Kisses on a Postcard

by Terence Frisby

  A Note on the Author

  Terence Frisby is a playwright. He has worked extensively for many years as an actor, director and producer. His most famous play, There’s A Girl In My Soup, was London’s longest-running comedy and a worldwide smash hit. His script of the film, which starred Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn, won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for the Best British Comedy Screenplay. His other plays are performed internationally.

  He has written many television plays and two television comedy series: Lucky Feller with David Jason, and That’s Love, which won the Gold Award for Comedy at Houston IFF.

  As producer, he is most proud of presenting the multi-award-winning, South African show ‘Woza Albert’ at the Criterion Theatre, London, subsequently off-Broadway.

  His BBC Radio 4 play, Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late, from which this book sprang, won The Giles Cooper Play Of the Year Award.

  A musical stage version was produced at the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple, in 2004. Terence is currently mounting a production of it for London’s West End entitled Kisses on a Postcard.

  First published in Great Britain 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Terence Frisby

  This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The right of Terence Frisby to be identified as the author

  of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

  with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  To Jack and Rose Phillips, our foster parents

  during the Second World War, who gave my

  brother and me three rich years of childhood while

  the world destroyed itself around us. We will be

  grateful to them till our dying breaths,

  which now can’t be that far away.

  Foreword

  What memoir of childhood could be entirely true, written through the wrong end of the telescope? There are always reconstructions, guesses, elaborations, omissions. On top of any unintentional inaccuracies I have to own up to inventing certain characters and changing a few names and events to protect people – and, possibly, their descendants – who were once very kind to two small boys. And even to protect those who weren’t.

  But some of the deliberate changes of the story and characters are there for a different reason, which is all to do with the way this book came into existence.

  It started as twenty-two pages of reminiscences. The BBC commissioned me to turn those pages into a ninety-minute play for Radio 4. I am a playwright, and play-writing is about architecture. Without a shape, you don’t have a play, so I shaped my reminiscences into a narrative that would hold together through a beginning and middle to a proper climax. Also, to make a play (well, certainly a radio play) you need dialogue. Nobody could possibly remember, verbatim, conversation after conversation that took place many years ago and which I reproduced for the radio. They are from my imagination, based on my memories of what actually took place. This play, entitled Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late, won the Giles Cooper award, The Best Radio Play of the Year, 1988.

  The success of the radio play led to the next step, which was a stage musical at the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple. It had twenty-three children and twenty-two adult actors in the cast. Once again I further doctored the literal truth to fit a musical play. After all, how many people suddenly burst into song in real life – though I certainly did. But I assert fiercely that I have remained true to the people and memories of my wartime childhood.

  When I finally decided to write the story as a book, I had to decide: do I cut out my inventions and go back to the bare facts or stay with the narrative I had shaped them into? There was only one answer. Anyway, after writing the two scripts, my version of the story is as real to me now as what might have actually happened nearly seventy years ago. So perhaps I should call this a re-creation of my childhood. However, I can say, hand on heart, that nearly every one of the people in this book existed as I have drawn them, most of the events happened and all of my story is truthful to their memory and the spirit of their lives.

  This is a thank-you letter, if you like, to the people of Doublebois and Dobwalls and – especially – to Jack and Rose Phillips, Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack to us and the whole of Doublebois, an extraordinary, ordinary couple who seem to me to embody everything good in working-class people of that time. Although none of us ever mouthed such sentiments then, we loved them and were loved by them.

  Let me not omit our mother and father, whose concern for their two sons gave birth to the original, imaginative Kisses on a Postcard idea. Every last word of that part of the story is utterly true.

  Chapter One

  I was the luckiest of children: I had two childhoods.

  My earliest memories are of pre-war antiseptic Welling, just in Kent but really suburban London. The world I first lived in was even younger than I was, street upon street of it, all built since my birth in 1932. This brave new one-class creation consisted of red-brick, pebble-dashed houses – semis or four-in-a-row – bought on mortgages by young couples who had managed to raise the £25 deposit. With their small children they had escaped from the grime of Deptford, Woolwich Docks and New Cross (where I was born) through the newly legislated green belt, to fresh air and gardens. Our garden, according to my father, was the biggest in Eastcote Road. Because of a slight bend in the road a spare wedge had been tacked on to our plot. My father was perpetually proud of the imagined status his extra square yards bestowed on him and we assimilated our share of his pleasure.

  In spite of the gardens, we kids lived in the street. Children were everywhere, gangs of us on every second corner. Those new-laid, spacious-to-us, concrete streets were our playground. A ball and a bike were essentials from an early age. A motor vehicle was a rarity when it disturbed our games of football, cricket, or ‘aye-jimmy-knacker’, a pitiless physical team game that involved one team bending over in a line at right angles to a wall, locked together, head between the legs of the boy in front, while the other team, one by one, vaulted heavily on to their backs to make them collapse. When the whole team was mounted the riders of this tottering heap chanted, ‘Aye-jimmy-knacker, one, two, three, aye-jimmy-knacker, one, two, three, aye-jimmy-knacker, one, two, three. All men off their horses.’ If any of the riders fell off, their team lost. If the boys underneath collapsed, they lost and had to bend over again. If they didn’t, they had won that round and had their turn as riders. And so on and bruisingly on. The smallest boy in each team stood with his back to the wall with the head of the first boy cushioned in his stomach, at first sight the cushiest place to be until the thumping riders landed a
nd the head was driven into you with, literally, sickening force. I remember the feeling well: I was frequently the smallest boy.

