That day to be walking about among the ruins was an odd experience. Generations of homeless boys had passed through that institution since I finally went out of the front gate; times changed, as well they might have done. In the dining hall, under the baronial spread of stags' horns, and with a dusty bust of someone in marble standing guard over the door, we survived during the final two years of the war on the most meagre of rations. Breakfast would be two slices of bread and beef dripping and a cup of unsweetened cocoa; tea was two slices of bread and margarine or bread and jam and a mug of tea. Anything extra was a treat. On your birthday you were given, with some ceremony, a boiled egg. When I arrived first, I had just had – if not actually celebrated – my thirteenth birthday. Boz, Gerry Bosley, a doughy lad who became one of my great friends in the place, consoled me: 'Pity it's gone. You've missed your egg, Monkey.'
Fortunately we went outside the fence to school, to St Luke's elementary school, down Kingston Hill and into the outsiders' streets. Midday meals were provided, and while they may not have been every child's idea of plenty, they were most certainly ours. We ate every scrap and anything outsiders left as well.
It was the others, be it noted, who were the outsiders – those children who went home to fires and food and parents every day punctually at four-thirty. We had neatly, if unconsciously, reversed the social order. The Dickie boys, as we were widely known (the home, for some incomprehensible reason, was called Dickies) with our patched blue jerseys and robust independence, were not the ones beyond the pale.
On the other hand it was difficult for me, who, unlike many of the other inmates, had known a home and a mother, not to envy those free children. We had a few friends among them, for we were always a clan apart, but on one occasion I went to a boy's house in Kingston after school. The room, the furniture, the cat, the fire, all brought back a heartful of young nostalgia and regret.
By a coincidence, the daughter of the Martin family, our neighbours in Newport, lived in Kingston and on a Sunday afternoon (when, if we had not misbehaved, we were allowed out for a walk) I went to her house for tea. It was cosy and wonderful and I regretted having to leave. The lady's husband, a cheery sort of man called Billy, gave me a cigar to take back to the Gaffer.
I had not asked permission to go to visit them but I took the cigar back and hid it in my locker. There it was discovered. Smoking, next to thieving and masturbation, was the most heinous of crimes and here was I found with not merely a dog-end but a whole cigar! The Gaffer sniffed at it. 'And where did you steal this from?' he enquired ominously. The cracks in his gnarled face seemed to get deeper.
'I didn't steal it, sir,' I trembled. 'I went to somebody's house for tea and the man gave me a cigar for you.'
That did it. Going out to unauthorised teas was another crime and he was outraged. 'Which people?' he demanded. 'Who are they?'
'Friends,' I explained. 'Friends of my mum from Newport'
'Friends of your mum! Listen, sonny, you don't go to people's houses without asking me. Don't go again!' He gave me a smart clip around the ear and sent me off. He kept the cigar, however, and later the same day I saw the old devil smoking it.
Crime was not unknown, of course, and he was always on the lookout for it. He would creep about like some old grey preying eagle. Once a boy aptly called Hands, who was a skilful burglar, was apprehended helping himself from the oddments lodged in the office safe. 'Just putting it back, sir!' he howled desperately.
A kindly dentist lent some of the boys his prize stamp collection while they were in his waiting room. When he came to look at the albums again he found several valuable exhibits missing, including a set of Victorian penny blacks. The Gaffer, wearing his ancient smile, crafty and cracked, announced benignly in the chapel that night that there was to be a competition to see who had the best stamp collection in the home. First prize would be a whole pound note. Eagerly the Dickie boys hurried off to get their albums and very soon someone was standing boastfully displaying a page of penny blacks. He said he had bought them in a stamp shop when the owner's wife, who was nearly blind and liable to error, was in charge. The Gaffer did not believe him.
