4.Spring-summer 1955. Home from home.

After Mannheim what? Probably another little German camp in Bruhl, just up the Rhine. Only the vaguest memories. The SCI archive lists several camps in Bruhl and I can’t be sure which one was mine. Nor who was there or what work we did. Only glimpses, fragments.

Big tins of US gift-aid food, orange cheese and red jam. Four-lbs or 7-lbs tins that we opened with a tin opener and ate in various combinations with nearly every meal. I can also feel the thin body of a young woman through the thin silk of a sari or sarong. We’re standing alone in a room at the top of some sort of tower, looking out over a dark town and landscape. The young woman is Dutch, a bit older than me, and I have an arm around her. The cloth she’s got wrapped round her comes from Indonesia where she spent her childhood. She’s wearing it because our camp, or whoever is hosting it, has organised some sort of international night with foreign food. Perhaps she’s helped to make the food. Now we’ve climbed the stairs to look out, and she tells me that in the war her family was forced to leave when the Japanese invaded.

Until then Indonesia had been a Dutch colony, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. I don’t know whether what weighs on her is some particular horror or a vaguer sense of paradise lost. Fools paradise, perhaps, like many of those old colonial worlds. With my own colonial relations, I remember they assumed a different style of life than ours, black servants and sundowners on the balcony when we were turning to white goods, washing machines and pasteurised milk. I had an old great uncle who retired from the Sudan to live alone in a flat off the Earls Court Road. Every evening he cooked dinner for himself, then changed into a dinner jacket before he ate it (the dinner).

I wouldn’t have thought all that as we stood together in the dark. I might have thought of Aunt Lorna and her two children who spent the war in a Japanese camp in the Philippines, but probably not my mother's sister Erica who was interned by her own government in East Africa because she had married a German gold-miner.
In their colonial history and some other ways, the Dutch and English have a lot in common. We clung to each other, this young woman and I, and her sadness as well as the warmth of her body got through to me. The mix of sympathy and lust disconcerted me and it may have been that alternating current which kept the memory aglow.

In hindsight, my sensations that night can also help me work out the time of year and which of the SCI Bruhl camps that was. In summer it would not have been so cold, in winter too cold for her to climb the tower in a single layer of silk. Spring fits and one of the Bruhl camps on the SCI list took place in early April 1955.

I did not keep a diary of my work-camp years, but did take a notebook on earlier building jobs, in Wokingham before and after leaving school. That’s one reason why I remember those first building jobs better than several later work camps round Britain. Perhaps if I’d written more letters, or phoned home, that too might have helped fix things in my mind, but long distance calls were still expensive, for special occasions and emergencies.

At school, I had lost the habit – if I ever had it – of recalling events from day to day in conversation with parents and family. That’s one of the troubles with boarding school. Letter-writing became another sort of boring homework. By the time we were sat down to write them, as part of our Sunday routine, the moment and the need to share it were lost. Our letters, mine at least, were formulaic: 'Are you well? I am. Thank you for the...Yesterday we played St Andrews, and lost 2-1.' even if it was an away match that I didn't watch.

Telling the story is essential to recall, though the story once told often takes the place of the events it describes. Damned if you don’t, damned if you do. It helps if you have been used to communicating as you go, with people close enough to trust and show and interest. Even day-schools can be too far removed. When children get home from school, they mostly dont want to talk about that other world. ‘What happened at school today?’ The answer ‘Nothing much’ unless it was something extraordinary.

With the gaps too wide to bridge, we get accustomed to partitioning our lives, right hand from left. As with home and school, so with home and work, or day and night. We live in one dream, work in another, sleep in another. In a Rilke poem, Orpheus leads Eurydice back up the long tunnel from Hades. In sight of daylight at last, he forgets his deal with the underworld and turns his head to see if Eurydice is there. And her lifeline is cut. Instead of crying out, Eurydice sinks back with a sigh of relief.

For me, as the end of school holidays approached, I could no longer forget the darkness of the term ahead... But by the time I started work on those building sites near home, this sort of tension was gone. The daily cycle ride between home and building site was almost enjoyable, with things to look forward to both ends. When I got home I could talk about the day’s events.

For my parents as well as me, these holiday jobs of mine opened windows on blind spots. They too had been to private schools. Though socialist in principle, they had little contact with manual working life. For my mother, marriage and the war had brought what she sometimes felt as a descent into childcare and housework, for my father the call-up and basic training for the navy came as an almost welcome bread. If I talked about my working days, Martin and Richard may sometimes have been listening. Susan was too young, perhaps, and a girl, but Martin joined me on one of those building sites, and Richard came out to a workcamp in Algeria.

My workcamps in the UK, apart from one in Glasgow, were not as new and memorable to me as Mannheim before or Algeria later. As a child we'd moved a lot and I'd had an unusual sampling of manual tasks. My mother liked us to share with the chores. And, just after WW2, my prep-school offered unusual opportunities, Recently opened, Frilsham House was a private mansion that had served as a wartime hospital. Besides a vista of daffodils, now lost under the M4, the new school had a vegetable garden with fruit-cages, but no playing field or swimming bath. Conventional labour and materials were scarce, so we children were set to work. Some mornings we would shell peas or broad beans for lunch. Some afternoons we would have half an hour off games to pick soft fruit, with the last few minutes into our mouths. Less willingly, we picked flints from the newly levelled playing field.

The real achievement was digging our own swimming bath, teachers and boys working side by side like canal navvies to fill the barrows as they wheeled between us down a central ramp. The hole was not rectangular but an organic oval. Cement was reserved for reconstruction so the pool was lined with the skin of a wartime blimp or barrage balloon. By the middle of summer term, the lining went in, and we watched the pool slowly fill. Then in a triumphant opening ceremony we all jumped in.

Child labour? It didn’t feel like exploitation. Now I realise that our parents were paying for us to do this work and it added value to the school, which was the property of the headmaster. It also made a welcome change and added value to our lives.

