5. Pop, bang...

Back into London for flying bombs and rockets in 1944. People must have thought the bombing was over by then, and my father expected to return to his old civil service job when the war was done.

46 Clarendon Road, Kensington W.11, just round the corner from Holland Park tube station. That was the first place I clearly registered as home. The address is printed in my mind, as is the phone number PAR(K) 6027, in case we find a way of ringing back through time. Our small back garden opened to the ‘big garden’ a semi-public square beyond. For a while we had a black Labrador dog called Sammy, but he took to walking out, then moved in with two women who fed him cake. Or perhaps he got fed up with children. Our house filled up. First the Wachters, an Austrian Jewish family who came to share the house, then my sister Susan, born soon after the war. With the Wachters, there was no formal division between families. I think they had the basement and a room or two above. Not a basement, but a semi basement, with a door leading into what we called the area, with a flight of steps up beside the house. Another, wider flight of steps led up to the front door above. As with previous houses, I remember these exterior details more clearly than anything inside the house: Cancellors, two or three stops earlier, had its front door upstairs, with a footbridge over to the road. (In Algiers, a long time later, I stayed UNDER under a bridge, not in a cardboard box, but an apartment in a block that formed a sort of dam across a dry ravine, with a road that formed its roof. That was immediately after another war, the Algerian war of independence)

The V1 and V2 attacks came as a dramatic coda to our war. Richard, the baby, slept upstairs near George and Mary while Martin and I slept under wooden tables in the basement with Freddy and Peter Wachter. Martin says the tables had pictures of cows and horses pasted on the undersides. I only remember that we enjoyed our basement camp, occasionally peeping out through the blackout, alerted by the undulating siren wail, we could peep out through the black out at criss-crossing searchlight beams, or lie still, listening out for the bumbling V1 engine noise.
Shoot that doodle bug down, babe
Shoot that doodle bug down
It’s Hitler’s secret weapon
Shoot that doodlebug down
First you hear its engine
Then you hear it stop
Then you dive for shelter
Then you hear it POP

With the V2 rockets, a few months later, the bang often came first, the sirens wail not a warning but in mourning. Meanwhile people still had rings made out of bits of shot-down German planes, and there were more recent stories of British fighter pilots edging up alongside incoming doodlebugs, nudging them round with their wingtips: return to sender. I don’t remember much about the killing and dying on either side. If there was talk of that, it was kept from us children. Freddy and Peter brought stories back from school, comics had German soldiers in cloche helmets and fat officers who said ‘Gott in himmel…Donner und Blitz.’
Nearer home, we knew what not to be frightened of. If a doodlebug engine stopped overhead, we could relax under our basement tables. The glidepath would take it on to someone else. We’d hear the bang, but without much thought of who or what was hit. The one that landed closest blew some of our windows out. Richard was found, his cot encrusted with broken glass, still fast asleep.

I have no picture of any rubble or gaps down our street, but the bits of shrapnel and ‘flares’ we found in the morning if we were lucky. The shrapnel was jagged bits of shell or bomb that rusted almost immediately. The ‘flares’ were strips of foil – later known as ‘chaff’ – dropped to confuse a radar we hardly knew existed.

One afternoon in the big garden we saw a V1 heading towards us in broad daylight. We were sitting on the grass, Mary. Martin, Richard and I, having a picnic in the big garden. When the sirens went, Mary showed no signs of moving and we settled back, reassured. By then nobody used the public shelters at the end of the road, except to play or piss in. Then we heard the engine noise and for the first time saw the stubby little plane. I have a picture of it in sky, coming over the end of the square from the right. I don’t know where it ended up, and Mary had forgotten all about the incident when I asked her about it half a lifetime later. I asked why she would have been so calm? ‘Perhaps I hardly cared by then,’ she said.

Caring or not, Mary dashed us to cover a few months later when a V2 rocket landed on Holland Hill. We were walking down Holland Park Avenue on the far side from tube-station, shops and home. Mary had Richard in a push-chair, Martin by the hand. When the sky exploded, Mary and the other two ran across the main road, to take cover in a shop. I set off to follow, but saw Richard’s shoe fall off, stopped, checked for traffic, then ran to pick it up. I felt quite pleased with myself, until Mary shouted at me.

That was the only time I saw either of my parents scared. When I asked Mary why she might have been past caring, that afternoon in the big garden. She said it might have been about George and Tanya. Tanya was her younger brother Tony’s wife. Tony was an army engineer, killed shortly before the end of the war. Then the Wachters went back to Austria, and Tanya and her children came to live with us. Tony and Mary had been close as children, but the war, and her pacifism, came between them for a while. She must have confided in him, her fears about losing George, if not to the enemy then the sirens of Bletchley Park. In one hastily pencilled letter he told not to worry, , he knew from his own experience – with a nurse in a military hospital – how easy it was to be distracted, but also what mattered most. George would be back. The picture I have of Tony is not him but a photograph in Grandmother’s flat, young but moustached, in his army uniform. The other picture is from life, but could have been anyone, no face just a soldier swinging out of a jeep by our house. I’m looking down from a window, the open jeep has just drawn up. This must have been when Tony called to say goodbye before leaving for France. All I remember is excitement when the jeep parked at our gate, and pride when the officer in it – Tony must have had his cap - came running up our steps.

News of his death came by phone. From Grandmother, or Tanya. After the ring, the shock of the sound that Mary made. A wail that sunk a groan as her breath ran out. Did I see, or later imagine, her slumping down against the wall the phone was on.. Martin says we helped her up the stairs and he felt her weight was too much for him.

For years I imagined Tony resting in the shade of an apple tree, taken unawares by a stray shell. But Mary said no, it wouldn’t have been an orchard in Normandy, but later, more likely Belgium, where he was salvaging some abandoned German equipment. A booby trap, or IED. Tony did not come home, but he was right about George who did.

Bluebirds? If Mary was right about George and Tanya,she never went into detail. What did George feel or do for the young widow who came to share our house? Romantic sympathy or consummated affair? Not a full-blown threesome or even we children would have noticed. Tanya was a pianist – the Queen of Thump as my mother’s elder brother Armine called her. Tanya’s mother – Mrs Polunin to us – had painted George’s portrait when his call-up cast his future in doubt. Seventy years later, his future no longer in doubt, the portrait does its job in our house. It’s my default image of my father, bless his gentle enquiring eyes, and also reminds me of my sons.)

Apart from standard wartime drama, what stands out in my memory of those years is not so much the big events as a scattering of everyday incidents, like outcrops of coral from a submerged reef. Some of them could have happened any time, not quite fixed in time, or standing in for former or later events as the tide of oblivion eddies over them. Some points can be fixed. I was reassured today when I checked a detail on a map of London. The picture I have from that picnic afternoon is of a little plane coming over the trees. We heard it first, then saw it high in the sky, not over the houses that formed the sides of the square but the wall at one end. That confused me. In my mental map, that end of the square was to the East, but the doodlebug should have come from the South. According to the street-guide, my mental map was skewed, but memory and observation spot on. The doodlebug would have approached as I rememberet it. So what about Mary’s memory, of her desolation at that time? Tony’s death, and anything between George and Tanya, must have come later. Did those events cast a long shadow back on her memory of earlier summer months? Shifting currents, changing light...