Kenneth O. Morgan: My Histories

Chapter One

A Divided Consciousness

EVERYBODY HAS A PAST , everybody has a memory. My past is the product of a divided consciousness, divided between the London of my origin and the Wales of my memory, between essentially north Wales Aberdyfi and south Wales Dolybont (just three miles away as the Welsh crow flies across the Dyfi estuary), between my sense of being an Owen and the fact of my being a Morgan. It is this ambiguity, my schizoid view of myself, that is an explanation of the way I have approached the study and writing of history, with all its multiple identities, these sixty years and more.

My historical past began in North London, in a middle-class suburb called Alexandra Park in the borough of Wood Green. I was born in a nursing home in Pellatt Grove near the tube station in Wood Green on 16 May 1934. My family lived in a small semi-detached house, number 219 Alexandra Park Road. I gather that we had a tranquil time in those pre-war years. Both my parents were state school-teachers, very modestly paid but in a profession which, in Wales, enjoyed high public esteem and which had proved an escape for many working-class Welsh people in the bleak years. In the 1930s my father, David James Morgan, who had known some unemployment in the period after the First World War, had a secure job as a school teacher in a secondary school in a working-class area of Islington. My mother Margaret Morgan, née Owen, had been a teacher in an infants’ school who cruelly lost her job after 1931 when the National government, incredibly as it now seems, decided that married women who taught in schools should be removed from the payroll. She did not return to work of any kind until opportunities arose as a supply teacher during the war when, indeed, she occasionally taught me in Aberdyfi school. My father, as a teacher and a fine one, evidently placed much emphasis on my being able to spell and read English – though not necessarily Welsh. I have vague recollections of being on the beach in Aberdyfi – it must have been during the Munich crisis – showing some grown-ups that at the age of four I could spell ‘Czechoslovakia’. In the spring of 1939, I went to Rhodes Avenue school in Alexandra Park (the avenue so named because Cecil Rhodes had once lived there), where the headmistress, Miss Lorraine, decided that since I was so far ahead in my reading ability I should be placed in a solitary class of my own. It was not a good idea for a very shy and only child, and this decision did apparently greatly upset me. After a brief and distressing period, I was restored to the normal school class, which is what I had wanted. And that appears to have been the only crisis of my earliest years in Alexandra Park, of which otherwise I know and remember nothing.

It was Wales, not London, that shaped my memory. We were a Welsh-speaking family, my father the son of a Cardiganshire village blacksmith, the eldest of eight children, and my mother the daughter of a sailor/boatman, one of three children, of whom a younger brother had died at a very young age. Both were very devoted to their respective families in mid-Wales, and we went to visit often, usually to my mother’s home of Aberdyfi with its beach and other delights for a young child. I was christened in Y Babell, the little Methodist chapel at the top of the hill in my father’s home of Dolybont, in August 1934, reportedly taking exception to the event at the time. I was given the Christian names Kenneth and Owen – Owen being my mother’s maiden name, which I treasure. I was an only child, but I did not mind that. To a considerable degree, my many cousins on my father’s side – Gwilym, Margaret and Leri, Anne and her younger brother, David, all lovely people – made up for what, if any, sense of deprivation I felt. We and their spouses have always been very close.

My parents had met in Liverpool in the 1920s where my father had his first significant job teaching in the Bluecoat School, and where my mother had gone to visit her brother, Arthur, another teacher in Liverpool at that time. My father later took my mother to see the West End musical ‘No, No Nanette’, and I know that its famous song, ‘Tea for Two’, was always tinged with romance for my mother throughout the rest of her life. After a prolonged engagement that allowed them to accumulate some savings (not unusual in those days), they were married in a Calvinistic Methodist chapel in Maengwyn Street, Machynlleth, in the western tip of Montgomeryshire, a short distance from the Dyfi estuary. Aberdyfi is to the north and facing the estuary, whereas Dolybont is a small inland village about a mile from Borth to the south of the Dyfi. This wedding location sounds like a tactful compromise between my parents’ two homes, but they were apparently married there because the Aberdyfi Methodist minister was away on holiday. The date and location of the marriage are not without interest. Their marriage date was 21 August 1930, the day on which the Queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, was born. In those respectful royalist days, her friends excitedly told my mother that this was indeed a lucky omen which promised a long and happy marriage – and so it did, since my parents lived serenely together until my father’s death forty-eight years later. The location of my parents’ wedding (now an art gallery) is directly across the road from an ancient battered building, which is claimed to have been Owain Glyn Dŵr’s putative Welsh parliament in 1406. It has always given me pleasure to have this link, however uncertain, with Wales’s Braveheart and with this major episode in Welsh history.

