For the Time Being (28 page)

These children had never had to deal with slyness, deceit and a form of godliness and piousness which actually included their being sexually abused by an apparently kindly ‘Uncle'. Laughter was forbidden, even playing outside was frowned upon; servitude was to be their lot. They were trapped, these once lusty, laughing East Enders, all spirit, or almost all, snuffed out, until someone would come to their rescue. But although Hilda wrote desperate notes to her distant mother on the inside of old cigarette packets which she had scavenged, they went unanswered.

The appalling thing is that the parents of these evacuated kids, by which I suppose I mean the Mothers (Dad was usually at war, at sea, in the desert, or dead, or a prisoner), quite often dumped
their children deliberately, and then cheerfully, wantonly, lipsticked and nylon-stockinged their way off with some Yank.

With their children out of sight and out of mind, husbands elsewhere or dead, they risked a new chance at life. Shirley Anne Field tells in her autobiography,
A Time for Love,
how she lost
her
mother for thirty years. This lady surfaced in Georgia with a different husband and a slew of new children. The call from the West had proved too strong to resist, and poor Shirley Anne, and her brother Guy, had to cope with a half-forgotten Mum, as adults. ‘I've never had a mother,' her brother said. ‘So I don't know how I feel.' Reasonable?

But Hilda Hollingsworth was lucky: at the very end of the war
her
mother found her and her sisters in their desolation and misery. The children saw her, by chance, one day in the village:

‘Coo'ee … ! Coo'ee … !' The call raced towards us; it sounded strange but yet familiar … wonderingly I stood up. Words formed inside my head. IS it? Can it really be? … A pink chiffon scarf floated in a soft floppy bow under a face that was smiling showing slightly crooked teeth between bright red lips.

It was Mum.

This, after years of uncertainty, misery and despair, mental cruelty and physical abuse. Relief in reading of the ‘rescue' is overwhelming. But Hilda tells this sorry story with an amazing generosity of spirit. She brims with ‘reasonableness'. Everyone was, after all, strange. The Welsh were isolated by language, geography and culture, religion and, to be fair, guilt. The East Enders were alien, noisy, free, uninhibited, and who would want a dirty bed-wetting child from the slums? An English child at that! An Evacuee; even if the money paid out by the Government did come in handy. Why mess up the neat little houses hiding behind their lace curtains? There was plenty of coal, sheep on the hills, potatoes a-plenty, and God was in His Heaven.

It was a tragic, blundering intrusion into everyone's life.

Hilda Hollingsworth's excellent, disturbing, but passionately
lived book is wonderfully evocative of its time, funny and sad, amazing in its courage. It is the kind of book which suddenly makes one realize why the British deem Dunkirk to have been a victory. This is a book written from the courage of the soul. The writer is now married, a mother, and all is well after those punishing years; there seems to be no shred of bitterness. However, I do not suppose she will hurry across the Severn Bridge for some time to come.

Daily Telegraph,
11 January 1992

The Germans: Who are They Now?
by Alan Watson (Thames/Methuen)
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
by Peter Millar (Bloomsbury)

You know perfectly well that they always get the best places by the pool, the best deck-chairs on the cruise, and often push ahead of you in the queue for the ski-lift. Frightfully irritating; we British simply do not behave like that. We are (apart from that small group who attend football matches abroad) far too modest, polite, reticent and – shall I say it? – far too British And Proud Of It ever to behave with such vulgar displays of selfishness. We do not grab, shove and push ahead. That is simply not our way.

A pity that the Germans do. They are presently ahead of us not only in the queue for the ski-lifts and the towels at the Tenerife pool-side. We have been taken unawares again. I wonder why? The largest ethnic nation in the whole of Europe has quietly, implacably, moved centre-stage and will not be budged. In a very short time Germany will once again dominate Europe completely: I am quite glad to know that it is fairly unlikely I shall be around to see the results.

