Battle of Britain Skies; Irony on Stage during the Blitz - 'Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards

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I was 10 in 1939 when war broke out. My earliest memories of the war were seeing the planes fighting overhead during the Battle of Britain. I was in London at the time and actually saw planes fighting overhead. The sky was white from all the vapour trails from the Spitfires screaming about. The dogfights were literally going on over our house. We lived in Hampstead near the big airfield at Hendon where the local Spitfire squadron was based. So I remember watching and enjoying many battles.

Later on when we got to the period of the ‘blitz’ there was night bombing and my father was an air-raid warden. His job was to patrol the streets in case of incendiary bombs falling and setting fire to the buildings. Quite against the rules, he found another tin helmet which I put on and we used to walk the streets together keeping an eye out for bombs. At that time I actually remember seeing the searchlights picking up enemy planes and the guns on Hampstead Heath firing shells landed in the streets around us and sometimes the pieces of shrapnel were too hot to pick up. Eventually I would pick them up. One of the things we used to do with them at school was to swap pieces of shrapnel!

In 1940 during the period of the blitz my father who had a clothing warehouse in a street off Cheapside, called Friday St, went to work one morning to find not only had the building been destroyed but the whole of the street. He took me to see it. I couldn’t see where the street had been all the buildings had collapsed in with bits of walls left sticking up. He was extremely upset but at least nobody was killed, it had been an over night thing and there were no dwellings just business premises. He moved his premises to a place in St Paul’s Churchyard, literally next to St. Paul's Cathedral and that got bombed as well! The cathedral however, suprisingly and miraculously survived.

I was evacuated before the serious ‘blitz’ started and I was living in Cumberland (now known as Cumbria). I spent a couple of happy years there till my father imagined things were getting better in London so I moved back. I managed to get a place at Haberdashers School near Hampstead.

Being in London the war was pretty active but we tried to lead relatively normal lives.
However, as a Jewish boy I was more aware than most of some of the horrors not commonly known that were going on in Europe. The rabbi from the local synagogue, who had come from Holland, Dr Van de Zyll, referred to some of the horrors befalling Jews in Europe.

I was determined not to end up dead if the Germans did arrive. I decided to join the local cadet force that was attached to our synagogue so that I’d be able to defend myself and even kill before I was killed. At 13 I learnt to shoot a rifle, be it a 1st World War Lee Enfield rifle! I learnt to dismantle a Sten gun, to fire a Bren gun and throw hand grenades. We certainly had the feeling that if we found ourselves in the same position as other European countries we would not, lie down and be murdered.

It was through the cadets that I had the good fortune to meet a theatrical agent called Valerie Glynne. Valerie sent her assistant to our cadet group because she needed some volunteers to play 6 Arab boys. She thought Jewish boys would fit the bill! I’d always been interested in acting so of course volunteered and Valerie saw ‘something’ in me and became my agent!

I went along with anything Valerie suggested. By the age of 15 I’d had many small acting parts; I was in a BBC Children’s Hour serial, called ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. I’d also done little bits in films and odd things during the holidays that did not impinge on my education. One day she sent me to an audition. After they gave me something to read they said “Yes, you can do it.”
I suddenly thought “I’m in a play!” “Oh my goodness, it’s a play. Not something I can do in half hour or a day, and rehearsals start on Monday at The Strand Theatre!”

I’d set off for school in the normal way but instead I got on the tube and went to the theatre to rehearse. This went on everyday and nobody seemed to bother about the schooling I was missing. My parents didn’t know I was doing anything different. After 3 weeks of rehearsals the stage manager announced “We are going on a 6 week tour starting next week and we open in Glasgow on Monday. Come to Euston station on Sunday at 9.15. We will have a dress rehearsal with the complete set before then we open with the first performance on Monday evening.”
“What am I going to do, my parents have no idea what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks, they think I’ve been going to school as normal. What do I do! There’s no understudy.
What’s going to happen?”
I had visions of my father, who had a fierce temper, going berserk with me. I just didn’t know what to do. So I phoned Valerie, she said “You’ll have to face him”.
“But what do I do if he cuts up rough?”
“If he does tell me and I’ll talk to him, it’s very important that you do this, it’s a good career move.”
So I went home to face him, I simply said “I’m in a play, it’s interesting, by a young playwright called Peter Ustinov. My father in the play is Roger Livsey.”
Roger Livsey was a famous star at that time. “Wonderful” my parents said
“I’ve got a scene with him and we open in Glasgow on Monday.”
“That’s wonderful that’ll get you away from these dreadful flying bombs, get you out of London. Marvellous, marvellous.” said my father.
I was astonished, no one asked how it had come to pass, how I’d got the part, where I’d been or how I’d been rehearsing.
They helped me pack, took me to Euston and saw me off on the Sunday. There was no mention of the schooling that I’d missed or going to miss. In fact I didn’t go back to school and complete my education because Roger Livsey gave me a letter of introduction to the principle of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). As a result of Roger’s recommendation I was allowed to start there at 15 and a half instead of 18. They stretched a point because they were so short of men due to the war!

The play I was going to perform in was called ‘The Banbury Nose’. The interesting thing about this play, which is about a traditional military family, is the theme that ‘life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards’. When the play opens all the characters are old, doddery and sometimes unpleasant. As the play progresses they get steadily younger so when my character makes an appearance the audience have already met the adult version living under the bullying influence of his father. By the end of Act 3 the characters appear at their youngest and the audience has seen the mess they have made of their lives.

One evening when the play was showing at Wyndhams Theatre, London I was waiting in the wings to take the curtain call. For the last line of the play the leading lady looks optimistically at all the other characters and says, ‘What great happy futures lie before us.’ At this point the curtain came down accompanied by the most almighty explosion. A V2 rocket had hit somewhere nearby, probably not more than a couple of hundred yards from the theatre. The theatre shook and people fell off their seats. Then as the curtain rose for us to take our curtain call the audience were picking themselves up and laughing nervously. On stage we were laughing too, in relief that we hadn’t been hit, and also at the irony of the last line and because of the difference a few seconds or a few feet could make. We could so easily have had no future at all!
I have many memories of that time but the irony of this incident makes it my most memorable of the whole war.

This incident occurred in the autumn of 1944, at the launch of attacks by V2 rockets they would arrive suddenly from the sky without warning, as opposed to the V1 ‘flying bombs’ which you could hear. Earlier in June we had gone through the period of attack by the V1 flying bombs and I remember waiting to go on stage and often hearing the drone of the engine noise. When the noise of the engine cut off there was a short interval before it exploded and blew up a fair number of buildings. I can remember hearing that noise when we were on stage but unfortunately nothing ever came that close to us. I used to feel sort of proud to be going on and doing my stuff, showing no fear. It was matter of luck whether we were injured or not.

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