In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  It would be unjust to say that either of these amiable young people put less than their whole being into the job of reporting the dusty doings of Willesden, but there were afternoons when they quietly slipped off to the cinema at the other end of the High Street.

  The chief reporter appeared equally out of place, but for other reasons. He was a brash and busy Scot, engulfed at any season in a thick-collared blue overcoat. He had a red face and wore spotted ties. He had experience on provincial and national newspapers and, when he was not drinking in the West End, or sleeping it off at his lodgings, he could find a story anywhere and sell it anywhere too.

  Although the business of compiling a weekly newspaper, which came a poor second to the established journal of the area – the Willesden Chronicle – was marginally his main concern, our chief reporter was often engrossed in the study of greyhounds or horses running that day. To finance these investments he did a steady trade in filing linage stories to Fleet Street and it was he who properly taught me this art. One Friday night when I was going to a youth club dance, he bet me five shillings I could not come into the office the next morning with a story that would make the national papers. Having rashly accepted the wager I was relieved and delighted to be told during the first waltz that my partner's sister had become engaged that day to an internationally famous speedway rider.

  At once I went to see the lucky girl, the daughter of a local shopkeeper. Yes, they were engaged. She was pretty, the speedway rider (absent abroad at that moment) was notoriously handsome. There would be a motorbike wedding in the spring. Happily I telephoned the story to the national newspapers.

  On the Monday morning my chief reporter cheerfully paid up the wager, then the telephone rang and it was the famous motorbike man. 'Engaged!' he bawled. 'Who said I'm engaged? All I know is I'm in a whole lot of trouble because of you. I'm going to be sued for breach of promise by somebody else. It's all your fault!'

  Inexperienced as I was, I was petrified. Visions of expensive libel actions hovered before me. In great anxiety I rang the alleged fiancée. Her mother, a no-nonsense London lady, answered. 'I don't know what he's playing at,' she said grimly. 'He proposed and my daughter accepted. He's accepted presents from us and he's put his motorbikes at the back of our shop. As far as I'm concerned they're engaged. So there.'

  So there it was, indeed. They had a motorbike wedding in the spring.

  It was in the magistrates' court I found a course of unending, small, but often touching and funny theatre. When I first went to the courtroom a wry man from the rival paper leaned over on the press bench and said: 'Ah, you're this week's reporter, are you?' The turnover in staff at the Citizen had become legendary.

  Willesden was what the police called a 'good crime area' which meant there was a lot of it. Several CID men from Harlesden, Willesden Green and Harrow Road found their eventual way to the upper glories of Scotland Yard. There was a young and enthusiastic detective-constable who later rose to some eminence, but in those days was feeling his early way. We were two of a kind. 'How do I get my name in the paper?' he anxiously asked me one day. He said it was essential as a detective to get your name in the paper so that superiors noticed you.

  He had, frankly, only been engaged in the sort of investigations that rarely evoke even local headlines. 'When you're in court giving evidence,' I advised him. 'If there's some unusual aspect of a case, some odd name or something a bit outlandish, then make sure you emphasise it. I'll take it down and write it up. I may even be able to get it in a national paper.'

  A week or so later I was sitting in the juvenile court and my detective friend was giving evidence against two boys, the siblings of a well-known local clan, every member of which was occupied with crime of one sort or another. (It was alleged that even the grandfather had trapped sparrows, sprayed them yellow and sold them as canaries.) These two lawless juveniles, aged about seven and eight, were accused of stealing two bicycles. The chairman, a grim-looking lady with kindly ways, asked the policeman what the boys had told him. Cocking a speculative eye in my direction, my friend said: 'They said they wanted the cycles as adventure bikes, your honour.'

  I groaned and shook my head. Adventure bikes! That would never do. I grimaced towards him. The magistrate looked puzzled. So did the two accused.

  'Adventure bikes?' asked the justice. 'Whatever did they mean, adventure bikes?'