If this sounds like ‘Dismal Desmond', then I must agree and regret, but let me turn your attention to a couple of books which will open indifferent eyes to a few unattractive truths about our present situation. And we really should know something, now that the Channel Tunnel is a fact and about to provide us with an umbilical cord to Mother Europe; we
cannot
ignore Mama. We did nothing to stop this idiotic scheme; all we have ahead is a mutilated chunk of Kent and a mass of apprehensive, squabbling people whose lives are in danger of the New Railway. It does not exist yet. It probably never will. For the moment, we can get from Paris, Berlin,
Amsterdam, even Rome on the fastest trains ever, until we reach Dover. Then we take the bus or British Rail and wobble along to London. Eventually.

Both of these books are extremely well written, concise, fully researched.. One is a sort of documentary, the other an historical appraisal. Both should be read.

Alan Watson's
The Germans: Who are They Now?
is less easy for the beginner. It is an almost complete history of the German people from the start to the present, with disquieting hints of the future. It shows a race whose determination to survive, and win, is daunting, whose passionate belief in their country overwhelms by its very intensity, and it demonstrates how amazingly this once utterly destroyed country has roared back into full action, puffed with pride, sleeves rolled up, passionate with self-belief, leaving behind for ever, it would seem, the total destruction which was its lot only forty-five years or so ago.

Mr Watson ends his book on a rather hopeful note – one of rebirth, renewal, awareness. There are ‘new voices' in Germany today, and of them he says:

… they are … the voices of a pluralistic nation and a democratic state … cautious voices, informed and, to an extent, tortured by the past, but they are not the voices of arrogance, ignorance or hate.

Can one be reassured by that generalization? What does ‘to an extent' actually mean? Arrogance? Ignorance? Hate? Mr Watson is a learned historian, he sets down his facts clearly and precisely, he knows his Germany well. But I wish that a little seed of doubt did not weigh so heavily in my metaphorical pocket; that it did not rub at the thin fabric of my belief. I feel that in the near future my little seed will have fallen on to fruitful ground and flourished once again as a tree of terror.

I crossed the Rhine on my twenty-fourth birthday in March 1945 to find a ruined, blazing landscape of craters and dead cows. I reached what had been Berlin early in May. A landscape of hell. Nothing higher than 10 foot, apart from blind façades here and
there; no human life apart from three shadows slaughtering a horse at the entrance to the Zoo, no sound except sparrows, the stench of death a pungent scent. It clung to one for weeks. Dust, rubble, shrapnel-riddled trams, splintered trees and gently smouldering tanks in the Tiergarten. Death was abroad. This was
certainly
defeat, wasn't it? No. Not really. Only provisionally.

I was there again in 1952, to work. The rubble was immaculate, the trams were running, there were glamorous shops all along Kurfürstendam housed in Quonsett or Nissen huts but with immensely chic fronts and windows crammed with gloss and riches. Hotels and restaurants, night clubs, neon flashing, music, paintings, libraries, traffic racing. The city was alive again, breathing. The occupants were jolly, laughing, working and playing hard. They were reaching already for the towels, the deck-chairs, the place in the queue. They were flexing confident muscle. We merely admired, exclaimed approvingly, ordered another Pils. Unaware.

In 1972 I was there again, to work. The Wall had been built, the city severed, East and West. I worked and lived for three months in the shadow of that Wall which sundered not only the city but the entire nation from top to bottom. In the East it was dark, no lights glimmered; in the West they blazed, life was bursting. Thrusting. On the sleek gold doors of my hotel elevator someone had scored, deeply at eye level, a row of swastikas: a reminder?

Peter Millar's
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
is a racy, chatty book about the ordinary people who were trapped behind that Wall on the East side. He has dealt with a group who managed to survive in and around a tatty bar in a run-down sector. Possibly these eyewitness accounts, excellently set down, will be an easier, less political read for the beginner. When you finish, you will be forced to realize how appallingly similar we are to each other. We have the same courage, and strength, the same pride, theirs even stronger from surviving a hideous war. The ‘woolly' over the print dress, the socks with sandals, tight perms, baggy suits and Doc Martens, the same interests from pigeons to vegetable marrows, the same lavatorial jokes – it makes one wonder why we have spent so much time fighting each other; we are far nearer to each other than to
the French, Spanish, Italians or even the Poles. And yet, and yet, of course we are different.

The Germans are diligent, industrious, clever, good and religious, caring, resilient and inventive. So are we, but as a nation we are lazy, hidebound, suspicious, and self-regarding, to this day. Why? We both endured the first, terrible, modern war, but they suffered total, humiliating defeat, while we did not. They were brought down, cut up, occupied. And they emerge as the victors. Can anyone say why?

