Growing Up In a War by Bryan Magee Read Free Book Online

my visits lasted only as long as the school holidays, and my actual life was always being lived somewhere else.
    Apart from an infant stay in hospital, the opening three and a half months of the Second World War were the first period of more than two weeks that I had spent away from home, not only from my parents but also from Hoxton. After that, each move was one more change, one more way of life, one more world. But Worth was the first of my new worlds. For that reason it has remained a bigger experience than the fifteen or so weeks that it lasted might suggest. At long intervals through the years I have felt the need to go back there and stroll through the village, over the railway bridge to the church; to sit in a pew and contemplate the memorial to Ken Constable, and look at the chandeliers, and wander round the churchyard; and then walk back through the village again and down Pound Hill into Three Bridges, following the route that the gang of us used to take every day to school. Sometimes I would continue into Crawley. I would always, at some point, find myself standing in front of the bungalow, with the oak tree still there in its front garden, and wonder who lived there now, and hope that they were not looking out at me through one of their windows wondering what that stranger was doing standing there staring at their house. Now, alas, the bungalow is no more. A few years ago it was knocked down, and a proper house built in its place. But the oak tree is still there. And Miss Rutland’s bungalow is discernible as part of the enlarged house next door.
    As things have turned out in my life, my period in Worth was the only time I have lived for more than two weeks in a village. While I was there I expected it to be for as long as the war lasted. Because I had no idea that my stay was going to be so short, my mental adjustment was to being there for ever: I dug in, so to speak, and thought of myself as living there. It is true that among the most pungent aspects of the experience were some negative ones, the chief being that it was not Hoxton, and that I was not living with my father. But there were positive ones too, if sometimes difficult to put into words – things to do with openness and sky, the field outside the kitchen door, the trees, first green and then gold … clambering around in trees, sitting in trees, talking endlessly in trees. The feeling that stays with me most keenly is of a close community of people surrounded by nothing at all; and the individual things I recall go right down to the various birds and insects, this goldfinch, that wasp, a particular fly, on a particular occasion.

CHAPTER SIX
    WITHIN A DAY or two of my going to Worth to live with my grandmother, the school I had been at in Hoxton was evacuated to the Midlands. I did not hear accounts of this until some time afterwards, but when I did, I heard it talked about so much that it acquired a life of its own in my imagination. The children – each with a label hanging round his neck with his name and address, and each carrying a suitcase – were delivered by their families to Dalston Junction, a few hundred yards from Hoxton. From there they were taken by train to Euston. At Euston they found themselves checked off as one school among many. Thousands of children were being shepherded by their teachers in that great terminus, while extra-long trains stood waiting at the platforms. Then, school by school, the children were packed into the trains, until the corridors would hold no more, and the trains pulled out to their various destinations, the passengers having no idea where they were going. The train carrying the Edmund Halley school stopped first at Rugby. It let a school off there, and then crawled slowly back down another line, stopping at every station. At each stop a confabulation with local worthies took place on the platform which ended sometimes with a whole school getting off and sometimes with no one getting off. Finally, the