The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  Every summer on the First Sunday After the Derby (it is not thus described in the Book of Common Prayer but so many boys of noble birth had racehorse owner fathers that at Heatherdown, it far outranked Rogation Sunday, the Sunday after Advent, and the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity) a prize was given to the boy with the most beautiful garden. Each boy had one about the size of a lavatory that in a small commercial hotel, but immense ingenuity and forethought was displayed by the owners. Actually, these allotments were status symbols of the worst kind, and boys whose family estates employed an army of gardeners proudly displayed the most exotic flowers and shrubs, delivered for planting hot from the family greenhouses while the more modest smallholders nurtured colourful annuals and arranged them in intricate patterns.

  I could only manage a bi-annual crop of mustard and cress.

  The year that Humorist won the Derby saw that rare phenomenon, a drought in England, and my crop, carefully timed for the Flower Show, failed, burned to a crisp.

  By now the self-appointed jester to the upper classes, I decided to fill the gap, and creeping out of the dormitory after dark, I made my way downstairs and flitting from tree to tree in the moonlight, arrived at a well-known gap in the wall which separated Heatherdown from Heathfield—the girls’ school next door.

  From preliminary reconnaissance, I knew that this gap opened on to the kitchen garden. I selected a huge vegetable marrow plant, pulled it up by the roots and once safely back on the male side of the wall, hid it behind a piece of corrugated iron. It took some while and several near heart attacks but I finally made it back to bed. The next morning I retrieved the marrow and in the hubbub caused by the arrival of other boys’ parents in Daimlers and Rolls-Royces, managed to plant my prize on my poor piece of desert.

  It didn’t go down very well. The Countess of Jersey—one of the parents—presented the prizes.

  She didn’t give one to me and later, I was caned again by a no longer affable Sammy Day: not for making a nonsense of the Flower Show which could have been justified—but for stealing which put a totally different connotation on the thing.

  After this, I went rapidly downhill from popular school clown to unpopular school nuisance. Striving to maintain my waning reputation, I fell in the lake and nearly drowned, purposely split the seat of my trousers on the school walk through Ascot and was caught trying to get into the Racecourse—a hideous crime. Poor Brian Franks, a Bembridge friend, near death’s door with pneumonia at Wixenford, a school nearby, received from me on the day of his ‘crisis’, a large chocolate box inside which was a smaller box, then a smaller box and so on down the scale to a match box with a piece of dog’s mess in it.

  Not a funny joke, especially for the Matron who opened it, but then I didn’t know Brian was ill.

  Brian↓ overcame his illness and my gift and has remained a life-long friend but the Matron took a dim view, the smoke signals went up between Wixenford and Heatherdown and Sammy Day decided that his school could get along without me.

  ≡ Later as a Lieut.-Col. in the Special Air Services in World War II, Brian, for great gallantry after being dropped behind the German lines, was decorated with the D.S. O. and M.C. It is rather depressing to think that his mother complained to mine because I told him the facts of life when we were both ten years old. He, not believing this phenomenal piece of news, had asked her for up-to-date information.

  I was ten and a half when I was expelled.

  ∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧

  TWO

  THere is a Chinese proverb to the effect that when everything in the garden is at its most beautiful, an ill wind blows the seeds of weeds and suddenly, when least expected, all is ugliness.

  The decision to remove me from Heatherdown, I am sure, was not taken lightly because in those days expulsion from school was tantamount to ruin for a boy of my age. Public schools with bulging waiting lists could pick and choose among far more desirable applicants and any boy without a public school education started life at an incalculable disadvantage. Sure enough my mother soon received a polite letter from Mr. Tuppy Headlam for whose house at Eton I had hopefully been entered, saying that unfortunately, he had decided that he was going to have to ‘shorten his entry list etc. etc.’ But of this I knew nothing. It was the end of term anyway, and in the excitement I noticed no chill on the part of Sammy Day, nor any of the other masters, as I said goodbye and went off whooping and hollering with the rest of the boys to board the school train for the trip to London. On arrival at Waterloo Station, the shouting, laughing hysterically happy boys were clutched to parental bosoms while eyes were averted from filthy nails, grease spots and ink stains.

