In My Wildest Dreams (18 page)

'What do you want, son?' he enquired, not unkindly but without looking away from his paper.

This was it. I took a deep breath. 'Sir,' I said perhaps not as firmly as I might, 'I want to be a writer.'

He had grown a trifle deaf with age and it was some moments before he revolved from his newspaper. But he always encouraged ambition. 'Good,' he said eventually. 'Well done. I'll see you're a waiter in a good restaurant.'

The only waiting I did in those days was for girls who never turned up. I was very romantic, and still am, about women. Certainly the women of my boyhood dreams were always pink-cheeked, with a parasol and possibly surrounded by a bower of roses. Humiliation, perhaps not surprisingly, was to be my lot throughout my boyhood and into my teens. At one time I thought I must be close to holding the world record for waiting under clocks.

I confided in Frank Knights, the oldest boy in the home, that I had made a date with a deliriously pretty girl from Surbiton High School. Frank, who was known as Nightshirt and was worldly-wise, enquired if she had a similarly beautiful friend. It turned out she had and we arranged to meet them under the clock at Kingston bus station. Brushed and clean we hung about for an hour and a half but they did not show up so we went and spent the money on egg and chips in a café. It was the first time in my life that I had been out to dine.

There occurred another far more mortifying experience with a girl who did keep the appointment. She was a snooty, thin thing I met at evening classes (in pursuit of my dream, I was learning shorthand and typing after drawing inaccurate lines, building bad walls and defacing pieces of wood during the day). We began to talk about music and, in a moment of extravagance, I invited her to a concert at the Albert Hall. To my ecstasy and horror she accepted. She would telephone me to fix the day.

Now she did not know I was in an orphanage and I did not want her to know. This was when Mr Paul had become Superintendent and I was able to haunt the office on the Saturday, waiting for the phone to ring. It would never do for someone to pick it up and say: 'Dr Barnardo's.' Fortunately she called at more or less the arranged time and I was swift to the receiver. I can still remember the number. 'Kingson 0232,' I responded in my poshest voice. Matron put her head in the door and went out again. 'Sorry,' I said and, to explain the pause, truthfully added: 'It was just one of the staff.' Now she thought we had servants too.

The assignation was arranged. She rang off, saying thrillingly that she was looking forward to seeing me again. Now I had the problem of obtaining money. As a senior boy I was getting half-a-crown a week pocket money and I worked out I could just manage the train fare and the lowest-priced tickets for a total of ten shillings. The sporting Mr Paul advanced me a month's pocket money on account of some fiction I related. On the day, shaking and shining, I went up to London on the train and then by bus to the Albert Hall.
There she was.
Waiting – for
me
! As though I took women out every night, I kissed her on the cheek.

Difficulties then began. She grumbled that we had to go and sit up in the highest
gods,
clumping and complaining up the endless stairs. When Cedric had taken her, she moaned, they had sat in the
front
stalls, just behind the conductor.

'You don't hear the music properly down there,' I argued with inspiration. We sat down. It was like peering into the mouth of a volcano. 'Up here the music floats to you.'

She kept muttering through the first half of the concert and then horrified me in the interval by announcing that she really
would
like a drink. Dumbstruck I mentally counted the money in my pocket. 'Please, dear,' she said archly. A gin and ton.'

A gin and ton! Christ, how much was a gin and ton? Trembling, I went towards the bar. 'And
might
we have a programme,' she called after me. 'We ought to have bought the programme before
surely.'

Sod the programme, I thought. But there was no escaping the gin and ton. I approached the bar. I had never bought a drink in my life. 'Gin and ton, please,' I mumbled.

The lady had a suspicious eye and I had a sudden hope that she would refuse to serve me. It would, on the other hand, be a humiliation to have to admit that I had been turned away as being under-age. But that gin and tonic would mean that I would not have enough to buy her a ticket on the train home. I gritted my teeth while the bar lady hesitated.

She made up her mind and said: 'All right then. How many? Two?'

'One!'
I bellowed. She fell back shocked. 'One, please, just one,' I whispered.

