This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (17 page)

Saturday was a long, arduous slog – delivering the milk, collecting the empties, knocking on people’s doors and waiting for them to answer, telling them how much they owed, running to Johnny for change from the big leather pouch he carried around his waist like a gunslinger’s belt. In some of the more prosperous streets on the round, money would be left wrapped in a note jammed into the neck of an empty bottle. Johnny would stop periodically to light the roll-up that rarely left his lips and open the huge black ledger to record who’d paid, who hadn’t and which orders had changed. When he’d finished, out would come his comb and he’d carefully reconstruct the ‘Tony Curtis’ that never seemed to me to have deconstructed in the first place. Lunch was a Swiss roll from the little produce cupboard on the milk float, torn in half and shared between us, washed down with a pint of silver-top, full-fat milk.

The worst houses to service were the overcrowded, multi-occupied ones with an open front door and no bells with which to summon the occupants. We’d have to go in together and take a floor each, banging on the two or three (or even four) doors
behind which a family or a group of single West Indian men were squeezed in appalling conditions.

There was one of these places in Ruston Close, a cul-de-sac of twenty houses off St Marks Road. Number 10 was in particularly bad repair and there were two customers on each of the three landings. Johnny always sent me in alone while he lit a fag, removed the pencil he kept lodged behind his right ear and commenced an unusually intense scrutiny of the ledger.

No matter what the time or season, 10 Ruston Close was always dark. There was no natural light on the landings or bulbs in the light fittings. An awful smell of decay and mould, stale food and detritus seeped from the walls. Each room contained several young West Indian men for whom existing in these conditions was the price they paid for coming to the motherland. It took me ages to collect the money, run to Johnny and return with the change. I could never understand why my streetwise boss, my Shane on a milk float, never came in with me to lend a hand.

It was some time later that I discovered the truth about Ruston Close. The cul-de-sac had been renamed. It had previously been Rillington Place and number 10 was the house where, over the course of ten years, the infamous serial killer John Christie had murdered at least seven women, including his own wife, and the baby daughter of one of his victims, concealing their bodies in the garden and behind the walls of that gloomy, forbidding house. He had committed his final murder there less than a decade earlier. After a badly mishandled police investigation, Christie had finally been caught, tried and hanged for his crimes in 1953 – but not before innocent fellow resident Timothy Evans, the man whose wife and baby girl
Christie had killed, had been wrongly convicted of their murder and sent to the gallows. No wonder even tough Johnny Carter was loath to set foot in the place.

I actually began working on the milk round before Dr Tanner declared me fit to return to school. The 10 shillings a week brought me some money to spend. Desperate though she was, Lily would never take a penny from me, insisting instead that I began to save in a Bible-shaped piggy bank she gave me for the purpose. Neither did she question why I was able to work but not to study. Dr Tanner had provided the sick certificate and that was good enough for her. Eventually I had to bite the bullet and go back. The anticipation was probably worse than the reality, but I’d still have preferred not to have been there if I could have avoided it.

The Saturday milk round restricted my chances of getting to Loftus Road to watch Queens Park Rangers, but I attended as many home games as I could manage or afford. When I couldn’t go I had to content myself with my football magazines and books. Lily had trained us to keep our eyes on the pavement and the gutter whenever we passed a pub or one of the newly legalized betting shops, because that’s where men were most careless with their cash and most likely to drop coins from their pockets. One day I struck lucky outside a betting shop on my walk home from Latimer Road station, spotting an array of coins scattered on the ground, which I pounced on and quickly pocketed. When I inspected my haul I found I had about 10 shillings’ worth in all, including three half-crowns. I ran all the way to Shepherd’s Bush market to buy the one thing I desired above all others:
The Topical Times Football Annual
.

Although I lived and breathed football for a long while, I
wasn’t much good at actually playing it. I made the Danvers House team at Sloane no more than a couple of times, and even then only as goalkeeper. Malcolm Macdonald demonstrated his footballing genius early on for Turner House, scoring five against me in the Danvers goal.

