Left Field: CHAPTER 2 - Alice in the Oven

‘Can I stay at home, please?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ my mother said. ‘Rattling around in this house all on your own. Go and put your coat on.’

I have always hated shopping and I blame my mother for that.
During the long wait while she sat at her dressing table, which was itself dressed in starched crochet frills, I would watch as she powdered her nose, rouged her cheeks, and then the five-minute search for her hat, sometimes a scarf.

First stop: Mr Thomas, the cobbler above Bromley South station. I say above as there was a row of small shops built on the bridge. The trains shook the stacked shoes and jangled the blank keys waiting to be cut.

My mother handed him my Clarks school shoes. ‘I don’t know what he gets up to,’ she told him as if I wasn’t there. ‘He’s always running everywhere. Why he can’t keep still I don’t know.’ She looked at me, her face a brief smile. ‘You little rascal.’

‘Keeps me busy,’ said Mr Thomas. ‘Wednesday morning all right for you to collect?’A nod, then on to Cullens, the grocers.

‘Good morning, Mrs Douglas-Wilson. May I have your list?’

My mother would sit on a wicker chair at the far end of the counter while Mr Roberts, in his long brown jacket, climbed a ladder which ran on rails along the line of shelves. He called down, ‘Two tins of sardines today? These ones in brine are very good. Only half a pound of sugar this week? How’s the doctor? Saw him on Masons Hill on Saturday. Appeared to be having trouble with the motor. It was coughing a bit on the way up. I’m afraid this corned beef has gone up a ha’penny.’

‘Can we have some ginger snaps?’ I always had to remind her to buy biscuits.

Mr Roberts would open a large bin and scoop a dozen pieces into a paper bag. He would then hold the two corners of the bag and twizzle them several times to seal it.

Then to Importers, the coffee shop at the top of the High Street with a café at the back. I liked the aroma of roasting coffee revolving in the drum in the window.

‘Half a pound of Continental, please, Mr Barraclough. Ground two and a half. I’ll go and have my coffee and pick it up on my way out.’
I had to sit listening as my mother chatted to Naomi Peters, Dorothy Somers and Patty Masterson, her three friends, who were always there and always talking. Occasionally, they smiled in my direction through their unbroken words.

‘The tennis match has been cancelled with this rain. My daughter is so upset.’

‘My husband gets home so late. It’s hard keeping dinner warm for him.’

‘You must go to David Greigs. They have some excellent fresh salmon in today and their eels are always good.’

The local library was just across the road. Literature was my escape from my mother and her nattering friends. ‘Can I go and get a book?’

‘Yes, but be careful how you cross the road. Be back in 15 minutes.’

My favourites were Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows and Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, an illustrated and probably abridged version. The first was a rural escape from the suburbs, but safely English, while the second took me as far away as you could get.
And as much as I could find of Lewis Carroll so as to escape logic altogether: ‘and the moral of that is – be what you would seem to be – or, if you’d like it put more simply – never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’

In the winter flu season my mother would place Alice and her Wonderland friends in the oven for an hour ‘to get rid of the bugs, dear’. I always had a warm feeling when I read these books and I’m grateful to those talking women at Importers for encouraging my love of literature.

In Market Square there was Medhursts, the local department store, which had an extraordinary contraption for making purchases. The cashier would place the customer’s money in an envelope and pin this with a clothes peg to an overhead wire ‘track’ that whizzed the envelope way across the ceiling. Change and receipt came back the same route.

I remember my mother taking me there to meet Father Christmas for the first time. I sat on his lap and he gave me a Meccano set. How did he know?

That was the year my faith in Santa Claus was destroyed with a little help from my sister Liz. On Christmas Eve my mother told me to call his name up the sitting room chimney and ask him to visit.
I bent down close to the fire and called out, ‘Father Christmas, please come tonight.’

A voice came back. ‘Yes, child, I will.’

My sister started to laugh and I turned round to see my mother talking in a deep voice through her cupped hands. A dead giveaway, but I didn’t want to believe my own eyes or ears.

 That night I asked my mother if my sister Joanna and I could leave a glass of sherry for Father Christmas as it was a cold night and he’d appreciate it. We had lost Liz to the faith.
‘ 
Yes, of course, dear.’

We put the glass outside my bedroom. The next morning it was empty, with a note beside it. ‘Thank you for the most welcome glass of sherry.’

