Growing Up In a War Read Online Free PDF Page B

and I bawled out to them: ‘An airman!’
    For my grandmother I felt no positive affection, unlike the way I did for my grandfather and Aunt Peggy. Although I accepted the other aspects of my life in Worth, I was not happy about living with Grandma. It gave me problems which I did not know how to cope with. At home in London my mother’s indifference to me had always had the back-handed advantage of leaving me to grow up in freedom. She cared little what I did, and never wondered where I was, provided I came home for meals. On days when there was no school she would shoo me out on to the pavement of Hoxton Street after our midday dinner and say: ‘I don’t want to see you again till it gets dark.’ And from that moment I was at liberty to do whatever I liked, go wherever I liked – anywhere, that is, except home. If I got into trouble it would not matter provided my parents never heard about it, so for me the important thing was not keeping out of trouble but keeping the trouble from my parents. This was how I had become used to living; so when I found myself in Worth I went on behaving like that. However, my grandmother was not like my mother. She felt responsible for my welfare, and wanted to know where I was going, and what I would be doing when I got there; and she became angry if I did not tell her. Furthermore, because the village was a village, the scrapes I got into reached her ears. She genuinely tried to do what was best for me, but without asking me what I thought or wanted. Her decisions boxed me in at every turn, and it became intolerable. She was, it seemed to me, behaving as if I were a well-treated prisoner.
    A day came when I exploded. Shouting through floods of tears, I denounced her for ‘the way you treat me’. She was dumbfounded, and in righteous outrage said things like: ‘But everything that happens here is done for your benefit. I do everything I can think of for you.’ I knew this to be true – in fact I understood the situation clearly – but at that age I was incapable of putting such thoughts into words. The frustration this induced was itself intolerable – I knew exactly what was wrong but did not know how to say it. So I carried on accusing her of treating me badly when I knew that this was not what it was, and not what I really meant.
    I think this scene may have played a decisive role in bringing my period at Worth to an end. When Christmas showed its funnel over the horizon, my father said that, since the anticipated bombing of London was not taking place, it would be all right for me to come home at least for Christmas. After that, I would not return to Worth but would rejoin my old Hoxton school, which had been evacuated to Market Harborough in Leicestershire. Then, he said, I would once more be with my old mates and my old teachers. The reason he gave for this change was that the school in Three Bridges had turned out not to be good enough. It was not educating me properly, he said. I imagined this must be true if he said it, but was puzzled how he could know, since he was not living with us and had never been to the school. It seemed to me I was learning more there than I had at my school in Hoxton. Certainly I was finding it more interesting. But I supposed what he said must be true in some grown-up sense beyond my comprehension. Only now, as I write this chapter, over sixty-five years later, do I find myself reflecting that the real truth was probably otherwise.
    What I think now, when I look back, is that my grandmother felt herself inadequate to the task of controlling me. There were my scrumping and smoking, both of which were crimes and could have led to trouble with the police, perhaps even (in her mind) to my being sent to a borstal. There were probably whispered, giggling sounds in the night telling of who-knows-what going on between me and Gwen. I was roaming all over the countryside getting up to mischief, and then lying about it when I got home. I was misbehaving