For the Duration - Chapter Three

Chapter Three
POCKETFULS of CONKERS

IF THE AUTHORITIES behind the mass evacuation experienced relief when the trainloads of children finally pulled out of the cities, the local councils of the host villages and towns doubtless felt some apprehension. What would be the effect of a surge of fresh young blood coming into their communities? It would be difficult to be objective in the actual placement of their quotas of children. No simple equation based upon house size and number of occupants could really decide which evacuees should go where.
There would be welcoming homes, but plenty of reluctant ones, too. As well as the more clear-cut factors such as age, sex and marital state, there were the imponderable ones: the health of potential foster-parents, their stability, and the likelihood or not of their being able to cope. There were no computers, either, to match evacuee with foster home, after the manner of marriage agencies today. The placement committee would have little, if any, background information on the young newcomers, who would be like troops in a logistical exercise.
In Bampton, as in every other place to receive evacuees from the cities, there were unhappy and unfortunate billeting results. And some disastrous ones, too. Even the most easy-going and sympathetic of foster families experienced times of friction and despair. On the other hand, however, strong bonds were established between city and country families, and friendships were made which lasted long after the war was over.
Mary was out and about daily, on her bicycle: tending the chickens, shopping, and keeping in touch with village affairs. I heard her telling Meryl sad and sometimes sordid stories — often exaggerated after being passed around, no doubt — of housewives at their wits’ ends. Horrifying accounts of wrecked furniture; belligerent and uncontrollable youngsters; and children not toilet-trained. The truth, probably, was that some were having a most trying time, verging on nightmarish for a few. At this time, only the unsuccessful billeting arrangements were newsworthy, so a fair picture was not yet emerging.
When I first heard that Bampton was to receive lots of London schoolchildren, I was excited. As it turned out, I got to know very few of these newcomers, and now I can not remember even one of them by name. They tended to keep to themselves, naturally, as they were from the same school, and a decidedly “them and us” attitude developed between the Bampton children and the evacuees. But was I one of “them”, or one of “us”? I was a Londoner, yes, but I felt very much a part of Bampton.
For a while my loyalties were divided, and I tried to keep a foot in each camp, making it seem as though I somehow understood the problems and thinking of both sides. I did not have much in common with the other Londoners. They were from the East End, from the other side of the river, from a rougher and grimier locality than my part of New Cross. Although my father’s work in Deptford was largely among similar families, I can hear his disapproval (and snobbishness), had we seemed to be getting too friendly with such children — “Oh, no, dears; they’re not really our type, are they? The way they talk... Don’t you think they’re rather common, really?”
Not that I ever consciously chose friends according to my father’s dictates; no, there were more immediate reasons for my not becoming close to these East Enders. They were less settled than I was. They tended to come and go. As the phoney war progressed, and the likelihood of air raids seemed to recede, pining mothers from London would arrive at weekends, gather together their children and belongings, and take them away from the strangeness of country life, back to the known “security” of home among the gas-works and factories.
I did not go to school with these other Londoners, either. It was realized at once that the village school could not cater for all of the children now living in Bampton. Local children would attend school in the mornings, and the evacuees in the afternoons. I was asked which session I would rather attend: decisions, decisions! Now I should have to declare myself — one of “them”, or one of “us”. I doubt, really, that the choice was seriously mine. There was an understanding all along that I was to go into Meryl’s class, even though I was a year younger than normal. I stayed in this class for two years, and sat for “the scholarship”, as it was known, in the summer of 1941, when I was eleven.
So, I was firmly aligned with the village children. And no child ever raised an objection at receiving only half a day’s education. At some stage, the policy must have changed, for I know that this blissful situation did not continue throughout my Bampton schooldays, but we made good use of the afternoons while it lasted. Some more daring of the boys worked out a way to make the school day even shorter. At the start of the war, at least, it was a firm rule that we must carry our gas masks to school every day. If we forgot them, we would be sent home to get them — so one or two made a habit of “forgetting” theirs. There was a limit, of course, on the success of this ruse: schools had ways of bringing pupils into line.
I had exchanged the austere, two-storeyed red-brick buildings and expanse of tarmac playground of Waller Road School for Bampton’s more intimate structure of grey stone, with its unmade playground at the front, and small field beyond a smaller sealed area — for Physical Training and organized games — at the rear.
Mary’s back garden wall formed part of the school boundary. In those days, walls, railings and fences were, to me, designed for scaling; none more so than the dry-stone walls so common in this part of England. They were mellow and pleasant in appearance, and the stones exuded warmth and friendliness to exploring fingers. Why go by the road, when this convenient, shorter route was available? The wall began to suffer from my too frequent scrambling, and so this way was forbidden me. Mary was no strict disciplinarian, but she could be firm, and knew when to be.
Our recess-time games in the playground often involved running full-pelt, either as hunted or as hunter, or “he”. One exciting game gradually added those caught to the hunters, and we would join hands in pairs, or perhaps in long chains, and charge wildly after the dwindling quarry. Instead of the nerve-quivering grazing which a fall in Waller Road playground caused, a tumble now meant that dust and gravel lodged in scratches and wounds made by the scattered stones.
At Bampton, we played an energetic form of leapfrog. One boy bent over, facing the wall, hands holding himself away from it, and a second boy ran down the slope and vaulted onto his back. He then took over at the front, and a third boy now had two boys to run at and leap onto. The longer the crocodile grew, the more vigorously the remaining boys had to hurl themselves onto its tail, in their attempts to get as far forward as possible. Finally — inevitably — the whole line would collapse, and we would return to class dusty and dishevelled.

