The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  I sat gloomily in the front of our old car, driving south to the Windsor School in Hamm. To me, the journey dragged on, but we arrived after only 30 miles to the place where I was to be abandoned. It was a monotony of identical and featureless buildings, each of red-brick and five floors, lined up next to a cricket field. Previously living quarters for German soldiers, they were now school dormitories. These former barracks were divided into school houses, and named by the conquering British after homeland castles: Caernarvon, Edinburgh, Marlborough, Hillsborough, and my house, Balmoral.

  Each dormitory had empty cream walls, a single ceiling light with a white conical shade, and six iron-framed beds with a small locker beside each. There were showers and sinks for everyone at the end of the corridor, and trouble from matron if we failed to leap from our beds and head straight for them at the sound of the morning bell. We learned to make our own beds and clean our dorms, which meant dusting and polishing the brown linoleum floor. Boys from the tidiest dorm got to stay up an hour after lights out on Sunday and listen to the radio.

  At night, a duty master prowled the corridors with a large white plimsoll gym shoe. If one boy in a dorm was caught talking, the duty master would line up all six for a swipe of his shoe across our pyjama-clad backsides. One master hit us much, much harder than the others. Perhaps it gave him some secret pleasure, but we made sure we kept quiet when he was on duty.

  We wore school uniforms of crimson jackets and grey flannel trousers. On the jacket breast-pocket was the school badge, bearing the motto ‘Concordia,’ which was at odds with the accompanying motif of castle turrets and crossed swords.

  I still have the claret-coloured plastic writing compendium my parents gave me with their instructions to write each Sunday. Even now, the smell of it brings back the misery and abandonment I had felt; the desperate knowledge that no matter how much I wanted, I could not see or speak to my family. My life was in the hands of people I didn’t know or like. I had to live with boys I had never met and didn’t choose. Everywhere were hundreds of strange people I couldn’t escape. I felt crowded and lonely at the same time.

  With no choice but to assimilate into this unwelcoming world, the torment slowly eased. I ended up tougher, more confident, and able to stand up to occasional bullies. I also learned to satisfy prowling night masters by exaggerating the suffering inflicted by the great white plimsoll. I developed a lifelong antipathy to body contact sports after 45 seconds on a rugby field, a crushing tackle, and the distant voice of the sports master: ‘Hinton, Hinton, answer me. What day is it? What date is your birthday?’ I became the only boy in the St Boniface chapel choir, sang the descant, didn’t care about the mockery of rugby-playing schoolmates, and fainted once while carrying the cross into church. At an ecumenical service, the Protestant soprano sang ‘Ave Maria’ with the Catholic contralto and it was easily the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. ‘Ave Maria’ also taught me how repetition can ruin great music.

  At the age of 11 in the 1950s, British children were divided into two groups by the Eleven-Plus exam. Those who passed were identified as bright children who would receive a more academic ‘grammar school’ education. This meant studying other languages, English literature, and more advanced science and mathematics, in order to prepare for university and the professions. The rest were classified as better suited to more practical pursuits and attended ‘secondary modern’ classes. While grammar kids studied Latin and the classics, the others spent more time learning to, as it was described, ‘work with their hands’ at woodwork, metalwork, and digging the ground to grow vegetables in ‘rural science’.

  Before arriving at Hamm, I took my Eleven-Plus exam. I never heard the result, but must have done all right because I was placed into a grammar school class. We started learning French, and were told we would study Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

  All new arrivals were interviewed, and my interview happened two weeks after I arrived. I sat beside the teacher, whose desk was facing a window overlooking the cricket pitch. He didn’t look up from his desk, where there was a book for his notes and a sheet of paper from which he read questions. There was one question and answer I never forgot:

  ‘What do you want to do when you finish your education?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet, sir, but I want to be either an actor or a car mechanic.’

  The actor part of the answer was true — I appeared in school plays and amateur dramatics until I was 20. But a car mechanic? I never understood why I said that; the words came from nowhere. I had an illustrated book at home with a chapter about the internal combustion engine and had been fascinated that millions of sparks made car wheels go round, but I had never wanted to be a mechanic.

  I knew at once I had given an unwelcome answer. The master shook his head slightly and wrote a note. ‘We don’t really teach acting, but we can certainly help you understand how cars work,’ he told me. And that was that. I became a ‘secondary modern’ boy, never to take another French class or study Great Expectations.

  In Britain, grammar and secondary modern educations were segregated into different schools. At Windsor, we were integrated in dorms but went to separate classes. I was looking through the locked troop ship gate at those first-class passengers all over again.

  I learned to operate a lathe, bend hot metal over an anvil, make a dovetail joint, and build a trellis to grow peas. I hated it. These were decent and important things to learn, if you wanted to, and if you were good at them, but I didn’t want to and was no good at them anyway. Never again have I sown a seed or planed a piece of wood. To be fair, there was a little literature, too. I was once made to learn William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ by heart — as a punishment for talking in class.

  For years, the testament to my education was not a framed certificate, but the white-painted wrought-iron lamp on my parents’ television. It was still there in my thirties, rocking on its misshapen base.

