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For William, Holly and Arthur with apologies
Il n’y a qu’une vie, c’est donc qu’elle est parfaite
Paul Éluard (1895−1952)
Foreword
In your head you are for ever young. The photo page in your passport states a fact, but it doesn’t tell the truth. When some of your best friends die, however, you have at least to give a nod to the arithmetic.
I never wanted to write a memoir because I didn’t think my life remarkable. But at some point after the pandemic I became aware that people of a younger generation were struggling to understand what I was saying. It was as if the stars by which I’d always steered now belonged in a different sky.
The only dividend of the years’ vanishing, as far as I can see, is that it makes aspects of the past appear more interesting or humorous than they felt at the time. So I thought I’d put together some essays on the things that had meant the most to me, to fix in print my gratitude or pleasure; and if some of what emerged would seem quaint to younger readers that would be part of the deal. When they’d looked at these thirteen enthusiastic pieces, randomly ordered, my publishers asked me to leave out the least autobiographical and to rearrange the rest in a more chronological sequence. So as I’d tried to steer away from memoir, they shunted me towards it. The result is therefore a hybrid. But we are all mongrels, I suppose, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
I was also asked to remove some of the many names of friends or colleagues to whom I felt indebted, for fear that parts might read like the credits at the end of a film. So I did. However, I think these people know who they are and how much they have meant to me. Whether or not they find their names here, this book is dedicated to them. Also to those, much missed, who have already braved what lies ahead.
Mayonnaise
Everything is fine. We’re alive. We live in England. It’s all good. From a fog, faces and words emerge. Mum. The kitchen table with a metal mincer clamped to the edge. Willy, the friendly Dalmatian with his thumping tail. A bowl of dripping. Wet washing on a rack above the range. But who we really are and what it’s all about . . . That’ll come into focus when I reach the age of six or seven − by which time we’ll have reached the unimaginable, spaceage date of 1960.
To start with, though, it’s all about things. Hard surfaces and not falling over. Chairs and tables. The texture and smell of different woods. Marmalade on fried bread at breakfast. The awful cold mutton at lunch. As a toy, I have a ‘farm’: a piece of hardboard painted green with a blue splodge for a pond and a balsa wood ‘house’ with straw thatch that’s been glued to the board. There are some plastic Friesians that can be placed at the edge of the pond. It’s a present from our grandmother, on Mum’s side. We never meet her, though, and when we ask why, a pained look comes into Mum’s eyes and she says it’s better that way. Dad’s mother died of cancer in the War. Mum’s
father was killed by the Germans. Dad was wounded by them and they thought he’d die. But he didn’t.
So Edward, who was born in a local hospital in 1950, and I, who was born in 1953 (in the bathroom for some reason), are part of a new project. Pioneers in a landscape that’s been through a bad time but on which the sun is now set to shine. We’re not rich, but we’re not as poor as the people in the cottages next door; for a start we have an indoor lav. Mum is tall and fair, Dad is handsome and has tweed jackets and striped ties; they know what they’re up to.
The world beyond our house at the village crossroads is filled with other people, who to my mind are either frightening or ridiculous. Everything I need is here in the house and in the garden that surrounds it, with its brick steps, wrought-iron gates and musty wooden sheds. Edward is an inventive playmate, introducing me to pirates and cowboys and armies and dressing up. I trot along behind, an Apache in the old garage, a lookout in the walnut tree. Ship ahoy!
Everything seems to be old or second-hand. My clothes are cast- offs or bought from jumble sales, bazaars or ‘bring-and-buy’s. Likewise, the Dinky and Corgi toy cars are battered, flaked and missing tyres. But there are plenty of them, enough to have races down the wooden corridor that leads to the telephone (we share a ‘party line’ with the people opposite) and ample, when you add the lorries and the vans, to build a traffic jam round the gate-legged table. Some of the toys must have been bought as a job lot
because even though Edward has had two more birthdays and three more Christmases, he couldn’t have been given this many Vanwalls and Sunbeam Talbots. Next door, visible through the fence, is Abberbury Close, an almshouse for old ladies, who donate the occasional knitted golliwog or cock-eyed teddy bear.
