A Young Man's Passage Read online

  There are two daughter schools of Downside which might be worth your visiting, as they would both be relatively easy to get to from Surbiton. One is Worth, which used to be a preparatory school for Downside when I taught there, but which is now building up its own public school – it is in the most lovely setting and Downside sent the cream of its community to form the staff there. Three Bridges on the London–Brighton line is the nearest station, about four miles away. The other is Ealing Abbey, which was also founded and staffed by Downside and is, of course, very much cheaper, as it is a day school.

  I do hope you are all managing to keep warm in this fantastic winter—

  Bless you all always—

  Yours affectionately

  Fr Julian Stoner

  Whatever the letter from my mother to Father Julian had said about my potential, I wasn’t very bright. In fact, there was some suspicion that I was backward. (I gather ‘backward’ is a bit like being ‘slow’, as if we are all clocks on the wall.) Reading and writing were difficult for me: for several years I could only manage mirror-writing.

  Arundel House was rather posh and costly and after a while the fees were too much, I think, and let’s face it, I was hardly the star pupil. I was moved to St Joseph’s in Kingston, which was a bit rougher.

  I remember putting my hand up once and asking the teacher if I could go to the toilet. As several other children in the class had already been she got fed up, thought I was being cheeky and said no. It was a rather urgent number two so I asked again but was snapped at and told to be quiet.

  I remember that stool with great clarity. Despite my best efforts to restrain it, it forced its way out to the semi daylight of my grey school shorts like a beaver emerging from its burrow. It sat in my shorts, steaming like an angry dragon, until the offensive odour alerted my classmates.

  ‘Miss! Julian Clary’s pooed himself!’

  I was hauled out of the classroom, mortified but self-righteous – ‘I told you I needed to go!’ – and cleaned up.

  My soiled pants were spirited away and I was told to put on another pair. They were huge and so near the end of their pant life – no elastic, several holes – they were just about ready to be used as a dishcloth.

  FOR HOLIDAYS WE’D go to St Ives in Cornwall, or to visit my grandparents in Norfolk, or to the Isle of Wight where my father’s sister, Aunty Doreen, and her husband, Uncle Bob, owned a guesthouse. It was in Sandown, and had a big sweeping staircase with a red carpet. There was a lounge, dining room, music room, lots of bedrooms and chalets to stay in and a big lawned garden. Doreen had a white albino Chihuahua called Pancho. Their son Michael, our only cousin, was six years older than me. Our favourite game as children was called Fight as Hard as a Lion – wrestling with lots of animal growling added. Michael, being the biggest and oldest, was always the most successful lion. An attack imminent, my sisters and I used to squeal with excitement as he ambled towards us, roaring like the king of the jungle.

  My mother made us all laugh a lot from an early age. It wasn’t always what she said but what she did. An old favourite was walking into a room with a pair of knickers on her head and saying something mundane like, ‘Hot cross bun anyone?’ She could diffuse a tense domestic mood with ease. One hot day she served up a beef stew. No one fancied it much and she silently scraped the considerable leftovers onto one plate. She then walked to the other end of the table where my father sat and without a word poured the entire meaty mess down the inside of his open-necked shirt. There was a stunned silence, then everyone laughed, apart from Beverley, who cried.

  During lengthy car trips to holiday destinations my mother told elaborate and funny stories that she made up on the spot, keeping us enthralled for hours on end. The punchlines were improvised from our surroundings. One was about an old man who never washed. He had mice nesting in his beard and sparrows in his hair. ‘And when we turn the next corner we’ll see where he lived . . .’

  We’d crane our necks to see the dirty man’s home. . .

  ‘A windmill!’ said my mother with delight.

  Another instructive tale was how the bungalow came to be invented. I won’t offer you the full version or we’ll be here for a hundred pages, but basically it concerned an impatient foreman at a building site. Once the walls of a house were complete he’d get a large number of workmen to lift the ready-made roof and, with the instruction ‘Bung-a-high!’, chuck it up in the air so it landed on top. One day, in his haste, he shouted too early and the house was only half built. Registering that it was not as high but not realising his mistake he shouted, ‘Bung-a-low!’ And that’s the true story of how bungalows came to be.

