Up West by Pip Granger Read Free Book Online Page B

to a lorry to take it to Regent’s Park to be exploded. As his fiancée lived in Marylebone, he was excused the trip. The other five members of his team were all killed when the trembler blew it up in Lisson Grove.’
    Ray also remembers that, ‘in autumn 1944, in broad daylight, I was riding a bus somewhere near Marble Arch/ Oxford Street, and a very little way ahead there was an explosion: a building covering almost a block shimmered, and just collapsed, leaving a cloud of dust, and blocking the road. There was no warning, as it was a V2.’
    Of course, living through war scarred people physically as well. One thing I remember vividly from those early post-war years is just how many injured men there were selling things on the city’s streets: matches, razor blades, bootlaces, glass animals, hot chestnuts. There were those whose minds had fractured, and there were also the ‘walking wounded’. Many ended up as sandwich-board men or pearl divers (washer-uppers) in restaurants, or simply spent their days moving from a doorway to a park bench, from the bench to a bomb site, from bomb site to an alley behind a café that gave its leftovers away. There never seemed to be enough hostels, and dry, warm places to doss down for a night were at a premium.
    Barbara Jones and her sister, Pat, were evacuated at the beginning of the war, but her parents stayed behind in their home just south of the Strand. Mr Jones volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service. ‘My dad,’ says Barbara, ‘prevented the Royal Society of Arts building from burning down by throwing incendiaries off the roof when the Little Theatre next door went up in flames – and received thanks, and a cheque, from the Society!’
    Later in the war, Mr Jones was terribly injured in the bombing. ‘He was put with the dead at first,’ Barbara remembers. ‘When they finally got around to dealing with him, they had to put his skull back on in nine pieces. He was written up in the American version of the
Lancet
as the Man Who Wouldn’t Die. My mother was told he would never work again, that he might not see again, or grow hair again,all sorts of things he would never do again. If he had a bang on his head, he’d be dead.’
    Barbara’s sister, Pat, takes up the story. ‘But he grew a shock of hair, he worked, he could see. When he was drunk, though, he would sometimes fall down and hit his head, and of course it would bleed like mad, and I’d be petrified.’
    Another consequence of the war, and one that would make its presence felt, albeit in a different way, into the fifties, was how it liberated people sexually. As my mother – who had jostled to near the front of the queue when sexual liberality was being parcelled out – used to say that nothing loosened knicker elastic like the thought that you might die in the morning. For many, the last vestiges of Victorian repression decayed to dust in the face of all that transience. As Quentin Crisp wrote, in
The Naked Civil Servant
, ‘As soon as bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed. Voices whispered suggestively to you as you walked along; hands reached out if you stood still, and in dimly lit trains people carried on as they once had behaved only in taxis.’
    London in general had filled up with young people – many, but not all, in uniform – looking for some kind of escape from the alternating periods of boredom and terrifying danger that made up military life. The influx of American troops from 1943 on brought a whole new culture and even more sexual openness in to the mix, a development that sent Quentin Crisp in to raptures. GIs ‘flowed through the streets of London like cream on strawberries, like melted butter over greenpeas. Labelled “with love from Uncle Sam” and packaged in uniforms so tight that in them their owners could fight for nothing but their honour, these