Hang on, that was my father’s writing.

I don’t remember my mother ever being upset with us children, but she often argued with her husband. That’s something I blocked from my mind, but my sisters remind me that plates used to fly. My father worked a seven-day week and had little time for us and her. When she was very old, she told me that he was less than attentive in bed.
Like my father, I think her own childhood had left its scars. My mother and her younger sister, Enid, were the daughters of Rees Bevan, the General Manager of Briton Ferry steelworks in south Wales. His wife had been killed in 1920 when my mother was twelve years old. My grandparents had been travelling in an open-topped car from their home in Pontardawe to Swansea. A lorry pulled out in front of them and because she was standing up to enjoy the sun and wind, her neck was cut by the windscreen.

Two years later, my grandfather married Betts, the under-matron at Malvern Girls’ School where he’d sent his daughters. Betts was only six years older than my mother and she saw to it that both girls were cut off from their father’s money. Thanks to Betts, there was never going to be help for either sister from their wealthy father.

They had a younger brother, Ken, who died of diphtheria, aged eight. Betts told the two sisters that he was ill because he’d eaten too many sweets. The girls nursed him and my mother told me that his last words were ‘I want to see my mother’. She said her brother had been popular in Pontardawe and all the shops closed on the day of his funeral. Throughout her life, she talked about Ken and how much she’d loved him.

At bedtime, if I was fooling around and disappeared under the sheets, my mother would get angry with me. I think it reminded her of Ken’s death. When she was dying, she kept mentioning his name.

After my mother left school, Betts made her feel unwelcome at home in Pontardawe so she went to Italy and took a job as a nanny for a contessa in Florence. She became fluent in Italian and used to entertain her charges on the piano and violin; she played both well. Her father came to visit her and got a small comeuppance on the journey there. He got off the train in Milan in his pyjamas to buy a newspaper and the train left without him. My mother always laughed when she told us that.

She spent her life trying to fit in with English middle-class conventions. At meals she would say, ‘Take your elbows off the table’, ‘Don’t scoop your peas’, Turn your fork over’. Salt had to be poured in a small pyramid at the side of the plate. When eating soup, the bowl had to be lifted away from you, never towards. Spread over your knees was a table napkin, but never a serviette When the meal was finished, knife and fork had to be placed together and set at six thirty on the dinner plate.

We were told never to say ‘toilet’, but ‘lavatory’. Never ‘pardon’, but ‘I beg your pardon’. We had to greet guests politely and say goodbye when they left. When my mother held her regular coffee mornings, she would call us down from our bedrooms: ‘Children, come and say goodbye to Mrs Paterson.’ If we were visitors at a friend’s house, we should never ask to look around.

Language and behaviour were codified to distance the upper and middle classes from the standards of common people: they were non-U to our U.

My mother had a slight Welsh accent. When she was with her sister, Enid, the accent became broad Swansea. I remember them gossiping about their cousin.

‘Do you remember Mathonwy, Betty?’

‘Oh yes, I do that,’ my mother answered.

‘She was a one, she was.’
 
My mother would then deliver the punchline. ‘Only had to hang her knickers on the end of the bed and she was pregnant.’ Dialogue worthy of Under Milk Wood.
 
One of the things I’m most grateful to my mother for are the holidays we took on a farm at Llangennith on the Gower Peninsula where Dylan Thomas had his first kiss. My father rarely came with us and would wave us off at Paddington station. We would visit her father in Swansea – God knows why – and then take the bus to Llangennith where we stayed on a dairy farm.

I loved climbing on the back of the tractor trailer each morning as the farmer loaded his milk churns. He let me sit beside them as he took them to the depot in the village.

Back at the farm, my sisters and I used to spend hours jumping from the barn loft into the deep straw below. When we got bored with that, we would stand on the rails of the gate leading into the field, staring at the cows. They, of course, stared back. 

The beaches on the Gower were an adventure playground. My sisters and I played hide-and-seek in the dunes and, when the tide was out, we’d hunt for razor clams. They burrowed below the sand, but left small round depressions. We’d run to the sea line and fill milk bottles with water which we poured into the holes. We’d been told the clams would think the tide had come in and emerge from their burrows to feed through their siphons. Nobody really knows the truth of any of this. We never caught any. I would have liked to stay on that farm forever because I hated the journey home. 

