Dare to Be a Daniel (15 page)

I always cry at the Durham Miners’ Gala, standing on the balcony at the County Hotel as the bands go by and the children dance, and the injured miners wave from their wheelchairs as they are pushed past.
Gresford
, written to commemorate a terrible mining disaster, is another real tear-jerker.

I like happy endings and detest violent films, which frighten me and seem designed to acclimatise people to violence, spread
despair
among the viewers, in exaggerating the evil side of mankind, and encourage hopelessness and cynicism.

High Noon
, which had a violent end to it, depicted Gary Cooper as the sheriff married to a woman (Grace Kelly) whose pacifist – probably Quaker – convictions were tested when gangsters came to town to kill him. She saved her husband, resolving the dilemma we would all face in a similar situation.

Another powerful film is
Dr Strangelove
, in which Peter Sellers plays three parts: a German scientist; an RAF officer who is a bit of a buffoon; and the President of the United States, who finds himself sucked into a nuclear incident that he hadn’t planned, but which could well have led to a Third World War. Mockery is a powerful instrument in politics and, after watching
Dr Strangelove
, no one could take the case for nuclear weapons seriously.

All my life I have lived in the oral tradition, learning from listening and watching rather than from reading, and communicating by speaking rather than writing. I am not – nor do I aspire to be – an intellectual.

In some ways, however, I do feel the disapproval of intellectuals who look down on people who have lived in the oral tradition; but it is a fact that from a speech you get a multi-dimensional understanding of a person that is not available through the printed word, however beautifully crafted. When you listen to someone, you can make up your mind about the nature of the person speaking and whether they believe in what they are saying. I have learned most of what I know (not least at my surgeries as a Member of Parliament) through listening to people, not from reading books.

Experience comes into play, of course, because with experience you are able to judge the truth of even the most powerful
demagogue’s
speech more directly and personally than if you had read the same words in a book or an article.

The oral tradition is in fact far stronger in history than the written tradition. For generations, people learned by the stories that were told and passed on orally; these made an impact that was greater, it could be argued, than that of written works by clerks and scholars.

I suspect that, in my mind, the Protestant work ethic made the enjoyment of
anything
suspect – that applied equally to reading, and I have undoubtedly denied myself a lot of pleasure by not reading fiction. However, there is also the hard work involved in decoding twenty-six letters before you can understand what the author is saying! I remember at one of the great universities in Beijing someone explained to me that in Chinese the little pictures give greater freedom to your imagination and allow you to visualise, say, a man or a horse. I much favoured that way of communication!

By contrast, my grandchildren are immensely musical and artistic, and when I hear them play or sing I feel most inadequate.

7

The Outbreak of War

WE WERE ON
holiday at Stansgate in summer 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. Parliament was recalled, and my parents went back to London. My brothers and I stayed at Stansgate and sat listening to the radio as Chamberlain announced that ‘a state of war now exists’. I shall never forget the realisation that this would fundamentally change our lives. I was both relieved and frightened and I sensed that my brother Michael, who was then just eighteen, would volunteer for the Air Force before his call-up papers arrived. Two days later we heard of the first air attack by the RAF on Germany; this was later made into a film called
The Lion Has Wings
, part of the propaganda of war.

I have described how war affected my schooling, with Westminster School being evacuated first to Lancing College in Sussex and then to Exeter University. In 1940 Father was the Member of Parliament for Gorton (Manchester) and he and a number of other MPs joined, or rejoined, the forces. He was sixty-three. My mother was left to look after the constituency as best she could.

I had a telegram from Father and all it said was:

+
I HAVE A NEW JOB. NO RISK. HONOUR BRIGHT
! +

At the end of July 1940 the school authorities decided, incredibly, that it was safe to return to Westminster and preparations were made just as the Battle of Britain was beginning! When the Blitz started, the family was living at Millbank. Every night when the siren went off we would hurry to the basement in Thames House just by Lambeth Bridge (now occupied by MI5) and unroll our mats to sleep. Down there was a friendly atmosphere and we got to know everybody well. We could hear the bombing quite clearly, and on one occasion an old lady whom we knew was late in arriving and we were worried. As she came into the shelter we asked, ‘What is it like up there?’ And she replied, ‘It’s awful, look at my umbrella, it’s absolutely soaked!’

On another occasion a landmine was dropped near the shelter and 500 people were killed in and around Thames House. St John’s Westminster, which I had attended as a child every Sunday, was bombed. Coming up in the morning, you could see the fires still blazing over East London, where the docks had been hit, and there were some daylight raids, where I saw the bombers of the Luftwaffe being attacked by anti-aircraft fire.

At that time there was a severe blackout, and every light had to be turned off and the curtains tightly drawn, in the hope that this would make it harder for the bombers to know where they were. Therefore, before we left the house every night we turned off the lights at the mains, but when we returned we found that the electric clocks had moved forward. That summer we had a cook, and we discovered that although she came to the shelter
with
us, she used to go back to the house and turn on the lights, and we began to suspect that she was a spy.

Father’s first reaction was to say, ‘It certainly saves money if Hitler pays our cook!’ But he did report it to the security services, who duly investigated. When a bomb hit a government department, the record of spies was destroyed and by then our cook had moved elsewhere.

‘Digging for Victory’ was the current slogan and the need to grow our own food to survive the blockade on imports by German U-boats was very real.

