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World War II
L
ooking through the
window of my office at Green College, Oxford, I can see, less than a
hundred yards away, the venerable stone buildings of the Radcliffe
Infirmary where I was born nearly sixty-five years ago, three weeks
before Britain declared war on Hitler. Fear of fascism as much as
fear of Hitler colored the conversational environment of my early
years. Having known no other life, I accepted war-time existence as
the way the world was, unable to distinguish products of the
emergency that would disappear with a return to peace from those
things that were permanent features of society. For adults it was a
minimalist existence compared to their pre-war life. Food was scarce
and rationed, and “the blackout” rigidly enforced by air raid
wardens, insured that not a sliver of light escaped from windows
sealed with blinds or black cloth. Street lights, neon signs that
hung like dead vines on the sides of buildings and other forms of
outside illumination were gone for the duration, night was like it
was meant to be--totally black. Commerce was strictly constrained by
the war effort. In my childhood experience houses were never bought
or sold, new shops never opened, no one started a new business,
there were no professional sports, gasoline rationing prevented
virtually all private use of automobiles, there was no ice cream nor
any new toys in the stores.
The newspapers were so filled with the war that I grew up thinking
that once the conflict was over, there would no longer be
newspapers. Fearful of defeat and invasion, the population held onto
whatever money and possessions they had. The prime minister, Winston
Churchill, asked that people turn in their pots and pans and the
iron railings in front of their houses, anything made of metal that
could be melted down and turned into munitions. Years later I would
learn that this was an exercise in futility dreamed up by Winston
Churchill to instill a sense of sacrifice for the war effort in the
people of Britain and had no practical relevance to the production
of weapons.
My parents lived in a small apartment on the curiously-named
Squitchey Lane in North Oxford. The three, four-unit apartment
buildings were clustered together on a corner lot with a grass area
behind. Beyond was a line of garages for the tenants. We did not
have one because we did not have a car. These stucco-clad buildings
had been put up just before the war and my parents, considered very
lucky to get in, were among the first occupants. The rent was one
pound ten shillings a week and bald Mr Pye came each Friday to
collect it. This was my world for the first eight ears of my life. I
knew all the neighbors: glamorous, cigarette-smoking Mrs Axtell who
lived underneath us had a husband away in the war but was always
throwing parties and having men visit; Mr Abbot, the newsagent in
the nearby shopping district, his wife and son of seventeen who was
about to go into the army; the two friendly Dr Sinclairs, husband
and wife who wore uniforms and were in the army, but commuted
everyday to a local military hospital, and Mrs Geddes who lived
across the hall from us and who had a daughter, Mary, my own age and
my earliest playmate. Mr Geddes was in the army in North Africa.
It was largely a world of mothers and children. Most men I
encountered were over fifty. I was lucky to have a father at home.
Both my parents had been born in Perth, Western Australia and my
father, a medical scientist, had come to Oxford in 1936, initially
as a postdoctoral fellow, and then as a lecturer in the physiology
department. As an Australian citizen and an academic playing a vital
role in the war effort, he was initially exempted from the
conscription that affected other men his age. He had made a name for
himself, and become a potential Nobel Prize candidate, by being the
first person to demonstrate the presence of Vitamin C in the human
body. Despite his youth, he was recognized as one of the world’s
leading authorities on nutrition. With the outbreak of war, he
became an advisor to the Ministry of Food. Winston Churchill had
directed that a nutritional safety net be established to insure that
a minimum standard of health and nutrition be maintained for mothers
and children despite food rationing and other sacrifices of the war.
My father made frequent trips to London amid bombing raids to help
establish what that standard should be and what supplements to their
rations mothers and children should receive. A bottle of
concentrated orange juice and of cod-liver oil provided free to all
children every two weeks was among the measures taken. My father and
other scientists traveled the country speaking to factory employees,
community groups, and women’s organizations to educate them about
good nutrition, especially vitamins. Ironically this program
resulted in a level of nutritional health for children of working
class families that far exceeded that which they had enjoyed in
peace time, when poverty, ignorance and an indifferent government
did not reach out to them. I was kept strictly on the diet my father
was recommending to the government and I was made the test child for
the program. Every three months I was taken to a lab at the
headquarters of the Oxford Nutrition Survey at 10 Parks Road where
my blood was drawn, my night vision was tested in total darkness,
and I was given a general physical. My father went to great lengths
to prepare me, but it was still a frightening experience for a
three-year-old. My health dictated the diet of the children of the
nation.
Shortage of food was an important part of my early life. I remember
regularly standing in line in the cold with my mother for countless
hours at a bread factory where we went twice a week. The government
set up feeding centers in church halls and other large buildings
where anyone could go to obtain a nutritionally balanced meal
outside the rationing system and for minimal cost. My father
frequently took me to eat at one such facility where the fare seemed
always to be the traditional English dish of ground beef and
potatoes known as shepherd’s pie. It was in a church hall across the
street from what has become Green College, the college where now I
regularly dine at “high table” on Thursday evenings on gourmet
cuisine with the best wine. Each time as I leave I look across at
the church hall and marvel how my life has changed in a little over
sixty years.
