Late, Late at Night

by Springfield, Rick

  “Mum, it is Christmas!”

  “We’ll see.”

  The action is nonstop. It is HUGE! Where the hell could a kid pogo?

  Our days at the Howard Hotel begin with piping hot chocolate served from a polished silver pot. We see live West End shows like My Fair Lady. Buskers on the streets play and sing and look for tips, white-gloved hotel doormen usher us into the street and look for tips, Cockney taxi drivers look for tips, toffee-nosed waiters hand my dad a bill and look for tips on top of the outrageous price for eggs and sausages. It seems like all of London is after what little money we have.

  The city holds all kinds of great and grisly attractions for a ten-year-old boy. London is still plagued by thick fogs back then, and I am mesmerized. I am just getting into the whole boy-loves-monsters thing, and the heavy fogs are so “Jekyll and Hyde” that I just know Jack the Ripper must be waiting around some bleak corner to tear us all a new one. It is creepy cool.

  We visit the Tower of London and view its very nasty and much-used chopping block where the heads of two of Henry VIII’s wives were separated from their lovely, non-male-heir-producing, allegedly adulterous young bodies. A collection of old agony-inducing implements is on display, laid out on shelves and in glass cases like so many “Grandma’s tchotchkes” that you just can’t bring yourself to throw away. The Iron Maiden, the Boot, the Pear of Anguish (don’t ask—it was one of their freakier inventions), racks, whips, spikes, pots for boiling oil—all of it leaves a deep impression and stokes the fires of my unsettled young imagination. The British are so damn good at torturing that I’m in awe—and a little worried regarding what this says about the people I am now amongst. I will soon be trying to befriend the descendants of the crazy bastards who invented these staggeringly painful torture implements, at whatever new school I must shortly attend.

  The prospect of school is very much on my mind throughout our three-week stay at the Howard the Coward Hotel. My mother keeps dropping lines like, “As soon as we get settled in our new home, we must get the boys into school …” as though we’re actually missing something wonderful. I know that my long days of freedom are almost over and that I must face my worst nightmare—going to a new school—again. And on top of it all, this time it’s me who will be the stranger in a strange land. The very prospect of having to go through all this is beginning to freak my little head out. The increasing dread spoils my fun in London, like the dark prospect of Monday morning that hangs over every Sunday afternoon.

  My brother takes it a step further, entering what we will later refer to as “the black spot stage.” He starts looking under the bed and searching the closets immediately upon entering our hotel room each day and asking the strangest questions. “Mum, should I ask English teddy boys [local toughs] if I have to wash my hands after handling dirty English coins?” Mike sees black spots on his hands and does a lot of obsessive washing of his various body parts. (Seems like the beginnings of OCD to me now.) I tell you, we are stressed out. But we never talk about how freaked we all are. That just isn’t part of “soldiering on.”

  My dad has a giant responsibility squarely on his shoulders. He must comprehend and assimilate a brand-new work platform—computers, in all their complex and bewildering infancy—and eventually take all this knowledge back to the Australian Army. My mum, though she never says so at the time, worries about us going into yet another school, as well as her own issues about running a new home in a new country. My brother and I are out of our minds with the anxiety of it all, not to mention having puberty on the horizon.

  And just when it seems my anxiety cup is filled to overflowing, I am in the hotel bathtub one night when my brother pushes me into the water heater, a primitive, gas-fired, broiling, all-metal contraption placed conveniently over the tub at ass height, if you’re ten. I end up in hospital (no “the” in the UK, either) with third-degree burns on my later much to-be-filmed ass. I admit we were goofing off, but I would have accepted a simple “Richard, stop horsing around,” rather than suffer the indignity of having a young English female nurse pull my pants down to my ankles to examine my severely scorched butt cheeks in the local emergency room. The next day I have a fever, I ache, and I can’t sit down. It is on this day of misery that I am told I am starting my new school the very next morning.

  Whoopee!

