o’clock in the afternoon, by which time they had, presumably, digested their ‘dinner’.
On one occasion they flagged down a Rolls-Royce, the sort in which the chauffeur is isolated from the passengers and exposed to the elements.
They, the constables, were happily engaged in taking down the chauffeur’s particulars when a very small, open motor car driven by a very boozy-looking man came round Ther Bend at about sixty miles an hour, roaring with laughter and thumbing his nose at the constables who had no chance of flagging him down, let alone taking down his particulars.
And it was always at this point, at Number 122 that we turned back. Beyond it was terra incognita so far as my mother was concerned.
Later, when I was given a scooter, I was allowed to scoot up the footpath from our flat past Number 122 to Number 54 Castelnau alone. Number 54 was, and still is, an Edwardian house equipped with barge-boards and decked with finials; one of a whole lot of similar houses which extended southwards on both sides of the road as far as the Red Lion, a pub with a rampant lion over the entrance. Number 54 was the house of a Jewish family called Rosenthal. Their youngest son, Martin, was my best friend when we were both at a pre-prep school run by two impressive ladies in yet another Edwardian house called Castelnau College, and later at Colet Court, the prep school for St Paul’s and after that at St Paul’s which were opposite one another in Hammersmith Road. Mr Rosenthal, who was very all there, had worked for many years with the East Africa Company, which had laid the foundations of what are now Kenya and Uganda. Mr Rosenthal had been an intimate friend of Trader Horn, otherwise Alfred Aloysius Smith, whose reminiscences of Darkest Africa (edited by Ethelreda Lewis) had become a best-seller. Both Martin’s father and Trader Horn were heroes to us. The only trouble was that neither of us had ever set eyes on Trader Horn; but Martin very kindly said that I could pretend that I knew Trader Horn, which was what he was going to do. We soon found out that if anyone asked you, ‘I say, man, do you know Trader Horn?’ and you said yes, you were assured of social success at Colet Court, something which, up to then, Martin and myself had stood in real need. The Rosenthal house was full of African memorabilia – the very walls groaned under the weight of huge guns for slaying elephants, dinner gongs made from elephants’ tusks waiting to be banged, and the skins and heads of wild animals.
The adult Rosenthals played bridge incessantly, usually with other Jewish families to whom they were linked by marriage. Most of them lived in the same sort of houses as the Rosenthals. One of the younger sons who was about the same age as Martin and myself used to charge his mother half a crown to kiss him goodnight; but he made up for this when the war came by joining a gunner regiment and getting killed in Tunisia.
One of these families had a business in Hammersmith market. When they played bridge all of them sat at little card tables and the ladies were very elegant and made up, and whatever the weather outside – it could be a day of blazing heat – it was with the blinds drawn and the lights on. Too young to play bridge, we played vingt-et-un with the family’s ex-nurse, a rather forbidding woman of indeterminate age called Edith, and Martin’s younger sister Eva, and anyone else who could be roped in to form a quorum for a game. We ate matzos and Gentleman’s Relish, an unsuitable summer snack, while the atmosphere became more and more insupportable as the men puffed away on their big cigars. It was as someone from the Christian world outside that I attended Martin’s bar-mitzvah and the celebration of the Passover.
The Rosenthals had a garden large enough to play cricket in with a tennis ball which was always getting hit out of bounds, over the banks of the reservoir at the bottom of the garden. When it did we used to squeeze through an iron fence and climb the bank in order to look for the ball, but generally speaking it could be seen bobbing about out on the water and we had to wait for the wind to blow it back towards the wall of the reservoir. Usually it blew in the wrong direction and someone else picked it up, so we never saw it again. This was the biggest reservoir in Barnes, which was a wonderful sight in winter when birds from the far north congregated on it in astonishing numbers.
Sometimes, at the age of about seven or eight, when we got bored, we used to play ‘rude’ games together in one of the bathrooms, and on one occasion when playing ‘Doctors’ we gave one another a soap and water enema using a garden syringe that happened to be handy. Martin’s attempt to give me one was a failure but mine to give him one had spectacular results. We were discovered by Edith who gave us a good smacking and I was sent home for the day, but she never told the Rosenthals and I continued to be invited to their house. After this we gave up ‘rude’ games as being injurious to health.
Although the various blocks of flats – Castelnau Mansions, Riverview Gardens, Castelnau Gardens – presented a series of fairly prosperous façades to the outside world, kept up by Mr Edwards’ knob-polishing, from their backs they gave a somewhat different impression. In fact some of them bore a distinct resemblance to the slum tenements on the Hammersmith side of the river, past which I used to battle my way to Colet Court.
For example, Castelnau Mansions had several flights of steep, unlit, narrow backstairs with a very primitive privy on each landing but no washing facilities, intended for the use of domestic servants, who also had a minute bedroom next to the kitchen in each flat. Whether it was intended that the domestics should use these backstairs facilities was not clear. Our domestics never used them – they shared the bathroom and loo with us. In all the forty years my parents lived at Three Ther Mansions, these backstairs were never painted. In some other blocks of flats the occupants had to put their dustbins into lifts and lower them away down to the ground floor, where again the porters and the dustmen took over.
And behind our block there was a sad-looking garden that was no one’s responsibility, with patches of grass that looked as if they had lost the race and innumerable docks that hadn’t and a wooden shed. This garden led away into a series of alleys smelling of cats in which the dustbins were stacked up by the porters awaiting the arrival of the dustmen.
All in all it was a good place for children, who loved it. Fortunately, although I was an only child and the only one in Castelnau Mansions, there were others in other blocks such as Riverview Gardens, some of whom had already formed a gang, which Martin and I were invited to join, which wasn’t difficult as there was no leader because everyone wanted to be leader.
The gang included Philip Turgle, who was Belgian – goodness knows how the Belgians pronounced his name; and there was Roderick Blaine (‘Roderick Blaine had a Pain and it wouldn’t go away again/Tee-hee!’ we used to chant mindlessly). And there was Twinkle, who was American Jewish and whose father was a tailor. And there were one or two others, whose names I have forgotten. And last but not least there was Margaret Evans, the only girl in the gang, who could do anything that boys could and was braver.
It wasn’t much of a gang, really, because there weren’t any other such gangs in the neighbourhood, except those in Hammersmith, on the other side of the river, which were solidly working-class and dangerous whereas ours were solidly middle-class and feeble.
So we fought imaginary battles with one another in the noisome back alleyways, pretending they were trenches, and bombed one another with clay bombs which we began to manufacture when Twinkle discovered an almost endless sticky supply of the stuff in one of the back alleys. (How Twinkle came by his name was a mystery, for he was really a quite outstandingly ugly little boy.) Then we found that we could launch the bombs from the end of a nice, springy sapling; they went twice as far as they did when you simply threw them by hand.
Then we started baking the bombs over a fire made with old boxes, in order to produce a shrapnel effect, and ended up by breaking someone’s kitchen window on an upper storey of a flat in Riverview Gardens. And that was the end of clay bombs.
Every so often in the winter there were thick, pea soup type fogs which sometimes lasted for days and brought London to a halt. Knowing how lethal these fogs were, it seems incredible that our
