Kisses on a Postcard

A N
ote on the
A
uthor

Terence Frisby is a playwright. He has worked extensively for many years as an actor, director and producer. His most famous play,
There’s A Girl In My Soup
, was London’s longest-running comedy and a worldwide smash hit. His script of the film, which starred Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn, won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for the Best British Comedy Screenplay. His other plays are performed internationally.

He has written many television plays and two television comedy series:
Lucky Feller
with David Jason, and
That’s Love
, which won the Gold Award for Comedy at Houston IFF.

As producer, he is most proud of presenting the multi-award-winning, South African show ‘Woza Albert’ at the Criterion Theatre, London, subsequently off-Broadway.

His BBC Radio
4
play,
Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late
, from which this book sprang, won The Giles Cooper Play Of the Year Award.

A musical stage version was produced at the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple, in
2004
. Terence is currently mounting a production of it for London’s West End entitled
Kisses on a Postcard
.

First published in Great Britain 2009

Copyright © 2009 by Terence Frisby

This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The right of Terence Frisby to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted by him in accordance

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce

or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it)

in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic,

digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who

does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be

liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408803202

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To Jack and Rose Phillips, our foster parents
during the Second World War, who gave my
brother and me three rich years of childhood while

the world destroyed itself around us. We will be
grateful to them till our dying breaths,

which now can’t be that far away.

F
oreword

What memoir of childhood could be entirely true, written through the wrong end of the telescope? There are always reconstructions, guesses, elaborations, omissions. On top of any unintentional inaccuracies I have to own up to inventing certain characters and changing a few names and events to protect people – and, possibly, their descendants – who were once very kind to two small boys. And even to protect those who weren’t.

But some of the deliberate changes of the story and characters are there for a different reason, which is all to do with the way this book came into existence.

It started as twenty-two pages of reminiscences. The BBC commissioned me to turn those pages into a ninety-minute play for Radio
4
. I am a playwright, and play-writing is about architecture. Without a shape, you don’t have a play, so I shaped my reminiscences into a narrative that would hold together through a beginning and middle to a proper climax. Also, to make a play (well, certainly a radio play) you need dialogue. Nobody could possibly remember, verbatim, conversation after conversation that took place many years ago and which I reproduced for the radio. They are from my imagination, based on my memories of what actually took place. This play, entitled
Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late
, won the Giles Cooper award, The Best Radio Play of the Year,
1988
.

The success of the radio play led to the next step, which was a stage musical at the Queen’s Theatre, Barnstaple. It had twenty-three children and twenty-two adult actors in the cast. Once again I further doctored the literal truth to fit a musical play. After all, how many people suddenly burst into song in real life – though I certainly did. But I assert fiercely that I have remained true to the people and memories of my wartime childhood.

When I finally decided to write the story as a book, I had to decide: do I cut out my inventions and go back to the bare facts or stay with the narrative I had shaped them into? There was only one answer. Anyway, after writing the two scripts, my version of the story is as real to me now as what might have actually happened nearly seventy years ago. So perhaps I should call this a re-creation of my childhood. However, I can say, hand on heart, that nearly every one of the people in this book existed as I have drawn them, most of the events happened and all of my story is truthful to their memory and the spirit of their lives.

This is a thank-you letter, if you like, to the people of Doublebois and Dobwalls and – especially – to Jack and Rose Phillips, Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack to us and the whole of Doublebois, an extraordinary, ordinary couple who seem to me to embody everything good in working-class people of that time. Although none of us ever mouthed such sentiments then, we loved them and were loved by them.

Let me not omit our mother and father, whose concern for their two sons gave birth to the original, imaginative
Kisses on a Postcard
idea. Every last word of that part of the story is utterly true.

C
hapter
O
ne

I
was the luckiest of children: I had two childhoods.

My earliest memories are of pre-war antiseptic Welling, just in Kent but really suburban London. The world I first lived in was even younger than I was, street upon street of it, all built since my birth in
1932
. This brave new one-class creation consisted of red-brick, pebble-dashed houses – semis or four-in-a-row – bought on mortgages by young couples who had managed to raise the £
25
deposit. With their small children they had escaped from the grime of Deptford, Woolwich Docks and New Cross (where I was born) through the newly legislated green belt, to fresh air and gardens. Our garden, according to my father, was the biggest in Eastcote Road. Because of a slight bend in the road a spare wedge had been tacked on to our plot. My father was perpetually proud of the imagined status his extra square yards bestowed on him and we assimilated our share of his pleasure.

