Owning Up: The Trilogy (35 page)

The explanation was, in human terms, something to be grateful for. The number of casualties among naval personnel during the D-Day invasion hadn’t been anything like as heavy as expected, in fact almost negligible. In consequence the Navy had quite enough fully-trained ratings and didn’t need us. At the time though, while perfectly aware that this was why we were to be transferred, I can remember feeling nothing but frustration. Cooks, stewards and writers didn’t wear bellbottoms. They wore a uniform rather like a shabby chauffeur, dark blue with a white shirt, black tie and a eaked cap. Furthermore the writers, the branch into which despite no ability whatsoever in maths or methodical clerical work I was enrolled, contained a majority of the one class I believed it somehow perfectly defensible to despise: the
petit bourgeoisie.

In my indifference to the progress of the war, first at school and then in the Navy, I was by no means alone among my generation. Beyond the normal self-absorption of adolescents, I think our failure to consider the implications of losing was based on an inability to conceive this as a possibility. This was not surprising, even for those of us who thought of ourselves as rebels. Since our childhood we had been indoctrinated, both openly and implicitly, to believe in Britain’s superiority.

Being half Jewish, I’d every reason to fear and hate Hitler and was, theoretically at any rate, an anti-Fascist, but the tone of British propaganda during the Second World War, at any rate until the discovery of the extermination camps, was either practical – ‘Dig for Victory’, ‘Lend to Defend the Right to be Free’, ‘Britain Can Take It’ – or mocking. Hitler, Goering and the rest were ridiculed in cartoons, songs and comedy shows on the wireless. ‘Adolf, you’ve itten off much more than you can chew,’ sang Arthur Askey. Fougasse’s warnings against careless talk showed the Nazi leaders sitting rather cosily on a bus listening to a pair of garrulous house- wives giving away secrets on the seat in front. There was none of the anti-German hysteria of the 1914–18 war. No dachshunds were kicked in the streets. Beethoven, far from being banned, was responsible for the V-for-Victory musical symbol. Rommel was even promoted as ‘a good German’, a worthy opponent, and the German troops respected whereas the Italians, with their lack of enthusiasm for the conflict, were despised.

I was too young to take in Dunkirk, but found Churchill’s rhetoric and
persona
curiously unreal. Even the bombing – and I sat through several weeks of that in my grandmother’s cellar under the block of flats next to our house in Liverpool (the smell of damp still evokes the’ crump of falling bombs) – felt more like a natural phenomenon than the destructive and deliberate work of man. ‘Jerry’s late tonight,’ people would say almost affectionately. Nor did the hearty joviality or the purposeful grim tones of the newsreel commentators make the war less distant or more real. I was still a child when it started and it seemed to have been going on for ever. The disappearance of bananas meant as much to us as the Battle of Britain.

On the other hand my contempt for the lower-middle classes had nothing to do with the war, nor was it confined to me. It’s an old heresy, and one that still exists, to believe that the upper classes and the working classes are alike in their freedom from convention, are somehow ‘real’, whereas the lower-middle classes are the prisoners of their own aspirations, castrated by their pretensions, fair game for teasing and shocking. Through holding this belief it is possible to suck up to the aristocracy and patronise the working classes and feel unsnobbish while in fact indulging one’s snobbery shamelessly at the expense of suburban commuters and their families.

Worse, most of this snobbery is based on taste, on the crooking of little fingers and non-U vocabulary. It’s not really the sense of propriety, the admittedly narrow outlook, the opportunist morality that goads the intellectual, and all these defects are perhaps more strongly in evidence in the suburbs than in any other sector of the community. It’s the garden gnomes, the love of light classical music, the chiming doorbells, the ritualistic washing of the car; these are the butts, the excuse for mockery. Of course the assertive belief that their standards are right, that their measure of taste is unassailable, can be irritating. In the Navy I was constantly under attack from the
petit bourgeoisie
for preferring jazz to, say, the
Warsaw Concerto
and I retaliated cruelly and contemptuously, wrote home sneering at those I called ‘the tomato-growers’, while at the same time deceiving myself that I was socially without prejudice. To find myself a writer, a clerk, in a badly-cut suit with a collar and tie depressed me immeasurably and, to be truthful, I was aware too that dressed like that I would be an object of less interest to homosexuals. For them, traditionally, bellbottoms were in themselves something of an aphrodisiac. There was nothing to be done, however, and having handed in our ordinary seamen’s uniforms and drawn our hated fore-and-aft rig, Percy and I were sent to do the first part of our writers’ training course at a camp on the outskirts of Malvern.