When we moved out of London, we called the our house Field House. It wasn’t old or grand but did stand among fields, with a wood at the bottom of its own half acre of long grass. The house was red brick with some outbuildings of wood and corrugated iron. There was no bathroom and no electric light when we first moved in. We got used to stoking fires, filling and trimming oil lamps, taking care of the fragile mantle that made the Aladdin shine so white, and turned black if the flame was uneven or too high. In the lean-to that became our bathroom, we found – I say ‘we’ though Martin and I were away at school - a litter of puppies. The one we kept was already named Laddy, after the Lassie in Lassie Come Home. My father had the top of our bit of field ploughed up to make a vegetable garden. The only time I remember him swearing and hitting out was when I crept up and dropped something on his bare back as he dug. On the other side of the house, we made a lawn and later, inspired by our school swimming pool, I made Martin help me dig a pond. This was rectangular, properly shuttered and lined with concrete. Just big enough for children, until goldfish and water plants took over.

On the Wokingham building site, it was digging again, trenches for foundations, to a longer line and in different company. We had a big mixer to load and tip: one of cement to four of sand or gravel and just enough water to bind it. We stopped ten minutes early for cleaning up, washing and scraping shovels, while the mixer cleaned itself, turning empty but for clanking brickbats. I mostly worked with Ernie and Jock, one from Berkshire, the other... a Jock. Ernie was quieter, ruminative, stout as in strong. Jock was leaner, with a lined face and jaundiced view of life. They were mostly kind to me, showed me what to do and included me in the banter between them. I remember Ernie taking a pick to some hard ground and saying ‘Roll on winter.’ When I asked why he said 'More challenge, when it's frost.' Years later, at Reuters, one of the teleprinter operators I worked with would let the copy stack up till he went on line. Others would prepare a long loop to give themselves breathing space, but he preferred to tap the ticker tape out live, keep pace with the machine.

The apprentice on the Wokingham site was more of a butt for jokes. I was an alien nodding in, he was of their world and on the way up. Often he would be looking down on us, atop a trench or mound with dumpy level or marker pole. When there were gaps between jobs, or we made ourselves a gap, Jock and Ernie saw that I stayed on my feet, shovel in hand. ‘You don’t have to do anything, just look like it.’

Or they nodded me off to a hiding place behind a pile of blocks, ‘Get in there and write your notes.’ They knew I was writing about them, they seemed content with that but I dont remember them asking what or why. Words were my business, they may have felt. The working classes and the wordy class...

In the beginning was the word? No, the word may have become God, but first there had to be something to talk about, give the orders to. Words armed themselves with swords, or vice versa. Once the point was driven home, the swords were beaten into ploughshares, into cash, with a few kept for ceremonial use, as a reminder. If my work-mates accepted me, it was because, for the moment at least we were on equal terms. I might have the notebook, but they could tell me what to do, and my scribble might come to speak for all of us.

We were paid weekly, notes and change, in little brown envelopes. How much? Them more than £10, me less, maybe £7 12s 6d. Once out of the envelope, the money lost its shine, and I didn’t like the smell. On work-camps, the pocket money for long term volunteers was only 10s a week. I didn’t mind that because we got our keep and all got more or less the same, and beer cost about 6p a pint.

The other Wokingham job was with a decorating firm, on a contract for school windows. Hundreds of metal windows, which we painted with grey undercoat then glossy white. Narrow frames, glass easily smeared. First we had to scrape off dirt, lumps, loose flakes and rust. I had quite enjoyed the building work, but not this. It was holiday time and the classrooms were empty. But for my parents’ money, and their decision to send me to private school when I failed my 11 plus maths, I might have gone to that school or another like it.

In my last year at Leighton Park, we had exchange visits with a new secondary modern school in Slough. I was quite envious because it was co-ed and I liked a girl I got talking to. I felt I was missing something, not just girls but another way of being. With this girl, if only for an hour or two, I felt that she had more to her than she was ready or able to say. For my part didn’t have to blurt things out, then wish I’d said them differently. My family said they saw my lips move after I spoke, as if I were savouring my own words. But now I think it may have been a process of revision: you may need to get something wrong before you can put it right. What I found with this girl was a new quietness, watchfulness, her in my world for an afternoon, then me in hers.

On Guy Fawkes night at Leighton Park, which really was a park – a treelined half-mile along a main road into Reading – we had a big bonfire. Odd that a gentle Quaker school should burn a Catholic in effigy. Odder still that we 'Leightonians', many of us from liberal families, should describe our local counterparts as ‘Scummies.’ I'm sure that was the word I heard used to describe the boys who came in for bonfire material, or a fight, or just to watch the fireworks. What we saw in each other was not quite the 'inner light' or 'that of god in everyone.'

The foreman on the school-decorating job behaved more like a Christian. He gave himself the dirty jobs, like spraying ceilings, and made sure the kettle was boiled in time for our breaks. We had our tea and sandwiches off an improvised table in the hut. The surface was an asbestos sheet, safety was not an issue then, and the grey surface was good for drawing on. Every day, we moved our tea things to make new space for his emerging city-scape. As other people read or smoked or joked, the foreman added more buildings, roadways, trees and lamp-posts. No people, birds or dogs as far as I remember. Unlike my notes his work was open for all to see. Later I read the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and Jude the Obscure, but I already began to realise that creative intelligence can pop up anywhere.

At one of my earlier schools I remember being impressed by a painting of huge leaves driven by wind. They looked as if they would blow out across the room and I was surprised to find that the painter was a bad-tempered bully in the form above mine. Forty years later, I was struck by another tree painting, on display in the hall of a Manchester comprehensive. This time the roots as well as trunks and foliage were visible, and they projected out of the picture into real space. I was told the artist was an Asian girl, and that she had since been removed from that school. Her elder brother told outraged teachers not to worry, she would be able to paint at home and he would supply her with materials.

So what would I have been writing in my notebook? I could find it now, but I I fin d my writing hard to read. Then as now, I had no proper plan for my writing or future publication, but I had been thinking of becoming a journalist. My great-aunt Olive, founder of a famous girls' school, had urged me to go for Law. She might have settle for the Times, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. My father read the Times on his train to London, but I rarely looked beyond the boring small print of the then front page. At school, the only paper I liked the look of was the News Chronicle. That was like a leftish Daily Mail, and the journalist who caught my eye was a foreign correspondent called James Cameron. I wrote to him and he wrote back, inviting me to lunch. ‘Give me a ring when you get to town,’ he said. In the byline mugshot, Cameron had a wolfish look, but the voice on the phone was plummy: ‘Jump in a cab,' he said when I rang from Paddington. I had only travelled in taxis with family and heavy luggage, never on my own as the quickest way from A to B.

