In My Wildest Dreams (36 page)

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.

It was my regular routine to do the rounds of the various organisations in the crowded borough. One of these was to the Conservative Club where a dear old boozer was the political agent. In that generally dingy area the party was very much in the minority. Labour members of the council outnumbered Tories by eight to one (which did not stop the Socialists electing a Tory mayor, in recognition of long service to the town, something that would be a little short of a miracle today).

One morning, making my customary call at the Conservative Club, I found the agent, a retired army officer, as usual affably at the bar. I asked if the forthcoming council elections had meant much additional work. He choked on his Scotch and, ashen-faced, asked me the date, then the time. When I told him he emitted a spectral howl and staggered towards his office, slamming the door. Noon that day was the deadline for the handing in of nomination papers for the forthcoming elections. It was now eleven-thirty and he had forgotten to send them. Nor were they signed and seconded.

Somehow a scrawl of somewhat instant signatures appeared on the hastily filled-out papers and there was a dash to the town hall. The town clerk looked at the clock and shrugged. It was three minutes past noon. The nominations were invalid. The next council had a vastly increased Labour majority and the Tory agent decided to retire.

One of the Labour councillors was a personable young man called Reginald Freeson who rose to the higher levels of the party and who became, despite an attempted left-wing intrusion, Member of Parliament for Brent, of which Willesden forms part. Reg Freeson was a journalist who at one time worked for a series of children's comic papers. Once, years later at some sort of party, where
The Times
man introduced himself sonorously: 'Martin-Thompson-Billings,
The Times,''
and I said: 'Leslie Thomas,
Evening News,'
slightly less impressively, Reg Freeson added unselfconsciously: 'Reginald Freeson,
Mickey Mouse Weekly
.'

Social events, lunches, annual dinners and receptions in Willesden were usually my concern since most of the other reporters had homes to go to. I welcomed this because I was fed and watered rather better than my pocket would allow (I also went to the cinema free). One of the regular festivities was the social evening of the Anglo-German Friendship Club where Teutonic ladies and gentlemen and Willesden residents tried to forget the enmities of war, which had been over only six years. At these gatherings the waiters were uniformed members of the Royal Artillery Association who not long previously had been firing shells in the direction of the selfsame Germans they were now serving. I asked one of the former gunners how he felt about this: 'They're a very good crowd, the Krauts,' he said after thinking about it. 'During the war I must have killed quite a few of them but I'm sorry now.'

After Mrs Dyer had hit me on the head with the saucepan we decided that, with no further hard feelings, we should part company. I took my belongings a mile or so further into the centre of Willesden to the house of another widow, Mrs Bailey, where I had a room directly overlooking the cemetery.

Mrs Bailey was a splintery old dear whose concern was 'to feed you up for your wedding'. This agricultural ambition she attempted to achieve by shovelling fried and other food onto my plate in great quantities at all hours of the day and with what she considered to be apt commentary. 'Here's your belly lining!' she would proclaim, bringing in smoking porridge at seven in the morning. She was not a good cook. Her piles of chips often resembled a burnt-out log cabin and I saw many a baleful-eyed egg looking out of the charred wreckage. 'You won't notice it under this gunge,' she would enthuse, sloshing out the HP sauce. 'That'll keep you stoked up for the winter,' and 'Let this lot gurgle down inside you,' were other culinary phrases.

She was also magically untidy. Clothes, utensils and furniture were piled everywhere, only being moved to be piled elsewhere. It was really only a two-roomed flat with the bathroom also doubling as the kitchen. A small gas-cooking range was placed on top of the toilet cistern. 'It saves a lot of time,' was her unhappy joke, and there was a wooden board which could be placed on top of the bath to provide a surface for kitchen work and to support mountains of undone washing-up and dirty laundry. Both the crockery and the clothes were washed in the bath, sometimes together.

