In My Wildest Dreams (19 page)

My efforts to be handsome, to prowl rather than walk, to stand my quiff on end (I prominently wore white gloves while fielding the tennis balls) were abruptly wrecked by a bump like an onion which blossomed on my forehead.

This was the aftermath of a breakfast-time fight with John Brice, usually a friend, the boy who had first arrived with me at Dickies door. The battle ended with him delivering a well-directed left-hander to the side of my head, knocking me down. The bruise was bad enough but, I realised with gradual horror, it showed no signs of diminishing. A lump remained. An ugly lump that, even as I surveyed it in the mirror, seemed to be growing by the moment.

In Kingston there was a man who sold newspapers who had an even bigger bump in the same place. A purple knob over his eye. He was obviously the one to ask, so I asked him. 'It's a cyst, son,' he informed me obligingly. He fingered it familiarly. 'Won't ever go down now. Not till I'm dead.'

Horrified I went away, hands to my own bump. God, it was enormous! What was I to do? Without telling anyone I went to a local doctor. He was very doddery, so elderly he would have retired but for the war. 'Oh yes,' he said looking at the projection with interest. 'I think that will have to come off.'

After all the other patients had gone I lay on his couch while he gave me a local anaesthetic and proceeded to saw and chisel into my head with obvious enjoyment. He went at it with such endeavour that he cut the main artery.

Blood hit the ceiling, blood sprayed the wall. It was everywhere. Belatedly a nurse, not much younger than the doctor, came in and fell down in a dead faint on the floor. The ancient physician was clamping clips to the side of my head in an attempt to stop the flow. He kept muttering. 'I just can't find it. Ah, there it is. No, it's not.'

I was the calmest person there. It occurred to me that there was a good chance I might bleed to death at this rate and I lay thinking over the few years of my life and coming to the astonishingly bland conclusion that I had experienced a pretty good time. My shirt, my trousers, and my new tartan tie, of which I was very proud, were soaked and scarlet. 'I think you'd better call an ambulance, nurse,' suggested the doctor, not before time. She had pulled herself together and went out of the room like an old rocket. Then, to general relief, he managed to get the clips on the right bits and I was carried to the ambulance with so many piece of metal on my head (he was not sure which ones had done the successful job) that I looked like a stuck bull transported from the ring.

The ambulance man who sat in the back with us eyed me moodily. The doctor, trying to be bright, said: 'I've been asked to give a lecture on haemorrhaging next week.'

The ambulanceman grunted: 'I should take 'im along with you.'

To the end of my days at the Technical School I was never capable of building a wall that did not tumble down. They fell with all the readiness of those of Jericho, but without a trumpet. They were badly put together and the mortar was too wet or too dry. I was even less competent at metalwork and there was an uncomfortable incident due to my cavalier use of a blow torch and the vicinity of the instructor's backside.

Few of my lines executed at the drawing board managed to proceed neatly on the intended course. Any form of mathematics left me thwarted. I would never have made a draughtsman. My mother's dream of long before came to naught.

In the woodwork class I shared the dunces' bench with a resourceful and well-spoken chap called Harry Futerman, who became a London solicitor. The tight woodworking joints we were required to fashion tended to rattle like castanets, the gluepot was called for and often spread itself over bench, tools and pupils. Futerman and I were set the elementary task of planing the top of an ill-fitting door on the school canteen. Our passions were football and cricket and our conversation was directed on these subjects to the detriment of the job in hand. We planed away happily, a little bit more here and a little there, just a shade here to balance that bit where we seemed to have taken off too much . . . At the conclusion of the task a boy, or small man, could have slid through the aperture and that is exactly what happened, for the canteen was burgled that night and some buns and loose change stolen.

In an attempt to carve out something more artistic than the required mortise and tenon joints I devoted a lot of secret time to an elegant miniature tombstone embossed with the slogan 'RIP', followed by the name of the woodwork master. This was discovered by the instructor himself who thought it in poor taste and hustled me to the office of a particularly obnoxious man, the deputy headmaster, who sported both a monocle and a sneer. His hair was always plastered down from a middle parting, like some antiquated upstaged actor. He wore pin-striped suits and spoke with a voice that squeezed from his nose. He was not a nice individual.

