In My Wildest Dreams (34 page)

'Oh, there he is!' called a mother from the dock-side seeing her boy at the rails. 'Oooo . . . isn't he thin! Haven't they been feeding you, Tommy?'

Few things are more embarrassing and ungainly than bawling a conversation up the side of a ship but most were undeterred. 'Big party tonight!' 'Got you some nice pork chops!' 'You're back in time to mow the lawn!' 'You're playing for the team on Saturday!' 'Auntie Mary died last week!' The soldiers remained relatively silent. A few remarks called back seemed the best they could manage. Some attempted, at that difficult distance, to introduce their comrades of the past two years but for the most part they merely stared at the flushed faces and the moving hands and handkerchiefs. Most, with nothing to say, retired below, calling down that they had received orders. They merely sat in the canteen, almost hiding. One young man had actually seen his welcome disintegrate into a terrible bawling row between himself and his father over some money that was owed. His mother had been so incensed at this crass intrusion on the occasion that she struck her husband with her handbag and in a moment there was a pitched fight on the dockside and the police had to be called. The boy sat morosely. 'Christ,' he muttered. 'They were scrapping when I went away and they're still scrapping when I get back. Wish I'd signed on, I do.'

From the ship those of us not delayed by tearful embraces were transported to a camp near Aldershot and that evening had the almost mystic experience of walking down a country lane for a beer at the local inn. There were rustics sitting outside on benches made from logs and we eventually fell into conversation with them. They were only vaguely interested in our tales from the distant side of the world, and not impressed in any way whatever by our shoulder flashes saying 'Singapore' or 'Malaya'. One of them told us a long story about a woman in the village who had been squashed to death by a horse and another reckoned that the fine weather was bound to break soon, probably at the change of the moon. The dusk deepened into a purple night and the honeysuckle smelled so fine in the hedgerows when we were having a pee on the way back to camp.

Most of us went on disembarkation leave although one unfortunate soul, having been cheeky to the local sergeant-major, was put on a spiteful seven days confined-to-barracks and when we left was pounding up and down the square in the sun carrying full kit and rifle, something he had avoided all through his service overseas.

I was given a rail warrant to Barry, where my brother lived with our aunt and uncle, but on the train running westwards to Wales an unkindly inspector came to the compartment and said that there was an error in my ticket and I would have to pay extra. This so incensed a man seated by the door that he vehemently attacked the inspector. 'Can't you see?' he demanded. 'This boy's been overseas for his country. Look at that, mister.' He pointed to my shoulder flash. 'Know where that is – Singapore? Don't suppose you do.'

'There during the war,' replied the ticket man with a sniff. 'Taken prisoner. You should have had a bit of my medicine.'

'Well I was in Italy,' retorted the man. 'And that
was
bloody war, I can tell you. Mud everywhere and at Anzio . . .'

Nonplussed I watched this unfamiliar British confrontation developing before my eyes. Other passengers joined in. A woman said she had done her bit like for her country like everybody else and a man told her it was very hard in the Tank Corps. Everyone was arguing at once and there was an Irishman who kept modestly muttering: 'Well, who built the airfields, I ask you? I'll tell you,
we
built the airfields. The airfields . . . the Irish built the airfields . . .'

I was taking no part, just watching, astonished while the two main protagonists were getting heated. 'I
walked,'
asserted the passenger who had defended me. 'Walked, mate, from one end of Italy to the other!' He glared at the inspector as if it were his fault. 'In the end my boots were in tatters on my . . .'

'Boots?' echoed the ticket inspector scornfully. 'You had
boots?'

The arguments ended in a great deal of animosity with the Irishman, presumably as a neutral, trying to mediate. The ticket inspector went off in a huff, slamming the door, but forgetting my faulty ticket which had begun it all.

