Memoirs Chapter 4

Kenilworth

By about my second year at Grammar School, Dad’s career with Betterwear was producing a decent if not always reliable income, and Mum’s ambition to live in a bigger, posher house was beginning to look realisable. Kenilworth, a genteel town six miles south-east of Coventry, was known to Ken and me because we had been there with Mum a couple of times to visit an old friend of hers in a cottage opposite the famous ruined castle. I remember rolling down the steep grass slope of the empty moat. Now, a just-about-affordable, three-bedroom, semi-detached house with a car port had been identified in a new development called the Oakes Estate. The mortgage was negotiated, my childhood home was sold, and the move was made.

The new bus journey to school took about the same time as the old one but its character was very different. Having crossed a narrow strip of open countryside, the road became a kind of boulevard, straight and steep up Gibbet Hill, with dense woods on either side in which lurked the houses of the relatively rich. At the top of the hill, we passed the first few buildings of the new, inaccurately and snobbishly named, University of Warwick (well inside the Coventry City boundary and a full ten miles from Warwick). Then, on the right, came the great green expanse of the War Memorial Park, and on the left Top Green with its row of big trees announcing our arrival at the grammar school on its hill above the city centre. Suddenly I was seeing the city of my birth from a greener, sunnier aspect.

The Clock Tower, a nineteenth century memorial in Gothic style, marked the centre of Kenilworth. To the south stretched a long motley high street (Warwick Road) soon to be updated with a little precinct, Talisman Square, off to one side. To the north, the main road to Coventry was forced to make a big detour round Abbey Fields, a green space perhaps not much bigger than The Field in which I spent my early childhood, but very much more civilised. It had acres of regularly-mown grass, a big hill, down which in snowy winters people actually skied, a stream, a small lake, an outdoor swimming pool (nobody called it ‘baths’) and the fragmentary foundations of the medieval building after which it was named. Beyond lay the old High Street and a pub called The Virgins and Castle which would later become a favourite haunt.

But for now, aged about 14, my aim was to find some kind of social life. I read in the local paper (or, more likely, Mum read it) that somewhere in the town there was a youth club held every Tuesday night. The youth leader’s address was given and I cycled over there to knock on his door. A rather good looking teenage girl answered and told me where the club met. I was encouraged. The following Tuesday I duly turned up at a school hall in which half a dozen people, including an older man who was obviously the leader, were playing table tennis. At first this seemed a disappointingly minimal provision. I hung around not knowing what to do next (the leader remained intent on his game) but was rescued by a slightly scruffy, curly-haired boy with a cheerful grin, who quickly rigged up a table and challenged me to a match. He also introduced me to Judy, the leader’s daughter, she who had answered the door, and to her slightly older friend, Jill. The boy’s name was Robin and he was to become my best friend for the next couple of years. I cycled home that evening feeling optimistic and looking forward to next Tuesday.

Robin was the son of a local farmer whose modest 100 acres was well within cycling distance of the town. It was a mixed farm, arable and dairy with some pigs and chickens. One field was rented out to Courtauld’s, the Coventry textile manufacturer, who used it to weather-test their products. Although he was only a year or two older than me, Robin seemed to be in charge of the farm. His parents were like characters in a story, ‘The Darling Buds of May’ perhaps, though the TV series was still in the future and the Larkins were more civilised and sanitised than Robin’s family, the Tibbettses. Mr Tibbetts looked too ancient to be Robin’s dad, and all I can remember about his wife is her hair: long, thick, curly, streaky-grey and tied behind her head with baler string. It might have been the hair of a cavewoman. I never saw her or her husband dressed in anything but old overalls. They mostly ignored me when I visited, which soon became every weekend. The ancient farmhouse was ramshackle and none too clean, as much a working building as the barn or the cowshed, and the yard was always a sea of mud. Wellingtons were the only possible footwear.

To Robin, farming was second nature; to me it was unknown territory. I learnt simple things just by watching him — how to pitchfork a bale of hay onto a trailer, how to ride the buck-rake on the back of the tractor (health-and-safety was unheard of) or how to lead the cows into the milking parlour. Robin was a good teacher, in a passive way. I remember one occasion when he warned me casually that a cow in the shed I was about to enter had just given birth and was not yet ‘cleansed’. It was just enough to prepare me for what would otherwise have been an alarming sight. He worked all the daylight hours except Sunday afternoons when we would walk the farm with shot guns shooting pigeons. It was sport of a kind but it was also pest control and it had nothing to do with grouse moors or gamekeepers. On Friday evenings, after a night out, we would take a few bottles of beer back to the farmhouse and, when the yard was quiet, creep out in the darkness to shoot rats in the chicken shed. Very few rats were killed and there would be the odd casualty among the chickens but it was fun of a kind and, in theory, more pest control.

