In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  She had been taken mildly ill and at the last moment the event was cancelled. The distress of the Barnardo authorities was nothing to mine. Panic-stricken, knowing that even now the details of the event that did not happen were being fed into the rollers of the printing press, I got to the telephone, fiercely ejected a nun who was jabbering to someone in Ireland, and called Mr Harold at Voluntary Place. 'Oh blimey!' I heard him howl. I could hear him running to stop the presses, which he managed to do. He returned to the telephone. I could hear him trembling. 'You've got three and a half minutes to write the story,' he said. 'You'd better start now.'

  I managed to piece it together as I went along, something 1 learned to do as a matter of course in time to follow, and I got my front page headline after all.

  In that suburban village sensations were rare. There was the exclusive story that Mrs Renée Dubois, a local celebrity, did not believe in God and Canon Wansey, the rural dean, did. I managed to get them together in the village hall on a Tuesday night and the debate was a sell-out. But mostly life was peaceful. A circuit of rural police stations, undertaken once a week, rarely yielded sensation, although country crime sometimes tends to the exotic. A drunk drove a steam roller he had found parked into the River Roding; a man alleged that someone dressed like Robin Hood had fired an arrow at him in the forest; what was said to be a human hand found buried among trees turned out at the postmortem to be the paw of a bear, how it came to be there we never solved.

  It is a continuing tradition. A friend told me in lugubrious earnest that he had suffered a major loss, all his garden gnomes had been stolen during the night. 'Twenty-one assorted gnomes, pixies, elves and trolls,' he reported deeply. And the windmill.'

  The police, he added, said, 'It wasn't malicious.' The gnomes, pixies, elves and trolls were later found lined up at a country bus stop, but he never got the windmill back.

  My daily round in Woodford, now undertaken by bicycle, included the required calls on undertakers and the subsequent usually sad and often embarrassing calls to bereaved homes. Once a widow actually clutched me as she wept because there was no one else to clutch. It was an unhappy task gathering memories for publication but the final shame was the instruction that the reporter, having garnered all the information about the bowling club, war service, the love of his garden or her interest in knitting, would then be required to ask for three shillings and sixpence for the insertion of an official notice, separate from the news report, in the Deaths column. I managed to do this a couple of times but it stuck in my throat. Fortunately there was a rider to the instruction which said that if the bereaved family refused to part with three and sixpence then the reporter was to insert the death notice anyway, free, the idea being to make the rival newspaper think we were carrying more advertising than we actually were. I, and most of the others who had this indignity forced upon them, simply wrote the notice without asking for the money and said that the family had refused to pay up. It was such a miserable subterfuge.

  One afternoon, calling at a cottage where an old lady had died, I was astonished to see, as the door was opened, not one but two coffins in the tight front room. As sometimes happens, the death of one lifelong partner resulted in the quick following of the other. Then I discovered that the deceased woman's sister had dropped dead on hearing the news and the deceased man's brother had done likewise. Naturally I told this to one of the senior reporters and it appeared the next day in all the national newspapers. He pocketed the proceeds.

  I was, however, becoming aware of the bounty called linage, the journalist's perk of adding to his income by transmitting local stories of sufficient interest to Fleet Street newspapers. On November the Fifth I was on a bus and I saw Woodford Council workmen dismantling Guy Fawkes bonfires which had taken children many hours to build. Getting off the bus I asked the men why this was happening and was informed that the bonfires were in unauthorised places. I telephoned the London Evening News and they sent a proper reporter to Woodford and the topical story appeared on the front page that evening. 1 received one guinea for my tip. When I showed it to one of the boys at the hostel he said: 'Don't you feel like a common informer?'

  The trouble was that I did.

  Naturally I was deeply in love again; now with a laughing woman reporter called Sybil who was in her twenties and never caught so much as a sniff of my devotion; her unawareness was such that she went off and married another journalist called Fred who roared around on a motorbike. Fortunately a fresh girl with blonde ringlets joined as a junior and within a few days I had charmed her to having coffee at the Kardomah and taken her to the ballet at the People's Palace in the Mile End Road.

