In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  With March the light evenings drifted in and the early western springtime arrived. On St David's Day I wore a daffodil to denote my Welshness although by then I must have already been losing my Newport accent, the sounds that had caused much hilarity among the Devon children when Roy and I first arrived. Voices, I think, change according to the age at which one moves from one environment to another. There are people who have left Wales as adults and never lose their native sound, but twelve is an age of change. Going to live in Devon, among the broad vowels, then to London, and eventually to Norfolk, made my voice an unusual compound. Once I heard a BBC producer describe it quietly as a 'bastard accent' and I suppose it is.

  In the pale evenings we began to play cricket; someone fashioned a bat from a piece of cherrywood and we played in the garden. From the first moment I made contact with the ball was born a love affair and it has lasted all my life. Not that I was any good. At school, stiff with pads and lifting a heavy bat, I proved an awkward performer. So often did I miss the ball that a secondary batsman was placed behind me during practice sessions, hitting the many deliveries with which I had so miserably failed to make contact. Also the hard leather ball kept hitting me in the testicles and knocking the breath out of me. Someone said solicitously that I should get myself a box and, not realising that this was the term for a protector, I stuffed an egg box down the front of my pants in the hope of buffering the blows.

  In March my brother returned. He had been in hospital from the previous October so he must have been seriously ill, although I did not realise it then. Appendicitis followed by diphtheria – from which in those days children died quite easily – was a formidable combination. He came back to Lower Knowle even thinner and whiter than he had been. I remember sitting on the floor with him showing him the tugboat and the steamroller I had made for him. He seemed very pleased. Then he said casually, as he pulled the boat and its barges along: 'How's our mam?'

  Nobody had told him and I could not gather the courage to do so. 'She's still ill,' I mumbled. 'But she's getting better.'

  'We'll be going home soon then,' he said brightening. 'I want to go home to Mam now I'm all right.'

  The next day we were told we were going to London.

  VI

  London had always seemed far, far, beyond any horizon, but as beckoning as Shangri-La. Roy and I went around Kingsbridge smugly telling everyone where we were bound. None of our schoolmates and few of the staff had ever been there. The headmaster led me out onto the steps outside his office and said that in the school play I had looked superb in the cavalier's trousers. He put his arm around my waist and said, with an ambiguity that only occurs to me now, that in London I should watch out for peculiar men.

  Roy and I said farewell to the cosy house at Lower Knowle and went towards the outside world. Once more the local train puffed us to Newton Abbot, then on to Exeter, where we boarded the express for London. Below the netting of the luggage racks in the compartment were framed photographs of places served by the Great Western Railway, their hue as brown as the livery colours of the company itself. Roy sat opposite me and above his head was a picture of the Transporter Bridge at Newport.

  My eyes scarcely left the window through the whole journey. I witnessed the landscape change before my eyes, the red and spring-green fields of Devon giving way to the chalky uplands of Wessex; then the flat country before London, our first glimpse of the Thames in Berkshire, and finally the spread and sprawl of London's outer towns and suburbs. I knew exactly where we were because I had borrowed books from the Kingsbridge library and had charted our course in an exercise book noting each landmark – a pleasure that is still very much mine before going on a distant expedition. The armchair travelling is as rewarding as the real journey.

  We arrived at Paddington, steam and echoes rising to the bomb-broken roof, crowds of travellers, fat cheery porters in waistcoats, anachronistic taxis, and one ambulance. That was for us.

  Roy, it was true, had been acutely ill, but we were both embarrassed having to get into an ambulance. Ambulances were bad news. We used to touch wood when we saw one and in our street in Newport sick people requested them to come after dark because they did not want the neighbours to see them carried away. My mother insisted when she first went to hospital that she should be taken under cover of night, although, naturally in the event, a whole crowd of wellwishers turned out to see her off.

  It was frustrating being in London, the most exciting place I had ever visited, and having to view it through the meagre slit near the roof. I saw only a thin panorama of the magic city, bits of buildings, top windows of houses, the upper decks of buses and strange trolleybuses with their arms stretched above them in attitudes of perpetual amazement. Many of the buildings were ragged as old teeth, bleakly standing as a reminder of German bombs; there were lamp standards, long blind because of the blackout and segments of advertisement hoardings. One of these, realistically representing a brick wall, was scrawled with rough white-painted words: 'What We Want Is Watneys!' With my enlarged imagination about what London might be like I thought this must be some slogan of revolution or, at least, politics. I asked the dumb-faced woman who accompanied us, sitting hunched like a bag of forgotten washing on the other side of the ambulance. She sneered: 'It's beer. You mustn't have anything to do with that. Not beer.'

  That, I think, was the sole observation she made throughout the journey. She fell back into blankness, her hands wringing, her mouth chewing some private cud. Her chin had whiskers.

  She was no exception among the staff of Barnardo's in those days. It would not be too much to say that many of the people employed to look after the children needed a home at least as much as the children themselves. They were given a room, food and a doubtlessly minimal wage, and they went about their work wrapped in a blue overall and a formidable expression.

