As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi
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looking lost and forlorn with a label round my neck.
During the Blitz in 1940–41 I was still in Leytonstone. Dad, being over thirty, wasn’t called up for a while and, like millions of others, dug out and built an Anderson shelter in the back garden. It was purpose-made from sheets of corrugated iron bent into a semi-circular shape. Dad set it over a concrete base embedded two or three feet in the ground. It had no soak-away, but it had bunk beds on either side making four beds in total. Like others, Dad covered it with earth and a little rock garden: planting aubretia, roses, Canterbury bells and geraniums.
I’m not sure if this camouflage decoration put off the Boche from dropping bombs on us. During the raids we were hunched up with sopping feet in the Anderson, which every now and then shook and quaked in the depths from after-shock. I heard later that when I was three one huge bomb fell just hundreds of yards down our road at the junction of Essex Road with Crieg Road in front of the Leyton High School for Boys, gouging out a vast crater.
Grandpa and Grandma were mainly with us during the Blitz. Grandpa stood outside the shelter and stationed himself as if on guard. I can’t say what he thought he would be able to do if a bomb fell on us. I do remember later that if anyone farted in the shelter they were made to stand outside – expelled as a punishment. Perhaps this was what Grandpa kept doing!
Soon I would go away, too; that was inevitable. But to where, and with whom?
Dad was called up into the army and left us in 1941, but as he had bunions so badly (at one time he was in Croft’s Hospital with them, where they cared for him in the maternity ward!) he was never sent abroad to a war zone. As a humble private he served in the Royal Army Service Corps at postings in Scotland, Wales and the South.
When Hitler threatened to invade England Dad was stationed on Clapham Common, pasting up and setting out dummy tanks and guns of painted cardboard on the Common. They used lorries and dug tracks in the ground to make it all look real, so the Luftwaffe flying above would think we were heavily fortified.
Uncle Henry joined the Catering Corps. He was stationed at Reykjavik in Iceland. Later he was posted to a barracks in Buckinghamshire, so eventually – after the Blitz and not necessarily for my safety – Hilda took Raymond and me to stay with her not far from him in Little Brick Hill, a village outside Bletchley, near Cosgrave. We lived upstairs in the village pub. Mum stayed behind in Essex Road working, so she was very lonely and of all of us most exposed to danger. She’d come out to see us at Little Brick Hill whenever she could, and this was always a treat.
But my life with cousin Raymond was quite the opposite.
Raymond and I were billeted together in the pub, sharing a room. My cousin Raymond was six or seven years older than me and I spent a lot of my childhood years with him. Auntie Hilda treated me with kid gloves – she would love the Jesus out of me – while Raymond got the rough end of her tongue. It was he, not me, the golden boy, who always seemed to come in for it.
Not long before we were evacuated there was one hell of a ruction which I will never forget. I was round at Poplars Road and Auntie Hilda asked Raymond to take a jar of precious jam through to the front room and put it in the cabinet where she stored the best pieces. He picked up the jar and pranced up the passageway, puffed up with airs and graces as he went, possibly the more so as I was watching, but as he came through into the front room the lid spun off the jam, and the jam shot out of the jar all over and up the wall. Hilda was so furious that she completely lost her rag and knocked him to kingdom come.
‘Auntie, Auntie, stop it, stop it!’ I screamed, as I stood by terrified.
Now that we were living together in Little Brick Hill, Raymond at last had me in his power and at night under the bedclothes he had the chance to take his revenge. He would scare and terrorise me, tickling me, pummelling me, playing at ‘tortures’ under the sheets.
‘Why can’t he stop trying to frighten me all the time?’ I remember thinking. ‘I am so much younger than him, so why is he tormenting me so much?’
It was pretty obvious to someone a bit older. With hindsight I could quite understand him wanting revenge on me. I was treated as the special one, the one apart from the rest of the family, while Raymond was the ‘bloke’, the laddish one. Later I realised that I was always accepted as the one who didn’t quite fit in, who wasn’t going to take an ordinary route through life.
One day we went apple scrumping together in the orchard of a big house where a grand lady lived – a highly dangerous thing to do, for it was trespassing and illegal. I didn’t feel part of it, but I followed where Raymond led. The school I attended gave a picnic party for the local children, but they wouldn’t allow evacuated kids like Raymond and me to join in. Learning of this, Hilda went ballistic, stormed off to the headmistress, and made such a fuss that in the end, while we were still not included, we were taken back to the pub and had our own picnic. At that tender age I’d never heard language like Hilda’s – it was quite some gab she had the gift of!
All was clear from bombing raids when I returned home to Essex Road in late 1944. Like the thousands of young children sent out of London to avoid the Blitz and the destruction of much of the East End, I was restored to Mum – and Dad when on leave. We were reunited, Hilda and Raymond, too. Grandma and Grandpa were full of joy to see us again. Dad was still away, but hardly very far away: in Clapham.
Victory was in sight. But unknown to us there was a new and even deadlier threat. We came back to what was the most terrifying ordeal of all, the destruction caused by the pilotless planes; first the V1 flying bombs, then the deadly V2 rockets launched on London from mobile trailers.
The flying bombs were like a dark shadow, chugging, rattling and droning across the sky, with their 1,000 pounds of explosive which always seemed to be released at a point just above your head. We would sense that, because the noise would suddenly cut out, and we never knew if they’d glide onwards or fall straight down. During the cold, miserable winter of 1944 we got to know these new weapons: all at once, without any warning, there would just be this eerie silence. They were fired straight into sub-orbital space and came down so fast that if we heard them we had been lucky and had escaped.
One day this happened to us. ‘Face down on the floor everyone!’ shouted the white-coated fishmonger. I was round at Poplars Road. Raymond and I had been sent out to buy fish for Kitty, our cat.
There was a flash and then a huge explosion as the rocket hit the Baker’s Arms bus shelter about 150 yards away. Everyone threw themselves on the floor of the shop. Buildings were blown up or simply collapsed. Debris flew everywhere. Bodies, blood and severed limbs were scattered across the street; ambulances screamed and sirens wailed as fire engines and rescue squads arrived.
Raymond and I had flattened ourselves on the fishmonger’s floor. We’d had a very lucky escape. There was dust and debris everywhere. A woman came up to where we lay flat on our bellies, quivering with terror.
‘Where do you live?’ she asked. ‘Do you live locally?’
This kind woman then took each of us by the hand and brought us back to Auntie’s place in Poplars Road. Here a couple of front windows had been blown out and we found Hilda in a petrified state, sitting on top of the kitchen table. She was perched there as if there was a swirling flood rising around her.
‘You must take shelter under the table,’ she’d been told before the air-raid warning and the rocket struck. Definitely the safest place was to shelter under it.
‘But I can’t, no I can’t!’ she shrieked. ‘There’s a mouse there!’