Unreasonable Behavior Read online

  I felt cast out, unchosen, rather as if I were the wrong breed of dog. I remember running after my father when he set off home at the end of a visit and begging him to take me with him. My stay in Norton St Philip lasted less than a year, but I was soon evacuated again. I was always being evacuated. In my ignorance of Hitler’s bombing plans, I supposed that my mother thought—Get him on the road again, give myself a breather.

  In my third evacuation I hit a new low. I was sent to the north of England, to a village not far from Bolton in Lancashire. They were chicken farmers, and I got one egg a week on Sundays. Their main interest was in keeping me out of the house as much as possible by sending me to service in the morning, afternoon Sunday school, and then they would try to get me to go to the evening service as well. After tea on weekdays, they would lock me out until ten o’clock at night in all weathers.

  I slept on the floor. My room had no lino or furniture, just some old chicken incubators. It was a room that was never used, and just because it was spare these people were forced to take in evacuee children they did not want.

  With me in the house was a lad whose old man owned a pub in Camden town. He used to wet the bed and he got terrible hidings for it. We had landed among people who were rigid and, for all their Bible talk, very unforgiving. They found our ways alien, as we did theirs. I hated their funny way of cooking potatoes with their jackets on, and I wouldn’t eat them. I would be clouted for that.

  Clouting was an enduring memory from that evacuation. I was clouted by the schoolmasters, clouted by the kids in the playground, and clouted when I got home. I was building up a tidy store of resentment and mistrust.

  One day I fell off a barn attempting some daredevil feat and smashed my face. That is why I have a broken nose. I crawled across a field and passed out. I woke up to see two women standing over me. They got me home, and I could see the chicken farmer was sorely tempted to bang me another one in the face for getting into trouble. He insisted on sending me to school the next day. Now that I had a huge swollen face on top of my much-mocked London voice I became an even bigger joke.

  Finally, I wrote to my mother to say that I wasn’t being treated well. She sent me the train fare and I made my way home. The night before I left, the chicken farmer dragged out a dustbin, emptied the chicken meal from it and filled it with hot water. I got my first bath in seventeen weeks.

  That whole experience had strange after-effects. Once I got my own space, and a farmhouse, I always liked to have a few chickens about. I think they’re very decorative and so, unfortunately, does the local fox. More seriously, it gave me a lifelong affinity with persecuted peoples. I know what it is like to be branded uncivilised and unclean, and to be treated as something pernicious. Except that I was ostracised and ill-treated by my own people, and not an alien race.

  In the short term, though, the effects of evacuation were hardening. The loneliness and the long separations from my mother had done for me what public school did for the boys of the middle classes. It had turned me into a tough little blighter who could stand on his own two feet. It also made me twitchy.

  3. DERELICTION IN THE BUNK

  Back in wartime London, I developed a variety of odd habits. I would jerk my neck out repeatedly in a convulsive way. I was terrified of stepping on cracks in the pavement—all children have a bit of a fixation about this, but mine was carried to extremes. Above all, I liked to race the bus. I used to come out of the Tube at Finsbury Park, which slopes up like a drift-mine, see the 212 for Highgate starting up and tear along the road beside, or in front of, it for several hundred yards, past the school clinic, testing myself.

  I discovered later in life that I was dyslexic, a condition that was not improved by the constant moving from school to school. By the time the evacuations were over, I could scarcely read even the simplest things, and was certainly not digesting the words I did struggle through. In those days there was only one sort of remedial teaching for slow learners and that was the cane, or a hard clip round the ear with the back of a hand. Exasperated schoolmasters seemed to think that violence would prod you forward. In my case, it simply made me violently backward. When first I got back to London I went in dread of beatings and whackings, and even punchings, that teachers had licence to administer. One master tried to speed my progress towards the Eleven Plus examination by banging my head against the school wall. Yet it has to be said that these terrifying Finsbury Park teachers were ranged against a most evil bunch of boys.

  Don and his brother, Michael, Trafalgar Square, 1945

  Don, Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, 1945

  Don (front row, left), 1947

  All of us returning from the country experienced great difficulty settling back into our impoverished urban homes. I know the smell of poverty as well as I know the stink of bomb-shelters and chicken houses. For me it is a compound of mildew and damp, of floor-cloths that are never clean and never get cleaned because there is no hot water, of too many bodies confined in too small a space. Even with my sister away, we would always be shifting round at home, trying to fit better into that cold, cramped basement so that my father could have the maximum warmth. I remember often sleeping in close proximity to his night-long cough. Yet the circumstances of my childhood fitted me in later years to stand before the poorest of people with humility. I would know without being told exactly what their lives were like.

  Close to where we lived, in Fonthill Road, there was a notorious street known to everybody as The Bunk. It was a place beyond poverty, accurately described in a book called The Worst Street in North London as a home to thieves, punch-up artists and every other known type of criminal. Residents of The Bunk used to treat the police the way people treat the bulls of Pamplona. And not only the police. The red alarm boxes, labelled ‘Emergency, Fire’, were always being punched in by the boys in The Bunk to bring round the brigade. Often kids would set fire to one of the bombed-out buildings in order to make the call genuine. When they arrived, men of the fire brigade would be stoned, or would have their hoses cut. The children of The Bunk all went to my primary school.

