wrong-headed but decent impulses, like the pacifism of Methodists in Grantham, as well as out of corrupt ones. One can never do without straightforward common sense in matters great as well as small. And finally I have to admit that I had the patriotic conviction that, given great leadership of the sort I heard from Winston Churchill in the radio broadcasts to which we listened, there was almost nothing that the British people could not do.
Our life in wartime Grantham — until I went up to Oxford in 1943 — must have been very similar to that of countless other families. There was always voluntary work to do of one kind or another in the Service canteens and elsewhere. Our thoughts were at the front; we devoured voraciously every item of available news; and we ourselves, though grateful for being more or less safe, knew that we were effectively sidelined. But we had our share of bombing. There were altogether twenty-one German air raids on the town, and seventy-eight people were killed. The town munitions factory — the British Manufacturing and Research Company (B.M.A.R.Co., or ‘British Marcs’ as we called it) — which came to the town in 1938, was an obvious target, as was the junction of the Great North Road and the Northern Railway Line — the latter within a few hundred yards of our house. My father was frequently out in the evenings on air raid duty. During air raids we would crawl under the table for shelter — we had no outside shelter for we had no garden — until the ‘all clear’ sounded. On one occasion, coming back from school with my friends, carrying our gas masks, we made a dive for the shelter of a large tree as someone called out that the aircraft overhead was German. After bombs fell on the town in January 1941 I asked my father if I could walk down to see the damage. He would not let me go. Twenty-two people died in that raid. We were also concerned for my sister Muriel, who was working day and night in the Orthopaedic Hospital in Birmingham: Birmingham was, of course, very badly bombed.
In fact, Grantham itself was playing a more dramatic role than I knew at the time. Bomber Command’s 5 Group was based in Grantham, and it was from a large house off Harrowby Road that much of the planning was done of the bombing raids on Germany; the officers’ mess was in Elm House in Elmer Street, which I used to pass walking to school. The Dambusters flew from near Grantham — my father met their commander, Squadron Leader Guy Gibson. I always felt that Bomber Harris — himself based in Grantham in the early part of the war — had not been sufficiently honoured. I would remember what Winston Churchill wrote to him at the end of the war:
For over two years Bomber Command alone carried the war to the heart of Germany, bringing hope to the peoples of Occupied Europe and to the enemy a foretaste of the mighty power which was rising against him…
All your operations were planned with great care and skill. They were executed in the face of desperate opposition and appalling hazards. They made a decisive contribution to Germany’s final defeat. The conduct of these operations demonstrated the fiery gallant spirit which animated your air crews and the high sense of duty of all ranks under your command. I believe that the massive achievements of Bomber Command will long be remembered as an example of duty nobly done.
In Grantham, at least, politics did not stand still in the war years. Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 sharply altered the attitudes of the Left to the war. Pacifist voices suddenly became silent. Anglo-Soviet friendship groups sprouted. We attended, not without some unease, Anglo-Soviet evenings held at the town hall. It was the accounts of the suffering and bravery of the Russians at Stalingrad in 1942–43 which had most impact on us.
Although it can now be seen that 1941 — with Hitler’s attack on Russia in June and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor which brought America into the war in December — sowed the seeds of Germany’s ultimate defeat, the news was generally bad, and especially so in early 1942. This almost certainly contributed to the outcome of the by-election held in Grantham on 27 February 1942, after Victor Warrender was elevated to the Lords as Lord Bruntisfield, to become an Admiralty spokesman. Our town had the dubious distinction of being the first to reject a government candidate during the war. Denis Kendall stood as an Independent against our Conservative candidate, Sir Arthur Longmore. Kendall fought an effective populist campaign in which he skilfully used his role as General Manager of British Marcs to stress the theme of an all-out drive for production for the war effort and the need for ‘practical’ men to promote it. To our great surprise, he won by 367 votes. Then and later the Conservative Party was inclined to complacency. A closer analysis of the limited number of by-elections should have alerted us to the likelihood of the Socialist landslide which materialized in 1945.
Unusually, I took little part in the campaign because I was working very hard, preparing for examinations which I hoped would get me into Somerville College, Oxford. In particular, my evenings were spent cramming the Latin which was required for the entrance exam. Our school did not teach Latin. Fortunately, our new headmistress, Miss Gillies, herself a classicist, was able to arrange Latin lessons for me from a teacher at the boys’ grammar school, and to lend me her own books, including a textbook written by her father. The hard work helped keep my mind off the ever more dismal news about the war. In particular, there was a series of blows in the Far East — the loss of Malaya, the sinking of the
In spite of my efforts to get into Somerville, I failed to win the scholarship I wanted. It was not too surprising, for I was only seventeen, but it was something of a blow. I knew that if I was not able to go up in 1943 I would not be allowed to do more than a two-year ‘wartime degree’ before I was called up for national service at the age of twenty. But there was nothing I could do about it, and so at the end of August 1943 I entered the third- year sixth and became Joint Head of School. Then, suddenly, a telegram arrived offering me a place at Somerville in October. Someone else had dropped out. And so it was that I suddenly found myself faced with the exciting but daunting prospect of leaving home, almost for the first time, for a totally different world.
CHAPTER II
Gowns-woman
Oxford does not set out to please. Freshmen arrive there for the Michaelmas term in the misty gloom of October. Monumental buildings impress initially by their size rather than their exquisite architecture. Everything is cold and strangely forbidding. Or so it seemed to me.
It had been at Somerville during bitterly cold mid-winter days that I had taken my Oxford entrance exams. But I had seen little of my future college and less still of the university as a whole before I arrived, rather homesick and apprehensive, to begin my first term. In fact, Somerville always takes people by surprise. Many incurious passers-by barely know it is there, for the kindest thing to say of its external structure is that it is unpretentious. But inside it opens up into a splendid green space onto which many rooms face. I was to live both my first and second years in college, moving from the new to the older buildings. In due course, a picture or two, a vase and finally an old armchair brought back from Grantham allowed me to feel that the rooms were in some sense mine. In my third and fourth years I shared digs with two friends in Walton Street.
Both Oxford and Somerville were strongly if indirectly affected by the war. For whatever reason, Oxford was not bombed, in spite of the presence of the motor works at Cowley which had become a centre for aircraft repair. But like everywhere else, both town and university were subject to the blackout (‘dim-out’ from 1944) and much affected by wartime stringencies. Stained-glass windows were boarded up. Large static water tanks — as in Somerville’s East Quad off the Woodstock Road — stood ready for use in case of fire. Most of our rations were allocated direct to the college which provided our unexciting fare in hall, though on rare occasions I would be asked out to dinner. There were a few coupons left over for jam and other things. One of the minor benefits to my health and figure of such austerities was that I ceased having sugar in my tea — though only many years later would I deny my ever-sweet tooth the pleasure of sugared coffee (not that there was over-much coffee for some time either). There were tight controls over the use of hot water. For example, there must be no more than five inches of water in the bath — a line was painted round at the right level — and of course I rigidly observed this,
