Memoirs of a Dance Hall Romeo (7 page)

We had breakfast and I saw her to the tram by eight-thirty the following morning, for she had told her mother she was staying the night with a girlfriend after attending somebody’s annual dance in Bradford, and had promised to catch an early train home.

I had never seen her look prettier. She kissed me briefly as the tram rattled down the hill and ground to a halt. The conductor reached for her arm as she stepped on the platform.

‘Tuesday,’ she called as the tram pulled away.

But I was to see her again before that, for early on Sunday evening, Jake came round to look for me. His mother’s brother, a prosperous wool merchant, was staying with them for the weekend and had offered him the loan of his car for the evening, a pre-war Riley saloon.

Jake suggested a drink in the country at a Wharfedale pub he’d often talked about but which I had never visited. I agreed. Time and chance again, I suppose.

It was a pleasant little village by the river, and the pub at that time still retained a lot of its old world charm. It was fairly busy. Mostly locals, but there were at least half-a-dozen cars drawn up outside when we arrived.

I was halfway through my first pint, sitting in the window seat, and Jake had gone to prise some decent cigarettes out of the landlord. I watched idly as a car drew up outside, another pre-war model, but a Bentley for all that.

There were two men in the front seats, two women in the rear, a happy foursome, all good friends to judge by the laughter. Helen was the first one out and stood there waiting for the others, nicely turned out in a light-green dress with matching coat.

The man who took her arm had greying hair and looked fifty. Well-dressed, prosperous. Some sort of businessman perhaps. They passed so close to the open window that I could have reached out to touch them. Close enough for me to see the wedding ring on her left hand. There was a kind of inevitability to it, for there was nowhere to run. I sat there, waiting. The door opened and in they came.

I heard the grey-haired man, presumably her husband, say, ‘And what about you, darling?’

She asked for a sherry and he moved to the bar, and in the same instant she saw me. Her heart may have missed a beat, but certainly she gave no sign, could not afford to, for the other man had given her a cigarette and was now proffering a light.

So many things made sense now. Though what precisely were the circumstances which had forced her out three nights a week to seek whatever it was she needed elsewhere, I would never know. Certainly her husband, if such he was, seemed pleasant enough, and she smiled with real affection when he handed her drink to her.

Jake returned with the cigarettes. I stood up and emptied my glass. ‘Let’s try somewhere else. This is getting too busy.’

He nodded, swallowed the rest of his beer and led the way out. I paused at the door and glanced back, for the last time, for there would be no more Tuesday nights at the Trocadero, I knew that.

For a moment her companions had their heads together, and that mask of hers slipped, a kind of mute appeal on her face, the hand with the wedding ring pushed forward across the table.

I smiled once with all the reassurance that I could muster. I think she understood. I hope so, for I owed her so much. It may have been my imagination, but I fancied a kind of relief on her face as I turned away.

I never set eyes on her again.

A jut with her bum would stir an anchoret.

WILLIAM CONGREVE

I
T WAS YEARS BEFORE
the term Blackboard Jungle became notorious. When it did, I always felt that I knew exactly what they were talking about having served at Khyber Street.

It was a depressing business from that first Monday morning. A friend of Jake’s, noticing us waiting for a tram at the park gates, gave us a lift into town in his car. He dropped me about a quarter of a mile from the school, but at a point where I had to approach it from a different direction than was to become normal.

I picked my way through an area which had been badly hit by bombing in the war, an undulating brick-field with, here and there, the odd row of houses still standing. Somewhere in the distance there was the sound of the sea breaking on the shore, an impossibility surely. When I reached the edge of the brick-field, the ground dropped steeply into a carpet of narrow streets, terraced houses, the air thick with morning smoke, and the source of that noise became plain. It was the roar from Khyber Street.

The yard, small as it was, was divided by a brick wall topped by wicked rusting spikes. Girls on one side, boys on the other, for rape and worse was expected at an early age. The boys’ yard seemed crammed to bursting point. Certainly I had to use physical force to get to the entrance and the noise was unbelievable. It was more like a mob howling at some palace gate than anything else. An unnerving experience.

