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O
N MAY
10, 1940, the same day that Winston Churchill became our prime minister, Germany invaded France, Belgium, and Holland in what was known as the “Blitzkrieg.” Hitler pushed through France, encountering resistance all the way, and he eventually succeeded in reaching Paris. On June 23, he paraded his victorious troops down the Champs Elysées, marching them through the Arc de Triomphe. He had been expecting to find all the treasures of the Louvre Museum waiting for him but, in a brief space of time, they had all been removed, spirited away and hidden in chateaux and caves across France. The fact that Hitler never found them is miraculous.

The might of the German Army was such that the British troops (and some of their French allies) were forced to retreat to the English Channel beaches of Dunkirk, where they were constantly strafed by the Luftwaffe and a great many died. But some 340,000 men were rescued from the beaches by every civilian yacht, fishing vessel, barge, and motorized boat that could sail across the Channel from England, all of whom had been called to action by Churchill.

Some years later, my mother mentioned that she and Ted had been entertaining the troops in France when Hitler invaded, and they had been lucky to catch one of the last ferries to England before the borders closed; if they hadn’t, they would have been interned. I realized that had things been different, I might not have had a mother at all, and I felt a deeper sense of appreciation for her.

Finally, Hitler turned his attention to Britain and began to prepare
for an invasion. In order to be successful, he needed to achieve air superiority—so he charged his Luftwaffe with destroying the British air and coastal defenses first. The result was the Battle of Britain, which lasted from July to October of 1940, and was the first battle to be fought solely in the air.

JUST BEFORE THE
Blitz began in earnest, Mum sent for me to come to London to live with her and the new man in her life, Ted Andrews. Though my father had custody of Johnny and me and could have contested it, he didn’t—perhaps because he felt a little girl needed her mother, perhaps because he couldn’t afford to keep us both. Whatever the details of this decision, the result was that I went with my mother, and Johnny stayed behind with Dad.

London was an awakening of some sort—as if I suddenly grew up, child to adult-child in a matter of days. In retrospect it seems I had been half-asleep until then, safely cradled in the warmth of a home and my father’s love. I remember little snippets of early history before I was five, but afterward the memories are solid.

My first impression of the city was that it was full of soot and black. The trunks of the trees were black; their branches were bare and black—with limbs reaching toward an unforgiving sky. The buildings were black, the streets were black. There was seldom any sun. It was foggy, damp, and cold, the kind that gets into your marrow. It must have been a winter month, for I remember a dusting of snow, like dandruff on the hard lumps of brown grass in some little square or park.

I don’t remember how I was brought to London, just that I suddenly came to live in a tiny ground-floor apartment in Mornington Crescent, Camden Town. It was in a building shaped somewhat like a flatiron, on the corner of a curving street that bracketed an old cigarette factory. Two pantherlike statues stood at the entrance, and it was aptly named the Black Cat Factory. With the advent of the war, it had been converted to the manufacture of munitions, and soon thereafter became a target for German bombs.

Camden Town in those days had nothing to recommend it—just a main street coming from Euston and going north to Chalk Farm, the
traffic merely passing along it. These days it is increasingly upmarket, and the factory building has been turned into offices. But in 1940 it was a very shabby area.

The apartment was dark, no color that I recall. In the kitchen a dusty window with bars on it overlooked a small, bare inner courtyard. There was a bedroom and a bit of a living room. And there was Ted Andrews—a new shadow in my life.

I don’t recall that I met him before coming to London. I didn’t want to acknowledge his presence, and in truth I only have a vague memory of him at Mornington Crescent. It was as if by focusing on my mother and our genetic bond I could exclude him, deny that he had anything to do with us. I blanked him out, trying to make him disappear. But he didn’t.

Compared to my father, this Ted was a big man. Compact, powerful, a sort of bullet head, and fast-receding sandy hair. For the theater he wore a toupee, blending the hairline with color. He had a florid complexion—everything about him seemed a little pink or red, even at times his eyes. He dressed smartly for the era—he often wore a fedora, and his suit jackets were double-breasted, with two open seams at the back, which created a flap.

“So you can lift it up and enjoy what’s underneath,” my mother would say in the bawdy voice she used when she wanted to convey what a lusty wench she was. She always claimed that she loved a good backside…and teapots, things with spouts. It made people laugh. (And she did indeed have a small collection of bizarre-looking teapots.)

Ted had been the black sheep of his family and had apparently endured a miserable and abused childhood. I know nothing about his parents, although in later years I did meet one sister, Mabel, and her children. He ran away from home when he was twelve, and later traveled from Canada to London to seek his fortune. He played the guitar and had a fine tenor singing voice.

He was ill at ease with me. His occasional overtures were met with shyness or outright derision on my part. My father and mother had not yet divorced—that would take three years. But Mum became pregnant, though I’m not sure even that registered with me at first.

Someone moved in with us—a mother’s helper, I think. There wasn’t
space enough for us all to sleep in the apartment, so a room in the basement of the building at Mornington Crescent was taken over. It was a utility room of some sort. Pipes ran across the ceiling and there was an old iron boiler. Certainly it was hot, even stifling. Two barred windows revealed a wall mere inches behind them. The place was freshened up with a coat of whitewash, and cots were brought in for this “someone” and me. After the first twenty-four hours, we kept the lights on all night, as rats would emerge and creep along the pipes.

My mum and Ted continued to go away at times, performing various gigs. They were probably just overnight trips—but life seemed empty and I felt very alone. I missed my brother and the countryside, and thinking about Dad made me unbearably sad. I don’t recall what I did with myself at the beginning…except for one day.

It was close to Christmas, and I think the promise of the holiday had been talked up by my mother in her desire to cheer me and give me something to look forward to.

