A Documentary of Childhood
A piece I enjoyed writing about school years in the 1960s.
What is here, my friends, is nothing but imagination at work, entangled with childhood memories. They coalesce and mingle like the colours of Neapolitan ice cream left out on a summer’s afternoon. As we age, they become non-linear. That part of us, that fraction of our very existence, slips away, and we become less as a result.
So when I look back and feel for the fragments of what was once a continuous experience, it becomes flawed. Smells, sounds, and sights reorder themselves; slip into and through each other and mislead me.
It’s as if my senses are a window of fixed width travelling back to a life lived in London by a group of lads at school in London.
What follows is not about me, but about the time, the ’60s. The characters you’ll read about are fictional, the place is the west end of London.
Longer pieces don’t get read on Medium. I get that.
This work is not full of prose, not romantic, but it is my imagination stretched to its limit to provide you with enjoyment. Please seat yourself comfortably, and let me take you back.
It is without doubt, a work of which I’m deeply proud.
After that, well you tell me. Enjoy.
I walked to school every school day for three and a half years, straight along the main road I lived on until I reached the unimaginative High Road. That high road is still there; I can check it on a map.
But for junior and infant school, nothing is the same. The road was busy with buses, cars, and lorries.
The road crossed the canal before diving under the railway, then passed the factory behind the railings that printed maps. On warm days, the printers would open a large pair of frosted windows enough to glimpse the noisy, ineffable interior.
If we climbed the railings, we could see in. The presses disgorged huge world maps — the biggest I’ve seen. The paper world would be spat out every five seconds — faster than God could manage. As the print works building ended, the offices began. The factory was black brick and closed, but the offices were bright and glassy with a door that said ‘Push’.
The reception was a circular building, and from the ceiling hung a massive globe. I used to peer up at the southern hemisphere, taking in Antarctica, Australasia and South America. I never saw the northern hemisphere — that view was reserved for those lucky enough to climb the stairs towards the first-floor offices.
I wondered if it had ever fallen off onto any of the visitors. I imagined it plummeting earthwards, without irony, and rolling around crushing people.
Brian ran ahead in the fog. When he had run ten yards, I could no longer see him. He would lunge back into view screaming. The fog dulled his shouts. It dulled the sounds of traffic, too. Cars with headlights like candles eerily crept passed as slowly as we walked. All its lights were on when the 266 bus suddenly appeared from the gloom. It looked like an office passing by. The passengers peered out of the windows, wiping the condensation away, trying to see if they were nearing their stop.
I wanted to run, too. I wanted to know if I ran fast enough, whether I’d be somewhere else entirely. Anything was possible in the fog. Today, perhaps it leads somewhere magical — somewhere outside of time where something, anything at all, could lie just beyond the visibility of now.
Another schoolmate, Barry West, was scared of the fog and screamed the one time I went out of his sight. Barry didn’t have a brother. Mum told me to hold Barry’s hand to school. But that was sissy.
When we got to the playground, it was filled with friends and classmates. All excited by the unfamiliarity of the usually mundane asphalt space.
There was a shout from somewhere fogbound. A boy ran into our group, holding a ball. Look, he shouted, there are hundreds of them. He aimed the small black sphere at the ground and bounced it. Eight small faces snapped upwards to watch it disappear into the murk. It returned to joint incredulity. Someone whistled a slow, appreciative note.
There’s loads of ’em by the wall, and he turned back and ran. He was lost in the fog in a second. We followed and saw that he wasn’t exaggerating. There were millions and millions of black balls lying on the ground. Superballs, with huge bounces, had started to appear in toy shops, and it looked like men from the factory had tipped a load over the wall for the kids.
We were beside ourselves with joy at this unexpected treasure. We picked up as many balls as we could. Some bounced them, others threw them into the fog, where they disappeared. We crammed our coats and trouser pockets with balls. Others arrived. Girls too. Lucie ran over. She tucked her hair behind an ear. I gave her a ball. She bounced it, caught it, and smiled briefly at me before running back into the playground. I watched her disappear in the fog, fading out of my world and back into her own.
At first playtime, the fog had almost gone. I felt a sense of loss as I walked into the re-familiarized playground. I wanted the fog to come back. It took the ordinariness away and reminded me that there was wonder in the world — even in West London.
