In My Wildest Dreams (13 page)

The camp was memorable because during the night there was an air raid on Newport (by this time, 1943, a fairly rare occurrence) and we stood by our tents on the hilly field and watched the fireworks over the distant town, the searchlights, the exploding guns and the fire glowing over the roofs. I began to wonder if my mother was all right.

She was not, although it had nothing to do with the air raid. When I returned on the Sunday evening, a strange man was sitting by the couch talking earnestly to her. My first reaction was that the CID had caught up with my brother on account of an incident in which he and a friend had removed a baby from a pram, removed the pram from its wheels, and used the wheels as a plaything. This was not, however, the case. When the man had gone my mother explained carefully that she would have to go back into hospital for a while and that this man had come to tell her about a wonderful school in the country – in distant and romantic-sounding Devon – where we could go until she was better. We would all be together again by Christmas.

She must have been purposely vague about it because at first I imagined that this adventure was to be some obscure time in the future. It sounded exciting, a holiday to some place of which I had only read. 'The masters play soldiers with the boys in the woods,' she told us. She said it again and again, reassuring us, and herself.

We went to bed, Roy and I, discussing this unusual prospect. The following morning I woke and heard her crying in the next room. We both went into her and weeping she clasped us to her. 'You might be going today,' she sobbed. Today! We were dumbstruck. Now, right away, instantly. She told us to go and put on our best blue suits and then the same man who had been sitting on the couch turned up and took us down to Dr Galloway Smith's for a medical examination. On the way we met Gwyneth, a girl with whom I had been in love for some time, and I smirked and was glad I was wearing my blue suit. 'We're off to Devon,' I boasted.

Everything happened so quickly then. All this, our street, our friends, our very life – was changed in less than a day. We went home from the surgery and once more went up to our mother's room. She tidied our hair from her bed, hardly strong enough to lift the brush. 'Be good boys,' she said. 'See you at Christmas.' We believed her; we could not imagine that it might be for ever. She could not help crying again and I remember going outside the room and having a howl against the passage wall, marking the green distemper with my tears.

Then the man came back and told us it was time to go. We went in and embraced her once more. She was wearing one of her posh silk nighties but her bones showed through. We all had another cry and promised we would be back for Christmas and we went out of the room and house. I'm not sure how old our mother was; about forty-eight, I think. We never saw her again.

Even now, after all the years, I remember one chilling instant of that day; the man rolling off his overcoat in the train that was carrying us away and revealing on his lapel a round blue badge bearing the words: 'Dr Barnardo's Homes'. We were going to an
orphanage
! It was like a blow in the face. I attempted to manoeuvre my head in a circular fashion, like a parrot does, to make sure I had not misread the letters around the edge of the disc. There was no mistake. The man sat down and looked stolidly out of the train window. Choked, I whispered to my brother: 'We're being sent to Dr Barnardo's.' He did not understand and said: 'We already been once to the doctor's today'

A sense of outrage, even betrayal, came over me. Our mother sending us to an orphanage when we were not even orphans! Then I realised that the train was passing the bottom of our street. I did not know then that it was called irony. There were the engine sheds, there was the working men's institute, there were the rows of houses with smoke coming from the chimneys. I could just pick out ours. Our mam was down there and she had sent us off to an
orphanage
! It was almost as if we had been sold. Then I realised what had
realty
happened.
She
had been tricked as well. That man sitting so concerned on the couch had told her all the tales about the school in Devon where the masters played soldiers in the woods with the boys, just to get us away from her. Dr Barnardo's probably collected children from all over the place with this disgraceful ruse. The train whistled along the banks of the River Ebbw and I saw some boys I knew playing on the coal dust. 'Look,' I said to my brother. 'There's ole Fatty Turner and Ben.' We waved but the boys did not look up from what they were doing. In a moment some trees blocked the view, they were gone, and we were gone too.

Almost immediately, although I find it difficult to credit now, I began to get interested in the scenery. The sense of adventure caught me. The bright marshy fields ran away down to the Bristol Channel. We were going for one night, the man told us, to Cardiff, only twelve miles away but somewhere I had never visited, except when the annual summer charabanc threaded through it on its journey to Barry Island. It was my first taste of that anticipation which comes even now, a great many cities later, on journeying to a strange place. On the following day, the man told us, we would have to go back the way we had come, through Newport, and then change trains at Bristol and Exeter and Newton Abbot on our way to south Devon. Bristol! Exeter!
Newton Abbott.
Suddenly the world was opening up. And
south
Devon. That had a touch of the exotic about it. I could picture it lounging and lush in warm climes. And it was only going to be until Christmas. That had been her promise.

We reached Cardiff Central, a cavern of steam, and then out into the strange city, onto a foreign-looking brown and cream bus, through streets of unfamiliar shops and faces. We arrived outside a large house with a notice on its gate: 'Dr Barnardo's Homes. Cardiff Home.' The gate opened onto a new life.