'After this,' he pronounced, having been told of my crime, 'I shall never again denote a penny to Barnardo's.'

This outraged me. 'If it's only a penny then you'd better keep it,' I answered. 'We don't depend on people like you.' Whereupon he hit me around the ear.

There were others who were more sympathetic. The man who taught us plumbing was a companionable chap who liked me even if I never conquered the mystique of wiping joints or bending lead. When I had first attended the school he had set each of us the task of drawing a plan of the water system of our own house. For the majority of pupils this was reasonably simple. At Dickies, however, with its sixty rooms, passages and towers, the water system was on an heroic scale. I asked Bosky, a cross-eyed teenager who stoked the home's boiler.

'I'm
not
a Dickie boy,' he used to philosophise while squatting on the coke pile. And I'm not a master either. I'm a sort of in-between.' Inspiration would light his coaly face. 'I'm the
boiler-master,
see.' Bosky had no notion of how the water worked. He just shovelled the coke, quite often everywhere but through the door of the furnace. So I had asked the Gaffer who, liking to encourage knowledge, immediately showed me the plan of the water pipes from the tank in the tower through the labyrinth of curves and corners. It looked like the map of the London Underground. I copied this faithfully and handed it in with the more prosaic plans of suburban houses as offered by my schoolmates. The plumbing master mentioned that I seemed to live in a mansion and I explained where and what it was. After that he was always kind. One day when I had made a particularly monstrous mangle of a basic pipe circuit he sighed: 'What do you want to do as a job, Thomas?'

'I want to be a writer, sir,' I replied promptly.

'Good,' he said. 'Just as long as it's not a plumber.'

I was better at some things. At the end of the two years I emerged with distinctions in English, History and Geography, coming last or next to Futerman, in all the other subjects. The
Daily Mirror
was running a series of very brief fiction called 'Story to Read in the Train' and I submitted one, tenuously typed on the old Dickies Underwood. It was not published but I had, in return, a wonderfully encouraging letter from a man called C.E.T. Field who was in the
Mirror
features department. It was very good, he said, but I was competing against professional writers. I must keep writing, and reading . . . write something every day . . . read something every day . . . I still have the letter.

Futerman used to run a racket in the free bus tickets which some boys were permitted. Bartering, selling, exchanging these tickets, was a daily trade. My involvement meant a considerable difference in my pocket money, enabling me to buy both the
Mews Chronicle
in the morning and the
Evening News
(from my acquaintance with the cyst) at night. The first English cricket team since the war was visiting Australia, and Boz, my friend from Dickies (who was at the same school), and I would race to see what the scores were. Recently I found myself sitting next to Alex Bedser at a dinner and I told him how I remembered the excitement of learning that he had taken a catch to dismiss one of the Australian, opening batsmen in the first of the post-war Test matches. Even now I can see Boz, red face gleaming, reciting the words of the cricket correspondent E.M. Wellings. And Bedser, because of 'is great 'ight was able to knock t'ball opp and catch it as it dropped.'

Futerman, who had considerable style, opted to skip school and attend the Derby in 1946, and he invited me to accompany him. On the suspect bus tickets we made our way to Epsom where we saw Airborne score a memorable victory. Well, we saw its legs go by our noses as we crouched in the crowd at the edge of the rails. Futerman had been running the book at school and had lost heavily, so much so that winnings would have to be paid out in free bus tickets. We began to walk back but it was a long way so we got on a bus. 'Somebody,' pronounced Futerman, 'will have to wait for their winnings.'

