Life Without Armour by Alan; Sillitoe

in the House of Commons during some important debate he seemed to be asleep, not caring to be influenced by what the Leader of the Opposition had to say. Disraeli’s own speech was already prepared, and this gesture of integrity, and disregard of other points of view, must have impressed if not influenced me, since I remember it when most films from that period have been forgotten unless they contained set-pieces of violence and adventure. Such films, far more thrilling to see, were those of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni. Never mind that such characters ended heroically dead, at least they’d had their time of glamorous power and glorious excess.
    Every day was an island, closed by sleep and sleep. The hour of a film came and went, leaving no firmer mark that school life could not rub out, or tread down to a layer where it was apparently forgotten. At the time of tests, because no homework was ever given, I often (though not too often) studied in the bedroom in order to steal a march on the others. Having little confidence in my ability to memorize what was imparted during lessons, it was the right thing to do, and proved I could learn more through lack of confidence, which was a secret kept to myself, than by boasting or carelessness.
    By the summer of 1939 I was sufficiently well informed to deplore the treaty between Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, but such an event was overridden when on 1 September we were sent home from school with a cyclostyled map showing those areas of the city from which all children under fourteen should be evacuated. Anyone living east of the sinewy River Leen could become a casualty in a bombing raid, and our house lay within the area.
    My father found work building shelters, a job calling for overtime which he was willing to give, the double advantage to the rest of us being that there was more money to spend, and he was less around the house. My parents were thirty-eight years old, and after fourteen years of marriage it was suddenly easier to feed and clothe their children in terms which were no longer desperate. As my mother said with bitter irony: ‘There’s no cloud that doesn’t have a silver lining.’
    They were against sending four of their five children – Michael had been born two months ago – away for the Duration. If they were killed in the bombing, which everyone thought sure to come, they might never see us again. On the other hand, if we went away they wouldn’t have us to look after for a while, which Peggy and I knew weighed somewhat in their arguments, while she and I had no objections because we would be getting away from home on an adventure which the government was paying for.
    â€˜We’ll let them go,’ my father said finally, ‘and see what happens.’
    My mother was more fearful. ‘I suppose so. We don’t want the Germans to kill all of us.’
    Everyone had been so terrorized by propaganda that mass bombing was expected to start immediately. The parents of Arthur Shelton, however, refused to sign the offer of evacuation, his father saying: ‘If we die, we all die together.’ The signature giving permission had to be written on the back of the map, which I had hoped to keep.
    The list of clothes to be taken included such exotic garments as pyjamas and underwear, which none of us had. I walked up the street to the buses with my gasmask box on a string, and a carrier bag containing a shirt, a pair of socks, and The Count of Monte Cristo . One could not have travelled lighter. I said goodbye to my Latin, French, Spanish and German Midget Dictionaries, and my maps and papers, thinking they might get lost if taken with me, though perhaps to keep an anchor after all at home.
    Given a pastry and a bar of chocolate, which Pearl vomited out of the window even before the bus reached open country, we sang our way through Sherwood Forest, Peggy keeping her arms around Brian who wondered what was