In spite of the gardens, we kids lived in the street. Children were everywhere, gangs of us on every second corner. Those new-laid, spacious-to-us, concrete streets were our playground. A ball and a bike were essentials from an early age. A motor vehicle was a rarity when it disturbed our games of football, cricket, or ‘aye-jimmy-knacker’, a pitiless physical team game that involved one team bending over in a line at right angles to a wall, locked together, head between the legs of the boy in front, while the other team, one by one, vaulted heavily on to their backs to make them collapse. When the whole team was mounted the riders of this tottering heap chanted, ‘Aye-jimmy-knacker, one, two, three, aye-jimmy-knacker, one, two, three, aye-jimmy-knacker, one, two, three. All men off their horses.’ If any of the riders fell off, their team lost. If the boys underneath collapsed, they lost and had to bend over again. If they didn’t, they had won that round and had their turn as riders. And so on and bruisingly on. The smallest boy in each team stood with his back to the wall with the head of the first boy cushioned in his stomach, at first sight the cushiest place to be until the thumping riders landed and the head was driven into you with, literally, sickening force. I remember the feeling well: I was frequently the smallest boy.

No cars were parked in those streets because none of our parents owned one. In Eastcote Road of nearly a hundred houses there were perhaps three, primly stowed in their garages, or standing gleaming on the garden path of the smug owner. We were interrupted more often by the milkman’s or greengrocer’s or coal-merchant’s horse and cart, and by the occasional steaming pile of manure left behind, snapped up for his dad’s flower beds by the first one there with a bucket and shovel.

We rode our bikes wildly round our empty streets in a wheeled version of hide-and-seek, which we called tracking, then more sedately out on to the main roads, with expeditions to Danson Park, up Shooters Hill (and tearing madly down again, nearly out of control), into the extensive woods: Oxleas, Jack and Crown. ‘No Bicycles’ it said on the notices, but that was of no interest to us. We rode further afield to Blackfen, Woolwich Ferry, Blackheath, Eltham swimming baths and down the A
2
bypass to haunted Hall Place, near Bexley.

I was six when I got my first proper bike to join in this fun. It was a fat-tyred affair blackmailed out of my parents, who foolishly promised me a two-wheeler when I could ride one. Since infancy I had ridden a tricycle, a trike, which I had grown to despise. Presumably they thought they had me in a catch-
22
situation: no bike, can’t learn; can’t learn, no bike. But I borrowed one and took it to the top of Ashmore Grove, where two friends balanced me on it and shoved me off. I stayed on long enough down the hill to crash the bike into the gutter and run home to announce to my parents that I could ride. As soon as I had my own bike I made my brother Jack’s life a misery by following him and his friends everywhere. He was four years four months older and regarded me as an embarrassing, unwanted accessory. They could have left me behind eventually, but I could stay with them long enough to get out of our estate and ensure that Jack wouldn’t leave me pedalling furiously on my fat tyres, alone and at the mercies of main-road traffic. So I was waited for and reluctantly included, happy beyond words to be on my bright-red new (second-hand but new to me) bike, out with the big boys.

Dad, lower-middle-class Dad, worked on the railway, a carriage-trimmer, later an undermanager, then, post-war, boss of the carriage-and-wagon repair depot at Stewart’s Lane, Battersea. He had been a successful amateur boxer, a local welterweight champion and contender for national ABA

titles. He encouraged us both to box, just to look after ourselves. All of us boys in those streets were in and out of fights constantly. When Jack came home one day in tears because a bigger boy had hit him, Dad offered him sixpence to go and hit the boy back, no matter what happened subsequently. I can’t remember what Jack did but I went and hit the boy’s younger brother, about my size, came home, demanded and got my sixpence. But boxing didn’t take with either of us. Dad was a member of the Labour Party, a trade unionist, a physically strong, aggressive, hard-working man who could frighten us by the force of his personality and his occasional tempers. He was also very sentimental, gentle, loved to make us laugh and – as did our mother – made us feel secure and special. This was expressed one day when he came home from work carrying a piece of varnished wood with the word ‘JackTer’ cut into it and painted gold. This he screwed into the lintel over the front door and everytime Jack and I went in and out we were reminded that our house was named after us.

Mum came from a family which had all the appearance, speech and style of the upper middle class – without the income. They were mostly professional musicians, all of them female by the time I was around. The males had died or disappeared and one great-uncle was in jail in Canada for some white-collar crime. Mum played the piano and would bash out jazz and popular tunes with a strong rhythmic left hand – stride, it was called, because of the way the left hand strode up and down the keys controlling everything. I loved it when she played: the little rituals of lifting the lid of the piano stool to get the music out, the deliberateness with which she took her seat – no concert pianist did it better – the fiddling removal of her rings, placed carefully at the upper end of the keyboard, and then the house was filled with rhythm and joyous noise. Both of our parents came from Brighton. She had been a professional jazz drummer there in the
1920
s. Yes, that is what she was, possibly the only female jazz drummer in this country, unique. She played all over Sussex at country-house dances and at various venues in Brighton. At a dance at the Ship Hotel one Saturday night my father stared long and hard at the drummer and, knowing her, she almost certainly glanced back and wielded her drumsticks with extra panache. When the band broke for the interval and records were played he was the only one with enough nerve to ask the MC if he could have a dance with the drummer.