As well as Willy, there is Bumble, a miniature dachshund with a kink in his tail. He walks on three legs because as a baby I rolled off the bed and fell on top of him. We don’t talk about his broken leg because it doesn’t reflect well on whoever was meant to be doing the childcare. (Many years later a hypnotherapist in Wimpole Street will try to persuade me that a suppressed memory of falling is at the root of my fear of airborne turbulence. It doesn’t work.) Where Willy is all eager affection, Bumble is halitotic and difficult. Mum insists that the little dog accompany her and Willy on their daily walks up to Donnington Castle, where the long-legged Dalmatian bounds over the fields. Bumble limps along the path, his prodigious male organ smacking him first on one flank, then the other. He has a thin, handsome face, with a long nose and whiskers.
In the morning, Mum comes in and wakes us up. There’s no heating, but we’re allowed to have the gas fire on briefly while we get dressed. I like sitting in the bathroom while Dad has his bath. In vest and boxer shorts, he then shaves in front of the mirror and anoints his hair with something called ‘Honey and Flowers’, combing it back in
the candid, nothing-to-conceal style of the reliable man. ‘How old are you, Daddy?’ ‘Thirty- nine.’ ‘You’ve got a paunch.’ ‘No, that’s relaxed muscle.’ The routine never varies. He holds his trousers out in front of him back-tofront, puts in one leg, then flips the trousers round deftly to get the other leg in the correct hole. When he dies − in February 1998, when he’s eighty and I am forty-four − I will put my own trousers on the same way for a time, as a tribute; but I lack Dad’s snappy wrist action.
When Edward goes to school, I’m quite happy to play alone. I saddle up with an old towel over a wheel-back chair and canter off across the prairie. Even though we live between the racecourse at Newbury and the training yards of Lambourn, I’m so allergic to real horses that I can’t get closer than twenty feet without having a fit. So the polished pine of the chair will have to do. Luckily I have acquired a magnificent gun called a Buntline Special, which is my permanent companion. I drill a hole in the bottom of the holster with Dad’s corkscrew, push some string through and tie it to my thigh to make me faster on the draw. I urge the chair on across the dusty plain.
Cowboys are on television most days. We like The Lone Ranger and Champion the Wonder Horse , though we puzzle over the theme song and the line ‘He can take a whitton from a bone’, though a close listening today suggests it was actually ‘like an arrow whizzin’ from a bow’. Not at Horne Mead House in 1957, though. Later comes Bronco with Ty Hardin. The theme song lyrics are
on the trite side, I admit: ‘Bronco, Bronco, tearin’ across the Texas plain / Bronco, Bronco / Bronco Layne.’ But Ty Hardin is tough. Probably uses a Buntline Special. Then there is sport, for which our appetite is huge. Horse racing, swimming, athletics (‘atherletics’ to me) and, best of all, the slow, intoxicating drama of Test cricket with our national honour depending on the courage of Fred Trueman and Colin Cowdrey. Lunch at Old Trafford is not until one- thirty, but reluctantly we are dragged from the screen at one for whatever cold-meat horror awaits. In theory I’m not allowed to leave the table until I’ve finished, but this rule is seldom enforced and at a pinch I can get Willy to help out. He has absolutely no problem with cold mutton; fat and gristle are fine. I love him and his soft black ears with white hairs showing through.
Our own versions of sport are half-formed. I’m too young for cricket, though I like running. We’ve watched enough atherletics to know that in long-distance races you don’t just sprint all the way: tactics are important. From the early days, there’s a dramatic commentary, provided by Ross and Norris McWhirter. I’m usually Vladimir Kuts, the Russian 1956 Olympic champion. As I round the apple tree for the third time and wait for the sound of the bell, I collapse in an asthmatic fit (‘He’s down, he’s down! Kuts is down!’) and bang my fists on the grass in an attempt to get some air into my lungs. The real Kuts never seems to have this problem.