The Sloane playing fields were a bus ride away in Roehampton, where we had to trek one afternoon a week. I might not have shown much prowess on the park, but I looked forward to those afternoons. They were a break from the schoolwork I hated. And at Roehampton there was fresh air and extensive grounds. Another attraction was the presence of pupils from the Carlyle Grammar School for Girls, situated right next door to Sloane in Hortensia Road, who shared our Roehampton sports ground. The walls of Carlyle Grammar were high and we never mixed with the girls apart from at Roehampton. As we matured, that window of opportunity was welcomed more and more eagerly by the boys from Sloane.

ALTHOUGH 1962 WAS
a difficult year, it was not all gloom and doom. That summer I was to be taken away on holiday by the Children’s Country Holidays Fund, a charity that provided seaside or country breaks for inner-city slum children who would otherwise never have the chance of any respite. Originally established in 1884 by the Reverend Samuel Bartlett and his wife as the Children’s Fresh Air Mission, the charity is still going strong today, known in its current incarnation as CCHF All About Kids and focusing on children of primary-school age.

I don’t know how this opportunity came about: I imagine Lily or Linda must have put my name forward as Linda had been on a CCHF holiday herself, in 1956, when she was nine. I remember waving her off at the coach station with Lily.

Linda had gone to Guildford, a mere forty miles from Notting Hill, though at the time it seemed to us a long way away. I was going somewhere more exotic than Surrey, to another country: Denmark. It was to be a ten-day adventure at the end of the school summer break. We would be staying at an agricultural college about thirty kilometres from the port of
Ejsberg, taking the train from Liverpool Street to Harwich and sailing from there to Denmark. From the day the trip was arranged, I spent hours lying on my bed thinking about the voyage and anticipating the thrill of arriving in a foreign country. I could not begin to imagine what it would be like. With our visits to Coventry, Hull and Liverpool now a distant memory, I could hardly comprehend not being in London, let alone not being in England.

When the time came, Lily removed my school reports and other papers from the cardboard Christmas hamper case and packed it with everything she thought I would need. Before waving me off on the train at Liverpool Street, she managed, as she invariably did whenever taking her leave of me, to find a mysterious patch of dirt on my face that required the spat-on hankie treatment.

Our party comprised about seventy of us waifs and strays of secondary-school age, a small officer corps of university students who had volunteered to supervise us and a couple of adults in overall charge. The crossing to Ejsberg was terrible. An almighty storm had the North Sea heaving and rolling like a fairground ride and practically every one of us was seasick. I abandoned my bunk in the humid cabin below deck where I was supposed to be sleeping. In the crew’s quarters nearby, sailors were chatting, eating, drinking and smoking, oblivious of the turbulence. Green with sickness, I eventually found some relief sheltering under blankets on a deckchair in the open air. There I spent the rest of that long night, dozing fitfully.

The dawn of a beautiful summer’s day transformed everything. The rising sun revealed a wondrous sight. I gaped, utterly dumbstruck, as Ejsberg harbour came into view under an
impossibly clear, piercing blue sky. This was another country where people spoke a different language, watched different television programmes, followed different football teams. It seemed incredible that I should be here.

We were taken by coach to our accommodation at the college, a fine old building in good repair which the students had left neat and tidy for us before departing on their own summer break. We were all given an information pack, a small ring binder full of notepaper on which to record every day of our adventure, and £2 worth of Danish kroner. I was allocated a room with two brothers named Ozorowitz, who were of Eastern European extraction – Russians, I assumed – and who would spend the entire holiday arguing and fighting with one another. I was often called upon to adjudicate, which was something of a thankless task. On one occasion I got into a fight with Alex, the elder Ozorowitz, after I tried to defend his brother.

As we all gathered together, boys and girls from all over London, I spotted a familiar face I hadn’t seen for years: Stephen Kirk, the boy who had stolen my precious blue metal box, the one with the cream interior containing my collection of bus tickets and sweet wrappers, when I was six. Although a few years older than me, he hadn’t grown very tall and wasn’t as big as I might have expected. He still smelled of trouble, though. He was surrounded by a little gang of which he was obviously the leader. He looked in my direction but with no sign of recognition.