Someone ran up to me and held out his hands. He had half a ball in each hand. I had pockets full of balls. I took out two and gave him one. Without the fog now,, at least I could see how high the balls would bounce. I jumped into the air and threw my ball with as much force as possible. The ball split like some fissioning nucleus, and small pieces shot off at unexpected angles. Teachers on playground duty were throwing balls to each other and laughing. The balls made your hand smell funny.
Brian was my best friend. He’d been my best friend on and off for two years. Playground friendships were always subject to fads, and boys fell in and out of favour. Girls were never friends, not even Lucie. Brian stayed more or less my best friend as he lived across the road from me, and we walked to and from school together.
He’d come in for tea once a week or so during term time to watch telly. Mum would make an extra plate of meat or fish paste sandwiches, and Brian would wolf them down, always saying, Thank you, Mrs. Preston. Looking back, he always seemed a bit on edge, but I don’t think I noticed that much at the time. When the evenings were long and summery we’d go out to play.
A railway shunting yard was two paces beyond our flimsy back garden fence and gate. Where the railway tracks weren’t hard up against back fences, they gave onto narrow and overgrown wasteland, and this was our park. Wagon movements were relatively rare when we played; Mum and Dad always told us to be careful where we went.
We came from a railway family, so I’m guessing fear and respect for trains were taken as read. There were tales of boys playing and being trapped between buffers and losing legs, believed in earnest then dismissed later as scare tactics.
They were probably true. At least somewhere.
Brian taught me to sneak. At least I remember that he taught me. Perhaps it was the other way around. The school building was like a castle with turrets and an irregular roofline inset with attic windows. That’s what I tell myself. It was probably far more prosaic.
Vauxhall Victors, Vivas, and Morris 1000s sat in the teachers’ car park. There were cycles, too. The headmistress would pay with sweets any boy who washed her car during the lunch break. In my memory, she looked like Mrs Thatcher’s Spitting Image puppet. The boys’ toilets were outdoors and had no roof. I don’t remember where the girls went. The bogs were covered with brown glazed tiles. We would see who could piss the highest. We’d try, in vain, to get it over the wall. Haha, what if we did, and a teacher was walking past?
Wet playtimes were the worst of all possible school days. Screaming children confined to an ancient building playing with bean bags.
.Brian curled his finger and motioned to follow him. We were in our last year at the school and were on the top of three floors.
There were boys’ and girls’ cloakrooms, one in each wing. Rows of low benches hunched, with coat hooks above. Damp duffle coats and anoraks hung listlessly, and a musty smell was all-pervasive. There was a door next to the cloakroom that was usually locked.
I don’t remember being curious about it before, but Brian turned the knob, and it opened outwards. Stairs led straight up from the doorway into the gloom above. What’s it…. I asked, and Brian silenced me with a finger against his lips. He went up, leaving me alone. I could follow him or go back to the classroom.
If I returned, I wouldn’t know what lay at the top of the stairs. If I followed, I r,isked being caught out of bounds and would feel the cane across the back of my legs. I looked back. No one had seen us. I went up, and two steps later, Brian whispered down to close the door. I protested that it would be dark, and as I said the words, there was a pointed click and a light somewhere above cast a gloomy, fly-spotted and dismal light down on me.
I closed the door, and as it clicked shut I felt a momentary pang of panic as I thought it might have locked. I crept up the steep wooden steps, holding on to a tall handrail not meant for small children. When I reached the top Brian gestured with both hands to the expanse.
I didn’t know it then, but I’d just entered an attic that stretched across the whole school. I had never been in an attic before, and this was immense. Wooden trusses held up the roof and made for an intricate structure that checkered views in all directions.
Ancient chimneys thrust their way through the floor and out the roof. It felt cold, and I could hear rustling. Birds, Brian told me, they live here. There was dust on every surface. There was an eerie silence about the space despite the birds. I could hear my heart beating inside my chest, and Brian said, Look.
I followed him to a trellis table covered with balls. As I got closer, I realised they were not balls but small heads. Closer still, they became puppet heads — heads made from plasticine. They were the first stages of papier-mache puppet heads. Each one had a little tube coming from the bottom for an index finger to poke up.
They would be cut open and the modeling clay removed before rejoining, painting, and dressing. Then, some sort of end-of-term puppet show would ensue. Mainly they were Punch and Judy, but there were babies, mums and dads, brothers and sisters, and maybe even a teacher.
