This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (14 page)

Strangely, whenever we went there after school, there would be no other children around. We could swing and climb and jump and roll for hours in this outpost of our little empire as if
it were our own private fiefdom. Holland Park produced conkers on an industrial scale and Carol Smith, who could beat most boys at most things, was always particularly keen to stock up for the season.

At the other extreme, geographically, culturally and aesthetically, was Wormwood Scrubs. There were very few trees on the Scrubs and certainly no peacocks. Just flat, barren land used for football pitches at weekends and overshadowed by the dark, hulking mass of Her Majesty’s prison on the far side. This was London W12 at its most desolate, and it stretched for what seemed like miles. When Lily worked on the White City side, at Harry’s Café, cooking eggs and bacon for the truck drivers heading up to the North Circular or down to Shepherd’s Bush, I’d go to meet her there sometimes and wonder what it must be like to be lost on the Scrubs after dark.

Tony Cox persuaded me to find out. He’d heard there was a derelict army camp way over towards the prison and talked us into going to investigate it. A tenuous grasp of history was only to be expected in a bunch of ten-year-olds, but even that doesn’t fully explain why we were convinced that the camp had been run by the Japanese and that they had baked British soldiers in the ovens. But apparently that was the word on the street. This alternative Famous Five – Tony, Dereck Tapper, Walter Curtis, Carol Smith and me – set off in the late afternoon of a winter’s day.

By the time we reached our destination the prison walls were still visible in the gathering gloom. Tony had brought the front lamp off his bike to use as a torch. The site had indeed been an army camp of some description. There were turrets and concrete bunkers overgrown with grass and weeds. We played a
few half-hearted war games, pretending to be soldiers, but as the prison walls faded into the descending darkness, all we really wanted to do was to lay down our arms and head for home. Tony, our leader, was scathing. What was the point of coming all the way out here if we didn’t go down into what looked like a concrete subway and find the ovens in which our brave boys had been incinerated?

We stood nervously contemplating the slope leading down to what had once been a tunnel but was now open to the sky. It contained a complex array of walls and alleys that looked as if they had been the living quarters. Tony switched on his lamp and pointed the way. The rest of us followed meekly, staying very close together. When we reached the bottom, Tony moved the beam of his bike lamp around to properly illuminate what we’d already discerned by the light of the moon: there was a row of three or four openings that looked very much like ovens.

I froze but Carol insisted on poking about inside these large metal canisters, searching for bits of charred remains – a bone or a tooth that might have survived the flames. Convinced that we were the first to make this discovery, we vowed to ensure that it remained our secret. This was fine by me, particularly as Lily would have been extremely cross if she’d found out where I’d been. We returned to the ‘death camp’ once or twice more in daylight but it was always deserted and the only people who might have been aware of our investigations were a few dog walkers and any lost souls peering out of the tiny, barred cell windows above the walls of HMP Wormwood Scrubs.

The camaraderie I shared with Tony and our mates was the nearest I got to Blyton-land during my time at primary school and its days were already numbered. The band of Bevington
brothers (and one sister) would be scattered once we followed our own paths through the secondary education system and my close friendship with Tony did not survive puberty.

I passed my Eleven-Plus. Given how momentous the exam was, I wish I could recall even one of the questions. I do remember the day of the exam itself, with Mr Gemmill in attendance and my final year teacher, Mrs Leadsford, supervising. Tall, slim and very attractive, she’d been an enormous help in those all-important last twelve months. When the results arrived, Lily was ecstatic, although I don’t think she ever really doubted that I’d succeed.

Dereck Tapper also passed the Eleven-Plus, becoming the first black child at our school to do so. He must also have been one of the first to take it. Given the hardships he must have endured, it was a remarkable achievement.