I hated Bromley and the London suburbs. North of London’s inner periphery road, the North Circular, and south of the South Circular has always been enemy territory to me, their streets living graveyards, their houses full of repressed emotions. Give me the inner city with its noise, sirens, dirt and anger.

We had moved to Bromley in 1946 when I was one. My first memories are from three years later. I remember a lot of snow, followed by a very hot summer. 1950 is recorded as being unusually warm with temperatures in the high 80s.

Perhaps childhood memories play tricks on us, but each trick contains a truth. Snow above the knees and watching my father dig a path to the pavement. The coal man tipping sacks of anthracite down the coal-hole. The bread van, the milkman, the rag-and-bone man with his horse, cart and bell. Running into the back garden to watch the sweep’s brush emerge from the chimney stack. The buses coming up Westmoreland Road: the 126 to Beckenham, the 138 to Hayes Common.

Of all the telephone numbers in my life, I can only remember Ravensbourne 4510. Of all the cars, I can only remember the registration of our Morris Oxford, RKE 595. I remember my first bicycle, a black Raleigh which, on summer mornings, I’d ride through affluent streets to the swimming pool at Bickley School on the other side of town. There is a strong smell of roses in those memories and the smell of the swimming pool itself, a chlorine memory. The more adventurous bicycle rides were out past Hayes Common to Westerham. I would cycle past RAF Biggin Hill and watch the Meteor jets take off and land. 

There are memories of trains: steam giving way to electric as childhood gave way to adolescence. Standing on the pedestrian bridge at the far end of Bromley South station, waiting for the Golden Arrow to Dover to pass underneath my feet, steam enveloping me in a thick cloud. A temporary excitement, unlike the longer-lasting smog that gripped London in the early 1950s. Going to school with a handkerchief over my mouth which turned yellow on the journey, unable to see my hand in front of my face.

One memory still makes me feel guilty. May 1st, 1953, my mother’s 45th birthday. It must have been that year because the shop windows were full of Union Jacks and pictures of the new Queen. My sisters gave me one shilling and sixpence and told me to buy our mother a box of chocolates. I walked into Woolworths and spent the money on marbles.

When I got back Liz said, ‘We told you to buy chocolates for Mum and you bought marbles!’

I started to cry and ran upstairs to my parents’ bedroom. I placed the marbles on my mother’s dressing table. My sisters stood at the door.

‘What are you doing, David?’ Joanna asked.

Through guilty tears, I lied. ‘Look, they’re a lovely present.’

Elizabeth was born on August 18th 1941, and Joanna two years later on the same date. Curiously, the daughter my mother’s stepmother, Betts, had with Rees Bevan – also called Elizabeth – was born on August 18th and Betts died on August 18th. I don’t know what a numerologist would make of all this, but a bookie would say the odds are wildly against it.

My mother told me pointedly that my two sisters were ‘planned’.

‘And me, Mum?’

‘You?’ She would laugh and give me a hug.

In 1944 my father had been based at a military hospital in Shaftesbury. In July he was in the second wave of the D-Day landings. Although not with the front-line troops, he was entering a war zone to treat the wounded and traumatised. Perhaps on that last night in the house at No 39 Bell Street at the top of Gold Hill (some readers will remember it from the Hovis ads), he and my mother would have said their goodbyes. I can imagine her asking him if he had any condoms. He didn’t and probably didn’t fancy walking down that steep hill to get them from the hospital. ‘Betty,’ he might have said, ‘we can’t worry about that. I’m leaving at dawn.’

'Ah well,’ she would have replied, ‘I’m probably safe.’

I am proof of how safe she was. Whenever I visit my eldest son in Cornwall, I stop off in Shaftesbury and walk up Gold Hill. I love it. I like to imagine that that hill gave me life.

A year before she died, I visited my mother with my partner, Anne. 

‘Happy birthday, Mum.’

She turned to my father. ‘Is it my birthday?’ ‘Yes, Betty, it is.’

Her face lit up. ‘Oh good.’

‘You are ninety today,’ I said.

‘Am I?’ She turned to my father. ‘Am I ninety, Ian?’

‘Yes, Betty, you are.’

‘Oh good,’ she said.

I gave her our present. Four packets of Marlboro Lights. She looked puzzled and handed them to Anne. ‘I don’t smoke. You have them.’
‘Your ashtray is full, Mum,’ I said. ‘Dad doesn’t smoke.’

‘Is it?’

‘Anne doesn’t smoke either, Mum.’

