Goating

By David Moate

Autobiography: A personal diary of a lifetime of Going Off At Tangents. Revised edition (January 2009)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257610822

Book preview

1973

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1932-49

It was a warm summer afternoon 3rd September 1939. Andrew Baker, the boy next door, skidded his bike to a halt. I didn’t have a bike. He was my friend, who had everything as far as I was concerned. He was an only child and his home, a large semi-detached adjoining ours, was beautiful; and his father was very important with Firestone’s factory on the Great West Road. And they had a motor car. Also, he was taller than me.

We were about 7¾ years old.

War, announced Andrew, has been declared.

I wasn’t sure what I ought to think about War having been declared. But Andrew obviously thought that it was important. So, therefore, for me it had also to be important.

I had stayed in their house when I had had measles. The room was kept darkened but that brief memory was of a temporary sojourn in a home of warmth and luxury. That was some while back when I was probably only 4 or 5 years old.

And I knew their house quite well, because I often went to play with Andrew in his garden. They had green lawns and trees, and a wooden playhouse at the end. Ours seemed to be mainly concrete and jumbled timber. Andrew never came to play in our garden.

I had been on holiday with them once, to Felpham-by-the-Sea. We went in their motor car, a real Ford Popular. I cannot remember anything about the holiday but I do know that I was nearly always car-sick in the back of that Ford Popular and glad when we arrived anywhere.

Our garden used to be green grass, like Andrew’s next door, but workmen came and laid solid grey concrete from the living room out alongside the kitchen windows, and past and around the wood-and-glass scullery with its big wooden rain tub outside. And then came a stone paved area with a heavy rockery and sandpit. A crazy paving path went up the garden, divided into two and met again outside a large new greenhouse at the end of the garden. Grass, there wasn’t much left.

And then, on the solid concrete area were created two or three rickety lean-to barns, with corrugated iron sheeting on top, and filled with untreated lengths of timber, with the irregular bark still on the sides. And many tearful hours I was forced to spend under my father’s bullying injunctions whilst all this junk was put into place.

Why he purchased all this useless wood I cannot to this day comprehend, unless he remembered his own father’s chicken farm adventure of twenty years back. Or possibly, with his weird individualistic biblical beliefs he was building up stocks for another Noah’s Ark ready for the end of the world - which it appears he hopefully anticipated right up to his death.

I was attending a local private school just down the road, about 100 yards the other side of the underground railway bridge. This establishment was called Hounslow College. I had been there since I was 4½ years old, but very little remains in memory. It was a privately run affair in a large Victorian house, with a Doctor Hindle as the Headmaster and a Miss Spencer as the Headmistress. It was an all boys school and we wore dark blue blazers and caps, with shields on the top pocket of the blazer and on the front of the cap. I was very much afraid of Dr Hindle and Miss Spencer, but in retrospect without any reason that I can recollect. They both wore black professional gowns and mortar board hats with a tassel hanging over the side.

The day always started with prayers, with the 60 or 70 or so pupils crammed into what must have once been a drawing room, and Dr Hindle entered and stepped up onto a little platform and led the assembly in some sort of religious procedure. All I ever worked out from the routine was that his hat was called a Letter Spray hat, because towards the end of the proceedings there invariably came a point where Dr Hindle reached upwards and as he took off his headgear he paused and solemnly enunciated the words LETTER SPRAY. I presumed that the spray was the tassel over the side.

I think I owe some debt to this school because although I cannot remember learning much else it did teach me good basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

I was once beaten with a slipper by a prefect for some misdemeanour, but the trepidation was far greater than any hurt. I was more fascinated by the recounting of stories by a boy who joined in mid-stream, about his previous private school where trousers and pants were pulled down in the headmaster’s study before punishment was administered. No doubt, in retrospect, that was why his parents removed him and transferred him to the dull but chaste surroundings of Hounslow College, Lampton Road.

I have a memory from when I was 6 years old. I was being bathed by my mother and for some reason she left the bathroom for a while. Rolling around in the water my little penis gained from the bottom of the bath its first experience of sexual excitement. Little did I understand what was happening but had a very strong feeling that something was out of order and only very reluctantly stood up in the bath on the return of my mother, with my little member sticking straight out in front of her. Disapproval filled the air like a Victorian winter. My instincts of reluctance were well founded. Whatever it was that I had effected was without doubt, disgraceful.

Sunday mornings we children, that is myself and Muriel and Keith, were walked round to our Grandmother’s shop at Bath Road about a mile and a bit away, the smallest and newest, Roger, being pushed in the big four wheeled pram.

About this time an old German lady Miss Drozio was introduced into the scene to endeavour to teach me and my younger sister Muriel to play the piano. Miss Drozio was probably a very nice old lady, but in those days she was a rather frightening apparition, a one-sided hunchback of elderly age and sagging face, dressed in heavy Victorian clothes down to floor level, with a flower-embroidered hat. She didn’t actually walk, but did what was more like a slow three-step shuffle.

Nothing much was learned piano-wise and I regret to say that poor Miss Drozio’s visits were regularly dreaded.

When I was about nine years old, one of the vergers of Hounslow parish church called at our house canvassing for recruits for the church choir. Without consultation my Mother sold me off to him. Reluctantly, to say the least, I attended at the next choir rehearsal. I hated the whole thing but was given no choice. I remember particularly the humiliation of having to don the girlish smocks. I was extremely small for my age, probably about three foot eight inches in height. I made any excuse I could to avoid this unhappy exercise. As I recollect, one got about one penny per service attended, with large bonuses for weddings and other special events such as consecrations of new cemeteries. The worst moment occurred every three months when the choir assembled in the room at the back of the church for payment of wages. Oh, the humiliation as the choirmaster started with the top earners at perhaps thirty-five or thirty-six shillings and worked his way slowly down to perhaps eighteen or nineteen shillings with the recipients one by one picking up their earnings and slipping from the room. Then a pause as the choirmaster surveyed the one other, small, remaining occupant of the room. Moate... three shillings and twopence.