They were proto-heads. Heads are waiting to be adequately born, yet they are devoid of eyes, lips, freckles, colour, and hair. All they had were noses. Brian picked one up. He put his finger into the tube and made a funny voice.
Hello, I’m Mister Graham, and you will play the triangle, or I’ll slipper you.
I picked up one, too, and we played a grotesque puppet show. I had one on each hand now; they looked at each other and talked.
What are you doing here, big-nose? Who said that? I can’t see you; I haven’t got any eyes, haha.
With a quick, silent movement, Brian thumped the head onto the table, stirring up eddies of dust in the still air.
He looked at the puppet head, laughed and showed it to me. Its nose was flattened. It no longer looked much like a head. He took one of the puppets off my hand, and Bam! He hooted triumphantly. I looked at the crazy glint in his eyes and felt my puppet nestle into my palm, exactly the right size to be pounded. Smash! Nose-less. Whack! Another. I stopped. Brian was on his sixth or seventh. Stop, Brian. We’ll get caught.
I didn’t say Stop, Brian, it’s wrong, but Stop, we’ll be discovered. He shook his head and picked up another puppet. His eyes never left mine as he pounded it onto the table.
Lucie lived the other way from me in a posher area. She had a natural park in which to play. I saw her with her friends as I entered the hall after leaving the attic. They were playing catch with small rubber rings, sometimes screeching with laughter. I approached her as casually as a ten-year-old could and realised my hands were dirty with attic dust. I hid them behind my back.
Hi, I called. Lucie ignored me, winding her hair behind her ear. D’you wanna know a secret? I said. P’raps, she replied non-committedly. Come over here then. She put her hand through the ring, pushed it up her arm and followed me to the side of the hall. She looked at me distrustfully. What? she said.
You know Brian, I replied, well, he’s been out of bounds.
Doin’ what? she asked.
My courage deserted me. Brian was my best friend. You can’t tell a girl even if you love her. I don’t know; I finally managed. She turned, pulled down the ring, and returned to her game. I don’t remember ever speaking to her again.
Maisy was in my class. She arrived before Christmas and spoke strangely, Mrs Taylor told the class. Maisy was from America and would stay at the school for a while.
We were to be friends and look after her.
But she did sound funny. And she was tall. After Christmas, she handed out little envelopes to everyone in the class. They were birthday party invitations. I’d never been to a birthday party, and she was pretty cute and talked to me, but Lucie ignored me. Maisy spoke to everyone. She hardly ever stopped talking about how her dad was important.
I told her my dad drove railway trains, and she said that was nice, but her daddy flew planes. Mum said I couldn’t go to the party because we had to go to Nan’s that weekend. She told me to write a thank you to Maisy anyway.
Brian said he wasn’t going to Maisy’s party because she was a yank. I said it wasn’t her fault that she never stopped talking. Maisy was crying in class and said that no one was coming to her party because I’m different.
I handed her my letter telling her I was going to my nan’s. She didn’t believe me, and that always haunted me. I felt despondent for her.
Brian’s dad was a deep-sea diver who served in the Navy. That’s why I could never come to his house. His mum didn’t want strangers in their house. He told me that while we were watching Do Not Adjust Your Set on the TV and eating bread and jam.
I only saw his mum once in three years.
I was in Woolworths with my mum and brother. I saw Brian take some sweets from the Pick ’n’ Mix, and a woman slapped him across the face as she grabbed the sweets and threw them back.
He saw me watching. I tried to say hello, but he was too far away, so I waved. His eyes welled up, but he bit his lip as a big red mark spread across his cheek. His mum yanked him by the arm, and he was gone. He didn’t speak to me for a week and went to school alone. I knew he was cross that I’d seen him because he played with Gavin that week, and he never played with Gavin.
Next week, it was forgotten, and we went to the sheeting shed to play. It was unknown to anyone why it was called that or even what it meant. My dad told me it was an abandoned hostel for railway men who’d worked trains down from the north and stayed overnight before running trains home the next day.
Dad said he’d stayed in similar places in Leeds and Manchester. I only remember one day there.
I’d gone round to Brian’s back gate, knocked and shouted, but he hadn’t come. I lifted the latch, and the tall wooden gate opened slightly as I pushed against the rusty hinges. I was just about to call him again when Brian came out his back door.
