Not one of the boys

Chapter One: Beginnings
by Christopher Levenson

[Editor’s Note: This is the initial chapter in regular contributor Christopher Levenson’s memoir]

*

I was six years old and frightened. When the decision to leave was made, and who made it, I no longer know but with very little warning my father told my mother to pack. Then, later that November day in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz, the four of us—my parents, my younger brother, Geoffrey, and myself – arrived at Euston Station at night. In the Underground, before we reached the terminus, we had to pick our way past numberless recumbent forms,– the bodies of sleepers that later re-emerged in the paintings and sculptures of Henry Moore–before reaching platforms that were dark and tense under low iron girders festooned with smoke. Maybe by then it was early morning.

The journey north from London to Lancaster, which nowadays takes three hours or less, lasted most of the day, and was interrupted by long, unexplained stops in open countryside, presumably to avoid air raids. As a child what I remember best about the war was that most of the time no one seemed to know anything, though many pretended to, and those that did know were not about to tell anyone. One of the many slogans I recall from the war warned ‘Careless talk costs lives’ and another asked “Is your journey really necessary?”  Ours was, for the school where my father taught, the Regent Street Polytechnic, was being evacuated en masse. The atmosphere in the compartments was close, smoky and dusty: my father, a lifelong pipe-smoker, was playing cards, probably Bridge, with some of his colleagues.

This must have been my first long journey. At the age of six it was certainly the event that made the greatest continuous impression on me, and the almost three years that it introduced, from November 1940, after much of the worst of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain had already been endured, to the Autumn of 1943, when we returned to London just in time for the Doodlebugs, the V1 Flying Bombs, gave me a different perspective on English life from what I would otherwise have had in suburban London, where I was to live for the rest of my childhood and adolescence.

Not that I was the average kind of evacuee child. separated from its parents and subject to the kindness or otherwise of strangers. Although at one time my parents had considered sending me and my brother to Canada ‘for the duration,’ they were deterred by the torpedoing in September 1940, of the liner, the City of Benares that had resulted in the drowning deaths of many evacuee children. At least I was with my family.

But this feeling of being slightly different, of not quite belonging in any of the usual categories, seems to have affected me at various times in my life and may well have contributed to my becoming a writer.

On the surface my home background seems ordinary enough.  Born in central London in the Royal Free Hospital which, before it moved to its present site, was within the sound of Bow Bells, I was thus, officially at least, a Cockney, though I have never thought of myself as one. The date, 13th February, 1934, happened that year to be Shrove Tuesday, so that throughout my childhood my mother made me pancakes– crepes – on my birthday. My first home was in Paget Road, Stoke Newington, but of these years I can remember nothing and before my brother was born in March 1937 my parents had escaped with me to a new suburb, Canons Park, near Edgware, on the northwestern outskirts of London.

On my mother’s side, the Pinners were straightforwardly English and working class. My maternal grandfather, Ernie, had worked all his life on the railways at Kings Cross, while my mother’s younger brother, Fred, who had left school at the age of thirteen, worked for a long time as a bus driver, then later as a porter at Smithfield Meat Market. Unfortunately, I don’t remember much about my maternal grandparents, for they both died before or just after the beginning of the war. I do retain a sense of their flat in Kings Cross, heavy, dark, and overstuffed with a large coal fire behind a polished cast iron grate, and of  two heavily built grandparents: Gran-ah-dear, so called because when my brother or I were being ingratiating or cute, she would say “Ah, the little dear!”. She had tight silver curls, while Granddad, with a large, squarish red face, was waistcoated, had a gold pocket watch and smelt faintly of beer.

My father’s side of the family was altogether different in ways that for a long time remained mysterious to me, for my father was, as my mother put it, reticent and secretive. The mystery is embodied in my father’s full name, Maurice Rene Levenson. Although no one would have suspected it from his speech, my father had been born in Paris of French parents in 1902 and had lived mainly in Paris until 1922 when, after his father’s death in 1920 from bowel cancer he had come to live in England, became a naturalized British subject and, finally, after teaching stints in Warminster and the Isle of Wight, settled down in London. As a child and young man, he had frequently travelled between London and Paris, accompanying his father, Abraham Solomon, who was, amongst a number of occupations, a teacher of French in England and of English in France.  My father was an only child. His birth mother, Louise Helicon, having died in 1910, her place was taken by his mother’s best friend, Jeanne, the woman I knew as Grand’mere. Thus, I missed knowing my paternal grandfather by many years, and my father never spoke of him or of his other, more distant French relatives, although after the war he did get in touch with them again by mail, sent food parcels and even, after my parents separated, visited some of those he felt closest to. These included Leon Felix, my second cousin, whom, with his wife Monique I was happy to meet on three occasions between 2002 and his death in 2006.

My father, then, was totally bilingual and apart from three words — cre-a-ture, veh-i-cule and cutle-ry – that he continued all his life to pronounce in the French way–he spoke perfect English.  Nor could anyone have detected from his actions, his gestures, or the way he dressed that he might have preferred some aspects of continental life as, in his place, I certainly would have. As scout, Rover Scout and later, when I was at Harrow County Grammar School, Scoutmaster of one of the school’s three troops, he had assimilated completely. He ate my mother’s standard English food without audible demur, dressed in tweed jackets and baggy grey flannels, adopted British political attitudes and institutions, and betrayed, to me at least, no inkling of his ever having regretted his change of nationality.      

Yet his middle name was Rene and he handed it on to me. I can still remember my acute embarrassment at the age of eleven when, towards the end of the war, having distinguished myself in a schoolchildren’s drive to collect newspapers and books for the troops, I was to be presented by some local councillor with a certificate to that effect. He called out my name in front of my assembled peers as Christopher Renee Levenson, the anglicized female form. But even the initial R on its own in combination with Christopher was enough to produce smirks on the assumption that it stood for Robin and well-meaning but insensitive adults would recite the lines “Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.”                

