Peter and Johnny

Peter a few years later in school photo
Ladies below are the school cooks
Boy at left is now an antiques
expert on popular TV programmes

From evidence I deduce I was 12 by the time I went to live on the Isle of Wight. The School Magazine of the Newport Grammar School, so kindly given to me by the headmaster’s daughter this year, tells me I started in the Spring of 1954. And ringing in my head is the song, Oh Mein Papa, in the Eddie Calvert and Eddie Fisher versions. I associate the song with a warm spring day, helping cut tussocks of grass at the back of Powys House, East Cowes, my new home. There was a glut of orange shield bugs, and later in the year a plague of flies, in that same garden.

So I must have been 12 and that underlines the frustration with which I spent the last days at Merrion House School, and at Granny’s in the holidays, waiting for the divorce to be finalised, impatient to start a new school, new house, new stepfather, new way of living. Anyhow I was innocent enough to be 11 or even younger. I travelled to the Isle of Wight on my own and encountered a man in the train. His hand was moving in his pocket and he looked at me. I was pretty unnerved but didn’t want to offend him. Then he tried to involve me with his life-story and endless apologies. I muttered something and moved to a compartment protected by the presence of other passengers; but on the ferry he tried to corner me again, anxious he said that I should not think ill of him. My innocence stayed intact and I was 13 before I discovered self-stimulation and indulged it only in the strictest privacy.

Blackett’s lodging house was a granite four-storey slab with a circular drive at the front and a small wilderness behind. I loved the basement. It had various rooms, mostly deep in cobwebs with some astonishing junk: gasmasks from the War and all kinds of components and offcuts which Blackett had taken from the aircraft factory. In the midst was his workshop with metal-working tools, vices and sheets of Perspex. He’d bought these to make models, such as a sculpture, clear like glass, of the Princess Flying Boat. He always had something on the go and later he would present my grandfather with his coat of arms incongruously in Perspex, with its motto Usque ad mortem fidus impressed on the scroll with metal-working punches. There was a lot of blue dye all over the things in the basement. I believe it was used in machining metal, as a guide to the flatness of a surface.

I soon made friends with a local boy, Peter. His father worked with Blackett at the aircraft factory, and Peter was at the Newport Grammar School. Apart from Matt, he was the only good friend I had made outside boarding school. He often invited me to his house. His parents were working-class, and I envied their easy-going ways and their cosy little house. It’s almost exactly like the one I’m buying today: a little Victorian worker’s cottage. They had a television, which I’d heard of (from Matt of course) but never seen before. It didn’t impress me and often displayed a sign “Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible”. I was much more impressed with Peter’s elder brother Lawrence who had an airgun which could fire lead pellets at birds (and neighbours’ cats too, if you dared). Having an elder brother meant you learned things parents never mentioned. For example, Lolly (Lawrence) had told Peter about condoms and Peter told me, referring to them as “rubber Johnnies”. To me it seemed a crude and ugly idea: I accused him of making it up. We used to wander all over town when we weren’t at his place or my big house, which impressed him greatly: he was very deferential when he came. Sometimes we went to the beach. It was nothing grand, being infested with seaweed and washed-up flotsam, for the Solent was one of the busiest shipping-lanes in the world, not a lido. The beach was separated from a wooded area by the Esplanade, a broken-down concrete road almost impassable by motor-car. In a clearing were two corrugated-iron enclosures for changing in and out of bathing costumes: one for boys and one for girls. This was the scene of Peter’s revelation about the johnnies, and other tales---disturbing and exciting---of naughtiness between boys and girls. I looked at him in amazement: this chubby-faced boy with owlish glasses was more than met the eye! Yet he was no participant, just the messenger, or possibly a voyeur. The technical facts of life I knew, but not till then their role in gossip and play.

Along East Cowes Esplanade
It hasn't changed! Thanks iwbus & flickr

Peter and I were ideal companions together with his family dog, who accompanied our mischievous jaunts. Together, they knew all the places worth going to and what trespassing we could get away with. I admired him for his street-knowledge and he admired me as a “brainbox”. My own well-trodden paths were in books---rare objects in his house.

Our friendship suffered a setback. When the school term started, Peter accompanied me on the bus and up to the school gates. From that point on, our paths diverged. I had been placed not one, but two forms above Peter. He was in a babies’ class and it was imperative to ignore him. He understood this perfectly well and as time went on we became strangers to one another.

The Wooing of Blackett

English divorce in the early Fifties wasn’t a sedate exchange of paperwork between lawyers. If you wanted to contest it---there was every reason to do so---you had to appear in court, and risk your pain being turned into Sunday morning entertainment by reporters from the News of the World. Yes, this humiliation happened to my mother and Kenneth. It was nasty.

You couldn’t have a divorce simply because you wanted one and the “grounds” were all potentially lurid. My mother went for Cruelty. My stepfather Kenneth was ready to fight this by every means, furiously defending his property and reputation. My mother feared he would counter-sue for adultery, and tried---by every means---to conceal the evidence from him. She was in constant fear of private eyes. So Blackett remained on the Isle of Wight, and she remained in the attic flat at my Granny’s house. At weekends, while I was at boarding-school during term-time, they would each take a train and rendezvous at the approximate mid-point: Brighton. This brash seaside town, now famous for its Gay Pride marches and long nicknamed London-by-the-sea, was already known for its hotels where lovers would sign the register as Mr and Mrs Smith and have a “dirty weekend”. Even there, my mother and future stepfather were vigilant, apparently.

But one school holidays, Blackett with elaborate precaution did come to Granny’s house. He brought me a craft knife with exchangeable blades as a present. I thought this was pretty good, and he seemed to be genial with a sense of humour. That evening, my mother prepared him a seductive concoction in the kitchen, a snack rather than a meal. I was indignant when I discovered it was just for the two of them. “Where’s mine?” It seemed they were trying to cut me out of their fun. As far as I was concerned, the acquisition of a new stepfather to replace the old was a matter for me to celebrate as much as my mother; and it was my role to assist her in making a better choice this time. Clearly Blackett with his flowers and all was doing his best to impress her. He would need to reckon with me as well. To the extent I approved of him as my new father-figure, I would co-operate with her too, so all would gain

When parted, the lovers would write to one another every day. I was pretty amazed by that. Sometimes she would read me selected fragments of his letter to her---all this of course in a joyful school holiday, when I was trying to monopolise my mother’s attention after those dreadful dark years (for which I do not blame Kenneth: he was not the cruel man she depicted). So I took it upon myself to include a daily letter too. I had nothing to say so I would draw cartoons. These soon became satirical, with Blackett as their butt.

He smoked a lot so I would draw him with three lighted cigarettes in his mouth and others nearby, often burning the furniture. He was a handyman (his frustrated engineering creativity always blossoming into new projects) so I would show him hammering floorboards and inventing things. He used to remark on the way I threw my clothes on the floor, so I had him screwing hooks to the floor to make it easier to hang them up overnight. I was an eleven-year old schoolboy, after all.