I spent a week in Barry getting to know my brother again. He was no less unpredictable. He had gained, or had thrust upon him, a job in Cardiff, through the influence of our Uncle Chris, but his response had not been quite what the family hoped. He had to travel every day by train, the eight miles from Barry and, in order to conserve the money that should have been spent on fares, he used to leap from the slowing train into a convenient pile of sand just short of Cardiff Central Station and then scamper down the embankment. It was dark when he began this practice in the winter and he had become careless. He jumped one day only to find, suddenly and painfully, that the friendly sand had been replaced by stony rubble and sharp gravel. He was carried off to hospital to have his wounds stitched.

My Auntie Kate was still singing volubly, sometimes in the early hours, and occasionally in tune. She begged me never to 'go foreign' again. She could not appreciate how anyone could have ambition that stretched beyond the Great Western Railway, although she dolefully admitted that Roy was now unlikely to progress that far as 'The Company' was thought to be pressing criminal charges. Uncle Jack, silver head almost fluorescent, came in breezily each evening from driving his lorry for the Tubal Gain Iron Works, had his dinner and departed for the Institute. On Friday nights, when he opened his wage packet, he would recite sonorously in his fine voice: 'Tubal Gain was a man of might, in the days when the earth was young.' Kate used to crane her thin neck to ascertain how much was in the wage packet but he never let her see. That was no business for a woman. He referred amiably to their decent house as 'this crib', to his fat dog rolling like dough from the settee as 'this pup', and if a lady were visiting he would invariably offer to conduct her to the lavatory and hold her out. Kindly, this childless couple asked me if I would like to live with them but I declined. My ambitions were different and at some distance.

After my leave, when the final army day arrived our national service group was taken to a demobilisation centre at Hounslow where we gladly surrendered most of our kit. The practice of giving released soldiers civilian clothing had ceased but we were allowed to retain one uniform since we were on the reserve for three years and we were informed darkly that we might need it. It was just as well that they let us keep the uniform because apart from that I only had my singing suit.

I remember well those last few military moments. We came out of the demobilisation centre and stood in a bantering and awkward group on the pavement; all my comrades, my friends, Reg, Harold Wilson, Johnny Staton, Smudge, of the past two years. The Virgin Soldiers had come home. There were handclasps, back slaps and good wishes, the exchanging of addresses and promise of reunions. Then they all went away. In a trice they were gone. Gone to different parts of London, to Manchester, to Glasgow, to unknown towns and villages. In that moment, and for the first time in years, I felt myself completely alone.

Standing there in khaki with a single suitcase containing, in the main, my fawn jacket and brown trousers, I knew that from that morning I was starting my life again. I was at liberty to go where I pleased, anywhere in the world; it would not matter. At twenty I was freer than most people are at any time in their lives. I could travel to any point of the compass; to Timbuctoo, New York, or even back to Singapore, provided I could find the fare. There was no one to stop me and I had nowhere special to go. I felt solitary but excited.

Along came a London bus and on the front it said simply 'Kingston'. The sign was good enough for me. I got aboard. It was not Timbuctoo, but it was the only place I felt I knew and belonged. So I got a ticket to Kingston. Back to Barnardo's.

Even as I boarded that bus one part of my life reached out to touch the next. The conductor came along and I fumbled for the fare, taking from my pocket an assortment of change including some Malay one-cent pieces, which must be among the world's few square coins. The conductor spotted them at once.

'Just come back have you?'

'First day in civvy street,' I nodded.

'Out there in forty-two,' he said. 'Ended up on the Burma blinking railway.' He told me his regiment.

There was only one man I had ever met from that regiment, a character at Nee Soon who used to regale us to boredom with legends of deeds against the Japanese that no one could deny. The conductor smiled ruefully at the name. 'Knew him well,' he sniffed. 'Deserted when the Japs were coming. Ended up in a cell.'

The bus trundled towards Kingston. The conductor said he now lived in the Surrey suburb of Carshalton where my friend from my early army days, Kenneth West, also lived. I decided to go and see Ken as soon as I was settled. I would need to start collecting a few friends.

