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As far as I was concerned I could never be bothered to get out of bed unless the bombing was so heavy my mother insisted and then she and I sat in the cupboard under the stairs. It was there that I witnessed real fear, almost to the point of terror for the first time. My mother had always been a cool customer in all circumstance. Whatever her emotions, and I have seen her white round the mouth with sheer anger; she was always dignified, usually kept her own council and apart for some slight indication as I have just described, one would not know her real reactions. On many nights when she insisted I join her, in what she referred to as the ‘cubby-hole’, we would hear bombs falling, windows rattling, but on only one occasion when I was at home did a stick of bombs actually threaten us. There were about six in a row. We could hear each explode with barely a second between them, which seemed an age, and there was a steady increase in the vibration of the explosion and in the noise each made. Inexorably they came, as steady as time itself and we were both sure one would hit us. It was then I saw my mother, she was white knuckled, rigid with such a fixed look on her face that I was more worried for her than where the next bomb might fall. It landed beyond us and the house shook. In the light of the torch, with the drama increased by the oblique shadows and sharp contrasts cast by it, I saw her slowly relax, but it was some time before she fully recovered.

The Balham Tube Station Disaster A considerable number of people in London generally, and our district in particular, took shelter from the blitz in the underground railway stations, sleeping on the platforms. There were other shelters, there were brick structures with heavy reinforced concrete roofs, a very common sight on the street corners of Belfast when I arrived there in ’42. Some people used Anderson shelters, made from corrugated steel and provided by the ARP for the householder to erect. You had to dig a hole about half the depth of the shelter height, then the body of the shelter which was like a tiny Nissan hut was put in place and covered with sandbags. The idea was fine if the base of the shelter could be drained and water prevented from getting in, otherwise within months of being erected they were useless. My grandmother was issued with a Morrison shelter some way through the war. This was nothing other than a dining table made from steel and capable of supporting beams and similar debris, should the house be damage. The idea was that the family slept under this thing every night.

It is only as the years have gone by that the true price, of what the Continentals and Russians paid in the Hitler War, has come to light. It dwarfs what I write here, but at the time we, on the receiving end, thought ourselves hard done by. On the night in question my friends and I had been off somewhere and were on our way home when we heard the air raid siren wail. Almost as soon as the guns opened up we heard the most awful bang and reckoned rightly that a bomb had fallen in Balham High Road, but we didn’t hang around to find out what had happened, for once discretion took over. It was therefore the following day before we heard of the disaster and the full extent of what had happened. The story we heard was that the bomb had fallen in the centre of the High Road over the platform area of the tube station, but that was all the damage that was done at that moment. Unhappily though, almost immediately, one of the last buses of the evening ran straight into the hole left by the bomb and burst a huge water main, this in turn poured gallons of water into the tunnel.

It was a disaster contrived by contributing circumstances, each of which, while serious would not have been catastrophic. The authorities knowing about the water main, had taken it into account in the planning. They had assumed that if the pipe received a direct hit the water would flood the street and then descend the escalator, so to avoid that eventuality they had installed water-tight doors which were shut at night. Coupled with this the station was at the lowest part of the line so that any water entering the station could not flow out, and last but not least, it had been designed as a station in peace-time, it was therefore merely an emergency measure, not a purposely designed air raid shelter in the accepted sense. I don’t remember the death toll, it is a matter of record, but most people knew someone who had experienced that awful night or perhaps perished.

The Guns I came home from evacuation in time for the blitz on London, so all the hassle of evacuation was totally negated, except it had been an incredible experience and I had learned more about life in one year than I would have in three or four, at home. At the time, among the younger people there was a level of excitement, which I suppose, was the same hysteria felt by our fathers, twenty-six years earlier. We were dying to get into the war, to join the others we had known at school who were two years older and already in uniform. Our only recourse was second best, if we couldn’t get into it, we would watch from the sidelines and perhaps also try to join the Home Guard. If my mother had known what we were up to in those early days of the blitz she would probably have tried to chain me to a water pipe, but she thought I was playing Ludo or some other parlour game in a friend’s house, as did all our parents. Fortunately, then, the telephone was the exception rather than the rule. Our little subterfuges, lies if you like, were easy to make convincing.
