In My Wildest Dreams (14 page)

Perhaps, thin and pale as I was, I was a natural victim because soon afterwards in the churchyard of St Edmunds, after Sunday evensong, I was savagely beaten up by a gang of choirboys still wearing their cassocks. It was then that I began to have my doubts about religion.

After we had been about a month in Kingsbridge, and I was wondering at the absence of replies to my letters, our mother died. The grey-haired superintendent softened the blow as much as he could by breaking the news in instalments. On a Friday he told me that she was very ill with cancer and on the Monday he said she had died and was out of the pain. He gave me his stamp album to look at and went out of the room so that I could have a cry in private.

Strangely I did not shed my tears for very long. The superintendent came back with a letter from an uncle of whom, until then, I had no knowledge, my father's brother Chris. My mother had called him to her hospital bed and asked him to look after us. He was the only one of the family with any money, having a thriving ship-repairing business (the descendant of that founded by my grandfather) in South Wales. Inside the envelope was a folded pound note which was more money that I had ever possessed in my life. While still sniffling over my mother I put it gratefully in my pocket.

No one had told Roy. He was taken suddenly ill and it was decided to keep the news from him until he was better. When I went to bed that night he was sweating in his sleep. For the first and only time in my life I kissed him. He grunted. The following day he was taken to hospital with appendicitis and this was followed by diphtheria.

The following day I went to school and the bespectacled headmaster put his arm about me and told me he had been told my bad news and advised me to keep a stiff upper lip. We were in the school vegetable garden and I was digging again. He said he was casting me as a cavalier in the school play and if I would like to go to the storeroom with him he would fix me up with a costume. This he did, suggesting that I took my trousers off so that he could see if the costume fitted. It apparently did not, so he gave my winkle a flick with his hand, transferring it from one side of the cavalier's trousers to the other. 'That's better,' he said, beaming happily.

At the home of one of the aunties, a fruity fat girl not much older than me said she was sorry to hear my news. 'That's all right,' I assured her brazenly. 'I treat life as one big joke.' I must have read it somewhere.

Soon there was someone else's misfortune to share. The big lad John Mills, who used to help the grumbly old gardener to shovel coke into the hot water boiler (called by the old man 'that incinerator'), had become my firm friend. We had joined the local youth club and he taught me the rudiments of football and cricket. He had a younger brother, a happy boy, called George, and one day I found them sobbing in each other's arms. Their father, who was in the navy and whom they adored and talked about all the time, what he did, his jokes, his letters, was missing presumed drowned at sea.

'Don't cry, George,' I remember saying, sitting in the inglenook fireplace of the dining room. 'My mam's just died as well, but I didn't tell anybody because of Roy.' His round, tear-streaked face turned towards me. 'That's right,' confirmed Nurse Nelly, adding to the dubious theory that two sorrows are better than one. 'Leslie hasn't got anybody either.'

John and George's mother had already died and that night, when John and I went down the gloomy path to shut up the chicken house, our regular task, he said: 'I can't believe it. I can't believe he's dead. Not our dad. It was like I just saw him today. I don't know what we'll do now.'

If the natural resilience of children enables them to play in the rubble of their own houses, as they were doing in many parts of the world at that time, then the same optimism helped me, if not to play at least to sit quietly, in the rubble of my early life. It surprises me to recall it now, but I started to weigh up the situation quite coolly and with logic while walking to school one day soon after my mother's death. It was raining on the steep streets and the water gurgled down the gutters and drains. We progressed in a crocodile with John Mills in charge, over two hills and up the side of another. Head down against the downpour I watched it run over the pavement slabs and sluice down the gratings. When we reached the school I stood under corrugated iron shelter with the other boys and maids (some of whom had just been deprived of their homes by the Americans) and with the rain drumming and the children chattering, continued to think out the situation.

I was twelve years of age, my parents were gone, my small brother was in a Plymouth hospital, my elder brothers were somewhere anonymous, Lin probably at sea, Harold perhaps in Birmingham. Harold did eventually write ('My advice is, money talks. But it's always said "goodbye" to me') and he also sent a tin of toffees, but that was months later. As far as I can recall I never received a letter from Lin. On the other hand, I had gained an uncle and an aunt and a cousin, all previously unknown to me. Uncle Chris continued to write, his handwriting the most polished I had ever seen, certainly in our family. He told me about himself and his family and promised they would visit me as soon as they could. He and his wife Nance even made some attempt to discover whether they could reclaim Roy and me from Barnardo's – being 'restored' as it was called among the boys in the homes, for most of whom it was a constant but hopeless dream. Apparently our mother had legally 'signed us over' to Barnardo's but, nevertheless, someone was sent from the Homes head office to visit Chris and Nance at their home in Barry. The house, as I came to know, was comfortably middle class; they owned a car and a cocktail cabinet and it was the cocktail cabinet that scuppered us. The amiable Chris offered the visitor a gin and tonic. I do not need to have seen this person to guess what he was like, for sobriety and religion were the cornerstones of the homes. He must have left the house with a shocked expression and that was that. We would be in Barnardo's for the rest of our childhood.