Carol Smith failed. Walter Curtis was in the year below us so had a year to wait for his ordeal; he, too, would fail. The big surprise was Tony, my resolutely unstudious friend. I think he would actually have preferred to have gone to Sir Isaac Newton Secondary Modern, along with the majority of the boys in our year at Bevington, but instead he found himself destined for grammar school. A few others also passed, including a boy named Peter Hayward, whose parents declined the opportunity of a grammar-school place because they couldn’t afford the uniform. Peter wore glasses and I remember feeling really sorry for him because I knew he’d be bullied as a ‘four eyes’ at Isaac Newton. Lily couldn’t afford the uniform, either, but she would never have contemplated for a second not sending me to a grammar school.

On that single day, the day of the exam, Tony Cox did well.
Others in my year who were bright enough and worked much harder happened to do badly. Yet our performances on that day alone would largely determine our futures. The arbitrary nature of this test, and the traumatic effect of its importance on the lives of small children, was already the subject of fierce political debate.

There was, in fact, already another alternative: a new type of secondary school had just opened in Holland Park which was neither a grammar nor a secondary modern. Ironically, for some of the well-heeled parents at the other end of the Portobello Road, it would have been
de rigueur
to send their Eleven-Plus successes to this innovative ‘comprehensive’ school, which was open to all children, whether or not they had passed the exam. But for working-class Lily, there was no point in passing the Eleven-Plus if it didn’t lead to a grammar-school place, which she saw as her children’s escape route from the kind of life to which she’d been condemned. Ironically, Holland Park Comprehensive was to become a hugely successful and fashionable school, and even at that early stage the kids who went there were more likely to be mixing with the offspring of diplomats and politicians than the Bevington Road Primary School diaspora.

So Lily and I set out to find a grammar school that would take me. The nearest was St Clement Danes in Du Cane Road, but they didn’t even call me in for interview. Our next choice was Sir Walter St John’s in Battersea. They at least granted me an audience, which Lily attended with me. This consisted of the pompous, begowned head teacher putting a coin on one end of a ruler, balancing it across his fingers and asking me a question about the weight needed to counterbalance it, or some such
nonsense. I was nervous enough being interviewed; having to subject myself to more tests struck me as perverse. I gave the wrong answer and was rejected. It began to dawn on Lily and me that passing the Eleven-Plus might have been the easy part. These head teachers were sizing me up to see if I was good enough for their schools and I was not, it seemed, coming up to scratch.

Sloane school was our last roll of the dice. There were no other grammar schools within reasonable travelling distance. As it was, Sloane was a forty-minute tube and bus ride away in Chelsea, well beyond my stamping ground. It had five hundred boys and a famous headmaster, Guy Boas, who’d been in situ for thirty years and was known nationally for his schoolboy Shakespearean productions during the 1950s. When Lily and I arrived there seemed to be hundreds of boys sitting in the school hall, all waiting to be interviewed by two teachers stationed at desks on the stage.

Guy Boas wasn’t there but his avuncular deputy, Mr Bailey, was and it was he who beckoned me towards him for a five-minute discussion from which Lily was, to her chagrin, excluded. I reassured her that the interview had gone well. At any rate, there had been no silly tests and no trick questions, as far as I could tell. A few days later, I was offered a place, as were Tony Cox and Dereck Tapper.

As well as free school meals, I qualified for a free tube and bus pass because I lived more than three miles from the school. Lily was able to purchase a second-hand uniform, which included a belted navy blue mac I never wore and a cap which I’m proud to say never went anywhere near my head. The ‘Social’ provided shoes, but there were still books to buy and
‘amenity fees’ to find, which meant Lily taking on still more cleaning jobs, in spite of the doctors’ warnings.

Why had Sloane taken me when two other schools hadn’t? Perhaps it was less discerning than the others; maybe there was some kind of ‘baby boomer’ drought in London SW3, or more wealthy families than in other boroughs who eschewed the state system altogether and sent their offspring to public schools.

Whatever the reason, on 5 September 1961, Tony Cox and Dereck Tapper and I set off, on separate routes from our respective homes, to begin our grammar-school education in the unfamiliar environs of the King’s Road, Chelsea.