  Since I had now been a reporter for several months I was able to impress her considerably. When no one else was looking I would turn my collar up, speak out of the corner of my mouth and wear a pencil behind my ear. I lent her a book about journalism and, keeping to my scenario, I inserted a creased piece of paper between its pages as if it were some overlooked message. It read something like: 'Thomas – re. the Smithson murder story. I think you're right. The police won't listen. Keep digging.' It was prosaically signed 'Miss Rose', who was my chief reporter on the Woodford Times. I had folded the paper – the rough toilet-roll variety upon which we wrote our reports – and abbreviated some of the words so that it looked authentic. Reality, however, was somewhat less breathless; a round of dancing displays, Conservative whist drives, flower shows, rabbit club meetings, and amateur theatricals, with the odd funeral to add drama.

  Possibly because I had no real home to which I could return in the evenings, I came in for a great many of these assignments, which few others welcomed. Rotary Club functions replenished my repertoire of jokes and I drank chummy half-pints of brown ale with the elite of the Chamber of Commerce. Dancing school displays were graphically described, as was See How They Run performed energetically at the parish hall. I took an interest in people's angora rabbits and King Edward potatoes. Pleased organisations wrote appreciative letters to the editor and I was given another ten shillings a week. At sports meetings I noted the winning times for the egg-and-spoon race ('A new record was set at Woodford Green on Saturday . . .') and if at weekends I made a few runs or scored a goal on my own behalf I made sure it was well reported. Once I was playing football on a Sunday and we lost 14–1. My report failed to mention by name any of the numerous goal scorers on the victorious side, indeed their blitzkrieg was mentioned only in passing, but the construction and final execution of my brilliantly worked, though lonely goal, was recounted in detail. It appeared with the headline: 'Fine Goal by Thomas'.

  Part of my mid-week duties was to visit vicars and ministers and to keep a finger on the pulsating world of Women's Institutes, Mothers' Meetings, as well as the Folk Dance Society, the Model Engine Club and the Woodcraft Folk. A mechanical Methodist minister used to whirl me around his parish on the back of his powerful and terrifying motor cycle. Once I was so frightened that I bellowed over his shoulder that even if he were ready for Heaven I was not. One day we went to a district gathering of a wives' and mothers' organisation. About a hundred of them were sitting around the wooden walls of a large hall, facing inwards, slapping their thighs and singing: 'Thousands have been here, thousands more to come . . .'

  Another job handed to me was to write a weekly précis of the films coming up at the local cinema in Wanstead. This only involved collecting the publicity material from the manager, roughly working out the story and compiling the column. It assured me of a free seat at the pictures twice a week, although the manager made it clear that if I took anyone else they would have to pay and I was accountable for such accessories as ice cream.

  From my thirty shillings a week and what I could add to my expenses, I had to pay fifteen shillings for my keep at the hostel. Next door lived a nice wealthy couple called Hensher – he was a furniture manufacturer – who, wanting to encourage me on my way through life, told me that if I ever needed anything, but anything, 1 was to go to them. M
any years later I met with widowed Mrs Hensher on a cruise liner and she recalled that the only imposition I made on their generosity was on the night immediately following their offer. 'We wondered what you wanted,' she laughed. 'You came to the door and reminded us that we offered to help you in any way – and then asked if we had anything you could use to go to a fancy dress ball. We gave you a table cloth and you went as an Arab.'

  I recall the ball well because the reporter assigned to cover it for the paper, a handsome lad with a well-rehearsed enigmatic smile and a trilby, put a card saying 'Press' in his hat brim and won a prize as a reporter. Walking home with Tom Merrin, we found a horse with a bowed head wandering towards us through the gloom. It had a forlorn halter around its neck and Tom suggested that we should tie it to somebody's door knocker. There was a small cottage nearby and we coaxed the horse down the garden path and hitched him to the brass knocker. As he moved about the knocker began to knock and an old lady wearing a nightie who came to the door had a terrible fright when the horse walked in.