It seems now that I occupied at this period a disproportionate amount of time listening to ladies who sang at the piano. The jolly sisters at Kingston were succeeded by another hostess, of good intention but limited scale, who would attempt notes well beyond her reach. Her eyes would go up as her voice vanished, as if she were trying to see where it had gone. I found that my eyes were ascending searchingly also. She did, however, make excellent chocolate cake and was far from mean with it. Delving into my half-a-crown pocket money I myself had set out on a musical career. For ninepence a week an incredibly rheumy old dear taught me scales, a piece called 'Merry Bells' and Rubinstein's 'Melody in F' on a piano with a keyboard like a mouth of bad teeth. Notes were missing wholesale and when nothing but a wooden mallet sound came out she would la-la it. A firm press on the hard pedal (the other one didn't work) would sometimes set off the journey of a Guinness bottle, rolling bumpily across the floor.

Given the limitations of professional player and piano, Rubinstein would have been excused not detecting his 'Melody in F' (La-la-la, clunk, la-la clunk, la-la clunk) and my repertoire never advanced beyond it.

However, by one of those almost mystic moments of fortune, it led the way to the furtherance of my dream of being a writer. I was practising on the piano in the chapel one evening when a visitor to the home came and stood behind me.

'Rubinstein,' he murmured.

Pleased, even astonished, that anyone should have recognised it, I went back to the beginning and treated him to 'Merry Bells' as well. The following week I found myself sitting in a huge chair, in a sumptuous apartment, while the man's wife, an opera singer, performed an aria at a white piano. My benefactor's name was Charles Mitchell and he was a journalist and an author. I related my ambitions and soon after he took me to lunch at the Authors' Club in London.

Curiously, being in Barnardo's had always provided a reason and a means of social elevation. We orphans were taken to tea and circuses by wealthy and influential people who hired buses or even taxis to transport us into an enriched world. We became quite familiar with it, particularly at Christmas time, when there was an embarrassment of outings from which we could take our pick. At times we became quite choosy.

Now, here was I, from Maesglas, Newport, Mon, and at sixteen, having lunch, at a club in Northumberland Avenue with authors and writers all around, eating, drinking and talking about their books and travels. It was thrilling and I dreamed of the day I might sit there and discuss
my
work and
my
journeys. I never did. That visit was my first and last.

It was on the kindly Charles Mitchell's advice to Barnardo's that I was sent to a college in Walthamstow, London, to start a course in journalism. I was to live in a hostel, a bus ride away, in one of two adjoining houses run by the Homes for older boys waiting for jobs.

One of the houses was a tall, pale Victorian pile called 'Staffa' and the other a neat modern place with a bow window called 'Iona'. They shared a pleasant, and mysteriously unkempt garden and, wonder of wonders, I was given a room of my own.

It is easy for me to remember, even at this distance: walking in, putting down my suitcase and closing the door. It was on the ground floor with a French window opening out on the rear garden. There was a bed, a wardrobe and a chest. After hanging my jacket in the wardrobe, I arranged my few books on the top of the chest and then sat down on the bed, looking about me, realising with joy what a turn for the better my life had taken.

An ex-RAF man and his wife were in charge the Wellbeloveds (a name I was to borrow for a sergeant in
The Virgin Soldiers).
There was another adult resident, a dusty fellow who went out to work in some capacity for Barnardo's and lived in the house called Staffa. His hobbies were boxing (during which he was fiercely pummelled by all the boys and appeared to relish it) and chasing the same lads around the bathroom with a syringe loaded with soapsuds. We were in no doubt as to what were his aims with this weapon but we made sure he was never able to implement them. If he got too close we would gang up on him and give him another pummelling, leaving him propped up in a corner with a smile on his face.

At the college, a giant brick building with a Grecian pillared front, I discovered that I was the only male in a class of students studying shorthand and typing. Even with this plethora of riches, however, my achievements with girls continued to disappoint. We had regular ballroom dancing lessons at lunchtime and I learned to tango and foxtrot with the best. Three times a week there were midday 'gram-dances' and we would whirl about the floor to the wonderful rhythms of 'Skyliner', 'American Patrol' and 'Twelfth Street Rag'. I remember distinctly the first time I asked a girl to dance. Having newly mastered the one-two-three of the slow waltz I ventured to the Saturday night extravaganza, bursting in my best suit, and stood on the sidelines trying to remember the steps and gain the courage. A young man called Michael, who was hardly over twenty and had returned from the war minus his legs, had bravely staggered around on his metal substitutes, and I thought my task was a good deal less demanding than that.