It was a wonder any inmate had money to buy anything, let alone stamps, although postal orders received from relatives were put in a 'bank' and could be drawn upon before the recipient was allowed liberty on a Saturday afternoon. Otherwise pocket money ranged from threepence a week to a shilling, depending on age, and it took three weeks of threepences to buy a cinema seat. The largesse might also be stopped at a moment's notice on account of theft, a minor riot or, as it was rumoured in a rhyme, if Brentford Football Club, said to be the Gaffer's favourite, was having a bad run. The couplet went:
Digs, the boss,
Brentford lost,
Dickie's get no pay.
In Dickie-boy language 'digs' meant 'watch out', the equivalent of the public schoolboy's 'cave!'. By a fractional change in emphasis it also meant 'excuse me' or 'get out of the way'. 'Digs-I, you kids' meant 'Look out, I'm coming through' as you pushed your way through a crowd crouched like crows on the hot water pipes. A boy with a face of rubbery exuberance, called Porky, invented an entirely new language of his own including words like 'renze' and 'loom' accompanied by running his knuckles across your ear ('renzing'). He spoke this language alone, with some of us repeating the occasional word. Even when he was angry, tearful or in an argument he still used it. It was, I suppose, his way of remaining an individual. There was a general internal language: dush was money, tuck was sweets. When the Gaffer 'dushed-up' he gave you your pocket money (in my case fourpence) with one hand. If you wanted 'tuck' he took it back with the other hand and gave you your ration of confectionery.
I enjoyed sweets as much as anyone but I was able to resist them. In my locker was still half a tin of toffees, half of a gift from my brother Harold. I was keeping them for when I again met my younger brother and, although the temptation was sometimes sharp, I never availed myself of his share. Once I had clutched my fourpence at dushing-up time I used to walk out quickly. My uncle continued to write to me and to send me occasional postal orders, and I would go down into the town to the cinema or, better still, sit in the gods in the Empire on Saturday afternoon, forever entranced by comedians, singers, jugglers and magicians. My heart lifted when I saw that Old Mother Riley and Her Daughter Kitty were to top the bill. I could scarcely wait until Saturday, but when it arrived some misdemeanour had been committed in the home and no one was allowed out. This time I made a break for it, climbing over the fence and haring down Kingston Hill. I sat up in the dimness, next to the cherubs carved on the roof of the Empire, watching my music hall idols and engulfed with guilty pleasure. I was not caught, either.
Hard though he was, stern his face, bitter his tongue and swift his hand, I cannot now think of the Gaffer without some measure of affection. There was a constant warfare between him and one hundred and fifty urchins (for much of the time he had no male assistant) and both sides took advantage of every ploy and counter-ploy. It would be difficult to assess him by today's standards: narrow, scarcely bending, bigoted beyond belief (he despised the Welsh, including me; something to do with their attitude to Winston Churchill; the Irish were unmentionable). He was a lonely, beleaguered man who believed implicitly in Victorian morals and standards. Nothing less would do.
He was blind in two directions. The first was in the matter of his wife who, though entitled 'matron', played little useful part in running the home. She was a little bun of a woman, with bright glasses, a fat waddle and an incandescent religious mania which never managed to spill over into anything approaching practical Christianity. Once a week when Korky, the sickroom matron, had a half day, she would take over the sickroom duties. I once saw a small boy with his hands tied to the iron bedhead 'to stop him picking the sores on his face'. She also took Bible class on Sunday afternoons and could be moved to tears while telling us how she was almost sure that the Lord Jesus had visited Cornwall. Apart from those two w
eekly manifestations, she remained entrenched in her cottage, a brick house set apart from the main pile of the place, eating her way enthusiastically into our sweet ration. There was nothing for her to do in her house; she had two boys to do all the cleaning, serve at table and do the washing-up, in itself a privileged post since it enabled the incumbent to eat the scraps from matron's table. These 'cottage boys', as they were curiously called, were made aware of their choice position. A lad called Peter Lott, who had been my friend, when selected for these duties was told by matron that, if he wanted to keep the job and its culinary perks, he must have nothing more to do with me. Apparently I was a bad lot; a liar and a thief.
