NORWICH 

I was born into a world full of sound and fury. In a small corner, of a small island, a small city was being blitzed and burned by German bombers; not because it was important, but because of a world-wide insanity that saw our city as part of a monstrous strategy conceived by a madman. And in one small part of that 1000 year old city of 100,000 inhabitants, half a mile outside the broken remnants of the centuries old city wall, now encircling a cowering city, helpless against the brutal onslaught from the skies, lay a warren of Victorian terraces, pubs and corner shops. In one of those small, four-room houses, a family was struggling to survive an onslaught of circumstances even more devastating than Hitler’s blitzkrieg: a father confined to a cripple’s bed, never to leave it; a daughter dying in a children’s hospital; a mother suffering the loss of her younger brother in the chaos of Singapore, and all the while trying to hold this broken family together with no money, and little hope.

It was in this Wonderful Year of 1942 that I first began my journey to, and exploration of, a world of such profound and wondrous fascination, that even now, a lifetime later, I am still trying to understand its meaning, and grasp its impalpable essence.

A black sky laced with white beams of light, restlessly searching; a distant-thunder rumble of engines high in the darkness; the musty smell of hessian sacking and damp blankets, in the semi-submerged shelter in the back garden, with its two rows of bunks and kerosene lamp. These may be trace memories, or recollections of stories told and films seen, mixed with post war explorations of that same shelter that remained, submerged and weed enveloped, for some years. But however fragmentary my memories of the blitz might be, the shattered city that I emerged into, at Wars end, blinking and stumbling as I tried to make sense of this immense new world, is still as clear and sharp as it was when I first  saw it in those austere, grey,  but wonderfully exciting post war years.

The City

The heart of Norwich that existed within those broken walls before the War, was a medieval warren of streets, alleys and yards; mouldering half-timbered buildings leaning over dingy streets and poverty stricken tenements; street corner pubs and shops; stone and flint churches, warehouses, builder’s yards and grimy Victorian factories, large and small. But as well as the sprawling evidence of poverty, amid the detritus of the centuries-old neighbourhoods, vibrant communities existed, and were being extended into the new council estates that were built on the outskirts of the city at the end of the twenties, and gave families like mine a chance to live in circumstances that more fitted the twentieth century. But the city was about more than the struggle of its inhabitants to make a life for themselves;  at its core stood a bold and proud city centre which told the story of the centuries in one panorama of disparate, incoherent buildings.

The centrepiece was, and still is, the angular art deco City Hall, built and dedicated a year before the war began, just in time to defy the bombs that rained down in those first years. Its bold front steps, flanked by massive bronze lions, overlooks a market that has existed since Norman times, which is itself fringed by a row of splendid Edwardian shops and banks, and an arcade whose mosaic and decorative extravagance speaks of the confidence of a time before the first of the great wars that devastated a nation and a city. 

Looking out from those same steps, the market is flanked on one side of the square by a flint-built, fifteenth century Guildhall; and on the other side, the great church of St Peter Mancroft, established soon after the Norman Conquest and built in its present form in the middle of the fifteenth  century, and the last resting place of the eminent Sir Thomas Browne, and many other locally celebrated worthies, whose names and deeds have faded with their inscriptions on the melting stone. Looking further from the city hall steps, over the variegated awnings of the market, beyond the Edwardian pride etched into the imposing buildings of Gentleman’s Walk , is the elegant power of the Norman Cathedral, piercing the skyline as it has for more than 900 years, and the equal of any in the country. To its right, sacred power and secular power side by side, symbolising what was then one of the most important cities in the country, is the immense man made mound that supports the stone faced, castellated majesty of The Castle, the squarely ponderous edifice that has overlooked the city during a millenium of extraordinary history. To the east of the elegant sweep of Castle Meadow that ringed this mound, can be found the open space that was flanked by the cattle market on one side, the huge porticoes of the central post office, and the multi-roomed three storied Victorian edifice that was the great hotel, all of them overlooked by the winged Victory monument that celebrated the Boer War. This open space leads into the great sweep of the boulevard of Prince of Wales road, flanked on both sides by impressive Victorian town houses and finishing at the ornate Victorian train station.

