In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  We changed again at Newton Abbot and it was drawing on to evening by the time the puffy local train reached Kingsbridge, in the district called the South Hams.

  The old stone town, unlike anything we had ever known, spread up a steep hill with a wide creek at the bottom of its main street. It was brimming with evening quiet, late sun falling through the gaps between the grey buildings as we trudged up the incline of Fore Street with the bulky and morose woman. Our luggage was minimal. Roy had his comics and I had half a dozen William books. I cannot remember now where I obtained them (they may have been unreturned to Newport library, although half a dozen does seem rather a large haul) but they remained my most treasured, in fact almost my only, personal possessions throughout the next two years.

  As we neared the crest of Fore Street my foreboding increased. Roy nudged me and said he already wanted to go home. I thought he was going to make a run for it. The place where we were bound, however, was a reassuring surprise; a sedate period house on the brow of the hill, with wide white windows and an impressive blue door with a brass knocker. The lady who answered the knock was tweedy with the sort of English voice I had only heard on the radio or at the pictures. She seemed glad to see us and said that we could have some food after we had been bathed.

  Been bathed! Roy and I glanced at each other in panic.

  'She ain't bathing me,' said my brother. 'No bugger is.'

  She did, however, stripping off our best suits and throwing them into a pile. I was more offended about the suits than the treatment. We had been quite proud of them and now they were being tossed aside like rough rags. What is more it was the last we saw of them. When I enquired, some weeks later, what had happened to our suits I was told they had been burned, which upset me even more.

  It was a memorable evening. Two girls, sisters of our age, had also just arrived and were efficiently undressed and bathed with us, in and out of the bath in blushing rotation. Trying not to look at their nakedness we asked their names and where they were from. The younger one began to howl. The lady who did the bathing, scrubbing us all without expression, said there was nothing to cry about but the little girl carried on just the same.

  Afterwards when we were in bed, in odd, hard pyjamas that smelled of ironing and mothballs, with four or five others in the dormitory, Roy leaned over to me and whispered: "Night, Les.'

  "Night, kid.'

  Silence, then: 'What about them girls then?'

  I opened a concerned eye. 'What about them?' I asked.

  'Well, you know. Did you see anything?'

  'Not much.'

  'I couldn't either. But I had a good look.' A pause. 'I hope our mam's better soon.'

  'So do I. Better not talk any more. 'Night.'

  "Night, Les. Never seen one with no clothes before, have you?'

  'No. Go to sleep.'

  'All right. 'Night.'

  It must have been that there was an odd day before the end of the week so we were not sent immediately to school with the other children. Instead we were permitted to go out for a walk. We bought some bright yellow September apples from a basket displayed outside a greengrocery shop. We walked through the inclined town, quiet in that wartime autumn, and down to the ribbed waters of the tidal creek.

  Sitting on a seat by the creek I wrote an urgent letter to our mother asking her to send for us at once as we had decided we did not like the place. We bought a stamp and posted it, one of a succession of notes over the next few weeks, but I don't suppose she ever read them. I hope not. After the post office we walked along the water bank and then had a paddle. Roy, always the more adventurous, ventured further out and became stuck in the mud. His pale horrified face turned towards me. Both his legs sank unstoppably into the slime. The water lapped the bottoms of his short trousers and he began to cry. I stood on the bank giving instructions: 'Lift that leg, now lift that. Don't lean backwards.' He tried it. 'I'm still stuck,' he said heartrendingly. 'Les, I reckon I'm sinking!'

  An old man came along and suggested wisely that if Roy leaned forward we might be able to reach his hands and tug him out. The mud was well up to his knees now and there was no doubt he was going down. With a terrible squelching he managed to lean towards us and we caught his hands. He very nearly pulled the old chap head first into the creek but in the end we triumphed, hauling him black-legged to the bank. We thanked the man and asked him the time. He pulled a watch from his waistcoat. 'Always carry my old turnip,' he said. It was one o'clock and we had instructions to be back by twelve-thirty.

  Roy was still encased in mud to the knees, his shoes oozing, as we hurried up through the town and presented ourselves at the back door of the home. One of the staff, a jolly young woman called Nurse Nelly, saw us and burst out laughing. Back into the bath we went.

