Who Are You Anyway?!

Who are you anyway?

Doyne Byrd

Copyright © 2016 Doyne Byrd

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Table of Contents

By way of Introduction, or Glossary

Sugar Plum fairy

Haileybury was bigger

To be a soldier

Doing what you want

Another country

Stork Magic

Acting Parent

All you do is wait, eh?

Chkhikvadze time

Doing it like Larry

Big Sea-change, but the water remains the same.

Severance.

The Real Thing

Nyugszik a csendes temetőben

By way of Introduction, or Glossary

For fear of footnotes, which might give this account an unwarranted academic gloss, I’ll here run by the potential Dear Reader a casual guide to the jargon, vulgar parlance, idiom or vernacular of the various periods and socio-professional enclaves it covers. For instance, there was a time in my teens when ‘harry’ was used as a superlative, followed by the relevant adjective being given the suffix ’ers’. Thus warm weather was ‘harry hotters’. I don’t use this at any point, and only mention it as an interesting possible subconscious inspiration source for Ms. Rowling’s naming of her hugely successful schoolboy hero and magician. Another was ‘johnson’, replacing the all-purpose ‘thingummyjig’, thus the Albert Memorial became the Albert Johnson. When these colloquial bad habits began, I cannot tell. I only remember their being about, and then not, and memory, as it functions with me, is what this account is about.

So, we begin with wartime, WWII wartime, within the socio-professional enclave of the officer class of the Royal Marines, the vernacular of which, being ship-bound, has a salty tang. For instance, the sea is called the ‘drink’, largely if one is in it. So one doesn’t refer to going to sea as going to the ‘drink’, because when at sea one is on it, not in it. The armed services are divided into sailors, soldiers and airmen, and are so termed whatever their rank. To the Senior Service, the Royal Navy, to which my father’s arm belonged, soldiers were ‘Pongos’. Whether or not that is because they were deemed to Pong’ i.e. stink, was never explained to me. Becoming a Pongo from a Senior Service background was definitely a step down, and I took that step. And that was only the start.

My father flew with the Fleet Air Arm and so was much exposed to the word ‘prang’, for crash, smash-up etc. Whether fliers coined the term or not, I don’t know, as it was certainly used widely later by the ordinary civilian. Which brings me to ‘gungie civvies’, a term encountered in my time in the Army, more Sandhurst than Other Ranks. Other Ranks being not officers but Non-commissioned Officers, Sergeants, Corporals and ordinary soldiers. The same with sailors and airmen. Though the ordinary seaman, I do remember, was called a Naval Rating. At Sandhurst I was introduced to OR sauce, as tomato ketchup was dubbed, as it was not considered fit fare for the better bred and/or Officer Class. We splashed it on, nevertheless. ‘Gunge’ is dirt, so ‘gungie’, dirty. ‘Civvies’ are civilians and ‘Civvie Street’ is where you are when you are out of the Services. Another word for dirty is ‘manky’, so we had the Mankie Tankies, that is, soldiers of the Royal Tank Regiment, who wore black berets to hide the unavoidable grease ‘n oil. They don’t feature here but I like to remember.

‘Civvie Street’ lead me into the Stage Door, generally deemed to be several worlds away, but you get tied to the mast there too. The centre of the Actor’s life is the stage, even if they never perform on it, and the stage becomes alive by the actor being either ‘on’ or ‘off’ it. An actor can be ‘off’ because he or she has missed their cue, leaving those on stage to improvise, pending the absentee’s hoped for appearance. Or being ‘off’ can refer to an actor not being able to perform, as the result of illness. ‘On’ can also refer to an understudy having to perform to replace their indisposed principal, that is the actor originally engaged to play the part. The stage itself can be a Prosc Arch stage, i.e. the traditional picture frame playing area, which is delineated by the Proscenium Arch. It can be ‘in-the-round’, i.e. audience on all sides. In sum, it’s where the actor plays, and is divided up into ‘upstage, ‘downstage’ and ‘stages’ ‘left’ and ‘right’. Downstage centre is where the actor likes to be, central and closest to the audience. Though an actor so-placed can be ‘up-staged’ by an unprincipled actor seeking to gain attention to themselves behind the downstage actor’s back and unbeknown to them.