*

Early in the war, air raid shelters were built just outside the rear boundary of the school, on some open land. The above-ground timber framework was challenging, and fun to climb on, and as ballast was added and the design became more apparent, we would balance on the top of the structure, looking down on a sort of maze. We would leap from one section to the next, as though the Civil Defence was providing us with our special adventure playground. When completed, the shelters were popular hideaways for young felons.
“Where are you goin’, then?”
“The shelters.”
“What are you gunna do?”
“We bain’t tellin’ you, you’ll tell on us.”
“No, I won’t. Can I come, then?”
Jimmy and Derek let me go with them to the school shelters, and it turned out that they had a small packet of Woodbines. And so my first illicit puffs at a cigarette — and tentative, hesitant puffs they were — were taken in the security of the air raid shelters.
Their walls formed a substantial and hidden backdrop for “pitch and toss”, too. This was played with pennies. We took it in turns to pitch a coin as close as possible to a penknife stuck in the ground, then the closest pitcher tossed all of the pennies into the air, keeping the “heads”. The next closest would have his turn at tossing, and so on, until there were no pennies left.
No doubt, the authorities felt that they acted for the public good, when they put hefty locks on these shelters, but to us schoolchildren it seemed more like the act of spoilsports. Many youthful rendezvous had been kept in their darkened and secret corners. Although the shelters were never used for their intended purpose, Bampton’s youngsters did appreciate them.
There were various other reminders that there was a war on, although the village was settling into a relatively placid, if new, routine. The nightly blackout procedure, of course, was one such reminder. An air raid warden on his rostered duty, or a village policeman, would become very agitated about light peeping from a window. A light might go on in a room, the blackout momentarily forgotten. If the official were in the vicinity, his wrath would be immediate and colossal. “Put that bloody light out!” was the standard enjoiner, and not at all apocryphal. This refrain, with minor variations, echoed up and down the country.
Just who would or could have spotted that isolated beam of brightness in some remote corner of the land, and what they would or could have done about it, I do not know. I do know, however, that any breach of blackout regulations did seem serious; likely, even, to bring down a rain of bombs from what seemed a totally peaceful sky.
Then there was the Home Guard, today universally and jocularly referred to as “Dads’ Army”. The men of the village who were in the Home Guard, however, took their duties very seriously. They met regularly in the Town Hall, paraded, drilled, and engaged in mini-manoeuvres with units from neighbouring villages.
On our push-bikes, we used to travel the roads and lanes for miles around Bampton and, on one excursion down the Buckland road, when I was being given a ride on the cross-bar of Jimmy’s bike, we left the road to examine a new phenomenon. An unwieldy contraption of logs and beams sat bulkily on the grass verge a few yards off the road. We examined it. We clambered all over it (of course). We sat astride the topmost spars and discussed it. Then we continued along the Buckland road, towards the river, and soon were thinking of other things.
Barricades such as this one were shortly to be seen on the various roads that radiated out from Bampton. The Home Guard had been involved in their construction, and they could be manhandled into position across the road should an invading army be heading for Bampton. It was probably as well that their effectiveness was never tested, but they were good for morale. The signal that was to alert the population that England had been invaded — the ringing of the church bells — never came. After the lights had gone out, the bells had stopped ringing. For years this most characteristic and evocative of sounds was missing — and greatly missed —throughout the land.
Bampton’s surrounding farmland consisted largely of small fields, bounded by hawthorn hedges, but a new feature was appearing in the more open parts. Strategically placed poles ranged across the larger fields: a deterrent to troop-carrying planes. As petrol became more difficult to obtain, few motorists toured unfamiliar parts but, had they done so, road-signs would have confused them greatly. In an effort to bamboozle enemy agents, or the advance guard of an invasion force, many place-names on signposts were obliterated, mileages altered, and fingerposts swivelled to point down the wrong road.

