magic.
Sitting there on the bench, I wondered what sort of boys we were. Were we wild? No, I think we were pretty tame. We didn’t scratch the paint of the cars or let down the tyres or break off the wipers. We didn’t steal, we didn’t break-and-enter, didn’t mug old ladies.
We went to the Saturday-morning cinema, of course, and at home we could sometimes be quiet. There was no such thing as television to watch or home computers to play with, but we did listen to the wireless and we played games, cards, board games, paper games, or made models with Meccano. We also read books, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, The Midnight Folk, The Amulet, etc., but these were not as essential to our lives as the comics and adventure weeklies – like The Wizard and Hotspur – which my father called ‘penny dreadfuls’ and deplored. So if necessary we had to read these under the bed-covers, by torchlight.
As the years passed John and I gradually became larger, louder, more enterprising and more of a nuisance. This was made worse by the fact that we didn’t really get on.
After some initial reluctance he had become, with reservations, reconciled to the fact of my existence and was even willing to use me, occasionally, as a menial accomplice, but not as a companion.
I was untiring in my efforts to procure his acceptance and approval, while he was not only determined not to give it himself but was also anxious to prevent my getting any from anybody else.
In our dealings with grown-ups John and I were strictly in competition and loudly jealous of what we thought were our rights. I also remember spending a lot of time whining at whoever was there, trying to get them to make John play with me, while John was probably whining at them to get me off his back. The rest of the time we spent noisily bickering.
I have the feeling that ‘they’ – Elsie, Amy, Peggy, even Daisy – came to see the pair of us as a single agglomeration of squabble, nuisance and overcrowding, and became thoroughly fed up with it. So it must have been a great relief, if the weather was reasonable, to be able to send us to play in the Recreation Ground.
As to our characters, what John and I were like personally, there is a better reference than my cloudy memory. In about 1934 Ray wrote a novel called No Epitaph, which was, as he admitted, largely autobiographical. Included in it were thumbnail sketches of the hero’s two sons, James and Richard. He wrote:
… They were good-looking children, in fact as well as in his prejudiced eyes. James’ dark colouring was unlike either of his parents. His complexion was olive, his hair black, his eyes bright and dark brown. His most attractive feature was his bright, white-toothed grin. Inattentive, rampageous and greedy, he got himself forgiven innumerable escapades by his cheerful smile and instant assumption of a false penitence … James held a larger place in his father’s affection than Richard, a year younger. Richard was not indeed so apparently lovable a child … With one year’s gap in everything, Richard had had to strain always, and learned to ascribe his failure to cheating by his brother, to ill-luck, to insufficient self-advertisement, to anything rather than his natural inferiority … Because his elder brother grabbed all the attention that he could, Richard had formed the habit of talking almost incessantly, so that he might break into any pause in the conversation and for a minute secure the centre of the stage. Once started on his way, it had become an obsession with the child: he thought aloud like an old man. ‘Vere is,’ he would say – he had retained one or two childish mispronunciations – ‘a man in ve park who gives sixpences if you run fastest in races. Yesterday I ran faster van James and he gave me sixpence. I know he is vere and and it is true. He always gives sixpences and he wears a brown hat. I can run faster van James. When I have forty sixpences I shall buy a bicycle. Arfur, James’ friend at school who doesn’t like me, was bought a bicycle by his faver …’ Anne was too conscientious a mother to rebuke or punish Richard for ‘lying’, but his incessant stream of small imaginings was a minor nuisance, battering on her half-attentive ears day after day. It obscured Richard’s sweet and generous nature and his puppylike affection. He was far more unselfish than his brother: give him a quarter of chocolates and he would scatter them around his friends (or rather his brother’s friends, who would condescend from their attitude of contempt to him just long enough to rob him completely) while James would stuff himself silently in a corner …*
Although the age gap is different I’m sure that James was John. I also have evidence to confirm that Richard was me, and there is no reason to doubt that the piece is a fairly accurate account of how our parents, or at least our father, saw us. When I look back at myself the picture I get is very similar to the one Ray gives, but seen from a different angle. It is that of a child constantly scrambling for acceptance, like somebody frantically trying to clamber on to a crowded raft, hoping somehow to be allowed a place. Fortunately, I could also see that the child knew nothing of this. He never lost hope, never gave up trying, bore no grudges and took whatever small mercies came his way with innocent delight.
That is all ancient history but there is one small piece of evidence with which I would like to set the record straight. The green bench I was sitting on was the one which the man in a brown hat had sat on when he did, once, give me sixpence for winning a race. His hat was brown and, dammit, I wasn’t lying.
I got up and walked away from these disagreeable memories. There were more pleasant ones to entertain.
John and I were not stuck in that poky house for all our time. Ray and Daisy were great travellers and they took us to France almost every year, and once on an epic journey to Spain.
They would often go for short visits to Paris on their own. Daisy had even flown there in an airliner, a Handley-Page Heracles, from Croydon Aerodrome. The adventure had frightened her terribly but I, with my passion for vehicles, thought it must have been terribly exciting.
Daisy’s younger brother, our uncle Eric, had had a different aeronautical adventure. He was to fly in an airship, but he was lucky enough to miss his flight because his car broke down. The airship was the ill-fated R101 which, that night, crashed into a hill in France and burst into flames.
I saw the newspaper pictures of the crumpled skeleton of the airship and heard the reports on the wireless, and I know I wondered what I would do if I were on an airliner which was about to crash. It occurred to me that the obvious thing to do at, or just before, the moment of impact, was to jump vigorously into the air. In that way one would be going upwards, not downwards, and would land gently, as one would from such a jump. I wondered whether anybody had thought of doing this. The idea stayed in the back of my mind, along with the car which had small wheels in front and large wheels at the back so that it would be going downhill all the time, thus eliminating the need for an engine.
V. Another Place.
When they went to Paris Ray and Daisy usually left John and me at home with the housekeeper or, quite often, they would send us with her to a left-wing holiday camp called Treetops. Once or twice we stayed with Grannie, Ray’s mother, sometimes with other relations. Only once did we spend a long time in a completely strange environment.
This happened at the beginning of 1933 when Daisy had arranged to become a film star. No, that’s an exaggeration. What happened was that Rudolph Messel, who was a very rich young man as well as a socialist, had formed an organization called the Socialist Film Council, which was going to make The Road to Hell, a film about the evils of unemployment and the Means Test. Everything was set up for this and shooting was about to start when Amy, our housekeeper and the king-pin of the family’s life, had to go back to her home in Leiston. This was a serious crisis because somebody had to look after John and me.
So,