One day at home I had been sitting on the downstairs toilet for some minutes when my father rapped on the door. Open the door, he demanded. There was no alternative but to obey. He came in, and gave me some story about it being dangerous to let things dry up on one. With which excuse I was turned over and he spent some while on washing and cleaning out my upturned bottom. I was bewildered and ashamed.

I joined the 2nd Hounslow Wolf Cubs, with Andrew from next door. We played good games and learned to tie a few knots.

By the time Andrew and I were 10 years old the war had been going on for two years and we had great fun in his garden playing war games. His parents allocated the whole top end of the garden to his use, and our happiest hours were spent deploying lead soldiers in dirt trenches and mud forts, and eventually introducing tanks composed of oblong lumps of wood with an enormous nail knocked in aslant of the top to represent the gun. We quickly became so adept at manufacturing tanks that ordinary troops stood very little chance. Battle between the opposing forces was based on alternate throws of a tennis ball at the enemy lines. Any tank or lead soldier knocked askew was out of the game, and any gap so created could be filled by advancing opponents.

We also built a submarine that we could actually get into, which to the uninitiated might have appeared to resemble a rough wooden box with large gaps between the planks. Then, more hopefully, an aeroplane; from a long plank you could actually sit on, with two pram wheels for take-off and a long heavy elastic band made of an old inner tube of a car, which ran from a propeller at the front to a fixing point, a large nail, at the tail end. As I recall, we had great faith in both these projects at the time.

Real-life Cowboys and Indians games were enhanced by an airgun given to Andrew by his parents. Many hours were spent by either side peppering each other from, alternatively, inside or outside the wooden playhouse at the end of his garden.

Poor Muriel, my younger sister, tended to suffer in those days. If anybody had to be tied to a stake, or forced to eat worms - that was Muriel.

Towards the end of 1941 when I was in my tenth year our mother swelled out in pregnancy and just after Christmas she went off to a nursing home. When she came back there was a baby with her - Anne, the fifth and final child.

One afternoon a week was sports afternoon at Hounslow College and we all went three stations up the line on the underground railway to Boston Manor where there were large playing fields, bounded by the railway on one side and, down the bottom, by the Grand Union Canal. Here we played football and, also, I vaguely recall we had the annual ‘sports day’ with running and jumping and so forth. One of the pupils, a friend of mine, actually lived on the edge of these sports ground at Boston Manor. His name was Gordon Gowers and he was tall and thin and sandy-haired. I think he was older than me. Somehow his mother had some access to black-market Cadbury’s dairy-milk chocolate, and I always looked forward to the occasional invitation in to their home, anticipating the moment when Mrs Gowers would move towards the sideboard which contained the illicit store of goodies.

During the coming summer of 1942 it was somehow decided that I should be put forward for the preparatory class of Latymer Upper School, a grammar school at Hammersmith. Entrance to this school depended greatly upon the result of a personal interview with the headmaster, and for some reasons of convenience it was arranged that I should go to the interview session with Gordon Gowers, attended by his mother. And so, as the chance of life had it, I was presented in all my 45 or 46 or so inches to Mr Wilkinson the headmaster of Latymer. It happened at that time that apart from perhaps Harrow or St Pauls there was a lack of schools of any depth of educational quality in the west of London, and Mr Wilkinson was going to great lengths to select pupils of potential talent regardless of their financial or other background. Latymer had full fee paying pupils, but otherwise received a direct grant from the government to subsidise its activities and also pupils of inadequate financial means. Its Headmaster created of Latymer an oasis of educational quality, regardless of wartime problems, in a catchment area largely barren of alternatives.

Gordon Gowers and I were both found acceptable to join the junior preparatory class from where we would take an entrance exam after a year to qualify for entry to Latymer Upper School proper.

Andrew Baker from next door was going to St Paul’s public school.

I started at Latymer in September 1942 at 10 ¾ years of age, in form 1 in company with some 25 other boys. We had a lady in charge of us, Miss Davies, a greying haired spinster whom we liked very much. The school was a long pseudo-Gothic building, with modern ancillary buildings alongside, set in Kings Road, Hammersmith, a heavily built up area in west central London. Our nearest railway station was Ravenscourt Park, about 50 yards down the road opposite the entrance of the school. At the back of the school was a large brick-walled tarmacadam playground, with wire fencing to protect the surrounding houses from missiles and tennis balls. Football, with tennis balls, was a fetish for the majority of the school’s pupils - before school started, and in every break period, and after school finished at 4.10 pm in the afternoon.

After some intermediate examinations Miss Davis jocularly commented upon the similarity of answers between one of our fellow pupils, Bernard Lester, and another boy. Whereupon a weasel-faced colleague called Snelling made some derogatory remark about cheating. Bernard leaped over the desks and had Snelling against the wall in a second. Miss Davies took it in her stride. We all thought it was jolly dramatic but I rather suspect Bernard did it for effect.

Some of us stayed late in Ravenscourt Park one lunchtime, hunting for lizards under rocks, and we were all lined up in the corridor outside the classroom and belted with a slipper by a senior master.

My next younger brother Keith was about 7 years old at this time, and in earlier years had developed rickets which left him eventually with a slightly convex abdomen.

