My Autobiography (5 page)

Help of the helpless, O, abide with me.

It was then that I felt utterly dejected. Although I did not understand the hymn, the tune and the twilight increased my sadness.

But, to our happy surprise, within two months Mother had arranged for our discharge, and we were dispatched again to London and the Lambeth workhouse. Mother was at the gate dressed in her own clothes, waiting for us. She had applied for a discharge only because she wanted to spend the day with her children, intending, after a few hours outside together, to return the same day; Mother being an inmate of the workhouse, this ruse was her only means to be with us.

Before we entered our private clothes had been taken from us and steamed; now they were returned unpressed. Mother, Sydney and I looked a crumpled sight as we ambled out through the workhouse gates. It was early morning and we had nowhere to go, so we walked to Kennington Park, which was about a mile away. Sydney had ninepence tied up in a handkerchief, so we bought half a pound of black cherries and spent the morning in Kennington Park, sitting on a bench eating them. Sydney crumpled a sheet of newspaper and wrapped some string around it and for a while the three of us played catch-ball. At noon we went to a coffee-shop and spent the rest of our money on a twopenny tea-cake, a penny bloater and two halfpenny cups of tea, which we shared between us. Afterwards we returned to the park where Sydney and I played again while Mother sat crocheting.

In the afternoon we made our way back to the workhouse. As Mother said with levity: ‘We’ll be just in time for tea.’ The authorities were most indignant, because it meant going through the same procedure of having our clothes steamed and Sydney and I spending more time at the workhouse before returning to Hanwell, which of course gave us an opportunity of seeing Mother again.

But this time we stayed at Hanwell for almost a year – a most formative year, in which I started schooling and was taught to write my name ‘Chaplin’. The word fascinated me and looked like me, I thought.

Hanwell School was divided in two, a department for boys and one for girls. On Saturday afternoon the bath-house was reserved for infants, who were bathed by the older girls. This, of course, was before I was seven, and a squeamish modesty attended these occasions; having to submit to the ignominy of a young girl of fourteen manipulating a facecloth all over my person was my first conscious embarrassment.

At the age of seven I was transferred from the infants’ to the older boys’ department, where ages ranged from seven to fourteen. Now I was eligible to participate in all the grown-up functions, the drills and exercises and the regular walks we took outside the school twice a week.

Although at Hanwell we were well looked after, it was a forlorn existence. Sadness was in the air; it was in those country lanes through which we walked, a hundred of us two abreast. How I disliked those walks, and the villages through which we passed, the locals staring at us! We were known as inmates of the ‘booby hatch’, a slang term for workhouse.

The boys’ playground was approximately an acre, paved with slab-stones. Surrounding it were one-storey brick buildings, used for offices, store-rooms, a doctor’s dispensary, a dentist’s office and a wardrobe for boys’ clothing. In the darkest corner of the yard was an empty room, and recently confined there was a boy of fourteen, a desperate character according to the other boys. He had attempted to escape from the school by climbing out of a second-storey window and up on to the roof, defying the officials by throwing missiles and horse-chestnuts at them as they climbed after him. This happened after we infants were asleep: we were given an awed account of it by the older boys the next morning.

For major offences of this nature, punishment took place every Friday in the large gymnasium, a gloomy hall about sixty feet by forty with a high roof, and, on the side, climbing ropes running up to girders. On Friday morning two to three hundred boys, ranging in age from seven to fourteen years, marched in and lined up in military fashion, forming three sides of a square. The far end was the fourth side, where, behind a long school desk the length of an Army mess-table, stood the miscreants waiting for trial and punishment. On the right and in front of
the desk was an easel with wrist-straps dangling, and from the frame a birch hung ominously.

For minor offences, a boy was laid across the long desk, face downwards, feet strapped and held by a sergeant, then another sergeant pulled the boy’s shirt out of his trousers and over his head, then pulled his trousers tight.