  For my father, departing on holiday was a military procedure: roofrack, trailer, tarpaulins all loaded onto the sturdy Zephyr. Anyone would think we were going trekking up the north face of the Eiger in slingbacks.

  Before one holiday I remember Beverley and I spent the evening dressing up Sindy and Tiger in their going-away outfits (stripes for Sindy, a peach puff-sleeve smock affair for Tiger), and packing a varied selection for the rest of the trip. Tiger was my favourite toy. In fact, he was a leopard (judging from his spots) but I didn’t know that then. Originally designed, I think, to sit on the back shelf of a car, he was soft and sleepy, his wild staring amber eyes replaced at some point with plain black buttons. I see him now on a shelf in my bedroom, looking kind and long-suffering despite being covered in a thin layer of dust.

  Anyway, once we were all loaded into the car at the crack of dawn, my father cast a final eye over his troops. He glared at Tiger in his gorgeous silk frock.

  ‘We’re not going anywhere till Tiger takes that dress off,’ he said with an air of determination.

  From an early age I sensed that I wasn’t quite the only son my father had in mind. I wasn’t very boyish. Football and cars weren’t my thing, try as he might to interest me in them. He tried to involve me in decorating once, telling me it would be a useful skill when I was grown up.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a man in.’

  WHEN I WAS seven we moved from the police flats in Surbiton to a police house in Teddington: 37 Blandford Road. It had a garden and everything.

  When the time came for us to set off on our annual holiday, the Zephyr’s roofrack and boot loaded up with luggage, it was pouring with rain. My mother began one of her long, improvised stories, which lasted until we reached our destination. It was about a disastrous family holiday when it rained all day every day and there was nothing for it but to go and buy a puppy. As it happened it never stopped raining for us either and so the story came true.

  At a loss to entertain three children who were expecting fun in the sun, ice creams and sand castles, and unable to keep us cooped up in the damp cottage in St Ives all the time, my parents drove us all around Cornwall, stopping at various kennels to view the puppies. We saw all sorts and then had to decide. I was quite sure I wanted a beagle but they weren’t ready to leave their mother and would have had to be sent to London by train in a box, so we decided on a long-haired miniature dachshund and called him Monty.

  My grandmother wasn’t impressed when she heard the news. ‘Fancy getting a German dog!’

  Our choice was not a wise one as things turned out. As the months passed it became apparent there was nothing miniature about Monty at all. He grew and grew until he was the size of a low hairy sofa. Bad tempered and destructive, he would bare his teeth and growl at anyone who so much as looked at him.

  I had a farmyard animal set supplemented with lions, elephants and a hippo. I’d shove a plimsoll under the green rug in my bedroom and have an instant hillside. Tom the farmer rode round on his tractor tending to his sheep and cows, then moved further up the hill to where the more exotic creatures lived. One fateful day, Monty chewed off both his legs. His arms, which until then had reached out at 90 degrees, the better to clutch the steering wheel, were also nipped and twisted. They no longer boasted two manly cupped hands, forever in the gripping position –
not that Tom let that stop him. He carried on as normal. As did his wife, I’m pleased to say. Jill, a bucket-holding, pinnied farmer’s wife, lost both her legs up to the knee in the same incident. But she was there, leaning against the farmhouse door the very next morning.

  Monty didn’t just snap and nip and chew small plastic things, he attacked with intent. Excuses were always made for him until he bit my father. Then his days at Blandford Road were numbered. Off he went to live a life of luxury in the Manor House in Norfolk. As I recall the plan had been to have him put down but we children were so distraught at the thought of such premeditated murder that my grandparents stepped in and saved his bacon. The country life suited him and within weeks he was a placid, good-natured animal, doted on by his new keepers.