She looked at Anne. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Are you two married?’

‘No, we’re not,’ Anne said. Then looking at me, ‘Not yet.’

My mother looked concerned. ‘Ian, are we married?’

He nodded.

She smiled at him. ‘Oh good.’

She then turned to me. ‘Why aren’t you married?’

Before I had a chance to answer, her attention had drifted back to the cigarettes. She fumbled one out of its packet. ‘Will you light this for me, Ian?’ She took two puffs and left the cigarette to burn. ‘I’m tired. I’m tired, aren’t I, Ian? I think I’ll go and lie down.’ I took her to her room and pulled back the covers. I kissed her and she smiled up at me. ‘I love you. No, I adore you.’

In the last months of her life, and after 20 years of looking after her, it all became too much for my father. He told me that every evening he found her banging on the bedroom window and screaming, ‘I want to die. Let me die!’ She had to be moved to a care home. At the end of our visits there, we’d say goodbye and get up from our chairs. She did, too. ‘Oh good. We’re all going home now.’

When my mother died on the eve of the Millennium, aged 91, I didn’t cry. I’d been mourning her for years. The operation 28 years earlier had been a success, but as soon as the surgeon’s knife left her brain, the mother I had known was no longer there. She was confused and unable to do anything for herself. The only positive result was that she was cheerful for the rest of her life.

As I write this now, my father is clinging on and my mother’s ashes are in the attic where they’ve been for 13 years. She is waiting for him. When my father dies, my sisters and I will take them both to the Gower where we spent those childhood holidays. We will scatter their ashes at Worm’s Head. He’ll be able to spend more time with her there than he ever did when we were children. 

Now go to CHAPTER 3

Left Field: CHAPTER 3 - Commie Wilson

Summer 1958, aged 13, my mother took me to Gorringe’s in Buckingham Palace Road to get my school uniform: two pairs of black trousers, a herringbone suit, a school blazer and tie and six white shirts with detachable starched collars.

I looked at myself in the mirror in my first long trousers. ‘Can I keep these on?’

‘Of course you can and we’ll have tea at Lyons Corner House.’

I felt sure everyone was looking at me as we ate our Maryland cookies.

‘Are you excited about going away to school?’ my mother asked.

‘Yes, but I’ll miss you.’

‘How do you think I feel about you going?’ she said as she removed her lace hanky from her purse.

There wasn’t much to say to that. If she felt it was out of her hands, what could I do?

The school train left Waterloo station on a wet September morning. We drove there from Bromley in the Morris. My father lifted my leather trunk out of the boot and my mother helped me with the birch-plywood tuck box. She had filled it with her homemade strawberry and raspberry jams, Marmite, Ryvita, biscuits and cake and three bottles of her milk-cloudy ginger beer carefully wrapped in the Daily Telegraph.

We followed the porter as trunk and box were taken to a platform with a chalk board marked CANFORD SCHOOL TRAIN. The porter put them into the luggage wagon. My father tipped him while my mother hugged me. ‘Remember to ring every week. Reverse the charges.’

I nodded, unable to speak.

‘And don’t forget to write.’

My father shook my hand, then patted me on the back.

‘You’ll be fine. Come on, Betty. We must go.’ He always brought goodbyes to an end with these words, ‘We must go’, and I never knew whether this was because he had an appointment to go to, or because he had to go before he dropped his guard and joined my mother and me in our damp farewells.

My mother gave me a last hug and pushed me towards the train.

My starched collar was already itching and I was sweating by the time I reached my carriage, the windows pasted with NEW BOYS.
I stood in the corridor, looking back up the platform as the train chugged out of the station. I couldn’t see my father, but my mother was still there, dabbing her eyes with her handkerchief, getting smaller and smaller.

And then we were on the London to Weymouth line heading for Wimborne, west of Bournemouth, a route that, five years later, would be gone with the decimation of Britain’s railway routes – the Beeching cuts – along with the steam engine that had pulled our train.
Boys in the two carriages ahead were unravelling toilet rolls into the wind. Long lines of paper flew past like white dragons and disappeared into sheets of rain. 

To keep myself from choking up, I got out my Eagle Annual to catch up on Dan Dare and the adventures of extra special agent Harris Tweed, while the boy opposite me picked his nose with one hand and flicked the pages of The Wide World Magazine with the other. It was an illustrated monthly which The Times described as ‘brave chaps with large moustaches on stiff upper lips, who did stupid and dangerous things’.

