This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (28 page)

One day I returned from school to find him on our doorstep, white mac fully buttoned despite the warm weather. I let him in and left him sitting in the front room to wait for Linda. Half an hour later she arrived and asked me, in hushed tones, if Mr Pepper had said anything. He hadn’t – and he looked tense. Linda feared the worst. We went together into the front room to learn our fate.

Mr Pepper began by saying how much better off we would be if we agreed to the arrangement he had already suggested. Had we thought any further about it? Linda said we hadn’t and wouldn’t. He then made a point of asking me if I was of the same view. I announced, somewhat more meekly than Linda, that I was. He told us that he’d argued with the council that we should have the opportunity to remain together and had eventually managed to obtain their reluctant agreement. We could be given a place to live on two conditions. The first was that we had to find an adult householder in London to stand as a guarantor. The second was that we accepted that he would be visiting us on a regular basis as our social worker.

Linda was so overcome she almost cried. She took Mr Pepper’s phone number and said she’d ring him as soon as she’d been round to Peabody Buildings to ask Uncle Jim to stand as guarantor. Mr Pepper was clearly impressed by my sister’s maturity and no doubt felt they were now allies. But if he thought there’d be no further confrontations he was underestimating her.

Once Uncle Jim had agreed and Mr Pepper had been to see him with all the necessary paperwork, the council offered us a
flat in Hammersmith. Linda went to take a look at it. The flat was on the top floor of a ten-storey block served by a lift that was covered in graffiti and reeked of urine. The previous tenant, an old lady, hadn’t wanted electricity installed, preferring to retain gas lighting. It was in almost as bad a state as the condemned houses in Walmer Road and Southam Street. The walls were damp and cracked and there was mildew everywhere. Nowadays an enterprising estate agent might try to talk it up by describing it as ‘open-plan’: not a single room had a door – they had apparently all been pulled off and chopped up for firewood. We were used to unpleasant smells but the rank stench emanating from that flat, Linda declared, almost made her vomit. Wisely deciding against investigating the source of the appalling stink, she closed the door, marched to the nearest telephone box and rang Mr Pepper.

‘The flat is disgusting, I’m not accepting it,’ she told our hero.

‘You can’t refuse,’ he said. ‘They won’t make you another offer. You’re in no position to reject it. You have to go where they send you.’

‘Well, we’re not going there. Go and look at it yourself and if you honestly think you could live there, come round and tell me.’

Mr Pepper went to see the flat the following day. It was the last we heard of it and within a week we’d been offered another one.

THE SOUTH SIDE
of the Thames was uncharted territory for Linda and me. But that’s where the council sent us – to Pitt House on the Wilberforce estate in York Road, on the border between Battersea and Wandsworth. Number 11 was on the first floor of a squat four-storey block built in the 1930s.

It was, it must be said, only just south of the river – about 500 yards from Wandsworth Bridge. Opposite the estate, on the riverbank, was the huge Booth’s gin distillery, whose aroma covered the entire neighbourhood like a thick, pungent juniper blanket. My memory automatically generates that smell whenever I cross Wandsworth Bridge, even though the distillery gave way years ago to plush riverside apartments.

Our flat was a maisonette. Our own front door opened into a sizeable living room and there was a separate kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms, our first indoor toilet and a proper bathroom. To us it was pure luxury.

We left North Kensington on 4 May 1964. It was farewell to Berriman’s, Maynard’s and the little old lady in the ‘milk shop’ opposite us. Farewell to the people who’d managed to establish a community amid the squalor and poverty of Southam Street
and Walmer Road. Linda would never return but for me, the umbilical cord had not quite yet been severed.

Too far away now to help Johnny Carter deliver milk or paraffin, I said goodbye to him and thanked him again for my guitar. Mike loaded our few belongings (including the Salvation Army three-piece suite) into a small hired van. We left Steve’s piano behind for the demolition men, part of a Notting Hill that was disappearing for ever.