  Our real times were spent out of school. I spurned authority, all the boys did. We used the derelict bombed houses as our hideaway places. They were the arenas for our obnoxious behaviour. We would buy a pennyworth of chips for our lunch, ram them into a dry roll and take it into a derelict house, climbing right to the top where we would sit and discuss things, as if we were in some kind of parliament. The usual debate concerned how we were going to sabotage our school. In gutted buildings sometimes we crapped from the top floor to the bottom, pretending we were bombing Germany. It was all weird, though no doubt Desmond Morris would see it as quite normal animal behaviour. It demonstrated the breaking of discipline, the breaking of authoritarian rule over us.

  One of those derelict houses later played a striking role in my adult life. While we were still growing up, bombed houses were either a haven or a prey for vandalism. We stripped the lead and sold it to metal dealers. We ripped up the remaining floorboards and chopped the wood to sell it as kindling to old ladies for two pennies a bundle. The catacomb shells of shattered buildings gave us pleasure, and great sensations. There was nothing quite like the thrill of negotiating one dangerous level after another when all the staircases had gone. For us, it was like climbing the Eiger, and there we would bivouac for hours, in our own private places, away from the eyes of the alien adult world.

  As we grew older, we went in for the pleasures of total escape from school. The school clinic was a staging-post for playing truant. It was the place to go if you had abrasions or minor injuries. I would put my name down for clinic, then go nowhere near it and abscond. I would go down into the Tube, and get out at Cockfosters, the end of the line. I would double back across the rails, to dodge the ticket collector, and then launch myself straight on to the countryside, looking for birds’ eggs and snakes and things of that order. I spent a lot of time absc
onding, usually with a couple of mates with similarly inflated wounds.

  Frequently the wounds were genuine. I got into a lot of fights. I was not a natural warrior, and usually fought other boys because I would not be pushed around by them. To this day I won’t back down if I can help it, and I have had all sorts of bullies in front of me. It’s a good attitude in a way, but often painful.

  The boys who were most admired at school were the punch-up artists, sometimes as many as six or seven brothers in one family, and an offence against one was an offence against the lot. But it was the imaginative thieves who earned the most respect—boys who could go to Covent Garden at night and have fresh grapes for sale in the school break next day. In the centre of London there were also thousands of properties, temporarily abandoned yet undamaged by bombing, just waiting for boys to exercise their skills at breaking and entering. I was not too tempted in this area myself, less from any natural law-abiding instinct than from the sense I had that thieving was one of the surest ways of losing my liberty.

  Predictably, I failed to pass the Eleven Plus, and so moved on from primary school to Tollington Park Secondary Modern School with much the same bunch of other boys. Half my class was heading for Approved School or Borstal, and I was fortunate to avoid the same fate. There was a certain code of loyalty where I lived, despite the roughness. The front door of your house was always open, and on summer evenings everything would be open. People used to sit at their windows because they never had to invert themselves, as later they did when watching television. They were used to looking outwards—and to some degree they would look out for each other.

  There was also a family unity in those days. I recall that cosseted family feeling when bathing in the tin tub in front of the fire. Each of us took turns, my father first, and each had the same few saucepansful of hot water. I still think warmly of those moments, despite my brother Michael getting ahead of me in the pecking order when he was born and being apt to pee in the water.

  Sometimes family unity would break down in our house when my mother lost her fiery temper. My father used to gamble on the greyhounds at Haringey. Perhaps it was a way for him to restore pride in himself when he was sick and unemployed, but it led to more than the usual problems of family finance.

  My mother stretched out the family budget by leaning heavily on the tallyman and the pawn shop. I had a key role in this economy, which now seems like a sob story from Dickens, but which was only too real. I would take my father’s suit on a Monday morning to the pawn shop and go again on the Friday to get it out. It was always wrapped in a bedsheet.

  The whole business humiliated me. The pawnbroker was a little man called Mr Lucan, who had a bald head, wore rimless glasses, grew a little tache, and always wore a pinstripe grey suit with a very white shirt collar. Women didn’t like going to Mr Lucan because he always held on to the palms of their hands when they were exchanging tickets. I didn’t like going there either. It gave me the feeling from an early age that I would rather steal than beg.

  On Saturday morning I would go to pay the tallyman, then double off to pay the rent at Donaldson’s in Hornsey Road. Another job of mine was to lie to those who came collecting at the front door. ‘My mum’s not in.’ It was a poor premium to put on a kid, to start him off lying, but it was part of the old lady’s constant battle to keep us clean, clothed and fed.

  Our clothes came from a secondhand shop run by a woman called Jessie Chapman, which usually looked as if someone had backed up a lorry-load of spaghetti and dumped it down. In among the tangle somewhere would be something that might fit me. My mother would bring the garment home and try to knock the terrible secondhand smell out of it.

