Eighty Not Out (5 page)

During the early years of the war, we all became fans of Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, and the Kenneth Horne–Richard Murdoch duo. Sitting around the too-small open fire in our living room, knitting companionably and listening to the wireless, the blackout curtains tightly drawn over taped windowpanes, brought us as close as we were ever to be. During the next decade Johnny volunteered for army service and was sent to Ceylon; Auntie Rosemary broke off the engagement and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force; I became a restless rebel against I knew not what; and my mother used a variety of talents, ranging from dressmaking to modelling miniature rock gardens, in an effort to swell our coffers. She got a contract with Valentine's postcard firm to photograph views all over the province, one assignment taking her to the Isle of Man. That job boosted her ego, and travelling expenses were paid, but in truth I do not think she made much profit.

The war brought curtailment of all frivolous pursuits: the aviary was abandoned and riding excursions, to my relief, ceased, as did visits to the stables at Comber because of petrol rationing. Flo, whose looks epitomised an elegant hunt follower, in tight jodhpurs, hard hat and skinny, knee-high boots, had, like Auntie Rosemary, joined the
WAAF
.

When a letter came in 1940 with the news that my father had died, no tears were shed either by my mother or me. He died in Worthing at the home of the devoted woman to whom he left the residue of his estate, ‘in gratitude for her care during my many illnesses'. No record exists of any issue, but a friend, somewhat unhelpfully, suggested the possibility of a halfbrother or sister.

5

Victoria College under Mrs Faris

T
he outbreak of World War
II
coincided with the beginning of my first term in the lower-fifth class at Strathearn: after passing the Junior Certificate two years later I moved to the senior school, Victoria College, on the opposite side of Belfast near the university. With commendable speed, new regulations were announced and gas masks were issued with instructions on how to put on and remove them. Their presence, added to the pile of books that accompanied us from one classroom to another, was an annoyance; they were also an encumbrance when riding a bike. We soon learned that trumpeting noises could be produced by applying the snout to the cardboard box in which they were kept, but were sharply told that the threat of a gas attack was a serious matter and not to be so infantile.

For pupils whose parents wished to evacuate them, the school had a base at Portballintrae, on the north Antrim coast, and our relatives in Connecticut telephoned to offer me a home for the duration of hostilities. My mother never seriously considered the offer, and it was graciously declined. Although I was not consulted, my feelings were mixed: I would have loved to visit the
US
, but had misgivings about whether or not I would have got on with my distant cousin, Jane, with whom I was encouraged to have a pen-friend relationship. We had been born in the same year, but the letters she sent were written in an unformed hand, describing a way of life that bore no resemblance to my own. She enthused about summer camps, attendance at baseball matches, and school grades. I was remiss about replying, resorting to the excuse that some letters must have been lost in the post.

My experience of the great outdoors was limited to camping with the Girl Guides, which I had joined because I liked the pack leader, Miss Knox, who was also our maths teacher. She took us through some of C.S. Lewis's childhood haunts, into the Holywood hills. I remember feeling chilly, making ineffectual attempts to light a fire, the all-pervasive smoke, pits of ash with a small red core where dark grey scabby spuds stayed an interminable time, before it was decided they just might be ready to eat. They were always hard in the middle, and I did not like potatoes much in any case, so I confined myself to lukewarm baked beans and cocoa. The only practical thing I learned with the Guides was how to turn hospital corners when bed-making.

It was to Miss Knox that I went when I found my knickers bloodstained: she was reassuring, and probably accustomed to such emergencies, because she gave me the necessary elastic belt equipped with a hook at each end, plus a bulky pad. Thanks to my older best friends, I knew more about menstruation than either Miss K or my mother suspected. Surprised at its early onset, my mother apologised, saying she had intended to give me a book titled
Growing Up
, printed by the Lilia firm of sanitary pad manufacturers. During furtive forays into my mother's chest of drawers, I had already read it, as well as leaflets about what looked like a much more practical method of dealing with the flow – Tampax. It was explained that this was unsuitable for young girls, but after some months of those pads, which had a way of shifting out of place, thus making a revealing lump either fore or aft, I persevered and boasted success to my slightly shocked mother and aunt.