The implications of what my combination of names actually stood for were far worse. Once when I was about thirteen, Hugh, a classmate of mine said casually in response to some comment of mine “Well, you’re not properly English anyway.” At the time, I assumed that he was referring to the Rene and my partially French background.  Only years later did it strike me that he probably intended the remark to allude rather to my surname’s Jewish connotations. My failure to suspect that this was a casual, good natured touch of antisemitism, if indeed it were so intended, was not surprising. My father once told me that he had been secretly baptised as a Catholic against the wishes of his agnostic father, Abraham Solomon, who throughout his life was known as Louis. Certainly, there was nothing identifiably Jewish about his behaviour or attitudes. And indeed, why should there have been? I now know from his French birth certificate that a David Levenson, whose father came from Minsk, was born in Paris in 1847.    

However, the female side of those three generations were all French Catholics, so that despite my Jewish surname I am only 1/64th Jewish, hardly enough to have qualified me for extermination on racial grounds. Indeed, it was not until the 1970s, when I was living with Debby, who subsequently became my second wife, and who was half-Jewish on her mother’s side, that I learnt anything of the customs and traditions common even among non-observant Jews. Shortly after I started attending Harrow County Grammar School in 1945, I looked up Levenson in a Dictionary of English family names and found what at the time I felt was temporary relief in the information that the name derived from Leothwyn, a Saxon thane in Warwickshire! When I went down from Cambridge in 1957, and had my attention drawn to my abysmal Finals results reprinted in the​ Jewish Chronicle,​ I was merely amused. Besides, what self-respecting Jew would call his son Christopher?  Nominally, nevertheless, I see myself as a walking paradox.       

In other respects, my suburban childhood was uneventful.  We lived in a semi-detached house with a small garden in the front and a slightly larger one in the back in a street lined with flowering shrubs and the occasional tree. When not marking homework, my father spent a lot of time in the garden and for a while, during and after the war, in the Allotments, and he took a justifiable pride in his rockery. But the house itself was undistinguished, the furniture standard ’30s style, heavy and dark, the lighting fixtures nondescript. Although my father could draw quite well and helped me with my own early attempts at perspective, we had few reproductions of paintings, while the wallpaper and carpets were at best inoffensive, mute.  Indeed, a muted quality is what I associate most with those years between our return from Lancaster and my finishing at Harrow County in 1952.   Though my mother later came out from under the shadow of this muteness, my father never did.   Even as a young child my birthday or Christmas presents from my father were labelled not ‘from Dad’ nor even, more formally, ‘from your father’ but ‘from M.R.L.’ as if he had been a casual acquaintance, unwilling to identify himself any further. My mother likewise sent some of her gifts ‘from E.E.L.’. This is something that I have never understood but that, unreasonably perhaps, hurts me to this day.

Unfortunately, I can no longer recall the good things from my earlier childhood that connected me with my father except vaguely a few times being given what he called ‘flying angels,’ that is, riding on his shoulders, or, more frequently piggy-back rides. In general, he was not physically demonstrative. In retrospect I sense, unfairly perhaps, a prudishness about both my parents in respect to displays of physical affection. At least in respect to my own sons, I tried to do otherwise and, whether or not by way of over-compensation, I think of myself as quite a tactile person, even a sensualist.  This extends also to animals, much to my wife Oonagh’s irritation at times because, she says, I can’t see a cat or dog without wanting to ‘maul’ it.  As an adult I once had a dog, for two months, but never in my childhood. Certainly, as regards cats I was not deprived, for we had a succession of them. One of them, a half-Persian ginger male, was called Dandy, an abbreviation of ‘​Orlando, the Marmalade Cat,’​ which had been one of my favourite children’s stories. When my parents were on the verge of separation, I would sometimes overhear my mother talking to the cat, saying things like “You’re the only one who understands me, Dandy.”

Ultimately what drove my parents to separate, though it was an excruciatingly long process –they presumably agreed to stay together for my sake until I had finished high school – was the death of my brother, Geoffrey, and all the guilt and sense of defeat that surrounded it. He was three years younger than me and I have my own guilt at not being able to remember more about him than I do.  Having had four sons of my own, I know only too well that any child of eight has had an enormous amount of time to develop their own personality. Although my mother had many memories of my brother, and often told me that “Geoffrey was such a loving little boy,” in a way that certainly implied to me that I was not, most of my own recollections, alas, concern the fights we had rather than the good times. He died on 14​th​ March 1945, his eighth birthday. What was so terrible about his death is that it was so unnecessary, resulting from a misdiagnosis by our family doctor of what turned out to be appendicitis. Apparently, my father went along with the doctor’s incorrect diagnosis, trying to stay calm through the night as my brother vomited and was in obvious pain, while my mother, sure that it was more serious, felt that he needed to be taken to the hospital. By the time he was taken there the next day, he had developed peritonitis and had to undergo two operations, with gangrene finally adding to his problems. He was given his birthday presents a day early.

The following morning my father, who had spent the night at his bedside, came into my bedroom looking haggard and told me “You won’t see your little brother anymore.” The next thing I remember was going by Underground with my parents to the cemetery in Isleworth where he was buried. I remember it as a cold, grey day but what I felt most, I think, was drained, and empty. Later the toys Geoffrey never had a chance to play with were given to some children’s charity.  Seeing how close the bond was between Oonagh and her brother, only eleven months younger than her, I often wonder what differences there would have been in my subsequent life if he had lived and I had had a brother with whom to share things, to consult and argue with, and especially in the context of such a book as this, to compare and contrast our respective memories.

For my brother, fifty years dead

It took forever, that trip

one nondescript Saturday:

first the Tube, then the North London Line.

At eleven for me it was all

uncharted territory.

Then this graveyard in Isleworth.

Why would they tuck you in there,

so far away from home?

I have never been back.

My first death was a grief

I had no words for then

but have since grown into

and carry under my heart 

like an inoperable tumour.

Often  I try to imagine 

how as adults we might have met,

come together or parted 

in anger, and every March

as snow-like, your death sinks in

I am wary of your absence.