  The young detective looked desperate. 'They . . .' he hesitated, glanced at the scowling little boys, then back towards me. He brightened with inspiration. 'They said,' he reported softly, 'that they wanted an adventure. They wanted to ride the bikes to fairyland.'

  Horrified, the two tough children stared at the policeman. The magistrate smiled indulgently. 'Is that so?' she said beaming at them. 'To ride to fairyland?'

  'Nah,' said the youngest. 'That's a lot of bollocks.'

  Before going to the Willesden paper I had never been required to cover inquests, so often touched with a paltry sadness and at other times with a macabre fascination. It was astonishing how many women sat down and made a phlegmatic cup of tea after finding their husband with his head in the gas oven. One said she cooked the Sunday lunch in the same oven once they'd removed the body.

  A retired policeman was being evicted from his house. He had apparently left and a bland estate agent was showing some prospective purchasers, newly weds, around the property. They reached an outhouse door. The agent, opening the door but not looking in, intoned, 'This is quite a useful shed. You can use it for all sorts of things.' Someone had. The evicted tenant was sitting in a chair with his throat cut.

  A pathetic husband one morning went along the press bench offering 'all the money I can afford' if his dead wife's name could be kept out of the newspapers. His children did not know their mother had committed suicide. The tragedy had taken place outside my area and would not have appeared in my newspaper anyway. I was vastly relieved.

  Among those tight streets there was drama every day. When I was first instructed to cover an inquest, on a Monday morning, I went by mistake to a little-used Coroner's Court in Kilburn instead of the normal venue at Ealing. No one seemed to be about, the door was locked, and eventually I enquired at the fire station next door. A fireman told me that I ought to find the coroner's officer 'down the yard' and I walked across a paved area and into what appeared to be an open garage. Stepping in, I found myself among the mangled but neatly sorted remains of three road accident victims. I had walked into the mortuary.

  Years later, in Rio de Janeiro, I was researching an article about some men from a village in central Brazil who had been found dead after going out to 'keep a rendezvous with an Unidentified Flying Object'. After much difficulty I tracked down the pathologist who had performed the autopsies on the men to the Legal-Medical Institute in the humid centre of the city. The pathologist was friendly and offered to show me his reports if I would care to follow him to his office on a higher floor. One elevator was out of order so we stepped into another and went up in the company of a bleeding corpse on a trolley (the hair was standing on end in shock) and two young girl secretaries who chatted and filed their nails unconcernedly during the short and shocking journey. We left the elevator and then had to walk the length of a huge morgue to reach the pathologist's office. It was just after the Rio Carnival and there were bodies everywhere, as though some mad carnage had taken place in the room. Chatting idly, the pathologist led me on into his office. He got a file from a cabinet and when he turned around I had passed out cold in a chair.

  Dealing with death becomes such an everyday thing for some people. I remember peeking over the shoulder of a famous pathologist who was waiting to give evidence at a London inquest. He was doodling colour-fully on his folder – spleens and livers and curly intestines. And a heart with a dagger through it.

  Winter came to Willesden and I was discovering that the daily journey from Surrey to the north-west edge of London and especially the return, after I had covered an evening assignment, was bec
oming difficult. It was necessary to leave the friendly West family and find somewhere locally to live. Outside a nearby newsagent's shop there was a frame of postcard advertisements, one offering a small, single, clean room in a nice house with breakfast and evening meal – one pound, fifteen shillings a week.

  Inside the newsagent's I asked a fluffy, middle-aged lady about the advertisement. Yes, she could recommend it thoroughly, it was a good house in a decent road and it was owned by a conscientious lady who really looked after her lodgers. In fact it was herself.

  Mrs Dyer was the widow of the manager of the local Odeon, who had passed on not long before, leaving her with the house and a black dog called 'Deon', named after the cinema. The house was in a road with trees, something of a rarity in that area; a red-brick front, with stairs going up and up inside. My room was at the very top of the house, adequate and clean, next to an Irishman who, I was forewarned, lobbed his empty Guinness bottles into the loft after finishing their contents while sitting up in bed. I said that did not bother me and we came to an agreement. I lived there for the next two and a half years.

