From Bow to Burma: Teacher of English Overseas

PART ONE: FROM PILLAR TO POST: 1935–1959

(from Bow to Bangkok)

1

To Them That Sit in Darkness

To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

St Luke 1, 79.

London’s weather was about normal for mid-February. On the miserable night of Wednesday the thirteenth the north wind swept down from Mile End Road, gusted along Campbell Road and sent hail clattering over the slates of the long terrace, slithering into gutters and bouncing into tiny front gardens. The sharper gusts slanted it on to the long rows of darkened windowpanes, and shifted it where it lay pale in the yellow pools of light beneath the street lamps. The Widow’s Son, a pub just round the corner at the bottom of the road, had closed for the night and the street was deserted. Behind the terrace, where the small back yards ended in a wall and a sheer drop to the railway lines, the wind hissed along the rails.

By this time on a weekday, everyone along the terrace would normally be asleep, or at least tucked up in bed; but one back yard was faintly illuminated by light coming from a rear window, for downstairs in number 117 there was a party atmosphere. By the sash window, which had been opened an inch or two because the air inside was hazed with cigarette smoke, stood a table half covered with bottles of ale and Guinness brought from The Widow’s Son.

Crowded into the tiny room were half a dozen men with tumblers in their hands, joking and placing informal bets on whether the baby would be a boy, and if so, whether he was going to be called Valentine. One of these men, all brothers, had indeed been christened Valentine and looked forward to having another in the family. Their mother—who had borne sixteen children of her own and was acknowledged in Bow as an experienced and reliable, if totally unqualified, midwife—was upstairs helping yet another baby into the world. She had already taken up towels and hot water. Occasionally, one of the men would turn round and glance at the mantelpiece. It was a few minutes before midnight, and the chiming clock that stood there would soon be announcing Saint Valentine’s Day, 1935. Footsteps rumbled down the staircase. The laughter and chatter faded, and the brothers were all facing the inner door when it opened a little and a face appeared.

It’s a boy, and they’re both doing fine.

A boy first time? Bloody good.

Congratulations, Reg!

Congratulations!

They were shaking Reg’s hand, clapping him on the back, calling him Dad, pouring him a Guinness and having another drink themselves.

Cheers! Cheers!

Then, as they remembered their bets, some crowed and others complained.

See? What did I tell ya? That’s twenty Woodbines. Cough up.

Shit. I was sure it’d be a girl.

Oi! Come on nah, Val, you mean sod, you owe me ten bob.

Bugger me, another couple of minutes and I’d’ve had a quid in me ’and!

(That was Uncle Valentine, a clerk in a Belgian bank somewhere in the City.)

And so it went on. The winnings were paid out and there was more merrymaking, until their mother came down to take Reg upstairs to kiss his wife Isobel and have his first look at me. Only then was Gran able to come back down to sit among her sons and enjoy her favourite tipple—a pint of Guinness and milk, half and half.

That, according to the testimonies of parents, uncles and aunts, and with almost no descriptive embroidery of my own, is how I came into this world. And thank goodness I arrived when I did: I’d hate to be called Valentine like my uncle. My parents probably wouldn’t have got married when they did if it hadn’t been necessary. I was born about six months after the wedding and I could hardly have arrived at a worse time. Parts of England were only just beginning to recover from ‘the slump’, the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street Crash; but in London’s East End and other parts of the country there was still mass unemployment. For the poorest, housing conditions were bad, diphtheria and other diseases were killers, and undernourishment was such that tooth decay set in quickly. Dental care was unaffordable: many people in their thirties, including my aunt Ivy, had no teeth because when they started to go bad, it was cheaper to have them all pulled out—provided you could afford dentures. Apparently, when I was just two there was even an outbreak of typhoid in Croydon that killed forty-three people. When in the same year I got double pneumonia, I was treated at home and almost died.

