In My Wildest Dreams (46 page)

Even now I don't know how long I was up there. Probably less than thirty seconds. I screamed the boys' names and barged into the bedrooms. There was no reply. Thick smoke was enveloping me, filling my lungs. Then a red glow loomed up in front of my eyes and I realised I was on fire.

Turning, I shouted and ran across the landing. I fell all the way down the stairs and rushed out of the house, to the front, where I rolled over and over in the wet grass. When eventually I sat up I realised I was naked, my pyjamas had shrivelled from me. My hair was gone and skin was hanging from my hands and arms like chewing gum. There was a strong smell of hamburger. The Great Dane came up and gave me a few exploratory licks.

While all this drama was going on people two houses away slept undisturbed. Indeed some did not wake until the firemen had finally put out the blaze. One neighbour had a telephone call from another and thought the caller was joking. He went to his window and saw all the evidence of the drama spread outside.

The twins, it appears, were not in the house at all. They had gone out of the back door and into another neighbour's house. This I did not know until months later at the inquest on the dead man, whose identity – like that of the other participants in this tragic matter – does not concern this story. The boys' mother truly believed they were inside because after I had come out of the blaze she went upstairs and tried to find them. She was badly burned also.

We were taken to a local hospital which, fortuitously, had a special unit for treating burns. In the ambulance the mother and I, stretched out, conversed and decided that we would never again be able to face roast beef.

My injuries were widespread but not deep. The burns of the children's mother, and indeed of the little girl who had jumped from the window, were more serious but happily they recovered without noticeable scars. When we were able to move about in the hospital we used to visit each other in the wards and laugh about the state we were in. We wondered if we might audition for parts in a horror film.

My burns covered about half of my body. I looked a dreadful mess. Maureen, summoned from Sussex and not told the extent of the injuries, almost fainted when she came into my room at the hospital. A policewoman, who accompanied a male colleague when he came to get a statement, did faint. She apparently took one look at this swollen (even more than usual!) head and passed out cold on the floor. I had no lasting injuries, although I still have the marks of the seams of my pyjamas on my shoulders and scars on my hands, with which I must have covered my face. My main problem was the large amount of fumes I had consumed – enough, as one doctor cheerfully told me, for me – who had never smoked – to have got through twenty cigarettes a day for the whole of my life. This, however, had its compensations because an extremely attractive lady physiotherapist was given the three times daily task of rubbing and pushing my chest, even to the extent of sitting upon it, in an effort to get rid of the foul phlegm that was the result of the smoke. I wish I had been in a fit enough state to appreciate the treatment. A more unpleasant episode was when several students appeared and began to strip the skin from my already tender feet and legs. A doctor ordered a team of them to do it – to get the painful business over as quickly as possible.

For several days I could not see. I knew I was not blind and that it was merely the burned skin covering my eyes. Someone brought me a radio and I listened to more music than I had done for years. There was also a Morecambe and Wise radio programme where Eric said he had obtained a job in a zoo, feeding the pelicans. It did not pay much but it filled the bill. That made me laugh. Then, one morning, I heard the rain coming down outside and I managed to open my eyes enough to see it streaming beautifully down the window pane. That was the moment when I really knew that everything was going to be all right. And, in the end, it was.

When I began to write this story I was unsure at which point it should finish. Now, I think, I have reached that point. Not only that but the letter 'I' has broken on the typewriter. The last fifteen years of my life have been more or less settled and successful and, perhaps not so strangely, this seems to me to be the least interesting part of the tale. It is a different story; it is about a different person. I fear it might just be a catalogue of books and people, which I believe would hardly bear comparison with my mother knitting khaki swaddling clothes for the Baby Jesus, with a small boy who lost his winkle in a museum, or with some of the less happy moments I have remembered.

In writing the early pages about my mother I became, strangely you might think, for the first time, curious about where she was buried. She had always said that she wanted no fuss, flowers or favours when she was dead and she did not get any. Through a friend, however, I gained the details of her place in Newport cemetery and the exact date of her death, which I did not before know. The most intriguing piece of information, however, was that D.J. Thomas, my father, was the grave
owner.
These two, who hardly owned anything through all my childhood, had a piece of land! Then, of course, my father died at sea, so she is there by herself. It is probably just as well. They would only quarrel.

