Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  After my mother died, we asked him where he would like to go for his birthday. He chose Jersey, because he had never been there. He took a bus from Coventry to Victoria coach station in London, where my wife and I met him and took him on to Gatwick airport. We hit a serious problem at customs. After he had set off the alarm on his way through, he was ordered to empty his pockets and out fell a whole jumble of knives, pocket scissors and other assorted sharp objects.

  When he was told he couldn’t take them on the plane, he got very cross, saying they were his property, he had owned them for over fifty years, and they had no right to take them from him. Tempers were frayed so badly that the head of security at Gatwick had to be summoned. She immediately berated my wife and myself for allowing him to bring all this stuff; but we hadn’t been there when he’d dressed and packed.

  One of the customs officers, more amused by the episode than his more senior colleagues, said to me: ‘It’s amazing how a man so old and so tiny can create such a rumpus.’ Eventually a compromise was reached and my wife was allowed to go back air-side, as they call it, and send the items to his home in Coventry by parcel from the post office in the Gatwick terminal.

  At the height of the row, the security people had taken a photo of the three of us. When my wife came back into departures and passed through various checkpoints before she could board the plane, she could see our photo coming up on all the computer terminals as her passport and boarding pass were checked. One official, looking at the picture, said: ‘He must be the oldest terrorist suspect ever!’

  Finally, Claire reached the plane, only just in time, and sat down beside us heaving for breath, having run most of the way. My father’s comment did nothing for her temper: ‘She took her time, didn’t she?’

  When I took my father into his hotel room in Jersey, he dug deep into a trouser pocket and fished out, with some satisfaction, yet another knife – used, he said, for taking stones out of horses’ hooves or from the tyres of bicycles – which had somehow escaped detection. ‘They think they’re so clever, these people, but they never found this,’ he said with some pride, as though he had won a major victory. I decided not to tell Claire about this.

  He was always firing off letters to the local paper in Coventry about anything that annoyed him, usually local matters but sometimes wider national or international issues. The frequency of these letters increased after my mother died – either because he had more time on his hands or because she wasn’t there to listen to his opinions or to tell him he was talking rubbish. When he died, the Coventry Telegraph ran a news story reporting the death of the paper’s most prolific correspondent.

  He had brought back two abiding memories from his army service in Italy: opera and gorgonzola cheese, which my sister and I were required to eat even though we hated it. While in Milan he had organised a visit for his company to La Scala opera house, where Beniamino Gigli was singing. The commanding officer at first vetoed it, but was then persuaded to change his mind and go along with them. I imbibed his love of opera, especially the romantic arias of Verdi and Puccini. At his funeral in 2002, he asked us to play the famous duet from The Pearl Fishers by Bizet.

  • • •

  My father comes into conversations between my wife and myself almost every day, mainly because I inherited his weakness for corny jokes and even weaker puns. When I utter one of these, my wife gives me a warning look and says: ‘Tom, stop it!’ I suppose it’s as good a way as any to be remembered.

  CHAPTER 2

  RICK

  For some reason I can’t explain (though a psychologist might), many of my friends throughout my life have been exceptionally tall. That was certainly true of my best boyhood friend, Rick Melville, whom I met at the age of eight as we were unloading furniture on our return to Coventry after being evacuated during the war. He was sitting on a wall nearby and watching us. We stayed in touch for the next sixty-six years.

  Rick was brilliant at all sports and came close to winning an England cap at rugby football. When he retired from playing for Coventry, then one of the country’s top clubs, he held the record for the number of tries scored in a career. He played in the same three-quarter line as two legendary England players, Peter Jackson and David Duckham. He was also a top-class sprinter, held the British junior long jump record for many years, and had a trial for Warwickshire at cricket.

  I have a picture of the two of us standing outside our front door in our caps and school uniforms on our first day at Bablake School, after we had passed the eleven-plus, with me coming up to his armpit. It is a rare picture of me wearing a cap, as I have always tried to resist headgear, even when I was an officer in the RAF.

