When I Lived in Modern Times Read Online Free Page A

her oval face, giving her a vaporous femininity. She lost herself in movie magazines and kept up to date with what the stars were doing for the war effort. “If only we were in America,” she said. “They’ll never bomb America. We’re too close, too close.”
    “Don’t cry, Mummy.”
    “Yes. I should buck up.” And she dried her tears and repainted her lips and powdered her nose.
    But at night when I lay in bed, I thought of a German invasion and of the swastika flying above Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament and ourselves rounded up, marched off to somewhere I didn’t want to start imagining.
    London was a huge, drab metropolis. The color of men’s uniforms imposed a khaki sameness on the world. There was too much navy blue in women’s suits and dresses. Before the war, I remembered, there seemed to be more red: more red dresses and shoes, more pillar-box-red coats, more crimson and scarlet and magenta everywhere. Hair had been more visible, too—Veronica Lake peek-a-boo styles falling over the face, instead of tied back in the inevitable net snood to keep it out of your eyes while you worked at your lathe or pounded a typewriter. We were on a war; footing and frivolity was banned. The Italians had been taken away and interned and the Belgians struggled to make their fabulous pastries on the ration.
    From a young age I had stood at my mother’s side at the salon, handing her pins and clips, listening ungratefully while she taught me everything she knew. I was sent on humble errands: to Steckyn’s on Wardour Street to pick up shampoo capes and sleeping nets and snoods. As others hoarded string, we were sharp-eyed for hairpins that had strayed on buses or in the street, collecting them up in our handbags, knowing that the metal they were made of was diverted into the production of airplanes and helmets and ships and bombs and that these few slivers of steel had to be gathered and kept in a safe place, sometimes, when there were shortages, under lock and key.
    After school and on Saturday mornings, I learned all the techniques of hairdressing and the habit has stayed in my fingers to this day. Whose hair did I dress? The mothers of the very girls I was at school with and sometimes the girls themselves. They knew me as the hairdresser’s daughter and I was excluded from their busy social lives. My true friends were in Soho and what did I feel when Gabriella, at sixteen, watched police officers take her father and older brothers off to be interned as enemy aliens, a fate which she was only spared because she had been born in England? I thought, “We are fighting fascism but who are the anti-Semites?” Gabriella, whose father had taught me how to eat spaghetti with a spoon and fork and always tipped his hat and gave a half-bow when he passed my mother in the street, admiring her chic suit and hat with a little half-veil? Or the schoolgirls whose fathers and brothers were in the RAF or the Navy or with their regiments winning medals and who never invited me to their birthday parties?
    I was seventeen and leaving school and what I wanted to be was an art student. I wanted to study at the Slade where the Jew Mark Gertler had learned to paint three decades before, and whose work spoke of a life more savage and less placid than the decorative compositions of Duncan Grant or the spare, bleak landscapes of Paul Nash with their tendency toward abstractions. I wanted the art student’s life, to get away from the bourgeois conformity of my schoolfriends. I read Bertrand Russell; not the philosophy, of course, but the pamphlets on free love and marriage.
    But Uncle Joe said that if I wanted to be an artist he could get me a job in an office. I could be a
commercial
artist, helping in the preparation of advertisements for things like Horlicks or aiding the war effort by designing illustrated pamphlets showing housewives how to stretch the ration or urging them to save string. Gradually, he chipped away at my