My more immediate world, viewed that day in the school playground shelter, oddly felt secure. The house where I lived was comfortable, the food, despite the eternal peanut butter, filling, and if love was missing then affection was the next best thing. We had a fine garden and a large paddock; there was a pony called Pommerse, which I was learning to ride bareback, and three friendly dogs. I also had my first long-trousered suit.

This was my 'bundle-suit', part of a scheduled bundle that appeared in a bulky blue bag a few weeks after my arrival. I no longer had to sleep in camphor-smelling pyjamas and go to school in somebody's discarded coat or shoes. The bundle contained a completely new outfit; shirts, socks, underwear, a tie and the long-trousered suit. Already, I was deeply in love with a girl in my class and I wore my long trousers to impress her. Strictly the suit was for best but I was allowed to wear it to school. Not that it did anything to enslave her. Her nose always travelled past me as though suspended on a cord. At Christmas I bought a National Savings Christmas Card, with half-a-crown's worth of savings stamps on it, and sent it to her. She never mentioned it when school began again in January but she kept the stamps just the same.

For the first time in my life I was enjoying lessons. I was put into a class with children two years older than my age group (one of my self-delusions about my beloved was that I was too young for her). We worked under the cheerful and robust regime of a teacher called Mr Casely, who, I am glad to say, is still living down in Devon. A few weeks ago, when I was taking my son Matthew to a pantomime in London, a man and his wife boarded the underground train and sat opposite. He leaned forward. 'You're Leslie Thomas, aren't you?' he said in a pleased sort of way. 'I was a teacher at Kingsbridge School when you were there. I've heard you talk about it on television.' He beamed. 'But I don't remember you at all.'

Few people would. But I remember them. The Luscombes and the Steers and the Hannafords. When I have walked in later years up Fore Street in Kingsbridge and read those same names over the shops and businesses, I have seen them again in the school playground or at their wooden desks, with the wintry Devon rain dropping outside the window. I went to evening classes for woodwork and made some toys for my brother, a steamroller and a jaunty tugboat and barges. There were also evening lectures on psychology, bird migration and local history which I never missed. The church in Kingsbridge held a series of mid-week talks in its shadowy chancel, Aspects of Christian Thinking, I believe it was, and I did not miss one of these either. I suppose I was trying to educate myself.

For the first time, also, I began to realise there was something called sport. We played rugby and hockey at school, although I was so wispy that I was useless at the former and at hockey the big Devon girls could easily knock my feet from under me, and did. The one I adored so much seemed to take real pleasure in striking me around the thin knees with her stick, or in trampling over me when I was winded and prostrate. It was the only contact we had. On Christmas Eve, however, there was to be a hockey match and, glory, glory, I was selected as linesman and possible
reserve player.
I left the home, without permission, and muddily ran up and down the boundary waving a windy handkerchief. My elation was quickly shattered for when I returned to Lower Knowle I was summarily put to bed. I lay there, on Christmas Eve, feeling fairly sorry for myself. At midnight they needed somebody to help pump the organ at the church service and all was at once forgiven. This organ was pumped with a wheel, to which was attached a wooden handle, like an old-fashioned clothes mangle. John Mills pushed it from one side and I caught the handle and pushed it back to him. I needed to stand on a box or a stool to operate the system and on this holy night, with the congregation carolling how the shepherds saw a star, I saw a number of stars because I slipped forward and the handle caught me under the chin. I woke up groaning and out of wind, the same condition as the organ.

With March the light evenings drifted in and the early western springtime arrived. On St David's Day I wore a daffodil to denote my Welshness although by then I must have already been losing my Newport accent, the sounds that had caused much hilarity among the Devon children when Roy and I first arrived. Voices, I think, change according to the age at which one moves from one environment to another. There are people who have left Wales as adults and never lose their native sound, but twelve is an age of change. Going to live in Devon, among the broad vowels, then to London, and eventually to Norfolk, made my voice an unusual compound. Once I heard a BBC producer describe it quietly as a 'bastard accent' and I suppose it is.

