Growing Up In a War Read Online Free PDF

For big items she would walk to Crawley and bus back, as we did when the two of us went to the pictures there. (Of the films we saw, the one I always remember is
Stagecoach
.) Only one or two people in Worth had cars. Several had bicycles, but these were not of much use across fields, so most of the time people walked. This, of course, must have been so since the beginning of time, and no doubt it never entered people’s heads to question it, but it did mean that their horizons were narrow by the standards of the post-war world. During the three and a half months I spent in Worth, the only other places I went to were Three Bridges and Crawley. Other nearby towns I heard mentioned were Horsham and Horley – I used to mix the two up – and East Grinstead; but I never went to any of them; and there were quite a few grown-ups in the village who never went to any of them either. Some had never been to London.
    Although Worth was a backwater, it was less rustic and remote than the village in Dorset where I had been for a couple of holidays when I was younger. That had been an exotic world of buzzing heaviness and flies, of farmyards and outdoor privies, with the reek of dung everywhere, and few roads, whereas this was comparatively well tailored. Even so, my experience in Dorset was of great help to me in Worth. It had made me used to being in the country, and hearing country accents all round me, and playing with village children, mostly in fields, or clambering in trees; and it had taught me such basic skills as how to make a bow and arrow. Having enjoyed it before helped me to feel at home in Worth – more at home, I suspect, than my grandmother, who probably had less experience of being outside London, except at some of the cockney seaside resorts. Even so, I went on thinking of London as real life, the real world, from which I was now separated because of the war. But I did not feel homesick, perhaps because I was relieved to be away from my mother.
    Homesickness was something I never experienced as a child, despite the fact that after the age of nine my base was always away from my family. I was pleased to see them during school holidays, but never longed for them when I was not with them. One thing I do remember, though, that may be connected with living away from home for the first time, is that at Worth I took a new kind of interest in reading. I had always gobbled up comics greedily, unable to put one aside until I had read every word of it, and secretly spending forbidden sums of money on them. But in the area round Worth the shops did not sell the comics I was addicted to – the
Wizard
, above all, and also the
Hotspur
– and I regarded the others as inferior, so I was forced now to move on to something halfway between comics and books. They were novelettes, actually, though no one used that word. They looked like very thin paperbacks, were aimed at grown-ups, cost tuppence, and were probably the crudest as well as the cheapest adult fiction outside magazines. The leading genres were romantic, adventure, detective and cowboy, and I opted for detective, these being mostly Sexton Blake stories. But I was prepared to try anything, except romantic. I became as addicted to novelettes as I had been to comics – in fact I thought they were better, because they were longer and more grown-up. I remember one about the Ku Klux Klan (the first time I heard of it) in which its members were the goodies as against the dirty niggers who were the baddies. This makes me wonder now about the provenance of some of them. There was one about airmen in the First World War in which, as in my comics, pilots were represented brandishing pistols and shooting at one another from their cockpits – wonderfully exciting. This, I thought, was what I wanted to do when I grew up. Once in the bungalow, when my grandmother thought I was out, I heard her in the next room praising me to a visitor and wondering aloud what I was going to be in life,