Their wooing involved various gramophone records acquired for the ambience. It started with Mantovani’s Orchestra: Only a Rose, Kisses in the Dark. Then it was Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 which always puzzled me as it seemed above my mother’s taste in music and I didn’t understand how she, let alone Blackett, could have come across it. I had not heard of that ultra-English film, Brief Encounter which makes high romance from furtive meetings of lovers in a grimy railway station. Between Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, the restraint and clipped accents leave everything unsaid. Only through the music do we know what’s in their hearts. I knew nothing of that, and simply enjoyed the music, which they went on playing for years after they got married, in quiet evenings by the fire, as well as Puccini’s La Bohème.

It’s laughable now that I saw their romance as a threesome and accepted no hints to the contrary. I went back to school full of music and a new sense of adventure. Soon I would be leaving this tedious boarding school. We were just waiting now for that divorce to come through and then we would go to the Isle of Wight, with its flying boats and yachts and Miniten and swimming-pool (at Woodside anyhow, algae-infested as it usually was) and my new school, where I would go every day and then come back home. I had every reason to be caught up in the romance. I discovered English music too: “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations and “Land of Hope and Glory”. Queen Elizabeth II had her dazzling Coronation and a British Expedition had just climbed to the summit of Everest. Life was possibility.

Blackett and the Princess

Saunders-Roe Princess Pic: John Howard Worsley

Preface
Continued from Woodside. I had promised that the next instalment would be “The Wooing of Blackett”, but we are not there yet, I have to introduce the man first.

Now read on
Some time after my ninth birthday my mother finally walked out on my stepfather. According to her story it was more like she ran not walked, with pots and pans hurled after her as she fled down the stairs. But I was at boarding school and therefore out of touch with day-to-day events at home. This is why I am reliant on the public record for the chronology. I’ve found a list of songs from the UK hit parade between 1951 and 1954. It will be invaluable to synchronise their dates with my memories, so I can untangle them: Answer Me, The Happy Wanderer, Oh Mein Papa, and several songs from films:Wonderful Copenhagen from Hans Christian Andersen, the song from Moulin Rouge (1952), the song from Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, “I’ll be loving you eternally . . .”, and more. I didn’t get to see any of those films but my mother told me about them. To me they were happy songs and I took their tunes and words back to boarding-school with me, to hum and sing whilst I mopped the floors under the eagle eye of Mrs Nora Brummell-Hicks.

My mother had moved to the top flat of Granny’s house, and this was the best time we’d ever had together. We became friends. She apologized for the marriage to Kenneth. That is where she bought the typewriter which so fascinated me, and planned to train as a shorthand secretary. After the darkness of the previous years I enjoyed having my mother to myself during the school holidays. We did little projects together, for example I would dictate at a certain speed and she would type. We did prize competitions and sent them to Woman’s Own. One was to submit colour-schemes for a room. Mine was absurd but that was the fun of it. I would try and make her laugh, inventing new lyrics to the popular songs, drawing cartoons. Some of these were to amuse my grandfather too.

Sometimes my baby sister, now three, would come and stay, and I would look after her while my mother went out. She was restless. She had set the divorce in motion but I caught her in the larder munching spoonfuls of ground coffee and she confessed an addiction to this odd vice.

She decided we would still go to Woodside for a summer holiday, even though that was the favourite haunt of Kenneth, my stepfather on whom she had walked out. She was careful of course to ensure he hadn’t booked the same week. I don’t think it could have been before 1952. I got friendly with a boy there who was constantly singing “Two on a Tandem” but that song is not giving a definitive date. It is more music-hall, Billy Cotton Band Show than a pop song of the day.

I promised to tell you why nudism---or Woodside at any rate---is a key part of my story. I leave out those parts which aren’t crucial to the narrative. For example, my mother was also a Spiritualist at this time, seeking messages from her first husband (who I still believed to be my father). But that didn’t provide any turning points. Naturism did: for at Woodside she met Blackett.

Blackett was one of his names and out of the five he’d been given I think it’s the one which suits him best. He was a no-nonsense man, an engineer born and bred in Tyneside, as his flat Geordie accent, spoken with the mouth almost closed, so clearly betrayed. He might have ended up on the shipyards but he strove to better himself and escape the human tide of working-class men streaming into those clanging yards. He studied hard and passed enough exams to commence in the engine rooms of Merchant Navy ships, which took him to places as exotic as Yokohama and Buenos Aires. But when a man’s no longer young, and the promotions aren’t offered, he seeks dry land, so he joined the aircraft manufacturer Saunders-Roe, a few miles from Woodside. The company was the main employer in East Cowes and its big project was the Princess Flying Boat, so stylish inside and out, which everyone still hoped would fly commercially from Southampton to New York with 107 passengers in great luxury.

Blackett had a big house in East Cowes, rented from the company. As well as his day job, with his wife he took lodgers: transient employees and students on secondment. He’d had three children, but one had died of meningitis. Then a lodger called Satterthwaite fell in love with his wife: took her and the two surviving kids to Australia. He never saw them again.

He’d heard about Woodside and got in the habit of bicycling through deserted country lanes to go as a day-visitor on Saturdays and Sundays. That’s how a romance developed with my mother. I didn’t notice the wooing, but when I found out, it became plain that he would have to woo me too.

Sunlit ecstasy

Back of the shopping centre

Spirituality, spiritual, Spirit, essence. What? Where do these words go? What do they signify? In essence I am an animal, defying every religion in this assertion. As soon as I leave the constricted world of indoors my ecstasies are those of a dog---a puppy in fact, for I haven’t been properly disciplined. My tail wags furiously, and since I have no tail, these words must do proxy for wagging.

It’s August and in these Northern temperate climes it’s a month of smells. I miss the seaside but instead of going there this Saturday I summon its essences from adolescent memory especially the aromas: decaying seaweed, ice-cream, sun-tan oil on young women (fiercely guarded by their muscly young men), sweat, cigarettes, decaying crustaceans, hot dogs, dog-dirt, damp sand, unknown smells. All this to a backdrop of glittering ocean in the setting sun, the mournful cries of seagulls wheeling overhead, the constant ebb and flow of waves on shingle---sighing-whispering then cymbal-clash---the very lungs of Creation, breathing life into the Universe. Wafted on the breeze are distant children’s cries, sharp, ecstatic, like shards of coloured glass endlessly shifting in a kaleidoscope, never the same, never different. It’s not today’s seaside I crave but the seaside of days remembered.

In puppydom, I forsake the sanity of the office, of BBC Radio 4, of popular culture, of what I share with family and friends. I go where all is wild and everything is possible.

