My Father's Fortune (12 page)

My mother takes me for the entrance exam. It's conducted orally, by the Reverend J. B. Lawton in person. He wears a clerical collar and heavy priestly boots. His grey hair's cropped as close as his little unblinking eyes are set, and his cheekbones gleam from the closeness of his shave. In the corner of his study is a rack with a selection of canes of various thicknesses. Hoping no doubt to head him off from investigating too closely my progress in arithmetic, which is still limited in spite of my father's efforts, my mother lays stress on my literary abilities, and the success I have had with titles such as ‘The House I Should Like to Live in When I Am Grown Up'. The Reverend J. B. Lawton obligingly concentrates the examination upon the arts side.

‘Spell “beautiful”,' he says.

‘B-u-e …' I begin, but realise at once that this draft could be improved. ‘B-e-u … B-a-e …'

My restless search for perfection evidently impresses the learned and pious proprietor. I've passed. I'm in.

At Sutton High School for Boys, he explains to my mother, I can prepare to take the Common Entrance Examination, and go on to any of England's great public schools. Or, if she and my father prefer, I can stay on here, in the venerable corrugated-iron halls of Sutton High School for Boys.

For another ten or eleven years, if Eton or Winchester don't appeal.

Every now and then the war comes closer to home. Fielding's handsome son-in-law is shot down, and loses both his legs. I don't know when this happens. I just remember him later, I think at the end of the war, in trim civilian suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, off with all the other commuters each morning to catch the train at Ewell East station, swinging himself bravely down
the street on two tin legs and two crutches, pipe clamped in the determined jaw, a hero still. He and his wife are living with her parents, like so many other returned war heroes with nowhere else to go – until the marriage breaks up. He departs, and the glory at No. 12 with him.

It's the Blackout that does for my beloved grandfather. He was knocked down in the unlit streets by a taxi, says Auntie Phyllis in the little memorandum she wrote for me years later, and this starts up an old injury sustained a dozen years earlier when he fell down a flight of cellar steps. He was still living in digs in Kentish Town, still ‘fending for himself', and apparently was reduced at one point to hanging around the Carreras works in Mornington Crescent at the lunch hour, waiting to touch Phyllis for a discreet cash handout. Everyone in her office knew about it. People would tell each other, ‘Oh, there's Lawson subbing her old man again.' By the time of his death things seem to have looked up a bit, and he was working as a clerk at Cable and Wireless. The post mortem, as recorded on his death certificate, says nothing about injuries caused by cellar steps or taxis. It mentions only a heart problem – and cirrhosis of the liver. I have no recollection of his drinking more than the odd pint with my father at the Spring Hotel in Ewell Village. Can both my grandfathers have been boozers?

The next victim is closer still. Christmas 1943, and things on the home front are looking notably bleak. ‘The Government', records my almanac of the twentieth century for 22 December of that year, ‘says there are only enough turkeys for one family in ten this Christmas.' Our family's one of the other nine. Not even Sid has been able to raise any eatable birdlife from the farmers of Lincolnshire. My father decides that one of us must be sacrificed. He goes out after breakfast and chases the drake round the garden. Through the bare winter flower beds and the desolate vegetable patch. Round the coal shed. Over the asbestos fence into the stinking quagmire around the air-raid shelter.

Within an hour or so he has caught it, and conducted it to the garage to wring its neck. He has consulted the Khaki Camp
bell handbook and found out how to do this, swiftly and with a minimum of suffering to either victim or executioner. The drake, however, exemplifies the national spirit of defiance invoked by Winston Churchill in his famous response to the prediction that England would have her neck wrung like a chicken: ‘Some chicken … some neck.' Some drake, it turns out – and its neck, reports my father later, is as rubbery as a garden hose. The scene in the garage is kept from us, but it plainly gets more and more like the murder of Rasputin, until finally my father has to fetch the rusty chopper from the coal shed. Though since the rusty chopper's too blunt even to chop firewood …

Eventually the drake's dead and plucked, and my mother has cooked it. Even after two or three hours in the New World cooker, however, it's still, like England, defying its enemies. None of us can get so much as the prong of a fork into it.

