Soul on the Street

by William Roache

  One of the things that being sent to boarding school did was lead me to be able to look after myself wherever I went. I still like to make my own little area wherever I go, my own little nest. Although it also taught me to get on with people, I always sought out private places where I could be alone and this included an abandoned house that I broke into and turned into my secret hideaway – secret, that is, until an estate agent turned up with a prospective buyer and I had to hide in a cupboard.

  Sport was a big part of my life too. I played cricket a lot at school. I was an opening batsman, batting right-handed for some reason. I was a steady bat. I could stay in, but if ever runs were needed quickly, I wasn’t the man. I’d lose my concentration and be out. I found that games could teach you a lot about yourself. And about other people. I was also a slow left-arm bowler, and if ever anybody had dug themselves in, I’d be brought on to bowl a couple of overs. I’d probably be hit for six and hit for four and then the batsman would be out, because they would get too relaxed with someone like me bowling. That was another lesson. I was never a killer player in any way, but I used to enjoy it.

  I also liked rugby. I played for the school at both rugby and cricket. In rugby I played scrum half, which is where you get jumped on by all the heavy forwards and bear the brunt of it all. I’m not sure what that says about me!

  Once after a cricket match against the naval college side from HMS Conway we were taken on board the old ship for tea and before we left a bugler sounded the Last Post. It moved me very much and it was almost as if it brought back a memory of a previous life. At the time I didn’t think it through, but this feeling has stayed with me and all my life I have been tremendously excited by the sound of a trumpet or bugle.

  Outside our little world at school the war was going on, but it was all strangely remote. My father would have been just coming up to 40 when it started and he wasn’t called up. Certain doctors stayed behind and he was one of them. He ran Ilkeston Hospital and worked with the local Air Raid Precaution group. So I never had the sense that there was someone close to me involved in the fighting. Uncle John spent the whole of the war in Gibraltar, in the Royal Army Medical Corps, so he didn’t have any particularly hair-raising stories to tell when he came home on leave. And I never saw wounded soldiers returning home. I had a protected war, really, in the sense of brutality and cruelty and carnage – there was nothing of that. My fear of death didn’t start with the war.

  In a way it was almost like a game. I remember in the drawing room at Rutland House we had a big map of North Africa and the Mediterranean on the wall, and it had little flags stuck into it. My father used to listen to the radio and move the flags along according to where the British forces were and what was happening. It was fascinating to see him doing this. I remember him being quite upbeat and I think this must have been towards the end of the North African campaign when we were pushing Rommel back and Montgomery was leading the assault. Moving the flags forward just seemed like a fun thing to do. I never actually made the connection with armies slaughtering each other.

  Generally speaking, I didn’t think about what was happening much at all. Provided my day unfolded as it should, everything was fine. I had no inclination to think beyond that. I don’t know if I should have. Some children are very enquiring, full of curiosity about the world, but I wasn’t – not then, anyway.

  At school, we were well fed, considering the times, and were even allowed four pieces of special blended chocolate on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t in any way feel deprived, although I would sometimes fantasize that my desk was full of sweets and bars of chocolate.

  Rationed food was kept in a second-floor room at Beech House and no one was allowed up there. Occasionally, though, we would gang together, post a lookout and take it in turns to help ourselves to a lump of sugar or some dried fruit. We never took much and it was as much for the thrill of being naughty as anything else.

  Then one Saturday afternoon a full house assembly was called in the billiards room. This was a rare event and we expected an important announcement. When all 40 of us were in our seats, Mr Lewis arrived, looking grim.

  ‘I am horrified and appalled,’ he announced. ‘There is a thief in the school. Someone has been into the food store and stolen a box of raisins.’

  We all sat in guilty silence. I was blushing furiously. ‘If he looks at me,’ I thought, ‘he’ll think I did it.’

  ‘I will give the boy responsible the chance to do the honourable thing and own up,’ Mr Lewis continued.

  No one moved.

  ‘Very well,’ Mr Lewis said. ‘I am going up to my study. You will all remain here until the culprit comes to me and admits his guilt.’ He left the room.

  We sat in silence for a long while. Eventually someone whispered, ‘Does anyone know who did it?’ No one answered. The clock ticked by. Our Saturday afternoons were our own and we usually spent them out in the gardens, not shut up in the billiard room. At one point a boy offered to own up just to get us out of there, but in the end he changed his mind.

  After two agonizing hours Mr Lewis finally came back and let us go, but he told us that we would all have to reassemble in the billiard room every day after lunch until the thief owned up.

  I was firmly convinced I’d be spending half my life there, but the very next morning we learned who the culprit was. It seemed he had not only taken the box of raisins but eaten them all as well. This had been too much for his bowels to cope with and during the night the fatal evidence had appeared in his bed. Mr Lewis caned him for theft.

  Apart from the rationing, our other main reminder of the war was seeing evacuees arriving in Colwyn Bay. These were children from London and other big towns who were being moved to safer areas. We watched them being distributed to people, clutching their suitcases and gas masks in cardboard boxes. This was something I never saw at home because we were too near to Derby to be regarded as a safe area. Evacuees were always sent to outlying areas like North Wales.

