This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (24 page)

Linda wanted to write to our aunties and uncles in Liverpool. Not to ask for money – we understood they didn’t have any to spare – but just to tell them that Lily was in
hospital preparing for major heart surgery. Lily was adamant. We were not to worry them. When the operation was over and she had her new lease of life, we would go to Liverpool, the three of us, and show them how much better she was.

Local people were very good to us. As well as the box of groceries from Mr Berriman, we were given a stack of second-hand clothes by a woman in Walmer Road with a large family, together with a bunch of flowers to take in to Lily. Before she had gone into hospital, Lily had ordered two annuals from Maynard’s to give us for Christmas. She hadn’t paid for them but the newsagent passed them on anyway and wouldn’t take a penny for them. Linda’s was a pop-music annual; mine was
The BBC Grandstand Book of Sport
. In a fit of nostalgia for Christmases past, I actually wrapped my book and put it by my bed on Christmas Eve so that I’d have a present to open when I woke up on Christmas morning.

Lily tried to get herself discharged to be with us at Christmas but her consultant wouldn’t hear of it and neither would Linda. She was determined that when Lily was discharged from hospital, she would go straight to a new home. The clinicians said that returning to the damp conditions at Walmer Road, even for a few days, would jeopardize the preparations for the operation.

Mike would be with his family on Christmas Day and would fetch Linda on Boxing Day and take her back to Watford. Mrs Cox, who was Lily’s only other regular visitor, invited us to spend Christmas with her family but neither of us was keen. There were no spare beds for us to sleep in and in any case, we wanted to be at the hospital with Lily on Christmas afternoon. Instead it was agreed that I would go to the Coxes
for my dinner on Boxing Day while Linda was in Watford.

So we spent Christmas morning alone again, this time six years older and wiser – Linda now knew she had to unwrap the chicken before placing it in the oven. This time she even managed to stuff it with sage and onion as well, serving it with roast potatoes that were almost as good as Lily’s and vegetables that, unlike our mother’s, had not been boiled to within an inch of their lives.

This feast took longer to cook than Linda had bargained for and by the time it was ready we were running late. We were determined to be at the hospital from the very start of visiting time so that Lily wouldn’t be the only one without her family there when the doors opened, and we had a long walk ahead of us. I ate my Christmas dinner standing at the pull-down work surface that was a common feature of the kitchen cabinets popular in working-class homes of the 1950s and 1960s. Linda finished ironing our best clothes before gobbling down the special meal she’d cooked so painstakingly.

It was a particularly cold Christmas Day and we were pleased to reach the sterile warmth of the hospital. Of the eight beds on Lily’s ward, only three were occupied. The other five patients had been allowed to go home for Christmas. The ward was decorated and had a proper tree. Linda had managed to put some decorations up at Walmer Road, but they couldn’t match the quality of those in the hospital. Ours had been stored in an ancient biscuit tin for as long as we could remember, making their brief annual appearance about a week before Christmas Day: some paper chains, sprigs of imitation holly and a couple of paper bells that opened out like concertinas, which had to be Sellotaped into shape before being pushed into the ceiling with
the rusty drawing pins returned to the biscuit tin with them every year. We’d never had a Christmas tree, real or fake, and we pointed out to Lily how fortunate she was to have one on the ward. She promised we’d have a tree next Christmas, when she was home, her health transformed, and we’d be living in a house with our very own front door – a house that was worthy of a Christmas tree.

Lily was as cheerful as we’d seen her since that terrible November night. She’d applied her lipstick and dabbed on some perfume. We were her only visitors but she made us feel that we were the only ones she wanted. We stayed until 8pm, when the nurse told us we had to leave. As we were about to go, Lily pulled Linda close and whispered to her that she had yet to sign the consent forms for the operation. She still wasn’t sure that she should go ahead with it. For once, Linda told me what Lily had said and asked me what I thought. As we walked home through the silent streets, I confided to Linda how scared I’d been on the night Lily had been taken to hospital. I felt that if the operation was her only hope, she should agree to it for our sake as well as her own.

