For the Duration - Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven
SCORCHED FLOORBOARDS and COLD TOAST

AFTER PEARL HARBOUR, England’s hit-parades reflected America’s direct involvement in the war. The air-waves were filled with songs such as Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer, and This is the Army, Mr. Jones (Green, Brown and so on), in which Mr. Jones was reminded that from now on there were “No private rooms or telephones”, and Mr. Green that “We like our barracks nice and clean”. Then there was the very popular revival from the days of the Great War, Over There — “The Yanks are coming, The Yanks are coming...”
It was soon evident that the Yanks were, indeed, coming. Their uniforms and their accents, their gum and their wealth were increasingly seen and heard, chewed and lavished throughout Britain. Sleepy villages and big cities alike felt the influence of the huge influx of American servicemen, who managed to exude an exotic glamour wherever they were posted.
These American tunes, however, never ousted everybody’s favourite, Vera Lynn, from the charts. When she sang The White Cliffs of Dover, or We’ll Meet Again; when her voice caught characteristically in Yours, or I’ll Be Seeing You, sentimental longing and nostalgia welled up inside every listener. The “Forces’ Sweetheart” had millions of civilian admirers as well, including the young boarders at Bancroft’s.
It cannot have been many weeks after our triumphal ascent to the dormitory that the inevitable occurred: an air raid alert at night. The siren always sounded worse then, than in the daytime, and I never knew how anyone managed to sleep through the switchback wailing of an air raid warning. Often a far-off siren would be heard first, and then progressively nearer ones, and it seemed to me that the local alert should have awoken the proverbial dead.
My bed was beneath a window, and this night I was wide-awake in an instant, and shutting the window before the siren had climbed to its first peak. The prefect who slept at one end scurried the length of the dormitory, checking windows before lights could be switched on, and shaking the occasional still recumbent and oblivious boy. The housemaster emerged from his quarters at the other end, blear-eyed but bustling.
“Hurry, boys! Quickly, now — just take one blanket with you, it probably won’t last long. What’s that? Yes, of course put on your dressing gowns too, but do hurry!”
I was hurrying already, not needing the master’s words. Was I about to experience something of what I had missed by being in Bampton? A taste of the Blitz, perhaps? Were the raiders heading our way? Or would it turn out to be a false alarm? Whatever, I wanted to be below ground, not on the top floor.
There was some distant grumbling of gunfire, no more threatening than faintly heard thunder, and that was it. We were all much too stirred up to have tried to sleep in the cellars, and the All Clear brought a chorus of groans of pretended disappointment. The nett result was a disturbed night — a couple of hours less sleep than usual — and probably some adverse effect on our studies the following day.
Those who had feigned a feeling of being let down were compensated often enough in the next two years. There was no pattern to the raids. Several nights consecutively we might trek down the flights of stairs; and up again in an hour or so. A month or more without an alert might follow, and then a savage flurry of activity for a week or ten days — or, rather, nights.
There was certainly nothing like the unrelenting intensity of the nightly campaign of 1940-41. From time to time, however, the Luftwaffe’s raids on London were locally severe. A flight or two of enemy aircraft over southern England, with only a few bombers reaching London, might well create simply a “nuisance” raid, officially: but a series of these flying visits spread through the hours of darkness meant, at best, a prolonged period of uncertainty and disruption for those on the ground needing their sleep.
London was by no means the sole target. In the “Baedeker” raids, for instance, a historical significance and a richness of medieval architecture gave sufficient reason for some concentrated devastation. Canterbury, Bath, York, Exeter: tourist guidebooks had enticed parents and grandparents of Goering’s aircrews to these splendid old cities. They came, they saw, and appreciated. Their offspring viewed tensely through bombsights, glimpsed spires amid flak, and destroyed.
At Bancroft’s, if the alerts were short-lived, we would return to the relative comfort of the dormitories; a succession of raids, or a lengthy one, would keep us in the cellars for the night. The banshee wail of an air raid warning sharpened my senses, and I used to lie rigid in my bunk, hearing honed to detect the slightest suggestion of a hostile sound, and too suspicious of prolonged quiet to emulate the majority and fall asleep.
As the war progressed, so the ground defences became stronger: and noisier. If one of the newer mobile batteries of some type of rocket projectile were nearby, and operating in conjunction with the regular ack-ack, the din could be frightening. Some deemed this fearsome cacophony reassuring; after all, London and its inhabitants — us — were being protected, and the raiders attacked in their turn. Imagine what it must be like at night over an enemy city with such a vigorous defence operating. Granted. Thinking personally, though, I reasoned that the guns would not be firing if no aircraft were present, and so somewhere up there were bombers laden with bombs, each one a distinct threat to me.