2

HMS
Duke
, a shore establishment, had been built as such and lacked in consequence those bizarre touches which helped relieve the austerity of the requisitioned Butlin Camps. It stood a little outside the town and depressed me instantly. For the first few weeks Percy and I were in different classes and couldn’t even go on shore leave together. Later we were able to appear at ‘Commander’s Requests and Defaulters’ for permission to rejoin each other and, at the price of a raised eyebrow from the officer on duty and a confirmatory smile from our Petty Officer, our request was granted.

On board, as we soon learnt to refer to the rigid geometry of the camp, we were taught nothing as yet in connection with our future role as the Navy’s clerks but, in the company of cooks and stewards, sweated and cursed yet again through our basic training. This was reasonable enough. HMS
Duke
was after all the intake establish-ment for all fore-and-aft men and, by relinquishing our bellbottoms, we were officially new entries. It was dispiriting though and lacked that salty obscenity that had made the rigours of Skegness acceptable.

A season in hell among the tomato-growers was how I saw it, and my sense of snobbish outrage was fed by discovering that, whereas seamen turned in wearing their underwear, a practice which struck me as cheerfully squalid and which I soon adopted in preference to my pyjamas, my fellow clerks wore pyjamas
over
their underwear.

The traditional cry ‘Show a leg’ derives from the sexually permissive eighteenth century when sailors were allowed to cohabit with women between decks. On this command, the hairless leg of a doxy extending sleepily over the edge of a hammock entitled its owner to snooze on. They shouted ‘Show a leg’ at 0630 every morning on HMS
Duke,
but mechanically and with no indication of awareness as to its original meaning. In fact the whole rhetoric of this bout of training lacked edge or colour. Our very Petty Officer, dispirited by the slightly priggish reaction of the more strait-laced writer trainees, abandoned any pretence to originality and fell back on those well-worn military clichés already familiar to me from a number of wartime films in the Crown Film Unit tradition.

‘If yer don’t pull your fuckin’ socks up,’ he’d shout with the minimum of conviction, ‘I’ll ’ave yew runnin’ up and down that fuckin’ ’ill ! It needs flattenin’!!’

The hill in question was truly enormous’. It towered over the town nestling on its lower slopes, and this should at least have given the Petty Officer’s uninventive threat the virtue of maximum exaggeration. It didn’t, because the Malvern Hills, while certainly steep and at that time of the year generously splashed with extravagant browns and oranges, managed to avoid the grandeur to which their scale entitled them. They had the look of those reproductions of watercolours you could buy from the larger branches of Boots; an easily digested aesthetic calculated to appeal to those retired military men and elderly ladies with small private incomes who had elected to spend their later years in Malvern’s innumerable private hotels and boarding houses and were largely responsible for the spa’s air of moribund gentility.

The presence of a naval camp, while no doubt accepted as a patriotic necessity, may have initially distressed the residents, but the Navy’s choice of personnel was as tactful as possible. The largely abstemious writers, in their very appearance reassuringly suggestive of more prosperous times when a chauffeur waited to receive his orders for the day, sipped their halfs of bitter quietly in the orderly public bars. They posed no threat. If HMS
Duke
had been a training camp for Glaswegian stokers the recognised need for sacrifice in our hour of need would have been stretched to breaking point.

The only evidence in Malvern that the average age of the entire civilian population wasn’t around seventy was provided by a number of schools in the area. In particular there was a girls’ school, which allowed its sixth form out on Saturday afternoons. They’d walk, whispering excitedly arm in arm, up and down the mountainous High Street, sit in cafés lost in moony reveries or, after mysterious glances and long pauses, burst into irrepressible shared giggles. Percy and I would walk past them as we strolled the streets, waiting impatiently for the pubs or cinema to open. We’d sit, sipping coffee and watching them tucking into powdered scrambled eggs on toast or ‘fancy cakes’ made from soya bean flour and rilled with synthetic cream. Percy found them irritating, but I, with my more ambivalent sexual identity, was mildly excited by their purple blazers, shirts and ties, grey flannel skirts and black woollen stockings and would sometimes murmur with wistful lasciviousness a phrase I’d heard used by great aunts when I was a small boy – ‘She married straight out of the schoolroom’.

