Writings, Essays and Stories |
The Boy In The Road |
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'You are my sunshine, my only sunshine |
He lay in the road and squinted up at the sun. The tar surface was hot and soft to the touch, and he liked the smell of it. There were no cars on the road. Only three people in the whole street owned a car, and they were away somewhere, probably at work, he supposed. He closed his eyes, and the world became orange. He thought of his dog, Bonzo, who was orange and white. The dog had a way of trotting at an angle, which the boy admired very much. Sometimes he tried to walk like that himself. |
The boy opened his eyes just as a red and black butterfly flitted across the road. The boy, whose name was Sam, let his thoughts float after it. He thought about the Raymond gang, which had a membership of four; Raymond Chine, Stuart, Sam himself, and his brother Keith. The two boys were very comfortable with each other, although in fact they were not really brothers, or even related. They were, however, equally stubborn. When Gill bought them a cricket set, consisting of two bats, some stumps and a ball, the boys took it all down to Valentine’s Park and had a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours. When it was time to go home, they were both tired, and neither one wanted to carry the equipment back up the hill which lead to home. After some argument, Keith left it on a low coping wall for Sam to pick up. Sam left it there, expecting Keith to go back for it. When they got home, Gill sent them back for it, but by that time, of course, it had gone. |
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Sam was a sort of out-rider for the gang. When someone said, “I dare you”, they all knew he was the one who would carry out the dare. The boys sensed a kind of wildness in Sam, which set him a little apart from them; “I dare you to climb to the top of that tree”, “I dare you to lift that lady’s skirt”, or put pennies on the railway line for the train to flatten out, or jump off the bus while it was moving. Once he even took a half crown from Auntie Eva’s purse. He took it to the local sweetshop but he had no idea what to buy with it. The shopkeeper took him back home. Auntie Eva gently explained to him that it was wrong to take money without asking. She didn’t seem angry, and she didn’t scold him. He felt so ashamed that he promised himself he would never do anything like that again. |
Sam had been with the Draysons since he was three years old. Before that he had lived a very long way away, in Scotland, with his mother. He had no memories of that time, but Eva and Gill Drayson sometimes mentioned it. Auntie Eva told him that his mother had been on her own, and that times had been hard because of the war. She said that his mother had to go into the farmer’s fields at night sometimes, to steal turnips; otherwise they might both have starved. Sam didn’t really think about things like that, but he stored it away somewhere at the back of his mind, as something to mull over when he was older, and could perhaps understand it. |
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Right now he had more interesting things to think about. Like Deirdre Ross, for instance. She always seemed to know more about the mysterious world of grown-ups than did the boys. She wasn’t part of the Raymond gang, but often hung around with the boys, who tolerated her because of the indefinable air she carried, of knowing more about the way the world worked than they did. Yesterday she had told the boys that she knew a secret. “Keep it under your hat, boys, but I know where babies come from”, she confided in a stage whisper, and pointed vaguely towards her tummy. Sam thought of a baby in a hat. A top hat. It was all a bit confusing, and he added it to his list of things to mull over at a later stage. |
Sam let the sun soak into him. Could life get any better? High up, a single-engine airplane droned slowly across the sky, the sound getting fainter as it moved away. He watched it until it disappeared. He remembered that he had asked Uncle Gill if there would ever be another war. Gill had been mending a shoe on an iron last. He looked at Sam. “I hope not, boy,” he said. The war had ended three years ago. On the rare occasions that he had been taken to visit his mother in London, Sam had seen the bombsights which still littered the streets, looking like missing teeth. There were more fields then streets where the Draysons lived, and there had been no bombing raids here in the war, but still, Sam thought, if there were another war, the Germans might concentrate on his area next time. |
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He thought about his house disappearing with a loud bang, and Bonzo running down the street with his funny sideways gait, and his tail between his legs. He tried to imagine the street without his house in it, and couldn’t. The house was all he knew; the kitchen where Auntie Eva placed him on the sideboard and scrubbed his face and knees with a flannel at teatime, the dining room with the big radio and the brown tiled fireplace, and the front room with the piano, which nobody ever went into. The main bedroom upstairs, which belonged to Eva and Gill, had a clock on the wall which was taller than Sam, and was operated by a system of weights and chains. Sam never really understood anything at all about that clock. |