When I first arrived I immediately decided to make another move as soon as decently possible but I did not want to hurt my new landlady's feelings and I had to wait for a proper-looking opportunity/By the time that arrived, if it ever did, I had been so won over by her sweetness and eccentricity that I forgot to go. Her only son had gone off to France in 1939 with the British Expeditionary Force when he was about my age, and had been killed in the first trenches. She saw me as a sort of replacement.

The cemetery, its crosses and posturing angels almost beneath my window, was a constant source of interest. Drinking a cup of tea, I could watch the funerals. Their variety was infinite; masses of mourners and forests of flowers for one occasion down to a solitary matchstick man I once saw head hung over the open grave, with the white billowing clergyman and the idling grave-diggers. One night a young drunk climbed the iron gates and went to sleep on his mother's tombstone; one day the chapel in the middle of the cemetery caught fire during a service and everybody hurried out into the open air, the undertaker's men rushing through the flames to rescue the coffin and its occupant.

On the distant side of the cemetery was a park and I sometimes used to go over there on Friday, my day off, to kick a football around. There was rarely anyone else to join in and I would dribble the ball around the feet of trees and practice passing to non-existent teammates. Often I was observed by an ancient man who sat unattended in the park shelter, and one day he asked me if he could play. It was impossible for him to run for he hobbled on a stick, but the park shelter was not unlike a goal and he suggested that I should kick the ball towards him and he would be the goalkeeper. He could continue sitting. I concurred, mainly to do him a favour but after trying this out a few times I found that it was quite useful practice in placing the ball carefully either side of his hopefully stretching hands. He enjoyed it greatly and kept waving his stick (which he often used as an elongation of his arm to stop me from scoring) and shouting, 'Shoot! Go on, lad, shoot!'

It was strange but good fun and I combined it with my serious practice by dribbling the ball around the tree roots and then kicking it at the goal with its seated custodian. The old man loved it and became more enthusiastic as time went on. Once I flattened him against the wooden boards at the back of the shelter by selfishly getting too excited and firing the ball in with some velocity. Even this did not deter him. Once I had picked him up and he had regained his breath he was keen to carry on with the game. One morning when I arrived with the ball he was sitting there grinning smugly in a green goalkeeper's jersey which he wore thereafter. God knows what the person who looked after him thought when he went out dressed like that and came back covered with sweat and odd bruises. Then, one day, he was not there and he never came to the park again. I never knew his name so I could not find out what had happened to him, but I suppose he had died. Not, I hope, through any overexertion at football. I really believed he looked forward to it and, as he once told me, it was a lot better that just staring at nothing.

Going to the park with the ball and returning to my lodgings meant a detour around the cemetery. One day it began to rain coldly while I was kicking around among the trees and I decided to risk a short cut through the tombstones. I was wearing old trousers, a jersey and muddy boots and I was carrying the ball. Although it was raining thickly I felt I should not run but, at the most, trot.

My route took me down the central path of the cemetery to where the chapel stood in the middle. As I was rounding the corner of the chapel I bounced the ball once, without thinking, and then turned the corner to be confronted by a funeral. At the same moment the ball struck my toe, bouncing away from me, alongside the procession of mourners, until it became horribly entangled in the legs of the men who were carrying the coffin. One of them trod on it, another sidestepped and the long box wobbled perilously. The pallbearers then played a close-passing game, each one trying to flick the ball clear, only to see it strike the shoes of another. Eventually, one fellow, with a firm clearance, sent the ball skidding along the path –
and into the prepared gravel
Oh my God, I thought, what now? Some of the mourners were beginning to cry, glaring in my direction while I stood stupefied. The coffin wobbled once more. What could I do? Ask: 'Could I have my ball back, please?' One of the gravediggers solved the crisis by jumping into the hole and retrieving the ball. The final terrible, farcical moment came when my football suddenly shot out of the open ground like a shell discharged from a mortar and bounced away between the tombstones with me following. I never went into the cemetery again.