would not work on the children, such miserable rages being passed on to us, much as an electrical charge going along a line of connected people injures only those at the end.

I would clear off for as many hours as possible, one day coming home to catch Peggy by the bed praying to God for peace in the house, hot and bitter tears falling on to her frock as she turned to me half ashamed and said: ‘It’s the only thing to do, our Alan. You should do it, as well, then perhaps he won’t hit her any more.’ Supposing God to exist somewhere — a titanic figure misty at the edges, remote and pitiless, but no less God for that — it was nevertheless hard to believe that such prayers could be in any way answerable. So I ran from her, screwing back my tears at knowing she didn’t even have the Burtons’ cottage for a refuge.

Packed off on a summer’s morning with a bottle of tea and some sandwiches, our feet gave salvation in taking us, under a perfect sky, on a round trip of five or six miles to the Trent. After infancy, none of us was ever ill, as if living in the middle of an emotional battlefield held off infection.

Peggy at twelve was in charge of me at ten, Pearl at eight, and Brian at five who travelled part of the way on my shoulders. Our only instructions were not to talk to any dirty old men and, happy to be out of the house and free, we found a ruined dredger moored by the riverbank, and chased each other around its rusting machinery for hours.

The way out was easy, but the road back a somewhat slower march, not altogether because we were tired — though we were — but due to anxiety as to what we would find on getting home. As often as not the pessimism was unwarranted, and our parents would be in a good mood, since they had managed to get some food on the table, or had spent the time in bed. But the more one went into despair at the state of things the more difficult was it to come up on the corresponding swing of the see-saw and think that times were not really as bad as they seemed.

The nadir was reached in the spring of 1937, when my father went to work at the Furse Electrical Company, the only job since his few weeks at the tannery around the time of my birth. For the first month he earned nine pounds nine shillings, and then walked out because such payment was only ten shillings a week more than he would have received on the dole. This was an ill-advised decision, for many families supported themselves on that amount, and the regularity of such an income would have improved our lives.

Perhaps he clocked himself off because it was found that he could not read or write, and the humiliation was too great to be borne. The shame at having to admit this to my mother would have been more biting still, for in the land of universal education the illiterate is a pariah.

Having given up the job, unemployment money was not paid for the ensuing months, and the family existed ‘on relief’, applying to the parish for tickets which could only be exchanged for food, rent, some coal, and clothes from absolute necessity. There was no actual cash, and my mother was outraged at what he had done, accusing him during even more terrible rows of having given up work not so much due to the low wage as because he was, and always had been, ‘bone idle’, a taunt Peggy and I began to see was true. He had, my mother shouted under his blows, made the family destitute — a new word whose significance was soon apparent.

My mother took to going out in the evenings with her sister Edith, dressing as well as possible and putting on powder and rouge to make her look and feel younger, and packing screwed up newspaper into her handbag so that it would not seem empty. They stood at the bar of some pub downtown till spoken to by a man, who would treat them to a drink or two, and give them a few shillings when they came back from wherever they went.

My father’s fist was paralysed when the truth came home, and though his vocabulary was limited he certainly knew the word prostitute. So did we, for it was bellowed many times, my mother’s perfect answer to his justified accusation being that with such as him to keep there was nothing else she could do.

She walked out, screaming that she would never come back, after throwing all the money from her handbag into his face. He hardly moved from the fireplace for a week, the house run, if that was the word, by Peggy, who picked up the coins and went out for food, bought some cigarettes, shook the rugs into the yard, and made sure we got up each day for school.

The man she had gone to live with brought her back after a while. Or maybe she persuaded him to do so, and my father agreed to take her in. Peggy and I were sitting at the table showing Pearl how to do a jigsaw puzzle, and Brian underneath stopped hammering a piece of wood, to look up at the man and say: ‘No nose’, for he had been disfigured by a shellburst in the Great War. Thereafter, my father, when he wanted to pain and insult her, would shout that she could go back to old No-nose if she didn’t like it where she was.

Being of a brooding disposition, even more so due to his disabilities, my mother’s faithlessness led him to wonder who of her children had come from him. Such speculations must have tormented him for the rest of his life, though with diminishing force, for I believe that in happier moods he was certain enough that we were all his.

And yet the episode seemed to have broken his spirit, in that he tried harder to get work. The fights at home did not decrease, however, because there was never enough money for cigarettes, and my mother still went out now and again with her sister.

In the first ten years my father was employed for a total of just over six months. The fact was, he didn’t like going to work, was uneasy with spade or hammer, or sweeping brush. Being solitary, melancholic and illiterate, he felt at a disadvantage to everyone else, and obviously was. On the other hand his father had taught him the basics of upholstery; he could paint doors and put up wallpaper, cobble shoes, mend a wireless, do carpentry and frame pictures, and was never happier than when at home occupied with such tasks, or even in somebody else’s house, because he could be cheerful and obliging when out of his own.

Nottingham was a town of different industries, by no means an area of the highest unemployment. Work was available if you searched hard enough, but my father just didn’t look very far, though it could also be said that when he did no one saw him coming. Social conditions were not good, but they never had been, so you could not blame them. You were a plaything of Fate, and hope was the only solace, and it was hope which gave me the energy to believe that I would one day get away from such a life, and never go back. I could hardly know that to do so I would have to become a different person, and was even then in the grip of a process that must have begun at birth — if not before.

Chapter Eight

Early in 1938 we moved to a terrace by the side of the Raleigh Bicycle Factory, a house with a parlour and two proper bedrooms, a small plot of garden back and front, and our own water closet across the yard. My parents made their bedroom in the parlour so that Pearl and Peggy could have the back room upstairs, and Brian and myself the other. Later that year my father got a job with Thomas Bow the builders lasting ten weeks, and then another in November with the British Sugar Corporation that ended after eight days.

Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérable, also done as a serial on the wireless, had as lasting an effect on me as the one by Dumas. A neighbour, Monty Graham, a fearsome little Scot who had fought his way through the Great War in France, lent me his musty-smelling and abridged Readers Library edition. Pages tended to fall out, and the first fifty were missing, but I read what remained, though later saved penny by penny to buy my own copy.

Set in France, Les Misérables nevertheless seemed relevant to life roundabout and, apart from Beatrice by Rider Haggard, it was to be the only adult book read before the age of nineteen. The story (though who doesn’t know it by now?) tells of Jean Valjean, hounded by the sinister police agent Javert even after he had been nineteen years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister and her starving children; the painfully hard existence of Fantine who became a prostitute so as to pay for the upbringing of her illegitimate daughter Cosette; the ingenious street urchin Gavroche whose secret den was in the foot of the statue of an elephant, and who reminded me of my cousin Jack; then the 1830 Revolution in which Jean Valjean rescues Cosette’s wounded lover (who is thereby going to rob him of the only person he ever loved) by carrying him through the sewers of Paris on his shoulders. Such grand themes blended into an exciting narrative which couldn’t be seen by me as anything but real.

It was fortunate that Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo were known to me so early on, and had such a deep effect, for between them they lit up my darkness with visions of hope and promise of escape. Dumas’ story was one of revenge, and Hugo’s of justice, both books powerhouses buried in the heart which they helped to survive.

Concurrent with my reading, a phase of acquiring lead soldiers lasted till well after it should. Matchsticks set in cracks between the floorboards, and a wall of joined Woodbine packets, did for fortifications, a few neat grenadiers deployed on one side, and a half section of khaki Great War soldiers on the other. Such arms expenditure was financed by pennies cadged or donated at the Burtons’, spoiling my economy with regard to books but giving hours of brainless diversion.

When I was coming up to eleven my grandmother thought I should take a Free Scholarship examination which, with sufficiently high marks, would get me to a school until the age of seventeen, instead of starting work at fourteen. One’s age began to assume importance: a change in life at eleven would decide how the next six years were spent.

Grandmother Burton had taken in my preoccupation with the school prizes in her parlour, and habitually gave me old laundry or penny cash books with pages still clear at the back to write on. My grandfather must have considered buying the house, because he let me have two cadastral plans of that part of Lord Middleton’s property on which it stood. These were drawn to a scale of 1:2,500, and I learned that one inch on the paper equalled 2,500 inches on the ground.

Unfolding the thin sheets, it was possible to make out the land, on which I daily rambled, in such detail that by going a hundred paces I had moved over an inch on the paper. With pencil and rubber I arranged the companies and platoons of an imaginary battalion into defensive positions around groups of cottages, on a bridge, by the edge of a wood, and along the railway embankment. Machine-guns were set out for crossfire, and barbed wire laid, the maps used this way until they were worn out. The idea of joining the army as soon as I became of age appealed to me as a way of leaving home.

My grandmother said that on my passing ‘the scholarship’ she would pay for uniform and books by arranging a loan from the Cooperative Society, of which she had long been a member. What attracted me to the scheme was that at a secondary school one would be taught French, a necessary road through education being paved with a knowledge of that language. Jack Newton’s brother taught him to count up to ten in French, and these magic syllables were passed on to me. I bought a dictionary and tried to translate sentences into French, though not knowing how to conjugate verbs was a fullstop to getting anywhere in my studies.

In the basement of Frank Wore’s secondhand bookshop downtown was an enormous table on which many treasures could be found for threepence, and some for slightly more on the shelves above which occasionally came out under my coat. A Pitman’s French grammar showed my errors of translation, and provided a rough but effective phonetic guide to pronunciation. One such primer contained a plan of Paris, making me familiar with the buildings and street names of that place much sooner than with those of London.

In the week before taking the scholarship examination I felt set apart from those in the class, though the proportion of pupils sitting for it was not small. My sister would tell her friends proudly on the street: ‘Our Alan’s going to do his scholarship next week.’ Needless to say, I did not pass, though two boys did, one whose father ran a hardware shop, and another whose mother owned a café. The unfamiliar puzzles and conundrums I was asked to solve might just as well have been Chinese ideograms, for I had expected to be tested on knowledge rather than intelligence.

When the result came my disappointment was not acute. I had wanted to pass, and hoped I would, yet didn’t care too much that I hadn’t, telling myself that the test had been taken as much for the experience as for anything else. Perhaps it was thought by the teacher, however, that my marks had been close enough to justify another attempt, for I accepted the chance of a free scholarship exam the following term for Nottingham High School. Hard to remember what season it was, the day of the test being cold and wet, and my shoes letting in water, but the high spirits of Arthur Shelton and I declined somewhat on going through the gate and seeing masters wearing caps and gowns much like those at the school of Billy Bunter in the comics we laughed at.

Since my experience of the previous attempt I’d had no coaching, but at least knew what to expect. A hard try was not enough, however, and my second failure indicated that I was not a fit subject for formal education. Success would in any case have led to all kinds of complications, not least that of leaving my friends and entering a world I was not prepared for. I could not know it then, but I wanted to go in by the ceiling, not enter by the cellar.

I knew that to continue schooling until the advanced age of seventeen was impossible in a family which needed any money that could be earned as soon as the legal age to work full time had been reached. It would be emotionally out of the question for me to endure the justifiable resentment of someone like my father, who at least had the power to make me feel guilty at having money in my pocket to buy books when there was little enough to eat on the table. It was the only moral problem I was to inherit.

Disappointment was not despair, there being worse things in the world than failure, and once the illusory hurdle of further education was out of the way my life could take the course it was obviously fitted for, and allow me to do the best that was possible in no other terms but my own.

Chapter Nine

Sometime in 1939 I stood in line at school to receive a gasmask. At last we mattered to the government, which was arranging for us not to be choked to death during an air raid. In my already long life there had been talk of war: in China, in Abyssinia and Spain. The Germans (of whom I had often heard that the only good ones were dead), after electing the Nazis to run their country, had retaken the Rhineland in 1936, and had now gone into the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia. Hitler ranted like a dog with the colic, and people in the rest of Europe were afraid because they did not want war.

As well as being poor, we could shortly expect to be bombed. The only good thing was that for most of the time we were too poor to be worried, and you could only worry about one thing at a time. Nevertheless, listening to people discussing the horrors of the previous conflict, which had ended only twenty years ago, and hearing of bombing atrocities in Spain, the prospect was frightening. The gasmask was a precious piece of equipment that had been given to us, but its significance could hardly promise a peaceful future.

At Radford Boulevard Senior Boys’ School I was, with a few friends, always near the top of the ‘A’ stream. The diminutive Percy Rowe, another reputed terror of a teacher, had been a victim of shellshock, which to our silent amusement seemed a positive advantage as, with shaking hands, he drew a map of the western coast of Scotland or the fjords of Norway on the blackboard. On seeing me looking at a Michelin map from Wore’s bookshop he said he had used them driving lorries to and from the trenches during the Great War. He also taught English, and responded keenly to whoever wrote good ‘compositions’.

Many of the usual boys’ books were borrowed by me from the nearby public library, which included every ‘William’ title by Richmal Crompton, as much as could be found by Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne (who replaced G.A. Henty and Herbert Strang) as well as other novels by Alexandre Dumas (especially the d’Artagnan series), and Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Toilers of the Sea. Thirty or forty books were kept in the bedroom cupboard, mostly novels but also history, geography, and French grammars. An ex-Guardsman living nearby let me have his one-inch Ordnance Survey sheet of the Aldershot Training Area, which greatly increased my knowledge of map-reading. Old Mr Smith, who was dying in a house at the yard-end, sent me his paper railway map of England.

A scene which impressed me, in a film on the life of the Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli — though I suppose it could have been put in by the scriptwriters — was when in the House of Commons during some important debate he seemed to be asleep, not caring to be influenced by what the Leader of the Opposition had to say. Disraeli’s own speech was already prepared, and this gesture of integrity, and disregard of other points of view, must have impressed if not influenced me, since I remember it when most films from that period have been forgotten unless they contained set-pieces of violence and adventure. Such films, far more thrilling to see, were those of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni. Never mind that such characters ended heroically dead, at least they’d had their time of glamorous power and glorious excess.

Every day was an island, closed by sleep and sleep. The hour of a film came and went, leaving no firmer mark that school life could not rub out, or tread down to a layer where it was apparently forgotten. At the time of tests, because no homework was ever given, I often (though not too often) studied in the bedroom in order to steal a march on the others. Having little confidence in my ability to memorize what was imparted during lessons, it was the right thing to do, and proved I could learn more through lack of confidence, which was a secret kept to myself, than by boasting or carelessness.

By the summer of 1939 I was sufficiently well informed to deplore the treaty between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, but such an event was overridden when on 1 September we were sent home from school with a cyclostyled map showing those areas of the city from which all children under fourteen should be evacuated. Anyone living east of the sinewy River Leen could become a casualty in a bombing raid, and our house lay within the area.

My father found work building shelters, a job calling for overtime which he was willing to give, the double advantage to the rest of us being that there was more money to spend, and he was less around the house. My parents were thirty-eight years old, and after fourteen years of marriage it was suddenly easier to feed and clothe their children in terms which were no longer desperate. As my mother said with bitter irony: ‘There’s no cloud that doesn’t have a silver lining.’

They were against sending four of their five children — Michael had been born two months ago — away for the Duration. If they were killed in the bombing, which everyone thought sure to come, they might never see us again. On the other hand, if we went away they wouldn’t have us to look after for a while, which Peggy and I knew weighed somewhat in their arguments, while she and I had no objections because we would be getting away from home on an adventure which the government was paying for.

‘We’ll let them go,’ my father said finally, ‘and see what happens.’

My mother was more fearful. ‘I suppose so. We don’t want the Germans to kill all of us.’

Everyone had been so terrorized by propaganda that mass bombing was expected to start immediately. The parents of Arthur Shelton, however, refused to sign the offer of evacuation, his father saying: ‘If we die, we all die together.’ The signature giving permission had to be written on the back of the map, which I had hoped to keep.

The list of clothes to be taken included such exotic garments as pyjamas and underwear, which none of us had. I walked up the street to the buses with my gasmask box on a string, and a carrier bag containing a shirt, a pair of socks, and The Count of Monte Cristo. One could not have travelled lighter. I said goodbye to my Latin, French, Spanish and German Midget Dictionaries, and my maps and papers, thinking they might get lost if taken with me, though perhaps to keep an anchor after all at home.

Given a pastry and a bar of chocolate, which Pearl vomited out of the window even before the bus reached open country, we sang our way through Sherwood Forest, Peggy keeping her arms around Brian who wondered what was happening to the world. At Worksop, a colliers’ town twenty-seven miles to the north, we assembled in a church hall to be sorted out for different homes. Unable to say goodbye to the others in the crowd, a car took me to a house in Sandhill Street, much like our own but slightly larger, opening at the back on to a shared area of beaten earth. Forty-year-old buxom Mrs Cutts, who wore glasses, showed me into her comfortable living room, a pot of delicious beef stew warming on the hob, which my hunger wasn’t yet acute enough to taste.

Mr Cutts, a big man who also wore glasses, and was fond of his beer, sold fruit and vegetables from a handcart for a living. During the Great War he had served with the South Nottinghamshire Hussars in the Salonika Campaign as a sergeant-major, which gave his voice a sufficiently high decibel count for bellowing his wares. Schools hadn’t yet been found for the evacuees, so I was soon helping him to push the cart through the streets, up on to awkward pavements and among the backyards of the houses. On Saturday he would give me threepence and an apple, and even a banana if he had done good trade.

Another evacuee shared my bed, and we explored the country roundabout, roaming quarries for newts to put in a jam jar, so that it wasn’t long before Worksop and its environs was as familiar as my native Radford. The Cutts left us free to come and go, the only rules being that we had to sit down to a hot dinner at midday, and finish supper by eight o’clock at night. For breakfast there was porridge and toast, and sometimes a treat of tinned pineapples at tea. When the trousers I arrived in became unfit to wear Mr Cutts bought me new ones out of his own money.

I was fascinated, possibly infatuated, by a girl called Laura, who lived in a caravan of the gypsy sort on some nearby waste land. Her parents sold crockery from a horse-drawn cart in the mining towns roundabout. On once referring to them as ‘gypsies’ Mrs Cutts gently corrected me: ‘They aren’t gypsies, Alan, they’re “travellers”,’ though no offence had been meant by me, because ‘gypsy’ sounded more romantic.

The idea of going to school in a strange town was not to my liking, but the day came when Mr Cutts ordered a general sprucing up and took me to a building much like the one in Radford. My teacher, he said, had been his captain in the Great War, and would be sure to look after me providing I behaved myself. This cohering microcosm of society seemed strange after the non-hierarchical homogeneity in Radford, where my father avoided everyone except an equally destitute friend or two.

At school I was commended for an essay on ‘The Great Nottingham Warehouse Fire’, perhaps my first piece of fiction, for it had never happened, though the conflagration was lovingly described. I joined the public library and took books into the Cutts’ home, the only one found there being a spy novel by William le Queux.

It was easier to get into the adult cinema, and also cheaper than in Nottingham, though try as we might the ushers would not let us pass to see a French film about venereal disease called Damaged Goods. Still, we saw H for Horror films such as Dracula and The Vampire Bat, which more than made up for our disappointment.

An indefinite stay in Worksop would have been to my liking, but one morning a letter from home was handed to me by Mrs Cutts, who had paid the postman, since it had come without a stamp. I immediately imagined that my father had lost his job, that my mother hadn’t even the money to spare for postage, that they were once more on the edge of penury and fighting as bitterly as ever. In the letter she merely asked how I was getting on, and told me that all was well at home, but the air of gloom lasted for days at the implication of the missing stamp.

The matter was easily explained. She had given the letter to a girl in the street, and the twopence-halfpenny for a stamp, as well as a penny for her trouble, to take to the post office. But the girl had spent all the money on sweets, and dropped the letter in the box to get rid of it. Nevertheless, the spell of my idyllic life in Worksop was broken, and in any case, not long afterwards, when I had been there about three months, my mother wrote to say she was coming to take us home.

The Cutts were sad, and so was I, because there had been talk between Mr Cutts and his captain of trying even at this late stage to get me into a grammar school. When my mother arrived the Cutts laid out a good tea, and wondered why she wanted to take me back. ‘The war might go on for years,’ she told them, ‘and Nottingham ain’t likely to get bombed.’

Mr Cutts was sceptical about that. ‘The war hasn’t begun yet. You’d do best to leave him, I’m telling thee.’

In one way I felt no wish to leave, but change was also attractive. If I had shouted definite objections to going back it might have been possible to stay, and perhaps that was what the Cutts were hoping for, yet I was finally without will one way or the other as if, during such periods of decision, it was only possible to live from minute to minute rather than with any sense of days or weeks.

We said goodbye, then followed my mother to collect the rest of her children, and went together to the bus station. I took back more than I had brought in the form of clothes and goods, and an interesting view on how other people could live. On the other hand, being an outsider, such knowledge hadn’t been earned the hard way by having to grow up in the family. If that had been the case it might have seemed little better than my own, except that there would have been more food to eat and better clothes on my back. But I never forgot how good the Cutts had been to me.