Four hours later, green Dennis coaches ferried us from Wimborne station for the two-mile journey to the school.

Canford Magna had been built as an extension to John of Gaunt’s fourteenth-century kitchen, but John was never there. His son, Cardinal Beaufort, did visit, although I doubt he spent much time in the kitchen. 


 Five hundred years later, Canford had become the home of Sir John and Lady Charlotte Guest, nineteenth-century iron magnates and owners of the South Wales steel firm, Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds. The Cardiff works were rivals to the Briton Ferry steelworks where my grandfather had been general manager, so I had a tenuous connection with the place.

When I was preparing to go to Canford, my parents had shown me photos of the buildings and its grounds. It looked beautiful, sitting on the banks of the river Stour, with its grey stone walls and manicured lawns bordered with oak, beech, horse chestnut and elm, the old parkland now extensive playing fields. But like the rotting flesh beneath the bindings of a Chinese concubine’s slippered feet, appearances are deceptive.

As I entered the building for the first time, we were asked to report to the prefects who stood holding clipboards. I approached one of them.
‘Name?’ he asked, without looking up from his list. 

‘David Douglas-Wilson.’

‘Surname only.’

‘Doug—’

‘Over there.’ He pointed to a line of boys.

In the 1950s, public schools were run like armies and divided into regiments, known as Houses. There was School House, Franklin, Salisbury, Beaufort, Court, Monteacute and Wimborne. I was to be in School House. My housemaster was a fierce Yorkshireman, Frank Hopkinson, whom we called Hoppy. He was the geography teacher and had a huge world map behind his desk, the fading British Empire in red.

On the first night we were gathered in one of the large classrooms and Hoppy organised a compulsory boxing match. The introduction to my new school friends was not with a handshake, but a punch.
‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘You are privileged to be in School House. We have the best teams, the most cups. I expect all of you to continue this tradition. Life is a test. There will be many tests while you are here. This is the first. Each of you will box one round. Make space. Push the desks back and we’ll start.’

With his clipped language, this man had no time to waste.

After the boxing, the prefects were introduced. ‘This is Thompson,’ Hoppy said, ‘Captain of School House rugby. This is Mitchell, Captain of the House hockey team.’

Mitchell looked friendly and after the introductions were over, I went up to him. ‘Is there a public phone?’

‘What for?’

‘I want to ring my parents.’

‘Forget it,’ he smirked. ‘Forget them.’

He put his hand on my shoulder. I thought he was doing this to soften his words, but he was pushing me away.

From the moment I arrived, I hated Canford: the cold corridors, the ox tongue we’d been served for the first meal, a housemaster who looked like Hitler. Then there were the bells. There were bells for everything. For getting up and going to bed, for PT, for starting and ending classes, for meals, for assemblies and, of course, the chapel bell.
In the passageway to the kitchens, where we queued for our dinner trays, there were rows of redundant bells, reminders of the Guest family years. Their numbers and names were on brass plates: BILLIARD ROOM, SMOKING ROOM, LIBRARY, HER LADYSHIP’S CHANGING ROOM, DINING HALL.

That first night, in a dormitory with 20 boys I’d never met before, was terrifying. I lay awake, thinking of my bedroom at home: my mother kissing me goodnight, the sound of the TV downstairs, my father locking the back door, the click as the hall light was turned off and Penny, our dachshund, running up the stairs to her basket on the landing.

Here the strip lighting in the corridor was left on. I remember going to the toilet that first night, frightened I would meet someone. What do you say in the middle of the night to a complete stranger?
The next morning I was given a ‘tutor’, a second-year boy who had three weeks to teach me answers to the School Quiz. Useless information. How many rugby pitches Canford had, the number of oak trees in the grounds, the names of the Masters and their subjects, the distance in yards from the school gates along the towpath to the bridge at Wimborne, the date the school was founded, the number of boys in the school in 1948.

The film maker, Derek Jarman, was at Canford in the 1950s. In his journal, Modern Nature, he wrote, ‘Smarting under this tortured system, the boys tortured each other, imposed valueless rules and codes of conduct, obeyed imaginary hierarchies where accidents of origin and defects of nature were magnified.’