Shortly after my third birthday I was enrolled in Miss Franklin’s
Wayside Nursery School. Miss Franklin was a stout spinster in her
forties with greying hair pulled back in a tight bun. She took roll
each morning sitting in a straight-backed chair, with the children
dressed in yellow smocks arrayed on the floor in front of her. She
sat in a no-nonsense fashion but with her knees apart, and you could
look up her skirt “all the way to the top.” We snickered among
ourselves and she never knew why.
Miss Franklin was a devout Roman Catholic and her school was across
the street from a Catholic church which had a small group of nuns
associated with it. There was also a priest, a silent, frightening
figure in black, who moved in the background and never spoke to the
children. On several occasions we were taken there to watch
flickering black and white movies of the missionary work their order
was doing in Africa. The semi-naked black figures moving among tiny
thatched kraals seemed so distant from anything in my own
experience. It was hard for me to relate to the idea of these nuns,
strange characters in their own right, going to Africa to impart
Christianity to these people.
My father, a slim compact man with a thin moustache and glasses,
would depart each morning, even in the worst British weather,
bicycling to work down the Banbury road to the physiology department
in the university. He had attached a small seat to the crossbar on
which, on weekends, I could sit while he rode. In this fashion I saw
most of Oxford and the surrounding countryside. Sometimes we stopped
at a pub where he would sit me outside with a lemonade while he went
in for a pint of beer. Occasionally he took me to work with him.
Like any large research lab, the smell of chemicals and forest of
glassware were its most memorable features. But to me the most
exciting aspect was always the visit to the floor with the research
animals. There they had guinea pigs, rats, mice, dogs, cats and even
several species of monkey, each of which my father taught me to
identify. Periodically my father would take his turn spending the
night on the roof of the building, along with other faculty across
the university, looking out for incendiary bombs that the Germans
might drop. These had to be extinguished immediately to limit the
damage in the old highly flammable structures.
Despite the war, it was an exciting time in medical research in
Oxford. Among my father’s colleagues were, Howard Florey an
Australian and Ernst Chain, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, who
with a team of other scientists were turning Alexander Fleming’s
original discovery of penicillin into the biggest breakthrough in
the control of infectious disease of the twentieth century, Dorothy
Hodgkin, a crystallographer was working on defining the structure of
insulin, for which she too would later receive a Nobel prize, Peter
Medawar, another Nobelist, who was doing original work in
immunology, a field that over the next fifty years would come to
dominate medical science. ( I have a picture of myself at age two
running naked on a lawn with his daughter Caroline.) And there was
Hugh Sinclair, an iconoclast and visionary thinker in the field of
nutrition who became convinced of the importance of essential fatty
acids in the human diet. A meticulous scientist but inattentive to
his personal appearance and habits, he always stank of the whale
blubber or other animals fats he was working on. For fifty years his
pioneering studies were largely ignored, but today our understanding
of the crucial importance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids in
human health is largely attributable to his work.
My father tried hard to be a good parent, especially in the
intellectual realm. He read to me almost every evening, heavily from
popular science, particularly about animals, as well as mythology,
geography, and the poems from Shakespeare’s plays, most of which I
could recite by my fifth birthday. Above my bed he pinned a map of
the world about which he regularly quizzed me so that I could soon
identify all of the countries and most of the major rivers and
cities. We had a large illustrated book with the most famous works
of the world’s great artists which we went through so often that I
could name each picture and its painter.
Perhaps because he was self-conscious about the culturally
unsophisticated background he came from in Australia my father took
a strong interest in ballet. The only picture I remember on the wall
of our apartment was a copy of Degas’s “Ballerina.” I recall at a
very young age being taken to a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan
Lake. My strongest recollection was of a young man in uniform,
probably on leave, sitting next to us who seemed overcome by emotion
watching the grace of the dancers. At some point my father had
briefly taken ballet lessons and when I was no more than four it was
proposed that I take classes at the Oxford ballet school. My parents
were good in always wanting to expose me to new experiences and
opportunities, but always with the caveat, “if you do not like it
you do not have to do it.” The ballet school was filled with women
in tights in their late teens or early twenties exercising at the
bar or leaping around the room. I was terrified by their size, power
and fast movement and fearful that I would be knocked over. I did
not go back.
Horseback riding was another matter. My teacher, Gwladys Antonia
Doering, was a quintessential British eccentric and an Oxford
fixture of the forties and fifties. In her youth a cultured
academic, I remember her as a tall gaunt figure in her late fifties,
with facial hair, a large hat, always wearing the same heavily worn
garments with multiple petticoats, loping with powerful strides,
rope or halter in hand, through the streets of Oxford. She rode the
bus, but usually forgot to pay. In those days people let it pass.
