Dare to Be a Daniel (12 page)

An early political paper: my thoughts on disarmament in 1936

I was allowed to go to Gladstone’s by bus, and a route was planned that permitted me to get there without crossing the road, although it did involve a diversion from the direct route. I was given my fare every morning to pay for the ticket. In those days the buses were owned by different companies – for instance, the red open-decked buses of the General Omnibus Co., and the chocolate-coloured double-deckers owned by Thomas Tilling. I realised that if I took a different route from the one I had been told to take, I could save about tuppence a day and so, without telling my parents, I saved the money and spent it at Woolworths. This was discovered when a bus ticket in my coat revealed that I was not catching the authorised bus route – I had a lot of explaining to do.

I was leader of a group known as the Bennites, and our rivals were led by MacMahon, who organised the MacMahonites. We used to flick bits of paper at each other, using slings with rubber bands, which could sting very sharply at short range.

On one occasion I stole a pencil from a fellow pupil. I was so overcome with guilt that I told my father what I had done and he contacted Mr Leman about it. The importance of telling the truth was instilled in me as an essential requirement, then and throughout life. I subsequently wrote to my father, who must have been away from home in 1935:

Dear Daddy

I got your letter and I am really sorry about the untruth. I have honestly decided to turn over a new leaf … Mr Leman was very kind to me and what he told me impressed me, it was decent of you to get him to talk to me as I realise it was for the good.

At Gladstone’s, I did not particularly excel: ‘English: Too slapdash’; ‘Drawing: No artist but he is keen’; ‘Arithmetic: Rather inaccurate and should be neater’. By the time I was twelve, at the end of 1937, Mr Leman wrote of my general conduct:

Anthony is a little too conscious of ‘Anthony’. He works well and tries hard, but has a tendency to overdo things … Next term I shall watch him with interest – he
ought
to be good.

From there I went on to Westminster School as a day-boy and, incredible as it is to report, I had to go to school every day in a top hat and tailcoat; I was there from 1938 to 1942. Westminster was equally conservative and we even had the son of the German Ambassador, von Ribbentrop, at the school. My brother Michael was already at Westminster when I moved there, and the dayboys were very fortunate in not having to board in dormitories. I think public-school boys have always found prison easy because the accommodation and discipline are familiar.

Westminster was a very old foundation and I had the experience of prayers in Westminster Abbey every day. I learned the Lord’s Prayer and others in Latin, and they had a comfortable ritual feel. The organ was played by Mr Lofthouse, and the Abbey became a very familiar place to me, although I do not recall going there for services. I do remember watching the coronation of George VI in 1937 from outside the House of Commons.

My housemaster was Mr C. H. Fisher, a very jovial man, who had the responsibility of teaching me about sex. There were no girls at Westminster School, so they continued to be a mystery, although Mr Fisher had taken me aside at the end of one day to give me a clinical explanation. By then I had seen a few bulls,
cows
and dogs in action, had exchanged smutty stories with my schoolmates and had a fairly clear idea, even though this was never explicitly linked to the species to which I belonged. It was in marked contrast to my own grandchildren’s understanding, because they seem to know every detail from the age of about seven. Mr Fisher was known as Preedy because he smoked Preedy’s tobacco in his pipe; later he married the matron.

Another teacher was Mr Carlton, who later became headmaster, and was known as Coot. On one occasion my father asked Coot to come out with us to the cinema and took us afterwards to a milk bar, which I thought was a night club. Father no doubt chose the milk bar because it was cheap.

Another of our teachers was Mr Wordsworth, known as Siggy, a descendant of the poet. We also had a science teacher called Mr Rudwick, who was known as Beaker, and we called his children ‘Beaker’s experiments’. I didn’t like science; my main interest was politics, although we were never taught it as a subject.

The headmaster of Westminster, Mr J. T. Christie, later became the principal of Jesus College Oxford and was inevitably known as Jesus Christie. He was very tall and he gave us a moral education which he hoped would influence us for the rest of our lives.

One lecture he gave was on the importance of ‘keeping our minds clean’. He said, ‘There are three rooms in your mind: the front room, where your thoughts are known to all your friends. You must keep it clean and tidy. Your back room, where you have private thoughts which you do not need to disclose but also must be clean and pure. If in the basement you keep a lot of smelly vegetables that are rotten, the smell will come up and infect your back room and your front room and you must always remember that.’ One boy, who was known to be homosexual and had a relationship
with
another pupil, commented on this speech by saying, ‘But I keep my smelly vegetables in the front room!’

There was quite a lot of homosexuality, in the sense that some of the boys were actively gay and others were prepared to go along with it. There was gossip, but not much was made of it. I dare say the headmaster had this in mind when he lectured us.

The school had a rowing team – we rowed from one of the boathouses at Putney. I did of course support Oxford in the boat race because I intended to go there. I enjoyed fencing, and did épée fencing, but was never really enthusiastic about any sport.

I loved the Boy Scouts and my Scout Master, Godfrey Barber, was a pacifist, a good, kind man. We had a Scout camp in Oban, Scotland, and lived in tents. Mr Barber developed a ‘wet latrine’ where, instead of peeing into the ground, he got us to cut a little trench and fill it with pebbles. We stood by the trench and peed into it, protected from public view by a canvas screen just in front of the trench.

When a visiting Scout Commissioner came to see us he made use of this, but totally misunderstood the principle, and stood on the pebbles and peed against the canvas screen. He declared he had never seen such a good Scout latrine!