James Cameron in the flesh was friendly, direct and humorous, ready to disillusion but not discourage me. ‘It’s a job like any other,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘but if you try somehow, you just might find....’ ‘Keep in touch,’ he said when we parted, and a year or two later I got back to him. And many years afterwards again, in Cairo and Algiers, I met women who fondly remembered their moments with the roving Jimmy Cameron.

By then I’d been given more good advice. Before or during the war in the Pacific, my father’s elder brother Gerald – Lorna's husband - had got to know a journalist called Christopher Chancellor. He went on to become Reuters managing editor and Gerald arranged for me to meet him. In his office at 85 Fleet Street. Sir Christopher, as he may have been by then, helped me off with my coat and drew up a chair for me. He asked why I was interested and told me how the agency worked. It was then a trust, serving mainly the British press, with a network of correspondents in places that no one paper or broadcaster could afford to cover. Once it may have been possible for copy-boys to rise to editor-in-chief, now I was advised to go to university and keep an open mind. Which I did and it was ten years later that I applied for job at Reuters. By then Chancellor had moved on and I did not mention our meeting. What got me the job was a degree in Arabic and a couple of freelance pieces for the News Chronicle and Guardian. I felt a mixture of moral superiority and resentment as Chancellor's son, Alex, rose quickly through the Reuter ranks and PollyToynbee, barely out of university, got in at the Observer.

My first three workcamps, in Spring 1955, took me to Birmingham, Hampshire and Glasgow. Between these short-term projects I spent time at the IVS (International Voluntary Service, UK branch of the SCI) centre in Pembridge Villas, not far from where we’d lived in Holland Park before moving to Field House. The Birmingham camp was based at a community centre in a drab suburb. All I remember about it is that Birmingham buses seemed to run round the city rather than in and out of it. People would go to neighbouring suburban centres but not into the city. A teenage boy I talked to had only ever been there once. Same with me. Like the other boys around I lacked the money and the curiosity.

Some of the campers on these short term projects were ardent believers who liked to sing from our little yellow SCI songbook. From them, and from a short history of the movement, I gathered that the founder, Pierre Ceresole, had gone to prison for refusing military service during the First World War. Afterwards he had brought French and German volunteers together to clear up some of the rubble. Not all the French and Germans were ready to forgive each other but the idea remains sound. A similar approach is being adopted by Israeli opponents of the Palestine occupation who raise funds and work with Palestinians and 'internationals' to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes. (One, which I helped to rebuild for the fourth time in 2002 has just been destroyed again, in February 2012).

My IVS/SCI badge was a pick and shovel in bas-relief on bronze, a more or less conscious tribute to the soviet hammer and sickle. I’ve got one in a little box with a Bronze Cross life-saving medal from school. The SCI anthem was a prayer to Friendship, l'Amitie: 'You, who make half our miseries disappear, come and make us live like brothers' to a mawkish melody. If the devil gets the best tunes, good causes rarely get as good as they deserve. What could be less convincing than 'We shall overcome...some day'? Once in a goodbye ceremony at the end of a workcamp, we were stood in a circle on a railway platform to sing the dreaded song. As the others held hands, I slipped away – petered out ?– to the Gents or nearest cigarette machine.

The Hampshire camp was at Le Court, a Leonard Cheshire home for disabled ex-servicemen and people with incurable illnesses. A bright and sunny place, with good food, friendly nurses and one or two patients I enjoyed arguing with. We never saw the founder, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC. He had been a bomber pilot, got promoted young and decorated for bravery. He played a part in both the Dam Buster raids and the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki. When war was over he turned from killing to caring, though that may be too glib. Cheshire owed his wartime reputation and promotion partly to the care he showed for his air crew. He had bombers stripped of some lethal glass-house gun turrets. That both saved lives, and made room for extra bombs or fuel.

Le Court, the building, reminded me a bit of my Frilsham prep school. Sometimes I felt uneasy. Managers, staff, patients were all in it together in the nicest possible way, but there were fault-lines, and I felt one or two of the patients were uneasy with me: bad enough to be young and disabled in a wheelchair without having to make way for smart-ass volunteers. One night, there was a dance at Le Court. What bothered me was not the privilege of four good limbs but the fact that in this rather classy setting I only had a bright green sports jacket. I wonder how some of my team mates felt with their coloured skins (see other picture, with Ben, from Ghana, tipping the barrow. He surprised me one day by pissing down the bathplug as the water ran out, but then that seemed quite reasonable.)

The person I admired on that camp was not a brave patient or the sainted war-hero, but another boy on my team. About my age, he was tall with a bow-wave of swept back hair and some skills that the rest of us lacked. He came on placement from a borstal or approved school and was part-way through a painting and decorating apprenticeship (see picture of him blow-lamping a windowframe as Mehdi and I scrub the floor). His masterpiece was a rainbow toilet seat. He found his niche in an outdoor toilet we were doing up. He removed the old wooden seat, then sanded, primed and undercoated it. For top coat he selected a range of coloured gloss, which he applied in concentric bands, each merged into the next. A lucky horse-shoe rainbow for all who sat thereon.

What happened to him afterwards? What prompts, forces or enables people to change course? Ceresole seems to have been consistent, went to prison for his beliefs then set about putting them into practice. Cheshire turned from warrior to carer. My mother stuck to her pacifist guns even when war broke out, and her husband and brothers joined up. Her younger brother Tony was angry with her at first but sounded more understanding in the letters he wrote as the allies advanced through France. In the Ardennes, he got killed.

The Tenants, a family we knew in Wokingham, upped stumps and moved to Scotland. Peter Tenant worked in London, got to know my father on the train and my mother through Quaker meetings. He gave up his London job and moved with family to a huge run-down estate in Stirlingshire. One school holiday I hitched up to stay with them. It took a day and a night and Valerie Tennant, Peter’s wife, met me at Callander in the morning. She came in a van and we stopped on the way up a long private road to pick up a tree. I was 16 and reasonably strong, Valerie was heavier and stronger. She went round to the thick stump-end of the log, picked it up and waited for me to lift the thinner one. 'Damn,’ she said as we wrestled the log into the van. Her end secured, she bent down and kicked off what remained of her petticoat.