Today she might be thought of as a “bag-lady.”
She taught riding at Port Meadow, a large stretch of common land
given to the people of Oxford by William the Conqueror, on which
anyone could graze their animals. It was said that she was not
particular whether the lesson was given on one of her horses or
someone else’s, if indeed, she owned any horses at all. She would
end the day by taking tea at the elegant Randolph Hotel where she
carefully left her muddy boots, but not the strong odor of horses,
at the door.
Although the war and the fear it generated gradually diminished as I
grew older, in the early years the sense of threat was intense. The
war we knew was the air war, which throughout Europe would involve a
quarter of a million planes and the loss of 200,000 lives. Rarely
was one or more planes not visible somewhere in the sky. I grew up
with a Pavlovian response of fear whenever the long steady note of
the air raid siren warning of imminent attack punctuated our lives,
and of pleasure and relief when the oscillating sound of the “all
clear” was heard. Oxford was a university town, but it was also the
site of the Oxford Motor Works, which was churning out military
vehicles at a fierce rate. And it was on the flight path of Germans
planes flying to attack the industrial center of Coventry. Heavy
German bombing seemed a certainty. When I was an infant in 1941,
fear of bombing led my mother to move with me to a village in the
Cotswold Hills to which my father would bicycle on the weekends. One
Sunday afternoon my parents took me for a picnic on an open hillside
near the village. Suddenly a low flying Messerschmidt, apparently
separated from the rest of his squadron, roared down on us from a
cloudless sky. One burst from his machine guns would have quickly
put an end to the three of us. Whether out of humanitarian decency
or lack of ammunition, he did not fire. My parents decided that we
were probably just as safe in Oxford, after all. Unbeknownst to the
public, a secret agreement had been reached whereby the allies would
avoid bombing Heidelberg and in return the Germans would spare
Oxford and Cambridge. However, a year later when there were again
rumors that Oxford would be hit my father moved us to the resort
town of Brighton on the south coast of England. Not long after my
mother and I took up residence with friends there, the Germans began
“hit and run” raids, flying the twenty miles across the English
channel, dumping their bombs on the coastal towns and quickly flying
back to occupied France before the British planes could get in the
air to attack them. These resort towns had no strategic
significance. It was merely an effort to intimidate and demoralize
the civilian population.
Once a joyous center of fun and recreation, Brighton had become a
dreary town. Just to kill time and keep me entertained, my mother
spent many hours walking me along the sea-front where the once
laughter-filled beaches had become a dismal tangle of barbed wire,
mines, and concrete pylons to slow any German amphibious landing.
The screaming air raid sirens usually gave us time enough to run to
the underground shelters. Once my mother and I were caught on the
street as a bomb fell less than a block away. We were blown off our
feet into the doorway of a store. The store’s plate glass window
crashed down, but neither of us was injured. The raids got steadily
more frequent with part of almost every night spent in the shelters.
Finally my father arrived to take us back to Oxford. That night the
raids were particularly heavy and my father exhausted from his
journey wanted to take his chances staying in bed rather than going
to the shelter. He had taken my place in my mother’s bed and I was
sleeping in a makeshift bed on the floor next to him. Over the weeks
my mother and I had become somewhat inured to the bombing, but I
could sense the fear in my father who was experiencing it for the
first time. I was initially determined to show him that I was not
afraid, but eventually the raid became so intense and the exploding
bombs so close that I had to admit my fear and ask in a plaintive
voice if I could join them in the bed. The next morning we returned
to Oxford and would give up looking for other refuges for the rest
of the war.
It was the face of war close up that was more frightening to a young
child than the somewhat abstract threat of bombing. Several of the
Oxford Colleges had been turned into hospitals to treat the wounded.
St. Hughes had become the center for casualties with brain damage.
When you passed by on fine days you could see, at a distance, men in
the grounds wandering around or sitting in wheel chairs with their
heads swathed in bandages. It was a frightening site to a three or
four year-old. On one occasion, when my mother and I were riding on
a train, the young man sitting opposite us had terrible scabs on
much of his face and one of his arms. He explained to my mother that
he was a Spitfire pilot who had been badly burned when he was shot
down. I remember trying to get my mother to move to another
compartment.
Whenever I hear people speaking glibly and even enthusiastically
about war, I think, from my own experience, about the devastating
and lasting psychological effects it has on children even when the
exposure to the full horrors, as in my case, is limited. There are
times when I feel my whole life has been shaped by those distortions
of everyday existence that war inflicted on me. It also makes me
believe that those who did not share similar experiences can not
begin to comprehend the tragically unanticipated implications of a
lightly taken decision to go to war.
Italy surrendered in 1943, but its prisoners of war were kept in
Britain until the cessation of hostilities with all of the axis
powers. Unlike the German prisoners they were given considerable
latitude in mixing with the civilian population. They wore dark jump
suits with “P.O.W.” emblazoned on the back in large letters. On
weekends they congregated in the center of Oxford going to shops,
pubs, and restaurants. I remember them as gregarious and friendly,
especially to children.
