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Dear all
A hundred years ago… the
Great War proceeded through some days of, arguably, its new normal – slogging
along on Western and Eastern Fronts with few new developments (the Battle Of
Artois concluded on January 13, the Battle Of Soissons on the 14th, both
inconclusively).
Meanwhile, my father, Sam, 16, his brother, Ted, 18, their pals
from Edmonton, north London, and the rest of the Cockney crew comprising the
2/1st City Of London Battalion, Royal Fusiliers,
enjoyed what proved to be their final days in England for almost two years.
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
Last
week, Sam wrote of their Tonbridge sojourn – drilling, digging trench defences
in case of invasion by the German Army, offset by wonderful treatment from the
local families billeting them – as one of the “best times” of his young life.
But, very unusually for him, a couple of these weeks passed without event or
observation that lodged in his wondrous memory to re-emerge when he wrote his
Memoir in the 1970s.
So, as his editor and blogger, I decided
to use the pause as a means of reviewing a few aspects of the childhood that
shaped the strong, fearful, opinionated, worried, oddly innocent lad who
volunteered for war in the ninth of these blogs. He wrote about 50,000 words,
toddler to teens, before these war declaration to 1919 peace parade blogs began
to roughly parallel events, macro and micro, a hundred years ago. I’m
excerpting some snippets of that story of a poor boy’s life in the early 1900s
every Tuesday on the Memoir’s facebook page, but here are
some details that seem formative, one way or another:
Well,
the first line that he wrote as he set out to write his one and only book – as
an old man who’d left school at 14 in 1912 – has to be quoted here because it
gave the memoir its proper name:
‘May I say straight away he became
nobody of any importance…’
And
then there were fleeting memories of factory-owning luxury in Manchester as a
tot, before “ruin” assailed the family and they journeyed to London, an
occasion of mortifying embarrassment to mother and children:
‘… a railway official came into the
carriage and inspected tickets. He looked at mother — they were alone in the
compartment, mother and the four children — and he said, “I quite understand,
short of money, eh? Can’t pay for tickets for all of them. Well, where you
think it’s necessary – and if we stop at a station – put two of the children
under the seat… Do as I say. That will help.”’
This
is where I remind readers Sam started out writing in the third person, calling
himself “our boy” or “Tommy” in the early chapters... Strangers and “come down
in the world”, the family scraped by, like thousands of others in their north
London suburb. Hunger gnawed at the children’s bellies daily – surely the
reason for his detailed memory of meals, good or diabolical, throughout his
Memoir:
‘So, when one day our boy saw a lad
younger than himself sitting on the ground tearing up paper and eating bits of
it, he asked him, “Why are you eating paper?” “Because I’m hungry,” said the
boy. Our lad thought, “Perhaps it would help if I could do the same”. He tore
up some paper and chewed it, but, oh, it tasted horrible. He never resorted to
that again...’
They
moved house to somewhere even cheaper, the children (four born in Manchester, a
fifth in London) often not seeing one of their parents for days. But,
eventually, after walking all over London to find it, the father got a steady,
though low-paid job, celebrated with a real Sunday dinner:
‘That week when Dad received his
first pay packet was long remembered because on the Sunday, very unusually,
their mother lit a coal fire in the grate of the kitchen range and they baked
rather more potatoes than usual and boiled a small number of haricot beans
(hard when bought, they had to be soaked for 24 hours or so before cooking).
For this occasion dishes they hadn’t used for some time were set out on the
table. One for the potatoes, another for the beans, and a larger one for the
joint. Mother placed it at the end of the table where father sat. He carved it
most carefully, small portions for the children, of course, but the taste of
that meat in addition to the beans and the potatoes was a treat.’
But,
even as a young schoolboy, Sam could feel how the family’s downfall had damaged
his parents’ relationship forever:
‘... home life remained variable.
Despite recent slight improvements, the trial of all the years since the
family’s tile company in Manchester collapsed had sharpened the mother’s
temper. Her hand would whip out with a smack at very slight provocation. She
frequently recounted the quality and style of their life as it used to be and
had ceased to be and the blame for all this, of course, she laid at father’s
door. Perhaps he was an easy-going, soft type of chap. She classed him as such.
