London Blues (4 page)

Sure, I was interested in these things and I made all sorts of inquiries and spent a long time with Tim but where could I have gone if I had nailed it? Do you think any sheet in Fleet Street would have touched it? Those were the days when every newspaper editor used to have a photograph of the Queen on his desk. These were the chaps who went to church every Sunday. God. The Queen. My Country. Truth was an unstable commodity that changed from day to day.

What was it that Carlyle said about history? History is present politics. Uh-huh. These guys would have told you truth is present politics. Nobody had to lean on them and say ignore this one, old boy. They didn’t have to be told this. They knew what was expected of them. Now it’s changed a bit, but not that much. There are other outlets now and television too and there you’ll find some of the best shit-stirring investigative reporting around.

So, you hear this type of thing and you can’t do much with it. And you can’t do much with it because you haven’t got the half of it. It’s like being blindfolded and let loose in a library. You know it’s all there but how are you going to find what you are looking for?

Tim didn’t have the full story. Couldn’t have. But he sensed that there was something going on and he sensed that he might have been manoeuvred but he didn’t know why and, really, how. You can be used and not realise you are being used. You can also be used, realise you are being used, but misunderstand why and how you are being used. He got wind of something being afoot but that was it. You know something’s there but you don’t know what it is.

ROCHESTER
. About 25 miles east-south-east of London. It was here that the Romans, like the Britons before them, forded the River Medway some nine or so miles upstream from where it empties into the Thames estuary.

Charles Dickens was here. Didn't he spend his early years in Chatham, a mile or so down the road? And here too is ‘Cloisterham' of
The
Mystery
of
Edwin
Drood,
Dickens' uncompleted last novel. And nearby are the marshes where at the beginning of
Great
Expectations
Pip encounters the escaped convict. This is where I will be going.

To start to know your subject, start to know the places he (or she) grew up in, lived in, died in. Place
is
very nearly person. Know something about the place and you'll know something about the person. The topography of Tim is drawing me in. But first I need a cup of coffee.

I drive out of Rochester, over the bridge and across the river to a place with the bewitching, adjectival-sounding name of Strood. Its name is its most attractive feature. Then off to the right and under the sweep of a railway viaduct and past the Steam Packet, a little Victorian pub built of stock bricks.

The road rises and threads its way through the Medway town environs and then it begins a gentle and deliberate
descent and ahead I see the rolling chalkland and its open fields.

Now there are derelict railway lines and disused army earthworks, overgrown cattle paths and droves, pre-war bungalows ‘modernised' to look like Texas ranch houses and electricity pylons taking seven-league steps to a
monumental
power station over by the estuary.

A little way past Lower Stoke the road crosses the here infilled Yantlet Creek, then a level crossing on a lonely railway track and you enter the Isle of Grain. There's a sign that says so, but now it is an isle in name only.

Isle of Grain. Parish of St James. And in that Saxon
intermediate
division between the parish and the county, the hundred, this is the Hundred of Hoo.

Ahead, now, is the vast BP oil refinery. All pipes and towers and minarets glistening in the fading sunlight. At night it must look like a scene out of
Blade
Runner.
And here a sign that says
KENT TERMINAL
but, more aptly, should read 
TERMINAL KENT
.

Here too are the saltings and the marshes and quays and wharves of the estuary waters where the coastal birds still
bravely adjust to every fresh incursion into what has been their habitat since their ancestors first leapt from the trees. Here is the snipe, the sandpiper, the moorhen, the wild duck, the tern, and a hundred varieties of gull.

There's a gentle rise in the road and ahead is the village of St James's, more usually known simply as Grain. But village is the wrong word, it provokes images of some pastoral scene. Grain isn't like that now. It looks like a transit camp for refugees.

There are some old cottages on the left and then ahead the small Church of St James with its tiny squat tower that, at 31 feet, does not reach the height of the nave. This is a Norman church of masonry and mortar that replaced an Anglo-Saxon wooden structure that was old and decaying a thousand years ago.