Life at their Invertrossach was a mix of hard graft, refinement and eccentricity. Through the day we would saw, dig or knock in fenceposts, and there was a small tractor that one of the girls taught me how to drive. At 4 pm our work on the garden and land would stop for tea in the drawing room, a sprinkling of Chinese leaves in a silver pot. Sometimes the adults dressed for dinner, and I was a bit older than the Tenant girls, almost adult. One night the Moderator of the Church of Scotland was to be a dinner guest. Even if I'd possessed a dinner jacket, I wouldn't have brought it in my rucksack. I need not have worried. As it turned out there were two old old tweedy jackets at table, one that normally served as my school uniform, the other worn by Peter to keep me company. What drew or drove the Tenants back to Scotland was a sort of greenish patriotism, the need for something more down to earth than Whitehall or the City.

After their children left home, Peter and Valerie Tenant moved again, this time to Northern Ireland, where they worked to give comfort, if not reconciliation, to Catholics and Protestants. In the image I have of them, Peter and Valerie sit facing each other across a wide open fire. It’s after dinner. Valerie smokes a pipe as she picks and pokes an embroidery hoop, while Peter darns a long woollen sock. That done, he reaches for a volume of Walter Scott and reads aloud.

Michael Sorensen, the secretary of IVS during my first two years, was another strange man. He dressed formally for such an offbeat job, often wearing a long dark overcoat, and rarely wasted words. When he talked to people, he looked before he spoke, from eyes set deep under heavy brows. Sometimes he smiled, as though through a chink in the clouds. I never knew what he did in his office, but he spun no lines, showed no ambition for himself and I trusted him.

The IVS centre in Pembridge Villas became a home from home, not unlike our old house in Clarendon Road. The tall terrace building was part-office, part-hostel for volunteers passing through. In the front office was Esma Boroughs who received volunteers like me and other visitors. He was more welcoming and talkative than Michael, small, almost shoulder-less under loose knitted jumpers. In contrast, his head was classical and his voice melodious. Staying at the hostel could be entertaining or boring according to who else was there. Adelaide must have been a refugee from Franco Spain. She was temperamental, far from home and found communication difficult, and a lot of catering got left to her. Another longterm volunteer and CO was John Burningham. We never went to the same work camps, but often met in London between them. John had a clearer sense than I did then of who he was and what he could do. He was thickset, creative and funny, looked a bit like Orson Welles and always had a girlfriend. I liked and envied him. Within a year or two he was producing lovely London Transport posters. Later he wrote and illustrated some of the best children’s books I’ve ever seen. John had an Indian friend, Homi Katrak, who often played Rastus to his Massa in a little comedy of the Old South. Homi had been, may still have been, a waiter at the Savoy and talked bitterly of the meanness he found behind the facade, not just between Upstairs and Downstairs, but within the ranks.

A French Moroccan woman stopped by at the IVS and quite shocked me with a joke about an old sheikh who satisfied his wives with carbon paper. There was also a Frenchman who had worked and hitchhiked round the world. One day we were to attend some event that required a long ride on the tube. I had looked forward to the journey together and he was happy to talk. Half way round the Circle line we went, with never an interesting moment. How could anyone have seen so much and thought so little?

Et tu, Greg? I once worked for a week or two in the IVS office and chanced on one camp-leader’s report about myself. After one or two plus-points, he ended ‘Frankly I didn’t like to him.’ The next secretary of the IVS was called Frank – Frank Judd, who l later became a Labour minister, for the Navy perhaps. He wasn't the man who made the report about me, nor did we like each other very much.

Michael Sorensen and Esma must have given me the benefit of the doubt. By the time I got to Govan in Glasgow, it was as work-leader on a fortnight’s decorating project. We were to clean and redecorate some old people’s flats, in tall dark tenement buildings unlike anything I had seen before. Narow entrances, long flights of cold dark stairs, toilets on landings. The old tenants mostly stayed put while we worked around them. I arrived a couple of days in advance to see what had to be done, how best to do it, and where to get advice and materials. Although I was still 18 and one of the youngest of some dozen volunteers, a little advance knowledge was all it needed to lend me authority, coupled with what little I'd learned on school windows in Wokingham. I tried to do my share of the dirty work as well as doing the rounds and delivering what was needed from place to place. When I didn’t know what to do, I said I would go and find out. We got some help from the man who had set up the jobs for us, and some from the former tradesman at the paintshop. Some of the old people slept through the day under dust sheets in their chairs. Others got us cups of tea and gave us cake. I was too busy or careless to take this chance of finding out more about the place and their lives.

Some of the people we worked around had almost nothing, just cans and crusts, bottles on bare surfaces. Others were hemmed in by accumulated furniture and bricabrac which made life difficult for us: what to pile on what, where to put paintpots, ladders and ourselves. A table or chair might collapse when moved or stood upon. A skirting board, hollowed out by dry rot, crumbled when the surface-paint was scraped. Plaster, stripped of the paper that kept it in place, would fall back onto the floor revealing expanses of old brickwork. We took to leaving the existing paintwork and paper in place, for fear of what we’d uncover. In one case, I remember cracks in a wall encrusted with little husks, generations of bedbug shells. We could rarely make a proper job of a place, but some of us – and some of the residents – didn’t seem to know the difference. So we patched and skimmed: if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. On the one hand, I discovered how incompetent some otherwise intelligent people can be. On the other, I was encouraged to find that we could cope somehow, and by the appreciation some old tenants showed. Even good intentions better than nothing?

At the community centre where we stayed, I got to know an old shipyard worker who had not worked since he fell down a funnel. A more-or-less reformed alcoholic, he was gave me glipses of an industry in its ruthless heyday. One night I walked down to the water’s edge and climbed as far as I could up a crane. Lying on my front far out on the metal arm, I could look straight down onto the dark water. Pitch dark, with oily reflections of the lights the other side. Why climb up there? To see if I could, to see how it looked and felt up there, to talk about it sometime afterwards...As often, especially in the dark, climbing down was more difficult than climbing up.