Chapter Ten

Nottingham seemed a different place after Worksop: there was a war on. My father laboured again at the sugarbeet factory, and would come home every day with half a pound of purloined sugar in his mashcan — of which there was already a shortage — adding it to a cache in one of the cupboards.

School at the normal place was discontinued, but classes were held in Wollaton Hall a mile or so away, and it was put about that we should go if we could. Arthur Shelton and I chose not to for a while, relishing the freedom to roam. By a railway bridge near the Trent a solitary soldier manned a Lewis gun in his sandbagged outpost, looking over what we could see as a wonderful field of fire. An army lorry stopped close by, and a soldier took a slice of bread and a mug of tea to the Lewis gunner, before getting back into the cab and driving to the next lonely sentinel.

The wherewithal to construct an Anderson shelter was dumped in our patch of back garden, and my father, one of the few in the terrace to accept one, dug out the soil into which it would fit, the dimensions suggesting no more than a rather wide grave. He then pieced the curving panels of corrugated tin together and put planks inside for us to sit on, dubious that such a cubby hole would be much help if a bomb fell anywhere near, but padding plenty of soil over the top nevertheless.

One morning when my mother went across the street to fetch a breakfast loaf she saw a soldier standing forlornly in the shelter of the shop doorway. On her coming out he asked if she knew where he could get a cup of tea. ‘Yes, my duck,’ she said unhesitatingly, ‘come back to our house, and we’ll give you one.’

Over the breakfast that went with it he told her he had gone absent without leave from his nearby anti-aircraft artillery unit, and she let him stay with us, sleeping on the settee in the living room for six weeks. I was persuaded to give up my Identity Card, on which he rubbed out my name and inscribed his own, so that he could go to the Labour Exchange and apply for a job. This was a successful ruse, and he would have lived out the war working in a factory had not a neighbour suspected that he was a deserter and told the police. When in court for, among other things, having a false Identity Card, he said he had stolen it rather than incriminate my mother or myself.

After a few sessions at Wollaton Hall, school was resumed in the normal buildings. Nineteen forty opened with a severe winter of ice and snow, and if the Germans had thought to bomb at that time the Anderson shelter would have been no more than an igloo. In minus zero temperatures my dress was basic: shoes and socks, short trousers, a shirt next to my skin, a jersey, and a jacket, though I rarely felt more than merely cold. When Arthur Shelton and I cycled the seven miles to Stanton Iron Works near Ilkeston my physical being seemed to divide in two, the part that felt the effect of the heavy frost slowly benefiting from that dominant part of me which had a warm enough stove glowing inside to heat both.

When morning school was over we would go to his house one day and mine the next where — always a fire to sit by in both — we would each dissolve a penny Oxo into a basin of hot water and mop it up with a slice of bread, sufficient nourishment till getting home in the afternoon for tea. There would of course be something for supper. Feeding at the dinner centre had been discontinued because my father had work, while Arthur’s, being a skilled carpenter, had never been unemployed. We must have been what Robert Graves and Alan Hodges meant in The Long Weekend (a social history of Britain between the Wars), when they referred to ‘the unkillable poor’.

Arthur’s mother did cleaning work for a Jewish family, and one day came home with a wind-up gramophone and some records the woman had given her, mostly selections from Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan, whose tunes we listened to for a while.

One of the teachers at school accompanied himself on the piano with the aria ‘Where e’er you walk …’ from Handel’s Semele, entrancing music which sent me home trying to sing it. Apart from the popular bands of Joe Loss, Henry Hall and Debroy Summers, little enough captivated me on the wireless, unless it was a snatch of something quickly drowned by oscillations as my mother swivelled the needle to another station.

The issue of ration books sharpened her mind regarding food, since she felt obliged to buy the amounts stated on the coupons. From then on, with a family of seven, there was no difficulty in feeding us. Cigarettes were not rationed, though they were sometimes scarce, and we children were quite willing to scour the shops, getting five here and ten there, to keep our father happy.

I bought sixpenny maps, coloured but schematic, none of them showing every name mentioned on the wireless, to follow what was happening in the war. This was not very much to begin with, though my interest in geography and anything military soon became an obsession. Deciding to write a history of the war, I listened each evening to the six o’clock news, for weeks taking down details of the day’s events, until the pile of notebooks and paper almost filled a cupboard.

Hurrying home, I cleared a corner of the table, and hoped no one would make a noise and cause me to miss something, which they usually didn’t because the news to my father was the next best thing to being in the cinema. I eventually gave up the task, daunted at the idea of going on till the end of a war which might last as near forever as would make no difference. It was also obvious that the Nottingham Evening Post was doing the job better, so my father used the paper to light the morning fire, though a map stayed pinned to the inside of my cupboard. The experience increased my dictation speed wonderfully.

The Germans conquered Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and then France, people wondering whether it wouldn’t be England’s turn next. Brick air-raid shelters were built in the street, and concrete barricades erected at main road junctions. For a while I made notes, with sketch maps, of the defences around the city, then stopped on realizing it was not the right thing to do. It seemed unlikely that the Germans would come, yet I hoped that if they did everyone would be issued with rifles from the age of twelve.

Silhouettes of German planes, especially those which could carry parachute troops, covered one sheet of a newspaper: ‘I’ll catch one on the end of my clothes-prop,’ foul-mouthed Mrs So-and-So called along the yard. ‘Right up his arse!’ In a few days I memorized the silhouettes, as had many of the boys at school, where there was as sharp a commerce in small arms ammunition as there was later to be in pieces of shrapnel. I accumulated two score of bullets in their feeding belt, and while playing around with them one day, several fell into the fire. My mother, as silent and cool as I’d ever seen her, pokered them out before they could explode, then made me give the whole lot to the police.

We followed the cricket-like scores of air battles further south, during a summer which turned out as good as the winter had been extreme. On our way to school the sky was filled with dirty orange puff-balls of anti-aircraft fire at a lone raider sloping overhead, and we heard the pattering fall of shrapnel for the first time.

My father boasted that because he had ‘swung the lead’ at his medical board for call-up he had been placed into a category that would never be conscripted. Or he said with some glee that he had been ‘too young for the last war, and too old for this.’ No one wanted the war, yet few complained, probably because it brought more work, as well as a kind of prosperity, and a sense of purpose in that peace was something everybody could look forward to.

Two of Aunt Edith’s sons were called up but promptly deserted, though by the end of the war she had them and two more on active service. My cousin Stanley Sillitoe enlisted in the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, and was killed in North Africa. Various uncles enrolled in the Home Guard, but my father even dodged the chore of fire-watching. When he showed amusement that Hitler, a mere house-painter, had become the leader of the German nation, my mother said: ‘Yes, and it serves the Germans right.’ My father delighted, as did I, in hearing Quentin Reynolds on the BBC taunting Hitler as ‘Mr Schikelgruber’, and listening to the homely postscripts of J. B. Priestley after the nine o’clock news.

Those who took a more intelligent look at the newspapers than most, and had been in the previous war, said that Germany would be so hard to defeat by Great Britain alone, that the conflict might go on for ever. If this was the case I would certainly be in it sooner or later, which gave something to look forward to, and not with trepidation either. Any goal was better than none, and to go to war seemed so much of an adventure that it turned into an ambition.

I took great interest in reports of RAF bombing raids over Germany, measuring the angles of their courses to various cities, the distances they had to go, and calculating the time needed to get there, thus increasing my facility with practical arithmetic. At the main bookshop in town I bought pamphlets on street fighting and elementary tactics, as well as a paper-covered book, Notes on Map Reading, published by the War Office. From it I learned about intervisibility, vertical intervals, horizontal equivalents and magnetic variation, as well as three different kinds of north and how to find the true one from sun or star, a whole new vocabulary. I memorized the approximate value of representative fractions, so that when by chance the teacher at school asked how many inches there were to a mile he was surprised at my right answer.

Familiarity with colloquial English lagged behind geographical knowledge. A newspaper headline: ‘Sailors on the Spree’ led me to wonder how any member of the Royal Navy could have got to Berlin at this discouraging stage of the war, it being hardly conceivable that some lucky and fabulous military operation had been launched without my knowing. On reading the article I came to understand the expression: a few sailors had been hauled before a magistrate and fined for being offensively drunk.

From the autumn of 1940, for about a year, the sirens signalled a possible air raid nearly every night. We soon got used to the bang and clatter of gunfire from batteries behind the nearby woods, and the peculiar lame-dog drone of Junkers, Dornier and Heinkel bombers, always hoping that they were not going to drop their loads on us.

My father worked at the Raleigh factory, almost next door, and was often on nights, so my mother and the five of us would sit in the Anderson shelter. We could not have been living in a more dangerous place had the Germans decided to attack a factory on full war production employing 10,000 people, but no bomb fell within half a mile, though it was machine-gunned by a low-flying plane one night.

In the shelter we propped each other up on the planks, most of the time in a half doze, stupefied by the smell of damp soil and the odour of combined breathing. Heavy sacking hung over the entrance to conceal the light of a tiny oil lamp whose paraffin fumes also thickened the atmosphere. By two in the morning the all-clear might sound, a welcome and more even wail than the alert, and we would go back into the house to have a few hours’ sleep before getting up for school.

The only serious raid was in May 1941, when 200 people were killed. My father, at home that night, couldn’t resist going into the terrific anti-aircraft barrage to enjoy the glow in the sky from burning factories that had always refused him a job. Few bombs fell on our area, but the piercing whistle of one descending will remain: and all the time in our frail shelter, whenever German planes were overhead, the consciousness that the next second might be our last never quite gave way to dumb endurance. Even so, I did not regret having come back from Worksop to the more exciting life in Nottingham.

Chapter Eleven

The discharge stamp in the army paybooks of my cousins would have been that of a footprint on the final page, for they voted with their feet, and went back home to burn their uniforms in the bedroom grate. They became legendary in the family for blatant thievery. Without identity card or employment documents or ration coupons (and not even a gasmask, though they never gave that a thought) they had to exist on what could be acquired during the hours of darkness, when smokescreen and blackout, and often no moon either, helped them in depredations which must have serviced half the blackmarket business in Nottingham. They baffled the police for some time, but when they were caught, as related in the local newspaper, they served a year in jail, and on finishing that term were sent back to do further time in a military prison. A few weeks after resuming normal service they deserted again, and went on with what seemed to be their normal wartime occupation.

They occasionally came to our house, and over breakfast related the highlights of rooftop escapes during their nightly adventures. My mother looked after their purloined goods one night, though my father did not care either for them or their exploits, and would not let her do so again.

About this time I played with the idea of becoming a writer, though mainly a journalist, and chose a book on the subject from the library. I tried to learn Pitman’s shorthand out of a threepenny manual from the table in Frank Wore’s inexhaustible bookshop, but gave up after a while because it was too difficult to distinguish between the thin and thick symbols that had to be written at speed.

My fingers were always itching to write, however, and I loved inks, paper, pens and notebooks. In a large limp-covered jotter I recorded details of my cousins’ way of life, thinking I might one day write something about them in a novel, noting their age, weight, height, colour of hair, where and when they had been born, what clothes they wore, as well as their address, when they had one. Then I inscribed sketches of their past lives and brief army careers, and entered accounts of their robberies and escapades which included, as far as I could ascertain, the date, time and location of particular shops and offices broken into.

My mother found the book and, on glancing through it, rightly considered such material too incriminating to leave lying around. Protesting that I was going to write a novel, she ignored such a ludicrous boast and poked it into the flames, perhaps also thinking me stupid enough to use the data as the subject for an essay at school.

The book on journalism told me that articles for newspapers had to be neatly typed on sheets of good paper, so it was discreetly proposed to my cousins that on next breaking into the appropriate premises they bring such a machine back for me, with the assurance that they would be paid for it on the instalment plan, or out of what money my journalistic enterprise might earn. They did not reject the idea, even laughing about it, and as good as promised they would get one for nothing. Perhaps my mother had mentioned my secret ambition, and they were amused, possibly flattered, at the notion of having their own biographer at some future date. I waited in hope, but the scheme was quietly forgotten, my mother no doubt realizing that it would be bad for everyone if the police saw reason to search our house and found one there.

Either my parents were getting old enough to know better, or with adequate rations and money to pay for them there was less reason for antagonism. Perhaps the atmosphere of war sapped some of their bile. Peggy had become a second wage-earner, bringing home twelve shillings a week from a sweet factory up the road. She and I were more able to show our disapproval of any violent clash, though we could not yet muster the strength between us to stop the mayhem on the few occasions when it occurred.

My parents had the cash to go now and again to the cinema, and spend Saturday night at the pub, and there was sufficient also for pennies to flow into my pocket, mostly for running errands or doing the weekend shopping. Arthur Shelton earned a few shillings delivering newspapers morning and evening, but I refused such jobs from a mixture of pride and inertia.

The time was coming when it would be necessary to work full time anyway, though I could not prepare myself for it by imagining such a situation. School was the basic condition of life, home a place to stay while going there, and the prospect of labour in a factory something that could not be allowed to spoil my enjoyment of the present. By the age of thirteen I could swim well, walk any distance, go up trees like a monkey, and ride a borrowed bike for a few yards without holding the handlebars, much I suppose like most other boys, and not a few girls, in the area I came from.

It gave some satisfaction to hear on the wireless, on 22 June 1941, that the German Army had invaded Russia. Spreading a map so as to follow the campaign as closely as possible, it was easy to see that Great Britain now had a much better chance of surviving the war. The national anthem of our Soviet ally was added to those played every week in a fifteen-minute programme on the BBC. I listened to every one, and having memorized the verses of Rouget de Lisle’s ‘Marseillaise’ from a French grammar, could fit the words to the tune.

The German advance in Russia was rapid, and dreadful things were happening, though we were not to know the full horror till the war was nearly over. It was obvious that the greater the distance the German Army went through the network of towns and cities the more certain were they to lose, as had Napoleon over a hundred years before, but such vigorously gritty place-names on the map as Novograd Volynsk, Riga, Byelaya Tserkov, Vorishilovgrad and Dniepropetrovsk were a pleasure to hunt for, pencil and rubber in frequent use as the line shifted east across the map.

The accumulation of books no longer inflamed my father. Being in work, they didn’t seem a waste of money, especially since during the war there wasn’t much else you could buy. I even persuaded him to get me the six volumes of Practical Knowledge for All, for thirty-six shillings to be paid for by instalments, though he failed to meet the last few, and I settled the debt on starting work. The books covered every subject, but I concentrated most on surveying, geography, French and, later, aviation, losing myself night after night in this detached treasure-house of information.

At school I wrote an essay on the possible strategic aims of the German offensive in the direction of Rostov-on-Don, explaining how the push must then continue south-east towards the Caucasus so as to gain control of oil wells at Grozny and Mozdok — both places shown on the map — which were needed for their industries and war effort.

Such comments had obviously been heard on the wireless but, written several times in rough form, then copied in my best hand into a clean exercise book, I showed the essay to Percy Rowe, hoping perhaps for a word of praise. After looking at it, he told me to stand before the class and read it — an embarrassing performance. Perhaps he was impressed, because the following week he lent me G.D.H. Cole’s Post War Europe, a book too long and closely written for me to take in.

Sorting more assiduously through Frank Wore’s basement, I formed an obsessive liking for Baedeker’s little red guidebooks, and volumes of the Guides Bleus series. These increased my geographical knowledge, as well as French, and delighted me with their coloured maps. In the street plans of German cities one could pick out industrial areas said to be targets of the RAF, but those often dilapidated publications from a not too bygone age, with their descriptions of places in countries of western and southern Europe, also indicated a stable and desirable world beyond the one in which I was all too firmly fixed.

From the library I took what books there were about travelling in Russia, though their topographical information was too often unsatisfactory. In a collection of Russian folk tales I liked one which told of the Devil, suitably disguised, who came to a village and said to the assembled people that whatever ground any of them could walk around in a day they would own. In the burning month of August those who decide to get as much free land as possible set off into the blue for a dozen or so versts before turning ninety degrees to continue the square. All fall dead or exhausted by the afternoon, and accomplish nothing. The only person to end with a piece of land was a Jewish man, who walked a few hundred yards one way and completed the square in an hour or so which, I thought, on finishing the story, and realizing what an intelligent person he was, is exactly what I would have done.

Other books taken from the library were those of the ‘Ten Pounds’ series: France on Ten Pounds, Italy on Ten Pounds etc, indicating that after the war, whenever that would be, it might be possible to visit such countries on what could be saved out of my wages.

On Saturday afternoon, either before or after the usual browse at Frank Wore’s, I would call at a travel agency up an alley in the middle of town and beg, buy or talk the elderly and now underemployed clerk into parting with travel brochures on France, Belgium and Switzerland. Most contained maps, plans and pictures, as well as interesting advertisements for spas and hotels. This did not go on too long, because after a while he had nothing left to give me.

My test results were consistently high through the last two years at school. At the final assembly before leaving, held as usual in the large gymnasium, the headmaster called me on to the stage, and gave me a black leatherbound copy of the Holy Bible. Taking it home, I noted the label inside which said that it had been awarded to me for ‘proficiency in Biblical knowledge’.

Such a reason puzzled me but, glad to have the Book, it has been read many times, more often perhaps than any other, and is still within arm’s reach on my desk fifty years later.

Chapter Twelve

The clock had stopped. ‘They’re making all these precision objects for shells and what-not,’ I thought, ‘and they can’t even get a clock on the wall that works.’ I was wrong. The passage of time in the classroom had been rapid compared to this.

No sooner was my foot in the door that first day than a man came to me and said I was now a member of the Transport and General Workers Union, and that threepence a week would be stopped out of my pay. I didn’t want to belong to a union, was my response, further informing him that he should, in the current exhortation to the unwanted, go and get dive-bombed, because he would get no money out of me. There seemed something ignominious in belonging to an organization of which so many others were members, indicating that I was a follower of Marx (Groucho) from a reasonably early age, but the convenor, if that’s what he was, laughed and said I had no option, because it was the law these days. The stoppage was automatic, and no one could avoid it.

My father, who worked in another shop, or department, came to see how I was getting on and, finding nothing to pick fault with, went back to his work. My job was ‘burring’ hundreds of brass shellcaps with a sharp chisel. When segments were milled out of them, burrs were left which had to be prised away from the edges by hand, leaving all parts of the object smooth. They covered the surface of a large low table, and I tackled the task as if invading and subduing a hostile country, clearing a way here, a route there, until the two avenues into the mass of resistance met, and my pincer columns succeeded in their fell design. Having mopped up those pieces which had been surrounded, another clear road was driven towards the enemy capital, subsidiary columns put out on the way should relieving forces seek to thwart my plan of attack.

In a couple of hours the table was empty (I had the job to myself) till someone came along with more boxes, which they did very soon, to reoccupy my beloved tableland with their barbaric forces. Such ‘piece work’ was paid for at so much a hundred, and the more I did the more I earned, but they had to be neatly done, or the examiners would send them back.

My father got up every morning at half past six, and fifteen minutes later called me out of the bed which I shared with my two brothers. After he had lit the fire and the kettle had boiled, I would bump sleepily down the stairs. My mother never rose with him, for it was the time of day when he was, to put it mildly, volatile. After a breakfast of tea and bread-and-jam, while listening to the news, we went down the street in silence, clocking-in just before half past seven.

In my pocket was a cheese or potted meat sandwich to eat in the few minute tea-break at ten. I went home for a hot dinner at half past twelve, varying the moment of my exit so as not to walk up the street with my father. An hour later I was back, working without a break till half past five.

My first wages came to one pound twelve shillings and sixpence, by today’s values about twenty-five pounds, but in those times a reasonable amount for a youth of fourteen to earn. On Friday night the wage packet was put unopened into my mother’s hand, and she gave back half a crown for spending money (about two pounds fifty pence) which may not sound much but it would buy a couple of paperbacks and two seats at the cinema. My sweet coupons went to Pearl and Brian, confectionery not essential to my wants.

The work was neither arduous nor unpleasant, though a few days had to pass before I became used to the stunning noise from scores of machines and the rhythmic slapping of powerbelts overhead. After a few weeks on ‘burring’, at which job one sat down, I was put to operating a drill, before which it was necessary to stand. Having a machine of my own gave a sense of responsibility, though I was slightly nervous of its power and possibly malicious temperament.

A small piece of steel had to be fixed in a jig, the whole thing held firmly against the lower base, and the spinning point of the drill brought slowly down by the handle to make several holes in the metal at places indicated. The operation was straightforward, but for a while it was difficult to grip the jig with sufficient strength, and several times the whole unit would break loose and spin violently, wounding my flesh if a hand didn’t get out of the way quickly enough. The thing to do then was switch off the motor and start again, the white liquid of disinfectant suds soaking the reddening bandage around my finger. On one occasion the drill broke, but the toolsetter was tolerant, and put in a new one without comment.