For anything here left out I would recommend the Reader make little lists as they progress, and thereby consult info-techno services, or even a dictionary, for calmer perusal. That way one can stay with the flow, which the esteemed Reader will come to see is something of an obsession of mine. Good reading! might be an Hungarian well-wishing.

Sugar Plum fairy

I must start with a photograph. Aged four or thereabouts, holding my mother’s hand in the sudden glare of photographic flash, a small rabbit transfixed by headlights, paralysed against escape… from…? Social contact, for I am faced with a party for small ones, and in which I quite plainly don’t want to take part, and I remember quite clearly, or at least I did for a long time, I really didn’t want to take part. My mother smiles encouragingly, to distract from the blatant reluctance. It was my first attempt at identity and I stuck to it.

My father; as all fathers, an important part of such an account as this seeks to be; is not in the picture, nor would he be, in the general way of things. This was a children’s party, after all. My father’s absence was more substantial. He was a soldier, more precisely, an officer in the Royal Marines, as his father and grandfather had been before him, and he had been engaged, as thousands of his fellows, in the biggest conflagration European history had yet produced, and into which I had been born some eighteen months before the powers that be wrapped it up. My father survived, having been fortunate not to be exposed to the worst of it. Nevertheless he had definitely done his bit. A career officer before the war, he had chosen to fly with the Fleet Air Arm, an option open to Royal Marines, and he had taught flying to the wartime intakes before commanding a squadron, 888, of American-built Martlet fighter aircraft, flying from the aircraft carrier, Ark Royal. His campaign medals list the Burma star, the Africa star, the Italian star and the Atlantic star. In one of these theatres of war he was mentioned in despatches, placing the oak-leaf, that went with such recognition, on his Victory Medal. He was the very opposite of a Warbore, talking about his experiences hardly at all, and so his sons were dependent on photographs and documents, and, for a time, a scrapbook affair called, in that Service’s jargon, a Linebook, which eventually got filed away from our access. The Linebook was the prime source of photographs, letters, drawings, bits of doggerel on personalities and their idiosyncrasies. These Linebooks were so-called, as telling tall stories about one’s combat exploits was dubbed ‘shooting a line’. For example: Whizzo prang! Caught him in the dustbin with a tin-opener! referring to the shooting down of an enemy aircraft. The widespread disapproval of boasting, and any kind of self-promotion, that prevailed in the Officer Class of the time, produced these scrapbooks as a more acceptable alternative. My father’s ingrained self-effacement was such that, in time, even the Linebook became irksome. The abiding image of his wartime service was a cartoon-style watercolour that went through the sequence of downstairs lavatories (the place for these things) in the houses and service quarters we lived in, until his retirement to the house at St. Cross, outside Winchester, where it shared pride-of-place with a signed Giles cartoon depicting Guardsmen throwing lavatory paper at a Royal Marine’s band because that year the RM band played the cup final at Wembley, and not the Guards, Grenadier or otherwise. Apart from the fact that my father’s musical tastes were confined to ship-side music, i.e. military bands, and Strauss waltzes, the only explaining pretext I could figure out, having never been told clearly why, was that my father was, in the early Sixties, Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence. Not a job, however, that had anything to do with ceremonial. The water colour, done by his good friend, sailor not marine, Jonny Scott, was of a scene on the aircraft carrier, the Ark Royal depicting the occasion when a young and obviously inexperienced flyer ‘pranged’, ie. crash-landed, my father’s aircraft on to the landing deck of the carrier, and my father is dancing enraged upon the wing of the bent aircraft, observed by nervous Royal Naval personnel and a sardonic Naval officer on the bridge in foreground. To place it geographically, the Rock of Gibraltar loomed in the background. Whatever parades I saw, whatever military events I was witness to, this scene ever remained for me what service was about, and the Rock, as it did for many, provided perhaps the most salient symbol of Englishness.