My parents were quite different in personality, for all the similarity of their background. Much of this difference can be related to their respective home communities. Aberdyfi, then a straggling village with a population of around 2,500 had been a popular and quite fashionable watering place from the early nineteenth century. This was especially the case when the golf links were opened as an 18-hole course in 1892. They were much popularised by the celebrated newspaper correspondent Bernard Darwin, a grandson of the famous scientist, who sang the praises of their very varied holes. Notable among these was the short third hole, the legendary ‘Cader’, where a player drove into the void since the green was invisible. One of my pleasures when caddying for my uncle was looking through a rustic periscope to see if the green ahead was clear. The golf, and the convenient mid-Wales railway line, brought many more affluent visitors to Aberdyfi, most notably public schoolmaster golfers. There was quite a smart hotel, the Trefeddian, along the road towards Towyn (during the war it housed girls from a Swiss boarding school, the Chatelard), while many boarding houses on the front had a steady stream of visitors. One of them was owned by Nain, my grandmother, a happy, kindly soul with a good sense of humour. She developed a close relationship with many of these visitors who loved her and came time and again, even during the war years.

With its bathing, its swimming, its little putting course and tennis courts, and lovely walks in the hills beyond the village to such legendary Arthurian sites as Bearded Lake, Aberdyfi was a cheerful, outward looking place and great fun for children. I used to love sitting in an upstairs room in the early evening watching the changing colours of the Cardiganshire hills across the water. Another joy was walking on the beach along the shore, listening for the bells of Aberdyfi ringing out as a legacy of the legendary Cantre’r Gwaelod, the land submerged in Cardigan Bay as a result of the reputed negligence of Seithennin, a local chieftain. Seithennin, it is said, was a drunkard, a fact that led to the defences against the sea being fatally neglected and Cantre’r Gwaelod being drowned and lost for ever – a useful temperance message. I was always certain that I could hear the ringing drowned bells of Cantre’r Gwaelod from the sands in front of our house. Over the intervening years, Aberdyfi has become more affluent; British Railways provided an attractive jetty, and there are now smart restaurants, coffee bars and women’s fashion shops along the sea front. Affluence, however, has also meant anglicisation. When I last stayed in Aberdyfi with my wife Elizabeth during a holiday in 2012, I could not find a single person who spoke Welsh – everybody, it seemed, had come from Wolverhampton. Aberdyfi had gone global.

By contrast, my father’s home, Dolybont (or Penybont as it was commonly called), very picturesque, was a more inward-looking place, with an atmosphere redolent of the religious revivals that had once erupted nearby. Dolybont was tiny, with a population of barely a hundred, which had to take the bus to Borth or, more ambitiously, to Aberystwyth to buy food and other necessities. It was truly a Welsh version of la France profonde: the postbox on the wall of my aunt’s house, Tanyrallt, bore the letters VR for Victoria Regina. The village’s central feature was a steep bridge that crossed the river Leri. It was next to it that my grandparents lived in Yr Efail, the forge where my blacksmith of a grandfather, Tadcu, plied his trade. He was a quiet countryman, who sadly died when I was eight after a hard life of labour. I recall him with great affection letting me use some old bellows to stoke up the fires in the forge before putting the horseshoes in for treatment. He loved to pile all his very young grandchildren into bed with him while he told some simple Welsh stories, some of which I re-told to amuse my own children decades later. I suspect that Tadcu was a man of profound intelligence for all his lack of education. Some years after his death, I found great piles of Welsh periodicals in Yr Efail, Y Traethodydd and Y Genhinen, sober monthly publications containing learned articles on literature, theology, history and much else. He would have had time to read them because his day’s strenuous work as a blacksmith came to an end at around eleven in the morning. In a fairer world, Tadcu would not have remained a blacksmith for all his life. My grandmother, Mamgu, was a dignified, lovely lady always dressed in black. Mamgu and Tadcu were my main ties with Dolybont, rather than my numerous and mostly jolly uncles and aunts. Otherwise, there was much less entertainment for a boy than in Aberdyfi – indeed, on Sundays, life seemed to stop altogether. But always in my childhood, one of the great joys in life was going to sleep in Yr Efail with the comforting ripple of the Leri in my ears.

