by Paul Bruce
We suddenly saw that an electric underground train was rocking along the line towards where Roy lay. We waved our arms at the driver, trying to attract his attention, to make him stop. I saw his face as he looked at us and then at the rail, suddenly realising that someone was lying on the live wire only a matter of yards ahead of him. We heard the screech of the brakes and saw the train lurch violently as he tried to prevent it hitting the boy but he couldn’t stop. We watched helplessly as the train went over Roy. It was awful. I don’t know if I panicked or fainted. Suddenly there were police and ambulance men all over the place and I began running around, obviously in a state of shock. A policeman caught hold of me and slapped me across the face, trying to calm me, to bring me to my senses. I couldn’t stop shaking; I couldn’t control my body. Then I saw the remains of poor Roy, the blood, the mess, the gore. It was horrific.
We were taken to hospital and checked over to see if we were all right to be sent home. We were all in shock. Dad collected me from the hospital. He, too, was shaken by what had happened. When we returned home, he sat me down and lectured me. He went on and on and on, telling me of the dangers, the stupidity of playing on the railway lines. All I could do was think of poor Roy, of the mess, of the police picking up bits of his bloodied body and putting them in plastic sacks. For two days I couldn’t eat a thing.
I never went near the railway line again and never again did I play ‘chicken’. Roy’s death made me feel guilty, as though I had killed him myself. For weeks I had nightmares, not only about Roy dying but in the realisation that I, too, could have been killed. I would wake up screaming, believing I was about to die under a train. Even today, I never go near the edge of a station platform, for every time I do I still see poor Roy’s body.
However, there were also happy childhood memories. I always looked forward to visits from my aunty Marje. When I was seven and eight, she would come to visit regularly, bringing with her sweets and a bag of broken biscuits. She was a good-looking woman, with dark-brown hair and dark-brown eyes and she exuded warmth. She was the epitome of everyone’s ideal mother. I loved her. She always wanted me to sit on her lap, something I can never remember doing with my own mother. She seemed to love me and I, of course, loved the fuss, the affection and the warmth she showed me.
Another happy childhood memory was visiting my granddad, my mother’s father. A Yorkshireman, an ex-miner and a keen pigeon fancier, he would take me to see his prize pigeons in a shed in his back garden. He, too, was warm and showed me affection. From him I would learn things that were much more interesting than what was taught at school. He would chat to me and explain things and I found I could ask him questions without risking a cuff round the ear. More than anything, however, the pigeons fascinated me.
Sometimes he would allow me into the pigeon loft where he kept perhaps 20 to 25 birds. He used to breed them. They always seemed to be hatching eggs and he took great pride in breeding pigeons which went on to win races. He would follow the careers of the more successful pigeons that he bred and would tell me how they were doing. He would allow me to stroke them, to feed them and would point out to me the particular attributes of each and every bird. He had his favourites and I had mine.
I would visit him once a week or so, although it was a long bus ride away, taking about twenty minutes. When I was very young, it seemed that he lived really far away. On my tenth birthday, Granddad gave me a set of three bird books as a special present. The books were written by T. H. Coward, who, I later learned, was a noted ornithologist. This gift seemed to signal that I was becoming an adult, finally growing up. I treasured those books and would spend days reading them, memorising them, trying to learn as much as I could so that I could become a pigeon breeder just like my granddad. I still have them, I still prize them and still read them.
It was that introduction to bird life that sparked an interest in birds that I have retained all my life. When I was around eleven years old, I began going to nearby woods to look for birds’ nests. It didn’t matter what type of birds they were. When I found a nest I would watch it for hours, usually hiding in a nearby bush from where I could see the birds’ ‘toings and froings’ while they reared their chicks. To this day, watching the simple act of birds feeding their young gives me a feeling of inner warmth.
Birdwatching did, however, interrupt my school life. In junior school the teachers had managed to instil in me a desire to learn and I enjoyed it. However, once I found my hobby, school work never seemed as important as birdwatching and when I was eleven years old I decided to leave home and go and live in a den on the Thames marshes about two miles from home.
I bunked off from school and went off to the marshes, to an area where builders had dumped their refuse. From the discarded planks, bricks and pieces of masonry I made a den where I intended to live. I hadn’t thought about food or washing or clean clothes. I was happy just to watch the birds over the marshes.
Later on that first day, I met another boy of about my age. I can’t remember his name because we never met again. He immediately agreed to join me. By evening, of course, we became hungry and went off in search of food. We found some large bottles of sweets that a shopkeeper had left out at the back of his premises and took one each. We returned to our hideout and began eating our way through the sickly stuff. After an hour or so, I had had enough of sweets; I wanted something proper to eat. It was becoming cold. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go home because I knew my father would give me a good thrashing.
As night fell, we saw torch lights coming towards us in a great arc across the marshes. Then we saw police cars driving slowly along the surrounding roads. We realised that they must be searching for us so we left the den and began walking towards the line of torches. Someone shouted, ‘There they are,’ and some police officers came running towards us. It was after 1am before the police took us home and, unbelievably, I wasn’t given a good smacking. I think my parents were too overcome with relief to hit me. However, I had learned my lesson. I would never run away from home again.
