Time to Be in Earnest (6 page)

The school had no library and I can remember few books except Piers Plowman’s
History of England
. History lessons were my joy. In memory they are a jumble of marvellous tales: myths, legends and facts, continents, centuries and characters blissfully muddled together so that I came to see them as a series of vivid pictures. Alfred brooding by the fire as the cakes blackened, a white pall of snow falling on the coffin of Charles I, Hannibal urging his elephants across the Alps, Julius Caesar falling in a welter of blood, Wolfe storming the heights of Quebec. There must have been some attempt at chronology since I clearly recall the Blue River of History which stretched along one wall on which we would stick cut-out figures of kings and queens, insert dates and draw pictures of the main events.

I was happy at the British School. The Headmaster, Mr. Wynn (I think that is how the name was spelt), seems in retrospect to have been a remarkable teacher. He loved poetry and his choice was eclectic. We learned the poems by heart and I can still remember the poems of the Shropshire countryside, particularly A. E. Housman. We enjoyed the vigour and patriotic fervour of poems which today would, I fear, be regarded as politically incorrect: “Horatio Keeping the Bridge,” “Vitae Lampada,” “Drake’s Drum.” The first poem I was asked to read aloud to the class—I must have been about eight at the time—was “The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna.” I was torn between pride and embarrassment caused by my awareness when scanning the verses that the word “bayonet” was new to me and I could neither understand nor pronounce it.

All the poems have remained favourites and I am sorry that children, no longer required to learn poetry by heart, are denied this storehouse of pleasure. The day began always with an act of worship and a hymn, although I have no memory of hymn books. I think the hymns were those we frequently sang in church so that the same ones recurred with somewhat monotonous frequency, sung in the sing-song childish voices
of the Welsh border. Every morning throughout my school life I heard a reading from the King James Bible. There was, thank God, no
Good News Bible, a
version which is very bad news for anyone who cares for either religion or literature.

My parents, ever restless, moved house four times during the few years we lived in Ludlow. The third house, well outside the town, was too large and expensive for my father’s income and we didn’t stay very long. It was called The Woodlands and stood alone in a beautiful garden which ran down to the River Teme. My sister and I walked to school each day carrying our lunch between us in a wicker basket. It was a long walk and I can remember one winter day when we both trudged, weeping rather desolately with the cold.

I saw great poverty when I was a young child; poverty is not ameliorated by the beauty of its surroundings. There seems to be a belief that urban poverty is worse than rural poverty; I believe the reverse may be true. In cities there are more public places, more libraries, more refuges from the cold. A few of the children I went to school with were almost in rags. I can remember clearly one small boy—his name was George—with the pinched face of an adult, a similarity enhanced by a blob of white foam near his ear which reminded me of my father’s shaving soap. Little else but the child’s face was washed, and he came to school ill-shod and, I suspect, hungry. At one lesson he was very severely caned (the use of the cane, brought sharply across the palm of the hand, was fairly common) and howled with pain and perhaps a less focused misery. For the remainder of the lesson the male teacher was particularly kind to him, colluding with him in small jokes against the rest of us. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that this was because he was ashamed of his severity. From an early age I had this insight into adult motives and sometimes spoke uncomfortable truths aloud, a habit which caused my mother to describe me as a cynical child. I can’t have been an easy one, perhaps, nor a pleasant one. I sometimes regret that my insight into my own motives has been less acute.

Despite deprivation we never saw a policeman at the school; there was no violence, nothing was ever stolen. What, indeed, was there to steal? It is difficult for people of my generation totally to accept the theory fashionable in the 1960s and still popular with some optimists that the main cause of criminality is deprivation. Deprivation is, of course, relative. The poor then had so much less, expected so much less, were satisfied with less. The inequalities and injustices of society were too
readily accepted by the victims as well as by the more prosperous, but they were not constantly emphasized by television advertisements with their cunningly contrived celebrations of material success, nor were we children taught directly or by implication that because we had less, less was expected of us. But I remember George at the British School if I am ever tempted to believe that all was well with England in those years between the wars.