  I braced myself for my usual encounter with ‘Tommy’. He was enlisted on these occasions to meet the school train at one platform, collect my trunk and see me safely ensconced in a third-class compartment on the train for Portsmouth Harbour where my mothei would be waiting to take me on the ferry across the Solent to Ryde and thence to my beloved Rose Cottage, Bembridge, I.W. Once this had been accomplished, Tommy’s contribution to the proceedings ended.

  ‘Tommy’ was easily identifiable. Above his beetling eyebrows and Duke of Wellington nose, he wore a top hat, the wont of his ilk whenever the King was in London. He bore down upon me, uttered no word of greeting and with en imperious gesture of his umbrella commanded me to follow.

  Everything so far had been perfectly normal. He hardly ever wasted conversation on me, so the silent march through the station following a porter with my trunk gave me no sense of foreboding.

  Soon I was alone in a sooty compartment that smelled of stale smoke and orange peel, watching the retreating figure of my step-father stalking towards the exit. Hanging out of the window I saw him pause and speak to the guard and point in my direction. The guard nodded his understanding. Soon we were off.

  ‘I sat back and savoured the delicious aroma of my compartment, then, after examining the framed, faded pictures of Freshwater Bay and Shanklin, I snuggled into my corner seat, gazed out of the window and gave myself up to delicious anticipation of the four weeks’ holiday ahead.

  My mother had beautiful teeth and a beautiful smile. I imagined her standing by the barrier, the Harbour behind her, waiting for me. Would I run to meet her as I longed to do? No, I thought, the little kids at Waterloo had looked pretty soppy doing that; I would play the whole thing cool—saunter, that’s what I’d do, saunter, and then suddenly, shove out my hand and give her the wooden bracket I had made for her in the carpentry class. I had clutched this bracket in my hand wrapped in brown paper ever since I left Heatherdown.

  Two hours later, the green Hampshire countryside gave way to the drab outskirts of Portsmouth and as the train slowed down for its first stop, Portsmouth Town, I looked down into the busy heart of the city—another five minutes, ten at the most and I would see my mother and the holidays really would start. I wondered if the tyres of my bicycle were flat and if Grizel and Joyce were there and above all if Brian Franks was back from Wixenford yet. Max I knew was away on a six months’ training cruise as a cadet on H.M. S. Thunderer but I squirmed with excitement, little knowing that the Chinese wind had blown a whole car load of weeds into my garden and I was, at that very moment, waist deep in nettles.

  The train stopped. The guard opened the door, jerked his thumb in my direction and addressed someone behind him. That’s the little bastard.’

  A gigantic man in a trench coat with a magenta coloured face and tufts of hair sprouting on his cheek bones, filled the doorway.

  ‘Get your things,’ he commanded, ‘you are coming with me.7

  ‘No, sir,’ I quavered, ‘my mother is waiting for me at the next stop.’

  ‘Don’t argue, get your bloody things.’

  Stupefied with fear, I cowered into my corner.

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ said the man to the guard, ‘get his bloody things down, will you? I’ll lug him out.’

  With that, while the guard lowered my suitcase and mackintosh, this hu
ge creature picked me up bodily. I grabbed wildly at the luggage rack as I was carried out and dropped my mother’s bracket. I don’t think I fought much or even cried. I was paralysed with terror.

  I was dragged along the platform, outside into the station yard and shoved into an ancient car.

  ‘What are you doing with that little boy?’ asked a woman with a baby. ‘Mind your own fucking business,’ was the answer. I noticed a heavy smell of spirits.

  Through Portsmouth we lurched and out to the genteel suburbs of Southsea. I now sobbed uncontrollably. My brain refused to consider what could be happening to me. I cried for my mother.

  ‘Stop that bloody noise and when you do, I’ll tell you where you’re going.’ My sobs dried up into a snivelling kind of hiccups.

  ‘First of all, you have been expelled from Heatherdown because you are a dirty little shit. You are not going home for the holidays, you are staying here with me and if you don’t behave yourself, I’ll tan the arse off you—Any questions?’