I became the owner of a second hand bicycle which was nice. As long as you didn’t let go of the handlebars, because if you did the front wheel shot sideways and you crashed; which I did, cycling down Lampton Road with a bag of buns. A bun started to fall out and I grabbed it. The bicycle went from under me. I went over the top grimly holding on to the buns, and landed head first on the pavement resulting in a general growth of bone on one side of my forehead which has remained forever.

The war impinged on our lives in only peripheral manner. Most of the boys at Latymer came from the west side of London, and generally speaking the worst effects of German bombing were in the centre and east of the city. We became used to carrying our gas masks in their little box satchels; and to the air raid sirens moving us from the classrooms to basement areas for protection. At home at night we would sleep either under the stairs or under the solid dining room table, but very few bombs ever reached our side of London. We took a great delight in collecting pieces of ‘shrapnel’ in the street during those days. These were pieces of metal from bombs or anti-aircraft gun shells. The nearest bomb to our house blew a big hole in the bowling green in Lampton Park just at the end of our garden.

I remember the searchlights at night weaving their probing fingers into the night sky, occasionally picking out a tiny but real ‘enemy’ aircraft. Often the whole night sky above central London would be aglow from the blazing buildings below. I personally never knew anybody who was killed or injured from the German blitz of London.

I was sent for extra-curricular instruction during my first year at Latymer, to prepare me for the entrance and scholarship examination which would be vital to both being allowed to enter the upper school proper and also to my obtaining a county scholarship award to cover the fees. I went on Saturday mornings to receive my first instruction in Latin from Miss Lake, the principal of a private school which both my brothers Keith and Roger were attending, Keith having first attended Hounslow College. She was a lovely lady, and it was a joy to attend these Saturday morning sessions.

To generally improve my mathematics and particularly to instil some rudimentary knowledge of algebra and geometry it was arranged that I should attend a Major Blake who lived in a large old house in Bath Road, Hounslow, near to where my Grandmother’s shop had been before her recent move to Selsey by the sea.

Major Blake wore sagging tweedy clothes, and was very large in comparison to my small self. We were completely alone for these evening sessions, and I never felt at ease. He would begin to sit close, and to fondle my bare knees in avuncular fashion. I would edge away, and eventually the lessons would end. Finally, he talked to me seriously and told me he would ‘like to see me stiff ... did I understand him ...’ and more to this effect. I was rigid with fright. I must have said no, one way or the other, because he ceased his advances and then solemnly warned me not to mention the conversation to anybody or he would be sent to prison and I would be sent to Borstal. I escaped, trembling and ashamed. I never told anybody, because there was nobody I knew who I felt would understand.

I had now moved up from the Wolf Cubs at 2nd Hounslow to the Scout Troop proper. The troop had moved from Hounslow due to some argument with the local Vicar, and it had become allied with the 4th Heston troop. It was this troop I joined.

During 1943 an incident at home sticks in my memory. One morning there was some argument at the front door between my 10 year old sister Muriel and my mother. Muriel set off down the garden path and into Lampton Road. My father chased after her and dragged her back into the house. He sat down on the stairs, pulled her across him, pulled down her knickers and commenced a lengthy spanking of her bare bottom. I was witness to the whole scene and fracas and had been threatened into the front lounge by my father as he dragged my sister into the house. I eventually opened the lounge door and screamed up at him, You bully. You bully … The outcome has faded from memory.

I passed the autumn entrance examination to Upper Latymer and at the same time gained the County Scholarship which provided for all my fees. My results were not good enough to put me into the first ‘A’ stream, however, and I started in from 2B. This was no great disgrace, as there were still forms 2C and 2D below me.

That Christmas our Aunt Mabel came and stayed in the little front bedroom upstairs. I saw her at least once, and she was pleased to see me. Her voice was like when one has a bad sore throat. Just after Christmas an ambulance came and she was taken off in it and died in hospital. Uncle Frank, her friend, came a lot after that. He was a quiet man, and I liked him. He was very gentle and easy to get on with. I started acquiring a few pet mice, keeping them in makeshift boxes. And then one day he left a beautiful big mouse case made of wood, painted green on the outside, with sliding glass windows at the front, a balcony at the back with a square boxroom at one end for the mice to sleep in, and a delicate ladder for them to run up and down from the balcony to the main floor area. It was a work of art. So, I got more mice and they rapidly reproduced lovely little mice-kittens. Surplus mice were sold off to a nearby pet store. A second and larger mouse cage appeared from out of the blue. He never said anything, but he had made them himself.

During 1944 the Germans commenced their ‘doodlebug’ attacks on Southern England. These were unmanned rockets, full of explosive, travelling at some 300 miles per hour, with stubby little wings, and had a loud thundering intermittent droning noise. They were radio controlled from Europe to switch off their engines and glide down to explosive destruction at an appropriate time. Everybody got used to the noise of an approaching ‘doodlebug’ and also to fear the sudden cut-off of sound which indicated its imminent descent. One of my brothers, Roger, just escaped with his life nearby to our home during the middle of one day when one of these machines cut out. Everybody in the area scurried to street air-raid shelters or other cover, and he just got into a shelter when the thing hit the ground only 30 or 40 yards away.

That summer of 1944 when I was 12½ we children were sent to Selsey to stay at the Bungalow ‘Kelpie’ with our Aunt Madge and her two little boys Bobby and Jimmy. Her husband was in the Navy. To me as a small boy she was a shrill-voiced, smelly, over-fat bully. Perhaps I was just over-sensitive, but I remember finally running from that bungalow determined never to go back. Fortunately my Uncle Len and Aunt Winnie were staying nearby and, although hazy memories blur the exact picture I can remember that they picked us up one by one and we stayed with them.