Harmony Row was an infamous little street not far from where we lived and worked. I didn’ t hear the Row, but walked down the street on a Saturday or Sunday morning-after, the pavement and roadway a mosaic of broken glass. I hate that crackling underfoot, even now on a Swansea beach, as I walk on a patch of shells left by the tide. In Glasgow pubs, I liked the combination of pint and whisky, though not sure which to chase with which. After two, it makes no difference, but I hardly got to that. The district had a reputation for being tough, but the only time I ever felt afraid was when a man I knew came up behind my at the bar. His conventional ‘Arright. Jimmy?’ hit me like a thunderbolt.

Later, working in an engineering factory, I realised that this aggressive joviality is the product of noisy workplaces where men have to shout at each other to be heard. The habit, once formed, extends to other social settings, as does deafness among men and women subjected to the crash and grind of machinery. Or heavy music, as I tell Will, our youngest son works with that.

3a Mannheim pics

Grey ground, green trees -

though maybe not the ones

we planted in that other world.

And us?

3. Early 1955 Mannheim

Job done c1957, and now the abenteuerspiel !

But my time was earlier, in 1955 - or was it the following year? - when the work was only half done. The trouble is I remember some times and places quite clearly, but cant put dates to them or even be sure what order they came in. I remember camps in Britain, Germany and Algeria but not how I got from one to the next or what happened in between. When I began writing, I tried to piece the bits together and work out the most likely order. I used my common sense, remembering sun in one place, frost in another. Mannheim was definitely in the winter, but which winter? Probably the second, I decided, since I must have been sent to short camps in Britain before a long one abroad. On trial, as it were. Then I found a list of SCI work-camps on the internet. The UK camps I remembered came after, not before, the Mannheim camp in Germany, and that was in January 1955. Later there were two other camps, in Worms and Bruhl, but the second I could not get a proper fix on.
Dates don't matter, experience speaks for itself, the narrative in a time of its own? Yes, but when we try to make sense of real events, it helps to know what order they came in, unless we can also dispense with cause and effect. Memories may also be compared to observations in a scientific experiment. To be reliable, an experiment must be repeatable, observable by different people in different places. History is never repeatable in that way, but it is more reliable if several witnesses agree: their versions will never quite repeat, if we are to believe them, but must at least correspond. Either way, there's a sort of democratic truth in both science and history...
Since starting to write about Algeria, I’ve come across a snapshot of the team on my first camp. It includes a woman I thought I remembered from another camp, in Lebanon, a year and a thousand miles away. Now I’ve heard from a man I worked with at a later camp in Algeria. Unlike me, he kept diaries. For that period at least I can check my memories against his notes made at the time. So far, I’ve not been proved quite wrong, but reminded of things I’d quite forgotten.
When I started writing on Mannheim, I did get it wrong. I moved the camp from one winter to the next, and that led to several false inferences. For instance, if I didn’t drink on my first camp in Algeria, this might have been because I had not yet been corrupted by crates of Karneval hock in Germany. If, as now seems likely, the Karneval booze-up came first, then it may have been that experience which put me off drinking in a country awash with strong red wine. Rather surprisingly the little yellow songbook of Service Civil International included the old drinking song, Chevaliers de la Table Ronde. 'Et la tete sous le robinet!’
If common sense can play havoc with memory, how reliable is it for prediction? This morning, Fred (whose allotment we share in Swansea) rang up and asked if I thought Israel and/or the US would attack Iran. Oil sanctions were being tightened and warships exercising in the straights of Hormuz, but I said I thought both sides had too much to lose. Fred, like me, seemed unconvinced. What if some in Israel might welcome havoc on the ground, as would surely result from an air strike on Iranian nuclear centres? Might that not provide Israeli hardliners with a pretext and cover for ethnic cleansing: the removal of Palestinians who stand in the way of a Jewish democracy in Judea and Samaria?
I’m writing this in Wales, January 2012, about Germany in January 1955. That was ten years after the Second World War. And now I have the SCI archive, listing camps in order, country by country and year by year. In January 1955, a workcamp opened at the Eherlenhof youth centre in Mannheim. Over Christmas the following year there was another on a self-build housing project near Worms.