My mother, just like Nain, reflected the gentleness of Aberdyfi. A quiet modest woman of endless loyalty to friends and family, she spoke the soft north Wales Welsh of Merioneth. Where my father’s Cardiganshire Welsh, used the words gyda or mas to signify ‘with’ and ‘out’, my mother would say efo or allan, as I do now. When I became a grandfather, I faced the acute dilemma of whether my new grandchildren should call me Taid or Tadcu – it is, I think, indicative of my outlook and personality that the north Wales Taid won out. It is an easier word for young children anyway. The vowel sounds were very different – fo for ‘him’ in Aberdyfi, fe in Cardiganshire. I am a fo man. I used to say that I grew up trilingual: English, north Wales Welsh, and south Wales Welsh. My mother, a keen pianist, had trained as a teacher in Bangor Normal College, as had my father a few years before her. She would recall the ferocious college rules to prevent the young ladies speaking to young men anywhere, redolent of the regime of the Taliban. She was rebuked, for instance, for speaking to her brother in the street at the time of the death of their younger brother, Huw. She was endlessly patient and kind, which may be a reason why she was so successful in teaching small children how to read. She spoke with great sympathy of the children of canal people that she had taught in London and of their pathetic enthusiasm for education, born of the fact that they were endlessly on the move and had no continuous time at school. She was particularly good at teaching immigrant children later on, perhaps because, like them, English was not her first language either. In the 1950s, she had remarkable success in teaching Greek Cypriot children to read, whose delighted parents showered her with little Greek trinkets as a reward. My mother’s father, Owen Owen, was evidently a shy, delightful man, who sadly died before I was born in 1932 – I deeply regret that I never knew him. Among other joys, he would have taken me out on his boat into Cardigan Bay and made me less of the landlubber that I am.

My mother’s family comprised unremarkable country people, with one exception: Evan Evans, my maternal great-great-grandfather. Born in Barmouth in 1779 he had been working in the field on the Ynysmaengwyn estate near Towyn to the north of Aberdyfi around 1800, when he was press-ganged into the navy. He saw fierce and active service, and fought at Trafalgar serving on HMS Minotaur, a ship that fought literally alongside Nelson’s HMS Victory. Evan Evans had a tough time at Trafalgar, where three of his mates were killed, and he himself was injured in the face. He was known locally thereafter as Boch Mawr (‘big cheek’). I still have the large musket he used at Trafalgar, and also his pension form of 1813 which states that he was to receive £10 a year for life (no negligible sum) and that anyone trying to impersonate him would be punishable by death. However, he seemed to flourish after his naval service, and is recorded in the 1851 census, which means he must have lived on into his seventies, perhaps more affluent through prize money than he would have been had he remained undisturbed in the fields of Merioneth.