  Jimmie, the Irishman, worked on a car assembly line where his workmates used to weld his hammer to the metal bench at least three times a week. He would sit at the table and, halfway through the evening meal, suddenly put down his knife and fork and grin as though remembering something from long ago in Sligo. 'Those bhoys,' he would remark, shaking his head until his rimless glasses slithered sideways on his nose. 'Those bhoys, they did it again today, they did. Welded the hammer to the bench and, God help me, every time I fall for it! Every blessed time. I'm picking up the hammer and it's stuck to the bench and they all laugh and I think to myself, Jesu, they've done it again . . . and there's me falling for it . . . well . . . well . . .'

  He was a goodly man of unalterable habit. He poetically called neighbouring Gricklewood Crinklewood. Every evening, whatever the season, he would retire to his narrow room immediately following the meal, after announcing to the other boarders that he was considering taking an early night. Up there he would read books, drink Guinness in bed, tossing the empties through the open loft trapdoor. When he went home to Ireland to see his wife, an annual pilgrimage, Mrs Dyer would get a ladder and go into the loft and bring the bottles down. There were hundreds. His reading had filled him with lore about foreign places but with a margin of error that outdistanced even that of my father. 'Now, do your people still use the pysinned arrows?' he enquired gently of an Indian metallurgist who was briefly a guest. 'And do they extract the pysin from the trees of the jungle?'

  Each Saturday at lunchtime, Jimmie would repair to the pub on the corner and stay until closing time, during which period he had backed several horses tipped by his workmates and which invariably lost. Apart from his work and the pub he rarely went anywhere. His wife paid him a surprise visit from Ireland once and he told her he would show her the sights of London, the like of which she had never seen, indicating that they were an everyday thing to him. They set out and walked down the Harrow Road towards London, several miles distant. It was only after they had gone halfway, and she saw a signpost, that she suggested that a bus might be, by chance, going in their direction.

  His undemanding routine was such that he would wake at six-thirty each day, without an alarm clock and look across the street to ensure that a neighbouring workmate's light was on. This meant that it was time for him to get up. One night I had been to a Chamber of Commerce ball or some other excitement and, arriving home at about one in the morning, was astonished to see Jimmie shaving in front of the bathroom mirror. 'All, young fellah!' he exclaimed. 'What would you be doing about so early in the day?' He stared at my black tie and dinner jacket. 'And dressed like that and all?'

  I explained that I had not yet been to bed and it was one o'clock in the morning. 'But . . . but . . . but . . .' blustered Jimmie. Like a man betrayed he glared out of the window and across the street. The other man's light had gone out. He had apparently only got up to go to the lavatory. 'Who can you trust these days, I ask you?' muttered Jimmie, returning to bed.

  His good nature was not even put out by the circumstances of his son's wedding. The son had been to university and lived separately next door. On the day of the wedding, Jimmie took over the responsibility of shepherding the guests from the house to the Roman Catholic church, and insisted that everything should be done with minute precision. Unfortunately his watch was wrong and the procession of highly dressed Irish folk arrived at the church doors just as the puzzled couple were emerging from the sparsely attended service.

  At Mrs Dyer's, the other guests included a Dutch bus conductor who was a fast bowler, an Australian who ate only ice cream during the day and (so Mrs Dyer believed) was almost bald as a result, and Mr Turner, a wry Lancastrian who was stationmaster of Wembley Central and spent his weekends walking from public house to public house. He drank little, the object of the safaris being to collect pub names. He used to enter them in a little book and study them in the evenings. My room had previously been occupied by two Irishmen who had departed hurriedly after failing to put together the ingredients of a bomb. Although they were in a rush they remained long enough to settle the rent, which Mrs Dyer thought was pretty decent considering the police were on the way.