  I shall always remember Southsea Common: flat, greasy, wet and windswept, with a dejected flock of dirty sheep morosely munching its balding surface. Halfway across he stopped the car and slapped me hard several times across the face.

  ‘Stop it, for Christ’s sake…You’re not a bloody girl.’

  I was still whimpering with fear when we arrived at a dreary house in a shoddy row. Grimy net curtains and an aspidistra filled half of a bleak downstairs window which looked on to a brick path and a muddy garden: the other half was filled by the curious faces of half a dozen boys. Commander Bollard ran a school for ‘difficult’ boys.

  I don’t know how my stepfather found him. He was an unlovable man who fulminated constantly against the terrible injustice he had suffered by being ‘axed’ from the Navy when a promising Lieutenant-Commander. Now he and his thin-lipped, blue-veined, tweedy, terribly ‘refained’ wife added to his meagre pension and indulged their mutual passion for pink gin by taking in a dozen or so boarders.

  The boarders were without exception pretty hard cases. Nearly all had been expelled from one or more schools and despairing parents had committed them to the tender care of Commander and Mrs. Bollard, hoping that stern discipline would work where kindness or indiference had so far failed. A few eventually pulled themselves together and clawed their way back to acceptance by lesser public schools. Others ran away and joined the merchant navy. Several ended up in Borstal.

  The gallant Commander laid about him with a will on the smallest excuse, and there was hardly a bottom in the house that did not bear witness to his Dickensian brutality.

  We were treated like young criminals and soon began to feel that we might as well behave like them. Pocket money was not allowed as part of our ‘cure’, but extra food was essential because the gin-sodden labours of Mrs. Bollard only half-filled our bellies.

  The house was a three-storeyed rabbit warren and terribly over-populated, but oh! it was clean. We scrubbed and rescrubbed every inch of it daily. It must have been the only building in existence where the wooden floors were holystoned twice a day. Oil lamps had to be spotless too—there, was no electric light—and an ill-trimmed wick was evilsmelling evidence of highly punishable inefficiency.

  The ghastly dining-room was called the ‘Gun Room’, the kitchen ‘the Galley’, the cellar ‘the Brig’ and so forth. We did not sleep in hammocks but on wooden shelves, four to a room. The Commander and his wife prowled about at night in stockinged feet hoping to catch us talking.

  A couple of grey-faced ex-schoolmasters came every day to give us almost continuous lessons and there were no games. Saturday afternoons were free and we made full use of them.

  One of the few useful things I learned there was the Morse Code which the Commander taught himself. I suspect it was all he knew but it made it unnecessary to speak when talking after lights out. It did, however, make flashlights and batteries an essential part of our survival kit. These were procured in the same way as food—by stealing.

  On Saturday afternoons, ‘the ship’s company’, as the Commander liked to refer to his chars, split up into highly organised gangs of four to six an went shop-lifting for chocolate, condensed milk, cakes, batteries, flashlights, and other essentials.

  Every day was torture for me. I received no word from my mother and when, once I borrowed enough money, sevenpence I believe, to put through a telephone call to wish her a happy Easter, somebody at Rose Cottage hung up as soon as they heard my voice. Feeling a complete outcast and worst of all, within sight of Bembridge seven miles away across the water, I gradually became the best and most dedicated ‘front man’ in the establishment.

  ‘Curly’ and ‘Dusty’ were the two unchallenged gang leaders. I worked mostly in Curly’s group. A large foxy-faced boy with a mop of sandy hair, protruding teeth and freckles, he called the shots on Saturdays. He was a brilliant organiser.

  On Saturday mornings he decided exactly what was to be lifted during the afternoon and it was never an excessive amount—food for consumption during the coming week or saleable goods to provide purchasing power. Curly knew a ‘fence’ in Southampton who worked with smugglers in the merchant navy and with the exception of our most ambitious effort, a ‘hot’ motorcycle, which had to be dumped in a chalk quarry on the Downs, this man took everything we had to offer.

  One Saturday I was paid the supreme compliment of being chosen to travel with Curly on the bus to Southampton to visit the ‘fence’.

