My father came back to Glasgow on leave once during his training. When my mother and I met him at the railway station, I barely recognized him getting off the train, carrying his duffle bag and rifle on his shoulders. He had lost so much weight during his strenuous training that he was a shadow of the father I had known. During his leave, and while my parents were away from the small flat, I enjoyed playing with his service rifle and revolver. At one point I overheard my father telling my mother that because he spoke Danish, he had been ordered to be part of a spy operation to be dropped into occupied Denmark by parachute. Fortunately for my father, the operation was cancelled, for his chances of surviving this adventure were low.
In Glasgow I was put into a first-rate educational institution, Allan Glen’s School, where unfortunately I did poorly academically, except for the chemistry class, where for some inexplicable reason I always got the top mark. My mathematical abilities did not impress my mathematics teacher, and my physics teacher considered me an abysmal failure. However, I discovered that I had inherited my father’s talent for drawing, and won an all-Glasgow drawing competition, which greatly pleased my art teacher.
After his training, my father was promoted to corporal and was stationed in Glasgow. Since the flat my mother had rented was too small for all three of us, my father rented rooms in a house in the western part of Glasgow. Unfortunately, not long after moving in, my mother had yet another altercation with the unpleasant landlady with whom she shared the kitchen. My mother objected to the mouse tracks in the fat in the frying pans, which the landlady had not washed. And so, one night, my father came in and pulled me out of bed and said that we were leaving. We took off in the dark in a military jeep with our few belongings, and my father requisitioned living quarters for us in yet another house, using another war permit.
The council house we were billeted in was owned by a Mrs. Barge, who had a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. Mr. Barge was in the medical corps, stationed in Libya as part of the Eighth Army. For the next year and a half, I shared a room with Mrs. Barge’s daughter, my parents had the main bedroom, while Mrs. Barge and her son slept in a third room.
The Germans bombed the port of Glasgow in 1941 and 1942, trying to destroy its shipbuilding industry, which was located about five miles from Mrs. Barge’s house. Over a period of three nights, we suffered a serious blitz, as the bombing raids over Glasgow increased in intensity. The six of us had to sleep in an Anderson air raid shelter in the Barges’ back garden. It was partially underground, and was made of corrugated iron. Most houses had these air raid shelters in their gardens during the war.
On the second night of the blitz, the Germans dropped incendiary bombs on our neighbourhood. They destroyed the church at the end of the street, and many houses near us caught fire, but we were spared. The next day, I walked around in the garden picking up pieces of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells. They had razor-sharp edges. One had to be careful going from the house to the shelter when the bombing started, because fragments of shells were dropping from the sky. One night when in a panic we were running from the house to the air raid shelter, my parents donned steel helmets and ran on ahead, leaving me to reach the shelter bare-headed, since all the helmets were taken. This scene continues to haunt me today, a reminder of the horrors of war suffered by children.
During the three days the blitz lasted, about 1500 civilians were killed in the port of Glasgow, the highly populated area of Clyde-bank and in our neighbourhood. Roughly 60,000 civilians were killed during the bombings of England and Scotland. This compared to the 400,000 casualties suffered by the British soldiers and air force and navy personnel. In addition, of course, were the many thousands of severely wounded in the civilian population and the military, and the more than one million houses destroyed or damaged in the air raids on London alone.
Soon it was time to move again. In late 1943, my father, now a captain in the intelligence corps, was posted to the east coast English port of Grimsby and Hull, where he was put in charge of security, checking the fishing boats that came in from Denmark, again potentially containing Nazi spies. This time my father succeeded in getting me accepted by Hymer’s College, even though my scholarly aptitude did not impress the headmaster. At the age of eleven, I was a day student at this prestigious English public school, while living in a boarding house in Hull with my parents and twelve other people.
The war ended in 1945, and my father, now a major, was sent to northern Germany the next year to oversee the Flensburg occupation troops. Instead of following him once again, my mother and I returned to Copenhagen by boat in January 1947, and I entered a Danish high school. Since by this time, after all our years in England, I was neither speaking nor writing Danish, the first year of school in Copenhagen turned out to be another gap in my education. It was a strange experience, sitting in classes not understanding a word that was being said around me, particularly by my teachers. I spent a lot of time looking out the window of the schoolroom, daydreaming.
In Denmark, children finish high school in their mid-teens and are then considered for a preparatory program for university in the gymnasium. Entrance to the gymnasium stream in Denmark depended upon tests, academic performance during high school and, most important, upon the recommendation of a gymnasium teacher. When I was fifteen, in my last year of high school, and by this time fluent in Danish, I was interviewed by a young mathematics teacher from the Copenhagen gymnasium. My whole future seemed to be riding on this interview. If the teacher was satisfied with my answers to his questions, he would recommend that I enter the gymnasium in the fall. Three or four years later, I could then apply to university. If I failed this personal interview, the only options available to me after high school would be entering a trade school or seeking work, most likely menial and ill paid.
The teacher ushered me into a small schoolroom with grey-painted walls and wooden desks. He cleared his throat, wrote on the blackboard and asked his first mathematical question. I sifted through the confused jumble of mathematics knowledge in my mind—detritus from my thirteen schools and two languages. When I did not immediately answer the teacher, he sighed and tossed another question at me.
Standing helplessly at the blackboard with the teacher’s increasingly unfriendly blue-eyed gaze boring into me, I sensed the familiar feeling of a panic attack beginning. My heart raced, I felt faint and my brain ceased to function. The teacher, his voice rising, asked two more questions. I was unable to answer even the simplest one. I had become mute.
The teacher strode up to the blackboard, snatched the chalk from my hand and said, “Moffat, I can guarantee that you will never become a mathematician.” I stumbled from the room. The interview had taken half an hour. The teacher’s report was so negative that there was no chance at all for me to enter the gymnasium. That was effectively the end of my schooling.
Millions of children grew up during the Second World War in Europe. I don’t know how many of them had as disruptive a childhood as I had, moving from town to town and school to school sometimes several times each year. I don’t know how many others were subjected to such frightening and frequent bombing attacks and other horrors of war that they sustained permanent psychological damage. Millions of children today, in various parts of the world, still experience daily conditions of war, terrorism, natural disasters and famine. Once one gets beyond a sense of gratitude at having survived at all, it is natural to wonder how a wartime childhood helped shape the adult person one has become.
My inferior, fragmented schooling, together with the panic attacks induced by many nights of fearing imminent death by German bombs, seemed to prevent me from pursuing a life in science— or any other academic field I might have