At the height of the Blitz, David and I were moved to Oban, where we stayed at the Columba Hotel; my grandmother and grandfather were also staying there. As soon as I arrived I volunteered for the local Air Raid Precaution (ARP) unit and explained that I had been in London during the Blitz – this was designed to impress them, and did! They were busy preparing for a war that had not yet hit Oban, so my experiences (even though I was only fifteen) were considered quite interesting. Oban was in fact the base for the Sunderland Flying boats, manned by the RAF and crew from the Royal Australian Air Force, who stayed in the hotel, so it could have been a target.

A Warden’s Report Form from October that year, in my writing, describes: ‘House collapsed and
FIRE
spreading,
THREE
German aircraft seen, SIX of ours in pursuit. RAF Motorboats in attendance. Warden
S
MITH
slightly wounded’, which must have been a practice report, as there were no raids as far as I remember.

I later received from the Assistant Medical Officer of Argyll County Council a letter thanking me for ‘attending so enthusiastically at the First Aid Post’. I wore an armband and I still have my St John Ambulance first-aid manual from that time, full of
terribly
dangerous advice, including that if someone has a shock, give them a hot drink! I was clearly a precocious fifteen-year-old participant of the civilian preparations for war.

We were in effect refugees and it was very boring, much of the time. One day I clambered out of the window and climbed on to the huge, six-foot-tall letters that spelt out ‘Columba Hotel’; I was seen moving from letter to letter and was hauled in. Another day I tried to make gunpowder by getting saltpetre from the chemist, but having completed the mixture, a match failed to ignite it, so I put it on a fire to see if it would burn. It put the fire out.

My brother David, then aged eleven, got so depressed and angry at being sent to safety out of London that he told me he wanted to commit suicide. So I dug out some strong throat lozenges, which burned when you sucked them, and gave him two of them to eat. He then told me that he had changed his mind, and could I help? So I said I had an antidote and gave him four more of the same lozenges. He survived. But I got into a lot of trouble when this was reported. My brother says that when I was bored I could create discord and annoy people and would ‘argue the hind leg off a donkey’ about anything.

Returning south, I found that the school had been evacuated again, to Buckenhill near Bromyard in Herefordshire, where we took over a series of old buildings, including a Victorian castle called Saltmarsh where all sports were replaced by gardening. We had military exercises and were kitted out in battle-dress, tin hats and gas masks. It was at the age of about sixteen that I first learned how to fire a rifle, do bayonet drill, toss grenades and take part in live-ammunition exercises. They were much more risky than was ever admitted.

The old grenades that we used had a pin in them and, when
you
removed the pin, the grenade was safe while you held it because it had a little handle that you gripped. When the handle was released, the grenade went off after five seconds. We were told that under certain circumstances, if you threw a grenade at an enemy soldier, he might catch it and throw it back within five seconds and blow you up instead. The way of dealing with that was to allow the handle to be released, count three and then throw the grenade, so that it exploded just as it dropped into enemy lines. There was one boy who accidentally dropped the grenade just before he threw it, but happily he got behind the sandbag, thus saving himself from death. Where live ammunition is used, the timing has to be very precise and our cadets, working by the clock, had to move out of the positions they occupied before the real bullets were fired at them.

On one occasion the local butcher, who was in the Home Guard and was responsible for a Lewis machine gun, arrived late with his crew and opened fire before the legs of the Lewis gun had been anchored into the ground, so that when he started firing, the bullets went all over the place and we had to run to escape them.

Another time, a ‘sticky bomb’, which was an anti-tank grenade covered with glue, which you had to take up and attach to the side of an enemy tank, failed to go off. One of the teachers, Mr Murray Rust, had to be sent in to explode this sticky bomb, which as far as I remember he did by firing at it with a pistol.

We were also present at one of the earliest demonstrations of the Blacker Bombard – a thick piece of piping mounted on a stand, at the bottom of which there was a sharp pin. Elementary mortars were dropped into the tube and, as they fell, they struck the pin, which exploded them and fired them off in the general direction of the enemy. There was no serious aiming mechanism
and
the main thing was to get your head out of the way after you had dropped the bombard into the firing tube. We also used Sten guns, which were all-metal sub-machine guns that got very hot when you fired them. What you had to do was dip them in a bucket of cold water until they cooled off and could be used again.

In Oxted, while still living at Blunt House in school holidays, I had joined the Home Guard and we had a guard room in the village where we gathered every night, preparing for our patrols in case German parachutists arrived. By then some of our rifles had been taken away as they were needed in the Soviet Union, and we were equipped with bayonets stuck in a piece of metal tubing, known as pikes.

At nights I would patrol with my pike and was warned that German parachutists might arrive disguised as nuns – in retrospect, I am glad I never saw a nun, because at sixteen, with a pike and clear instructions to kill on sight, I fear I could have done a lot of damage. In the guard room we did our drill with rifles and were taught how to load them, press our fingers down to keep the top bullet out of the barrel, pushing the bolt over to hold it down, and then press the trigger, leaving the rifle ready to use by pulling the bolt back and pushing it forward. One of the old boys, who had been a general (possibly in the Boer War) and had rejoined the Home Guard, had just been appointed a corporal and was very proud of his stripes. When loading his rifle he followed the instructions, but accidentally pulled the bolt back twice, so the gun was loaded; he fired a bullet through the wall, which passed through the lavatory of the house next door, which a woman was using at the time.