Around where we lived there were Ack Ack gun emplacements, there was one handy to Clapham South Station, on Clapham Common, and this was often our substitute for a night at the cinema. We had a rough idea when the raids would start and would go up to the Common and hang about outside the fence within which were several guns, manned by soldiers. We would hear guns and see the searchlight beams in the distance. Next there would be a sudden hiss and crack as our searchlight would arc-up and a huge, bright beam would shoot up into the air and move with a stiff but steady motion, like a bright stick of light, a gigantic pointer sweeping the sky, then the guns would open up and the immense noise of the first salvo was both startling and exciting.
What goes up, of course, must come down. The shells were timed to explode and designed to shatter into red-hot shards of jagged steel about four inches long and about three-quarters of an inch square in cross section, twisted and bent – lethal. These would fall to earth during an Ack Ack bombardment, hitting the pavement at speed, creating sparks and then ricocheting off into the darkness in any direction. Sometimes one could hear a sort of purring noise as they hurtled through the air. Everyone picked up their first when it was too hot to handle, but experience is a great teacher.
We wore tin hats we had scrounged because there was no warning when a shower of steel was likely to fall. It was not our guns that were the problem, they were making steel rain for someone over Wandsworth or Streatham. We were getting someone else’s shrapnel, and it was on you before you were aware. The cacophony of the guns obscured how close or distant the action was and therefore where the metal rain might fall. The strange thing was we were not afraid, merely afraid of missing some momentous historical moment, which we did. We were too young and too stupid. When something really serious really did happen, fortunately we were several streets away from Balham Station.
I remember the Parachute Mines, as we called them, they could clear a good many houses if they exploded . About half a mile from us, after a night’s raid the woman of a house in Upper Tooting went into her front, first-floor room to find a mine hanging by the ‘chute’ cord in the room. It had come through the roof but not exploded. Fortunately the army defused it.

I finished up with a Mr Bailey and his wife. He was a retired electrical engineer and had graduated from Oxbridge. His wife too had an academic background but her main interests were Craven A cigarettes and Bridge in that order, she was a chain smoker and had a small brown stain on her upper lip, just below her nose, to prove it. Bailey was a most interesting man. He had spent his latter working years before retirement designing under-sea armoured cables to carry telephone wires to the Continent and America, some were about six inches in diameter. He had short sections cut and mounted in brass and covered in heavy glass to act as doorstops and paper weights, but in fact they never stopped any door nor weighted paper, they were just left about, to trip the unwary. He was a semi invalid and his wife a tall ascetic woman of stern countenance and mien, as thin as a lath, always heralded by cigarette smoke, controlled us all, including Bailey, with a rod of iron. The house was actually a bungalow, set in modest grounds with macracarpa hedges and windbreaks of the same hedge set at angles in the lawn so Bailey could sit out there in shelter throughout most of the year
I was billeted with another man I’ll call Jim. He was more heavily built than I, with black hair and a dark complexion. He was very popular with the girls. Unsurprisingly I was not of the same opinion, but because we were billeted together, we were automatically friends. We cycled together to school in the mornings but rarely returned together, he generally had other fish to fry.
Mrs Bailey might have offered a stern appearance to the world and indeed was a stickler for discipline in every sense, but basically she was kind and above all patriotic to a fault – so much so that one day she committed what I thought of later as patriotic vandalism.
Patriotic Vandalism I have said elsewhere in the text that Ellen, my mother, had taught me to value articles, even to the extent that I hated playing marbles because I knew the lovely glass balls with their intricate patters of twisted, coloured glass would become chipped, so, when I was told by Mrs Bailey to start to punch holes in beautiful solid copper preserving pans and the like with a pick, I was appalled.