In the pale evenings we began to play cricket; someone fashioned a bat from a piece of cherrywood and we played in the garden. From the first moment I made contact with the ball was born a love affair and it has lasted all my life. Not that I was any good. At school, stiff with pads and lifting a heavy bat, I proved an awkward performer. So often did I miss the ball that a secondary batsman was placed behind me during practice sessions, hitting the many deliveries with which I had so miserably failed to make contact. Also the hard leather ball kept hitting me in the testicles and knocking the breath out of me. Someone said solicitously that I should get myself a box and, not realising that this was the term for a protector, I stuffed an egg box down the front of my pants in the hope of buffering the blows.

In March my brother returned. He had been in hospital from the previous October so he must have been seriously ill, although I did not realise it then. Appendicitis followed by diphtheria – from which in those days children died quite easily – was a formidable combination. He came back to Lower Knowle even thinner and whiter than he had been. I remember sitting on the floor with him showing him the tugboat and the steamroller I had made for him. He seemed very pleased. Then he said casually, as he pulled the boat and its barges along: 'How's our mam?'

Nobody had told him and I could not gather the courage to do so. 'She's still ill,' I mumbled. 'But she's getting better.'

'We'll be going home soon then,' he said brightening. 'I want to go home to Mam now I'm all right.'

The next day we were told we were going to London.

London had always seemed far, far, beyond any horizon, but as beckoning as Shangri-La. Roy and I went around Kingsbridge smugly telling everyone where we were bound. None of our schoolmates and few of the staff had ever been there. The headmaster led me out onto the steps outside his office and said that in the school play I had looked superb in the cavalier's trousers. He put his arm around my waist and said, with an ambiguity that only occurs to me now, that in London I should watch out for peculiar men.

Roy and I said farewell to the cosy house at Lower Knowle and went towards the outside world. Once more the local train puffed us to Newton Abbot, then on to Exeter, where we boarded the express for London. Below the netting of the luggage racks in the compartment were framed photographs of places served by the Great Western Railway, their hue as brown as the livery colours of the company itself. Roy sat opposite me and above his head was a picture of the Transporter Bridge at Newport.

My eyes scarcely left the window through the whole journey. I witnessed the landscape change before my eyes, the red and spring-green fields of Devon giving way to the chalky uplands of Wessex; then the flat country before London, our first glimpse of the Thames in Berkshire, and finally the spread and sprawl of London's outer towns and suburbs. I knew exactly where we were because I had borrowed books from the Kingsbridge library and had charted our course in an exercise book noting each landmark – a pleasure that is still very much mine before going on a distant expedition. The armchair travelling is as rewarding as the real journey.

We arrived at Paddington, steam and echoes rising to the bomb-broken roof, crowds of travellers, fat cheery porters in waistcoats, anachronistic taxis, and one ambulance. That was for us.

Roy, it was true, had been acutely ill, but we were both embarrassed having to get into an ambulance. Ambulances were bad news. We used to touch wood when we saw one and in our street in Newport sick people requested them to come after dark because they did not want the neighbours to see them carried away. My mother insisted when she first went to hospital that she should be taken under cover of night, although, naturally in the event, a whole crowd of wellwishers turned out to see her off.

It was frustrating being in London, the most exciting place I had ever visited, and having to view it through the meagre slit near the roof. I saw only a thin panorama of the magic city, bits of buildings, top windows of houses, the upper decks of buses and strange trolleybuses with their arms stretched above them in attitudes of perpetual amazement. Many of the buildings were ragged as old teeth, bleakly standing as a reminder of German bombs; there were lamp standards, long blind because of the blackout and segments of advertisement hoardings. One of these, realistically representing a brick wall, was scrawled with rough white-painted words: 'What We Want Is Watneys!' With my enlarged imagination about what London might be like I thought this must be some slogan of revolution or, at least, politics. I asked the dumb-faced woman who accompanied us, sitting hunched like a bag of forgotten washing on the other side of the ambulance. She sneered: 'It's
beer.
You mustn't have anything to do with that. Not
beer.'

That, I think, was the sole observation she made throughout the journey. She fell back into blankness, her hands wringing, her mouth chewing some private cud. Her chin had whiskers.