The road continues past the church and by some ageing cottages and then the High Street becomes a mere trackway, its metalling chipped and disintegrating, past what remains of the cottages of Willow Place, and there a scruffy carpark strewn with dented beer cans and emptied ashtrays and dog shit. Here, beyond the sloping grassland and the geometrical concrete blocks designed to prevent the Germans invading, and beyond the weathered groins and piers and half-submerged abandoned barges on the mud flats, is Father Thames himself, emptying into the North Sea. Then a panorama of Essex coastland that shades gradually into the grey swells of the sea and the grey swirls of the sky.

Here is the end of the road. It goes no further. This is the end of the journey for us, but here was the beginning for Timmy. For here on the Feast of St Brocard, hermit, 2 September that is, 1937, a Thursday, just back there towards the church in a cottage now demolished, George Eric Purdom was born.

Now the watery light of the morning merges with that of the afternoon and memories are stirred.

MRS
FLORENCE MIDDLEMOST
: I've spent all my life on Grain. I was born here in 1918 just as the Great War ended. Mum and Dad had come down here from Gravesend. We lived in a clapboard cottage down near Home Farm. Dad used to put these poles up in the garden with a platform high above the ground and the herons used to come and nest. I think that's one of my earliest memories.

I never called him Tim or Timmy. I always called him Eric because that was his name.

Eric's mother was Joan and we were at school together at the National School by the church (the same school Eric went to). I had been there for a couple of years before she came. Her parents moved over from Borstal around 1930.

Joan lived with her parents just the other side of the church in Willow Place but that's not there any more, the cottage they lived in. Joan was a few months older than me, or I might have been a few months older than her. I can't remember now. We were very close friends and spent all our time together when we were young.

Joan had several boyfriends and then … well, you know what happened and it's too late now to sweep it under the carpet. She was
expecting.
She wasn't the first unmarried girl in Grain to have a baby and she won't be the last. I think her mum and dad were very upset to begin with but they made the best of it.

A bonny, fat little baby was Eric. He was always called Eric by us here, but George was his first name. I don't know why that was so. And I certainly never called him Tim or Timmy. I don't know where that came from.

Joan never said who the father was and everybody used to whisper that it was him or him but nobody knew for sure. I think I know. I think it was one of those American engineers who worked down at the oil refinery where Port Victoria used to be.

I got married that same year Eric was born and didn't see much of Joan after that. When the war broke out she left Grain and took Eric to stay with her mother's family up in
Nottingham or Northampton until the war was over. I spent most of the beginning of the war with my little boy and girl in Oxford while George, my husband, was away in the Army. Then we came back to West Malling for the rest of the war and back to Grain in 1945. Joan and Eric came back soon after that and then Eric started school here by the church, where Joan and me had gone.

Eric was a lovely little boy, always full of energy and high spirits. A real handful. Also, very obliging. He used to carry my shopping back home for me, lend a hand in the garden and so on. A little gem.

Joan married some time in the early 1950s and went to live in Rochester. I don't know who she married. I think my friend Edna said he was a printer.

The last time I saw her and Eric was in 1953. She came back to visit. And I know it was 1953 because that was when we had these great floods and we couldn't get off the island. We were stuck here, we were! All of the Kent coast and the Essex coast too was under the sea.

I never saw Joan again after that visit though we still used to exchange Christmas cards. And then one year I didn't get one and I knew something had happened to her. She had died of cancer in St Bartholomew's in Rochester. A long illness, I heard. Very sad. She was a good woman … and it will be nice to meet her again when I pass on.

Eric, I think, went to work in the dockyards. A welder, or it might have been in the machine-shop. I really don't know.

I didn't know he went to London … what is he doing now? Is he married? Does he have a family?

VICTOR COULSON
: Mrs Middlemost! I remember her very well. Is she still alive? She must be getting on for eighty! A real battle-axe in her day. She used to give us kids such a rucking if she ever caught us getting up to no good.