Despite such larks, Robin was a serious farmer. He used to say that geography was his best subject at school because he knew far more than his teacher about the productive use of land. Yet often there was an improvisatory quality about the day-to-day running of the farm. One day I went with him and Ron, one of his young part-time helpers, to the livestock market in Warwick. We took the small van, not much bigger than a Mini, and I sat in the back. Robin spotted a bargain in the auction and decided to buy three calves on an immediate take-away basis. In theory it was impossible for the little van to accommodate three people and three calves but somehow we all squeezed in. The journey home was a surreal nightmare. At one point the largest of the calves seemed to be driving.

Robin had two cousins, John and Peter, who worked as tractor drivers on the golf course, just across the lane from the farm. They were both ruggedly handsome men, stereotypically strong and silent. I don’t think Robin and I had ever thought of our youth club pals Judy and Jill as potential girlfriends but if we had then we should never have let them anywhere near the cousins because almost instantly, or so it seemed, John and Peter, Judy and Jill became John and Jill, Judy and Peter.

It was Robin who introduced me to Friday night dances at Kenilworth Working Men’s Club. They took place in a small prefab hall at the back. Entry, which cost about one-and-sixpence, was never guaranteed. Committee members took turns as bouncers and applied different rules, some insisting that only members’ sons and daughters were allowed in, others imposing apparently random age criteria. The bar served only soft drinks to us youngsters, but an alcohol-free beer was popular among the boys. Music was usually provided by records (the term ‘discotheque’ was as yet unknown) but occasionally by a rather good local group called Los Cimarrons, always known as The Los Cimarrons. (The original Cimarrons were African slaves of the Spanish in sixteenth century Panama — it says here.) Obviously from the teenage participants’ point of view the main purpose of the dance was to meet members of the opposite sex. As a complete beginner, I never had much success, although I did learn how to dance in the simple freestyle then favoured. It was up to the boys to ask the girls to dance, naturally, but the girls were under no social obligation to accept and refusals were, in my experience, common. Robin was a terrible dancer with no sense of rhythm yet his requests were more successful. It was at one of these dances that he met ‘Nessa, who was to become his steady girlfriend. She was a good looking girl who lived on the local council estate but she took to farm life as if born to it, eventually putting on a little weight and wearing simple farmer’s-wife-style clothes. Everybody thought that she and Robin would get married but I later heard that they had parted.

Farmer Friend

Do you remember when, that moonlit night,
we swaggered to the barn with those four-tens?
You kicked the door as I thumped on the light
and aimed to shoot the rats but not the hens?
Or fighting that old Fordson in the lane,
me dangerously riding on the rake?
You brought us storming home before the rain,
bawling some awful song about heartbreak.
Well that was long ago, lost pal of mine.
Now, passing on a route I hadn’t planned,
my courage falters when I see the sign
that says you’re still the steward of this land.
If you were me now, would you hesitate
to take the risk and turn in at the gate?

I’ve mentioned Ron, one of Robin’s part time helpers. He and I became friends. He lived on the council estate, just a short walk from our house, with his mother and his older brother, Colin. Nobody ever mentioned a father. Ron was a simple soul, tall, thin and always smiling but in a slightly worried-seeming way. He worked as a labourer on a building site. Colin was brighter and more outgoing. He had worked in a joinery factory but now lived in idleness on the considerable compensation he had received after mangling his leg in a sanding machine. (His leg, note, not his arm. He freely admitted he had been larking about at the time.) He walked with a limp but otherwise seemed fit. Through Ron and Colin, I met Chris, an apprentice carpenter, rather shy and easily amused. And then there was Bugsy (nobody knew his real name). He worked as a coalman, humping hundredweight sacks of coal from lorry to back-yard coalhouses all day long. He was permanently grimy as well as loud and uncouth but he was also friendly and generous. He lived with his mother and sister, a girl of dubious reputation, in a caravan on waste ground by the disused railway station. Occasionally, one or two of these pals would call for me at home and my mother would look askance. She was no snob, but these were not the respectable friends she had probably envisaged for me after the move to Kenilworth.