Dickies was outwardly much as I remembered. There was nothing that could alter or alleviate that grim facade. Years later, when they finally knocked it down and I watched the demolition men at work, it was with an oddly mixed sensation. There were piles of broken bricks and pyres of burning floorboards. The toppling of the tower was a climactic sight but somehow the intended cheer stuck in my throat. They had even unearthed the archaic golden letters, long removed from the front, 'The Dalziel of Wooler Memorial Home. Dr Barnardo's Homes'. They were lying randomly about like gigantic ingredients for alphabet soup.

On that previous day at the beginning of August, 1951, I trooped up the familiar hill and was once more confronted with my past and my immediate future. I knew they would give me a bed and they did. Vernon Paul had proved a decent and liberal superintendent and he and the hardworking Miss Blott, who had a swift laugh for the numerous oddities that occurred, had brought about a change in the comfort and well-being of the boys. I had brought Miss Blott a present from Singapore, an electric-blue Chinese dressing gown, crawling with red dragons. She seemed both pleased and taken aback. I do not know whether she ever wore it.

They gave me a small room and I arranged my few belongings and sat down on the bed with a sigh of relief. I was home.

There was another boy of my era staying there, who even in his young days had spoken with a rounded City businessman's voice. His name was Michael Earwaker, which although pronounced Erica was naturally translated as Ear-whacker. When I appeared on
This Is Tour Life
a few years ago, Michael, splendid in a waistcoated suit and striped tie, with the same matching accent (which had never really fitted the patched trousers and Dickie boy jersey), appeared on the programme as part of my past. A few weeks later I heard that he had died.

The new generation of Barnardo boys looked at me with some historical interest. I told them how it was in the old days before everyone was fed properly, had a bike, could play billiards or go to the pictures more or less when they liked. The amiable but firm Mr Paul patrolled the home with his golden retriever, a dog I had been sent to fetch as a pup from the kennels and which was gloriously sick on the bus. It had proved good-natured to the point of lethargy. Some boys had built a trolley and the dog was accustomed to sitting on it while being towed about the grounds.

My first need was to get a job. Initially I went to Chelmsford where there had been some faint response to one of my Singapore letters. The editor of the
Essex Chronicle,
however, did little to encourage me. They were really looking for a sports columnist, he said. They had found one, I asserted. I went back to Kingston and that evening composed a sharp specimen sports column. The editor wrote back and said they had miraculously filled the job during the few hours that I was writing it. The only other hopeful note had been sounded by the editor of the
Croydon Times.
It diminished every moment I sat in his office.

'You've got a boil on your nose,' he said perceptively.

Yes, I said I had noticed it.

'How old do you say you are?'

'Twenty.'

'You look much older than that,' he said.

A man as crushingly observant as this must, I thought, be able to pick out a sharp-eyed reporter like me, so I swallowed my indignation.

'I've been out in Malaya,' I reminded him as if this might be an explanation both for the boil and my premature senility.

'Oh, really,' he said, picking up a page proof of his paper from the desk and reading it avidly, making small, pecking corrections as he did so. 'Whatever were you doing out there?'

'Fighting,' I answered desperately. 'In the jungle.'

'Croydon is a jungle,' he recited dreamily. He paused and wrote the words on a pad, presumably as a future headline. 'Perhaps we may have something for you,' he decided, looking over the top of the page. 'Why don't you come and see me again in a few months?'

All right, I said, I would. Perhaps when my boil was better. Miserably I walked out into the street. Carshalton was only a bus ride away and I went there and saw my friend Ken West, who had completed his national service two weeks before me. His posting had been to Richmond Park and he had gone home to sleep every night. He was, and remains, both handsome and humorous and his family welcomed me. There was his tiny, beautiful and regal mother Marie (in Australia, to which they eventually migrated, she was known as the Duchess of Dandenong), and his stepfather Ben who loved cricket and ballroom dancing. He and Marie were experts, and once I saw them perform a tango where
he
leapt into
her
arms at the climax. There was Ken's sister Barbara, a chatty schoolgirl, and a sturdy toddler called John. One day John, who was only three, crept up behind Ben, who was sitting reading a newspaper, and cracked him over the balding head with a cricket bat. The cricket bat broke and Ben slumped silently to the floor. They were an interesting family.