Such work, soon accustomed to, developed strong hands, but the money rate for the job was so low, or I was slow and a bit too wary, that my wages declined during the next few weeks to little more than a pound every Friday. On asking the foreman to find me another job, or put the rate up, he said it was impossible to do either, adding that the youth who had been on it before had made it pay, and that anyway, somebody had to do the work, so I had better go back and get on with it.

For a while I managed to increase the speed till my wages edged towards what they had been at first. What I wanted, I protested, was a more positive form of war work, not drilling an obscure part of the common bicycle day in and day out, which comment, among others equally unreasonable, exasperated the foreman even more.

Bernard Clifford was also dissatisfied with his work and pay. By now I wanted to find a job elsewhere, but to do so one had to apply, under wartime regulations, to the Ministry of Labour office for a release form. Some boys had already filled them in, and had their applications to leave turned down. It all depended, Bernard told me, on the reasons you gave for wanting to go. There was space on the back of the form to state them, but the process was also helped if you could get the foreman to say, in the appropriate place on the form, that he was willing to let you go.

After organizing a virtual sit-down strike of myself and half a dozen others, the foreman felt more than able to do this. Taking up all the space allowed, I wrote several succinct sentences, in ink instead of pencil, and signed it. A fortnight later the chief penpusher must have pulled his finger out sufficiently to send a release certificate authorizing me to go my way, and thus ended my one and only stint at the Raleigh, the foreman as glad as I was that it had not lasted longer than ten weeks.

Whatever place I had gone to at the age of fourteen would not have tolerated me for long, and the Raleigh, having provided my baptism of fire in the industrial world, was a good preparation for accepting the fact that a living had to be earned, and that I had no right to expect that it would be easy.

Aware of my father’s commendable maxim ‘no work, no food’ (and he should know, I thought) I was re-employed almost immediately by A. B. Toone and Company. One factory was much like another, yet all were different in the goods they made and the individuals who worked there. Conditions seemed easier at Toone’s, however, for the shift didn’t start till eight o’clock, and ended at five, though I did the same number of hours because the place stayed open on Saturday morning.

About a hundred people were kept busy in a five-storey red-bricked mill which stood between two streets of small houses, manufacturing plywood for Mosquito bombers and invasion barges. My work at first was to stand at the end of a tablesaw in the Cellar Department and, when Sam England the operator trimmed off a board, pick up the strips and put them on to a pile. After sufficient pieces had accumulated I bundled, tied and carried them upstairs to be taken away on a lorry at the end of the day.

I missed the cash-register excitement of piece work, when every hundred done meant pence and shillings in my pocket. For the moment work was slower, and I almost slept on my feet, soon getting used to the whine-scream of handsaws and the juddering of sanding machines, and the air that was thick with the finest sawdust and motes of baked glue even though extractor fans contributed to the noise by driving some of it into the street. On my way home an occasional gob of orange spit flashed into the gutter. I wouldn’t wear a cap to prevent dust thickening my hair, unwilling to assume the badge of a workman settled in for life. A cursory wash every day in the scullery had to suffice until total immersion in hot water at the public baths on Saturday afternoon.

The factory was one of thousands all over the country kept going by women and girls, youths like myself, and men above military or retirement age. A bonus system helped output to reach its maximum, and we carefully watched the charts pinned to the office door. My next job was bringing half-inch boards six feet by three from the presses on the floor above into the cellar for the finishing processes. The edges were still ragged with protruding veneers, but I soon became skilled at getting out splinters and then, with care, avoiding most.

Two boards at a time were carried to start with, adding gradually till I could hold five or six. This number was not an obligation, but I took pride in testing and increasing my strength. Some of the workers in the cellar were women and girls, and I fell in love with one or two, unknown to them, as they sat chatting and laughing around a large table — taping, filling and scraping the boards to perfection.

In keeping the cellar tidy and provisioned with work I was the assistant to Bill Towle, who was two years older, though we had known each other in the district for years. As children we once went rambling over the Bramcote Hills with a couple of his father’s old pipe bowls, filling them with tobacco from nub-ends picked off the street. The smoking was enjoyable, but not the sickness that followed soon after.

In tea-break and dinner hour (I brought something to eat from home, for there was no canteen) Bill insisted on teaching me unarmed combat, in which he was certainly an expert: what to do when attacked with a knife (he used a real one), how to break out of a half-nelson (calling for speed, agility and cultivated aggression), the trick of throwing someone who aimed a kick at you (he wore heavy boots), tackling an uprising fist (his was particularly meaty).

Strong and adept, he slung me all over the boards, until my quick reactions got the better of him from time to time. His father had marked him down for the Royal Navy, and Bill already had a sailor’s way with women and girls, as well as an inexhaustible warehouse of the filthiest jokes imaginable, not to mention a staggering capacity for booze. Because of his physique, and perhaps abilities, he had become a part-time soldier in the local Home Guard company, and said he would take me with him to their church hall headquarters so that I could enrol as well.

To say there was something unsatisfactory about my life at that time would be correct, but only to the extent that it was not full enough. I had plenty of friends, took a girl out now and again, did a certain amount of reading, and was as much interested at the goings on in Russia and the geography of the battlefields as in the system which the Germans were trying to break. Arguing for what seemed the human fairness of such a social regime gained little agreement from my workmates, though they didn’t think me a complete fool either, since we talked about other topics with a marvellous sense of humour, often bickering in the most basic terms as to whether jazz, which they liked and I did not particularly, was better than all other music.

The captain of the Home Guard unit looked at my five feet six inches of height, which needed another year or so to attain the final three. ‘You’re too young at fourteen,’ he smiled. ‘Either come back at sixteen, or go into the Army Cadet Force.’

As it happened, I joined the Air Training Corps, having read something about it in the newspaper.

Chapter Thirteen

I walked into the hall of a school on the evening of 1 October 1942, with Arthur Shelton and a few other youths, to enrol in the Air Training Corps. Flying-Officer Pink, the squadron adjutant, told the warrant officer to put us in line with other potential recruits so that he could see what raw material had come into his orbit. I didn’t think he had been so close to anyone from a factory before, most members of the ATC being either at grammar school or working in shops and offices.

Flight-Lieutenant Hales, the commanding officer, later recalled that I wore a bit of old bootlace for a tie, and looked like someone who had climbed out of a barrel of shoe polish. This sounds exaggerated, though there could be some truth in the picture, because I worked in the same shirt for a week, a clean one not being put on till after the Saturday bath. Deodorant was non-existent, and we managed with strong wartime soap.

Mr Pink was short, somewhat rotund and, when without his cap, seen to be thoroughly bald. After asking our names and ages he demanded those of us to put up a hand who did not brush their teeth. I had to signal this admission, which I did without embarrassment, never having considered my mouth to need that kind of attention.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m going to put you recruits on probation for a month, to see how you behave. If everything goes well you will be given a uniform, and then you’ll be able to write the word cadet before your name, but don’t forget that, in the meantime, if you want to belong to 209 Squadron, which is second to none, let me tell you, you will clean your teeth morning and evening! Is that understood?’

It was, and a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste were paid for out of my next week’s spending money. The only thing I didn’t like about his otherwise sensible speech was that he put me, among others, on probation, and had not accepted me immediately as being the finest possible acquisition.

My limbs were so unco-ordinated that for a while I had difficulty in marching correctly, but the drill soon taught me how to move, and my aspect smartened quite a lot. Lectures were given twice a week for a couple of hours in the evening, with an optional assembly on Saturday afternoon, which I went to, and instruction also on Sunday morning, ending with a grand review of all 400 cadets of the two West Nottingham squadrons. The only attendance I disliked was that for the monthly church parade.

On each ordinary occasion, however, I made sure that the uniform trousers were pressed to a sharp edge, and my shoes well polished. I would hurry home from the factory, have tea, a good wash, get into uniform, then quick walk a mile to the school. On Saturday afternoon, and again on Sunday morning, it was a round four miles to different buildings, and because buses were infrequent and often full, or stopped running by nine in the evening, I never used them, knowing in any case all the short-cuts of the area.

My knowledge of maps decided that I would train to be a navigator, and many hours were spent studying at home. There were classes in subsidiary subjects, and Arthur Shelton, who was clever with anything electrical (and chemical: we once tried to make gunpowder) wired up morse keys and buzzers, so that we practised until we could take and receive faster than anyone else in the squadron. We also improved our English, and learned mathematics, the principles of flight, aircraft recognition, engine theory, meteorology, navigation, RAF law and administration, health and hygiene, and anti-gas regulations — the Initial Training Syllabus for aircrew, in fact — our teachers being business and professional men who gave their time free. The reckoning of the day changed its character when calculated from midnight to midnight, all navigational problems and squadron orders being based on the twenty-four-hour system.

At annual camp we were attached to an aerodrome for a week, and the RAF looked after us. The first place was at Syerston, too near Nottingham for my liking, where we slept twelve to a bell tent and it rained most of the time, but we were given demonstrations of parachute packing, took a turn on the Link Trainer, and were shown the rudiments of air-traffic control.

Going by rail to our second camp, my first train journey as a grown-up, I followed the route through Lincolnshire with my National Road Atlas, noting every lane, bridge or stream, to the amusement but, possibly to the satisfaction also, of Mr Pink who accompanied us. This time we slept in Nissen huts, and on the range fired twenty rounds each from Short Lee Enfield rifles, which left me with an aching shoulder. Strangely enough, though always left-handed, I picked up a rifle and used it in the normal right-handed way. We were also instructed in infantry tactics and street fighting, creating mayhem among the blocks of the married quarters with blanks and thunderflashes.

In less than a year from joining I had gained the Proficiency Certificate Part One, but was too young to be given either the paper or the badge, for no one was expected to pass under the age of sixteen. The only part of the test which I had to take twice was drill, but I received high marks for English, mathematics and navigation, and the absolute top for signals. When Flying-Officer Wibberley, who ran a motor haulage firm, asked what he could give me as a reward for my success, I asked for a copy of The Complete Air Navigator by D.C.T. Bennett, the bombing raid pathfinder of the timer. This book, generously supplied at the cost of fifteen shillings, joined my much-read library, and from it I learned, among other things, the Greek alphabet, also noting the motto at the beginning: ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of safety.’

My father disliked me putting on a uniform but hadn’t been able to do anything about it. His permission was needed before I could go flying, however, and this he was reluctant to give, because he was genuinely afraid for me, considering the aeroplane to be a dangerous kind of transport. There had been cases, though he couldn’t have known about them, of cadets being killed in accidents, or in planes shot down by German nightfighters roaming the sky above training airfields. I forget whether it was his signature I obtained (something he was normally glad to give, in order to show he wasn’t totally illiterate) or my mother’s, since I was quite capable of forging either, but a group of us were taken by bus to RAF Newton, seven miles from Nottingham, to go up for the first time.

In a hangar smelling of peardrops, or ‘dope’ as we called it, we were given a parachute, told which handle to pull if we had to jump out of the plane, and sent to wait our turn outside the flight hut. The parachutes banged against our behinds as we walked across the grass and hauled ourselves on board the De Havilland Dominie, a twin-engined biplane of plywood construction, with seating for a pilot and ten passengers.

The Polish pilot taxied to the edge of the field for take-off, put the nose into the wind after a long slow rumble over the grass, then increased speed until the fixed undercarriage parted from the earth. Such a moment of truth could not have been more spectacular. At a couple of hundred feet, as the aircraft gently turned, or ‘banked’ as we had learned to say, the first blue elbow of the Trent came into view. Fear of air-sickness was forgotten at the sight of familiar landmarks between the Fosse Way, straight as a Roman ruler, and the Derbyshire foothills fading into the green haze.

Smoke from the marshalling yards and factories lay south of the city but, immediately to port and starboard, visibility was good enough to distinguish churches and park spaces, streets and railway lines, the castle squat on its sandstone rock and Wollaton Hall among the greensward, as well as old hideouts and well-run routes that up to a few minutes ago had seemed so far apart but that now in one exposing vista made as small and close a pattern as that on a piece of lace. From 1,000 feet the hills appeared flat and lost significance, but the secrets of the streets covering them were shown so that no map could have done the job better, doubly enthralling because I hadn’t seen a street plan of Nottingham which, with the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, were not sold to the public during the war.

Distance opened in every direction, countryside and townscape from the vantage point of the clouds, on this first flight of many. It was obvious at last where part of my mind had always been, and I knew that if I could get so far vertically off the earth there should be no limit to the mileage I might do on its surface. Eyes ached in closely concentrated search, till after twenty miles the stately old Dominie turned east to join the circuit for a landing, and we were taken to have a meal in the Polish airmen’s mess. What was eaten there has been forgotten, but I do recall that pudding came on the same plate as the meat, thus providing a culinary signpost towards life with a difference.

Chapter Fourteen

Armageddons come and go, as did Stalingrad, a great Soviet victory. Germany must be booted into the dust, but when? I wrote to Stanford’s in London for a large-scale map of the Volga-Don area, and it came to me rolled in a cardboard tube. Nothing but the best was good enough, if I was aware of its existence, and if I could meet the price, which wages allowed me to do. Two shillings included postage and packaging, and the map was worth every penny. The scale was sixteen miles to an inch (I still unroll it from time to time) and Stalingrad was called Tsarytsin because the map was twenty years out of date, but the rivers and contours were the same as during the battle and those, I thought, would never change, though on going there twenty years later, when the place was called Volgograd, certain waterways had been added or enlarged. For the remainder of the war I followed events on maps in Baedeker guidebooks which could be acquired for little (at times nothing) in Frank Wore’s cornucopia-shop.

Orders occasionally came to the factory for a quantity of jacquards, superstrong sheets of cardboard used in the lace trade. Holes were punched in them according to the design, and I wondered if a few wouldn’t still be those of my father’s brother Frederick, who had long since disappeared to London. He had been back in Nottingham for some years, but wasn’t spotted by any of the family till after the war.

Each jacquard measured two feet by four and was put together on the same principle as plywood, but with paper and special paste. The antiquated machinery was in a dingier part of the cellar, and my job was to hump hundredweight sacks of alum and flour to a vat and empty them in, stirring to an even broth with the requisite amount of hot water to make the paste. Overalls and boots got caked with the stuff, and I would go home stinking like a pig.

The next stage of production was more agreeable. Several of us worked in the large and often sun-filled attics hanging hundreds of jacquards to dry in rows under steam heat. While they did, time was our own. Often two or three of us pulled ourselves up and down by rope on the goods hoist, till the strangulated shout of the foreman scattered us to the four corners of the factory.

I taught map-reading to George Meggeson, an army cadet sergeant swotting for his Certificate ‘A’, pencilling elaborate topographical maps with their conventional signs on reject jacquards, so that he could pass the latest in infantry tactics on to me. Sometimes we were called down to help despatch the jacquards, which task I did not much relish, but I learned how to make and tie a parcel.

Close to sixteen, I was earning over two pounds a week, but knew there was better money to be made. I had a girl to take out, and wanted to save. On a couple of occasions I worked double time during the holidays to help clean the flues of the furnace. Though the fires had been out for twenty-four hours the narrow space we crawled along like Tom Sweeps to push out the banks of soot was fiercesomely hot. Coming home from such overtime I was black from head to foot, but the extra hard-earned pound went into my pocket.

Between fourteen and eighteen every day seemed like three, every week like a year, every year a decade. After eight hours’ work, the long full evening until eleven or midnight was another day, followed by a third of dream-packed sleep. Two evenings a week were given to homework, mainly the study of navigation, and ATC lectures took up two more.

Friday and Saturday nights were spent with my girlfriend who worked at a clothing factory making army uniforms, and lived on a housing estate. At sixteen she was a tall, mature girl with a full bosom, and long brown hair worn in a neat fringe at the front. Our main entertainment was the cinema, or simply walking the streets, but there was real delight in the promise and comfort of being with her, and indulging in whatever trivial talk of the moment interested us. My first real love, she was trusting, passionate and generously willing, so that we were soon ‘going all the way’ on the living-room sofa while her parents were out, sometimes on Sunday night as well, for her father was an amiable coalminer who liked to sit with his wife over a few drinks in the pub.

Of the two items to be considered in sexual relations, the first was venereal disease, or a dose of the pox, as Bill Towle put it, but it was unlikely that any of us would catch such an affliction because we were young, knew each other, and stayed within the group. The second fear was that of getting the girl pregnant, and to avoid this I called every week at the chemist’s to buy a supply of Durex, it being assumed that those who did not take such precautions asked for all they got, and a bit more. As Arthur Shelton’s father said: ‘When you get married, a penny bun costs tuppence!’

On the remaining evening of the week I would go out with John Moult, another cadet, crawling the pubs and knocking back a pint or so of Shipstone’s ale. The headquarters of the squadron moved to a place three miles away, and on the long journey home Johnny and I would enliven the empty streets by a caterwauling of popular songs, or try to figure between us the names of the — as then — forty-eight states of the USA, or otherwise test each other on general knowledge. He asked me where Leonardo da Vinci’s mural of ‘The Last Supper’ was, and told me the church and the place when I admitted not knowing, his question coming back to me on visiting Milan and seeing it for myself many years later.

On Sunday afternoon we listened either at his house or mine to a half-hour programme of light classical music, thus becoming familiar with the names of at least some of the great composers. Neither of us found time to read anything except textbooks, and I was practising more advanced navigation at the table in my room, its surface littered with charts and drawing instruments. I learned what stars, planets and constellations were useful to navigators, the names of cloud formations in meteorology, as well as how to recognize every type of aircraft.

The sky, by day or night, became as important as the earth’s surface, and knowing what was in it widened my angle of sight. Most of my life I had glanced little above the treetops or eaves of houses, but now everything to be seen on looking upwards had a name. The glow of the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, took four and a half light years, travelling at 186,000 miles per second, to reach the earth, a fact which put our planet earth in its place, and the people who lived on it even more so, which might have been a depressing realization had it not also been so marvellous as to open my mind to all kinds of cosmic speculations.

At RAF Snitterfield, near Stratford-upon-Avon, I flew at night for an hour on ‘circuits and bumps’ (take-off and landing practice) in an Airspeed Oxford trainer. One such aircraft had crashed just short of the runway a few days before, killing both pilots, its sombre wreckage glowing in the lights every time we took off. Once our plane was airborne its manoeuvres were occasionally such that the dazzling multi-coloured pattern of the aerodrome lights seemed half the time to be in the sky, and when I finally stepped out on to the dispersal point a reflected glitter of the same design appeared above my head, suggesting that my senses still had some way to spin before the usual equilibrium came back.

I went on a two-hour ‘hedge hopping’ exercise across the fen country, also in an Oxford, and spent much time looking between the pilots’ shoulders, ostensibly to consult the map but also at approaching embankments, farmhouses and telegraph poles, wondering whether to duck or where I would run should we hit something. Visiting Shakespeare’s birthplace came as an anticlimax, especially as I had so far been no closer to his works than the prose rehashes of Charles and Mary Lamb.

At sixteen I obtained my ‘release’ from Toone’s plywood mill and became a capstan lathe operator at Firman’s small factory in the Meadows district, a two-mile bus ride and one-mile trek from home. The forty people who worked there started at eight in the morning, and I was glad to be back on a five-day week.

No longer a plain labourer, but a capstan lathe operator turning out objects for Rolls-Royce engines, I became familiar with the micrometer and depth gauge, since everything had to be correct to within a few thousandths of an inch. Working at top speed on piece work, my wages soon reached four pounds a week, which allowed me to save from the ten shillings my mother handed back. The repetitious sweat of producing over a thousand brass nuts a day did not worry me, because for one thing I was making it pay and, once accustomed to the process, could dream my way from morning till evening as if I were two people.

After a few months Bert Firman, who owned the place but came in full-time like any other workman, offered me an extra ten shillings a week to get there an hour earlier and sweep the place clean. This meant leaving home at half past six, but I accepted gladly, and the old school Bible was soon interleaved with pound notes. My mother told me later that she had found the hideaway and, taking one or two out on Monday morning if she had no cash, put them back by the weekend so that I wouldn’t know. But one week, being suspicious because they weren’t in the right page place, I pencilled an asterisk faintly on each note, and on finding one that was clean didn’t put the reason down to the influence of the Holy Scriptures. Why she should have been so short of funds by Monday was hard to imagine, because my father’s and my wages ought to have lasted the week. Though Peggy had joined the Women’s Land Army, so there was nothing more from her, Pearl had started work and brought money in.

While giving most of my earnings to the house, I never thought I had decent enough clothes to wear. Fortunately, attending all possible parades at the ATC, much of my spare time was spent in uniform. My mother provided me with overalls, for which extra clothing coupons were given anyway, but otherwise she bought me a suit from a pawnshop, whose pinstripes were almost brushed into extinction. A secondhand overcoat soon became too short, and was passed on to Brian, and for a while an ATC anti-gas cape covered me when it rained. I did not complain, because my mother had few enough clothes of her own, and was genuinely too hard up to supply my proper needs as well as those of three younger children whose priorities no one could question, though they weren’t exactly well dressed, either.