*

So my new life was becoming established, and without my having to think about it, or determine new directions. Mary was looking after me at home, and Meryl was controlling my school progress: both capably and without fuss. I had plenty of friends and, with them, I took part in all sorts of activities that were not readily available to me in London.
Before the war, we had covered much local territory in South London, largely on foot, and our excursions had generally had some particular park or common as their goal. A pushbike gave me wonderful mobility in Bampton, and I relished the greater freedom it offered. Errands to village shops, taking eggs for sale to houses all over the village, daily trips to The Orchard to feed the chickens, collect the eggs, clean out the houses, or whatever: all became less of a chore with a bicycle.
I had collected blackberries from the hedgerows, and gone mushrooming before it was light, on holidays in earlier years. Both afforded acute pleasure, in their different ways, and we used to savour the memory of such expeditions during the following months, in London. I now had expert local knowledge available as to the whereabouts of the most prolific blackberry hedges, and the fields most likely to provide the searcher with copious mushrooms.
My schoolmates introduced me to the delicious art of scrumping, the exciting experience of gathering fruit from someone else’s garden or orchard, without the owner’s knowing it or, at any rate, being able to catch the criminal. Apples, mostly, and often before they were ripe, but that did not matter. The scrumping of fruit such as raspberries, or gooseberries, was a more dangerous business, as this usually entailed trespassing in the actual garden of the house, instead of in the more remote orchard.
We collected pocketfuls of conkers, the shiny-brown horse chestnut, jealously guarding the biggest and most polished ones, thinking of their potential as winners in the coming conker fights. We threaded our prized conkers with string, and took turns at hitting an opponent’s conker as forcefully as possible, trying to crack the shell and, eventually, break it from the string completely. Some boys went to great lengths to produce a champion conker. They would bake them in an oven, and “pickle” them in methylated spirits. Sometimes the most unlikely conker, the weediest and scruffiest one, would win battles and become a champion.
With the winter rains, the streams would fill and overflow their banks, and how often I would be in trouble for coming home with my wellingtons saturated inside! They spent much of their time before the range in the kitchen, packed with tightly screwed-up newspaper. Poor, long-suffering Mary! Then there were trees to climb. Some were time-honoured favourites, especially a row of old elms along the back of the cricket-field. Generations of boys had worked out the best routes on some of these trees, such as soaring Giant, and venerable Stumpy, the latter a gnarled old veteran, hollow and lightning scarred. We went rabbiting — though never very successfully — experimenting with snares placed strategically (as we thought), over burrows, and learning something of the unfriendly nature of ferrets.
Birds’-nesting was extremely popular, and not frowned upon in 1940. Most village boys had at least a basic collection of different eggs, carefully blown and set in cotton wool in a cardboard box. We prided ourselves on not damaging an egg in the process of blowing it: a pinprick at each end, the one to blow into being slightly smaller than the other one. It was important for an egg to be thoroughly blown — an unfortunate, stale odour would give the game away, otherwise.
Meryl gave me her old collection, housed in shoeboxes. The labels were faded, and some eggs the worse for wear, but I valued this gift. She had acquired an ostrich’s egg from somewhere, a colossal egg with astonishingly thick shell. This took pride of place, and was much admired. Although prepared to take an egg if we needed it for our collections, we followed an unwritten code of conduct, and wilful damage to a nest was rare. We took care not to frighten parent birds, or to disturb the surrounds of the nest.
We paced over open pastures searching for the simple nest of the lapwing, and waded around the swampy edges of ponds after moorhens’ nests. The most beautiful nest that I ever found was that of a long-tailed tit; it was an intricately woven, high-domed construction, with tiny entrance hole on one side, near the top. Another that gave me tremendous pleasure was a robin’s nest, with young, on the ground in some ivy. I gazed in awe at rookeries high in the elms, and listened, entranced, to the lazy cawing of the freewheeling rooks in the late afternoon.
We did not think it sissy to come home at the end of a day with armfuls of flowers gathered from some farmer’s field, or local copse. Too many for Mary to manage, and probably starting to wilt, but she would never object: cowslips from the meadows, perhaps, or slender-stemmed bluebells and ground-hugging primroses from Bluebell Woods, along the Station road.

*

Is it any wonder that I hardly missed the life that I had left behind in London?

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