With no one around, I let myself into their cold apartment (which was never locked during the day), and began to search for hidden Christmas packages. I rifled through a chest of drawers, peeking under clothes that I didn’t recognize. There were satin and lace cami-knickers that seemed too luxurious and indulgent to be my mother’s, but were obviously hers. I opened closet doors and poked about and even looked in the kitchen cabinets. I felt sick and guilty, and knew that if I discovered anything tantalizing it would diminish the pleasure of it on Christmas Day. But the compulsion to search for some concrete proof of love was strong. I was careful to leave everything as I found it, and came away empty-handed.

THE WAR SUDDENLY
came into focus for me. Air raid sirens wailed often, especially after dark. The warden came around.

“Put that light out!” he would shout at the smallest chink of brightness escaping through the blackout curtains.

The basement room became my shelter, and I prayed that my mother would be safe in the flat above.

As the bombing raids increased, we were often forced to retreat into the Underground stations for safety, joining the streams of people doing
the same thing. I had never been in a subway before. I remember going down long escalators to the station platform and inhaling that unforgettable smell of baked dust. Cots were stacked in tiers against the platform walls, pushed as far away as possible from the black pit and the terrifying electric rail—so powerfully alive that it would kill you if you fell on it.

There was a tremendous sense of unity in the subway shelters. Night after night people survived, and bonded. They gathered in groups to socialize and smoke. They tended to their kids, changing little ones’ nappies or sitting them on their potties. They cooked on small Bunsen burner stoves and drank hot tea. The really exhausted ones slept under coarse blankets, even when the trains roared through. It all looked exactly as depicted by Henry Moore in his extraordinary sketches that I came to admire later in life.

One night when the Blitz was particularly bad, we had just stepped off the escalator when Ted suddenly said, “Jesus, I forgot the guitar!” It was a precious and important belonging, for half the vaudeville act would have been ruined if the instrument had been destroyed. He raced back up and out into the dark night to retrieve it, and it seemed to us below that he was away far too long. Every once in a while we heard the ominous crunch of a bomb decimating some building. My mother was terribly worried. When Ted finally reappeared down the escalator, triumphantly holding the guitar aloft, a great cheer went up from the crowd. He responded by entertaining everyone with his songs, which pleased the crowd and took their minds off the horrors going on above.

Another time, another air raid, my mother and Ted returned late from entertaining somewhere. The warden came around, knocking on every door in the apartment building, saying that an incendiary bomb had been dropped in the area. The trouble with incendiaries was that sometimes they would not explode until hours after they had been dropped. This one could not be found. Everyone was told to evacuate.

My mother and stepfather were so exhausted that they decided not to respond to the call. I believe they were the only ones left in the building, and they quietly crept into bed. Upon getting up in the morning and going into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, my mother pulled back the
blackout curtains and gasped—for there, snugly settled in the concrete square of the courtyard, was the incendiary bomb. They had slept by it all night long.

On November 14, nine hundred incendiary bombs were dropped in a period of ten hours on the city of Coventry, razing it to the ground. It was a terrible blow to the nation, and morale was badly shaken.

AUNT JOAN SENT
a terse telegram: “
Married Bill in Gretna Green yesterday. Love Joan.”

Gretna Green is a romantic spot in Scotland, famous for providing quick weddings to lovers who elope there.

The news came as a shock to my mother. She believed (probably correctly) that Joan was angry with her for abandoning her and my father, and that Joan only married Bill to spite her. I got the impression that she was also very sad about the marriage and felt it foolish: that Bill was a good sort, but rather weak. Caught up in the confusion and demands of her new life and what must have been a chaos of emotions, it may have been the first time my mother reflected on the consequences of her actions. Aunt’s marriage was the closing of another door, perhaps one that Mum hadn’t anticipated.

Some forty years later, Aunt told me that my father had offered to marry her for the sake of us children. After Mum left, it had been up to him and to Auntie to look after Johnny and me, and though it must certainly have been difficult with Dad working and Aunt teaching, they coped brilliantly. Aunt confided that Dad said that he could never love her; it would be a marriage of convenience only. I think Aunt secretly always loved
him,
and years later she clung to him as a lifeline—which drove my father nuts! Needless to say, they did not marry.

After Auntie married Bill, Dad moved with Johnny from Kenray to a small flat in Hinchley Wood, near Esher, Surrey.

SOME TIME IN
1941, my mother’s helper took me to the Bedford Theatre on the High Street in Camden Town. It was my first visit ever to a theater. I don’t remember what I saw, but everything I did then was unfocused and anxiety-ridden. Several days later my head began to itch
dreadfully. My mother examined my hair. I had lice. She scrubbed me raw, then rinsed with vinegar, which on my lacerated skin was a form of torture. I screamed a lot—but it did the trick.

Also around this time, I remember being taken to a specialist for what my mother referred to as my “wandering eye.” A condition now known as “strabismus,” it was probably inherited—my daughter, and later her son, had the same problem when they were young. At that time it was thought to be due to a weak muscle, and the theory was that if strengthened with exercise, the eye would straighten up. So my mother found a woman who specialized in eye massage.

I underwent several excruciatingly painful treatments. I had to lie down and submit to the therapist sticking her thumb in my tear duct and working the muscle with enormous pressure. I could hardly bear it—the tears simply poured out—but since I was told it was necessary, I tried to comply. I don’t believe the treatments did me any good at all.

Ted Andrews bought me a new book called
The Art of Seeing
by Aldous Huxley. It was the first gift he ever gave me. It contained eye exercises, such as holding a pencil and following it with one’s eye to the right or left, and wearing a bow pinned to one’s shoulder so that the offending eye could be attracted toward it. I was made to do these exercises religiously, and maybe they worked, or maybe I simply outgrew the strabismus, for today I don’t seem to have it—except perhaps when I’m very, very tired.