Three: Friends

Michael and the Evanses – Colin and Chris – Girls

Pam and Portsmouth – Matt and the Outside World

Down in The Fields

CONTEMPORARY LETTER TO MICHAEL EVANS

King’s Lynn, Norfolk

August 2003

Dear Michael,

It was good to talk to you on the telephone the other day, our first contact for over 40 years. Since then, I’ve been recapturing memories of our earliest times together. Whatever I may have lost of the daily details of our years as friends, the very first day we met is extremely clear. A number of other impressions stand out too. In time, we may be able to find out how much, or how little, your own recollections resemble mine.

At least, we share the common context. With our house Selkirk at the centre of my narrow world, I can trace the immediate boundaries of our formative years. Radbrook Road ran across an area shaped like a flat-nosed kite. Ridgebourne and Oakfield Roads made up the left-hand side. Kenwood Road was the flat piece across the top. Shelton and Roman Roads came down on the right to meet the bottom end of Ridgebourne Road.

Inside this tiny area lived most of the children I played with at different times. I’d come to know some of them when I first went to school and a few before that because their mothers were my mother’s friends. At that time, as you’ll agree, we could safely walk, and later cycle, from our own house to somebody else’s. You’ll recall that traffic was so light then that, on Sunday mornings during the later 1940s, we used to roller skate on Roman Road, then a stretch of the A5. We zoomed down the hill, hardly disturbed by a car or any other vehicle, with the enticing smell of everyone’s roast lunches wafting across the road from all directions.

The lack of traffic meant that cars came along one at a time, often with long gaps between them. I don’t think you knew Peter Sower: I probably knew him more after you’d started at your school. A few of us, Clive Freeman, Malcolm Scott, David Phillips and I, used to sit outside his house on the corner of Shelton Road and Kenwood Drive, writing down registration numbers as the cars chugged past. With so few cars we could quickly check in our notebooks when someone recognised a number we thought we’d seen before. Peter’s knowledge and ear were so finely tuned that he could often tell us what make of car was coming along the road before it even reached us. I was immensely annoyed that he could do this and nearly always be right. Recognising when you’re completely outclassed like that, the only defence is to pretend, in a rather lofty manner, that knowledge of that kind is simply not necessary. Later on, under the dark blankets of your bed at night, you admit to yourself alone that someone like Peter is terribly clever, and that you are terribly jealous.

You lived only three doors up Radbrook Road from us, and were my very first friend. I was between three and four when we were first introduced - and introduced we were. I was playing with my trike on our front drive, near the steps to the kitchen door. My mother was looking down towards the gate but I had my back to it. I was preparing to show her something quite remarkably clever that I could do on my trike but her attention was elsewhere. I heard footsteps coming up the drive behind me and then, high above my head, a charming, measured and cultured voice saying: ‘Hello. I wonder if your little boy would like to come and play with my little boy.’ The voice belonged to your mother, Mary Evans. The two mothers chatted together for a while and it seemed that I did want to play with her little boy. Mary took me up the road to meet you and that was the beginning. In the coming years, we became very close friends and so did Mary and my mother.

That day, though you may not have been aware of it, I walked into a different world. This family and home of yours had a style and background that hardly resembled ours at all. On that first occasion, Mary walked with me to your house and showed us to one another. She said: ‘Michael, this is Graham, and Graham, this is Michael’. I don’t think I said anything at this point, being more interested in looking around me and at you. You said ‘Hello, Graham’ in a small, high voice, very polite, measured and cultured like your mother’s. I noted that you were somewhat plumper than me and, I soon discovered, you were just over a year younger. You’d obviously learned to speak ‘very well’ – elocution classes had played their part - but the speech pattern you and Mary used together at times, and the one you used with me at first, was a strange third person construction. Mary said to you: ‘I think Michael ought to show Graham his little tricycle, and perhaps let him ride on it.’ You obediently wheeled it towards me and said: ‘Would Graham like to ride on Michael’s little tricycle?’ While I understood what was being said, I’d never heard anyone talk like that before. It was one of my first indicators that the Evanses were different from the Browns, something I’d never had to think about previously. Before long, another aspect of that difference became clear to me: they were rather better off than we were.

Your father Tom was noticeably a good deal older than Mary. I’ve understood him to be probably a partner in a traditional estate agents’ firm. In this role, I see him managing estates for landowners in rural Shropshire, arranging the buying and selling of their produce and equipment, paying the wages to the farm employees and looking after the accounts. You and I went to his office at Castle Gates occasionally with a message from Mary, or perhaps you were asking for some pocket money, but he naturally spent considerable time visiting farms out in the country. He impressed me in one respect above all others: he owned a car, a long, low, dark green Rover with running boards, leather upholstery and shiny wood dashboard fascia. He wore expanding bracelets on his shirt sleeves to keep the cuffs up, and always had a handkerchief stuffed up one sleeve. It’s funny how small details like that stick in the memory. They probably struck me at the time because I’d never seen such things before: Evanses differed from Browns in style as well as substance.

One summer, Mary encouraged Tom to take you and me out with him for the day on one of his estate trips. Picnics were packed and we climbed into the Rover. Miles out of Shrewsbury, Tom said we would have our lunch at a railway station, which he said was called More. Most of my own experience of railway stations came from going to Shrewsbury station with my mother and the WVS, and I imagined us sitting on wooden seats eating our sandwiches on a busy platform with crowded trains coming and going in front of us. None of this really fitted in with my idea of a picnic. When we got there, we saw that More station was already completely ruined. By 1946 or ‘47, another branch-line had failed to survive. Beyond the entrance to a field, you could see where the tracks had been removed and the grass had grown. There was not a single station building to be seen. All that remained was part of a platform, also completely overgrown, where, following humanity’s temporary interference, Nature was fast taking back its own. Contrary to my earlier thoughts, it was just the place to put down a blanket to sit on and have a picnic. Tom didn’t join us, preferring to eat his sandwiches in greater comfort, seated behind the steering wheel in the Rover. We ate ours and then played trains, train drivers, stationmasters and signalmen, whistling and chuff-chuffing all over the place.

