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Bombing, Evacuation and Street Games.

Childhood War Memories of Alan Marshfield (b.1933), in four parts

PART 3 (continued from Parts 1 & 2)

During the blitz, when we were living in Northam Street, Portsmouth, I attended Arundel Street School (see Part 2). My class teacher was Miss Webbley. I later wrote this tribute.

MISS WEBBLEY

She read us The Water Babies, made me sit
by John who drew maps of the world like quilts
with China next to London and Ceylon.
I was no better. Told to draw a wall,
I didn’t need to watch her at the board
but did a grid of squares and got ticked off.

Mondays was handkerchiefs. My jersey sleeve
stiff with dried snot. Asked Mum. Received a rag
from her discarded bloomers. Which wasn’t nice,
the silk was slimy even before I blew.
Got my first taste for acting. Captain Kyd.
Mad Hatter. Peter Pan. Arabian Nights.

Knights of the Table better than the Beano!
Doing sums and copperplate were fun:
we always got good marks for copying.
She dragged partitions like great hangar doors
and three classrooms were made into a hall.
All things bright and beautiful! They were.

In summer, sweaty feet in stiff, grey socks.
Girls with dirty hair and skipping ropes.
Saw Miss Webbley on the tram once. She looked
strangely old in mackintosh and hat.
She was younger when we brightly paid attention
or bowed ashamed on being ruler-smacked.

Crasswell Street, by the way, and the streets off it (Town Street, Brighton Street) seems to have been an area in which my mother’s maternal grandparents, William and Mary Goble, lived. Little Gran (Nellie/Ellen) was married from 48 Town Street. People lived in the same place for long periods of time, families stayed close to one another. Perhaps they tended to move into property owned by the same landlord as before.

During the middle part of the war in Portsmouth, in Northam Street, I recall my mother in various ways I haven’t mentioned yet. She went out one day to get her hair permed and I thought the result was dreadful, though she no doubt felt prettier herself. She came running from that house one day, and met us running back to it along Arundel Street, the main thoroughfare in those parts, when the air-raid sirens had gone off in the late afternoon. Billie and I were coming home from school. She was frantic—grabbed our arms and cried with frightened relief to a passer-by, ‘They had the sense to come this way!’ We could, after all, have come via Church Path. We often did.

It was tough for her bringing up two boys in the war. A timid woman doing her best. She didn’t have to discipline us much but I do recall that she once had to try and hit me with a stair rod, as I scrambled away from her under the table, because I’d been nasty to brother Bill. But in general we loved to be round her. I used to stand by her in the kitchen, watching her cook stews and make cakes. That elementary knowledge of cooking was something I later took for granted. Although my mother told us stories about having been so hungry when she was young that she had dabbed crumbs up off the table because that’s all there was, we children of the back-street thirties and wartime forties, with its rationing, did not go hungry.

I suppose we were not terribly interested in food. Among my jumble of memories on the subject I recall that at different times our mother served us the usual fare: Sunday roasts, chops, Monday fry-ups or stew, steak and kidney pies and puddings, spotted dick, custard, apple or rhubarb tart, rice puddings, porridge oats, occasionally ‘a bit of smoked haddock’, a tin of salmon and lettuce and vinegar, and so on. Fish and chips only seldom. The only fish and chip shop I recall was the one in Tangier Road, from which as boys we bought bags of chips to eat in the road. Tea-time after the war in Station Road were often the occasion of special treats like jam doughnuts. The only diary I ever kept—a pocket diary when I was about fourteen—recorded mainly what we’d had for tea.

I know this because Bill and I met a couple of girls in New Road, sisters whose surname was Tucker. The bolder one told us not to make the usual joke, but I didn’t see what she meant. We were walking with them and I showed them my diary. ‘Why, all you’ve got down is what you had for tea!’ That made me shamefaced. How unsophisticated of me. We had only one date with them, when we all went for a cycle ride to Bosham.

Going back in time again: in the Northam Street house, when I was about eight, I experimented with a compass. I walked along the passage and the needle just happened to be pointing the way I was going. I turned right and went up the stairs and felt desperately disappointed when it didn’t alter its direction too. I’d been told that a compass showed you which way to go. There was a garden with a high wall with a gate in it which gave onto the alley beside the house. This alley led to Netley Street, a long cul de sac which was another way of reaching Arundel Street. Exploring those streets was fun and learning their names became second nature. I think everyone in those days, when walking was so common, got to know the street names around them and felt warmly comforted by the familiar local warren.