I had commenced the current school year in form 3B, and although I was not doing well I wrote a poem which was printed in the school’s summer 1945 annual magazine, and which Miss Davies, who happened to be taking our lesson on the day of publication, read out to the class, pausing at the end to say, There! If I had told you that was by Wordsworth you would have believed me. which made me burst with pride.

That autumn I moved down a stream at school into 3C. Muriel had gained a scholarship from her local state elementary school and went to Haberdashers Askes, a fairly high class establishment.

The following summer Muriel was attacked one afternoon in an urban lane known as ‘the hedges’ near to our house at Hounslow, dragged into the bushes and physically assaulted. She was 12. My mother was grim faced and distraught. I didn’t quite realise what it all involved but remember wishing I could kill. Little Keith bravely rushed off to the lane, got to the beginning thought twice and rushed home again.

Home life was nervy and unhappy. We didn’t seem to have a normal family existence. There was a strained antagonism whenever my father was home. I did not like him.

Apart from the end of year school ‘Jantaculum’ - a happy and hilarious cabaret and skit show held in the main hall, the headmaster, Mr Wilkinson, decided that the schools cultural efforts should be extended to the presentation of two or three plays before an audience of parents and friends, utilising the grand hall of the nearby Hammersmith Town Hall for the purpose. I was coerced into being a volunteer, and was put into a junior section scheduled for a slightly pantomimic production involving Pirates and Brigands, and even Fairies. To my horror and shame I was allocated to be a Fairy. It was too much to bear. I wandered round miserably for days until I finally plucked up courage and in trepidation approached the Headmaster’s study door, making sure nobody was about. I gave a little knock.

Hello, said Mr Wilkinson from a great height.

Please, Sir, I don’t want to be a fairy.

I explained as best I could that as far as I was sure of anything, it was certainly that I didn't want to be a fairy in the forthcoming production.

He was jolly understanding.

Oh well, he said, I would have thought it was a pretty good part, but never mind. How about being a pirate?

I thought that being a pirate would be very nice, thank you very much. No use in taking it any further - how could you explain that the real humiliation was having been selected as only being fairy-type material in the first place.

So I became a pirate. And jolly glad I was when I saw the fairies in their puffy little skirts, twittering across the stage.

Happy nights were Friday nights which were Scout nights with ‘Wide Games’ in the suburban streets. I say suburban, but by today’s standards they could almost be termed country streets. And there was occasional camping. But I was small and not doing as well as others of my age. At school I didn’t seem to be learning. Subjects became more and more obscure. I didn’t do any homework at night; depending upon scribbling notes from friends’ work on the way to school in the train or in the mid-morning break. I was severely caned once for lying that I had done some mathematics homework and had lost it.

The war with Germany came to an end in 1945, but rationing and school meals with powdered potato didn’t change.

Just before the summer holidays, our year at school went for a day’s outing - an unusual event - to Box Hill, near Reigate in Surrey. A welcome relief from the tribulations of the classroom.

That autumn I moved into 4C, at the age of 13¾. This was bad enough - to be in the ‘C’ stream, differentiating one’s evident standard of intellectual ability from one’s original companions, but worse arose. At the end of the first term I was further relegated to 4D. There was only one more stream to go to hit rock bottom! The problem was that I just really did not have even the haziest comprehension about almost any subject. Algebra was just a puzzle and the theories of Geometry were a mystery. A co-efficient or a logarithm were just meaningless. Physics or Chemistry did not get past the starter’s gate, and as for History, the least said the better. Being in a lower stream meant suffering only one modern language, French, and in retrospect the teacher must have been in despair. Oddly enough, apart from school I was quite a bookworm, and my mother was often chiding me to put a book down and ‘go out and play’. I was quite good at basic arithmetic and English essays, and continued to enjoy the playground tennis-football.

And so the routine continued, backwards and forwards on the underground trains between Hounslow Central and Ravenscourt Park, Hammersmith. Actually, the trains did not in fact go underground until they got to the other side of Hammersmith en route into central London proper. As with many commuters one became accustomed, when pushed, to cutting one’s timing in the mornings to split-second calculations. It was possible when one was attuned to train times to recognise the far-off rumble of the train coming from Hounslow West, and to leave the house, falling into running rhythm with the oncoming train and to pace it along the road, under the iron bridge, left into the station, left again up three steps past the ticket collector, round to the right and, as the pneumatic doors hissed open, to make it up the last flight of steps on to the platform just in time to perform a successful gliding leap through the closing doors. Or if it was an older type train known as a ‘bulldog’ with brass handled double doors, then one jumped on the running board, pulling the doors open, and stepped inside. The type of train never varied from schedule. One would always know as one set off down the road what sort of train one would be arriving at the platform. The organisation rarely varied, and everything usually ran to time.

Hounslow Central Station was built on a high embankment, so that one looked down on both sides from the single central platform on to the suburban houses below. There was one end house with the whole of its flat side painted white, face on to the platform, with the impinging advertisement in big black lettering.