Tuesday, 6 June 1944. A Tuesday morning like any other at Sutton High School for Boys. Latin, I think … Until the walls of the classroom shudder in anticipation as the door's flung open and the Reverend J. B. Lawton makes a solemn entrance. We all freeze. Any faint sounds – of breathing, perhaps, or of a page being cautiously turned in
Kennedy's Eating Primer
– cease. The good pastor has already caned his way through a queue of fifteen or twenty boys waiting after prayers, perhaps a fifth of the school, and has no doubt dispatched a few more in shifts since then. What does this unscheduled visitation portend? The solemnity of his expression suggests the worst. A really shocking new offence has come to light. A pen nib has gone missing, perhaps. The entire class is going to be caned. He's going to take off his jacket once again and roll up his sleeves. He's going to put the same effort and concentration into every stroke of the cane as he always does, rising a little on his heels, with his eyes opening suddenly wider for a moment in concentration, as he brings the weapon down with such impressive force and accuracy on to that small outstretched hand, that awkwardly vertical behind …

But no. The kindly shepherd of our souls is simply passing on some war news he has just heard on the wireless. The Allies have launched their long-expected invasion of Europe. We give a faint cheer, and no one's punished for it.

A week later comes further war news. This time it announces itself.

It's in the middle of the night, and presumably the air-raid warnings have sounded, because we're sleeping downstairs, our parents as usual next to the live fuse boxes, my sister and myself in the corridor outside Nanny's room. A familiar racket of ack-ack, but this time so loud that Nanny comes out of her room to join us, uttering little cries of terror. And she's right, because now there's a sound the like of which we have never heard before in any previous raid – an angry buzzing, deafeningly loud, like a giant bluebottle, that passes directly over the roof of the house as if almost touching it. The whole house shakes like Sutton High School for Boys – and then shakes even more violently as the buzzing suddenly ends in a gigantic explosion.

We're all dead! We must be! Nanny's certain of it. She keeps shouting that she knew we were going to be killed and now we have been. It's not just Nanny – we're all screaming and shouting. We're all crawling around trying to find each other, unable to see anything because the air has gone thick and white. It takes some time for our parents to establish that they still have two children, and for us to understand that we still have two parents. All five of us, it slowly emerges, even our late grandmother, are not only alive but unhurt.

The air's thick and white because this is where the plaster ceilings of the house now are, hanging in suspension, and spread fine over the floor and the Bentalls three-piece suite. Also scattered about, in a very deteriorated condition, are all the windows on the north side of the house in their Arts and Crafts lead mullions. The front door has deserted its post in terror, and is leaning shell-shocked against the wall on the opposite side of the lounge. Upstairs in the front bedroom, where my sister and I would have been sleeping if
my parents had ignored the warnings, as they sometimes have in the past, a tangled mass of window-lead set with broken glass is curled up as peacefully as Goldilocks on my pillow.

It's only when day breaks and we hear the BBC news that we can begin to establish what's happened. The Germans, it seems, have started using a new form of weapon, a small pilotless jet aircraft packed with explosive, that flies until it runs out of fuel and crashes. One of the first of these, engine still running, has passed over the roof of our house. It must have missed us by a matter of feet, because it failed to clear a house in the next street, on slightly higher ground about two hundred yards away. The family who lived there are now all dead.

Nobody in Hillside Road knew them, though, so there's no damper on the excitement of all the local children at the sudden change in our circumstances. A team of men from the council comes down the street, nailing shiny linen over the empty window frames, and the lounge is filled with the soft white light you wake up to after an overnight snowfall. A white Christmas! Except that it's June, and the powdery white icing has transformed not the outdoors but the indoors.