All of the above are details that I gathered in later life, because of course I have no recollection of that time. Although things must have been difficult for the Abbotts in Bow, I think the hardship was offset by the size of Gran’s family (of her sixteen pregnancies, most had survived and some were earning) and by her own small earnings as an amateur local midwife. Life was certainly not as hard as in the north-east, where the heartbreaking Jarrow March was starting. At least my father was working as a bank messenger for Credito Italiano in the City. But just before my birth my mother had been obliged to give up her job selling perfumes at Potter and Moore’s, a nearby store, so there was one less wage-packet and one more mouth to feed. Gran’s place was bulging at the seams, and buying a house was out of the question so my parents moved with the new baby, first into upstairs rooms in Rounton Road and then, after a couple of years, into the downstairs half of 22 Swaton Road, home of the kindly Mrs Dale.

Much, much later I would learn that there were destructive forces on the move in the wider world. Hitler had begun the rearmament of Germany, and his future ally, Mussolini, was embarking on the conquest of Ethiopia. Stalin was waging a campaign of terror, holding show trials and executing or exiling countless people from all walks of life; in the Far East, the Japanese were slaughtering the Chinese; and Mao’s long march to Shensi was already under way. Being unaware of such distant matters, and with even domestic incidents leaving no pictures in my memory until I was about three—only a few first-hand fragments proved indelible. I can see one of them now.

There’s a cinder path running from the back door to the end of a narrow garden. This is behind the terrace house in Swaton Road, just a couple of hundred yards from Gran’s. The path runs close to a pale grey wall on the left, and on the narrow strip of soil in between there are some colourless straggly plants that feel brittle in the hot sun. I’ve just come down the path and pushed them aside because I want to get up on the wall. On tiptoe I can only just see over it, so I’m scrabbling at the grimy lime-washed brickwork with my feet and trying to heave myself up with my hands. My fingers slip off, covered with whitewash flakes. I try again, pressing my cheek against the cool surface, my eyes just coming level with the top of the wall. The reason I now remember this so clearly is that it was at that moment that my eyes focused on a huge spider a few inches away. It was heading for my gasping mouth. I fell backwards in a panic and tumbled into rustling leaves. Of course it wasn’t huge really, just one of those peabodied spiders with very long delicate legs; but at that age and at that short distance I found it horrifying. I was only about three, so this happened well before the outbreak of war in 1939.

That little memory is of no particular consequence, but I value it for two good reasons: firstly because it is my earliest, and secondly because it is my own and not someone else’s. In recalling their childhood people often unknowingly pass on what they have been told by relatives and family friends rather than what they truly remember. It’s easy to do: a favourite anecdote about you has been told so many times in your hearing that your mind’s eye builds up a vivid picture of the episode, a story that feels so much like a memory that you report it as one. But, for fear of being thought a cissy, I told no one about my fear of that spider until I was a grown-up.

It’s impossible to tell which of the next two memories comes second. It’s even possible that both vignettes are drawn from the same day in 1940. In one of them, I’ve been playing just outside the door—the front door this time. There is no garden, just a pavement, so I know it is not Gran’s house on Campbell Road, but the one in Swaton Road, the one we were living in. I’m standing on the pavement looking at the sky above the terraced houses of Bow. Some little aeroplanes have appeared and there are some distant booming noises. Two of the aeroplanes come closer, then wheel overhead, snarling and stuttering. At this moment, I feel my arm being pulled almost out of its socket and my feet leaving the ground as I am dragged indoors by my frantic mother. That’s one scene.

The other is of three lamp-lit faces surrounded by darkness. Outside there is a droning noise punctuated by sharp bangs and booms that make the earth jump. It feels as if we’re in a runaway vehicle that’s rumbling and rocking along a bumpy, unlit road. The faces are those of Mrs Dale, who lives upstairs, my mother, and also a stranger—probably a passer-by who, when the air-raid siren sounded, was too far from her house to reach her own Anderson shelter in safety. The noises, the loudest preceded by a screech and followed by a swinging of the paraffin lamp and a heaving of the ground I’m sitting on, continue for a long time. Occasionally, there are pattering noises above my head as pieces of something fall on the shelter.

The experience must have been terrifying for these women, but I remember only excitement. That is all I can truly recall about this particular scene, but I was later told that I had been persuaded that the loudest noises were caused not by bombs, but by the crashing of dozens of enemy planes. Time and again I would say, "Was that one of theirs, Ma?"

And I’d clap delightedly on learning every time that it was.