The war was not going well, Dunkirk had either been evacuated or was about to be and those of us living on or near the South Coast were convinced we would be invaded any time. We were all a little despondent but Mrs ‘B’ was in deep despair and it was about this time that the Government made another of its asinine edicts – the collection of gates, railings, copper, brass and aluminium for the war effort. Even at sixteen I could see the ramifications of such an instruction, it left the way open for abuse on a massive scale, any bent second hand dealer could lay down a store of brass ornaments and items which would fetch a fortune when the war ended, even if the Germans were victorious, and I pleaded with Mrs ‘B’ not to give her beautiful brass candlesticks, copper warming pans and the like, but her patriotism coupled with her feeling that Britain was about to disappear without trace made her blind to all I said. It only made the wound open again years later when the truth of that edict was made public and my schoolboy reasoning had been vindicated.
Fish Pie. I believe that normally the Baileys had a large bedroom and slept in separate beds because when we arrived our bedroom was separated from theirs by a folding timber partition. Jim and I slept in a double bed but everything either we or the Baileys said was discernible through the wooden wall so we devised a method of talking which made our speech sound like a vague mumble. We spoke using only the roof of our mouths, with our mouths open and we fuddled the consonant, with the result when we talked of Fish Pie it came out like ‘Igh Hi’
Although the Baileys had all the trappings of wealth, I don’t believe their income was what it had been before Mr Bailey retired. They were never mean, on the contrary, but I had just come from the Tates, and guessed this might have accounted for the regular appearance of Fish Pie on the menu. Jim and I ate separately in the glass conservatory overlooking the garden, an ideal place for a meal. The Baileys ate elsewhere. What they ate is unclear but we had Fish Pie until we were beginning to grow scales. Rationing was in force and there was certainly a shortage of basic food, but we lived in a village and there, I’m positive, some form of barter was the order of the day.
The fish pie was made from potatoes and pink salmon with a crusty top. Perhaps we made the mistake of praising it the first time we had it, but get it we did; and so at night when we went to bed we started talking about Igh Hi and then laughing to the point where sometimes we were almost hysterical. The more we laughed the more Mrs Bailey shouted through the partition and this only fuelled our sense of the ridiculous, especially when she asked us what we were talking about. It is strange that amidst all the momentous happenings during those years, that something as insignificant as a fish pie should stand out enough to be remembered with amusement if not affection.

Lewes – A Place Apart In retrospect there was something almost magical about the months I spent there. I was not aware of this at the time, I was often unhappy, but who is sublimely happy all the time, contrast gives colour. Lewes, the Town, was the hub, but it was really the district which was wonderfully anachronistic, such a revelation to the Town boy, contrasting to all he knew yet a living encapsulation of all he had read in novels, heard on the radio and imagined – it was pure Noel Coward and Ivor Novello
Incorporated into Lewes Grammar we resumed our education,. I was billeted in a village nestling against the South Downs in the Ouse Valley with a married couple, the Baileys. At first I didn’t like the idea of cycling 3 miles each way, every day, but later I realised I had been presented with a unique experience, one I would never have had if I had been billeted in the town. The village, just a collection of houses bordering the main street, itself a cul-de-sac, culminated in a path leading up into the Downs. There was a church hall for whist drives, the annual Christmas festival, the local drama group, in time the LDV; in fact, everything a village hall is expected to sustain. Opposite was the post office cum village shop, the hub of village gossip. In warm weather the village street acted as a funnel. Sitting high up on the hill studying, I found I could hear a conversation taking place below. Understanding what was said, I looked round and the only people in sight were women, half a mile below me, talking at the gate of the post office – they were gossiping. When they stopped and left, the sound stopped.
