A Traveller's Life (6 page)

In the autumn of 1928 I was sent to Colet Court, the Junior School of St Paul's which stood opposite it in the Hammersmith Road. By a quirk similar (but not the same) to that which locates Harrods in SW1, when everything else in Knightsbridge is in SW3, Colet Court was in Hammersmith W6 and St Paul's in West Kensington W14.

As if to emphasize the connection between the two schools the architect or architects, who were obsessed with this material, had embellished both sets of buildings, which were constructed of purple brick, with what seemed like acres of shiny, orange terracotta. A large part of my schooldays were spent in these disturbing surroundings, which suggested some more restrictive uses than seats of learning, and it was quite common for boys waiting outside St Paul's in the evening for a bus to take them home to be approached by some stranger, often a foreigner, wishing to know what kind of ‘institution' was this enormous pile of Victorian Gothic in the Hammersmith Road, and of what sort were the inmates. Eventually, after some exceptionally earnest or morbid sightseer, wishing to see and know more, had enquired at the porter's lodge, an order was promulgated to the effect that when
such a question was posed by a member of the public we were forbidden to say that the place was a ‘loony bin'.

A photograph probably taken in 1929, in the summer term of my first year at Colet Court, shows me, at least after the extensive retouching to which it had been subjected, to have been a healthy, cheerful-looking boy with large, protruding ears and a large mouth full of very slightly protruding teeth.

Because my ears stuck out (whichever ear I slept on flapped over on itself, like an envelope) at night when I went to bed I was made to wear what were called ear-caps. They were made of cotton, had what looked like miniature fishing-nets on either side to keep the ears against the head, and were kept in place with a couple of bits of ribbon tied under the chin. Just as a hairnet or a bath cap imparts to the wearer an excessively senile or infantile appearance, according to whether the wearer is old or young, so did ear-caps, and for this reason I was extremely sensitive about wearing them, just as I had been sensitive, years before, about wearing red rubber waders on Bournemouth beach. These ear-caps proved to be useless for restraining ears as powerful as mine. After a few days my ears broke through the netting, and after I had worn out something like half a dozen pairs in a month, according to my mother, I was made to wear something more robust that looked like a pair of metal earphones with leather ear-pads in place of phones. However, these were so uncomfortable that I eventually refused to wear them at all, in spite of having been ‘given the slipper' by my father to encourage me to do so. After this nothing more was done about my ears, as nothing was done about restraining my teeth, and eventually ears and teeth returned to where they should have been in the first place, of their own accord.

This photograph, my last studio portrait for many years, was taken by Mr Spencer, whose studio was in an early Victorian villa
next door to St Paul's School, and it was he who had been responsible for photographing me ever since I first sat up, unaided, and wore nothing but a loincloth.

It was Mr Spencer – a mild, pleasant man who used to wax the ends of his moustache into needlesharp points with the aid of a preparation called
Pomade Hongroise
, an operation which he once performed for my benefit at my earnest request – who first engendered in me an interest in photography, although a number of years were to pass before I had the opportunity to gratify it. Mr Spencer's camera was a massive affair, made of mahogany and brass, which used glass plates. When he was going to operate it he used to put his head under a black velvet cloth and gaze into a ground-glass screen on which whatever he was photographing appeared upside down, which must have been disconcerting until he got used to it.

Mr Spencer had various backgrounds against which one could be photographed: woodland dells, palace balconies, simulated sunsets, that sort of thing. He could even paint in gnomes and fairies, and did so in one unforgettable picture of me, with a fringe and aged about four, wearing a pale blue knitted-silk round-necked pullover and shorts to match. Much to my disappointment, apart from the picture with the gnomes and fairies, which I do not think she herself could really have liked, my mother always insisted that whatever background I happened to be taken against should be eliminated, so that I invariably appeared in the finished portrait against a white or sepia nothingness.

Another important piece of equipment, with which Mr Spencer used to keep his younger sitters in good humour, was a little, brightly feathered bird, which spent the time in a small box when it was not called upon to play its part. Whether it was a real bird that had been stuffed, or an artificial bird, it is difficult to say; but the entire contraption came from France.

‘Watch for the dicky bird!' Mr Spencer used to say, with his head under the velvet cloth, just before he was about to take a photograph, at the same time squeezing a red rubber bulb which caused the bird to pop out of the box and utter a few chirrups before disappearing.

Every morning in term time for my first two terms at Colet Court, I walked from Three Ther Mansions over the bridge and through the back streets of Hammersmith to school. On these journeys I was usually escorted by Kathy. My mother was often away now, travelling with my father. We did have a cook-housekeeper at this time called Mrs Hartland, who was large and puffed a lot. Mrs Hartland was more or less a facsimile of poor Mrs George, who had walked into the river by Hammersmith Bridge with her umbrella up. However, the walk to Colet Court, even if she came back by bus, would probably have done Mrs Hartland in. In the evening Kathy used to meet me and bring me home by bus.

All these rather complicated arrangements were necessary because my father insisted that I should walk to school each day, rain or shine, instead of being taken there on a bus from Ther Boiler, until I was considered old enough to travel by myself. ‘The exercise will do him a power of good,' he used to say, as if I was some obese person who otherwise might spend the rest of the day with his feet up, instead of what I was, a rather skinny little boy who spent quite a large part of each day playing football, cricket, learning to box, training for sports day or else roaming around the playground with a friend pretending we were Sopwith Camels shooting up Fokker triplanes, doing our best, by keeping on the move as rapidly as possible, to avoid the gangs of bullies with which the place was infested.

‘Breathe in deeply,' he used to say, ‘when you're crossing the bridge.' And because this, too, would do me good, I did, inhaling
the Thameside air and the nasty smells which came from a municipal rubbish tip and Manbre & Garton's saccharine factory which made the whole of Barnes stink when the wind was in the wrong quarter.