In the afternoon we called at Hope Hall, a minor stately mansion in the Hope Valley. I saw it again some years ago as we passed on the high valley road above it and felt an instant memory replay. Tom was invited inside for some time, possibly for serious discussions and tasting a glass of something with the owner. Then he took a long walk across the fields to distribute the wages. The small river ran through the grounds to the front of the house and, on its banks, abandoned Bren-gun carriers had been parked to rust away. These wartime relics kept us occupied and out of trouble for ages until Tom returned to drive us all back to Radbrook Road.

It seemed to me that Tom spent many of his working days miles away from Shrewsbury. This meant he was frequently not home in time for what we called ‘tea’. All my father needed to do was leave his office on The Mount at five, cycle home and be back with us fifteen or twenty minutes later. Tom might not be home until six or seven o’clock, so had what your parents called ‘supper’ some time after that. Mary would put this full hot meal on a tray with its silver cutlery, silver serviette ring and silver condiment set, and deliver it to him in his deep armchair, beside the fireplace, in your beautifully furnished sitting room. You often had some of this supper with him and, when I had still not yet gone home, I sat and watched you. This was something I was jealous about. It seemed like the pinnacle of luxury to be able to stay up and eat a real, serious meal at that time of the day – and do it in an armchair by the fire instead of having to sit up to the table. I know I asked my mother if we could eat later than we usually did, and have our ‘suppers’ on a tray. The answer was ‘No, dear’ and I knew instinctively that it was pointless to pursue it further.

I could clearly see the boundary of our entire back garden at Selkirk, but the end of your back garden was completely out of sight from the house. Mature flower beds and rockery gave way down three steps to a huge lawn, fringed by large trees. Then came a rustic fence and a path to the enormous shed where the kitchen garden began and all kinds of crops grew in their impeccably neat sections. Finally, the best place of all for us, the orchard. Every type of plum, apple and pear tree seemed to be growing here, each surrounded every spring by dutiful clumps of crocus and daffodils. Here the grass was allowed to grow long, just scythed now and again during the summer to produce great piles of cut grass for us to build into houses or Neolithic-type enclosures, not that we knew what those were.

Gardening was one of my parents’ chief interests all their lives, but I don’t think Mary and Tom were so fascinated by it. You probably remember their gardener Mr Lewis whom they addressed as ‘Lewis’, and he may well have respectfully tipped his cap to them when receiving his instructions. There was a large Atco motor mower for the extensive front and back lawns. We used to follow Mr Lewis along, up and down, as he mowed and rolled the flawlessly straight light and dark green stripes into place. I remember one day you’d asked your mother for a piece of string for something we were doing, and she suggested going down to the shed because ‘Lewis can probably help you with that’. As we went down the garden, you were calling out ‘Lewis, Lewis’. Mary grabbed you and said, very sternly: ‘It’s Mr Lewis, Michael.’ We weren’t supposed to bother him while he was working, but we would hang around him by the shed when he was having his lunch break. We asked him questions and listened to the odd things he told us, mainly hoping, like baby sparrows, to be thrown the odd crust or a bit of cheese from his sandwiches.

Now and again you and I went to see Mary’s father who lived in The Red House on The Mount, where there were two maids, Alice and Louie, as well as a gardener. He’d been married twice, because you had two Grannies on that side of the family. Periodically the earlier one, known as ‘French Granny’, would come over from France to stay. She was appropriately exotic and well-heeled, always bringing piles of interesting and unusual presents. It was probably from both her and her father that Mary drew her own artistic instincts. Her father was an architect, as I’ve discovered much later, who made you an entire model grocer’s shop of the old-fashioned kind, with every conceivable jar and packet of food on the shelves, scales and weights and money and all other details complete. I know Mary engaged in painting and drawing and later dabbled in ballet classes. She seemed to cultivate interesting people in the arts generally, including one known to us as ‘Uncle Barney’ who did something in the impresario line with lavish musicals. Barney spent much of his time travelling, often in America, and would send you by airmail those multiple postcards which release a dozen colour photos of California or Florida or New York when you open them. They arrived quite frequently, as did, I suspect, long letters to Mary. My mother and yours would have conversations about Barney from time to time, as they also did about others of Mary’s circle of intriguing acquaintances.

In spite of the considerable difference in backgrounds and relative wealth, both our friendship and the one that developed between our mothers were strong and genuine. Long after my parents had moved away to Staffordshire, then Bedford, and finally to Cambridge, Mary and my mother continued to exchange annual Christmas cards. I’ve no idea when Mary died, but I do recall my mother saying that at least a couple of years had passed without a card from her. (My mother died earlier this year, 2003, aged 95). On the other hand, I don’t think our fathers had more than the minimum of polite neighbourly contact. I may be wrong, but I don’t believe either set of adults ever invited the other to visit, except most notably on Fireworks Night when there was generally a big party for adults and children at your house.

Mary had been readily sensitive to the potential for jealousy on my part, and when she thought of buying you some new toy, she would often buy one for me as well. Even so, there seemed for me to be so much to be jealous about in a wider way. Your life seemed so much more charmed than mine in every respect. You even had comics like Beano and Dandy when I was not yet allowed them, and you went to town on the Midland Red bus on your own to buy them. The confidence provided by money seemed to permit infinitely more freedom of action. There were times when these differences evidently became more than I could cope with, particularly on the inevitable occasions when you and I had temporarily fallen out.

