Читать книгу Einstein Wrote Back - John W. Moffat - Страница 10

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CHILD OF WAR

MY PARENTS MARRIED three weeks after they met, speaking barely a word of each other’s language. My father, George Moffat, was born in 1907 in Glasgow, Scotland. As he grew up there, he played musical instruments from a young age, beginning with a classical-piano teacher who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt. My father also took up the trumpet in the Scottish Boys’ Brigade, won the all-Scotland championship in coronet playing and taught himself to play the accordion. In addition to his musical talents, he was a successful artist, and at age seventeen won a scholarship to go to Rome to study painting. His father forbade him to go, however, for he wanted my father to work in his tailoring business in Glasgow. But my father left home and joined a band in England, playing the trumpet. The band toured around Europe just before the Second World War and ended up at the La Scala nightclub in Copenhagen, where my mother, Esther Winther, a local girl, was working as a chorus dancer. They immediately fell into a heady romance.

My mother learned that she was pregnant while my father was touring with his band in Norway. Her gynecologist was very surprised that she had become pregnant, for she suffered from a serious condition that he had told her would prevent her from ever having a child. Throughout her life, my mother always spoke of her pregnancy and my birth as a miracle. She never became pregnant again.

In 1938, when I was six, my father foresaw that the Nazis would invade Denmark. Since he was still an alien, a British citizen holding a British passport, the Nazis would have detained all three of us and put us in a camp. So we moved to Britain and, my parents believed, to greater safety.

When war broke out in September 1939, the entertainment industry in England closed overnight because of the widespread fear that the Germans would bomb London. My father took a job as a truck driver for a pharmaceutical company, which was dangerous work, driving around London at night in the blackouts. He then worked in the intelligence service, starting by censoring servicemen’s letters from abroad.

Concerned for my safety, given the ominous signs of the coming bombings, in late 1939, when I was seven years old, my parents evacuated me from London, putting me alone on a double-decker bus to Glasgow, where my grandparents lived. During the bus trip I was sustained by the sandwiches my mother had packed, and the kind reassurances of the bus driver. I lived with my grandparents and my aunt Rhoda for a year as an evacuee, attending a nearby school. Not surprisingly, I did not do particularly well at school that year in Glasgow.

In fact, my grandparents and my aunt Rhoda could see that I was not thriving in the absence of my mother and father, so despite the danger of the blitzes as the German raids on southern England intensified, they sent me back to London alone by train. We soon left for Bristol, where my father worked as an intelligence officer searching incoming ships for Nazi spies.

By 1940, the bombing had increased, and in August of 1940 the Battle of Britain began, lasting through September. This was a prelude to the Nazis’ planned invasion of Britain. In an operation that we later learned was code-named “Sea Lion,” they intended to land on the Kent and Sussex beaches. The heightened bombing in the summer was designed to control the English Channel so that the British navy would not be able to destroy the German barges that would bring tanks and troops during the invasion.

In Bristol we lived in two rented rooms in a house that was not far from the British Aeroplane Company in Filton that made the famous Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes, which enabled the British eventually to win the Battle of Britain. The German pilots who flew in at night were well aware of the location of this facility. After London, Liverpool and Birmingham, Bristol was the fourth most heavily bombed city in Britain during the war. I would lie awake until eleven at night, waiting for the sirens to start wailing, heralding another bombing attack. I would issue a silent prayer to a God unknown that I would survive the night. My parents and I often had to huddle under the stairwell, trying to sleep on makeshift mattresses in that supposedly safest place in the house, which could protect us from a direct hit.

Starting at seven in the morning, when children were on their way to school, the air raid siren would wail again, and waves of German bombers would roar over Bristol. As a young child, I walked alone through streets destroyed by incendiary and high-explosive bombs, my shoes crunching on broken glass. One morning as I walked through the streets filled with rubble, I picked up a pamphlet, dropped as propaganda by German bombers the night before to persuade the English to capitulate. It showed a picture of a child with the top half of her head blown off, a victim of the German bombs. I stuffed it into my school satchel to show my parents later.

Holding tightly to my satchel and gas mask box, I managed every day to reach my class, which was deep underground in a cavernous air raid shelter. During the afternoons, the class would be brought up outside for some fresh air. We often sat on sandbags, eating the lunches our mothers had packed, and watched the dogfights between the Spitfires and Messerschmitts up in the blue sky. The silver-and-grey Spitfires and black Messerschmitts traced out white contrails as they circled one another, and we heard the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns. On the way home from school, invariably the sirens would wail again. I often would have to knock on the doors of strangers’ houses and stay with them until the all-clear siren sounded.