A dance at the ATC headquarters went on every Saturday night for about a year, and with a quiff in my hair as dashing as that of King George, and smart to the extent of a tie-pin showing at the opening of my buttoned waistcoat, I must have gone around the floor in waltz or foxtrot time much like a sailor after six months at sea.

Selecting my partners and the type of dance with care, I met a girl who interested me because she did not work in a factory. She was rather short, and very quiet, with hungry little features, and hair worn in a roll at the forehead and then a short way down her back. Grey eyes, the liveliest of her advantages, suggested that if she did have something to say — and she did, was the implication, lots — no one roundabout would be flattered by her opinions, so why waste what was better kept to herself?

I assiduously courted her but, though seeming to like my attentions, and accepting me as her ‘young man’, as if I would do until someone better swanned along, she was meagre with any favours beyond the customary good-night snogging. There was little fondness between us, but a mutual fascination at each other’s strangeness kept the friendship going. On my part I began to mistake it for love, because the aim of getting into her cunt became my main object in life. We went cycling once into Leicestershire, and I thought my chance had come at last when we lay down to rest on a hillside near the village of Gotham, but it hadn’t. Another time we walked from where she lived into the pocket of countryside around Top Valley Farm, but that was no good, either. She was the first girl I took formally out to lunch, instead of informally into a pub, which she would not have countenanced, and I telephoned the office where she worked twice a week from a public box near the factory to say how much I loved her.

After the weekly hop ended at eleven I walked her home, which was even further out of my way, and we spent an hour kissing, with me trying to get as far with her as I had with my previous girlfriend, who had been callously given up for this fruitless pursuit. Further along the wall her slightly more attractive sister was being fucked silly by a friend of mine, but it was my bad luck to be lumbered with the one who was so hard to get, and I never reached my goal, for she always slipped into the house and left me — high, but dry — cursing myself for a fool on the five-mile traipse home.

During the week at my lathe hope revived, only to be put down once more. She must have become frightened when she almost let me ‘get there’, and told her sister to say that she didn’t want me to see her again. I responded with a long and fervent letter, not one to give up easily, which she must have destroyed without reading. My self-esteem was damaged beyond repair, for a couple of days, and then I met a girl who enjoyed fucking with a steadiness of purpose that fully satisfied me until after joining the air force a couple of years later. Her widowed mother, in her fifties and somewhat deaf, had an Indian man for a boyfriend, and while they were banging around on the bed upstairs, my girlfriend and I were similarly at it, making hearthrug pie in the living room.

Chapter Fifteen

By the age of sixteen part of me was in every respect a fully integrated workman. If I wanted to come in late at night, or in early morning, when all others in the house were asleep, I had only to prise open the scullery window, find the key just inside, and let myself in by the back door, the only stipulation being that I lock up after me. So although by no means twenty-one, the key to the door was already in my pocket.

There would be new experiences, of course, the more the better (the more the merrier, also), and while there was a vast quantity to learn I seemed adult to myself, and imagined that other people thought so too. If a strong doubt lingered it was only because the officers of the cadet force led a life I knew little about.

I cared for no man, and cared not whether he cared not for me as I stood before the lathe with sleeves rolled up and, a thousand times a day — though the magic of turning out each separate object never left me — released the bar an inch towards my middle, spun back the turret, pushed in the chamfer tool, forced the drill, suitably cooled by a constant jet from the sud pipe, and worked the two cutting blades forward and back till the simple brass hexagonal nut fell into my right hand and was thrown into a tin, another item for the engine of a Lancaster bomber.

We worked hard in that factory, day in and day out, week after week, all through the war: youths like myself, women and girls, and the three men kept out of the Forces as toolsetters. One of the women, tall and thin, her hair entirely grey, had lost her sergeant husband in a bombing raid over Germany. Scanning other faces that breach the wall of memory, who was that tall fair woman with laughing eyes called Meg who came in every day from Edwinstowe? Then there was the slim dark-haired woman of impeccable but tragic aspect, or so it seemed to me, who sat on her high stool before a miniature lathe making I don’t know what superfine object. I only ever viewed her from a distance, and never knew her name, for she always sat with the women, mostly listening to their talk. Someone remarked that she was Portuguese, but it occurs to me now that she may have been a Jewish refugee.

My ambition was to become a competent navigator in one of those aircraft whose engines we were helping to make, and join the flow of hundreds that set off night after night to pour forth the Wrath of God on Nazi Germany which, having sown the wind, was having the misfortune to reap the whirlwind with little or no sympathy for its ordeal. The irony of one day destroying those objects of art and architecture so meticulously detailed in the guidebooks which I frequently looked at, did not occur to me, and if it did I would not have worried much, knowing by now that war was war, that it was them or us, imbued as I was with the absolute confidence of being on the right side.

My only anxiety was that I might not be able to get into the air force, or any military service at all, because young men’s names could be picked out of a hat, compelling them to work in the coalmines as ‘Bevin Boys’. Such a fate, if it came up for me, was the only one which could turn me into a deserter. We dreaded, but mostly loathed, the name of Ernest Bevin.

My lathe was converted to produce a different engine part, but the customary blueprint was missing. ‘Rolls-Royce haven’t sent one,’ Bert Firman said. ‘Or maybe they forgot, and it’ll come next week. But as we know the measurements we can make do without.’

Taking the piece home, with a micrometer and depth gauge, I cleared the table in the kitchen, and went back in the morning with the drawing done to scale on fine graph paper. The job was simple, but perhaps as a result of this Bert said I ought not to join up but stay on for a few years at his factory and become a qualified mechanical engineer. It would mean going to school on a few evenings of the week for a year or so, but such a course would put me in a reserved occupation, thus keeping me out of the Forces. Though flattered by his plan, I had no difficulty in turning it down.

Looking up from the factory entrance in my dinner hour during June 1944, at khaki railway carriages on the embankment marked with large red crosses carrying wounded back from Normandy, it seemed that the war might still have years to run. In the next few months, however, the strength of the West Nottingham squadrons of the ATC fell by half, as if people thought the war was as good as over. I felt it could take an age to push through such a large country as France, as had been the case in the Great War, and then Japan would have to be defeated. Either I knew more history than most, or I had not yet realized the effect of the armoured column and the firepower of ground-attack aircraft in modern war. Perhaps my imagination refused to picture a less structured life after a war which was so much part of my existence that I did not want it to end.

The total time spent at camps and on training courses during my time with the ATC came to over three months’ full-time service. I flew in many different types of aircraft, the smell of pear drops, rexine and high octane fuel combining to sicken when the circuits and bumps went on too long. As the number of cadets decreased there was less competition for the few flights available. Warrant Officer Rome, a Canadian, took me up in a Dakota from Syerston and let me work the controls. On another flight I did the navigation, mainly by pointing at relevant features on the ground and comparing them to the map. More exciting were the training flights, also in Dakotas, in which tightly packed bales of hay were pushed out of the wide side door on to marked dropping zones, either practising for action in the Balkans or for supplying food to the starving in areas liberated from the Germans.

Circuits and bumps in Hamilcar gliders hauled by a Halifax bomber gave better thrills than any apparent fairground peril. When I turned my head from a safety-belted stance behind the pilot we seemed to be inside a long wooden shed. Dropping its tow rope, the enormous contraption went gracefully like a bird to the start of the runway when, as if halted by an invisible hand, it plummeted 800 feet, and on reaching ground trundled almost silently along the grass until it stopped.

Crates of Short Lee Enfield rifles sent to the squadron were unpacked and de-greased, and used for the kind of arms drill which sent a different percussionist clatter through the wooden floor of the establishment. A two-two calibre rifle range was fitted out in an underground hall at the local gasworks, and other NCOs and myself spent an hour on Sunday morning improving our marksmanship, lying down and letting go on rapid fire, the walls echoing the noise tenfold, till we came back into daylight with ears ringing and eyes sore from the tang of cordite.

Because of my seniority I felt obliged to acquiesce when volunteers were called for, as when one of the officers decided that the squadron should form a concert party. We concocted short dramatic or funny sketches and, after entertaining the other cadets on a couple of Saturday nights, took our skills to a local prison serving temporarily as a borstal. Whether the brown-coated inmates thought much of the performance was hard to say, but they appreciated the packets of cigarettes our officer told us to have with us and surreptitiously give away.

While standing at the lathe my mind was lively with fantasies, re-enacting flights made under blue sky and above cumulus cloud-fields, and then being told on the radio telephone, after the pilot had mysteriously lost consciousness, to bring the kite in on my own. Or I would stow away in a Lancaster and, a gunner being wounded, take over his station and shoot down a German night-fighter. More often there was a lascivious reappraisal of sexual encounters from the recent past, and revelling in others yet to come with my present girl. To cool down I might tax my memory with facts that had been learned, or run through what had still to be mastered in the aviation syllabus.

Such maggoty and fevered musings, pegged within brackets of three years back and the future only as far in front as the next weekend or stint at camp, were fuelled by the mechanical and not unpleasing repetition of work, as if to keep me sufficiently content not to bear animus against the lathe itself.

My girlfriend worked in a netting factory and sat in line all day talking with other women. She had a firm and slender body, and a pale oval face with grey eyes that had a slight upward slant suggesting something oriental in her background, though she was absolutely English. I never wore uniform when meeting her, or talked about anything to do with the cadet force, because she thought I had succumbed to a life distasteful to her and unsuitable for me, that such interests could not really be part of me, and that I was in some way ‘putting it on’. She would have been more sympathetic had I donned a uniform of plain khaki, or a matelot’s rig, but perhaps most of all she didn’t like that part of my life from which she had chosen in any case to be excluded. It never became a real issue between us, since she saw how useless it would be to try and deflect me from it, due to my way of totally ignoring criticism or disapproval, while barely even noticing that I had done so.

What we talked about I’ll never know, but we made love whenever we could, and once fucked five times in twenty-four hours. Silence seemed not to bother her, perhaps because it was a state in which she saw no possibility of conflict, and in any case it didn’t worry me. At the cinema we were too absorbed to talk, and it wasn’t possible to do so in pubs jumping with noise and too packed anyway to find a seat. Nevertheless, the nights we spent together were precious, and we loved on terms that were comfortably established, such regularity freeing me from wasting time going after other girls.

We went swimming in the Trent beneath Clifton Grove and, coming out of the Eastertime water trembling with cold, found warmth in each other’s arms. Later there was an ample tea for ninepence at a cottage in the village. I took her rowing, or by bus to Hucknall for a walk up Misk Hill. Ordinary excursions pleased her, but she was uneasy when, as with my former girlfriend, I invited her to lunch in a restaurant, sensing a ruse to extend the limits of her social experience.

Earning as much as five pounds a week, and sometimes more, provided sufficient overflow for acquiring a secondhand bicycle. Arthur Shelton and I rode to Derby or Newark, and one Easter to the Lincolnshire coast, where we shivered all night in a concrete pillbox, before cycling back through seventy miles of rain.

Some of the past was already attractive to recall, or it provided a good enough reason for the destination of Worksop by bicycle, and cut out any uneasiness at knocking without notice on the back door of Mrs Cutts, who had looked after me so well as an evacuee five years before. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and in my solitary way through Mansfield with neither town plan nor signposts I went too far west through Pleasley and the Langwiths before regaining the Worksop road, consoling myself with the thought that even the best navigators get lost.

I must have disturbed her afternoon nap, and had to say my name before being invited in, motioned to step carefully by Mr Cutts who was dead asleep on the sofa. She apologized for the plate of stew being cold, but it was welcome after my long ride. The boy who had been evacuated with me had got into trouble for thieving, and they had sent him back to Nottingham. I sensed her horror at this experience, and a desire to change the subject. Asking about Laura, who had lived in a caravan on nearby wasteground, she said: ‘We used to have a little laugh at how sweet you were on her. She was your first love, we’d say. But they aren’t here any more. A pony towed the family to a site near Chesterfield two years ago. Laura’s a lovely young woman now.’ She had guessed the reason for my visit, and so it was me who switched the topic, by saying I had to go. Mr Cutts did not wake, and she sent me back to Nottingham with an apple and a sandwich in my saddlebag, which I ate by the gateway to Newstead Abbey, unable to decide whether or not my journey had been wasted.

I was a fully integrated workman only insofar as there was little left to learn about the surrounding milieu, so it was time to get out by any means possible. In April 1945 I heard you could volunteer for aircrew with the Fleet Air Arm from the age of seventeen and a quarter, under something called the ‘Y’ Scheme.

It may be worth quoting from the booklet put out at the time: ‘The Y scheme concerns candidates for the General Service branch, who come in as ordinary seamen in the first place, the pilot/observer candidates for the “A” branch (the Fleet Air Arm) who enter as naval airmen … Whichever the branch, the candidate has got to earn his commission in the same way as any other entrant, but to have been accepted by the Y scheme means that he is a marked man and that he will get every opportunity during his service training to prove himself worthy of a commission.’

Getting the morning off work, the first one ever, I went to the recruiting office to enlist, to the regret of my employer and the intense disapproval of my parents. To pass the medical was no problem and, after my preference for the branch of service had been noted, instructions came from the Royal Navy a fortnight later to present myself before an aircrew selection board at 13–15 Nantwich Road, Crewe, the letter containing a railway warrant for May 2nd.

A cadet friend, who had his School Certificate, and had passed all the tests which the ATC could devise, had come back from Crewe a few days before, having been considered the perfect candidate by Mr Pink and other officers. Cadets who succeeded in getting through an aircrew selection board, either for the Navy or the RAF, were entitled to wear the white flash of the Initial Training Wing in their caps, and in ATC squadrons those able to do so were a small and select band indeed.

Everyone expected to see the aforementioned cadet come on parade sporting his white flash, but he had failed, and was too dashed to say why. Since my schooling had stopped at fourteen this seemed ominous for my prospects, and my usual over-confidence was replaced at times by utter pessimism. Being fit and capable did little to abate the anxiety of thinking that failure would finish me off. I had trained obsessively for two and a half years, had diligently taken in what was put before me, and would go to the selection board with high recommendations from those officers who had been my instructors. Hoping there was nothing after all to fear I quelled inner disturbance by a determination to do my best.

I got up at six, even before my father, washed thoroughly at the kitchen sink, and put on my uniform. After a quick breakfast I took a bus to the railway station. Beyond Derby the train ran through the Potteries, whose grimy back-to-backs and smoking kilns made Nottingham seem like a garden-city.

In Crewe it wasn’t far to the large Victorian house where the Navy had its aircrew testing facilities. After the medical came the eyesight test, a matter of picking out numbers made up of dots of a certain colour from a confusing multitude of dots of all colours, to prove I wasn’t colour-blind.

At the selection board itself, standing to attention in front of four elderly (or so they seemed) and urbane naval officers, questions were shot at me such as: ‘If a triangle has an angle of fifty-six degrees, and another of sixty-four, what number would the third angle have?’ I was a little flustered at one point, but managed to give all the right answers. On being asked what sports I liked to play I feigned an enthusiasm never felt, having all my life regarded sport as a waste of time. ‘Cricket and football, as well as’ (which were liked because they could be done alone) ‘rowing and cycling.’

After a meal in the mess I went into a classroom with half a dozen others for aptitude tests, reminiscent of those set for the scholarship exam at the age of eleven, but which by now had lost their mystery. A short time later I was called into an office where a man sat casually filling out a naval identity card. When he handed it to me I assumed he had made a mistake, and then could hardly believe my luck in knowing that I had passed.

Everything had seemed so informal, but perhaps that, I thought, was the Navy’s way of doing things. He gave me three shillings for my first day’s service pay, and said all I had to do now was go home and wait to be called up for flying training on HMS Daedalus at Lee-on-the-Solent near Southampton. I felt as if I was floating instead of walking to the station, and must have opened my wallet half a dozen times to stare at the small red piece of folded card bearing my name, and the number FX643714.

Looking back, that first success of my life was a low hurdle to have crossed, yet it proved to me that I was as good as anybody else, and maybe even better than most. I had wanted to be a navigator (or Air Observer, as it was called in the Fleet Air Arm) but being accepted to train as a pilot, who also had to know about navigation, was no disappointment. A photograph of the time shows me staring into space, eyes glassy as if half blind, my expression suggesting that full sight could be regained should an effort be made to see what exactly is before me.

Almost across the road from the station in Nottingham was a service stores, and even before leaving the counter I had fixed the distinguishing white flash into my cap, to show off on parade that evening, not feeling similarly pleased until my first novel was published thirteen years later.

The war seemed far from over, and I had, as it were, ‘taken the King’s shilling’. The Red Army was fighting in Berlin, and Hitler had, as my mother said when I walked into the house from the factory, ‘Snuffed it.’ Cousin Jack, having put a year on his age so as to volunteer and get into the war before it finished, battled with the infantry against an SS Cadet Training Battalion in the Teutoburger Wald. Another of his brothers was in West Africa, and a cousin who had deserted earlier in the war was riding on a tank towards Hamburg. Peggy had left the Women’s Land Army to join the NAAFI, and put her name down for overseas.

At teatime I opened the Daily Mirror and saw a double-page illustration of the horrors of Belsen. My mother looked over my shoulder: ‘That’s what the Germans have done to people.’ Pamphlets detailing atrocities in Russia, with photographs, had been sold outside the Raleigh factory earlier in the war, but few had imagined inhumanity on such a scale as was now revealed. We were to learn that the Germans and their all too willing helpers had deliberately murdered six million men, women and children simply because they were Jewish. Poles, Russians and gypsies, also considered less than people, had been starved and butchered at will, telling everyone on the Allied side, if they hadn’t already known, that the war could not have been fought in any better cause.

Chapter Sixteen

May 8th was a day of flags, bonfires, tea-parties and unbridled boozing. If Delacroix had painted his ‘Liberty’ on that day in Radford, she would have been a big blowsy bespectacled woman of forty-odd in the White Horse pub doing a can-can on one of the tables, showing Union Jack bloomers with each high kick of her shapely legs, to cheers from the drinkers, among whom were me and my girlfriend. My father vomited all the way home, too senseless to realize till the following morning that he had lost his false teeth, by which time they had gone for ever. The nine pound-notes in my Bible were gladly donated, so that instead of living on slops for a month he was fitted the following day with another set.

On Wednesday 9th May a sore head didn’t stop me going flat-out at my lathe. War production went on because Japan had yet to be defeated. People were uneasy at the prospect of peace because the pre-war days of unemployment might come back, not everyone able to find work on reconstruction. Even my aircrew ambition would come to nothing unless the war in the Far East lasted another two or three years, by which time I would be flying from aircraft-carriers, and the possibility of being killed was a barrier against picturing a future.

During the General Election Bert Firman didn’t think it funny when we stuck a Labour poster above his bench, but after the results came through it was a shock that Churchill was no longer the figurehead of the country, and that the days of inspiring perorations on the wireless were over, though of course there were plenty of people who said it was good that he had been thrown out.

At the Air Training Corps a shortage of officers led to me occasionally teaching navigation and signals to younger cadets. From Syerston I flew to Harwell and back in a Lancaster, my station the rear turret behind four.303 Browning machine-guns fortunately not ammoed up, otherwise I might have been tempted to let go out of sheer joie de vivre. Playing in inter-flight football matches was a pleasant enough activity on the odd Saturday afternoon. Exhausted but doing my utmost, I scored a goal towards the end of one game, then heard a cry from the sports officer in the stands: ‘Run, Sillitoe, run! Don’t hang about!’

What the fuck did he think I had been doing all this time? My rage abated in a few seconds, but I made only a pretence of playing in the few minutes left. Energy was free, and I was lavish with it, but would not be a spectacle for those who, shouting encouragement or denigration, would drop dead if they had to run fifty paces.

Going to annual camp at Syerston, I fainted on arrival, and did not wake up for a week. Those days were utterly lost, impossible to know where they went. Perhaps I had been too much with my girlfriend, as if to make up beforehand for our separation, or working over-assiduously at my lathe in an effort to keep up the wage of six pounds a week which was almost as high as my father’s. Or maybe there was some kind of ’flu going around.

I was aware of nothing, no dreams or fevers, no fits or miseries, no discomfort, only the obliteration of time and consciousness — my consciousness at any rate — and perhaps beneath it all, in some dimension inconceivable, schemes were concocted, snares laid, life shaped, and me unaware of such goings on until whatever they were overtook me.

Opening my eyes on the strange bright cleanness of the station sick-bay, the quart bottle of milk noted on the locker was swigged off in a few moments, its rich cool liquid feeding me back to life. The medical officer told me I hadn’t moved, or needed any attention, so they had left me to sleep myself out. I thanked him, and asked if it was all right to get up and go. ‘As soon as you like,’ he said, ‘but take it slowly for a while.’ After a meal in the mess I caught the bus home, and on Monday morning cycled as usual to work, chagrined at having wasted a week in hospital instead of getting more flying hours in.