My mother, like journalist John Simpson's father (
Days from a Different World: A Memoir of Childhood
), warned about ‘herd mentality' and encouraged me to question authority. Her counsel was superfluous, as I had entered the world a ‘defiant individual', though this was diagnosed only many years later, under life-threatening circumstances.

Maths was not my strong subject. After infant failure to impress Gramp, the next stage had been in primary school, when told to head the left-hand column T and the right-hand one U: nobody explained that these letters stood for ‘tens' and ‘units'. Then there were
LCM
s and
HCF
s, which I eventually learned stood for ‘Least Common Multiple' and ‘Highest Common Factor' – although to this day I have not grasped their purpose. Our primary teacher had been Miss McMaster, thin, gaunt, bow-legged, flat-chested, with hair worn in a tight little knob on the nape of her neck. She must have been at least seventy in 1939, and her mission was to teach us scripture and arithmetic. I muddled through until the homework consisted of a sheet of long-division problems. I must have missed a critical lesson, because all I knew was how a worked-out sum should look. Accordingly I produced a neat sheet of arbitrary figures, with the Xs in the right places to indicate that a unit had been borrowed from the line above, and handed it in for correction. I was summoned to Miss McMaster's desk, where she glared at me witheringly, took a purple crayon to score right through the work-sheet, shut the book, and hit me smartly on both sides of the head with it, before firing it to the back of the classroom, from where I retrieved it against a background of subdued sniggers. We did a lot of parrot memorising of tables, not only numbers but rods, poles, perches; pecks, minims, pints, quarts, gallons. Height and distance involved inches, feet, yards, furlongs and miles; then there was weight, which began with fractions of an ounce, of which it took sixteen to make a pound, otherwise written as ‘1lb'; fourteen of these made one stone, and eight stone made one hundredweight, and twenty hundredweight made a ton. When it was thought we had a fair grasp of this lot, it was time to acquaint ourselves with The Decimal System. Star pupils apart, most of us were faced with yet another torture, although we were assured it was really simple. Millimetres, centimetres, kilometres, milligrams, centigrams, kilograms, leading, if I remember rightly, to a metric tonne. It did not work for me, and I still think of my height in feet and inches, my weight in stones and ounces, and distance in terms of miles rather than kilometres. Grams versus ounces in the delicatessen are easier, but I prefer rooms measured in square feet rather than square metres.

Any latent appreciation of Shakespeare's works and the classic poets was extinguished by the uninspired teaching of a succession of Protestant spinsters, allied to the fact that the plays we studied were
The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar
, and in my final year
The Tempest
. The first time I had any awareness of the bard's stature was at a sixth form production of
King Lear
, staged at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution (or Inst., as it was commonly known), the boys' school where my friend Celia's mother and my maths coach taught. Cramming for examinations, we were encouraged to commit long passages to memory, and to learn narrative poems by heart. All that remains are thunderous parts of Macaulay's ‘Armada', much of Tennyson's ‘The Lady of Shallot', bits of Christina Rosetti's ‘Goblin Market', and Yeats's ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree'. Nothing was taught about Yeats's politics and lifelong association with Lady Gregory – uncomfortable stuff for the Protestant ladies, and tainted by the whiff of republicanism.

My lifelong love of maps is probably inherited from my mother, who introduced me to Bartholomew's series of the British Isles, and Ireland in particular. I learned about contour lines, and how to draw mountain profiles. I spent many hours poring over my Grandma Eileen's copies of the
National Geographic
magazine and the 1933 edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, which had fine colour plates of marine life. In an avid search for information about male anatomy and human reproduction, I consulted
Harmsworth's Home Doctor
. Some of the books on art were helpful in this respect, although the Victorian fig leaf was still all too prevalent. Gradually I became aware of artists such as Laura Knight, Russell Flint, John Lavery, the pre-Raphaelites, Whistler, Landseer, and Winterhalter's paintings of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their brood. Despite my aunt's years at art school, she took no active interest in the international art scene, so names of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists were unfamiliar; the exception being Picasso, whose work was abhorred, although there was grudging admission that some of his Blue Period paintings were talented. I misguidedly bought Sir William Orpen's book
The Outline of Art
; a heavy tome, printed in black and white, it was not ‘child friendly'. Reading an article in
Lilliput
magazine, which Rosemary sometimes brought home, introduced me to Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.

