This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (10 page)

As it turned out, it wasn’t us who left Steve but Steve who left us. I knew immediately that he had gone when I noticed that his shaving equipment – the open razor, the stubby brush, the shaving soap, the jar of Brylcreem – had vanished from
the shelf above the stand-alone ceramic butler sink in the kitchen. Lily was ahead of me. She was already rushing straight for the bedroom, emerging to tell us that all his clothes had disappeared, along with the battered suitcase that had accompanied us on our holiday to Liverpool. The first thing I checked for was the book of nudes at the top of the wardrobe. It had gone.

Steve left on a Saturday morning in the autumn of 1958, sneaking off while we were out. Lily, Linda and I had gone ‘down the Lane’, partly so that we wouldn’t have to creep around to avoid disturbing him, but mostly to see if there was anything useful we could scavenge from the stallholders. We’d returned home expecting a normal Saturday afternoon. Steve would rise at noon and sit around in his string vest and trousers, studying that day’s runners and riders in the
Daily Sketch
. Linda would go out with her friend Marilyn Hughes. I would play in our room and Lily would iron and clean and rustle up what she could to supplement our staple diet of bread and dripping.

But this was no normal Saturday. For me, it was a red-letter day; a Saturday I would always remember for the happiness I felt when I was sure Steve had really gone. The sense of exhilaration floods back every time my mind returns to that morning. It wasn’t until I was much older that I understood why, while Linda and I were euphoric, Lily’s reaction was to sit down at the kitchen table and cry. Life is very black and white to an eight-year-old and I was perplexed. Surely she should be as delighted as we were? The period before Steve’s departure had been worse than anything we’d ever experienced. His idleness and our poverty had grown more acute, our lives more miserable.

Yet Lily sat at the table and sobbed. She wept for the wasted years, for the love that died, for the hardship that lay ahead. I’d never seen her cry before, but tears would come to her more easily from then on. She had always felt that Steve might change. Though she had shouldered the burden of supporting the family, while he was there, some small financial contribution was at least possible and she could nurture the faint hope that he might some day make more of an effort. Now even that was gone. She would also have been acutely aware of the stigma that attached to women abandoned by their husbands, irrespective of the circumstances.

I understood none of this on that Saturday in 1958. All I felt was joy and relief. My dread was not that Steve would be lost to me for ever but that he might come back. Linda, though even more ecstatic, was able to empathize with Lily. In my bewilderment and immaturity, I reacted only with impatience. Our response quite possibly made her feel even more wretched: the idea that her children could be so overjoyed at being abandoned by their father can only have added to the miasma of regret and failure swirling around in her head.

That evening Lily and Linda addressed the practicalities and resolved to try to track Steve down. There was probably little legal redress available to Lily and even if there were, we knew no lawyers and certainly couldn’t afford to hire one. But they reasoned that if Lily at least knew where Steve was she could pursue him for financial help to raise their children.

Since the next day was a Sunday, Steve would surely be playing piano at the Lads of the Village at lunchtime. Lily decided to go there, taking Linda for moral support, but there was no sign of Steve. The landlord was brusque. No, he didn’t know
where Steve was. In any case, it was Lily’s fault that he’d run off – ‘You should have gone out with him more and not been so unsociable.’ Their next port of call was the home of Steve’s eldest brother, Wally. They got no further than the doorstep. After Lily had explained her predicament, he reacted angrily. ‘We’ve all got our problems,’ he retorted, closing the door in their faces.

Lily eventually pieced together what Steve had been up to (though not where he’d actually gone) from various conversations with local gossips eager to share salacious details. I knew little of what she learned. Linda often told me that the most-used phrase in Lily’s vocabulary was ‘Don’t tell Alan.’ But in the fullness of time I got to hear about Steve’s affair with Vera, a barmaid at the Lads of the Village. How he’d spent Christmas with her when we were left alone in Southam Street; the hop-picking holidays in Kent with Vera and her son from a previous liaison; the child Vera had conceived with Steve, but miscarried. Now they were living together, but Lily didn’t know where.