  Lower Knowle, as the house was named, was far from being an unkindly place. It was a reception house, an Ever-Open-Door as Barnardo's called them, using the Victorian doctor's own phrase for his first shelter for homeless children in the grim and gritty East End of London of the eighteen-seventies.

  It had been the home of a kindly Mrs Patterson, who had lent it to Barnardo's for the duration of the war. When I was grown up I went back there and stood on the pavement outside. An elderly lady approached and asked why I was looking at it.

  I told her I had once lived there. She was pleased. 'It's my house,' she explained. 'During the war I kept thinking of those poor children in Barnardo's at Plymouth with the bombs falling all round them. So I offered Lower Knowle so they could be safe.'

  She invited me in. As such places always are, it seemed much smaller now, but I remembered well the rooms; the long, stone-flagged dining room with the French doors out onto the garden, the staircase, curved like a feather in the elegant front hall, the bedroom where I used to lie and hear the American tanks trundle down the street.

  It was on that visit, and on subsequent occasions in Kingsbridge, today a lively holiday centre, that I came to thinking about the occupation of part of south Devon by the American armies rehearsing for D-Day. Thirty thousand acres, including six villages, to the north-east of Kingsbridge were cleared of their people and for eight months the soldiers practised their beach landings to the accompaniment of live artillery bombardments. More than seven hundred Americans died one night only a few weeks before the invasion of Normandy in 1944 when a flotilla of German torpedo boats crept out of Cherbourg and ambushed a landing exercise. The story – the civilian evacuation, the American soldiers and the tragedy of those who died before they had ever seen a German – I used as the basis for a novel The Magic Army.

  The Americans arrived in south Devon only a month after the two boys from South Wales. The wide exercise area was cordoned off but there were mishaps. When I was researching for The Magic Army I saw in the 1944 files of the Kingsbridge Gazette that two of my schoolmates had been killed by a mislaid hand grenade. It happened two weeks after I had left for London.

  There were happier stories. The girls, or 'maids' as they were called in that region, accustomed to the awkward courtship of rural lads, fell easily and wholeheartedly for the young American newcomers whose uniforms and talk were both so smooth. They were ever-generous and resourceful. They raised money for a church by charging a penny a time to see a pineapple and a banana, unknown fruits in wartime. As for us, at the orphanage, they sent us barrels of peanut butter.

  We had peanut butter every night for tea for six months, so much so, I have never eaten it since. Roy said it looked like sheep shit.

  There were only about sixteen children at Lower Knowle. We had our photograph taken and it appeared in the Barnardo magazine under the caption: 'Steps!' It was apt for we stood in a line, from a homeless toddler called Winston at the front to a strong boy named John Mills at the end, with me next to him. My brother was somewhere in the middle.

  The home was in the charge of a handsome man with silver hair who had a propensity for dressing as a vicar. He was not ordained and that, together with some othe
r irregularities, later led him into trouble, but I knew nothing of this. After I had gone away from Kingsbridge I sent him and his wife a Christmas present, a book which I can still remember cost six shillings, a sum which must have taken me a considerable time to save. It was The Way Of All Flesh which, considering the trouble that came upon him, was not altogether inappropriate.

  Young lady members of the staff worked under the pseudonyms of Auntie Sally, Auntie Judy, Nurse Nelly and Nanny. In the main, they were kind and jolly. One of them fell backwards into the churchyard while coping with a local fireman on the wall. She used to embrace me at times and I looked forward to it because it was my first close contact with a large bosom. There was also a pink-faced youth who filled the function of an assistant master. One evening, just at dusk, he said to me: 'Do you feel like having a wrestle?'

  He was not much bigger than me and I said all right and we went out onto the stepped lawn and grappled for about half an hour. He rolled on top of me and jumped up and down and then I sat astride him and jumped up and down. We were both red-faced and sweating by the time we had finished and it seemed to me, at the time, to be an odd way for a grown man to spend an evening.

  Perhaps, thin and pale as I was, I was a natural victim because soon afterwards in the churchyard of St Edmunds, after Sunday evensong, I was savagely beaten up by a gang of choirboys still wearing their cassocks. It was then that I began to have my doubts about religion.