We endured our training and, although my sluttish appearance led at times to a mild reproach, we could by now perform our drill and tie our repertoire of knots without even thinking about it. I had expected to be morally shocked by bayonet practice, the only addition to the Skegness curriculum, and no doubt had I been conscripted into a fighting regiment I would have been appalled. Here, however, among my fellow pen-pushers, the pale cooks and weedy stewards, the exercise lacked all realism. Even the Petty Officer in charge found it difficult to keep up the pretence of ferocity. ‘H’imagine you’ve got a German h’on the h’end of that,’ he’d yell as we jabbed feebly away at the suspended straw-filled sacks, but it was perfectly obvious that neither he nor we could imagine any such thing. Neither, given our naval futures in pay depot, galley or Officers’ Mess, was thesituation likely to arise.

Life in camp was a kind of limbo, not unbearable exactly but more or less unpleasant depending on how early or how cold it was, or whether what we were doing involved painful physical effort. Yet I can remember one moment when I was suddenly aware of being intensely, almost impossibly, happy. I was one of a number of ratings marched down to a railway siding to transfer some stores, potatoes I believe, from a goods van to one of the camp lorries. It was a warm and sunny October afternoon. I was eighteen, and somehow the stationary, rusty goods train, the overgrown banks of the railway cutting, the noise of the cinders crunching under our feet, the blue cloudless sky, the rhythm of the work, a sense of physical well-being – all fused to become one of those rare, almost painfully ecstatic experiences which stay in the mind for ever, and are all the more mysterious for having no logical or overtly emotional explanation.

‘Liberty Men’ is the name for sailors on shore leave and once at liberty Percy and I headed for the cinema. This formed part of what would now be called a complex: a handsome Victorian building with a heavily-marbled hall under a fine iron and glass roof and with a fountain of nymphs and cherubs extinguished for the duration, for at a time when patriots were advised to paint a line only a few inches above the bottom of their baths no fountains played or trickled. The cinema was small but, whether by chance or because whoever booked the films was an enthusiast, the programmes were uniformly excellent. Bette Davis in
Look Stranger
sent us beside ourselves with camp enthusiasm, and it was here too that I first watched that great mutilated masterpiece,
The Magnificent
Ambersons.
We sat in the warm dark, almost alone, for even at that time when cinemas were always full, Welles was box office poison. So it was for us that the Ambersons lost their fortune and to us that the master, having introduced his actors and technical credits, thundered out that last great megalomaniac cry – ‘I wrote and directed this picture. My name is Orson Welles.’

One afternoon on shore leave, alone for once (perhaps Percy was on leave in Aldershot), I went to look at a British Council travelling exhibition of Blake and Fuseli. Both were artists I admired; both after all had been praised by the Surrealists, or by Herbert Read at any rate, and the latter provided a chapter in Sacheverel Sitwell’s
Splendours and Miseries,
a book I’d chosen as my prize for writing the poem about Prometheus which Percy had so despised.

Among others peering at the pictures was a family, the father ruddy and bearded, dressed in the tweedy homespun style of an Osbert Lancaster Hampstead intellectual, his short pleasant-looking red-haired wife and a small son. ‘That,’ I heard the man announce firmly and resonantly, ‘is a bloody fine piece of work by Billy Blake,’ and he jabbed with the end of his pipe towards one of Fuseli’s nightmare ladies smiling in a most ambivalently malicious way under her elaborate coiffure.

Absurdly, and on occasion dangerously, I’ve never been able to stop myself pedantically correcting people’s incorrect information. Once, aged about ten, I’d narrowly avoided having my ears boxed by an irate father at the Liverpool Zoo when I’d told him that ‘dat leopard’ he was pointing out to his small son was in fact a jaguar. This time too I sailed in. ‘Actually Fuseli,’ I murmured. The man took it well. He looked for a moment at the single sheet of the catalogue” to check up, found out I was right and shouted: ‘Bugger me! So it is, and who are you?’ I told him my name and was asked to tea. His name, he told me, was Donald Cowie and he was an author. He was a publisher too. Fed up with what he called ‘the bloody freemasonry of publishers’ he’d founded the Tantivy Press and, with remarkable persistence and serendipity, had unearthed pre-war stores of very beautiful paper lying in small and mostly rural paper mills. On this he had printed and published a large body of his own work, most of it light satirical verse in a traditional mode and, as bookshops were starved for anything to put on sale in those paper-rationed days, he did extremely well.