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The
impact of this on me was to make me very downhearted.
    Next morning I arrived back in London. I had foolishly
given up my job in Harrods believing that I would be doing
my naval training for the next three months, so I was now
unemployed. I was determined not to go home, as my father
would have said, 'I told you so.' I just could not face the
defeat and humiliation. So I was forced to sign on the dole
and look for a job. It was a very depressing experience and I
was at an extremely low ebb. I was eking out my savings,
living in the YMCA, walking the streets, visiting some of the
sights like St Paul's Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament,
but I was like a piece of wood floating in the Thames, a piece
of flotsam drifting here and there. I had come a long way since
my carefree days with my little terrier Wiggy running along
beside me, and none of it was for the good.
    While I was in a state of limbo in London, the newspapers
and news programmes on the wireless were describing events
with an ominous tone. TheSpanish Civil War had ended in
victory for General Franco, and there had been a very tense
period in 1938 whenHitler demanded that the Sudetenland,
Czechoslovak territory in which a large number of German-speaking
people lived, should be ceded to Germany. There
was a feeling that another war might start over this and a
general military mobilization got under way as the crisis built
up. Air-raid shelters and trenches started to be dug – I remember
noticing the piles of fresh earth as shelters were built in
Hyde Park. Gas masks were given out to the civilian population,
and hundreds of lorries carrying winches and towing
trailers full of gas canisters were parked around the city. These
were mobile installations to launchbarrage balloons – small,
hydrogen-filled balloons that rose into the air tethered by steel
cables, the idea being that they would prevent enemy bombers
from flying low over cities and factories. They floated high
over the city, like hundreds of huge, strange fish, the sunshine
glinting off their silver surfaces. People expected war to start
quite quickly.
    Then in September 1938 the British Prime Minister NevilleChamberlain flew to Munich to discuss the situation with
Hitler, returning with a deal that looked as though it might be
a peaceful solution. It gave Hitler everything he wanted,
including the Sudetenland, andWinston Churchill was
bitterly opposed to it. However shameful Chamberlain's
appeasement of Hitler might have been, most ordinary people
were relieved that another war had been averted. The dreadful
slaughter of the First World War was still very much on
people's minds; it had been over for only twenty years and
millions of people had been affected by it. There probably
wasn't a family in the country that had not lost someone in
the trenches, and it was still seen as a great and unnecessary
tragedy. Most towns and villages had erected a monument to
those who had died in what we called the Great War; I
remember the big ceremony in Kelso when I was younger for
the unveiling of the town's memorial to the local men who
had never come back from France. Nowadays there is a
ceremony at the Cenotaph in London, and in towns and
villages around the country, on the Sunday nearest to
Armistice Day, but in the 1930s there were local ceremonies
ofremembrance on 11 November itself, whatever day of the
week it fell, and the two-minute silence at eleven o'clock was
very strictly adhered to. Buses and cars stopped and people
stood still in the streets. At the time you were aware that this
silence was being observed all over the country. It was a very
emotional moment. So the threat of another war filled people
with dread.
    The relief of theMunich Agreement didn't last long. In
March 1939 Hitler took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. By
then we had had time to become accustomed to the threat of
war, and I think people thought now it was bound to happen.
The question was, when?
    Meanwhile, I was tramping the