*I didn’t actually find out Aunt Bill’s name until I was 18 and even now I’m not sure if it was Peggy or Vivian or both.
In later life, my mother reverted to ‘Kate’, but my aunt stayed Bill until she died. One of my daughters saw them walk past the window, tarted up for a night out and well past their use-by date, and said, ‘Oh look, there goes Bait and Kill.’
Not perfectly identical to the trained eye. One had God. One had Gin.
See if you can tell which is which and guess which one I got.
1953 – I USED TO BE WILLMENT
My father’s name was Edward Alfred Willment. So when I was born I was Colin Edward Willment, but when I was eleven my mother re-married. I’m not sure why. She proved to be a rubbish judge of character. She found my stepfather, Claude Baines Thompson, in the back of the cupboard under the stairs behind the old gasmasks and the buckets of eggs in isinglass and huge black-market tins of ham that that used to appear from time to time – food rationing didn’t end in England until 1954. So Claude Baines was removed from the cupboard, dusted down, fitted with new leather patches on his elbows and became my stepfather.
I had to sign a piece of paper saying I agreed to be adopted. I was eleven, what the hell did I know and besides I was bribed with a brand new wristwatch. So I became Colin Edward Thompson.
When I was fourteen, I told myself I would change my name back when I was old enough, but I never did. Sometimes, I still wish I had.
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE
Colin Edward Willment – aged 11
Colin Edward Thompson – aged 11
(with added wristwatch)
FITTING IN – PART 23.7
I hate uniforms.
I know you need them in certain professions. You need to be able to find a policeman or a nurse when you need one. You need to know if the person trying to kill you is officially allowed to.
So why do we need them when we are little school children?
‘Oh well, darling,’ my mother said, ‘it’s so the poor children can look the same as the rest of us.’
Really mother? But, I don’t think there are any poor children at my school.
We all know the truth, don’t we?
School uniforms are to do exactly what they say – to make you uniform. Not to help the poor. That would be a first, wouldn’t it mummy, apart from the money you put in your SPC* missionary box each week so patronising middle-
class bastards can go round the world ‘rescuing’ the poor ignorant savages with bibles, cigarettes, alcohol and guilt?
School uniforms are the first step on the ladder to make you fit in so you will grow up not rocking the boat.
And the poor children don’t look the same as us because they haven’t got posh school uniforms from Harrods like we had at boarding school. They’ve got clothes made out of nylon and they haven’t got lovely embroidered Cash’s Name Labels sewn into their anoraks have they? But then, they wouldn’t be much use to them would they, because they probably can’t read anyway.
‘But thank you mummy for explaining everything.’
*The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. I actually had a great love for this missionary box and became quite an expert at getting money out of it with a kitchen knife. I think my mother probably never knew because she didn’t empty it. She just handed it over to ‘Vicar’ who gave her a fresh one to fill up.
At Ealing Grammar School for Boys, it was uniforms from day one and not just in school. If you were caught not wearing your school cap on the way to or from school on school days, the first time it was written down in a book. The second time, you were suspended for a week and the third time you were expelled. I don’t remember anyone ever actually being expelled, but I did get the week’s free holiday.
I had decided to go to art school when I was sixteen, which as far as Ealing Grammar School for Boys was concerned was the equivalent of becoming a professional criminal or a tramp. Had I decided to be an alcoholic or a paedophile, that would definitely have been far more acceptable.
And here are some nice Christians from our local Youth Club, trying on their
Going-to-Tropical-Climes uniforms before going off to save Johnny Foreigner.
My friend Keith and I were both going to Ealing Art School and on the last day of term we took a bottle of petrol and a box of matches to school and on the green in front of the school, we made a small pile of our jackets, caps and ties, anointed them with petrol and set them on fire.
Some smaller boys cheered. Some sixth-formers said they weren’t surprised and suggested we should probably kill ourselves there and then, because how could our lives go anywhere but downhill.
And then, to crown off a perfect day, a teacher came running out of the school with a fire-extinguisher and shouted at the top of his voice about how much trouble we were in.
‘But, we don’t go to your school any more,’ we said, threw our satchels onto the fire – I took my good fountain pen out first – gave him the appropriate hand signals with both hands and ran away.
They wrote to my mother, who told me I had wasted a perfectly good jacket.
I suppose she was right. I could have given it to one of those poor children she’d been telling me about.
FRINTON-ON-SEA
Even the name sounds like a hundred years ago. I haven’t been to Frinton-on-Sea since I was a little boy, I hope it hasn’t changed much.
Every year my grandfather rented a house at Frinton for the summer and my mother, grandmother and I and stayed there for about six weeks. My grandfather came down at weekends. Aunts, uncles and cousins came down for occasional weeks. My cat Tigger came with us one year and showed his deep devotion to me in the way only cats can. He scratched my legs and ran away. We found him a week later, fat and content in a genteel teashop full of cream cake. He celebrated his return to the bosom of our family by scratching my legs.
The house we rented came with one of the beach huts in the photo. I think ours was the middle one because I remember the veranda had the gate in the middle. There were deckchairs and a little stove to boil the kettle and to this day if I smell burning methylated spirits it takes me right back to Frinton and the home-knitted swimming costume made of string that sagged below your knees when it got wet, which it did when the adults sent us down to the sea with our shrimping nets. There were never any shrimps. The only thing my cousins and I ever caught were colds.
Here I am in my gorgeous home-knitted swimming costume and rakish sun hat in the back garden at Frinton-on-Sea.
Rumour has it that when we went back to London, at the end of each summer, I left quite a few broken hearts behind.
This