His house was like mine, and this door led from his kitchen. Like us, the railway people had knocked down his old outside toilet and built a bathroom and toilet accessed from the kitchen. Get out, he whispered loudly. Mum’ll clump me if she sees you in here.
Is your dad back yet? I asked for the umpteenth time that month. Brian had told me before he was looking forward to seeing his dad back from China or somewhere. No, he replied, he’s still stuck. Next month. Maybe.
We ran down the alley towards the sheeting shed. Mark, Tony, and Vincent would meet us inside, and we would look for tramps. Since the place had closed, no one but vagrants had lived there. We were excited. I felt anxious — a sense of adventure. If there were tramps there they’d shout and chase us. We’d outrun them easily, but they’d be smelly and might throw bottles at us.
We went through the bent and loose corrugated iron fence and the broken window of a tiny downstairs room. It was dark here, but we could see light in the main part of the building.
Landon was already here.
There isn’t anyone here, he reported. Me ’n’ Mark looked. On cue, Peter let out a whoop from somewhere out of sight. Com’on QPR, he shouted. Vince supported Queen’s Park Rangers soccer team and was always shouting it.
All of his school books were covered with those three letters. He was useless at soccer and was always the last to be picked.
Where’s Mark? Brian asked.
He ain’t here, said Vince, coming into the room from the main hall. He held a chair leg in his hand and swung it with a thump against the door frame. We’ve looked all over, and it’s empty, he continued.
We walked into the main stairwell of the square building. Looking up we found ourselves in every schoolboy’s dream. A huge empty building. The staircase wound its way around all four walls of the vestibule. It seemed to go up dozens of floors, but Dad told me later there were only four. Landings went around two sides of each floor leading off to corridors. There were many small rooms on these landings and passageways. The top of the stairwell was glazed with dirty, cracked, bird-spotted glass.
It was impossible to see the sky above, but a uniform greyness bled through. It seemed silent, although we could dimly hear the main road traffic seventy yards away. The place was a wreck, but it was our wreck.
Chairs and some tables had been thrown down the stairwell, and fragments of furniture could be seen here and there. Our voices echoed in the stillness, and motes of dust could be seen dancing in the beams from steeply angled light streaming through cracks in the glass roof.
As we ran up the stairs, it was as if we were stirring the dust from some ancient tomb. It would float back down insouciantly. Small, boy-sized footprints were left across the stair treads and floors. Tony was lucky to have a pair of Wayfinder shoes and left little animal track footprints wherever he went.
I once asked him to show me the compass I knew was hidden in the heel, but he said his mum had told him not to show anyone. I think he’d lost it.
Mum said the shoes were too expensive.
First, we played hide and seek in the maze of dusty, broken cells. We soon tired of that as it involved lots of stair-climbing, and there were hundreds of rooms. Vince came out of one of the rooms, dragging a striped mattress. He and Brian heaved it over the banister rail and it fell two stories to the floor. It landed with a whump and a puff of dust. Let’s get them all, shouted Brian.
Yeah, we all screamed.
I pushed the door nearest me. It opened a little way. I put my shoulder to it, and the door groaned open, pushing the bed away. Pigeons flapped noisily away from their perches on the window sill. At the time, it never struck me as odd that the door had been blocked from the inside. The room was as broken and dusty as the rest.
The straw-filled mattress sat half on a low iron bed frame. Some of the supporting springing was hanging like it had been kicked through.
The bottom half of the sash window was smashed. I could see out through it to the road. A 266 Routemaster busied past. It was my red, diesel-engine anchor back into the real world of school and home.
I turned back to look at the room.
Apart from the bed, a small chair had one of its legs snapped off. A small cupboard had been upended against a wall, and a book was on the lino floor. That was it — nothing else. I picked up the book. It was a Bible.
I flicked through the creased and dusty pages. Mum told me that it was the most important book in the world. It didn’t look important that day, lying on the floor, its spine broken and pages folded back on themselves. I righted the cupboard and put the book into the drawer.
I glanced back through the grimy window before hefting the mattress through the door. It was as though my ears had been switched back on — the noise of three excited voices was deafening. I pushed and cajoled the musty-smelling palliasse over the rail, and down it tumbled, joining the half dozen already there. Vince and Tony were at the bottom, pulling the bits of chairs out from under the growing pile.
We spent the next hour launching as many of the stained and split mattresses into space as we could find. In the end, we had a tall pile in the stairwell.