Particular

People

Prefer

Platts

Perfect

Provisions

During the next few months in 4D I was approached by a little classmate called Cohen who offered to sell me a Rat. A very small, white and ginger rat, with pink eyes and a long sandy tail. I acquired it for one shilling, named it George and took it home. George grew rapidly and was given a large wooden box, the size of a small packing case, to live in. The box stood on one of its sides, with the open end facing out from under the sink in the corner of the kitchen. Wire netting over the open end prevented George from getting out; for a while anyway. He became very tame, as well as very large, and as he was so friendly there was little point in keeping him ostracised in his cage, apart from the fact that he chewed holes in the side of the box and got out of his own accord when he wanted. So, as often as not, George would be wandering around the ground floor rooms of the house, clambering up the side of an easy chair or sofa and ensconcing himself on somebody’s shoulder or sliding down to snuggle into a pullover or jacket. Or settling down for a snooze next to the cat, who in the early days would stalk away in high dudgeon but eventually accepted George as being some sort of eccentric who had to be put up with.

My father detested George.

My parents were now at bitter arms’ length, and there was continual bickering and acrimony when my father was at home. My mother would not even touch him, and if he tried to corner her there would be scuffles. She went to local Solicitors. My father then had a meeting with them, and they wrote to my mother suggesting a reconciliation. My mother had no money at her disposal; and there were five children to consider. Muriel was at Haberdasher Askes School, and the three youngest, Keith and Roger and Anne, were at Miss Lake’s ‘Ashton House’ private school.

My father went off for a few months for what was evidently a trial separation.

That autumn I moved downwards in the same stream, to Lower 5D. Scout camps were taking up part of the annual summer holidays. We had once been to Wiltshire but usually we went to neighbouring country areas in Middlesex or Buckinghamshire. At Selsey, during the summer holidays, I suffered from some ‘sleepy sickness’ and for some 2 or 3 weeks went to sleep where-ever I was put, day or night, in the garden, on the beach, it made no difference. But it went away.

Selsey had some delightful attributes. It was farming country around the sea front where our bungalows were situated, and the nearby farmhouse included an old brick windmill. The roads were all gravel. Early morning one could go mushrooming in the fields, and help the cowhand to bring the herd in for milking.

Milk, butter and eggs were purchased from the farm dairy. Also early in the morning there was the walk into Selsey village, into the back of the bakery to buy bread and rolls and doughnuts still hot and steaming from the ovens. Large boxes of Worcester apples would be delivered to the bungalow, sweet and crisp, to the devoured in large quantities. When it was stormy the waves would crash against the wood breakwaters in front of the bungalow, and hurl themselves over the roof and against the glass panels along the front veranda, falling with a ‘woomph’ on to the pebble beach and then suck back with a stone rattling swish. And what fun to dare out into the sea at these times; into the gigantic smashing rollers.

That autumn, my next brother Keith also came to Latymer. There was no problem as the Headmaster’s policy was to encourage family continuity in the school. Keith had passed his examinations adequately enough to gain the necessary County scholarship to cover his fees.

The next year, 1947, an exciting prospect came up. Two masters at school proposed to take a party of pupils on a walking tour in Switzerland. Although there were stringent currency restrictions they were evidently old hands at travelling in Europe from pre-war days, and the whole package was going to cost only £35, travelling from Victoria Station in the centre of London, and talking advantage of all possible group and other economies. Of course, most, if not all, of us had never been abroad in our lives!

My father found the money for both Keith and I to go with the group. Although one of the rules laid down by the masters in charge was that no boy should have more than £5 pocket money my father got permission to give me a large bundle of cash which he arranged would be collected by some needy client or friend in Switzerland. I remember that he did say that Keith and I could spend a little ourselves.

Anyhow, came the summer holidays and a party of some 35 to 40 boys of all ages met at Victoria Station and we set off with our little suitcases or rucksacks, in third class carriages towards the continent. We travelled across France, changing at Paris, all through two nights. Tired, cramped but excited. I was small enough to sleep in the luggage rack in my compartment as we rolled overnight through France - better off than many. Until the rack gave way!

Included in the party were a number of boys from my year, although they were all in higher streams. Bernard Lester was there. He was the boy who had leaped across the desks to attack Snelling in our first year at Latymer. Bernard came from a strong Jewish family background on his father’s side, but his father was unorthodox and had married a Roman Catholic. Bernard had been brought up as a Roman Catholic; a very confusing situation it must have been with his old grandfather up on the top floor intoning Jewish prayers all through the days and evenings.

There were also Malcolm Judelson, Geoff Gurney and David Price, all from the top ‘A’ stream, and all much taller and mature looking than I with my little round face, mousy tufty hair and sticking-out ears.

David Price and Bernard Lester would have long intellectual arguments about religion, which, try as I might, I really could not follow. David was held in great intellectual reverence because he had established an unbeatable proof that God existed. He went over it for me many times. God is, he would explain very patiently, because God is.

Thank you very much, I would say. Is that it?

That, indeed, was it. I could never claim to see it.

We arrived eventually at Basel Station in Switzerland, about 7 o’clock in the morning, and gained our first sight of un-rationed chocolate and other goodies since as long as most of us could remember. After a meal at the station we travelled on to a little village called Schwyz-Seewen in the mountains where we descended upon the Schwyzerhof Hotel late in the afternoon. We were settled three or four to a room, and then led by our schoolmaster leaders to a swimming area at the edge of a nearby lake where we all plunged in for a swim in the early evening sunshine.

After 20 minutes or so I was resting at the side when the air was split by a shriek of Help! One of the senior boys - Colin Wright, the captain of cricket for the school - had his arms thrashing in the air about 30 feet out in the middle of the swimming area. Nobody else was near him. Most were on the bank. Another cry of ‘help’, and I looked around. Nobody moved. So I dived in and swam as fast as I could towards him. Heaven knows what I thought I would do. As I reached the spot he disappeared under the water and to my horror a hand grasped my ankle. I kicked it away.

They eventually fished him out from the bottom of the lake and tried artificial respiration, but he was dead from a heart attack.