A waltz was announced from the bandstand and I strode stiff-legged, teeth gritted into a dog-like smile, up to the most voluptuous young woman in the college. There was no merit in starting at the bottom. She had a great round of black hair like a Michelin tyre behind her dark and sensuous face. Her eyes were large and dreamy. She wore tight clothes, sweaters which bulged with pulchritude and promise. Her name was Babs.

She was a sporting girl and, to my mixed terror and delight, she accepted my invitation to waltz. I was shorter than her and my head slotted almost exactly between her breasts, nose pressed into that perfumed escarpment. The dance took us around the outside of the floor. We never revolved an inch, just one-two-three, one-two-three, in a straight line, an awkward turn at the corner and then off on an unvarying course again, one-two-three, one-two-three. I held her as if I feared she might topple over. I could not, of course, keep this miracle to myself and as we cruised by the ranked faces at the fringe of the floor my eyes were seeking desperately for a friend, or even an acquaintance, at whom I could roll them to demonstrate my ecstasy. Each time I turned my head in search of approval or better still, envy, the end of my nose brushed the slopes of her bosom and I apologised, red-faced. She must have been a composed young lady because I remember her reply: 'Don't worry about them. They do get in the way.'

This temporary triumph was offset, however, by a continuing trail of real failures. One Saturday I decided to knock them cold by wearing a spotted bow tie to the dance. Only a stiff collar could be properly worn with this, I thought, and went on the train to Leytonstone to buy one. When I got it back to my room it was patently too loose. The clip-on bow hung like a boat about to capsize. Back on the train I went, the one stop to Leytonstone and the shop. The assistant accepted the crumpled collar in exchange for a size smaller. On the train once again I went and to my room where I stood puce-faced in front of the mirror while the collar garrotted me. Once more to the station and to the outfitters. This collar was distinctly sweaty but the man very decently changed it and I returned to the room where, delighted, I found that the third one fitted and the bow tie, with its spots and pointed ends, looked dazzling.

It seemed to work brilliantly. A girl with whom I performed the final waltz smiled agreement when I suggested I should see her home. The motive behind her ready acceptance became apparent when we stepped outside the college. Everywhere was thick with fog, the buses had stopped; we would have to get a taxi. There came a point where the routes to our homes diverged. There was nothing for it but to get out, pay for her journey, and walk the rest. As I alighted from the cab the lady broke off a flirtatious conversation with the driver to give me a passing kiss. 'Never wear that bow tie again,' she warned darkly. 'It makes you look like a skull and crossbones.'

This may, or may not, have been better than looking like a crow but generally in matters of romance the situation was neither encouraging nor improving. Even when I did eventually meet a fair-faced girl who might easily have held a parasol beneath a rose bower, those twin evils disaster and humiliation were waiting, gleefully rubbing their hands.

Her name was Ann. She was small and shy, given to whispers and blushes. She sang in the church choir, looking like an angel in her cassock. Already I had fitted her into a scene. Here was the girl, I told myself, for the rowing boat on the lake, even if it was March. I recall the month because it was my birthday and, at seventeen, I thought it was time I became more deeply involved with women which, surveying my dismal record until then, could not have been difficult. The sweet Ann, however, seemed to have gleaned some rumour that I was of bad amorous reputation; one who needed to be carefully watched for the first sign of a trick. She agreed, however, to let me take her rowing on the lake, Connaught Water, near Woodford.

It was an encouragingly sunny day causing us, in playing the idyll, to be singularly ill-dressed for the real season. I was wearing a sports jacket and open-necked shirt and she had a flowered summer dress with a knitted cardigan over her slight shoulders. Gallantly I helped her into the hired rowing boat while the attendant pocketed what must have been the first shilling of the season. She sat one end and I sat the other. Once clear of land and the sheltering collar of trees the breeze was keen. She pulled her cardigan closer and looked worried.

