When we had no bananas
Nicholas Harman
A NIGHTINGALE SANG IN FERNHURST ROAD by Christopher Matthew John Murray, £12.99, pp. 176 If any male in your family is filling in his pension forms this year, this is the Christ- mas present for him. He and I were skinny-legged 12-year-olds when the second world war ended, and are now OAPs, our past lives objects of derision. Young Matthew (who did not reach that age until five years later) has therefore foisted a fantasy upon us, inventing a 12- year-old diarist who sees those days through candid eyes.
Telling grown-up stories from a child's perspective is an unduly fashionable device, but it works nicely here. Christopher Matthew is a Betjemaniac, disguising social history as nostalgia and lacing it with jokes, some of them so old that their time may have come round again, others of the kind publishers call 'quiet', meaning they are not actually meant to make you laugh. His invented diarist lives in a one-child family in a prosperous 1930s south London sub- urb, and attends a pretentious prep-school. Child, school and suburb strive to return to a normality suspended by the huge disaster of war, but peacetime proves not so peace- ful after all.
Father is a stranger, a major freshly brown from North Africa (but was he really there?), bonding in the pub with fellow ex- officers who pull rank and embroider adventures. Mother struggles to abandon the consolations of wartime celibacy, gin and a neighbour known as Uncle Bob. The wartime schoolmasters, fogies too old to have been useful as cannon-fodder, are replaced by demobbed, deranged fighter pilots. Food is disgusting, eggs rare luxu- ries. Good pre-television fun is had with wireless programmes, mostly forgotten but including the first broadcast of Desert Island Discs (Daddy said, "Well, that's a non-starter if ever I heard one".'). Bananas reappear, black-out tape is scraped from windows.
A codger's pedantry compels me to note that Mr Matthew gets some (but not much) of this engaging trivia slightly wrong, his diligent research perhaps confused by memories of his own 12-year-old experi- ence in the very different year 1950. Promptly after the German surrender he has motor-cars by forgotten makers rolling off their wartime chocks and onto the streets. In fact that did not happen until petrol rationing was properly organised a year or so later; our Humber Snipe (ele- gantly camouflaged because my mother had been a Home Guard driver) was never used for private purposes until 1946.
Greater events get enmeshed in hind- sight. Come August, when the atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the diarist is sorry for the slaugh- ter. At the time we were all, I am ashamed to say, delighted, since the Japanese holo- caust ended the reading out in chapel of the names of Old Boys, including our head- master's own son, killed in forgotten Far Eastern campaigns. A graver anachronism is the appearance of long-haired girls who fancy our prepubertal hero and teach him how to kiss. It is notorious that sex did not arrive in Britain until 1963. In the gloomy 1945 of my experience boys and girls were brought up to despise each other. But then Mr Matthew's lucky hero was a day-boy.
`Buy three wise men, I'll throw in a fourth free.'
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