Growing Up In a War Read Online Free PDF Page A

come tootling down from London in his second-hand Austin 10, occasionally bringing her husband, my grandfather, with him, and thankfully seldom her daughter-in-law, my mother. And that made her content. On one such Sunday my grandfather was sitting in a deckchair in the garden reading a newspaper, my parents were in the house with my grandmother, and the car was parked outside the front gate. Teddy Green and I were playing in the street; and I, trusting that the garden hedge would prevent my grandfather from seeing us, started to show the car off to Teddy in whispers. ‘And this,’ I said, ‘is the handbrake,’ operating it to show how it worked – at which, in slow motion, the car rolled into the ditch under the hedge. My grandfather stirred. Teddy and I scuttled off into the brushwood opposite the house and hid behind trees, waiting in fear to observe the consequences of our actions (my action). Grandad emerged from the front gate and looked at the car, his jaw in his hand. Then he went into the house. Then everyone came out. My father was exasperated. ‘How could that have happened? Did you see anybody?’
    ‘No,’ said my grandfather.
    ‘Or hear anything?’
    ‘No.’
    It took all four of them a lot of heaving, and a lot of time, to get the car back on to the road, all talking at once while they were doing it, speculating on how this could have happened. At last, when it was done and the handbraking double-checked, they went back into the house. When I rejoined them later I looked, or hoped I looked, the picture of innocence, and had to be told what had happened in my absence. When the time came for our visitors to leave, my grandfather said his goodbyes to me out of earshot of the others, and his last words to me were: ‘I saw you. But don’t worry. I won’t give you away.’

CHAPTER FOUR
    WORTH WAS JUST a single stringy, straggly street off a not-very-main road. It was a cul-de-sac, so no one passed through it: the street just ended with the church, and then there were miles of unusually thick woodland (in which I and my friends spent a lot of time). I have since found that there are people who live not all that far away yet are unaware of the village’s existence. To them the name Worth is associated with a Roman Catholic abbey and boarding school, round which they assume any village of the same name is bound to be clustered; but in fact the abbey and school are some miles from the village, on the other side of the woodland; and during the time I lived in Worth I never even heard of them.
    Another thing that added to the isolation of Worth was that it did not contain a single shop or pub. This was because the woman who owned the village would not allow them. She wished to keep it, she said, unspoiled. She lived somewhere called Wentworth Park, on the other side of the main road. I have no memory of seeing a house there, but in any case I did not envisage her as living in a house but living in a park, as it might have been a London park. She was pointed out to me one day driving past in her car, and looked a nice woman. She was rarely mentioned, though; she was too remote. This has since suggested to me that people who own villages probably figure less in the minds of the villagers than they imagine. I am quite sure that scarcely anyone in Hoxton would have known who owned the land there. It would not have entered most of their heads to wonder – though critics of slum landlordism might expect effigies of the landlords to be burnt every Bonfire Night in the slum streets.
    The nearest shop, the little corner store that sold cigarettes, was a short way up the main road, at the crossroads from which Pound Hill ran down into Three Bridges. Although the shop was oddly isolated, it prospered. My grandmother went there for everything she needed at short notice, and bought the rest of her provisions from the yellow van that came to the village every day – a general store on wheels that stopped at each house.