  With my pocket money I began buying books. Neville Cardus's Autobiography was the first and How to be a Sporting Journalist followed, and then The English Counties in Pictures and The Poems of Rupert Brooke. A girl I had taken to a few dances gave me a Bedside Shakespeare, which was the nearest we ever got to any bedside. These books are on my shelves today, each with the square-lettered inscription: 'L.J. Thomas, Iona House, Hollybush Hill, Snaresbrook, London, E. 11.'

  My life on the paper was enjoyable although every week at Voluntary Place was an unending frenzy. When so many editions were produced in such a rush on such machinery and with such facilities, mistakes did creep in. There was a libel action when a court report stated that a man had cruelly burned his wife with a red-hot poker. The poker had not been red, but white. The man's defence was that he did not realise it was hot. Then someone in error consulted a year-old calendar and all the various twenty-five papers announced that summer time would begin (or end) on the Sunday night. It was a week early. People missed appointments, children were sent to bed at the wrong time, and a bus company was in chaos. Somehow the extraordinary monster croaked on.

  When Christmas came it seemed quite logical that I should go back to Dickies. Unfortunately, on the usual basis that I was the one without family commitments, I was assigned to cover a football match at Ilford on Christmas morning. In those days there was a Christmas Day train service and at the final whistle I hared down the street to Newbury Park Station and arrived at Kingston, on the extreme opposite side of London, at three in the afternoon, just in time for the plum pudding.

  One day to my astonishment my brother turned up at the hostel. We had kept conscientiously in touch since our reunion but I was quite unprepared for his arrival. Barnardo's had again overlooked telling me. After a long six years we were to live together again. It was not easy. He was a roamer, a law unto himself, who liked to wander off with the milkman, and have me searching the streets for him as we had once done in faraway Newport.

  He left his mark in various places, which included the incident of his initials carved in the soot underneath the local railway bridge. Last year I was being interviewed by a woman writer and I mentioned the death of my elder brother in Tokyo. When this appeared in print the word 'elder' was omitted and I had a letter from a boyhood friend of Roy's sympathising with me on his departure, and recalling that his initials were cut deep into the organ loft at Long Grendon in Buckinghamshire where he spent his years with his foster parents.

  On the very day my brother arrived at the hostel, however, something else occurred. When I returned from work there was an important-looking letter waiting for me. On His Majesty's Service, it said, and instructed me to report to Devizes Barracks, Wiltshire, where they were going to make me into a soldier. Or try.

  PART THREE

  THE VIRGIN SOLDIER

  IX

  No bright-eyed, patriotic volunteer of the Great War ever looked forward to being recruited into the army more keenly than I did. At one point, between my registering for national service and receiving my reporting orders, I actually marched into the local Ministry of Labour office and demanded to know exactly when I was to be called up. I thought they had forgotten me. This eagerness to get into the army was only matched, after a short period in uniform, by my eagerness to get out again.

  I decided that if I were to play my full part in the forces of my country then I ought to be posted to the Army News Service, which produced magazines and handled press and public relations. To this end I wrote to the War Office (on notepaper potently headed the Woodford Times) and informed them of the luck that was about to come their way. Since the primary thing that military life achieves in a conscript is to blunt ambition, this aim was at once thwarted. Its attainment was initially and lastingly damaged, I was later to realise, by my first interview with the civil servant to whom I reported for national service registration, some three months before my actual call-up.

  'What is your profession?' he enquired over his glasses and the counter. Then, as if he thought the words might be too difficult: 'What do you do for a living?'

  'I'm a journalist,' I replied, pulling my collar up and striking an attitude which looked as if I might start asking a few questions myself.

  He sighed ill-temperedly and laid down his pen. 'Aw, come on, son,' he said. 'I haven't got all day. I'm fed up with you kids coming here and telling me you've got fancy jobs. You can't all be ruddy field marshals.'

  'I'm a journalist,' I repeated firmly. I fiddled in my pocket for my union card.

  'What sort?' he grunted. Then sarcastically, 'Editor of The Times are you?'

  'Not yet,' I replied modestly. 'I'm a junior reporter.'

  He wrote: 'Junior porter.' I did not see my records until many months later and I was shocked at the libel. In the event, I suppose, I was very lucky I did not spend my army time carrying loads around on my head.

