Owning Up: The Trilogy (32 page)

A week or two later he left and we heard that he had rented a house on the outskirts of Southport in the suburb of Birkdale which, being fifteen miles from Liverpool and a completely residential town, was considered fairly safe should the bombing eventually start. He would reopen Parkfield in its new premises the following term. Towards the end of the current term at Oakridge, the Olympian headmaster descended from the clouds and began to address himself benignly to us Parkfield boys. He indicated that he would be far from displeased if we chose to suggest to our parents that he might be willing to accept us into the school, even those of us rather younger than was usual. ‘In the heart of the country…’ he stressed, ‘not a major city within sixty miles and, in the case of brothers, special arrangements…’ Bill and I talked this over and decided we’d rather go back to Twyne. In the end I think only two or three boys,
proditores
it goes without saying, took advantage of the headmaster’s offer.

It may seem perverse that I should prefer to return to Parkfield, but I had several sound reasons. Apart from the fact that the slipper was minimally less painful than the cane, I’d only two terms left to go. If I were transferred to a public school, and one which I actively disliked, I would find it that much more difficult to leave and go elsewhere. Also I hadn’t liked the way the headmaster beamed at us and patted our heads and recruited us to solicit our parents. All I hoped was that, wherever Maud and Tom did decide to send me, it would be nothing like Oakridge.

As there was still no sign of any bombing we went back to Liverpool for the holidays; something no one would have thought remotely possible only three months before. Singing the syrupy Oakridge school song in the chapel, while the scatological Chaplain ponced about genuflecting like a weasel, the only tears I felt were those of relief.

Parkfield’s new premises were a large detached Edwardian house of red brick, white plaster, intricate half timbering and ill-proportioned little towers. The staff, apart from Twyne himself, was reduced to two: an eccentric Maths master called Mr Corelli who looked like Einstein, and loved his subject so much that he managed to make it interesting, even to me; and a depressive Lancastrian who taught everything else except Latin. There was no games field, but we shared one with several other schools a quarter of a mile away. There were no extras: no art, no music, and the food was almost inedible.

Twyne seemed for him comparatively restrained, but he had his moments. We petitioned for a wind-up gramophone, and most of us brought some records. Among my contribution from the nursery pile was a very old and scratchy recording which had probably once belonged to Gampa. It was called ‘Yes, we have no bananas’. We were playing this one evening when Twimbo burst into the room.

‘Take that record off, Melly Major,’ he shouted, ‘it’s distinctly vulgar.’

‘But, sir,’ I said resorting to my usual tactic, ‘my mother chose it.’

Twyne’s reply very much amused Maud and Tom when I repeated it to them. ‘Mrs Melly,’ he said, ‘is a very Bohemian woman.’

We were allowed, at our parents’ request, to go home sometimes for the weekend, but Twyne hated it. Although not one bomb had yet fallen on Liverpool, he would tell us, as we set off for Birkdale Station, that we were ‘entering the lion’s jaws’.

The summer term of 1940 was my last at Parkfield. I had passed, on the strength of my English and History papers, my common entrance and that September left Lime Street Station on my way to Stowe.

Twyne had very much disapproved of my parents’ choice of school. In his view, as far as the public schools went, it was practically on a par with the Montessori System. There were, he understood, no traditions and the headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, was not only a dandy but addressed the boys by their first names. While games were played, they were in no way a fetish. The arts were encouraged, and so on.

He was more or less right, and the reasons for his censure were exactly why my parents had chosen it. There was still some beating, but I was beaten less in the whole of my time at Stowe than I was in one term at Oakridge. As for fagging it didn’t involve the master–slave relationship of the more traditional schools, but just meant that you dusted a senior boy’s study twice a week for your first few terms.

On my arrival J. F. sought me out, called me ‘George’, and said he hoped they’d make me happy. Most of the boys and masters were friendly, and in the Art School I found a heady and experimental atmosphere which suited me down to the ground. For some reason, to have come from Liverpool and to sing its praises excited some teasing, but otherwise there was nothing that didn’t delight me. I came home for my first holiday right over the top, spouting Eliot and Auden and raving about Picasso and Matisse. I calmed down in time but I was, for the moment, what Maud called ‘an affected bit of goods’.

