I have been thinking about my early life in a period of history that seems today to be extraordinary, but then was simply the way it was - freedom to think and act at a slower pace.
Let me start when I was in Switzerland, aged 14 and staying to learn French in a dark,
Gothic kind of house with a family called Chapuis. Their daughter, I believe, had been a temporary nanny in our family, learning English and looking after us youngsters.
When in Switzerland, my uncle, an MP, sent word to my mother that war was inevitable and I should return to England as soon as possible.
So I set off by rail through France and then to England by ferry, to live on my own in our country cottage.
With my father recently dead, my mother kept the family finances together by working and living in London.
I was brought up in a family that thought highly of nature, sport, and self-sufficiency, but not of intellect.
So life at Wellington College was for me a bit tedious, except for being rather different from the other boys, which my tutor realised and encouraged. But except for sports, art, and being an efficient brew fag, I was ill-fitted for that kind of education, being enumerate to start with, and often lost in the corridors and passageways of a large institution. But I coped, having been brought up to look after myself.
The war came. And in 1939, with my mother at WVS (Women’s Voluntary Services) a message came through to where she was working from an American family wanting a boy from England to escape Hitler’s conflict.
My mother asked me if I wanted to take up their offer. After all, it was thought, at that time, the Germans might well invade the UK and subjugate our country. My mother wanted at least one of our family to survive. I accepted.
So I took a train to Liverpool and boarded the Duchess of Richmond liner for my first of three wartime crossings of the Atlantic. Already at war, Nazi submarines were at large and dangerous.
(I returned in 1942, joined the RAF, became a pilot back in America, and returned to England at the end of the war in Europe.)
This was a short period of my life that, if unusual was, for one with little schooling, in a way educational.
We live now in a world of non-stop communication when we are aware of dodgy politicians, thieves, and villainy of which we were largely unaware all those years ago.
Now, in a world of “Health and Safety” I am so lucky to be able to look back nostalgically to that short and youthful age of freedom and innocence.