In 1940, and not a moment too soon, my mother and I would leave London, but there are a few other inconsequential pictures in mind that pre-date that escape. I remember once having to clamber over the rubble and fallen trolley-bus wires on Mile End Road, where there was a narrow, dark roadside shop in which, just inside, a huge inverted bottle stood glowing like a yellow lantern. I stood staring at it as great bubbles wobbled upward through it, and then I was served a cup of still lemonade the like of which I had never tasted and would never taste again. I remember admiring a night sky glowing with beautiful colours and being told that it was a direct hit on a paint factory that had set the sky ablaze. I recall stopping on the way to school some days to pick up chunks of shrapnel that lay still warm on the pavements and in the gutters. The fractured metal seemed to twinkle, but the jagged edges could cut at a touch. I also remember being taken somewhere on a trolleybus that went into a long black tunnel and came out beside a patch of ground that housed what at first sight looked like a huge elephant. I already knew what a barrage balloon was, but I had never seen one so close. I think it might have been at the southern end of the Blackwall Tunnel.

The docks were nearby, and I once saw a huge red and black funnel and some masts, all apparently growing from a long grey roof above terraced houses, and thought how strange that was and how small the houses looked. I can also still see and hear the steel railway bridge just up the road from my grandmother’s house on Campbell Road. As my mother and I approach it one rainy night I hear the usual metallic echo of dripping water, but when we walk under it and the darkness deepens, the great black ceiling suddenly thunders deafeningly and drops fall heavily all over us as a train passes. I can also see, one hot summer day, what looks like a half-buried gigantic orange in the back yard: it’s a bed of bright marigolds growing thickly all over the hump of the Anderson shelter behind the house in Swaton Road.

Many of my earliest memories derive from going somewhere, even if only down a little cinder path, to a market or round the corner to school. I was to spend a great deal of my life ‘going somewhere’, a fact that was predicted by a well-known eccentric racing tipster of those days who called himself Prince Monolulu. My mother had taken me shopping somewhere up in town, and as we were coming out of an arcade we saw a tall, colourfully robed exotic figure approaching. He was black, he wore a headband decorated with great coloured ostrich plumes, and he veered towards us shouting, I got a horse!, then bent down to pat my head. That much I remember. According to my mother, he said that dis li’l feller would travel a looong, looong way and would break aaall de ladies’ hearts.

My mother told me that not only was I able to write short words and read simple sentences when I was just two and a half years old, but I also showed an early teaching ability by annoyingly correcting people’s pronunciation. Mrs Dale, for instance, had apparently announced her intention to go and buy some fresh fish.

I fink I’ll get a nice bit of ’addick, she said.

"It’s not ’addick. It’s hhhaddock," said the odious child.

Oo-er. ’Ark at ’im!

Prince Monolulu was certainly right about the travelling, but my first journey, soon to take place, didn’t take me a long, long way—only thirty-odd miles as the crow flew. Yet that move from the grey streets of the East End was nevertheless momentous.

2

Fresh Woods

Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.

John Milton, Lycidas, 1637.

It was mid-September 1940 when Ma and I left Bow. Ma had rightly decided that it would be very risky to stay on there. In mid-August, two aircraft factories near Croydon aerodrome had been bombed, and a week after that some high explosive bombs had been dropped on Harrow, and crowds had visited the site of an unexploded bomb near Bow cemetery. After that first scatter of bombs, and just as Ma was preparing to leave, the Luftwaffe started bombing the East End night after night. The first raid, I learned much later, was on the night of 7 September, and I think we must have left London soon after that. Apparently the bombing went on almost continuously for seventy-six nights. It wasn’t until the third of November that there came a night without an air-raid alert, by which time 10,000 tons of high explosives and an equal weight of incendiary bombs had fallen on London. By November, half the population of the East End had moved out.

Although we got out in the nick of time, we didn’t escape all the bombing. The little nursery school in Eagling Street that I first attended had been destroyed, and I had no sooner been transferred to Devons Road School than that too was hit. I was then sent to a large, formidable red brick institution in Knapp Road that looked like a barracks without a parade ground. Above the black wrought-iron gates was a stone arch, with the phrase GIRLS & INFANTS in bold relief. The tarmac playing area surrounding the building was little wider than a path, and was separated from the main road by a tall, yellow-brick wall; it was the school’s walled-and-railinged flat roof that acted as the main playground. I seem to remember that this school, my third, also suffered a little damage; but when I went to see it fifty-five years later it looked just as I had remembered it and was still in use.