  Rick’s size came in useful on our first day. There was a tradition at the school called ‘fuzzerising’, an initiation rite in which new boys were subjected to various forms of discomfort, such as having one’s head pushed down a flushing lavatory or being forced to sit on a piping-hot radiator. Because he was bigger than the bullies, Rick fought them all off and I avoided trouble by sticking close to him, as if to say: ‘I’m with him.’

  I had been firmly reminded of my lack of height when the headmaster picked me out from the front row at my first assembly. Clearly intrigued by my size, or lack of it, he asked me to join him on stage in front of the whole school. He asked me my name. ‘Trelford, sir,’ I declaimed loudly, to the amusement of the boys. ‘And how tall are you?’ he asked in apparent wonderment. ‘Four foot and half an inch, sir,’ I replied, puffing out my tiny chest in a way that provoked hysterical laughter.

  The headmaster then placed his hand on my shoulder and announced solemnly to the assembly: ‘Gentlemen, meet Mr Trelford, the smallest boy to be admitted to this school since it was founded by Queen Isabella in 1344.’ Cue more laughter and applause. I thought afterwards: how could he have known that I was the smallest boy ever admitted to the school? Were records kept through all those centuries?

  That wasn’t to be the end of the taunting over my lack of inches, however. At the gym in the afternoon we were all required to strip to our shorts and vests and to run around in a circle. The PT master gradually pulled out normal-looking boys until only two of us were left: a very fat boy called Stubbs, whose bouncy breasts caused much amusement, and little me. He put his hand on my head and said: ‘From now on this boy will be known as “Bruiser”.’

  I sometimes wonder what psychological effect these cruel barbs had on me. I wasn’t greatly upset because of the lesson I had learned from watching my father talk to the giant footballer George Mason, a lesson which can be roughly summarised as: ‘We may be shorter but we’re just as good as the rest of them.’

  But it may be no coincidence that I went on to make my mark on the school playing fields, especially at rugby. It was as though I had to prove myself in a physical way, to show that I was as tough, or even tougher, than the rest. It may also have sparked my ambition to be a pilot in the RAF. Who knows – if I had been left to myself and not singled out and mocked for my size, I might have eschewed virile pursuits and immersed myself in poetry or chamber music instead. I might have become a different man altogether.

  Rick and I soon teamed up with two other boys, Ray Stone and Jack Pilbin, and over the next few years the four of us went on to dominate all the school sports teams, especially rugby, but also cricket and athletics. We went everywhere together and became well known as a quartet at school, at a church youth club and around the neighbourhood. As we all lived within a couple of streets of each other, we got to know each other’s families too.

  Rick’s father had played centre-half for Blackburn Rovers and also appeared for Warwickshire at cricket. We went to watch him at Edgbaston after climbing aboard the train from Coventry as it slowed round a bend and stowing away until it reached New Street station in Birmingham, where we managed to slip through railings to avoid the guards. We had enough money to buy tickets for the game, but funded our lunch and return journey by collecting empty beer and lemonade bottles aroun
d the ground and returning them to a tent for two pence each.

  Jack’s father, a boozy though genial Geordie, took me to my first proper rugby match at Coundon Road, where I saw Coventry beat Aldershot Services by twenty-six points to three. I was hooked on the game for the rest of my life. Norman Pilbin took a shine to me and pronounced one day in front of the others: ‘This is the one who’ll go furthest in life. I’ll bet he becomes the first Baron Radford [the suburb of Coventry in which we lived].’ Sorry to have disappointed you, Norman.

  Rick was a wing three-quarter, big and very fast; Jack a burly centre; while Ray and I built a close partnership at half-back – he as a talented stand-off and me as a nippy scrum-half. Ray and I developed such an intuitive understanding that I seemed able to find him with a pass wherever he was. All four of us went on to play for the county schools team and we all had trials for Coventry. Rick was the most successful, but the rest of us played rugby at a reasonable level.