We can be wild, so long as we hold on to the finger of someone who loves us, docile as a child at a fairground. In a dream the other night, my children were playing by the road but I lost my way trying to park the car and could not find them again, and it would have been hopeless. Dream landscapes don’t stay constant: you can never retrace your steps. Distressed, I woke and realised my children are grown up, not lost at all. Thank God for waking up! It’s the Ariadne thread that lets us explore the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

I do empathize with those on the edge, even those who have fallen into a seeming abyss. Driven mad by deprivation and yearning they may do strange and self-destructive things. Let them, I say, whilst we take steps for the safety of those whom they touch, for we don’t want more hurt to be spread than exists already. Let’s not call people monsters, when all we need is safety from them. I don’t need to be a moralist when I recognise that in drink and drugs and worse things, my brothers and sisters only seek ecstasy and escape, which I have discovered how to find without such self-destructive behaviours.

I see a strange thread connecting my early memories. From the youngest age, it was independence I wanted. I felt that my mother was dragging me round like a dog on a leash whilst she pursued her own ends unable to consider my needs. But as I got older, my focus blurred, for I saw how big was the world. I feared getting lost, having been in cloistered environments: home, boarding school. University was too big but I got used to it, found a pocket of familiarity within it, like family. After University, I was terrified by the hugeness of this trackless waste, the wide world. I don’t know how to write that part of the story when we come to it. That’s when my sanity was most challenged.

I went walking in the suburbs near work yesterday. I looked for the house of a crystal therapist I had consulted for my illness some years ago. There it was, I found it at last. Perhaps I will phone her next week to tell her I am well now and remember her care. The houses in that little part of the suburb were so finished, so well-kept that I couldn’t imagine living in one. It would be like settling into a silk-lined coffin, still alive. I’ve always felt this way about riches, even modest bourgeois comforts. My life has always been half-finished, with scaffold-poles erected, piles of bricks and sand alongside.

My needs are simple. They include taking myself for a daily walk like an energetic puppy. I pass a currant-bush and tear off a couple of leaves, to crush them and sniff. Oh, I love to lose myself in the present moment! In this ecstasy, I need nothing and no one,, not even a house to live in. I can be a tramp, a beggar, travelling choicelessly. Each venue has its own special charms. People everywhere have hearts of gold, when you look beneath their shapes and the way they treat themselves: they don’t know any better. As in a lucid dream I can go anywhere and do anything I want. Now I am at the Great Hollands Shopping Centre, a modest square of grass surrounded by modest local shops, a pub and a National Health clinic. This is where the nobodies, the unemployed and the elderly come on the local bus and potter around for a while. Here the graffiti give the main hope of artistic creativity; here the dropped litter is welcome rebellion from municipal dictatorship. I view the world’s dream and help dream this dream, a mere wayfarer passing through, striding over the earth’s crust like the giants, and indeed the dwarves, of old.

This one-hour ecstasy further subverts that resolve to write a coherent memoir. For what is memory? What matters my life-story, when little fragments of Now can evoke so much, as if they are pieces of the great puzzle of Life, each redolent with meaning and memory? Everything seems to remind me of something long past, at least in this blessed hour.

I recall a particular place in the grounds of that first boarding-school, where I trod underfoot the fallen leaves of a black poplar tree. I don’t know how I remembered those leaves but in the last year I have been searching for them, just to taste their scent. I discover from the internet that they are rare now in Britain, and they are known for their balsam scent from a sticky secretion of sap. Why do I remember those leaves, when I can hardly remember names or faces?

At the back of the Shopping Centre there’s a pervasive aroma of smoked red-pork: star anise, cassia, citrus rind, ginger. Like an orang-utan sniffing a distant durian-tree, I search my memory for its source. Oh yes, the Chinese stalls in Kota Kinabalu, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong. Do I love the present because it evokes the past? But I was the same as a child, when I hardly had any past!

Interlude

Heavy rain outside the house at sunset

A friend points out that the reason I am not getting many comments here is that I don’t reply to many of them. I appreciate them all and am excited to receive them. They are helpful and encouraging. What’s my excuse for not responding lately? Well, the impact of remembering---before it is transmuted into a string of written words---has been so powerful that I have been absorbed, soaked up in the sponge of long ago. Our past is not constantly present to us. It is lost, but not forever. We have to journey to get there, and in that journeying the present is altered and so is the past.

I once talked with a shaman, I mean an Englishwoman who practises the ancient techniques as she understands them. She said you can go back and change your own past. The intriguing idea has stuck with me. It doesn’t mean undoing your deeds. Done deeds stay done. It is about repairing what life did to you, and what you did to yourself.

Another friend spoke about the writing of memoirs. What is the point? Are we writing for publication? What do we get out of this? I’m clear about it now. We remember to regain our wholeness, to overcome prejudices, and to discover who we are. Yes, we need to discover who we are. Not knowing handicaps us. One possibility, said the friend, is a spiritual biography. For my part, I’m ready to do without the word “spiritual”, especially if it means non-material. The best ally of memory is smell: what could be more sensual and evocative? It’s part of our evolutionary inheritance and I find that responding to the feelings evoked by smells is a “form of meditation” (though I don’t like the expression) which links us to our animal nature, that is what we are rather than what we think we are.

Today’s self interacts with the remembered self as if we had a time machine, and we could learn from the encounter between the two. There’s a novel on this theme by Richard Bach: Running from Safety, a fictionalised memoir. The kind of books I like best are those which inspire the reader to emulate: but not “self-help” books where the author claims authority. What one can, all can. What one can learn by himself, others can too.

The writing is important---its vividness, readability, honesty---but more important is the remembering. Entering into this looking-glass world, I come close to that child and give him what I have now, such as self-esteem. I tell him he did his best, and show him what his latent talents have flowered into. In exchange he invites me to join in the fresh playfulness of childhood, free from the complicated troubles of the adult who has allowed the world to put a saddle on his back and break him in.

Woodside

Beyond the spit is Woodside’s shoreline

We reach the end of the country road. A sign says Woodside House Private and we go through the white gate, down a long winding drive to a red-brick residence, from the same era as my grandparents’ house – about 1905, but three times the size. The gravel path outside the entrance is shaded by a huge cedar tree full of cooing doves. We go to the back where a well-tended lawn slopes down giving way to rough scrub and a view of the Solent, the channel dividing the Isle of Wight, on which we stand, from the mainland of England.

Afternoon tea is being served to about forty guests dressed smart-casual. A butler in short summer jacket supervises the distribution of thin-sliced bread-and-butter, tea, scones with cream and jam, cakes.

Darting amongst the guests is Franklin, a middle-aged Sea Scout, gesturing, looking into people’s faces and croaking in quite clear English for a man deaf from birth. He invites us to view the Mauretania through his telescope and explains it’s not the original, one which had four funnels. Almost every day one of these liners passes majestically across the seascape, leaving for New York or returning to Southampton, just beyond the flare of the Fawley oil refineries on our misty horizon.

Woodside was a naturist holiday camp established in 1933 by the Rev W. E. Critchard on his retirement as an Anglican priest. He was in his eighties when I first visited Woodside in 1950. He mingled with the guests occasionally and spent much time in his book-lined study. Through its French windows he could observe human dramas and spectacular views.