Very soon they had made me feel entirely at home. My feet were under the table and I was drinking tea and telling them of my adventures in Malaya. When they suggested that I should go and live with them I felt my smile travel across my face. It had not been such a bad day after all. So I had a boil on my nose, perhaps I looked considerably older than twenty, certainly I had not got a job, but I had found a family.

Since I had hoped for higher things, it was with some reluctance that I retraced my steps to the printing press at Voluntary Place, Wanstead. There it was, still pounding into the night, its wood and corrugated iron walls rattling and emitting blasts of heat and workers holding their faces as they staggered into the open air for a breather. Mr Harold was there also, his narrow face cleft with anxiety but able to smile wryly when he saw I had returned – as if I had fallen into a well-prepared trap. 'You can have a job any time you like, Thomas,' he announced. 'We haven't forgotten you sent us a story from Singapore about Roy Romain. Sorry you didn't get anything for it.'

There was a vacancy (there nearly always was on one of the group's more weedy journals) on the far north-west side of London, the
Willesden Citizen.
I was to start on Monday and at five pounds a week.

Although this was a good distance from my new home with the Wests at Carshalton there was a connecting bus, which took an hour at the huge fare of ten pence, and I decided that I need not sacrifice my novel and contented domesticity. Novel and contented it undoubtedly was. It was my first adult experience of living in a house, having a room and family, going to dances, walking home, playing cricket, eating meals, discussing things and arguing others. It was a suburban living of which I fully approved. After all the uncertainties of the first part of my life I took pedantic delight in leaving the front door at eight every morning, buying the same newspaper (the
News Chronicle)
at the same corner shop, boarding the same bus with the same people, and returning the same way in the evening, reading the
Evening News
on the way home. For thirty shillings a week I was housed and fed, my washing was done, and I had companionship. On Fridays I came home with my pay packet and put at least a pound in the savings bank as a buttress against the future. On Saturday nights I would whirl around Wallington Public Hall or the Orchid Ballroom, Purley, and afterwards walk some girl home for a doorstep embrace; on Sundays there was cricket and a pint in the pub. It was as secure as Heaven.

I acquired my first enthusiastic girlfriend and several times a week we would become entwined in the alley at the rear of Merton underground station. As the chills of autumn drifted over Merton her mother insisted that she wore a vest. We were behind the tube station after going to the cinema one night, engulfed in passion, and I was pulling handfuls of the vest from her bloomers. It was the longest vest in the world; it came out in bales. My arms were full of it. She mumbled some apology for its length but her arms were busily about my neck (she was a real revolution in my love-life) and she was muttering enticements while I was hauling out her vest like a linen draper. When I had gathered all the slack over my elbow and was wondering what to do with it a door, previously unnoticed in an anonymous wall, opened and a troop of jolly London Transport workers about a dozen strong emerged. They wished us many jovial goodnights after realising the potency of the scene upon which they had intruded. In my shock I dropped the vest and it fell like a sail almost to her ankles. One of the men even made obligingly to gather it up for me. When they had gone we stood, me still the prig, mortified, her giggling into her hands. 'It's my mum's,' she confided. 'She's six-foot-one tall.'

On the Sunday before I began my first week's work on the
Willesden Citizen,
I conscientiously made a reconnoitring visit to my new territory. Outside a public house in the High Street were pools of blood, like red islands on the pavement. Brigades of Irishmen walked by on their way to Mass and some eyed the blood as if it evoked some indistinct memory. The publican came out with a woman carrying a bucket and broom. He rolled up his sleeves and then set her to work clearing the pavement. 'Be a busy day in the magistrates' court tomorrow,' he forecast. 'Biggest Saturday night for years.' Grateful for this complimentary information I enquired how the disturbance had begun. 'Two brothers,' he offered readily. 'Tom and Michael O'Farrell, from Kerry. Hadn't set eyes on each other in years. Their first drink together since they were boys. And . . . well, you know how it happens.' He surveyed the gore as it was washed into the gutter . . . 'They started on about old times and one thing led to another . . .'