German prisoners, with whom we had little contact, were by contrast
something to be feared. They were only seen in the towns being
transported in trucks to construction sites or farms where they
could be required to work under the Geneva Convention. Perhaps
because I only saw them in winter, they always seemed to have on
heavy overcoats and were unfriendly and unsmiling. My mother had a
sister who was married to a school master at Radley College, about
six miles from Oxford, and occasionally we would go there for the
weekend. Next to their house was a farm where German prisoners came
everyday to work. Other children and I were warned to stay well
clear of them with the same degree of concern with which we were
admonished to beware of the bull.
In the early part of the war, the greatest fear was of being invaded
by parachuting German divisions. People in Oxford believed that
because of the many open spaces near the city, we were in a prime
location for such an attack. The government had announced that if an
invasion occurred, people would be warned by the ringing of church
bells all over the country. Unfortunately, there were several false
alarms when church bells rang for some other reason, and we were
convinced we were about to see Germans on our doorstep. So ingrained
was the fear and hostility towards Germans that it took me years
after the war to overcome it. In some respects, perhaps, I never
have. One joy the Germans did bring to my life and that of other
children was the “silver paper” their planes dropped from the sky,
chaff to confuse British radar. In our drab colorless war-time world
these shiny strands from heaven added excitement and novelty to our
lives and most children collected it like stamps or baseball cards.
Later in the war American troops began to appear. They were unlike
the tired, worn-down, reserved British, the feared, resentful,
hostile Germans, or even the laughing, friendly Italians. The
Americans were outgoing, warm, generous, and to some child-like in
being largely oblivious to local sensitivities and customs. For
children, their greatest asset was that they represented a never
ending source of Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum. “Got any gum,
chum?” was the greeting we used any time we saw Americans. For young
women they were the source of nylons, an innovation in hosiery
hitherto unknown in Britain. But the G.I.s enjoyed salaries several
times that of British troops and had a widely despised attitude that
they had come to take over and win the war. For those who had clung
on through the blitz and turned the tide when Britain faced
invasion, this condescension from troops who had yet to see a moment
of combat was a considerable source of anger, giving rise to the
widely quoted aphorism that “the only thing wrong with the Yanks is
that they are overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” In the British
Army, one of the great bastions of the class-system, American
officers were seen as gauche, with no more refinement or education
than their enlisted men. British officers found it difficult to
accept them as equals. To most Britons, America was a largely
unknown country and culture. I do not remember meeting any Briton
who had actually been to America until I was at least twelve years
old. Concepts such as “manifest destiny” and “American
exceptionalism” would have been unknown to all but a handful of
academics.
Although my mother was born in Australia her parents had emigrated
from rural Wales at the turn of the century. Her father, a cobbler
in the tiny village of Caio, had tried to enlist in the British Army
at the time of the Boer War but was rejected for “flat feet.”
Instead, in 1901 he set out for Western Australia, where many Welsh
were going to flee the poverty in their native land. Having
established himself with a shoe shop in Perth he returned three
years later to marry his childhood sweetheart from an isolated
farmstead in the Cothi valley of Carmarthenshire.
When my parents came to Britain in 1936, my mother established
contact with her Welsh relatives. When I was four she had taken me
there for several weeks. At that time it was a very long trip; we
took several trains, breaking the trip overnight in the port city of
Swansea. Returning to the station the next morning I remember
walking by the smouldering shells of building after building, the
result of intensive bombing a few days before. During the war
farmers were one group given a special gasoline allowance.
My mother and I stayed in a little white-washed cottage with slate
roof on the banks of the Cothi river, the home of another cousin and
her two young daughters. There was no electricity or inside
plumbing. A bath was a weekly event in a galvanized iron tub in
front of the fire. Each day we walked through the fields to the main
farm house, Brynteg. There were rabbits everywhere which, as a
source of protein, sustained the local farmers throughout the war.
People would later tell me they do not know how they would have
survived without the rabbits. In the fall the river was filled with
spawning salmon. Although they were all in the livestock business,
it was against the law to kill and eat the sheep they were raising.
There was a network of first and second cousins, great uncles and
great aunts, related to me through my mother, scattered throughout
these wild beautiful valleys. This area had been the western most
extension of the Roman empire. There were the remains of Roman gold
and tin mines, aqueducts, military forts and lookout posts. My
relatives could trace their ancestry back at least to the sixteen
century in this area and our shared ancestors had probably worked as
Roman slaves. It was very different world from Oxford, but as with
rural people everywhere they were warm and friendly. Wales would
become an important part of my life. Generally, because farmers were
exempted from military duty, families were still intact, a new
experience for me. My mother came from a community of tenant farmers
from which the once powerful gentry had largely disappeared. There
was an egalitarianism quite different from the class-consciousness
in England. This, too, was the heartland of non-conformism in
Britain, and most were devout Methodists or Baptists. In my early
years, Welsh was still the predominant language with many people
speaking no English. During my lifetime, Welsh would gradually
diminish becoming the first language of fewer and fewer people. This
was where my roots lay and where I would later return to restore
myself no matter where I had gone in the world.
