A decent man and his wife appeared, Mr and Mrs Pamelly, who once called me from a cricket match and, to my everlasting gratitude, took me to hear my first performance of Handel's Messiah. There was Marlow, a handsome man whose real name was Marshall, a civilised person who became a rural dean, and Jim Guertin, a returned prisoner of war, who was good at sports and married one of the younger and prettier dormitory matrons. Then there was the man who first encouraged me to write.
His name was Wally Brampton and to us he was known as the Walrus. He was a large Lewis Carroll figure with a moustache, a waistcoat and a pipe. Back from the war, he proved a gentle character and the Dickie boys were swift to take advantage. He began to institute the miracle of suppers, scrounging any extra food that might be going and appearing beaming with it at eight o'clock in the evening. To children who never had a morsel to eat after five-thirty, this was a matter of some excitement. The story went down in legend of how he obtained a big tray full of suet pudding one evening and benevolently bore it to the dining hall. The Gaffer had given his grudging approval for this luxury on condition that grace was properly annunciated before it was consumed. Wally closed his eyes and recited grace. When he opened them again every crumbling crumb of pudding was missing, grabbed from under his praying hands by the boys who quickly wriggled away to hiding places only they knew.
It was this kindly person who one day came to see me when I was shut away in the billiards room because I had chicken pox. It seems astonishing that Dickies, where everything was so threadbare, where necessities were thinly spread, should have something so grand as a billiards room, but it did. It was behind the chapel and housed a full-sized billiard table. There were no balls, however, and no cues. I was sent there because the sickbay lacked an isolation room. Spread with spots I sat in a bed in the corner and began to try to write. I composed a story, which must have owed a fair amount to Henry Williamson, called 'Sleek the Otter'. The opening sentence ran: 'Sleek the Otter, ears and eyes alert, lay on a grassy bank beside the stream . . .' The Walrus came in and I showed the story to him. He read it carefully. 'That's very good, son,' he nodded. 'Very good indeed.' He went to his room and brought me some of his own books to read – Stalky and Co. was one. Then he took my story and showed it to the Gaffer. The old man grunted and said: 'Good. Since he's so clever he can write my report for the Barnardo Magazine.'
Thus I had my first work published. It was a description of Bonfire Night 1946, the first after the wartime blackout. I still have the cutting.
When I had read Stalky and Co., I sat down and wrote out what I considered to be my targets in life. Kipling's schoolboys can scarcely have given anyone more inspiration. I cannot remember what those juvenile objectives were now, but they included a provision that although I intended to be a good Christian I was not going to be the goody-goody type because 'Those sort of people are not to be trusted.' The document completed, I folded it away in a ragged photograph album into which I had put my two pictures of my mother and some coloured postcards of Newport, Mon. One day, when I was staying briefly in the Liverpool Barnardo's (en route for a camp in the Isle of Man), I found one of the young nurses in tears. She was holding this juvenile deposition of hopes. 'I shouldn't have done it,' she sniffled. 'But I was nosing through your things. I found this and read it.' She began to boo copiously. 'I think it is the most beautiful thing I have ever read,' she wailed. 'And I'm so sorry for being so nosy. I just had to tell you.' I was a little embarrassed, but grateful that a few sentences of my modest hopes should have such an effect. And now I've forgotten what they were.
Wally Brampton continued to encourage me, a help I regret to say I did not always appreciate, because I was as ready as any of the others to rag this gentle man. A year or so ago, thirty-five years after he had read my story about the otter, I was told that he had remained on the staff of Barnardo's and was about to retire. At that time a television company wanted to produce a programme about various people and their schoolmasters, and I was asked to take part. I knew that none of my schoolmasters would remember me, but I suggested Mr Brampton, who had so profoundly influenced my first efforts to write. He was living, newly retired, in the Midlands, at Kingswinford where he had once played rugby football, and although in poor health he agreed to appear on the programme. Then it was decided that he really did not fit the format and he and I were both written out. Disappointed, I wrote to him and in return he sent me a marvellous letter, full of reminiscence, full of the decency and understanding he had shown me all those years ago.