The shameful symptom of this was that I stole things - from you and from your parents. Not many, but enough always to be noticed. I think I stole them more as a kind of statement, rather than because I wanted to use the things myself or intended to keep them. In fact, I never kept the stolen object but took it away somewhere and broke it or threw it away. I even buried one or two in the garden rather than have them in my bedroom where they would eventually be discovered. Of course, these thefts were usually discovered. How much did my mother tell my father about them, if at all? I can’t recall him telling me off on this subject, but he may have done. I was certainly ‘spoken to’ by my mother and separately by Mary whenever these discoveries were made, and required to apologise. What still makes me squirm with shame and regret as I write about it now is the acute embarrassment I must have caused my mother and, even more so, the generosity of Mary’s reserves of gentle patience, tolerance, and understanding. I deserved very much worse and I’ve never been able to forget it.

Next door to you lived the Fowlkeses, and, at one point on the boundary between the two gardens, an Anderson shelter stood where the fence should be. We could get into the Fowlkes’s garden either by climbing over the shelter or by bravely creeping through its damp darkness and coming out of the door on their side. Halfway up their garden was the summerhouse they had built for their daughter Juliette. She had outgrown it and was mostly not there any longer, probably away at boarding school. You and I crept in through the back of her play house and spent long periods of time there, using her coloured pencils, her drawing paper, paint boxes, plasticene, playing cards, books and complete range of toys, albeit toys for girls. Juliette had clearly enjoyed lavish expenditure on her and we exploited her continued absence to the full. I believe she was groomed or ‘finished’ later for some sort of society career, becoming a kind of personal assistant or secretary to the Hon. Mrs Gerald Legge. My father was always a bit dubious about Harold Fowlkes who would grab us occasionally on the grass top of the Anderson shelter and tickle us, especially around the lower thigh, perhaps a little more strongly than simple, innocent play might allow.

As I understood it, your father’s family had a naval background. Tom hadn’t pursued it himself, but it appeared that, from the beginning, your future was clearly marked out in the Royal Navy. So when our schooldays began and I went to Pengwern House, you went to a different private school in Shrewsbury, later to the prep school Millmead under the headship of Charles Greenwood, and finally to Pangbourne. We met and played together less frequently but no less determinedly as time went on, until I only saw you in the school holidays when you were boarding. Once at Pangbourne, you clearly started growing up very much faster than me. I stayed the night on several occasions during the holidays at that time when you initiated me into a number of young male concepts and activities which I was not yet in the habit of sharing with anyone, or possibly even entirely aware of. I remember you said to me one morning as we were getting up (were we about 14?): ‘One of my friends at school was expelled at the end of last term.’ ‘Why was that?’ I asked. ‘He was caught fucking one of the maids’. I said nothing but looked, I hope, as worldly wise as I could, as though language and behaviour like that were thoroughly familiar to me on a daily basis.

Most of what I’ve included in this letter wasn’t dredged up with any great difficulty. I think much of it has been with me right through my life, available on the surface of my memory whenever I chose to remind myself of those early days of my life. You may have seen some things very differently, or have forgotten some of them. You must certainly have memories of other incidents or details that didn’t register with me at the time. What do we do now with all these recollections? It always seems to me that sentimental reminiscing for its own sake isn’t of very much use, except for its limited entertainment value. On the other hand, there’s plenty to be gained from reconstructing your own past to provide yourself with a stronger, clearer picture of it, and a person who shared some of it closely may be just the one to help in that process. I wonder what you think.

Your affectionate, and earliest, friend,

Graham

PS. I was probably twenty the last time we met. By then living and working in London, I’d come to Shrewsbury to see you, so we must have maintained intermittent contact with one another. I think Mary was living on The Mount then. I recall her saying it would be all right for me to smoke the pipe that I was affecting at the time. Among other things, we discovered common ground in traditional jazz and compared notes on the LPs we’d been listening to, and the few we’d bought: George Lewis, The Hot Five and Hot Seven classics, Kid Ory and the New Orleans marching bands. If I’m not mistaken, at lunchtime Mary suggested that you should first take me along The Mount to the pub, which is doubtless what happened. It was called The Windsor Castle then but now The Bull in the Barne.

FROM THE MEMOIR

Clive Freeman lived at the beginning of Kenwood Drive and David Phillips near Shrewsbury Barracks, slightly off my immediate patch but easily reached by bike. My mother and both their mothers were friends, and we boys were all at Pengwern House. One of them and possibly both had a rather lovely blonde sister, a few years older than us, who represented – without our really understanding why - the absolutely unattainable but greatly admired female person. Messy and younger male creatures like us just got in their way and were completely beneath their contempt.

The Phillipses lived in a large, dark house with dark brown paint on the woodwork and big cold rooms near the Barracks. At some stage during the war, in the midst of the general panic to get out of London, there must have been a family fear as well, a need to be somewhere else away from the bombing. Both my grandmothers came to Shrewsbury and, as I was reminded later when I knew David at school, lodged together with Mrs Phillips. My father’s mother died in 1942 so this period was the only time I ever saw her, when I was about three. I do remember, but only vaguely, visiting Mrs Phillips’s house with my mother and seeing both Grannies, sitting by the old range in the kitchen.