She was no exception among the staff of Barnardo's in those days. It would not be too much to say that many of the people employed to look after the children needed a home at least as much as the children themselves. They were given a room, food and a doubtlessly minimal wage, and they went about their work wrapped in a blue overall and a formidable expression.

It has to be remembered, of course, that this was wartime and there was a shortage of everything, including people. Nor would I include all the Barnardo staff in this doleful company for there were some who worked with faith and enlightenment. There was, however, a sadly sized collection of these grim and inadequate persons, of little cheer and ready to resort to the back of the hand when in doubt. They would not be tolerated today.

The shuffling, sniffling woman who finally led us from the ambulance at the Village Homes at Woodford Bridge in Essex made, I remember, some sort of flapping gestures with her chapped hands. I was to get out and Roy was to remain in the ambulance. When I said I was not leaving my brother she said: 'You'll 'ave to.' She glanced at me and lied: 'You'll see him tomorrow.'

The tomorrow was almost two years away.

In the Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, on the hill towards London, is a street today called Galsworthy Road. It was renamed in recent times following the showing of the
Forsyte Saga
on television and the realisation that the author of the novel, John Galsworthy, had lived there. I remember it as Gloucester Road (still the name of the far end of it) and it was on its corner with Kingston Hill that there stood a dire building with a yellow brick tower. Across its impoverished front, in oddly golden letters, were the words: 'The Dalziel of Wooller Memorial Home. Dr Barnardo's Homes.' It was a test of daring on the part of the young inmates to climb outside the building at the third-floor level and clamber along the gleaming letters.

I arrived at this ominous place on a streaming March morning just after my thirteenth birthday. With two other boys I had trudged with yet another spectral escort, this one with a limp, from the local station and we stood, all of us carrying our blue bundles of clothes across our shoulders, like some juvenile postmen, outside the main gate. I also had a parcel containing my William books. The silent man was puffing behind and in the interval it took him to catch up we were able to take in the awful facade of our new home.

'Bloody 'ell,' said one of my companions, John Brice, who was my friend until some time later he knocked me cold in a fight. 'It's just like a prison.'

The other lad was freckled, podgy and ginger-haired with staring glasses. He had confided to us during the train journey that his father had been killed in the
First
World War, which would have made him at least twenty-six. He began to cry and had to wipe his glasses on his clothes bundle. The man caught up, berating us for leaving him behind. 'Come on then,' he ordered. 'Stop staring. There's nothing to stare at.'

As was to be expected, he was unperceptive. There was a lot of be stared at. And we did not like the look of it. The place sprawled before us, across the horizon of a tended garden, with a moon-shaped drive going to its glowering front door. For what purpose it had been built is a mystery, although it had once been an orphanage for girls. It was the tower which, at once, both caught and repelled the eye. It rose two storeys higher than the rest of the pile, capped with a sloping roof under which was lodged a huge water tank. A German flying bomb missed this by inches a few months later. Had it struck, everyone beneath would have become, apart from other injuries, very wet.

We were ushered to the front door by our escort, stumping along behind, urging like a cowherd. The knocker, the central door knob and the bell smiled inclement smiles.

The door was opened by an urchin in an indescribably filthy blue jersey. He regarded us suspiciously as if we might have arrived to take something from him. Then, possibly thinking he ought to make an attempt to clean himself up, he wiped his nose on his streaked sleeve. 'I'll go and get the Gaffer,' he said.

He left us standing on the step. Muttering, our escort pushed open the door and we stepped into a place redolent with floor polish and echoing with remote voices. There was a short flight of red steps leading to a lobby which soared up into the central tower, the tower itself lined with a staircase that diminished into lofly dimness. Over the iron balustrades on the several landings pale faces looked down like moons from the sky. The cosy days were over. This was a real orphanage.

'New kids!' the shouts bounced about the landings above and more faces appeared. One boy, apparently to impress us, did perilous gymnastics on the iron bars fifty feet over our heads. Then, to our left, we heard shouts and the door opened to reveal two scraggy boys pushing another, smaller, boy with a seraphic expression and bottle-thick glasses, over a glistening linoleum floor on a square of blanket. They propelled him from one end of the room to another. On the back wall was a blue table and a wooden cross. This was the chapel and this was the method of polishing the floor.

'We're Ronuking,' shouted one of the boys. 'Don't it pong!'

Stony footfalls sounded and a man of ominous aspect appeared. He was gaunt and grey, with a steely jawline and well-scattered teeth. He wore a hairy green suit and sharp rimless spectacles. His name was Ernest Gardener, feared by all boys and known as the Gaffer.