I would lie awake in the cellar during a raid, ears strained and mind super-active. I tried to analyse what I was hearing: the staccato zap-zap-zaps, the reverberating rumbles, the drawn-out whooshes and the echoing roars. I guessed inexpertly at how far away the action was, and how much (if any), of the racket could be directly attributed to bombs exploding. Should I detect amid the chaos the throb of an aircraft’s engine, my anxiety increased. And should the faint, steady drone develop an urgency, should the engine start to whine or scream dementedly, then I felt sure that my worries were warranted — that one of the next stick of bombs would have “Bancroft’s” written on it.
One night, a friend and I threaded our way stealthily between the bunks to one of the cellar’s erstwhile coal-hatches, tucked behind a partition wall, and curtained for the blackout. What a relief to be able to see something of what was happening outside! We squatted on the steps, and peered at the sky; at the segment that was visible between the building and the trees across the drive, at least. The chill air was refreshing after the cellar’s closeness, and now we were not relying on our ears and our imaginations to assess the danger. It was clear that our persons were not in jeopardy — unless a monitor should happen upon us — and we felt secure and privileged in our secret vigil.
The sky flickered in the south, accompanying the rumble of guns. A stray searchlight swept across our portion of sky, a token gesture. These things signified violence and the potential for fear, but elsewhere. They formed the backdrop to our private haven of peace.
Having discovered the therapeutic qualities of this bolt-hole, I spent time there on a number of occasions when a raid seemed interminable; when the guns’ anger flared and subsided as raiders approached and departed, coming and going haphazardly. The searchlights fascinated as they ranged back and forth, back and forth, on their routine probing. It was exciting when they converged suddenly, and moved in unison, determined to hold the tiny silhouette in their combined glare. The ack-ack would respond to this stimulus in a frenzy. It seemed impossible that a plane could escape the blinding web of light, but I never saw one of these night bombers brought down.
On the morning after a raid in which the barrage had seemed particularly savage and prolonged, a few early risers could have been seen wandering around the school grounds. Ranging across the quadrangle and the school-field, heads down, they would squat occasionally, before moving on. Sometimes I was among them, and it reminded me of early morning mushrooming. During the night, from our vantage-point we would have heard — amid the heavier, more violent noises — the scuffling, rustling patter of shrapnel from the guns, and this was the crop which we were harvesting. Often we were poorly rewarded, but we did occasionally glean ugly slivers of torn metal.
As in Bampton, most of the boys at Bancroft’s had built up collections of wartime souvenirs. Stored at home were shoe-boxes of service badges and buttons, shrapnel, cigarette cards depicting uniforms, aircraft, warships and the like, bits salvaged from crashed aeroplanes, coins from around the globe, war maps and assorted newspaper clippings; and sometimes more complete items, such as a shell-casing or forage cap.
The mood was leisurely in the day-room, one Sunday morning in 1943. It was nearing time for chapel when I joined some boys of our year, grouped just inside the door from the locker-room. Just then, an animated jumble of questioning erupted.
“Let’s have a look, can I Hart?” — “What is it, is it real?” — “Where’d it come from?” — “When did you get it?” — “Come on, you can tell me, where’d you find it, Hart?” — “Does anyone know you’ve got it?” “Anyone”, of course, had meant a teacher or a monitor, and “it” was a finned, stout projectile, about fifteen inches long.
Hart was sitting on a table, feet on a bench, nursing the object proudly: “We got it yesterday afternoon. We climbed through the side fence, so no one’s seen it. I hid it last night, and no one knew ”
He went on to explain how they had been exploring some overgrown gardens which bordered an artificial lake not far away. He had spotted the fins poking through leaf-mould, deep among the bushes. He thought that his find could have lain there a long time, undisturbed — perhaps a survivor from the Blitz. We knew about duds.
“Let’s have a look at it, can I, Hart?” — “Yes, can I hold it? Is it heavy?” The two questioners were assuming that Hart would agree and pass the missile to them, but he resisted, and there was a brief three-way tug-of-war. A confusion of warning shouts and desperate lunges did not stop the incendiary — for that was what it was — from belatedly fulfilling itself on the day-room floor.
A medley of shouted advice, spontaneous cries of excitement, and derisive comments about the finders’ immediate future broke out. Someone responded appropriately, collecting a bucket of sand from the locker-room and smothering the “dud”, just as it was getting the floorboards to burn nicely. Almost on his heels came the duty master, who stopped aghast in the doorway, glaring at the mess at his feet. There was a nervous silence. It would have to be Houston on duty! Houston — dreaded by juniors, hated by many seniors, and avoided whenever possible by almost all of us.
Did Sermon and Hart’s minds replay their respective short lives in that moment? The end must have seemed imminent, even though they were not drowning. Houston, for his part, appeared to be choking. Veins swelled, colour deepened, apoplexy threatened. Before the protagonists were banished from our midst, Houston drew from them the main features of the story. The incendiary in the day-room had taken him by surprise, and he could barely keep his brittle control intact.
Lunchtime came, with two empty places at our table, and when we gathered in the day-room afterwards, all was tidy. The floor was damp, and smelling of disinfectant. No scrubbing, however, could wash out the evidence. The patch of scorched floorboards, slightly scooped, was to keep alive the memory of Hart and Sermon’s escapade, long after they had finally left Bancroft’s.