In the first house on the ‘Unadopted’ stretch of Oakfield Road lived Colin Tanswell, another friend from school. His back garden sloped down to a field and a stretch of the Rad Brook, giving us access to the woods surrounding Radbrook Hall, much later a hotel, but which I believe was completely closed up during the war. Here we heard cuckoos, always some way away, and the clattering of woodpeckers and twittering of any number of other birds echoing through the otherwise silent trees. Colin was a good friend like the rest of them for many years but he was often difficult to get hold of. His mother, to say the least, was not a sociable type like my mother and her numerous friends. Mrs Tanswell was a very strict and unbending person with an extremely unamused, and unamusable, view of life. Her hair was always pulled back hard from her face and wound into a bun on the back of her head. This accentuated the bleak stony structure of her face, adding to the overall stern impression. Thinking of her now reminds me forcibly of the film and TV actress Rosalie Crutchley, who specialised in stern and gloomy Victorian women - especially Mrs Sparsit in ITV’s impressive four-part adaptation of Hard Times during the late 1970s (with Patrick Allen as Gradgrind and Timothy West as Bounderby).

Calling for Colin to play was one of the more challenging moments of my young life. Following a tentative knock on the front door, Mrs Tanswell appeared and I would make the usual request: ‘Hello, Mrs Tanswell, can Colin come out to play?’ Playing inside the house was more or less out of the question. Her reply was frequently negative. ‘No, he’s tidying up his room.’ ‘No, he’s cleaning his shoes.’ No, he’s out in the back garden doing some weeding.’ ‘No, he’s helping with the washing up.’ And this said with such an air of finality that negotiation was completely out of the question. Colin’s small face sometimes appeared behind her, looking soulfully out at me, expressing the deepest disappointment. When she did say ‘Yes’ and turned to call him as though summoning him for a reprimand, he shot out of the house fast as though fired from a cannon. We ran down the road and disappeared at equally high speed in case she changed her mind. Only Colin really knew how tough she could be and he was always immensely pleased to spend time at someone else’s house where life was less austere. I have no picture of Mr Tanswell, but have since imagined him as probably very similar to Colin, palely receiving his instructions and getting on with his tasks obediently. It would surely be impossible for more than one such forceful and dominant personality to co-exist in comfort under the same roof.

Year in and year out these growing boys and I played together in pairs and threes and fours, forming gangs and clubs, sometimes with variations in membership as friendships waxed and waned, and new relationships replaced old ones. A good deal of the action involved bikes, especially as we became older, and this helped us to extend the bounds of our world. Looking back on it now, I realise that we all went everywhere, all the time, on our bikes. Throughout our entire childhood, the bike was the people’s transport. As many parts of Africa and Asia experience today, bikes were the only personal transport ordinary people had, and distance was not a particular obstacle in the way of going somewhere.

One friend who lived a bit beyond the immediate locality was Christopher Cureton who, in his particular way, was just as close to me as Michael Evans ever was. Indeed, I saw much more of him during our later boyhoods than I saw of Michael. He was at Miss Toddington’s school but lived out at Bicton, just a few miles away and a natural bike ride for anybody. He had dark red hair and his mother’s hair was a striking and luxuriant flaming red. Mr Cureton was a male nurse in what was then called ‘the lunatic asylum’. I learned early on that his father’s first name was Wesley, which, if I’d known or could understand anything about such things at that time, meant that they were Methodists. One implication of this was brought home to me years later when I went to visit Chris and his wife for a weekend in Lincolnshire where he was serving on an airbase. I’d started work in London and was engaged enthusiastically on my beer drinking apprenticeship under the encouraging guidance of a Geordie friend. To my shock and profound disbelief, I discovered that Chris did not drink, never had and never would. Fortunately for those around him, he had not the slightest objection to other people doing it.

Yet another only child, Chris was a clever lad, quiet, serious and definitely his own person. He was never particularly bothered about being part of a gang. He had the necessary inner reserves to be self-contained, while I think I always wanted to be with someone else, part of their crowd and always wary of being left out. Chris and I saw a great deal of one another, and it was probably with him rather than anyone else that I used to cycle to ‘serious’ places like Viroconium and The Wrekin, rather than just messing about around the Rad Brook and The Fields, or in somebody’s back garden. Perhaps Chris’s sober approach to life meant that he lived more surely in the ‘real world’, while we messers-about tended to indulge more the wilder reaches of our imaginations.

We were good friends throughout our time at Pengwern House but my strongest memories of Chris date more from my time at grammar school, and later after we’d moved away to Staffordshire. Due to the alphabetical arrangement of seating in class, I was the last of the B’s and he was the only C, meaning that he sat directly behind me. So the transfer from school to school did not separate us but further cemented the already strong mutual bond. We passed sweets to one another, and made endless fun together of teachers and fellow pupils, especially those with funny names. The particular area of Chris’s cleverness at school was in maths and the science subjects. Somehow his mind managed to grasp the logical principles involved that mine apparently could not. I was more diverted by literature and languages, so we formed a useful complementary pair. I still can’t really believe, years later, that I managed to pass my ‘O’ level maths without the help of someone like him.

Young children often make real friends with an adult who is not one of their parents, perhaps a grandparent or a favourite uncle or aunt, or a friend of their parents. Through some kind of magical chemistry, they make a valuable contact with someone who seems to understand them, who shares their interests and speaks the same language. The beauty of this situation is that the adult friend isn’t obliged to act in parental ways, which might mean being careful about your language or doing, or not doing, particular things that would otherwise be frowned on, or forbidden, at home. Grandparents and others frequently spoil the child, knowing well enough that the parents won’t make too much of a fuss about it.

Matt Rogers was my grown-up friend, and he was exactly the kind of friend that a boy with a somewhat serious father needed. He had been in the Far East during the War and was full of stories about strange things in exotic foreign places. He talked very fast in a strange but very infectious accent, a kind of Australian, transatlantic and West Country mixture. This, apart from anything else, made him different and interesting and romantic. He was extremely good looking and had a set of studio photographs taken somewhere on the other side of the world, smiling like a stereotypical Hollywood film actor, looking over his shoulder at the camera. On his head was an Australian bushranger-type hat with the brim turned up on one side. Each photo was signed Best wishes from Matt and I can imagine him now presenting them to the girls he met in foreign ports. One of those photos was among my very important personal belongings for years afterwards.