He was working hard doing the best he could in all the circumstances, but got
not much credit for anything as far as Tommy could hear.’
So,
with emotional uncertainty at home, Sam/Tommy looked outward to school, the
church choir, and the Boy Scouts for steadiness and a degree of encouragement.
‘Suddenly a change occurred for
Tommy. In charge of the Scout Troop was a cultured man, whose name I’ve
mentioned in passing – Mr Frusher, who was also the vicar, the organist and
choirmaster at the parish church… He approached Tommy at one of the Scout
gatherings and said, “I’d like you to join the church choir. Ask your parents
if they will be agreeable…” The vicar himself, Mr Frusher, with his dome of a
head, his powerful voice and perfect diction, had the gift of making people
believe that all was well in this best of all worlds; after his sermons, they
would leave the church feeling secure, strong, fortified, ready to meet the
trials of the coming week...”
The
vicar also played a part in developing Sam’s natural gift for playing musical
instruments. His mother acquired a battered old piano:
‘Tommy… made a wild promise to tune
it. He felt sure he could do it by ear. He’d seen a man in the local piano shop
doing it… Tommy discussed it with his friends and one young man said that, if
Tommy took an impression of the shape of the screw at the top of each string,
at his place of work, he could make a tool to fit. Tommy mentioned his
intention to Mr Frusher. A rather derisive smile greeted the proposition, but
he gave Tommy a tuning fork for A. With this to guide him, he used the key to
get the middle note right and the rest followed from that… Day after day, in
his spare moments he’d be sitting there tapping away on the keys and turning
the screws until his ear told him it was as near as he would get… When he told
Mr Frusher he’d about finished the job, curiosity overcame the choirmaster and
he had to call round and see it. Although, when he played a few bars on this
thing, his face betrayed a degree of pain, still he complimented the lad on
what he’d done and said, “If you like, I’ll give you a few lessons…’
When
Sam, Ted and their peers in the Scouts and choir reached their teens, they also
joined Frusher’s Sunday discussion group. Thus, Sam acquired the confused
mixture of puritanism, gallantry and fear that characterised his dealings with
women throughout the war:
‘In a sensible way, Mr Frusher
described the feelings contact between the sexes could arouse, the actions and
the results that would follow: the girls in trouble, the unwanted babies; the
worry, regret, fear; the difficulties which beset a young man who has fathered
a bastard. He drew this picture so impressively the lads were never likely to
forget. In fact, he constantly impressed upon them that sexual intercourse
before marriage was wrong, a crime, it must never even be considered, let alone
indulged in.’
And,
finally – nothing to do with the vicar – he learned what a great fight was like
and, perhaps, found the first hint of the stoicism that carried him through
Gallipoli, the Somme, Arras and six months as a POW. Harassed by Hoy, a
lieutenant of the “school bully”, he agreed to a setpiece scrap with seconds
and a referee on an adjacent field:
‘Tommy fell into the boxer’s stance
he’d learnt during Boy Scout training and shuffled about. Bigger and stronger,
Hoy lashed out frequently, but somewhat blindly. His face evinced murderous
malice throughout. Tommy himself found real hatred rising in him as soon as the
bout got going. He was being hurt. Yet a certain coolness, fruit of those
boxing lessons, kept his emotions in check… Tommy’s mouth and face began to
feel like a huge, puffed-up thing, ten times their actual size and, although,
clearly, both boys were becoming exhausted, neither capable of landing a
knockout blow, Tommy felt sure he was going to lose… It seemed endless. With
Hoy’s friends yelling at him to finish his foe off, by an indescribable piece
of luck Tommy swung his arm over, missed his target and struck Hoy on the upper
right arm. It dropped to his side and he yelled at Arthur [the referee], ”I
can’t hold it up! It’s paralysed!” That finished it. Arthur awarded the win to
Tommy, despite the opposition’s protests. Fearing a general attack, Tommy’s
friends hurried him away, shouting congratulations and slapping him on the back
— Tommy pretended to be unimpressed and said nothing about the sheer good
fortune of the punch hitting a nerve to end the fight.’
I’d say “ecce homo!”, but
I mean “behold the kid” - the boy who, after a couple of years out at work as
described in the early blogs joined the Army, September, 1914.
All the best —
FSS
Next week:
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