*

There were many staff changes in these middle war years, but an acting headmaster at the beginning of a new term jolted us. It was not Mr. Peet himself, the abruptly elevated senior Chemistry master, who affected us thus, but the reason for his promotion. Unbelievable rumours spread on the first day of term: rumours of death, rumours of suicide, even.
The rumours, sadly, crystallized into tragic truth. Although Mr. Wells had drifted, wraith-like, in the background of our school life, we did respect him and his ultimate authority. We would see him no more.
A core of teachers did remain, however, at Bancroft’s throughout the war; experienced masters, older men. Mr. Peet and Mr. Houston were old-stagers. Another was Mr. Francombe, a gentle and approachable man, and teacher of English. He also conducted the school choir, and was involved in a music club on Sunday evenings in the library, where he let Strauss and Tchaikovsky seduce us, via his gramophone.
The Major was a violent contrast to Mr. Francombe. Major Murray paraded us for Physical Training as he had paraded groups of boys since the Great War’s armistice, we assumed. His dingy office was beneath our changing-room, opposite the door to the gymnasium, and the art was in timing one’s passage through that door so as not to meet him. A plimsoll on the buttocks was as stingingly hurtful as the slapping sound it made was loud. The Major barked his “One, Twos!” and “Up, Downs!” interminably, his bite sometimes worse than his bark.
Among the various staff comings and goings was a succession of German teachers, whose classes were noisy, chaotic and, from our point of view, entertaining. Refugees from Continental horrors remote from our comprehension, Drs. Rothschild, Schaeffer and Binns gestured wildly and struggled linguistically as they tried to control us. Rothschild was small and intense, Schaeffer tall and angular, and Binns a grown-up European Billy Bunter. They suffered, while we rioted. They despaired, while we laughed. Astonishingly, a lasting interest in the German language was kindled in me at this time. I owe them thanks for that, and express regret at the inhumanity of schoolboys.

*

In my first year or two at Bancroft’s, day-boys were largely incidental to school life. We lived and perpetuated the myth that day-bugs, by definition, were inferior. Only later did I even think of forming a friendship with one and, when that happened, morning recess became a special time. My friend took to bringing twice his accustomed snack, and sharing it with me. We squatted together in the cloisters, munching cold, limp toast, folded over and spread with Marmite. I never asked Turrell if his mother wondered at his increased appetite, but I now knew that it was not exclusively bad to be a day-boy.
Having come to school each morning from home, Turrell chatted about homely things. He told me of his family; he talked of cousins visiting, and his mother’s concern that she could not entertain them suitably on the family’s rations. He described evenings around the fire, with his family, listening to “Mind My Bike” Jack Warner on the wireless. Thinking of my bleak evenings of homework in the day-room, I saw that, in some important ways, day-boys were to be envied more than pitied.
It was about this time that I first saw the film In Which We Serve. Unashamedly patriotic, and successfully propagandistic, it remains a powerful film. Noel Coward’s destroyer is torpedoed, and flashbacks from a life-boat sheltering sailors including John Mills, Bernard Miles and their Captain set the seamen in their homes. An air raid on Portsmouth, or Southampton, was dreadfully real on the screen, and a stick of bombs culminating in a direct hit on Bernard Miles’s ordinary little terraced home provided poignant moments.
As day-boys moved around the neighbourhood so much more than we did, they brought in news of enemy activity, casualties, bomb-sites worth visiting, and so on. I went with Turrell after school one day to see a large deserted house that he knew of. It was in the forest, well away from other homes, enveloped by a scrappy and overgrown garden. A small bomb, not a direct hit, had wrecked some sheds and damaged the rooms on one side of the house.
The place disturbed me. It had once been grand, and was still by no means a ruin. For how long had it been abandoned? Where were its owners? “It’s been empty for ages,” said Turrell, “but the bomb was only last week.”
We were upstairs, systematically visiting each room. We were subdued, and not taking advantage of the chance for some fun. No chasing around, no skylarking, no racing or wrestling on the stairs — just this quiet inspection.
Turrell and I were similarly affected by that empty home. Pieces of heavy furniture remained in most rooms, but no personal touches. No knick-knacks on mantelpieces, no ornaments on the sideboard: just dust and bits of plaster. No paintings or mirrors on walls: just different coloured patches where they had been.
We had clambered over the rubble at plenty of bomb-sites before. We had used the shells of little terraced houses as adventure playgrounds, heedless of the tragedy that created them. Somehow, this one deserted house engendered a sense of loss and pity in us. The melancholy returned that night, and my thoughts slid erratically before sleep among images of ruin and waste, with the suffering on the face of the gentle Bernard Miles prominent.

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