As I descended the escalator to the Bakerloo line, the swim suit – or bathing costume, as we used to call it – ads seemed unusually provocative. Those lithe, blonde and suggestively sleazy girls, thrusting forth their delectable crotches, must have unnerved many a man, but such is the hold of our puritanism that only on one occasion have I seen anyone give vent to his natural impulses, and that late at night, when a squat bowler-hatted man emerged from the train to the foot of the stairs, placed his hat and umbrella in his left hand, and with his right unzipped his flies, and lying across the moving rubber banister, wanked his way from poster to poster, reaching a sudden, ecstatic if silent climax some ten yards from the top, which he directed precisely and methodically into his bowler hat. He was arrested at the ticket barrier.
My new-discovered mood, the empty train (curiously there is nothing more liberating, more likely to give a sense of well-being and contentment, than an empty compartment rattling its way through the depths of London at midday), turned my thoughts to David and, because they are inextricably linked, my childhood.
It haunts me with an exaggerated nostalgia. The years since lack that sharp clarity of focus with which I can still evoke places, colours, feelings, fantasies, new pleasures, the secrecy of a child’s world of cowboys and Indians, camps in the ferns, identities assumed. Whether that sense of extremes that I recall at thirty-five is illusory I no longer know, but wartime summers stretched on into double summertime and winters seem crisp with snow and sledges. I discovered the dark thrill of the cinema and the names and faces of the stars, the impossible celluloid girls that I still yearn for, woven now into a thread of unrealisable fantasies that pulls at today’s experience with a tug of disappointment or permanent regret. And David shared that with me; for we grew up in the same town.
Trowbridge Spa marked its growth across the years in a crablike movement north. Some time at the turn of the nineteenth century some passing nobleman discovered a spring five miles outside the Norman town of Trowbridge in Kent, and the spa became a popular health resort. The water is sharp, cold with a tang of iron. The well still exists, though the old woman who sells it at a penny a glass is far removed from the fashionable Regency circles who once flocked there, and only a small cluster of elegantly proportioned shops and houses bear testimony to their past existence. By 1940 when I first arrived, an evacuee from the blitz, the town sprawled in different architectural shock waves out from the nucleus of the spa, up the hill in early Victorian, along the straight in late Victorian and finally merged with lush Kent countryside in a scattering of thirties speculative. To the east it was fringed by a common of coarse grass and fern, bracken, a profusion of trees, and an exotic outburst of sandstone rocks, carved by generations of lovers and trippers, their names and pledges worn away by wind and rain and the feet of a thousand children. For me, this seemingly endless stretch of common land with its names – Devil’s Dyke, Donkey Stand, High Rocks, the Sandpit – provided the location for a million dreams and celluloid games, where the fearless bandits George and Dave lurked and plotted, the two steely-eyed sheriffs patrolled, the twin fighter pilots purged the sky of the sun. There was little that could not be righted or frighted by us terrible two.
Children have a great sense of the hierarchy of age and my one slender year of seniority conferred on me all sorts of privileges of leadership. It was assumed that David should play Will Scarlet to my Robin Hood, Ginger to my Just William, deputy to my sheriff. That one year seemed to make an enormous difference to us. It separated us at school, even at Sunday school, and later sent me in new cap and blazer to the grammar school while he remained with the infants. But education wasn’t the real business of living and it was after school hours, or in the seemingly endless summer holidays, that our relationship developed, when the games took over and we made flesh and blood the heroes of our books and comics, while above us in the skies planes first etched out their battles in tracer shells and then gave way to the spluttering engines of the doodlebug.
To us the war seemed only an extension of our games, its menace only glimpsed on the trembling knees of parents in air raid shelters when it was said that incendiary bombs were falling on the town like fireworks. The next day brought the thrill of searching for shrapnel in craters, for cartridge cases, unused shells. Later the war brought American soldiers who ran off with our girls, it was said, and showered us with gum and candy from their jeeps. It brought glimpses of the enemy too, cheerful Italian prisoners of war in green uniforms who waved at us and whistled from their trucks.
And then the radio announced it was all over and there were Union Jacks and bunting and fireworks and bonfires on which Hitler was burnt as the guy. And a strange man who turned out to be my father came home, and David’s father arrived having spent forty-eight hours in the Mediterranean on a plank. But after their leave was over and the uniforms put away, they went back to their jobs and found the same old drudgery. The promises of the ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ had a hollow ring.
But for us there were pantomimes at Christmas, and the principal girl to love, and the radio comics and the catch phrases and the dreadful empty songs and the cinema and Esther Williams and Sonja Henie and Humphrey Bogart and Gene Kelly and …
Need I go on? Those drab, grey, heartbreaking, defeated years are forever touched with the romance of childhood.
When I was twelve the family moved back to London. It was after all our original place of domicile, and it was only Hitler who had sent us scurrying to the sticks, though there was no doubt in my mother’s mind that it was a temporary arrangement and as if to prove it, throughout four years of global warfare and three years of ensuing peace, the front room carpet was turned upside down, its pink fern-like pattern to the floor. She was waiting for a home of her own where the full rosy glory of the Wilton could be displayed; to her way of thinking the two rooms that we occupied in Trowbridge Spa did not qualify for that status. My mother incidentally is an interesting woman, but since she is not particularly central to this story (do I hear the Freudians chortle? All right, in a narrative sense) I intend only to allude to her from time to time whenever for the sake of historical authenticity it is necessary. But home being where the heart is for those who don’t have the financial wherewithal for a mortgage, we were dependent on the good if bureaucratic offices of the Lewisham Borough Council, as it then was, for accommodation, and lists being lists and long with it, and bomb damage being somewhat extensive in the metropolis, it took three more years of agitation on my determined mother’s part, and three years of desperation on my father’s, who worked in a factory in Shoreditch, sleeping in dusty lodgings during the week, and three years of reprieve for me, already advancing up the ladder of success and now attending the local grammar school, before an enormous pantechnicon, larger by far than anything we had ever lived in or were likely to, engulfed our few bits of protected and polished furniture and deposited them on the pavements of Sydenham. To those familiar with the geography of London, it would be superfluous to point out that Sydenham is almost as far removed from Shoreditch as it is possible to be and necessitated my father getting out of his bed, wherein he had slumped the night before, unconscious after overtime, at the hell-ridden hour of five-thirty; it is also many bus journeys away from the nearest school and, as far as my young vision could take in, practically everything else. Nevertheless we had a home and a bathroom for the first time in our lives and we were no longer classed as provincials.
The greatest loss for me was David. I was now in a large sprawling and incomprehensible city, at a hateful new school and without my closest friend. We wrote letters and looked forward to the holidays, but letters never reflect the real unstated nuances of relationships; rather they add a self-conscious element, the role of letter writer obtrudes, and as two boys who had entered the trap of prestige education, our words soon echoed the pretentiousness of misspelt French and schoolboy Latin. A new rivalry emerged and when we met again almost a year later it was this rivalry that created the context of our relationship. We faced each other like contenders, cagey, weighing the other up behind awkward smiles.
David had grown too and was now three inches at least taller than me. His voice had broken or was in the process of breaking and would make sudden violent and unpredictable shifts from basso profundo to strangled squeak. I still felt a boy and the privilege of that one year’s seniority seemed fraudulent in a soprano. At the swimming bath changing rooms that solid meaty and hairy thing