It left me with only enough money for the bus fare to Waterloo and my own return ticket. I would have to give her that. Jesus Christ, a gin and ton, if you please.

'Aren't you having one?' enquired the girl loftily when I returned.

'Me? Oh no. I'm in training, see. For football, I've had to cut out drink. Especially gin and ton.'

She sniffed. 'Did you get a programme? I'd like to know what they're playing even if we are a long way up.'

'Sold out,' I said desperately. 'All gone. Anyway I think it's more fun guessing, don't you?'

'Not really,' she said. 'I feel quite giddy up here, you know.'

I was glad when it was over. We silently boarded the bus and she stared out of the window all the way to Waterloo. She took out a gold case and selected a cigarette which I tremblingly lit for her with her own box of Swan Vestas. I was so miserable.

At the station I felt for my return ticket and prepared to hand it to her, planning to announce at the same time that, although it was eleven-thirty at night, I had remembered a sudden urgent appointment in the City. To my overwhelming relief she produced a season ticket from her bag. I wouldn't have to walk after all.

At the other end she gave me a peck like a hen on the cheek before heading for home. So much for romance. I brightened when I was walking up Gloucester Road, though. I woke Nightshirt and told him how wonderful it had all been, the Albert Hall, the inspiring music, the gins and tonics. He stirred in the dormitory moonlight. 'That must have set you back a packet,' he mentioned.

'Oh, it did,' I said, getting into my iron bed. 'But it was worth it. She's terrific.'

Nightshirt sniffed over the blankets. 'That's the trouble with women,' he said wisely. 'It's the bloody expense.'

Ever the romantic, my other early experiences with girls were not fulfilling. In the summer of 1945, the first of peacetime, I went for a holiday to my uncle's house in South Wales. Both my uncle and aunt and my cousin Adrian worked in Cardiff all day and sometimes stayed long into the evening. I went to their office on Cardiff Docks, Tiger Bay as it was called, and one day Adrian, who was two years older than me, took me to a cafe where he appeared to be on lascivious terms with a lush-looking girl with a flower in her hair. I could only gape as they clutched each other at the table. God, what would I have given for a girl with a flower in her hair.

Most of that holiday I was left in the charge of the beautiful and benevolent granny – my aunt's mother – who realised I was lonely and several times took me to the pictures although I am sure she did not want to see either
Hellzapoppin
or
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Emerging from the cinema on the latter occasion we agreed that neither of us had understood what had happened.

To keep me occupied during my unaccompanied days my uncle bought an Eskimo canoe, a wood-and-canvas kayak. The beach was two miles away but I optimistically bought some pram wheels and dragged it there one evening, took my clothes off, stowed them and the wheels in the bow of the tenuous craft, and eventually launched out into the leaden Bristol Channel. I had no idea what I was doing but merely paddled the slim boat straight out to sea, intending to round the rocky headland of Gold Knapp and land on the pebble beach on the distant side. Out and out I went. The waves became morose and choppy and water began to slop over the side. While I kept the kayak's head into the sea it was not so bad but once I tried to turn the Knapp – which I now know has currents so notorious that even experienced boatmen shun it – I knew I was in danger. The boat began to fill with water. Desperately I paddled, trying to round the cape, looking for help towards the shore. Nothing moved in the lessening light. Not for the first time I was on my own. Eventually, battered, wet and weary, I made it and the ingoing waves carried me side-on to the stony beach. Tumbling from the boat, I managed to drag it clear of the waterline, and collapsed face down on the pebbles. It was late evening and I attracted no attention. Eventually I sat up and, shivering, managed to get my clothes on and go to the top of the beach where there was a telephone. No one was in my uncle's house. Unbelievably, I then decided I would have to get the boat back to the house. It proved impossible to fit the wheels so I picked up the craft and put it on my shoulder and set out to walk the two uphill miles. About halfway there I was staggering about all over the road when some youths came along, rough kids, smoking and joking. They took the boat from me and carried it to my uncle's front door. I was very grateful.