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In the early
summer of 1944 the invasion of Europe was imminent. My
father took me to a little airport at Kidlington near Oxford
where we spent an afternoon watching large gliders made,
miraculously, mostly out of plywood, doing practice
landings. They were to be towed by planes across the channel
filled with troops to land in fields behind enemy lines.
What was not known was the exact date on which the invasion
would occur or the precise location of the landings, and a
great guessing game began. Each day the number of planes in
the sky began to increase. On the morning of June 6th,
perhaps sensing that the crescendo could not go on for ever
and seeing the sky particularly thick with planes, I
announced definitively to my parents “Today is the day of
the invasion.” I could not be talked out of it and to their
astonishment I turned out to be right.
As the war in Europe was drawing to a close, my father, who
had so far had been exempted from military service, was
called to active duty. I suspect that he may have had much
to do with it himself, concerned about being someone who had
not served in a sea of returning veterans. He went in as a
major in the army with a component of the Special Operations
Executive (S.O.E.) known as Force 136. Its primary job was
to support clandestine operations against the Japanese in
Burma, Thailand and Malaysia. He made a four-day trip by
flying boat to India, sending a letter from their re-fueling
stops along the way. From India and later Ceylon he would
send me gifts, including wooden elephants and other carved
animals. When the Japanese surrendered he moved on to Kuala
Lumpur where he was in charge of restoring the nutrition of
the Malaysian people who had been brought to a state of near
starvation. His letters and gifts were my first taste of a
world outside wartime Britain.
For a year and a half my mother and I lived alone. We were
close, and my mother worked hard to make up for my father’s
absence. She was not physically demonstrative, but tried to
fill my life with pleasant and interesting experiences. She
also had a strong social conscience and filled me with
concern for injustice. She showed great empathy and
compassion for those who were deprived or suffering. In
later years when she was a clinical psychologist for the
county of Oxford, she would collect perfume samples and give
them to teenage girls, usually orphans or emotionally
deprived, with a note that said “from someone who cares
about you.” We went on extended weekend trips to the resort
towns of Torquay and Bournemouth, the country town of
Paignton on the edge of the Cotswolds, and occasional visits
to London. It was a period in which the impact of the war
steadily diminished. Pre-war commodities, if not luxuries,
slowly began to reappear. Winston Churchill arranged for a
boatload of bananas to be brought from the Caribbean with
enough so that there was at least one for every child in
Britain. It was a highly anticipated event and for several
days I rushed home from school to see if my mother had
obtained my unknown fruit. When they finally appeared I ate
the revered delicacy slowly savoring the taste and smell. I
saved the skin until it had turned thoroughly black and had
dried up. Ever since, triggered mainly by the smell, I have
been unable to eat a banana without recalling that moment.
It was an inspired gesture- -a memorable streak of yellow in
the grey world of post-war Britain.
My mother took a job as a part-time secretary for a woman
doctor, Vera Walker, whose husband also was a physician. It
allowed her to save enough money so that later, after my
father’s return, there was enough for a down payment on a
house. It was something she would regularly raise any time
they had an argument. My mother and I were invited to the
doctor’s house for Christmas in 1945. Although she lived
only a few blocks from our apartment, her home was large and
expensively appointed. It was my first recognition that some
people lived more comfortably than others and that money was
the decisive factor. In general my parents taught me that
making money was something to be scorned and that as a goal
in life, as opposed to making intellectual or social
contributions to society, it was not something to aspire to.
They never saw this in any political context, but rather as
part of an inherent system of moral values by which everyone
should want to abide. I do not remember either of my parents
taking much interest in organized politics.
My mother also did volunteer work with the Overseas League,
mainly helping to entertain foreign visitors to Oxford. The
most memorable to me was an African from the Madagascar
named Ratsamamunga, who came to lunch. He was the first
black person I had ever encountered in the flesh, with the
missionary films at Miss Franklin’s church being the sum
total of my knowledge about Africa up to that point.
For VE Day my mother and I bought flags to hang out of our
windows, British, Australian and American. The day was the
most exciting of my young life. Hard drinking revelers were
in the street all day; many people maintained what amounted
to a day-long open house, and at night there were bonfires
and a few scarce fireworks in every community. That night I
stayed with a friend of my mother’s who was in her
seventies, so my mother could spend the night celebrating.