  Our new home lies about twenty minutes by train from London in the county of Surrey, in the town of Woking (pronounced “Whoa-king”— should have been a clue). To be more specific, the township of Horsell. Or to be even more specific, “Horsell, near Woking,” as our mailing address reads. This basically means, “Horsell is a piece-of-crap, insignificant little clump of houses that you could miss if you blinked, but to help you find it, should you ever really need to, then it’s somewhere near the bigger, more important town of WOKING.” The only really notable thing about Woking is that H. G. Wells chose its sandpits, where I will soon ride my bike, as the landing place for the Martians in his classic sci-fi tale The War of the Worlds.

  The English have such a unique approach to their home addresses. Every house in our neighborhood has a name! The one we’re renting is a small (my dad would say “bloody tiny”), whitewashed, tile-roofed, leadlight-windowed little number called Randene. The house names are usually a melding of the husband’s and wife’s first names. Our home’s owners are Randon and Maurene (I kid you not). My dad jokes that Randene is a way better choice than the other possibility, Mauron.

  In January of 1960, the Springthorpes move into Randene. My brother and I share an upstairs bedroom facing the street. There are enough rooms in our new house for us each to have our own, but we’ve always shared a room and will continue to do so until I leave home at seventeen, such is our need for companionship in our ever-changing landscape. Mike and I are the only constants in each other’s lives, and it is an unspoken given that we will always be there for each other. Certainly at that age, I depend more on him than he does on me.

  I set off for Goldsworth Primary School/House of Horrors, with a terminal case of nerves, not to mention being a bit sore in the singed-bum area. The school is located in an old, dark brick, scary-looking assortment of World War I–era buildings that now brings to mind the insane asylum from the film The Elephant Man. The other kids in my fifth-grade class are so far ahead of me in both maturity and scholastic ability that I feel completely out of my depth. It takes only one day of school for me to begin to understand the true nature of the shit I am in: I’m an Australian country lad from the ’50s dropped off twenty miles outside one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. I feel utterly bereft and alone. For the first time, my brother is not there to protect me. He has moved on to face high school and his own demons, leaving me to fend for myself, the inconsiderate prick.

  My mum walks herself up to the schoolyard on one of my first days and peeks in to see how I’m managing with my seared nether region and my new classmates. I hear her telling my dad later that night that she had seen me standing alone in the corner of the yard at lunchtime with my head down and my shoulders slumped. She says I looked pathetic.

  Oh, great—now I’m a pathetic coward! I already know that the first kid who tries to befriend me will be the school dork. That’s just the way it goes. The new kid is always that thin ray of hope for them. And predictably, the school dweeb with no friends already has designs on me. I guess I should be grateful for any olive branch of friendship, but in the competitive, punishing environment of the playground, if you’re seen with the school dork too many times, then you are, by association, a dork yourself. And I cannot afford to be typecast as a dork. Not here in the land of the Pommie bastards.

  Out of my feeling of isolation and the need to belong to something, I’ve started joining a bunch of kids’ mail-order clubs. I still have all the badges and pins they sent me to let me know how truly and deeply they cared. THE BIGGLES AIR POLICE. THE DOLPHIN CLUB. And unfortunately something called Harold Hare’s Pets Club. The H.H.P.C. sends me a membe
rship pin with a cute golden bunny adorning it and the words HAROLD HARE’S PETS CLUB in bold block letters. I make the unfortunate miscalculation of wearing this particular little number to my third day at Goldsworth Primary Insane Asylum for the Precocious and Mean-Spirited Little Pommie Bastards, thinking they’ll agree with me that it’s cool and therefore instantly envy me and possibly win me their friendship.

  It has the reverse effect. I’m roundly derided for being a “baby” and shoved and punched around the schoolyard by a bunch of them until the asphalt and I meet for the first, but most certainly not the last, time. Over the next few weeks I’m called “Australian pig,” “convict,” and “little baby” by the meaner faction. I don’t mind the first two, but really, the “baby” thing is too much. So I push back. I get into a couple more fights that are quickly broken up by vitriolic teachers who I’m sure would much prefer to watch us beat each other to a bloody pulp.