The favourite haunt of our disreputable group was a café in the high street called The Late Eat. There was a counter at the front for take-aways, then a few steps down to a dark back room with a couple of tables where we would sit for hours with seldom-recharged cups of coffee. The café served lunch and tea but in the late evening, after the pubs closed, it was reputed to be dangerous. I never witnessed any serious trouble but we liked the idea that it was a kind of wild west saloon where at any moment somebody might draw a gun. One character in particular was widely feared. He was known as ‘Fingers’ and he certainly looked the part: hefty, tall and tattooed, with a hare lip and a hard stare. We would keep our heads down and mutter ‘Fingers is in’, enjoying the imagined drama. I never spoke to Fingers and for all I know he may have been perfectly charming.

Another favourite haunt, especially on Saturday night, was the little local cinema. Its official name was The Alexandra but everybody called it ‘The Shed’. It was a fleapit. No other word will do because this was an institution thick with clichés: ­kids at the entrance asking adult strangers to take them into A-rated films; boys waiting anxiously outside, hoping not to be ‘stood up’ by the dates they had made at the dance the night before (yes, me on a couple of occasions); double ‘snogging seats’ in the back row; usherettes with torches selling ice creams in the interval (I may have imagined those) and rowdy boys at the front throwing things at the screen. I don’t remember any of the films I saw there, except a documentary about the Holocaust, certain scenes from which have stayed with me ever since. But the films were secondary. For the young people of the town, The Shed was a meeting place and a gossip-generator (who was with whom?), the default venue on the most important evening of the week.

But then another meeting place appeared, fulfilling a need that we didn’t know we had. The old youth club had been no more than an improvised venue for a small group of friends. Now the county council had decided that we deserved a proper, purpose-built club with an official youth leader. I don’t remember seeing it under construction. It seemed to appear suddenly, fully-equipped and manned, in the middle of town, just off the high street. There was some scepticism among my friends. It was rather school-like, not just a casual venue like the Late Eat or the Shed, so we would have to submit to some kind of authority. I was a well-behaved grammar school boy and willing to go along with it, but others were wary. I remember one incident that illustrates this difference between joiners-in and fringe-sceptics. A typically extravert art teacher had been called in to organise a drawing class. Naturally, I joined it. Portraiture was his chosen theme, so he asked for a volunteer model and one of the girls stepped up. The session — like a life class with clothes on — resulted in a dozen or so presentable pencil drawings which were mounted to make a little exhibition in the entrance hall. Somebody was kind enough to remark that they liked my effort. As we stood in front of it, I modestly pointed out all the things I hadn’t got quite right, and concluded that it was really pretty hopeless. (Secretly, of course, I thought it was rather good.) But then suddenly a boy approached and grabbed me by the collar. A fight seemed inevitable, but what was it about? It turned out that the model was his girlfriend and he had taken my denigration of the drawing as an insult to her. I had to repeat several times: ‘But it was me that drew it!’ Eventually he got the point, his anger subsided and he backed off with as much dignity as he could muster.

The first youth leader was rather formal and forbidding, like a headmaster. But then it turned out that he was just a temporary stand-in. When the real youth leader arrived we were unsure at first. He didn’t seem particularly friendly. Would he be another cold fish? And what would we call him? He had been introduced to us as Mr Saxby, but after a while he told us that we should just call him ‘Saxby’. Somehow, this refusal of both the formal ‘Mr’ and what would have been a slightly creepy use of whatever his first name was, cast him in a different light. From then on we thought he was OK. Soon phrases like ‘what did Saxby say?’, ‘you’d better tell Saxby about it’ and ‘Oh good, here’s Saxby’ were heard everywhere. He got it just right — being quietly helpful and sorting things out but never interfering when he didn’t need to and never pretending to be ‘one of the lads’.

Not all of Saxby’s youth service colleagues were as wise. About a year into the life of the youth club, head office decided it was time to offer a camping trip in collaboration with the Riverside Club in nearby Leamington Spa. I had heard of Riverside and had long wanted to join it just because I liked its name and its adopted song (‘Down by the Riverside’, of course) so I signed up. The destination was the Brecon Beacons, chosen for the same reason that thousands of Midlands hikers and campers choose it: because it offers real Welsh mountains without the long, slow journey to Snowdonia. In later years it was to become a favourite haunt of mine for solitary walks. I remember the time I decided to climb Pen y Fan from the steep east side and became so exhausted that I thought I was having a heart attack. Looking around, I reflected that it would not be a bad place to die — and began to feel better. But that was decades in the future. I only remember one episode from the youth club trip. We numbered about thirty, a coach-load, and we had climbed up to the plateau with our kit. It was a warm, still, moonlit evening. The tents were pitched, some expert from Riverside made a fire, and naturally we all sat round it. Then an old gentleman, perhaps the head of the county’s youth department, stood up and started singing: ‘Campfire’s burning, campfire’s burning, draw nearer, draw…’ At about this point the laughing and jeering started and grew until it drowned him out. We had no respect for sentimental old codgers and it was just embarrassing. He retreated to his tent. Saxby would never have made that mistake.

