Dizzy

Not everyone would know that 20 years before the author is born into the 1930's depression, life expectancy for a man in London's East End is a mere 30 years. It's not something the authorities are anxious for the public to learn. One way a man can beat the odds is to join the Army, which is exactly what Cyril, the author's father, does as a boy. In order to be picked he has to be supremely fit. The Army doesn't need frail, consumptive recruits, not until things get really nasty....
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Not everyone would know that 20 years before the author is born into the 1930's depression, life expectancy for a man in London's East End is a mere 30 years. It's not something the authorities are anxious for the public to learn. One way a man can beat the odds is to join the Army, which is exactly what Cyril, the author's father, does as a boy. In order to be picked he has to be supremely fit. The Army doesn't need frail, consumptive recruits, not until things get really nasty. Medical examinations become no more than a routine farce, and anyone who can walk is suddenly good enough to qualify as cannon fodder. By the time Dave's consciousness begins to develop he is down on the Channel coast in Brighton, then up onto the windswept heights of the Verne on Portland Bill, in one of Henry the Eighth's Castle forts. Unbeknown to him, an infant, his parents' marriage is on the rocks, but still destined to drag on a little while longer. The family fetches up in Worthing, 10 miles or so to the west of Brighton, where Jeanie and the kids will hope to live out most of the war's duration. His father abandons Jeanie and the three children -- about a year before the balloon goes up. Valerie Mignon is only one year old. So Auntie Peg, Jeanie's younger sister, who lives way up north in Geordieland, adopts the baby so that Jeanie can concentrate on bringing up Dave and his elder sister Sheila, who both turn out to be pupils of prodigious promise, securing open scholarships to grammar schools -- rare achievements for children of the poor. The tides go out a long way from Worthing's beaches, making them ideal from the point of view of an army planning a seaborne invasion, as Hitler's Wehrmacht, just across the Channel in occupied France, surely are. After the Blitz, the authorities consider evacuating vulnerable schoolchildren away from beachside towns. Dave and Sheila are scheduled for evacuation to Canada and/or the United States -- by sea. When first SS Volendam then SS City of Benares, ships transporting child evacuees, are sunk in the North Atlantic by German U-boats, with an appalling loss of innocent young life -- Jeanie pulls the plug like other loving mothers, forcing the unbelievably stupid scheme to be hastily abandoned. Instead, local schools are evacuated by steam train to the more remote and less accessible midlands of Nottinghamshire, school by school. Sheila's High School for Girls is withdrawn to Newark, while Davey's Junior Mixed goes to Mansfield Woodhouse, a coal-mining village. With her children scattered and put asunder, Jeanie ups sticks to Birmingham, to be closer to them all, and finds essential warwork at Dunlops...