Ma had known it was time to get out of harm’s way. But where to go? And what about Dad? His work as a messenger at the Credito Italiano ended when that bank was closed down because Mussolini had allied himself to Hitler, and Dad was reduced to caretaking by day and firewatching on the roof of the bank at night. He was taking turns, I suppose, with another employee and I consequently saw little of him. The nearby docks were a favourite target for the Luftwaffe, and large areas of Poplar and Bow were being flattened. A house that had yesterday looked solid and unshakeable would today be a heap of bricks, another a blackened, staring shell; and yet another would find its bedroom embarrassingly open to the public view, like a lady surprised in her underwear.

Ma was an orphan, and what I didn’t know at the time was that her only brother, John, had found a place in the country for his family to retreat to. Uncle John, Auntie Lily and their two children had just settled in there when John got his calling-up papers and was drafted into the Royal Artillery. Ma received a telegram inviting us to stay with Lily and share the rent for the time being. Dad would have to carry on working, so he stayed with Gran. Ma packed up our few belongings, paid off the rent, took me down Swaton Road to Campbell Road to say goodbye to Gran and her other in-laws and then, with me in tow, trudged up to Bow Road tube station to get a District Line train. After changing to the Northern Line for Waterloo and finding the right Southern Railway train, we glided out of the suburbs and passed a tantalising river and green fields and ponds.

Arriving in Guildford, Ma located the terminal bus stop of the Tillingbourne Valley service, and we boarded a small-nosed maroon bus with dark red plush seats, each bearing a little numbered disc on the back. There were notices saying ‘Season Tickets Must Be Shewn’ and ‘Spitting is Prohibited’ (I saw these later on). I don’t remember the whole of our journey, I just know from later experience what must have been involved; but, for some reason, I do remember clearly the little bus, the warm autumn evening silence as it stood waiting, and the smell of its dusty upholstery. The next bit I don’t remember. Perhaps I dozed off on the bus and, on arrival in Shamley Green after that long journey, I was sent upstairs to sleep straight away; but the things I can honestly say that I do remember after that are so bright in my memory that they might have happened yesterday.

I can list the images that remain in my mind’s eye, but it will be the most vivid that will come first rather than the earliest, because I have no idea of their chronology. I see them on a mental map rather than in time sequence, and some of the images might be memories of later visits. Down the lane, beyond the village green, there’s the most beautiful flower I’d ever seen—a single wild yellow iris, just out of reach, and near its stem my left leg alarmingly ankle-deep already in the black sludge of a swamp, unsuspected beneath its green mantle of weed. Beyond that, the lane comes to a narrow wooden footbridge across a clear shallow stream bubbling over stones, with chestnut brown and sapphire blue damselflies flitting above it. Turning back towards home, I come to the village green. It’s roughly triangular, and lying to one side in the nettles is a huge rusty metal roller that I can just climb up on; this giant lies just behind Forrest Stores, the only shop in the village.

I go back across the through-road and up the hill, where there are woods and copses floored with a mist of bluebells in springtime. Turning back toward the village I come to a dark doorway. Inside, there’s a forge, a blacksmith’s shining red face and the hind quarter of a massive horse glowing like a conker. Later on, I’d be helping the blacksmith by jumping up and pulling the bellows handle down with my whole weight. The forge is next to a little pub called the Red Lion, in front of which, between its outside benches and the Guildford road, stand three old pollarded elms, hollow and haunted by bats that flicker against a summer evening sky. Then the short row of Red Lion cottages. In the backyard of one, my new home in that winter of 1940/41, there’s a water-pump bearded bright with ice. Last, but not least, there’s my very different new school, my fourth, which I remember as having only one large room like a church hall and only one teacher dealing with four small age-groups of kids, one group in each corner. We have slates and slate-pencils for writing practice.