Varley, the ginger-haired boy from the day of the interview, and his bovine friend whose name, as I learned later, was Hatch, lounged against the door, kicking out at any smaller fry who came anywhere near. I was prepared for trouble, my loins girded to meet it. However, Varley did everything but touch his forelock, opening the door for me with scrupulous politeness.

‘Mornin’, sir!’ he said gruffly. ‘Hope you like it here, sir.’

‘Why, thank you,’ I told him and went inside, considerably moved by this evidence of a sunnier side to his nature. It only went to prove, of course, that most human beings were essentially decent under the skin.

The door to the woodwork room was open and my friend in the brown overall was standing at one of the benches lighting a pipe.

‘You didn’t think better on it?’ he called.

I moved into the room. It was smaller than I had imagined. Ten ancient wooden benches, tools in racks along the walls, brown-painted cupboards and, even here, the statutory blackboard on the wall behind the desk.

‘Oliver Shaw,’ I said and held out my hand.

‘Wally Oldroyd.’ He grinned. ‘Intelligence, wasn’t it? I was in the paratroops myself. Comes in useful round here at times.’

He started to lay tools neatly out on the bench, which I immediately took to be some kind of dismissal. I could not have been more wrong for, as I was to discover, he was one of the kindest men imaginable. A sort of latter-day Fabian trying to come to terms with a world gone mad.

‘I suppose I’d better report in,’ I said.

‘Staffroom’s top of the second stairs,’ he told me as I moved to the door. ‘Brace yourself, lad. It isn’t much. I make my own tea here, break and dinner. You’re welcome anytime you feel like it.’

He obviously didn’t expect a reply, was already busy at one of the cupboards, his back to me, so I went out and climbed the stairs.

The staffroom was unbelievable, a small cubbyhole with a window at one end, at floor level so that it was necessary to bend down to look out of it. There was a gas ring on a table in one corner and a cubicle of hardboard in the other which I discovered, to my astonishment, contained a lavatory.

Carter stood by the window drinking tea with two other men, a cigarette dangling from the centre of his lips. There was something close to relief on his face when I entered. Perhaps he had imagined I might cry off at the last moment. In fact this was very probably the right interpretation for, as I soon discovered, there was a high staff turnover at Khyber Street. Few people with anything about them stayed longer than a year.

He introduced me to my two colleagues. Mr Johnson was a tall, cadaverous man in a shabby brown suit, the cuffs of which had been bound with leather. Slater was a younger man who, rather incongruously for the surroundings, wore a kind of purple blazer and striped tie, relics of his college days, to which he hung on desperately, as a drowning man clutches at a lifejacket.

‘You’ve met the deputy, have you?’ Carter asked me.

‘The deputy?’ I asked, bewildered.

The deputy headmaster. Our Mr Oldroyd.’

I nodded, gaining further insight into the redoubtable Willy’s character, for most teachers I ever met would have brandished their status like a headsman’s axe above my head at the earliest opportunity.

Someone broke wind inside the cubicle, there was a certain amount of movement, the purpose of which one could only guess at, and then the chain was pulled. The unpleasant aroma which became apparent after that was all-pervading. The door opened outwards, which meant that because of the confined space we had to perform a certain amount of jockeying for position.

‘Hurry up, Schwarz, for goodness sake!’ Mr Carter said impatiently.

Poor Schwarz, who had been bullied by someone or other for most of his life. First the Nazis, now Carter. He was small and rather plump, his shoulders permanently hunched, the dark eyes peering anxiously from behind an ancient pair of gold-rimmed spectacles as he emerged from the cubicle.

He wore a neat dark coat, grey waistcoat with watch chain and striped trousers. I wondered wildly whether he was perhaps attending a wedding later in the day, but discovered that these were the only clothes in which he had ever been seen.

This, then, was the staff. Six of us, including the headmaster, to control two hundred and forty-one boys. As Mr Carter never taught it gave us a ratio of forty-eight boys to each teacher, but luckily the incredibly high absenteeism kept this down to more manageable figures.