  When we were about seventeen, we started visiting country pubs – we had an older friend with an even older car. I still have a nightmare vision of several pints still waiting on a bar counter, with whisky chasers alongside, which I had to finish off or lose face with my mates. When I returned home and crept up to bed, I soon found I had to throw up. Alerted by the noise, my parents were standing outside the bathroom door in their dressing gowns when I emerged, with differing expressions on their faces.

  My father, predictably, looked prim and rather shocked; my mother, however, seemed to have a smile close to the surface. When I tackled her about this some years later, she said: ‘I was just so relieved to see that there was some Gilchrist in you and you weren’t one of those strait-laced Trelfords.’

  When I returned to Bablake for my last year, the headmaster asked to see me and walked me up the staircase to his room. He was a huge man called Seaborne, who seemed to model himself on Dr Arnold of Rugby School, swishing around the place in his gown as if Bablake was a grander school than it was – up there, if not with Eton and Harrow, then at least with places like Rugby.

  ‘It would appear’, he said, with ill-disguised reluctance, ‘that I have no alternative but to make you head of the school. You were first in the public examinations, you are captain of cricket, editor of the school magazine, and you are the unanimous choice of the senior common room.’ When we reached his office, he hinted at the source of his reservations: ‘I want you to promise to get your hair cut. I don’t want the captain of Bablake School looking like an advertisement for the Kleeneze brush company.’

  He went on, as if musing to himself: ‘Why is it that small men reach such positions of power? I’m thinking of people like Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini.’ I was rather startled to find myself in such a galère of evil men, the last three of whom had died just a few years before. I never got my hair cut short. Nor did I ever wear my school cap, which used to puzzle young boys when I punished them for failing to wear theirs.

  The mention of the school magazine reminds me of the times I used to spend at the printer’s, trying to put the edition together. Sometimes the printer would say to me: ‘Don (I was always called Don, rather than Donald, until I joined The Observer), we’re still a few inches short on this page,’ and I would knock out a quick sonnet in biro on a scrap of paper to fit the page.

  • • •

  After school, I went into the RAF while Ray went to Imperial College in London and played rugby for Surrey. Whenever we were in Coventry we tried to get a game together for the Old Wheatleyans, the Bablake old boys’ team. On one Saturday, however, Ray was due to play for nearby Kenilworth while I played for the Old Wheats. We arranged to meet after our respective games in Broadgate, the city centre, and go on to the pictures. I waited for over an hour for Ray, but he never turned up.

  Or did he? At one point, as I was waiting, I was sure I saw him in a crowd of people that swept past me and went on through a passage at the side of the Owen Owen department store. He was wearing his usual raincoat. I shouted after him, but he didn’t hear me. After a time, I gave up, bought a copy of the Pink ’Un, the Coventry Evening Telegraph’s Saturday sports paper, and caught a bus back home.

  Upstairs on the bus I looked up the reports of our matches. The report of Ray’s match began: ‘A minute’s silence was observed before today’s game in memory of the Kenilworth fly-half, Raymond Stone, aged twenty-one, who was killed last night when his car struck a tree near Stoneleigh Abbey.’ I was naturally dumbfounded, not just by the tragic news itself, but by the fact that I had just seen him, or thought I had.

  I know, I know, I was expecting to see him at any moment and was therefore easily misled into thinking I had seen him when somebody similar went by. My rational mind understands that, but part of me still says: ‘I saw him. It was Ray.’ When I wrote about this curious experience in The Spectator many years later, my story started being quoted in books about the paranormal. Alan Watkins, then my political columnist on The Observer, was heard to say: ‘The editor’s seeing ghosts.’

  Jack Pilbin also met a tragic end. At the age of forty-five he hanged himself because he was hopelessly in debt. He didn’t go gambling, so nobody, including the Coroner, could work out how his finances had got into such a terrible mess. I remember the night he met his wife. We had all gone to a Christmas dance where boys from Bablake and our rivals, King Henry VIII, mixed with girls from neighbouring schools. I met my first wife, Jan, at a similar dance when she was sixteen.