The very different ways that my parents took my brother’s death seem to me characteristic of the differences in their temperaments that ultimately drove them apart. After the initial grief which, weirdly, they sought to allay or postpone a month or two later by a camping holiday in Devon and Cornwall, my father withdrew into himself while my mother gradually moved further away from being simply the housewife and mother. As I came to need less attention, she took on more activities outside the home. Even had they both wanted it, my parents could not have had another child together, for my mother had had a hysterectomy in late 1943 at the age of thirty-six, in connection with another operation. Maybe in view of feminist criticism of the frequency with which male doctors used to prescribe hysterectomies, that too had not been inevitable.

Since I was now away at school for much of the day, my mother took a part time job behind the counter at the local Co-op store and also became an active member of the local Co-operative Women’s Guild. Apart from meeting in each other’s houses for whist drives, which I attended sometimes, this also entailed occasional outings (I remember one in a charabanc to Clacton). These women were a lively, raucous lot but for the most part could not have given my mother much intellectual stimulus. She had had to leave school at sixteen to help support her parents but had done quite well academically and was still, or again, very interested in a number of things. As my classes at the grammar school took me into the poetry of, for instance, T.S. Eliot, my mother also developed an interest and started to do some of the same reading for herself. I was, I must admit, very priggish at that time and obviously felt that only young grammar school pupils were fit to learn about the Metaphysicals or James Joyce or modern poetry. It was embarrassing for me to think that my mother was discovering the same writers and with a good deal more obvious enthusiasm: it took me many years to realize that such enthusiasm, and a teacher’s ability to spark and nurture it, is one of the most precious benefits of any education system, at any age in a person’s life.  So too, only after I had outgrown my stereotypical child’s view of what a mother should be and do, did I come to see that this ability to start afresh in her mid-forties was one of my mother’s strengths and came to admire her determination and her driven quality. Once she had got a taste of financial independence, she enrolled in a two-year programme at a teacher’s training school in South London, before starting out as a primary school teacher in Hampstead, where she stayed from 1954 until her retirement in 1972.

After she moved to Christchurch, near Bournemouth, she worked on her French, and learnt some German and Italian which she then used on her frequent holidays on the continent. Locally, she developed an interest in old Roman and Saxon remains and sites, as well as in the writings of Thomas Hardy and William Barnes, the Dorset dialect poet.

By this time, 1954, I had returned from my two and a quarter years of alternative service in the Friends Ambulance Unit and my parents had finally agreed to separate. It was a relief. For most of my adolescence a sullen silence permeated the house, every so often punctuated by loud arguments. My mother moved from the marital bed into the small bedroom that had been my brother Geoffrey’s, and whose cupboards contained a number of German language books and dictionaries left with us ‘for the duration’ by a Mr. Schlesinger (I never knew his first name) a German Jewish refugee, when he was taken away somewhere to be interned. He never reappeared. I still have some of the books.

Mr Schlesinger

I don’t know how my father viewed my mother’s increasing independence — even though they were still living in the same house they took their holidays separately — but by the time I was ready to go up to university in the autumn of 1954, my mother had moved out and I wept, in a mixture of grief and selfish frustration, that they should be so blatantly unhappy just as I was setting out on an exciting new phase of my own life. Certainly, the divorce and my long absences when I was working abroad, did nothing to relieve what for my father had become a long-term depression. I see him still, sitting reading by himself in the evenings, in front of the electric fire or gardening, but meeting very few people. He perked up briefly when I got married and came over to Ommen, in the Netherlands, for the ceremony and was pleased when my oldest son, Martin, was born, but even this pleasure was short-lived. At the time we were living first in Holland and then for three years in Germany with only two or three trips back to England each year.  

Apart from us my father still had his colleagues at work, some of whom I had met from previous years — Leo Herman, a rotund, friendly Jewish gentleman who used to give me birthday presents that  were obviously remaindered books on the most diverse subjects, and  Mr. Quant, father of the famous Mary Quant — but the years from the time my mother left until 1972, when he suffered a stroke and had to move into a nursing home, must have been very lonely. He did have the expert help and care of Mr. and Mrs. Hearn, who came in regularly to clean the house and assist with anything else that needed to be done. Mrs. Hearn, a tall, silver-haired, bony Scotswoman, with bright twinkling blue eyes, was a good influence on his spirits, I think, but if he had any close friends at this time I don’t know of them.

One of the very few occasions when we had visitors was at elections, especially municipal ones, when our living room was turned for a day into the Labour Party committee rooms and I was deputed to check voters lists and sometimes go out in cars to help ‘pull out the vote’ a phrase that has nasty dental overtones. My father and mother were both strong Labour supporters. My father had a shelf full of the orange covered Left Book Club books brought out by Gollancz. My mother’s support was more visceral and focussed on a few favourite figures in Attlee’s Labour government such as Ellen Wilkinson and Herbert Morrison. Once or twice, I accompanied them to political meetings, on one occasion addressed by another of her heroes (and mine), Nye Bevan. Her views, including automatic support for the miners, were rooted in the relative poverty of her early childhood. But like many working class Labour supporters, she was not ahead of her time as regards immigrants and gay people.

Except when in the formalized settings of scout camps or maybe staff rooms, my father was not very gregarious. It was interesting that the nurses at the Home in Bournemouth where, thanks to my mother, he was able to spend his last few weeks in relative comfort, talked of his being “such a gentleman.” He was, and a major part of his gentlemanliness appeared in the very reticence and unforthcoming quality that must at times have driven my mother crazy. I cannot recall his ever really letting go. He was a conscientious and dedicated secondary school teacher but he had been a teacher for too long without a break. He travelled every day for forty-five or fifty minutes each way by the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus and back so that by the time he got home he had little energy for more than marking, glancing at the evening paper or reading a book. But even here he rarely seemed to read anything to the end: I would discover bookmarks made from slivers of newspaper half or two thirds of the way through many of the books. One of the worst things about high school teaching is that there is no provision for sabbaticals and thus little of the right kind of time for branching out into other areas of study. Efficient school teachers can devise marvelous schemes and techniques but after a while they tend to lose touch with what is happening in literature or history and all too easily become automatic, full of opinions and unverified half-knowledge.