A few days later I received a letter from Mr Wilkinson, the Headmaster postmarked Cairo, Egypt.

BY AIR

Aug 21/47

Master D W Moate

Hotel Schwyzerhof

Schwyz-Seewen

Switerland

My Dear Moate,

I am writing to tell you how splendidly you acted when Colin Wright needed your aid. Those of us who have heard about it want to thank you and to acknowledge the fine courage you showed.

I am sorry you holiday has been spoiled by this tragedy but you did all you could for poor Colin and are entitled to enjoy your holiday now all is over.

Bless you, my lad, for all you did for him.

Yours sincerely

F. Wilkinson

They didn’t know about my kicking the hand from my ankle.

Actually, we all forgot it very quickly and had a jolly good holiday. But I never forgot that moment of looking round the swimming area and realising that nobody, but nobody, was going to move at that crucial time.

However, a more terrible personal thing happened in the next few days. Through complete ignorance of its actual function I mistakenly defecated into a bidet and was impelled by circumstances to leave the scene of the crime without finding any means of flushing away the evidence. Nobody knew it was me as the joke rippled round the dining room. I naturally joined in the laughter as best I could.

Most of my friends had long trousers by that time, but I was still in short trousers. I spotted a shop with a beautiful pair of fawn trousers, raided the cash given to me by my father, and bought them. Slightly too big, but no matter. I was catching up with the world!

There were two teenage girls staying at the hotel who Bernard chatted up and the four of us would take some walks together and play ping-pong. I was struck with calf love one of them with long legs and a short skirt but was too shy and unknowledgeable to get anywhere. I suspect that Bernard did alright.

The party strode across the Swiss mountains and summertime glaciers, stayed a few days in Grindelwald and then returned to England.

Back home, in that October of 1947, my father commenced legal proceedings for a declaration that he was the owner of the house, despite it having been put in my mother’s name when they married, and my mother commenced divorce proceedings, on the grounds of cruelty. Her solicitor interviewed me as possibly a witness in the divorce proceedings. I was only a small 15 years of age but either from him or my mother I was made aware of the alleged flagellative sexual proclivities of my father which were to form part of my mother’s case.

Andrew, next door, got a new motor-bike in advance of his 16th birthday, which he rode up and down their garden. He let me have a few goes on it as well.

My pocket money was about three pence a week which was no way going to lead to a motor-bike, so I took courage in both hands and applied at a local newsagent’s shop, in answer to a notice outside, for a job doing a newspaper round. Whereupon my father did his best to dissuade me, even offering a large increase in pocket money. By this time he was not any more fully master of the house and could only cajole, and not threaten. I refused, and did my newspaper round. I have never regretted it. To be up early in the morning, whether in the warmth of summer or in the fresh crisp deep new snows of winter, or in the soggy rains of Autumn; in the empty streets and lanes, lit by street lamps or early morning sunshine, struggling under an enormous bag of newspapers for a hundred or so houses, is a worthwhile experience for any boy. I got six shillings a week to start with, and ended up at eight shillings, which carefully saved, gave me that financial backing in life to enable me to walk into a shop in Hounslow high street to purchase a Christmas present for my mother, who I knew needed clothes, a skirt marked at the attainable price of two shillings and sixpence.

That, I am afraid, said the lady shop assistant, is the dry cleaning charge.

At the start of the last term in 1947 I was relegated to the bottom stream, Upper 5E. I was finally down with the dunces. The atmosphere at home was overshadowed by the legal battles between our parents; for the divorce sought by my mother and for the ownership of the house sought by my father. About this time an ingratiating and persuasive curate got me into conversation; in Ravenscourt Park one lunch time I think it was. He persuaded me into accepting an invitation to visit him for a weekend at his parish at Rainham, Essex, on the Thames estuary the other side of London. Nobody raised any objection and rather reluctantly I went on the underground train for the visit. We spent a rather uninteresting day trudging around the district, including, I remember, a call at the cookhouse of some forlorn army barracks. He lived in an old house, and as the dull evening drew to a dark autumn night he explained that there was only one large bed, which we would have to share. I politely accepted the growingly distasteful situation, and then, pyjama clad, under the blankets felt the horror of groping hands. Finally plucking up the initiative to firmly push them away I sat up in bed and threw off the bedclothes. He switched on the light and I stared at him in miserable loathing. He went and slept somewhere else - on the floor I think, and we parted at the railway station early next morning. At home: Did you have a nice time? Oh, yes, thank you.

Except for some small-boy fumblings with Andrew I still had hardly the remotest idea about sex. Whatever it was it had to contain a lot that was pretty nasty and disgusting, because of my mother’s loathing for my father.

Then one day I came home and George, the large and lovable rat, was gone. My father had taken him off and got rid of him.

It was a white Christmas and snow lay thick over January and February. I was now 16. Spring went by, and then in July there came up in the Courts the case over the ownership of the house. My mother won. The property was hers, but not the furniture. The divorce battle was still proceeding. My mother locked the house against my father. He came one evening and pressed his face against the front window, banged at the front door and the back door, and then appeared outside the French windows at the back and smashed a pane of glass to get in. There were struggles in the hallway. How it ended I cannot remember, but I think my father must have gone, then or shortly afterwards, and I don’t think he ever returned. Peace finally descended on the house.

My mother felt that we should have a summer holiday at the seaside and booked a very economical chalet through an advertisement, for two weeks, at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, on the east coast. She also invited, to stay with the six of us, a Mr and Mrs Van Santen. Mrs Van Santen had for many years come to the Lampton Road house to do washing and cleaning and ironing. Mr Van Santen ran a small general welding business.