You were never alone at Canford. Never allowed to be alone. But it was a place of loneliness. The only opportunity to be with yourself was in bed at night, feet away from the next boy, both practising the art of silent masturbation. I don’t remember any gay activity in the dormitories. I naively never thought about that kind of sex. The only attention I received from a homosexual was during my first summer term, when a prefect stood before me at the running track. I was hugging my knees to my chest before the hundred yards race.

‘I can see your genitals,’ he said and smiled at me.

I got up and walked away.

Physical abuse at Canford was never far from the surface. Prefects had the role of sergeant majors. There was fagging. For one week every month, each junior had to clean the prefects’ studies. This meant getting up before 6am, shining their shoes, scraping dried baked beans from pans and plates, sweeping carpets with a pan and brush and dusting desks. They would inspect our work and, if dissatisfied, would award the fagger a ‘blue paper’. These were entered into a ledger which was kept in Hoppy’s office. Each evening a prefect would come into the Junior Common Room and run his hands along the window ledges, tops of cupboards and desks. If there was any dust, one blue paper to the boy who was on cleaning duty.

If a boy was summoned to the Senior Common Room or a prefect’s study and failed to fold his arms on entry, or did not go up to the most senior boy in the room, another blue paper.

Three of these papers and you went to bed, shaking with fear, because after lights out, a prefect would come into the dormitory and call out the victim’s name. ‘Douglas-Wilson, upstairs.’ There, in the Senior Common Room, you received six strokes of the cane, delivered by a prefect, while a second attended as a witness. They had cups of coffee they sipped between strokes. We were allowed to put trousers on over our pyjamas, but the wounds left weals.

One evening, sweet papers were found on the gym floor where School House juniors had been watching a film. When Hoppy asked who had dropped them, and in a rare show of student solidarity, we all put our hands up. He then ordered the prefects to beat everyone. All 30 of us were gathered on the stage in the gym and publicly caned, one by one.

For the worst crimes, beatings were given by Hoppy. Dating girls was in this category. We were allowed exeats to go to Wimborne, but these were only long enough to buy a Crunchie bar or a bag of aniseed balls in the sweet shop across the bridge. Not enough time to wander around or date a local girl.

I had fallen in love with the girl in the record shop. She had brush curls and a pink hairband and wore fluffed-out dresses. She was puzzled by my interest in Ray Charles, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. My only diversion into mainstream pop was when she persuaded me to buy Johnny Tillotson’s ‘Poetry in Motion’.

One Sunday afternoon on exeat, she had agreed to meet me on Wimborne Bridge to go for a walk. I don’t know what would have happened, but nothing did because a master passed us. I was so scared I said a quick goodbye and rushed back to school along the 1,245-yard riverside path, the only fact from the School Quiz that was ever of any use to me.

I should have stayed with her because it would have been compensation for what was to follow. That evening I was in Hoppy’s study. ‘You were seen with a girl in Wimborne.’ He pointed to the far corner of the room as he lifted the cane from the top of his desk. After a caning, we were supposed to say, ‘Thank you, sir.’ I never did, and he didn’t insist on the protocol with me. 

Canford was High Church and today I can still recite, not only the Lord’s Prayer, but the Apostles’ Creed: ‘I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth and in Jesus Christ his only Son ...’
Towards the end of the first autumn term, we were ‘invited’ to put our names down for Confirmation. I didn’t and was summoned to Hoppy’s study.

‘Douglas-Wilson, Reverend Geake tells me that you have not 
registered for Confirmation.’

‘I don’t believe in God, sir.’

‘That has nothing to do with it. You are letting the House down.’

They couldn’t force Confirmation on me, but they could harass me. Summoned a second time, I was told, ‘Douglas- Wilson, you’re not kneeling in chapel.’

‘I told you, sir. I don’t believe in God.’

Again I was told this had nothing to do with it.

‘Do you believe in God, sir?’ I asked.

‘My beliefs have nothing to do with you. We are not talking about God here, Douglas-Wilson. We are talking about loyalty.’

The last straw was when I confronted the religious education teacher, the assistant school chaplain, the Reverend Norman Crowder, when he read Matthew 19:24: ‘And I tell you, it is easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the gates of heaven.’

My hand shot up. ‘Isn’t that about socialism, sir?’

‘This parable is not to be taken literally, Douglas-Wilson. Sit at the back of the class and get on with your Latin.’

There I remained, isolated, but happily free of the Reverend’s attentions who liked to rub his crotch against the back of our chairs. After that, I was banned from RE. No Divinity GCE for me, but I got a good grade in Latin.