After my father died, my mother was asked by the Fleet Air Arm museum at Yeovilton, would she possibly bequeath the above painting to the museum, to join other works there of Jonny Scott’s, and be part of an exhibition illustrating that part of the Services’ history. They asked her to a little presentation ceremony, to which I accompanied her, and where I was pleased to meet Jonny Scott’s most attractive daughter, and my contemporary, over the ensuing lunch. We both agreed we couldn’t remember meeting before and, while admiring her across the table and attempting to make intelligent conversation, I couldn’t help wondering to myself, why not? My mother had made a great deal of my meeting, as a teenager, properly brought up young ‘gels’ she approved of. I, having at least suppressed the social horrors described above, without any exception that I can remember, ungraciously left in the lurch the girls she provided for me, and went after a girl of my own choice. On that far too late showing Ms. Scott was a lady we both would have much approved of. All she had to do was to bring us together, and she didn’t. There must have been a reason, I was passingly convinced.

The Fleet Air Arm, as a medium of wartime service, attracted the acting profession’s three most distinguished representatives. First and foremost, for me at least, Laurence Olivier, who can be seen in a piece of newsreel of the time, in his uniform, delivering an over-the-top, moral boosting speech in the Albert Hall. My father told of Olivier’s weeping in the corner of a hangar because he couldn’t get his landing right. This unfavourable story I believed to be influenced by my father’s disapproval of actors as a breed. John Gielgud fared no better, described as coming aboard ship ‘smelling like a tart’s boudoir’. Though that appearance was more likely in the way of entertaining the troops. Ralph Richardson fared best, for he phoned my mother just after I had been born, with a message from my father. This oh-so-thin connection was later used as an even thinner explanation for my choosing to join that disapproved of breed. The truly desperate suggestion was later made that he, i.e. Sir Ralph, would be able to help along a struggling young actor.

A stronger rationalisation; for these departures from the norm must be rationalised; was provided by my maternal grandmother, Muriel Roberts, née Mills, known as Mama, though Granny to me. She, in her younger days, had been the leading light in a Winchester amateur dramatics group. She had an expressive, theatrical manner, dealt out the superlatives in her fluting voice, and in her young day had an abundance of beautiful red hair, strong eyebrows, and a very pretty face. The stories are of my grandfather being much smitten. My mother liked to tell the story of her mother greeting her surgeon husband, arriving from the operating theatre late for one of her amateur dramatics lunches, with a fully outstretched, introductory arm and declaiming Inset, my husband! She was a great walker and often took me out, always insisting we go to the very tippity-top of the hill! She played golf, not at the time considered to be exactly a pastime for ladies, nor for officers and gentlemen for that matter, but she would have paid no heed to that. At a distance, I guess her to have been, in her conventional way, refreshingly unconventional. After I was born, my parents having no house of their own, my mother and I lived with her parents in their town-house with a large garden, Walcott, at the top of Winchester High Street. Not, however, for long, for her youngest brother, and her mother’s favourite, married, so we had to go elsewhere to make room for them. As my mother recounted with a deal of resentment. I, of course, knew nothing. I have no memory of where we might have gone. This turn of events served as a lasting explanation of why my mother’s relationship with her mother was not good.

Her husband, my grandfather, George Augustus Roberts, and Dad to all, except to his chauffeur, manservant and right-hand man Lewis, Lou to all. All right, all right, all right. was his signature tune when my Grandfather was asking him to do something, and ask was all he did. He never ordered. Lou, an orphan from humble beginnings, had been passed unfit for combat in the First World War. Something to do with his lungs. My grandfather was looking for a chauffeur and Lou applied, explaining, when they met, his health deficiency. The Doctor examined me and he said, You’ll do for me, and I done for him ever since. I never knew how old he was. He had weather-beaten looks that made attempts to guess his age pointless. He accompanied us out shooting, my grandfather’s favourite pastime, along with fly-fishing in the River Itchen. He carried the game, Pheasants throughout the season and Partridges in September, though never Hares. Whoever shoots a Hare, carries it, Dad made clear. He was beater too, and would glide through the Dark Wood, gently banging the trees with his stick, and, not too loudly, calling Ho, ho, ho. Game-sack over his shoulder, and with his flat hat and everlasting, faded, dark-blue suit, his camouflage was perfect. His lasting quote, in his Hampshire burr, referring to some particularly thick cover: You be goin’ in that there bloody ‘arrish, I b’aint. He outlived my Grandfather by some years, but then, because of his lungs, he had never smoked. My Grandfather had. My mother was walking her father in his last months in the water meadows by the river Itchen, and they were stopped by a young woman doing a cancer awareness survey. Yes, I know. I have advanced cancer of the left lobe.