The outside world makes a move on me at last when I’m sent to what I think is called a kindergarden. Miss Barton’s is in Speen, in a sort of prefab down a track. It’s full of other people. Children, to be precise. Around the walls are pictures of apples, bicycles, cats, dogs, elephants . . . all the way through to zebras. I have no interest in this or in the silly squiggles that are written on them. I don’t know what to do with plasticine and I can’t wait to go home, because there’s a level crossing on Station Road where I persuade Mum to linger until the gates close and a train comes clattering past on its way to Kintbury. That’s more like it. I love trains, though a model set is beyond our means, apparently. When we get home, it may with any luck not be cold mutton for lunch but my favourite − tinned tomato soup on grated stale Canadian cheddar.
One day at Miss Barton’s I have a pain in the lower abdomen and am allowed to go home. There’s a suspicious lump down there. Mum, who used to be a nurse, thinks this is not right. In Newbury hospital I’m operated on for a hernia, though how I’ve ruptured myself is unclear. Too much shot- putting in the Soviet cause, perhaps. I come home swathed in bandages with a huge scar in the groin that will be the subject of curious comment over the years. I’m spending a lot of time in bed anyway, since I contract every virus in southern England. Colds, coughs and all manner of chest infections keep me
between the sheets with Housewives’ Choice and Workers’ Playtime on the wireless. Back in hospital, I have my tonsils and adenoids removed on the grounds that if you have no tonsils you can’t get tonsillitis − and you really can’t fault the logic there. Thanks to the new National Health Service, this is all done for free.
In the early evening, after work, Dad comes upstairs for a game. Perched on his shoulders, I can see a single star out in the night. Perhaps it’s the very one in the song ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ that’s hanging in the sky over Abberbury Close. Though neither of our parents is a believer (they never go to church), we have to kneel and say prayers, including a dodgy one in which we ask God to ‘make me a good boy tomorrow’. There is often a French song called ‘J’ai perdu le “doh” de ma clarinette ’, which goes on for ages, as you also lose the re, the mi, the fa and the rest of them. The chorus goes ‘Oompah, camer-a, oompah, camer-a, oompah, oompah, oompah.’ (It’s many years before I discover that it’s actually ‘ en pas , camarade’ .)
Dad, it turns out, is a ‘solicitor’, a lawyer who gives people advice in a dark back room of a Georgian brick building in Cheap Street, Newbury. He has ‘clients’, who pay for his knowledge, and sometimes he appears in the local magistrates’ court to plead the case of a housebreaker or local rough. He is the junior partner in Pitman and Bazett. Pitman is deceased and Bazett rides to work on
a moped, which he parks in the office corridor. The best clients are the local landowners, for whom Dad does ‘conveyancing’, the fee for which can run the office for another month or so; though when he gives advice to a stable lad about his tenancy agreement I think he ‘forgets’ to send in a bill afterwards. He works for five and a half days a week. On Saturday mornings, he wears a sports jacket rather than a suit; he stays home after lunch, though, and does some gardening. He has two weeks’ holiday a year. I’m not sure if he ‘enjoys’ it. I suspect he doesn’t ask himself that question.
The adult world is one of obligation. People seem to expect nothing from it except survival. Peace is a continuation of the War by other means. Many years later I will read in novels and memoirs of how grown- ups experienced this decade. Ted Hughes described it as ‘a Tundra that we had to cross’. Doris Lessing’s novel The Golden Notebook depicts a London intelligentsia all at sea over Ban the Bomb and masochistic sex; the deeply confused main character goes to a meeting (I’m not inventing this) ‘to discuss Stalin on linguistics’. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis evokes the austerity of re- used razor blades and ‘the smallest drink he’d ever been seriously offered’.