By “spectacular views” I’m not referring to guests disporting themselves in the nude. Woodside was not a place of ogling and licentiousness. You could stay weeks and not see a bare breast or crotch. All was discreet. Accommodation was in wooden chalets of simple construction at the edge of the woods. Cold showers were dotted amongst these chalets, alfresco and unscreened, but these hardly breached the general rule of no indiscriminate nudity.

The designated place to mingle “naked as Nature intended” and soak up the sun’s rays, or rain’s drops, was the Paddock, a one-acre clearing within dense thickets and woodland. You entered through an improvised wooden gatehouse where you could leave your clothes: nudity was compulsory in the Paddock . On the other hand, obedience to rules was seldom compulsory.

The Paddock was little more than a wilderness, terraced into various plots and levels of rough lawn. For entertainment there was a swimming pool with sloped decking on one side, and some Miniten courts

I looked up Miniten on the Web. What a boon is the Web! I’d forgotten about Miniten and now know why. It’s a sport played world-wide but only by nudists. It’s just like tennis but the court is one-third the size and you use a special bat called a thug, instead of a racquet. It was invented in the Thirties---perhaps at Woodside, this very place. Before I learned Miniten, I had to persuade an adult or other children to play quoits, which involved throwing a rubber ring over the net and catching it. But the pool was the greatest attraction, even though it might fill with algae and be declared out of bounds, till it was drained and treated with chlorine. There was only a hosepipe to fill it.. Sometimes it had apples and leaves floating, for it was beside an old orchard. Cleaning the pool was often a job for the holiday-makers.

Woodside was happy-go-lucky and understaffed. And this meant that different parts of it had different vibes. It wasn’t all shaped by the benign wraith of the legendary Rev. Critchard, who had reached an age to withdraw from the scene.

Between the huge cedar tree and the path to the Paddock was the bath-house block, constructed by an imaginative carpenter and painted deep blue and pale turquoise with murals of Romans in togas and towels, and inscriptions like “He who baths last baths longest” - Seneca. Then in a distant corner was the Parish Hall. It wasn’t used for any religious purpose, it was just called that. It could be used for dances but usually had ping-pong tables. I recall when it rained all day and I played the bamboo pipe I’d made at school: it was a regular project. I played “John Brown’s Body”, “The British Grenadiers”, “The Londonderry Air”, “Men of Harlech”, “Camptown Races”; every folk tune and hymn I’d ever heard. I got applause and it seemed I was the day’s entertainer. Then they asked me if I knew any jokes. I remembered one I had heard from my stepfather Kenneth, which had to be told in different voices. A young woman goes for a picnic in the park with a group of friends, but fails to keep up with them. Getting upset, she goes to ask an elderly park-keeper: “Have you seen my picknickers? They should be round her somewhere.” He looks solemn. “Serve you right young lady for takin’ ’em off!” I could not understand why they laughed quite so much, but now I see it was a pleasant joke for a nudist camp.

Which brings me to the onset of puberty, when the ethos of naturism no longer appealed. I wanted to hide my body, not show it. Fewer kids of my age came along each summer. Those who did formed into a gang. We’d go through the woods to the Beach Café, and hung out with ginger beer and potato crisps and even cigarettes. The proprietor of this remote place was pretty much an outlaw and happily sold them to us. Suitably clothed, we could lounge about like teenagers, ogling and gossiping and being as sinister as possible. I learned from the grapevine tales (true or false) of what some of the adults got up to: sloping off to the Sloop pub in the evenings, giving the lie to the sexual innocence implied in the naturist ethos . . .

How Miniten is played

Woodside was to change my life, at least my mother’s and as ever, her fortunes governed mine. So we have lingered here a little and indeed could stay longer. So many fragments of memory, but they don’t all help the flowing narrative along. You cannot be strictly chronological in a memoir: too many parallel things are going on. I’m glad I chose to write in little chapters, one story each. Though I tell the truth as I recall it, the fact is, memory is so much more interesting than verified facts. This is how myths are born!

The next instalment will be The Wooing of Blackett.

The Naturist

pic source: jigsaw puzzle on sale at Amazon.co.uk

It took little time for my mother and stepfather to discover their marriage was a mistake. It’s presumptuous of me to judge---I was six when they married---but it didn’t need Solomon to see that they wed for a ragbag of Reasons: the chief one being her pregnancy. The knot was tied in church on a chilly day in March: my sister appeared in September. He was a bachelor of independent means---owning various properties around the town and living off their rents, while she was a woman of the upper middle-class with a young bastard to support. At thirty-eight she was a little old to live indefinitely with Mummy and Daddy, especially as her younger sister, Matt’s mother (see my last) had already sought sanctuary there, in similar circumstances.

Perhaps bride and groom each thought the other a prize because of their looks. My mother was not Helen of Troy but she knew how to turn men’s heads: a natural blonde with the heart of a spoilt child. He---I must give him a name, for he was the first and not my only stepfather. I’ll call him Kenneth: it suits the way he spoke, lisping and stammering like a bashful boy, with missing teeth at the front. You would not meet a more painfully shy man aged fifty-three. Yet he was handsome. Not as tall as my mother’s first husband, that long limbed-Dutchman with the moody looks of Rudolph Valentino, he was “rangy” all the same. With his lean physique & rugged yet boyish face, he could have modelled for country tweeds and brogues. But the state of undress suited him most. He was a dedicated naturist. If you don’t know what that is, “all will be revealed”: a phrase that may be all the clue you need. Far from being just his oddity, naturism affected the course of my life, as I will show in a future instalment.

I have never seen a white man with such mahogany skin. At school there was a wall-map of The World, in varnished calico, showing the Empire in pink, with the various “races” around the edge, in their national costumes. The Red Indian was depicted with a skin the same colour as Kenneth’s. TO him it was a sin to stay in when the sun peeped out; and even when it wasn’t shining, indoors was stuffy whilst outdoors was bracing. He had been a body-builder and it showed in his muscles and veins, visible like tangled ropes under a wrinkled hide.

Kenneth was like the classic "seven-stone weakling" in the advertisements of Charles Atlas. He’d been a runt of a child, prone to illness, his lungs and heart judged defective. He was bullied at school, overprotected by womenfolk at home who enforced lots of bed-rest and no playing out with other boys. As he emerged from his teens, a doctor advised him that all this molly-coddling had been bad for him: he should strengthen his body with fresh air and hard work. An inheritance gave him the chance to buy some land and start a pig-farm, all on his own. He prospered and converted his capital into properties to let. He could not abandon the thrift which had helped his lonely path. He obeyed a puritanical Christianity and Victorian values, but his true religion was Nature Cure. Stanley Lief, Harry Benjamin, Gayelord Hauser were its High Priests, with their respective publications “Health for All” (a magazine), Better Sight without Glasses and Look Younger, Live Longer.