His house in Colebrook Street, to which he and my grandmother had moved from Walcott, had, to me, a magical garden, with a stream running through it and Rooks in the high trees over the flint wall, that separated it from the Bishop’s palace. In the lea of Winchester cathedral, it was full of acknowledgements from ‘grateful patients’, paintings, bits of china. The piece that fixed me most was depiction of the death of Nelson upon the deck of the Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar that hung over the dining room sideboard, upon which my surgeon grandfather carved the joint, or Pheasants, when we’d shot any. Nelson was the supreme historical figure of the time. His image was everywhere. My parents had a charming little portrait of him as a young officer.

The shooting, which took part on and around the Hockley golf course, where my Grandmother played, was also the present of a grateful patient. Here I started my days at feathered game, and the odd Hare. First introduced with a 20 bore, as a young master should, before graduating to a 12 bore and being able to compete with my elders as to who put most in the bag. Dad was a fine shot, and there were few birds escaped him, as was the case with my uncle and, in time, myself. Once I got going, I approached the Blood-sport with an audible enthusiasm which grated somewhat with the more reserved tradition I was required to be a part of. Out of my teens I calmed down and, out of the army, I finally went right off it, prompted by a pheasant ‘towering’ in my hand. ‘Towering’ is usually applied to Partridges when, being hit, they suddenly fly straight up into the air and then, at a peak, fall back, dead, to the ground. It’s spectacular, and slightly mysterious. If hit in the neck, the blood enters the lungs and the bird stretches its neck to escape from the drowning effect, driving it upwards until it finally chokes on its own blood. The choking Pheasant in my hand put an end to any pleasure I had had in handling a gun, however well. By then, too, the sport was not what it was when I started. Pheasants scarce and Partridges none.

I don’t remember Dad saying anything to the effect, but my unrelenting evasion of medics I always felt was instilled by him. If you need them they’ll find you. Don’t go looking for them. He studied surgery under a man who did his demonstrations dressed in a blood-stained, bottle-green frock coat. He did his rounds of the Hampshire countryside in an unheated Austin 7, one winter contracting pneumonia as a result. He was awarded a CBE for his services to medicine during the First World War, which entailed his sewing and patching up the wounded from the Flanders trenches, who came in streams off the hospital ships that docked at Southampton. The mending analogy necessarily makes light of the appalling damage done to the human frame by the new products of the Weapon’s Industry, then progressing in leaps and bounds. Contemporary depictions in water colour of the medical solutions to that damage, which survivors had to live with, were deemed so disturbing that they were only made available to the ordinary citizen some six decades after the event. Once I was given a chance to glimpse how that experience would have influenced his view of the world. Like many small boys of my generation I was intrigued by, indeed almost addicted to, knives. Sheath knives, hunting knives, bowie knives, flick knives. I was bereft without one. One day, when we were staying with him, I left one somewhere and he found it. He called me into his surgery and left me in no doubt as to his absolute disapproval of it, and this disapproval was later passed on to my mother. It was the only time I received a stern word from him and, knowing nothing then, about the First World War and his role in helping to clear up the mess, I was put out for a long time. Physician, as well as surgeon, he later became the school doctor for Winchester School for most of his remaining working life, and was remembered with great affection. His one bit of nefarious distinction, that amused him, was that he had attended the birth of Soviet spy Guy Burgess.

