My grandfather’s work in Parliament, making laws, seemed to me very august and remote from our own lives, but at other times and places we had a real part to play. In his capacity as First Commissioner of Works Grandad often had to attend ceremonial engagements. As these tended to be a bit solemn he liked to bring along a grandchild to lighten the proceedings and do small tasks, like cutting tapes.
I had the honour of assisting him at the opening of Lansbury’s Lido, a section of the Serpentine lake in Hyde Park which he had had adapted for the people of London to swim in. On this occasion I became a shade over-excited and inaugurated the swimming season myself by falling in, a gesture which was much appreciated by the onlookers, less so by my mother who had to borrow a towel from the changing-rooms to dry me.
By far the most alarming thing that had ever happened in my short life took place by accident on May Day in, I guess, 1931. There was, as always, a great rally in Hyde Park, at which, as always, George gave one of his huge rousing speeches that was received rapturously by an enthusiastic, loving crowd. At some point, after he had finished speaking and was leaving, I became separated from the party. The situation was that Daisy and Grandad were in a taxi with the windows open and I was on the grass about twenty feet away from them. This would have been no problem if I hadn’t been stuck in the middle of a solid cheering crowd that was mobbing the taxi to shake his hand. The crowd was shouting: ‘Good Old George!’ George was shouting: ‘Thank you, Brothers and Sisters!’ and: ‘Keep up the good work!’ My mother was shouting: ‘That’s my son over there!’ and I was shouting: ‘Help!’ I was only at waist-height in a tight press of people that was moving as a single cheering mass, carrying me with it. I had to hang on to the arm of the man beside me to save myself from going under and being trampled.
By pure good luck the man saw me and caught my mother’s eye. In an instant I was lifted bodily into the air and passed from hand to hand like a long parcel over the heads of the cheering crowd, to be posted head-first in through the window of the taxi, amid laughter and cheers of relief from the crowd, and tears of fury from my mother.
IV. The Green Bench.
As I was looking at these memories my feet had taken me away from the house in Hendon and along old familiar streets to what Ray had called ‘the Recreation Ground’, a small park about a quarter of a mile away.
I sat on a particular green bench in the top corner of the park and looked around. The view from it was no more inspiring than the sight of the house had been – I saw a small, fairly drab area of worn grass divided by smooth paths and clumps of blackishlooking trees.
So this was the wide space where John and I and our friends used to play. We played football with coats for goalposts, rounders or one-ended hit-and-run cricket. We had quite big teams, so we must have played with other boys as well but, apart from Russell Wright and Jimmy Thwaites and Kenneth Collins, I couldn’t bring any of them to mind. I do know one thing for certain – we never played with girls!
Girls, I remembered, were different. John and I had girl cousins and of course we treated these more or less as people, but girls as a race were creatures apart, strange and unpredictable – as I had already found out.
When I was quite young, about four or five, there had lived, in the house opposite, a golden curly-haired Shirley Temple called, I think, Desire´e. One day she expressed a desire to have me over to play with. So, through the good offices of go-betweens (their maid and ours), I was duly procured, brushed down and delivered into her amazingly pink and frilly house. There seemed to be nobody else there. I remember myself as being dumb with embarrassment. Desire´e may also have been embarrassed, but she was voluble. Her discourse was a continuous paean of elaborate self-praise, punctuated with prods and interspersed with small items of scorn about me. I believe at one point she proposed an activity which at the time struck me as being a bit rude. I didn’t cooperate and quite soon, when grown-ups reappeared, she had me sent home for being, in some serious but unspecified way, naughty. I was deeply ashamed but very, very relieved to get away. We never spoke again.
I don’t think I minded about that. Her paths were not mine. John and I now had important projects that she probably wouldn’t have enjoyed – like damming the River Brent. This was no more than a broad, shallow brook, with a bed of black slime-covered things, some of which were stones. Wearing shiny Wellington boots we dislodged these and used them for building dams and diversions, a fascinating task which we did well and enjoyed a lot, even though we often got into trouble for coming home smelly. But for me, personally, the main attraction of the River Brent was that it was edged with patches of untamed jungle, lost land which had been left by the developers and had gone to waste.
Here the terrain was generally steep, with scrubby trees and bushes, bramble patches and rocks of broken concrete. In places there were branches to swing on and small smelly waterfalls that glugged out of the ends of pipes and flowed down muddy gorges to the brook below. But there were also precipitous paths that led to dark leafy bowers where, in summer, one could sense stillness, feel oneself far from civilization and even hope to see a rabbit. These sylvan glades, so near to home but so different, were awesome and full of magic.
Sitting there on the bench, I wondered what sort of boys we were. Were we wild? No, I think we were pretty tame. We didn’t scratch the paint of the cars or let down the tyres or break off the wipers. We didn’t steal, we didn’t break-and-enter, didn’t mug old ladies.
We went to the Saturday-morning cinema, of course, and at home we could sometimes be quiet. There was no such thing as television to watch or home computers to play with, but we did listen to the wireless and we played games, cards, board games, paper games, or made models with Meccano. We also read books, Alice in Wonderland, The Wind in the Willows, The Midnight Folk, The Amulet, etc., but these were not as essential to our lives as the comics and adventure weeklies – like The Wizard and Hotspur – which my father called ‘penny dreadfuls’ and deplored. So if necessary we had to read these under the bed-covers, by torchlight.
As the years passed John and I gradually became larger, louder, more enterprising and more of a nuisance. This was made worse by the fact that we didn’t really get on.
After some initial reluctance he had become, with reservations, reconciled to the fact of my existence and was even willing to use me, occasionally, as a menial accomplice, but not as a companion.
I was untiring in my efforts to procure his acceptance and approval, while he was not only determined not to give it himself but was also anxious to prevent my getting any from anybody else.
In our dealings with grown-ups John and I were strictly in competition and loudly jealous of what we thought were our rights. I also remember spending a lot of time whining at whoever was there, trying to get them to make John play with me, while John was probably whining at them to get me off his back. The rest of the time we spent noisily bickering.
I have the feeling that ‘they’ – Elsie, Amy, Peggy, even Daisy – came to see the pair of us as a single agglomeration of squabble, nuisance and overcrowding, and became thoroughly fed up with it. So it must have been a great relief, if the weather was reasonable, to be able to send us to play in the Recreation Ground.
As to our characters, what John and I were like personally, there is a better reference than my cloudy memory. In about 1934 Ray wrote a novel called No Epitaph, which was, as he admitted, largely autobiographical. Included in it were thumbnail sketches of the hero’s two sons, James and Richard. He wrote:
… They were good-looking children, in fact