My own artistic potential was considerable, and I came first or equal first, in school examinations; but again teaching had been uninspired, consisting of designing ‘all-over' patterns, making potato-prints, and drawing still life. I remember a pair of fur-lined boots, an open book, and a gas mask. On complaining about the dreariness of the subject, I was told to move to a more challenging angle. It was anticipated that I would get a top award in Northern Ireland, but on the day of the examination I sat staring blankly at sheet after sheet of paper, tearing up several, bereft of inspiration. I got an ordinary pass.

There was no careers guidance at Victoria College; the headmistress at that time was Mrs Faris, widow of a clergyman, to whose office I was called when I was reprimanded for not ‘respecting' the kitchen staff. The incident involved my discovery of a snail in some lettuce surrounding our lunchtime (twice weekly) slice of Spam. I had popped a derisory note into the suggestion box mentioning that protein in the form of
Mollusca
was not appreciated. Only girls of outstanding academic potential went to university; a few who, due to financial constraints, would be forced to work, were sent to a secretarial college; and the rest were expected to marry not long after leaving school. I suspect Mrs Faris regarded my mother's single parent status with distaste, so any aspirations I may have expressed were brushed aside as being unrealistic. She patently had little interest in what the future might bring, and said goodbye with no more than a formal handshake in 1944.

The battle with mathematics had continued through geometric progressions, logarithms, trigonometry, geometry, algebra, and eventually rudimentary calculus, for which coaching was needed to matriculate, which I did in 1945 – in the second division. Through the decades, with the exception of areas, weights and basic monetary calculations, none of the aforementioned has been of the slightest use. I did, however, enjoy geometry, the Pythagoras theorem, and calculating the content of cylinders and cones with the aid of the magic π. Maybe some part of the brain was late to develop, because by the time I was seventeen and had completed a year studying physics and chemistry in a class of first year engineering students, I could cope with simple mental arithmetic with relative ease. It was a year wasted, though I learned the chemical symbols and some understanding of bridge construction. The majority of the students were male, and one in particular, to whom I was not attracted despite his flashy good looks, too-long fair hair, and natty brown doublebreasted suit, pursued me relentlessly, slipping an empty Durex packet into my handbag.

During the war years, my mother and San volunteered for first-aid classes held at the Lower Braniel Primary School under the aegis of Mr Magee, the principal. A long, low, white, roughcast building dating from the mid-nineteenth century, with two rows of outside lavatories, one for the boys, one for the girls, the school was at the junction of the Lower Braniel and Gilnahirk Roads. Mr Magee, Murray, and most of the adult males I knew, were air-raid wardens, and we all became expert stickers of criss-cross tape on windows to lessen danger from flying glass. Reality struck at night no fewer than three times in April and May 1941. To begin with, we heard an unfamiliar throb of aircraft overhead and the searchlights of Belfast were swinging wildly in all directions; then when a few flashes at ground level were followed within seconds by a loud
wump
, my mother decided it was time to hide under the stairs. Unfortunately the underground shelter she and my aunt had dug in heavy clay had slowly filled up to knee height with water. I remember being frightened only when some landmines were dropped in the Castlereagh hills. I also recall feeling sorry for whatever Nazi bomber crew were caught by searchlights, thinking they were so far from home and were, after all, only doing what they considered their duty. I was at the time hopelessly enamoured of an
RAF
bomber pilot whose family lived nearby.

Ration books were issued, and soon the weekly food ration was in operation. Northern Ireland, in the rural areas at least, suffered less than Britain, almost everyone having a contact within the farming community. Rationing presented my mother with a new challenge. Hitherto unknown dishes would appear: crumbed sweetbreads, stuffed lamb's heart, eel, and even, I regret to say, whale. The sweetbreads were quite palatable; the hearts – which strangely I did not connect with frisking lambs – tended to be rubbery even after long baking, but I liked the stuffing. I shall never forget the writhing of chopped eel in the frying pan – although dead, the bits appeared to be in death agonies and I refused to try them. Whale, I gave a try, but even the grown-ups decided that once was enough. Marmalade was concocted from a gelatinous, artificial lemon-flavoured mix, in which fine ribbons of carrot simulated Seville orange peel. Butter and margarine were whipped up with milk to increase the volume. It shames me now to remember how little thought my peer group gave to the war that was raging in Europe, or the dangers the merchant navy encountered in order to keep the civilian population from starvation.