For recreation, he liked to see “shows”. They’d be called “burlesque shows” in the States, I understand, with their leggy chorus-girls and comedians. For old times’ sake---he clung to every habit that had yielded him joy---he haunted the livestock market at the nearby village of Battle. We’d all lean over the pens whilst the auctioneer jabbered the bids for calves, sheep, poultry, and pigs, as in Kenneth’s heroic farming days. Then it was time to refresh ourselves in what he called a “tea-place”. He abhorred smoke and drink but loved those places---usually more shady and empty than in my picture---where waitresses dressed in black, with white caps and aprons, served tea and cakes.

I seem to have resembled all three of my mother’s husbands, none of which was my father. Moody like the first, the one I never even knew; awkward in company, restless for the outdoors like the second. Never mind the third, we will get there in due course. But I do recall that in the first days of living in Kenneth’s house---we should call it a flat for the downstairs was let to tenants, in fact I was fourteen before I lived in a house exclusively occupied by my own family---I found myself adopting his stammer.

He was my first father-figure. I could hardly help imitating him.

Round and Round the Pampas Grass

Pic: Maggie’s Garden

I’m protective towards Matt and that is why I haven’t given the real name of my first cousin, a month younger than me. He was the first child I met on arrival in England aged four. We had driven from Tilbury Docks in Grandpa’s old Ford and I slept all the way. I woke to tea in the garden. Matt pointed out his tortoise, which crouched with its moving parts retracted. “That’s just a stone”, I asserted confidently. It got up and walked. From that moment on, Matt knew better than me about everything. He told me that a DUKW (duck) was a vehicle which could go on land and water, not to be confused with a DKW which was a marque of German car, or a Volkswagen, which could float because it was airtight with the doors closed. When he spoke of a Museum, I was quick to correct him. “It’s called New Zealand, not Museum”, I claimed, inaccurately. He asked me my favourite colour. “Red”. “Mine’s yellow”. Neither of us could prove the other wrong on that one, but even then I felt he had me beaten. Though I learned to read and he didn’t till years later, it was not book learning which counted. He seemed to have read the Book of Life. When he challenged me to a contest---which of us could piss the highest on the wall behind the shed---it wasn’t the result which counted but his knowledge that no-one would punish us.

Matt was fair-haired and grey-eyed. Photos show him innocent and handsome. He grew up to be strong and fit, though not athletic. He had a living father---an Army Captain, who though he was overseas (and divorced from my Aunt, I later discovered), still made Matt luckier than I. He lived with Granny. Sometimes his mother was there too and sometimes not.

He could climb trees and showed me how to climb up Granny’s garden wall and thence to Myra’s flat built above the neighbouring auto workshop. This made her cross and we branded her a witch. She invited us to visit the proper way, by the stairs. With its balcony her place seemed perched on a cliff edge, small as a gypsy caravan, and exquisite with tiny things: dolls and antique buttons.

Matt introduced me to magic lore. Near Granny’s house was Gillsman’s Hill, a narrow road canopied by trees going down steeply to a “wishing well” at the bottom, actually a spring, with water tumbling out from a carved lion’s head into a marble basin and spilling over constantly: all green with algae and housed in a worn sandstone shrine. Our ritual was to play “monkeys in a cage” on railings going down till we reached the “well”; then cup our hands to drink copiously of its freshness; then walk up the other side, keeping silence until we had thrice encircled the Wishing Tree, making a wish never to be revealed. If we deviated from this strict observance, a Witch would issue from “the house with no windows” (an electricity substation) and plant on us a Curse. All this I believed.

Matt was Granny’s favourite grandchild but I didn't resent it for he was a bird with a broken wing. His mother (my Aunt) explained he was “born in the Blitz”. All I saw was a clumsiness and sometimes theatrical tantrums, which only Granny could soothe.

I’m sharing all this with you because I cannot reminisce with him. His late mother a few years ago explained that he has no memories of the past. He was not her favourite son: she doted on the other one, who when floods or national emergencies strike is a local head of Government in waiting.

Whenever I stayed at Granny’s I’d look forward to days with Matt, if he was there and not in Kenya with his father. Granny used to put us in the bath together, the brass geyser roaring with gas as precious hot water trickled out. We enjoyed having each other as brothers: I don't remember where his real one was. Everything was fun, even running round the Pampas grass laughing, trying to catch one another. We bought things from the shop across the road and persuaded the house tenants to buy them, first aiming for profit, then at any old discount, to rid ourselves of the stock.

Our adventures extended and we roamed the streets and woods and even stalked in people’s back gardens at twilight for the thrill. One day we went to a wood not far from the Wishing Well that reeked of wild garlic. In a clearing, Matt practised throwing his new hunting knife into the ground till it pierced his gumboot impaling his foot. An old man passed with a sack of potatoes which he gave me to hold while he carried Matt home. Despite such incidents we accepted he was my elder and better, next to whom I was a timid bookworm. When we went to the convent school, another boy threw my cap into a field with a sign “Beware of the Bull”, or perhaps it was “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted”. I insisted we could not enter the field to retrieve it. Matt couldn’t read. He said I should go into the field and get it. When we reached home, my Aunt laughed at us and sent us straight back to fetch my cap. Matt was always right.

I could tell you much more of our times together and his superior wisdom. But then he was sent to the Prep School where I was boarding. These are painful memories for me, but I trust not for him: this is where his capacity to forget must have come in most handy. He had previously attended the Tower Road School with the common boys and girls of the neighbourhood, quite contentedly. But the Prep School system was to prepare boys and mould them by all necessary means to rule the Empire; spitting out those who did not bend to its disciplines. Matt was mocked by all and I did nothing to defend him. His clumsiness, his proud twisting gait, his slight facial tic, all worsened under the strain. When teased he would lash out in a fury; then in tears he would want Granny. Even the masters, even the Headmaster and his wife agreed he must have “St Vitus’ Dance”; accusing him among themselves, as in a witch-hunt. “Burn the Witch!” I wish I had stood alongside him and cried “Burn me too! We shall die together, and God will judge you!” In today’s world his condition would be labelled ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but the school was not there to help children with disorders. His mother came to collect him before the end of term.

It’s only now that I realise Prep School was a War Game, designed to harden you with “friendly fire” before a real enemy was encountered. I’m proud of Matt for blowing open the whole system, though at the time I could not comprehend this Theatre of Cruelty.

I intended to write only about our childhood friendship, but now I feel I must reassure readers. Though not killer material he was fit and strong, and joined the Army on a twelve year ticket. Granny in his tenderest years had taken him under her wing and now the Angels lifted him up. He got born again: a close-knit Christian sect which worships in one another’s houses has kept him safe ever since. He has worked as a gardener. He married a Norwegian girl and they had three bright girls. He tried to be a missionary in Soweto before the end of Apartheid but he wasn’t accepted. You have to be financially sponsored. So he does missionary work more locally in civilised suburbs. I have hardly seen him in the last thirty years: there are obstacles in the way that I can’t explain now. Even if he remembers nothing of our times together, I wish we may meet again.

