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A CHANGE OF HEART

In May 1941 my parents decided, quite suddenly, that they’d had enough of it. Two long years of war had brought the nightly air raids on Hull to such a pitch that our school was more often closed than open; and when it did open the classes that reformed were often many faces short. It was impossible to tell whether our missing classmates had been evacuated into the country or had died in the bombing, although to be truthful it was all the same to me at the time. If they’d joined the Great Exodus they were missing all the fun, and if they’d perished in an air-raid, well, one day without them was generally sufficient for me to forget them altogether; and because the entire world revolved around me at that time, and no one counted half so much in the scheme of things as my seven-year-old self, I was confident I would live to remember it all. Confident, indeed, that I would not be killed, although I was prepared to accept my fair share of narrow escapes as part of a natural process of survival.
We, the children, passed the time playing such games as Kings, Hop-Scotch and Rounders, and in the early mornings we combed the side-streets on eighteen-inch wheels for pieces of shrapnel and the brass nose-cones of shells hurled aloft from the gun emplacement over in Costello’s fields. The hotter the exchanges the night before, the greater our harvest, and many a large fragment of metal became the object of a swap, a bribe or a bullying. I was as cunning as a fox and as ruthless as a French general in those days; and I was afraid of nothing.
Suddenly it was all over. We were preparing to leave a city which, after two years of bombing, looked as if it was slowly being swallowed by the sea. One particularly disastrous air-raid  the so-called ‘‘May the seventh blitz’’ of 1941  had made such devastating inroads and swept so many houses and public buildings away, including the seven-mile-long riverside quay and the locomotive sheds at Alexandra Dock, that at last my father accepted the invitation, long held open, to send us  myself, my sister Ann, my brother Peter and our mother  to stay with some relatives in Barnetby, a small village in Lincolnshire.
The news of our impending departure broke on my ears one bright May morning, as we were preparing for one of our rare attendances at school. It had been decided that Father would carry on working in the city and would visit us every weekend, and I and my sister and brother would continue our education in the village school.
Peter was happy. He was frightened of bombs and in my opinion should have been born a girl. Ann was indifferent . . . but I left for school that morning in a towering rage. For me the excitement would be over. Leaving the city would be like a death.
I laugh now to think that, after sullenly shouldering the cardboard box containing my precious gas mask, with my name and address written clearly on its lid in my mother’s sloping hand, and storming out of the house to kick the hell out of every fence on the way to school, inwardly railing against this act of cowardice, this weak-kneed decision to quit; that after setting out in such a destructive frame of mind, I should find myself scurrying home at evening in a state of abject terror, past a blurr of fences and gates and notice-boards with sun-wrinkled documents pinned to them, to exhibit so profound and unquestionable a change of heart as to suggest that the next ferry sailing for New Holland would suit me perfectly.
How could I have changed my mind so suddenly? Because that same morning something very frightening took place; something so frightening that it changed my mind instantly.
It happened in the middle of one of our morning lessons. Playtime had just ended with Sue Clark, whom I called ‘my little mother’, tying my shoelaces for me. Our teacher, a slim woman with black hair tied back into an austere bun, was counting milk-straws from one box to another. Against the listless chant of the class her voice sounding like the chirping of a house-sparrow. Then the door opened and all eyes turned to see the squat, grey-haired figure of Miss Mannion, our headmistress, entering the room. The teacher stopped what she was doing and listened dutifully to the older woman’s whisperings, nodding assent from time to time. Then the headmistress left and our teacher told us all to close our desks quietly and stand up. Seconds later we were led out of the room and along the polished parquet of the main corridor, past empty classrooms festooned with the artistic efforts of five- and six-year-olds, and up the wide staircase to the upper corridors. Very soon we came across a number of children clustered around a large window that gave out onto one of the inner quadrangles. It was obvious by now that something out there was important enough to take precedence over the serious business of learning, and we pushed and squirmed and craned our necks to see it.
‘It’s called a barrage balloon,’ one of the teachers was saying. ‘It keeps the German planes from flying below a certain height, so that it’s harder for them to hit their targets.’
At last I caught sight of it, floating miles up in the blue sky, gleaming with the sooty sheen of aluminium, sidling now left, now right in the warm air like a tethered animal. Yet it appeared to be neither suspended nor tethered. Poised far above us in the bigness of the sky, it looked for all the world like some predatory creature waiting to pounce.
I stood hypnotised. The blood froze in my veins. Faintly in the background I heard our teacher’s voice.
‘This is the first,’ she was saying. ‘When we get the others . . . ’
The others? How many more were coming? I stood there stunned, staring in horrified silence, convinced that the moment I turned my eyes away it would make some swift movement . . . .
At four o’clock that afternoon I ran all the way home with my throat constricted and my mind paralysed with fear. I ran all the way without once looking at the sky. I watched my shadow flying before me, terrified by the thought that another might join it at any moment. If a cloud had moved across the sun just then I think I would have rushed blindly into the nearest house and thrown myself under a bed.

Two days later the five of us were standing together on the lower deck of the Tattershall Castle, a paddle steamer owned by the London and North Eastern Railway, en route to Uncle Jack’s Railway Hotel in Barnetby-le-Wold. I scanned the choppy river for bobbing mines as Peter covered his ears and danced around at the sound to the boat’s siren. Father joined a small group of working men looking sternly over the bow-rails at the burned-out warehouses and shattered piles of the centuries-old Riverside Quay.
For a long time I stood by the starboard rail watching the city of Hull falling back astern. Below me the engines pounded as the huge paddle-wheels beat white foam miraculously out of the filthy black Humber. My last memory of the Second Great War was the biting salt wind, the screaming gulls . . . and the ferryboat’s broad wake trailing out behind, white on grey, like a chalk line on a dirt road.

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