Owning Up: The Trilogy (31 page)

I was especially fond of Molly as on her day off she would take me to the pictures. We often went twice; to the matinee at the Gaumont and the evening performance at the Mayfair, and had fish and chips in between. It never occurred to me that it was odd for a twenty-year-old girl to choose to spend her day off with a twelve-year-old boy, but in retrospect I suppose it was because she was so fat that no one of her own age ever invited her out. She was very cheerful, though, and good fun too. If we both liked a film very much we’d sit through it again. Molly left to work in a factory where they paid a great deal more money.

Then Auntie Min came back as ‘cook-housekeeper’, and was given the flat upstairs. Her husband Tom moved in too, still working on the railways and silent as ever. Once Maud and Tom, after a party, brought back several members of the ballet for bacon and eggs (I don’t know who cooked them – it certainly wasn’t Maud) and found Tom Roberts, just off shift, drinking tea in the kitchen.

‘I thought,’ ‘darling Bobbie’ told Maud later, ‘that it must be your handy man, but then I thought, “What was he doing being handy at four in the morning?” ’

Bella, too, returned after Jack’s death, bringing Beryl with her. This was lovely for Andrée as it meant she had someone more or less her own age to play with. Beryl was very good at playground games, especially one that involved bouncing a ball against a wall, and gradually increasing the number of actions performed between each bounce. ‘One, two, three, a footsie. Four, five, six, a footsie. Seven, eight, nine, a footsie. Ten, a footsie, post the ball,’ she chanted. ‘Darling Bobbie’ happened to catch this too. ‘The child’s a genius!’ he cried.

In 1937 Tom gave Bill and me a choice. Cousin Emma had offered to pay for us to go to London for three days to watch, from a balcony in the Mall, the Coronation procession of King George VI or, if we preferred it, to spend a whole week in London at a later date. It was typically generous of Cousin Emma to offer such a treat and typically imaginative of her to give us an alternative. It didn’t take us long to decide we’d prefer a whole week and no Coronation to only three days and a view from the Mall. Tom was to go with us and we were all going to stay with Aunt Maud Bradley who lived at Hammersmith. Bill and I both got very, very over-excited as the day drew closer.

I’ve never discovered exactly who Aunt Maud Bradley was. She came at least once a year to stay with Gangie so I suppose she may have been a sister. She didn’t look at all like her though, because Gangie was very pretty, and Aunt Maud Bradley wasn’t at all. ‘An old boiler’ was the rather unkind phrase people used to describe elderly ladies who looked like Aunt Maud Bradley in those days. She didn’t actually live in Hammersmith either. She had a flat in a mansion block in Barnes but overlooking the river and Hammersmith Bridge. I thought the bridge was lovely, like a bridge in a pantomime, but the Thames itself was one of the few things in London I found really disappointing. I thought everything there must be bigger as well as better, but the Thames turned out to be far narrower than the Mersey.

I suppose Tom paid some of Cousin Emma’s money to Aunt Maud Bradley to have us to stay, but she didn’t spend much of it on food. For pudding, every time we ate in, which was as often as Tom could get away with it, there was always the same bowl of fruit salad and all Aunt Maud did was to empty another tin on top of what was left. Tom said he was surprised and indeed disappointed that it hadn’t fermented. We didn’t actually see all that much of her except when we got home. Her own ‘treat’ was to take us to
Gunga Din
at a cinema in Hammersmith Broadway. I was pleased to see it, because I’d read about it in Fat Molly’s
Picturegoer
and knew it wouldn’t be on in Liverpool for ages, but the picture house impressed me even less than the Thames. It wasn’t anything like as grand as the Mayfair or the Gaumont. It was more like the Rivoli.

Aunt Maud Bradley also came with us to the Zoo, the highspot of the visit as far as I was concerned. It was a boiling day (the whole week coincided with a heat wave) and we wanted to see everything. That is to say that Bill and I wanted to see everything. We rushed from Mappin Terrace to the sealions. We banged on the glass in the reptile house although it said we shouldn’t, and made the cobra rear up and open its hood as in
The Jungle Book.
We fed buns to the bears and had a ride on an elephant. We not only exhausted Aunt Maud Bradley but Tom too. When it was almost time to go we discovered we’d missed out the hippopotami which were in the North Gardens and this meant running through a tunnel under the road. Tom and Aunt Maud Bradley were sitting on a bench near the Aquarium. We were amazed that he’d rather sit on a bench than see a hippo, but he said he would.