The Charm Of The Ouse Valley. On a map of the area between Lewes and Newhaven, you will see the Ouse valley with such lovely village names as North Ease, South Ease, Rodmel, and on the other side, Glynde with Glyndebourne. In 1939-40 it was an area given over to agriculture. There was a poet called Pound, who lived in Rodmel. Not Ezra Pound, but a local focus of interest. He had named all his children with Christian names beginning with ‘P’, so everyone opened the mail. This was typical of eccentricities I found in the Ouse Valley. There were marked social differences in the Valley. There were the farm labourers, maids and their families. Then there were the traders, the post mistress and shopkeepers in Lewes and also some of the farmers. Then there were the professional classes, the Baileys fell into this category, maybe the vicar, next came the gentlemen farmers, the inherited wealth and finally the dignitaries such as the MP and the squire. By association I was part of the professional group, but though I was never truly comfortable, I learned much through socialising. The general air of the whole area was ‘County’ with a capital ‘C’. In our own village was the local Squire. Whether he really was, I never knew, but with the name of Sir Amhurst Selby-Bigg he had every right to be. He and his wife would give out prizes at do’s and in the summer he generously threw his personal tennis court open to the village and we had tournaments there with breaks for Robinson’s Barley Water. There were wealthy farmers who were sociable and as we went to school with their children we had an ‘in’ to the higher echelons of farm life. We went to market with them, helped with the harvest and generally mucked in, but these were not the farmers we had helped prior to coming to Lewes, these were ‘gentlemen farmers’.
The winter of ’39-’40 was particularly severe, to the extent that when cycling to school the only way of turning the corner at the bottom of a particularly steep hill was to ride straight into a six foot high drift, extract oneself and then head off on the next leg. Later there was a sudden thaw followed by an equally quick freeze which left the roads coated in about an inch of ice. We evacuees made slides and the locals had ice skates and were to be seen pirouetting and twirling past us. We slowly integrated.
Even though the war had gone badly and there was the threat of invasion hanging over us, one cannot live in a state of frightened paralysis. Slowly our lives became normal as we entered into a routine and with the routine, helped by the friendship of the people of the Valley, came a wonderful period of my life which was totally foreign to what I had known before. While I was rubbing shoulders with the English class system at its most rigid, what I found there probably knocked any snobbery I might have had out of my outlook for all time. I think I must have seen it for what it was and eschewed it because instinctively, from a social aspect, I became classless.

Encyclopaedia, make no mention of Evacuation, which affected 5 million children, in June ’39, disrupted families whose children were dragged off into the depths of the country, but also the poor devils who had to look after them. Evacuation is a sort of two way mirror, showing each group how the other lived. Not all of us were small with labels tied to our lapels, some were in their last year at school and had to go because the school went. In Sussex I lived in four different homes, three far outside my own experience. We were taken to a Sussex village, assembled in the church hall where we camped out until fixed up with digs. My first home was in a children’s orphanage where I was very happy helping the older children look after the little ones, but that was only temporary until an ordinary billet was found. Next I joined the Assistant Headmaster and his wife at the home of a senior member of the Stock Exchange and life really did change. The house, was mock-Tudor, standing in vast grounds, with a ‘shoot’ attached. The owner, Tate, had the sort of life-style common today, but one I had only seen at the cinema. It was a two car family, with a gardener-chauffeur and live-in maid. We dined off polished mahogany with lace mats, silver of the highest quality, each with his own napkin-ring and linen napkin. Brought up to protect the wood of our dining table under all circumstances, passing glasses, salt cellars and dishes, one to another on this highly polished surface, was like scraping an open wound but I soon acclimatised and decided I liked the life. I was treated as one of the family, but I had to earn my place by helping the maid, cleaning the car when the chauffeur was off and acting as a sort of gilly when Tate went shooting in his private shoot, which was a fair size. We hunted pheasant, partridge, rabbit and hare I was beater, gun carrier, and clack when Tate managed to hit anything, which was not too often. In search for rabbit, Tate saw one; I saw a flutter of grasses and suggested he shoot between the rabbit and the grasses, which he did and killed three rabbits. At length he explained to me how he did it – several times, never once mentioning my part in the operation. He told the tale to everyone in the house, including the maid, finally telephoning all his friends with news of the carnage. Generally, however, he was a poor shot and maimed more than he killed, with the result I mostly had to dispatch the poor things.