My father was a good-looking chap. Answer to a maiden’s dream, my mother liked smugly to say. The perfect gent, however, there was never any evidence of his exploiting that advantage, though there were ladies whom my mother was sure had her husband in their sights. One of these was Josephine, described as quite a gal. So much so, that she occupied a front seat in my fevered imagination at a time when there was precious little I could base my imaginings on. The War finished, my father was based at the Fleet Air Arm station at Lea-on-Solent, and there spawned what I fancy is my first memory. One sunny summer’s day, after lunch in a light-filled dining-room, Josephine telling me to Buck up and get your bucket, as we were off to the beach. A presence, an atmosphere, no face and no photographs that I saw, but she remained, that presence in the imagination. Many years later, when I was playing Otter in the National Theatre production of Wind in the Willows, I received a letter from someone who had seen the show and was interested to know, was I that Doyne Bi(y)rd whom her mother had known as small boy, whose father was Francis Godfrey Bird, and so on. Naturally I was intrigued. This was Josephine’s daughter. She brought her mother to the show. We went out to a restaurant afterwards and I sat on unreasonable expectation. My mother, away in the country, declined inclusion, it all being too long ago. When we parted, Josephine said, I gave you a lot of cuddles as a small boy, and they have made you what you are. Was I to conclude, she gave me them because she felt I needed them, as she sensed there weren’t coming from elsewhere? For her tone seemed coded, though in no way overbearing, as the text might indicate.

Two other sources of compensatory cuddles were my nannies. Bermuda Nanny first, called by me, inevitably, Mooda Nanny. So-called because she had been in Bermuda, is all I remember from later clarification. Why she never had a real name I never knew, unless it was my obstinately sticking to a name I not only liked but wanted. I have no other remaining impression of her, other than that I liked her, as did my mother, who was less taken by her successor, Joyce. Joyce gave a younger impression than Bermuda Nanny. Younger, less experienced, and so less reliable, from her employer’s point-of-view and, I like to think I remember, pretty. She did blot her copybook rather seriously when, one cold night, she set fire to her bedclothes, having left an electric fire on, next to her bed. My father had to leap out of bed and throw the flaming bedclothes out of the window, seriously burning his hands. At least that’s how it was passed on to me, my having slept through the whole affair. All I saw were the bandages on my father’s hands. Joyce escaped unscathed. I don’t know whether she finally left because of this, but I do remember not wanting her to go, and pleading for her to stay. Reason was stronger than my attachment, and so she remained my first, long-lasting, fond memory of a person.

No Joyce, and I was alone, or so I felt. Alone in the garden, for me a large garden, of a house on the Andover road outside Winchester. The house, by grown-up standards, must have been small. Three bedrooms, a drawing-room, kitchen. I don’t remember the dining-room, if there was one. It had a garage and a graveled drive, and it featured in my dreams for years. Never the garden, just the house. My father kept chickens in a chicken run at the backend of the garden, against the rationing of the time. Against the rats, that the chickens, their eggs and the huge compost heap at the end of the run attracted, he used a .22 rifle of his father’s, lying prone under the kitchen window, at a range of probably not more than forty feet. Though he was a good shot with a rifle I never, somewhat to my disappointment, saw a dead rat. There was a small orchard of gnarled russet apple trees where I first experienced the secret pleasures of a tent. Old style. Low wall/sides and a pitched roof, like a small house. A boy’s dolls house? Guy ropes and a supporting pole at either end. Only used on bright, summer days. The flap closed, the sunlight filtering through the green canvas which, so warmed, gave off a dreamy smell that made me feel quite safe in there, away from the world outside. Shading the garden from the Andover road, was a tall beech hedge bordering a lawn to the left of the drive and, on the far side of it from the house, trees, into which I would climb and dream of Elizabeth Fry, who was older than me, but, despite my mother’s efforts to have me understand it was her younger sister I should be attending to, it was Elizabeth for me. Of course I hadn’t a clue if Elizabeth even knew I was there. In the lawn was a rock-garden in which, one summer, wasps took nest. In the way of things I was lead to believe that wasps were bad. An enemy. Legitimate targets for aggressive behaviour. They, in the phraseology of the time, ‘had had it’. They had to go, and I was going to get them out. I chose a broom handle with which to do the job. My mother, on seeing this warned, You’ll get stung. I can’t have been stung by a wasp by then because I plainly didn’t know what she meant, and continued on until they, the little beasts, swarmed up the broom-handle and stung, something rotten, the little beast bothering them. I was much put out, very sore and very unhappy and was administered the necessary dose of I told you so, unmitigated, as it must be, by any trace of sympathy. A little germination of alienation. The experience brought me into close association with wasps. If I tell them to move, when they come to pester outdoor eating, they generally oblige. If they don’t, I crush them between finger and thumb, to protests against my doing that from any guests. Whether in my interest or the wasps’ I don’t care to ask. They still get me now and again, the wasps, largely when I’m not paying attention. Years of exposure has produced a sound immunity, so the effect soon passes. The hornet, whose tone off buzz I have recently got to know, I treat with much greater respect. They can kill you, you know.