Schritt, schritt, wechsel, schritt - Step, step, change and step – we could hear the dance teacher’s voice and the quickstep record through a window overhead. The Ehrlenhof, a former Hitler youth centre, was a modern greyish building, now a multi-purpose community centre and we were billeted in one wing, with metal beds in improvised dormitories and a big table to eat off. The centre was set among drab estates, part residential, part industrial, part wasteland, between Mannheim and Ludwigshaven. We were to help turn former bombsites into a miniature wilderness, not an adventure playground in the modern sense, more a miniature...Bavaria perhaps, with hill and wood and stream in close proximity.
What we found when we got there was still half-battlefield, bulldozed into steep mounds and hollows. This abenteuerspeilplatz was the vision of Herr Hafflinger, who believed that every city child should have a wilderness in reach. Our job was to spread topsoil over mud and rubble, build stone retaining walls, make paths and bridges, plant trees.
Weather permitting, and we were soon less concerned with a green future than keeping warm in the present, the next smoke-break and the next meal. From the stadtkuche we got a basic diet of potato, cabbage, sausage and grey bread. In England there may have still been rationing, but Germany had more to recover from.
Perhaps it was the greyness and austerity of our surroundings, or the monotony of manual work, that hardened our hearts and narrowed our minds. Privation doesn’t mostly make people nice. The core of our team was a small group of ‘longterm volunteers.’ We may have been ‘conscientious’ objectors, but now we took the line of least resistance, objecting to anything that disrupted our minimal comforts and routines. We were not lazy, cruel or anti-German, but nor were we tolerant or welcoming to the idealists and enthusiasts who dropped in to help save the world. We did the job, they talked the talk, we sneered. For a time, if I remember right, we had a middle-aged German 'head-sister' called Atta Gruhl. She set store by traditions and rituals, if not grace before meals, then at least a song from the little yellow book. And she served as lightning conductor for our, mainly English, derision. The English s-o-h can be quite soul-destroying, not least to those it excludes.
In contrast, the young German woman who taught dancing at the youthclub won our respect. From these poor and war-scarred backstreets she got a crowd of youngsters, some younger, some older than me, to take each other by the hand and learn new moves. Beyond calling out the steps, this teacher/youthworker rarely raised her voice. She spoke some English and welcomed us to join in, but didn’t make a meal of it. She reminded me of my English teacher Miss Watts, determined and vulnerable, somehow able to create a bubble of commitment and self-belief among unbelievers.
There was nothing solemn about the dance nights. The music was a mix of German pop and the American hits diffused by AFN, the American Forces network. Mannheim was in the American sector, and here, as in Britain – where the conquest took a different form - the GIs were at once resented and admired. Overpaid, oversexed and over there. I was happier with Sixteen Tons and Hoagy Carmichael than the Yellow Rose of Texas but soon had a regular dancing partner. We seemed to fancy each other and I wondered what to make of it when she saw Bob watching us. Bob was one of my workmates and for no apparent reason she said she hated him. Bob was no dancer though he had been a lifeguard on the Serpentine. One dance night, my dancing girl did not appear. Next morning Bob told us he’d been out with her.
Bob was a Londoner and looked like a bantamweight boxer, cleft chin and quiff of fair wavy hair. He was a capable worker and handyman and this volunteering was a way of seeing the world. James was a Scot, a former office worker who wore the remains of his suits for the playground work. Our fourth musketeer was Mehdi, a Pakistani Parsee with the air of an absent-minded scholar. His eyes were like the wrap-round ones of Mogul paintings which remain visible in profile. Mehdi told fortunes from palms and collected old railway timetables, which he used to plot imaginary journeys between stations chosen at random. The four of us mostly worked together. Another workmate, though not part of our little gang, was a Dutchman, Franz. He was good-looking, good-natured and hard-working with enough humour and presence to hold his own among cynics.
Franz spoke several languages and kept on good terms with everyone. At one camp-meeting, people grumbled about the state of the toilets and argued about whose job it was to clean them. Next morning, when we got up for breakfast, the toilets were sparkling. Nobody admitted responsibility but suspicion fell on Franz, clean-cut and well-washed as always.
Almost part of the team, rather more than less in our esteem, was a young Mannheim woman called Helga. She may have been a student but also had a job in town. Sometimes she came in before work to make our breakfast and returned in the evening to help with tea. She was thickset and strong with short dark hair and a plain face redeemed by fine clear eyes. From time to time she also worked with us on site. One day she offered to take us out. We hardly recognised her when she came to collect us. Not dumpy in working clothes but a diva in long dress, make-up and fur coat. She took us to a club, or music bar, and bought most of the drinks. None of us had any money. Afterwards, with no late buses, she took us to her bed-sit where half a dozen of us shared her bed. The best fit, we found, was side by side, neither lengthwise nor crosswise but on the diagonal, corner-to-corner, tallest in the middle.
Our work-leader was a Hungarian called Yoshka. He was a mason by trade but with a range of building experience, grasp of plans and willingness to improvise. He shouted, joked and cajoled in various languages. Sometimes we pretended not to understand. When he despaired of us, he did the job himself. When it got very cold, we hid behind a bank and lit a fire. We might wheel a barrow over a fire and take turns to lie in it. Yoshka liked puns and crossing languages. From ‘Macht nix’ to ‘Doesn’t matter’ to ‘Thousand meter’ to ‘Kilometer’. He could play tunes on his teeth, making odd faces and tapping out the notes with his finger nails. We once watched him do a sort of rope-trick. As first stage in the building of a suspension bridge, he threw a rope across a ravine. Rather than wait for one of us to catch it on the other side, he lassooed a tree then climbed across himself.
‘Jesus!' said James. 'Fill it with water, and he’d walk across.’ Mehdi once read James’ palm. Usually he would tell us things about ourselves, more or less credible, but this time he dropped the palm as if in shock. What he’d seen he would not say. James seemed less perturbed than some of us, whether because he was less suspicious or already knew.
I don’t know what became of James, but Bob and my one-time dancing partner went to live together in London. Mehdi later visited my family near Wokingham. His eyes lit up when he spotted a tin of currypowder in our kitchen. He asked my mother for a taste, took a teaspoonful and swallowed it – the powder, not the spoon.
Half a century later, I returned to Mannheim, on an exchange visit with a Swansea choir. I was impressed by the city. Swansea seemed provincial and old-fashioned by contrast and the Mannheim choir's singing was better than ours. On a free afternoon I crossed the river and found my way back to the Ehrlenhof. In the main hall there were tables set out for what looked like an Asian wedding feast. The abenteuerspielplatz was now largely overgrown with trees, but obviously still played in. I met the playleaders. One of them had got to know the playground as a child and still lived nearby. They showed me the remains of some structures I half remembered, and a safe metal replacement for the death-defying suspension bridge. I climbed up a tree to show I still could and they gave me a CD copy of photos from the glory days. Some were from before my time, most of the finished product. One shows a mountain stream with children playing in it, strung along its length like coral on a necklace (though the picture above may make the simile redundant). There must have been a pump to keep the water flowing round. No water on my recent visit.
One of the pictures shows Bob, half kneeling to plant a tree. Another shows me, on the back of a lorry, passing a sapling down to scarecrow Mehdi on the ground. I don’t know whether the trees I saw a year or two ago were related to the ones we planted. It was so cold when we dug our saplings up and replanted them that we doubted if many would survive. Our saplings came from a city- or state-owned forest near the river. The snow was thick and the ground frozen so hard it was almost impossible to get the roots out intact. We cut down close to the little trunks and pulled them out like stakes, or the handles of witches' brooms, to be stuck back in the ground when we got hem home. My granny had a story about Joseph of Aramathea planting his staff on Glastonbury Tor, where, in the myth, it grew like Topsy.
The foresters who worked those German woods had gleaming giant tractors, and a warm hut where we went for our breaks. We clustered round the woodstove to get the circulation back in our hands and melt the snow in our boots.
The work and frost hardened our hands till they cracked and bled at the seams. James, with deep pockets in his incongruous city coat, also wore woollen gloves. Perhaps his palms were the only ones still legible.
With Karneval we snapped from frostbite to bacchanalia. Basic foods from the stadtkuche were supplemented with cakes, cartons of cigarettes and crates of white wine. This contrarian Fasching lent was marked by chain-drinking, chain-smoking, chains of revellers in silly costumes singing oompah oompah tunes. I soon learned that if I drank too much, or much too much, I got a sharp headache. A weakness of mine, or a useful warning shot to pre-empt much worse next day.
One occasion was rather different. Our team was invited to a buffet supper with the Stadtdirektor at his family's home on the other side of town. Few of us had any decent clothes and I had to choose between down-at-heel slippers and broke-back working boots. It was strange finding ourselves in a civilised living room, with carpets and polished furniture. Not that we visitors came with the same memories, and this comfortable, cultured home may have been nearer to my default environment than, say, Bob's. But the immediate contrast was the same for all of us, between this softness and the bareness of our living quarters at the Ehrlenhof. We were kindly received, the stadt-direktor friendly, and his wife motherly. When I noticed my team-mates pocketing savouries and cakes, I felt embarrassed.
The stadt-direktor's daughter was about my age and seemed glad to practice her English, already a lot better than my school French. When we left, she came at least some of the way with us. I remember standing next her on a bus, looking down at my old slippers and her neat boots. Perhaps I played hardbitten to impress her. We got on well but hardly met again, too far apart and each with too much else to think about.
I don’t think Bob’s Mannheim romance ended well and I’d like to think Mehdi turned his time-table excercises into epic rail journeys. I had one postcard from Helga. She hitch-hiked on her own to Ethiopia. In her pocket she carried a folding knife which she took out to pare her nails with if a driver began edging in her direction. She and Franz must also have kept in touch. The last I heard was that they met up again and married. I hope they’re living happily ever after.