Matt was probably about my father’s age but seemed much younger. He had definitely ‘been around a bit’ and knew a lot about how the world worked outside Shrewsbury and well beyond England. I know there was plenty in some of his stories that I couldn’t understand but would never have admitted at the time. In some senses, he may have been considered a ‘bad influence’ on someone like me. But apart from telling me about some fairly risqué situations (doubtless exaggerated for effect) and exposing me to a few swearwords and some new slang, Matt’s ‘educational’ efforts did me no harm. I do remember using ‘bugger’ at home and being asked by my mother not to say it again.

Now a civilian, Matt lodged with John and Nora, near Colin Tanswell’s house, up Oakfield Road. John was one of my father’s colleagues and pub friends and Nora one of my mother’s good friends. I sometimes used to stay with them when my parents went away for a weekend without me. Like Matt, they were both much less buttoned up than either of my parents who would never have dreamed of using a swear word in front of me. John, Nora and Matt all swore now and again as a natural part of their everyday communication, so I became quite familiar with ‘bloody’, bugger’ and ‘sod’, though never with anything stronger. Occasional farting, too, was part of this more relaxed regime, more likely to cause mirth – if even noticed - than shame or embarrassment.

Matt was something of a horticultural wizard and earned his living doing people’s gardens and maintenance jobs around the house. He spent much of his spare time working on John and Nora’s vegetable garden, an extensive allotment strip at the side of their house. Something I heard my mother say in later years, and which I decoded properly some years after that, makes me think now that Matt might also have engaged with Nora in traditional lodger-landlady games during the day while John was at work.

Any time I felt like a breath of different air I would wander round there and have a chat with Matt while he was digging or tending something. Sometimes we went up to his room where he showed me all sorts of bits and pieces, souvenirs from distant parts of the world. He had badges and ornaments, strange seashells, wooden carvings, foreign stamps and dozens of odd coins, some of them with holes through the centre, a very serious sheath-knife, spent bullets and packets of picture postcards from all the places he’d been. The thing I coveted most was a beautiful hand-made mah-jong set, real bamboo pieces in a superb deep red velvet covered box with velvet-lined trays. Matt taught us all how to play it and we often did: Matt, my parents, John and Nora and me.

Matt’s maxim for success in life was that, above and beyond all other human qualities, your shoes must always be clean and shining. No doubt drawn from his army service, he was absolutely serious about this, though I could never treat it with quite the same solemnity. ‘When you get older,’ he said, ‘you’ll be going to interviews for jobs. As you walk into a room, the first thing anyone looks at is your shoes. If your shoes are a mess, you’ve already badly damaged your chances.’ Being one of life’s least enthusiastic shoe polishers, man and boy, could explain a lot about my position in the world. Matt would have been thoroughly ashamed of me.

Being a near neighbour, Colin also got to know Matt on those occasions when he was allowed out. We would both stop and talk to him while he planted seeds or weeded his impeccable rows of growing produce. He was tremendous entertainment for us, and the contrast between him and our parents must have been even more acute for Colin than for me. It was clear that we also amused him with our innocent questions and our transparent attempts to get him to say certain things, like ‘bloody’ and ‘bugger’, or to keep retelling some of his less respectable stories. Mrs Tanswell’s reaction if she had even the slightest inkling of Colin’s involvement in these infinitely sinful proceedings is beyond imagining.

If such a thing were possible, Colin was even more naïve than me. It showed in the kind of questions he asked and Matt always exploited this for his own amusement. Colin’s favoured form of question was ‘What’s that?’ or ‘What’s that for?’ or ‘What are you doing?’ He would stop on his own to talk to Matt who, in addition to answering questions like this, would deliberately coach Colin in how to say something like ‘bugger’ with the correct force and intonation. It was easy to tell when this had happened because Colin would then say it to me in Matt’s unmistakeable accent. Matt often told me of Colin’s visits because there was usually something funny to report. One day, he was forking over a pile of manure for the vegetable garden when Colin came along and asked ‘What’s that?’ Matt replied ‘That’s shit.’ Colin’s supplementary question was ‘What’s shit?’ and they both burst out laughing, one of them not quite sure why he was laughing.

Imaginary friends? Perhaps an only child is more likely to have an imaginary friend than a child with a sibling. I had one for years. He was called Gimmy (the ‘G’ is hard) and he lived at the back of the garden by the fence with the Bennetts’ garden. We talked together in the garden and he often came into the house, sometimes for meals, and especially when I was playing schools with my soft toys.

Gimmy also went with me quite often when I was playing with real friends who lived nearby. Not all of them liked him and he wasn’t too keen on some of them. When required, his surname was Wilson. The ones who liked him and entered into the illusion could ‘borrow’ him, especially when they needed one more to make up the numbers for something. Sometimes they reported back to me on how well he performed, or if he was a bit awkward, which he could be at times. Decades later, our first daughter had two such friends, whom she was always talking to and organising when she was playing in the garden on her own.

A CATECHISM CONCERNING GIRLS

To what extent was the young Graham aware of the presence of girls in his world?

Did he notice any of them, or play with them?

Only to a relatively small extent. Most of his mother’s friends whom they went to visit together seemed to have sons, and frequently only one, though there was sometimes an older sister around somewhere, keeping well away from boys and their stupid interests. He admits to a generalised image containing girls, for instance when they were playing about in The Fields. He could not say who they were and, at times like that, never saw them as particularly differentiated from the boys. He first encountered girls en masse at Pengwern House School but there they just all got on with doing the things children do together at school. Perhaps all they were really aware of at age five or six was that the girls wore different clothes and used different lavatories.

