Of course the future didn’t work out as they had hoped, and I dare say that away from the Meynells’ they could already see that it wasn’t going to. Stalin was turning the Soviet dream into a bloody nightmare, Hitler was rising to rekindle a different, perhaps even more bloody, ambition. But all the same, I think that to have lived at that time, with those dreams, must have been very glorious and exciting.
* R. W. Postgate, No Epitaph (Hamish Hamilton, 1932), p. 98.
A HOUSE, THREE SCHOOLS AND A WAR
I. Finchley.
In 1935 we moved from Hendon to Finchley, a distance of about four miles. Our new house, which had conker trees in the front garden, was immense. Well, it was only immense to my eyes which compared it with our little box-house in Hendon. Nor was it new. It was Victorian, made of dirty greenish-brown bricks.
Ray unlocked the wide front door and led us into the house. The hall was dark and dusty and smelt damp. He led the way up the wide, handsome, creaking staircase. The main landing was as big as a whole room in our Hendon house. He opened a door and showed me into a very large empty room with walls of mottled brown and mauve. There was nothing on the floor except some bits of whitish clinker that had once spilled from the broken fireplace.
‘This will be your room,’ he said.
Then John and I were let loose to roam through the great house from the two big attic rooms to the coal-smelling cellars. I found the idea of living in a house that I could actually run about in very exciting. The same was true of the back garden. In Hendon the back garden was a small patch closely overlooked by other people’s windows. This one was large and secluded. Quite a lot of it was metalled over with cracked asphalt because it had been the playground of the school next door, but there was a large grassy hump right across the back of it and it was lined all round with old pear trees and overhung by a very big walnut tree.
Having more space, John began to collect pets: white mice, white rats, rabbits, small snakes and lizards, even a very large goldfish that had cost five shillings and lived in a sink in the garden until some predator got it. After it had disappeared, Queagh, our cat, helped us to look for that goldfish. He made a great show of turning over the dead leaves and searching the shrubbery all around the sink. That didn’t fool us. He had eaten it.
Queagh was by far the most clear-cut character in the family. He was surly, with crumpled ears and an evil sense of humour. His pleasure was to sit in front of the vivarium where the snakes and lizards lived and gently stroke the glass front with his paw. This would cause the glass to inch itself along its groove until the reptiles could squeeze out. He didn’t try to catch them; he was content just to sit and watch them slither and scuttle across the garden, knowing that the neighbours would soon be ringing up in a state of panic to demand the removal of our revolting creatures from their nice rockery.
Taken all in all the new house was a great improvement, partly because it was so spacious but also because it was convivial. Ray and Daisy had given dinner parties at Hendon but the pokiness of the house had been a constraint. The Finchley house was broad and welcoming. I can see the fire in the long room, bright with a mountain of Coalite, and I can hear the dining room ringing with laughter, not embarrassed, strained or forced laughter but the happy, genuine laughter of people fully at ease with each other in an atmosphere where all undertones of suspicion or anxiety had been dispelled and replaced by whole-hearted trustful enjoyment.
As a neighbourhood, Finchley suited us much better than Hendon because we had family friends and relations nearby. In fact the suggestion that we should move had originally come from H. L. (Lance) Beales and his wife Taffy, who lived in an even larger house about a hundred yards away. Their children, Mary and Michael, also kept a lot of pets, mainly rabbits and guinea-pigs. John used to take his rabbits to visit Mary’s and they would give them the freedom of the grass tennis court for their meeting, or Jamboree, as they called it. John and Mary would run about the court trying, for some reason, to prevent the rabbits copulating – an absurd ambition!
Down Hendon Avenue and across the brook lived Douglas and Margaret Cole with their children, Jane, Ann and Humphrey. They had moved from West Hampstead to Freelands, a wide rambling house with a couple of acres of garden around it. A new hard tennis court had been built beside the house and in summer we used to go there almost every Sunday afternoon to left-wing tennis parties where there was good intellectual conversation, indifferent tennis and an unending supply of China tea.
Tennis was the game in the thirties. Unfortunately our asphalt back garden wasn’t big enough for a court, so Ray and Daisy marked it out with silver paint and bought a badminton set. Ray also bought a small pickaxe and a wheelbarrow so that we could have the pleasure – and it was a pleasure – of prising up parts of the crisp asphalt skin to expose the earth beneath. As time passed the garden became very fertile, in a wild sort of way, with a forest of giant, very delicious blackberries at the far end. The pride of the garden was a climbing rose that Daisy had bought in Woolworth’s for sixpence. Its name was ‘Albertine’, it grew to enormous size and I worked out that over the years it must have given us a million flowers.
I can see that garden in the summertime, with the crumbly yellowish bricks of the house, the badminton patch deeply embow ered in the surrounding trees and the squirrels dropping walnut shells on the players. It is a picture of mellow ease and contentment.
By 1936 I had graduated to long trousers, at least for ceremonial occasions, and John and I had both become very sartorial and particular about what we wore; details which, looking back, seem to be no more than nuances of drabness. Clothes were very dull in those days, but we wore sock-suspenders and put Brylcreem on our hair.
Once or twice a year Daisy would take us to visit the Gents’ Outfitters in the Charing Cross Road. The high point of the outings would be Chinese lunch with chopsticks at the Shanghai Restaurant in Greek Street, where the waitress was called Doris and had been no further east than Clacton. Between the Outfitters in Charing Cross Road there were seedy little shops which advertised DAMAROIDS and sold strangely shaped trusses. These were puzzling, but the amusement arcades, where the illuminated bagatelle games thumped and pinged and whistled, were fascinating. Daisy found them boring, so she tended to stay outside and look at the shops. When this happened I was able to nip to the back of the arcade and furtively put a penny into one of the machines marked ADULTS ONLY. These were always disappointing. You peered in and saw an old scratchy photograph. When you turned the handle the photographs tipped over and tottered past like a flicker-book. The pictures were faint and blurred and seemed to concern minor happenings in the lives of wellcorseted ladies and rolly-eyed gentlemen in suits.
I didn’t really need to be furtive about watching the not-veryrude pictures because Daisy was not in any way a prude – far from it! Perhaps from the music halls, where she had listened to Marie Lloyd belting out her hilarious, ribald songs, she had developed a healthily bawdy view of life and a very vulgar laugh. I recall one spectacular outing on which she took us to see the Crazy Gang at the Victoria Palace. The Crazy Gang were renowned for the high quality of their rude jokes and double entendres, many of which were so sophisticated that their import was lost on the nice-minded in the audience. However, that afternoon there was one member of the audience who not only saw every aspect of every gag but was also laughing uproariously at them. John and I got the distinct impression that the Crazy Gang were