A Victorian child of the same class—the Pooters’ daughter perhaps—received into our family would have felt immediately at home; a modern child, transported to a house without electricity, central heating, television, telephone or the use of a car, would feel himself banished to a dark age.

The sitting-room of our first Ludlow house, in a small terrace near the river, was lit by an oil lamp which dominated the square central table. As the shadows lengthened I would watch my mother turn up the wick, draw the match along its narrow oil-soaked edge and gently lower the glass funnel. It was like an evening benison to see my siblings’ expectant faces glowing gently and warmly in the light. Our final house in Linney View was lit by gas. The wall-mounted lights were fitted with short chains which, when pulled, would activate the gas supply or turn it off. The gas-mantels were delicate thimble-shaped domes of what looked like starched muslin, and so fragile that they could be fractured even by the careless thrust of a taper. Most of my childhood errands were to buy new mantels for the gas lights.

And the Victorian child would have felt familiar with our weekly rituals; the coke boiler lit every Saturday to provide hot water for the weekly bath, the clean clothes laid out for church on Sunday, the weekly administration of a purgative without regard to evidence of need, a prophylactic rather than a remedy; familiar, too, with the oddly named liberty bodice and with the itchy, wash-hardened discomfort of winter combinations.

We only very rarely saw a doctor. Doctors in the 1920s had little more in their armoury than had their Victorian predecessors, but what they couldn’t offer in scientific medicine was balanced by the patient’s almost superstitious belief in the doctor’s authority over the disease. To call in the doctor was an admission that the illness was serious, family and folklore remedies had failed and the secular deity must be summoned; his fee, found with difficulty, was both a propitiation and a talisman. A child admitted to hospital never saw his mother until he was discharged, there
being a belief that the presence of parents only upset child patients unnecessarily and disturbed hospital routine. My brother was admitted to hospital—I think because of a fistula—soon after we arrived in Ludlow, and on his return home called Mother “nurse” for weeks. There was a belief that intractable illness or vague ill-health were due to a focus of infection. Many adults spat out all their perfectly sound teeth into the receiving kidney-shaped bowl, while few middle-class children reached adolescence with tonsils and adenoids intact.

Children need to play as they need air, and Ludlow was the ideal town for an imaginative child. If we had been given expensive toys or had been brought up with television, video recorders and computer games, I’m sure we would have spent as much time tapping away in front of a screen as does the modern child, but without these excitements we had to make our own amusements. The street, almost entirely free of cars, was open to us, as were the water meadows sloping to the Teme, the river and Whitcliffe above, the paths hewn into the rock which surrounds the castle and which, with an outcrop of shrubs and the occasional cave, provided the setting for imaginative play and the acting out of innumerable roles. We had no bicycles and, although I longed for a scooter, my father avoided this expense by his theory that a scooter was a dangerous indulgence since it resulted in one leg being permanently shorter than the other. Similarly bedside lamps were not provided on the grounds that reading in bed damaged the eyesight.

At school, boys and girls were separated in the asphalt playground and the games we played there were less imaginative, more ritualistic and hierarchical. The two chief ones were skipping, usually accompanied by chanting, and hopscotch. A chalky stone would be used to mark out the hopscotch rectangle of six squares and we played by kicking a flat stone from square to square, sometimes diagonally, sometimes missing a square, or with other variations to test skill. It was important to find the right stone and, once found, it was jealously guarded. It needed to be flat but with rounded edges, smooth enough to slide easily but not so smooth that it skidded out of control.

On Saturdays in summer we would be taken, or more often sent alone, to paddle in the Teme. Minnows were caught and brought home in jam-jars and their early, much-lamented deaths were followed by ceremonial burying in matchboxes with full choral service. I remember that playing church was one of our enthusiasms. As the eldest I was invariably the parson, draped in one of my mother’s old nightdresses, and indeed
seniority established my right to the best role in any of our make-believe games.