As I read it, a memory returned of a day when, folded in the big Bible at Dickies, I discovered an unsent letter. It was to Barnardo's headquarters at Stepney, in east London, and it was from the Gaffer. It was asking for Wally Brampton's removal because matron disliked, among other things, his foul-smelling pipe. Fortunately the letter had not been sent or, if a another had, it was ignored. Now, these years later, Wally wrote to me: 'We had the Gaffer at my Barnardo home during his retirement years. He lived in one of the cottages. He used to ask me to get him American tinned food and he used to eat it straight out of the tin.'
I have never been either an enthusiastic 'visitor' nor a conscientious correspondent; I rarely write personal letters and, apart from a few near friends, I hate the notion of 'dropping in' on people. But I dearly wanted to see the Walrus again and, in my reply to his long and wonderful letter, I said that the next time I drove through the Midlands I would love to visit him. Less than a week later I had a telephone call from his son. 'My mother has passed your letter on to me,' he said sadly. 'It arrived the day after my father died.'
VII
For the next three years, until I was sixteen, the pile on Kingston Hill, with its cold corridors, its threadbare dormitories, and its lively inmates, was my home. There was an interval, however, when for six months we were sent, wonderfully and at a moment's notice, to the wide countryside of Norfolk, where we lived in an old rectory.
This occurred in the summer of 1944 when, just as everyone believed the war as good as won, with the Allied invasion armies ashore and advancing through Europe, there came the rude and dangerous interruption of the German flying-bombs. These robots, with their grunting engines appeared over southern England in July. For three years air raid warnings had sounded only sporadically but on this pale summer night we were hurried from our beds, in my own case in memorable fashion. I was in the sickroom, an enjoyable situation since it was comfortable and had a radio set. The matron in charge, however, a lady with button eyes and whiskers, known as Korky the Gat, had her own ideas of treating patients. In my case, because I was only half awake and enquiring dreamily what was going on, the remedy was a tremendous smack across the face which sent me tumbling over the bed but had the desired effect of rousing me.
Everywhere the Dickie boys were heading for the air raid shelters, with some going off at a sharp, sly tangent because it was discovered that someone had left the food store unlocked. Eventually we crouched in the dank earthen sanctuaries, in darkness except for a few torch beams, munching illicit grub and listening to the eerie and threatening engines in the night above our heads.
Over the next few days and nights we learned to play the game that the pilotless bombs provided, to listen for the engine cut-out and then count slowly until they exploded on striking the ground. We were on the direct route to London and, since the weapons fell at random, a great number blew up in the immediate surroundings. On the first Saturday afternoon, one robot shied off at the last moment and missed Dickies prominent tower by inches. It detonated only two hundred yards away, bringing down the ceilings and raising the dust of ages from the floorboards. Grouching below one of the dining room tables I felt the impact shudder my bones. Another bomb struck the hospital a short distance down the hill. Clearly it was time to move away.
Initially some boys, myself included, were evacuated to Hertfordshire, to a Barnardo technical school, which was still not out of the danger zone. There the air raid shelters were wate
rlogged so the instruction was that on the approach of a flying-bomb a watcher on the roof would sound the fire alarm and then everyone was to put their heads under their pillows. On the night following this adroit advice the jolting jangle of the fire alarms awoke us and we lay listening to the robot, grunting like a pig as it neared. It cut out, as we knew it would, and every head went under every pillow. Fortunately, after a long and frightening pause, it came to earth some distance away in open country.
This appeared to be a classic case of frying pan to fire and we were briskly dispatched to Norfolk to join the rest of the Dickie boys in two old houses, at Narborough and at neighbouring Marham. There we lived in rural bliss until the next January.