In the late summer of 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, my parents and I took a holiday in Weston-super-Mare, a small town on the west coast of England, in an attempt to have a respite from the day-and-night bombings in Bristol. One afternoon we were walking along the boardwalk, eating shrimp from paper cups and viewing the bathers sunning on the beach. Suddenly there was a roaring noise above us. Looking up, I saw two black Messerschmitt fighter bombers passing directly over us, and I got a glimpse of one of the German pilots in his black helmet and goggles. They were being pursued by two Spitfires, and in order to lighten their load to make a hasty escape, the Messerschmitts dropped six whistling bombs on the beach.

I heard the shriek of the whistling bombs as they fell, and then the hollow booms as they detonated deep inside the mud of the beach. Although the mud dampened the effect of the blast, everyone who had been bathing on the beach vanished. The blast blew my parents and me across the road adjacent to the boardwalk. I landed in a garden on my back, opened my eyes and stared at the blue sky, and there was a loud ringing in my ears. The blood was pouring out of my nose, and I felt a terrible tightness and pain in my chest. But otherwise I did not appear to be seriously hurt. That was the amazing phenomenon of the blast, which could lift you as if by a giant’s hand and deposit you in a garden without serious physical damage. In a daze, I got up, and soon discovered my parents in the same garden, on all fours, attempting to stand up, also suffering from nosebleeds and chest pains. They also were not seriously hurt by the blast.

At the time, I was somehow able to suppress the horror of our experiences during the war, and carry on day by day. However, about a year after the bombings in Bristol and Weston-super-Mare, I began suffering from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. I began getting severe nightmares and panic attacks. Even today I still occasionally experience panic attacks, generally when I am visiting Europe.

From Bristol my father was posted to the isolated farming and port town of Stranraer in western Scotland, where he was in charge of port security. Travelling by rail at this time during the war was an arduous and dangerous experience. All our belongings were in two suitcases during this move, and my father carried his precious trumpet in a black case. The trip to the western coast of Scotland took more than three days. We had to change trains because the Germans had bombed the railways connecting England and Scotland. I tried to sleep at night in the train carriage, which was stuffy with the smell of cigarette smoke and the anti-lice chemical odour of the British soldiers’ uniforms. The soldiers were with us in the train because military personnel took precedence over civilians in wartime transportation.

On the second night of the journey, near the industrial town of Doncaster in northern England, German bombs fell all around us as we approached the main railway station. The train stopped and we all had to get out and walk. During the ensuing panic, we lost our luggage, including my father’s trumpet. We walked, terrified, along the tracks as the bombs fell over the city, and finally got to the railway station, where after some hours we were able to board another train and continue our journey to Scotland.

At dawn of the third day, a cold, foggy morning, we arrived at the railway station at Stranraer. My parents were upset by the experiences of the trip and had a loud argument about whose fault it was for losing all our belongings on the way. My father managed to get hold of a military jeep, and at six o’clock in the morning he drove us to a house that he randomly chose on a dismal street in Stranraer, and he hammered on the door. A sleepy-looking woman with curlers in her hair appeared in her dressing gown. My father announced that he had a war permit that meant he could requisition a room for us for a few nights. The poor woman looked astonished, but then rallied, as people did during the war, and welcomed us in. She escorted me into a bedroom where her three adult daughters were getting up and were in the process of dressing. A small bed in a corner would be mine for the next three nights, as I shared the room with the young ladies.

Despite our initial difficulties in Stranraer, we soon felt grateful that we had left Bristol. My father heard from a colleague who had lived near us in Bristol that the house in which we had been renting rooms had been destroyed about a week after we left for Scotland and our eighty-year-old landlady had been killed. She was in the habit of opening her bedroom window during the bombing barrages and shaking her fist at the German bombers droning overhead. My father’s colleague told him that a bomb falling near her house had blown her head off.

After a few days we moved from our emergency lodgings to an old house outside Stranraer owned by two elderly sisters. Some weeks went by before it could be arranged for me to go to school, and during that time of freedom I became friends with a boy who lived on a nearby farm, and he and I roamed through the woods during the day hunting rabbits with slingshots. Once I started school, I often spent time in the late afternoons by myself on the deserted beaches, which were covered with barbed wire and other anti-invasion devices. One night not long after I had started school, a British bomber torpedoed a German troop ship that was sailing between the west coast of Scotland and Ireland. For days after the attack, I watched the bodies of German soldiers washing up on shore.