  Despite this experience, my interest in animals grew. We got a black cat called Cindy from the RSPCA. She disappeared over the back of the garden into Bushey Park and didn’t come home for weeks, and I lay awake at night imagining her creeping through the undergrowth, hungry and bedraggled but determined to find her way home. I was euphoric when she eventually turned up.

  Then a neighbour’s cat had kittens and we chose Robinson, a black-and-white number who did nothing her entire life but sleep in a cardboard box by the radiator. She died of kidney failure eventually, probably brought on from lack of use.

  Rodents were the next phase. After a moderate amount of pleading and assurances that we would do all the looking after, all three of us were allowed to go to the pet shop and make a selection. Frances chose Jasmine, a guinea pig whose ginger and white fur grew into pretty floral swirls but who was otherwise devoid of personality, just blank, distrustful, staring eyes. A bit like people who live in Chatham.

  My guinea pig Hildebrand, on the other hand, was as charming and delightful as a Jack Russell. She could recognise my footsteps as I minced down the garden path and would let out a cheery whistle like a London cabdriver passing a leggy blonde.

  She had long flowing black and white hair which I used to comb endlessly with a baby’s brush set and which billowed out behind her as she scampered behind me across the lawn. She was the Scarlett O’Hara of the cavy world, cocking her head coquettishly if she thought I had some celery or dandelion leaves hidden about my person.

  Beverley, to be different, got a mouse. Pip was beige with pink eyes and, as it turned out, pregnant. When she gave birth to six hairless, slug-like young, we opened the top of her cage to get a better look and invited the neighbouring children in too. Mice take it badly if they’re not left in peace at such a private time and Pip made her feelings clear overnight by eating her babies.

  The next morning Beverley ran in from the shed screaming. It was a scene of terrible carnage: Pip sat in the middle of her cage, a look of Myra Hindley about her, her stomach swollen with her own consumed offspring, the sawdust around her and her manic mouse-face red and wet with their blood. Scattered around her like mini footballs were their heads. Clearly Pip wasn’t the mothering type. This traumatic incident may well be the root cause of my dislike of all things beige.

  There was more horror to come when the Labrador from the children’s home at the end of our road leapt over the garden gate one sunny afternoon and attacked the guinea pig run. We came back from the park to find Jasmine dismembered on the lawn. I thought Hildebrand must have met a similar fate, but half an hour later she waddled out from under a rose bush and nibbled my toe.

  Jasmine was replaced with Patch, a seriously tan boy guinea pig, so named because he had a small white dot between his ears. To say Patch was oversexed would be an understatement. His low machine-gun-like mating call could be heard streets away and he would slowly hop from one back leg to the other as if the weight and urgency of his guinea-pig semen was a source of some discomfort. Fortunately Hildebrand was a keen recipient. Unlike Pip, Hildebrand was a proud and fastidious mother. I would skip round the garden, she would follow me and her brood would follow her, conga-fashion.

  When I was nine, my parents joined the property market and we moved to our first ‘proper’ home: 39 St Mark’s Road in Teddington, a fairly typical semi-detached three-bedroom house built in the 1920s.

  It was also directly opposite the Sacred Heart Primary School, which was very handy for me. I made friends with a boy called Barry Jones who lived up the road, the son of a big emotional Italian woman and a small, serious, preoccupied man.

  He had guinea pigs too, and took on several of Hildebrand’s litter. When his started breeding he just kept them all. They had a big walled garden and his brood lived in a disused greenhouse. I remember going round there several years later and the whole place was completely overrun with wild and untamed guinea pigs of every shape and size, dozens of them, many albinos, darting all round the place. I imagine some kind of pest control had to be called in eventually.

  ONE OF MY mother’s friends was Doreen Eldridge. She had three children too, and this coincidence made their friendship both inevitable and practical. I liked Doreen a great deal and it would brighten my day to hear her tap on the door and call:

  ‘Yoo-hoo! Only me!’