There were two other bedrooms; one for the girls, Tommy and Pam, and the box room at the end of the passage, which was shared by Keith and Sam. Next door lived Raymond Chine, the nominal leader of the Raymond gang, although Keith was the real leader. Raymond’s father was a bus conductor, but Gill Drayson was a bus driver, which was far superior. Once a woman had thrown herself in front of his bus. Gill stopped the bus inches from her head. When the company measured the skid, they decided to give him an award for quick thinking. The boys were very proud of that. |
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Sam heard a car turn into the road, and decided to sit up. The road shimmered in the heat of the afternoon. The car, a small black Austin, drove slowly down the road and disappeared around the corner, leaving a smell of exhaust fumes in the air. Sam considered his options. He could find the gang and see if they wanted to go over to the Crooked Billet farm, and throw stones at the windows of the abandoned farmhouse. Or he could see if he could catch a lizard in the field behind the street, although you really needed two for that – one to distract the lizard and one to creep up behind and catch it before it disappeared in the long grass. Or he could just lie down on the road again and look at the sun through his fingers. Yes, that would be the best plan. It must be teatime soon, and they would probably send Bonzo out to look for him. He thought about Bonzo’s funny walk, and smiled. |
And then, a week later, a letter came from his mother, and everything changed... |
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The smell of frying bacon was coming from the kitchen, but Sam stayed where he was. He glanced at his face in the mirror over the fireplace as if seeing it for the first time. Then he looked at the rest of the room, over his reflection’s shoulder; the two old armchairs, the long dining table and the sideboard, upon which rested the big mahogany wireless. |
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Sam liked everything about that wireless. He liked its solid chunkiness, the big wooden dials and the window with its red needle, which lit up when you turned the set on. He thought of the programmes he listened to in the evening, sometimes with Keith, sometimes with all the family. There was ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’; “Come on, Snowey, help me break down this door before the blighter gets away!” “Right you are, sir - here, better take my gun”; and there was ‘Journey into Space’, with Jet Morgan and Lemmie, which had them on the edge of their seats with its sounds of rocket engines roaring, hissing air escaping from something or other, and the eeriest music they had ever heard. He even listened to ‘Toytown’ with Larry the Lamb, although he was supposed to be too old for that; “Please Mr. Policeman, there’s a dra-a-a-gon in the woods”. |
He wondered briefly why it was called a wireless, when anyone could see the thick wire coming out the back of it, but life was full of mysteries. For instance, why were all airplanes a mile long, why did you float to the ceiling if you swallowed an orange pip, why was there a flagpole without a flag in the garden, and what had happened to their pedal car. This wonderful vehicle had been made for Sam and Keith by Uncle Gill, and was the envy of all the kids in the street. One day it disappeared from their garden, and the grown-ups claimed they didn’t know what had happened to it. The boys suspected it had been broken up for firewood, but nothing was ever proved. |
Sam sighed. Looking out through the French windows he could see the flagpole at the bottom of the garden. He remembered the ‘boxing match’ he’d had with Keith in the garden. Uncle Gill had bought them each a pair of boxing gloves, and they couldn’t wait to try them out. Off they trooped to the end of the garden. They both swung and landed a mighty punch at the same time. It was the only punch of the match. They burst into tears at the same moment, and the boxing gloves were taken away, never to be seen again. |
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When he had first come to stay with the Drayson family, they had called him Silent Sam, and even now, six years later, he wasn’t a great talker, but he was happy, and couldn’t remember having lived anywhere else. Keith was just four months older than Sam, Pam was a couple of years older and Tommy was nearly grown up. Tommy’s real name was Eve, like her mother, but she had always been called Tommy. Sam was a little in love with Tommy, but then so was everybody else. In summer they sometimes cycled the five miles to Hainault Forest to pick blackberries. At least, the two girls did the cycling and Sam and Keith perched on the handlebars. He remembered that the metal brake lever would pinch his thighs if he weren’t careful. |
And now his mother was coming to take him to London to live. Apparently she had just got married again and had written to say she wanted to take him home. Well, not home, this was home, thought Sam. His mother smelled of perfume and wore a fur coat. He went to visit with her several times a year. He wore his good clothes and tried to stay on his best behaviour. He was always glad to get back to his life with the Draysons. |