I had only known the countryside in spasms; the fields at the bottom of our road in Newport might as well have been stage scenery. Even at Kingsbridge it had been a small-town rather than a rural life. That apart, there was only the brief holiday on the Welsh farm.
Now I found myself basking in what seemed an unending summer of warm boundless skies and flat fields, bright with buttercups, living on the fringe of a village scarcely altered since the Middle Ages. For weeks there was no school. There was a great expanse of parkland in front of the house, more fields and woods to explore and a hidden lake where we swam and paddled a boat which some airmen had fashioned from the fuel tank of a crashed plane. For the first time I became acquainted with animals, moles, rabbits, foxes; I watched fish loitering slyly in a stream; lying, as I often did, on my back, I began to study clouds.
We had with us a whole library and I read a book every day, relishing especially the public school stories and telling myself that really the lives and activities of those privileged boys were not unlike those which we knew.
Walking through the village to church, or eventually to school, it was possible to stare right into the front rooms of the cottages in the single street. One always attracted me, for the window framed a scene of armchairs, a wireless set and, when the autumn came, a red fire eyeing me from the grate. There was a girl who lived there, a girl with dark ringlets and blackberry eyes, and she became my sweetheart. Each night I would creep from the house, my hair plastered down with purloined margarine. She would be at our rendezvous and, after one innocent kiss, we would walk along the dim road with our arms around each other's waists. We would go to her cottage where her mother would give me home-made cake and I could settle back before the fire, their dog at my feet, listening to Tommy Handley on the radio.
When we eventually went to school it caused problems in the single classroom. We were an unruly bunch, regarded with awe by the village children. Only a curtain separated us from them and our behaviour was so monstrous that the village teacher often used to march her charges into the playground rather than have them infected by our rowdyism.
When winter came they would push their little blue noses against the windows, pleading with us to be good so that they could return to the warmth of the schoolroom.
Our teacher had voluntarily come from the school at Kingston, a poor panic-prone woman who found it impossible to control us. Her name was Maggie and she rode a bicycle as big as a bedstead which, on occasions, we would dismantle when she was otherwise engaged. She tried valiantly to interest this rude mob in nature walks, in local history and in the Bible. She was a hapless person trying her best. If she only succeeded in teaching one lesson in her entire career, then I was the one who benefited. One morning she instructed me to read the daily excerpt from the Bible and, with the rest of the boys cat-calling, smirking, and munching stolen sugar beet, I realised like a vision how poetic were the words I was reciting. 'For lo the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of the birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land . . .'
After school I asked her what sort of voice a turtle might have. When she realised that, for once, I was not being supercilious, she promised to find out for me. She asked the vicar and the next day she told me he had looked up the reference especially. 'The turtle in The Song of Solomon,' she said, 'is really a turtle dove.'
After that I began to look at words and language in a different way. The meek, and Maggie was of that kind, may never inherit the earth for it's too late now; but in some places where they have laid a kind hand the touch has been deep and lasting.
It was through Maggie, also, that I earned my first money by writing. In her enthusiasm for the past she planned to take a group of the more controllable boys to Norwich, and the Gaffer, who liked to encourage anything he saw as a glimmer of interest in education, offered a half-a-crown prize for the best essay to be written about the visit. I won despite the fact that my effort was entitled: Exertion to Norwich. I don't think anyone else bothered to write anything.
In winter the bitter North Sea winds swept across the flat country. Christmas Day was heavy with hoar frost, lying like snow and clogging the iron branches of the trees. At sunset the whole landscape turned pink.
We had been taken to an American air force base for Christmas Dinner, an amazing mixture of turkey and sweetcorn and candied carrots, with as much ice cream as we could eat. I could hardly remember the taste. There was glistening holly and a starry Christmas tree and decorations such as we had never seen. Out on the white airfield, like skeletons in the mist, were two bombers which had crashed the day before on returning from a raid on Germany. No one mentioned them.