So did no specific, identifiable girls play any part in this phase of his life?

Pushing his recall mechanisms, one or two do begin to assert themselves in his mind. He conjures an image of a little girl called Gillian. She was in his class at school and probably, for him certainly, the prettiest girl in the room. He thinks they used to play together, though possibly not often on their own, and messed about on bikes. She lived only a small distance away, off Shelton Road somewhere, and as time went on he came to see her as his special friend. He may even have been somewhat besotted: she was extremely pretty. Sometimes, after Sunday lunch, he would jump on his bike, whiz round to Gillian’s house, and ride round and round in circles in the road outside. He affected a casual style suggesting that he just happened to be there on some other business, but was really hoping she would appear at a window or actually come out of the house to see him. Perhaps she did now and again in the summer, but mostly he returned home disappointed. He naturally maintained a detached attitude about this and never mentioned it to anyone, let alone her. Before they were seven, her parents moved away during the school summer holidays. He desperately wanted to see her again before she left, and kept going round there to catch a final glimpse. But he failed, and then she was gone. He may well have been considerably sad about this.

Is she the only one to rise to the surface of his memory?

No, she is not the only one. One of his mother’s friends from the WEA evening classes lived on Woodfield Road. His mother and he went round to see her regularly and he was friends with her daughter Ruth. They played upstairs while their mothers chatted below about things like Freud, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, existentialism and pacifism. Ruth was also pretty but in a more serious and studious way than Gillian, and had some very intelligent things to play with. There seemed to be little in the way of frivolity in Ruth’s daily life, so whatever they did play with had some sort of useful or intellectually challenging flavour to it. She was not noticeably precocious but she was definitely not one for just ‘messing about’. It seems to him now that Ruth’s early years could well have been rather more solemn and ‘grown-up’ than they needed to be. Did she rebel at some stage, for example, during her mid- teenage years, or later when she went to university? If anyone aged six or seven was heading for higher education, it was most certainly Ruth. He hopes she did manage to break out, though it would be hard to imagine her doing it in a particularly messy or destructive way.

Was there never a girl who made a more serious impression on him, perhaps when he was a few years older?

There was one. When Graham was seven or eight, Pam Bennett came into his life. The Bennetts moved in where Mr and Mrs Turner had lived, in the first house round the corner on Roman Road. Part of their back garden ran along the entire length of the Browns’ back fence. Shortly after they moved in, the boy noticed there was a daughter, a year or so older than he was, who seemed to be playing in the garden on her own. Choosing strategic times of day, he would lurk rather obviously near the fence under the fruit trees whenever he saw her outside, trying to attract her attention without actually appearing to do so. His mother told him off more than once for ‘snooping’ or ‘staring’ at the neighbours. He was told to come away from the fence. This rather interfered with his serious intention of establishing a presence that he hoped would lead to something more substantial and interactive.

Eventually it did, partly because his parents and the Bennetts met somewhere, most likely at The Beacon pub, made the right sort of contact and in time became good neighbours and good friends. Harold Bennett was in the RAF and had a very bright, active, positive, outdoor style. He knew how to do things and make things. If something practical were to be done, and done properly, Harold was the man to ask. That first winter he designed and made young Graham an exceptionally good sledge, mostly from bits and pieces of scrap materials thrown away at the airfield. On top of the sledge he even fixed a cushion that he said had once been in a plane’s cockpit. There was no sledge like it.

Are there any other examples of Harold Bennett’s distinctive qualities?

Yes, there are. Whatever was going on around them in Radbrook Road, Harold would always bring something special or different to it. One striking example was at Tom and Mary Evans’s Fireworks Night party. Harold brought the pièce de résistance: a Verey light pistol that fired bright lights high into the sky. They’d never seen anything like that. There were lots of bangers at that party, and Pam, Michael and he spent much of the time in the greenhouse, petrified by both the threat and the actuality of sudden bangs. They preferred the less frightening volcanoes, Catherine wheels, Roman candles and sparklers. Jumping Jacks were about the loudest things they could manage. Harold commandeered everyone’s larger fireworks and arranged them to produce a good variety of things going off in a meaningful sequence, rather than a random, disorganised shambles.

Young Graham saw Pam as a chip off this block. While she was quite obviously a girl, she was not girlish. He heard people say she was ‘big for her age’ and she had a very open, uncomplicated approach to things. Like her father, if there was something to do, she would do it, and the two became very good friends for what seemed like a long time. It probably overlapped the beginning of Michael’s going away to boarding school, so that he was not suddenly left without a good close playmate living nearby. Being in the Air Force, however, Harold never stayed anywhere for very long. After perhaps only a year or two he was posted to Portsmouth, taking Pam away from Shrewsbury and from her friend.

Did the boy miss his close friend after she’d moved away?

It is likely that he did. In fact, the Bennetts and his parents sensitively realised that this could happen, at least at first. So they arranged that Graham should go down to Portsmouth to stay with the Bennetts for a week during the summer holidays that year. This was done and he took one of his earliest long train journeys anywhere apart from to London. Whatever else, it was the very first time that he, aged probably only eight, went on the train on his own. His father took him to Shrewsbury station where he recalls him looking up and down the platform for someone else travelling with a child of more or less his age. They eventually found a man with his young daughter who agreed to keep an eye on the boy during the journey, and make sure he got off at the right place.

It worked all right, but he was quite worried by the way the other father was very different in temperament from his own. He looked friendly enough but was quick-tempered and, the boy sensed, on the edge of violence, something he had simply never experienced in the restrained and patient style of his own father. The daughter played up quite often, and was slammed back on her seat several times when she did something trivial that had been forbidden. The boy found it hard to see why, for example, she should not to stand up to look through the compartment window, or go out into the corridor. When she disobeyed, and she kept on doing it, her father grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her roughly back into her place.