  One thing that changing schools so frequently teaches me is to stay in the game, because eventually things can turn around. I’ve experienced this many times already, as I will many more times in the future. These experiences will serve me well twelve years later, sustaining me through all the bleak and lonely times of my first years in the United States.

  Lesson One: The circumstances will change if you stand your ground

  And stand my ground I do. I do not back down nor do I kowtow to the bullies. The school I’m currently being tortured at is looking for a new goalkeeper for their abysmal soccer team. I volunteer even though I’ve never played a day of soccer in my life and still believe that Aussie-rules football is the true game of the gods. I try out for and win the position of goalkeeper by throwing myself onto the asphalt, ripping bloody gashes in my knees in the process, and deflecting the ball away from the chalk-drawn goal, the way I’d seen it done on TV. Slowly, gradually, I begin making friends through playground games and sports. After the first interschool soccer game, I proudly tell my mum that I stopped the other team from scoring eight goals. “How many goals you did you let in?” she asks. “Eight. They beat us eight to nothing,” I say without a hint of irony.

  Regardless of this small “victory,” I am still stressed and start to engage in some very odd behavior at home whenever I get into trouble or am denied my way. As I said, our second-story bedroom window faces the street. And this is a very conservative, very English, very proper neighborhood. I take it into my ten-year-old head that when I am thwarted at home, usually by my mother, my most productive course of action is to race upstairs, throw open the bedroom windows, and scream at the top of my lungs into the chilly English night, “Help, help! They’re killin’ me! Please, someone call the police. God, help me!”

  The first time I do this I see, with great satisfaction, the bedroom or living room lights of every house on the street switch on one by one. It is so excellent. And I know my parents are cringing in shame in the kitchen. “That’ll show ’em!” I think. But it doesn’t. And the next time I’m threatened with punishment, I run upstairs, throw open the windows and … well, you know the rest. This time only fifteen houses do the “lights-on-what-in-God’s-name-is-happening?” thing, instead of the whole street. The next time, only five houses, then one. And finally the neighbors must all say to themselves, “Oh it’s just those crazy fucking Australians again. When are they leaving, anyway?” So I stop.

  Lesson Two: Lesson one notwithstanding, if it isn’t working, change your approach

  So I do. I stop screaming bloody murder out of my upstairs bedroom window into the cultured English evening and start to figure out what I can do to make my stay in this cold-as-a-nun’s-tit country bearable. Instead of resisting my new life, I choose to accept it—even embrace it. Gradually, I begin to appreciate the magic in this beautiful town of Horsell, near Woking. Before I even realize it’s happened, I am a part of it. The smell of woodsmoke in the English autumn, riding my new bike with my new friends (yay, I have some!) around the vast, leafy Horsell common and through H. G. Wells’s Martian-landing sandpits, listening to a kid tell me how he knows my parents have “done it” because that’s how I was born (I’m grossed out; this thought hadn’t occurred to me yet). Soccer, trips to London and the English countryside. Seeing the 150th bloody centuries-old church … truly, my mum is obsessed.

  The cold, frosty English winter nights. My first Christmas in our new town, and the first time I’ve ever seen snow, waking up one morning to see snowflakes drifting past my bedroom window. Mike and I build the world’s fugliest snowman in our backyard, a tall, skinny, lumpy pillar of snow, with a head, a scarf, and a hat. We roll in the snow, throw it at each other, and change clothes at least ten times that day. The only thing missing from this perfect scene is a dog. A year after our move, I’m in love with the place, finally feel at home, and never, ever want to leave.

  I graduate to secondary school, moving over the brick wall and next door from the primary school/psycho ward I’ve been attending. The older secondary kids subject me to the usual harassment. There are scary stories of initiation rites where they rub black shoe polish into the hairless ball sacks of the wretched newcomers. A color that will take months to dissipate. You certainly couldn’t scrub it off. Fortunately, the worst that happens to me is getting “bounced” (grabbed by the arms and legs and tossed into the air a few times), because I have a tough older brother who all the students are afraid of and know will kick their asses. Ha ha. God bless Mike.

