in which the weekly wash was done. A wash was a lick and a promise in the kitchen sink.
I took more notice of the children of the poor than of the grown-ups, because they were nearer my level in the world in terms of feet and inches, and therefore more often confronted me. I remember the boys more than I remember the girls because the boys tended to move about in gangs. I remember them, not all of course, but many, as being pale and thin, some of them almost transparent, so that looking at their faces with the skin drawn tight over them and their cropped, sometimes shaven heads above, I had the impression of being able to see their skulls through the skin.
But, although some were painfully thin, with bulgy, raw-looking knees protruding below the ungainly-looking shorts they wore, cut down from the discarded trousers of their elder brothers, they were tough, as tough as those of their fathers who had survived the war. Among themselves they fought like ferrets, on the pavements, in the gutters, anywhere, not caring what damage they did to one another or their already tattered clothes, putting in the boot, as it is now called, when they were able, employing methods that at Colet Court were regarded as unfair, except by the gangs of bullies whose techniques surpassed anything the poor could think up at that time in terms of the infliction of physical pain. Their parents fought, too. Their fights were not the lightning affairs their children were adept in, as if they were torpedo-boats racing in to an enemy anchorage and doing the greatest amount of damage in the least possible time and then getting out again. They were lumbering, major actions between what were more like dreadnoughts, that went on until one or other of the participants was rendered hors de combat, or until the police arrived. Such encounters in the streets of Hammersmith were awful to watch, at least to me, because the idea of grown-ups of whatever condition, who were presumed to know better, actually fighting one another, pulling great tufts of one another’s hair out sometimes if they were women, was unthinkable.
The children of the poor, boys and girls alike, were resourceful. They had to be. Apart from marbles and iron hoops they had scarcely any bought toys; or if they had they must have kept them indoors as I never saw any. They tied lengths of ragged rope to the crossbars of the street lamps and swung on them, or else used them for skipping. In the autumn the boys played conkers, as we did at Colet Court, bashing away at one another’s iron-hard, specially cured horse chestnuts on a string until one or other of them broke. They also played various street and pavement games, such as hopscotch, according to the season of the year, marking out the courts with chalk. If I and my friends used to chalk out the same games on the pavements in Riverview Gardens, residents complained and we got ticked off by the porters, who were numerous. What I envied them were the scooters and little carts, made for them by their fathers or elder brothers, using wood from old packing cases and wheels from discarded roller skates. These scooters made what to me was a wonderfully deafening noise as their owners scooted along the pavements or, more daringly, along the road. I thought them far superior to my own bought scooter from Hamleys which, although possibly a little faster, was depressingly noiseless, being fitted with rubber wheels. In the little carts, which were almost equally noisy, they used to pull their younger brothers and sisters, most of whom should have been in prams if they had had prams, all the way from Hammersmith up Castlenore to Barnes Common and back, a couple of miles each way. How these infants survived such jolting journeys is a mystery.
They were brave, too. In summer, when it was high tide at Hammersmith, some of the boys who could not have been more than nine or ten, used to dive into the then indescribably filthy water from the parapet of the bridge, a good fifteen feet above it, and then, never having been taught to swim properly, dog-paddle to the embankment. They used to do this until a policeman, or a policewoman wearing a helmet like an upturned basin, a huge blue serge skirt and big black boots, used to appear and chase them into Hammersmith, still naked, clutching their ragged clothes, but never catching them.
Besides being tough, resourceful and brave they were also, so far as I was concerned, and anyone who travelled the same route to school as I did, extremely nasty. In the summer of 1928, for the first time I was allowed to go to school without Kathy, providing that I travelled by the back street route, avoiding Hammersmith Broadway, in which my parents were always convinced that I would be run over. Sometimes, but not always, I travelled with another boy who lived nearby us, whose parents bound him to the same conditions.
To us, the perils of this back street route were far more real than any of the risks our parents imagined us running in Hammersmith Broadway, such as being knocked down by a bus or tram. It took us through the heart of territory in which the poor and underprivileged lay in wait while on what appeared to be their more leisurely way to their own schools. Travelling with Kathy, herself a member of the working class, I now realized was like having been provided with some sort of laisser passer. In any event, she stood no nonsense from anyone and on the only occasion she did have trouble, when what seemed to me a very large boy, one as tall as she was, crept up behind her and pulled her long hair, she gave him such a resounding slap in the face that he went off howling. Now, using the same route, we encountered the enemy, an enemy waiting to jeer at us, shove us about, smash our straw hats in or pinch our caps, according to the time of year.
If there were only a couple, and they were not too large, we used to stand and fight. We were quite good at fighting, in fact, for much of the time we did little else in the breaks at Colet Court, and quite often we succeeded in sending them away blubbing. Surprisingly, for all their ferocity, they seemed less able than we were to put up with physical pain.
If we did win such a victory, however, our triumph was usually short-lived. No later than the next day we would find ourselves the subject of a major ambush by members of the same tribe. This could be very serious unless we happened to be armed with cricket bats, or even school satchels would do if they were sufficiently packed with books, to bash the boys with. Otherwise the only thing to do was to run for it: capture meant torture, even if it was only of an improvised, not very refined sort, which it more or less had to be in an open street. (At Colet Court, where there were places hidden from view in the playground, to which few masters ever penetrated, torture could mean having drawing pins pushed into the palms of one’s hands.) Even so, we sometimes arrived at school, ourselves blubbing, with bloody noses and straw hats stove in and, worst of all, late, in which case we were reported. It is perhaps not surprising that when things got really bad we took to crossing Hammersmith Broadway by the forbidden route.
However, these misfortunes were soon forgotten travelling home to Ther Boiler in the evenings on top of a No. 9 or 73 open bus, bombarding other boys on the tops of other buses with peashooters or squirting water pistols at them; whistling at the girls from St Paul’s Girls’ School, with whom social intercourse while travelling was discouraged; hiding under the canvas covers, which could be put up over the seats in wet weather, to avoid paying the fare; or better still, waiting for the buses of the Westminster or Premier pirate bus companies, that were fighting a battle for survival against the London General Omnibus Company. Their drivers used to shoot ahead of the sedate red Generals at a tremendous rate and scoop up all the customers, so that, when the Generals arrived, which had to observe a time schedule, the passengers were already half way home. The pirates had no ticket inspectors to speak of, and often their conductors used to let schoolchildren ride free.
But these early back street encounters were as nothing compared with the risks one ran when one was older and was required to wear the ludicrous uniform decreed at St Paul’s – black jacket, striped trousers, stiff white collar, black tie. In winter, boys who had attained a certain height wore bowler hats and carried rolled umbrellas.
These last two items, although they conferred a certain, barely tangible, status on those who wore them in the company of their fellow Paulines, had the reverse effect on those wearing them all alone, for example in the Hammersmith Bridge Road.
By this time, aged fifteen or so, it did not matter whether I went to school by way of Hammersmith Broadway or the back street route wearing such an outfit. There were just as many possibilities of being elbowed, tripped or jeered at on the bridge itself (a nasty place for ‘an encounter’), or in