I certainly feel that this is what happened with my father and it totally blighted my relationship with him. Like some nations, Canada for example where the USA is concerned, some people tend to define themselves by what they are not and by how they differ from family and friends. In my case I did not fight enough with my father, though not for lack of trying. One of the things I objected to and resented in my father was the way he just seemed to give up, to resign himself to situations. Perhaps he felt that he had struggled hard enough, getting a B.A. from King’s College, London, at night school, to reach this far – a steady job, a comfortable enough house in the suburbs, a small, and then, a too small, family. Certainly, Geoffrey’s death knocked the stuffing out of him, but even taking that into account, I did not like the way that in my teens he deflected arguments with me about politics or morality or religion with a shrug or some non-committal phrase, letting things go unanswered, unresolved. In this respect I am much more like my mother. I grow irritated with myself if I cannot get something finished, whether it’s a meal, an essay or some work arrangement. I am eager to stick with a decision and hate to cancel or even postpone meetings, sometimes unreasonably so. I am determined to reach a particular place in a journey and unwilling to fall prey to constant second thoughts and doubts.

Increasingly, even before the separation and divorce, my mother took to going on continental holidays on her own or with colleagues and built up a network of friends in France and Italy.  She was motivated, I am sure, neither by ambition nor by selfishness. It was simply the way she had to be in order to combat the constant flux and uncertainty of her half-hearted co-existence with my father. I have come to see similar traits in my own character.  Except in the visual arts and in poetry, where I am at times now drawn to the indeterminate, gradually shifting shapes of dawn and dusk, revelation and concealment, I prefer the definite and the clear cut, and in literature prefer to recognize canons, genres, and categories even while recognizing that they are mere mental constructs, makeshift and hypothetical, and that rules exist to be broken. But before they can be broken, they have to be known and acknowledged.

During my early teens, however, I felt isolated at home and had few friends in the neighbourhood. Apart from my classmates and, later, the friends that I made for myself by starting such groups as the Harrow Young Poets Circle or by joining groups at the Quaker meeting, my social circle as a teenager was fairly limited, and my parents’ social life even more so. At least my mother knew people through the Co-op Women’s Guild but we hardly ever had anyone round to tea, let alone dinner.

The one exception was Grandmère. She was incurably French. She had settled in England when my father moved there, in 1922, and I had been aware of her for as long as I could remember and except for the war years, the ritual of having Grandmère over for Christmas and Easter was inviolable. Our sad, depleted household was all that she had in England, poor thing. She was my father’s stepmother and probably not so very much older than he was, but I cannot remember her as ever being anything but old. She used to arrive after a morning’s bus-ride across north London – she wouldn’t travel by Underground because she was scared of the escalators – a plump, shuffling figure swathed in dowdy browns and carrying with her a vast brown oilskin bag crammed with oddments and little presents. Moreover, she was usually accompanied by a cold so that her copious kisses, which to my mother’s horror she would sometimes get up to bestow on the unsuspecting backs of our heads as we sat at the dinner table, were always laced with a quaint mixture of eau-de-cologne and eucalyptus.

Grandmère’s chief disadvantage was that she was deaf, at first only partially but later almost completely. This of course could have its funny side, at least in retrospect. On the buses people turned to stare as my father bellowed our private affairs into her ear in French. They must have thought he was bullying her when, most of the time all he was doing was informing her for instance, that “Nous allons maintenant au jardin zoologique.” (We’re going to the zoo). On the two occasions that I recall visiting her flat, her infirmity proved rather more disconcerting. Because of her fear of being burgled, her apartment door was always locked and though we could hear her clearly enough walking around within, no amount of door thumping by my father could attract her attention. In the end my father had to scribble a note, slip it under her door, and hope that she would eventually see it and let us in. To make quite sure of a rendezvous it was necessary to write to her two or three days in advance, care of her newsagent, for, charitable and good-hearted creature though she was in most respects, she suspected her landlady of steaming open and reading her private correspondence.

Her one-room flat in Clapton overlooked the railway station and this was indeed my only memory of it from before the war but, whereas I had remembered four tracks with long-distance steam trains thundering past, I found only two tracks frequented solely by suburban diesel trains. As Grandmère got older her flat became ever more dilapidated and dusty. Because she had nowhere to store the coal for her fire, it was dumped on the floor and scantily covered with old newspapers. The whole room was dark and dusty and flowerless. A few tattered old French books were piled randomly on the mantelpiece and solid sideboards. Only the bright light blue of the new food safe stood out among the dulled browns, and this my father had provided for her as he had indeed provided almost everything else she had. Originally, she had been able to earn some minimal living for herself selling buttons at North London street markets but later she had only her National Insurance and a small allowance from my father. Her only constant companion was the landlady’s canary. After Grandmère had looked after it once for a week while the landlady was away on holiday, its stays became more frequent until finally the landlady obviously felt that she could dispense with the bird entirely.

Grandmere’s deafness was, I later discovered, the aftermath of diphtheria, from which she had suffered in Paris when only four years old. She once described to me how she had been carried downstairs by her father from their seventh floor flat and had been treated by a Dr. Roux, a student of Louis Pasteur’s. The doctor had saved her life but the disease left her hearing permanently impaired.  But she was a good raconteuse. I can recall several stories about her parents having had to eat rats and cats during the Paris Commune of 1870 in order to avoid starvation. Doubtless, though, with only the radio and her two newspapers, the ​Daily Mirror ​and the Guardian, ​by way of contact with the outside world, she had had more than enough time to develop this faculty. Perhaps for this reason too she radiated charity and goodwill. With her, everything and almost everybody was “nice” and “lovely.” Her letters, liberally sprinkled with exclamation marks, were full of good advice and French constructions, the latter, doubtless because of her deafness, persisting even after forty years in England. She always wrote, as she spoke, with a strong French accent. Her letters followed a time-honoured pattern: comment on the weather, advice that we take good care of ourselves and wrap up well, and news of Daddy’s last visit.