In Stranraer harbour, there was a Royal Air Force base, from which planes went out on patrol at night on the North Sea and the Atlantic. I spent time at the base and became a sort of mascot of the air force pilots. Some of the young pilots and crew that I got to know didn’t return from their patrols. I also spent time after school with the soldiers who occupied an anti-aircraft position not far from the house we were living in, and they would give me chocolate.

It was difficult sharing accommodations with strangers during the war. My mother, an excellent cook who was proud of her kitchen, often got into arguments with our landladies. And so, it was not long before we left the house outside Stranraer and moved into a house in town, renting rooms on the top floor with our own kitchen and bathroom. The house was owned by a dour, unpleasant older man. My father was usually away every night at the port, boarding vessels that came in from southern Ireland. He was searching for Nazi spies who would have entered Ireland from U-boats and then stowed away in fishing boats and smaller vessels coming in from Dublin and Belfast.

One morning, when my father returned from his shift at the port, and I was in the kitchen with my mother, who was preparing his breakfast, he announced that he had joined the army as a private. He felt that he was not contributing enough to the war effort at the port. My mother was shocked by this decision and couldn’t understand why he would do this at the age of thirty-four. He soon started a rigorous six-month program of commando training in an intelligence unit of the army in the south of England. My mother and I stayed on for two months in Stranraer and then moved to Glasgow, where we lived briefly with my grandparents and my aunt Rhoda until we found a flat of our own to rent. In Glasgow, my mother had a government job censoring the letters written home by British soldiers on duty abroad. She had become fluent in reading and writing English during the years she had been married to my father.

My father came back to Glasgow on leave once during his training. When my mother and I met him at the railway station, I barely recognized him getting off the train, carrying his duffle bag and rifle on his shoulders. He had lost so much weight during his strenuous training that he was a shadow of the father I had known. During his leave, and while my parents were away from the small flat, I enjoyed playing with his service rifle and revolver. At one point I overheard my father telling my mother that because he spoke Danish, he had been ordered to be part of a spy operation to be dropped into occupied Denmark by parachute. Fortunately for my father, the operation was cancelled, for his chances of surviving this adventure were low.

In Glasgow I was put into a first-rate educational institution, Allan Glen’s School, where unfortunately I did poorly academically, except for the chemistry class, where for some inexplicable reason I always got the top mark. My mathematical abilities did not impress my mathematics teacher, and my physics teacher considered me an abysmal failure. However, I discovered that I had inherited my father’s talent for drawing, and won an all-Glasgow drawing competition, which greatly pleased my art teacher.

After his training, my father was promoted to corporal and was stationed in Glasgow. Since the flat my mother had rented was too small for all three of us, my father rented rooms in a house in the western part of Glasgow. Unfortunately, not long after moving in, my mother had yet another altercation with the unpleasant landlady with whom she shared the kitchen. My mother objected to the mouse tracks in the fat in the frying pans, which the landlady had not washed. And so, one night, my father came in and pulled me out of bed and said that we were leaving. We took off in the dark in a military jeep with our few belongings, and my father requisitioned living quarters for us in yet another house, using another war permit.

The council house we were billeted in was owned by a Mrs. Barge, who had a nine-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. Mr. Barge was in the medical corps, stationed in Libya as part of the Eighth Army. For the next year and a half, I shared a room with Mrs. Barge’s daughter, my parents had the main bedroom, while Mrs. Barge and her son slept in a third room.

The Germans bombed the port of Glasgow in 1941 and 1942, trying to destroy its shipbuilding industry, which was located about five miles from Mrs. Barge’s house. Over a period of three nights, we suffered a serious blitz, as the bombing raids over Glasgow increased in intensity. The six of us had to sleep in an Anderson air raid shelter in the Barges’ back garden. It was partially underground, and was made of corrugated iron. Most houses had these air raid shelters in their gardens during the war.