This magnificent canvas telling the story of a 1000 years of history has been joined in the present day by a quiet memorial garden in the short space between the City Hall and the Market, that tells of the sacrifice made by the many 20th century young men, some in my own family, who left in hope, never to return. One hundred yards to the right of this spot, face to face with the awesome splendour of the face of St Peter Mancroft, stands the newest monument to civic pride, the 21st century fantasy that is The Forum: a magnificent crystal cave that is a genuine meeting place for a whole range of activities that take place in the open space between the two great buildings, and the open three tiered interior that houses what remains of the great library. While researching this book I spent many hours in the calm of its upper floors, that still house many of the records that are essential to the unravelling of a shared past.

A fine city engulfed in destruction when I was born, that I watched rebuild itself over many years, losing much along the way, but retaining in every corner, a shadow of the past; an imprinted memory in every street, building,  and otherwise unremarkable by-way. Every park, yard and street corner, a page of my life, and a page of the life of everyone who has lived here since the war and beyond. Where others can only see what is here now, some of us see through the modern glass, plastic and concrete to that other Norwich that will exist as long as there are those to remember. Where others see the bland, towering frontage of Debenham's store, I see a massive crater, ringed with rickety wooden palings, the bottom filled with rubble, and pools of standing water, where we would play with no thought of tomorrow; where others see the massive Castle Mall, I see and hear the bellowing turmoil of the Saturday cattle market, a maelstrom of noise and smells that can never leave me; and where others see the dispiriting concrete of the St Giles multi-story car park, I see the broad semi-circle of the Edwardian Hippodrome, and outside, the noisy excitement of the queues as we waited to enter that elegant theatre of dreams for the pantomime. No matter how long you have been here, you are only  truly a Norwich man the first time you say," That used to be The Hippodrome", or,  "That used to be The Corn Hall":  you are a Norwich man when what was there before,  is more real and solid than what is here now.

My life, and the life of Norwich are inextricably entwined, and my purpose is to try to recover those fragments of experience, that make up a part of not just my life, but the lives of so many others as they, and the years, slip silently away.

Elysian Fields

This was the Norwich that I began to explore in those post war years, but a Norwich reshaped by the bombs into something less formal, but infinitely more exciting. Our lives were given form by many things; school, home and family most obviously, but also by the wonderful open air playground that Norwich had become: the wreckage left by the war produced our elysian fields; our “playing fields of Eton” were the wondrous bomb sites that fired our imagination, and fulfilled our fantasies. We Blitz Rats were occupied all our spare moments in exploring the crumbling walls, rubble strewn spaces and hidden cellars that now became ours, while the rest of society passed by, oblivious to our activities, while they painfully, and happily for us, slowly, rebuilt their, and our, world. I have no memories of any serious injuries suffered by any of us – not for want of trying as my Mother would probably have said – as we climbed broken walls to bedrooms reduced to charred joists jutting out beneath empty windows, recreating the latest pirate adventure 15 feet above the broken ground; or lowering ourselves carelessly through the shattered concrete, and exploring the echoing basement that was the only remnant of a factory or warehouse  otherwise blasted into oblivion. 

The best of these was at the corner of St Benedict's St and Barn Road, a large open space reaching down to Westwick Street, and once the home to the Fountain Public House, Wholesalers and private houses, but, since the great blitz of 1942, a blasted, weed infested and rubble strewn wasteland. This desolate area was pitted here and there with black holes providing access into what we called “The Dungeons”, the cellars of the previous buildings, now transformed into dark, crumbling caverns of the imagination, where we could explore the different rooms through broken walls, and splintered doors, the dust-swirling gloom only lit by shafts of sunlight breaking through the fractured floors above our carefree heads.

