There was yet a third place we went to for our holiday the next year, further East along the Sussex coast, near a town called Dymchurch. For once this was not only near the sea, but I was also sufficiently fit to swim in it. Unfortunately, for all my fitness, the sea itself wasn’t so fit, as it was inundated with jelly-fish. So when we went swimming, we had to swim among the jelly-fish, and among them were some that stung us, leaving a red mark on the afflicted part of our bodies. Inland, too, there were mosquitoes who were more liberal with their stings. But we repaid them by squelching them on the window panes of our bungalow. Yet another predator, or so he was regarded by Dada, was a mouse which he had found in the kitchen. He was all for killing the poor “wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie” (as Robert Burns names him), but we were all for sparing him, he was so cute, and in the confusion of our civil strife the mouse managed to run away.
My main memory of that holiday, however, wasn’t so much the jelly-fish or the mosquitoes or the mouse as a miniature railway that ran between Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch. It ran just behind our bungalow, and a walk along the road would bring us to the local station, where we stood watching the trains for hours on end with unending fascination – like “the railway children” in Edith Nesbit’s story (though I never read the book). Once or twice we even took the train for the fun of it. Dada was no less interested in it for a reason of his own, that the owner had been a prisoner of war with him in Germany during World War I (or what we then called “the Great War”).
During the summer, Dada was only granted two weeks off – which is generous by Japanese standards – whereas we had two months away from school. So during the rest of the summer he would visit schools in “the home counties”, and so he could take us with him from time to time. Then he would leave us at a certain beauty spot, such as Box Hill in Surrey, where we could have our lunch together, and where he would leave us on his various errands. Then, while Mama would rest, we went in search of a reasonably level piece of ground that might serve as a cricket pitch – without any nearby windows to break. At other times he would take one or other of us in his car and bring us with him to the schools he was visiting. They were all so interesting, having been country houses of the gentry before they were bought by private schools.
Wartime in England
Sadly, the war put paid to our holiday excursions to the South coast. It was declared a Danger Zone, and what were now called “pill-boxes” – in continuation to the Martello towers of the Napoleonic wars – were installed along the two lines of the North and South Downs, to repel an expected German invasion. It was, to be precise, at 11 o’clock on September 3, 1939, that the Prime Minister, the “umbrella man”, Mr Neville Chamberlain, announced Britain’s declaration of war against Germany owing to the German invasion of Poland. Before, on his return from Munich the previous year, he had seemed so sure of peace as a result of his discussions with Hitler, and on alighting from his plane he had waved his rolled umbrella as a sign of his accord with Hitler. But even then he was derided in the press and even in song as “the umbrella man”. And now that derision was abundantly justified. No sooner had he finished his speech on the radio, than the sound of the first air-raid warning was heard, and we rushed with our recently issued gas-masks to our shelter beneath the stairs, where we waited in fear and trembling. But nothing happened. The all-clear was sounded, and we emerged from our shelter with feelings of relief. It had been a false alarm. It was because of an unidentified aircraft that had been spotted over the North Sea. That was all.
And that was all for the time being, as Hitler was preoccupied with his invasion of Poland, for which he had secured the cooperation of Stalin from Russia. Then it was Denmark, and then Norway, that claimed his aggressive attention. And then it was the turn of Belgium, to which he sent his troops so as to by-pass the Maginot Line in which the French had reposed their confidence. Then it was the end of Free France, as the French under Marshal Petain found they must needs submit to the overwhelming power of the Germans, while the British Expeditionary Force (or BEF for short) retreated to Dunkirk on the Belgian coast. There they were awaited by many ships to be evacuated in safety to England in what was called “the Miracle of Dunkirk”. They were a defenceless target to any German planes that might come and “strafe” them, but for some unexplained reason Hitler held back and allowed the English to return safely home. That was towards the end of May and the beginning of June 1940, when the whole BEF was ferried to safety, leaving only their larger equipment behind. And then, for us at home, the war began. As a boy of 13 when war had been declared, I had been impatient for something to happen, but to my chagrin, nothing happened – except in Poland and Scandinavia. But now at last my expectation was fulfilled.
First, there was the Battle of Britain, when Hitler required absolute control of the skies before launching his invasion of England. It was so thrilling. At that time the main aerodrome for the Royal Air Force (or RAF for short) was Croydon, to the South of Wimbledon, and so from Edge Hill we could command a good view of the battle. It was, I remember, a clear blue sky as the German fighters approached, and the British fighters took off to join them in countless skirmishes, all marked in thin white lines against the blue sky – lines going in and out, up and down, and some of them going all the way down to the earth, as plane after plane crashed. Were they German planes, we wondered, or our planes? But from the newspapers we learned that it had been a victory for our planes against the Germans, and so the feared invasion had been staved off, at least for the time being. What was more, in the midst of it all, my youngest brother John was born in the Nelson Hospital, and from then onwards, with a baby in the house, he was like a gleam of sunshine – more than the proverbial silver lining – amid the dark clouds of war. For by now I had become less enthusiastic about the war, having come face to face with the reality.
From those days of gloom, two events stand out in my memory, associated with the IDs (for Identifying Documents) we were expected to carry wherever we went away from home. Twice I was challenged for my ID by two soldiers, one of whom required my document, while the other pointed his rifle at me. But on neither occasion was I in possession of the document. And on both occasions the soldiers had to let me go. It was too much trouble for them to punish me, a mere schoolboy. In any case, if I had been a genuine spy, I would surely have been provided with such a document. So my very lack of it was a sure proof that I was harmless. In the first case, I was by myself, at the corner turning into Worple Road. In the second case, I had gone on a ramble with Tiny through the Surrey countryside, and we were passing by an army camp – and that was considered more suspicious. Still we were waved on, with a caution.
On yet another occasion, I was returning by myself from the midnight Mass on Christmas, in the darkness of Worple Road. It was the time when I was learning German from Fr Brannigan, and among the many songs he taught us was Haydn’s Deutschland uber Alles, which had become the German national anthem. For all its dark associations with the enemy, I was fond of the tune, which had originally been used for the Latin hymn Tantum Ergo, which we would sing at Benediction, to other tunes. Accordingly, under cover of darkness I sang the tune to my heart’s content, with the German words. Again, I might with more justice have been arrested as a German spy, but there was no one around to arrest me. Only, I might well have given scandal to the neighbors, not to mention irritation at this disturbance of their slumbers!
Of more serious concern to me and the family was the bombing of London and other cities from late 1941 onwards. Wimbledon wasn’t of any strategic importance to the German bombers, being no more than a leafy suburb of the city. But it was in the line of their nightly sorties to the North of the Thames, as the river provided them with a clear outline for the correct positioning of themselves. So almost every night from 6 o’clock onwards we would listen to the sound of the diesel engines invading