Once, that first winter, there was a pea-soup fog, a thicker version of the one in which, what now seemed long ago, we had returned to Barnes in the electric brougham from Pimlico, a sort that later, when I became interested in crime, reading the ghosted memoirs of ex-policemen from Boots Subscription Library, I associated with Jack the Ripper. In spite of its density I went to school just as if it had been any other day (something my mother would not have allowed if she had been at home, for such fogs were a menace to health, killing off innumerable people), despatched on this perilous journey by Mrs Hartland, who was much too much in awe of my father to countermand his orders.

Armed with a cap pistol for self-defence, holding Kathy's hand, something I would not have done in broad daylight in case some other boys from Colet Court saw me and pulled my leg about it, both of us wearing woollen mufflers over our mouths that – until they were washed – reeked of sulphurous soot, looking like a couple of robbers, we groped our way over the bridge and into Hammersmith in what had become overnight a void in which one could see nothing, except where here and there a gas lamp in the street produced a sickly yellow incandescence. In it we could hear the coughs and footsteps of other passers-by without seeing them until they were actually on top of us, the groaning of vehicles in low gear and the hoarse cries of men on foot armed with acetylene lamps who were trying to guide them through the murk. Eventually we arrived at school half an hour late, to find that those boys who had succeeded in getting there had already been sent home and, to my delight, repeated the whole adventurous process the other way round.

These narrow streets through which we made our way, now long since destroyed by wartime bombing or knocked down to make room for housing estates and flyovers, were where the poor lived. They even had the sort of names that, when I was older, I learned to recognize were reserved for the streets of the poor; because whoever was responsible for naming them, such as the official who named Fanny Road in Barnes, knew that it did not matter what sort of names they were given as the poor would never object to living in, for example, Distillery Lane W6.

In such streets endless rows of little two-storeyed terrace houses, built of fog-blackened London brick, stood back to back, each with its outside privy, separated by little yards in which the occupiers sometimes kept rabbits or carrier pigeons, or if they were large enough turned into little gardens; the sort of London houses which, if they have survived, have become something their builders and occupiers never dreamed of, desirable residences in streets with names that now have an equally desirable period flavour.

At one of these street corners there was a pub, taller or made to appear taller than the houses by a large sign with the name of the pub and the sorts of beer it sold inscribed on it in gold lettering, and curved to wrap around the angle of the building. In the morning, when we passed, it smelled of stale beer and sometimes the brewers' draymen could be seen, enormously potbellied, purple-faced men, wearing leather aprons, lowering barrels with a rope down a shiny wooden chute from the horse-drawn drays, or else, having completed the delivery, drinking the first pints of the day they were entitled to as ‘perks'. (Some of these men drank as many as sixteen pints a day ‘regler', according to a Watney's drayman I met in the 1950s.)

And there were shops as minute as the houses – smaller, in fact, in terms of living space because they were houses in which what had been the front parlour had become the shop. They sold
things that I was not usually allowed on the grounds that they would be bad for my teeth or my immortal soul, such as what my parents considered to be ‘vulgar' comics; more vulgar, but not in the sense of being ‘rude', than the
Magnet
and the
Gem
, both of which I was allowed and both of which Kathy enjoyed reading to me as much as I enjoyed listening, much more vulgar than the
Children's Newspaper
, which because of its virtuous nature I already found boring. It was a useless prohibition anyway, as I could always borrow one of these more vulgar comics – ‘I say, man, if you let me have a go of your comic you can have a go of my liquorice strip' – from other less watched-over boys at school.

Bad for the teeth were: lemonade made with lemonade crystals, much more delicious in my opinion than real lemonade; toffee sticky enough to pull out entire rows of stoppings; gobstoppers, huge sweets like musket balls that changed colour and the colour of your tongue progressively as you sucked them; sherbet imbibed through liquorice tubes from cylindrical yellow packets that looked like fireworks (oddly enough I was allowed liquorice); toffee apples that always had a thin layer of dust on them that had blown into the shop from the street outside.

Embedded in the pavements at some of the street corners there were cast-iron bollards, shaped like muzzle-loading cannon with imitation cannon balls stuck in their imitation muzzles, against which old men could usually be seen leaning, wearing cloth caps, white silk mufflers or red-spotted neckerchiefs and suits of what even to me seemed antique cut.

In 1927 the poor looked much poorer than they do today, in Hammersmith or in any other part of London. Their everyday clothes in those days, before sponging and pressing and dry-cleaning became commonplace, looked as if they had been slept in. For working men, manual labourers who lived by the sweat of their brows, there was no such thing as winter or summer
clothes. A working man wore the same suit all the year round, except on Sundays. In summer, if it was really hot, he might discard his jacket, hardly ever his waistcoat, even though the cloth from which such a suit was made was often thicker and heavier than that used to make a present-day overcoat.

Because of this the poor often smelt. It was not a term of derision as it usually was at Colet Court. ‘Yah, you smell!' Although some boys there did smell. It was a fact. One only had to travel, as I sometimes did to my great delight, on one of the tall, two-storeyed tramcars that used to sway down King Street from Hammersmith Broadway with bells clanging, like sailing ships rolling down to Rio, on my way to visit my Auntie May at Stamford Brook, or else travelling down Shepherd's Bush Road en route with Ellen to visit an uncle of hers who had a boot repairing business in Goldhawk Road, to know this smell for yourself, a bitter-sweet odour that a modern traveller, Laurens Van Der Post, identified some thirty-five years later (in connection with the Russian proletariat, en masse) as the smell of soiled clothing, left and forgotten in a laundry basket. A bath was a tub half-filled with water from the copper in which the weekly wash was done. A wash was a lick and a promise in the kitchen sink.