Linda paid the rent, fed the meters, bought the food, washed and swept, all with minimal help from me. Mr Pepper would call on us once a week in the early evening. On the nights he was due Linda would cook a proper meal to underline the success of our domesticity. She spent the weekends in Watford with Mike and then I would have the flat pretty much to myself.

Linda was as good as her word, never once defaulting on the rent. How she managed is still a mystery to me. Steve’s contribution soon dried up, leaving her to support us on her modest wage with financial help from Mike, when he could afford it. But manage she did, and I suspect she was so obviously in control that Mr Pepper quickly realized neither she nor I required the constant monitoring that had been stipulated. As a result, though he was obliged to continue his weekly visits until Linda’s eighteenth birthday, they gradually became briefer and more perfunctory.

What both Linda and I found most difficult was the antipathy of our neighbours, who seemed to resent seeing two teenagers occupying a council flat when they knew of many families on the waiting list. Given our own bitter experience, to a certain extent we could understand how they felt –
Lily had waited in vain for seventeen years for decent accommodation – but their naked hostility was hard to rationalize.

In two and a half years at Pitt House, I can’t remember any of our neighbours ever speaking to us. It didn’t matter much to me but Linda was gregarious and anxious for us to be accepted. It wasn’t long before the situation worsened. The eldest boy in the flat next door, a lad of about Linda’s age, hung around with a gang. One evening they pulled out the fuse box to our flat, which was easily accessible in the communal area at the end of the landing.

Mike reconnected everything, but it happened again and again – always our fuse box, never any of the others. Linda complained to the caretaker, to no avail. He seemed to bear us even more ill will than the tenants did.

With Linda in Watford most weekends and me out and about, it was probably only a matter of time before someone broke in. The flat would be in darkness and it was obvious nobody was at home. They would come on a Saturday. The first time they took our beloved Dansette. The second time they took my Vox electric guitar (which could have been divine retribution, given how Johnny probably acquired it in the first place). The third time they didn’t take anything because there was nothing left to steal. We had no insurance and we didn’t report the break-ins to the police, or to Mr Pepper. If we’d told Mr Pepper his Plan A could have been resurrected, and if we’d told the police they’d have told Mr Pepper.

Pitt House was a palace compared to where we’d lived before. If the price we had to pay to stay there was a bit of nastiness from the neighbours and the caretaker’s indifference,
it was worth it. What mattered most to Linda and me was being together, free from any institutions.

The Wilberforce estate was much closer to my school than Walmer Road. Indeed, I often walked there and back. The sixteen months I remained there after Lily died was the only period of my time at Sloane I enjoyed, thanks to the arrival of two new teachers I liked and who inspired my interest in their subjects.

Mr Pallai had left his native Hungary during the 1956 uprising. He moonlighted with the BBC World Service, broadcasting back to Hungary, while spending his days teaching us history and a new subject on the curriculum, economics. Peter Pallai was built like a rugby player – broad shoulders, slim physique – and wore his thinning hair close-cropped.

Half the teachers at Sloane seemed to me to be deeply uninterested in both their subjects and their pupils. ‘Dolly’ Harris, who taught us French, was so soporific that boys had been known to sleep peacefully through entire lessons. Mr Woosnam, our geography teacher, at least made an attempt to engage us in his classes. ‘What would you like to do in geography?’ he asked keenly. ‘Play football,’ came the depressing reply.

My favourite teacher was Peter Carlen, who had taken over from Mr Smith as our English teacher part way through my third year. By the time I entered my fourth and what turned out to be final year, he’d become the second most important adult in my life (Mr Pepper just clinched the top spot). In class Mr Carlen led us, line by line, through Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, exploring the context and the background and pointing out the power of alliteration (‘the rifles’ rapid rattle’);
he analysed
Animal Farm
, explaining the subtext and how Orwell used his characters to satirize the descent of the Russian Revolution into totalitarianism. He took us to the theatre to see Spike Milligan in
Oblomov
and musicals such as
Oliver!
and
Half a Sixpence
.