  We left for Dad’s next posting, Singapore, in November 1956. Before leaving West Germany — on 5 May 1955 — the country gained full sovereignty and was allowed to establish a military force and manufacture weapons. It would be 35 years before the fall of the Iron Curtain and the reunification of West and East Germany.

  The Cold War was still intense: just before we left, the Soviet Army, killing thousands of people, crushed an uprising in Hungary. Hungary was a long way from Hamm — about six hundred miles east on the other side of Austria — but the Hungarian Revolution was hugely important to us. Hamm was a British Forces school, and we had already been told that the Soviet Union was now our enemy and determined to rule all Europe. A teacher told us about the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and that our fathers were part of a military alliance pledged to defend Western Europe against ‘aggression.’ It was the first time I heard the word aggression. Dad told me not to worry about Hungary, that it was the Russians claiming back their own territory, and that they would never invade West Germany.

  Singapore was on the tip of the Malay Peninsula, 85 miles north of the equator, where the climate had no clear seasons except for wet and wetter, and the temperature hovered between the mid-seventies and mid-eighties. It was a rainforest world, luxuriantly green compared with the sands of North Africa. Huge open drains along the streets were torrents during downpours. Tropical surprises became routine: a long emerald snake coiled round a palm tree; the brown-eyed gaze of a long-tailed macaque monkey; a lizard darting across our living room wall; a raucous cloud of colourful birds. There was no air conditioning and our windows were always open, each covered with wrought-iron lattices. I learned a new word: acclimatise. We were instructed how to cope with the weather and avoid exertion for at least three weeks while our bodies adjusted.

  The people looked strange and small, and smelt different. They walked differently, too, the women with quick, short, sliding steps. They would sit without chairs outside shops and front doors, their bottoms resting o
n their heels in total comfort, eating from bowls held to their lips, scooping rice with chopsticks. In a miracle of balance and strength, tiny women transported towering bundles balanced on their heads.

  Our first Singapore home was in the Serangoon Gardens Estate, which had been built after the war for British families. It was a Surrey suburb with an Asian twist. The streets were called Brighton Avenue, Medway Drive, and Chislehurst Grove. We lived in a spacious bungalow with a garden and room for a live-in maid. Our home was opulent, especially compared with Bootle, and far above the local living standards.

  We bought our first record player, but only ever had four long-playing records. There was Salad Days, a musical about upper-class university life and a magical piano that made people dance, written by Julian Slade, an Old Etonian; the Chopin nocturnes played by a little-known Dutch pianist, Cor de Groot; Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones; and Deep in My Heart, the soundtrack of a 1954 film about the composer Sigmund Romberg, featuring Rosemary Clooney, Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, and Howard Keel. I played them for hours, and knew every note and every word.

  I went to day school in Singapore — to Alexandra Secondary Modern. James Dean had died in his speeding Porsche the year before and a lot of boys were copying his look — acting tough and sulky, with the collars of their white school shirts turned up, and their hair greased back at the sides and styled high at the front. Almost all the boys seemed to carry flick knives — they were easy to find in Singapore — and would occasionally threaten each other with them, although I never saw an actual knife fight. I quickly copied them, but I never told Mum about the knife.

  Just as in other schools, we were given daily milk, only in Singapore it came in cartons rather than bottles, which meant milk bombing was common. Cartons were thrown from an upper balcony into the playground; the heat guaranteed every milk-soaked target would be rancid by the time the home bell sounded. Milk bombing was a serious offence but I was never caught.

  During this time, British and Commonwealth troops were involved in a conflict known as the Malayan Emergency, a Communist insurgency in Malaya, which was only 14 miles from Singapore across the Straits of Johor. Dad was never sent there, but we travelled back to Britain on the same ship as members of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and one soldier had a missing arm. The Malayan Emergency lasted 12 years, until 1960. More than 500 British and Commonwealth soldiers were killed.

  My sister fell in love in Singapore. She was working as a secretary with the Australian Army and brought home a boy from Adelaide. Don Duberal was a blond, curly-haired corporal with a cocky Australian style, an unfamiliar accent, and a strange dialect. I learned phrases like ‘Dinkum’, which meant true or honest; ‘I’m feeling crook’, which usually meant a hangover; and, to be used in moments of celebration, such as when Don won on the horses, ‘You beauty’.

  Don was posted to Singapore after spending time in Malaya. He liked horse racing and beer, and giving my mother cheek. This immediately endeared him to Dad, but definitely not Mum, whose relationship with her future son-in-law never recovered from the night he arrived at our place after celebrating another good bet. Under his arm was a struggling chicken, purchased with his winnings and presented to my mother for family dinner. Helpfully, but not soberly, Don volunteered for the task of killing the bird. He held it down on a cutting board, took unsteady aim, and severed its head with a kitchen knife. Carelessly, he did so while holding only the chicken’s head, and the decapitated body immediately took off in my house-proud mother’s immaculate kitchen. It bounced crazily around us to the sound of Mum’s screams and the crash of crockery and glassware, blood spraying from its neck over the white walls and kitchen cabinets. Finally, it landed on top of the cooker, dead at last. Our kitchen looked like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino film. Don’s rapid retreat prevented an actual homicide. Don and Mum were never best friends, but I think Mum was privately proud years later when he retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel.