So my teenage social life was fairly full. I went out almost every night, despite the pressure of homework, and though my spending was modest, pocket money was insufficient to cover it. Mum and Dad said that if I wanted more money I should earn it, so I got a series of part-time jobs, the first of which was as a butcher’s boy for a local shop called Poulton’s. In term-time it was a Saturday job, delivering meat orders around the town on a carrier bike (if Dad could do it, I could do it) but in school holidays I worked mornings, accompanying Mr Poulton on his rounds in a small van. He had his regular customers, my mother included, from whom he would take orders on the doorstep and immediately cut the chops, liver, sausages, steak, whatever, at the open back doors of the van. I would then deliver the hastily wrapped meat back to the door. I think there was an awareness even then of the dubious hygiene implications, especially when we drove from one customer to another with the back doors open. But the customers would have been even more concerned had they witnessed the making of the sausages, which always involved a certain amount of mouth-blowing into the skins. On the way back to the shop, Mr Poulton would stop at the Conservative Club for a midday drink, leaving me waiting in the van. I couldn’t get out and walk because I needed to collect my wages. He was often tipsy for the final short leg of the journey. Christmas was the best time. Imagine: a young kid pedals a couple of miles on a snowy Christmas Eve to deliver your turkey. Wouldn’t you give him a generous tip? The customers didn’t know that I had also plucked the turkey, very inexpertly, in an unheated shed at the back of the shop.

I didn’t mind the butcher’s boy job. Apart from the turkey-plucking, it was easy enough and the hours were not long. But it was poorly paid so I gave it up and got a weekend job on a poultry farm down Castle Lane. It was a battery farm and the chickens were paired in little cages, stacked three-high along narrow aisles in big sheds. My job was to collect the eggs that rolled to the front of the cages, and then to go round again, removing steel trays and scraping the droppings into a wheelbarrow. My teacher was a young man with a mental disability who did this job full time on weekdays. When I had demonstrated a reasonable competence in these tasks I was allowed into the free-range, breeding part of the ‘farm’ where the hens lived with a cockerel in ordinary hen-houses. Gloves were essential when collecting the hopefully fertilised eggs from beneath the furiously pecking hens. The eggs were then put into enormous incubation ovens. A day or two later a faint cheeping would be heard and the big trays full of yellow fluff and eggshells would be pulled out. The chicks then enjoyed a couple of months of relative freedom in a small holding pen — their teenage years, perhaps — before being consigned to the battery cages.

At the time I didn’t feel qualified to pass judgment on this industrialised cruelty but I think it affected me all the same. I was also beginning to resent the impersonal manner of the boss to whom I was just a satisfactorily small item on a balance sheet. So when a homework emergency cropped up one Sunday, I phoned him to say I wouldn’t be in that day. I was a little ashamed of this show of unreliability but after I had given my apology I heard myself add that actually I wouldn’t be coming in any more. I thought, but didn’t say, that for once he would just have to do the mucking-out himself.

At about this time Ken was working as an apprentice at the Alvis factory in Coventry and studying for an HND in mechanical engineering at the Lanchester College of Technology (now Coventry University). As a schoolboy, he had been a weekend petrol pump attendant and he now secured a job for me in the same Kenilworth garage. This was much more congenial work. The staff was numerous by present day standards, and hierarchical, but with only one person on each step of the ladder. At the top was the owner, Mr Beaumont, who had taken on the garage to keep himself busy after his retirement from a directorship with the oil company. He was like an aged ex-army officer, upright, formal and immaculate. The Service Manager wore a suit and tie, despite all the oil and grease, and always had a pipe in his mouth down which he dribbled. The chief mechanic was a little man, strict and proud, like an NCO, with regulation overalls that were smarter than his immediate boss’s suit. And then there was the young assistant mechanic, Peter, who was Ken’s friend and was welcoming to me when I turned up on my first Saturday to fill the vacant place at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Self-service petrol pumps had yet to be invented so customers stayed in their cars while the petrol was being pumped. Many also wanted oil, water, battery and tyre-pressure checks. One of our regular customers was Jimmy Hill, the famous television football commentator, who was at that time the manager of Coventry City. He drove a big Jag, with two petrol tanks, and he tipped generously. I remember on one occasion serving a man in an old Standard 8. He said he probably needed some oil so I lifted the bonnet, checked the dipstick, and went to the shop to fetch a bottle of multigrade. When I got back to the car I poured the oil into what looked like the filler pipe but it quickly backed up and I realised with horror that I had actually poured it into the carburettor (the air-filter was missing). I knew enough about engines to realise that this might have drastic consequences, so I nipped into the workshop to consult Peter. He came out and calmly asked the driver, who was still in his driving seat, to start the engine. Surprisingly it did start but a cloud of thick black smoke quickly filled the forecourt, the street, the next street and the shops round the corner. Peter assured the appalled owner that actually it would ‘give the old engine a good flush through’. He was duly mollified, paid for his oil and petrol, waited for his change, and drove off in another cloud of smoke.