One matter I feel, however, must be added to this chronicle. On a June day in 1966 I was going to a cricket match at Lords and there, sitting on the Metropolitan Line train, was a beautiful and composed young lady. We began a conversation which has continued to the present day. Diana is a remarkable person who is, as someone else once said of her, lovely and lovely with it. She is both busy and serene, a difficult achievement. She has calmed my life. In the fourteen years of our marriage we have lived in many places and produced one son, Matthew.

My other children are now grown. My daughter Lois was married on a sunlit day we will always remember when the horse and trap refused to go down the hill and the bride and groom had to walk; and the village band played on our lawn beside the stream. Maureen, my former wife, was of course there that day with her husband Bill, a sincere and funny man who has been my friend for many years.

When I told Diana that I was going to embark on writing this account of my early life she smiled and said in her apt way: Just mention me in passing.' And that is what I have done.

Perhaps one day, when the events described herein have become even further removed and more misty, I will write about the next part – my life with books. But that is another story. Or, possibly, several.

Leslie Thomas

Summer 1940. Dunkirk has been evacuated. Dover is inundated with young soldiers, who wearily wander its streets, wondering what the future holds in store for them.

Toby Hendry, a fighter pilot, is awaiting orders when he meets Giselle, a young Frenchwoman who has fled occupied France. Can their love affair withstand the forces of war?

Reserve naval commander Paul Instow has been called up to fight in a war for which he feels too old. Distracting him from his worries is Molly, a young prostitute. Their relationship is tender and happy, but is this true love?

In Dover
Beach
Thomas chronicles the lives and loves of ordinary people in besieged Britain during these tense, but curiously elated days.

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Leslie Thomas

Midwinter, 1943. Britain is gripped by intense cold and in the darkest days of the war. It is six months before D-Day and the battle to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe.

RAF officer Paget is heading home for Christmas, back to the resurrection of a passion he thought was long over.

In a freezing hut on Salisbury Plain, Sergeant Harris is training his troops for landing on the shores of Normandy, but his mind is occupied by thought of just how his young wife is coping with his absence.

Lieutenant Miller has arrived at an all-but-derelict mansion in Somerset where his American division has set up its headquarters. His affair with an Englishwoman is both bittersweet and potentially dangerous.

Cook Sergeant Fred Weber is enjoying fishing off the coast of occupied Jersey. His calm is soon to be shattered as his war takes on a violent twist.

Each man is heading inexorably towards the beaches of France, where the great battle will commence . . .

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Leslie Thomas

The war, they said, would be over by Christmas. That was in 1939, and it is now January 1944. An exhausted Britain faces another year of conflict.

Meanwhile, small coastal villages in Devon are facing an invasion from an army just as foreign as that of the Germans. The Americans are smart, well-fed and well-equipped, and they have swept the bewildered citizens of South Devon from their homes in deadly earnest rehearsal for D-Day.

As the beaches echo to the sound of bullets and the local church to the sound of Glenn Miller, Americans and English are thrown together with sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful and puzzling results.

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Leslie Thomas

'It rained a lot, and steamed when the sun shone. It was always hot. But it was safe ...'

One way or another the Communist guerilla war in Malaya kept a whole British army occupied from 1948 until 1952. They were the virgin soldiers. Idle, homesick, afraid, bored, oversexed and undersatisfied.

A young virgin like Brigg had to grab his fun while and where he could – in the Liberty Club, in Juicy Lucy's flat or up in Phillipa's room – in one frantic attempt at living before he died or got demobbed . ..

'Scenes rivalling the best of D. H. Lawrence'
Daily Telegraphy

'Truly exciting'
Daily Mail

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Leslie Thomas

The worst has happened. On the eve of their return to Blighty, Brigg and his fellow National Servicemen find themselves sentenced to another six months in Panglin Barracks . . .

Many of the surviving characters from
The Virgin Soldiers
live again in these pages: dogged Tasker, the odious Sergeant Wellbeloved, the vulnerable Colonel Bromley Pickering and the comically touching Juicy Lucy.

But we encounter new characters too: the fanatical and demented Lieutenant Grainger; the endearing Welshman, Morris Morris – strong as a horse but vagglingly buxom; US private Clay – mysteriously lost in transit by the American Army; and last, but not least, Bernice Harrison, the sporting nurse who threatens to replace the wayward Lucy in Brigg's affections . . .

'Ribald and rich in comic invention'
Daily Mail

'Splendidly conveys . . . compassion, excitement, entertainment'
Evening Standard