  Our landlady was not so much shocked as amused by all that fuss. She was a genteel person with a nice voice and careful manners. I only once saw her lose her temper and that was with me. A staunch Tory, she was outraged when I brashly suggested that Winston Churchill was a warmonger and promptly cracked me over the head with a saucepan which dented as a result.

  I was the youngest in the house and she was sufficiently understanding to light a fire in the front parlour on Sunday afternoons so that I could entertain a girlfriend. One night she appeared on the landing, a powdery figure in a long, ghostly nightie, and apprehended me carrying my blankets and pillow down to the same front room where I had planned to make a young lady (and myself) more comfortable.

  Mrs Dyer missed her husband who had been the cinema manager and often talked romantically of their days at the pictures. She had one or two friends on the fringe of showbusiness; one old lady used to come to tea and talk about her career with a performing dogs act in a circus. The newsagent's shop where my landlady worked in the afternoons was owned by a grey, upright colonelish-looking man called Mr Rogers. They liked each other very much and sometimes he would be invited around to supper and at others they would go out for a ride on a bus.

  They would have been married, I expect, but he was taken suddenly ill and I came downstairs one morning and found her weeping while cooking the breakfast. Her great tears were falling sizzling into the frying pan with the sausages. 'He's dead,' she sobbed to me. 'My Mr Rogers is dead.' My heart went out to her for, like me, she was one of the world's solitaries and we embraced while the fat splattered. She went to see him in his coffin at the undertakers'. 'They do make them look very nice,' she said, her sense of the theatre unwilling to be subdued. 'He looked quite in the pink.'

  The theft of almost my entire wardrobe before I left Singapore had made dressing in style difficult in my new civilian life. It was difficult to wear my singing outfit all the time and the five pounds a week I was earning afforded little for replenishments. From somewhere I had obtained a pale blue hopsack suit, an unusual material that, like sacking, parted in holes like windows with the cross-fibres dividing the apertures into panes. I paid twenty-eight shillings for a pair of brown Oxford shoes and when winter came I dug out my long straight black overcoat which had come from Barnardo's. My body continued skinny (despite a diet of horsemeat steaks and chips at a cafe I used to frequent) and the overcoat hung on me like a pall. Topped by the white face and hollow eyes I presented an unhealthy spectacle. One day when I was sitting on a park bench, killing time before going to interview someone, a passer-by actually stopped and asked if I felt ill.

  It seems, however, that I was not wholly unattractive. I had a very pretty girlfriend,
who later became my wife, and I noticed older women considering me with longing expressions as if they were interested in fattening me up. One of these ladies, in her late twenties, always gave me a glass of sherry whenever I made a regular call at her flat in connection with the Kilburn Cacti and Succulent Society, not, you might think, an organisation which had a frequent output of news. Her husband was always out at work when I arrived and she eventually became quite skittish. One afternoon, with the sun streaming through her lace curtains, and the cacti and succulents lined up on the window sill, she grabbed me and threw me bodily to the floor. She was long and bony, like a horsewoman, and she proceeded to fling me about the carpet in the most frightful manner. I was both surprised and pleasured and we began laughing hysterically, although that was difficult when she was sitting across my stomach. I had not had a fight like this since the pink-faced assistant master at Kingsbridge had invited me to wrestle on the lawn.

  This rough and tumble excited both the secretary of the Kilburn Cacti and Succulent Society and the local reporter but, through some naive blockage, I still did not appreciate the full import of it. We rolled, bumped and somersaulted and that was all. Furniture was knocked and scattered, a big cactus spilled and the pot broke, and it was while we were lying panting, perspiring and still trying to stop laughing that she picked up the clock from beneath the table and said, 'Good God, Henry will be back soon. We'll have to carry on next week.'

  I looked forward to the next week like mad but, not for the first nor last time, I had failed to seize an opportunity. When I arrived on her doorstep she appeared almost frosty and said that the Society had no news that week, thank you. Then she shut the door. A few weeks later they moved away from the district.