Captain Hindrum, a retired Navy man weighing about two hundred pounds, with one hand behind him, the other holding a cane as thick as a man’s thumb and about four feet long, stood poised, measuring it across the boy’s buttocks. Then slowly and dramatically he would lift it high and with a swish bring it down across the boy’s bottom. The spectacle was terrifying, and invariably a boy would fall out of rank in a faint.

The minimum number of strokes was three and the maximum six. If a culprit received more than three, his cries were appalling. Sometimes he was ominously silent, or had fainted. The strokes were paralysing, so that the victim had to be carried to one side and laid on a gymnasium mattress, where he was left to writhe and wriggle for at least ten minutes before the pain subsided, leaving three pink welts as wide as a washerwoman’s finger across his bottom.

The birch was different. After three strokes, the boy was supported by two sergeants and taken to the surgery for treatment.

Boys would advise you not to deny a charge, even if innocent, because, if proved guilty, you would get the maximum. Usually, boys were not articulate enough to declare their innocence.

I was now seven and in the big boys’ section. I remember witnessing my first flogging, standing in silence, my heart thumping as the officials entered. Behind the desk was the desperado who had tried to escape from the school. We could hardly see more than his head and shoulders over the desk, he looked so small. He had a thin, angular face and large eyes.

The headmaster solemnly read the charges and demanded: ‘Guilty or not guilty?’

Our desperado would not answer, but stared defiantly in front of him; he was thereupon led to the easel, and being small, he was made to stand on a soap-box so that his wrists could be strapped. He received three strokes with the birch and was led away to the surgery for treatment.

On Thursdays, a bugle sounded in the playground and we would all stop playing, taking a frozen position like statues, while Captain Hindrum, through a megaphone, announced the names of those who were to report for punishment on Friday.

One Thursday, to my astonishment I heard my name called. I could not imagine what I had done. Yet for some unaccountable reason I was thrilled – perhaps because I was the centre of a drama. On the day of the trial, I stepped forward. Said the headmaster: ‘You are charged with setting fire to the dykes’ (the lavatory).

This was not true. Some boys had lit a few bits of paper on the stone floor and while they were burning I came in to use the lavatory, but I had played no part in that fire.

‘Are you guilty or not guilty?’ he asked.

Nervous and impelled by a force beyond my control, I blurted out: ‘Guilty.’ I felt neither resentment nor injustice but a sense of frightening adventure as they led me to the desk and administered three strokes across my bottom. The pain was so excruciating that it took away my breath; but I did not cry out, and, although paralysed with pain and carried to the mattress to recover, I felt valiantly triumphant.

As Sydney was working in the kitchen, he had not known about it until punishment day, when he was marched into the gymnasium with the others and to his shocked amazement saw my head peering over the desk. He told me afterwards that when he saw me receiving three strokes he wept with rage.

A younger brother referred to his older brother as ‘my young ’un’, which made him feel proud and gave him a little security. So occasionally I saw ‘my young ’un’, Sydney, as I was leaving the dining-room. As he worked in the kitchen, he would surreptitiously hand me a sliced bread roll with a thick lump of butter pressed between, and I would smuggle it under my jersey and share it with another boy – not that we were hungry, but the generous lump of butter was an exceptional luxury. But these delicacies were not to continue, for Sydney left Hanwell to join the
Exmouth
training ship.

At the age of eleven a workhouse boy had the choice of joining the Army or the Navy. If the Navy, he was sent to the
Exmouth
. Of course, it was not obligatory, but Sydney wanted to make a career of the sea. So that left me alone at Hanwell.

*

Hair is vitally personal to children. They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.

There had been an epidemic of ringworm at Hanwell and, as it is most contagious, those infected were dispatched to the isolation ward on the first floor overlooking the playground. Often we would look up at the windows and see those wretched boys looking wistfully down at us, their heads shaved all over and stained brown with iodine. They were a hideous sight and we would look up at them with loathing.

Thus when a nurse stopped abruptly behind me in the dining-room and parted the top of my hair and announced: ‘Ringworm!’ I was thrown into paroxysms of weeping.