That night they put my brother to bed early and I went down to the front gate and watched the traffic running by on the main road, the route to Newport. It occurred to me that Roy and I might make a dash for it, board one of the lorries and easily return to Maesglas. We could get off at the bottom of our street. What that sick, solitary woman would have done had we abruptly reappeared I cannot think. I dismissed the idea and it was just as well.

On the following morning with a woman bundled up in an overcoat as an escort, Roy and I embarked on the longest journey of our lives, a journey that, in time, was to prove very long indeed. The train retraced our route of the previous day and once more we stared from the window at the river, the engine sheds and the houses. There was no smoke coming from our chimney. Then, as if to compound the irony, we passed, on the other extreme of the town, the hilly street where we had previously lived, with the houses perched against the September sky, the cut of the quarry and the familiar grey pond. But it all quickly vanished as we travelled east, below the mysterious blackness of the Severn Tunnel and into England.

At Bristol, our first pause, we waited on the platform. What strange voices the people had, with red faces and rolling walks. One station porter shouted to another that the war would soon be over now. It was September 9th, 1943, and the newspaper placards announced in big letters that Italy had surrendered.

All the way down to Exeter I was pressed to the window, watching the fields of Somerset and Devon. Pleasant hills began and the earth became a red-brown. My brother read comics, a parting gift from a boy in Maesglas, but when we got beyond Exeter he joined me at the window and examined the foreign landscape. 'It's a long way, ain't it,' he said. 'It'll be a long way to get back.'

We changed again at Newton Abbot and it was drawing on to evening by the time the puffy local train reached Kingsbridge, in the district called the South Hams.

The old stone town, unlike anything we had ever known, spread up a steep hill with a wide creek at the bottom of its main street. It was brimming with evening quiet, late sun falling through the gaps between the grey buildings as we trudged up the incline of Fore Street with the bulky and morose woman. Our luggage was minimal. Roy had his comics and I had half a dozen William books. I cannot remember now where I obtained them (they may have been unreturned to Newport library, although half a dozen does seem rather a large haul) but they remained my most treasured, in fact almost my only, personal possessions throughout the next two years.

As we neared the crest of Fore Street my foreboding increased. Roy nudged me and said he already wanted to go home. I thought he was going to make a run for it. The place where we were bound, however, was a reassuring surprise; a sedate period house on the brow of the hill, with wide white windows and an impressive blue door with a brass knocker. The lady who answered the knock was tweedy with the sort of English voice I had only heard on the radio or at the pictures. She seemed glad to see us and said that we could have some food after we had been bathed.

Been
bathed
! Roy and I glanced at each other in panic.

'She ain't bathing me,' said my brother. 'No bugger is.'

She did, however, stripping off our best suits and throwing them into a pile. I was more offended about the suits than the treatment. We had been quite proud of them and now they were being tossed aside like rough rags. What is more it was the last we saw of them. When I enquired, some weeks later, what had happened to our suits I was told they had been burned, which upset me even more.

It was a memorable evening. Two girls, sisters of our age, had also just arrived and were efficiently undressed and bathed with us, in and out of the bath in blushing rotation. Trying not to look at their nakedness we asked their names and where they were from. The younger one began to howl. The lady who did the bathing, scrubbing us all without expression, said there was nothing to cry about but the little girl carried on just the same.

Afterwards when we were in bed, in odd, hard pyjamas that smelled of ironing and mothballs, with four or five others in the dormitory, Roy leaned over to me and whispered: "Night, Les.'

"Night, kid.'

Silence, then: 'What about them girls then?'

I opened a concerned eye. 'What about them?' I asked.

'Well, you know. Did you see anything?'

'Not much.'

'I couldn't either. But I had a good look.' A pause. 'I hope our mam's better soon.'

'So do I. Better not talk any more. 'Night.'

"Night, Les. Never seen one with no clothes before, have you?'

'No. Go to sleep.'

'All right. 'Night.'

It must have been that there was an odd day before the end of the week so we were not sent immediately to school with the other children. Instead we were permitted to go out for a walk. We bought some bright yellow September apples from a basket displayed outside a greengrocery shop. We walked through the inclined town, quiet in that wartime autumn, and down to the ribbed waters of the tidal creek.

Sitting on a seat by the creek I wrote an urgent letter to our mother asking her to send for us at once as we had decided we did not like the place. We bought a stamp and posted it, one of a succession of notes over the next few weeks, but I don't suppose she ever read them. I hope not. After the post office we walked along the water bank and then had a paddle. Roy, always the more adventurous, ventured further out and became stuck in the mud. His pale horrified face turned towards me. Both his legs sank unstoppably into the slime. The water lapped the bottoms of his short trousers and he began to cry. I stood on the bank giving instructions: 'Lift that leg, now lift that.
Don't
lean backwards.' He tried it. 'I'm still stuck,' he said heartrendingly. 'Les, I reckon I'm sinking!'