In the factory we talked about how politics were interesting to us now that Labour had won. There was a feeling that government had come just that bit nearer to ordinary people. Parliamentary reports in the Daily Herald were longer than in my mother’s Daily Mirror, and on reading of an egalitarian society coming about I did not quite understand what was meant, never having felt anything except equal, at least. To be told that I was equal was as impertinent as being informed that I was not.

As soon as Monday morning began in the factory the cut-off of Friday night was longed for. Between the two points of time lay an eternity spent in high-speed work, the muscle power of my arms in full play. Such heavy duty was nevertheless taken lightly, complaints made only if they could be plaited into a picturesque curse, or bottled into a joke. The emptiness induced by repetition, however, became less and less filled by what thoughts could be trawled through my mind. Such mental vacuity aggravated me, and boredom began to take over.

At midday I cycled to a nearby British Restaurant to get a satisfactory hot meal for a shilling, then pedalled to Frank Wore’s shop in town to see what books were scattered over the table which seemed to breed them. For sixpence I bought the first English edition of Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria, 1876, which was taken on visits to Israel thirty years later.

When an announcement was made at ATC headquarters that men were required to take up temporary posts as air-traffic control assistants with the Ministry of Aircraft Production, I lost no time in applying for the job. Bert Firman was getting fewer orders from Rolls-Royce, and it was likely he would soon go back to making gambling machines, as he had before the war, and I didn’t care to be involved with such work.

Jaded in my room after too much theory of aviation, too much work in the factory, perhaps even too much time with my girlfriend, an arm that could only have been mine but which acted without thought reached to the shelf for Les Misérables. So little was lost of its former hold that I was soon deep into it, the difference being that the love story now moved me as much as the pitiful struggles of Jean Valjean.

A short chapter entitled ‘A Heart Under the Stone’ was a series of notes in a high romantic tone which Marius Pontmercy left for his sweetheart Cosette to find. They struck so deeply that I read them again and again before going on through the last third of the novel. The love-lorn philosophical reflections of Marius lacked the mechanical precision my mind had been trained to, but much of me obviously hungered for such apothegms as: ‘The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing which can occupy and fill the immensity, for the infinite needs the inexhaustible. God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except giving them endless duration.’

These few pages were the literary equivalent of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suite Number Two, whose haunting music of broken love in the Camargue I heard on the wireless one mellow summer’s evening while in the house alone. The effect of the music, and now these words of Hugo’s, was to convince me that there was another world somewhere, but an interior more than a horizontal world, and such devastating sadness enveloped me because for the moment I could only contain the tormenting seed of it within myself, not knowing what it meant, or how to deal with it, or relate it to anything else.

In August I went on a fortnight’s advanced navigation course at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, practising square-search and interception techniques on Dalton computers, and learning how to ‘box’ an aircraft’s compass. Halfway through the schooling a friend waved a newspaper telling in big headlines that a bomb dropped on Hiroshima had wiped out the whole city. It was hard to believe the war was over, until a second such projectile descended on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered.

We abandoned classes for the day and went to London, no one at railway or underground stations asking for the fares of those in uniform. King George waved to us in the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Zipping from A to B on the underground to enjoy the novelty of being in the capital, I was surprised at how only a second or so seemed to pass between one station and the next, making it difficult to know whether the time was short because there was nothing in my mind, or whether it was due to the density of my reflections.

The station warrant officer’s daughter at Halton was about my age, slim, lively and russet-haired, with a sharp pale face. We passed each other walking along an impeccably kept avenue between the barrack blocks, on an evening when a delicious scent wafted from the nearby wooded hillside. Both of us immediately turned to say hello and talk, as if we had known each other before. Perhaps she was as much my type as I was hers, and in colouring if little else she resembled Edith Shaw of Parknook who earlier that summer had walked me through the overgrown rose-smelling grounds of Ranton Abbey near an aerodrome in Staffordshire.

I don’t remember the name of the girl at Halton, but recall that she took me to meet her father, who was neutrally polite, and gave me a cup of tea in their comfortable married quarters home. Nor is it certain that we kissed, but a letter or two passed between us, before her father was posted to Wales and contact ended. A year later, in the air force, a man came with an oral message saying that she still thought of me.

At that age love is as profound as it will ever be, but the objects of it are displaced by continually moving events. The tragedy of changing affection is also a factor; having only one life made it impossible to live through each piquant adolescent romance to a terminus of bliss or devastation. The enjoyable yet sad working out can only be done by memory, and mine was already a useless bundle of fused reflections as I took the train back to Nottingham knowing we would never meet again.

Chapter Seventeen

Exhausted from the factory, and smelling of disinfectant suds as I sat down to eat, my mother put a small buff envelope by my plate of conger eel, potatoes and peas, which contained notification of my appointment to the post of air-traffic control assistant. I was bemused at being referred to as a ‘temporary civil servant’, never having thought of myself as anybody’s servant, though feeling no regret at saying farewell to factory work for what I hoped would be for ever.

Payment for the new job would be monthly by cheque, and not much more than half of what I had earned in wages, though there would be no hardship in managing. I was sent for a fortnight’s instruction at RAF Wing near Leighton Buzzard, a short course in the control tower, with airborne experience in Wellington and Stirling bombers.

My posting was to Langar, in Nottinghamshire, and I was disappointed at not being billeted in the nearby village (birthplace of Samuel Butler, a fact not known until some years later) which was an option only for those who lived more than twenty miles away. The word ‘work’ hardly described what I had to do, and such an amalgamation of my enthusiasm of the last few years made it seem as if I were already halfway serving in the air force, since days were given to ‘duty’ rather than to the concept of hours ‘clocked on’.

Out of bed at six, I took a bus to the town centre, bought the Daily Herald, and caught an aircraft workers’ special to the aerodrome twelve miles away, arriving just before eight. Our boss was an amiable grey-haired squadron-leader referred to as ‘Pop’, who spent his nights on a camp bed downstairs next to the radio installation room because the accommodation price at the local pub was so ruinous. On entering the control tower, by an outside staircase, I put a kettle on the hotplate to make a pot of tea, taking a mug for Pop to drink between getting up and shaving.

Only two of the three assistants needed to be on duty at a time, with the squadron-leader either present or available. One of us stayed in the tower, while the other was taken by a van, which also towed the chequerboard caravan, to the runway of the day according to the direction of the wind. Once there, his first task, after the caravan was parked and the telephone cable plugged into the terminal point, was to place white planks on the grass outside in the form of a large letter T to indicate to any pilot wanting to land which of the three runways he was to use.

All the air-traffic controller had to do for the next four hours was sit in the turret of the caravan, much like being in the mid-upper turret of a bomber, and be on the lookout for aircraft approaching the circuit to land, in which case he cranked the handle of the field telephone to warn those in the tower to have a fire tender and a ‘blood wagon’ standing by, then signalled a green go-ahead on the Aldis lamp to the plane, by which time someone in the tower might be speaking to the pilot by radio.

At the end of the stint the other assistant would take over for the latter part of the day, and whoever was in the caravan would walk back to replace him in the tower. The only aircraft movements were four-engined York airliners towed across the road from the construction hangars and taken on test flights, or twin-engined Ansons landing now and again to bring spares and technical personnel from other A. V. Roe factories.

The tower man on duty in the morning would sit at the radio and take down details of the weather, spoken in a beautiful voice by a WAAF, at a score of airfields throughout the United Kingdom, and plot them on a chart. Another occasional job was to go on to the perimeter track with a pair of large tennis-like bats and guide an aircraft just landed into the correct dispersal point. Sometimes it would be necessary to climb on to the wing of an Anson with a handle and crank the number one engine into life, before the pilot in the cockpit, now able to start the other, could taxi out and take off.

The aerodrome had been used by the Royal Canadian Air Force, and another assistant and myself got into the large hut once used for briefing sessions to find one wall covered by a vast map of Europe on the one-million scale, and another of Eurasia at one to four million. Spinning pennies to decide who should have what, we dismantled them in sections and carried our loot home on the bus.

On dim winter afternoons, when Pop was out, we fired red and green Very cartridges for amusement, and sent rockets streaking in fiery tangents at the sky from a launcher in front of the tower. Flicking a switch at a control panel, the runway and perimeter lighting system could be flashed on and off like Morse code, goading the squadron-leader to telephone from the village one blackening afternoon and shout: ‘Stop playing the bloody fools with those lights! We can see ’em for miles!’

Using the telephone, and having to make myself clear over the radio, changed my accent towards a more neutral English. During the winter, with little air traffic and, on days of nil visibility, no flying at all, the three of us stayed in the tower. I read Pop’s Daily Telegraph and tackled the crossword, or played darts; or we would gaze outside in case the aeronautical equivalent of the Flying Dutchman should suddenly glide by our observation greenhouse in an enormous but ragged amphibian and request permission to land.

Time passed doing interception exercises on an assortment of exotic plotting charts, practising the kind of navigation useful for flying off aircraft-carriers. Every third day was free, and when two coincided with a weekend there was always some flying to be had at RAF Syerston. From Langar the A. V. Roe test pilot took me up in a York for a view of the devastating floods which had spread far and wide over the Trent Valley.

With my girlfriend we either made the most of it in her house or, when the weather was fine, went into a wood and unloosed our passions there. At the weekend, after her mother had gone to bed, we practised the necessary deceit of the ‘Nottingham good-night’, whereby loud farewells were called and the door decisively banged shut, but with me still inside the kitchen, so that I often stayed till nearly morning. It’s doubtful whether any parents were ever taken in by this form of good-night, since they must have used it when young. In fact it had probably been going for generations, and not only in Nottingham.

Anxieties, if there were any, must have been so deeply built into my co-ordinates as to be unnoticed. The machine of body and spirit ran in a perfect equilibrium of optimism, generating self-satisfaction in everything except to do with work, and knowledge of the world beyond. At last I had a decent three-piece navy-blue suit and, what gave great comfort, a smart grey Raglan overcoat — the result of my cousins’ earlier night-time depredations. Such a garment cosseted me from the elements, and held in those intimations of deeper love suggested by the poetic lines from Hugo’s novel which was not so much for children as was at one time thought.

Cleaned by the hot scald of the public baths, and walking on a frosty evening with my girlfriend to the cinema, always to find a seat on the back row, hair Brylcreemed into a quiff, a Senior Service burning even more tastily when blended with a subtle odour of domestic coal smoke feathering from every chimney, sufficient money in my wallet to last till the next monthly cheque, as well as the knowledge that we would be making delicious love in her house a few hours later, confirmed in all ways that life, being as full as we could make it, could hardly get better, while the possibility that it might ever become worse was unthinkable.

My cousin Jack came on leave in his khaki from Trieste, and thought we should see the film Henry V. The sound from the past filters through a sort of waking dream, out of visual effects that gave astonishment and pleasure. The milky malice of much of the idiom, except for the robust earthiness of the king who made at any rate as if to love his soldiers, put everything else out of existence for a few hours, a lot of time in those days, and soaked me in language that for the most part sounded English through a distant muffle.

The wonder of the king’s speech, a spectacular high-octane rant before the battle, was at that time eclipsed by the noise — music in advance of its time — of that massive flight of arrows between the woods of Agincourt which annihilated, with the cheapest weapon in the world handled by the commonest of men, the caparisoned chivalry of a nation. I had no thought of reading the book of the film, but the memory of that cloud of arrows going up to the sky and down again stayed till a properly equipped emotional expedition was mounted through that and the rest of Shakespeare’s plays.

Grit in my system chafed in the months before joining up and, impatient to receive my ‘papers’, on the approach of my one and only eighteenth birthday, I wrote asking the Royal Navy when I would be called up to begin flying training. Anyone who wanted to become a pilot, they replied, and possibly go on to get a commission, would have to sign on for seven years full time, plus five on reserve; otherwise, to take such care over their welfare would not be worthwhile. This was reasonable, but such length of service had not been my idea at all, and it was only possible to imagine seven years by thinking backwards, which made the age of eleven seem a hundred years ago, indicating in no uncertain terms that there was a future after all, and little sense in bespeaking so large a part of it.

The war was over by almost a year, but I wanted to use the experience of serving as an excuse to put off making any other decisions. I therefore arranged to be ‘discharged at my own request’ from the Fleet Air Arm on 28 March 1946, and immediately enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve for ‘the duration of the present emergency’, which was assumed to be for three or four years, to be trained as a ground wireless operator.

I was young enough to believe that all change was good, though there was some regret at leaving my job of airfield controller. Arthur Denny, another youth from the ATC, who later made his career in the RAF and became a wing-commander, stepped into my place.

Details of cadet qualifications went to the RAF Enlistment Board in the form of a Leaving Certificate, and I was able to read the general remarks on my character: ‘This man has been outstanding. As an NCO, and particularly as a Flight-Sergeant, he has evinced those qualities so essential to those who control. He is, in my opinion, a worthy representative of the ATC and what it is trying to do.’

In my working life I had learned the A to Z of plywood and jacquard making, gathered some experience of mechanical engineering, and in eight months had become competent as an airfield controller. My cadet training had been a sort of secondary education, giving the equivalent of ‘O’-levels in English, air navigation, mathematics, meteorology, and the theory of flight, as well as the ability to take and receive Morse code at wireless operating speed.

My route into the future was hard to see with any fixity, in spite of my determination to join up. To make the horizon more distinct did not seem necessary: the future would take care of itself and therefore of me. Either that, or I did not consider that any amount of thought could alter what might turn out to be good or bad in it. In any case I shied off thought, instinct telling me that it could too easily lapse into worry, which could give way to uncertainty, and even degenerate into fear. And I wasn’t having any of that. Such feelings were either a compound of self-indulgence and wisdom, or a shameful supineness in someone who by now ought to have known better, though I would not have cared to have anyone tell me which it was, wanting only the maximum amount of freedom within which Fate could have free play.

When my girlfriend’s sister was married, and we went to the reception at the local Methodist hall, she may have hoped that the cloying spectacle would persuade me to propose to her and become engaged. In spite of the love I felt, the idea never entered my thoughts, or if so made the kind of impression that was overthrown in a moment and forgotten.

After a tearful and passionate goodbye, and promises to write letters, I left on 8th May for RAF Padgate in Lancashire, to begin eight weeks of basic training, happy to put Nottingham and everything else behind me.

Chapter Eighteen

Some time passed before learning anything in the air force not already known, all of it being familiar except the experience of practising for sixteen hours a day what was previously done part-time. Those who had not been in the ATC, perhaps as many as half, started their drill from nothing, therefore training could only go at the rate of the slowest, though in the midst of so many who knew it even they became quick on the uptake.

On enlistment I swore an oath of loyalty to King George VI, and when asked my religion replied that I did not have one. The sergeant, a grin of annoyance across his putty-shaded face, put Church of England on the paper, and had the initials C of E stamped with my name and number on a bakelite ‘dog tag’ to be strung around my neck until demobilization.

I received my first underwear at the kitting out, and two uniforms which fitted neatly, plus a set of khaki and a pair of gaiters for rougher work. An overcoat was put into my arms, as well as woollen gloves, scarf and mittens, shirts and a tie, shoes, boots and socks. I had never been so well protected against the worst of the weather. Soon after arrival I was singled out to take a special hearing test, to make sure I had the highest aural standards necessary for wireless operating.

Alertness spanned every split-second when part of a swiftly moving block of men across the parade ground, or during drill in the great hangar when it rained, always relating to the slightest change of position in the man to your right. I wasn’t bored: the piously self-centred never can be. Part of my faculties relished the physical cohesion of belonging to an intelligent and responsive mass, while the other half enjoyed the over-view of such wheeling and about-turning from the cockpit of an imaginary autogyro suspended a hundred feet above.

The drill sergeants came from the RAF Regiment, some of them, as were the officers, redundant aircrew. Teasing took place in the billet, but no bullying, and the parade ground exhortations of the NCOs were now and again accompanied by earthy humour. Physical training alternated with rifle drill, runs over the assault course burdened with small arms and kit, bayonet fighting and grenade throwing turned us into soldiers though not hard infantry. Such an extension to ordinary life might some time be useful, I thought, especially the enhanced awareness of the body and an instinctive but careful use of firearms.

For all our marching and counter-marching as Aircraftsmen Second Class Recruits we were paid three shillings a day, one of which was allotted to my mother, who every two weeks took her allowance book to the post office, received fourteen shillings, then crossed the road to the Co-op and came out with almost more groceries than she could carry. The fortnightly pay parade left me with sufficient for tobacco, an occasional foray to the NAAFI, shoe polish, toothpaste and stamps. A pound or two was even put by for my first leave.

We were forbidden to go out during basic training, but Jack Mercer and I found a way through the back fence and went ten miles by tram to his home place of Atherton, where his mother welcomed us with a tin of sweet pears for tea. Few moaned about the food at camp, because the diet was good, and we were easy to satisfy after six years of rationing.

Mixing with people of all families and backgrounds was an interesting diversion. Docherty and a couple of cronies, hard men from Glasgow, kept together in mess and billet, distrusting everyone else for a while due to being in a strange element which they could not control and so felt threatened by. Perhaps because of my name they showed some interest in me, but I preferred arguing the Labour point of view with Ashley Bell, the solicitor’s son from Northumberland. As well as sharp lads who had grown up in London there was a tall, good-looking songster from Ireland, and he entertained us with militant or melancholy ditties out of an endless store of songs and verses. Because he could barely read and write we coached him with letters home, and helped to fasten on his complicated webbing equipment.

As the weeks went by one sensed the 120 of our flight becoming more and more cohesive as a unit on the drill ground. The idea was to make us as smart as the Guards and, eventually, marching twenty abreast, the line was so meticulously straight that whoever shouted the orders saw only one man go by at the point of the line passing, as if we were rehearsing for a military tattoo.

My immersion into the land of the all-fed and all-found was agreeable, no decisions to make as long as one did as one was told, which was never onerous or unreasonable. On the other hand, volunteer status was important to me, knowing that I had accepted the life of my own free will, and that call-up could have been avoided on taking Bert Firman’s offer of a reserved occupation by training to be a mechanic.

The final parade and march past in July was celebrated with a group photograph, and then a fortnight’s leave. In Nottingham most of my friends were also absent in the services, but my girlfriend and I, when not in the cinema, or holding hands in a pub over our beer, fucked the two weeks away with passion and abandon. She didn’t seem to enjoy being seen on the street with a smart airman as much as I had hoped, but my mother had either given my civilian clothes to the ragman, or put what fitted on to Brian. My bicycle had also gone, as had most of my books, but having cast myself loose in the big ship of the air force, possessions meant little beyond what could be stuffed into a kitbag.

At the beginning of August, candidates for wireless school were posted to Compton Bassett in Wiltshire to begin twenty-eight weeks’ training. Parades were few and, in order that the maximum time be given to learning, there was little or no bullshit, although billet floors had to be kept polished and kit displayed in regulation style at the bed-end.

School started at half past seven, and went on, with a meal break, until six. In a more relaxed pre-war era the length of the course would have been eighteen months, and instruction more thorough, but the times and the human material had changed. My Morse was already up to standard, while others could take at least some words per minute, so that with the initial barrier broken it was only a matter of practice to qualify.

Classes in wireless telegraphy procedure, and the technical aspects of radio, were later followed by the practical side of managing individual radio stations, our receivers and transmitters in Morse contact with each other. Touch-typing was also taught, and we were soon rattling out the loosening up exercise for morning fingers: ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’, a skill also used for operating teleprinters, as well as taking Morse more neatly than by handwriting.

The place resembled an adult technical college, many of the teachers being civilians or retired RAF signals types, one of the latter entertaining us with an account of plodding around the mountains of the Indian North West Frontier in the ’20s with a wireless installation on the back of a mule. To encourage us he sent the complete seduction scene from Forever Amber in Morse, adding at the end something not put in by the author: ‘He had shot his bolt!’ — then nervously telling us to rub that bit out in case an inspecting officer came in. Another tall, ruddy-faced old man had been a telegraphist for ten years at a place on the southern tip of New Zealand, which experience had left a glint of icy humour in his bright blue eyes.

Two trainee wireless operators of about twenty had seen war service as Marconi officers in the Merchant Navy from the age of sixteen, and came on the course with a row of medal ribbons longer than those on the tunics of most old sweats. Another young man, little older than myself, had spent the latter part of the war in the Far East as second officer on merchant ships, and he also had his decorations. I went on weekend pass with him, to a village near Weston-super-Mare, calling on his etiolated parents, who had been prisoners of the Japanese in China.