  Some of these ‘vacees’ would come round the school wall and we regarded them as a sort of yobbo element. I know we should have had great sympathy for these poor kids away from their home, but no, they were an enemy. Whenever we saw them we’d call out, ‘Vacees! Over at the wall!’ and then we’d all go out and shout things at them. They’d shout back, too. Somebody threw something at somebody once. That was as far as it went, though.

  Then one day when we were playing football we saw a German fighter flying over the field. The game stopped as we all stared up at it. We could see it quite clearly. It was black, with a swastika underneath. The pilot was obviously trying to escape from somewhere and get back home, and he just flew low across us and away. I’ve no idea what happened to him.

  My sister’s school, however, was actually machine-gunned. Penrhos had been evacuated to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, and that’s where it happened. The classrooms were machine-gunned by a German plane that went by, but fortunately everyone was in the school chapel at the time and no one was hurt. Divine Providence! That brought the reality of the war home to my sister.

  I was more interested in the military hardware. We never had any bombs where we were in Ilkeston, though a couple landed not far away. But Derby, ten miles away, where the Rolls-Royce works were, was bombed a lot. Every time I was taken to school or picked up on the way back, I had to go to Derby railway station and we always passed a barrage balloon. These were big grey balloons sent up at night to stop planes. They were shaped like Zeppelins with little fins on. The great steel cable that took each balloon up to a great height would get in the way of planes coming in at a low angle and would cut their wings off and bring them down. During the day the barrage balloons themselves were pulled down. Whenever I was driven past the one at Derby I would gaze at it, absolutely fascinated.

  Each barrage balloon also had big searchlights beside it and I was intrigued by how they worked, by the mechanics of it all, but I didn’t really think about what they were there for. When y
ou’re young you tend not to think much beyond your own environment, and I didn’t, even though there was a war going on.

  One thing that did strike me was seeing a rifle propped up in the kitchen at Rutland House. It belonged to the boyfriend of one of the maids, Alice. She was a very jolly and pleasant person and I used to spend a lot of time with her. I looked at the rifle and thought, ‘That looks quite exciting.’ But again, it didn’t really hit home to me what it was for.

  ‘Whilst there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.’

  In many ways my childhood was very free and casual. When I was on holiday I’d just go off on my bike, and I’d be away all day, down by the canal or off in the countryside, and nobody ever bothered as long as I was home for mealtimes. Otherwise I was free to do whatever I wanted.

  I was also free to find things out for myself. My parents didn’t feel they had to take me off to evening classes or that I had to join the scouts or the cubs or any of that. I was left to do my own thing, and I did. I used to spend a lot of time building dens in the garden. I loved making things out of wood.

  I tended to be on my own quite a lot. The trouble with boarding school is that you don’t see your friends in the holidays and you don’t tend to have friends in your local area. There were a couple of boys I used to play with in the early days, but they gradually moved away, so the holidays were generally spent pushing about on my own – which I liked. I didn’t feel lonely. On the contrary, I was very happy to be on my own. In many ways it was a welcome contrast to school. It was nice to get home and sit around and just set my own agenda and do my own thing.

  One summer evening I was listening to an Al Jolson record on our wind-up gramophone and the needle needed changing. When I went to get a replacement, I found a little tin full of old needles. Without thinking, I threw them out of the window. To my horror, they were immediately gobbled up by a flock of greedy hens. Feeling pretty guilty, I watched the hens closely over the next few days, but remarkably there didn’t seem to be any ill effects.

  Life wasn’t always that easy for my family, however. While I was away at school my mother’s father, Albert, committed suicide at Rutland House. He cut his throat with a razor and took two days to die. My father looked after him but in all that time my mother never saw him. At the time I was unaware of all the details, but I remember receiving a letter from my mother telling me that Grandpa had died. I felt sad and cried. He had always been there and now he was gone. Uncle John meanwhile was doing surprisingly well in the army. He had actually worked his way up through the ranks to become a quartermaster. The family put this down to the fact that there was a war on. He continued to visit us whenever he was on leave, leaving a trail of empty bottles behind him and quietly purloining small household items like soap and toothpaste. I was later told that he tried to seduce my mother on one occasion and did succeed in seducing a 14-year-old cousin of mine who was staying in the house. The final straw, however, came when my father watched him stealing money from his wallet. After that, his visits were restricted.

  Back at school I was finding out more about the world around me. On Sunday afternoons we would go for a walk in ‘crocodile’. That was being paired off in twos forming a long line. ‘Croc up!’ would go the cry, and we would all fall in and set off on the walk. You could only really talk to the boy you were paired with and it was on one of these walks that I received my sex education. I had a bit of a problem understanding the mechanics, but basically what my companion told me was accurate – apart from that if your mother was limping in the morning it was because she had ‘done it’ the night before!