I may, indeed, have dispensed a few untruths; it was one of the ways to survival, but there was not a lot to steal, except the odd slice of bread and margarine when one attained the duty of 'spreading'. This was another much-sought-after task which involved cutting the bread and spreading on the margarine or dripping for each day's breakfast or tea. Indeed, I had been much more sinned against than sinning, for my precious William books had disappeared from my locker. It turned out that the Gaffer, while snooping around, had purloined them and given them to another boy at Christmas. I was so outraged that I braved a protest. 'You must have stolen them from somewhere,' retorted the Gaffer.
The Gaffer adored the matron. He led her by the arm as she rolled towards the chapel on her weekly mission; everyone, staff and boys, had to stand when she waddled over the horizon. He ignored the sweet-jars full of our sugar which were carried to the cottage for her unending cups of tea, and when her budgerigar was assassinated he was so anxious to cover up the crime that he did not even punish the culprit.
This was a gangling Suffolk lad called Cyril Thorne (now a chimney sweep who became gloriously drunk after appearing from my past on the This Is Your Life programme). Thistle, as he was known, killed the budgie accidentally while using it as target practice for his catapult. There was the budgie, lying legs stiff in the air at the bottom of the cage. For the first and only time in anyone's memory, the Gaffer panicked. 'We've got to get another!' he cried. 'Before matron gets back.'
Matron was away in Cornwall looking for Jesus and when she returned there was a budgie sitting in the cage in her sitting room. 'Joey! Joey!' she twittered, eyeing it suspiciously, for it was a good deal bigger than the original, a bruiser of a budgie. 'Caw, Caw!' it answered. 'Bugger off!'
This outmoded couple, in charge of a battalion of lost boys in the midst of war, had a son, an army chaplain who served with courage in Italy and eventually came home wearing the Military Cross. He was an extraordinarily handsome fellow in his uniform and dog collar, and we felt it was only his proper due when he married a lovely, rosy girl. Any of the urchins in Dickies would have been delirious with happiness to take his place. I recall a day when I was working in the front garden and she walked by. I dared not look up at her. All I knew was that a heavenly perfume floated by on the Kingston Hill air.
One day in the nineteen-sixties I received a letter from this lady asking if she could come and see me and, puzzled, I agreed. She came through the door of my office in Fleet Street and there it was again, that fragrance from long ago. She was almost blind now and she had come because she had heard me talking about my Barnardo days on a radio programme. It was a remarkable tale she had to tell.
Predictably, she had always been resented by her husband's mother, the woman we knew as matron, but once demobilised from the army her husband had become vicar of a prosperous parish and she settled down happily to the life it afforded, the church and its various activities. She ran the Mothers' Union and the Sunday school. There were three daughters growing up and everything was contentment until the day the Gaffer died, the old matron having gone before. 'On that day,' said the lady, 'my husband came home raving drunk. And with two women of the lowest sort. I was so horrified I ran from the house. Never before had I known him touch a drink but after that day he never stopped. He drank all our money away, the house was full of undesirables, the church congregation dwindled. One day he fell out of the pulpit.'
She went to see the bishop but he did not believe her. However, there were confirming reports and eventually the vicar was defrocked.
'One day,' she related, 'he told me he was coining to kill you.'
'Me!' I almost fell from the chair. 'Why me?'
'Because of the way you described his mother in This Time Next Week,' she said. 'He was coming to kill you with a sword, a sabre, which we used as a fire poker in the vicarage. He had already terrorised us with it.'
I was glad to tell her that I had seen no sign of a vicar advancing on me with a sabre. 'I don't know where he is now,' she sighed. 'We are divorced and he has vanished. The last time I heard of him he was working in a factory somewhere.'
Why had she sought me out? She had never spoken to me before. I was just one of a hundred and fifty boys.
'You are the only person I know who remembers those days,' she said simply and sadly. 'I would like to know why all this happened. Do you have any idea?'
Since I had been a mere inmate of the orphanage, this might at first seem a tall order. But, as we talked, we came to the same conclusion. Here was a man who had seen all the horrors of war and who had returned with his faith demolished. For the sake of his parents he kept up the pretence until they were dead. Then there was no need to pretend any longer.