At this Andover road house, Grass Hill by name, my brother Nicholas was born. Nicho, as he soon came to be called. Like me, he came into the world at the nursing home down the road and was an answer to a kind of prayer for me. Not the ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ kind of prayer but a quiet rocking back and forth, while kneeling on my bed and repeating to myself over and over again, I want a little brother. What prompted this I have no idea. Maybe a simple need for company, for I don’t remember going to play elsewhere, or any other child coming to us. Life became much fuller once he was around. There was always something going on. He kept us amused, and the older he got the more apparent it became that he enjoyed doing so. Quite unlike his retiring brother.

Aged four when Nicho was born, it was a couple of years before I was sent down the road to board at Eastacre Pre-Preparatory school, to learn. Oh Lord, to learn! A process that baffled me from the start. My great bane was numbers. To me, devoid of life or logic, that is, I could not, for the life of me, grasp what they wanted, these letters that didn’t say anything. My brain froze, I tugged at my hair. Arithmetic. The very word itself is blindingly inert. A lady teacher of the subject I so exasperated that she had me stay behind after class for further instruction, which chiefly entailed rapping me over the knuckles with the edge of a standard wooden ruler whenever I got it wrong, which was all the time. It wasn’t the pain that distressed me, so much as the sheer unreasonableness. Why couldn’t she grasp I simply couldn’t do it, no more than fly?

The other bane was boxing, incontrovertibly believed to be an essential element in character building. Wartime pugnacity must have given it an extra boost, which carried it on for at least another decade, for I was still being made to put the gloves on during my recruiting period as a private soldier. At least there it had something to do with the job in hand. At this stage, however, it took me no time discover how much I hated being hit on the nose. It reduced me to a blind fury, and I would have nothing to do with exposing myself to a repeat possibility. After a few wild swipes, that connected with nothing, I dived bawling under a desk and stayed there. Having disgraced myself so thoroughly I was left in peace.

A feature of the daily routine at the school was what I can only describe as the every morning stool inspection. After breakfast we were filed in turn to the lavatory cubicles for obligatory bowl evacuation. Having done what we could, we then vacated the cubicle, taking care to remember the order not to flush. Not easy and generative of tension in itself, which tension in turn jeopardized one’s chances of performing satisfactorily, at least as far as the inspecting authorities were concerned. The door we left open for the attending matron, armed with millboard and name-list, who then entered and recorded our contribution, before offering encouragement or exhortations to try harder, as she saw fit, after which one was free to go on to prepare for class, and the cubicle was free for the next contributor, matron having flushed it. I can’t begin to imagine what our educators sought to achieve by this perplexing ritual, but it must have been in keeping with some health mania of the time. I have since learned that such fecal fascinations are prevalent in Germany, so it’s possibly something we contracted in the course of the war.