It was the only time I remember her leaving me at night in
someone else’s care and quite out of character for her to be
out most of the night carousing. Three months later on my
sixth birthday the first atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima. I remember the male Dr Sinclair, in his major’s
uniform, explaining it to me. It certainly meant the end of
the war with Japan and the happy prospect of my father’s
return, but he impressed on me his concern as to whether the
massive loss of life was really necessary and his fears
about the implications of such a weapon for the future of
the human race.
I went on from Ms Franklin’s to the Dragon School, a unique
institution that would have a profound affect on me, not
just in terms of what I learned, but upon my outlook on
life, the values I held and the kind of person I became.
Among the founders was Charles Liddel master of Christ
Church and the father of Alice of Alice in Wonderland.
Lionel Charles Liddel, one of Alice’s brothers was among the
first group of pupils. By the early twentieth-century its
reputation was such that parents put their children on the
waiting list at birth. Merely by being in Oxford it
attracted the children of talented and accomplished figures
both locally and from around the country. Those who had
preceded me or were contemporaries included-poet John
Betjeman, the children of J.R. Tolkein and the nephew of
Boris Pasternak, author Neville Shute, historian Antonia
Frazer, poet laureate John Stallworthy, the children of
Andrew Lloyd Weber (whose mother taught music at the
school), Labor Party leader, Hugh Gaitskill, several cabinet
officers in both parties, the children of several Nobel
Prize winners and several who went on themselves to win the
award.
I started just after my sixth birthday in the junior school,
a small two year program that was only for day students. We
would all go on to the senior school as day boys or boarders
to join the bulk of the students who entered only the senior
school at age eight. There was no provision for girls to be
boarders so their numbers were small and they were all the
daughters of Oxford residents.
I had heard that one of the features of this majestic
institution was corporal punishment and I worried during the
weeks before my first day of school that my reading ability
would be judged as not good enough and I would be subjected
to terrifying castigation. In fact, I was a proficient
reader, and I discovered corporal punishment was not
administered in the junior school that was run entirely by
women. My teacher, Miss Cleasby, was a kind and motherly
young woman.
My father returned in the middle of 1946. He had been gone
for twenty-five percent of my life and despite the
excitement of his homecoming, he was like a stranger to me.
We still did things together and he continued his interest
in me, but our relationship would never be quite the same
again. In my father’s absence my mother had been working
diligently, using what few political connections she had, to
obtain passage for the two of us on an ocean liner to
Australia. After a forced separation for more than ten years
she wanted to see her parents. In the immediate post-war
period, there were large numbers of people with
high-priority justifications for any transportation in or
out of Britain, and tickets on any boat were highly-coveted.
When my mother notified my teachers that she planned to take
me out of school for an entire term, they were astonished.
No one in Oxford ever did something like that, and they
warned that my nascent academic career could be irreparably
damaged.
The month long voyage took a toll on us, but especially my
mother. Our cabin was below the water line, and four mothers
with five children, all under seven, were crammed together
in nine bunk beds without temperature control or air
circulation. The air was stale and smelled of fuel oil.
While we had access to as much sea water as we wanted each
adult received only one bucket of fresh water a day for
herself and her children. On the first morning after our
departure I and most of our cabin mates developed serious
sea sickness in the traditionally choppy seas of the Bay of
Biscay. I spent most of the next three days huddled in a
blanket on the main deck vomiting, drinking ginger ale and
occasionally nibbling on salted sea biscuits.
We passed through the Mediterranean and the Suez canal. The
canal was barely wider than the ship, so that you felt you
were sailing along in the middle of the desert. You could
almost reach out and touch the camels walking on tracks
along the banks. I remember vividly the utter tranquility,
without a slightest ripple on the water, as we crossed the
Great Bitter lake, where only a few months before President
Roosevelt had met with King Saud to create America’s
oil-based relationship with the twelve year-old desert
kingdom. One morning I awoke to find that, during the night,
we had anchored in the harbor in Aden at the tip of Yemen.
Long a British bunkering station on the route to India, we
were to stop there for three days while the ship refueled
and took on provisions. I was stunned by the dazzling color,
the brightness of the sun and perhaps most lastingly by the
aroma of spices and incense. Young boys, naked, had swum out
to the ship and would dive after coins thrown into the water
by the passengers. Merchants in small rowing boats loaded
down with exotic looking leather goods, fezzes, rugs and
curved knives studded with semi-precious stones cruised
around us bargaining up to the passengers at the top of
their lungs. To me it was like Aladdin’s cave come to life.
We went ashore for an afternoon and walked around the town
among veiled women and men in strange garb, camels and
goats. It was an experience so different from the drab world
I had known to that point and a major milestone in my life.
Shortly after we departed into the Indian ocean we
encountered a major storm. Mountainous seas threw the ship
around. Virtually every passenger and crew member was
vomiting over the side. Again I was severely affected. When
my mother took me to the ship’s doctor, he decided I also
had severe tonsillitis and recommended that I be admitted to
the ship’s hospital. My mother was delighted to find a way
to get me out of our cramped cabin, even though I was the
only child in a ward of rough talking men suffering from
broken limbs or dysentery.