It was 9.30 by the time we got back to our cold, damp house, feeling distinctly unChristmassy. Sheila Thompson must have been listening out for us. She invited us up for something to eat. It was in the Thompsons’ tidy kitchen-cum-living room on the top landing of 6 Walmer Road, in front of a roaring fire, that we tasted turkey for the first time in our lives. For as long as I live I will remember those sandwiches: thickly sliced bread, real butter (rather than the margarine we were used to) and deliciously moist cold turkey. There were mince pies to follow, and the feast was accompanied by Shirley Bassey on the
Thompsons’ record-player. We wouldn’t have to walk downstairs to our grim rooms for ages yet. This was how Christmas should be. Linda and me in the best place for us and Lily in the best place for her.

Lily’s incarceration in Hammersmith Hospital didn’t make a great deal of difference to our lives. She’d been in hospital so many times that we’d grown used to fending for ourselves. I was a pretty low-maintenance kid, requiring little attention and minimal supervision. Linda would make sure I was up and off to school each morning. She didn’t need to be much of a sergeant-major to get me out of bed as I knew dawdling would spell trouble. A sixth-form prefect would be stationed every day at each of the entrances to Sloane school, and any boy arriving late would be reported to Doc Henry, who had already caned me once for persistent late attendance. Nobody at school knew my circumstances. Why should they have known? It was none of their business. Schools then seemed to have little interest in life outside their gates, and by the same token any parental curiosity about what went on within them was firmly discouraged.

Linda would toast some bread under the grill of the gas stove and put a box of cornflakes and a bottle of milk on the table for me. She had a more regimented approach to household cleanliness than Lily and was very strict about making me empty my urine bucket in the outside toilet each morning. As I took it back upstairs to my room, she’d squirt some disinfectant in it.

It didn’t take me long to get ready. It wasn’t as if we had a
shower (nobody did then) and the bath in the basement was for special occasions. The trick in winter was to get yourself from under the coat stack to setting off on the brisk walk to Latimer Road Underground station in as short a time as possible. I had it down to a fine art. A cursory wipe of my face with the flannel and the occasional dab at my teeth with an elderly toothbrush was the extent of my toilette.

That winter of 1964 my bids to beat my record speed were hampered by the time I had to spend combing my hair. I badly wanted to look like Paul McCartney but my hair became wavier the longer it grew and it took me ages to slap it down and straighten it with cold water from our one tap over the butler sink in the kitchen. These were the days before hairstylists for the male population, when men and boys had no choice but to go to a traditional barber whose approach to styling hair was similar to an army chef’s approach to cooking: basic. And it was my way or the highway. Barbers would actually tell off their younger customers for coming in with long hair. ‘Don’t let it grow so much next time, son,’ they’d say sternly, having turned the Paul McCartney you asked for into the George Formby they preferred.

At school, I flitted between two groups of friends: the Fulham set of Colin James and the Vampires and the Shepherd’s Bush set consisting of Andrew Wiltshire and John Williams (who lived on the Wormholt estate in Acton and could do a perfect imitation of Bluebottle, the Peter Sellers character from
The Goon Show
).

Unlike Colin, Andrew lived within walking distance of Walmer Road. Straight down Latimer Road, left into North Pole Road, left again at the Pavilion pub and into a small estate
of attractive houses with long front gardens and gabled doorways. Andrew’s parents rented 2 Nascot Street. His father Wally worked at Ravenscroft Park Hospital, where he was in charge of ordering and distributing the supplies. He was a very funny man and Andrew and his brother John shared his dark looks and sharp sense of humour.