  Jack was a rugged individual with a broken nose who smoked and swore a lot and seemed to model himself on Humphrey Bogart. We were all astonished when he took up with a girl from the local convent school who was simply exquisite. Neat, pretty and with the demeanour of a young nun, she seemed the very antithesis of everything about Jack Pilbin. Nonetheless, they married and were evidently happy until his sudden death.

  I was driven up the M1 to his funeral from London by my Observer driver, Jimmy Rennie. We arrived late and joined the hundreds of people who couldn’t get in to the overcrowded church and listened to the service through a loudspeaker outside. Jack had been a well-known Midlands rugby coach and I saw huge prop forwards crying uncontrollably. The irony was that a whip-round among these grieving friends would probably have solved the financial problem that drove Jack to his death.

  Rick had suffered a serious back injury towards the end of his rugby career. My father had been one of the Red Cross ambulance volunteers who went on to the field to help carry him off during the match. The club doctor said to Rick in the dressing room: ‘You’ll probably be playing again within six weeks, but you’ll really feel the effects of this injury in about thirty years’ time.’ Rick eventually contracted Parkinson’s disease and died at seventy-four, leaving me as the only survivor of our schoolboy quartet.

  • • •

  When I went up from school for an interview at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, the cross-country trains from Coventry, via Bletchley, got me there several hours late, so that I missed my slot by a considerable margin. Undeterred by this, I turned up at the porter’s lodge and said I had an appointment with Brigadier Henn, who was an English lecturer and also president of the college.

  After knocking hesitantly on the door of his rooms, I heard a distant voice shout: ‘Enter!’ So I ventured into a large study, with books stacked to the ceiling on all the walls, to find it apparently empty. Then a booming voice asked: ‘Who are you?’ I managed to trace the voice to a bear of a man perched perilously on a ladder high up among the books.

  When I explained who I was and how I had missed my interview that morning, I expected him to tell me to clear off. Instead, to my amazement, he recited the line, ‘O lurcher-loving collier, black as night’, then demanded that I finish the poem. Luckily, I was heavily into Auden at the time and was able to do as he asked.

  Then came another quotation from the man on the ladder, whose face I still hadn’t seen. ‘“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” What
does the word “construction” mean in that sentence?’ I recognised the line from Macbeth and explained that the word came from ‘construe’. After a bit more of this literary ping-pong, he finally came down the ladder and shook my hand.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid we gave all our scholarships away this morning. But I know James Winny at Selwyn was very disappointed with his scholarship candidates today. I’ll ask him over for tea to see if he has anything left. You wait outside.’ In due course, Winny arrived, we had tea, and he offered me an Open Exhibition at Selwyn College without asking me a single question about English literature.

  When I returned to school the next day, the headmaster called me in and said I had been offered a place at Pembroke College and an exhibition at Selwyn. He added: ‘You will, of course, accept the kudos of the exhibition. I have informed the colleges accordingly.’ He gave me a slip of paper saying that the school would have a day off in honour of my award. I had to carry this message round the school to be read out in every classroom. The clapping and cheers this evoked were some compensation, I reflected, for the mocking laughter that had greeted me on my first day at the school.

  • • •

  I was to enjoy the lectures of T. R. Henn, especially on his fellow Irishman Yeats, when I eventually got to Cambridge two years later, after my National Service, though he was treated as a bit of a joke by some students for his portentous voice and brisk military manner. He was described by F. R. Leavis as ‘the red-faced brigadier of King’s Parade’.

  On one occasion, when Henn was lecturing on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, some loose pages from the ancient paperback book he was quoting from fell to the floor. This brought sniggering laughter from his listeners. I shall never forget the old Brigadier’s response as he looked up from his haunches while gathering up the missing pages. ‘You may laugh,’ he cried in a passionate voice that was close to tears, ‘but this was all that held body and soul together during the war.’ The laughter stopped.