  No cars were parked in those streets because none of our parents owned one. In Eastcote Road of nearly a hundred houses there were perhaps three, primly stowed in their garages, or standing gleaming on the garden path of the smug owner. We were interrupted more often by the milkman’s or greengrocer’s or coal-merchant’s horse and cart, and by the occasional steaming pile of manure left behind, snapped up for his dad’s flower beds by the first one there with a bucket and shovel.

  We rode our bikes wildly round our empty streets in a wheeled version of hide-and-seek, which we called tracking, then more sedately out on to the main roads, with expeditions to Danson Park, up Shooters Hill (and tearing madly down again, nearly out of control), into the extensive woods: Oxleas, Jack and Crown. ‘No Bicycles’ it said on the notices, but that was of no interest to us. We rode further afield to Blackfen, Woolwich Ferry, Blackheath, Eltham swimming baths and down the A2 bypass to haunted Hall Place, near Bexley.

  I was six when I got my first proper bike to join in this fun. It was a fat-tyred affair blackmailed out of my parents, who foolishly promised me a two-wheeler when I could ride one. Since infancy I had ridden a tricycle, a trike, which I had grown to despise. Presumably they thought they had me in a catch-22 situation: no bike, can’t learn; can’t learn, no bike. But I borrowed one and took it to the top of Ashmore Grove, where two friends balanced me on it and shoved me off. I stayed on long enough down the hill to crash the bike into the gutter and run home to announce to my parents that I could ride. As soon as I had my own bike I made my brother Jack’s life a misery by following him and his friends everywhere. He was four years four months older and regarded me as an embarrassing, unwanted accessory. They could have left me behind eventually, but I could stay with them long enough to get out of our estate and ensure that Jack wouldn’t leave me pedalling furiously on my fat tyres, alone and at the mercies of main-road traffic. So I was waited for and reluctantly included, happy beyond words to be on my bright-red new (second-hand but new to me) bike, out with the big boys.

  Dad, lower-middle-class Dad, worked on the railway, a carriage-trimmer, later an undermanager, then, post-war, boss of the carriage-and-wagon repair depot at Stewart’s Lane, Battersea. He had been a successful amateur boxer, a local welterweight champion and contender for national ABA

  titles. He encouraged us both to box, just to look after ourselves. All of us boys in those streets were in and out of fights constantly. When Jack came home one day in tears because a bigger boy had hit him, Dad offered him sixpence to go and hit the boy back, no matter what happened subsequently. I can’t remember what Jack did but I went and hit the boy’s younger brother, about my size, came home, demanded and got my sixpence. But boxing didn’t take with either of us. Dad was a member of the Labour Party, a trade unionist, a physically strong, aggressive, hard-working man who could frighten us by the force of his personality and his occasional tempers. He was also very sentimental, gentle, loved to make us laugh and – as did our mother – made us feel secure and special. This was expressed one day when he came home from work carrying a piece of varnished wood with the word ‘JackTer’ cut into it and painted gold. This he screwed into the lintel over the front door and everytime Jack and I went in and out we were reminded that our house was named after us.

  Mum came from a family which had all the appearance, speech and style of the upper middle class – without the income. They were mostly professional musicians, all of them female by the time I was around. The males had died or disappeared and one great-uncle was in jail in Canada for some white-collar crime. Mum played the piano and would bash out jazz and popular tunes with a strong rhythmic left hand – stride, it was called, because of the way the left hand strode up and down the keys controlling everything. I loved it when she played: the little rituals of lifting the lid of the piano stool to get the music out, the deliberateness with which she took her seat – no concert pianist did it better – the fiddling removal of her rings, placed carefully at the upper end of the keyboard, and then the house was filled with rhythm and joyous noise. Both of our parents came from Brighton. She had been a professional jazz drummer there in the 1920s. Yes, that is what she was, possibly the only female jazz drummer in this country, unique. She played all over Sussex at country-house dances and at various venues in Brighton. At a dance at the Ship Hotel one Saturday night my father stared long and hard at the drummer and, knowing her, she almost certainly glanced back and wielded her drumsticks with extra panache. When the band broke for the interval and records were played he was the only one with enough nerve to ask the MC if he could have a dance with the drummer.

  They got married and her new husband’s job on the Southern Railway took them from the Brighton depot to New Cross in South London. She told me years later that she couldn’t believe what she had done to her life: from being a local celebrity, playing at dances in the town and glamorous balls in Sussex country houses, she had become a wife living in a Victorian flat on his modest wages with two small sons in one of the poorer bits of South London. When we moved on to Welling it must have been a bit of an improvement, but the cultural desert of north-west Kent was no replacement for fun-filled, shameless, gaudy Brighton-on-Sea, home of the dirty weekend and chosen residence of so many glamorous figures since the Prince Regent built his pleasure dome: the glorious, dotty Indian Pavilion with its Dome, where she and various members of her family had frequently played.