The Book of Illuminations

Click here for source

Recalling materials for a memoir is like being an archaeologist. Sometimes you have to make do with nothing but a handle, or a spout. From this you deduce and reconstruct the rest of the jug whose fragments have been ground small by Time. Painstaking effort must be aided by guesswork, for you don’t have every piece of the puzzle. So in these notes, the snippets of recall light up the darkness of oblivion.

Fantasy can be stronger than reality. It’s as true for a sleepless child in a boarding-school dormitory as for a monk in his cell visited by a succubus. Sent to bed when it wasn’t yet dark I would see through the window giants fighting, like a Punch and Judy show. It was tall elms bending in the wind, their heads knocking together, their jaws silently shouting.

On nights when the other boys were sleeping I would invent images of gratification. Two of these stick in my mind, from when I was eight or nine. The first was simple enough. The scene was the Green outside my home. It’s an expanse of public grass covering the West Hill, where children play and adults walk their dogs, beneath the mournful cries of wheeling gulls and backed by the glittering sea. There’s a playground there still, with swings and a little roundabout and a bucking “horse” big enough for five children to ride. Best of all the attractions is the cliff of sandstone rocks, carved by Time and the limbs of generations into ledges and galleries and crevasses for children to clamber dangerously.

Lying in my dormitory bed, I’d be riding my own horse, a great Shire such as brewers employed to draw cartloads of barrels. Though I could ride it on the beach or through the woods, I chose to canter and gallop in circles around that playground on the hill, showing off its flying tail and mane. The rough boys of the district scattered beneath my charger’s feet, with the respect due to a knight.

Enough said about that fantasy! But the other one was more curious. A certain toy was popular at the school: the “John Bull Printing Outfit” consisting of wooden blocks with grooves to take type, in the form of letters and punctuation marks made of rubber. With tweezers you could assemble your text into the blocks to produce a “do-it-yourself” rubber stamp to press on an ink-pad and thence to paper. Adults also used it for that purpose, for producing ad hoc rubber stamps.

In nocturnal fantasy I used a printing outfit to produce a special edition of the Book of Common Prayer. This with Hymns Ancient and Modern was one of the two books the congregation used at the village church, as in every Church of England service in those days. It goes back to 1550 and it’s famous for graceful language:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord; and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of Thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Typically a prayer book was in tiny print, but this did not deter me from selecting it as the first publication of my magical printing press. Later, my mother acquired a small typewriter and touch-typing manual, with the intention to equip herself with secretarial skills. This was after she had left my stepfather and returned to my grandmother’s house, a move which lightened my own darkness greatly. In the holidays I constantly begged to use this machine, just for the sake of printing words on a page and admiring them.

I confess that the fantasy of making a book has never left me. In ’72 when I lived in a hippy commune and made a great Dragon on my wall in charcoal (to be painted with iridescent scales) it was about composing Illuminations, a compendium of my choicest mystical encounters, drug-induced or otherwise. In the early Nineties commuting on the London Underground I scribbled notes for a mighty tome called Seer and System, a humanist-mystical method for designing computer systems.

Nothing much seems to have changed.

Best two days

Long ago, when we were both 11, I received a wonderful favour from Cooksey. We used surnames only at prep school, so Cooksey is all I have: hardly enough to track him down now. His parents were in Hong Kong, but at half-term, when almost every boy went away for the Saturday and Sunday, he was invited to stay with his aunt. My own parents sent word that I could not go home that weekend. So I stayed at school and Cooksey lent me his new bike.

Its beauty captivated me: a Raleigh Kingfisher, metallic blue frame, drop handlebars, caliper brakes, three-speed gears and a racing saddle. Those were the days when a boy might have to make do with a more ancient kind of bicycle: matt black, stirrup (rod) brakes, no gears – the kind of indestructible bike that Miss Marples would ride round the village whilst she snooped and solved mysteries.

There was only one snag: I had never ridden a bike. The headmaster’s wife Nora Brummell-Hicks told me I could do what I liked for two days: no school discipline or time-table applied, as long as I was indoors by dark. She and her husband wanted the time off too! I could go to the kitchens when hungry: Cook had been instructed to leave some cold food in the safe. I hadn't been as free since stepping off the Rangitata at Tilbury. It felt like heaven.

The sun shone from dawn to dusk and I didn’t waste time indoors. I was out with the bike when the dew was still shining like diamonds on grass and hedgerow.

The school was where it says Great Sanders on the map. The red arrow points to a disused track through the woods. That’s where I got on the bike and tried to ride it. I don’t know how many times I fell off into nettles and brambles or on to the hard track. I became covered in scratches and stings and dust, my nostrils full of cow parsley and meadowsweet and crushed nettle-leaves. The track was dappled with shade but I sweated with the sun and the effort and didn’t relent though hunger and fatigue pulled at me. Frustration and defiance were stronger goads. When I could ride five yards without falling off, I knew I could ride.

I went to the kitchen and summoned Cook as if I were Lawrence of Arabia at the Officers’ Mess in Cairo, as played by Peter O’Toole, dressed as a sheikh, with an Arab boy in tow:

LAWRENCE
We want two large glasses of lemonade!
BAR MAN
This is a bar for British Officers.
LAWRENCE
That's alright; we're not particular.

. . . . . . . .
BRIGHTON
What's going on?
OFFICER
It's Lawrence, sir.
LAWRENCE
Lemonade with ice.
BRIGHTON
Well, explain yourself.
LAWRENCE
We've taken Aqaba.
BRIGHTON
Taken Aqaba? Who has?
LAWRENCE
We have. Our side in this war have. The
wogs have. We have. He likes your
lemonade.

Then I went back and rode the bike, from end to end of the track through the woods, never falling off. Only when dusk made it too hard to see did I collapse into my bed. If I could, I would have taken the bike between the sheets with me. I dreamt about nothing but bicycle-riding and the next morning, still dusty, every muscle aching, I got up, washed in cool water, and went out to ride again.

Sir David Cooksey

PS this post was inspired by Serenity's latest on the same topic.