My father was a more forceful personality than my mother by far. He was evidently a clever boy at Ardwyn grammar school in Aberystwyth. He liked to tell me, in his modest way, of when his sixth form class was asked by the famous schools inspector, Sir Owen Edwards (the only Merioneth man other than me who has been a history tutor at Oxford), ‘Can you give me an example of perfect English style?’ My father piped up, ‘Cardinal Newman, sir!’, which somewhat took Sir Owen aback, and was indeed a remarkable answer from a young boy, especially a Protestant. My father also went to Bangor Normal College before service in the First World War in 1916–18 following the introduction of conscription. He entered the Royal Field Artillery, in the A (Cardiganshire) Battery, and was dispatched to Egypt. So a young Cardiganshire man, who had probably never been to London, found himself gazing at the pyramids and the Sphinx. His war began at the battle of Gaza, and he ended up in Damascus at the end of 1918. He used to talk about some cultural aspects of his war years in the desert fighting the Turks, of his good relations with the Gurkhas, of his low opinion of the Egyptians (many of whom, he said, were thieving), and how he (as a virtual non-swimmer) swam across the Suez Canal. He knew a few words of Egyptian, notably ‘talaheena bint’ (‘Come here, woman’), and I used to wonder what use he may have made of this phrase. He spoke with pride of having met General Allenby, the one military general for whom he ever had a good word. Like many old soldiers, he never mentioned any of the horrible scenes that he must have witnessed in Palestine, such as at the battles of Gaza or Megiddo, but he retained a memento of his war service in a small white circle on his left hand where a Turkish bullet had passed clean through while he was laying down telegraph wires ahead of army lines. A close friend was the Revd Jack Stephens, later both an Anglican clergyman and famous rugby back-row forward who played for both Llanelli and Wales. I recall Dad mentioning the death of his especially great friend and relative Ivor Morgan, on 19 September 1918, in the very last weeks of the war. He described this to me some forty years after the war had ended, and then burst uncontrollably into tears – it was almost the only time I ever saw this old soldier cry. I have Ivor’s memorial card next to me as I write. He looks a nice, kind man too.

After the war, my father ended up teaching for some years in Liverpool, which was where and when he both met my mother and played, in 1923, in a simultaneous chess match (inevitably unsuccessfully) with the Russian world champion Alexander Alekhine. He then moved on to teach in a state school in Islington, North London. His subjects included both mathematics and science, and also English and literature. He was a quiet scholarly person of extraordinarily broad culture. Indeed, I think he was probably the ablest man I have ever known, and I was truly fortunate to have him as a father, He could occasionally be aggressive in manner, but never to me. Obviously, he was a superb teacher, much used by our neighbours to give extra-mural tuition to their children. He could seemingly do everything. He was skilled at woodwork, he could draw clever sketches, he knew all about gardening. And perhaps for that reason, I was useless at most of these – though I shared some of his talent for drawing. One of the things he made in his woodwork was a table-tennis table, and the games we played in a room off a small cellar beneath the hallway gave us endless pleasure throughout my school days. The narrow confines of our cellar meant that I always played ‘ping-pong’ close to the table – and so I do now, playing against my eldest grandson Joseph.

Although my father’s ideas on day-to-day moral issues tended to be cautious and conservative, his opinions on many public subjects were robust. His political views appear to have moved sharply to the left during the First World War. He was thus sympathetic to Russia and hostile towards Winston Churchill, a daring viewpoint during the war years to say the least. Our house reflected some of his unorthodox interests – Marxist tracts by the Communist Palme Dutt; Union of Democratic Control material attacking lies in wartime; pamphlets from the society claiming that Bacon had written Shakespeare’s plays; and, especially, papers on the putative world language Esperanto. He seems to have been naturally minority-minded. He was anti-religious but much enjoyed Welsh chapel services, where he could focus on the sermon and perhaps discuss famous Welsh preachers with the minister afterwards. His abiding interest was chess – both problems and games – which gave scope both for his mathematical gifts and his abilities as a crisp writer. He wrote a famous monthly column ‘Quotes and Queries’ for the British Chess Magazine right down to the month of his death in 1978. I was delighted in Aberystwyth, in 1995, when we appointed a History Professor who told me he had read my father’s column avidly. For him, I was just the son of the famous D. J. Morgan and I was overjoyed to know it. But he combined all this with a cheerful zest for life, including a love of football and cricket which he had played as a young man and of which I also became an enthusiast. Overall, as a devoted (perhaps over-devoted) father, he had an enormous influence on me. He had no particular wish for me to make money, but he did want me to develop my mind – that in due course I became a university teacher gave him unbridled delight. I owe him almost everything. He was also devoted to his seven brothers and sisters and had an intense attachment to family, which must have been difficult for my mother and the other spouses. Several of his siblings followed the traditional Cardiganshire route of becoming milkmen in London. But my father was the only academic, and the greatest brain, within it. For him, the Morgans were a mighty tribe of biblical eminence, and he was its unchallenged elder. I do not feel that I have wanted to inherit that particular role.