  After we had been about a month in Kingsbridge, and I was wondering at the absence of replies to my letters, our mother died. The grey-haired superintendent softened the blow as much as he could by breaking the news in instalments. On a Friday he told me that she was very ill with cancer and on the Monday he said she had died and was out of the pain. He gave me his stamp album to look at and went out of the room so that I could have a cry in private.

  Strangely I did not shed my tears for very long. The superintendent came back with a letter from an uncle of whom, until then, I had no knowledge, my father's brother Chris. My mother had called him to her hospital bed and asked him to look after us. He was the only one of the family with any money, having a thriving ship-repairing business (the descendant of that founded by my grandfather) in South Wales. Inside the envelope was a folded pound note which was more money that I had ever possessed in my life. While still sniffling over my mother I put it gratefully in my pocket.

  No one had told Roy. He was taken suddenly ill and it was decided to keep the news from him until he was better. When I went to bed that night he was sweating in his sleep. For the first and only time in my life I kissed him. He grunted. The following day he was taken to hospital with appendicitis and this was followed by diphtheria.

  The following day I went to school and the bespectacled headmaster put his arm about me and told me he had been told my bad news and advised me to keep a stiff upper lip. We were in the school vegetable garden and I was digging again. He said he was casting me as a cavalier in the school play and if I would like to go to the storeroom with him he would fix me up with a costume. This he did, suggesting that I took my trousers off so that he could see if the costume fitted. It apparently did not, so he gave my winkle a flick with his hand, transferring it from one side of the cavalier's trousers to the other. 'That's better,' he said, beaming happily.

  At the home of one of the aunties, a fruity fat girl not much older than me said she was sorry to hear my news. 'That's all right,' I assured her brazenly. 'I treat life as one big joke.' I must have read it somewhere.

  Soon there was someone else's misfortune to share. The big lad John Mills, who used to help the grumbly old gardener to shovel coke into the hot water boiler (called by the old man 'that incinerator'), had become my firm friend. We had joined the local youth club and he taught me the rudiments of football and cricket. He had a younger brother, a happy boy, called George, and one day I found them sobbing in each other's arms. Their father, who was in the navy and whom they adored and talked about all the time, what he did, his jokes, his letters, was missing presumed drowned at sea.

  'Don't cry, George,' I remember saying, sitting in the inglenook fireplace of the dining room. 'My mam's just died as well, but I didn't tell anybody because of Roy.' His round, tear-streaked face turned towards me. 'That's right,' confirmed Nurse Nelly, adding to the dubious theory that two sorrows are better than one. 'Leslie hasn't got anybody either.'

  John and George's mother had already died and that night, when John and I went down the gloomy path to shut up the chicken house, our regular task, he said: 'I can't believe it. I can't believe he's dead. Not our dad. It was like I just saw him today. I don't know what we'll do now.'

  If the natural resilience of children enables them to play in the rubble of their own houses, as they were doing in many parts of the world at that time, then the same optimism helped me, if not to play at least to sit quietly, in the rubble of my early life. It surprises me to recall it now, but I started to weigh up the situation quite coolly and with logic while walking to school one day soon after my mother's death. It was raining on the steep streets and the water gurgled down the gutters and drains. We progressed in a crocodile with John Mills in charge, over two hills and up the side of another. Head down against the downpour I watched it run over the pavement slabs and sluice down the gratings. When we reached the school I stood under corrugated iron shelter with the other boys and maids (some of whom had just been deprived of their homes by the Americans) and with the rain drumming and the children chattering, continued to think out the situation.

