Anniversary
This is a couple of days late. I didn’t think of it in time, and by then Robin didn’t want to run two guest blogs in a row.
Seventy years plus two days ago I was staying with my grandparents on the outskirts of a small town in the hills above Gloucester. They lived in three old cottages knocked into a single house, with a wonderfully peaceful view south east across a wooded Cotswold valley. It was a perfect September day almost at the end of the school holidays, a mild sun clearing away the last wisps of mist in the valley. I was mooching around on the front lawn, and Grandfather was sitting in a deckchair in the shade of an old mulberry tree reading his newspaper, with his clunking great wireless playing softly on the folding table beside him.
He was a distinguished old gentleman, and still looked it, erect, aquiline, with white hair that curled naturally into ringlets at the end.* He’d been a politician most of his life at the more radical end of the Liberal party. When he was MP for a London constituency my grandmother, who was an old-fashioned high Tory, would canvass for him, telling the voters that though she couldn’t agree with his views she could assure them from personal experience that he was a very good man. This got him plenty of votes until his party officials heard about it and stopped her, presumably because they thought she wasn’t taking politics seriously enough.
He’d worked hard for women to get the vote. But his main interest had been in world peace. At the start of the First World War he’d been in Berlin with a delegation of bishops talking to their German counterparts trying to stop their armies marching into Belgium. The Kaiser’s sister had to get them a special train to get them out. After the war he lost his seat in Parliament but headed an organisation to promote international co-operation. He was given a peerage for his work in 1930.**
I didn’t know most of that then. To me and my brothers he was a kindly old guy who made up silly little rhymes for us and played the odd card game with us and let me sit in the window-seat of his study reading his Encyclopaedia Britannica.***
He turned the volume up and called me over. A man started speaking in a solemn, precise voice, saying that he had cabled somebody in Germany telling him that a state of war now existed between our two countries. He went on speaking for a bit. I understood some of what he was saying. The Germans had invaded Poland and we’d got a treaty with the Poles that we’d come in on their side if anyone attacked them. The French were doing the same. I didn’t listen closely. It was adult stuff. War might be exciting, with us winning a lot of battles, as we usually did in the kind of history I’d been taught. But we were safe on our island and I wasn’t going to be old enough to fight before we’d won the war. Pity.
An aeroplane flew over, a little silver cross on that placid blue sky. Aeroplanes were still uncommon enough for people to look up when one passed. Grandfather went on watching it long after I did.
I’d been aware war might happen, of course. There’d been that mysterious stuff about Czechoslovakia a year before, and the even more mysterious Danzig Corridor, but basically it would be adult stuff. We’d win a few great battles against enormous odds, like Crecy and Blenheim and Waterloo, but we’d come out on top in the end because we always did. I was far more worried about finding some decent conkers† to take back to school.
It took me years to realize what a dramatic scene I had taken part in. Grandfather knew perfectly well that we were not safe on our island. Islands meant nothing to the Luftwaffe. He knew what the Stukas had done in Spain. Last time almost all our losses had been in the trenches. This time they would be in our streets. I don’t know about Grandfather, but many intelligent people believed that some of the bombs would contain poison gas. I have no doubt Grandfather had called me over not only because this was an historic moment that I ought to experience, but because in his mind I represented the generation that would inherit a ruined world, those of us who survived.
When the man stopped speaking Grandfather got up and went indoors, without a word as far as I remember. A bit later the housemaid came out to collect the radio and put the chair and table away. Next year she would be working in a munitions factory.
Three years later, with the war in full swing, I experienced a sort of negative echo of that scene. Negative, because it happened not in the sunlight but on a moonless night. There are a few places left in England where you can still find the utter darkness that covered the country during the blackout. The sky was once again cloudless, strewn with far more stars than you’ll normally see these days. We were then staying with some old cousins in the same small country town, in a house large enough to have its own park. We’d been to a party down in the town and had just started back up the hill when the sirens sounded. This happened surprisingly often, because the aerodrome at Gloucester was an important research centre for British warplanes, and though it was near the limit of their range the Germans would occasionally send a bomber or two over to make a nuisance of themselves. The aerodrome was strongly defended by a ring of anti-aircraft guns on the hills above it, and pilots would sometimes turn back rather than face the barrage, jettisoning their bombs on the way to lighten the load. They preferred to look for a target, to be able to say they’d bombed something. Our town was on their escape route. One raid in which several people died was said to have been caused by people leaving a party, as we’d just done, and spending too long saying good-bye to their hosts in a lit doorway.
By the time we reached the park gate we could hear the throb of the bomber’s engines. A dozen searchlight beams were weaving around looking for it. We were halfway across the park when they found it. Instantly all the beams swung to that point, and there it was, a silvery cross at the top of a cone of light, sharp against the velvety dark behind. Obviously it couldn’t have been the same plane I had watched with Grandfather, but in my mind the two moments now belong strongly together.††
Then the guns went off. We stood and cheered, waiting for one of them to score a hit, until we heard a sudden pattering rustle in the grass a little way up the slope, and somebody had the sense to realise that what goes up must come down, and we ran for home.
Next morning we went back out to look for scraps of shrapnel to swap for other valuables when we got back to school.
* * *
* Granny told me that an Austrian baroness once said to her “Oh how I would love to run my fingers through those long white curls!”
** He cabled Granny with the news of the peerage offer, adding “Am minded to refuse.” She cabled back “Do nothing till I come.” He accepted.
*** “The pain of living and the drug of dreams/ Curls up the small soul in the window-seat/ Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” T. S. Eliot, Gerontion. Spot on. He might have been in the room with us.
† A schoolboy game played with horse chestnuts on the ends of strings.
†† Yes, I know the undersides of night bombers were usually painted matt black. I called one of my brothers to check and he remembers the moment as vividly as I do.
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