My mother and we five children arrived at Clacton, joined shortly afterwards by the Van Santens. The ‘chalet’ turned out to be a more or less one-roomed beach hut. The Van Santens tactfully departed.

Clacton was a pretty cheap sort of place and it rained a lot of the time.

Back home, Keith was suddenly struck down with severe meningitis and was isolated in the local Hounslow Hospital. He went on the danger list but came through the crisis and recovered.

The school deferred my taking the School Leaving Certificate examination (called Matriculation) due to the pathetic marks I had attained in the trial run that summer, and when we reconvened that autumn I was put into a special class called Upper 5 Reserve. It was a sort of last chance situation. We were all to take the examination at the end of this extra term.

When the examination was only some two weeks away something special happened. I suddenly became filled with a resolve to pass, and had a perception that it really ought to be quite easy. Subjects which had been a mystery suddenly took on a different look. The mists of years which had obscured comprehension lifted away. I took to my bedroom and worked out a number of answers to possible questions in each subject. For geography I traced out and memorised maps of a number of countries, and main towns and rivers and mountains and a few agricultural crops and suchlike. For French I learned off a piece of text by heart for the oral examination. Problems began to fade.

Geometry suddenly only required a common-sense approach to a few basic theorems. Algebra was suddenly perceived as being only figures with a different shape.

So I sat Matriculation with these last-minute pulled together bits and pieces, and gained enough respectable marks in enough subjects to get me a complete pass plus a few credits.

Came Christmas and then in the third week of January 1949 the Courts gave my mother her divorce on the grounds of sexual cruelty. At the end, as far as I know, my father did not defend the case, although I was not aware of all the details of the matter at the time. The Courts also made an order for my father to pay maintenance of £1 a week to my mother, plus a few hundred pounds a year in total for the upkeep of the five children.

The Headmaster, Mr Wilkinson, called a meeting of us 20 or so boys in Upper 5 Remove. We sat in his study and he explained that after the first term of this special class we would have to consider what we wanted to do, whether to stay on, or to leave and take up careers.

I thought I might like to leave and take up a career. At this time I had been conned by a bulky and loquacious Welsh boy, Jones, who had persuaded me that there was a fortune to be made in the silver and jewellery trade. For some reason I was the one who ought to go off and learn all about it; after which we would go into business together and become very rich. The Headmaster was a little perplexed at my choice of a career but an interview was fixed up with a famous firm of silversmiths in Regent Street, near Piccadilly in the West End of London. My resolve to be a silversmith and jeweller melted away when they intimated that the first few years would be spent in the basement, packing and cleaning.

A friend of mine, Derek Bryant, one of the greater intellectual successes from a higher stream at school, had left after matriculating the previous summer and had got a position with the Royal Exchange Assurance Company head office in the City of London, so I wrote and applied for a job. At least, I think it was this way round, although it may have been that I read an advertisement in the newspaper, and then found Derek already ensconced. Anyhow, after an interview with a very large gentleman I received a letter offering me a starting position in the cashier’s department at a wage of £3.15.0d per week, which I accepted.

I went to say goodbye to the Headmaster. He looked down at me.

What do you really want to become? he asked.

A millionaire, I replied.

He took one of my hands and held out the fingers, and smiled.

I think you will, he said.

I needed a suit to commence my life in the working world. But I only had a few pounds available in my Post Office book, from the savings from my newspaper round and the occasional gift banked away. My mother and I set off down Hounslow High Street, shop by shop, to try to get a suit for the three or four pounds in hand. No luck. We moved on to Chiswick, and then Hammersmith. There we found a general clothiers shop called Lloyds who produced a two piece double breasted suit in a brown tweedy material for £3 all in. That was it. Tired and exhausted we returned back home with the booty. And in my tweedy £3 suit, carefully pressed every night, all of 5 feet and a bit high, and just 17 years old, I started work in the cashiers department of the Royal Exchange Assurance Company, in their grand old column-fronted building just across the road from the Bank of England.

They were very nice at the Royal Exchange. It was very comfortable and established. I attended in the big boardroom six mornings a week for early morning letter-sorting. Then I reverted to my high stool at the counter of the cashier’s department for the day (half-day on Saturdays), where I was in charge of dozens of cheque books and rubber stamps. My main job was to write out and rubber stamp cheques for claims and maturities of life policies and sundry other matters and to cross stamp them with my various rubber stamps, in accordance with long lists which were delivered to me. I sat behind a counter with a brass grille on top, on the first floor of the building, looking on to a pair of double doors at the top of the big flight of stone steps leading up from the imposing main entrance of the Royal Exchange Building.

One day a little old man shuffled in through the double doors in front of me and came up to the counter. Could you please change this sixpenny piece into coppers? he asked. I’ve got a taxi waiting below and I want to give him a tip.

Right-ho, I said cheerfully, reaching into the trouser pocket of my tweedy suit. The next second I was knocked aside by the Chief Accountant of the Royal Exchange. Allow me Sir Frank, he said, and picked up the sixpenny piece as though it were the Crown Jewels, and carried it off into his little office compartment, re-emerging with a little pile of one-penny pieces which he deferentially pushed under the grille.

Sir Frank Watney, one of the Directors of the Royal Exchange and Chairman of Watneys the famous brewery company, picked up his little pile of coppers and shuffled off through the double doors to dispense his tip to the taxi driver patiently waiting in the street below.

The chief accountant gave me a look as though I had been trying to edge him out of a seat on the Board, and stalked back into his little office.