It was during that August they had the swimming gala in the open-air baths which I have already described – when I came second in a two-boy race because my two swimming costumes had fallen off in the water. As I was proudly looking at my second prize and the local reporter was noting my name for his column a pretty little girl in a brown swimming suit came up to me and smiled: 'Hard luck.' That is all she said; they were the only words she ever spoke to me, but at once I was in love again.

The following day I went back to the baths but she was not there. She had been sitting with her family outside one of the private chalets and, by dint of sly enquiries which augured well for my future as a reporter, I discovered the family's name and their address. That evening I loitered in the rain at a bus stop just opposite the house. Buses stopped and the conductors could not understand why I did not get on. I was there for hours waiting for her to emerge. 'Oh!' I would exclaim with many-times-rehearsed surprise. 'Fancy seeing you again!' When I was about to give up she came out. It was almost dark but I was sure it was her. She was with another girl and they ran chattering to another house across the road, so quickly that I had no time to arch my eyebrows or utter a syllable of my speech. I pulled up the collar of my coat and went moodily home. I suppose I was simply lonely.

After four weeks at my uncle's comfortable house I was glad to get back to the rough familiarity of Dickies. There, at least, I knew where I was and I was never alone. We had a concert during which Boz and I performed a lusty song called 'Dear Old Donegal', not you might think the ideal choice for a blatant Yorkshireman and a boy from Newport. Two of the visiting audience, a pair of cosy sisters in their late twenties, invited us to tea at their house at Kingston. We jumped at it and on the following Sunday had a splendid time with lots to eat followed by singing at the piano. One sister played and the other put her arms about each of our shoulders while we chorused, pressing us close as she sang so that we were each aware of a large warm breast. Later they took me to hear the
Messiah
at the Albert Hall and I paid several visits to their house. I was harbouring hope that they might have similar designs as some of our slinking male visitors but, unfortunately, nothing improper ever occurred. My run of ill luck with women was continuing.

There was one further humiliation and it was again associated with swimming. (There is doubtless some Freudian interpretation.) We had gone camping on the Isle of Man – life was now much more free and enjoyable – and there I met a lovely dark girl, with long eyelashes, who was called Isa Luny. Determined to impress her I swam out one evening from the beach, out, out, far out, to where cormorants were diving. I turned onto my back and saw her miniature figure waiting on the shore. She must have been a mile away and I turned and began to return. It was cold and darkening now with the shore becoming indistinct; it was much harder swimming back. Eventually, out of strength, out of breath, I staggered up the sharp shingle. White, thin and shivering, water running down my long nose and my hair stuck on my forehead, I stumbled on. My beloved was waiting. 'You know,' she remarked thoughtfully, closely studying the sight. 'You look just like a crow.'

Having told the story on a television programme, and mentioning the little girl's rememberable name and where she had lived, I had a charming letter from her. Thirty-eight years on, Isa Luny confessed she could neither recall me nor the incident, but she felt very sorry about it.

Crow or not, I doubt if I was much to see, although we were being fed properly now and I was playing football and cricket, both at home and at school. Indeed I cut a fine figure, I thought, when I was a ball boy at the first Wimbledon tennis tournament after the war. Barnardo's traditionally provided the ball boys and it lent us a touch of glamour that was otherwise far beyond our reach. Seeking the limelight, perhaps, I one afternoon strayed onto the court when Colin Long, an Australian, was serving. The ball hit me in the seat of my shorts. Afterwards the player apologised and I apologised to him for spoiling the service. 'Kid,' he said. 'When that upsets me, then it's time I packed up.' I wonder what reaction it might have provoked today?

Sheila Summers, a golden South African, and Kay Menzies, the British champion, played in that first postwar Wimbledon. Predictably I could not make up my mind with which one, the fair or the dark, I should get involved. Every day I turned up looking my smartest and one day when a door opened accidentally, I actually viewed Miss Summers in her brassiere, her sunbathed skin under the white straps. Oh God, I thought, nothing else matters now.

There was a men's doubles couple called Cohen and Tallart and during one of their matches a spectator leaned into the court and asked me where they were from. 'They're Jews,' I replied confidentally. 'I suppose they're from Jerusalem.' I wondered why the man and everyone in earshot laughed uproariously.