early memories

My earliest memories are of home and school. Home was 23 Harcourt Street, London W.1. School was a short walk along York Street. School was St Mary’s (Church of England) Infants. It was a comfortable small world. 

My world grew larger in 1935. I was 7 years old. We stood in Hyde Park to cheer the Silver Jubilee procession of King George V and Queen Mary. School was now St Mary’s (Church of England) Elementary. In Miss Carpenter’s class we sang “What is the meaning of Empire Day? Why do the cannons roar? Why does the cry ‘God Save the King’ echo from shore to shore?” And Major Collins unfurled the great wall map of Africa and thrilled us with the story of Cecil Rhodes whose ambition it was to paint the map of Africa ‘red from the Cape to Cairo’. Red was the colour of Great Britain and the British Empire on the political maps in our atlases. The geat British Empire ‘on which the sun never set’.

It was the beginning of our mesmerisation into a world that existed only in the fireside dreams of our elders - who ought to have known better. 

Early in January 1938, just a few weeks after my 10th birthday, I moved to the Mercers’ School, a medieval foundation in the City of London. And once again our elders - who apparently did not know any better - filled our heads with ideas and ambitions which might, just ‘might’, have been valid in the confident glory days of Edward VII but which had been trampled underfoot in the mud of the Western Front in the Great War that began in 1914.

And so it came about that when, in the wartorn London of the early 1940s, I read John Gunter’s ‘Inside Europe’ I could hardly give credit to his findings. They were too different from our schoolbooks.

I had passed my 40th birthday and living briefly among Melanesians on a small island in the South Pacific when the moment of truth arrived. My schooldays had led me astray. The ethos they implanted carelessly ignored realities too harsh to be contemplated. 

I look around me and remember the Shelley I discovered at Univ. 

A traveller regards the shattered remnants of a vast statue part buried in the desert sand and there on the pedestal “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’