Outside his lessons, he maintained his interest in our welfare. He once saw me reading the copy of
David Copperfield
I’d borrowed from Mr Cox and asked me what else I read. I told him about the paperback crime thrillers I’d begun to pick up for a few pence at the Quality Book Shop in Shepherd’s Bush Road. By then I’d swapped a whole stack of
Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly
magazines for a shelf full of crime mysteries by Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris, John Dickson Carr and Edgar Wallace. He suggested that I write a review of every book I read at the back of my English exercise book and guided my reading, giving me a list of books he thought I ought to read and would enjoy. On his recommendation I was introduced to Geoffrey Household, Ian Fleming, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and C.S. Forester.

Mr Carlen was in his early thirties and wore his already greying hair fashionably long, which must have frustrated Doc Henry, who was for ever sending me home to have mine cut. The timbre of his voice commanded attention. I never heard him raise it. There was no need: nobody misbehaved in Mr Carlen’s lessons.

By this time I’d decided I wanted to be a writer as well as a rock star. I told Mr Carlen of my ambition and he encouraged me to develop characters, pre-plan plots and submit my stories as school projects. I created Mr Midnight, a black-clad superhero with a mission to avenge the wrongs done to innocent
citizens, and a detective, Inspector Andrews – basically a synthesis of all the detectives created by the authors whose books I devoured. Having noticed in the novels I’d read that so many important conversations took place in restaurants, I made Inspector Andrews a regular at The Golden Egg, one of a chain of garishly decorated budget eateries. Apart from Renee’s Pie and Mash Shop on the Golborne Road, it was the only restaurant I was aware of.

I was so convinced my future career as a writer was assured that I used the lessons that bored me (basically all of them except English, history and economics) to try to teach myself to write left-handed, on the basis that if I was going to make a living out of writing I would need to be ambidextrous in case I broke my right arm. I suspect the fact that my hero Paul McCartney was left-handed also had something to do with it.

After Mr Carlen told me about the
Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook
, which offered advice to budding writers and a useful directory of newspapers and publishers of books and magazines, I began to send off my pathetic stories and poems to various magazines and built up an impressive collection of rejection slips. I comforted myself with the knowledge that all writers had to face the disappointment of having their work declined on their way to becoming famous.

One day Mr Carlen handed me the money to purchase four copies of a book for the school library from a bookshop on the King’s Road. ‘Which book?’ I asked.

‘Whichever one you think boys like you would like to read.’

It was noon on a summer’s day and I was delighted to be released from school to browse in a bookshop entrusted with the assignment of spending the school’s funds, which after
some consideration I allocated to George Orwell’s
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
. I felt very adult and, like Mr Carlen, a little bohemian. I remember lighting a cigarette as I strolled down the King’s Road in the sunshine. I’d left my school blazer and tie in the cloakroom so that, for this expedition at least, I could imagine I was a struggling writer seeking inspiration rather than a schoolboy on an errand.

Mr Carlen knew I intended to leave school at the end of that academic year and wanted me to sit my mock O-Level in English a year early, perhaps reasoning that if I passed I’d be motivated to stay on and take the real thing. As I remember, the mock exams were used to test whether a child was good enough to take the prestigious O-Level or should instead be entered for the inferior CSE. I was keen on the idea but it needed the headmaster’s approval. Doc Henry refused to allow it unless I made a commitment to stay on. I had made up my mind, however, and being deprived of sitting an exam was hardly going to change it.

Despite our precarious financial situation, Linda never pressurized me to leave school. Quite the opposite. She was scrupulous about going to see my teachers on parents’ evenings. They must have been uncomfortable talking to a ‘parent’ who could have been in the sixth form of the girls’ school next door. Linda always gave me the same advice following these consultations, which was basically work harder, stay on, fulfil your potential. She’d tell me how much Lily would have wanted me to take O-Levels and how I’d be throwing away the advantages of my grammar-school education if I left prematurely. When I pointed out that she herself had left school at fifteen, she made the reasonable point that she’d continued her education at college and, in any
case, she had known what she wanted to do, whereas I didn’t.