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Instead of coming home, he often spent the night sleeping in one of the Tube stations so he could get up and go straight to work the next day. Hundreds of others did this too, and by 6 p.m. people started setting up for the night, reserving their spot. You’d see them clutching blankets and pillows, and women sat there on the platforms in curlers, putting cold cream on their faces.
It didn’t take long before I was out like a light, lulled to sleep by the sound of the gunfire and the bombs falling all around us. When we woke up in the morning it was freezing as we crawled out of the shelter and back into the house. Mum had to get breakfast for Miss Higgins, and I had to get ready to go to school.
Our area of south London had been quite badly bombed and as I walked to school I saw that one of the houses in a nearby street had been hit. There were soldiers helping to clear up the debris, and the people who lived there were sorting through the rubble, desperately trying to salvage some of their possessions.
During the war years this became a normal sight. The roads were littered with bits of barrage balloon and shrapnel – pieces of bombs and bullets. I stopped to pick up a few nice silvery bits that I knew would get some admiring glances from the other children at school.
Every child was issued with a gas mask that we had to carry around at all times. Well-to-do children kept theirs in leather or plastic boxes, but mine was in a cardboard box with a string handle so I could carry it over my shoulder. It was all a big game to us. Sometimes the air raids would be during the daytime so we’d have practice runs at school. One morning the siren went off and we all trooped down to the cellar. We sat there having an arithmetic lesson with our gas masks on. They were made of rubber, and had goggles and something that was a bit like a coffee filter at the end of the nose – I found them ever so claustrophobic. So to stop me from feeling frightened and take my mind off wearing one, I decided to make it into a bit of a joke.
‘Look, you can make rude noises,’ I said, blowing a raspberry into my mask.
Everyone laughed and thought it was hilarious, and soon every pupil in my class was doing the same thing. Unfortunately the teachers weren’t amused as we didn’t get much work done.
I can’t ever remember anyone being upset or frightened during the air raids at school. It became part of our daily lives and we just accepted that that’s what happened.
A lot of children were evacuated to the countryside, but Mum refused point blank to let me go.
‘You’re staying here with me,’ she said.
I was so grateful for that. She was all I had in the world, and while the bombs didn’t scare me, being away from her would have terrified me.
Thankfully none of our family were injured or killed, although Mum’s brother, my Uncle Harry, had a bit of a close shave. We received a letter from him one morning telling us how an incendiary bomb had landed on his doorstep, and he hadn’t realised and opened the door.
‘Poor Uncle Harry,’ she said. ‘The bomb went off straight in his face.’
‘Is he all right, Mum?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It gave him a bit of a fright and singed all his eyebrows off, but apart from that he’s fine.’
Even though it was mean, we couldn’t help but have a bit of a chuckle about it.
The war also brought me a new playmate. I became best friends with a pretty little blonde girl called Diana Baracnik, whose family moved into our street after fleeing from Czechoslovakia. We’d climb trees or go to dance classes together, and after school I’d go round to her house and play dollies. I loved my dolls and I had about six of them. Some of them were china and some were papier mâché.
One person who felt very strongly about the war was my brother Raymond. He’d always been a socialist like my father and he shared his strong views.
‘Wars and violence don’t solve anything, Rene,’ he told me. ‘Nobody wins in war.’
He didn’t want any part of it and he was one of those known as conscientious objectors – people who for social or religious reasons refused to go to war.
During the First World War conscientious objectors were seen as criminals and sent to prison. Women would wander round and hand any man who was the right age and not wearing a military uniform a white chicken feather, which was a symbol of cowardice, to shame them into enlisting. Several conscientious objectors killed themselves because they couldn’t cope with the stigma. During the Second World War the punishment wasn’t as severe, but you could still be arrested for refusing to do National Service and you had to appear in front of a tribunal to explain your reasons why. Despite the risks, Mum respected Raymond’s opinion as she shared similar beliefs.
‘Your father would have been so proud of Raymond,’ she told me. ‘I know he would have done exactly the same if he was here now.’
Mum had told me many times that my father was strongly anti-war. Because of his bad asthma he wasn’t called up during the First World War, but his older brother Raymond had been.
‘Raymond was a tail gunner, and the first time he went up he was shot and killed instantly,’ said Mum. ‘Your father was heartbroken. He said his poor brother was just cannon fodder and that only reinforced his anti-war stance.’
It seemed apt that my brother had been named after our late Uncle Raymond.
One morning we were all having our breakfast when there was a loud rap on the front door.