We rushed downstairs to survey our work. It was a fine landing bed. Unusually, I went first. I strode up half a flight and climbed over the bannisters. Holding onto the rail with my arms behind my back, I leaned out.
Jump shouted Brian. I thought better of it and edged back down a few stairs before leaping outward and screaming. I hit the unforgiving pile with a dull thump. I couldn’t breathe from the dust I’d stirred and was swallowed up by at least two layers of bedding.
I swam to the top of the mattresses, wheezing, coughing and sneezing. Brilliant!, was all I could say through the coughing fit. Brian was next and went where I’d first climbed over. He threw himself down into the cushioned pit. As he landed, a roar of triumph and a jet of dust shot skywards. He climbed out and was a different colour. I looked down at myself and realised that I was no longer my usual self.
We worked our way up the outside of the staircase until we were almost a whole story up before we heard the police siren. We froze as one. Looked at each other before some instinctive reaction took over, and we all ran.
We squeezed out the window into the afternoon sun. Following Vince closely, I realised how smelly he was. I looked down.
God, mum will kill me if I come home like this, I said to no one in particular.
Me too, said Tony.
Brian just shrugged his shoulders and ran for the outside fence. We exited speedily and ran full pelt for Vince’s backyard. We banged each other’s backs to dislodge some dust and grime. There was a bucket of water, and we washed our hands and faces and looked ten times dirtier. At home, Mum was asleep in front of the telly, so I took off my T-shirt and washed it.
When we returned the next day, the fence had been mended, and our wonderland had been taken away.
The prospect of moving to high school was exciting and scary. Brian and I would be going to the same school. It just couldn’t get any better. Mum had taken me shopping to buy my new uniform. I loved the bold colours — they stood out more than the blander tones of the junior’s ties and jumpers.
Blazers were new to me, and the prospect of an inside pocket somehow excited me. I wanted to go out to play with my shirt and tie on. I knew passers-by would be impressed by how smart and grown-up I looked.
Mum said no.
It would keep for another week until I started the new term. I sneaked my tie in my pocket and rushed to Brian’s to show him. I could never hear his doorbell ringing, so never knew if it worked. After what seemed like an age, I decided he wasn’t coming and ran round the back. I knew he wasn’t allowed to have friends anywhere in the house, but I couldn’t contain myself.
The gate gave way as I pushed it, and I entered the unfamiliar yard.
Our yard led up steps to the garden; his led to the alley. There was an old-fashioned washing boiler with a mangle on top and a single bicycle wheel.
Washing hung desultorily in the still air. It looked grey as if it had been there for years. I could hear shouting from inside the house. Brian was crying. This numbed me — I’d never seen him cry, even when he fell off one of the huge cable bobbins we used to climb on and roll like circus acrobats and got a massive splinter in his hand and gashed his face and knee.
But he was crying now, I was sure. His mum was screaming. I edged closer to the back door. I could hear Brian shouting through his tears: no, no, NO!
Then he said, I don’t want to go to Parkhurst; I want to stay here. Why couldn’t they stay at the Scrubbs? His mum screamed back that they were leaving.
Leaving? Leaving! No, Brian can’t leave. Not now. We’re going to high school together. I backed away from the door and knocked into the boiler. The mangle fell onto the concrete yard. The shouting inside stopped. I turned and ran as I heard the kitchen door being unlocked.
As I sped through the gate, I turned back. Brian was looking at me through the parted, grubby net curtains. His face was contorted with crying and tears, his hands pressed against the window, and his fingers splayed.
Dad later told me that Parkhurst was a prison, like Wormwood Scrubbs.
The first year at the big school was OK.
I soon made new friends, and before I knew it, a year had gone by, and Brian was a memory. I’d left Lucie behind for a year. I hoped and prayed that she would come to my school. I made little pacts with God, telling him I’d stop biting my nails if Lucie came next summer.
Then I stopped biting, reasoning that God would see through that plan and expect me to fulfil my part of the bargain first. At the start of my second year, and swaggeringly experienced in the ways of high school, I was exactly the sort of friend Lucie would need to navigate her first couple of weeks. She didn’t come. I waited, thinking maybe she’d been on holiday with her family but never arrived.
I never saw Lucie or Brian again.
I started to bite my nails again when I realised that often it’s not enough to want something badly.
I had my first niggling doubts about God.
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