The wing-commander in charge of the camp ran the place fairly benignly, but would occasionally inveigh against us via the tannoy speakers in every hut, threatening to stop our ‘privilegees’, whatever they were, if we didn’t refrain from rowdy behaviour between classes. We imagined he just liked sitting in his office before a microphone and emphasizing his position as governor of the institution, but when someone defecated into one of the baths he assumed that a person in our hut was to blame. We were asked to reveal who it was, but only the culprit himself knew the answer to that, and none of us had much hope of him owning up, simply because we were totally unable to understand why he had done it, which made it certain that he could not have been in our group. Someone from County Durham wondered if a stray St Bernard called Dropper hadn’t been wandering around but, never able to say who had been responsible, we were confined to camp for a fortnight.

Other things seemed equally petty. Walking by the parade ground, a sergeant shouted from fifty yards away: ‘Take that pipe out of your mouth, airman!’ which I hadn’t realized was against the rules. I came back to the billet one evening to see that the half-dozen books usually on a shelf behind my bed had been strewn across the floor by an inspecting officer on his rounds, signifying that only official kit was to be exposed, and all personal material stowed out of sight in your kitbag. I wasn’t a smart bullshit airman after all, though such incidents were only part of the game while being trained.

Halfway through the course we were given fourteen days’ leave, and in our first bout of lovemaking I tried to introduce my girlfriend to something apart from the usual ‘missionary’ position. She told me angrily that such a trick could only have been picked up from another woman, an unwarrantable assumption, because hard work had been taking up all my time. Whether she was tired of waiting, or wanted to be free of the affair anyway and used this attempt at a bit of fancy fucking as an excuse, was hard to say, but it struck me as so remarkably easy to break up a long association that it didn’t much bother me when it happened. What else did you think about when taking Morse? The procedure was as automatic as working at a lathe.

A favourite excursion from the radio school was to shin up 500 feet to Oldbury Castle, by the White Horse that had been carved out of the chalk downs. The westerly view from a spot nearby revealed the beautiful green declivity of Ranscombe Bottom and, not having lived for such an uninterrupted length of time in the countryside, I would sit on the turf thoughtlessly gazing, finding a kind of peace not known to be necessary until then.

As if to console myself for the loss of my girlfriend, though not alas in the same way, I got to know charming, dark-haired Jean Simons. She took me home to meet her father, who clearly did not approve of such a friendship, but the platonic association made me happy for a while.

Progress on the course was carefully measured, and at the halfway point a few who failed the tests were sent to learn another trade. A Nigerian in the class must have been a telegraphist in his native country, for he took the fastest Morse of all. One afternoon the instructor started the sending machine at the normal speed of eighteen, putting up the rate little by little. By twenty-eight words a minute most had stopped taking it, but the ex-Merchant Navy operators, the Nigerian and myself stayed in the race. Morse was easy enough to read at such speeds but difficult to write legibly, and at thirty-six words a minute the field was left to the Nigerian, who continued a few moments longer. Two days later he fell into a kind of fit and had to be taken off the course, but he must have been the greatest Morse-artist of all time.

In the post-war austerity period a typewriter could be sold for today’s equivalent of two or three hundred pounds, if you could get one. Thirty vanished from our classroom one dark night, which meant that an airman on the camp must have organized the theft. No one knew who had done it, and the machines were quickly replaced. We spoke few words of condemnation against the thieves, though gave no praise either. One’s sense of justice was defined only in so far as knowing that sooner or later those responsible would be caught, since every bag of loot carried a built-in risk deep inside.

On being asked whether or not we would be willing to serve overseas my name immediately went on the list. The only person to sign on with more alacrity than most was the airman in our class who had organized the Great Typewriter Robbery. Unluckily for him, he was plucked from the troopship just before it set off down the Solent, and hauled away to do a couple of years in gaol.

At Christmas we went on leave, our journey delayed by a go-slow on the railways. The train was so crowded that some of us lay half frozen on mail sacks for the five hours it took to reach London. Hundreds got off at Paddington, cursing the engine crew who, it was thought, had made them late for their connections, some airmen hovering by the cab as if intending to lynch them, which sentiment seemed reasonable. I didn’t reach Nottingham till midnight, and walked home through the silent town with my kit.

In the New Year ice and snow cut off the camp from all supplies. Fuel was scarce and we were cold. When the NAAFI ran out of stock we cut a way through the wire fence to reduce the distance to a small pub in the village, where we sat by the fire and drank pints of rough, intoxicating cider.

Rations became more meagre, and at one time we went into the mess for little more than a dab of reconstituted potato and a slice of bread, which spartan victuals continued for some time. Nevertheless, instruction was carried on and, though grumbling occasionally, we stayed healthy, except for one man who coughed up a pint of blood one morning, and was removed to the sick quarters, never to be seen again. The wing-commander received a decoration for having kept the school going.

My final assessment on passing the course, on 28 February 1946, was fifty-seven per cent, somewhat low but it did not surprise me, never having been fully at ease with the theory of wireless. The pristine cloth badge sewn on to the arm of my tunic, of a clenched fist emitting six vivid sparks, signified that the wearer was no longer an ordinary inconspicuous erk, but a man with a trade, my first and last certificate of competence. Another shilling a day brought twenty a week into my pocket alone, so that we were now rich, someone quipped, beyond the dreams of average.

The usual embarkation leave often days passed without note, as did my nineteenth birthday. From then on it was a matter of waiting for a troopship to take us to no one knew where, first being shunted with kitbag and all accoutrements by train to the transit camp of Burtonwood in Lancashire. Nothing better to do but roam the lanes, and the streets of St Helens, we talked and walked with whatever girls would, for a little blameless amusement, talk and walk with us. Frank Pardy and I found a girl called Cynthia who, with a friend, kept us company for a few days — difficult to say why her name floated back after so long.

We were without duties or purpose for six weeks, the longest period for me since being at school. Spiritual or inner life was non-existent, no thoughts in those days of God, or philosophizing as to the reason for being on earth, or where one would go to after death (if one went anywhere at all, and if Hell had been signified it would not have mattered), certainly not the anguish to ask: ‘Why am I where I am?’ Questions were a luxury, and even less likely to come if nothing could be foreseen, except perhaps mundane speculations as to where on the oblate spheroid we would be going, at which my map of the world was frequently unfolded to make guesses.

We passed the time talking, joking, aimlessly rambling, drinking and sing-songing in the canteen, and sleeping. We got up at six-thirty so as to be in the mess hall with the first rush for breakfast, in case quantity diminished and quality deteriorated. My language was a mixture of economical English, air force slang, and fancy phrases from Nottingham dialect, to be used as verbal trade beads in exchange for whatever rarities my friends could dredge up from their regional speech.

The Americans had been at Burtonwood for much of the war, and an easy-going air lingered after them. Soft spring-like breezes wafted over the camp and surrounding fields, an atmosphere in which to recuperate from hard work on the course, and our privations of the winter. A ‘full house’ of inoculations was given against smallpox, typhoid, para-typhoid and many other strange diseases. A sort of convalescence was suggested by the constant ache and irritation in our arms, and the whiff of ether, which did little to check our ebullience at the prospect of leaving the country for the first time.

Because we had been sent to Lancashire it was assumed that the ship would set out from nearby Liverpool, but orders came to go by train to Southampton. Issued with rifles, laden with full kit, and arms still tender from the latest jabs, there was the usual singing, card games and eating of rations during the night. One developed the facility of falling into cat naps, and being comfortable in all kinds of postures, so that time drifted easily by.

In the morning, when the train drew parallel to the quayside, the huge portholed flank of the Ranchi was visible through the door of the customs’ shed, which Royal Mail ship was to be our home for thirty-one days.

Chapter Nineteen

Land and much else being left behind told me that opinion should be set aside in order that the unique situation could be assimilated and turned into memory. People on shore, if they bothered to look any more, saw a common troopship thick with men, one of whom — me — had barged through the crush to the port-side rail, not having been on anything bigger than a ferry boat or a stretch of water wider than the Mersey. Steamships and small yachts on blue rippling water, wooded hillsides and succulent fields on shore, made me wonder when England — for all I thought about such a crucial part of myself — would be seen again. My observations would become blurred with the passing of time, as the carborundum wheel of an impacted past rubbed too hard against it. Such reflections only made more piquant the suggestion from that other part of me, though it was not altogether trusted, that I could not have cared less.

Beyond Lee-on-the-Solent lay the buildings of HMS Daedalus where I would have done naval training and learned to fly with the Fleet Air Arm, but regret was a feeling little known, and passed like a shadow as the ship altered course to go around the Isle of Wight. On 8 May 1945 the war in Europe had ended; on the same date in 1946 I had reported for duty with the RAF; and now on 8 May 1947 a ship of 12,000 tons was taking me away from England — and nothing significant has happened on that vital date since.

The vessel carried 1,000 crew, and 2,000 troops accommodated in ten low-ceilinged mess decks, a space claustrophobic but soon accustomed to, with long fixed tables and forms for sitting on to eat, and large hooks above for slinging hammocks at night. In the morning they had to be taken down, tidily folded and placed in a rack, space being claimed anew each evening.

Shipboard was as different a life as I had ever been pitched into, a barracks surrounded by water, and regulated by bells at six for us to stow gear, shower, shave, and be at breakfast by seven. After everything on the mess deck shone we could roam or josh about till bells sounded for muster stations and lifeboat drill, when the captain, OC troops, provost marshal, and a gaggle of other scrambled-egg personalities, after inspecting the cleanliness or otherwise of our quarters (though there could be no otherwise), walked by our ranks, an endless sea frothing greenly beyond the rail. For the rest of the day we were free, unless called on for routine duties which were few with such numbers to share them.

Many sicked up crossing Biscay, latrines clogged with vomit. Portuguese fishermen, in rough water for small craft, waved on the third day, green cliffs of their country like a fairyland in the distant glow. Off Cape St Vincent some card spoke Browning — in May — while our vast boat steamed on towards the Pillars of Hercules, another place and time-group pencilled on my map.

The distance run every day, posted up in the saloon, showed an advance of about 300 miles. A letter to Squadron-Leader Hales of the ATC in Nottingham gave an account of life on board, but told of no murmur or anything felt. Much of the time I lay on deck, thoughtless and inert, getting up only for the good and copious food at mealtimes. One cadaverous airman covered page after foolscap page of a journal, and I wondered how he found so much to write about.

The Mediterranean was more stormy than Biscay, but there was little seasickness by now. My face became painfully swollen, and the dental officer pulled out an abscessed side-tooth. Dull days were interrupted by orders to stand in line and have more serum pumped in, and in the evening we hugged our arms in the cinema showing Two Years Before the Mast (or was it Mutiny on the Bounty?), the ship on the screen wallowing in as rough a sea as that around us, a double dose of weather at the top end of the Beaufort scale.

I took up time to explore the complicated structure, or stood on a lower deck as close as possible to the hypnotic bow wave sheering through grey-green cream-topped water, staring hour after hour to diminish a primeval fear of the sea. Passing liners and merchantmen flashed Morse from bridge to bridge, which I could interpret for those who saw only a meaningless flicker of light. Every vessel, out of courtesy and safety, announced its name, port of registration, where it came from and the place it was bound for, and my ability to read visual messages, not taught at radio school but practised on airfield control, improved immensely during the voyage.

One morning the nearest porthole showed a camel ridden by an Arab along the Asiatic side of the Suez Canal, much like a picture in an early geography book come to life. At the other end of the waterway the mountains of Sinai turned purple in the afternoon light, bathing the place where the Israelites had gone over to escape the wrathful Pharaoh and his pursuing chariots, and fulfilling another image of my infant days.

The hammock provided an underlay for sleeping on deck, too hot now to spend the nights below. By day we wore khaki shorts and gym shoes, being obliged to dress smartly only at boat stations. After the morning intake of cool lime juice I settled on to a piece of vacant deck to play endless rounds of clock patience, much like Benkiron in John Buchan’s Greenmantle, which I had just read, or watch Red Sea dolphins come playfully out of the glassy water as if to keep the ship safe from all malevolence.

At ashy-looking Aden fuel was taken on, and my close-grained twelve-page letter to Squadron Leader Hales went with the mailbag on the next westward boat. Socotra was the starting point for a seven-day passage across the Arabian Sea, the compass set at points familiar only on my map, in whose margins I kept a log so as not to lose the reckoning of time. None knew at what place we would disembark, and the power of the sea, waves smaller but the swell mightier, caused the old Ranchi to roll as if never to level out again, slowly coming up only to go down as steeply on the other side, yet cutting crisply for mile after nautical mile as if through an endless light green jelly cake.

From the rubbish of the ship’s small library (all items relished none the less) I took out the Penguin edition of Mutiny on the Elsinore by Jack London, on whose prose my eyes focused sharply enough to realize that here was something different. The novel punched home the opinion that the Nordic races (whatever they were) possessed an innate and eternal superiority over all other people. Though I might not have seen anything too outlandish in this — such attitudes inculcated from the beginning of consciousness — Jack London reiterated the point so as not only to slow down the narrative, which was unforgivable, but to make me find something objectionable about an idea which I hadn’t previously cared to formulate.

During a few hours’ shore leave in Colombo the Victorian engravings from books at my grandparents’ were now in colour, and less impressive to my mind of nineteen than they had been to a child in the age of wonders. One of a group, I felt like a somnambulist, my first experience of a foreign land little more than a meal at the YMCA and a meander along York Street and down Queen Street, nothing to impress beyond the sight of a few strange costumes.

Perhaps memories are few because my sensations were so absorbing, yet there remained the corrugated Arabian Sea beyond the harbour, and the sudden appearance of a palm tree bending over a stagnant pool. In the heat of the day, with no town plan to show how far we were going, it was nevertheless enjoyable to be walking with that aimlessness of young and indigent soldiers in an overseas town, though I was happy enough to get home to the ship.

The one diversion came when a couple of turbaned men stopped us near a park and wanted to read the future in our hands, a proposition I may have rejected too brusquely — believing whatever was in store to be totally irrelevant, and not wanting a stranger to tell me what it was, even if he knew exactly, which in any case I didn’t see how he could — for the parting words of one that I had ‘snake eyes’ intrigued rather than offended me.

The boat rocked around the coast of Ceylon, lights far off on a dark tree-crowded shore, and headed across the Bay of Bengal towards Malaya 1,300 miles away. Those contingents disembarked at Colombo had left the ship less crowded, and with the patience of the sea I hoped to be carried even beyond Hong Kong, almost wishing the boat would go on for ever, oceanic vastness inducing a resignation not previously known.

I slept deeply at night, one of a long row on deck, waking at dawn to let barefooted Lascar seamen in their saris sluice all woodwork clean with jets of salt water. The gramophone record of a brisk march by Souza, which hurried us to boat stations, became more and more cracked, and I wondered when the captain would authorize a new copy from the top of the stack by his elbow. Either that, or find another tune after skimming the old one duck-and-drake across the briny.

It was as pleasant a peacetime cruise as anybody could wish for, especially when we sighted an island off the tip of Sumatra entirely covered in jungle. Huge spherical grey jellyfish took the place of dolphins in the Straits of Malacca, the sea swollen, the sky dull, the air steamy. A day before Singapore we learned that the destination for wireless operators was close, and at two in the afternoon my larger scale map sheet of South-East Asia, taken from the briefing hut at Langar, and brought as an inspired guess as to what region at least the final landing would be in, revealed with precision that we were off Port Swettenham. By nine at night Malacca was passed, the Singapore Approaches closing around the ship at half past four next morning. An increased speed for the last twenty-four hours led us to speculate that the captain might have some sentimental reason for going all out.

In spite of our pleasant cruise we were more than ready to quit the fuel and stew smell of the ship, the rumble of perpetual motion underfoot, the constant swish of water keeping the air tacky with salt and ozone, and the swaying sailor walk developed on promenading the ever-shrinking decks. With kitbags ready, and rifles distributed as if on landing we might inadvertently stray into a battlefield, which I wouldn’t have minded in the least, we watched the ship tie up at half past seven in the Empire Dock, an area of petrol tanks and warehouses, though palm trees and bungalows on hills provided a more residential backdrop to the scene.

Chapter Twenty

Events moved slowly enough, and only later could I say they raced and leapfrogged — almost up to the present, when they go slow again. Stepping down the gangplank with full kit to a waiting lorry was like a scene in a newsreel. Such pictures from the past, though trivial, become salient due to an uncanny persistence in being remembered, but in the process they exclude anything of importance that may have been in the mind, as spars on a calm surface after a boatwreck provide few clues regarding the currents which might have existed beneath the water.

Whatever my irrecoverable thoughts, to which I would have said ‘good riddance’ at the time, even supposing there were any, we crossed the island into Johore via the Causeway over which the Japanese Army went on to occupy in 1942 what military strategists had said could never be taken. A few days in a hutted camp several miles into Malaya gave time to retrieve the use of our legs, by leaping half-filled trenches among neglected rubber trees. Otherwise we played the usual card games for unfamiliar cents and dollars.

Accustomed to Duke of York manoeuvres, a group of us were posted back to Seletar on Singapore Island. Our accommodation was in barrack blocks set between lawns and gardens, four-course meals in the mess seeming like two dinners in one (as I might earlier have thought) and we shared an Indian servant for a few dollars a week to fix beds, clean shoes, bring coffee in the morning and see to the laundry (dhobi now). Two shillings a day overseas allowance since leaving Southampton enabled me to buy my first wristwatch, as well as a new fountain pen — for which only red ink was available.

The high-frequency direction-finding (HF/DF) station was a small square hut at the end of the runway with a view across to Johore. Such work hadn’t been included in the school course, but I was soon taking bearings with the Marconi-Adcock apparatus and tapping out three-figure numbers in Morse to Sunderland flying boats of 209 Squadron, as well as to KLM, BOAC and QANTAS airliners on the Europe run.

Nightwatch, from six in the evening till eight the next morning, was a long time to be on the alert, but the operator soon to go home underlined in a copy of Balzac’s Droll Stories the remark that ‘You have to be over twenty to stay awake all night.’ Free issues of tobacco and cigarettes helped, as well as a liberal allowance of tea sweetened with condensed milk and a katti of sugar from the village store. Water was boiled on a primus stove, but the danger of an arm being licked to the shoulder by pristine and painful flame was so constant that I preferred trawling the scrubby area around the hut for scraps of wood to make a fire.

Just before dusk (what there was of it), I spotted a half rotten box, and aimed a kick in case a snake lurked there, cautious because one had run over my foot the other night as I came out of the camp cinema. While arranging the pieces under my arm to take back to the hut, a paralysing ache gripped my leg. Cursing and limping, I made tea before bothering to investigate the pain now gone into my foot as well. Unable to find punctures in the skin, I imagined it to be the bite of a hornet, though never knew for sure, and after several days all trace had gone.

Squeaks of Morse around midnight were rendered indecipherable by atmospherics screeching into my earphones. I turned the control wheel to bring the signals clearer, nursing it for a while till recognizing my own call sign tapped out by a radio officer in a Lancastrian passenger plane on the 2,000-mile leg from Darwin. Monsoon cumulus up to 30,000 feet hid the stars, so the only navigational aid over the whole stretch, apart from fallible dead reckoning, was the Marconi equipment on my desk connected to four tall aerials outside. Such responsibility was not lost on me and, like a friendly and concerned spider at the centre of its web, the succulent prize was drawn to a safe landing by more and more accurate bearings the closer it got.

With Bill Brown, another operator, we hammered two Mosquito droptanks together with spars of wood to make a crude type of catamaran. Homespun paddles took us halfway across the estuary on an afternoon’s exploring trip, and water gushing in led me to wonder if the plywood hadn’t been made at Toone’s factory three years before. We aimed towards shore in the remaining tank, until that also split along the bottom, marooning us on a shelf of bush-covered mud on the edge of the mangrove swamps.

The tide was on its way in but, having spotted the name ‘Alligator Shoal’ on a map in the signals’ office, I didn’t relish swimming the necessary distance to firmer ground, though what there was to wait for neither of us knew. I kept the thought to myself as to whether we would make it to safety, finding interest in white clouds above the water, or in the green hills of Johore. Due on watch in a couple of hours, and though by now imbued with the anarchic spirit of ‘couldn’t care less’, it was plain that life would turn serious indeed should duty be missed.

A Chinese fisherman, upright in a sampan and pushing the oars before him, glided from behind the bushes, having already seen the half-submerged tangle of our homemade craft, and veered towards us. Barely fitting into his boat, water level with the sides but sliding harmlessly by, he put us ashore near the wireless hut. We lacked the verbal means of saying thank you, and our gestures turned his wrinkled face into a sketch of laughter.

After a month at Seletar, four of us signallers were ordered to the staging post of Butterworth, a few hundred miles up the Straits of Malacca. I was glad to do more travelling, especially in an Avro-19, which lifted from the runway at Changi and followed a route marked on my map from Langar. The sea to port was stippled with ships and junks, waterways meandering through coastal swamps. Eastwards the jungle backbone of the peninsula was topped by cumulo-nimbus, and I speculated on the chances of finding out what the terrain would be like to hike in. Tarzan films, as well as too much Rider Haggard and Edgar Wallace, fuelled a congenital urge to go into a tropical rain forest and perhaps discover something about myself, or at least break such romantic notions of adventure by a dose of reality.