The tale had a sequel. A year later when I was living in Surrey, there came a knock on the door one Sunday afternoon. My wife Diana went to answer it and there standing in the streaming rain was a woebegone figure in a ponderous overcoat. 'Is this where Leslie Thomas lives?' he asked. She let him in. He needed a strong cup of coffee. Diana went to make it, and I took his soaked coat and asked him to sit down. His face was drawn and he had only one tooth. 'Do you know who I am?' he asked. 'The last time you saw me I was wearing a dog collar.'
There we were, the boy from the Homes, now at long last settled and happy, and the man who seemed to have had everything and yet had somehow lost it. Unfortunately the Gaffer's son then became abusive, demanding money and behaving in a wild way. I picked up his coat and propelled him to the door. Firmly I pushed him out into the rain. Diana was all for calling him back, but I knew that once we did we would never have been rid of him. We saw him pitifully struggling into his overcoat in the deluge outside. It must have taken him three or four minutes.
The second blind spot in the Gaffer's make-up was that he, with an eagle eye which could pin-point a boy throwing a stone at two hundred yards, who knew every trick his charges could perpetrate, failed to understand that we had both resident and visiting pederasts.
In my four years as a member of that primitive community I can never remember any sign or talk of homosexual associations between the boys. It may have been an acknowledged part of public school life, but it was not of ours. Perhaps we were not sophisticated enough. We had inmates ranging in age from eight to sixteen or seventeen and, although there was a practising masturbation society, nothing remotely like a homosexual association ever became apparent. But that was between the boys. The masters and the visitors were different.
Two gentlemen, always welcomed by the Gaffer and matron, shared a house in the town and asked boys there for tea on Sundays. More than tea and cakes were involved, however. I went to the house only once (the host's aged mother was blindly knitting while it all went on around her) and left quickly through a window when I could not dodge around the rooms any longer. Others described how they had made similar getaways. One of these genial householders used to come to our home to play the piano for hymns on a Sunday evening, and he later attained high civic office and sat as a magistrate.
Within the home we had a succession of murky masters, one of whom used to stride around in Scout's trousers, blowing a whistle. He had a 'room boy', a pearl-faced oggle-eyed lad, who was supposed to make the man's bed and generally to skivvy, but who rarely seemed to leave the small bedroom at all. One day one of the dormito
ry matrons came upon a scene which sent her running, ashen-faced, to the Gaffer. At least the old man believed her. The transgressor was thrown out abruptly, with scarcely time to pack his medicaments, but by then he had been in residence two years.
This same man once told me that there was to be a special competition for a stage play, to be written by a boy and to be performed in the professional theatre. It seems an unlikely story now but, at a trusting fifteen, I believed him. Yes, I would like to enter. And he was going to help me! Oh, good!
I wrote the play and handed it to him. He said it was wonderful and later gave me the encouraging news that whoever was running the competition thought so too. It needed some polishing, however. He suggested that, as I was then of an age to stay up later than the other boys, I should go to the room at the top of the tower where he, another master and our two jolly visiting gentlemen would perhaps be able to give me some help. Clutching my script, I mounted the big shadowy staircase late that night and then up the small stairs into the highest room in the place. The four men sat there, wearing strained expressions. I sat down and there was a curious hiatus, as though no one knew what to say or how to start. A few desultory remarks were made about the plot, but mostly there remained an uncomfortable silence. Suddenly I became apprehensive. Saying it was my bedtime, I got up and went out of the door, almost falling down the stairs. Nothing more was ever mentioned about the play. It was a very strange and ominous interlude.
Fortunately there were also kindness, belief and understanding. Spinsterish though they were, the majority of the dormitory matrons tried their best and one or two younger women were lively and attractive. Towards the end of the war a new generation of masters appeared. The Gaffer, who had frequently been in sole charge, had known some strange helpers during the war years, including one religious soul, now a Nonconformist minister, who recently wrote to ask me if I minded sending him two thousand pounds to give his daughter a nice wedding.
In My Wildest Dreams Page 14