I was to pass the first week gaining experience by spending my time with the other members of the staff in rotation, which seemed a sensible enough idea for it was reasonable to assume that I could actually learn from them, although time was to prove otherwise.

Morning assembly was an interesting experience. The boys were marched in, class by class, and occupied one side of the hall. Only when they were in position were the girls allowed in from the other side, shepherded by five assorted ladies who, even at that distance, seemed no more prepossessing than my own colleagues.

There was noise and laughter to an extent which astonished me, and I got the distinct impression that the older boys were actually calling out to the older girls, many of whom seemed disconcertingly mature for their age.

Mr Carter walked in briskly, got up on a wooden box behind the lectern and hammered on it with a ruler. ‘I will not tolerate this disgusting noise!’ he screamed.

There was immediate silence and they all waited, presumably as fascinated by his performance as I. ‘Hymn two hundred and thirty-three,’ he went on.

Mr Schwarz, who had been waiting at the piano, struck out boldly and everyone launched into
All Things Bright and Beautiful
.

There was nothing beautiful about it and when it was finished, there was considerable shuffling. Mr Carter waited grimly, and gradually all heads were bowed. He kept his own eyes open, hands clasped before him and began to pray loudly, punctuating every few lines with that awful graveyard cough of his.

‘Oh, God,’ he intoned. ‘Make us like Thee in every way. Teach us how to go forth into the world in the image of Thine only begotten Son, Christ Jesus, our only burden love and Christian charity, all men our brothers…’

At this point he descended from the box with incredible speed, scattering boys like ninepins. Presumably they were used to these forays for there was not the instant panic I would have imagined.

I saw his hands rising and falling. Finally the crowd parted and a boy stumbled forth, arms raised to protect his head. A smallish boy, I noted. In fact, in all the time I was on his staff I never knew Carter to assault any of the older boys in a similar manner, although on occasion, he would simulate such an attack with much shouting and dramatic posturing. He cuffed the boy all the way to the door and tossed him out into the corridor, then returned to the lectern and glared at the entire assembly.

‘That lout.’ He ground his teeth together. That filthy beast out there,’ here he pointed, hand shaking, ‘is not fit for decent company.’

Everyone there seemed as mystified as I was. I never did find out what the wretched boy was supposed to have done. My own theory, after seeing several such incidents over a period of time, was that it was all a ploy on Carter’s part. He liked to imagine himself a holy terror. Such actions were deliberately calculated to enhance his image.

The rest of the staff seemed unconcerned, except Wally Oldroyd, and there was a kind of contempt on his face as Carter brushed past him on the way out.

It seems to me that one of the deficiencies of the teaching profession is its insistence that all its members are dedicated intellectuals who have voluntarily turned their backs on the world of industry and commerce, where they would undoubtedly have made their fortunes, to devote themselves to the service of youth.

I never met anyone like that at Khyber Street. Perhaps Wally Oldroyd, who did a solid professional job. The rest were shabby little men who would have been inadequate at anything they put their hands to. Khyber Street was their final resting place, the end of the line. There was simply nowhere else to go, which didn’t help their charges, most of whom were the product of the kind of home with which Charles Dickens would have been perfectly familiar. It was all very sad.

I felt sorry most of all for Mr Schwarz, who was just grateful for the chance to have a job, a job of any kind. He had been a teacher of music in a Munich Conservatoire for many years, but that was before the concentration camps. At Khyber Street he took each class for singing once a week, which meant that for most of the time he was expected to teach English and general subjects.

Considering that he spoke a kind of pidgin English, the effect can be imagined. He survived only because he had Class One, the youngest boys in the school. Anyone older and he would have been trampled into the floorboards. I spent a full day with him and learned nothing except how to fill in the register, enter up milk returns, school dinners and the like.

My visit with Johnson must have lasted for a similar period, but lives in my memory by reason of one incident only. When I accompanied him into Class Three, pandemonium reigned. Two or three boys struggled on the floor, there was a card school going on in the corner, everyone else seemed to be reading comics.