‘Open up,’ shouted a gruff voice. ‘It’s the police.’
Mum looked at Raymond in a panic. I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
‘What shall I do?’ she whispered to him.
‘You’d better go and let them in,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide.’
Mum went and opened the door, and two officers came marching up the stairs and into our dining room.
‘Raymond Bott?’ one of them said to my brother.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Young man, I’m afraid we’re going to have to arrest you for failing to register for National Service,’ he said, pulling him up from his chair. ‘Come with us, please.’
‘I’m a conscientious objector,’ he told them. ‘I don’t believe in war.’
‘Well, you will have to appear in front of a tribunal and tell them your reasons for that. Then they will decide what will happen to you,’ the other one said.
Mum burst into tears.
‘You can’t do this,’ she sobbed. ‘You can’t just take him away like this.’
‘I’m afraid we have to,’ one of them said, leading him off down the stairs. ‘We’re just obeying orders.’
My brother didn’t say a word, and he wasn’t allowed to take anything with him. My mother was inconsolable, and I could hear Miss Higgins frantically ringing her bell downstairs, probably trying to find out what all the fuss was about.
I just sat there eating my toast, completely stunned by this drama that was happening over breakfast.
Mum followed the officers downstairs, and I ran to the window and watched as they pushed Raymond into the back of the police car and drove away. A few neighbours had come out of their houses to see what was going on too, and they all stood there staring. Mum came upstairs sobbing.
‘I can’t believe this has happened,’ she cried.
The following evening after school I called at my friend Diana’s house as usual. Her father answered the door.
‘I’m sorry, Irene,’ he said. ‘You won’t be able to play with Diana any more or come round to our house.’
‘But why?’ I asked. ‘She’s my best friend.’
‘You’d better ask your mother,’ he told me.
I went home in floods of tears to Mum.
‘Diana’s dad says I’m not allowed to be her friend any more,’ I sobbed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He probably heard about what happened to Raymond,’ she said. ‘A lot of people don’t agree with your brother’s views about the war.’
‘But what do you mean?’ I asked. ‘What’s that got to do with Diana’s dad?’
‘He probably thinks that Raymond’s a coward for not wanting to fight the Nazis,’ she explained. ‘Perhaps his family had a bad time in their country, which is why they came over here.’
I was devastated that I’d lost my best friend. I couldn’t understand what difference the war and my brother’s beliefs made to whom I could and couldn’t play with.
But it wasn’t just a one-off. Word soon spread among our neighbours that Raymond had been taken off by the police, and after that a lot of people wouldn’t talk to Mum or me. They’d see us in the street, put their head down and walk straight past us. There was a huge stigma attached to being a conscientious objector, or a ‘conchie’ as they were nicknamed. A lot of people associated it with being a coward, but in fact most conscientious objectors were motivated by religious reasons.
Raymond had to appear in front of a tribunal that would decide whether to give him an exemption, dismiss his application and send him to fight, or make him do non-combatant work. A week later we received a letter from him.
The tribunal decided that I should be sent to work in the Pioneer Corps where they have given me the task of digging up roads. It’s hard labour and the days are long but at least I have stuck to my principles and I’m not involved in any way with the taking of lives. I’m stationed at a barracks in Lincolnshire and ironically most of my fellow conscientious objectors are extremely religious so they are slightly bemused at being billeted with an atheist like me who is constantly questioning their beliefs.
Mum was relieved that he was all right, although she was annoyed by the type of work Raymond was doing.
‘What a waste of his talents,’ she sighed. ‘He’s far too clever to be digging up roads.’
His superiors must have realised that too, as soon Raymond wrote to us again to say that he had been transferred to the Army Service Corps, where he was given the job of drawing maps. Part of his role eventually involved helping to plan the D-Day landings, which he justified by saying it was about saving lives rather than taking them.
Despite the war, daily life at home went on as normally as possible. By the time I was ten, however, Mum had run out of patience with Miss Higgins.
‘I can’t look after that woman for a second longer or I swear I will kill her,’ she told me.
But work in the orchestras was in short supply during the war as some theatres had been badly bombed and were forced to close. Things were going to be tight financially again, so we were forced to move back in with my grandparents.
The day before we left the house in Norbury, a government inspector came out to check all the Anderson shelters in the street. Mum and I watched as he tapped the mortar between the bricks. To our horror, it crumbled instantly and his finger went straight through it.
‘Shoddy workmanship,’ he sighed, shaking his head. ‘If a bomb had dropped on that thing it would have been curtains for you two.’
