For the Duration - Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight
COMPLETE with WAISTCOAT

TIME MUST HAVE BEEN PRESSING for, within days of dismissing myself from Burford Grammar School, I was back in London, and being prepared for my new school. I was to be a boarder at Bancroft’s School, a minor public school on the outskirts of London. Bancroft’s is governed and supported by the Drapers’ Company, one of the City’s great and ancient Companies, and my father’s enthusiasm was catching as the day approached when we were to be greeted by the Company at their grand old Hall in the City.
“Just wait till you see the splendour, son. Rich? I should say so. Their wealth is legendary, and the great Halls of these companies date back hundreds of years. I dare say they’ll put on a magnificent spread for us — you wait and see.”
He was absolutely correct about the grandeur of the Drapers’ Hall. I retain distinct images of ornate ceilings, towering columns, and silverware reflecting in mirrored walls: but the afternoon tea fell considerably short of the feast I had pictured. My father’s ideas were influenced, no doubt, by earlier reading of entertainment in the grand manner — banquets held in honour of visiting dignitaries — and the dozen or so eleven-year-olds and their parents hardly qualified as such.
Afterwards, parents and boys mingled, and eyed other parents and boys surreptitiously, assessing social status. I learned later that only one of us was not a scholarship boy, the odd-one-out’s father being an Old Bancroftian, and that our families could, in the main, be loosely termed “upper working class”. Our homes were scattered across London, homes that we should shortly leave, to converge on our new school, just out of London proper, hard by Epping Forest.
Beforehand, however, I needed the school uniform, and how incongruous I felt in it at first! What was a lad like me doing in a virtually black suit, complete with waistcoat? Not to mention shirts with separate collars, necessitating collar studs! The blazer and flannels seemed all right; but they could not be worn until the following summer. Oh, well; at least I should look the part of a public schoolboy.

*

I had been away from London for two years, and was struck by the interminable drabness of its suburbs. Before the war, I had accepted this as normal: now everywhere seemed so grey and shoddy. I wanted to know what the Blitz had been like, but my father would never let himself be drawn into describing those months. His timber framework still fortified the little room downstairs, and the twin pocket lawns in the back garden were still neatly trimmed — no Anderson shelter would ever deface them! The upstairs front room was a mess, with its windows boarded and ceiling stained, but otherwise the house seemed little changed inside.
All along the street, the foot-high wrought iron had disappeared from atop the low walls bordering our front gardens. There were no front gates, now, either: all in aid of the War Effort. Across the road, the park railings had gone, as well, and unkempt shrubberies poked untidily onto the pavements, adding to the general shabbiness.
The desolate shell of St. Catherine’s, opposite, demanded inspection. Its grounds were overgrown and littered, its interior clogged with refuse and debris. Skyward, a few rakish beams patterned my view as I stood, head right back, gazing. I did not stay there long; the melancholy of those ruins was too strong.
On foot, treading familiar streets, I saw gaps in the terraces that never used to be. Sometimes rubble-strewn, sometimes cleared; sometimes a row of half-a-dozen houses gone, sometimes a single home. Dwellings plucked out at random. Tattered wallpaper on surviving walls exhibited itself, inviting criticism of pattern and taste. A painful reminder of personal tragedy in the anonymous space left by the bomb. Deeper into Deptford, around my father’s Pagnell Street Mission, the rows of stunted houses were far more terribly changed. Whole blocks were ravaged.
I went by tram to visit Cousin Bill, in Brixton. His home was on the top floor of a block of flats on the corner of the street where I was born. From the tram, I peered out at the unrelieved greyness through tiny rectangles of clear window; the rest was taped against splintering, and darkened for the blackout. I recalled how, when I was very small, the same journey had seemed magical. We would sit at the front of the tram, downstairs, and look through an orange-tinted window at the driver, and at the street ahead, all aglow, and filled with promise.
Bill wanted to show me the local bomb-damage (there was no reticence on his part about life in the Blitz), and soon found an excuse to drag me out onto the fire-escape. This was an iron-grating staircase, which zigzagged from outside the kitchen window into the yard, four storeys below. The landing housed a few geraniums and other hardy plants, my aunt’s garden. Bill led me along this short landing, and hoisted a leg over the sill of the neighbouring flat’s window, saying: “Come on, Tone. Through ’ere. ’Sall right, but be careful — you gotta mind these bits o’ glass. Keep close to the wall, too, ’cos....”
He did not need to explain. Having gingerly manoeuvred myself through the window, I could see that very little of the floor was safe to stand on. I did not know that their block of flats had been hit by a high explosive, and that not much remained of the top two storeys of adjoining flats. They had not yet been cleared, but soon their ex-neighbours’ wallpaper would be on view.
Bill’s face beamed as he showed me around his private playground. It was largely unsafe, and due for demolition, but for the time being it catered for an exciting range of precarious pursuits. Testing the flooring; trying to visit each room in turn, without retracing one’s movements; traversing this wall, and that: such things tested one’s judgement, climbing ability and balancing skills, and were distinctly challenging. They made the heart beat faster, and gave great satisfaction when accomplished.
I gained confidence as I became more accustomed to the instability of the footing, the gaping emptiness of some rooms, and the general exposure of the site. We played follow-the-leader for a while — Bill was the leader, he always had been — until he tired of this game. Then he scampered down the fire escape, yelling: “Tally-ho! Bandits One-five! Here goes nothing!” and the like, at the top of his voice.
Late that evening, home again in Kitto Road, I had difficulty explaining my dishevelled appearance. Unconvincing mutterings to the effect that I had helped clean out the yard behind my grandmother’s place — quite close to Bill’s flat — did not satisfactorily account for my badly scuffed shoes, filthy shirt, seat half-torn out of my trousers, and all-over dusty state.
It had been dark for some time when I caught the tram at Kennington to return home to New Cross. This was my first experience of travelling in London’s blackout, and Bill had come to the tram-stop with me. We walked down the main road to the intersection, where the traffic lights kept their vigil; coloured eyes masked to slits, with hooded lids. Even with Bill, I felt more solitary than when I had been out on my own at night in Bampton.
Bill told me how he and his family had visited my father the previous winter, and had had to walk home on a night of dense fog. Apparently, no buses or trams were running. To cap it off, the siren sounded, and half of the journey was made in the uncertainty of an air raid. In bravado, I had told Bill that afternoon how much I envied him his experiences in the Blitz. My inner self knew how glad I was that, on this particular night, London was free of both fog and hostile warplanes.

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