Was I worth it?

Well was I worth it?

I was born in a nursing home in St Albans (St Olive’s) and I cost 15 guineas plus 15 shillings for circumcision. That was getting on for two weeks salary at the time. My mother gave me the receipt. I’m not sure if I was meant to reimburse her.

I was baptised in St Albans Abbey. As we lived in Marshalswick my mother must have got on the electoral roll at the Abbey just to get me baptised there. We never went there for services. My parents had moved out of London after the war and my mother had elocution lessons to hide her roots. She did all the right things to get ahead. Join the Tory party, the Townswomen’s Guild, attend G & S; and among them cultivate contacts at the Abbey without actually having to attend.

My earliest memory is going to a children’s party. Somewhere back in Cricklewood, North London, through one of the last of the pea soupers; so called because it was like walking through soup, thick mushy pea probably. It was in 1952 or thereabouts. However fast my parents walked and disappeared round corners, I managed to keep up; and we came to the church hall where the party was held. And I looked in. And saw that there was nothing I could do or say that would help me join in. I simply wasn't part of what was going on. So I stayed on the edge of the room, where thankfully they left me. It was the first time I became aware that I was an outsider. I have been on the margins ever since. A watcher not a participant.

It's interesting that, apart from holidays, when we sat in school uniforms on Colwyn Bay beach, in all the memories of growing up my brother is nowhere to be seen. Was he there? I don't now know. But in the memory he doesn't feature, except occasionally as a teenager when I used to annoy him by turning up when he was playing cricket with his mates.

But in most of my memories I am alone – climbing trees to watch the trains at the end of our garden, walking down country lanes; or at home curled up with a book from the mobile library.

All the way through school I had the same feeling of detachment. I was on the outside looking in on things happening to other people. I had one or two friendships and a few times went to play with others. But none survived my going off to university and I didn’t make an effort to contact them when I came back. It was a world I had left behind.

Now they would put a label on it. Maybe I was autistic. I certainly took refuge in numbers and collecting.

My parents sent me to school and then moved. These days they would be prosecuted for less. I was expected to get the bus home by myself. No-one had told me that to stop the bus you have to put your hand out, or ring the bell when you want to get off. So three buses later I stayed on two stops beyond mine and then forgot where the new house was.

I was six, and three miles from home at a dame school on Holywell Hill, St Albans. Common at the time they were run by elderly spinsters – who had perhaps lost fiancés in the war. Mine was presided over by Miss Marjorie Cloutte. They took boys to the age of eight only; girls from five to GCE.

Every week we were trouped around the corner to St Albans Abbey for matins. As soon as the chanting started I was sick. Regular as clockwork. When I started to go back to church in my late teens I always felt giddy and assumed it was the same problem until someone told me to drink less on Saturday nights.

There was no sports field so we were taken off to Verulamium to play rounders there. The changing rooms were at the Roman theatre end of the park. Usually I managed to stay out of the game, but tried to look busy. Normally I was excused sports as I suffered from asthma. Whether as a result of the pea-soupers or not I don’t know. But most often when the others went off to games I was left in school and helped the dinner ladies get out the lunch – always spam and half a tomato.

When I was eight I went off to Aylesford House, the local prep school. A very minor public school which was really a crammer for St Albans School. Staffed almost entirely by ex pupils who could find work nowhere else and a few who had arrived from the army in 1947, and no one had the heart to tell them to leave. We had to wear pink blazers which immediately made us a target for local kids. I soon started riding my bike to school so that I could go the back way, three miles through the lanes, to avoid the village.

The major excitement of the week was when the water tower overflowed. They didn’t seem to have any sort of stop valve on it and it took so long to fill that the pump was turned on and then left until water poured down the school field. The field which held terrors for me. I was never sporting and usually still excused games. But occasionally the teachers decided I should play something. And I ended up in goal because no-one else would do it. The other side had usually scored four or five goals before I could get my boots laced up. The only race I came in first was the slow bicycle race – when of course you are meant to come last.

