And when it snowed we snowballed one another, which was a good deal less painful than being clay-bombed. And on 5 November we attempted to blow ourselves to smithereens, using what were then really powerful fireworks. And when there was a spring tide we got our feet wet on the towpath. And when it was Boat Race Day, we bought what were called ‘Favours’ – crossed oars made of bamboo decorated with light or dark blue ribbons – from men and women who had been selling them on Boat Race Day from the year dot. And on the towpath there were scenes of Hogarthian strangeness with men chewing glass for a consideration, and drunks male and female being carted off by policemen. I was for Oxford, I thought Cambridge’s light blue sissy, and for years and years Oxford never won, testing my loyalty.
It was when one of the great fogs enveloped London that, equipped with a single lantern containing a single candle, and with scarves wrapped round our mouths to stop the fog getting in, we braved the pitchest of pitch-darkness down in the central heating tunnels that ran under the flats at the bottom end of Riverview Gardens, the ones with a view over the river, in which red-sailed Thames barges could still be seen going down on the ebb tide. At that time it was not a very salubrious situation. Facing the flats on the left bank of the river was the huge refinery of Manbre and Garton – the smells that emanated from it owed more to saccharine than sugar and at times the whole area reeked of it. A little further upstream towards Hammersmith Bridge were the Hammersmith Borough Council’s tips, where all the rubbish was shot into lighters and taken away down the river – that is the parts of it that were not blown across the river and over Riverview Gardens in the form of thick clouds of dust.
Down there in the tunnels all of us were frightened, except Margaret Evans who told us not to be ‘funky’. Down there in the tunnels there was not a sound except for an occasional clonking noise from the heating system. Down there we were looking for the spookiest place in Riverview Gardens and this was it. But the most memorable time for our gang was when my mother, who liked the idea of a gang, rigged us out as ghosts, using old dust sheets. Dressed all in white, with tall, conical hats stuffed with tissue paper to keep them upright and slits for eyeholes, we looked like miniature members of the Ku-Klux-Klan, or penitents in Holy Week.
Wearing these outfits, we used to swoop down The Gardens, making ghastly ghostly noises, alarming the inhabitants of the flats and gesticulating at the passengers on the upper decks of the Number 9 buses.
By the time I married Wanda in Florence in 1946, I had already lived for nearly twenty years in Castelnau Mansions and I felt that I had had enough of it. Already, by the time I was nine or ten and was at Colet Court, the alleyways that had served as trenches in which we played our war games, pelting one another with clay bombs of varying degrees of hardness, now seemed nothing less than squalid, and the smell of dustbins and cats insupportable. And with all this against it our gang simply melted away, and the whole tiny area became intolerably sad.
I made what I now see to have been two attempts to get away from Castelnau Mansions, the first in 1938, when I became a sailor, the second in 1939 when I became a soldier. Both times I found myself inexorably drawn back to them. Even when Wanda came to England in 1947 and we had to find somewhere to live, we had to stay with my parents at Three Ther Mansions. They were heroic because the flat was pretty small for four of us. There was a double bedroom which just took a double bed, with views down The Gardens to the astonishing great hulk of Harrods Furniture Repository, a single bedroom, which had been mine, a small drawing-room and dining-room, both overlooking the reservoir, a very small hall and a minute bathroom. And there was a kitchen and the minute domestic’s bedroom, which my father kept his suits in as there was no living-in domestic any more. And in it he also kept, done up with string, hundreds of back copies of the Morning Post. And there was the terrible loo on the backstairs.
Why my parents, who were only badly off intermittently up to that time, chose to live in such crowded quarters when there was no need for them to do so was a mystery to me. I can only think that they weren’t really interested in homes in the accepted sense of the word at all. Years of rag-trade travelling, anywhere from Bradford to Berlin and Perth to Paris, where they bought ‘models’ to copy, most of the time living in hotels, with all the advantages of having room service at the press of a button and not having to make beds, may have blunted their taste for the homely hearth. Whether this was true or not they used to spend several months of the year travelling, which seemed like whole ages to me.
It could have been worse. They left me in the care of a housekeeper, a Miss Roy, a good, kind woman whose Liverpudlian accent I used to try and copy, and of whom I was very fond, so that I could not have had any real need to be sorry when my parents set off on what they called ‘The Journey’ in order to sell their productions, something that I was to set off on some twenty years later. Nevertheless, I always found myself crying as they went down the stairs and through the door with the brass doorknobs to the taxi waiting outside The Mansions, wondering if I would ever see them again.
In January 1947 the British coal industry was nationalized and in one of the coldest winters anyone could remember there was no coal. In these inauspicious circumstances Wanda gave birth to a daughter in Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital across the river near Stamford Brook. At that time we were living in a small, top floor flat round the corner from Three Ther Mansions at 24 Castelnau Gardens, for which we paid what seemed the high rent of £63 a year. If anyone thinks that life with Wanda was dull in that flat, or later, when we lived in Riverview Gardens, then they have got it all wrong. It was in Castelnau Gardens that she let slip a can full of garbage which she was trying to insert into one of the lifts on an upper floor of the building – it fell on one of the porters down below. He didn’t sue us. It was a miracle. Later, in Riverview Gardens, she forgot to turn the gas off. This led to a spectacular explosion which destroyed a stuffed fish; but not as spectacular as the one when she boiled a kettle full of methylated spirits, under the impression that it was water, while camping on the banks of the Somme en route for Italy.
In the summer of 1947, when the baby was about seven months old, Wanda decided to take her to visit her parents who lived in the Carso, the strange limestone country around Trieste, leaving me to get on with the execution of the autumn orders, some of which we would soon be delivering to the shops. At the time I was working for the family firm as a commercial traveller in the fashion business.
Although she had been very reluctant to do so, being of an economical turn of mind, she had eventually been persuaded to travel by wagon-lit. At this period, with large areas of Europe still in a state bordering on chaos, it seemed a justifiable extravagance for a woman travelling alone with a baby.
I had also arranged for her to travel in a through coach from Calais, which meant that when the train reached the Gare du Nord, instead of getting down there and taking a taxi across Paris to the Gare de Lyon, she could remain on board and be shunted round the city on what is known as the Ceinture to the Gare de Lyon, where it would be attached to the Simplon-Orient Express.
I got the two of them to Victoria in good time for the boat train to Dover, in our Hillman Minx; but as we were walking to the platform preceded by a porter pushing the remainder of her luggage and with the baby swinging between us in a portable cot, Wanda suddenly said, ‘I’ve forgotten the basket!’
The last time I had seen the basket was in the hall of the flat. It contained all the mysterious necessities of weaned-baby travel, many of which I had myself regarded as mandatory when I was a baby – huge quantities of nappies, boiled water and a complete menu of baby food and drink for three days on a train. The extra day’s supply was in case the train broke down. At that time, with the war only recently over, baby food was not so easily obtained in Europe as it is today and Wanda had prepared purées of fresh vegetables and farmyard chicken,