The thought was momentary, and premature, the others in the plane pointing through the windscreen at Penang, not so densely forested nor half so high as the mountains, but a jewel-like island lost sight of as the pilot banked over the water towards Butterworth airstrip, set the plane neatly down, and taxied to the ramshackle control tower.

Life was more basic, billets of long thatched huts, called bashas, among coconut palms on the beach facing the ships in George Town harbour. My horror of snakes diminished on closer contact, and in any case few were dangerous, though a rustling in the latrine bucket taught one soon enough to button up quickly.

The HF/DF hut where I worked was a patch-roofed eight feet by eight structure a couple of miles up the coast and off the far end of the airstrip, set on a square of beaten mud in the middle of a paddy field. A python which occasionally splashed its proprietorial way across the water was ignored, but when a small snake curled around the leg of a farmer ploughing with his buffalo outside my hut he pulled so violently that the reptile snapped in two, and though it had already bitten and drawn blood he must have known it was not venomous as he went on stoically with his labour.

I jumped from the back of the lorry on the runway with my haversack of rations and descended to the raised path to begin the nightwatch, having barely room to pass the afternoon operator on his way out, so that we had to edge around each other to avoid slipping into a foot or so of water on either side. First thing to do at the hut was sign on in the log book and check what if anything was happening on the frequency, signifying that the responsibility for the next fourteen hours was all mine, as it had been when put on my own machine at the factory, or installed in the runway caravan on air-traffic control.

Chair, table, bed and a small cupboard furnished my residence, with the big outside for a toilet. The childhood fantasy of my cousin Jack and me had been that all one needed for a happy life was just such a hut as I now had charge of, and I would have been content to live there for more time if need be than the duration of the usual stint. A Sten submachine-gun and Short Lee Enfield rifle, with plenty of ammunition, completed the outfittings, and in the hour of light still left I cleaned both guns, firing a few rounds into the water from the Sten to be sure it worked, and hammering a steel rod down the barrel to get the bullet out when it jammed.

The music of the spheres came into my earphones, and I communicated in Morse with Rangoon and Singapore, chatted to Saigon using my bits of French, and even for half an hour after dawn made contact with such far-away places as Karachi, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Every transmitter, even if of the same make, had a different tone and, no need of call signs, one soon learned to know them at the moment of their tune-forking into the ears.

This furthest outstation of the camp was connected by field telephone to the control tower a mile away, and though letters home were marked ON ACTIVE SERVICE I never felt anything but safe after shutting the doors and lighting the place from the power of a large accumulator. Mysterious splashings from outside were ignored as I sat at the table reading, and when appetite struck there was a tin of sardines or cheese, and half a loaf in the metal ammunition box used for keeping provisions dry and free from insects. A primus to make tea was slightly less demonic than the specimen at Seletar, but I had got the hang of using it, and could brew up in double-quick time — of necessity on the stove because there was no gathering of wood in a paddy field.

I was allowed to close my station for the night, unless a late plane from Singapore was on its way with mail and supplies, in which case I would listen until it landed. Stretching out on the string bed, proper sleep was hardly possible, for at the slightest sound my right hand would touch the loaded rifle with its short meat-skewer-type bayonet firmly in place.

Opening the wide doors to daylight at the operating time of seven o’clock a wash of blood-red sun from over the palm forest slowly painted the stalks of rice swaying in the water. A flushing out of my insides with a dose of strong tea was followed by a snack if I was hungry. Taking stock of the larder, two tins of sardines were surplus to requirements, and on my giving them to the Chinese farmer already ploughing near the hut he took off his wide round hat and smiled acceptance, and presented a coconut of appreciation to the man who came on after me, unable perhaps to tell us one from the other.

An aircraft on a regular early morning meteorological reconnaissance tapped out its reports, which figures were telephoned to the control tower for analysis. The frequency (or wavelength) was also used by any plane in distress and, when the navigator of a Beaufighter sent an SOS, the Singapore operator and myself fixed his crash-landing site accurately enough for him and the pilot to be picked up from an uninhabited island by Air Sea Rescue two hours later.

Monsoon time brought frequent rain, and on the long watch, light off during sleep to save power, came the noise of an atmospheric battleground such as I had never heard before. I recalled how my Grandmother Burton, at the first distant rattle of thunder, would shelter under the stairs with an oil lamp till the storm was finished. How, I wondered, would she cope with this?

Ripples without let-up lighted the hut through the cracks. Chilled sweat was in my bones by morning, and a foot of water, in which floated a small drowned snake, washed around my bed. The primus was also submerged, meaning that breakfast must be put off for a while.

It was plain that the directional properties of the aerials were useless, so the signals officer telephoned permission for me to get out. Laden with rifle, Sten gun, ammunition, haversack, and log books stuffed between vest and shirt to keep them as dry as possible, I set off for the runway. The path had been washed down, which meant wading through the flood, cape flapping uselessly in horizontal rain, to a lorry waiting on the tarmac. That patched and eerie place was closed and dismantled, and I worked for a while in the comfortable signals section on the camp, no longer able to give bearings, but keeping the frequency open for distress calls and emergency air traffic.

The fifty-hour working week left time for a derelict boat found on the beach to be lovingly tarred and carpentered, fitted with rowlocks, tiller and a mast. A dozen of us contributed many hours to its upkeep, as if under the skin of airmen lay the frustrated souls of matelots. We sculled, or tacked with a fullblown but patched spinnaker, to ships in George Town harbour, dodging multicoloured little sea snakes for a swim over the side, and at dusk hauling it up the shelving beach to safety from the waves.

Scads of my hair began to come out and, horrified at having a pink skull like every man of my father’s family, I asked my mother to send a bottle of Silvikrin — as advertised in monthly editions of the Daily Mirror which she sometimes posted and which went on their rounds through the billet. Perhaps my hair was too thick anyway, and humidity made the excess fall, because after a while it stopped, so that baldness was never part of my fate.

For reading there was Life Magazine and the New Yorker, and slightly risqué stories in publications from Australia. The camp library provided Tolstoy’s Sevastopol, as well as The Kreutzer Sonata which puzzled me with its theme of fatal jealousy, and also a history of the Franco-Prussian War. Ronald Schlachter, another wireless operator, lent me I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves, which novels caused me to remark fatuously how exciting it must have been to live in Roman times.

‘Maybe not,’ Schlachter replied, ‘because bods like us would have been slaves.’

On a little wind-up gramophone we heard Harry James’ ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee,’ and made fun of ‘Sparky’s Magic Piano’. Time was passed in the NAAFI over pints of Tiger Beer, or we would walk up and down the beach and watch fishermen drawing in their catches of weird tropical fish, mindless pleasures after hours of concentration at the wireless.

A motor launch took us on picnic and swimming trips to Tiger Island, and leper huts between palm trees on Pulau Jerejak brought down a lugubrious silence in the few minutes passing. At the apex of our lives, a superstitious horror was felt at the closeness of human beings in the grip of incurable disease. Neither doctors nor maimed were visible, and we imagined those in the shuttered buildings slowly dying, and that being set apart from society in their contagion they must be suffering the greatest pain and humiliation of all.

Some old hands in their early twenties who had been abroad as long as four years waited impatiently for the number of their demobilization group to be made known. They invariably heard it even before the commanding officer of Butterworth, for as soon as it was decided at the Air Ministry which group was to be released that month a wireless operator at RAF Uxbridge would clandestinely tap out the number, with neither preamble nor signature, to an alert operator in Gibraltar, who relayed it to Egypt, from where it was bounced against the Heaviside Layer to Karachi, and spun on from there to Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore, a string of dots and dashes pinging and ponging halfway round the world in a few minutes. Whispering the number in the camp caused wireless operators to be regarded as beneficent magicians, and an occasional second helping came from the cooks at happy news passed on.

The trade of wireless operating blended with my temperament, and in the dead of night I would tune in on the spare radio to hear phrases of primitive music from the ionosphere, or a brewpot of jangled avant-garde sounds in no known language stirred around in the steely cackle of atmospherics. Such noises suggested other worlds where mysterious activities took place, and my pencil hovered in readiness for a spate of automatic writing, as if a text of vital importance to my life and spirit might suddenly come out of the Babel-screed.

Living from one wireless watch to the next, and with the time in between fully occupied, either the mind did not apparently exist, or what there was of it can never be recalled. Thought was expressed only in action, and if there were any thoughts they were so banal as to leave no mark in the memory. The most trivial actions drown the recollection of thought, though a semblance of inner turmoil indicated that the fusing of such wires could not go on for long without breaking, and that thought and action might one day separate from their apparently perfect marriage.

On the blackest of nights, when no aircraft were flying or land stations able to catch one’s Morse, I called up God and asked him to explain how the universe had been made and how far it was to the end of it. The fact that I had always told myself I did not believe in Him was brushed aside by the effrontery of the question coming to mind and acted on. Nor did His understandable refusal to respond deter me from asking a second or even a third time. Having a Morse key and a transmitter, it seemed a natural question to put. After all, He might have answered.

Chapter Twenty-one

As long as work was done well we weren’t much troubled. Shorts and plimsolls barely resembled a uniform in walking around the camp, but slovenly we never were, the only call for proper dress when stepping forward to salute before receiving a wad of dollar notes, or on any business in the headquarters area.

After a technical examination and speed test for Morse I was reclassified Aircraftsman First Class, bringing my rate of pay up to three pounds a week. All success in the RAF was measured by merit, which is why it seemed for a time my natural home. The week before the test I memorized simple circuit diagrams as if they were maps — as indeed they were — from AP 1726, the wireless operator’s vade mecum. I hardly knew what they meant but, with my practical experience, I passed at the high rate of seventy-two per cent.

As soon after pay parade as time off came, no buttons to shine though shoes had been well polished by our ‘bearer’, we rickshawed to Mitchell Pier and took the ferryboat Bagan to Penang. Alan Crossley, Frank Pardy or Ronald Schlachter guaranteed a ready group for a meal of rice with an egg on top at the Boston Café, then to see a film such as Cairo or Watch on the Rhine, followed by an evening with taxi-dancing Eurasian girls at the City Lights.

A Chinese tailor ran me up a suit of white drill so that I could dress like any other European civilian on walking out of camp. At the Whiteaway Laidlaw department store in George Town I was measured for a sports jacket and trousers for use in England — where clothes were rationed and in utility style — attended by a white assistant as if in a shop back home, and not caring what was in his mind as he called me ‘sir’.

From the camp, or better viewed from the rowing boat out in the Straits, a mountain could be seen twenty-odd miles to the north, called Kedah Peak, or Gunong Jerai, set apart from the main range and rising to 4,000 feet as if, on the western side, coming straight out of the sea. The colouring, according to the state of sun and cloud, might give the illusion that the area of surrounding jungle was much larger than it was. Darker clouds on the summit could also make it seem higher and more remote, and thus even more tempting to explore.

I considered going on a bicycle to reconnoitre, prior to tackling the Peak on foot, having created in my mind an irresistible exercise ground of wonders and hardship. Its distinctive summit was the last unusual topography seen before going to bed, and the first tantalizing sign on walking between palm trees to the wash house with towel and toilet bag in the morning. The George Town library gave little information, except for a book saying that a king once lived on its slopes who had fangs and drank human blood, which superstitious belief was interesting only for as long as the smile lasted.

On wireless watch, keen to keep a meticulous log, I recorded the ding-dong interchange of signals on to spare paper, then entered them neatly into the book when a free moment came. Sharing the watch periods with Frank Pardy, Pete Spruce and ‘Tash’ Horton, we shepherded aircraft on their journeys across South-East Asia. Every direction-finding station, along the route and off, would exchange all information and position reports about any plane airborne in case something should go wrong.

An old log book, which I still have but shouldn’t, records how a non-stop Lancastrian, on its lonely route from Karachi to Singapore during the night of 12–13 January 1948, was tracked by its airfield of departure, monitored by Negombo in Ceylon, picked up by me at Butterworth, and drawn to base by Singapore. Fussy and proprietorial, we listened even when atmospherics bushed the eardrums hour after hour up to midnight and through to dawn, ever on the alert for that half-murdered squeak of urgent Morse from an aircraft homing through the night.

Parts of the kampong area around Mitchell Pier were declared out of bounds to all airmen because of prostitutes setting up in business. Having the reputation of being knowledgeable about maps, I was asked to make a coloured enlargement from the one-inch sheet on which to show the forbidden zone, handiwork to be lodged within a glass-framed noticeboard at the gate.

Shortly afterwards, the CO having no plan of the airfield and its outstations, I was given a hand-held compass and asked to do a survey. For a few days, with a bag of instruments, and lunch in my haversack — looking now and again for a red light from the tower warning me to get out of the way because a plane would be landing — I wandered the runway and its environs taking bearings. Such work was an enjoyable combination of the physical and the technical, joining my knowledge of air navigation to what I had learned years ago about surveying in Practical Knowledge for All.

The length, alignment and width of the runway provided a ready-made base line on which to triangulate from either end the various radio facilities, the fuel store, the fire engine shed, and control tower. Magnetic variation was zero, so all angles read true, simplifying matters still further. Halfway through, much data already transferred from notebook to drawing board, the clerk of works came across a plan made after the construction of the base and I was, as it were, laid off.

When a Dakota transport descended on to the airstrip early in 1948, a tractor took the crates from its belly to a dry site several hundred yards beyond the runway on the opposite side to the paddy field. The wherewithal for a new HF/DF station had arrived, and I was sent out to begin operating the moment it was put up, as if the wireless mechanic seconded for the job had only to wave a wand and the scattered pieces would join themselves together.

Older than me by a year, he sat on the bare earth with a toolkit at his feet, looking at the crates through cigarette haze as if wondering what to do next. I felt sceptical as to his abilities, unable to conceive why a sergeant and several men hadn’t been sent up to do such work, but after a while he stood up and took off his cap — he was in full khaki drill uniform — ambled to the nearest crate, and split it open. In something like a couple of hours, with hardly any assistance from me, he erected and bolted together the wooden sides of the hut, then put on the roof. A few hours later, when the aerials were in place, we carried the Marconi-Adcock equipment inside. Next morning, after a special plane sent from Singapore had tested the bearings and found them as perfect as could be, the station was declared operational. The mechanic then hopped the next flight back to Changi.

Neither assistance nor supervision was necessary at the D/F hut, and in any case there was only one chair to sit on, unless advantage was taken of an old cable drum outside. The morning and afternoon watches were interesting because more aircraft were about. During the nightwatch, the air muggy though slightly cooler, traffic was slack, and I lounged in the cane armchair with earphones around my neck, reading a borrowed copy of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, an absorbing but tragic story concerning the sort of people I had known, which left me with a feeling of hopelessness about their condition. A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison fell in the same genre, yet he was less sombre because the style was more polished, the plot more artful. I was amused by The Diary of a Nobody, though snatched any likely item the library could provide, whatever the quality, including books by H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse, Rafael Sabatini, P. C. Wren and Warwick Deeping.

On the standby radio at midnight the haunting music of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suite Number Two came shortwaving through static out of some place in the Pacific, as if it had followed me halfway round the world from a summer’s evening in Nottingham when I had heard it in the house alone and thought that my soul would burst. This adventitious repeat in the hut indicated a black hole in my personality that must sometime start to fill, though it was impossible to know how it would happen from the not sufficiently unhappy state I was locked into.

By dawn, sleep had nearly won. Convinced the log book was kept in precise block capitals, an hour later showed the letters spider-crooked. The early morning aircraft sending its met report, or calling for a bearing, helped me to wakefulness, after which I made tea on the primus, and waited for the lorry to take me back to camp. Dawn sunlight on Penang made a spectacular flood of menacing green and mercurial vermilion on the landscape, and I wrote a score of lines which, hardly knowing what to make of them, came out as a kind of free verse poem from which all emotional content was missing.

Some kind of change in my life must have been taking place within the agreeable trance of duty done and leisure enjoyed, a spirit clandestinely deciding what my fundamental obtuseness would not be able to deny when the moment of reality came. There was no intimation that such was on its way, because a vague day-to-dayness was the whole of my existence, and I belonged to where I was to the extent that such feelings as weighed on me from time to time did not allow me to see into the future, or imagine anything I could not bear to contemplate.

It was not part of my nature to live without a goal, however, so I began assembling a group of friends to explore the Kedah Peak area. Schlachter and I pedalled to Bukit Mertajam and, leaving our bikes by the railway line, shinned up 1,800 feet of its forested hill in an afternoon, so easy a climb not to be expected, however, on Kedah Peak. I persuaded Ron Gladstone, a wireless mechanic, to come on the trip, and we made an appointment to see Mr Robb, the Chief Surveyor in George Town, who during half an hour of his time told us he had ascended the Peak in 1939, but from the northeast, where a motorable track went almost to the summit.

This sounded too easy for us, who intended going up from the south, which Mr Robb didn’t believe to be feasible, because the area was covered in primary jungle, and tigers were said to roam there. This only increased our enthusiasm and, realizing there was nothing further to say, he provided us with the necessary map sheets, and wished us luck.

An education officer recently posted to the station ensured that travelling players passed our way. Dangerous Corner and Dover Road were put on in the NAAFI, and an occasional lecturer came to talk on current affairs. Classes in Malay were started, but few could be attended by me because they clashed with times on watch. In any case, who was there to practise with? The dance-girls at the City Lights laughed when I tried.

Flight-Lieutenant Rice, the education officer, perhaps encouraged by his wife, found sufficient talent to form a concert party. Mr Margolis, the airstrip meteorologist (together with his wife) also liked the idea, as did others from the signals section who, having the kind of intelligence which wasn’t afraid to show enthusiasm, enrolled in ‘The Butterworth Variety Group’.

For some reason it was decided that I should recite the Stanley Holloway monologues ‘Albert and the Lion’ and ‘How Sam Won the Battle of Waterloo’, as well as render a couple of Cockney songs such as ‘When Father Papered the Parlour’ and ‘I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I Am’. The Lancashire and London accents weren’t familiar, but a talent for mimicry enabled me to convince, in a comic sort of way. Nor had I ever memorized so many lines (or any at all, come to that) but jettisoning all timidity I took on the parts with sufficient gusto to amuse.

My involvement in the concert party helped to gain Mr Rice’s backing for the expedition to Kedah Peak. He presented the scheme as an educational experience to the CO, whose permission I naively hadn’t thought to be necessary providing we went in our own time. But such official blessing gave access to all facilities, and in April four of us borrowed the Jungle Rescue jeep to have a look at the area.

Beyond the kampong of Semiling, leaving the jeep at the estate manager’s house, we walked four miles between rubber trees and by the Sungei Bujang, to a dam where the track ended. The stream bed was wide and shallow, rocks scattered here and there, and we probed a few hundred yards north till the steep and seemingly impenetrable jungle reared to either side. Heavy knives would be needed to cut a way through, though we hoped to ascend most of the way by the stream, then zig-zag up the few hundred feet of escarpment (marked clearly on the map) to the summit. Ron Coleman, George French, Ron Gladstone, Ron Sanger and myself finally set the date. The CO insisted that an officer go with us, and Flight-Lieutenant Hinshall-wood, the camp dental surgeon, volunteered. We were also told to take a backpack wireless and keep in Morse contact with the camp. Since two of us were operators and one a mechanic this seemed no difficulty, and a twice daily schedule was worked out.

Gladstone thought that for fitness’ sake he and I should spend an hour running up and down the beach every evening, but after a couple of half-mile jogs my chest seemed full of rusty nails. I considered myself as fit as ever in my life, and that whatever happened on Kedah Peak running was not likely to be called for. Nor did Gladstone continue the exercise.

Appointed navigator, I collected the same compass used on my aborted airstrip survey, and enlarged a map of the Peak area to leave space for detail not on the Survey of Malaya sheets. Certain parts of the projected route were enlarged six times in outline for plotting bearings from subsidiary summits to give our position, and bound atlas-wise to avoid opening a larger map.

Gladstone assembled the stores, including rifles and a shotgun, with fifty rounds for each. We devised a list of rations to last ten days, most of the food in tins and weighing nearly 200 pounds which, divided between us, clocked each pack on the scales at almost half our body weight. After a medical check declared us fit the MO insisted that we have a typhus inoculation, and take anti-malaria tablets for ten days before departure (and for ten days afterwards), this latter precaution seeming unnecessary, since we were going into an uninhabited area.

On the morning of 12th June, all ready to leave, a worried man came to the lorry from the wireless section and said they couldn’t get the pack radio to work. A condition being a condition, indeed an order, we should not have gone, but the power of optimism prevailed over insubordination, and the confidence induced by a six o’clock breakfast made it impossible to abort what had been in preparation for weeks. Hinshallwood, by now as keen as the rest of us, looked up into the palm leaves and said nothing, so Corporal Coleman banged against the cab, and told the driver in no uncertain terms to pull his finger out and get moving.