We landed in Fremantle, the port town near Perth in Western
Australia. We were met by my paternal grandfather, Walter
Howard Bourne, a slim purposeful man with rimless glasses
and grey hair. I have always remembered him as physically
resembling Harry Truman who was much in the news at the
time. His grand-father, my great-great-grandfather, John
Bourne, had emigrated from Britain in 1853 with his wife,
Charlotte Rose and four young sons. John had been an ivory
turner of modest accomplishment when, lured by the news of
the Australian gold rush, they had fled the slums of
Victorian London. After a three month journey they landed in
Melbourne and went immediately to the gold fields at
Ballarat. John reportedly mined £ 6,000 worth of gold over
the next fifteen years, but gambled much of it away. Their
youngest son, Arthur, drowned in a flooded mine shaft at
Kangaroo Flats when he was eight, and another son, Henry,
was killed in a rock fall in the Suleiman Pasha gold mine in
1885. Henry was forty-two, married, and, today, has more
than sixty descendants still living in the state of
Victoria.
The family had for the next two generations eked out a
living in the mining industry. Then, in 1905, my grandfather
lured, like his grandfather, by the discovery of gold, moved
to the site of the new finds in Coolgardie in Western
Australia. After two years of harsh living in a shelter made
of poles and canvas, little gold to show for it, and the
death of their two young children, he and his wife, Minnie,
moved to Perth. There he landed a job as a printer, a trade
he had learned as a teenager at the Moonta Mines Gazette.
Over the years he moved up to become the deputy government
printer. More significantly he also became a union organizer
founding the printer’s union in Western Australia. This led
him into politics and a heavy involvement with the Labor
Party. He had played a critical role in helping to assure
the election to the parliament in Canberra of a young
protegé, John Curtin. Walter, however, felt that Curtin had
forgotten him and, once in power, had done nothing to reward
him for his years of loyalty. He would remain bitter to the
end of his life.
My mother’s family, with whom we were to stay for the next
three months differed significantly from that of Walter
Bourne. Ben Jones, my mother’s father, was retired and
suffering from parkinsonism, attributed to the Spanish
influenza pandemic of 1918. He slept in a chair much of the
time and was hard for a little boy to relate to. Their
modest home exuded Welshness. Pictures of Welsh scenes and
Welsh people covered the walls. Ben and his wife Letitia (Letty)
spoke Welsh much of the time and, despite a life time in
Australia, their existence centered around the Welsh
expatriate community with its clubs and musically oriented
social evenings. Even at that young age I remember, during
that trip, becoming acutely aware of people’s cultural and
ethnic differences.
Australia was for me a staggering contrast with war-time
Britain. The constant warm, sunny days, of the approaching
Australian summer, the bright neon lights at night downtown,
green-grocers stores with piles of fresh and exotic fruit,
milk shakes, (something I had not previously encountered),
shops filled with goods including books and toys of every
description, un-rationed gasoline, so that travel by car was
the rule rather than the exception, the absence of any kind
of war threat or austerity, and the informal relaxed nature
of Australians, opened a whole new vision of what the world
could be like. The vastness of the countryside after the
neat hedgerows and tiny fields of Britain fascinated me. We
spent time at the beaches where, my mother told me, my
grandfather in his youth had been a re-known shark
fisherman. My parents had met when they were both students
at the University of Western Australia. After graduating my
mother, before getting married, had worked for a year as a
teacher in the tiny outback town of Toojay. She was
attracted to my father, she told me over the years, not only
because he was very bright and academically successful, but
because he made no secret of his desire to make the most out
of his life even if meant going to the ends of the earth to
escape the parochialism of Australia.
My mother’s eldest sister owned a cabin in the mountains in
a small community called Darlington that was a couple of
hours bus ride from Perth. There we walked in the bush among
giant eucalyptus trees, elegant tropical flowers called
“kangaroo paws” and saw foot-long, stump-tailed lizards,
wallabies and the occasional kangaroo. Always wary of
snakes, we searched for “black boys” a waste high cross
between a fern and a palm with a high concentration of a
turpentine like substance that made them ideal for starting
fires. Disappearing then, I am sure that if any still remain
today, they are a protected species.
After one weekend visit we were waiting in the general store
and cafe for the bus back to Perth. A rough, friendly
fellow, not unlike “Crocodile Dundee,” asked me “Do you like
to drink spiders?” “What’s a spider,” I replied. Somewhat
incredulous he explained that it was a Coca Cola with a
scoop of ice cream in it. “What’s Coca Cola?” I asked having
never heard of it before. He thought I was trying to be
smart with him, but he did buy me a “spider” while my mother
struggled to explain that the complete absence of sodas was
a part of the deprivations we had endured in wartime
Britain.