His parents had split up when he was three, and he had been with the Drayson family ever since. He had seen his dad only once since then, on his fifth birthday. His dad had brought him a large cannon with wooden wheels, and which fired wooden cannon balls. The grown ups called his dad Jock, and seemed to like him a lot. Auntie Eve gave Sam a gold cigarette lighter to give to his dad. It was wrapped up to look like a toffee. Sam thought that was a very clever idea. Jock put the boy on his knee and talked to him in his funny Scottish accent. Sam liked him a lot, but that was the last time he saw his dad. |
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He returned to the present to hear Uncle Gill calling him from the kitchen. Sam scuffed his shoe against the fireplace. He did not want to go into the kitchen. He knew his life was about to change in ways he could only imagine. Uncle Gill called again, and this time Sam made his way to the kitchen. Uncle Gill did not look at him. “Your mother will be here soon, boy. I’ve made you a bacon sandwich for the journey”. |
Auntie Eva had gone off to work this morning, Keith had gone to school, and Pam and Tommy had gone wherever they went during the day. Sam and Uncle Gill were the only ones left in the house. The boy watched as Uncle Gill cut the rind off the bacon. This was the first time Sam had ever seen him cook anything. |
They heard a car scrunching to a stop in the road outside. Footsteps came up the path. Now the man looked at the boy and ruffled his hair. Another first. Sam found he could not speak. The doorbell rang. |
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Sequel |
Sam stood at the door, twisting the ornate Victorian door knob. It wasn’t that he liked it, in fact he thought it was ugly, but it gave him something to do. His family - his new family - were seated at the long table, about to eat. No-one seemed to notice him and he wondered whether he should join them, but he was reluctant to walk across the room to the table. He knew they would turn and look at him and he would rather they didn’t notice him, so he stayed where he was. |
He looked up at the ceiling. He had never seen one so high. It was edged all the way round with a sort of sculptured floral pattern made from plaster, with extra convolutions in the four corners. There was a circle of the same pattern in the centre of the room, and in the middle of that hung a chandelier. The house was so different from the one he was used to that it was difficult to believe it was his home now. |
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He thought about Eva and Gill, who had looked after him for as far back as he could remember. In some part of his mind he had known they weren’t his real parents, but he had always felt at home there with Tommy and Pam, the sisters, and his brother, Keith - well, his foster brother, as he was supposed to call him now. And then there was Bonzo, his dog - should that be foster dog, he wondered? Just then his grandmother looked up. “Come and sit at the table, Sammy. Your dinner is getting cold”. |
There were many things to learn now. His speech had to change, for one thing. He was required to sound his aitches, speak more clearly and with rounder vowels. He hadn’t realized there was anything wrong with the way he spoke, but he was a quick learner and soon mastered the required accent. He had no intention of giving up the way he spoke altogether. Everyone at his new school - Munster Road Primary - spoke the same way he did, so he finished up with two accents; one for school and another for home. It puzzled him slightly that his grandfather also spoke the same way, but the family didn’t seem to mind that. The old man was supposed to be very clever, even though he was an East End cockney, so he was allowed to drop his aitches. |
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One of the differences between his old life and his new one was that he was no longer permitted to bring friends home from school. This was his grandmother’s idea. She was in charge of things when his mother was working, which seemed to be most of the time. |
The inevitable result was that some of the boys at school formed the impression that Sam was a bit stuck-up and got into the habit of chasing him at home time. Sam didn’t mind too much at first. He was a fast runner and there wasn’t much chance of them catching him. All the same, by the end of the week he had had enough and decided to teach them a lesson. |
He knew what to do. He had just finished reading ‘The Call of the Wild’ by Jack London, and he remembered the part where a lone wolf was being chased by a pack of dogs. The wolf waited until one of the dogs miscalculated and drew too far ahead of the pack. The wolf slowed down and turned suddenly on the dog, which realized its mistake, but too late… |