  Curly had decided that as summer was coming on, thin cotton shirts and singlets would be most acceptable to the ‘fence’s’ regular customers—sailors heading for the Indian Ocean, Dakar or Panama. We lifted that day about two dozen saleable articles. As front man for candy, cigarettes and buns, my job was simple: to open big blue eyes wide and engage the owner of a tobacconist’s or cake shop in long conversation about the price of various items which I hoped to be able to buy for my crippled uncle in hospital. While this was going on, one or two of the rest of the gang pocketed necessities from the far end of the counter. It was easy, in the small shops but the big stores, with the possibility of store detectives, called for a more advanced technique—the marbles.

  Once I saw that ‘the lifters’ were exactly in position for their grab, I burst’a large paper bag full of glass marbles. The crash of falling glass turned all heads—many willing souls stooped to aid the poor little boy who even on occasions could summon up a few tears of embarrassment. We never ‘worked’ the same store twice.

  Three weeks passed and as a relief from the Commander’s crude and vicious discipline—I once spent a whole day in ‘the brig’: alone in the darkness of the cellar listening to the rats scrabbling about among piles of old newspapers around me—Saturday afternoons became oases in the desert of my loneliness.

  Thrashed by the Commander for the smallest offence, illfed, apparently deserted by the family, expelled from a well=known school and facing my future through a bead curtain of question marks, I was, after ten years of life, already at a very low ebb.

  But if, Dear Reader, you should think that I was a victim of circumstances, a magnet for bad luck, or just plain ‘hardly done by’, I beg you also to consider the possibility that I was a thoroughly poisonous little boy. After a month under the command of Commander Bollard, his wife one day came to find me. A cigarette permanently waggled from her tight mouth. Her upper lip was yellow.

  ‘May husbind wants yew,’ she announced.

  I followed her to the ‘Captain’s Cabin’—a dreadful little study full of leather furniture and old navy lists. Around the place plenty of bottles were in evidence—none held sailing ships.

  The Commander lounged behind his desk.

  ‘All right, you little bugger, you have been sprung. Get packed, don’t steal anybody else’s stuff’ because you go through Customs here before you leave—you’re catching the three o’clock ferry to the Island.’

  My heart nearly stopped beating. I could hardly believe it. I rushed upstairs and
started packing furiously, terrified that he would change his mind.

  No mother met the ferry on which I was dumped unceremoniously by the gallant Commander. With a strange last–minute change of character; he thrust a stick of Southsea Rock into my hand along with my ticket. On the short train trip to Bembridge I reflected on what sort of welcome would be awaiting me.

  It was my ally, Grizel, very distressed, bless her, who met me and as we walked up the hill to the cottage, she filled me in as to my immediate fate.

  I was to be sent into the Navy, if they would have me and if I could pass the exam, about two years hence.

  ‘How is Mum? Is she very angry with me?’

  ‘I think she is terribly unhappy about Heatherdown. They wouldn’t have you at Eton after being expelled, you know.’

  I had a poor welcome at Rose Cottage, but it was no worse than I had expected. My mother was in her room. I went upstairs with leaden feet and watery knees.

  Coldly she went over my miserable performance at Heatherdown—the damaga was done, she said, but it was far more serious than I realised—I wouldn’t be able to get into anything now. The Navy might take me but everything depended on getting very high marks in the exam: if I got those they might overlook my being expelled from school.

  My mother explained that I had been brought over from Portsmouth, not for a holiday but to repack my trunk and leave the very next morning for Penn Street, in Buckinghamshire, where ‘Uncle Tommy’ had arranged for me to go to a crammer’s, who would try to get me past the entrance examination for Dartmouth.

  Another of ‘Uncle Tommy’s’ selections? I quailed at the thought but I couldn’t see that things could get very much worse than they had been lately so after a silent family supper, I borrowed Grizel’s bicycle and pedalled up to the Mill House where Brian Franks lived, knowing I would find a sympathetic ear. Still shaky from his illness, Brian gave me an eye-witness account of the opening of my gift. It seemed that the Matron had unwrapped the box with quite a flourish and the contents had flown into a medicine cabinet whence it had been extracted with forceps.