  It is December 16, 1961, and the school is having its annual Christmas show, which consists of marginally talented students performing while their parents watch and swoon. Tonight is the first night I will ever touch a guitar and kiss a girl on the mouth. I’m backstage, just hanging out and hoping to kiss Heather, an older girl my friends have bet me I’ll be too chicken to lip-lock with. I’ve never noticed this girl before—she is cute but way, way, way older. My friends and I are all eleven and she’s sixteen!! Almost married, for crying out loud, isn’t she? Still, I’m waiting for the right moment.

  One of the older boys has a guitar that he’s on the program to play. I ask, as every other kid is doing, if I can hold it. He hands this stunning instrument to me—a Höfner semi-acoustic. The mighty world-changing American Fender and Gibson guitars haven’t yet made it to Europe at this point; English kids are stuck with Höfners (made in Germany; Paul McCartney did pretty well with one of these), Hagstrom (Swedish), and Eko (Italian). I pluck the first two bass strings, E and A, and goddammit if it doesn’t sound like the theme song to one of my favorite TV Westerns at the time, Cheyenne. Good Christ, I can play the guitar!!!

  If that isn’t momentous enough, I then meet Heather in the dark playground outside the school hall, where she proceeds to lean down (she towers over me) and plant one on my lips. I have never been kissed on the lips before. Certainly not by a much older woman who’s “got it all goin’ on.” The English girls in my class, with names like Jill Braithwaite-Smythe and Gwendolyn Ainscock, are way more mature than the girls I’ve known back in Australia. They are into kissing and darkly hinting at the possibility of more… . Honestly, where do all these predatory, sexually aggressive girls go when, years later, I finally get up the nerve to try and actually have sex? I’ll tell you where they go … they vanish from the playing field like mallards fleeing a shotgun blast.

  As the parents are doing inside the hall, I swoon like a giddy young girl after this kiss. Technically speaking, I’m not really all that far from being a girl. My balls haven’t dropped and there isn’t even a wisp of pubic hair on my scrawny little body. But baby hormones start racing through that scrawny body and I fall instantly, madly, cinematically in love with Heather. It’s pitiful, actually. I’ve worked all winter long on a paper route in the freezing snow and the cutting wind to save up enough money to buy halfway decent Christmas presents for my family, and after the kiss I drop that plan like a flaming dog turd. Yes, I’m already scheming about the cheap crap I’ll give my family instead so I can buy my new love somethin
g wonderful and expensive—a sign of our deep and passionate bond.

  I settle for a little piano music box/jewelry keeper thingee. It has a purple velvet lining and looks very sophisticated and suave … I think. I’m certain that this music box will one day become a treasured heirloom that will be passed on to our children and down through the generations along with the impossibly romantic tale of how their father first wooed their mother with this simple yet elegant treasure.

  I creep up to the back door of her semi-detached, thousand-of-’em-in-a-row house one night before Christmas and leave the carefully wrapped music box/jewelry keeper thingee, plus a staggeringly romantic and, may I say, very grown-up-sounding love letter, for her discovery the following morning. That night, in my bed, I have visions of her running to me, tears in her eyes, picking me up (I am a pretty small kid) and swinging me around and around as the violins swell. In truth, I never hear from her again. For all I know, she threw my precious gift in the trash. “Randy little bastard,” she probably thought.

  I kept a small red diary for exactly one year in my childhood, and it happened to be this year, 1961. I can now actually look up what I was doing the day my future wife was born, which was December 22, 1961. And what was I doing on the day the future mother of my children was having her own struggle down the birth canal? Delivering that goofy music box/jewelry keeper thingee to the “other woman.” And I know for a fact that I got up that morning at exactly a quarter past eight, because it says so in my diary. I went to bed at a quarter past nine that night, if that’s of any interest to anybody. In fact, every friggin’ entry begins and ends with what time I get up and go to bed. Why I thought my reveilles and bedtimes were so compelling is beyond me.

  Hahahahaha. I just read the entry for December 20, 1961, and I quote: “I love Heather Flint but I’m not sure she likes me.” Well, at least we know her surname now and can punish her accordingly for breaking my tender young heart. She’s probably a grandmother by now.