I also got a good grade in history. I couldn’t stand the present so I concentrated on the past. The history master, Basil Rathbone – not the actor – was a large, shambling man who chain-smoked through class. He was the only teacher who left me with love for a subject. He was also the only master who was anywhere close to being a liberal. At the beginning of term I used to bring CND pamphlets and leaflets into school. They went unread by my fellow pupils, although during the Cuban Missile Crisis my opinions were taken more seriously. Rathbone read them all.

He also had a risqué sense of humour. ‘Would you prefer to be in the light with the ten wise virgins or in the dark with the ten foolish virgins?’ he would ask us apropos of nothing.

Our headmaster, Mr Hardie, had two beautiful daughters. Once, when we were discussing the four-minute nuclear warning when sirens would announce Armageddon, Mr Rathbone said, ‘You will have just enough time to boil an egg, but not to eat it.’ Then added, ‘but if I were you, boys, I’d forget the egg, make a dash for Hardie’s house and hope that he was out.’

I was a member of the school Debating Society which was as intellectual as things got at Canford. I had trouble finding a supporter for the debate on ‘Public Schools should be abolished’. And lost that vote. Heavily.

My nickname was Commie Wilson, but there were others far more radical than me. There were boys who refused to be beaten and were expelled. One of my friends ran away and walked the 25 miles to Southampton before he was found, returned to school and then thrown out.

I reluctantly took part in most school activities. I was even a member of the Combined Cadet Force which was compulsory, but I suppose I could have tested the school and said I was a conscientious objector.
There was Army, Navy or Air Force to choose from. I chose the Army because, as a commando, I could swing on ropes across the River Stour. The Navy cadets paddled beneath us in an ancient lifeboat with the school caretaker, Lieutenant Pantlin, nicknamed Plug, standing to attention in the stern as coxswain.

The Air Force had a glider and 12 boys would divide into two teams and pull on two elasticated ropes while the ‘aircraft’, balanced on its ski, would be anchored to a stake in the playing field. The ‘pilot’ was strapped to a wooden block on the nose. On an order from the commanding officer, the pilot released the anchor. A good flight would be 30 yards at three feet off the ground, then a nose dive into the rose bushes. It was rumoured that, in the 1930s, a boy had taken off with a strong tail wind and made it over the school before ditching in the river.

When not swinging on ropes, I was a bugler in the CCF band. Every month there was a parade when a visiting officer from the real Army would inspect us. On these occasions boots had to be spit-polished with blacking, belts, buckles and bugle shined with Brasso. The French teacher, Colonel Kirkpatrick, (aka Wump), a doppelgänger for Captain Mainwaring in the TV series Dad’s Army, would stop in front of me. ‘Ah, Commie Wilson.’ He’d then turn to the visiting officer and say, ‘It’s good to see we have the communists on parade.’ 
    
Once a year we had Field Day, which meant going on recce patrols on Canford Heath, a good opportunity to take cover and smoke cigarettes. Back on duty, we’d fire blanks at each other from First World War bolt-action Lee Enfield rifles. I remember stuffing mine with dirt and firing off at the other boys. When new, these could fire 15 rounds a minute. I used to think about the soldiers who used these guns in the trenches. Many of them didn’t survive that minute when they were sent over the top.

Canford was a sports school, not so much for the exercise, but for the development of team spirit, essential in every regiment. So rugby and hockey in winter, but not football – working class – and cricket and rowing in summer. Few boys in School House played tennis, a sport discouraged by Hoppy. He considered the game to be individualistic and effeminate.

If your name didn’t appear on the list of players for that day, you had to stand on the sidelines, cheering on your team in the never-ending inter-house matches. If you were caught studying in the library, you were a third of your way to a beating.

Because I was small, I played right wing at rugby, but refused to run fast or tackle an opponent. My reluctance to engage in sports was most marked with the annual School Run. At the end of the autumn term, 400 boys would run six miles across Canford Heath, a maze of brambles and thorn bushes. Prefects in blue shirts were stationed at every junction to direct the runners and watch for slackers. When they were out of sight, I would walk to make sure I was always among the last 50.

I left Canford in December 1962. I had a plan. In an inter- house rugby match in the last week, I tackled and scored the winning try. That same week I came in at number 20 in the school run.
On my last day Hoppy invited me to his study. Too late now to be summoned.