She had no one to turn to. Her sister Jean had by this time left Walthamstow to return to Liverpool, Uncle George having transferred there with the Post Office. In any case, Lily would have been reluctant to admit to her abandonment. Her sisters were never told of the problems when Steve was at home, so she was hardly likely to reveal what she regarded as her failure now that he’d gone. For Linda and me, Steve’s departure marked the end of a terrible life and the start of a brighter future. We did not understand, then, why Lily felt that the bad old life was merely entering its next phase.

IT WAS JUST
past midnight on 17 May 1959, my ninth birthday, that Kelso Cochrane, a thirty-two-year-old Antiguan working as a carpenter to try to save enough money to study law, was murdered on the corner of our street.

The murder remains unsolved but Lily saw the beginning of the altercation that led to Kelso’s death: five or six white men pushing and shoving one black man. As she shouted at them to leave him alone, one of the assailants looked up and their eyes met. She recognized him and she was pretty sure he recognized her, too.

I know this man’s name, but will give him a pseudonym here. Let’s call him Barry Dempsey. He was typical of the hollow-cheeked Teds who populated Roger Mayne’s photographs. He lived at the other end of Southam Street, but was notorious right across the Town. Most of the young guys round our way swore and scrapped but few had Barry’s reputation for unprovoked violence.

Poor Kelso Cochrane had the misfortune to encounter Dempsey and his cohorts at midnight on the Saturday of a warm Whitsun Bank Holiday weekend as he was walking back
from Paddington General Hospital, where he’d gone to seek treatment for his hand after injuring it at work. Kelso lived in a flat in Bevington Road near my school and had presumably walked down Southam Street from Kensal Rise at the far end.

At the same time, Lily was walking up Golborne Road on her way home from serving and washing up for Mrs Dehn, who used to host a dinner party every Bank Holiday weekend. When Kelso Cochrane was accosted on the corner of Southam Street and Golborne Road, outside the bagwash, Lily had reached the Earl of Warwick on the opposite corner and was turning left into our end of Southam Street. After Barry Dempsey caught her eye, she took fright and ran home without a backward glance. Sadly, the sight of a gang of white Teddy Boys bullying a solitary black man wasn’t unusual on the streets of Notting Hill. Lily hoped that by shouting at them she would let them know they had been seen and halt the attack. She must have been mortified to find out the following day that Kelso Cochrane had been stabbed once, in the heart, with great force and had died in St Charles’s Hospital less than an hour later.

As my ninth birthday dawned on the Sunday of that sultry weekend, Southam Street became the centre of attention for reporters, police officers and politicians. The community was stunned and the atmosphere was heavy with suspicion and fear. A murder then seemed to create more shockwaves than it does today, perhaps because there wasn’t anything like the saturation news coverage we are used to in the twenty-first century. Everyone tuned into the same few limited news bulletins on the wireless or on television, if they had a set. For those who did, having a choice between two channels was still a novelty: ITV had only been in existence for three years. Linda’s friend
Marilyn Hughes’ parents were the only people we knew locally with a telly – her father was also the only man we knew who owned a car – and they would occasionally kindly allow both of us to go round to their house in Wornington Road to watch
The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin
.

That day we didn’t have to possess a TV to know that the camera crews set up outside the Earl of Warwick were broadcasting pictures of the streets where we lived to audiences around the world. Kelso’s murder was the lead story in all the bulletins.

At lunchtime, the men got suited up as usual to go to the pub as the police began house-to-house inquiries, monitored by the women who habitually spent hours at their open windows on the upper floors of Southam Street, watching everything that went on. They would put pillows or cushions on the crumbling window sills on which to rest their folded arms, the raised sash windows poised above their necks like guillotines. The heavy activity that Sunday brought reinforcements to their ranks. They would all have seen the police come to our door, either that day or the next. The officers were mainly interested in talking to any men in the house to establish their whereabouts on the Saturday night.

There were, of course, no men in our home now and goodness knows what Lily told them, but she certainly didn’t mention Barry Dempsey and I doubt if she told them about the fracas she had witnessed. Who can blame her? She would have been as appalled by the murder of Kelso Cochrane as anybody in Notting Hill, but this was where she and her children had to live. She had enough troubles without having to contend with the very real possibility of retribution by people who had killed
at least once already. And with murder still punishable by the death penalty, the stakes were high.