  Due to my father’s illness, mother became the tough character at home. She often had to go out to earn the family bread, especially in winter when my father’s health was at its worst. In wartime, English­women did some really heavy jobs, and the old lady worked in an aircraft factory or loading crates on to lorries at King’s Cross Station. She had a fearsome reputation as a fighter. My mother once took on the woman next door, who was known for her physical prowess, when she told my sister—then home for two weeks from her adoptive home in Somerset—to eff off and take her posh accent elsewhere. She pasted the woman in front of the whole street, which became an arena, all windows open and everyone watching. She did it again when another woman complained about my behaviour. My mates said they all enjoyed seeing Mrs Nash’s knickers in the brawl, and my mother became something of a local hero.

  I found it all rather distasteful. Maybe I had a little snobbish streak in me even then, born of an inferiority complex that took hold in Somerset when I was assigned to a lower class than my sister. I respected my mother, but my hero was my mellower father, who spent more time with me. Despite his regret that he’d been unfit for the army, he was a hero to me when I saw him carrying stretchers for the ARP. I gained a sense of gentleness from him.

  In the evenings, after the remains of a bread and cheese supper and the tea cups had been cleared off the old kitchen table, my father would start making things for me and my brother—a rocking horse or a cathedral of matches. He got me making little carts and trolleys, and even a covered wagon, which Michael drove, brandishing a rubber pistol. I was the Apache Indian at the back.

  I used to draw my father. I would pin up the paper on the wall and sometimes go right over the edge, so that when I took the paper away there would be a white square on the wall with lines going off it in all directions. He still encouraged me and I began to develop some skill. I loved my father, and felt the strength of his love for me. I was probably the only boy in the neighbourhood whose father never gave him a hiding. My greatest fear was his death, but I overcame it by playing a part in his survival. This often took the form of simple errands, like stealing coal from a nearby yard to keep him warm. My main service was spending time with him, and drawing was part of this. We also went to the cinema together.

  By this time I had graduated from Hopalong Cassidy at Saturday morning children’s cinema—when one boy would go in and open the fire door to let in the rest of us while the usherette wasn’t looking—to the early war films. One evening, as I was getting ready to go to the pictures with my mother and father, a woman knocked at the door to tell my mother that I had been interfering with her daughter in an air raid shelter in Tollington Park. It was true, of course, but it had only been experiment on both sides.

  I remember my father taking charge as my mother’s voice rose an octave. ‘Get yourself washed,’ he said. ‘We’re going to the police station.’

  I was stripped of my shirt at the sink and my mother smacked me from one side of the scullery to the other.

  ‘If we’re going, we’d better go,’ I heard my father say. They’re really going through with this, I thought.

  He must have been stifling his laughter all the while, for we didn’t go near the police station but ended up in our favourite spot in the front row of the Astoria cinema. It was as if they were taking their thirteen-year-old son out for a treat on entering manhood.

  4. A SHOCKING LIBERTY

  I knew the war was over for good when my mother launched her attack on the air raid shelter in the back yard. She and I demolished it together with ordinary household hammers. It took months, and it transformed the level of the ground. When it was done, my mother started a little garden.

  I was less ready for peaceful pursuits. As the real soldiers were being demobbed, I joined up. A little group of us twelve- and thirteen-year-olds organised pitched battles on Hampstead Heath. We made our own weapons. I used to fashion Bren guns—the English automatic weapon of the day, and very accurate it was. I would provide ‘first aid’ from my father’s old ARP kits. These ferocious bush wars took place in our imaginary Killing Fields behind Kenwood House. There we would welcome death, and took pride in giving a good performance. I doubt if any of us knew of Robert Capa’s amazing picture of the falli
ng soldier in the Spanish Civil War but that was our most cherished way to die.

  The end of hostilities against Germany and Japan left a whole generation of urban kids unable to think in any terms other than those of war. I was mad about it, and the movies fed my madness. The Astoria cinema was showing little else but John Wayne or Errol Flynn in films like Back to Bataan.

  I also had access to the best of British toy soldiers. Some of the local housewives used to take in lead soldiers—a gross on a tray—and do what they called home work. They would paint them at home to earn extra money, the way some people take in typing today. So there was always a constant supply of fresh soldiers for my war games with young Michael in the back yard.

  Don and his brother, Michael, Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, 1940s

  By the time I joined the real cadets, with their proper uniforms, at the age of thirteen, I was already a veteran. My outfit was the Royal Fusiliers, and I remember the enthusiasm with which I would buff its badge—a blazing cannonball. We assembled in a drill hall near Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury and spent weekends in camp at Osterley Park, where proper training was carried out with blank cartridges and thunder-flashes. It was like simulated war. I thought it was great.

  Even so, my army career did not last long. My father and one of my teachers helped to turn me towards a gentler interest. Drawing was the only talent that was not assiduously beaten out of me in my schooling. It also was one of the few skills that the boys at Tollington Park were prepared to tolerate—even to admire. Being good at English or maths could get you branded as a teacher’s pet or bright spark. Drawing was all right. It was extraordinary, like magic. I am not sure how extraordinary my talent was but it led to Mr Cooper steering me into a trade art scholarship and attendance at the Hammersmith School of Arts and Crafts and Building—a school for bricklayers as well as budding artists, opposite Lime Grove television studios.