'I love Mendelssohn,' I declared as I tugged the oars. We had already discussed music. 'Wouldn't you love to see Fingal's Gave?'

Not a bad opening from a lad of seventeen, you might think. Then I saw she was gazing at me with growing alarm. 'Fingal's Gave?' she muttered.

I looked down to where her eyes were pinned. Oh, God, all my fly buttons were open! My legs were wide apart and as I stretched to pull the oars so the terrible aperture gaped. There was nothing I could do. She was right in front of me, a truly captive audience, and my hands were fully occupied with the oars.

She was convinced it was a trap, 'Take me back, please,' she trembled. 'I want to go back.'

Ahead was a small lump of scrub-covered mud projecting from the lake. 'An island!' I exclaimed with high-pitched brightness. 'Look, an island! We'll land there.'

She was glad of any port in a storm I suppose. Still staring at the gaping mystery in my trousers, she nodded agreement. I headed for the landfall.

What took place next has been repeated in many film comedies, but I still find it difficult to appreciate. After helping her ashore I found myself trapped in that familiar farce – the boat began to move away from the bank. I had one foot on the island and one in the boat. My fly was gaping wider than ever. Something had to give. I made a pathetic penguin-like attempt to gain the shore and fell backwards into the icy water. The girl began to scream uncontrollably.

She continued to scream until the attendant came out from the shore to retrieve us and his drifting rowboat. Later she told her friends that she thought the whole scenario was some ruse which would enable me to remove my trousers.

This story reached me and, properly distressed, I wrote a lovely letter to her saying that I felt for her so deeply that nothing was further from my mind. I even concluded it with a little poem.

On the following Sunday the choir boys and girls in church were seized with fits of giggling. Every face turned to me in the front pew where I sat to gaze at my adored. My love letter and my private sentimental rhyme were being passed secretly around during the sermon. The following week I was in love again with another girl who actually took me to her house where she was to cook a meal. On this occasion the pressure cooker blew up. It seemed I was doomed to a life of celibacy, dreams and regret.

From the widespread windows of the college library I could look out over Forest Road to a single bulky building outside of which, spelled vertically, was a sign in red lights which said 'Guardian'. It was the local newspaper, the
Walthamstow Guardian,
and the legend beckoned me like a long, nail-varnished, enticing finger. Since I was the solitary student taking the journalism course, which was in fact merely an adapted commerce curriculum, I spent much time in the library; for mathematics and business practice were outside its scope, and mine also. Sitting at a self-imposed thesis on Mendelssohn on dim winter afternoons my eyes would drift across the greasy road to the lit windows of the building and I would imagine the activity within. The editor in his book-lined office, the bowed and dedicated sub-editors, the urgent reporters coming in with the news from the streets, perhaps from as far afield as Chingford and Epping. Sometimes I saw a car hurrying off and I wondered where that lucky man was going in search of adventure and sensation. Mendelssohn seemed to have happened a long time ago.

At last I was getting the feel of Pitman's shorthand, its world of grammalogues and diphthongs, even beginning to think in it, which I still often do, although my typing was woefully uncoordinated. We learned the touch technique by placing a shield over the keyboard and typing out sets and systems of letters to the accompaniment of martial music. The tutor would wind the gramophone and the stout sounds of the Colonel Bogey march would crackle out. Sitting there among all the girls I would be several bars behind and fully aware that I was once more committing some sort of Assyrian cryptogram to paper. Sometimes I tapped between the keys and the whole basket of the machine fell in on itself. You could, however, sing under your breath to the march:

Be kind to your web-footed friends,
For a duck may be somebody's brother.
They live in the fens and the swamp,
Where the weather is cold and damp.

Charles Mitchell continued to encourage me. Barnardo's had given me a typewriter in a wooden box and I sat at home slowly composing articles and short stories for newspapers and magazines that were returned so punctually that I marvelled at the speed of the post. He knew that I was fretting at my lectures and wanted to get onto a local newspaper in any capacity. One day he sent a thrilling message to say that he had arranged for me to have a trial on a group of papers whose printing press was only a walk around the corner from the hostel where I was living.