lived in an even larger house about a hundred yards away. Their children, Mary and Michael, also kept a lot of pets, mainly rabbits and guinea-pigs. John used to take his rabbits to visit Mary’s and they would give them the freedom of the grass tennis court for their meeting, or Jamboree, as they called it. John and Mary would run about the court trying, for some reason, to prevent the rabbits copulating – an absurd ambition!
Down Hendon Avenue and across the brook lived Douglas and Margaret Cole with their children, Jane, Ann and Humphrey. They had moved from West Hampstead to Freelands, a wide rambling house with a couple of acres of garden around it. A new hard tennis court had been built beside the house and in summer we used to go there almost every Sunday afternoon to left-wing tennis parties where there was good intellectual conversation, indifferent tennis and an unending supply of China tea.
Tennis was the game in the thirties. Unfortunately our asphalt back garden wasn’t big enough for a court, so Ray and Daisy marked it out with silver paint and bought a badminton set. Ray also bought a small pickaxe and a wheelbarrow so that we could have the pleasure – and it was a pleasure – of prising up parts of the crisp asphalt skin to expose the earth beneath. As time passed the garden became very fertile, in a wild sort of way, with a forest of giant, very delicious blackberries at the far end. The pride of the garden was a climbing rose that Daisy had bought in Woolworth’s for sixpence. Its name was ‘Albertine’, it grew to enormous size and I worked out that over the years it must have given us a million flowers.
I can see that garden in the summertime, with the crumbly yellowish bricks of the house, the badminton patch deeply embow ered in the surrounding trees and the squirrels dropping walnut shells on the players. It is a picture of mellow ease and contentment.
By 1936 I had graduated to long trousers, at least for ceremonial occasions, and John and I had both become very sartorial and particular about what we wore; details which, looking back, seem to be no more than nuances of drabness. Clothes were very dull in those days, but we wore sock-suspenders and put Brylcreem on our hair.
Once or twice a year Daisy would take us to visit the Gents’ Outfitters in the Charing Cross Road. The high point of the outings would be Chinese lunch with chopsticks at the Shanghai Restaurant in Greek Street, where the waitress was called Doris and had been no further east than Clacton. Between the Outfitters in Charing Cross Road there were seedy little shops which advertised DAMAROIDS and sold strangely shaped trusses. These were puzzling, but the amusement arcades, where the illuminated bagatelle games thumped and pinged and whistled, were fascinating. Daisy found them boring, so she tended to stay outside and look at the shops. When this happened I was able to nip to the back of the arcade and furtively put a penny into one of the machines marked ADULTS ONLY. These were always disappointing. You peered in and saw an old scratchy photograph. When you turned the handle the photographs tipped over and tottered past like a flicker-book. The pictures were faint and blurred and seemed to concern minor happenings in the lives of wellcorseted ladies and rolly-eyed gentlemen in suits.
I didn’t really need to be furtive about watching the not-veryrude pictures because Daisy was not in any way a prude – far from it! Perhaps from the music halls, where she had listened to Marie Lloyd belting out her hilarious, ribald songs, she had developed a healthily bawdy view of life and a very vulgar laugh. I recall one spectacular outing on which she took us to see the Crazy Gang at the Victoria Palace. The Crazy Gang were renowned for the high quality of their rude jokes and double entendres, many of which were so sophisticated that their import was lost on the nice-minded in the audience. However, that afternoon there was one member of the audience who not only saw every aspect of every gag but was also laughing uproariously at them. John and I got the distinct impression that the Crazy Gang were enjoying Daisy’s appreciation so much that they were slipping in particularly fruity jokes especially for her, so it sometimes seemed as if she was the only member of the audience who was laughing. John and I were so embarrassed that we were practically hiding under the seats, but Daisy really enjoyed herself.
Sometimes, if one of us had a birthday, or had Christmas money to spend, we would go to Hamley’s toy shop in Regent Street. It was from there that I chose, by grace of Ray and Daisy’s friend, Rudolph Messell, who was rich and liked to give big presents, something that was destined to become my most prized possession. This was a Super-de-luxe Conjuring Set by Ernest Sewell. It came in a big box that cost nearly two pounds and contained some very sophisticated pieces of equipment with which I looked forward to impressing rapturous audiences.
Rapturous audiences were not readily available to small boys of eleven, but there would soon be a ‘window of opportunity’ – Grandad’s party.
George Lansbury’s seventy-seventh birthday party might have been a rather muted occasion because he was at what must have been the lowest point in his long political career. At the Labour Party Conference in 1935 he had suffered a vicious personal attack from Ernest Bevin, who had, in effect, called him a traitor and accused him of stabbing the Labour Party in the back. The Party faithful had not rallied to his support and he had resigned from the leadership.
Such a shattering blow would have broken most politicians and left them bitter. It is a measure of George’s greatness that his spirit seemed to be quite undamaged and he was his usual jovial, grandfatherly self.
Grandad’s birthday party had always been quite an elaborate affair which was attended by all, or certainly most, of his large family. Usually thirty or forty people turned up and I am told the occasions could be a bit tense, often for reasons that were more political than personal. Ray couldn’t abide Party-line Communists and every year of Stalin’s reign made him more contemptuous of them. Equally he had little time for the far right wing of the Labour Party, which our uncle Ernest Thurtle represented. He could also be less than respectful of Labour activists who affected what they thought were working-class accents in order to show that they were down-to-earth trade-unionists. To cap it all, Daisy’s eldest sister, Annie, was a Christian fundamentalist. She wasn’t really on speaking terms with any of them except perhaps her sister Nellie, who worked at Collet’s bookshop and wasn’t quite a Communist, though her youngest sister Violet very definitely was. So at one level the party was festive and full of fun, while on another it was fraught with submerged implications, turned backs and barbed references. Apparently John was sensitive to these tensions and found them a bit alarming. I was totally oblivious to them and so, I believe, was Grandad. He and I simply enjoyed the party and joined in with gusto.
At this particular party I was especially excited because, after a deal of campaigning, it had been established that I would be permitted to entertain Grandad and the party with one, just one, of the tricks from my amazing new conjuring set – but I wasn’t to muck about and waste time. That was fine by me and I set it all up most carefully. The moment came and my parents, sighing indulgently, apologized to the assembled guests and craved their indulgence while their tedious son showed off with his conjuring trick.
Everybody sat down and I began the trick, which was the best one in the box, involving a tall magic goblet. I didn’t waste time. I borrowed Grandad’s engraved gold watch which had been presented to him by the Borough of Poplar. I lowered it carefully into the goblet on to a bed of cotton wool and after a few deft passes transformed it into a half a pint of hot coffee. I had in fact improved the trick. In order to add verisimilitude I had earlier slipped a lump of yellow soap into the coffee with the result that as I was pouring it proudly from the goblet into a mug, something round and yellow slurped in with it.
Grandad gave a bellow and shouted: ‘Cripes! The little tyke’s done it again!’ – or words to that effect.
Suddenly there was a lot of noise. Grandad was demanding his watch back, Daisy was shouting for a kitchen towel, Nellie was denouncing me, John was looking on the floor. Everybody was talking very loudly and urgently, while I, the only sensible person there, was fumbling for the soap in the mug of coffee in order to get it out and show that it was