When I was not busy on the forecourt I was encouraged to help the mechanics with routine tasks such as fitting new tyres. I could jack up a car, take off a wheel, remove the old tyre, fit a new one, whether tubed or tubeless, fix the valve, pump it up and refit the wheel in perhaps ten minutes. It was hardly a racing pit stop but I felt I had acquired genuine new skills. I never had much use for them in my future life but maybe they helped in a small way with general self-confidence and dexterity. At home, I had always been known as a clumsy kid.

By this time I was in the sixth form. My new French teacher, Mr Irwin, happened to live in Kenilworth, quite close to the garage. One day, he walked past while I was serving a customer and said hello cheerfully enough. But in school a few days later, he made his disapproval clear. When I told him that I had worked on Saturdays for years he seemed genuinely shocked. I think he imagined that working on Saturdays was forbidden by school rules. There was something touchingly naive about this but my faint amusement only made him more cross. It occurs to me now that grammar school teachers — often the products of boarding schools — were sometimes less worldly than their pupils. As far as Mr Irwin was concerned, the boys he was obliged to teach, even in the upper forms, were barbarians. ‘Oaf!’ was his favourite insult, shouted out when he lost his temper. When we imitated him later among ourselves, we would always add the second syllable: ‘Uck!’. He wouldn’t have got the joke.

I am unsure when it was exactly that our family moved to a bigger house on the same Kenilworth estate. Other circumstances remained the same though it was noticeable that the new neighbours were of a different class: a headmaster and his attractive wife, Annis, on one side, and in the adjoining semi a Chinese/English couple who taught at the new university. We had little to do with either, although Mum did occasionally talk to Annis. It was easy even for me to see the nature of this relationship. Mum loved a good long natter about nothing much, but Annis would submit only if cornered. The awkward thing was that the two kitchen windows faced each other across the driveway. Mum loved the little waves that they exchanged when standing at their respective kitchen sinks but Annis couldn’t bear it. She took to pulling her roller blind down just below eye-level and from then on she was said to be ‘a bit stuck-up’.

Brecon Beacon Walks

1
The final steep, short pull up Pen y Fan,
the highest peak, can be exhausting.
Spring or summer, you won’t be alone
on these companionable crags but reflect:
there is no reason to be here
except to share a common kind
of quiet poetry. So dump your sack,
select a vacant flat stone
at the edge and ease your limbs.
To the north, the distant quilted fields
but nearer, in the shadow of the ridge,
the little lake of Llyn Cwm Llwch,
as black as tar. Ten thousand years ago
a slab of ice was trapped
and still it spills its fitful trickle
down the hillside to the torrents of the Usk.

2
There is no road to Sgwd yr Eira.
From the car park in Penderyn
follow tractor tracks through quarry waste
and puddles, then an easy climb
in rye grass to a summit where
the fences fall from view.
A wood conceals your destination
like a blanket slipped and crumpled
in the valley. Go on down
into the trees and the white noise
of the hidden waterfall.
Giant steps descend into the gloom.
Skirt the pool (take care, the rocks
are slippery, deaths are said to have occurred)
and sidle in the gap between the cliff face
and the glassy, plunging wall.
Reach out. Touch the water. Feel how cold.

3
The great Welsh poet, R S Thomas
blames the English for the reservoirs
and dams. He finds their calm serenity
revolting; prefers the native harshness
of the poem to the watercolour’s mass appeal,
a pose, he says, for strangers:
you and me, we foreigners who flee
the arid cities, with our caravans
and tents, like refugees;
we who carry the disease of not belonging.