setting the teeth on edge. Adults never went to bed. They stayed up for three nights. Sleeping in chairs, playing cards, drinking themselves sober. Beds were reserved for the children - three at one end and three at the other. Too excited to sleep, rooms were awash with whispers. Moonlight filtered through chinks in the curtains. It was a silent-movie world of silhouettes and shimmering silver. Stories of ghosts and rattling skeletons, goose-pimpled the flesh and lifted the hairs on the back of the neck. But sleep would come at last, as inevitable as the end of Christmas itself. Light was engulfed. Laughter extinguished.
My first school was St Teresa’s Roman Catholic Primary School in Canning-Town. My memories of it are somewhat shadowy. That first morning, hand in hand with my mother, walking beneath the trees at the edge of the Hermit Road Recreation Ground still fills my mind with terror. There it was that another small birth took place. Had I been dangled by the feet and slapped bodily into the shock of existence, my screams and tears could not have been more authentic. There it was that the seeds of recalcitrance were sown. Being dragged away by a nun off into the unknown, never again - as I thought at the time - to see my kith and kin, was a jolt to the system that I’ve never fully recovered from. There it was that my first groping intellectualisms grasped at the meanings of distrust. My propensity towards the solitary life had its roots - in what I saw then - as that early betrayal. Much of my earliest school experience was clouded by that event. The rest is rather vague. Beanbags are a more prominent feature than I think they should be, though the symbolism eludes me. School dinners made their queasy mark: fish in white sauce, cabbage, boiled beyond the bounds of credibility and reeking of some antediluvian drainage duct, and of course, tapioca, that slippery excuse for frog’s-spawn, forced down the throats of the innocent in the name of: “You’re lucky you’re not starving and living in Africa."
After measles and sundry other infantile infections I settled into a somewhat uneasy truce with my warders and my surroundings. Strangely, when I think of present day realities, I was allowed to make my own way to and from school. It was then that my imagination began to expand in ways not conceived of by your average dour educationalist. The Church of the Holy Trinity, or as we knew it, Trinity Church - a black towering edifice that somehow managed to survive the worst excesses of The Blitz - was encompassed by houses in various states of bomb-damaged dereliction. One of those houses - a large three-storied dwelling - stood on its own amongst the piles of rubble. Some of its walls were missing. It could be peered into as you might look into an open doll’s-house. In one room a bent and buckled bedstead was perched precariously on the edge of oblivion. In another, where the blast echoing cupboard doors hung broken and askew, striations of incoming light filtered through the loose and missing slates to animate a dance of glittering dust. There, it was rumoured, a doctor had committed suicide; hung himself at the top of the stairs in a fit of morbid depression. That was our house of do-and-dare and there it was that we tested ourselves. Discovered the limits of our bravery. The staircase was built into a brick extension on the outside of the house. A series of steps and level planes zig-zagged their way up to the topmost landing. There, there swung a noose. Whether it was a memento mori from the rumoured suicide or just put there for a jape by one of the local wags, nobody knew. Suffice it to say that for us children it was real enough. Only once did I make the nerve-racking ascent. I can still smell the brick-dust and the damp. Can hear the creaking of the stairs and the beating of my tiny heart, trapped like a mouse behind the wainscot. When I got to the top - more breathless with anxiety than exertion - I saw the noose highlighted in the shadows by the slant of incoming sunlight. My fear was almost palpable. I was close to paralysis. Then someone behind me screamed and a flock of escaping pigeons exploded on thunderous wings. Never was an exit more undignified. Discretion being the better part of a rout, the residue of whatever bravery I had, remains there in that house; a ghost in search of another ghost; that haunts me still.