We enjoyed a freedom unknown to most children today, freedom of the streets, the walks round the castle, the river. Some of the lessons we learned in the streets would have horrified our parents but the two worlds didn’t communicate. With few toys, we constructed a richly imaginative world. Our parents could turn us loose, apparently without anxiety. I can remember only one untoward incident. We were playing in the shallow cave off one of the castle walks when a young man carrying a cane invited us to follow him to a more secluded place and spank his bottom. To children who spent some ingenuity in avoiding having our bottoms spanked the request was bizarre. When we declined he walked away without pressing us.

Children must have been sexually abused when I was a child; they always have been. But because the fear of sexual abuse hadn’t become a national obsession we were never taught to be afraid of strangers. The criminal statistics for England and Wales show that seven to eight children are murdered each year by strangers and this figure has not greatly altered over the years. The figures are insignificant compared with the dangers to children on the roads, but they can never be comparatively insignificant in the minds of parents. The possible abduction, rape or murder of a child is the horror which we hardly dare allow into our thoughts. Because of those seven to eight tragic deaths children today, particularly middle-class children, live under a form of house arrest.

And for our external fantasy life we had the cinema. I am not sure whether the price of admission to the Saturday afternoon matinee at Ludlow was one penny or twopence, I rather think the former. I can remember joining the long queue of children, pressing our backs against the staircase wall, waiting for the doors to the auditorium to open. I suppose there must have been some form of censorship of films, but the ones which remain in memory certainly weren’t made for children. Perhaps I saw some of them with my parents. I can remember the silent films, particularly
Birth of a Nation
, remember, too, the first talkie,
Broadway Melody
of 1929. The arrival of the talkies aroused immense interest and the manager of the cinema announced that, in contrast to the inferior sound systems in the picture palaces of Shrewsbury or London, Ludlow was to have “the talkies not the squawkies.” As we had no baby-sitter the whole family went together to participate in this modern miracle. The auditorium darkened, the screen glowed, music swelled out
in glorious bursts of melody and—almost unbelievably—the gods and goddesses spoke.

On Sunday afternoons there was usually the family walk. It can’t have been much pleasure for my parents since I remember that we trailed after them, bored, tired and oblivious to everything but the need for this compulsory exercise to end. But paradoxically it left me with a love of walking which has remained all my life, and childhood walks through the Shropshire meadows return every time I smell clover or the pungent scent of Queen Anne’s lace or feel wet grass against my ankles.

And then came the day of the scholarship examination, the equivalent of the later Eleven Plus. I can’t recall that we were given any particular coaching for this, but we did all realize its supreme importance. If I passed I would go to the high school, an almost unimaginable privilege. I would learn French and Latin, the school would have a library, there would be all the less academic excitement of the stories in the
Schoolgirls’ Own
which were my weekly reading. Those of us who passed the first written part of the examination then went to the high school for the oral, and I can remember waiting to be called into the interview room, sitting on a very low chair in the kindergarten classroom. I had no problem with the first part of the interview but mental arithmetic, as always, was sheer horror as the metal grille of incomprehension clanged down. And then some four weeks later came the letter to say that I had been successful and was to take the enclosed form with me to the medical centre for my physical examination. I can remember walking round the castle to the familiar office where we used to go to have cuts bound up, chests listened to and minor injuries treated by the school nurse. I was dizzy with happiness, an iridescence of joy which embraced not only me, but all the world around me. The stones on the path gleamed with a supernatural light, the grasses shivered and silvered, the Teme ran sparkling under a clear sky, even the ramparts of the castle reared over me like some celestial city. Alas, the triumph and the joy were both premature. Apparently the money didn’t run to the number of pupils offered places and the last on the list fell off. I was undone by that dreaded mental arithmetic.