An old man came along and suggested wisely that if Roy leaned forward we might be able to reach his hands and tug him out. The mud was well up to his knees now and there was no doubt he was going down. With a terrible squelching he managed to lean towards us and we caught his hands. He very nearly pulled the old chap head first into the creek but in the end we triumphed, hauling him black-legged to the bank. We thanked the man and asked him the time. He pulled a watch from his waistcoat. 'Always carry my old turnip,' he said. It was one o'clock and we had instructions to be back by twelve-thirty.

Roy was still encased in mud to the knees, his shoes oozing, as we hurried up through the town and presented ourselves at the back door of the home. One of the staff, a jolly young woman called Nurse Nelly, saw us and burst out laughing. Back into the bath we went.

Lower Knowle, as the house was named, was far from being an unkindly place. It was a reception house, an Ever-Open-Door as Barnardo's called them, using the Victorian doctor's own phrase for his first shelter for homeless children in the grim and gritty East End of London of the eighteen-seventies.

It had been the home of a kindly Mrs Patterson, who had lent it to Barnardo's for the duration of the war. When I was grown up I went back there and stood on the pavement outside. An elderly lady approached and asked why I was looking at it.

I told her I had once lived there. She was pleased. 'It's my house,' she explained. 'During the war I kept thinking of those poor children in Barnardo's at Plymouth with the bombs falling all round them. So I offered Lower Knowle so they could be safe.'

She invited me in. As such places always are, it seemed much smaller now, but I remembered well the rooms; the long, stone-flagged dining room with the French doors out onto the garden, the staircase, curved like a feather in the elegant front hall, the bedroom where I used to lie and hear the American tanks trundle down the street.

It was on that visit, and on subsequent occasions in Kingsbridge, today a lively holiday centre, that I came to thinking about the occupation of part of south Devon by the American armies rehearsing for D-Day. Thirty thousand acres, including six villages, to the north-east of Kingsbridge were cleared of their people and for eight months the soldiers practised their beach landings to the accompaniment of live artillery bombardments. More than seven hundred Americans died one night only a few weeks before the invasion of Normandy in 1944 when a flotilla of German torpedo boats crept out of Cherbourg and ambushed a landing exercise. The story – the civilian evacuation, the American soldiers and the tragedy of those who died before they had ever seen a German – I used as the basis for a novel
The Magic Army.

The Americans arrived in south Devon only a month after the two boys from South Wales. The wide exercise area was cordoned off but there were mishaps. When I was researching for
The Magic Army
I saw in the 1944 files of the
Kingsbridge Gazette
that two of my schoolmates had been killed by a mislaid hand grenade. It happened two weeks after I had left for London.

There were happier stories. The girls, or 'maids' as they were called in that region, accustomed to the awkward courtship of rural lads, fell easily and wholeheartedly for the young American newcomers whose uniforms and talk were both so smooth. They were ever-generous and resourceful. They raised money for a church by charging a penny a time to
see
a pineapple and a banana, unknown fruits in wartime. As for us, at the orphanage, they sent us barrels of peanut butter.

We had peanut butter every night for tea for six months, so much so, I have never eaten it since. Roy said it looked like sheep shit.

There were only about sixteen children at Lower Knowle. We had our photograph taken and it appeared in the Barnardo magazine under the caption: 'Steps!' It was apt for we stood in a line, from a homeless toddler called Winston at the front to a strong boy named John Mills at the end, with me next to him. My brother was somewhere in the middle.

The home was in the charge of a handsome man with silver hair who had a propensity for dressing as a vicar. He was not ordained and that, together with some other irregularities, later led him into trouble, but I knew nothing of this. After I had gone away from Kingsbridge I sent him and his wife a Christmas present, a book which I can still remember cost six shillings, a sum which must have taken me a considerable time to save. It was
The Way Of All Flesh
which, considering the trouble that came upon him, was not altogether inappropriate.

Young lady members of the staff worked under the pseudonyms of Auntie Sally, Auntie Judy, Nurse Nelly and Nanny. In the main, they were kind and jolly. One of them fell backwards into the churchyard while coping with a local fireman on the wall. She used to embrace me at times and I looked forward to it because it was my first close contact with a large bosom. There was also a pink-faced youth who filled the function of an assistant master. One evening, just at dusk, he said to me: 'Do you feel like having a wrestle?'

He was not much bigger than me and I said all right and we went out onto the stepped lawn and grappled for about half an hour. He rolled on top of me and jumped up and down and then I sat astride him and jumped up and down. We were both red-faced and sweating by the time we had finished and it seemed to me, at the time, to be an odd way for a grown man to spend an evening.