Mum and I stared at each other in shock.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘To think we’ve been sleeping in there every night for nearly two years thinking that we were safe.’
By this time my grandparents had rented out their attic room to a ninety-year-old spinster called Miss Smythe, so Mum and I had to live on the much bigger and lighter second floor of the house. It felt like a palace compared with the poky, cramped attic. We had two bedrooms, and our own living-room and bathroom. Moving back to Battersea meant that I had to change schools to Honeywell Road Primary, but I still did my ballet lessons, which I absolutely loved.
One day Mum sat me down.
‘What you want to do when you grow up, Rene?’ she asked.
I knew my answer straight away, because since I was a little girl I’d only ever wanted to do one thing.
‘I want to be a ballet dancer,’ I said. ‘I want to be on the stage.’
A lot of other parents at that time might have just laughed or told me I would have to go out and get a proper job, be a teacher or a secretary, but Mum didn’t flinch.
‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to go to stage school if you’re really serious about doing that. Where would you like to go?’
‘Italia Conti,’ I said without hesitation.
It was the world’s oldest and most prestigious theatre arts training school, the one that the older girls at dance class always talked about. I didn’t ever think in a million years that Mum would be able to afford to send me to stage school, but to my surprise she didn’t question it.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll contact Italia Conti and get some more information.’
Mum kept her promise and a few days later she told me what they had said.
‘It’s £20 a term,’ she told me.
My heart sank. That was a heck of a lot of money in those days, and I knew it was the end of my big dream. As a single mother who went from one job to the next as a violinist, there was no way she could afford expensive stage-school fees like that.
But in 1942 Mum made the biggest sacrifice of her life for me. She sat me down one day and took hold of my hands.
‘There’s something I need to tell you, Rene,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve found a solution to our problems. I’ve decided to join ENSA.’
ENSA stood for the Entertainments National Service Association, a group of performers who travelled around the world during the Second World War to entertain British troops and keep up morale. They had everything from singers, dancers and musicians to comedians, bird impersonators, contortionists and even roller skaters.
‘The pay is good, and having a regular wage is the only way that I can afford to put you through stage school,’ she said. ‘It means that I’ll be away from home for a while, but you can stay here with Papa and Gaga. They’re going to post me to Egypt, where I’ll perform as part of a quartet.’
It was a huge shock, and I couldn’t believe she was prepared to do that to help me achieve my dream.
Things moved so quickly. A week later I sat on my mother’s bed watching her put on her new ENSA uniform, which consisted of a khaki shirt and belted jacket, an A-line skirt with a pleat up the middle, and a peaked hat. It hadn’t really sunk in yet that she was going thousands of miles away and I wouldn’t see her for years.
‘Come on, then,’ she said, holding out one hand to me while in the other one she clutched her beloved violin. ‘It’s time to go.’
We caught the Tube to the Coliseum, the theatre from where the new recruits were departing. As we walked towards the entrance I could see a big fleet of three-tiered coaches waiting outside. It was pandemonium as hundreds of performers in ENSA uniforms said tearful goodbyes to their families. Mum handed someone her violin to load into the bottom section that was filled with an array of musical instruments. Then she turned to me and gave me a cuddle and a kiss.
‘Oh, Rene, I really don’t want to leave you,’ she said, tears welling up in her eyes.
‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be all right,’ I said, as I hated to see her upset.
‘I love you very much,’ she told me.
Then she turned and walked away. I could see her dabbing her eyes with her hankie as she climbed onto the coach. I watched her take her jacket off, and as she sat down and waved to me through the window that’s when it finally hit me.
This was really happening. She was really going.
The only person in the world besides my brother that I loved with all my heart was leaving me.
I was in such a state of shock I couldn’t even cry.
As I watched her coach drive away I felt completely and utterly alone in the world.
I got the Tube home in a daze. I was used to being on my own and I was fiercely independent, but it felt very frightening at the age of twelve not having anyone looking out for me. With Mum and Raymond both away, there was literally nobody in my life that I could go to. No one to give me a kiss or a cuddle, or who would make sure that I was all right and put me first in the world. My grandparents weren’t interested, that was for sure.
When I got in that evening they didn’t ask me anything about Mum or whether she had got off OK or if I was all right. But as I walked through the door I couldn’t hold back my emotion any longer and I burst into tears.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ my grandmother asked.
‘I’m just really sad about Mum going away,’ I sobbed.
‘Oh, don’t be so selfish,’ she said.