As for everyone else, the tranquil tenor of our lives was totally disrupted when world war broke out in September 1939. My father had to stay with his school in Islington, later evacuated to Hertfordshire. But he insisted that my mother and I go down immediately to Aberdyfi to stay with my Nain, and I then went to the local school, Aberdyfi Council School as it was known, complete with my compulsory gasmask. I missed my father terribly during the war years – he could only come down fleetingly during school holidays. But in every other way it was a happy transition. I loved Nain and her large house, and always found Aberdyfi immensely enjoyable. When I entered the Lords, I had no hesitation in telling an initially doubtful Garter King of Arms that I wished to be ‘Morgan of Aberdyfi’. The little seaport still bore many traces of its maritime past, when brigs and schooners had made it the busiest port in Cardigan Bay with much trade – coastal trade locally, and also further afield to places like Norway and Spain. My mother’s father had been a part of that past before the First World War, serving on vessels that took slate from the Corris and Abergynolwyn quarries to places like Scandinavia, and returned with timber or perhaps minerals. When I lived in Aberdyfi, a notable landmark was the ‘boatman’s seat’ on the harbour front, a haven for elderly ex-sailors, all purportedly captains, reminiscent of Dylan Thomas’s Captain Cat. One prominent figure was a blind sailor who shouted at us boys as we raced along the jetty. I was told years later by my Swansea colleague, Professor Alun Davies, who gave an extra-mural class on international history in Aberdyfi, that this old man would terrorise him with loud (and unanswerable) demands for the latitude and longitude of places mentioned. The traditions of the sea were plentiful in Aberdyfi – in house names like ‘Maglona’ and ‘Mimosa’, and in monuments in the local cemetery which testified to losses through shipwrecks or other disasters. Its maritime location persuaded Kurt Hahn, with his link with Gordonstoun school, to set up the Outward Bound school there during the war in 1941, and it is still going strong. A remarkable old chap lived two doors away from us in 9 Bodfor Terrace, ‘Pomona’, whose owner Zoe was a great friend of my mother; he was Zoe’s father, Captain Williams, a man in possession of a fine late-Victorian moustache and a colourful ship’s parrot with even more colourful language. He had evidently sailed to several remote places, and held me spellbound with tales of the storms in the Bay of Biscay and of the even greater terrors of sailing ‘Round the Horn’, which he had done more than once. His house had ample mementoes of life at sea, including tangles of rope and lifebelts – as had our own house too, souvenirs of my grandfather’s career as a man of the sea.

There were other local personalities in Aberdyfi. One was Ellis Williams, the genial ferryman who would spend his afternoons having tea in his living room looking out at the Dyfi estuary, spying through a telescope for customers in Ynyslas on the other side of the river. They would wave their scarves for him to sail over and pick them up them, which he always did. The deacons in our chapels, all shopkeepers, were much-respected big personalities – chemists, drapers, grocers and the like – with our chapel, Tabernacl, having greater prestige because the Calvinistic Methodists were the most numerous nonconformist community. I was never really a believer, though I enjoyed the Sunday School trips into the countryside. A remarkable local figure of a quite different kind was Berta Ruck, the daughter of a former chief constable of Caernarfonshire, who lived on the top floor in ‘Pomona’. She was a highly successful popular novelist, who wrote scores of romantic novels which brought her to the attention of Barbara Cartland amongst others. She had the air of a grande dame of the late Hapsburg empire, but she was a popular figure locally. I knew her as Mrs Oliver since she was married to Oliver Onions, also a writer, who had apparently changed his surname to protect his sons. She remained black-haired and was physically remarkably energetic. Every morning when I woke up, I would look out upon the beach and see Mrs Oliver, even at seven in the morning, whatever the time of the year, doing her exercises on the shore before plunging into the chilly waters. Perhaps for that reason she lived on until 1978, dying at the age of one hundred. Down the road from us, in a huge white house called ‘Craig-y-Don’, was a great man I never met, Lord Atkin of Aberdovey – popularly known as ‘Judgatkin’. I never went to Craig y Don – he had grandchildren whom my mother fatally dismissed as being ‘stuck up’ – but Atkin himself became one of my great heroes later on. His judgement in the Liversidge vs Anderson case, when he quoted the old Roman tag that in times of war the laws were not silent, was a great blow for civil liberties which I would refer to in the Lords when discussing the Labour Party’s Counter-Terrorism Acts. I recall his funeral cortège in the village in 1944. I wish I had met his grandchildren, and certainly him.