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That night the boys chased him home, as they had down every night that week. As he turned the corner into Dancer Road, he glanced back. Sure enough, one of the boys had pulled ahead of the others, eager to cut him off before he reached his gate. Sam slowed and waited. The boy rounded the corner, and just like the dog, realized his mistake too late. Sam’s punch caught him under the ear, and he yelped and fell back into the hedge. Sam walked the few yards to his gate and didn’t bother to turn when the rest of the gang appeared round the corner. As they saw what had happened they hesitated and then stopped. That was when Sam turned to look at them. There was no more trouble after that. |
Sam wished all his problems could be solved as easily. He imagined clipping his grandmother behind the ear and watching as she dropped the tray of aitches she was carrying, tripping over a stack of rounded vowels, which rolled all over the floor like gobstoppers. “Get serious, Sam, you’re in this for the long haul”, he drawled out of the corner of his mouth. He loved American films. When he lived with the Draysons, they had taken the boys to the cinema once a week. Fred McMurray, Jimmie Cagney, Jack Palance, Jimmie Stewart, Bogart - he knew them all. |
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He focussed back on the present. His grandmother apparently had to be known as Nana. He couldn’t help thinking of the dog ‘Nana’ in Peter Pan. He had seen the new Walt Disney version at the cinema just before he moved to his new home. Come to think of it, he thought, Wendy’s house was very much like 20 Dancer Road. Anyway, at least they didn’t want him to call his grandfather by the male equivalent of Nana. Perhaps there wasn’t one. |
Even worse than the Nana business was the fact that his mother, whom he didn’t actually know very well, wanted him to call her Mummy. No boy that Sam had ever known called his mother that, and he wasn’t going to do it either. He promised himself that he would solve the problem by not calling her anything. Perhaps she wouldn’t notice. |
Then there was the problem of Boris, his mother’s new husband. It was because she had married again that Kitty felt able to reclaim Sam from his foster family. Boris was Polish. His real name was Boleslaw, with the ’w’ sounding like a ’v’. Kitty struggled with it for a while but finally she gave up and settled for Boris. Boleslaw didn’t like the name, claiming it was Russian rather then Polish, and he hated the Russians. To be fair, he hated Germans and Jews with the same passion. He didn’t seem to like anyone very much, and as Sam found out in due course, he liked Sam least of all. |
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Dancer Road was situated in Fulham, and that part of South London was very much a working class area in the early ‘fifties, when Sam first saw it. Most of the houses were very tall and had definitely seen better days. In Victorian times the servants had lived on the top two floors and the owner’s family spread themselves through the rest of the house. This was pretty much the way that Sam’s mother, Kitty, had arranged 20 Dancer Road, except there were no servants. |
It seemed odd to Sam to live in a house full of strangers, who were actually his relatives. He wondered how so many people could fit into one house. He counted them off on his fingers. At the top of the house lived Nana, but Granddad lived one flight up from the ground floor because they were separated, soon to be divorced. Next to her lived Uncle Roy, who wasn’t that much older then Sam himself. Down one floor was Sam’s own room, which was next to the family’s sitting room, where he had had his first meal with all the family. Down again was the bathroom and the tiny kitchen. Down still further was the bedroom of his mother and Boris, which was next to his Grandfather’s room. On the ground floor lived an old couple called Mr and Mrs Loveday who came as part of the house when his mother had bought it. |
In time, Sam settled into his new life. He grew used to his family, with the exception of Boris. Boris seemed to spend a lot of time hissing, and turning lights off after people as the left the room, so that when they returned a few minutes later they had to turn the light on again. He was a great hisser. He would do it if you used too much toothpaste, or left a tap running or brought mud into the house on your shoes. Sometimes you didn’t know why he was hissing. |
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Boris seemed to think that anyone who had not built a bridge across a Dutch canal under fire, as he had, or thrown a grenade into the river to catch fish, hadn’t really lived. |
It was about this time that Sam became interested in art. He did a watercolour of a black metal paint box, trying to paint the reflections on the box exactly as they appeared. His mother showed it to Boris, who said he didn’t know what the white bits were as the box was obviously black. |
Sam never talked about his life with the Draysons. That was his own private world, and had nothing to do with his present family, but he knew that that part of his life was over and set about making friends at his new school. There were Roger and Alan Plant, who made you laugh until your mouth ached. They had a kind of act, where one would unscrew the leg from the other while they talked in a pantomime German accent. All the kids in the playground would gather round to watch. Then there was Barbara, who was born on the same day as Sam. One day she suggested they meet after school, under the stairs at a nearby block of flats, and take their pants down. Sam wasn’t quite sure what the point of this was, but it was definitely an exciting idea, so he agreed to meet her. He waited at the appointed time, but she didn’t show up. Sam wasn’t sure whether he was disappointed or relieved. |
