For John and me the riding was easy. We were both experienced cyclists, light and wiry. Each morning our bicycles were like young horses, circling the yard, eager to be away on the road. We developed a habit of whizzing on ahead, leaving the others to trundle after us at their own speed. Then we would stop at a wayside estaminet, order vin rouge-grenadine a ‘l’eau de selz, and wait for the elders to catch up and pay the bill, which would only be about five francs. They couldn’t very well refuse such a small sum and the slight tint of rosy inebriation that was my happy condition on those mornings was soon burned away in leg-work.
Lunch was bought – a long loaf, some pâté, tomatoes, cheese, wine and water – in a village, and eaten, with the bottles chilling in the shallows and the toes fingering cool sand, on the green bank of some shady stream.
Towards evening we would come to the designated town. There John and I would drop back, leaving Ray, riding slow and high on his high, slow bicycle, to make his entrance and sniff the atmosphere, but circumspectly, as at dusk a bull elephant approaches a waterhole, leaving the herd to await his signal to follow.
Ray would come to a hotel and heave to outside it. The herd would follow and an important discussion about price and suitability would ensue. At St-Valerien, madame of the hotel came out to greet us. She spoke most highly of her establishment and intimated that if we were to take dinner as well as bed and breakfast all would be felicitous and of good price. The herd acquiesced and madame led us in, shouting orders as she did so to bring the dormant hotel to life. Small children with baskets, on foot and on bicycles, were despatched to the shops. A boiler was lit, bags were unpacked, baths were taken, and after a short cool stroll through the village we came back to find, not just dinner but a proper menu with choices. Later, the sheets were coarse but clean and I slept, as always in those times, still as a stone angel.
Waking up in a French village was always the same and always surprising. The sun would be up first, trying to find a way in through the shutters. It would reflect blurred green and gold stripes on to the ceiling, which would move and change with the passing shadows. Then, as if by a signal, somebody outside would drop a bucket, clang, on to the stones. A door would creak, a chain rattle, and then a shrill voice would let fly with a short complicated yell which would echo among the resonant walls. What was it, a greeting or an imprecation? Whatever it was it would be answered by more buckets being thrown and other voices from other directions giving answering yells until it seemed the whole town was out there, greeting the day.
That morning, after a French breakfast of croissants and hot chocolate we said goodbye to madame, and Ray paid the bill which, when converted, worked out at one and ninepence (9p) a head.
Ray, for all his atheism, was fascinated by churches. During the tour we must have seen and examined quite a number of them, but the one which has left the strongest impression with me was the Abbey at Ve´zelay. There the tops of the pillars and all the odd corners of the stonework are infested with carvings of ribald persons and unlikely creatures doing unexpected things. I noticed them and searched them out, wondering what they were up to, wondering indeed what religion was up to that it gave house-room to such manifestly disreputable denizens.
It soon became clear that we had not come to France for the architecture. Gradually, as we travelled westwards, I began to recognize the names of some of the towns and villages. I wondered why this was, and then I realized where I had seen them before – on the labels of wine bottles. Sleepy little towns like Nuits-St-Georges, Puligny-Montrachet, Volnay and Mersault were approached by Ray with the reverence of a pilgrim – which indeed he was, for in these places the nectar of the gods might still be found and taken. Here the vin maison was premier cru and the ‘good bottle’ of the evening was the stuff of dreams.
Although they had made the pilgrimage in a spirit of dread, fearing that the impending war might sweep it all away, Ray and Daisy were not so foolish as to allow the wine or food to be tainted with foreboding. It was a very happy time and I suspect that, if anything, the thought that he and Daisy and the rest of us might be mocking Providence simply added to Ray’s delight.
V. When War Comes.
The family returned to Finchley and the real world, a bit saddlesore but content, to find that the international situation had taken a turn for the worse. At school we no longer said: ‘If war comes …’
We said: ‘When war comes …’
Then, at the end of September, Neville Chamberlain flew back from Munich waving the absurd document that, he said, ensured peace in our time. Herr Hitler had confirmed that the Sudetenland had been his last territorial ambition in Europe. The threat of war was said to be over.
I remember the enormous feeling of euphoria that swept through us. Hearts were lighter for many days, but the underlying sense that war was still somewhere in the offing was not fully dispelled and I don’t think anybody, even among the pupils of Woodhouse School, was really surprised when, in March 1939, Hitler’s army marched into Prague and took the whole of Czechoslovakia.
Politics, the international situation, the prospect of war, had never seemed fully real to me, mainly because I hadn’t bothered to pay any attention to them, but gradually things began to happen which brought them home.
I watched Anderson shelters being delivered. These were the corrugated iron bolt-holes that householders would assemble and bury in their back gardens as a refuge from bombing. There had been an ‘air raid drill’ at school and I had been given a gas mask in a cardboard box, which I had tried on and didn’t like. There had also been talk of evacuation; of taking children away and sending them to stay with strangers in safe places. All these things concentrated my attention. I still had the idea, somewhere in my head, that war was supposed to be exciting, even heroic, but these preparations seemed peculiarly unexciting, inconvenient and boring. They were also frightening, in a numb sort of way, because they didn’t seem to be preparations for anything positive, like riding into battle, but more like preparations for some overall but unspecified disaster that would soon befall us all.
Ray seemed to be fairly calm about it all but Daisy was very frightened indeed. She told me that ‘they’ now had bombs that could wipe out half a town at one blast, and guns that could fire round corners and seek out their targets, and gas that was invisible but deadly. Her picture of the power of modern armaments was, fortunately for the world, premature; such things were yet to come. She didn’t speak of it again but fears for our safety must have been in her mind because she and Ray had made plans for our evacuation.
They had met W. B. Curry, the headmaster of Dartington Hall School in Devon, and he had generously offered to take John and me as day-pupils at reduced fees if the war came. Their old friend Kay Starr was the secretary of Leonard Elmhirst, one of the owners of Dartington Hall. She offered to provide accommodation and look after us. So that was settled; the moment war came John and I were to go straight to Devon.
Meanwhile we made ready for war. We stuck strips of brown paper across the windows. We upholstered the thick-walled cupboards between the kitchen and the hall with mattresses and we listened to the wireless, which told us that crowds of children were waiting at railway stations to be evacuated, carrying their gas masks in cardboard boxes.
On September the first Hitler invaded Poland and Ray said it was time for us to go. Philip and Valerie Beales (Lance and Taffy’s son and daughter-in-law) offered to give us a lift in their car. They would be going to somewhere near Cirencester, which was more than halfway to Devon. The