We were evacuated prior to when Chamberlain was doing his diplomacy and the rest of us waited with baited breath. I remember the day war was declared, it was a beautiful sunny day in August, we listened to the fateful words spoken on the radio and then, those like the Assistant Head and Tate, who had seen it all before, looked meaningfully at one another and no one spoke for a while. On an errand for Mrs Tate, emptying the cigarette machines in the district of cigarettes – she expected the cost of tobacco to rocket – I heard air raid sirens for the first time, it was eerie, but an air raid in that beautiful countryside on that beautiful day was really unimaginable,
I was in matriculation year – working in Tate’s house under the eye of the Assistant Headmaster’s wife, it was like a correspondence course because there was nowhere the senior boys could be accommodated. We met occasionally but most of our work was done individually, with the consequent drop in standards. Those days would have formed the summer break under normal circumstances, so when it was time to resume schooling in the proper environment we were all shunted off once again to join the locals in a grammar school. I finished up in Lewes, a lovely part of East Sussex, for a period of my life I’m glad I did not miss.
The Incident Of The Adder I was almost totally a town boy. I loved the country and found pleasure in walking through the shoot and across the fields. This day I came across a short grass snake, it was light fawn and dark brown with markings in a ‘V’ pattern on its head. Twelve to fifteen inches long it looked positively beautiful and I could not resist it. Apart from those I had seen in Africa I had only seen snakes in glass cases at the Zoo. I picked it up and stroked its head and back and after a while put it in my jacket pocket. In successfully frightening the maid with it, I decided to put the grass snake up my sleeve, and then reaching for the salt; the snake would glide down my arm, slither across the shiny mahogany – Surprise!!
The grass snake had other ideas. Firstly it mysteriously transformed itself into an adder, next, bored with games, it bit me in the thumb and finally it poisoned me. It must have been a Sunday because Tate was at home. When he saw the snake he realised it was an adder and promptly killed it. Next he telephoned the local doctor, some 5 miles away and then drove me to him at speed. By the time I arrived a lump had formed in the lymph gland under my arm and even though he gave me an antidote I could not use my arm for days after that – serve me right for my ignorance.

In the 30’s the middle class had aspirations of, if perhaps not ‘ectually’ moving up a class; perhaps being accepted as an appendage to the upper classes. This involved display, like a cock pheasant in the spring, only it was even more prevalent among the females who were the prime movers, having nothing else to think about through the day. In ’39 I was evacuated to Sussex along with 500+ other boys and masters from our school, I was 16, impressionable, in a totally strange milieu, amid total chaos. The poor recipients were caught on the hop and so were we. It was then I met everyone from the Lord of the Manor, to gypsy itinerants – country folk.
At that time, it seemed to me, the boundaries of class were more clearly defined and more stringent than in London – more like the Raj I knew in Africa, and, ignoring the plight of the poor Africans, the rest accepted it and didn’t, as today, rail against it. In Sussex, the gradation ran roughly like – Landed Gentry, Lord of the Manor (LOM) – Gentleman Farmers, the Professionals, the Cloth, and New Rich – Tenant Farmer, Trades People and Craftsmen – Labourers – Itinerants, Seasonal Workers and the Unemployed – the Evacuee. The nouveaux riches wouldn’t even say good morning to us, yet the LOM, with the marvellous name of Sir Amhurst Selby Bigge, not only made our path smoother, he entertained us to tennis parties in summer, on his lawn. The Farmers welcomed us as did the rest, and as we were thrust on all but the LOM, we went to the local secondary school with the locals, we gradually melded, but even then, we knew our place.
In the 30’s mostly only the pretty rich had a car and an offer of an outing was an occasion. As far as I can remember I only rode about ten times as a guest from 1930 – ’39 In the days of the two seater, with the Dickey seat at the back, the visitors sat cramped in the Dickey seat, open to the elements, and lucky to be there even if they could see little past the hood. Later, with saloon cars we were all together, although ridiculous ritual and absurd display had to play a part. The visitor, to show gratitude brought along a large bar of – would you believe – Motoring Chocolate, fruit and nut, milk chocolate. On the back of the better cars there was a cast iron, hinged carrier on which it was obligatory to display a huge cabin trunk, plastered with hotel labels to demonstrate you were a traveller of wide experience. Inside it there might be nothing, or a wicker picnic hamper. It was de rigueur to hoot when you passed a car of the same make; years later people touring on the Continent hooted when they saw another with a GB plate. There were a lot of other rituals, the most absurd and class ridden was the salute of the AA Man. The AA were dressed in WW1 army cast-offs, rode on a motorcycle/side-car combination and directed the traffic as and where required, or else stood at a crossroads waiting to be called. As you passed with your AA badge displayed, the AA Man jumped to attention and gave a very smart salute. The bit that took me to the fair was that if he failed to, some drivers reported him.