When I moved on to secondary school, all my good intentions about working hard went out of the window. I was far more interested in birdwatching and playing football. I just didn’t bother with school work. I would bunk off from school and go to the marshes off the main Southend Road, where I would spend the whole day birdwatching. Of course, I would always be back in school in time for football training. I loved football. I played inside right and played for the school from the age of thirteen right through until I left at fifteen. The teachers said I showed real aggression.
To improve my soccer I decided to start weight training. I was just thirteen! My parents used to kid me along and take the mickey out of me, but, as far as I was concerned, my weight training was deadly serious. I believed it would help me to gain strength in my legs and upper body and improve my football. I would work out really seriously three times a week in the school youth club. I doubt if it helped me at all but it did at least keep me out of trouble – for most of the time anyway.
My second brush with the police occurred when I was thirteen and this also resulted from innocent behaviour. Accompanied by my best pal Phil, I was travelling by train to watch Tottenham Hotspur play a match on a November evening. We had bought some fireworks, bangers of course, and were throwing them harmlessly out of the train window. Suddenly the guard appeared, demanding to know who was firing a gun out of the window. The train stopped at the next station and the police were called. They didn’t believe our story about the bangers and preferred to believe the guard. As a result, we were taken home by the police and never saw the match.
That episode made me think hard about telling the truth. My mother had told me that I must always tell the truth, never tell lies, and all would be well. It seemed to me, however, that every time I told the truth I was not believed and that some other person, who I knew to be lying, was accepted as telling the truth and I was branded a liar. It seemed terribly unfair at the time and it
worried me throughout my teenage years.
Problems with my father were becoming more frequent. He was forever telling me what to do, criticising me, ordering me about and, whenever he felt justified, he would whack me, slapping me on the side of the head, punching me in the arm or chest and throwing me to the ground. I was beginning to feel humiliated and angry and the weight training at the youth club had given me some confidence in my own strength.
One evening he came home from work and my mother told him that I had again been playing truant from school. He turned on me, hitting me around the face and sending me across the room. Something snapped inside me; I had had enough and I went for him. I punched him straight in the face, a real hard punch, hitting him the way I had been taught to use the punch bag. I had never even attempted to hit my father before. He was taken aback by the ferocity of my attack.
‘You little bastard,’ he said grimly, ‘I’ll teach you to hit your father, come here.’ He hit me back, hard, and we traded punches. He probably hit me more than I hit him but I didn’t feel any of his punches because of my fury. I kept hitting him as hard as I could wherever I saw an opening – on his face, his chest, his stomach, his arms, anywhere. My mother came into the room and screamed at us to stop. We both stopped and looked at each other. Then I walked straight out of the house. However, my anger had done the trick; never again would my father attempt to hit me. I was fourteen.
My faith in adults was shaken again during the following year. My pal Phil and I would hang around outside the Thatched House pub in Dagenham, listening to the music. We couldn’t go in, of course, but we could hear the music if we stood by the window. We enjoyed listening to pop music as we drank a bottle of lemonade and ate crisps.
One evening a man in a big, two-tone maroon Humber Super Snipe came to the pub and, while we were admiring the car, he asked Phil and me whether we wanted to earn a few pounds in pocket money. At that age, a few pounds seemed like riches and we readily agreed. He told us to go to a nearby factory which manufactured car batteries and explained that he wanted us to load some lead ingots into the car. We climbed over the fence and he broke open the gates with a crowbar. We must have loaded forty or more ingots into the car, some in the boot and others in the front to level the weight. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours to give you the money,’ he said.
We waited and waited but he never came. We kept an eye open for his car because it was quite unusual, but we never saw him again. That adventure made me realise that there was no easy way to make money. It also taught me not to trust people.
Despite our repeated pleading, neither of my parents ever gave any of us any pocket money. All my mates at school received pocket money every week and I felt ashamed that I never had any. Never having money to buy sweets or comics made me feel inadequate. I knew I had to do something to rectify the situation but there weren’t many options. Phil also came from a large family and, although he was given a little pocket money, it was never enough. We thought of doing a paper round but that meant waking at 6am. It seemed too much like hard work, especially in the cold winter months. Phil and I would talk about ways of making money and then we hit on the idea of stealing things people wanted so that we could sell them easily. We knew that all our friends at school loved having new fountain pens so we decided that they would be the easiest to sell. Being small, they were also the easiest things to steal and conceal. We decided on Woolworths because it was so easy to nick things from the counters.
My life of crime began one Saturday morning when the store was crowded. I was about thirteen. We decided to steal two pens each. We went up to the counter and pretended to find a pen that we particularly liked. Then, when the assistant’s back was turned, we put two in our trouser pockets and walked slowly away from the counter. I think we sold them for a shilling each.