It was a London I was never to experience again – tourists’ London. We went to the Tower, and Madame Tussaud’s where I was critical of the Chamber of Horrors. There was only one proper torture-you pulled back a curtain and there was a Turk hanging from a hook through his stomach – and the murderers looked quite like ordinary people. We enjoyed being taken to the Regent Palace Hotel for lunch afterwards, though. One of Maud’s ‘boyfriends’ who had moved to London took us. For five shillings each you could eat as much as you liked and there were fifteen courses. Bill and I managed twelve apiece. Tom said it made him feel quite liverish just to watch us. Maud’s ex-boyfriend said, ‘What appetites, dear.’

Tom took us to see a revue at a big theatre. The star was an actress called Frances Day. She was very pretty and imitated several film stars. Tom had chosen this revue because he’d met Frances Day on a boat going to Portugal where he had a client in the wool business. He said they became quite friendly and she’d called him ‘Mr Woolly Man’. I asked if we were going to go round and see her later as we did with friends of Maud’s. He said no. She mightn’t remember him and besides Aunt Maud Bradley was tired and wanted to get back to Hammersmith.

One afternoon we had tea at the House of Commons with David Maxwell Fyfe, our local MP. Afterwards we went and watched a debate from the visitors’ gallery. It was an important debate to start with and I recognised several of the members from the cartoons in the newspapers and the newsreels at the Tatler. Churchill was there, and Neville Chamberlain, and Lloyd George with his long white hair and moustache. After a while, though, a man got up and spoke with a Welsh accent about snobbery in the British Navy, and most people, rather rudely I thought, walked out.

At the end of the week we thanked Aunt Maud Bradley and caught the tube train back to Euston, changing in the middle on to another line. Tom got into a panic on tube trains because he always worried that we’d get lost and go to the wrong station, but we didn’t. Bill and I recognised several of the names on the map above the window of the carriage from having played Monopoly. On the train back to Liverpool I suddenly wanted to eat an orange more than anything in the world. I didn’t usually like oranges very much, but I could hardly wait to get to Lime Street so that I could peel one and pop the segments in my mouth.

I didn’t get back to London until almost ten years later. It was a different place, scarred with bomb damage, grey, its paint peeling, everything rationed.

In a way we got to see the Coronation after all. When we went back to Parkfield Twyne told us that he was going to break his own rule and take the whole school to the Mayfair to watch it in colour. I was absolutely amazed, but immediately asked him if we were going to stay and see the whole programme. He said he’d have to find out if the main film was suitable, and told us a few days later that it was not. It was a comedy with Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, and I was furious at missing it, but there was nothing to be done. On the appointed afternoon we filed in to the Mayfair, me displaying my savoir-faire by making it obvious I knew my way around, and listing the films I’d seen there since it opened. We sat through the Coronation which was very long and quite boring, and then filed out again as the titles came up for the main feature. Hoping to catch at least a glimpse of the suave Walls with his little moustache and Ralph Lynn with his monocle and ‘silly ass’ laugh, I looked over my shoulder until we were right out in the foyer.

Munich happened: Chamberlain in the Tatler waved his piece of paper, and most people thought it marvellous. Bill and I discovered a new milk-bar where you could ask for a free sample. Tom dug a shelter into a high bank in the garden well away from the house. It had sandbags round the entrance and a tin roof on which he piled the earth back. It was useful to play in. Fred, Alan and Tom volunteered to become air-raid wardens if there was a war. The authorities tried out the sirens a few times.

The weekend that war was declared, the ballet was back in Liverpool. ‘Darling Bobbie’ and Freddie Ashton were spending the day with us. We listened to Chamberlain on the radiogram. The grown-ups seemed very sad, not a bit excited. Ginger, beyond helping us now, rubbed against Maud’s legs. She smiled a lot at us, but they weren’t proper smiles.

Tom told us that next day he and Maud were going to drive us down to Cousin Arthur Bromilow’s in Shropshire and then that Mr Twyne had arranged for Bill and me and the rest of the boys from Parkfield to go to a public school nearby, at any rate for the following term, and that Andrée would stay with the Bromilows and go to the same school as their granddaughter Bridget. He’d obviously known all this in advance.