I focused my attention on the delights that awaited us, which were being outlined by one of the adults in charge. There were to be organized excursions to the seaside, to the Lego factory and to the Lurpak dairy to see how butter was produced. On
most days, however, we would be free to do what we liked: to explore the grounds of the college, to walk in the surrounding farmland and to make use of the extensive sports facilities. The undergraduates would be supervising us and if there were any problems we should go to them in the first instance.

The leader of the students, a young man called Raymond, was introduced to make a little speech to us assembled tykes. Tall, with shoulders even broader than his smile, he was also what Lily would have called ‘well-spoken’. Raymond told us that he and his colleagues would be available whenever they were needed, day or night.

The next morning I was enjoying a hearty breakfast and chatting with the eight or nine kids at my table when Stephen Kirk walked by. ‘Watch out for him,’ I advised my new brothers-in-arms. ‘He’s trouble.’ I told the cautionary tale of how he’d stolen from me (though I failed to mention what I’d kept in my blue tin box, for fear of ridicule).

After breakfast we all wandered outside to play for a few hours before our first trip. A boy approached me and asked me to come with him as he wanted to show me something. He took me to the back of an accommodation block where nobody in the college grounds could see us. There stood Stephen Kirk, surrounded by his acolytes. So much for brothers-in-arms: somebody had told him what I’d said at the breakfast table and he was not at all happy about being called a thief. He grabbed me by the throat. ‘You bin talking abaht me, ’ave yer?’ I was frightened but also angry – too angry to feign ignorance. I said that he had indeed stolen my tin box, but then struck a conciliatory note, telling him it really didn’t matter now.

He ordered me to empty my pockets. I had on me some of
the kroner we’d been given the previous day. Aggrieved to have been labelled a thief, he apparently saw no contradiction in demonstrating that this was exactly what he was. He took the money and said he wanted the rest as well, otherwise he and his gang would ‘get me’. I was pushed to the ground as they strolled off, laughing.

What to do? We’d been split into two groups for that day’s trip and neither Kirk nor any of his gang was in mine, so I had a little time to consider my options. I could hand over my remaining kroner and spend the whole holiday being terrorized by him. I could fight him to get back what he’d taken already. Or I could report him. I wasn’t keen on ten days of misery, and I didn’t have a hope of beating him in a fight. The last option was a risky one and would break the great unwritten rule: thou shalt never grass to a teacher. But the students weren’t teachers and Raymond had been insistent that any problems should be reported to him.

When we got back to the college, I found my way up to the office where the students were based. Raymond was there. I explained what had happened. He thought for a while, and then asked me to come at 7pm to the main lounge, where the students were responsible for us in the evenings. He told me he would get Stephen Kirk there as well so that the grievance could be sorted out.

As the main lounge was the principal thoroughfare between the TV room and the table tennis and snooker room there were lots of other children milling around when I arrived at seven o’clock. The adult leaders largely left the students to it, so neither of them was around. Stephen Kirk had evidently been summoned as Raymond had promised – he was already
standing there, smirking, with some of his gang dotted around him. A flock of girls was in the corner dressing a doll. Raymond sat in a huge armchair, looking cheery and benign. He had four or five of his male colleagues with him. He called Stephen over and asked him if he’d stolen my money. ‘Nah, sir,’ said Stephen emphatically. There was a pause before Raymond stood up and delivered the most horrendous clump to the side of Kirk’s head, knocking him sideways.

Still smiling sweetly, Raymond asked again if he’d stolen my kroner. This time Stephen owned up. Two of the other students grabbed his arms and lifted him up so that his face was level with Raymond’s. There followed the kind of battering that may well have been normal in the public schools these students would have attended. We inner-city urchins were used to violence, so it was nothing startling to us, either. It was the methodology that was unusual.