  It has to be remembered, of course, that this was wartime and there was a shortage of everything, including people. Nor would I include all the Barnardo staff in this doleful company for there were some who worked with faith and enlightenment. There was, however, a sadly sized collection of these grim and inadequate persons, of little cheer and ready to resort to the back of the hand when in doubt. They would not be tolerated today.

  The shuffling, sniffling woman who finally led us from the ambulance at the Village Homes at Woodford Bridge in Essex made, I remember, some sort of flapping gestures with her chapped hands. I was to get out and Roy was to remain in the ambulance. When I said I was not leaving my brother she said: 'You'll 'ave to.' She glanced at me and lied: 'You'll see him tomorrow.'

  The tomorrow was almost two years away.

  In the Royal Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames, on the hill towards London, is a street today called Galsworthy Road. It was renamed in recent times following the showing of the Forsyte Saga on television and the realisation that the author of the novel, John Galsworthy, had lived there. I remember it as Gloucester Road (still the name of the far end of it) and it was on its corner with Kingston Hill that there stood a dire building with a yellow brick tower. Across its impoverished front, in oddly golden letters, were the words: 'The Dalziel of Wooller Memorial Home. Dr Barnardo's Homes.' It was a test of daring on the part of the young inmates to climb outside the building at the third-floor level and clamber along the gleaming letters.

  I arrived at this ominous place on a streaming March morning just after my thirteenth birthday. With two other boys I had trudged with yet another spectral escort, this one with a limp, from the local station and we stood, all of us carrying our blue bundles of clothes across our shoulders, like some juvenile postmen, outside the main gate. I also had a parcel containing my William books. The silent man was puffing behind and in the interval it took him to catch up we were able to take in the awful facade of our new home.

  'Bloody 'ell,' said one of my companions, John Brice, who was my friend until some time later he knocked me cold in a fight. 'It's just like a prison.'

  The other
lad was freckled, podgy and ginger-haired with staring glasses. He had confided to us during the train journey that his father had been killed in the First World War, which would have made him at least twenty-six. He began to cry and had to wipe his glasses on his clothes bundle. The man caught up, berating us for leaving him behind. 'Come on then,' he ordered. 'Stop staring. There's nothing to stare at.'

  As was to be expected, he was unperceptive. There was a lot of be stared at. And we did not like the look of it. The place sprawled before us, across the horizon of a tended garden, with a moon-shaped drive going to its glowering front door. For what purpose it had been built is a mystery, although it had once been an orphanage for girls. It was the tower which, at once, both caught and repelled the eye. It rose two storeys higher than the rest of the pile, capped with a sloping roof under which was lodged a huge water tank. A German flying bomb missed this by inches a few months later. Had it struck, everyone beneath would have become, apart from other injuries, very wet.

  We were ushered to the front door by our escort, stumping along behind, urging like a cowherd. The knocker, the central door knob and the bell smiled inclement smiles.

  The door was opened by an urchin in an indescribably filthy blue jersey. He regarded us suspiciously as if we might have arrived to take something from him. Then, possibly thinking he ought to make an attempt to clean himself up, he wiped his nose on his streaked sleeve. 'I'll go and get the Gaffer,' he said.

  He left us standing on the step. Muttering, our escort pushed open the door and we stepped into a place redolent with floor polish and echoing with remote voices. There was a short flight of red steps leading to a lobby which soared up into the central tower, the tower itself lined with a staircase that diminished into lofly dimness. Over the iron balustrades on the several landings pale faces looked down like moons from the sky. The cosy days were over. This was a real orphanage.

  'New kids!' the shouts bounced about the landings above and more faces appeared. One boy, apparently to impress us, did perilous gymnastics on the iron bars fifty feet over our heads. Then, to our left, we heard shouts and the door opened to reveal two scraggy boys pushing another, smaller, boy with a seraphic expression and bottle-thick glasses, over a glistening linoleum floor on a square of blanket. They propelled him from one end of the room to another. On the back wall was a blue table and a wooden cross. This was the chapel and this was the method of polishing the floor.

  'We're Ronuking,' shouted one of the boys. 'Don't it pong!'

  Stony footfalls sounded and a man of ominous aspect appeared. He was gaunt and grey, with a steely jawline and well-scattered teeth. He wore a hairy green suit and sharp rimless spectacles. His name was Ernest Gardener, feared by all boys and known as the Gaffer.

  As I came to know him, over the years I was there, I realised that here was someone from another time. He was like an ancient sergeant-major, a narrow man of Victorian thought and values, in charge of a hundred and fifty hard-cased urchins who varied from the sly to the rumbustious to the downright criminal. His attitudes had scarcely shifted an inch in forty years. At the end of the road for us, he was confident, was only Hellfire. One day he announced in chapel that all our brains would be turned to milk because of the filthy things we did in the night. He had some kindness but it was well buried. He ended his days alone in a Barnardo-provided cottage eating his food straight from a tin.