There was a “splash pool”. A concrete tank about ten metres long and maybe a metre deep. We were expected to go in as a class. With no bathing trunks on – they were thought bad for health. For some reason my reports say I have a distinct lack of enthusiasm for swimming. The same teacher took selected boys up to his flat where he had a recording machine. Long before tapes came in he would create discs and you could hear yourself back. The teacher mysteriously disappeared for a term and then came back, so presumably nothing was proved.

I did get into the school plays, usually dressed as a girl, which were sometimes performed in the open air. I was in the school choir and discovered for the first, but by no means the last time, just how cold churches could be as we filed into the local church for carols. And I was supposed to be learning the recorder but was totally lost in the first two bars of the concert and had to mime the rest. I also learnt a few magic tricks which I did as a party piece at end of term parties and discovered, as Tommy Cooper did, that you get more laughs if things go wrong.

One teacher decided to teach me Greco-Roman wrestling after a particularly nasty incident in the village. I discovered it was possible to stick up for myself without being particularly strong. I also discovered that to fit in you had to break the rules. It was a great relief once I was beaten by a teacher for the first time. Far from being any sort of embarrassment it made me one of the crowd.

Each year there was a speech day together with an exhibition of the work we had been doing that year. Most years I had won a prize for hobbies with leaves from my stamp collection. As this was always controlled by my father I wanted to do something for myself and did a project on newspapers. My grandfather had been a journalist for the Financial Times. After the death of his first wife he had run off to St Ives with a French actress much to the consternation of the rest of the family who never mentioned him again. This before I was born, and he died shortly after, so I had never known him. But I think writing was in the blood. Anyway I did my project – writing to the Daily Mail and the Telegraph to ask them how they produced their papers. And wrote it up for the exhibition. Needless to say I didn’t win, which delighted my father who said I should have stuck to stamps.

On wet games afternoons we got to watch films in the hall. As we waited for them to thread the film I used to read the old Victorian copies of Punch which were lining the walls. Then we would watch worthy films about the steel industry or more occasionally the story of flight, or the world speed records. Usually we were hoping the planes and cars would have a spectacular crash, which they usually did. I went to the cinema with my mother as well. Usually war films about the navy. I think she was trying to find out what my father had done in the services as he never spoke about his experiences.

We often went up to London to visit my mother’s parents. The great treat was that they had a TV in the 1950s. We didn’t get one at home till I passed my O levels. So I always hoped that we would stay late to watch Dixon of Dock Green. But we had to get the train back and I would doze in the corner as the engine blew out smuts which seemed to find their way through the windows even if they were closed.

Holidays were also by train. Long slow journeys across the countryside to end up in North Wales or Devon. A trunk had to be sent ahead with the luggage. But we still had to take suitcases to drag through the inevitable rain to our guest house. Then endless walks over the hills. Usually there was a bribe of sorts – “There’s a lovely lake just around the next corner”. Until finally we were in sight of some obscure summit.

As a family we did get to the theatre, sometimes local light operatics but at least once a year to London. First to the Golders Green Hippodrome for the pantos or to Haringey for the circus (including going on a ghost train that gave me nightmares for years); then to the West End to see whatever was new – My Fair Lady, Sound of Music, Oliver, Fiddler on the Roof. With the school I went to the Royal Tournament each year. So going off to London to the shows and exhibitions became second nature.

We used to have regular visits to the great aunts – my father’s mother was one of thirteen. And every year we would go up to Colwyn Bay to Nellie and Faith; or down to Blackheath to Nessie; or over to Clavering to Elsie. Great Aunt Elsie was my favourite. She had been a geography teacher at Tottenham Girls School and so was a fount of knowledge about distant places. Later when I took geography at A level she would pass on to me her Royal Geographical Society journals. If I had an asthma attack when I was there she would give me Heath and Heather herbal cigarettes and I would puff away on what I later discovered was largely cannabis.

There was a big debate about when I should take the 11+. I was a year ahead throughout the prep school and the head wanted to hold me back. But in the end he gave way and I went off to grammar school when I was still only 10.