Chapter Eight
Early in 1938 we moved to a terrace by the side of the Raleigh Bicycle Factory, a house with a parlour and two proper bedrooms, a small plot of garden back and front, and our own water closet across the yard. My parents made their bedroom in the parlour so that Pearl and Peggy could have the back room upstairs, and Brian and myself the other. Later that year my father got a job with Thomas Bow the builders lasting ten weeks, and then another in November with the British Sugar Corporation that ended after eight days.
Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérable, also done as a serial on the wireless, had as lasting an effect on me as the one by Dumas. A neighbour, Monty Graham, a fearsome little Scot who had fought his way through the Great War in France, lent me his musty-smelling and abridged Readers Library edition. Pages tended to fall out, and the first fifty were missing, but I read what remained, though later saved penny by penny to buy my own copy.
Set in France, Les Misérables nevertheless seemed relevant to life roundabout and, apart from Beatrice by Rider Haggard, it was to be the only adult book read before the age of nineteen. The story (though who doesn’t know it by now?) tells of Jean Valjean, hounded by the sinister police agent Javert even after he had been nineteen years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister and her starving children; the painfully hard existence of Fantine who became a prostitute so as to pay for the upbringing of her illegitimate daughter Cosette; the ingenious street urchin Gavroche whose secret den was in the foot of the statue of an elephant, and who reminded me of my cousin Jack; then the 1830 Revolution in which Jean Valjean rescues Cosette’s wounded lover (who is thereby going to rob him of the only person he ever loved) by carrying him through the sewers of Paris on his shoulders. Such grand themes blended into an exciting narrative which couldn’t be seen by me as anything but real.
It was fortunate that Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo were known to me so early on, and had such a deep effect, for between them they lit up my darkness with visions of hope and promise of escape. Dumas’ story was one of revenge, and Hugo’s of justice, both books powerhouses buried in the heart which they helped to survive.
Concurrent with my reading, a phase of acquiring lead soldiers lasted till well after it should. Matchsticks set in cracks between the floorboards, and a wall of joined Woodbine packets, did for fortifications, a few neat grenadiers deployed on one side, and a half section of khaki Great War soldiers on the other. Such arms expenditure was financed by pennies cadged or donated at the Burtons’, spoiling my economy with regard to books but giving hours of brainless diversion.
When I was coming up to eleven my grandmother thought I should take a Free Scholarship examination which, with sufficiently high marks, would get me to a school until the age of seventeen, instead of starting work at fourteen. One’s age began to assume importance: a change in life at eleven would decide how the next six years were spent.
Grandmother Burton had taken in my preoccupation with the school prizes in her parlour, and habitually gave me old laundry or penny cash books with pages still clear at the back to write on. My grandfather must have considered buying the house, because he let me have two cadastral plans of that part of Lord Middleton’s property on which it stood. These were drawn to a scale of 1:2,500, and I learned that one inch on the paper equalled 2,500 inches on the ground.
Unfolding the thin sheets, it was possible to make out the land, on which I daily rambled, in such detail that by going a hundred paces I had moved over an inch on the paper. With pencil and rubber I arranged the companies and platoons of an imaginary battalion into defensive positions around groups of cottages, on a bridge, by the edge of a wood, and along the railway embankment. Machine-guns were set out for crossfire, and barbed wire laid, the maps used this way until they were worn out. The idea of joining the army as soon as I became of age appealed to me as a way of leaving home.
My grandmother said that on my passing ‘the scholarship’ she would pay for uniform and books by arranging a loan from the Cooperative Society, of which she had long been a member. What attracted me to the scheme was that at a secondary school one would be taught French, a necessary road through education being paved with a knowledge of that language. Jack Newton’s brother taught him to count up to ten in French, and these magic syllables were passed on to me. I bought a dictionary and tried to translate sentences into French, though not knowing how to conjugate verbs was a fullstop to getting anywhere in my studies.
In the basement of Frank Wore’s secondhand bookshop downtown was an enormous table on which many treasures could be found for threepence, and some for slightly more on the shelves above which occasionally came out under my coat. A Pitman’s French grammar showed my errors of translation, and provided a rough but effective phonetic guide to pronunciation. One such primer contained a plan of Paris, making me familiar with the buildings and street names of that place much sooner than with those of London.
In the week before taking the scholarship examination I felt set apart from those in the class, though the proportion of pupils sitting for it was not small. My sister would tell her friends proudly on the street: ‘Our Alan’s going to do his scholarship next week.’ Needless to say, I did not pass, though two boys did, one whose father ran a hardware shop, and another whose mother owned a café. The unfamiliar puzzles and conundrums I was asked to solve might just as well have been Chinese ideograms, for I had expected to be tested on knowledge rather than intelligence.
When the result came my disappointment was not acute. I had wanted to pass, and hoped I would, yet didn’t care too much that I hadn’t, telling myself that the test had been taken as much for the experience as for anything else. Perhaps it was thought by the teacher, however, that my marks had been close enough to justify another attempt, for I accepted the chance of a free scholarship exam the following term for Nottingham High School. Hard to remember what season it was, the day of the test being cold and wet, and my shoes letting in water, but the high spirits of Arthur Shelton and I declined somewhat on going through the gate and seeing masters wearing caps and gowns much like those at the school of Billy Bunter in the comics we laughed at.
Since my experience of the previous attempt I’d had no coaching, but at least knew what to expect. A hard try was not enough, however, and my second failure indicated that I was not a fit subject for formal education. Success would in any case have led to all kinds of complications, not least that of leaving my friends and entering a world I was not prepared for. I could not know it then, but I wanted to go in by the ceiling, not enter by the cellar.
I knew that to continue schooling until the advanced age of seventeen was impossible in a family which needed any money that could be earned as soon as the legal age to work full time had been reached. It would be emotionally out of the question for me to endure the justifiable resentment of someone like my father, who at least had the power to make me feel guilty at having money in my pocket to buy books when there was little enough to eat on the table. It was the only moral problem I was to inherit.