During the preceding term the bombing of London had started in earnest and that August it was the turn of the provincial cities. Up until then Tom, Fred and Alan, as chief air-raid wardens, had little to do except make sure that people observed the black-out. They’d spent a great deal of time in a rather rough pub down by the docks where Tom had become almost as much a fixture as at The Albert, while Fred and Alan scored a great hit at a Wardens’ hot-pot supper by singing a parody, written by Fred, of ‘Side by Side’. The middle eight bars went:

We’d rather have our wardens

Than any other wardens in town.

We’re touched by their loyalty and devotion,

And very often touched for half-a-crown.

The conclusion was especially well liked:

When you knock and ask a man to put his light out,

He feints with his left and puts his right out.

So wardens in blue, always march two by two,

Side by side.

Now, however, with heavy raids every night and the docks on fire there was no time for hot-pot suppers. My father and uncles were up all night and returned grey with fatigue and covered in dust for a few hours’ sleep before setting out again at dusk.

We didn’t use the shelter Tom had dug in the garden, but took refuge in the Griff’s cellar together with those other residents of York Mansions who had remained in their flats. The Griff took it all very calmly, largely I think because she couldn’t believe that Hitler would have the nerve to harm her. One night Mary, the Griff’s parlour-maid, was coming down with a tray of tea, having left the door at the top of the cellar steps open, when a bomb fell somewhere in Park Road. The blast blew her down the last few steps and the tray flew up into the air. Mary wasn’t hurt at all and the Griff, having first briefly commiserated with her, then expressed her satisfaction that it wasn’t the best china.

After a week or two of this Tom decided that we ought to be evacuated again, preferably somewhere not too far away so that he I could join us when not on duty. His solution, while practical, appalled me. He rented Parkfield for the rest of the school holidays with Twyne in situ. Having just escaped, I was going to find myself again under that hated roof. I would much sooner have sat out the I blitz in the Griff’s cellar.

In fact it wasn’t too bad because I realised, almost at once, that Twimbo had no jurisdiction over me whatsoever. He was like a sorcerer who had lost his power, whereas I could make quite certain that everything he had suspected about Stowe was absolutely true. He twice offered to ‘coach’ me in Latin and I refused outright. After I that he left me alone. Tom, during one of his weekends off, made a discovery about Twimbo.

‘Do you know what he does every evening?’ he said. ‘He goes down to the Scarsdale Hotel, sits in the bar and soaks up whisky.’ Drink would, of course, explain a great deal of his behaviour. Twyne, though none of us had ever suspected it, was a serious boozer.

I had lunch some years ago with a publisher a few years younger than myself and discovered that he had been a boy at Parkfield in the early 1950s, during its final years at Birkdale (for Twyne never moved back to Liverpool). Once we’d established this, our publishing venture was forgotten. People at nearby tables were rather startled to hear two apparently sane men shouting: ‘My God-fathers!’ and ‘Ye Gods and little fishes!’ at each other. What the publisher told me – of which I’d no idea – was of Twyne’s end. He had written to all the parents saying that, for various reasons, he was in financial difficulties, but if they could see their way to advance a term’s fees all would be well. Most of them had, and during the holidays Twyne had drunk himself to death.

That evacuated holiday in Birkdale, I decided one afternoon to dress up in some of Maud’s clothes, make my face up, and walk with Andrée, then eight, into Southport. I’ve no idea why I wanted to do this. I have never been attracted by transvestism and, with this solitary exception, have only worn drag at fancy dress parties where it was requested and once, as a joke, during the last evening of a season at Ronnie Scott’s. This day, however, I went to pick up Andrée and we set off down Waterloo Road, me tottering along on Maud’s court shoes, Andrée with strict instructions to remember to call me ‘Auntie’. On the outskirts of Southport proper were two back-to-back public toilets sited on an island in the middle of the road. Holding Andrée firmly by the hand, I entered and used the Ladies. We then walked on into Southport, where we had an ice in a fashionable café in Lord Street and returned home.

During the writing of this book several events have taken place, on both a public and personal level, which have made parts of it no longer currently accurate.

