Life [11]
One thing you’ve got is your bike. Me and my mate Dave Gibbs, who lived on Temple Hill, decided it would be cool if we put those little cardboard flappers on the back wheel so it sounded like an engine when the spokes went round. We’d hear “Take that bloody thing away. I’m trying to get some sleep around here,” so we used to ride down to the marshes and the woods by the Thames. The woods were very dangerous country. There were buggers in there, hard men who’d scream at you. “Fuck off.” We took the cardboard flappers out. It was a place of madmen and deserters and tramps. Many of these guys were British Army deserters, a little like the Japanese soldiers who still thought the war was on. Some of them had been living there for five or six years. They’d cobbled together maybe a caravan or some tree house for shelter. Vicious, dirty swine they were too. The first time I got shot was by one of those bastards—a good shot, an air gun pellet on the bum. One of our hangs was a pillbox, an old machine gun post, of which there were many along the tideway. We used to go and pick up the literature, which was always pinups, all crumpled up in the corner.
One day we found a dead tramp in there, huddled up, covered in bluebottles. A dead para-fin. (Paraffin lamp, rhyming slang for tramp.) Filthy magazines lying around. Used rubbers. Flies buzzing. And this para-fin had croaked. He’d been there for days, weeks even. We never reported it. We ran like the fucking Nile.
I remember going from Aunt Lil’s to infant school, to West Hill school, screaming my head off. “No way, Mum, no way!” Howling and kicking and refusing and refusing to go, but I did go. They had a way about them, grown-ups. I put up a fight, but I knew it was a full-on moment. Doris felt for me, but not that much. “This is life, boy, something we can’t fight.” I remember my cousin, who was Aunt Lil’s son. Big boy. He was at least fifteen, with a charm that cannot be imagined. He was my hero. He had a check shirt! And he went out when he wanted. I think he was called Reg. Cousin Kay was their daughter. She pissed me off because she had really long legs, could always run faster than me. I came in a valiant second every time. She was older than me, though. We rode my first horse together, bareback. A great old white mare that barely knew what was going on, that had been put out to pasture, if you could call it that round where we lived. I was with a couple of mates and Cousin Kay, and we got on the fence and managed to get on the horse’s back, and thank God she’s a sweet mare, otherwise if she had taken off I would have gone for a loop. I had no rope.
I hated infant school. I hated all school. Doris said I was so nervous she remembered bringing me home on her back because I couldn’t walk, I was trembling so hard. And this was before the stickups and the bullying began. What they fed you was awful. I remember at infant school being forced to eat “Gypsy Tart,” which revolted me. I just refused it. It was pie with some muck burned into it, marmalade or caramel. Every schoolkid knew this pie and some actually liked it. But it wasn’t my idea of a dessert, and they tried to force me to eat it, threatening me with punishment or a fine. It was very Dickensian. I had to write out “I will not refuse food” three hundred times in my infantile hand. After so many times I had it down. “I,I,I,I,I,I,I… will,will,will,will…”
I was known to have a temper. As if nobody else has one. A temper that was aroused by Gypsy Tart. In retrospect, the British education system, reeling from the war, had not much to work with. The PT master had just come from training commandos and didn’t see why