13.02.2012 A few days ago, on BBC radio Desert Island Disks, I heard a wartime recording of a nightingale, against a background of bomber-engines. I wondered if the record was made by Ludwig Koch, - a Jewish refugee who found a job as BBC sound-engineer and pioneered the recording of birdsong (his name was familiar to me because his daughter, Erica, stayed with us for a while at the end of the war). When I googled ‘nightingales and bombers’ I learned that this was indeed a BBC recording, but not who recorded it. The bombers overhead were Lancasters, bound for Mannheim.
When we worked on our playground, the Mannheim bombsites must still have been obvious, but made no sharp impression on me, probably because I was used to bombsites at home. It was only when I revisited the city in 2009 that I realised the extent of the damage. Mannheim now has a fine new theatre, but there’s a little garden where the old one used to be, and a sign that describes its destruction, along with a palace not far away, by British bombers in 1943. On other buildings round the city centre, there are plaques which describe what stood there before and the number of people who lost their lives.
Now I learn that in 1940, after the German bombing of Coventry, Mannheim was the target of a British experiment in ‘terror bombing.’ Mannheim too had been an important industrial centre, but the new policy, as developed in Hamburg, Dresden and later Mannheim mission, was not aimed only or mainly at industrial or military targets.
On my last visit to the city, I stayed with a woman from the Mannheim choir which hosted us. She baked one of the biggest cakes I’ve ever seen and told me that her mother had been run over and killed just after the war by a British army truck. The man who later became became her husband was a German naval officer who was ordered to scuttle his ship in the Black Sea and spend most of the war half-starved in a Soviet POW camp. He developed a lasting hatred for cabbage, and for some reason tomatoes, but remembers beetroot as a Christmas treat. Somewhere in Germany – Mannheim or Worms – I remember walking across a wide flat space one deep midwinter night. A bombsite, recreation space or some other sort of vacant lot. It's late and I’m on my way back to camp, arm in arm with a middle aged German in a long leather coat. We’re strangers but happen to be going the same way. There’s no-one in sight, no street lighting in that empty space, just stars and a sparkle of frost underfoot. We become friends, as you do when you've had a drink and don’t understand a word of what's being said to you. We begin to sing. It may not yet be Christmas, or already New Year, but the song we sing with such feeling is Silent Night. Stille Nacht, Heilige nacht.
Perhaps the ground we walked on was cleared by one of those British bombing raids. Neither that night, nor at any time during these visits to Germany, barely 10 years after the allied victory, did we talk about the war. Not the agonies of defeat, nor the sometimes wanton destruction from the air. Unless we did and I forgot... When my companion put his arm around me that silent night, I thought what a sentimental old German, but didn't pull away. The warmth that that got through his leather coat was welcome and four legs are better than two on unsteady ground.