A lofty officer took charge of some of our party for the day. His name was Oscar H. Scarf. He was immediately popular and another group of boys joined us, deserting another young man who looked hurt and disgusted. 'Aw, go to hell,' he muttered and sloped away. A few months later when we were back at Kingston, Oscar called at Dickies and took thirteen of us to the cinema in the town. 'One full ticket and thirteen half tickets,' he said to the bemused cashier.
Shortly after New Year we had boarded the train at Narborough and Pentney Station and with a mixture of sadness and relief the people of the village said goodbye to us. My girlfriend Mary was waving to me and holding up her dog so I could see it. Later she wrote a letter to me which began: 'Dear Leslie, I've still got the same dog . . .'
Our return to Dickies, marching like a junior army down Gloucester Road, had a touch of comedy. The home, its grim facade now embellished with battle-scars, had been occupied by Irishmen working on emergency repairs to the town's hospital and houses.
The Gaffer was aware of their presence and had decided on a pre-emptive strike to reoccupy the place. Two of the Irishmen, peering from a window, almost fell out when the column of one hundred and fifty boys led, as though by some warrior general, by the Gaffer advanced up the drive. The Gaffer simply marched us into the building and succeeded in occupying half of it before anyone in authority could intervene. We had four dormitories back but had to share the dining room with the robust Paddies. Before they left for their day's work, they lined up for a steaming hot breakfast of sausages, bacon and eggs and fried bread, and it was not long before the Dickie boys, nostrils twisting, crept down the stairs and helped themselves also. The Gaffer, whose distrust of the Irish was every bit as deep as his solemn dislike of the Welsh (the Scots he absolved because his wife had Scots blood), assembled us and warned direly that there must be no fraternisation with 'these filthy and foul-mouthed men'. But sausage, bacon, eggs and fried bread were thicker than warnings and they became our allies and friends until the time when they were found other billets and we were left in sole occupation of Dickies again.
I still had no idea what had happened to my brother. It seems extraordinary now that two children could be so casually separated and, being already bereft of parents, each should then have no knowledge of where the other had gone. With hindsight, I suppose that I could have demanded to know where he had been taken after that abrupt and careless parting in the ambulance, but I was only a boy and it was difficult to approach anybody, and particularly the Gaffer, on matters like that. Once or twice, when he was in one of his occa
sional benign moods, sitting in the chapel before the assembled inmates, making humorous guesses about what he imagined our homes had been like or what was to become of us in the future, I mentioned that I did not know where my brother was. But, because I failed to put it in a forthright way, he had passed it off as a joke, asking around the room: 'Anyone seen Thomas's brother?' and pretending to search under the benches.
He was not as monstrous as he sounds but he had moments that made him seem very close to it. He once ridiculed a boy to tears by saying that some people who had visited him had 'smelled to high heaven'. All the others, of course, had smirked and turned their faces on the unfortunate lad. 'Doesn't anybody have a bath where you come from?' he demanded. Then there was a running joke that one inmate had lived in a hovel in Chapel Alley, Brentford, a location which the Gaffer alleged he knew well. Everyone always laughed at this familiar patter, including the boy. Another pathetic youngster, called Willy, was always weeping and demanding to 'go home to my mum'. The Gaffer, and in truth the boys as well, picked up the phrase as a taunt. Well, eventually Willy tried to go home to his mum and ended up electrocuted on the Southern Railway near Waterloo.
The situation sounds disgraceful, writing it in this age, yet none of us at that time thought it was cruel or unjust. When my Uncle Chris and Aunt Nance eventually appeared from South Wales to take me to visit the London Zoo, they arrived looking prosperous and in one of their two cars. The Gaffer entertained them in his cottage but later, when all the boys were assembled in the chapel, he ribbed me unmercifully about my relatives. Later Chris told me he had given the Old Man five pounds to put towards the 'funds'. 'Thanks very much,' the Gaffer had replied blithely, thrusting the fiver deep into his pocket. 'He didn't give me a receipt or anything,' said my puzzled uncle.
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