Lives in Writing by David Lodge

wonderful was the war! . . . it gave us the essential thing we lacked: it gave us a myth, a myth nurtured by the wireless, newspapers, the cinema, that allowed us semi people to leap our garden gates, vault over our embarrassments into the arms of patriotism.’ George couldn’t wait to join up, though he was forty, but ironically, like many servicemen, found himself posted to safe barracks in the country while the bombs were falling on Rosehill Avenue. ‘We kids rampaged through the ruins, the semis opened up like dolls’ houses, the precious privacy shamefully exposed. We took pride in our collection of shrapnel.’
    The pleasure and wonder that young boys, untroubled by adult anxieties, could derive from the Blitz were vividly evoked in
Hope and Glory
, but its most memorable scene belongs to a later phase of the war. In the First World War Ivy and her sisters had fled the threat of German Zeppelins by retreating to the Thames-side village of Shepperton where their father had a bungalow as a weekend retreat and holiday home. Now, driven by some atavistic urge, she took her own children back to Shepperton (still undeveloped and unspoiled) for safety, and so began John Boorman’s lifelong romance with rivers, of which the Thames was the archetype. He swam, and fished, boated and punted, and fell into a lock while the sluice was open, narrowly escaping drowning – the first of many brushes with death in his life.
    He attended the local C. of E. school and sang in the parish choir, but when he failed the 11 plus his mother sent him to a private Roman Catholic grammar school run by the Salesian order, where he experienced the culture of corporal punishment sadly characteristic of Catholic education in those days. ‘The young brothers and priests seemed pent up, over-wound, their only release the infliction of pain.’ No attempt was made to convert him, but a devout chum with a shaky grasp of the relevant theology insisted on baptising him secretly in the school toilets, pulling the chain and catching the water in his hand before it was polluted by the toilet bowl. ‘I became, in a manner of speaking, a closet Catholic.’ Perhaps John Boorman did in fact acquire from this schooling a feeling for ritual and symbolism that is more Catholic than Protestant, and which left its mark on his films.
    Towards the end of the war the school was destroyed by a ‘doodlebug’ (the V1 flying bomb) just as the academic year was due to begin, an episode with which Boorman ends
Hope and Glory
, in the scene where the blazered schoolboys deliriously celebrate on the bomb-site, and the director says in voice-over: ‘In all my life nothing has quite matched the perfect joy of that moment as my school lay in ruins and the river beckoned with the promise of stolen days.’ The idyll that followed was marred when he shot a kingfisher with an airgun and suffered bitter pangs of remorse. Imposing an adult interpretation on the event he comments: ‘I became the Fisher King whose wound would not heal until the grail was found and harmony restored.’ When the family’s uninsured house burned down shortly afterwards he regarded it as a punishment for this sin and for his complicity in his mother’s infidelity. Whether that relationship was consummated is not clear, but when Herbert fell mortally ill Ivy nursed him devotedly and made no attempt to disguise her love for him from her husband. Her adolescent son purified himself by a ritual dip in the Thames, believing that if he could swim without causing a single ripple on the surface of the water he would recover the state of grace he had lost. ‘That experience, so profound, set me on a quest for images, through cinema, to try and recapture what I knew that day.’ At the time of writing, he still swam naked every morning in the cold river that runs past his house in Ireland.
     
    A maverick Salesian teacher, Fr John McGuire, encouraged John to think he might become a writer, but the