Watching the Wall tumble down that winter night troubled me greatly. Part of me was filled with admiration, joy that tyranny and totalitarianism were being overturned, delight that the young had finally erupted, that families so cruelly divided would be once again together, that Russia would feel the savage wind of change. All that, plus a secret dread at the political idea of a unified Germany once more. These would be New Germans with some lessons learned, survivors of the engulfing fire, young without a trace of guilt. Why, indeed, should they have guilt after so long?

This new-forged nation could be the most frightening in Europe. Alan Watson writes of ‘new voices' in a ‘pluralistic nation and a democratic state …' Is it? How long will it stay like that? Have they learned from that bitter past? Have
we?
Only the old are left to remember; the young have always been headstrong. One fears for this impoverished, rather smug, island of ours which I so cherish but which I fear is unaware of the extreme dangers it will have to face once again.

The Germans are building a fantastic cruise liner for P&O because no one in the United Kingdom would, or could, accept the tender. Why? And why does almost every young German speak at least two languages apart from their own when our politicians cannot even speak diplomatic French? Why don't our new carriages fit the tunnels? Why are the coal mines closing because coal from abroad is cheaper? Why will all the fast trains in Europe stop at Calais? Why does Christmas here last a fortnight?

Perhaps we should flood that wretched tunnel, secure ourselves behind Dame Vera's white cliffs and call out the Home Guard again.

We will need them unless we start to reach out and grab the towels, deck-chairs and the places in the queue for ourselves. We could, of course, be too late. If you read both, or either, of these two excellent books you might close them with an uncomfortable feeling of trouble ahead. See what you think.

Daily Telegraph,
1 February 1992

Hell's Foundations: A Town, Its Myth and Gallipoli
by Geoffrey Moorhouse (Hodder)

Bury, in Lancashire, is a modest town. A town hall, market square, parish church, a drill hall and a mayor. The normal trappings of provincial life. It lies some five miles north of Manchester. When I knew it, in 1941, I was a newly commissioned, very nervous officer billeted up the road in a cotton-mill-owner's abandoned mansion on a hillside in a suburb called Ramsbottom (locally known as Tupsarse because it was at the ‘end of everything').

From the terrace of the house, grimed with soot and wind, one looked down into a grey, fogged landscape of endless slate-roofed ‘back-to-backers' and soaring mills throbbing with trundling looms, glittering with acres of lighted windows (dark in the black-out after 3.30 in the afternoon), and huge chimneys trailing and belching smoke endlessly into the curdled air, which loitered out over the spoiled valleys until, eventually, it was dispersed across the distant moors. Not a very attractive vista. I have known better views from happier terraces. It was sad, cobbled, drab, poor.

However, Bury was near at hand. The centre of our lives at that time. It had a cinema, bars, a theatre even; holystoned doorsteps, lace curtains, kindness and incredible warmth for a ‘soldier'. For Bury was an Army Town; not like Aldershot or Pirbright: just a modest place which had, at one point in its life, slowly bled to death from the loss of its young men in the First World War. It suffered so brutally from war and killing that even after a second time around, in ‘39, after the havoc of Korea, the cut and thrust of Malaysia and Aden, the carnage of the Falklands and the bizarre, media-encouraged sand-deaths in the Gulf – even after all that, the terrible word ‘Gallipoli' is burned deep into the very
fibre of every soul who was born in Bury, or who had family there.

Bury lost a large number of its youth in the Dardanelles. It was the home-town to the Lancashire Fusiliers, who, because of muddles, bickering, ill-planning and ignorance, lost 13,642 men in the Great War – 1,816 of them in the scrub and shale of Gallipoli. It is little compensation to know that no fewer than six earned themselves the VC; myth has it that they were all won before breakfast. The death toll and the casualties were far too shocking to be absorbed by Crosses for Valour. Even six at once. The young Fusiliers had been patriotically offered up for the politicians' errors; they had even been bullied by the militant women brandishing their white feathers, and they went cheering, singing, promising to come home victoriously to the grime and love of their Lancashire womb.