PPS After keying in the tale, I did try and chase up Cooksey on the Net, despite the lack of a first name. Could it be Sir David? Yes, it could! (though he is 2 years older. That is probably right too)

Life on Board

Lying awake at night, it’s as though I can draw back a curtain to expose deep alcoves of memory. It takes a little perseverance. Suddenly I recall that “perseverance” was a favourite word of Monty Brummell-Hicks, the scary headmaster of my prep school, that place I was sent for ten or twelve weeks at a time. I only have to ask myself a question about those days, and wait patiently for the answer.
For example I couldn’t remember what we called him and his formidable wife. It’s stuck in my mind that she was Nora and her maiden name was Strudwick, and someone, it must have been my grandfather, remarked that she had been a notable “flapper” in the Twenties. She remained a lady of energy and presence, tall and large, jutting both front and rear, constantly organising, cooking, teaching and making. Yes! We called them Mister and Missis, not just amongst ourselves as boys, for these were their official titles, to distinguish their roles from our own mothers and fathers.
Mrs was an august presence. I used to recall her as ugly and asexual, but what did I know? We were just silly boys who thought that since they had no children of their own Mr and Mrs never had sex. In any case, Mrs was taller, wider, older, more dominant and even more jutting than our notions of a stereotyped “pinup girl”. For his part, Mr liked to dress like a working farmer in breeches and gumboots, and except in one of his rages, his attention was always elsewhere, or so it seemed for his weather eye swivelled all over the place, while his glass eye, its socket usually watering, would stay fixed upon the boy in front of him. Both Mr and Mrs were constantly active: he as groundsman, she as housekeeper. Their attention on the boys wavered on and off like a defective light-bulb. When things were going smoothly, they had better things to do. He’d stride off with a gun under his arm to shoot rabbits, or in the summer months you’d hear for hours at a time the drone of his motor-mower, and occasionally glimpse him on his metal seat behind it, grinning like a skull, pipe clamped between his teeth. She’d be in the pantry hanging muslin bags from the ceiling which dripped into great bowls. Some held curds to make cheese. Others dripped the juice from blackberries, picked by the boys at the beginning of the Autumn term, when we were handed a two-pound jam jar and told not to return until it was filled with good ones for her approval. She made all the jam, whether blackberry and apple, plum, rhubarb, marrow-and-ginger, gooseberry, blackcurrant. She made furniture polish---a congealed brown soup of aromatic chemicals---with which the boys had to shine the oak staircases and floors. Every morning we were awakened at 7am and given five minutes to dress before we hurried to our allotted task: to sweep, to mop, to polish. This way the whole house was kept clean, clattering with our busyness, while Mrs would urge us on with her booming stage voice: “Boys, boys! Not like that, like this!” seizing the mop from a boy's hand and applying it with vigour. Oh yes! She was an actress too, or at any rate she directed all our plays, tirelessly rehearsing till we spoke our lines with exaggerated feeling. In my first role I was a pirate, running my hands through a pile of doubloons and pieces of eight; a fascinating hoard of genuine old coins. I was a poor actor for I’d lose myself in daydreams inspired by the vibes of my surroundings, rather than attend to the social objectives. Both Mr and Mrs tried to coax me out of absent-mindedness, to little avail.
Today in recalling Mr and Mrs I feel a certain sense of family. They were more vivid than my actual parents, who were locked in destructive rows so that home was a battlefield strewn with wounded. Though I say this, I recall nothing: blessed oblivion. I was ready to gather crumbs of motherly affection from Mrs Brummell-Hicks when they were to be had; or from Matron, but no matron stayed long in the job. These women's attention was mingled with harsh compulsion, as when I got one of my whitlows, a mass of pus under a fingernail. They would make me stick my finger in scalding water for minutes at a time, once causing me to faint. Mrs was the first person in my life to notice my short-sightedness. Muttering against my mother, she took me to town in her stylish old Morris 8 to see an oculist and an optician. I was prescribed oval glasses like those of Franz Schubert. And that reminds me of her Percussion Orchestra, when I had just joined the school. She would play his Marche Militaire on the piano and I was assigned to strike the triangle at certain points, though I craved the drum or cymbals.
Mrs also complained at the shortfalls of my equipment measured against her mandatory Clothes List, which specified everything a boy must have, every item labelled with his name, from his trunk and his tuckbox down to a dozen handkerchiefs, ten pairs of socks, a brush and comb, and some cash for pocket money to be given to him weekly. According to my mother, she had to beg or steal every penny she spent on me, and this was part of the reason she was going to leave “that man”.
At least twice, when we were alone together, I called Nora Brummell-Hicks “Mummy” and then squirmed in embarrassment. Half a century later, I weigh up the place of Mr and Mrs in my emotional life. It was more fear than love. Their care was intermittent, momentary. They were no more involved with their boys than a ship’s captain with his passengers.
In later recurring dreams, that school house and the rms Rangitata which brought me to England were merged into one: an echoing space of staircases and galleries to get lost and search and yearn.

Guilty

From Ripley’s Believe It Or Not!

I’ve hinted that my headmaster, Montague Brummell-Hicks, viewed me as a boy in need of control and correction. He seemed to have dark suspicions of my character and this irked me from the earliest days, for I saw there were other boys, more handsome and sunny of disposition, whom he favoured. Though I was undeniably the cleverest in classroom pursuits, he always seemed to frown and brood when he contemplated my case.

It goes back to my earliest days in that school, or rather nights. It must have been in my first term (aged 6½), before I went to hospital. We were under the care of Matron, Miss Woolgar, in matters of washing and getting up and having our lights turned off at night. She was a motherly soul and what I remember best of her is being ill with ’flu. In the afternoon, she propped me up with pillows in a big armchair in her cosy day-room, which doubled as her sitting-room and a sick-bay for the walking wounded. She gave me Ripley’s Believe It or Not to read; a big book of amazing things from Indian Fakirs who went blind gazing at the sun; to nine-year-old mothers; monstrous human deformities; an American railroad worker who survived a heavy crowbar driven through his skull and brain and out the other side; 49 different spellings of Shakspear; an astonishing number of words beginning with sn- about the nose and matters nasal. It was one of the Omnibus editions published in the Thirties, but when I recently obtained a copy I found it was a bit slimmer than Miss Woolgar’s. Some of the articles I remember are not there.

After lights out, we would sometimes have pillow-fights in the dormitory by moonlight, or plan “midnight feasts”. Sometimes we would take turns telling ghost stories, or playing games which began with someone saying “It was a dark and stormy night . . .” Popular topics were pirates and highwaymen. One night a conversation took place whose details I have totally forgotten. It makes me wonder what else has been washed away in the waters of Lethe; or conversely, if anything is ever washed away. In this case, one sentence of four words stays beached, exposed on the shore, when all the rest has been scrubbed. The words were mine and once uttered, hung briefly in the air: words simple, bold, curious, innocent, yet naughty. They were incriminating words, a statement of intent, which, if they reached the wrong ears, would brand me a pervert, even if not followed up by action, which fortunately they were not, since the dormitory door opened as soon as they were uttered. The light went on, too suddenly for the boys out of bed to leap back in; revealing the headmaster, his face purple and distorted with rage. His fury could only be quenched by applying a cane to bare buttocks. There was no questioning, no trial. He wasn’t calm enough to speak. Afterwards, we were awed, bruised, sore from the beatings (administered to anyone who was out of bed when the door was opened; and of course to me). The incident was never spoken of again.