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Then there was John Munton. He was just as funny as the Plant brothers in his own way. He was a big, clumsy boy, who wore glasses. Something of a loner, he would have been picked on but for his size. As it was, when he teamed up with Sam they were more than a match for any of the local gangs. |
That summer, Sam saved up and bought an air rifle. It was a BSA .173 with a rifled barrel and a beautiful polished wood stock. Sam practised hitting tin cans in the garden and was surprised to find he was quite a good shot, but when John showed him the guitar he had just acquired, they both knew they had to swap. Sam had already experimented with a plastic saxophone and could play a chromatic harmonica quite well. He had tried an accordion but couldn’t make any sense of the chord buttons. But now everything fell into place. Somehow he understood what to do on the guitar straight away. |
He started having half-hour lessons from a local dance band guitarist called George Weston. For his first week’s homework he had to learn three chords. The next day he went down with ‘flu, but he didn’t let that stop him. He sat up in bed, practising his chords and by the time he had his next lesson he had learnt the chords, and could play them in time. After a few weeks George Weston told him he was ‘one in two million’, and said Sam could ‘hear the chords’. This was just before Rock ‘n Roll burst on the scene. Sam thought his teacher meant he could hear the guitar playing at the back of the orchestra, on the Perry Como records that Mr. Weston liked so much. |
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Sam spent most of his spare time practising. He liked it all; jazz, rock ‘n roll, country and classical. He listened to Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, B.B. King, Ray Charles, and jazz players like Tal Farlow and Barney Kessel, but his idols were the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and Lonnie Donegan. By the time he was seventeen he had been working in an advertising agency near Baker Street for a couple of years. There were several kids in the agency who had guitars and they used to bring them in at lunch-time. One day, as they were tuning their guitars, someone put his head round the door and told them Buddy Holly had just been killed in a plane crash. |
Shortly after this, Sam left the agency, signed up with the Merchant Navy, and spent some time on P.&O. liners in the catering department, cruising to and from Australia. He liked to think of himself in a small ship on a storm-tossed sea, lashed to a dishwasher and bravely passing out the plates. He found that he was never seasick, which surprised him as he was always sick in the back of cars when he was a boy. Sam liked the sea. He liked the way the wind would whip all the tea out of your mug if you stood in the bows and held it up. He liked to watch the dolphins in the blue waters of the Indian ocean. You could see them quite clearly, sixty feet down. They would keep quite still, and suddenly accelerate and climb, easily overtaking the ship. Best of all, if you stood right up in the bows, gripped the ship’s rail tightly and looked down, you could see them curving elegantly out of the water and across the ship’s prow. |
After two years of this happy, sun-drenched life, when he was at home for Christmas, and between ships, he decided, on an impulse, to stay ashore and form a band with a guitarist he had met on his last trip. In the years to come, Sam would play in many bands and would have a long career, teaching music and art. |
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Buddy Holly was only the first in a long line of casualties in the music business; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Rick Nelson, Roger Miller, Marvin Gaye and John Lennon, to name just a few, but none had quite the impact on Sam as did the death of Buddy Holly. Not so much because he had a great talent - which he had - but because Sam was seventeen at the time, and what happens to you when you are seventeen stays with you always. |
Epilogue |
Sam now lives with his wife, Karen, daughter Abi, and three dogs, in the north-east of Scotland, near Forres, home of Macbeth's three witches. The blasted heath is long gone, but there is a park called Grant's Park where Sam walks his dogs. At the back of the park is an ancient beech tree, on which someone has very carefully carved 'H.S. loves R.A. 1.6.47'. Sam would have been six years old and six hundred miles away when this message was carved, perhaps laying in the road and squinting up at the sun as the hot tar melted in the summer heat, and an orange and white dog came trotting towards him. Sam admired the way the dog walked very much, and sometimes tried to walk that way himself. |
James Donaldson Collins |
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