I was nine or ten and already I thought it preposterous that anyone like the boy I had to sit next to at school would draw maps of the world out of fantasy and not fact, uniting every country in a patchwork quilt with England next to China.

Arundel Street School was a high, sombre, Victorian building with enormously high walls round its playground, tall enough to intern killers. There we were inoculated by nurses, drilled through our tables, taught copperplate writing, the importance of wiping our noses, and generally made to feel. Air raids seldom occurred before nightfall. On the way home I’d slip into a dusty and lovable little second-hand bookshop at which I’d spend a penny on old comics. Aunt Elsie had a cupboard full of boys’ story albums which had belonged to her son Eddie, who had died at the age of 14 some years before (in 1939). She promised Bill and me that we’d have some of these one day but we never did.

Instead, I foraged for books in the secondhand shop and in the far more splendid proper bookshop in The Arcade, a glass-covered lane of shops on the corner where Edinburgh Road met the main Commercial Road. In the Arcade bookshop I bought myself, before I was twelve and before the war was over, The Selected Poems of Rudyard Kipling, edited by T.S.Eliot, and started a deep love affair with them, learning many of them—Gunga Din, If, Et Dona Ferentes. Here’s something I wrote later about the Arcade.

THE ARCADE

Under the lamp, faux Art Nouveau and late,
a map of the harbour where, in earlier days,
you enjoyed an easier life. Far from it now,
you raise from the parallels: streets and arcades,
one in especial, with factory gates.
And you
paint with bifocals bicycles and trams,
Dürer-like hatchings-in of a sky and roofs
with microcosmic finesse.
And you descend
under the jaundiced watts and the false pearl
of night-owl light into a scene half there,
once. Half invented.
Men in dour
overcoats, dogged, cycle-clipped, the sky
still, an edged marquetry, but hatched in paper.

You enter an inner light, the ivory polish
of the one place that mattered, the Arcade.

And then its bookshop, where from volumes you,
idly, intense, picked on half-sentences.

°Õ³ó±ð²Ô…

from Queen Street, from Arundel Street,
from Commercial Road, Unicorn Road, the air
was bleached with air-raid sirens and you

sought the nearest shelter with a Beano.

The war didn’t keep us from our entertainments. We went to the pictures with our parents and on Saturdays to the junior film mornings, fuggy and very noisy affairs, on our own. Cinemas were fuggy places: adult smoking was encouraged by cigarette trays screwed to the seat-backs. To name all the cinemas would mean reciting a meaningless litany, yet to me each picture house was a deeply emotional and aesthetic experience. Portsmouth had many districts and each had its picture palaces. In North End there were the Odeon and the Regent (later the Gaumont). In the Commercial Road were the Savoy, the Classic, one of the three or four Essoldos, the Royal, the Palace and the Vic. In Fratton Road were the Rex and the Troxy. There were other Odeons in Southsea and Cosham. We queued for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, for Johnny Weissmuller, and for serials like Buck Rogers in space and Roy Rogers in B-movie Westerns.

In about 1943 we moved to Northover Road, Copnor, where we lived as lodgers in the house of Aunt Ena (née Waterman) and her husband Harold Bastable, the butcher. They had a son, David, five years younger than me, and a dog called Lucky. The war was still raging, and on at least one occasion we were all bunched in the Anderson shelter in their garden. The night was memorable for two reasons. First was the smell. Added to the usual dank earth smell came a sudden sulphurous fart. Unfairly I accused brother Bill but it might have been the dog. The other event was an explosion. With hindsight I could see that the bombing concentrated on Landport and the Dockyard, but I didn’t know that. Stray bombs fell everywhere. Against the door-space of the half-sunken corrugated iron shelter was a plank of wood. It was the most vulnerable part of our defence but it let in some air and cold moonlight. Suddenly there was a brighter light and the crunch of a bomb. It wasn’t the biggest scare we’d had but it was one of them and the flash of it stayed as a permanent after-image.