  My parents never told me anything about sex and there was no instruction from the teachers in those days, so that Sunday afternoon walk was my one and only sex lesson – from another ten-year-old. It seems remarkable now, but that’s what it was like in those days. Whereas now there’s everything at school – information, counselling even – then it was up to you to find things out for yourself.

  Around the age of nine or ten most of us had found out about masturbation. It was looked on as a sort of hobby more than anything else and has become associated in my mind with an ‘official’ hobby that was a school craze at the time – collecting chewing gum and chocolate wrappers dropped by the American GIs stationed nearby. Whenever we would see a GI we would call out, ‘Got any gum, chum?’, but we actually wanted the wrappers as much as the gum itself. We would stick them in scrapbooks and build up whole collections. The whole school went mad on it.

  One day a boy found a square packet that no one had seen before. We gathered round to look at this strange new chewing gum. It was called Durex.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘All That’s Left of the School Dramatic Society…’

  ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,

  than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’

  Hamlet, I, v, 166–7

  Time moved on and I began the hormonally charged years of puberty. I don’t know if there was any connection, but it was then that I had two psychic experiences.

  The first one happened in the bathroom at Rutland House, a long thin room about 10 foot long, with the loo at the back facing the door. It was while I was sitting on the loo – a good place to be for what happened subsequently – that I suddenly looked towards the door and there it was.

  It was an ill-defined shape standing in the doorway. The outline was that of someone with a sheet thrown over them, but it was all a gritty grey colour and staring out of it was a pair of yellow eyes. They were looking right at me.

  Literally frozen with fear, I looked down, desperately trying to think what to do. There was no escape – it was in the doorway.

  When I finally forced myself to look back, it had gone.

  I had no idea what it was. There was no question of a trick of the light. It was broad daylight and quite a clear day.

  I never told anyone about this incident, but now I knew why my sister used to make me run to the bathroom to switch on the light. She always felt that there was something down there and she was afraid of it.

  For a while I was very wary of going down that corridor, but whatever it was, I never saw it again.

  Since then I have heard that water is an energy field that can be used by discarnate beings to manifest in the material world, and I have wondered about the old well that was just under the bathroom. During the war it was part of the emergency water supply, so obviously water ran in there somehow or other, maybe from a spring.

  I was shaken by the experience, but gradually I got over it. After that, whenever people talked about ghosts or paranormal phenomena I would think back to that shape, but it didn’t set me off enquiring, which is what these things are meant to do. I would want to know about anything strange, to hear all the details, but I would leave it there. I didn’t start enquiring seriously into such matters until years later.

  The other paranormal experience I had was very different. Again I was at home. One night I woke suddenly to find bright moonlight shining into my room, making it almost like daylight, and there, floating just above the foot of my bed, was a large light blue Buddha. With it came a beautiful feeling of peace. Although I am not a Buddhist, I do feel an affinity with Buddhism and possibly it was something I embraced in a previous life. Again, I never told anyone about this experience. I didn’t really know how to explain it, or what to say, so I just kept it to myself.

  It was around this time that I was having the very unpleasant experience of waking up in the morning unable to move. Only after a superhuman effort could I suddenly break free of this, and I would dread going to sleep knowing what was waiting for me when I awoke.

  I did ask people about this inability to move in the morning, but no one seemed to understand it. My father dismissed it with, ‘It will pass.’ Later on, through my metaphysical studies, I found the explanation. At night, while we sleep, our spirits leave our bodies and go onto another plane, the astral plane, and actively participate in th
e life there. Sometimes we can wake up before our astral bodies have fully returned, and this was what was happening to me. Fortunately, after a short time, it stopped. Perhaps I had just started visiting the astral plane and was taking a while to adjust to the experience.

  Let me explain: when a spiritual being is ready and wants to incarnate, it isn’t just a bit of pure spirit suddenly plunged into a physical body; there’s a gradual descent through lower and lower vibrations. So imagine a bit of pure spirit which has to descend into something like a big heavy diving suit at the bottom of the sea, and that is our physical body. Our physical body is just a vehicle in which we can function on the material plane. The spirit lowers its vibrations gradually, starting with what we call the mental body, which is a slightly lower vibrational shell. Then it descends into an even lower vibration, which is the desire body getting an even thicker shell on it before descending into an etheric body. The etheric body is the lowest vibration before the physical body of which it is an exact replica. In it are all the plans for the type of being it is going to become and to some extent its destiny – just like an oak tree is inside an acorn. This is planted into the embryo and the vehicle for the incarnation begins to grow. The incarnating spiritual being is around during the conception and makes the final descent into the embryo, sealing off all memory within the first three months. Science has proved some of this in a way by the discovery of DNA, which gives an indication of your physical destiny, appearance and, quite often, how you are going to go out of this world. This would be shown by you being predisposed to a disease. Sceptics will ask, ‘Well, what if a cure is discovered for your predisposed disease?’ The answer to that is, ‘If a cure is discovered while you are here, that is part of your karma, it is not by chance. There are no accidents in God’s world, so by and large our destiny is laid out – but we do have free will.’