The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [9]
That first evacuation did not last long. Stanley and I were the last two children left in the village hall at Wargrave in Berkshire and had to be rescued by a very kind woman who whisked us off to a huge house in a Rolls Royce. There we were showered with kindness and given unlimited cake and lemonade – it all seemed too good to be true. It was. The next day a busybody official came round and said we were too far from the school and we would have to be sent elsewhere and split up.
Stanley was sent to live with a district nurse and I was taken in by a couple who were just plain cruel. My mother couldn’t come to visit straight away because the Germans were bombing the railway lines. When she eventually managed to get down she found me covered in sores and starving. There was an allowance to cover the costs of taking in evacuees and my hosts were out to keep as much of it as possible; I’d been living on a tin of pilchards once a day. Even worse, they used to go away for the weekend and leave me locked in the cupboard under the stairs. I’ve never forgotten sitting hunched in the dark, crying for my mum and not knowing if anyone would ever come to get me out; time had ceased to have any meaning. That experience was so traumatic that it has left me with a lifelong fear of small, enclosed spaces and a burning hatred of any cruelty to children; all my charity work is aimed at children’s charities, particularly the NSPCC. Anyway, back then I decided I’d rather risk the bombing than be locked up in a cupboard again. Happily, my mother agreed and took Stanley and me straight back to London, determined not to be parted from us again.
By now the Blitz on London was happening in earnest and it seemed to me that Adolf Hitler had found out our address. The bombs got closer and closer and when London was set alight by blanket incendiary bombing during the Battle of Britain, my mother had had enough. My father was called up to serve in the Royal Artillery and she took us to North Runcton in Norfolk, on the east coast of England.
Sometimes I think the Second World War was the best thing that ever happened to me. Norfolk was a paradise for a scrawny little street urchin like me, coming from all the smog and fog and filth of London. I was a little runt when I went there and by the time I was fourteen I had shot up to six foot, like a sunflower growing up a wall. Or a weed. Wartime rationing meant no sugar, no sweets, no cakes – no artificial anything – but we had good food, supplemented with wild rabbits and moorhens’ eggs. Everything was organic because all the chemical fertilisers were needed for explosives, so I was given this unexpectedly healthy start in life. We lived with another ten families crammed together in an old farmhouse, with fresh air, good food and, best of all, the chance to roam free in the countryside. I went round with a gang of other evacuees; the village mothers wouldn’t let their kids play with us because we were so rough and our language was a bit suspect, to say the least. Now I look back on it, we must have been a bit of a bloody nuisance – we raided the orchards, stole milk off doorsteps and got into fights with the local boys – but my experiences there changed