It was apparently an area strong on news. The following day I went to the magistrates' court, my first assignment for my new paper, and the O'Farrell brothers, displaying both damage and remorse, appeared in the dock, arms on each other's shoulders. The magistrate was given the same explanation as the publican had offered me. 'Ah, it was a family reunion,' he said wisely and with no surprise.

'Oh, yes, sir, you could say that,' agreed one of the brothers gratefully.

'But it got out of hand,' prompted the magistrate.

''Twas the others,' interpolated the second brother. 'Not us. 'Twas the others. The boys from Cork.'

The magistrate appeared to find this completely reasonable. 'Fined five shillings each or one day in prison,' he intoned. They were familiar with the form. They chose to take the one day and were sat down next to the press bench to witness the rest of that morning's action, whereupon they were allowed to go. As I went out into the gritty industrial sunlight they were arguing with another man outside the first public house on the right. One of the brothers had him by the lapels of his coat. It was going to be an interesting place to work.

In its neighbourhood Willesden had a great number of illustrious persons, all dead. Kensal Green was to the south of the borough, eternalised by Chesterton ('before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green'). Most people went by way of a 662 trolley bus. From the top deck you could look, if you desired, over the grey wall to the mildewed city that housed the famous dead.

The large borough stretched up to Cricklewood in the north and the tough streets of Kilburn in the east. Industry was piled untidily in the west, the smoke rarely clearing enough to see the roofs of Acton.

Many years after I left it I described the region in my novel
Dangerous Davies, The Last Detective:

It was a choked place, a great suburb of grit and industrial debasement. Streets spilled into factories and factories leaned over railway yards. A power station, its cooling towers suggesting a touch of Ali Baba, squatted heavily amid the mess like a fat man unable to walk a step further. In winter the air was wet and in summer the sun's brightest and best was rarely more than bronze. Spring might bring an inexperienced cuckoo in from the country but he soon fled for there was nowhere for him. Trees and flowers were born to fight and lose.

There were factories for the making or assembling of soup, dynamos, home electric organs, rat poison, bicycles and boot polish, conglomerated in all their various grimes. Smoke hung about and dust had no time to settle on Sunday before it was stirred again on early Monday. In the old days the district had been quite famous for its watercress.

Lying amid it all, like an old man's outstretched arm, was the Grand Union Canal, grand in no way now. Its greened unmoving water divided the whole region, its modest but still ornate bridges pinned the banks together. Almost parallel with the canal there were several main, mean, shopping streets, jointing in the way a drainpipe joints at a change of direction.

The premises occupied by the
Willesden Citizen
fitted competently into this scene. There was a narrow shop, with a cobbler's premises on one side and a car sales pitch, occupying a space cleared by a wartime bomb, on the other. The front of the shop was taken up with a counter for the important business of receiving small advertisements. The two ladies who handled this matter, as well as the general accounting and the making of tea, being accommodated in a cosy cubicle between the counter and the dank back room which housed the reporting staff. The squalor of this place would be hard to exaggerate. Linoleum on the floor was rotting and, when lifted, revealed not boards but bare clay. There was a single table and four chairs, a bench with a telephone and ragged piles of iodine-coloured past issues. There was a big single window, which looked out, or at least would have looked out if it had ever been cleaned, onto a dismally enclosed yard where a lavatory crouched guiltily in one corner. In summer, if you rubbed a portion of grime from the window, you could see a single, ashen dandelion protruding bravely from a crack in the boundary wall. In the winter there was no wild life to be seen at all.