  One of the motives behind my eagerness to serve the King was my desire to cut for good the bonds that still held me to Barnardo's. After all I was eighteen, a trifle old for an orphan. In the event, of course, all I was doing was moving from one institution to another. For me the army was nothing new; I was back in a dormitory again. Another aspect of my military ambition was that it might enable me to travel overseas and meet a lower class of woman. I was weary and frustrated with the Saturday dances; with walking hand in hand, the cumbersome kissing on doorsteps and the long lonely treks home after the last bus had vanished. Nothing ever happened. Once, with trembling hand, I had touched a girl's nipple and as if I had pressed some activating button she burst into tears. This was no way for a lusty young chap to live.

  So truly a Virgin Soldier, I boarded the train to Devizes, Wiltshire, to commence the great adventure. My calling-up papers had disappointed me in one way, in that I was not joining a famous regiment. The War Office had blundered. It also remained indifferent to my pointed suggestions about the Army News Service. I was joining the Royal Army Pay Corps. They were going to train me to be a clerk.

  Reluctantly I cast aside the thoughts of putting through a telephone call to Whitehall protesting that I could scarcely add up my expenses let alone the army's, or demanding at least to be conscripted into my father's old regiment, the Royal Artillery, or into the Royal Engineers like my Uncle Bert who had fallen so fatally into Newport dry dock.

  My complaint, of course, had firm foundations, for in the British Army it was commonplace knowledge that if you desired to be a parachutist then you applied for a posting as a cook. Equally any men with culinary skills found themselves dangling on strings in the sky. It seemed to me illogical that, at some expense, the Government was going to keep me for eighteen months doing something for which I had no aptitude whatever. Even when I eventually settled to the dull and drearsome life in the Pay Office in Singapore, I had good shorthand speed and I could type, but these jobs were allotted to civilians while I tried to make sense of army accounting.

  My e
ntry in Who's Who sums up succinctly the resulting period of my life. It says: 'Army service 1949-51. Rose to lance-corporal.'

  At first, however, it was almost as brisk and interesting as I had hoped, even if I continued not meeting-women. Basic training, the nightmare of so many writers who have described it, I found to be enervating. It was July and the Wiltshire weather was fine. We pounded up and down the barrack square, shouting out the time of the movements like chorus girls; our feet emerging with howling blisters from boots stiff as tombstones. On the firing range I discovered that I could not close my left eye independently to sight my shots and so I either had to fire the 303 service rifle left-handed or somehow block out the vision of my non-aiming eye. We were among the last soldiers to use the elongated weapons, for they were phased out quickly after that, and the monster proved impossible to aim and control with the wrong hand. The first time I tried, the kick jolted it sideways, to the extreme anxiety of the recruit in the next firing position.

  'Right, Thomas,' bellowed the sergeant-instructor. 'If you are not to inflict widespread and nasty casualties on your own side, you 'ad better block up your left mince pie with somatt.'

  Thus I had to fix a handkerchief under my beret or steel helmet, hold the other end tight between my teeth, thus cutting out the vision of the contrary eye. 'Good lad, Thomas,' approved the instructor on inspecting the white device. 'When you want to surrender – wave it.'

  For the first few days we went around like cardboard men in the new, stiff, ill-fitting, battledress. Some big youths had to embarrassingly march up and down the square in their own clothes and shoes until outsize supplies arrived. There were twenty or so men to a barrack hut, the buildings arranged in what were known as 'spiders', each section of huts being linked by corridors. A good-natured Scots corporal slept in a room at the end of ours and there was a similarly humorous NCO in the neighbouring barrack room, a big, blue-chinned Cockney whose shouted orders could be heard in distant Devizes on market day. The platoon sergeant was a small springy individual, a little action-man, full of bullshit as sergeants were thought and ought to be. Bullshit was a word we began to use with energy; also fuck and fucking. I had never used this oath since my mother warned me that it was the Devil's private word and I could drop dead on the spot, but now I renewed the acquaintanceship with enthusiasm, and I've been using it on and off ever since. Apart from 'bollocks' there were few other swearwords. The ones we used were designed to fit each and every occasion.