I WAS DEEPLY
unhappy at Sloane Grammar School. I hated the journey, the teachers, the lessons. I had few friends. Tony Cox was in a different form and in any case I’d grown less fond of wandering the streets with him in the evenings, preferring solitary confinement with my guitar, my burgeoning collection of second-hand Matchbox cars – which could be had for a few pence down the Lane – a book or
Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly
. Dereck Tapper was in my class but, like me, he seemed to have become more introverted in the scholarly environment of ‘the Sloane’, as it was known. We’d be subjected to dense and wordy lectures every morning at assembly by the gowned and mortar-boarded Guy Boas who, in our first year, was seeing out the final months of his distinguished career.

We ‘one-ers’ would be placed in the gallery, looking down at the imposing figure of our headmaster, holding centre stage, leaning on his walking stick and regaling us with his reflections on over thirty years at the school. The only plus point was that assembly would overrun and eat into the timetable of, typically, double maths, French and Latin.

Guy Boas was succeeded by Dr Henry, a small, thin man with
sharp, pointed features and wire-framed glasses which encouraged our depiction of him as the Camp Commandant. Our form master was a young Welsh geography teacher, Mr Woosnam, who collected the dinner money every Monday morning by calling each boy’s name and waiting for them to approach his desk with the required cash. Every week he’d call ‘Johnson’ and I’d be forced to respond by shouting, ‘Free, sir.’ It was an embarrassment akin to asking Mr Berriman to put Lily’s groceries ‘on tick’ in front of a shop full of customers.

Unlike me, Dereck was a PE star. Also in our class was the nascent footballer Malcolm Macdonald, who went on to play for Fulham, Newcastle United, Arsenal and England, and the two of them developed a fierce rivalry in our well-equipped gym (we had wall bars, a trampoline and ropes which we were required to climb at the end of every PE lesson). Malcolm lived in Fulham, between Bishop’s Park and Craven Cottage. It goes without saying that he was an exceptional footballer but he also excelled at cricket and athletics, and carried off the prize in every event he entered at our annual sports day at Hurlingham Stadium. But Dereck matched him as a gymnast – if such a term can be applied to the practitioners of the PE we were forced to endure every week.

At breaks I would avoid the playground, preferring to go to the geography classroom where Mr Woosnam or one of his colleagues would show reel-to-reel film documentaries about Africa or India, or the Monte Carlo Rally. Or I’d go to the excellent library where, on my first visit, I had picked up a paperback and borrowed it on the strength of the cover.
Damsel in Distress
by P.G. Wodehouse launched a lifelong love affair with the work of the great man.

There were other cultural pursuits. The music teacher recruited me to the school choir, in which I sang Verdi and Bizet’s
Carmen
for a school production. There was also a film club that showed proper movies one evening each month. I had no interest in this until I noticed that the film to be shown in November was
Shane
, starring Alan Ladd (yes, him again). I was thrilled by the prospect of seeing the book I knew practically by heart brought to the big screen (or to be accurate, the flimsy, portable screen, stretched to its full height of about ten feet in the school hall). I decided to pay my tuppence and go.

I know this may sound like hyperbole, but that evening was one of the biggest disappointments of my life. Shane’s appearance in the first pages of the book is a moment of dark foreboding. He wears dark clothes, a black silk handkerchief knotted loosely around his throat and a plain black hat with ‘a wide curling brim swept down in front to shield the face’. As Bob, the young boy watching his approach, records: ‘The eyes were endlessly searching from side to side and forward, checking off every item in view, missing nothing. As I noticed this, a sudden chill… struck through me there in the warm and open sun.’

As I took a seat in the front row of the school hall, I was anticipating this dramatic opening and all that would follow as if I were Bob Starrett sitting on the upper rail of his father’s corral in Wyoming. The film kept to the sequence of the book, beginning with Bob watching Shane’s approach – but the man who came into view wasn’t dressed in dark clothes with a black hat, riding a black horse. He was a diminutive, blond man with a white hat on a grey horse. He was dressed in bright colours
and seemed to have a cheery disposition. Paramount Pictures had turned my Shane into Roy Rogers.