The War was something serious that had been. It wasn’t referred to in any direct way and, when older, I tried to assemble my small boy’s impressions of that time. It features as something everyone was keen to forget. We don’t need to talk about it. Traces I could register were tanks rolling past the garden gate and on down Andover road. Aircraft glinting high in the sky on a summer’s day, and the droning sound they made. Also there was a winter trip to Donibristle, the Fleet Air Arm airfield in Southern Scotland, near Dunfermline. Donibristle, I was lead to understand, was a place where good things happened, and it was interestingly confused for me with Donnybrook in Dublin, where my father had been as a small boy. So with the two Donies mixed in my mind the winter trip to Scotland was full of anticipation. I would see aeroplanes close up and all sorts of important things. Two things I remember from the trip are a pair of huge horses pulling a plough, and seeing, or imagining I saw, Pheasants flying out from under the surface of a puddle, whilst going for a walk with Joyce. The huge horses I later learned were Shire horses, the Pheasants puzzled me for years, and even appeared in dreams.

At Eastacre we slept, we boarders preparing for preparatory school, some half dozen to a dormitory, and in ours was a chap; I wanted to say ‘little,’ but we were all that; who had been born with webbed fingers requiring operations to separate them. Distinction it itself, but he was also a scion of the Chipperfield circus family and so to the rest of us, or at least me certainly, he was a prince from a magical world, Dickie Chipperfield. He had a round, rather elfish face, and gave the impression he knew everything. In absolutely no overbearing way at all, but simply that if you asked him he would know, and for him it would be quite normal that you should ask. When we were later at our public schools he made the news, having run away from his Public School, Wellington, if I remember aright. He could no longer endure being away from his animals, was the reason given, which meant, when one thought about it, that his enforced absence seriously, and perhaps dangerously, eroded that vital working relationship. Also, thinking about it, it was that relationship that give him the calming common sense that made his presence a blessing at the Pre-Prep School. My elation at the news of his escape was less hindsight wise. Every boy at boarding school dreamed of running away, but no-one else that I heard of had the guts to get up and go. The inmates likening these institutions to the famous German prisoner-of-war camp, Colditz, was widespread, and his escape was as exhilarating as anything out of films like ‘The wooden horse."

My stint at Eastacre saw out the ’49 -’50 school year, and most of the time I felt looming over me the threat of the future. Hitherto the future meant only tomorrow, or Christmas, or when we were going to Swanage, where my Grandmother would, unbeknown to me, hide sixpences and the occasional half-crown in the sand, and then suggest, in a casual way, that I go and dig about in the sand to see if I could find anything interesting. The excitement of the resulting discoveries was unlike anything. My mother didn’t wholly approve. The introduction to the future as the grown-up world saw it, was, after all, what pre-preparatory was all about. Would you make it to the next grade? That’s what you were there to prove. Would you fit in to the Public School system, which you’d better, because if you don’t you will bring lasting disgrace on to both your parents and yourself. Having proved myself a poor learner this threat became increasingly likely. The final determiner was exams. I didn’t really know what an ‘exam’ was, except that it was something at which I could fail, which meant that I shouldn’t have done it in the first place, which meant, for me, that I’d rather not do it all. Fail became the dominant word. I only wanted to go back to the garden and my world of imagination, providing by reading The Jungle Book and the Mowgli stories.

My desperate wishes against the dread of the future were realised in the form of my father being posted to the command of the Royal Marine detachment aboard the Cruiser HMS Kenya, which ship was to be based at the Naval base at Trincomalee, on the east coast of Ceylon. The debate for my parents was, does my mother go too and take myself and Nicho with her, or does she stay in England while we, or at least I, get on with school. Please, no! I wasn’t consulted, naturally. Although, if we went, it would mean I would be going to whatever Prep School, if I got in, a year late. Against that my mother decided it would be unfair to deprive us of the experience. I was saved! I was free! We might not even have to come back at all, I dreamed. The Jungle Book and its characters were going to become real. I would meet my favourite animal, Bagheera, the Black Panther.

We set off from Southampton in a troop-ship, secured from Germany as a war prize and renamed the Windrush. It was deemed a rickety old tub by the grown-ups, but it bravely took us out into the open, endless, grey-blue sea. I looked forward over the bows, watching and feeling the ship’s pitching up and down against the slow swell, and hoping to get those ‘sea legs’ all the grown-ups had told me about. The thing about ‘sea legs’ was, if you didn’t get them you’d be sick all the time. Which would come first was my preoccupation, the sick or