An hour after the war was announced the siren wailed, and we all went and sat in Tom’s air-raid shelter, the only time it was ever used, waiting for the sound of the bombers. After a while the all-clear sounded, and we went back into the house and had lunch. Tom said perhaps it was just a trial to make sure that people didn’t panic.

Next day we got up early. All the staff had gone and Maud, for the first time in her life, tried to cook sausages for breakfast. She didn’t know about pricking them, and turned the grill on full to make it quicker, so that they all exploded. We thought this was very funny, but then Maud burst into tears so we stopped laughing.

We drove down to Cousin Arthur’s in the old 1920s car Tom had bought for the summer. He never bought a new car; he’d spend about £10 on what he called ‘a heap’ and then sell it again after we got back from Trearddur, although this year we hadn’t been there. It was a beautiful day. We got to Cousin Arthur’s in time for tea in the garden. We sat under a cedar of Lebanon eating toast and honey in front of the pretty Georgian house in the bright sunlight. The grown-ups listened to the news all the time. I drew a caricature of Hitler which I thought was quite good. I showed it to Maud who said she didn’t know why I wanted to draw such a horrible man. Somehow the Bromilows managed to find us all somewhere to sleep that night. Next morning Maud and Tom said goodbye to us and drove back to Liverpool in ‘the heap’.

Tom said later that neither of them expected to see any of us again.

19

That same afternoon Cousin Arthur drove Bill and me to Oakridge, a minor public school on the Welsh borders, and over the next day or two the boys from Parkfield reassembled in this unfamiliar place. Twyne was already there to greet us, although that is certainly an inappropriate word for his gloomy if uncharacteristically restrained presence. He told us that once the term had started, which was still ten days off, we would be subject to the rules and regulations of Oakridge, although of course initially under his supervision. He also explained that in a few weeks he would be leaving us to find premises in order to reopen Parkfield as soon as possible. He hoped we would work hard and play hard. We slept that evening in a dormitory which had been set aside for us, and wondered if the bombers were over Liverpool, some sixty miles away.

Oakridge was a comparatively new seat of learning but was determined to overcome this by embracing the public school ethos at its most unyielding. Beating and fagging were held to be sacred principles; there was a school song made up from those lush Victorian harmonies guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of the managers of rubber plantations at sundown; and a great number of rules about which piece of grass you could walk on and what buttons you could do up. The headmaster was a towering Olympian figure with a raw red face, and the buildings were unfashionably Gothic and already convincingly choked with ivy.

On the first morning of term we went down to breakfast in the usual place only to find we were expected in a different hall on the other side of the school. Those of us who had cut it fine were in consequence five minutes late. Immediately after breakfast we were sent for by our new housemaster and given three strokes of the cane. He was a jovial and savage little man called Shorte and appeared to think we should enjoy the beating almost as much as he did. It was like that all term. I’d never been beaten with a cane before, or heard the dreadful preliminary swish as it parted the fusty tobacco-laden air of Mr Shorte’s study. I was to learn to know that sound well before I’d mastered the complicated structure of rules in a large school, and even after that for comparatively trivial offences.

In time we settled in. There was a school chaplain who fascinated me. He was very High Church – even Gangie might have had reservations about the amount of incense and lace he favoured – and he wore a soutane at all times. He was also very unprepossessing with a leathery yellow face and a soft insinuating voice, but what distinguished him most was his Rabelaisian relish in lavatorial and excretory jokes. I’d no objection to this – on the contrary, but I didn’t hesitate to use it as a Twyne-tease. ‘The chaplain,’ I told him I with a mixture of mock horror and surprise, ‘tells us lots of jokes about lavatories, sir. Why is that, sir?’ Twyne was as shocked as I’d hoped, but he couldn’t of course say much. ‘Disgusting,’ he mumbled, and turned away.

With all of us sleeping in the same dormitory, our sexual activities were resumed and indeed extended. One night I was in somebody’s bed when the door was flung open and there stood Twyne silhouetted against the dim light from the stone passage. I slid out of the bed and began to crawl towards my own, wondering if I could possibly make it before Twimbo, who was walking down the dormitory on a tour of inspection, discovered it empty except for Little Ted. Under one of the intervening beds I fortunately encountered a pair of rollerskates, which went crashing out across the wooden floor like a runaway train. Twyne, with a cry of ‘My Godfathers!’ ran back to the entrance of the dormitory to find the light switch and, by the time he did, I was safely back in my own bed, apparently asleep.