2. Late 1954: Conscience or what?

Until 1960, British 18-year-old boys were conscripted for two years National Service in the armed forces. Exceptions were made for those judged physically or mentally unfit, or engaged in other ‘essential' industries (mining, forestry, hospitals or merchant navy). There was also provision for ‘conscientious objectors’ to do some sort of alternative civilian work (mining, forestry or the merchant navy?). But first they had to convince a local tribunal that their objection was indeed conscientious, not cowardly, self-serving or daft. This seemed to me reasonable at the time. Later I realised that reason lies somewhere between the all or nothing positions then required: either we had to be against all wars, or to consent to whatever war our government dropped us in. Surely the reasonable man (and we were all men) might distinguish between wars of self-defence, aggression and colonial oppression.
But I was 17, not that reasonable nor quite a man. The issue of conscientious objection was only raised for me because my mother was a Quaker pacifist and because my parents had sent me to Quaker schools. Unlike most other boys of my age I was made aware that I had a choice to be or not to be a fighting man.
It wasn't that I wanted to be odd, I may have sought attention but still aspired to be a Man among men. Already at my prep-school, soon after war, I tried to have it all ways. My father had been in the wartime navy, and while girls drew horses and dancers, boys drew Spitfires (then Vampires and Gloucester Meteors) and speedway bikes. We may also have heard of Dr Albert Schweizer working wonders in Africa. When it came to saying what we wanted to be when we grew up, many other boys said naval officer or RAF pilot. Someone may then have said Doctor. I plumped for Doctor in the Fleet Air Arm – why choose when you can have the lot?
I liked to hold my own and wasn't against conflict or fighting as such. When it came to taking sides, between Cowboys and Indians, Roundheads and Cavaliers, I might have been more inclined than some to take the Indian or Roundhead side. But more important was to be included in the game, on the winning side if possible. That, to my amazement, was how it turned out in our school mock-elections in 1945. On the previous holiday I had helped my father canvas for Labour in North Kensington. 'Vote George Rogers’. Back at school - Frilsham House, now lost under the M4 – I found myself the only Labour voter, apart from an obligatory Labour candidate and Jeger, the son of an Italian race-horse owner. Perhaps he had an eye for outsiders, or felt like one himself. When Atlee beat Churchill, we were vindicated, but people still called me 'Labour Hard-Boiled Egg.' This was presumably to rhyme with Greg, though first names were rarely used at school, and when Martin came to join me there, I called him Wilkinson 2.).
In my immediate family, there was no tension over what I chose for national service. My father too had been a pacifist until war became unavoidable. Later, before he was called up, I remember helping assemble sten gun parts on our dining room table in Petts Wood. Once at Quaker school, though not religious or morally inclined, I couldn't help realising I had the choice, and quite liked an argument. As one of the youngest, and therefor smaller, members of my class, I found words served me better than force. I didn’t like seeing other people bullied, but dont remember sticking my neck out in their defence. A couple of times when I was picked on myself, I got satisfaction from hitting out, if only with the flat of my hand. When we learnt boxing, while still at prep-school, it seemed odd that we should be set up to hit each other in the face, then told not to lose our temper. Why else should you hit a fellow in the face? The next time I hit someone in the face with a fist it was as a grown up nearly 30 years later, because I did lose my temper.
If the choice to be a CO had not been presented to me, I would have gone for the easiest or most exciting option. Other people I knew found themselves in Cyprus, Kenya, or Malaysia, learned languages, drove tanks into historic buildings in Germany or boats into Suez.. At one point I considered the merchant navy, but soon found a Catch 22: for a seaman’s job you needed a union ticket, and for a seaman’s union ticket you needed a seaman’s job. There was one loophole, to become a waiter on a channel ferry, then blur the job description. I opted for the CO tribunal.
The tribunal for conscientious objectors consisted of local notables - magistrate, clergyman, trade-unionist. I got some guidance from my house-master on the sort of questions they might ask and the sort of answers I might give, or not. To the question ‘What would you do if you found a German soldier attacking your grandmother?’ you might say ‘I’d try to find some other way than killing him’ or even ‘I don’t know.’ But not ‘You don’t know my grandmother’ or ‘How would it help to drop a bomb on his?'
I was not particularly clever and if I had been, the issue would probably not have arisen. I would have gone to a grammar school not Quaker private schools. As it was, I sat my 11-plus alone in the headmaster’s study because I was the first and only boy at Frilsham House to sit the state exam. 'Cocky' – our name for the head - was ashamed of himself and me when I failed the maths. If I'd gone to grammar school I would have saved my parents a lot of money and myself the option of refusing military service. For me, as for millions of other children, but in a rather different way, failing the 11-plus changed the course of my future life. I just wasn't clever enough. At Leighton Park a few years later, the headmaster once notched me down as unscholarly ( while Richard, my youngest brother and the only one us four siblings to make his name in academic and public life, was deemed unfit for any sort of higher education). With me, the head changed his tune a bit and sometimes read my essays out to his special English class. My aim there too was to have it both ways, to score with him and with the boys in the back row. I knew I'd got it right when some of them laughed in the right places and an essay came back 'Alpha/Delta, I don’t know.’
It’s lucky I faced the tribunal before going to Algeria, or I might have had to face the difference between so-called 'just' and 'unjust' wars, between, say, fighting Hitler and stamping out colonial rebellion. As it was, I could rest on Quaker credentials and simple injunctions: 'Love thine enemy... Thou shalt not kill.' That was what everyone bowed their head to in church. I may have been developing a nose for hypocrisy, and I couldn't quite envisage killing somebody in cold blood, or because I was told to..
When the tribunal time approached, it occurred to me, or someone pointed out, that I could do better than work in the nearest forest, hospital or coalmine. If the issue was war and/or peace, what might make wars less likely in future? Somebody told me about the work-camp organisation International Voluntary Service for Peace (IVSP, later just IVS) was the British branch of Service Civil International which was set up in the rubble of World War 1 to help reconcile old enemies and stop it happening again.
When I got to the tribunal in Reading, I had a letter from Michael Sorensen, the IVSP secretary in London, offering me two years of unpaid employment in work-camps, at home and abroad. With this offer, I was able to sidestep one standard option - non-combattant service in the forces – with the added objection that this might release someone else to do the dirty work. When the tribunal duly endorsed the work-camp option, I felt like Brer Rabbit released into the briar bush. Authority meant well, or Stupidity could be turned to advantage.
Not so lucky was the young Jehova’s Witness I met before the tribunal hearing. In his scripture, only God’s War was allowed, but how could you have every man Jack of us deciding which war is Armageddon. I dont know what happened to this witness, whether he caved in or went to prison. Later I heard a Swiss colonel justify this too as free choice: the army or jail, it's up to you.
For my part, I did not just two years in work-camps but three. Obviously I enjoyed it, as in 1962 I went back for another year in Algeria. That was at the end of the Algerian war of independence and my own three years at University. I dont know how much value this 'service' had for anyone else, but I'm sure it was good for me. Now I feel everyone should have the chance, not of a gap year for the few who can afford it, nor the more common experience of youth unemployment, but a more organised break for everyone between school and long term commitment to qualification and career. If that' too is not a thing of the past.
As I sailed through the tribunal, so I passed my driving test. I don’t remember which came first, but the examiner growled at me as he signed the form: ‘Now go out and learn to drive.’ A few weeks later, by mistake, I spun my parents’ Ford Prefect through 270 degrees on the wide road past my old school gate. Nothing was coming the other way, and I was able to steer round the remaining 90 degrees and continue as though nothing unusual had happened. On another occasion, on the same bit of road, I remember driving in a fog so thick that I had to lie across the passenger seat and follow the curb as it appeared beneath the open far-side door.
Getting older, I’ve got thinner skinned. Not exactly cautious or sensitive to consequences for self and others, more a case of survivor's guilt. How could I have been so lucky so often?