The Terraced Wedge
We finally moved from the awful flat to a house we all called ’76’. My brother could now come home to be educated. 76 was close enough to 88, my grand- mother’s house, for her to help out when Willie had to work late. Unless one has never lived in a terrace house on the bend of a road, and a tight inside bend at that, one cannot possibly imagine the consequences. As far as the house is concerned, the bend starts at the kerb on the far side of the road, then there is the road, the footpath, the front garden – however meagre, only then does one arrive at the front face of the house, which, for road symmetry, must be the same width as the rest of the houses on the straight. The house is like a slice of pie, wide at the front and narrow at the back and the degree of squeeze is determined by the depth of the house and the tightness of the curve. 76 had a front room, a second room on the ground floor before arriving at a side entrance to the garden, the kitchen and then the scullery, and throughout this parade of rooms and spaces, the width narrowed inexorably. It was as if the house had been squashed in a ‘V’ shaped vice. Don’t get me wrong, it was a palace to what we had been occupying previously, the freedom, the independence, the joy of a place all of one’s own was immeasurable. It was just a funny shaped house with an even funnier shaped garden. It was just our own personal slice of speculative mismanagement.
The hall leading from the front door to the living room had a kink where the staircase started. On the wall at the kink was fixed above head height the shilling-in-the-slot gas meter which had all sorts of interesting pipes, name plates, covers and seals, each with its own resonance when hit by a lead air-gun slug. So the Wyatt Erp era of gun law opened, and also open season on gas meters. I had swapped something or other for an air-gun pistol and it was my pleasure, especially at holiday times when I had the house to myself, to sit at breakfast and practice the ‘quick draw’. The target was the gas meter, not as a whole, but the various units, and success was signalled by the sound each gave off when hit. As you can imagine, this palled after a while and I advanced to using a mirror and shooting backwards over my shoulder.
All the years I knew her, Willie was subjected to fearsome migraines and never more so than at 76. It had never been a severe problem for me before, when she was ill I fed myself, but when my brother joined us circumstances changed. We started having greater choices; this included roasts, Yorkshire puddings, boiled salt beef and carrots and so on. The problem was we had no refrigerator, only the wooden ‘safe’ in a cool place in the garden, with its wet cloth in the heat of summer, wet earthen crocks with dripping towels and other devices to prolong the life of meat, and milk in particular. Willie would buy a roast for the weekend but often the migraine would strike and I would have to provide the dinner. In this way I learned to cook anything, stews, roasts, even pastry when my interest had been awakened enough for a meat pie. I spent the morning running up and down stairs receiving orders for each stage as it arrived, given in a weak, pained, wavering voice, but in time it became routine.
By comparison, in about 1935, my Aunt Min, our school-teacher aunt, had a marvellous one-room flat in Russell Square which I envied. For its time it was well in advance of the norm. To start with it was approached by a lift and was so high one could see right across London to the East. Off a tiny hall was the bathroom, a wardrobe, a general storage cupboard and, what interested me most, was a small cupboard which contained the refuse bin which was emptied by the building staff from the corridor through a small door into the corridor. The room itself was not exceptional except for the cupboard in the lounge which opened to reveal itself as a tiny kitchen with stove, sink unit and storage. To me it was the life to aim for. At 76, aged about 14, for the first time ever, I was given a room in which I could do what I liked, and it was then I started designing multi-function furniture for the bed-sit, some of which I saw later in magazines. There were two pieces in particular, one impracticable, one later commonplace. The first was a rotating wardrobe with doors back and front so in one position it was a wardrobe, in the other it was a larder – totally daft, although years later, in a one-(tiny)room flat I was to use a wardrobe for both functions. The other was a bed with a bed-head for sitting up against when in bed, which folded down to form an occasional side-table when the bed was transformed into a divan as part of the seating arrangements. I believe it was ahead of its time.