My father puts on his official Fire Captain's steel helmet to protect himself from any bits of the house that may still be falling off, and gets up into the loft to investigate the state of the roof. Bathroom stool – knees flexed twice – foot on bedroom door handle – foot on architrave – push lid – grab edge; even the climb up there is already an excitement to watch. And then, as he lifts the trap out of the way with his helmeted head, there's not the darkness of the loft but the brightness of the open sky above it. My sister and I run out into the front garden – and sure enough, there's the Fire Captain's helmet, where no Fire Captain's helmet ought to be, emerging cautiously from the wonderful hole in the middle of the Dutch tiles. The helmet, like the homburg around my study door twenty or so years later, is followed by my father's head. He's smiling down at us, as amused as we are. This, one of my sister's sons told me recently, is the only thing that his mother
could remember about our doodlebug: our father's head emerging from the hole in the roof.

It's a memorable summer. The leftovers of the white linen from the windows are a good new raw material for the camps that we build on our patch of wasteland behind the houses. The tangled lead from the mullions is even more interesting. You can melt it in an old tin lid on top of the New World gas stove and make little pools and balls of quicksilver. You can tip the molten lead into water to form fantastic shapes, or use it for a hundred other things, if only we could think what they might be.

Our house is changed even further by the acquisition of a Morrison shelter, which is not something for waterfowl to live in at the bottom of the garden, but a perfectly practicable steel table, named after the current Home Secretary, like the Anderson before it, and set up indoors. My parents must have been more alarmed than I realised by that first doodlebug. They have abandoned the trusted habits of improvisation and acquired a proper official airraid shelter, without waiting for passing navvies or for someone to give us a discarded one when the war's over. It makes our kitchen as excitingly overcrowded as the dining room sometimes used to be on Sundays, and perhaps for my father more reminiscent of the kitchen in Devonshire Road. It has wire cage walls on three sides, and is floored with mattress, so that it makes a snug nest like a children's camp. We sleep in it at night, and during the day fling ourselves into it, if we have enough warning, whenever a doodlebug threatens.

The entertainment provided by the flying bombs continues. Never again does the angry buzzing come as close and loud as it did that first night. Even in the distance, though, it provides an agreeable touch of tension. Some fresh excitement may be just about to happen. A bigger bang. More dramatic destruction. We listen as the uneven racket gets louder – watch sometimes from the back garden as the persistent little insect with the tail of flame approaches … Until suddenly the noise stops. ‘It's cut!' shouts
everyone, and we all fling ourselves into the Morrison, or flat on the ground.

Silence. Wait … It's going to be a really big one!

And always we're disappointed. Six thousand people are killed by flying bombs before they're through, and after that first one they're always somewhere else.

A team of tilers works its way along the street, replacing the temporary tarpaulins on the roofs. One of them is a handsome young American called Mike, who wears gym shoes instead of boots like all the others. He has bad feet, he explains, which is why he isn't fighting his way through Normandy. All the children in the street fall in love with him. We gaze at him adoringly as he runs lightly over the tiles on his rubber soles, and stands with casual disregard for either height or doodlebugs on the very crest of a roof against the summer cumulus. We sit on the ground at his feet as he drinks coffee. On the pocket of his shirt is embroidered ‘Stella, Chicago, USA, 1942'. We fall in love not only with Mike but with Stella, the beautiful girl who's waiting for him so heartbreakingly three thousand miles away. We fall in love with Chicago.

Actually I'm already in love with Chicago, even before I know that Stella lives there, perhaps because it's my mother's legendary birthplace, or because ‘Chicago' is such a romantic word. Or perhaps simply because it's in the USA, which I'm also having a love affair with at the time, I think because of a Puffin book about the history of the country, which has pictures in brightly coloured poster paints of covered wagons and the Liberty Bell, and which mentions the Sioux, who have almost as romantic a name as Chicago, though I discover many years later that I've been mispronouncing it. I have the Union Jack and the Hammer and Sickle as well as the Stars and Stripes arrayed above my bed, but the Stars and Stripes is the only one of the three that I'm in love with, and at the centre of the array is a photograph of not Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I'm in love with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How could I not be in love with
someone called Delano? Even though, as with ‘Sioux', I discover years later that I've been mispronouncing it.