Chapter Twenty-two

The Kedah Peak trip — for it was no more than that — has been used in various of my books, spun-dried to produce outlandish shadows of fictional characters. The present account, shunning exact repetition as far as possible, tries a peeling back of the skin so as to reach the truth of the experience, though it is unlikely to get much closer. Only by what came afterwards can light be realistically flashed back to when half a dozen of us vanished for six days from the world. During that short enough period Chinese communist bandits began killing whoever they could of the British, service personnel or otherwise, in an effort to terrorize them out of the country so that they could set up a Marxist government.

It is fairly certain that the officer commanding RAF Butterworth wished the exercise of climbing Kedah Peak had never been conceived, especially since we had set off without radio communication and could not be recalled. Perhaps I exaggerate, yet six of his men were apparently lost in the jungle, which in those early days of the Malayan Emergency was assumed to be swarming with competent and ruthless guerrillas waiting in well-prepared ambush positions for just such noddy-boy action men as us.

We were seen by the CO, perhaps, as a group of lunatic, disobedient and sedentary signals types unable to give much fight if attacked, or to survive in such terrain even if we weren’t, and he wasn’t to know he couldn’t have been more wrong — though his anxiety was understandable. I don’t recall whether news of our disappearance was given to South-East Asia Command at Singapore, but he must have passed some uncomfortable days wondering whether or not our names would have to be added to those already filling the casualty lists.

A search party was sent by lorry to our jumping-off place, for I had left details and a sketch map of the route with the education officer. Once there, as we gathered later, they walked a short way up the Sungei Bujang beyond the dam, blew a few blasts on whistles whose noise would have been smothered by the first high waterfall if not before and, realizing in any case the futility of their task, withdrew. By this time we were several miles away, well above the 3,000-foot contour line and close to the Peak.

As if to prove that the RAF always looks after its own (and it did), the search party next day drove almost to the Peak on the track leading in from the north-east, but by now we were well on our way down. On the sixth day we noticed the silver fuselage of an Avro-19 flying over a clearing where we had paused in the sun to dry our clothes, and imagined it to be passing on a postal run to Rangoon, whereas it had been sent to look for us.

It was eleven o’clock before we set off on the first morning, rocks underwater so coated with algae that a couple of us capsized before establishing a suitable balance for walking. Even in my factory days I hadn’t carried so much, at least not on my back and for such long hours, and the others must have felt it even more.

Corporal Coleman took charge of our party because he had done some bushwhacking in East Africa. A few years older, and experienced enough to know that the first day ought to be easy, he said nothing at our stopping for lunch, or when we later stripped off by a pool to swim, as if out on an extended picnic.

At three o’clock the stream narrowed into a ravine, and our only way forward was to cut a way up into the jungle. Soon afterwards the world changed to a maelstrom of rain which hammered at first as on a roof, and then gathered to fall in plate-sized splashes from the ceiling of trees, drenching us in seconds. Vegetation was so dense that visibility was never more than a few yards.

We floundered up the steep bank through reddish mud, grasping at creepers, and cutting at those which blocked our way. It was a good initiation into the worst kind of travel, and we took it with little humour, merely bashing our way forward and advancing when we could. After a few hours, the day coming to a close, we found a way back to the stream and laid out camp on a large flat bed of rock. Dry wood was got from somewhere, and mess tins of mouth-watering Maconochie’s meat-and-vegetable stew were soon simmering between hot stones.

‘Camp’ was a misnomer, for we carried no tents, and spread groundsheets over the rock before pulling a blanket over us, mosquito nets suspended from overhanging bushes. The sentry system never gave more than four hours’ sleep: knowing nothing about bandits, we took precautions as if by instinct, and certainly no marauders could have surprised us during the night. The two on guard were well separated, though able to communicate by signs, sitting quiet and watchful with loaded rifles, safety catches off so that even the faint click before firing would not betray us. The CO need not have worried, born as we seemed to be with the know-how of infantry.

The next morning, Sunday, compass bearings plotted us at less than a mile in from the dam and about nine hundred feet higher, little enough to show for a day. We ate breakfast of hardtack biscuits and tinned bacon, packs from then on becoming somewhat lighter after each camp.

We struggled the next three days closer to the Peak, following the stream when we could, but mostly chopping and pulling our way up and down through primeval forest. I had never done anything so energetic, yet didn’t question why I was there, living from minute to minute in the cocoon of effort, isolated from any feeling or emotion the world might have to offer; no novelty, but different scenery. In the midst of purpose realized, this is what I had wanted to do, nothing more and nothing less, imagination and reality perfectly blending which, for the time being, was all there could be to life. Venture adventure: the marvellous end of it all, yet by no means an end.

How the others explained such a climb-and-slither to themselves I did not know, since what was in my own mind was hardly of a questioning nature. Thought and action were hide-bound together, and in any case one was almost too exhausted to think, always striving to grasp the right creeper with which to haul oneself up the bank, and to prevent rolling with top-heavy kit when going down gradient. The only talk came in warnings, jocular complaints and half-cock remarks, until camp was set in the evening, when a certain amount of badinage made the meal pleasant. Soon afterwards, all but those on guard lay in the undergrowth to sleep.

There was a feeling that, having got myself locked into this rain-soaked forest, I had come as far in my life as possible, that this was the zenith of my physical existence, and nothing in that sense could be the same again. The success of the experiment must have consisted partly in not having to speculate on what that success was to entail. Thoughtlessness and acceptance contributed to my enjoyment of being there, for I loved all that was hazardous and arduous, gloried in those occasional glimpses of the ash-grey Peak, lifting from a muffler of forest, that had to be struggled for because it was there. Pack and rifle on my back, and hacking a trail where no one had bothered to go before, it was as if I had to reach the Peak not only for the struggle to be over but for a different life to begin, though during my self-imposed and not altogether unpleasant travail this life was real indeed.

For days we hardly saw the sky through the netting together of enormous treetops. Knowing at the same time how minor our little exercise was compared to those of the heroic Fourteenth Army in Burma during the war, it was nevertheless a taste of endurance in that the first week must always be the worst, and we knew by the end of ours that we could have gone on much longer, although a parachute drop of food and new boots would have been appreciated.

Curiously enough there was, for the first couple of nights, something never before noted in my life: difficulty in getting to sleep. My daylight soul would not depart with its accustomed speed on my head going down, and though the delay may not have lasted as long as it seemed in my impatience, the wonder and irritation was noticed. The cause was obviously the strangeness of my bed and situation, the noise of rushing water, the unwillingness to relinquish alertness, and the damp discomfort.

By the end of the fourth day, a couple of hundred feet below the Peak, our way was blocked by an escarpment that we could not climb. A little beyond lay the Dak bungalow of our dreams, but we didn’t have the wherewithal to scale the wall and reach it. Not too disappointed, as if lack of success was also part of the adventure, we clung to the muddy undergrowth of the ledge much, we joked, like those explorers in The Lost World of Conan Doyle, and at nearly 4,000 feet dozed as best we could.

The view in the cold dawn was more inspiring for being hard earned: we saw the kind of terrain we had come through to be where we were: miles of dark green interlocking cauliflower tree-tops hiding our plodding serpentine approach and, before rain clouds came in again, a vista of clear land beyond, with its seeming paradise of paddy fields and rubber plantations, kampongs and rivers, and islands off the coast in the sombre glow of the rising sun. Instead of a short slog over the top to the bungalow, from where we could have telephoned for a lorry and been back at Butterworth in a few hours, we had a day’s trek and slither down through thornbush till reaching the usual jungle.

Unable to follow our track made on the ascent, a cliff face stopped us dead and seemed impossible to cross. We had been cut off from water for twenty-four hours, and needed to reach the stream, whose course would also make navigation easier. It wasn’t known how feebly or otherwise a scattering of bushes gripped the rock, but we decided to chance it and, nerving ourselves, got over by a narrow ledge. Sometimes in my dreams I see that awesome drop.

At the night’s camp, which point had taken three days to reach on the way up, the stream was flowing strongly. Tearing down rotted boughs for a bonfire, a few yards into the trees, I was falling asleep on my feet, something which happened to the others at different times. But for me it was new, my senses so disorientated that I seemed to be elsewhere, yet at the same moment where I was, indicating not only that I no longer knew for a certainty where I was, but that wherever it was I couldn’t feel sure I wanted to be there, a peculiar sensation impossible to forget.

For a few moments my mind was divided, one part in the forest with noise from the rushing stream, and the other in a dimly illuminated room of no place possible to locate, but with a fainter sound of water nearby. My senses switched at will (but not my will) from one state to the other, perhaps as much a symptom of exhaustion as an indication of that splitting of the mind which would later not only enable me to understand more clearly what was going on around me, but to make use of that gap between thought and action necessary for spiritual development.

As energetic as ever next morning, and expecting to spend further nights in the forest, we fixed each other’s packs into the most comfortable positions (for our backs were now scarred from the weight) and adjusted bush hats at the jauntiest old-hand slant, which stayed that way only while in the clearing.

Trees had fallen at all angles. Some, of a wider diameter than the length of a man, blocked our way along the stream now and again, while others in deep forest had been down and undisturbed so long that the boot, on crunching through the covering of crisp bark, sank into purple softness inside.

Looking at my map of the area, and comparing it with the log sheet, each camp site must have been fixed on counting the tributaries entering the main stream, by plotting compass bearings (which often meant guessing the identity of a jutting hilltop momentarily revealed by dissolving mist or lifting cloud), noting the disruption of contours close to a ravine or pool, and reading an aneroid barometer before using the conversion formula to make a fair estimate of the height. Positions in six-figure map references showed our tracks with more confidence than was felt at the time, and if correct at all it was as much by guesswork as skill in navigation. No amount of care could have produced better evidence of a will to stamp a pattern on what was felt to be uncharted, a desire to suggest order where little or none existed, and to posit knowledge of the half known as much in myself as on a few square miles of jungle.

No places were dry for long, but we disregarded the frequent soaking of everything on our backs: while stripping off by the stream to get rid of leeches we saw the Avro-19 searching for those who were thought to be lost.

We went up into the jungle for the last time to bypass a ravine, then waded down the river which on the first day had been paddled along. Almost to our surprise, by four o’clock in the afternoon, the forest opened out and we were through. Hinshallwood walked across the dam to the hut, and telephoned the camp for a lorry to meet us. Our ragged patrol, boots almost off our feet, marched four more miles to the main road rather than wait to be picked up by the edge of the forest.

Chapter Twenty-three

Wearing our smartest khaki drill, we lined up in the CO’s office with the confidence of the absolutely guilty. In phrases of those days that salved the mind: butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths, and we didn’t have a leg to stand on.

I could not have felt more at ease. The CO had seen the diary and maps kept on the trip, and had already torn strips off Coleman and Hinshallwood, so on his asking why we had been so foolhardy as to vanish into the jungle for a week without taking a two-way wireless there was nothing we could do but stay silent. He went on for a while at how rash we had been, but a lightening of his features was detected when he concluded: ‘Next time, you’ll be carrying a full radio pack, because from now on you’re our Jungle Rescue Group. You’re the only ones on the station with the experience to go after any plane that crashes in that sort of country.’

‘You were lucky,’ Sergeant Flowerdew said, marching us out, and I wondered in what way he meant, but didn’t bother to ask. At the medical check on our return my weight had dropped a few pounds to 137, but we were passed as fit, and life was back to normal, except that the insurrectionary situation in the Peninsula deteriorated daily.

Miles from the camp, and isolated in a hut beyond the runway, D/F operators were vulnerable to terrorist bullets skimming through the night. Such a condition didn’t worry us, though we were aware of standing little chance against armed and silent men who might surprise us while busy at the radio. I erected an outpost system of tin cans on connected wires so that there might be a second or two in which to run into the dark with my rifle should any prowler come close.

Fancying one of the tins moved near midnight (it may have been the wind, or perhaps I was jumpy after all; certainly I was alert) I took the rifle, left the hut unlit, and stalked noiselessly through the elephant grass convinced someone lurked between me and the trees a few hundred yards away. Peering into the darkness, my shadow merged with that of the half moon, and when he moved I took aim, and let go a single round. The sharp echo went to heaven and down again, as if filling the whole province with noise while I fell back step by step towards the hut, and waited in concealment fifty yards to one side in case anyone else came close or appeared from the direction of the trees.

The noise of the shot brought a section of the Malay Regiment to my hut, but I denied having fired, and my word was taken. I doubt anyone was hit, though had no compunction at shooting to kill, since a person in the area at such a time could only have been coming to threaten me. A search for signs of a casualty in the morning revealed nothing. No one had said anything about the use or otherwise of firearms, in spite of the State of Emergency being well into its second month, but since we had them it seemed obvious that my rifle should be employed in accordance with the age-old maxim that the best way to defend oneself was to go out and meet the attacker halfway — at least.

All guns were later withdrawn from outstations and sent back to the armoury, on the assumption that if the hut was raided by the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army — no less — they would acquire first-class weapons and ammunition with little or no difficulty. To console us for being defenceless, patrols of native Malayan soldiers were increased in the area, but I saw few of them, and one night a whole platoon was found sleeping in the nearby fuel store, for which criminal misdemeanour they were dismissed from the service.

An operator who resented being without a weapon gave a bottle of whisky to a sergeant in the armoury in return for a Smith and Wesson revolver, and a carton of ammunition. He brought it in his pack on every watch, to lay loaded and cocked by the Morse key. I kept a bottle of rum to hand rather than continue with the uncertain advantage of a more lethal comforter — or adopt a course which was against regulations.

The four-engined Lincoln bombers of 97 Squadron flew to Malaya from the UK and began pounding suspected bandit hideouts in the jungle. All twelve would take off from Singapore island and head north-west, their wireless operators competing to be first in getting a bearing. As each string of Morse came hammering on the air I noted his call sign and told him to wait, and when they were in the correct queueing order I would go down the list until all were dealt with. Every bearing was sharp and therefore accurate, though it was hard to think their bombs hit much in the kind of jungle I knew about. But it was exhilarating to work with so many experienced operators in the sky at once, rather than spend hour after hour listening to mind-numbing atmospherics.

A company of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry were billeted in tents within the camp boundary, and HMS Belfast used George Town harbour as a base for up and down patrolling along the coast looking for boats smuggling arms to the terrorists. We didn’t reckon much to the Army signallers, who were trying, and not doing very well, to get a message by lamp over to HMS Belfast one night. Ronald Schlachter finally took over and rippled it across.

Schlachter and I made fun of the Emergency situation by initiating ‘Bandit Routine Orders’, which we persuaded one of the clerks to type on Orderly Room foolscap and pin to the noticeboard beside the legitimate Station Routine Orders. An average sample of our nonsense might be: ‘Bandits are to fall in at 0630 Hours to take up amble-and-bush positions at map reference 123987, stop. Catchee erks from ship with knees not yet brown, in crossbow fire between dock and NAAFI, stop. Signed by the Red Admiral: Get-sum Inn.’ They caused amusement for a few days, until torn down by an irate warrant officer.

I had expected to be in the Far East for two or three years, but it was decided that we would be trooping back to Blighty in July, after barely eighteen months. It seemed uneconomical of the air force, which had taken such trouble over our training, to let us go just as we had reached the height of our competence.

ROTB, the acronym for ‘roll on the boat,’ made a convenient code group for rattling out in Morse whenever the ennui bit deep, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to leave or not, a will o’ the wisp who couldn’t care less — on one level — carried along by the general euphoria of the men in the hut, who unanimously desired the boat trip back to civilian life, more able perhaps to imagine the future than I was. Most of them believed they had jobs to return to, and were not much troubled if they hadn’t, since there was work for everyone in those days. Demobilization for me was a precipice over which to do a free-fall into reality, but I could see only as far ahead as the ship departing from Singapore in six weeks’ time.

A difficult decision still had to be made, however, because the signals chief, Flight-Lieutenant Power, called me into his office and asked if I would care to stay on a few more years. He did so perhaps because some weeks earlier the wireless operator of an aircraft had mentioned me in a report saying I should be thanked for the way I had worked under difficult circumstances. Or maybe the question was put to me because I was a volunteer and not a conscript.

An answer was wanted there and then, as I stood stiffly, and baulked at the blunt enquiry. I was tempted to stay on, as happy in Malaya as I had ever been anywhere, wireless operating a compatible job I could have done to the end of my days. Had time been given to think I might well have said yes, but then felt slightly disloyal when a voice in me insisted on saying no which, as things turned out, was the correct decision to have made.

Having committed myself, I played with the notion of using my service qualifications to get a Postmaster General’s Certificate of Wireless Telegraphy, so as to become a radio officer in the Merchant Navy. If I didn’t want to take that amount of trouble I could re-enlist into the Royal Canadian Air Force, and receive twice as much pay for the work I was doing now. All I wanted was to live without effort, and do the kind of work I liked, as well as have the big decisions made for me.

The last weeks pulled along, the refrain of ‘roll on the boat’ moaned around the billet instead of said in a tone of hope and expectation, as if the moment would never come. The so-called Emergency had lost its excitement, and took on the ding-dong character of a crime wave that would — as indeed it did — last for years. Trains between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore were sometimes shot at from the bush, but the more murder and mayhem perpetrated by the bandits the less it seemed they could expect any kind of success.

After signing off from my last wireless watch a dozen of us were motored with full kit and a suitcase to Prai railway station. We travelled to Kuala Lumpur in a carriage with wooden seats, changing after dusk to one with bunks for our comfort, but which produced more sweat than sleep. In twenty-four hours we reached the same old Empire Dock at Singapore and, on 23rd July, our troopship Dunera, of 11,000 tons, was played off by the bagpipes of a Highland band.

Standing on the lower deck while crossing the Bay of Bengal a drop of water that splashed the back of my hand tasted like acid, the ship tumbling comfortably on through the monsoon at an average rate of twelve knots, not much more than the speed of a bicycle. Every four days I turned my watch-hand one hour in the direction of tomorrow, a mechanical gesture suggesting that even on a troopship a future of some kind might be possible.

At times I regretted leaving Malaya, sentimentally touched when ‘Beyond the Blue Horizon’ was played on the ship’s tannoy. Unlike my usual extravert self I preferred as much isolation as I could get. Up in the morning before most others I shaved in peace and put on a clean uniform, because after eight o’clock sea water only ran through the showers.

Asian deckhands wielded hoses almost as thick as their bodies, steely anacondas of salt water sluicing towards the scuppers. The usual marching tune brayed at ten from the speakers, while the knotted rope of the days was rewinding us back to Europe. There was nothing to do except now and again do as you were told, so I played patience, went to the canteen for a pint of beer, had a game or two of darts in the swaying saloon, and read (among other books) The Confessions of an Innkeeper by an amusing though snobby type called Fothergill.

On bulkhead duty I stood by steel doors in the very guts of the ship, which were to be shut flush if the sea broke in — whether from stray mines or icebergs I couldn’t decide — keeping my nightmare of a sudden wall of water well under control. Staying awake all night and sane was nothing to a wireless operator, but if any water did rush in it would be impossible to get off the ship from so deep down.

In the Red Sea the showers were warm and oily to the skin, and lime juice tepid. Falling asleep on deck in the sun, sweat from my body streaked out over the wood like piss from a dead-drunk. I should have known better, but managed to conceal the burned skin as we again crossed the Passage of the Israelites, and went through the Canal by night. A few days later Pantellaria was circled on my map, the glow of its lighthouse more attractive because Italian was spoken on the island.

Orders were tacked up on passing Gibraltar for changing into heavier Home Service uniform, back to sharp creases, and a cap badge hard to glisten in the salt air. Hammocks were slung in the claustrophobic warmth below, away from roughening weather, and one had to bend double on coming down late so as not to bump the undersides of those already ensconced. The duty NCO walked around flashing his light to see that all was well, or maybe to check that no one had gone missing over the side.

A stormy sea did not spoil my appetite, and perhaps from boredom I went balancing on goat’s feet up and down the companionways to fetch breakfast from the galley and deal it out: a large tea urn, basket of fresh bread, a plate of butter, a stone jar of bitter and excellent marmalade, and a steel pan of eggs, sausages and tomatoes.

In the Bay of Biscay, feeling in my haversack for the last Malayan cheroot, and finding shelter out of the soulful wind to light it, I climbed to the highest deck for a better view of the turbulent water, windows glowing in the white cliff-face of the bridge, the whole boat shuddering, lifting and churning its way forwards. I felt at the summit of my power (and indeed happiness) as if I had already lived for ever and saw a kind of future that only those who live from day to day can envisage — empty but without end. The absolute fearlessness of standing on the edge of a cliff in no danger of going over gave confidence to face whatever might be in store. The beautiful morning had ended, but with everything coming my way.