Somewhere around this time I went to the famous London Sunday street market called Petticoat Lane and bought a large box of day old chicks at one penny each. I put them in a wooden drawer from a clothes chest, and settled them beneath my bed with an electric light bulb on the end of a piece of flex to keep them warm. Some half dozen of these actually survived and in a few weeks started growing up to be chickens. I purchased some army surplus wire netting, with camouflage bits all over it, and made a chicken run at the end of the garden. Somebody suggested that the pedigree of my small scraggy embryo chicken flock had much to be desired, so I answered an advertisement for a dozen West Sussex chickens, fully guaranteed. These chickens duly arrived, and beauties they were. Very different to the odd scraggy lean hungry remnants of Petticoat Lane. The newcomers were a lovely golden brown, plump and perfect. Truly professional chickens.

Unfortunately, the chicken run had some security imperfections and my chicken farm spent more of its time scampering around the garden and (due to my not knowing one should clip their wings) roosting overnight in the trees. Many times during the day they would be wandering around when suddenly as though by telepathy one thought would strike them all and there was a sudden rush, beaks foremost, from all parts of the garden and they would surge towards the house and scramble and flutter on to the kitchen window-ledge. Bunched up in motley array they would all tap desperately on the window panes for food.

Due to the non-clipping of their wings they became very good flyers, and the neighbours were often knocking on our front door clutching little wicker shopping baskets and asking, I believe this is probably yours? At which, the brown paper or other covering over the basket would be pulled back to permit a long feathery neck to emerge topped by two blinking eyes and a beak.

They had to go in the end, and they were killed for eating. Including one, whose head I chopped off with an axe, upon which the wretched headless thing leaped away and did a couple of laps around the near end of the garden. I didn’t like that experience at all and left my uncle to wring the necks of the remainder.

The Royal Exchange Company had a marvellous sports ground in the suburbs of London, and I quickly began to enjoy the weekend football camaraderie. However, after a couple of months or so I began to get restive. I met up some mornings in the train with a Jewish boy also from Latymer, a year or two older than me. He was, or seemed, tall, with black frizzled hair and moustache. His name was Frank Stirling. He told me that it had been Steizberg but he had recently changed it for business reasons. He was studying to be a Certified Accountant. He explained to me the marvellous opportunities this offered. You did not need to be articled, as with Chartered Accountants, but provided you worked in accounts of any sort for five years and then passed the examinations, then you were equal. And what was really exciting, you could, when finally qualified, earn as much as £8 a week! Irresistible! I wrote a letter of resignation to the Royal Exchange and went to an employment agency to find a job in a firm of accountants.

I was taken on by a large cigarette-ash-dribbling Mr Smith, one of two partners of a tiny firm of accountants called ‘Evans Davies & Co’ in Berkeley Street close to the Ritz and Mayfair Hotels in the West End of London. However, I had to take a drop of earnings. They would pay me only £3 a week.

I saw the other partner, Mr Evans, only about twice in all my time with the firm. He was obviously more a wheeler-dealer than an accountancy type. Most impressive. Also, it turned out that he was the Accountant to ‘Particular People Prefer Platts Perfect Provisions’.

Mr Smith had a big face and an enormous paunch, and wore blue suits. He smoked cigarettes continuously, rarely removing them from his mouth, and allowing the ash to grow longer and longer until it tumbled down on to his ample blue waistcoat.

I signed on at a suburban night school, the Chiswick Polytechnic, for my studies, and commenced my humdrum duties as a very junior audit clerk. To me, though, they were not humdrum. I had become desperately ambitious to learn.

I loved night school, and took every opportunity to pester the few employees in the little firm of Evans Davies & Co about the mysteries of accountancy, double-entry, trial balances and such-like. One of the clerks was an elderly ex-barrister called Mr Herbert who had lost his hearing and needed a large plastic-box deaf aid. This disability had caused him to retire at a late age from his profession as a Barrister. I questioned him continuously on legal matters, and he recommended me to read ‘SNELLS EQUITY’. He meant it as a joke, because in fact it was an enormous fat book only used for reference purposes. I got it from the library and ploughed through a lot of it, and astonished him with questions on equity and common law and the merging of these streams of law in the Act of Jurisprudence 1873. He then explained that he had only suggested the book as a joke.

At home my mother was distraught for money and my father wanted the furniture. My mother sold the house and purchased a cheaper and much smaller semi-detached house in a modestly nice back street at Whitton a few miles away. The address, 25 Alton Gardens, was just a few hundred yards from the famous Twickenham Rugby ground. The cash balance on the transaction went to paying legal costs in respect of the divorce and buying some furniture, but the new residence was somewhat sparsely furnished. I slept on a cheap iron bed in the front ground floor room, on bare-board flooring and with an upturned orange box as a bookcase and side table. My mother went out to work, as a shop assistant in Oxford Street and then as a telephonist but her wages were meagre.

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Mid-1949 - 1950

Mr. Smith at ‘Evans, Davies & Co’ was an Incorporated Accountant, a designation new to me. Evidently, although equal at law, there was a sort of pecking order in the profession. Chartered Accountants held the highest status. Incorporated Accountants were next, followed by Certified Accountants. A number of other bodies tailed out behind them. My uncle Len had joined an association called the International Accountants, but they did not have any examinations and the main qualification was to remember to pay the annual subscription.

Although the Incorporated Accountants normally required candidates to be articled for five years in the profession they had made a new rule designed (but not restricted) to help returning ex-servicemen, following the end of the war. If one just worked in the profession for six years, as opposed to being articled for five years, one could take the examinations and become a member. I immediately eliminated the Certified Accountants from my plans and signed up with the Society of Incorporated Accountants. I was given exemption by the Society from the