Sometimes she sent me stamps, mostly foreign, whilst for my father, who had twice been a scoutmaster but whom she obviously still regarded as a little boy, she would enclose newspaper cuttings about the activities of some local scout troop. After all, she herself took a good-natured, bird-like interest in almost everything. When I was reading, she would interrupt me from time to time to ask “What you ‘ave zere? Show!” She was very difficult to jolt out of her good humour. Indeed, the only time that I can remember doing so was when, at the age of five in response to her command “Show!” I promptly brandished my infant phallus at her. She was not amused and I did not repeat that trick. In general, though, Grandmère was an incurable optimist and quite absurdly grateful for the sometimes grudging hospitality that we offered her. She would merely sit, a benign growth, looking at pictures, admiring the garden, laughing helplessly at her own stories, mild, benevolent, approving, and determined to help. After lunch we had virtually to wrestle her smooth, rosy-cheeked bulk into the armchair to prevent her from taking over our tiny kitchen and doing all the washing-up. 

Having seen with Aaron, our grandson, what a difference grandparents can make to the quality of a small child’s life, especially today when most families are nuclear, rather than extended, I can only regret that my two maternal grandparents died when I was still very young while Grandmère for all her goodwill was able to play only such a minor role in my life.

Apprentice

My mother’s parents died in quick succession 

when I was only six. I hardly knew them enough

to sense my loss. We were away, up north,

evacuated. Then, at the end of the war

my father’s stepmother, Grandmère, emerged from Clapton

came over at Christmas and Easter to our tidy suburb.

Scared of the Tube, she took buses across town

With a perennial cold, and reeking of eucalyptus,

her leather shopping bag creaked, weighed down with goodies

As she was stone deaf, we had to shout in French

“Nous allons maintenant au Jardin des plantes.”

What did the neighbours think?

When my turn came around, and with no role models.

I slowly learnt on the job, driving Aaron to early morning 

hockey or baseball practice, telling him bedtime stories, 

for the most part just an apprentice, being there. So, undetected 

a pinch of a herb or spice may help to flavour the dishes…

The nuclear character of our family had been, if anything, even intensified during the war years because of the evacuation. After the first few days in Lancaster, when we were billeted in a house almost literally in the shadow of John O’ Gaunt’s former castle with an elderly couple, who complained about Geoffrey or myself playing with the radio, we moved to larger and much more pleasant premises which we shared with an amiably maternal Canadian lady, Mrs. Brand, whose husband Ernest was in the Merchant Navy, and her two sons, Robert, a year older than me, and Brian, a year younger.

Scotforth, where we lived for the next three years, was a kind of village suburb of Lancaster, maybe three or four miles out from the centre. The actual house we lived in, ‘Heathfield,’ was third from the end of the village and also of the city, and was built on the A6, the main London to Glasgow road at that time. In recent years its distinctiveness has been diminished by the addition of a small housing estate opposite the house where, in my childhood, there had been only farmers’ fields, and by the building of the M6 Motorway. This reduces both the amount of traffic on the main road and its importance, but at that time the road was a main conduit for long army convoys. These included sixty-foot-long trailer trucks about fifteen-feet high that were popularly known as Hitler’s Coffins. Civilians did not know for sure what they contained, presumably aircraft fuselages or wings, but one day when as so often a convoy was halted on the opposite side of the road to our house, Geoffrey and I went across and asked one of the drivers what the huge boxes contained. I seem to recall that it was I who rushed back to my parents with the answer: “Mummy, mummy, we know what’s in those boxes! They’re full of red tape.”

We knew very few of our neighbours, unless you count Mr. Airey who brought us cans of milk still frothing and warm from his own cows, and I don’t recall there being very many children of my own age nearby, except for the Rogerson children who lived in the oil-sodden, ramshackle garage a hundred yards up the road (and were the neighbourhood bullies), and of course Robert and Brian Brand, with whom we shared the house. But we did get occasional visits from tramps and for a long time there was a chalk sign — a circle with a dot inside it — outside our front gate, that meant “They treat you well here,” for my mother would give them soup or sandwiches and a cup of tea. The inmates of the Ashton Institute, the local mental hospital, also used to wander past at times and lean over the gate to carry on somewhat disconnected but amiable conversations with us, but one day after someone apparently less docile had escaped from the Institute, my mother turned a tramp away empty-handed, afraid that he was the escaped mental patient. After this the chalk sign disappeared and my mother suffered pangs of conscience, fearing that she had been needlessly inhospitable to a genuine tramp.

The house itself, which dated from 1902, was spacious in a way no longer feasible. Obviously from the row of bells in the scullery it was built to include servants.  The house was a two-storey stone structure with a large central doorway and hall (at least by the suburban London standards I was used to). It had a very substantial garden both back and front. Of the front garden I remember very little except for the irises and large poppies, but the walled back garden was full of fruit trees – apples, pears, plums, damsons – as well as an assortment of berry bushes, especially blackcurrant, redcurrant, and gooseberries, in addition to the usual vegetable patch where we “dug for victory.” 

We were lucky to have so much fruit at our disposal, which certainly varied our diet, but although my mother made marvellous rhubarb and ginger jam and very good marmalade, an art I have tried myself – half the fun deriving from the steamy fragrance of the boiling oranges and from scraping the sides of the saucepan – she was never a great cook for main dishes. In retrospect, however, I have to admire the way she adapted to wartime deprivations and especially to the new culinary experiences that were imposed on us by food rationing and by American aid. As well as peanut butter, which I quickly came to enjoy, these included dried egg and dried milk. Somehow, she managed to make a very good replica of scrambled eggs from the dismal yellow powder, while in cocoa and some baked goods and desserts even dried milk could be effectively disguised. Apart from which during my three years there I developed a taste for such plebeian northern staples as tripe and onions and parkin, a molasses-like sweet pastry. By my present standards, the food must have been monotonous but studies have shown that in general, war-time rationing had an overall beneficial effect on the national health, and although I like exploring foods, I have never thought of myself as a foodie or a connoisseur.