For a village child in 1959, however, it’s all fine. We don’t mind being cold, and the size of an alcoholic drink is not a problem. I know nothing of Soviet tanks in Budapest,
supertax or contraception; I pray only for a mutton-free lunch and a Ted Dexter half-century. I am even starting to make exceptions to my fear of ‘other people’. Once a week a man comes to help in the garden. He rides a heavy bicycle with a huge chain guard; he has hobnail boots and cycle clips and thick sandwiches, wrapped in greaseproof paper, that leave a pile of crumbs, like sawdust, in the tool shed. He’s a very good gardener. His vegetable crop is so prodigious that Mum gives some surplus beans and marrows to the people in the row of cottages next door. When he finds out, the gardener ticks her off and Dad sacks him for being rude. I’m disappointed because I’ve never got to try his crumby sandwiches. The milkman is all right, too. I like the pencil tucked behind his ear at an angle and the way he hands the bottles through the kitchen window. He has orange juice on his float as well, though we’re not allowed to have this fancy stuff. Then there’s Mrs Taylor, who comes and does the rough work − banging a hoover into the skirting boards and polishing the grate. She gives us Everton mints from a paper bag and calls your hand a ‘pud’ (rhymes with mud); she says ‘mankelpiece’ and ‘acrost’ and ‘five and twenty past’. One evening, Mum and Dad go out (a rare event) and she babysits for us. When our parents get home they find a note by the telephone that says: ‘A lady rung.’ I think this is helpful of Mrs Taylor, but Dad is mysteriously amused for days and days. Mrs T takes a shine to
me because I ‘put her in mind of the little one I lost’. Our names are quite beyond her, however, and she refers to us as ‘Edwin and Bonny’. When a thrilling new food called yoghurt arrives in the shops, the closest Mrs Taylor can get to the word is ‘vulgar’. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘Edwin loves a raspberry vulgar.’
Well . . . What’s this all about? What’s going on? Is this ‘happiness’, perhaps? Pealing ignorance and tinned tomatoes on toast. Shirley Abicair on the wireless and ‘Sugartime’ by Alma Cogan. I can maybe stay in this village house and its garden with its books and dogs for ever, looking out of the window, thinking about horses and cars, particularly my favourite, the beautiful Citroën DS with its sloping headlights and airy suspension. Perhaps things will never change. Perhaps they don’t need to.
Then, in the summer of 1958, when I’m five and Edward is nearing his eighth birthday, we go to a place called Elstree, in Woolhampton, a village about twenty minutes’ drive towards Reading. This is a ‘boarding school’, into which my parents, looking serious, disappear with the headmaster and his wife. There’s a grass semicircle in the drive in front of the forbidding house, round which Edward and I chase each other for half an hour until the grown-ups re-emerge.
That September, Edward vanishes. He has gone to be a ‘boarder’ at Elstree. I catch Mum crying in the garden. I’m sent to a tiny village school in the corner of a
field in West Woodhay. It’s called Greenwood, and we fifteen reluctant boys in green ties, shorts and sandals are its first pupils. The junior class is taken by Mrs Sexton and the senior by her husband, the fearsome Mr Sexton, also known as ‘Sir’. He carries his right arm tucked away, loose, inside his jacket; his right leg is attached to a surgical shoe by a spring that disappears up his trouser leg. He has been shot in the head while fighting in a tank in Sicily and shipped back to England with life-threatening injuries. He has had to learn not only how to walk on one good leg and to write with the wrong hand, but how to speak again. He has a deep voice and a grave manner and we’re in awe of his injuries and his stoical bearing.
Every morning I wait in Dad’s office to be picked up by Mr and Mrs Sexton and driven to Greenwood. There are two or three of us crammed into the back of a maroon van, whose controls have been adapted for Mr Sexton, though not extensively. There’s a notice on the back window that says, ‘Disabled. No hand signals.’ A round knob has been attached to the steering wheel to enable him to turn it with his one good hand, and that’s about it. I close my eyes when he has to change gear.
At Greenwood, I learn to read. There’s a mobile library that comes to Donnington, or sometimes we go to the public library in Newbury, where there’s a wider choice of bad men to be defeated by brave underdogs. Of the books we have at home, my favourite is The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting, which I persuade
Mum to plough through several times, even after I can read for myself. I lose count of how many times I’ve read The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, but I always fight back tears when Cadpig gazes rapt at the figures in a model nativity in church because it’s the closest she can get to watching television. (We don’t like the later Disney film, though, with its American accents and the two female dogs fused into one, which undoes the book’s uneasy triangle of Pongo and his two bitches.) Sometimes Mrs Taylor reads to us, but she doesn’t like it when I put her right on the longer words.
After school, Mum tries to make me play with other children. There’s a date in a big house with a boy who has a ‘nanny’ and therefore barely sees his parents. I think this is ridiculous. Luckily I have an asthma attack and have to be taken home. There’s tea in a bungalow with a boy whose mother is from Venezuela, though I react so strongly to the long grass in their garden that this date also comes to an early end. And then there’s poor Danny Grant, a little boy with specs and a leg iron, who lives on a modern estate. We give him a lift home every day after school; and every day he gets his caliper caught on the door sill and sends his small bundle of books flying. His father drives a Humber Hawk, a car which for some reason I despise, and give as my excuse for not going to play there. Mum has no idea about cars, so eventually I’m made to go − and stay the night as well. The Grants do everything the wrong way. Instead
of thrashing a football about in the garden, they want me to do advanced Meccano with Danny. I’ve been given a stage one Meccano set myself, but have managed to build one thing only, the beginner’s bench, which wobbles. Danny’s bedroom is like an engineer’s workshop. And then, when it’s time for bed, Mrs Grant asks me if I’d like a ‘tinkle in the toilet’. A what?
At Greenwood there’s a system of stars for good work that appeals to me; the trouble is I can never get far on the star chart because I’m off school so much. I have to leave early on a Wednesday to go to the hospital to have injections that are supposed to cure my allergies − and so once more that smell of gas and antiseptic in corridors painted only halfway to a horizontal line and carrying their puzzling signs, ‘X- Ray’, ‘Pathology’, ‘Out- Patients’; the waiting area with its torn magazines; and then the iron ache of the injection as it fills the arm and the glucose sweet from a tin for not making a fuss. In summer, they open the French doors of the men’s ward and push the old boys out to lie in the sun.
I miss most of my last term for a more exciting reason. In the Easter holidays, Edward and I have been watching horse racing on television, culminating in the Grand National, where the grey Nicolaus Silver recovers from a jumping error to forge ahead on the run-in. As soon as it’s over, we naturally go out into the garden to rerun the race ourselves. Becher’s Brook is a low yew hedge which Edward tells me to take on all fours, like a real horse. I
obediently fly head- first over the jump, grazing the top with a trailing foot, and land on my left elbow. There’s a peculiar sound − and the sensation that my lower arm is falling off, remaining attached only by skin to the rest of me. It hangs useless by my side. So it’s back to those pungent corridors and into the children’s ward, though it feels like slipping into another century. My plastered arm is held vertical and attached to an overhead bracket. That evening (when the call is cheaper, after six o’clock) Dad telephones an old doctor friend to ask what’s going on; the doc unwisely speculates that the arm is being held up to keep the blood flowing back to the heart and so avert the risk of amputation. There’s probably no such danger, but Mum is alarmed by the news. Meanwhile, there’s no specialist bonesetter available. The nearest surgeon thought to be up to the job is a Mr Squire, who’s based in Reading. He’s much in demand, it seems, and day after day I ask the nurse if Mr Squire might be in that day. The worst thing is the bedpan and having my bottom wiped not with paper but with something that looks like a horse’s tail. Dad visits after work and looks at the table in the middle of the ward where the children who can get up are being fed. ‘It’s like a chimpanzees’ tea party,’ he says, cheerily. To hell with chimpanzees. Where’s this surgeon?
Eventually the bone is set and I go home with a hefty plaster cast in a sling. I at once contract whooping cough, with spasms and projectile vomiting. For some reason,
I decide this is the ideal time to learn how to ride a bicycle − something I’ve long believed to be beyond me. With one arm in a sling, I manage to complete a circuit of the lawn on a child’s Raleigh from a jumble sale before being sick into the flower bed.
The Raleigh’s too small, it has return handlebars and is painted a sissy red; it’s a girl’s bike, really. Along the streets of Newbury and Thatcham I gawp at the different bicycles that go by: drop-handlebar racing bikes and shiny machines ridden by Brylcreemed youths whose handlebars are swept up in a V shape, allowing their riders to sit back and whistle. But we can’t afford a new one, so I switch my yearning to the accessories. I spend hours in Halford’s on Northbrook Street looking at saddlebags, which range from the tiny toolkit to the multi-compartmental tourer. I long to have one − so I can put things in it and carry them. Even a medium-size bag costs something insane, like seventeen and six. Anyway, it wouldn’t go on my little Raleigh because it doesn’t even have hooks under the saddle.
Mr Squire’s handiwork, an X-ray reveals, has not been quite all we hoped. So I have to go back to hospital to have the arm re-set. Up till now, I’ve rather enjoyed the attention due to a wounded steeplechaser, but this seems a bit much; it also rules out any chance of a late run on the school star chart.
About twice a year for the rest of my life (so far) my left arm will gently rise of its own accord while I’m lying
in bed at night. I never know when it’s going to happen, but it’s a strangely pleasant feeling, as if the bones have their own memory.
In the holidays from school, Edward and I resume our old games. On the mantelpiece, there’s still the blue papiermâché egg with a coin slot in the top mounted on a base that reads, ‘The League of Pity’. This is a charity that helps poor children, orphans, ‘spastics’, those with polio or leg irons or some other disadvantage too terrible to think about. We’re meant to put spare coins in it. Unfortunately, Edward and I don’t have any spare coins. My pocket money is six old pence a week, one penny for each year of my age; Edward is on nine. Six old pence is 2.5p in today’s money and even allowing for inflation that leaves slim pickings for the poor children.
Apart from soldiers and cars, the main occupants of the toy cupboard are soft toys no longer needed for bedtime comfort − teddy bears of various sizes and states of wear; dogs and rabbits; a couple of monkeys and some foam- rubber characters with wire in the limbs that can be bent into various shapes. It seems important to find an activity that can involve them all and really there’s only one thing for it: cricket.
The ground is the playroom; the wicket is the lino floor revealed by pulling back the rug. It’s quick and slippy, with something in it for all the bowlers. The stumps are three narrow cylindrical wooden building bricks; the bats
are small wooden rectangles from the same kit and the ball a large dice covered in sticking plaster. Its numerous edges give encouragement to the spinners.
Under the flag of the MCC , Edward selects his best eleven; my team is the CCC . We have to kneel down and, grasping the hapless toys, engage them in the game. The foam-rubber ones get cheap runs on the rebound but also give many caught- and- bowled chances. My stars are a rubber golliwog called Mr Swingabout, a genuine all- rounder who bats four and bowls first change; and a stylish batsman called Nana − a three- legged dog whom I had secured from Edward’s squad in exchange for two erratic glove puppets. As a reward for not making a fuss about my arm, I’ve been given a small rubber Mexican with a sombrero and a poncho. I christen him ‘Mexican’ and he scores 112 not out on debut. It’s the first time any CCC player has made a century and I only wish I could say it was the first of many for my little amigo , but in truth he struggles to hold his place after the return of Blue Bear from an emergency limb reattachment.
As we grow older, the cricketing aspect becomes secondary to the human drama, much of it taking place off the pitch and involving a seductive Siamese cat. At lunch one day, I stun my parents by telling them that Mrs Teddy is getting a divorce. The game expands to meet our need for psychological drama, becoming a mixture between Test Match Special and Peyton Place. I don’t know at what
age we finally put the toys back in the cupboard. Dad will merrily maintain that it was when Edward went to university. I believe it was when the CCC won their first and only test, when, on the afternoon of the fifth day, my opener (a Lenny the Lion puppet) cut the ball backward of square into the skirting board for four. It may have been in 1964 or ’5; but whatever day it was, we both accepted that part of childhood then was over.
There’s an age when your memory stops being episodic and becomes continuous. I think children enjoy this change, because it enables them to look forward to the high points and to endure those things that have to be borne. They know it’s ‘traditional’ to have Coca-Cola on Saturday morning and have noted that Father Christmas is a stickler for dates. Repetition is power. The Brains Trust on television always ends eventually, giving way to Sooty and Sweep. You can even kid your parents that because they once bought a bag of crisps after a swim at the local pool, it is now their duty to do so every time. When I try to remember being a child, I think mainly of struggle. But my memory, so adhesive when it comes to useless facts, is probably suspect on this bigger picture. The things that push themselves into your recollection are the ones that made your life different from that of others: that’s just good narrative sense. These quirks also bulk large because other members of the family have teased you about them over the years: the day that Mum took you
to the cattle market for a fun outing, but you cried because the calves’ heads were tied up so tightly; or the time when you wept because you couldn’t bear to see the roses being deadheaded.
The truth is that as a child I was usually cheerful and always had enthusiasm for the day ahead. Also, there was music. There was Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman on Sunday afternoon as well as Radio Luxembourg. The first single I bought was ‘Johnny Angel’ by Shelley Fabares, a teen drama with a ghostly reverb. The explosion of excitement that came from pop music in the Sixties somehow expressed our own sense of coming change − the thrill of growing up and believing all things to be possible.
My own tastes were intense but narrow. They included: all the Beatles singles, but not so much the album songs − except ‘All My Loving’, which seemed to me then, seems still, the perfect pop song – anything with a wallof-sound, Phil Spector production; one or two voices, like Roy Orbison and, a bit later, Dionne Warwick or Stevie Wonder.
One evening we went to a folk and skiffle concert in Oxford. Among the acts was a harmony group called the Springfields, who had two good songs, ‘Say I Won’t Be There’ and ‘Island of Dreams’. In the middle of each one, something odd happened. The girl singer, who had blonde hair and mascara, stepped forward and sang the middle- eight alone; a sort of charge went through the theatre before the washboard harmonies resumed. Her
voice was hard, yet plaintive; it seemed to crack with emotion on particular chord changes; it made your scalp tingle. A year or so later, Dusty went solo, and her first single, ‘I Only Want to Be With You’ (on the blue Pye label), had a giggling sexiness added in just below the killer notes in her mid-range. We played it till our parents begged us to stop.
I’ve run ahead a bit here. I hadn’t heard these acts at the age of seven, which is where I’m trying to stop and take stock. It’s 1960. We are at that milestone now. And although style journalists will try to convince us that ‘the Sixties’ didn’t ‘really’ begin until 1963 and will then quote the most-over quoted poem in history to support their case, we can safely stick to the facts. Things are changing. Food, for instance. Mum has ditched the cold mutton and the sponge desserts that no one liked. She’s discovered ‘le continent ’: Constance Spry is being elbowed off the shelf by Elizabeth David. We’ve met a family called Johnson, who live in Bradfield, where the father teaches Geography. The glamorous mother is called Eliane, she’s from Belgium, and she passes on some culinary tips. Out goes the salad cream, never to return. Meanwhile in the medicine cabinet the tiny bottle of olive oil, purchased every two or three years from Hickman’s the chemist to be trickled into an inflamed ear, receives a surprise call-up. It’s now to be dribbled, drop by drop, into beaten raw eggs to make something called mayonnaise. We’ve previously had offal because it was cheap (pig’s liver was powerful; heart − not sure which animal it
came from − was chewy); but now Mum is serving up mild sweetbreads and kidneys in rich sauces with rice, cooked not in pans but in coloured ‘casserole dishes’ bought in London. The dining room has acquired a rug from a shop called Casa Pupo. Blimey. The old roast beef, my favourite, is still pink inside but the gravy is enriched with homemade wine. The vegetable garden, of which Dad is now in sole charge, produces waxy new potatoes flecked with mint, mountains of soft broad beans, tiny fresh courgettes fried in butter (marrow is out) and fistfuls of baby carrots. These vegetables complement the new cuisine as efficiently as they rescued the old. The fruit cages, Mum’s domain, are engaged in a constant battle with ‘those blasted birds’, but still produce more than we can eat in the summer, with the remaining raspberries and blackcurrants being bottled.
The sun has come out. We still don’t have any money (nobody does) but it seems that somehow we can afford a Hornby Dublo train set. It’s only a small circle, but it’s so well made that Berkshire’s most ham- fisted family can fit it together. It has a little green locomotive, two open wagons and a guard’s van. There’s a hefty transformer with a dial that can make it go faster or slower or backwards. On Christmas Day, I sit on the floor entranced while the train goes round and round and round.
Our house is not as big as it had seemed to me as a toddler. There are three bedrooms − ours, our parents’ and the spare room at the top of the staircase. The bathroom doubles as an Olympic swimming pool, where we work
on tumble-turns while impersonating the Scottish swimmer Ian Black. During the 1960 Olympics, we discover that the fifty-kilometre walker Don Thompson trained in his own bathroom with kettles and heaters blasting steam to prepare him for the heat of Rome, where he wins the gold medal with a hanky tucked beneath his cap and hanging down his neck. I find it useful to dress this way when fast-walking to the shop, commentating on my progress up the village street, now the Appian Way.
So the house is quite compact − though there’s a door we aren’t allowed to open, beyond which lives a ‘tenant’, whose weekly rent is recorded in a threepenny notebook. For a long time it’s a bachelor called Mr Buchanan, who has a built-up shoe, which makes a clunking echo as he walks about above our kitchen. ‘Uh-oh,’ says Mrs Taylor, ‘Mr Bowman’s coming through the roof.’ The best tenants, though, are the last.
On his return from work in the summer, Dad has barely had time for a glass of milk before he’s required to bowl to Edward and me on the lawn. Although he is still in his early forties, he’s already stopped playing cricket regularly after a couple of seasons as captain of Newbury. He finds the bowling of an eight- over spell every evening a bit more than he fancies, and it’s a great day when he asks the new tenant, a young man called John Kemp, if he fancies a trundle. I wouldn’t say Mr Kemp has Dad’s guile or variation of pace, but he’s willing to put it there or thereabouts in his Bri- nylon
shirt. Edward’s strong bottom- hand is severe on anything in the leg stump area, but Mr Kemp gamely sends down another over of gentle outswing, keeping his wife, Shirley, waiting with his tea.
The decade-defining change is dramatically clear when it comes to holidays. A week by the icy sea at Bexhill in 1956 was no one’s idea of fun. The Isle of Wight was a step up, with better ice cream (Eldorado, not Wall’s) and slip practice with a tennis ball on the beach − ‘What a catch! Oh no! He’s put him down!’ − but the sea itself, in sight of the container port at Portsmouth . . . Thick sweaters, thermos flasks and running on the spot were essential after the briefest dip. You should never ask a lady why she isn’t swimming, we’d been told; and whatever that reason may have been, it got Mum off the hook for the full fortnight as she sheltered from the north-east wind behind a sea wall.
Then in 1961, when I was eight, something momentous was announced: a visit to France. Dad’s elder brother, Uncle Neville, was behind it. He’d booked several rooms in a boarding house called Le Beau Séjour in Deauville, a seaside resort in Normandy, purpose-built in the 1890s. All I knew of ‘France’ was what I’d learned at Greenwood, where I’d drawn coloured pictures of Madame Souris, Mrs Mouse, a busy little housekeeper. I’d also been to Reading with my mother to see Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday at the cinema. There were two picture- houses in Newbury, the Regal and the Forum, but Mum liked to go to Reading (lunch of liver and bacon in the Oasis café first)
because it was there, in 1948, when she had been working for Elizabeth Arden, that she first met my father. The smoky old brick town with its cloying smell of malt from the Courage brewery, so unlovely to everyone else, had happy memories for her.
Monsieur Hulot could hardly have been a better preparation for the Beau Séjour. There was a sandy tennis court nearby, a shaded terrace garden and a short walk to the beach. The bathrooms had little basins called ‘bidets’ that were the source of inexhaustible amusement to the grown-ups. The doors from the hall into the dining room were glass-panelled with half net curtains; a swing door led into the kitchen from which came the plat du jour borne in by white-coated waiters. Round the room were respectable French couples, the level of whose wine bottle was marked off on the label with a coloured pencil at the end of dinner. Lapdogs were fed by their owners with morsels of cheese at table.
Edward and I were allowed to sit at our own table for two, which made us feel grand, though my fear of what might issue from the kitchen was intense. It turned out to be all right − then better than that. There was usually some sort of green soup that held no horrors; the main course was free of mutton fat or fish bones; and for pudding there were things we had never had before − fresh peaches, bunches of grapes and Petit Suisse, a small cylinder of soft cheese in a thin cream sauce.