When I decided that, with the approach of war, I should transfer from the Scouts to the Air Training Corps, Mr Barber was very disappointed. We had an exchange of correspondence about this, in which he wrote:

With regard to the ATC I came to the view that if it must take place simultaneously with scout meetings, boys who feel bound to join would have to leave the troop … So I’m afraid we must lose you, and I expect you will start at the beginning of next term …

Yours ever

S. M.

PS Your journey report, by the way, omitted all bearings and distances.

I felt I should prepare myself for military service. During the war pacifism was a controversial idea, to the extent that the League of Nations Association – an organisation rather like the UN today – was regarded as suspect.

There was a student group at Westminster called UFPF (which stood for the United Front for Progressive Forces), known as the Uff Puffs, which was influenced by the growing anti-fascist movement with which Stafford Cripps was associated. I threw myself into the junior debating society and we discussed the case for and against appeasement; I took a critical view of the Munich settlement that Chamberlain had just negotiated with Hitler.

Westminster School was evacuated, first to Lancing College in Sussex and then, in the summer of 1940 when France fell, to Exeter University.

Although I had an expensive private education, which was normal for upper-middle-class children at the time and was intended to prepare me for a well-paid job of some kind, I find, on looking back, that it did not help me much in later life. What I learned in the Air Force, as a constituency MP and by observation gave me a far better opportunity of understanding the world in which we live than the schooling that I received.

I was never a great reader at school and cannot remember many books being read to me as a child. I had one book on my shelves called
Theras, The Story of an Athenian Boy
. I also remember a book that I think my uncle gave me, about two people on a desert
island
who ended up pricing everything: instead of exchanging potatoes for wood, or whatever, one of the men said, ‘Let’s work out the relative value …’ A sort of textbook for capitalism. And I adored a picture-book called ‘A Naval Alphabet’ with wonderful colour plates.

My attitude towards women – ‘females’, as I called them then – was very backward, as the following reference in my journal for 1942, when I was seventeen, shows:

The theory of friendship with females

I cannot say that I really understand females yet, therefore I am not really qualified to write. What I have found out however I will put down.

Silence, quietness, modesty and honesty count very much. The sort of person required [by females] is one who is very friendly, leaves most of the talking to the other person, speaks not of himself, is scrupulously honest and upright, has a ready sense of humour and who is gentlemanly. That is to say helps them on with their coats, opens the door for them, gives up his seat for them, pays for them everywhere. This is very primitive … and makes females look so as well. Later I may understand them better.

Subsequently I wrote about the difference in my attitude towards boys and girls:

With girls I feel romantic. Of course there is no lasting element in it and I know it, but I seem to love them. Whenever I meet a respectable looking girl, I think I have fallen in love with her. I don’t quite understand it. Contrary to my feeling to male friends, I have no desire to discuss politics or religion … It is a thing of emotions, not of interest or reason.

As a teenager, I wrote in my journals the most elaborate, stumbling analyses of ‘how to approach females’, comparing friendships
with
them to friendships with ‘males’ and trying to distinguish between physical attraction and relationships based on shared interests and understanding – passages that look absurd now, but which reflected someone brought up in a family of boys by Victorian parents, and who went to an all-boys school.

In 1942, at the height of the war, Mother and I went to stay at my Uncle Ernest’s old home, Blunt House, by then a girls’ school. I was sixteen or seventeen and there was a girl whom I liked very much; I tried to get into her bed, in the dormitory. Not surprisingly, the offence was discovered and raised with my mother, who must have been very embarrassed. Most unfairly, the girl involved was punished, whereas I was not. In a letter she wrote to me after the ‘incident’ she said:

PS. Just a short note at the end. Miss X really blamed me for the whole thing, [unreadable] that you were so young and hadn’t met many girls and that I should have been firm and refused but how could I have? In fact according to her I led you astray.

During the war I wrote to my brother, who was serving in North Africa, and said that I thought of subscribing to a girls’ magazine called
Girl’s Own Paper
, but discovered it was full of advice on dressmaking and cookery that wouldn’t really have helped me.

I once asked my father, when I was about twelve, what buggery was, and with a look of extreme embarrassment he said, ‘It is two men trying to have a baby.’ Even at that age I knew this was nonsense and, when I told Father that, he referred me back to Mother, who I suspect had never heard of it.

At some stage I think a booklet was smuggled into my room called ‘Straight Talks to a Boy on Growing Up’, which I seem to
recall
consisted of very sketchy descriptions of the way that babies came to be born, accompanied by dire warnings against masturbation. It quoted the advice given to Boy Scouts, which was that if desire gets too strong, try plunging your arms up to the elbows in cold water – a remedy I never tried, but which I suspect would not have worked.

From 1937 and 1938 I have poems and letters that I never sent, with declarations of passion: ‘to my love Pauline, I dream every night of you’; ‘Hether [sic] Betty Harper whose laughing eyes and flowing black hair and sporting decency are in a class of their own’; ‘Name-not-yet-known whose calm dignity and graceful movement made a true case of love at first sight’.

I did have embedded in my mind for many years, right into my late teens, that if you even kissed a girl delicately on her cheeks, you had to marry her – a thought that held me back on many occasions, for fear that marriage with children might prove a disaster. I sometimes wish my eight-year-old granddaughter had been available to advise me when I was eighteen.

A normal and open attitude towards sex seems to me to be so obvious, and when Caroline and I were asked about it by our own children, we answered frankly, but maybe in some trepidation, waiting for the next question. This was usually ‘What are we having for dinner tonight, Dad?’, which indicated that the basic information provided had satisfied their curiosity.