At the rear of the house behind the scullery was a laundry room equipped with a heavy hand mangle and an outside toilet. Both were roomy, cool places with coarse whitewash that came away in huge flakes. The fruit trees were good for climbing too and afforded a view over the stone walls across the fields that began two houses away, to the railway line. It was not long before I became addicted to standing on the bridge over the railway about a quarter of a mile from our house to watch the trains go by, collect the engine numbers, and rejoice in the aromatic wumph! of steam as the locomotives passed under the bridge.

Later, when we returned to London and trainspotting was no longer so easy, I switched to collecting bus numbers.  At the time, since London Transport had not renewed its stock during the war years, a wide variety of buses from the pre-war period were still in service. So, not content with simply ‘spotting’ those on local routes, I spent my sub-teen years travelling alone across London, mostly at weekends, to bus depots in places such as Sidcup or Ilford that I have never since revisited. In time, as the older buses were replaced and I became interested in other things, the appeal diminished and I took up other less active hobbies, such as collecting cigarette cards and stamps. Since my father smoked a pipe, I had no easy access to cigarette packages but, by purchase or swapping, I soon acquired quite a collection, sets of famous trains, coats of arms, cricketers. 

It was the same with stamps: after my father gave me a starter album, I swapped or bought my way into a decent enough collection. Even the hit or miss way that I collected, stamps opened up a new world for me, not the actual countries but at least an awareness of names such as the Turks and Caicos Islands, Seychelles, Djibouti, Aden, and Madagascar and long before I had been even to safe Switzerland with the school, I had feasted my eyes on ornate scenes of tribal customs and tropical landscapes, in stark contrast to Britain’s own boringly sedate and predictable offerings, mostly of the monarch. I sometimes wonder whether what drives such collections is perhaps a desire on the part of children who have so little control over their own lives to create some sense of completeness and control. Maybe that same motivation lay behind my fondness for making town plans of imaginary places and concocting bus or train timetables.

At Lancaster during the war, I do not recall collecting anything, partly no doubt because so much of our lives seemed to be spent outdoors.  Besides, the neighbouring fields had other attractions, such as collecting mushrooms in the early morning. On one of our short walks, where we would play with wooden propeller toys or balsa model airplanes, my father suddenly crouched down to capture something he had seen moving in the grass. It was a vole, but before we had time to admire its bright beady eyes and quivering mouse-like body, it had escaped up my father’s jacket sleeve. My father spent the next few minutes in hilarious discomfort as the vole slid down his back and his trouser leg before finally making its getaway back into the grass.

At that time the area now occupied in part by Lancaster University was very rural. To the south of us as far as Garstang there were only fields full of cows and farmhouses, long, low grey stone buildings with slate roofs surrounded by carts and milk churns. Their cool, whitewashed kitchens and stone flag floors have remained my standard of what a farmhouse should look like.

For longer walks, sometimes in the company of a Mr. Barrington Whitlow, a charmingly old- fashioned gentleman whom my parents knew from the Friends Meeting, we would take picnic lunches and go over the fells to Abbeystead in the Trough of Bowland or walk up our local ‘mountain,’ Clougha, a mere thirteen hundred feet above sea level, the mildest of humps in the moorland that led up to the real Pennine chain. Still, getting there entailed crossing small streams, or becks, by stepping stones, climbing several stiles over stone walls, and tramping over rough grass and heather where we were likely to disturb curlews and plovers. After the first mile or so, there were few farms or buildings of any kind, just sheep. Fortunately, we were well equipped with the one-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey map. For whatever reason I was at times obsessed with maps and both then and later, in Edgware, loved inventing maps of imaginary islands and town plans and even concocted bus and train timetables linking the imaginary cities.

Ordnance Survey

Obsolete now except as collectibles, thanks to

Google World maps’ 24/7 intrusion

into our streets and gardens.

Nothing is strange any more, we are all peeping toms

in the furthest corners of New Zealand or Equador,

Though these maps in my childhood, one inch to the mile,

seemed to reveal everything —

chapels, streams, level crossings, footpaths, churches with spires —

they still left us space to explore on foot, to feel our own way.

On kitchen tables before setting out, I imagined contours,

saw a cliff face rear up, pictured the farm by the marsh.

And they were durable: tucked into our rucksacks

along with a picnic lunch and a compass, even when folded

they did not fray. They gave us connection,

security and scale. It was a tangible world.

Apart from visits to the Lake District, only an hour or two away by bus, our other excursions included Ingleton, a little town on the edge of the Pennines, which boasted some waterfalls and the White Scar Caves. Certainly, at the time I was impressed by the stalactites and stalagmites with their fanciful names and by the underground streams and murky echoing caverns. On one occasion we combined a trip to Ingleton with a visit to the grounds of a country house for an open-air performance of the first Shakespeare play I ever saw​, A Midsummer Night’s Dream​. We would often go for shorter trips to Halton and Caton, a few miles up the river Lune from Lancaster. In the opposite, seaward direction, we could walk along the canal to Cockerham and Glasson Dock, marvellously bleak and desolate places almost surrounded by stinging salt flats and the deep mud branches of the creek that filled at high tide. The whole area was covered with coarse marsh grasses and the pale pink shore flowers we knew as ‘thrift.’ Glasson Dock, especially, with its boarded up houses and grey destroyers in the docks, had an abandoned, sinister feel to it, though the railway line from Lancaster, its rails now removed and converted into a footpath, was quite active during the war years.

So too were the canals.  Our house was well-placed for the Grand Union Canal that ran north-south and was only half a mile further than the railway line   Beside the abundant wild life, such as swans and the occasional kingfisher amongst its reeds and rushes, there were the ‘monkey boats.’ These were the long, narrow barges familiar in the UK today as leisure craft, gaily painted and leased out to summer tourists for floating holidays, but during the war they were very much working boats, heavily-laden with coal and other basic commodities. I used to be fascinated by the families that lived in the tiny but cosy-looking cabins of these boats and envied what I thought of as their nomad life. Altogether, our walks along the grassy rural stretches of canal to Glasson Dock or northwards to Hest Bank, Bolton Le Sands, and Carnforth, with the lock gates and the miniature houses of the lock keepers, had a green and overgrown tranquillity about them that I have seldom encountered since.