The young Graham characteristically kept his head down and stuck into his comics and books, and tried to give the impression that he was not watching. He had no real direct contact with the girl during the whole journey – and that may have been part of the problem. He was certainly too shy to make the necessary approach. If they had got together, perhaps they could have talked and played together and prevented her intermittent rough treatment. His shyness was only one obstacle. The other was her suffering from the infinitely serious handicap of being a year or two younger than he was. You just do not engage with people like that, especially when they’re girls.

How successful was the boy’s stay in Portsmouth?

The week in Portsmouth was fine. Pam’s parents were their usual cheerful and generous selves and Pam took him round, walking and on the bus, to the different places she had got to know. Two things stand out more than anything else. They all went to the funfair at Southsea one evening where he did something for the very first time. He went on the Big Wheel, which he had never dreamed of doing when Pat Collins’ Fair came to Shrewsbury. He was certainly apprehensive if not quite reluctant but Harold’s bright and fearless encouragement showed him how pathetic he would appear if he stayed on the ground. They would all be up there, going up in the sky, waving down to his insignificant figure below them, standing all alone looking up. He did not enjoy the Wheel too much, especially the bit when it stops right at the top of its orbit. All that can be done then, apart from keeping one’s eyes shut, is to look around and realise that you are sitting at a very great height above the ground. Coming down from that position was less enjoyable than the going up, because one feels suspended out in space, falling into nothingness. When they reached the ground and got out of the car, the boy was immediately and violently sick. As Harold so sensibly observed, ‘We should have saved the candy floss until after the ride.’ Then he bought him a toffee apple to help him feel better.

And what was the other outstanding experience during his stay with the Bennetts?

The other thing may have sown the seed of something serious for the rest of his life. Pam had taken him to the cinema in Portsmouth and they were waiting at the bus stop afterwards as dusk gathered. Across the road they could see the lit windows of an upstairs dance hall. Some of the windows were wide open and he could hear the bright sounds of the instruments playing in the live band. Cutting through and over the sound of the whole band were the solos, the gurgling raunchiness of a tenor sax and the high, crisp soaring notes of a trumpet. Their statements spoke to him in that instant even though their language was strange to him. He felt they were saying something new and different and special It excited him and he kept it all to himself, wondering how he would ever hear such things again. By his late teens he knew what they were saying almost instinctively and he has enjoyed jazz improvisation ever since. It was his mother, ever awake to his developing tastes, who gave him his first jazz record, a 78 rpm disc of ‘Basin Street Blues’ by the Louis Armstrong All Stars.

Did the difference between their ages at this stage play any part in their relationship?

By the time he arrived in Portsmouth, he was vaguely aware that Pam had begun to grow up a bit faster than him. She had crossed a mysterious threshold and he knew there was something different about her. She was beginning to do what parents in those days called ‘developing’, engaging with the early twitches and nudges of youthful sexuality. She seemed rather keen on playing hospital-type games beneath the double bed that he was sleeping in while he stayed there. These games always seemed to require her to take off her skirt and lie around under the bed in her knickers. This took place several times and, whatever role he was supposed to play in this unfamiliar situation, he obviously failed to respond properly in the ways Pam expected and wanted. He probably needed much more precise instruction while she imagined he would do the right things without any prompting. As though to move things forward more productively, she even asked Harold if she could come and sleep in the double bed with him one night. After all, they were good friends. While Harold considered this suggestion, the young Graham looked the other way, as though he was the last person to be involved in such a thing. Just for a moment he was even afraid Harold might think it was all his idea. After due consideration, Harold concluded that perhaps it was not a very good idea.

So Pam remained frustrated, the boy remained mystified and, at the end of the week, took the train back to Shrewsbury. They wrote the occasional letter to each other after that, but their relationship must have dribbled away before very long, as it was bound to, and they never heard of one another again. How intense many of those friendships felt during one’s timeless childhood and yet how easily they managed to fall away.

DOWN IN THE FIELDS: A BOYHOOD EPIPHANY

One of our favourite places for playing, where we could stay all day if we wanted to, was what we called The Fields. One way into them was through an iron gate in the dip on Roman Road. From there, they stretched over to the upper reaches of Radbrook Road, beyond the junction with Oakfield Road. There was a large corrugated iron barn halfway up with a loft which we transformed in our fantasy enactments. To the left The Fields went uphill, seemingly forever, but none of us ever went up there to see what might be over the top. It was rather like what Badger referred to as The Wide World in The Wind in the Willows: we knew it was there, or we knew something was there, but we never quite thought it was our business to know any more about it. It also looked rather a long way.

Instead, we capered about near the steep slope that went down to the stream. This was the Rad Brook, the name of the road where our house was. It seemed quite deep in places and carried a lot of water in winter. It was never wider than a couple of feet and, in many places, quite easy to jump across. Down here we made dens in thick bushes and climbed what trees we could manage. We paddled, waded, threw stones, made ineffective dams where it was narrow enough, imagining it was a great swirling tropical river or the offshoot of some huge water system flowing around in mysterious mangrove swamp country. We probably had no idea what a mangrove swamp was. I fell right into it one winter when I was shooting down the steep slope towards it on my sledge. Just when I suddenly realised I had no idea how to stop the thing, the sledge hit a strong tussock of grass hidden under the snow and stopped dead. I was lifted up and thrown forward, face-first, into the freezing cold water.