Aberdyfi was very far from the battle zones and we felt totally secure there. I read the papers avidly and extended the knowledge of geography I had built up from my childhood passion for postage-stamps. Probably under my father’s influence, I took a particular interest in the Russian front and had large maps on the floor illustrating its course; I readily absorbed, with my abiding interest in geography, names like Nivjy Novgorod and Veliki Luki. We read with alarm of the horrors of the blitz of English cities like Plymouth and Coventry and, of course, of London. I saw the latter at first-hand in 1942 when my father took me around central London – my strongest memories are of people sleeping on bunks in tube stations, and of seemingly miles of devastated rubble surrounding St Paul’s Cathedral. But the war did impinge more directly, even in Aberdyfi. I faithfully carried my gasmask with me to the local school. In my Nain’s home, I tried to obey the government’s economy warning that we should wash ourselves in no more than six inches of bathwater; I took my school ruler with me to Nain’s large Victorian bath to ensure conformity. There was stringent food rationing, of course (perhaps less severe in a country village with its own local produce), and the hazards of dark nights if you were out because of blackout material cutting out light from windows. We used to be terrified when my very aged and totally deaf Auntie Mary Jane came down the unlit village from Chapel Square to play me at tiddly-winks, which she much enjoyed. One important wartime novelty was the fact that considerable numbers of evacuees from Merseyside were brought to the town. They were taught at the separate ‘National’ school, and I have no recollection of any kind of conflict with them. On the contrary, more boys meant more people to play football with, while several of them learnt Welsh and added strength to the choirs of the local chapels. We had a dark-haired young girl, Phyllis from Birkenhead, a few years older than me, billeted on us. I liked talking to Phyllis in her room upstairs. My mother seemed to disapprove, believing perhaps with some justice that she was unduly ‘advanced’ in her social or sexual attitudes. But we did nothing more daring than discuss her girls’ magazines.

More directly military, we had commandoes also billeted on us. We had two wonderful young men – Andrew, an English public-school boy, and Leslie, an immigrant I suspect, perhaps German-Jewish. They were exceptionally kind to me, allowing me to dress up in their uniforms and play with their rifles – on my ninth birthday, they kindly bought me a book about the navy in the Mediterranean, East of Malta, West of Suez, which I greatly enjoyed. They were, of course, among the shock troops trained to invade the Normandy beach heads, and I often wonder whether they survived, even for a week, after that bloodbath. In 1943, a most exciting development came which brought the war home even more directly. I looked out one morning and saw the beach covered with soldiers and amphibious landing craft – Ducks, Terrapins and the like. For many months, the beach between Aberdyfi and Towyn was the training area for the Normandy landing on D-Day. For small boys, this meant even more fun since the kindly men driving their Ducks would give us trips into Cardigan Bay. I reflect on this now when I often see aged wartime Ducks carrying tourists along the Thames beyond the terrace of the House of Lords. In Aberdyfi, all that survives of that particular episode are rough concrete pill-boxes scattered along the long beach towards Towyn, to ward off the alleged German threat – back in that day, my friends and I used them as bizarre and somewhat unsanitary play areas.

The small community of Aberdyfi, therefore, expanded rapidly with the evacuees and the soldiers and yet more soldiers in the nearby base at Tonfanau. The expansion happened without apparent trauma. There were dark rumours that abounded that some of the soldiers were becoming too integrated and that some of the younger local wives, whose husbands were far away on military service, were taking civilian-military harmony rather too far. My mother said they were ‘a bit flighty’. A legendary figure was a dark-haired handsome officer called Captain Barnes who was socially much in demand. A frisson of excitement was caused when he took part in a local drama production and played the romantic lead. Whatever the facts, it was certainly the case that some of the servicemen took to the natural appeal of Aberdyfi – and perhaps its female residents – and settled there after the war, running sweet shops and the like.