But the place I liked best of all was Silverdale, where we spent a week or two on at least two occasions, staying in a rented cabin less than a hundred yards from the shore. Silverdale, along with Arnside, Warton (where we frequently went blackberrying), Yealand Conyers, and Yealand Redmayne, was part of a cluster of villages in an area north and west of Carnforth but several miles to the west of the main north road and connected only by narrow winding roads between stone walls. Even today the area is not well known except to the locals.

The camp and trailer site where we stayed sloped down to the salt flats that formed part of the Kent estuary and was owned, I believe, by the people at Druce Farm. That certainly was where we got our milk and were able to stroke their pet lamb and admire the seemingly endless family of grey cats and their kittens. Most of the cottages on the campsite were quite ramshackle — some were converted buses or trams or caravans (as we called the trailers) that were obviously never going to go on the road anymore and whose flattened tires had succumbed to the long grass — but apart from the pleasure of wandering around the other cottages and tents, I was delighted by the abundance of red squirrels and rabbits, some astonishingly tame, that made their home there. I kept a record of the numbers of each that I saw, oblivious of, or indifferent to, the fact that I must have been counting some squirrels and rabbits several times over.

Sometimes we walked along a cliff path to Arnside, at that time the most forsaken of small seaside resorts or climbed the local hill, Arnside Knott, but often we were content to walk across the salt flats, riddled as they were with small pools that filled up each high tide and so contained crabs we could prod at and other small fish. I can’t actually remember swimming there; one would have had to walk out a long way at low tide and we had been warned about the danger of quicksands for those who ventured too far, although it was allegedly possible to walk right across the estuary to Grange-over-Sands at low tide if you knew your way. One continual source of fascination for me, that I later converted for symbolic poetic purposes, was the fresh-water spring a few yards from the pebble beach that was covered over with salt water at each high tide but that resumed its fresh clear taste less than an hour after the tide had receded.

The Sea Spring

Even the salt of the sea can be overcome.

As a war-time child by Morecambe Bay I had seen

the salt flats at Silverdale – stinging, desolate creeks,

tough islands of marsh grass, thrift and rotting bones —

submerge twice daily in the relentless battleship grey

of the estuary tide.

A hundred yards out from the pebble shore it was,

a spring where we drew fresh water every day.

At high tide it was gone

but only an hour was needed to rinse it clean

and the cold source would resume its clarity.

Despite the mountains of the Lake District about ten miles away to the North across the estuary, Silverdale and the other villages were calm, undramatic places but they had the smell of the sea and a kind of bracing indolence about them, a sense of being far removed from everything. At times we did make excursions, by train for instance to Grange-over-Sands with its Carmelite Priory, but seaside resorts in wartime are empty, listless places whether immobilized by the sun or rain-blown.

Besides, if it was simply the beach we wanted, Morecambe and Heysham were far closer. Morecambe was really just a northern version of, say, Eastbourne or Hastings, with the usual theatres, pony rides, piers full of slot machines where, for a penny, you could ​almost​ see what the butler saw or give yourself cheap thrills with the mechanical antics of the Haunted House, but Heysham Village was different. We often went there on weekends to picnic on the rocks by the beach, or to clamber over the rough headland, which allowed good views of the harbour where ferries left for the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. Usually, my mother made a cheese flan, one of my favourite dishes. But those were not the only attractions: on one end of Heysham Head were narrow cavities that had been cut out of the grey rock. They looked barely long enough or deep enough to hold a child but apparently these were the graves of the monks who had previously lived there and departed from there to Christianize Ireland. Years later, seeing the tiny suits of armour in the Tower of London, I realized just how much people had grown over the centuries, or more probably, over the previous century. The graves were filled much of the time with brackish rain water or dusty weeds, while a few yards away was one of the smallest and shabbiest zoos and fun fairs I have ever encountered. The only animal I recall was a sad, mangy brown bear, but I spent some amusing minutes in front of the distorting mirrors that were a prize feature of the fun fair. In the village itself, apart from the attractive Norman church that I have since revisited, there were several old cottages dating back to the eighteenth or even the seventeenth century, and some shops that sold nettle beer, a concept that always fascinated me. However, my parents, who were abstemious and in an average year might consume two or three glasses of wine, a little ginger wine at Christmas and maybe a glass or two of cider, were not about to let me try something even marginally alcoholic and I had to be content with Tizer the Appetizer, an insipid orange-coloured fizzy drink or ginger beer, available then in stone bottles. Nettle beer was no longer for sale the last time I visited Heysham.

On at least one occasion I remember going via Fleetwood to Blackpool, Lancashire’s main seaside resort, and doubtless I went up the tower, on the piers, and had fish and chip dinners, but it is all a flashy blur in my mind. The fact is, apart from the short trips I have mentioned we were not able to move around very much during the war and my parents preferred the familiar closer excursions mostly on foot or by local bus. Neither then, nor after the war, did we ever own a car.

What I did take from my years in the North, however, was a feeling that northerners were somehow closer to ‘real life,’ were more genuine and with fewer social pretensions. Whether or not this is so, I did acquire a prejudice in favour especially of Yorkshiremen and Lancastrians but really of the North as a whole. Although people in Lancaster liked to remind us that they too had experienced bombing, when a lone German plane returning from a raid on Barrow-in-Furness, a shipbuilding town across the other side of Morecambe Bay, had jettisoned three bombs on its return trip, in fact we were very safe in Lancaster and I experienced the war very much at second hand. I do remember queuing up to go inside a Lancaster bomber that was on display in the city before these aircraft became famous a year or two later for their role in the thousand bomber raids on German cities. My chief excitement however came from reading Picture Post ​photo essays as I waited at the barber’s or watching my father as he pencilled in Allied advances on a map of Europe while listening to the news broadcasts.