My main Fields friend was John Mansell-Jones. Having only a simple, single-syllabled name like ‘Brown’, I was always fascinated by people with double-barrelled surnames. They were relatively rare and to me they sounded both different and special. I knew nothing then of the aristocratic tendency towards this form of name and wondered how they came about. My mother told me how a woman usually surrendered her own surname when she married and took on her husband’s surname. She said some women might not agree to do this and insisted on holding on to their name – hence the double-barrelled version. I later learned that, because of the upper-class connotations, the practice had also developed an aura of snobbery, with all sorts of people using them without any strict entitlement to do so.

John’s parents lived on Ridgebourne Road, which ran more or less parallel to the stream. These houses had exceptionally long back gardens sweeping down the slope that formed the other side of the Rad Brook’s small valley to a fence at the end. The stream ran along the bottom of John’s garden here, and his father had built a small plank bridge across it and a stile to help us get us over the fence.

John’s granny lived with them at this time. In her bedroom, where he shouldn’t really have been, he discovered a large box of old cigars on top of the wardrobe. This was our opportunity for one of the great youthful rites of passage: smoking. John pinched a cigar from the box and we broke off a piece and crushed it so that the bits of leaf would fit into our small bubble pipes. These were white, clay pipes that you filled with soapy water and, depending on your breathing control, either blew decent bubbles out of the bowl, or were left with the soapy water you started with. We took this gear over to the barn with a couple of matches stolen from the kitchen cooker. This particular smoking experience was unrewarding. The old cigars had probably belonged to John’s late grandfather and were so dry that the contents of the pipe bowl became very hot and burned very fast. Despite two or three attempts, the only enjoyment we achieved was the vague sense of doing something adult and forbidden.

I connect this with another much more notable smoking episode a few years later. I was eleven and a pupil at the Priory School for Boys. One evening a week during the summer term there was an after-school Art Club where we were provided with paper and paint and allowed to paint anything we wished. I had very little talent for drawing or painting but liked the idea of more or less randomly covering a very big sheet of paper with paint. The only subject I could think of was a stormy sea. I swirled about with all the different shades of blue, going over it again and again week after week, making the sea rougher and wilder every time. I was rewarded unexpectedly when the Art teacher, Mr Barker, used it as an example to others in the group because it was big and bold by contrast with some of their feebler attempts at seascape.

After Art Club, a few of us would get a bag of chips from the Little Boro Fish Café in Frankwell and eat them on the hoof as we walked back along the river to Porthill Bridge. There was a children’s playground near the bridge, and we would sit on the swings there chatting before making the trek home up Porthill. Here one or two in the group smoked a cigarette, and the time came eventually when I felt I ought to have one as well. My mother used to keep a packet of Woodbines on her end of the mantelpiece in the living room. One afternoon I looked inside to find about seven left, and thought she would probably not miss one. I took it and, after my chips that evening, I smoked it on the swings and came home. My mother said nothing about it and, as so often during childhood, I imagined I’d got away with it. I went to bed and to sleep, only to awake very suddenly to be violently sick, depositing the still undigested product of the Fish Café on the blanket in front of me. I cried out and my mother materialised in my bedroom. She just looked at me, and said: ‘You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?’ A grey-green, slightly sweating, pathetic face nodded sheepishly back at her.

The Fields gave us hours and days of complete freedom for several summers. The space there seemed infinite. There was nothing we could damage and no-one we could annoy. Even when the cows were there, we all kept our mutual distance. But the stream still had to claim me once more. Towards the end of the great winter of 1947 it was very full of water and flowing fast. The John Mansell-Jones gang ran down his garden to find the plank bridge just under water. Great minds conferred and we decided to take off our shoes, stuff our socks into them, and throw them across to the other bank. Then, holding tightly onto the rail, we would paddle across the bridge. There are times when you feel like a Woody Allen character, potentially doomed whatever you do. The others all threw their shoes over successfully and I was the last to throw. My first shoe landed safely on the other side, but the second one fell short and landed in the water. It sank instantly and was rushed away by the hungry stream.

At moments like this all the brightness goes out of life. Your entire existence becomes an immeasurably heavy burden as the implications unfold before you. The worst one is having to go home on your own while the others are playing in The Fields and tell your mother about it. I was lent a pair of outsize Wellingtons to walk home in. My mother looked at them and asked the obvious question. ‘I’ve got one of them’, I said, ‘but the other one’s gone in the stream down by The Fields.’ Mrs Mansell-Jones telephoned my mother to help soften the situation, saying that she thought she could see the shoe, stuck against a stone on the bottom of the stream. For the next couple of days, the parents poked about with a rake and a long pole but, as we all knew really, the shoe was gone.

How much did a pair of children’s shoes cost then? I do know my parents were not at all well off. Whatever the sacrifices needed to provide an unscheduled pair of shoes for me, they made them. My mother has referred to that incident, among others, many times during my adult life when we’ve been reminiscing about my childhood or our life in Shrewsbury. She would simply say ‘Do you remember the shoe going in the stream, dear?’ I would reply ‘Yes’ and nod, but I still preferred not to say any more about it. She always respected my reluctance.

While The Fields remained part of my boyhood landscape, John Mansell-Jones went out of it when we were about nine. We’d been good friends and I admired his daring and the originality of the adventures he initiated. At that age, time seems boundless, and holidays, playing and friendships eternal. We never imagine that any of them could come to an end. Trivial matters like being called in for tea while you’re still playing or having to be home by a particular time always made an unduly brutal intrusion into the separately willed child’s world.

Suddenly, as it seemed to us, John’s father was being sent to work in Enniskillen and that was the end of our particular small world. We sat on our bikes outside his house for the last time. At this involuntary parting of friends, we had no idea what to say. Eventually, ‘So long,’ said John. ‘So long,’ I replied. Then I turned round and, never once looking behind me, pedalled home, my eyes prickling.

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