Mr Brummell-Hicks redoubled his snooping efforts thereafter, making additional restrictive rules which would have seemed irksome in a prison, designed to prevent activity behind closed doors, and set up Spartan regimes in which anything warm, comfortable or friendly was banished as if it would turn us all into women. If I remember correctly, to “behave like women” was his most scathing reproach. His policies upset Matron. In fact Matron wasn’t the same person for long, often lasting no longer than a term. I remember the headmaster supervising our periodic communal shower sessions. Hair shampoo was not unknown: it tended to smell of coal-tar. But he made us wash our hair with bars of soap, and scrub our bodies with brushes or bare hands, not fluffy cloths. Matron was still allowed to supervise our hygiene on other occasions, but there was a new obsession with bowel regulation. All boys must “go” in the mornings before lessons began, though this meant that we must queue for our turn. A commode chair was pressed into service, though it didn’t have the privacy of a cubicle. Matron muttered. She had been instructed to dose us with California Syrup of Figs, Cascara Sagrada and/or castor oil to persuade our digestions to conform. Matron dispensed these but if a boy was cut on the football field or tobogganing—I recall a boy Hartley with his legs cut to ribbons when his sledge hit the barbed wire at the bottom of the hill—it was Mr who poured on the stinging tincture of iodine.

At night we were allowed an insufficiency of blankets, which often kept me shivering awake. The senior dormitory was near to Mr & Mrs’ own bedroom. One boy who often wet the bed was made to have a string tied to his toe. The other end was threaded under doors so that Mr or Mrs could pull it in the night so that the boy could be awakened in the night.

I wonder if the headmaster’s negative attention directed at me would have subsided if another incident had not occurred a couple of years later. Clark and I became close friends. He was born in Burma, brought up by aunts in the nearby village and rather dark-complexioned. I imagine his father was white and his mother a native of the servant caste, but I knew these things only vaguely then. He taught me certain childish rhymes, so rhythmic they may have been designed for games with skipping-ropes. We were reported to Mr for chanting them. A beating would have been more tolerable, but our crime was noted in the book of Order Marks as “Filthy Language”. In some cases it was Mrs who assigned punishments for infringements noted in this book. In this way she would get tasks done in house or garden, such as sweep dead leaves and put them in sacks. But in this case it was Mr who determined a sentence of unheard-of harshness. It was the summer term and our leisure activities centred around a large muddy pond surrounded by overhanging trees. We swung on ropes over it, bathed in it, made rafts to float on it, made bamboo rods with floats of cork and matchsticks, so as to spend our leisure time in angling. Clark and I weren’t allowed to do any of these things or spend any time together alone. Our harsh punishment extended till two weeks before the end of term.

Games I played

Thanks Flickr / alida saxon

What distinguishes man from the other animals? I wish I had made a note of all the answers I’ve read. Perhaps someone somewhere has compiled a long list of them. Well here is another for the collection. What distinguishes man from the other animals is the vast spectrum of “normal”. Unlike ducks and pigeons, we don’t behave in standard predictable ways. (Ducks and pigeons? I can’t remember why I wrote that, must have been observing their behaviour.) How do we become what we are? Already in these memoirs I’m making important discoveries. It is a journey conducted in parallel with my reader, for you are just like me in being different from everyone else. Therefore you are not just like me. Hm. What I mean to say is that diversity is what we share and we are both engaged on the same quest, to discover “Why am I the way I am?”

As I delve into childhood memories—it’s a matter of “Seek and ye shall find”—I recognise the roots of my present behaviour and preferences. I ask myself how those roots originated but I don’t so far have answers. They might be innate, patterned in DNA that shaped my brain. Or they might be adaptations in my present incarnation that became fixed habits.

In my case a pattern developed of always, in any group of which I was a member, being the furthest from the centre: literally eccentric. When football or cricket was taking place on the playing fields of my childhood, I would be found at the boundary or beyond. The adjacent ploughed-field had greater fascination than the rapid transfer of a ball from one excited young sportsman to another. The rapidity of sport interfered with daydreaming. The material world gave out vibrations which had to be savoured before I could work out which way to turn, what to do next. This is what influenced my choice of game. If frisbee, skateboard or other such Californian devices had already been invented, or had my parents bestowed on me a bicycle, or a kite, then I might not have gone my own way and invented pastimes so far from the common pursuit.

I was frustrating the whole point of boarding-school, for its ethos centred in team games as training for Empire. Was this the reason my headmaster so resolutely refused to approve of me? Or was it that he saw in me signs of incipient homosexuality, of which more later, that must be stifled? Or perhaps he conflated both tendencies as equally undesirable and probably linked.

One of my earliest pastimes, in my first term at the school, was gathering “tobacco”. I had a tobacco tin and somehow I got the idea that the weed known as “broad-leaved plantain” could be smoked. I put leaves of this in the tin, with the intention of curing and offering them to my grandfather; or perhaps of smoking them myself.

The ploughed-field was dotted with fragments of pottery, none very ancient, especially pieces of clay pipe. At a later age, ten or even more, I collected them in a tobacco tin, perhaps the same one, and endeavoured to piece them together. I called it Archaeology but my headmaster dismissed my perseverance with undisguised contempt. It’s odd that both of these pastimes involved pipe-smoking. But Mr Sudell, my headmaster and my grandfather (whilst in his study) were seldom seen without a pipe, lit, being filled or the ashes being knocked out. It was candy that I craved, of course, but the adult vice somehow fascinated me.

The ploughed field had deposits of pure yellow clay, heavy and sticky, amongst the brown loam. This was something to gather and mould, to make things of and in the absence of a kiln, to allow my artefacts to dry by themselves over time.

I also discovered that I could attach a ball of clay to a springy stick and then with a movement of my wrist propel the projectile high into the air, where it reached the flock of birds circling overhead, but never hit one. My head was “in the clouds”! So in the winter months when other boys would gather round a goal mouth to play impromptu football in the breaks between lessons, I’d usually wander off to the ploughed furrows, happy in my own space. But when I did play football, I preferred the role of goalkeeper, for it involved less team co-operation than the other positions.

For long winter evenings many of us had stamp collections and we would swap freely. One boy started to give me the colourful stamps of the French Colonies, as gifts, not swaps. Eventually it became plain to us both that he was handing over his entire collection, the most extensive in the school, piecemeal. My parents were the poorest in the school, so I got less pocket money, a smaller set of fireworks for the Guy Fawkes celebrations, usually some gross deficiencies in the set of required items specified in the school’s Clothes List.

My stamp collection, newly expanded so easily by this bequest, gave me the experience of wealth. French colonials were beautiful: St Pierre et Miquelon, Djibouti, Reunion, Tahiti, the list was long. I don’t remember finding out where on the globe they were. I liked them but they were so easily acquired I had no sense of hoarding them possessively. I can’t remember but I must have handed them over to others when I left the school.

In my last term at the school, I remember whiling away the evenings playing cards. I think it was some kind of whist, but the main thing was the sugar-coated chocolate beans called Smarties that we used for gambling chips. We bought them at the school tuckshop. I remember becoming as rich in those as I had been in stamps, hoarding them, sorting them by colour, and of course eating them. I must have been twelve by the time I left that school, feeling mature, changing in some indefinable way, ready to move on.



PS revised 23/10/08