The Atlas

In wartime doing my childish bit for the allies

with my aircraft spotters guide,

I could tell from their black silhouettes

who had hit us, Heinkel or Messerschmidt.

Each evening after the six o’clock news I would watch

my father between stints as an Air Raid Warden

pencil into the atlas ‘Uncle’ Joe Stalin’s advances

or, after the second front, ours.

Names of rivers, Meuse Vistula, Don,

cities like Rostock, Benghazi,

the shape of the Normandy coastline

a thousand unnatural landscapes

were imprinted on memory.

But years before that, thanks to my ‘uncle’ Hellmuth

who reluctantly went back to Hamburg in ‘39, 

to do his bit, my eyes had gorged

on full-page photos in Im Fluge durch die Welt, *

a coffee table book from before the Great War,

gazing in awe at Buenos Aires, Sydney, Hong Kong, Yellowstone 

and Dresden, whose fires I could not blow out

on my eleventh birthday.  Somehow when my father died

the book was mislaid or sold. Now I can never explain

why I had to see with my own eyes all there was time for,

how I had to take on the world.

           * In flight through the world

In a way that is hardly imaginable nowadays with instant technology at hand everywhere in the form of smart phones and iPads: the radio was at that time of crucial importance for us and I suspect for most people in Britain. The names of certain news announcers, such as Richard Dimbleby and Alvar Liddell stuck in my infant mind, as did Tommy Handley’s comedy show, ITMA, whose characters gave several catch phrases to English usage, such as Mrs. Mop’s “Can I do you now, sir?” or “After you, Claude. No, after you, Cecil,” and most amusing of all, the Nazi Spy, whose segment always began with “Zis is Fünf speaking.” After the war my radio listening habit took in Children’s Hour which featured ‘Toytown’ with Larry the Lamb and Mr. Growser but also the Germanically-inflected tones of the naturalist Ludwig Koch. Later on, I would listen with my parents to the detective thriller ​Dick Barton, special agent ​and, in an age much more squeamish than today’s, recall the hero saying to his female companion after he had discovered a corpse. “No, no darling, don‘t look. It’s rather horrible.”

After the war too, I listened regularly to interview shows on the BBC such as ​‘In Town Tonight’ and can still give a reasonable imitation of the opening sequence with London traffic noises, a woman flower-seller offering ‘Violets, lovely violets!” and then a stentorian male voice shouting “Stop! Once again, we stop the roar of London’s traffic to bring to you some of the interesting people who are ‘In Town Tonight’.” So much of the wider world when I was a child came to us through the brown Bakelite and dark wood box of our Murphy radio, or the Wireless as we used to call it.

In terms of my personal wartime drama, the highlight must have been the two or three weeks I spent in the Isolation Hospital in 1942 with scarlet fever. As a small child I had survived mumps, chickenpox, whooping cough, and rubella, all without mishap. Early in 1940, I had developed double pneumonia and remember lying downstairs in Howberry Road in the darkened dining room with the windows boarded up and cross latticed (as the windows of buses and trains were also at the time) with sticky translucent tape to prevent or minimize the danger of flying glass, drinking lemon barley from brown-tinted glasses. When I had recovered sufficiently, we spent some time convalescing, not more than a week or ten days I think, at the, by that time, deserted seaside resort of Bexhill near Eastbourne, on the rather vulnerable south coast. I remember reading, with a delight I now find incomprehensible, a black bound volume containing several different Rupert books in a cool back garden surrounded by high stone walls. 

But these diseases had been leisurely whereas once the scarlet fever had been detected by our family doctor, Dr. Stewart, the essence of twinkling Scottish kindness and dependability, I was whisked away late one winter afternoon in an ambulance under a bright red blanket, and the ambulance bell was ringing! Apart from the chagrin at having to have all my books and toys burnt to prevent further infection, the thing I remember most about the hospital, which was a spread-out collection of single storey, possibly temporary buildings, was the way I was forced to share the sweets and food that my parents brought for me with ‘other less fortunate children,’ the kind of consideration one learns to appreciate only as an adult. The day I was released was also memorable for the scalding hot bath I had to take while the sky outside was still deep blue, with a thermometer in the shape of a wooden boat floating in the bath, and then wandering between the various buildings and catching glimpses of other children, one lying swaddled in bandages around his or her head, all obviously much more sick than I was.

Isolation Hospital              

A highlight of my war years:

at night in the ambulance,

swept up and borne along

in urgent majesty,

a one boy procession,

while people on blacked out streets

divide like the Red Sea.

Then weeks alone in limbo, hospital food,

my toys and books cremated,

audiences

with my worried parents.

The fever’s blur subsided.

At last a scalding bath,

the thermometer floating in a wooden boat. 

Afterwards, rubbed down, harshly released

into indigo early dawn,  

I lingered outside among lagged steam pipes,

gazing at other children, precious and swaddled

through frosty windows,

whom now I must leave behind.

Apart from this we all seem to have been in good health most of our time until my mother had to go to the Lancaster Infirmary in 1943 for something, I was told, to do with her coccyx or tailbone. But soon, it turned out, more than that had been removed.

The main result of my having spent almost three years of my childhood in Lancaster was that I retained a lasting interest in, and affection for, the North of England, its landscapes, its people, its turns of phrase, and its attitudes. Had I stayed in London, I would probably have grown to share, what at that time was the prevailing indifference towards, and ignorance of, anything north of Watford.

*

Born in London, England, in 1934, Christopher Levenson came to Canada in 1968 and taught at Carleton University till 1999. He has also lived and worked in the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, and India. The most recent of his many books of poetry is Moorings. He co-founded Arc magazine in 1978 and was its editor for a decade; he was Series Editor of the Harbinger imprint of Carleton University Press, which published exclusively first books of poetry. [Editor’s note: Christopher has reviewed books by Kelly Shepherd, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Catherine Owen, Jess Housty, Susan Musgrave, and Katherine Lawrence for The British Columbia Review.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster