It wasn’t long before the conductor noticed one of his piles of tickets was missing and there was a great hullabaloo. He made the driver stop the bus and everyone was asked to look on the floor at their feet to see if they could find the lost tickets. I pretended to look along with everyone else, chuckling to myself about the loot in my pocket. Of course, the tickets weren’t found and the bus continued on its way.
When we got to the Sorrels’ house, a pretty old cottage in its own grounds on the edge of a small village, I took off my coat and threw it on a chair. The movement must have jiggled the pack of bus tickets because Dennis suddenly spotted them poking out.
‘Here, Terry! What’s this all about then?’ he asked, pulling them out.
I thought he would think it was a good laugh and would share in the joke with me, but instead, to my horror, he shouted for Mrs Sorrel.
‘Look at this! Our Terry’s been thieving,’ he shouted. ‘He’s got the bus tickets.’
She came out of the kitchen and looked at me sadly. ‘Oh, Terence, how could you? We’ll have to take these back to the bus station tomorrow and apologize. What were you thinking?’
I braced myself for a punishment of some kind but it didn’t happen. She just seemed really disappointed in me and that made me ashamed. I hadn’t thought I was doing any harm, but Mrs Sorrel said that stealing is stealing no matter whether it’s a gold sovereign or a halfpenny piece. I was upset that she had a bad opinion of me from the very first day I arrived there. It wasn’t a good start.
I was furious with Dennis for ratting on me as well, and later on we had a scrap in the garden when I called him a dirty rat and a bloody tell-tale and a traitor. We quite often scrapped, in the way that brothers do, wrestling each other to the ground and giving dead arms and legs, but we never really hurt each other. Dennis was much stronger than me and he’d pin me down on the ground so I couldn’t fight any more and that’s usually how it ended.
The Sorrels had a great garden for kids to play in. An overgrown path led down to an old brick toilet and then there was a brass bedstead sticking out of the boundary hedge, which Mr Sorrel said helped to keep the foxes out. And best of all, just across a field there was an old aerodrome and we could watch the planes taking off and landing, which was very exciting for three young boys. One of the pilots from the base sometimes came over to the Sorrels’ for his tea and Dennis and I used to ply him with questions about how many bombs he had dropped and what it was like being chased through the skies by enemy planes.
Dennis and I slept in an attic room in the cottage, and we had to climb a ladder to go to bed at night, which was an adventure for lads our age. On bath nights, Mrs Sorrel put an old tin bath in front of the open fire and then heated a big cauldron over the flames to get hot water. Freddie would have his bath first, then me, and then Dennis, but between each of us she topped up the bath with hot water from the cauldron. No one had ever been so kind to me in my life up to that date. I’d lie back in the steaming water thinking ‘This is the life!’
During the week, Dennis went to a village school that was just across the road from the cottage but I didn’t start there, despite the fact I was almost six. I don’t know why. During the day, I just played out in the garden with Freddie and sometimes we helped Mr Sorrel to tend his vegetables. There was a lake nearby with swans on it so we might go to look at them. On Sundays we all attended the local church, which was the first time I’d been to church in my life. I found it a bit boring and was always being reprimanded for fidgeting during the sermon. The priest used big words and I could never understand what he was talking about so it was hard to sit still.
I was pretty happy there with the Sorrels. They were nice people, salt of the earth you might say, but I think they found three energetic boys a bit of a handful. I was already getting a reputation for being the naughty one of the three, although I don’t think I was naughty so much as restless when I got bored. I do remember that I was always being told off for using colourful language, which I had picked up from my dad and my older brothers back at home. Everyone swore in Bolt Street; that’s just the way they talked.
Anyway, come the New Year of 1941, a welfare officer arrived and told us we were moving on again and that we would be picked up on the 6th to go to our next home. It seemed we had only just arrived and started to get settled, and that was my main objection to the move. Although the Sorrels had been nice, I hadn’t had time in the three months to become attached to either of them. I just thought it would have been better if we could have put down roots somewhere instead of being always in temporary places. But it wasn’t up to me. That much was clear already. I just had to do as I was told and go wherever the council took me.
A man from Newport Council came to pick us up and take us to our next home, in the village of Yarpole near Leominster. After we got off the bus, we had to follow him on foot along some very narrow lanes, where frost sparkled on the tarmac and our breath misted the air. The last part of the walk was uphill and Freddie, who was still only three, kept falling behind so we had to shout at him to hurry up.
At last we reached a big black and white house surrounded by railings and set back in huge gardens. The council man opened a tall metal gate and led us up a long crazy-paving path to a huge wooden front door. He lifted the door knocker and knocked with a loud clattering sound and shortly afterwards a maid in a black dress with a white apron opened the door.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell the lady of the house that you’ve arrived.’
Dennis and I stared at each other, mouths wide open. The hall was oak-panelled with paintings hung on the walls and the highest ceilings I’d ever seen. An oak staircase lined with more pictures curled up to the next floor.
The maid reappeared and ushered us through a door into a living room that was bigger than our entire flat in Bolt Street. A posh lady with lots of wavy silver hair and smart clothes was standing by the fireplace looking at us.
‘This is Mrs Connop,’ the council man told us; then he introduced us to her one by one. We didn’t say anything, still too much in awe of the grand surroundings. To us, it was like somewhere a king and queen might live. All it lacked was a throne.
‘Go and wait outside in the hall, boys, while Mrs Connop and I have a talk,’ he told us.
We turned and trouped back out to the hall obediently.
‘Are we really going to stay here?’ I whispered to Dennis. ‘It’s like a castle or something.’
‘Looks that way,’ he replied.
‘This is far better than the Sorrels. We’ve landed on our feet this time,’ I said, gazing round.
Dennis shrugged. ‘If things don’t change, they’ll stay as they are,’ he said mysteriously, and I thought it sounded like an impossibly clever thing to say.
We could hear voices inside the sitting room but couldn’t make out what they were saying. I wasn’t tempted to put my ear against the door though. I’d already got used to the fact that grown-ups we barely knew made all the decisions about where we stayed and who looked after us. It wasn’t up to us. We just had to go with the flow and do what they told us to.
After a while, the council man popped his head out. ‘Come on in, boys,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m delighted to say that Mrs Connop has agreed that you can come and live here. This is your new home. Say thank you to her.’
‘Thank you,’ we all mumbled.
‘Now you have to promise that you will