Northover Road led off Westover Road and in the crook of the turning was another junior school. This was a long row of single-storey classrooms with a playground opposite and an admin suite behind it. My teacher here was Mr Hill, a stolid person who sat all the time. I was probably there for over a year before the end of the war and my 12th birthday. I have only two memories of the place. One was responding in an assembly to a request from the headmaster—too old for the war—for one of us to name a poem, any poem. I gave him Gunga Din, which he hadn’t heard of. One of the teachers from the side called out to enlighten him, ‘From the Barrack-Room Ballads, Headmaster!’ There was a grunt which meant that it sounded unseemly.

Neither this headmaster nor any of his teachers thought of putting their pupils in for the Eleven-Plus. A national education system enabling the most able 20% to go to grammar schools by passing an exam called ‘Eleven-Plus’ had just been started. Neither my parents nor my teachers knew much about the business. I must have heard about it from somewhere because I asked if I could take the exam. The headmaster was dubious but he let me have a go. I’d had no training so I didn’t pass, but was offered a place at the Technical School, a new sort of school designed to sit between the Grammar Schools and the Secondary Moderns.

In fact I did so badly that I entered the Tech at Hilsea in the C stream, where they didn’t even teach French. I moved up after one term to a B stream, where I caught up in French in one corner on my own, and to an A stream after a second term. When Bill entered a year later (he could have gone to the Grammar School but chose to follow me) he went straight into the A stream.

Whilst at Northover Road, aged about ten and eleven, I played mostly with brother Bill and cousin David. I called us a gang but I don’t remember anyone else in it. There was a boy called Grout but I don’t think he was a neighbour or fellow pupil. We played a lot on the Dump, the rubbish mountain between the allotments behind Stanley Avenue and the Great Salterns Lake. Its sides were steep and the underground pollution from it stained the lake a dark brown. That didn’t stop us from having a raft concealed in a creek under overhanging bushes. We never ventured out onto the main body of water. We’d seen what can happen to kids on rafts.

There was a different lake in the Claypits where the brickworks were—along Burfields Road between Dundas Lane and the modern Claybank Road. On this soapy water many children ventured upon narrow rafts. I believe a boy died by being pinned under a plank and drowning. We went on the rafts there anyway. They’d been strung together by boys before us. One day we toppled into the water. We tried to get our clothes dry by wringing them out under the bushes by the pit-side. It was no use. We had to go home wet and get ticked off.

So on the Great Salterns Lake we watched coots (how did they prosper on that foul water?) and picked bulrushes, though they were not so good as the ones by the millpond in Bishop’s Waltham.

On the Dump we found old bibles, which we pretended were enemy code books, and all sorts of old iron, like bedsprings and door handles, which we yanked away from the garbage to wield as weapons. We never actually fought. The place reeked, but with a dustbin odour which was bearable. Along the middle ran a track which the dust lorries used.

Along the shores of Eastern Road, looking out from the sea wall onto Langstone Harbour and the Farlington Marshes, we played other games. There were pill boxes in which we crouched. From the gun-slits we shot at Germans. There was also a Great House which was mysterious enough to feature in ghost stories we told each other. It was okay to roam in the overgrown grounds since there was no one from the boarded-up mansion to disturb us. On the marshes we started bird watching. I believe we saw lapwings. There were lots of gulls. Here is my poem about those times.

MAPS

The beach-scrub and the past contain two boys
making a map and writing up a log.
It does not matter that you can’t return,
for no one can. Under the lamp at night
I study a large-scale offprint of the time.

The little roads and lanes—now that flyover,
great trefoil roundabout and underpass
have made those desolate marshes and our fields
even more lonely than they ever were—
are heritage to no one’s children now.

I know that all maps lie. Not marked, the raft
we hid beneath the alders by the dump
where we stole secret Bibles and pram springs….
They got the pillbox in.... Today the war
is against silence and cheap, private things.

Still more inaccurate would be the map
that I might try to draw to show the path
back to the bird-watch places which you found
and could not rediscover even then,
although we were so proud at navigating.

What chain, theodolite, have you to hand,
what trig points to triangulate the darkness,
to mark, between infinity and nothing,
between the Word and cruel promises
the way to peacetime in your sunken den?

I travel back in memory and forward
to when we’ll be together. We’ll devise
all sorts of routes across the marsh and mudflats,
we will make valleys where no valleys were—
and we’ll have such adventures, won’t we, kid?

[Finished in Part 4.]

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