This testament to Man’s folly was flanked by remnants of a much earlier age, the old city wall, which then consisted of a length of flint wall with two or three Norman style entrances that used to stand beside the long gone St Benedict's Gate, the remnants of which had disappeared in the blitz, and which had been one of the main entrances into the ancient fortified city. To climb to the top of this notoriously unstable wall, in full view of passing adults, was beyond the aspiration of most, but some of us took on the challenge, although the better option was always the bomb site itself, which was ours, and ours alone. The great advantage of this particular site was that it was directly across the road from my local cinema, The Regal, a beautiful little provincial cinema, built in 1937, and mercifully, from our point of view, spared the bombs. We would leave the cinema Saturday mornings, our imaginations still aflame with visions of Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Lash Larue, or the ridiculously glamorous Buster Crabbe of 'Flash Gordon' fame, our ears still singing with stirring soundtrack music. For the next hour or so, before going home to dinner, we shot, blasted, and generally obliterated ourselves and each other as we galloped and climbed over the mesas and canyons, or flew along the alien landscapes and hostile environments of all kinds, that we found perfectly represented in the blasted landscape of war: a war more real to our parents than our most vivid fantasies, but of which we knew little, and cared less.   

Such was the cornucopia of destruction that was my heritage, that The Regal bomb site, although only a short walk from my house, was by no means the first such encountered on my journey; the first was in retrospect the most horrifying, because of the possibilities of disaster it represented.

My house was in a maze of Victorian terraces; a few houses one way was a tiny crossroad, on each corner a staple of life; two pubs, a general store and a butchers, the baker was round the corner beside the general store. That way lay school and grandparents, important in their own way, especially to the adults, but uninspiring to young imaginations. A few houses the other way however, and I would reach the great thoroughfare that was Dereham Road: turn left and the way was clear to the wondrous metropolis that always beckoned me. Before I reached that gateway to discovery however, I only had to go three houses along before I came to a gap in the terrace, a charred and broken gap, a missing tooth in a madman’s grimace, a reminder of the horror just passed. An incendiary had fallen directly onto the house and it had burned to the stone floor, quite capable of taking the whole row with it, but mercifully contained. This was the great fear of my father, trapped in an invalid’s bed a few yards away, and at the mercy of any fire that took control. We could go to the shelter, but the difficulty of carrying him there , and then getting him inside, posed so many difficulties that he chose to stay in the house, often kept company by my brother, who sheltered under the table, as they watched the glow through the one grimy window, and probably prayed. He was a brave man who bore his terrible affliction with grace and good humour, but he was afraid of the fire, my Mother told me this years later, and suffered fears and torments that few people experience. Such was the war, and the legacy of the war, as I will discuss later, that we blitz rats never knew about, and so never let temper our delight in our world of fantasy.

Blitzrats

This sombre relic was again utilised by us for recreation, although its proximity to home meant that we never felt free to do much more than the always pleasant pastime of leaping from a broken wall onto the unsuspecting back of the more easily bullied member of the gang, and sending him headfirst into a pile of rubble. Big Tony was the usual recipient of this treatment, as he was a big target to hit, was somewhat slow witted and uncomplaining, and sported a purple birthmark that covered half his face, a sure sign of victimhood to our unforgiving eyes. He suffered further humiliation at my hands, when, playing behind a low wall at the barbers on the corner of West End and Nelson street, I threw a stick into the street at an approaching cyclist, with the unexpected, but definitely gratifying result of seeing it lodge in his front spokes and throw him over the handlebars. The enormity of what I had

done soon calmed my excitement, and we quickly scurried away, leaving my victim groaning semi-conscious in the street. On the short walk home I calmed my fears of retribution by persuading a bemused, but frightened, Big Tony, that he had been solely responsible, and would undoubtedly go to prison. “What will my Mum say” he wailed, as I left him at the alley leading to his back door; I shrugged, to indicate that you reap what you sow, and went home whistling. 

Tony lived in Adelaide Street opposite me. He was passive but loyal; I had other friends that I treated as carelessly as I treated Tony, but Tony always went along with my ideas, usually to his detriment, but he never complained. One afternoon we had been scuffling in our aimless way around the bombed out building in the street, and Tony had had his usual share of casual violence inflicted upon him. At the end of the afternoon we both went in for tea, after which I went round his house to see if he was up for anymore  mayhem before the evening closed in. I went down the little alley parallel to the row of houses and approached his back door. The door flew open and I was met by his furious mother, a little woman dragging her lumbering and embarrassed offspring behind her. “Don’t you come here anymore, you’ve been jumping on him again and I’m not having him come home in this state – look what you did to him today”. With this last accusation she pulled Tony forward and pointed to his face, scarlet with embarrassment and birthmark, but further despoiled by a large smear of dog shit across his forehead, obviously inflicted when he went face down into a patch of weeds some hours earlier. She was naturally protective of a blighted son, but her outrage at me, (the story of my life) had made him sit and have his tea while covered in dog shit so she could make her point more forcefully; I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gone back that evening. Poor Tony.