I could go on and on, but those are the first things that came to mind. There were dusty, overripe damsons to find day after day at the foot of a tree on the way to and from school with my cousin, Ernie. We would eat them by the dozen after wiping them quickly on our trousers, and I recall how excited I was to find that there were birds other than sparrows and pigeons, beautiful things called chaffinches and blue tits, and how I loved being able to roam around at all hours of the day without having to scamper home at the sound of an air-raid siren. I remember—but the point is simply that this move to Shamley Green, a small village in the depths of Surrey, changed my life completely and influenced its direction ever afterwards. My enduring love of wild flowers, birds, butterflies, all things bright and beautiful, stems directly from Adolf Hitler’s decision to unleash his airborne blitzkrieg on my home town and Ma’s determination not to fall prey to his Luftwaffe.

The Credito Italiano was, as I discovered many years later, placed in liquidation by the Board of Trade and closed down in September 1940, so it wouldn’t be long before Dad was released from his final duties there. But Auntie Lily’s tiny place, number 4 Red Lion Cottages, was already bursting at the seams. It was necessary to find another place to live before he could join us. I found myself next in a small terraced house on a bank of the river Wey, just outside the quiet market town of Guildford and a few doors away from a pub called The Row Barge. While he was in the Royal Navy, the publican would need someone to take care of his son, and for this service, Ma got the house rent-free. Soon, Dad came down from London and at length managed to get a job at Dennis’s factory. A few weeks later he received his calling-up papers.

This little house was only a temporary lodging, but in the short time we were there, I clocked up some memories that have remained clear ever since. One is of my excitement as the river rises until our little backyard, then the lawn around the pub, then a stretch of the road, are all under water. In another, I am colouring a political cartoon in the Daily Mirror and feeling very much alone. I think Dad was out looking for work a lot of the time and Ma was looking after the publican’s son. In yet another little scene, I am again alone as with my crayons I finish off a drawing of a camouflaged Hurricane and hear on the wireless the chorus line of a popular tune that I’d heard Ma singing.

I was in my forties before I happened to hear that song again. Hearing it announced on BBC Radio 2, I sat down to listen to Room Five Hundred and Four, and my eyes filled with tears as I followed the words of this ballad, the story of a couple who were able to share only a short time together in a hotel before the man had to go away to war. I suppose the reason for my tears lay in another vivid memory of that time. My father is going outside on a cold grey day, turning to pick me up and give Ma and me a hug, then shouldering a bag and setting off for the Woking road without looking round. Ma is crying. This departure, as I discovered from my father’s Royal Marine service papers long after his death, occurred in mid-March 1941; and not until the war was over did I see him again, except for an hour or so when Ma and I were able, after spending half a day on buses, to visit him at a camp before his embarkation. I didn’t understand the enormity of this departure at the time, partly because I was only six, but also I think because Dad had already become such a transient figure.

The nearest school now was on the other side of Woking Road. Bellfields Primary, which was to be my fifth school for a short time, was in complete contrast to the little school in Shamley Green. It was of modern construction, gleaming with great expanses of window and set in acres of well-kept grass that I remember as being first jewelled with crocuses and later radiant with daffodils, but I remember none of the teachers there and nothing of what went on in school. I can only have attended for two or three terms, because early in the summer of 1942, the owner of the cottage we were living in was invalided out of the Royal Navy and Ma had to find another house, preferably one that was not chronically damp like the cottage by the river and which was far less cramped. She was told by the local rag-and-bone man that there was a fellow up in Gloucester Road who had rooms to let because he had just married and wanted to join his wife in Folkestone. Ma came to some arrangement with him and one sunny day we set out. The house was only about two miles away, but it was nearly all uphill and the move had to be made on foot. Ma had borrowed a pram, one of those huge contraptions that looked like a boat on four wheels, and into this went our belongings. We set out pushing this easily enough along the little road that ran by the river, but on the steep slope of Woodbridge Hill we slowed right down and had to push hard. The only part of this journey that I remember clearly was when, hot and tired, I stopped helping to push and sat on a little stretch of low wall that separated a two-pump petrol station from the main Guildford-to-Aldershot road. It was sunny and the gravel forecourt was surrounded with snowball bushes in bloom. On being reminded of this migration half a century later, in her