  I was twelve years of age, my parents were gone, my small brother was in a Plymouth hospital, my elder brothers were somewhere anonymous, Lin probably at sea, Harold perhaps in Birmingham. Harold did eventually write ('My advice is, money talks. But it's always said "goodbye" to me') and he also sent a tin of toffees, but that was months later. As far as I can recall I never received a letter from Lin. On the other hand, I had gained an uncle and an aunt and a cousin, all previously unknown to me. Uncle Chris continued to write, his handwriting the most polished I had ever seen, certainly in our family. He told me about himself and his family and promised they would visit me as soon as they could. He and his wife Nance even made some attempt to discover whether they could reclaim Roy and me from Barnardo's – being 'restored' as it was called among the boys in the homes, for most of whom it was a constant but hopeless dream. Apparently our mother had legally 'signed us over' to Barnardo's but, nevertheless, someone was sent from the Homes head office to visit Chris and Nance at their home in Barry. The house, as I came to know, was comfortably middle class; they owned a car and a cocktail cabinet and it was the cocktail cabinet that scuppered us. The amiable Chris offered the visitor a gin and tonic. I do not need to have seen this person to guess what he was like, for sobriety and religion were the cornerstones of the homes. He must have left the house with a shocked expression and that was that. We would be in Barnardo's for the rest of our childhood.

  My more immediate world, viewed that day in the school playground shelter, oddly felt secure. The house where I lived was comfortable, the food, despite the eternal peanut butter, filling, and if love was missing then affection was the next best thing. We had a fine garden and a large paddock; there was a pony called Pommerse, which I was learning to ride bareback, and three friendly dogs. I also had my first long-trousered suit.

  This was my 'bundle-suit', part of a scheduled bundle that appeared in a bulky blue bag a few weeks after my arrival. I no longer had to sleep in camphor-smelling pyjamas and go to school in somebody's discarded coat or shoes. The bundle contained a completely new outfit; shirts, socks, underwear, a tie and the long-trousered suit. Already, I was deeply in love with a girl in my class and I wore my long trousers to impress her. Strictly the suit was for best but I was allowed to wear it to school. Not that it did anything to enslave her. Her nose always travelled past me as though suspended on a cord. At Christmas I bought a National Savings Christmas Card, with half-a-crown's w
orth of savings stamps on it, and sent it to her. She never mentioned it when school began again in January but she kept the stamps just the same.

  For the first time in my life I was enjoying lessons. I was put into a class with children two years older than my age group (one of my self-delusions about my beloved was that I was too young for her). We worked under the cheerful and robust regime of a teacher called Mr Casely, who, I am glad to say, is still living down in Devon. A few weeks ago, when I was taking my son Matthew to a pantomime in London, a man and his wife boarded the underground train and sat opposite. He leaned forward. 'You're Leslie Thomas, aren't you?' he said in a pleased sort of way. 'I was a teacher at Kingsbridge School when you were there. I've heard you talk about it on television.' He beamed. 'But I don't remember you at all.'

  Few people would. But I remember them. The Luscombes and the Steers and the Hannafords. When I have walked in later years up Fore Street in Kingsbridge and read those same names over the shops and businesses, I have seen them again in the school playground or at their wooden desks, with the wintry Devon rain dropping outside the window. I went to evening classes for woodwork and made some toys for my brother, a steamroller and a jaunty tugboat and barges. There were also evening lectures on psychology, bird migration and local history which I never missed. The church in Kingsbridge held a series of mid-week talks in its shadowy chancel, Aspects of Christian Thinking, I believe it was, and I did not miss one of these either. I suppose I was trying to educate myself.

  For the first time, also, I began to realise there was something called sport. We played rugby and hockey at school, although I was so wispy that I was useless at the former and at hockey the big Devon girls could easily knock my feet from under me, and did. The one I adored so much seemed to take real pleasure in striking me around the thin knees with her stick, or in trampling over me when I was winded and prostrate. It was the only contact we had. On Christmas Eve, however, there was to be a hockey match and, glory, glory, I was selected as linesman and possible reserve player. I left the home, without permission, and muddily ran up and down the boundary waving a windy handkerchief. My elation was quickly shattered for when I returned to Lower Knowle I was summarily put to bed. I lay there, on Christmas Eve, feeling fairly sorry for myself. At midnight they needed somebody to help pump the organ at the church service and all was at once forgiven. This organ was pumped with a wheel, to which was attached a wooden handle, like an old-fashioned clothes mangle. John Mills pushed it from one side and I caught the handle and pushed it back to him. I needed to stand on a box or a stool to operate the system and on this holy night, with the congregation carolling how the shepherds saw a star, I saw a number of stars because I slipped forward and the handle caught me under the chin. I woke up groaning and out of wind, the same condition as the organ.