It gave me a horrible fright, though. When I lay in bed later that night, I had visions of his little face disappearing under the murky water, only his hands still waving in the air. At breakfast the next morning, I looked at his blond hair and baby features and shuddered to think that he could have been dead. Freddie seemed to have forgotten all about it but those moments when he lay unconscious on the bank were lodged in my memory forever. They introduced a touch of something dark and menacing into the otherwise perfect boys’-own summer on the farm.
It’s fair to say I was no angel as a young lad. I think I had a natural curiosity about the world that got me into trouble. I also had sticky fingers when it came to things I was interested in, and that’s another quality that tended to get me into scrapes.
There was a music room in a Portakabin behind the school where they kept lots of instruments for the school band: drums, cymbals, triangles and so forth. Although I wasn’t particularly musical, I took a fancy to these instruments and started taking them home with me, one by one. A drum was first. Once I’d successfully sneaked it out of the school, I was quite brazen about it, banging it loudly all the way back to the Connops’.
‘The nuns said I could have it,’ I lied to Mrs Connop, and she took my word for it and didn’t question me any further.
Next I took the triangle, and again said that the nuns had given me permission. It wasn’t until I had virtually the whole instrument collection in my bedroom that Mrs Connop thought to contact the school, who told her that I hadn’t been given permission to take them at all and that, in fact, they’d been on the point of calling in the police to investigate their disappearance. I had to return them and I got a double punishment because the nuns gave me a rap on the knuckles with a ruler for being a thief, and Mrs Connop gave me a whacking with a stick broken from an apple tree for lying to her.
It wasn’t the only time I was caught pilfering at school. The teachers used to keep a supply of sweets in a cupboard to reward children who had been especially good during the day. I would sneak in at dinnertime and help myself to them, and I got away with it for quite some time before I was caught. It seemed to me that crime paid because all those sweets I’d had were well worth the single rap on the knuckles I received.
Mrs Connop’s punishments were a bit more uncomfortable. I had to bend over and take six of the best on my backside, briskly delivered with a bendy stick, and I wasn’t keen on that at all. I’d try to run away but she’d always catch up with me in the end. You couldn’t win. Once, she bent me over one of the sacks of flour in the scullery where her bread ovens were kept and started whacking me. I saw a mouse inside the sack and reached in to grab it, thinking I’d use it to scare her. All women were scared of mice, weren’t they? I got my comeuppance, though, because the mouse bit me on the finger and I still got the whacking as well.
I don’t think I ever got away with anything at the house. When Mrs Connop found that someone had been up to mischief, she’d call us into the room and demand to know who it was. Although all three of us would protest our innocence, I had an annoying habit of blushing so she would assume it was me, whether it was or not. Either that or Dennis would tell tales on me. I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he thought she would like him better if he kept in her good books by sucking up to her.
Every morning, Mr Connop would knock to waken us for school and we were supposed to get up and wash then dress ourselves before going down for breakfast. One morning it was bitterly cold and I decided to get dressed sitting in bed, with my feet still under the covers to keep them warm. To me it was a clever plan and I couldn’t see any harm in it. However, when we got downstairs, Dennis decided to tell Mrs Connop – ‘Terry got dressed in his bed, under the covers’ – and she went berserk. She grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and started dragging me into the scullery, where she kept a stick ready for beating me.
‘You little so-and-so,’ she yelled. ‘Why is it always you who has to break the rules? Why can’t you be a good boy like your brothers?’
At that point I struggled and managed to break free. I ran out the back door and down the path, with Mrs Connop in hot pursuit.
‘Come back right now!’ she yelled.
‘No, I won’t, ’cos you’re going to hit me,’ I shouted back.
‘I promise I won’t hit you,’ she said, so I stopped and walked back towards her, but as soon as I was within reach she grabbed me by the collar and frogmarched me up to the house, giving me an earbashing about how there was a right way to do things and a wrong way. I still couldn’t understand why it was such a huge crime to get dressed in bed on a cold morning, but she was a very strict, formal type of a person who liked everything done properly.
Sometimes I knew I was definitely in the wrong and on those occasions I’d take my punishment without complaint. Once I found a shotgun out in the barn, and for a laugh I picked it up and pointed it at Dennis and Freddie, threatening to shoot them. Just at that moment, a big black crow flew past and I turned to aim at it instead, which was just as well because the shotgun suddenly went off with a huge explosion that knocked me backwards onto the ground. People came running from all directions and I got royally whacked for that stunt. I hardly felt my punishment, though. I was still in too much shock about the fact that I could have killed one of my brothers if it had gone off a few seconds earlier. My ears were ringing from the blast for the rest of the day.
We didn’t hear much about the bombing raids that were flattening British cities that year, but we were regularly warned that if we saw something that looked like an abandoned toy lying on the ground we should give it a wide berth and run and tell a grown-up. There was a pris-oner-of-war camp near where we lived, and there was some talk that prisoners might escape and plant boobytrapped toys where unsuspecting children would pick them up. I remember being told about this over and over again, but it went clean out of my head the day I saw a shiny red and silver model aeroplane in a hole in a drystone wall. I was over the moon as I pulled it out and whizzed it up and down through the air making plane engine noises all the way home.
‘Look what I found!’ I beamed at Mrs Connop as I walked in the door, holding out my prize.
‘You stupid boy!’ she yelled, grabbing it from me. ‘Do you never listen to anything you’re told? How many warnings do you need?’
My mouth fell open. Could it have been a trap planted by a prisoner of war? The thought of the danger I could have been in was chilling, but strangely exciting as well.
When my seventh birthday came round in December 1941, I was hoping that maybe Mrs Connop would buy me a nice shiny plane of my own, but she made a curious announcement one evening.
‘Your birthday is too close to Christmas,’ she told me, ‘so we’re going to move it. Your new birthday will be on February the third. Dennis’s is in March and Freddie’s is in April, so it makes sense to have them one after the other like that.’
I protested that I’d rather have my birthday sooner than later, but her mind was made up and that was that. I’d have to wait a couple of months to turn seven.
As Christmas approached, we started to get excited about it. We’d never really had a proper Christmas before, although the one on the ward at St Woolos hospital had been nice enough. Mrs Connop and Ginger put up a big Christmas tree in the hall and decorated it with ornaments brought down from the attic. The ones that I was most interested in were little parcels, neatly wrapped up in shiny paper, which hung all over the branches. Every time I walked past I tapped one of them, trying to work out what might be inside and whether any of them might be for me.
The Connops’ older children, Michael, John and Olga, came home on leave and Dennis and I pestered them to tell us stories of bombing raids over German army bases, and the Battle of Britain, and what it was really like to pilot a Spitfire. They