As I came to know him, over the years I was there, I realised that here was someone from another time. He was like an ancient sergeant-major, a narrow man of Victorian thought and values, in charge of a hundred and fifty hard-cased urchins who varied from the sly to the rumbustious to the downright criminal. His attitudes had scarcely shifted an inch in forty years. At the end of the road for us, he was confident, was only Hellfire. One day he announced in chapel that all our brains would be turned to milk because of the filthy things we did in the night. He had some kindness but it was well buried. He ended his days alone in a Barnardo-provided cottage eating his food straight from a tin.

There was no way back. I realised that as soon as I stepped into that place. It would need to be my home and I would have to make the best of it. They took me to a big hollow dormitory, where thirty other boys slept in three long rows. Each bed had its blue and white counterpane, folded and tucked to a certain ritual at the foot. Each bed had a scarred wooden locker. Large areas of the long windows were stuffed with cardboard and plywood because they had been blown out in the bombing of 1940 and had not been replaced. Wearily I put my bundle on the bed, my William books underneath it, and sat and stared around. I felt very unhappy and wondered where my brother was.

It was not, however, a place for dwelling on your sorrows. Everyone was there for some misfortune and some had experienced more than others. The boys had hardened themselves into a tough but resilient mob. There were more laughs than tears. Each one had his own bedspace which was guarded jealously. 'Get out of my bedspace, Breadcrumb,' I heard one boy shout at another. Breadcrumb was the nickname of a lad who gathered the last crumbs from the table and rammed them in his mouth. Everyone had nicknames. I had only just arrived when I was dubbed Monkey. I had a brisk fight with the inmate who first gave me this appellation, rolling between the dormitory beds, and I won resoundingly, but it made no difference; they still called me Monkey and it remained my name while I was there.

It was in those early days that I learned the singular power of the story-teller. Existence in the home was in layers of violence; certain boys could overcome others with their fists, and they in turn were subordinate to others who were bigger or punched more swiftly. It was a basic law and there seemed no escape from it. When I arrived I found myself very much in the middle strata, being able to lord it over half the boys, while trying to keep one step ahead of the other half. There were fights every day and I had plenty. If I won then I ascended one place on the fisticuffs ladder. If I lost I went down a place. Then came the miracle that removed me from attrition entirely – I found I could tell stories.

Each night, in the dormitory, with the lights doused and the blackout curtains giving only a little extra protection from the winds and rains that knocked on the makeshift windows, there was a time set aside for what was called 'spinning up'. The dormitory matron, who had a pokey room at the end like that of a barrack room corporal in the army, would leave us, heads projected from bedclothes, with the words: 'You can spin up for half an hour – and that's all.'

Although this might conjure an intriguing picture of pyjama clad lads bounding on bedsteads like trampolines and whirling like tops in the air, it was nothing more than the enjoyment of a bedtime story. For the first few nights I lay and listened and realised that the standard was not high. Whoever was telling the tale usually related the plot of some film he had seen or occasionally a story from a book. It was rarely they were accepted with appreciation and sometimes brief but violent criticisms flung across the darkened room would result in a quick foray from a bed and a shadowy beating-up of someone in the dimness. It was to stop the boy in the next bed being slaughtered by someone much bigger that I first offered to make up a story.

'All right, Monkey,' agreed the aggressor, giving the victim a dismissive push. 'Let's 'ear it then. If it ain't any good you'll get bashed up as well.'

So I began to spin up. It was a yarn, I remember, about a group of horsemen in the hills of some German-occupied country in Europe, who carried out guerilla warfare on their oppressors by abruptly appearing over the horizon and swooping on convoys and patrols. Even now it does not sound a bad plot. I made it up as I went along and before long I realised that the room had fallen into an enclosed silence. When the end of the half-hour arrived and the dormitory matron, Miss Robinson, a tall angular lady known to her charges as Chuck, came from her room to tell us spinning-up time was over, there were pleas for 'just another five minutes, Miss, Monkey ain't quite finished'.

She was adamant that the session was over and after quelling beneath-the-bedclothes grumbles she went back to her den. 'Come on, Monkey,' demanded a sibilant voice. 'Whisper it.'

Every night after that it was demanded that I spin up. Older boys, who were permitted to stay up later, began voluntarily to go to bed early so as to hear the next instalment of some serial I was desperately cobbling together. The denizens of other dormitories crept in on all fours, some of them lying concealed beneath the occupied beds to listen. 1 will never have a more attentive or appreciative audience.