The treatment took weeks and seemed like an eternity. My head was shaved and iodined and I wore a handkerchief tied around it like a cotton-picker. But one thing I would not do was to look out of the window at the boys below, for I knew in what contempt they held us.

During my incarceration Mother visited me. She had in some way managed to leave the workhouse and was making an effort to establish a home for us. Her presence was like a bouquet of flowers; she looked so fresh and lovely that I felt ashamed of my unkempt appearance and my shaved iodined head.

‘You must excuse his dirty face,’ said the nurse.

Mother laughed, and how well I remember her endearing words as she hugged and kissed me: ‘With all thy dirt I love thee still.’

Soon afterwards, Sydney left the
Exmouth
and I left Hanwell and we joined Mother again. She took a room at the back of Kennington Park and for a while she was able to support us. But it was not long before we were back in the workhouse again. The circumstances that led up to our return were something to do with Mother’s difficulty in finding employment and Father’s slump in his theatrical engagements. In that brief interlude we
kept moving from one back-room to another; it was like a game of draughts – the last move was back to the workhouse.

Living in a different parish, we were sent to a different workhouse, and from there to Norwood Schools, which was more sombre than Hanwell; leaves darker and trees taller. Perhaps the countryside had more grandeur, but the atmosphere was joyless.

One day, while Sydney was playing football, two nurses called him out of the game and told him that Mother had gone insane and had been sent to Cane Hill lunatic asylum. When Sydney heard the news he showed no reaction but went back and continued playing football. But after the game he stole away by himself and wept.

When he told me I could not believe it. I did not cry, but a baffling despair overcame me. Why had she done this? Mother, so light-hearted and gay, how could she go insane? Vaguely I felt that she had deliberately escaped from her mind and had deserted us. In my despair I had visions of her looking pathetically at me, drifting away into a void.

We heard the news officially a week later; we also heard that the court decreed that Father must take over the custody of Sydney and me. The prospect of living with Father was exciting. I had seen him only twice in my life, on the stage, and once when passing a house in the Kennington Road, as he was coming down the front garden path with a lady. I had paused and watched him, knowing instinctively that he was my father. He beckoned me to him and asked my name. Sensing the drama of the situation, I had feigned innocence and said: ‘Charlie Chaplin’. Then he glanced knowingly at the lady, felt in his pocket and gave me half a crown, and without further ado I ran straight home and told Mother that I had met my father.

And now we were going to live with him. Whatever happened, Kennington Road was familiar and not strange and sombre like Norwood.

The officials drove us in the bread van to 287 Kennington Road, the house where I had seen my father walking down the garden path. The door was opened by the lady who had been with him at the time. She was dissipated and morose-looking, yet attractive, tall and shapely, with full lips and sad, doe-like eyes; her age could have been thirty. Her name was Louise. It
appeared that Mr Chaplin was not at home, but after the usual formalities and the signing of papers the official left us in charge of Louise, who led us upstairs to the first landing into the front sitting-room. A small boy was playing on the floor as we entered, a most beautiful child of four with large dark eyes and rich brown curly hair: it was Louise’s son – my half-brother.

The family lived in two rooms and, although the front room had large windows, the light filtered in as if from under water. Everything looked as sad as Louise; the wallpaper looked sad, the horse-hair furniture looked sad, and the stuffed pike in a glass case that had swallowed another pike as large as itself – the head sticking out of its mouth – looked gruesomely sad.

In the back room she had put an extra bed for Sydney and me to sleep on, but it was too small. Sydney suggested sleeping on the sofa in the sitting-room. ‘You’ll sleep where you’re told to,’ said Louise. This caused an embarrassing silence as we walked back into the living-room.

Our reception was not an enthusiastic one, and no wonder. Sydney and I had been suddenly thrust upon her, and moreover we were the offspring of Father’s estranged wife.

We both sat mutely watching her preparing the table for something to eat. ‘Here,’ she said to Sydney, ‘you can make yourself useful and fill the coal-scuttle. And you,’ she said, turning to me, ‘go to the cook-shop next to the White Hart and get a shilling’s worth of corned beef.’