I lost touch with him when we moved, but 50 years later he came into my shop a few times, birthmark smaller, still passive and still loyal. He had made a life for himself and survived a wartime childhood, along with the rest of our gang, that could have broken us but left us unscathed – on the surface at least.

I didn't always need Tony's company however to indulge in acts of potentially lethal stupidity, and the day I found a coil of thin wire on a bomb site was a day I excelled myself in that department. I had probably been reading too many "William" books, but I somehow devised a cunning plan that was ill-thought out at best, but in truth, positively lunatic, and would have shamed a character from "The Beano". Directly opposite Adelaide Street, across Dereham Road, was Gladstone Street, and on the corner was a newsagents. The plain outside the shop had a heavy, square advertising box and I had the brilliant idea of looping the wire around the box, trailing it back across the road, and fixing it at the other end in Adelaide Street. The fixing was to be my finger, which would enable me to hold the wire firmly as I crouched unseen behind the wall, and waited for a car to come along. I had seen similar stunts enacted in the western movies that formed such a large part of my education, and it always produced spectacular results, but even now I'm astonished that I couldn't see any flaw in my mad scheme. I waited for a quiet time and managed to set up the wire without being stopped , and then squatted behind the wall to wait for my victim - the first car that came along. I have no idea what I expected to happen, the excitement of the deed overwhelmed any small residue of common sense I might have had, but I somehow thought I would bring the car to a halt, at which moment my plan finished. I squinted round the corner and after letting one or two cars go past, I plucked up courage and put my plan into execution as the next one approached. To this day the possible consequences are still chilling, but in the event I was reasonably lucky. I pulled the wire taut with perfect timing as the car sped into the trap, and I discovered that comics and movies were not a good blueprint for real life. The large advertising box across the road leapt into the air and came down with a crash that sent the shop owner running out; the wire, mercifully, snapped with an audible "Ping" as the car roared on regardless; and at my end of this mad exercise, the thin, cruel wire wound itself into the top joint of my forefinger down to the bone. The startling and unexpected result, and the shock of my nearly severed finger left me paralysed with fear and pain for a moment, until I finally realised the enormity of what I had done, and ran from the scene, undetected, as I contemplated the numb, profusely bleeding finger and tried to think of a story to tell my Mother. I survived this, as I survived many other careless escapades, but this one I didn't brag about, as even I could recognise the Olympic standard level of stupidity involved. 

The big grey stone house at the corner of Adelaide Street and Dereham Road was owned by twin sisters that we called “The Witches”. Tony remembers us running through one gate, across the front of the house and out the other; a brave effort as we were convinced they probably were witches, and were terrified of them; so much so that Tony’s brother, in his hurry to get away, gashed his chin on the metal gate, and had to be taken to hospital, for which episode Tony got “a lot of grief” as he remembers it, from his Mother for weeks after.

The only other memory I have of Tony was when we were sauntering up Dereham Road and approached the second of the bombsites that led to the city. This was partially utilised as a wood yard at the time, and therefore afforded even more opportunities to cheat death as we clambered over dangerously swaying piles of sawn planks. On this day however we had no thought of the wood yard, but were stopped at the entrance by a mousey middle aged man in a grubby raincoat. He asked us quietly if we would like to see something interesting, which seemed to two bored boys a reasonable offer on a quiet day. We looked at each other and said “OK”, then followed him into the stacks of wood, where he stopped, turned round, and opened his raincoat. We regarded his unremarkable member with some bemusement as we realised that this was the “something interesting” we had been promised; it was of no interest to us and so we exchanged glances, then turned and walked back to the road. Once clear of the yard, Tony was immediately indignant: “when he said something interesting I thought he meant chickens, or maybe rabbits, not that”. I sagely concurred that chickens, or even rabbits, would have been far more interesting, and so we ambled away, again aware that adults were a strange species, but unperturbed, and uncorrupted, never to mention it, or think of it again.