On the second night of the blitz, the Germans dropped incendiary bombs on our neighbourhood. They destroyed the church at the end of the street, and many houses near us caught fire, but we were spared. The next day, I walked around in the garden picking up pieces of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells. They had razor-sharp edges. One had to be careful going from the house to the shelter when the bombing started, because fragments of shells were dropping from the sky. One night when in a panic we were running from the house to the air raid shelter, my parents donned steel helmets and ran on ahead, leaving me to reach the shelter bare-headed, since all the helmets were taken. This scene continues to haunt me today, a reminder of the horrors of war suffered by children.

During the three days the blitz lasted, about 1500 civilians were killed in the port of Glasgow, the highly populated area of Clyde-bank and in our neighbourhood. Roughly 60,000 civilians were killed during the bombings of England and Scotland. This compared to the 400,000 casualties suffered by the British soldiers and air force and navy personnel. In addition, of course, were the many thousands of severely wounded in the civilian population and the military, and the more than one million houses destroyed or damaged in the air raids on London alone.

Soon it was time to move again. In late 1943, my father, now a captain in the intelligence corps, was posted to the east coast English port of Grimsby and Hull, where he was put in charge of security, checking the fishing boats that came in from Denmark, again potentially containing Nazi spies. This time my father succeeded in getting me accepted by Hymer’s College, even though my scholarly aptitude did not impress the headmaster. At the age of eleven, I was a day student at this prestigious English public school, while living in a boarding house in Hull with my parents and twelve other people.

The war ended in 1945, and my father, now a major, was sent to northern Germany the next year to oversee the Flensburg occupation troops. Instead of following him once again, my mother and I returned to Copenhagen by boat in January 1947, and I entered a Danish high school. Since by this time, after all our years in England, I was neither speaking nor writing Danish, the first year of school in Copenhagen turned out to be another gap in my education. It was a strange experience, sitting in classes not understanding a word that was being said around me, particularly by my teachers. I spent a lot of time looking out the window of the schoolroom, daydreaming.

In Denmark, children finish high school in their mid-teens and are then considered for a preparatory program for university in the gymnasium. Entrance to the gymnasium stream in Denmark depended upon tests, academic performance during high school and, most important, upon the recommendation of a gymnasium teacher. When I was fifteen, in my last year of high school, and by this time fluent in Danish, I was interviewed by a young mathematics teacher from the Copenhagen gymnasium. My whole future seemed to be riding on this interview. If the teacher was satisfied with my answers to his questions, he would recommend that I enter the gymnasium in the fall. Three or four years later, I could then apply to university. If I failed this personal interview, the only options available to me after high school would be entering a trade school or seeking work, most likely menial and ill paid.

The teacher ushered me into a small schoolroom with grey-painted walls and wooden desks. He cleared his throat, wrote on the blackboard and asked his first mathematical question. I sifted through the confused jumble of mathematics knowledge in my mind—detritus from my thirteen schools and two languages. When I did not immediately answer the teacher, he sighed and tossed another question at me.

Standing helplessly at the blackboard with the teacher’s increasingly unfriendly blue-eyed gaze boring into me, I sensed the familiar feeling of a panic attack beginning. My heart raced, I felt faint and my brain ceased to function. The teacher, his voice rising, asked two more questions. I was unable to answer even the simplest one. I had become mute.

The teacher strode up to the blackboard, snatched the chalk from my hand and said, “Moffat, I can guarantee that you will never become a mathematician.” I stumbled from the room. The interview had taken half an hour. The teacher’s report was so negative that there was no chance at all for me to enter the gymnasium. That was effectively the end of my schooling.

Millions of children grew up during the Second World War in Europe. I don’t know how many of them had as disruptive a childhood as I had, moving from town to town and school to school sometimes several times each year. I don’t know how many others were subjected to such frightening and frequent bombing attacks and other horrors of war that they sustained permanent psychological damage. Millions of children today, in various parts of the world, still experience daily conditions of war, terrorism, natural disasters and famine. Once one gets beyond a sense of gratitude at having survived at all, it is natural to wonder how a wartime childhood helped shape the adult person one has become.

My inferior, fragmented schooling, together with the panic attacks induced by many nights of fearing imminent death by German bombs, seemed to prevent me from pursuing a life in science— or any other academic field I might have chosen. Yet it may also be possible that the conditions of my childhood helped me to develop the self-reliance and strong personal motivation necessary to overcome those limitations. If I had managed to survive the war, all the dangerous travelling my parents and I had to do, the fierce bombings, the lack of opportunities to form long-term friendships, the constant moving from school to school, then surely I could continue to survive and make something of my life.