  Singapore was my father’s final posting before he would return to ‘civvy street’. Singapore was still a colony and the British had a vast military base on the island. As well as thousands of army and navy personnel and their families, the base employed ten per cent of the local population. A young Cambridge-educated lawyer, Lee Kuan Yew, who would become the founding father of the nation, led demands for independence. When elections were held in Singapore, our school would close and British families had to stay at home. Singapore ceased to be a colony in 1963 after 144 years of British rule. It became a republic two years later when it left the Federation of Malaysia.

  Mal and Don married in Singapore in 1958. We had the reception at our newly built quarters on an army housing estate, and Dad did the catering. They sailed away to live in Adelaide, and for Mum it was like a death in the family. She hardly spoke for weeks and ate almost nothing. She was so thin I thought she might die, but Dad didn’t seem to know what to do; I don’t think it occurred to either of them that she needed medical attention.

  We returned to England soon after, and when Dad left the Army we had to decide where to live. I think Mum had made her mind up already to take us all to Adelaide, but Dad looked at other options. Bootle was ruled out quickly. We considered Canada, but decided it was too cold after all those hot weather years. New Zealand looked attractive, but at nearly 50 Dad was too old to be accepted there as a migrant.

  In May 1959, after my final months of school at Maghull Secondary Modern near Liverpool, where I was awarded a C-minus in metalwork for that wrought-iron lamp, we left Southampton for Adelaide on the P&O liner SS Orion. Our passage was subsidised by the Australian government, at that time engaged in a mass immigration programme to populate the country. The four-week voyage cost migrants £12 for each adult, but children went free.

  I had already written to the The Advertiser, Adelaide’s morning newspaper, looking for a job. I knew it was useless to stay at school; my education had been too haphazard. I had been dropped, at random times of the school year, into one Army school after another, and left to catch up with the class. Each time I arrived, they seemed to be teaching what I had learned in a previous school. Apart from woodwork and metalwork, I had heard the same lessons over and over: Britain in the Iron and Bronze Ages; the Roman conquest; medieval crop rotation. I sat through at least three introductions to Pythagoras’s Theorem. I also wasn’t much of a student — even in secondary modern, my grades were modest with the exception of English ‘composition’.

  I had seen a lot of the world, but felt apart from it most of the time. In each new place we remained on the edge, in our own parallel ‘colonial’ world. Maybe it was a culture of detachment borne out of years of ‘occupying’, and a sense we were better than the people we lived among — wealthier, smarter, and cleaner. We never mixed with the natives, or ate their food. In Singapore, food carts would pass the house, their luscious smell coming through the windows, while we ate chops and chips. Today, much of what I experienced is familiar to everyone through television and cheap travel, but then it was utterly new.

  It didn’t help me pass an exam, but I gathered a lot of informal knowledge and experience of the world. For instance, I became a worldwide authority on different methods of corporal punishment. Teachers like Mr Bryant in Münster kept a cane in the classroom corner, visible and menacing. The night masters at Hamm stalked the corridors with the great white plimsoll. In the Scottish Highlands, where we were in transit for six months at the Highland Hotel in Strathpeffer, each teacher kept a thick leather strap in their desks, designed for the purpose of pain. These straps were a foot or so long, three inches wide, and cut in narrow strips at the end where it struck the hand — my hands had blisters for weeks before the skin hardened. In Maghull on Merseyside, teachers used the cane but also improvised. At lunch, it was common for a talkative pupil to receive a hard slap across the back of the head; my face landed once in a plate of semolina. In Singapore, there was more ceremony; the hea
dmaster handed out all canings and an appointment would be made for the following day, adding to the punishment by giving the pupil a long night to live in dread. I know of no ongoing cases of historic school assault; teachers must have been given a blanket pardon.

  Without the help or support of a school, I had discovered newspapers and narrowed my career choices to two: I wanted to be a journalist or an actor. The acting ambition faded fast in Adelaide, which was not a theatrical mecca. I did a lot of amateur performances and wrote to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York. Their replies were not encouraging.

  I was 11 when I began to think about working in newspapers. I didn’t grow up on the posh side of newspapers; the literature in my life was in the columns of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail. The English papers arrived each day, one day late, at our Münster flat. The Mail was an unwieldy broadsheet and the Mirror had huge headlines and more photos. I liked the Mirror better. While we lived in Germany, the Mirror launched Junior Mirror for children, and I collected all but one edition before it ceased publishing. It was the first time I was associated with the closing of a publication, but not the last.

  The first big newspaper story I remember was about Ruth Ellis, a nightclub hostess who was hanged for murder at Holloway Prison in London on 13 July 1955. The story was on the front page of the Daily Mirror and started with these words: ‘It’s a fine day for haymaking. A fine day for fishing. A fine day for lolling in the sunshine. And if you feel that way — and I mourn to say millions of you do — it’s a fine day for a hanging.’