The most reliable authority on Lily’s frame of mind that weekend is Linda. It wasn’t until some years later that Lily related the events of the early hours of 17 May 1959 to my sister. She told her how afraid she was that Barry Dempsey had recognized her and that the three of us might be in danger. When Linda asked why she hadn’t told the police, she said it would have put us at even greater risk. So she said nothing.

Within five years Lily would be in Kensal Green cemetery along with Kelso Cochrane. Had she lived, I’m sure that one day she would have told the police what she saw that night. Many years later, I informed them of it myself. At the time Lily was convinced that they would find the murderers without her assistance. She was wrong. Fifty-three years later those killers have still to be brought to justice.

In the months after the murder, the febrile atmosphere in the area was palpable, even to us children. Bevington Primary, under the firm command of the strong and charismatic headmaster, Mr Gemmill, evidently did its level best to ensure that the school – around 250 yards from the murder scene and in the road where the victim had lived – was a haven from the tension on the streets. Dereck Tapper must have felt particularly vulnerable. Few of those in the habit of using openly racist language had any qualms about doing so in front of their children, and it was quick to filter through to the very youngest members of the community. I’m sure Dereck must have been subjected to the commonplace taunts and harassment. He was a bright and popular kid who could look after himself, but in the wake of Kelso Cochrane’s murder he would have had far
more to contend with than before: the issue of race was being deliberately ramped up on the street corners of our community.

This climate of antagonism was linked to one man, one word, one name: Mosley. Such was my youthful familiarity with talk of Oswald Mosley that I imagined him to be a Notting Hill local, known only in our part of London. To me he was indistinguishable from the other notorious villains or bullies in our area whose names were frequently heard on the streets. I had no idea, at the age of nine, that Mosley was infamous throughout the country and around the world as the founder of the British Union of Fascists, the politician who had campaigned to bring Hitler’s policies to Britain before the war.

There are only four things I know about Lily’s political opinions. She revered Emmeline Pankhurst, drumming it into Linda that she must always vote because Mrs Pankhurst had fought for her right to do so. She disliked Winston Churchill for reasons I’m not clear about. She loved Jo Grimond and voted Liberal because of her trust in him. And she detested Oswald Mosley.

Having been interned during the war along with most active fascists, Mosley had left Britain in 1951 to live in France. His attempt to re-invent a British form of fascism known as the Union Movement had failed dismally. He returned to Britain in 1959 for one reason alone: to exploit the racial tension in Notting Hill by standing as a Union Movement candidate for North Kensington in that year’s General Election.

I heard Lily rail against this terrible man Mosley and picked up the name as it crackled on the Notting Hill grapevine that connected our phone-free homes. Leaflets announcing
Mosley’s candidature had been distributed before Kelso Cochrane’s murder. Their content fully exploited the absence of any laws against inciting racial hatred and he was therefore accused by many of being complicit in the crime.

The police laughably insisted that the motive for Kelso’s murder was robbery rather than race, while Mosley defended himself by pointing out that his leaflets called for the race issue in Notting Hill to be settled by ‘votes not violence’. This stance was totally undermined by the fact that he held a series of public meetings, both before and after the General Election, practically on the very spot where Kelso had been killed.

Lily laid down the law to Linda and me: she might well be out working when these gatherings took place but on no account were we to go anywhere near Mosley’s meetings. He was a fiend who supported Hitler. His followers were bad people. We were made to promise we’d keep away. I think I kept my promise to Lily – I usually did. And yet I have this memory of Mosley, in a double-breasted suit, standing above a crowd of several hundred people on a grey, early evening outside the Warwick. He spoke in a rich baritone, his arms in constant motion, his face flushed, his large body turning this way and that to project himself to every part of his audience. Whether on that occasion I disobeyed Lily and actually did see Mosley in the flesh, or whether my memory has conflated my genuine recollections of his Notting Hill meetings with images I happened to see around that time or not long afterwards, I cannot say.