It was, then, a safe and in many ways enjoyable war in Aberdyfi for a young child. But then, in early 1944, it all changed. My father, whose school was now back in Islington since the Luftwaffe air raids had long ceased, was anxious that we should all be back together again in Alexandra Park. My mother was very apprehensive, but my father assured us that a second front was very near and that the war would then soon be over. The first prophecy proved to be correct, but not the second. So we returned, to my great joy, to our home in Alexandra Park Road, which had hitherto survived the wartime trials. I scarcely recalled our London home at all and greatly missed the sea and my Nain , but it was good to be in the family home and have a life closer to normality. Soon afterwards, my education was fixed. I was interviewed for entry to the junior school of University College School in Hampstead. I was seen here by a genial old eccentric, Dr ‘Bunny’ Lake, the head of the junior school. He rambled on amiably but then asked me a solitary question: namely, the name of the stretch of water that separated Asia from Europe. With my geographical knowledge from postage stamps, that was easy and I confidently replied, ‘The Bosphorus, sir.’ On that sole evidence, he pronounced me to be highly intelligent and to UCS I went, with experiences that I shall describe in the next chapter.

In the meantime, the war was still very much on, and the pleasantness of our return was sharply interrupted. The belief that German air raids were a thing of the past was shattered in early June with the totally unexpected launching of V1 flying bombs or ‘doodlebugs’. I still recall the terror of being at home with my mother when a V1 seemed to cut off immediately overhead, which meant that a terrifying explosion would follow in around five seconds. Miraculously it landed in the nearby Alexandra Park racecourse and there were no casualties or damage. A few weeks later, in mid-September, we were not so lucky. My parents and I were woken up during the night (we slept downstairs, under the dining room table as the government recommended) by a colossal noise. We looked into the hallway to find that, along with broken windows, our front door had been blown clean off its hinges by the blast. Remarkably, the door was not itself damaged, and its leaded glass was intact. The V1 had landed at the top of The Avenue, a mile or so away, killing several dozen people. It was a major calamity. The burnt-out shell of the rocket remained there for some years afterwards, as a grim memorial. I seem to recall that, by breakfast time, the ARP were repairing it, and that by teatime (I went to school that day!) our house seemed reasonably intact, save for boarded-up windows. But it was an anxious period. As a wartime ‘scholarship boy’, I took long journeys to school on the number 102 bus to Golders Green, sometimes during V1 raids. When I got there, we often had our lessons in a changing room in the school basement. Films at the Wood Green Gaumont were sometimes interrupted by air-raid sirens. I recall my mother delaying buying us a new piano, believing that our house should remain as empty as possible in case it was struck again, this time by a V2. Another hazard of this difficult time was the horrendous London fogs or ‘smogs’, commonplace before the Clean Air Acts, which could reduce London’s road traffic to near immobility. I found them more frightening than the ‘doodlebugs’.

Yet, in spite of all this, wartime in Alexandra Park had its pleasures. The neighbourliness induced by dangers from the air made people, so it seemed to my mind, friendly and cooperative. To me, whatever critical historians now conclude, this was broadly the People’s War of popular legend. There was entertainment even in wartime. There were three good cinemas – the Muswell Hill Odeon being a famous instance of ‘art deco’ architecture – and old-fashioned music hall at the Wood Green or Finsbury Park Empires. Soon after the war ended, we had Tom Arnold’s circus at Harringay (so spelt then) with the Schuman Lippizaner horses, which my father, as the son of a blacksmith, much enjoyed. There was also a cornucopia of sport, especially watching Arsenal, whom I came to support (probably my father’s influence again) and who played at the Tottenham ground at White Hart Lane since the Highbury stadium had been damaged by German firebombing. The football teams of 1944–5 were a bit of a mixture – almost any eleven players who could be herded together – but the Arsenal side did include famous pre-war stars like Drake, Bastin and Male. There were also pilgrimages with my father to Lords cricket ground, which became my own particular Mecca after the war.

Even the war itself became almost enjoyable as it neared its end. VE Day was greeted with massive local celebration and a children’s street party where we ate jellies and danced the hokey-cokey. Later, there were fireworks in Alexandra Park. On 8 May 1945, there was a huge show of flags in Alexandra Park Road. As a Welsh family, we could not produce a Union Jack but only a Welsh Red Dragon, which