When we packed up to return to Exeter we knew that we were losing a battle to another threat, the sea, which had been eroding the dunes year by year and was by then almost at the backdoor of The Cabin. During the winter storms in 1940, the sea finally broke through the Warren to join with the estuary bay. All the summer homes were eventually swept away and the Warren became a sandbank visible only at low tide. But years later, the unpredictable sea began to return the sand, and the Warren dunes rose again, although smaller than before. There are no buildings now and signs on the beach say, pleasingly, “Give Way to Birds” because it is part of a much larger sanctuary.
I was still at school, of course, when the war began and became probably the greatest transforming experience of my life — as indeed it must have been for everyone who was near the front lines. It changed everything, and often for the better, including social and moral values, and economic and political expectations. It is a disturbing paradox that the world was a much better place in 1945 than it had been in 1939, and reflecting on it, I realize that the social values of Britain in the war years were almost the opposite of those today. In short, they were those of the left, liberty, equality, fraternity. The national spirit was fraternal, not individualistic. We were united against a common enemy, and the struggle for liberty took precedence over everything else.
Even the famous British class system softened, and people who would hardly have talked to each other in peacetime found common cause and a measure of fellowship. The goal was production, not consumption, and in fact it was unpatriotic, often illegal, to consume more than one’s equal share. Food, clothing, and petrol were severely rationed: four ounces of butter per week, an ounce or two of cheese, four ounces of bacon or ham, two ounces of the essential tea, a couple of shillings worth of meat which families pooled in order to buy a pitiful Sunday roast. One had to present a ration book to buy almost anything edible: dried and canned vegetables, rice, cereal, canned fish, cookies, candies, everything except bread, and for that you lined up at the bakery to buy the standard, greyish National Loaf. And then of course one had to queue, often for hours, for a ration book when they were issued from time to time.
The popular fish and chips were not rationed, but the shops could open only when they had cooking oil, so one went out looking for a shop with the welcome notice in the window, “Frying Tonight.” The unthinkable happened when pubs occasionally ran out of beer, and Scotch whisky, like cigarettes, was mostly “under the bar,” which meant that it was reserved for regular customers and no others need apply. Feeding pets was a nightmare:There were special shops selling horsemeat dyed green to prevent it from going onto the black market for human consumption, and one of my jobs as a schoolboy was to line up at a horsemeat shop and, if supplies held out until I got to the head of the queue, tuck a bloody parcel into my schoolbag for the ride home to a grateful dog. If we had known it at the time, no doubt we would have used the American saying popular during the Depression when clothes were an unnecessary expense, “Make it do, wear it out, use it up, do without.” We recycled waste to an extent that makes today’s programs look half-hearted. There were special bins for everything, including bones. Exhorted to give aluminum to make more Spitfires, we lined the streets outside our homes with cooking pots, learning only much later that they proved unsatisfactory for the job. Miles of old books lined the roads during paper drives, and the iron railings on our front garden were cut down and taken away, along with everyone else’s.
When Winston Churchill formed his coalition government in 1940, political debate and media criticism almost disappeared. Those few critics who remained, mostly on the left, were frowned upon, even reviled. Newspapers were reduced to four or six pages and found ways to print even in the “gutters” between two pages. The BBC radio news at 9 p.m. became the national source of reliable — or so we thought — information. We know now that after the collapse of France and the rout of the British army, Churchill seriously doubted Britain’s ability to survive. But at the time his defiant speeches rallied the country, and I doubt that the thought of defeat bothered many Britons. Call it stupidity or arrogance, but it probably saved us. The spirit was that of the solitary British solder, in David Low’s great cartoon, holding his rifle high and saying, “Alright, alone!”
It would be wrong to say war made people happy. Life was hard, particularly for women left to raise children on their own, and it was often tedious for everybody, but war removed a lot of reasons for envy and complaint. In fact, complaining became almost illegitimate and brought a swift and sarcastic retort, “Don’t yer know there’s a war on?” And in a way life was fulfilling; everyone had a job to do, and most did it, which was a relief for millions after the mass unemployment of the Great Depression. This helps perhaps to explain another paradox: While we claim to hate war, history suggests that it has been a popular occupation in most centuries. When wars were declared there was more celebrating than sobbing, with patriotic crowds marching through the streets in many countries. Now, films, TV programs, and books about past wars appear every year and often are hugely popular. In my view, the absence of a popular war helped to explain the militancy of young people when they opposed the unpopular war in Vietnam and struggled for civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s. I was teaching in a university at the time and was intrigued by the fact that students dressed in military-style clothing and spoke of their protests in military jargon: a march here, an offensive there, the campaign for this or that. They were seeking a substitute for war. I understood how they felt because for me the Second World War came as an adventure, a chance to escape from the routine of normal living.
My brother was eighteen when the war began and he soon volunteered for the Royal Navy. He was trained as a coder — encoding and decoding radio messages — and volunteered to be part of a small crew taking a ship to New Zealand, a long and uncomfortable voyage. He returned to Britain in 1943 and was commissioned and trained as a meteorologist, a handy skill for a sailing enthusiast who later took up ocean racing. When invasion threatened in 1940, my father joined the Home Guard, and I was thrilled when he brought home a rifle. It was still greasy from storage, and was called a Ross rifle. I discovered much later that Ross rifles had been manufactured in Canada to equip troops serving in the Boer War, and also the Royal North West Mounted Police. Despite various improvements, however, the rifles were never satisfactory and were eventually abandoned during the First World War when the Canadian army adopted the British Lee-Enfield. But so desperate was the need for rifles in 1940, after the British army left much of its equipment on the beaches of Dunkirk, that the old Ross rifles were dug out of storage and issued to the Home Guard.
Stranger things happened in those days. Some of the brighter sparks in the Exeter Home Guard mounted a machine gun on a tiny Austin 7 car as our answer to the German Panzers. Minefields were laid across the Warren golf links to hold up German invasion forces, but there were paths through the mines so that golfers could continue to play. Tank traps were installed on the beaches at Exmouth, which made it difficult to land dinghies, but they were used mainly as racks for bathers’ clothes and towels. Coastal defence guns were dug into the red sandstone cliffs to command the approaches to the Warren beaches, but as the nearest point in France was Cherbourg, about a hundred miles across the Channel, I can’t imagine, in retrospect, why anyone thought it remotely possible that the Germans would attempt such a dangerous and difficult crossing.
The war was going badly at the end of 1941 when we heard on the radio that Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. “We’ve won the war,” said my father, with unusual prescience — and with undue optimism because it was not until several days later that Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. That bears repeating when so many people, including most Americans, are under the impression that they entered the war in Europe to support Britain in the defence of liberty and democracy. They entered in fact because Hitler and Mussolini declared war on them in support of Japan. Of course, the United States had been aiding Britain and edging toward war with Germany, but one can only speculate about what might have happened had Germany and Italy not forced the issue. Obviously, there would have been a powerful argument in the United States for concentrating its strength against Japan and leaving Europe to its own war. But my father proved to be right, and within a year or so American troops