  Visits to Brighton to see both our parents’ families were always exciting. First, there was the journey, a thrill enough on its own: a suburban electric train to Charing Cross, with the wonderful stretch between New Cross and London Bridge where eight or ten lines ran parallel and your train seemed to race others into the station; the occasional steam engine might also roar or chug past; out of Charing Cross station into the Strand; onto a bus through Trafalgar Square, where you could twist your neck to see Nelson on top of his column; down Whitehall and soberly past the Cenotaph with its sombre meaning, much fresher then than now; motionless guards like your toy soldiers outside St James’s Palace; another opportunity to get a crick in your neck as we passed Big Ben and Parliament; along Victoria Street to another station, Victoria, part of our railway world; then the main event, a fifty-two-minute, non-stop ride on the Brighton Belle, our train: it took us back over the Thames for the second time, past the engine sheds at Battersea and Nine Elms, speeding through south London, into Merstham Tunnel and out into the ersatz Surrey countryside, really glorified suburbs, which developed into the Sussex Weald, proper farmland. The invariable exclamation from our parents, ‘Look. It’s the South Downs.’ This was the climax, the dramatic skyline of the Downs, the bare grassy slopes like a sleeping Gargantua rising out of the soft fields, always pointed out to us though we knew it by heart. I think Mum, in particular, felt she was arriving home when she saw the South Downs. The train dived under them in a tunnel and suddenly you were out into Brighton and the brassy seaside.

  Dad’s mother lived in Stanley Road up the hill behind the fire station in an ordinary Victorian terraced house. It was only several minutes’ walk from the station, at the back of the town. His father, former chef at the Grand Hotel, was dead. Drink was involved somewhere. As a result, Dad, though not entirely teetotal, was a very light drinker all his life. On the other hand, Mum loved the whole social business of going out for a drink and ‘enjoying yourself’. This difference in their tastes did not help an already difficult relationship. At the top of our grandmother’s road was a children’s playground to which Jack and I ran as soon as we could. Aged four, I broke my arm there on a roundabout and was being carried back to Granny’s while somebody sped down the road to the fire station, where my father was chatting to a friend. I remember clearly, and it became family legend, that the messenger rounded the corner at the bottom of the road running flat out as Dad, also running flat out (back toward
s me), appeared in the same instant as if he were making a well-rehearsed relay takeover. He took me in his arms and sprinted back down to the fire station. It was a jolting, painful ride, I remember, though I am sure he held me carefully. The firemen tied my arm between two rulers as splints and put it in a sling. An ambulance arrived, bell clanging, to take me on another ride, this one exciting in spite of the pain, to hospital, where I was anaesthetised while my arm was set. I had it in plaster for a while, proudly, until it started to itch like mad.

  It was the visits to Mum’s relatives that were the grand, sophisticated occasions. Indeed, it was one of them, her Auntie Molly, who had found the £25 deposit to put down for our house. My great-aunt Molly was the pretty one of the three aunts who brought Mum and her sister up – their mother had been packed off to Canada after some sort of scandal and had a second family there. All three great-aunts (and my absent, possibly disgraced grandmother) had been suffragettes and were very much free feminist thinkers before the turn of the century. They were well educated, cultured and all spoke with beautifully clear Edwardian diction. ‘Off ’ was ‘orf ’ in their language and if they called themselves or someone else ‘a silly ass’ it rhymed with pass with no anatomical overtones. I remember one of them saying to me in answer to my enthusiastic endorsement of a children’s film, ‘Grown-up life’s not like that. Films and plays are too tidy. Life’s much more messy. We’re all silly asses in the end.’ The word that I thought I had heard from such lips shocked me so much that the remark’s content has stayed with me along with the pronunciation.

  Molly was a classical double bassist. After one local scandal and more than one affaire she married a prosperous furrier so was able to keep her two penniless sisters. The younger one was sweet, vague Auntie Clare, who played the violin and viola and had a lifelong affaire with an equally broke violinist. When he died he left her all his possessions, a cupboardful of violins, not one of them a Stradivarius. I enjoy using the period word ‘affaire’ for their love lives because that is the mot juste; it was listening to their gossip that I first heard it, voice lowered, second syllable slightly stressed, and wondered what it meant. The older penniless sister was crabby Aunt Millicent, a virgin I am sure, who had taught algebra and Greek at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and intimidated Mum and her sister throughout their childhood. They all lived in a grand, spacious Edwardian house, 47 The Drive, the best address in Hove, with the sea at the end of the road. Again we could feel special. Molly and husband – who used to hand Jack and me munificent half-crowns when we visited – occupied the main, sumptuous body of the house, Clare and Milly in the basement flat. The general conclusion among Mum’s all-female relatives was that she had married beneath her. Nevertheless, they showed sympathy rather than censure.