I stayed for a week with Walter and Minnie Bourne. Their
house was near the South Perth zoo and this was used with me
as an inducement to be willing to spend the time away from
my mother with people who were for all practical purposes
total strangers. Separation was one thing, but there was
another matter that worried me. My father had been a
champion college athlete holding the Western Australian mile
record. Walter had been his emphatic manager and trainer. My
father described how following a shower his father would
give him, and on occasion other athletes, a special “rubdown
and massage”. I was to be the beneficiary of the same
experience and it was discussed by my mother openly with
Walter as “something Peter’s father has told him about and
he is looking forward to.” In fact I was petrified. Showers
were something with which I had had no experience before
coming to Australia and the idea of being rubbed down while
naked by a strange old man as part of some athletic ritual
when I was only a child left me very frightened. The first
morning my grandfather fetched me for the shower. He had
large oversize mittens made of toweling material with which
he vigorously rubbed me all over as I stepped from the
shower. Nothing untoward happened, but if it had, I would
have been too ashamed or frightened to say anything to my
mother. After that first day my grandfather seemed to lose
interest, but I have always been suspicious about what he
might have been up to in his younger years. But he did take
me to the zoo twice. High points for me of the whole trip.
Despite his earlier radical politics I remember him as
rigidly conservative in his personal values. Walter was a
very bright man who had only four years of education,
something that he clearly regretted. He had driven his
children to succeed as much for his gratification as theirs.
After an older brother had died in a a motorcycle accident
Walter had focused all of his search for gratification on my
father. Hard work and accomplishment was what he valued and
I could well see how my father came out of that home as a
driven over-achiever.
My father, years later described to me how Walter, who had
been forced to marry Minnie when she became pregnant despite
his lack of feelings for her, lived in constant fear that my
father’s two sisters might become pregnant and, until they
left home, strictly regulated any contact with boys.
Similarly he would not allow my father to date girls until
he was at the university and was always warning him that he
could destroy his career by “going too far.” Ironically, the
son of my father’s older sister, Dorothy, now in his
seventies recently told me that his mother was pregnant with
him when she got married.
Due probably to family connections, our return to the UK was
in far greater style than our outward voyage. My mother and
I shared a state room to ourselves on the main deck of the
ship. The weather proved to be perfect most of the way and I
recall few if any days of seasickness. I spent long hours on
deck usually in some isolated corner entranced by the sea
and its constantly changing character. Some days it was
smooth as glass, at other times broken into tiny
white-capped waves, or heaving mountains of water. Sometimes
it was bright blue, another day it would be green. On
several occasions there were bottlenose dolphins dancing in
the bow wave of the ship and once we passed a whale.
The lower decks were filled with Italian prisoners of war
being taken back to Italy. We could not mix with them, but
there was a deck overlooking an area they used for
recreation, where I would watch them. They played mandolins
and concertinas, held boxing competitions and religious
services. They sang and danced with a vigor that put the
British and Australian passengers to shame .
One port of call was Port Said in Egypt, a stop we had not
made on the outward trip. As we went ashore we were told
that at one of the department stores, Simon Artz, there was,
to attract customers, a man who was 8 feet 4 inches tall and
perhaps the tallest man in the world. (Now, I know probably
a Dinka from the Sudan.) This I had to see. I was duely
impressed by the giant who was as tall as advertised,
dressed in a long white robe and turban, and who stooped
down and shook my hand. Port Said was a bustling exotic city
filled with street vendors, camel drawn carts, veiled women,
and memorable smells of spices and sandalwood. As I grew up
any talk of the “Middle East” conjured up in my mind
memories of the three days spent in the city.
We also stopped in Naples to drop off our contingent of
Italian POWs. We docked early in the morning and there was a
vast milling crowd of family members waiting to welcome
their loved ones after several years of absence.. Many were
yelling up to the passengers begging for cigarettes. There
was a delay in the disembarkation process and the sea of
people on the dock, mostly women in black dresses and head
shawls, began surging forward through the restraining ropes
and police lines. Suddenly the carbinieri produced large
whips and started thrashing the people at the front in an
indiscriminate and vicious manner. Women were screaming and
running as the police chased them down and hit them. It was
a horrifying sight for the passengers hanging over the side
of the boat watching and I, am sure, even more so for the
returning Italian prisoners. My mother was noticeably shaken
by what we had seen and it was the major topic of
conversation on board for the rest of the day. There was a
lot of anti-Italian
sentiment expressed and the view that with Mussolini gone
for only 18 months fascism was still alive and well in
Italy.
Despite the war, I had what most would consider an idyllic
childhood. The trip to Australia was an important experience
for me, a significant milestone in my young life. It opened
my mind at a critical stage in my development to the
existence of a world beyond the secure, but narrow,
environment in Oxford. I had a taste of what life was like
without war and I learned that my experience up to that
point was not representative of how most of the people in
the world lived. The brief exposure to Yemen and Egypt
started what would become a lifelong interest in the Third
World. It was a significant milestone in my young life.
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