In Liverpool, during the Toxteth riots, the Rialto cinema, which I passed with Carol Ann, and the Racket Club, where I learnt to play tennis on the wooden court, were both burnt down.

Just before Christmas 1982, Alan Isaac, eighty-five years old, had a heart attack and died in hospital four days later. He had been active right up to the end. His final message to me, transmitted by a friend of his during the interval at Ronnie Scott’s, was, ‘Tell George I’m still battling.’

A few months later, in a nursing home in Surrey, Maud died at ninety-one. Her memory had been going for some time; whole areas of it drifting away like icebergs from a thawing ice-cap. Brighton, where she’d lived for fifteen years after Tom’s death, gone. Cran-leigh, where she’d spent the last five, gone. Most of her sixty-eight years in Liverpool, cracking up, melting.

At her ninetieth birthday party, Andrée, Bill and I, and most of our families, were there. She seemed a little unsure about what exactly was going on but after we’d had tea, I said to her, ‘Now Maudie, if you’ve had enough birthday cake, I’ll tell S. Le Kessin he can come in and do his conjuring tricks.’ Maud paused for a moment, and then began to laugh quite heartily. ‘S. Le Kessin,’ she said, ‘I haven’t thought of him for years.’

RUM, BUM AND CONCERTINA

1

I was sitting, less than a month off my eighteenth birthday, on the lavatory of the ‘green bathroom’ in my parents’ large comfortable ugly house in the Victorian suburbs of Liverpool, and I was crying bitterly.

The reason I was crying was because I’d just read a letter from a man called A B Clifford who was a housemaster at Stowe, the school I’d just left and, more relevantly in this context, Officer in Charge of the JTC there.

JTC stood for Junior Training Corps. When I’d arrived at Stowe, about a year after the beginning of the war, it was still called the OTC, but this had been changed to meet the democratic temper of the times. Officers’ Training Corps had suggested rather too blatantly that all public schoolboys were automatically officer material.

Changing an initial didn’t mean changing anything else though. The ancient Drill Sergeant still called us ‘sir’, and we dressed up every Tuesday afternoon in 1914 uniforms, with puttees and brass buttons. In the summer there were occasional ‘field days’ when we charged about the drowsy Buckinghamshire countryside pretending to shoot each other, while perspiring umpires decided whether or not we were ‘dead’.

Playing these Henty-like games made it difficult at times to remember there was a real war on and that boys we’d known well had been killed in it. Like their more fortunate contemporaries most of them had done their initial training at either Oxford or Cambridge, an arrangement that assured them of a place after the duration if and when they returned. They’d usually come down during this academic interim looking carefully languid in their new Brigade of Guards’ uniforms and, more often than not, enviably drunk. Then they’d be posted and a few months later we’d be told, in Chapel, that they’d been killed on active duty. A talented boy of Norwegian origin who liked to paint still-lifes in the school art- school in what he called ‘masturbational Pre-Raphaelite detail’ was blown up in Africa. A debating society wit, as humane as he was clever, was mown down in Italy. Then, for a moment, we’d realise, with morbid but not unpleasurable intimations of mortality that, if the war went on long enough it might be our name that J F Roxburgh was reading out with a distinct and untypical tremor in the famous, much-imitated drawl.

Yet in my case, however much I might fantasise along these lines, I was enough of a realist to know that if I fell it wouldn’t be in a commissioned uniform. I was patently not officer material. My puttees fell down, my buttons were either dull and smeary or, if halfway bright, the Duraglit had spread greasily over the surrounding khaki. Worse, I was always losing things and indeed, during the last week of my final term when the time had come to hand in my uniform, I’d discovered that I was short of a brass-buckled belt and one boot.

Thinking myself safe because I wasn’t coming back, I’d concealed the loss from the retired Sergeant in the 1820 Gothic armoury and left school in high spirits with several of my contemporaries; all of us defiantly puffing away at Black Balkan Sobranies through the taxi window. My confidence was misplaced. The missing items were noted and reported to Major Clifford. He bothered to write to me during his holidays, not only demanding I paid for their replacement but warning me, in an icy rage, that he intended writing to my future Commanding Officer at the Navy Shore Establishment, Skegness, informing him of my perfidious carelessness and suggesting some suitable punitive action on my arrival there.