Apart from her and Tim's mum there was nobody else up there I would ever want to meet again … and Tim. I wouldn't mind having a pint with him again.

I think his mother and Mrs Middlemost and the school were the only people who called Tim by his real name, Eric. Nobody else ever called him that. I don't know where it came from.

We lived in the coastguard cottages in those days. My old man was moved out there just after the war and that's where I grew up. I was about five then and I was twenty when we came back to Chatham.

Tim and I were at school together. We were best friends. We spent all our time together and used to get up to all sorts of tricks. We were always getting into trouble – even with the police! We once accidentally set fire to a hayrick!

We used to spend the summers beachcombing and playing pirates and digging up the mudflats looking for buried treasure.

Tim was always full of ideas, not just playing around ideas but ideas for making money and he used to involve me. Like this old rag-and-bone man who came up from Strood once a month. Tim chatted him up and we used to do the collecting for him, or some of the collecting anyway. We'd earn a few shillings each month doing that. Tim was about ten at the time. Then we used to go collecting empty bottles and taking them back to the pub and getting tuppence on them. We'd also catch eels.

In the summer we would cycle down to the beach at Lower Upnor and ogle the girls in their bathing costumes, and comb the beach for money and things people had lost. And as we were doing this you would see the old paddle steamers going up and down the river. They've all gone now.

Tim and I were just beginning to discover girls when he left the Isle and went to live down in the Medway towns. I bumped into him down at the public library in Rochester a few years later. I didn't recognise him. He came up to me and asked me what I was doing. Tim's mum was a lovely lady. I'd see her biking into Rochester on her bicycle, one of those things you don't see now that had a little engine mounted on the rear wheel. She was a legal secretary or
something there, I believe. I don't think we ever thought about Tim not having a father. I suppose he considered his grandad as his father.

Tim was bright and intelligent and smart but he wasn't cut out for school work. I think school bored him. He never paid a lot of attention, but even so, he was brighter than most of the class. This was the little school out by the church. We had this teacher, Miss Chatteris: a real dragon with horn-rimmed glasses and an enormous bosom.

Tim was well off to leave Grain when he did. By the time you got to fifteen it was the most boring place on earth. An exciting evening was something like sitting around the radio at home, or wireless as we used to call it. Sitting around it listening to Hughie Green's
Opportunity
Knocks
on 208, Radio Luxembourg that is, or listening to
PC49
on the Light. On really special days the old wind-up record player was dusted down and 78s of Reginald Foort or Ambrose were put on. There was one we had that I liked – the old Count Basie version of
Open
the
Door,
Richard!
My favourite record as a kid.

‘Tomorrow is … tomorrow is … what?'

‘Saturday, Miss.'

‘I know tomorrow is Saturday, but it is a special Saturday. Does anyone know why it is special?'

‘It's May Day, Miss.'

‘It is not May Day. May Day is at the beginning of May. Today is the 23rd of May and tomorrow is the 24th of May and tomorrow we celebrate something special. Goodsmith?'

‘Because it's 1947?'

‘Because it's 1947? Why should that be special?'

‘I don't know, Miss.'

‘You are a silly boy. Now, yes, Purdom, I know you know. But no one else does? Very well. Tomorrow … every 24th of May is Empire Day.
Empire
Day.
On Empire Day we celebrate the achievements and triumphs of the British Empire and give our thanks to God.
And
the King.'

‘Miss, I heard it on the wireless this morning.'

‘Well, you did not remember it until I reminded you. So, tomorrow is Empire Day and we celebrate it on the 24th of May because that was the birthday of Queen Victoria and it was under her that our colonies and possessions
multiplied
so greatly and over which she reigned so well and for so long. Now, because it is Empire Day we are going to have a special treat. Purdom is going to tell us a story … yes, come to the front of the class … there, yes. This is a story from
The
Ingoldsby
Legends,
one of Purdom's favourite books, and a story he has read many times. It is a local story, or certainly a near-local story. It takes place … if we were to walk over the embankment there what would we see? Kilmart?'