  There was no way back. I realised that as soon as I stepped into that place. It would need to be my home and I would have to make the best of it. They took me to a big hollow dormitory, where thirty other boys slept in three long rows. Each bed had its blue and white counterpane, folded and tucked to a certain ritual at the foot. Each bed had a scarred wooden locker. Large areas of the long windows were stuffed with cardboard and plywood because they had been blown out in the bombing of 1940 and had not been replaced. Wearily I put my bundle on the bed, my William books underneath it, and sat and stared around. I felt very unhappy and wondered where my brother was.

  It was not, however, a place for dwelling on your sorrows. Everyone was there for some misfortune and some had experienced more than others. The boys had hardened themselves into a tough but resilient mob. There were more laughs than tears. Each one had his own bedspace which was guarded jealously. 'Get out of my bedspace, Breadcrumb,' I heard one boy shout at another. Breadcrumb was the nickname of a lad who gathered the last crumbs from the table and rammed them in his mouth. Everyone had nicknames. I had only just arrived when I was dubbed Monkey. I had a brisk fight with the inmate who first gave me this appellation, rolling between the dormitory beds, and I won resoundingly, but it made no difference; they still called me Monkey and it remained my name while I was there.

  It was in those early days that I learned the singular power of the story-teller. Existence in the home was in layers of violence; certain boys could overcome others with their fists, and they in turn were subordinate to others who were bigger or punched more swiftly. It was a basic law and there seemed no escape from it. When I arrived I found myself very much in the middle strata, being able to lord it over half the boys, while trying to keep one step ahead of the other half. There were fights every day and I had plenty. If I won then I ascended one place on the fisticuffs ladder. If I lost I went down a place. Then came the miracle that removed me from attrition entirely – I found I could tell stories.

  Each night, in the dormitory, with the lights doused and the blackout curtains giving only a little extra protection from the winds and rains that knocked on the makeshift windows, there was a time set aside for what was called 'spinning up'. The dormitory matron, who had a pokey room at the end like that of a barrack room corporal in the army, would leave us, heads projected from bedclothes, with the words: 'You can spin up for half an hour – and that's all.'

  Although this might conjure an intriguing picture of pyjama clad lads bounding on bedsteads like trampolines and whirling like tops in the air, it was nothing more than the enjoyment of a bedtime story. For the first few nights I lay and listened and realised that the standard was not high. Whoever was telling the tale usually related the plot of some film he had seen or occasionally a story from a book. It was rarely they were accepted with appreciation and sometimes brief but violent criticisms flung across the darkened room would result in a quick foray from a bed and a shadowy beating-up of someone in the dimness. It was to stop the boy in the next bed being slaughtered by someone much bigger that I first offered to make up a story.

  'All right, Monkey,' agreed the aggressor, giving the victim a dismissive push. 'Let's 'ear it then. If it ain't any good you'll get bashed up as well.'

  So I began to spin up. It was a yarn, I remember, about a group of horsemen in the hills of some German-occupied country in Europe, who carried out guerilla warfare on their oppressors by abruptly appearing over the horizon and swooping on convoys and patrols. Even now it does not sound a bad plot. I made it up as I went along and before long I realised that the room had fallen into an enclosed silence. When the end of the half-hour arrived and the dormitory matron, Miss Robinson, a tall angular lady known to her charges as Chuck, came from her room to tell us spinning-up time was over, there were pleas for 'just another five minutes, Miss, Monkey ain't quite finished'.

  She was adamant that the session was over and after quelling beneath-the-bedclothes grumbles she went back to her den. 'Come on, Monkey,' demanded a sibilant voice. 'Whisper it.'

  Every night after that it was demanded that I spin up. Older boys, who were permitted to stay up later, began voluntarily to go to bed early so as to hear the next instalment of some serial I was desperately cobbling together. The denizens of other dormitories crept in on all fours, some of them lying concealed beneath the occupied beds to listen. 1 will never have a more attentive or appreciative audience.

  'You ought to 'ear the new kid spinning up,' the word went around the home. Any threat to my person made during the everyday warfare was met with a counter-promise by me that if I w
ere bashed up there would be no story that night. Immediately the bigger boys moved in and defused the menace. The only trouble was that, like Sheherazade, I had to keep thinking up tales. Any shortfall was likely to result in immediate difficulty so I always managed to scrape up some idea, although I don't think it went on for quite a thousand and one nights.

  The gardens and wide-windowed houses of what is called an executive estate (such as the one I wrote about in Tropic of Ruislip) are now spread over the two or three acres once occupied by the Kingston home. Barnardo's sold the site in the nineteen-sixties, and when the demolition men were at work knocking down the mouldy old building, I took part in a television programme filmed while the place was tumbling around me. The men and the bulldozers were taking chunks out of the walls and piles of wood were burning like funeral pyres. At the request of the director I was posed, like the boy on the burning deck, high above the flames and the crumbling bricks, ostensibly looking out over my past. The story very nearly finished then on a less than triumphant note because, fifty or sixty feet up, the floor began to give way beneath my feet. Gratefully I reached safety. It would have been ironic to have met a dramatic end in that of all places. And on television.