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By Root 438 0

of years ago I went back to North Runcton with my daughter Natasha. I had been invited to unveil a blue plaque on the village school where I had acted in public for the first time. We were given a great welcome and shown round the impressively modernised buildings, and then we drove to The Grange where the current owner let me in through the front door for the first time. The house, like the school, had changed – the quarters where we had lived were now a double garage – but the two bay windows in the drawing room looking out over the fields were just as they were when Mr English used to have me in for afternoon tea. As I stood there, I realised that one major part of me had been shaped in this room, while another had been shaped by the school we had just visited. And as we drove away from North Runcton, I was conscious of saying goodbye to my childhood and, although they were long dead, once again to the people there who had been such an important part of it.

So, thanks to Miss Linton – and if I’d failed, it would have been thanks to Mr English – I got to go to grammar school. The London school that had been evacuated nearest to us was a mainly Jewish school called Hackney Downs Grocers. I’d never met a Jewish person before but my mother informed me that my father’s bookmaker was Jewish and so was Tubby Isaacs, the man who used to sell Dad his jellied eels. Both these men were fat. Mum also said that Jews were clever because they ate a lot of fish (I hated the stuff my father used to bring home from the market before the war) and that most Jews had money, which made sense to me since Dad lost most of his at the bookies and spent what was left on jellied eels. So I was a bit surprised to get to my new school and find that although they were clever, the boys were not fat and they weren’t rich – in fact they were just like me. We even shared a name. The name Maurice was a bit unusual round the Elephant but at Grocers everyone seemed to be called Maurice. In fact a lot of them had Morris as a surname, too. Very confusing. The only thing that set them apart from the kids I’d been to school with before was that they worked hard. They got this attitude from their parents. My best friend Morris’s (I’m not making his name up) parents were obsessed with the importance of his education and, yes, they ate fish at practically every meal.

We got back to London in 1946 and it was a miserable time. Many of the familiar streets of my childhood had literally disappeared and the landscape was littered with the rubble of collapsed buildings. When my father was demobbed, having fought right through the war from El Alamein to the liberation of Rome, the council rehoused us in a pre-fabricated house. Years later, when I was in the movie Battle of Britain, I had lunch with General Adolf Galland, the former head of the Luftwaffe, who was acting as technical advisor. I didn’t know whether to hit him or thank him for his successful slum clearance programme, but it wouldn’t have mattered: he didn’t seem to have realised that the Germans had lost.

The prefabs, as they were known, were intended to be temporary homes while London was rebuilt, but we ended up living there for eighteen years and for us, after a cramped flat with an outside toilet, it was luxury. Outside, though, there was a constant smell of burning rubbish in the air as the authorities cleared the bomb sites, compounded by the thick smog produced by the coal fires. The shops were empty, everyone was queuing for the few goods that were available – and my only escapes were the cinema and the public library. For young working-class boys like me, America was really exciting. British war films were always about officers; American films were about enlisted men. British authors wrote about officers; in the library I discovered Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity. Here at last were stories about the experiences of soldiers I could identify with.

I may have been a keen member of the public library, but I was not enjoying school. I’d had to move from