The Two of Us Read Free Page A

old building and to save money it is being amalgamated with another school. They wouldn’t do that to Eton.
    For some reason, I hope unconnected with this event, I was moved to another school, Upland Junior, and here, under the guidance
     of an inspirational headmistress, Miss Markham, I developed my performing skills. Participation was the teaching method employed
     here, probably to grab the interest of the fifty-plus kids in each class. We acted everything, even geography – I was Japan
     and my best friend, Brenda Barry, was Singapore. In history, being tall, I got pretty good at playing kings and was a dashing
     Hannibal, thoroughly enjoying trampling over several small Alps. In science, Brenda, as the earth, did a pretty nifty revolve
     round my sun and our eclipse was a triumph. The only mild anxiety in my life was whether, in the playground, I would be last
     to be chosen in ‘The Farmer’s in His Den’. ‘Ee, aye, ante oh, we all pat the dog’ could be pretty scary. Even worse, ‘We all
     gnaw the bone’. They were golden days with only small childhood fears.
    The adults, meantime, must have been terrified. The Nazis had entered the Rhineland and Austria. In 1938 a deal had been struck
     by Chamberlain to give them the Sudetenland in return for ‘Peace in our Time’. Chamberlain was a man who, like my parents,
     had experienced the lunacy of the 1914–18 war, and it is understandable that he tried every trick in the book to appease Hitler.
     His despairing cry, ‘I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me’, reveals
     his anguish. I have a photo of him in stiff collar and cravat, watch-chain draped across his waistcoat, with two sceptical
     sober suited Englishmen behind him. He is shaking hands politely with a bullet-headed, ludicrously uniformed Mussolini, backed
     by a posturing Daladier and Goering similarly attired for a musical comedy. A gentleman at sea with a group of thugs. Yet
     the likes of my Dad in those days trusted their leaders to save them. They knew best, the upper crust. They were educated
     and knew what’s what.

    5 February
    Meeting in the flat at Number 10 to discuss luvvies’ (God how I hate that word) involvement in the election campaign. I found myself having a go at Tony Blair: ‘You surround yourself with men in Armani suits, and the man people elected is submerged in spin. They wanted your honesty, your raw idealism, etc., etc. Why are you running this campaign for the Daily Mail ?’ I went on about prisons – ‘Have you ever visited one?’ – and the vilification of asylum seekers. Was appalled by Hague’s speech in Harrogate saying Labour will leave Britain ‘a foreign land’. Shades of Enoch Powell. Why hasn’t he denounced such language? I couldn’t stop. I could hear myself ranting, it was awful. The woman from Coronation Street said, ‘I don’t know why you’re ’ere.’ Then others came to my defence and the whole meeting was soured. Blair was rattled but then so am I. Don’t think he is used to people disagreeing with him. I like him and especially Cherie but when in power people seem to shed their ideals and are only interested in staying there. He pointed out no Labour Government had had a second term so I suppose he has to watch what he says. But it’s sad. Get me. Silly actress telling off the Prime Minister. Mummy would be horrified. My Quaker friends would be pleased though: ‘Speak truth to power.’ Went home and told John, ‘There goes your knighthood, pet.’
    The days of the polite politics of Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and Chamberlain were about to collapse in the face of the savagery
     to come and with them my peripatetic but carefree childhood.
    In February 1939 people in Latham Road began to take delivery of Anderson air-raid shelters, but not my father. Was he still
     clinging to a belief that sanity would prevail? He knew the SS had ordered the destruction of Jewish properties