  I was a mere child, of course, and Doreen had come to see my mother, not me. I was acknowledged, patted and ignored as they settled down to morning coffee and biscuits. But this did not matter at all. In fact, it was all to the good, for Doreen’s discourse was not about nappies or Jimmy Young, it was always up-to-the-minute scandal and revelation about people we knew, or repetitions of overheard conversations with sizzling punchlines. There was never a dull moment when Doreen popped in, and I would quietly and unobtrusively play with my farmyard animals or pretend to be reading a book while listening to the latest gossip. Thus by the age of eight I was a veritable Who’s Who of Teddington Babylon, and as shocked as anyone by the particular goings-on of a woman, nay harlot, called Shauna (not her real name), whose activities enlivened many a morning’s coffee break.

  Doreen’s main asset was imagination – a startling originality that swept her along faster than most could keep up with. She spoke very quickly, spilling the words out in no particular order, and the listener had the task of unravelling and ordering them if any meaningful communication was to be made.

  Her appearance, however, was not disordered. She was tall and painfully thin, and from my position at floor level I would wonder at her long, sinewy legs, wound round each other like plaits of soft toffee. As she talked, Doreen would often sew. Nearly all her clothes she made herself; she would create summer dresses from curtains, aprons from summer dresses, tea towels from aprons and dusters from tea towels.

  Doreen (also known as Do-Do) treated her children with the same brisk vivacity that she treated everything else. She would break off in mid-sentence to call ‘Nick!’ (her youngest) from across the room, then, continuing her conversation, she would hold the struggling infant firmly by the shoulder while the forefinger of her other hand was busy clawing at his nose to remove some lumpy discharge.

  As Doreen had a weak bladder, she was obliged to get up at frequent intervals throughout the night. Even this she turned to practical advantage. When she got up at 6 a.m. she would wash and brush her teeth before returning to bed for the final hour of rest. This would save time later on, and five minutes after the alarm clock went off she was up and dressed and shovelling breakfast into her children. Lunch would be over by noon and tea on the table at half past three in the afternoon.

  If in the summer we went on a trip to the local open-air swimming pool, it was important to Doreen that we be the first to arrive. We would find ourselves sitting by the pool before it was warm enough to change into swimming costumes, and sleepy-eyed we would watch the attendant clean the scum from the water’s surface.

  I don’t remember Doreen ever being depressed, but she was frequently ill and unable to carry on at the usual frantic pace. She was asthmatic and slept with an oxygen cylinder by her bed. Sometimes she would seem to run out of breath, and I remember her groping in her handbag for a small plastic contraptio
n she called her ‘puffer’. She would place one end of this in her mouth and inhale, and then her breathing would be easier. As well as asthma, Doreen seemed prone to all sorts of other afflictions. A superficial finger wound became septic and her finger was amputated. For Doreen this was a great talking point and she would waggle her stump in the air and shriek with laughter. Bronchitis and influenza also seemed to enter and depart her body as they pleased. The maladies kept her thin and frequently weak, but they served only to increase her desire for quickness and efficiency in every aspect of her day. On Saturday mornings she would often boast that she had done her entire week’s housework, dusting, hoovering and all, by 8 a.m.

  As her children grew up, Doreen was able to enter more fully into the swim of social activity in Teddington. Thus her conversation took on a different tone, centring in general on the Railway Tavern. Fortunately for me, the character called Shauna was also a regular there. I had grown quite attached to the infamous Shauna over the years and, like a wayward relation, I would have hated to lose touch.

  For my mother, now free from child-bearing duties, time was more her own too. She chose college and career, but their friendship weathered the contrast.

  In the summer I would still sunbathe near Doreen on her visits, bury my face in a towel and be presumed to be in the trance of adolescence. Sometimes, at the vital part of her anecdote, Doreen would lower her voice, something she had never done when I was six, and I was obliged to cease breathing and sprout antennae to capture the sordid climax of the tale.

  WE WERE RAISED as Catholics, washed and smartly dressed every Sunday for church, which we attended with our mother – our father being more of an atheist. ‘You live, you die, that’s it,’ he said, rather unimaginatively.