Kath, Andrew’s mother, was Wally’s opposite. Well-spoken and rather prim and proper, she’d smile benignly at her husband’s banter. At least once a day, on the pretext of some manufactured complaint against his wife, Wally would say to his sons, and anyone else who happened to be in the house: ‘If I had the choice of spending half an hour with Marilyn Monroe or the rest of my life with your mother, who do you think I’d choose?’

Kath would smile sweetly. ‘She’d never have you for half a minute, let alone half an hour, you silly old fool.’

Nothing could disguise their deep affection for one another. The Wiltshires’ was a happy household, and streetwise, funny Andrew (never Andy) was to become my closest, dearest friend. Despite his short stature he also seemed irresistible to women.

One evening Cheryl Roberts knocked for Linda, who was out somewhere with Mike but due to return soon. I was there with Andrew. We’d been sitting in front of the coal fire, toasting bread on the flames with a toasting fork. Cheryl said she’d wait and so we moved to the front room, where I switched on the electric heater in her honour and we watched TV. At least, I was watching TV. As I was sitting in front of it in the armchair with Andrew and Cheryl on the settee behind me, I assumed they were, too.

There was the same age difference between Cheryl and Andrew as there was between Linda and me: three years. I was therefore shocked – yes, that’s the word, shocked – when I happened to glance round to make some witticism about the programme we were supposed to be enjoying and caught them snogging. Quickly turning my gaze back to the TV screen, I sat there beetroot red and frozen with embarrassment as the sound of lips being swapped continued to emanate from the sofa. I suppose I have to admit to a tinge of jealousy. I’d been lusting after Cheryl for as long as Linda had known her, but felt she was way out of my league. As indeed she was.

When Linda didn’t appear Cheryl said she had to go home. Andrew volunteered to walk with her. I can’t explain how I ended up going, too – like a huge great lemon rolling along in front, while Andrew, who was an inch shorter than Cheryl for each of the three years’ difference in their ages – reached up to embrace her at regular intervals.

There was no repeat of that evening and Cheryl eventually became engaged to Andrew’s brother, John. I’d take you on the route between these two events if I could remember the way. Suffice it to say that if nobody else knew about that evening, Andrew knew that I knew. It gave him a certain edge as we travelled together through our rites of passage.

The Fulham set and the Shepherd’s Bush set mixed only in the toilet of the Sloane school playground. It was actually more of a
pissoir
than a toilet. There were no cubicles and it consisted merely of a concrete shed with an entrance at each end and a duct along both main walls in which to urinate. Urination, however, was discouraged as this was the smoking room for third- and fourth-year boys (the fifth and sixth forms had their
own facilities elsewhere). There weren’t that many smokers so the place was rarely crowded. Terry Lawrence and Stephen Hackett would be there; Colin, Jimmy Robb, Andrew and John Williams were all regulars and I was a fixture during every morning break with my packet of ten Rothmans (when Lily could supply me with them) or Player’s Weights (when she couldn’t).

Doc Henry’s office overlooked the toilet and he could be seen at the window looking down malevolently as clouds of smoke drifted through the open portals and doorways of our social club. There was little he could do because of the perfect strategic position of the shed. Since no teacher could reach us without walking across fifty yards of open playground, where he would quickly be spotted by our look-outs, catching us red-handed was impossible. It was a rare victory over our cane-happy headmaster.

I became a regular visitor to Yvonne Stacey’s big house on Waltham Green. Although her German mother disapproved of Yvonne’s mini-skirts and much else about the emerging 1960s culture, she encouraged her daughter to bring all her friends home. She genuinely liked the company of young people and was interested in their views. A seamstress who had longed to become a doctor, she had been forced to quit medical school at the outbreak of war.

She’d met Yvonne’s father, a master baker, when he was a British soldier arriving in Germany fresh from the D-Day landings. That experience and the sights he saw in the concentration camps he’d helped liberate had deeply affected him. He spent most of his time at home sitting in silence, trying to control a temper that had been mild until the
after-effects of his wartime traumas kicked in, perennially overshadowed by his German wife’s vivacious personality.