Our shoplifting career went on for several months. We won such a reputation at our school, a secondary modern in Dagenham, Essex, that the boys and girls began giving us orders for items they wanted. The principal items ordered were pens, Dinky Toys, Airfix ships and planes for the boys and combs, makeup, compacts and lipsticks for the girls. On most Saturday mornings, we would visit a Woolworths store, mainly the branches in Dagenham and Barking, and take what we wanted. Sometimes we earned as much as five pounds a week each – a small fortune!
I knew we were doing wrong. I knew it was theft. I also knew that we would get into enormous trouble if we were ever found out. And yet those Saturday-morning escapades became a drug to me, a thrill, a challenge to see if I could pit my wits against the Woolworths counter assistants and any store detectives who might be around. I came to look forward to Saturday mornings and, somehow, we were never caught.
Only once did we nearly come to grief. One Saturday Phil and I were standing in front of the pen counter and suddenly I felt a hand grab my shoulder. I looked round, at the same time shouting to Phil to run. I broke free from the man and darted out of the shop. Neither of us looked back, we just ran like hell until we were half a mile or more away. It scared the hell out of us and cured us of shoplifting. We never tried it again.
Around then I also had a stroke of luck. My uncle, who owned a greengrocer’s shop in Manor Park, offered me a Saturday job, working in the back of the shop for the princely sum of £2.10s for the entire shift. He really made me earn the money. I had to work from eight in the morning to six at night. He did feed me, though, with a couple of cheese rolls in the morning, fish and chips for lunch and as much fruit as I wanted. It was hard graft but I enjoyed it. I was beginning to feel like a man even though I was just fourteen.
However, I still wasn’t bothering to study at school. I had failed my eleven plus miserably and had been allowed to drift along, hardly paying attention in class, concentrating on my football and dreaming of birdwatching. When I was fourteen, however, my form teacher asked me to stay behind one day and we sat and talked. He told me, quietly and patiently, that I was wasting my potential. He knew I was keen on football and sport but pointed out that the chances of ever being a professional footballer, or a professional sportsman of any kind, were probably negligible.
He asked why I was wasting my time, not bothering to study when the whole of my future life depended on getting good exam results and being able to hold down a good job with decent pay. He made me see how stupid I had been in neglecting my school work. He also made me determined to rectify the situation in the three months I had left at school. I hadn’t passed any of the mock exams so I would not be staying on to take the GCE O-level exams. I was about to leave.
For those not staying on, there was a school-leaving exam which was intended to show any potential employer whether an applicant had any intelligence. For those last three months I worked really hard, studying at home and paying attention 100 per cent of the time during classes, something I had never done before. I was determined to prove to the teacher and myself that I could do the work, that I did have real intelligence. The work paid off when I came tenth out of the ninety who were leaving. For the first time I felt a sense of achievement. I had proved myself.
Armed with my school-leaving certificate, I knew I would get a job. Round the corner from my home in Dagenham was a fur factory where pelts were cured, prepared and graded before being despatched to the furriers. Two days after leaving school, I went round to the factory and asked to see the foreman.
‘Any vacancies?’ I asked with some degree of confidence.
‘Is this your first job?’ he asked.
‘Well, I’ve worked in my uncle’s shop,’ I explained, ‘but this is my first real job.’
‘We might have something for you,’ he replied. ‘Come on in.’
I sat and waited while he went off to talk to someone. Then he returned, offered me a job as an engineer’s apprentice and added, ‘You’ll get £7.10s a week. You can start tomorrow.’
I left the works elated and happy with the world. I was just fifteen, I had a job and I was about to make my way in the world. It
also meant that I would now be independent.
Despite the fact that I had a job, I knew in my heart that this would only be a stop-gap until I was old enough to join the army. I had set my heart on becoming a Paratrooper like my uncle; that would be my real career. There was no question that I wouldn’t be accepted, that I wouldn’t pass the fitness test, the medical or any other exam they might ask me to take. I knew that one day I would become a Para like my uncle Stan.
A month later, however, the teenager whose job I had been given suddenly returned to the works and was given his old job back. I was offered the alternative job of hanging the pelts in the drying rooms. Within hours of starting this new job I was bored. I would spend all day, every day, looking at the large clock that hung in the works, hardly able to wait until five o’clock and freedom. The job was so boring and monotonous that I felt I could not wait until I was old enough to join the army.
I managed to stick with the job for a few months but finally I knew I had to leave or I would go mad. I kept popping into the Labour Exchange and looking at the jobs on offer. One day I saw an ad for a tea boy on a building site and decided to go after that. I reckoned that it could never be as boring as working in the pelt factory.
This time I was working out in the open, helping to build a factory about twelve miles from home in the Essex countryside. It seemed like freedom to be out in the open air. During lunch breaks I could even do a spot of birdwatching. Every day I would clamber into the back of the van with other building workers to be driven to the site. I didn’t like being the tea boy, though. I wanted to work on the site as a proper labourer and was pleased when, after a couple of months, another youngster joined the firm and took my job. Now I was a proper labourer, earning very good pay at £35 a week. I felt really wealthy.