From the back of the removal van London started to contract. My frame of reference had begun to alter. Perspectives were shifting. What was once in the foreground of my life had now moved from the middle-distance to become nothing more than a diminishing speck on the receding horizon. Between my future and me lay the industrial wasteland of the city’s outskirts. Terraces of Victorian and Edwardian houses were being replaced by tracts of derelict land, factory chimneys and slag heaps. A concrete bridge carried us over a tidal creek, where wooden wharves, derricks, and a tumbledown paintworks clung to the edges of the polluted waterway. Precarious stacks of rusty oil-drums towered over waste-lots. In all directions everything seemed to be in a state of ruin or decay. Industrial buildings of every conceivable shape and size were to be seen in various stages of dilapidation. Asbestos, tin and corrugated iron; these were the things of Empire. The materials, ‘the sun never set on.’ Here and there, the half-hearted attempts at cultivation - the dig-for-victory plots of hungry Londoners - had reverted to scrub and brambles. Occasionally, where the more persistent amongst them had stuck to the task, oases of prelapsarian greenery repaid their efforts with a meagre crop of homegrown vegetables. Eventually, beyond the motor-works, the rows of Lombardy-poplars and the brick-built, sports-fielded suburbs, we found ourselves on the edge of the Essex marshes. Romance had entered into my life. By no stretch of the imagination could that country have been called beautiful in any conventional sense of the word. But for me the wide marshland fields, counterpointed by elms and crisscrossed by dykes and ditches flashing in the sunlight, were the start of a love affair that enthralls me still. Sheep were still an integral part of the marshland economy in those days and for me, a child of the city, they were the first and enduring symbols of my changing fortune.
By the time we were approaching our destination it was early afternoon. Whether or not summers were hotter in those days, I wouldn’t like to say, but hot it certainly was. An outcrop of low hills skirted the Thames marshes. Tortuous creeks curved and coiled through the sweeping delta. Their silver scales glinting in the hazy heat. We passed an inn called The Barge. It stood at the top of Wharf Lane. An elm-lined shadowy descent to the level crossing on The London Tilbury and Southend Railway, and beyond that to a timber-yard and Vange Wharf itself. Unbeknown to me at the time, tens years hence would see some of my earliest work experience gained in that very timber-yard. But for now it was a by-road to the sea Somewhere to launch my imaginary ships, to set sail for adventure with the sun’s radiant doubloon hanging in the rigging. About half a mile further on we went under a railway bridge and then turned left into Sandon Road. This was one of the few metalled roads in the area. It was bordered on both sides by a rare assortment of single-storey dwellings. Some were solid enough, brick-built with tiled roofs and having the luxury of flagstone paths and patios. Most however, were not so well constructed. Wood, tin, asbestos and corrugated iron were as much in evidence there as they were on the journey through the outskirts of London. There was a difference though. Here there was a pride in the materials. These shacks - originally summer homes only, but now occupied all year because of their proximity to a bombed-out city - were really well looked after. Paint and pebble-dash, orchard trees, shrubs and cottage flowers had marked each of those unassuming houses with the stamp of individuality. There was something about them of the home and castle mentality so much associated with the English mind.
Where the old metalled surface ended, a newer, wider, concrete road began. On one side of the road ran the Fenchurch-Street railway line and on the other there was a hawthorn thicket and a stand of two large elms. As yet there were no pavements. We passed a few more bungalows set back in their own fields and orchards, and then drew up outside our new home. The area that I was moving into was officially known as Barstable, but to most of the residents and me it was to become known as the Luncies Road Estate, a name derived from one of the larger local farms. At that time - other than in the eyes of planners - Basildon as we know it today, scarcely existed. Apart from Barstable the only other estate - a mile or two across the fields to the northwest - was called Whitmore Way. The change could not have been more complete. As modern as our new homes were, three-bedrooms, two inside toilets, one upstairs and one down - luxury indeed! - we were nevertheless islanded on all sides by much older and more bucolic patterns of existence. From west, through north to east, we were surrounded by a patchwork of farms, smallholdings, unmade-roads, woodlands and thorn thickets. To the south the ancient flood plains of the Thames stretched out from Fobbing to Benfleet and beyond. All this - appropriately enough for the Essex creeks and marshes - was to be my oyster. Whether the pearls