‘You have been here four years and could have helped your House win more cups. I do not wish you ill, Douglas-Wilson, but I’m glad to see the back of you.’

I stood scowling in front of him, removed my tie, placed it on his desk and left his office. Years later, I found out that Hoppy was sacked for having an affair with a colleague’s wife. His obsession with ‘loyalty’, verged on the tribal. It must have slipped from his mind, along with his trousers. Talk about letting the House down.

I have no idea if that boy reading The Wide World Magazine ever came across the adventures of Sir Henry Layard, son-in-law of Lady Guest. A regular visitor to Canford, he would have rambled though that park with Lady Charlotte and told her of his adventures in Nineveh and how he’d stolen an Assyrian frieze from what is today Iraq, a country of a more contemporary and bloodier theft.

In 1994 this frieze was discovered behind layers of paint in the school’s tuck shop and sold at Christie’s for nearly £8 million. The proceeds went to the school, of course, not to the Iraqi people, from whom it was stolen.

The very name ‘public’ school carries with it the stench of British hypocrisy. Another robbery, this one linguistic. Canford was as far away from the public and their norms and needs as you can get. Yet secession from the life of the rest of the nation was no barrier to the desire to dominate it. This is something I understood and despised from an early age. And wanted no part in it.

The location for Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If was Cheltenham College, but it would have been more authentic had it been made at Canford, although I never went as far as Malcolm McDowell and organised an armed rebellion. There were too few of us brave enough to hate the place and see it for what it was. And even if we had, we would have been overwhelmed in less time than it took to empty the cartridges from those ancient Enfields.

I had only two friends at Canford: Roger Lavers who was in School House and Norman Boyer in Franklin. It’s extraordinary that, during those four years, these two were the only boys I called by their first names. The only two who were real people and in whose company I escaped my loneliness.

When Roger arrived at Canford, his two older brothers were already there, so their names were Lavers Major, Lavers Minor and poor Roger was Lavers Minimus.

Roger was from Westerham in Kent and lived next door to Lord Cromer, the then-Governor of the Bank of England. On summer holidays I used to cycle out there from Bromley to help harvest his Lordship’s wheat. It was great fun to ride on the combine harvester. I can’t remember what my job was. Perhaps I am one of the few people in his Lordship’s life who got a free ride off him.

At Canford you rarely got to know boys from other houses so my friendship with Norman was unusual. Perhaps it was because we shared a hatred of the place and wanted to get out as much as possible, so long as this did not involve the sports field. One of the only ways to do this, when exeat quotas to Wimborne were used up, was to walk across the school fields onto Canford Heath. This was allowed at weekends if there wasn’t a rugby, hockey or cricket match to cheer for from the sidelines.

On these walks we discussed our plans for the future. Norman said he 
was going back to Argentina where his father managed an estancia. I said my only plan was to move as far away from Canford as possible. Norman interpreted this literally and told me that if I could get to South America, he would ask his father to give me a job.

‘But I can’t ride a horse,’ I told him.

Norman laughed. ‘Commie Wilson, you’ll learn in a day.’ 

Now go to CHAPTER 4

Left Field: CHAPTER 4 - Gaucho & Sailor

December 1962 was the coldest on record and the only warm room in our Bromley house was the kitchen. I spent hours helping my mother with the Christmas pudding. She gave me three sixpenny pieces which I had to wrap in greaseproof paper and place into the mixture. Discovering the tiny silver bundle in your helping was exciting because the lucky finder could make a wish.

Even though I was 17, I still made sure I was her sous chef for another lucky dip – being allowed to lick the bowl with the last of the sugar, treacle and raisins. It seemed a good moment to tell her about my decision. ‘I’m going to Argentina, Mum.’

She slammed the oven door on the pudding. ‘I beg your pardon.’

‘A school friend says I can work on his father’s farm.’ 

‘How are you going to get to Argentina? On a magic carpet?’ 

‘On a ship.’

'If you think your father and I will help, think again.’
 
‘It won’t cost you or Dad a penny. I’ve saved money.’
 
That summer I’d worked as an orderly in the geriatric unit at Orpington Hospital. It involved a lot of bottom cleaning, but the bottoms belonged to some extraordinary old men. I remember one of them had been an infantryman in the First World War. He seemed very old, but couldn’t have been more than 70 in 1962. He’d had a stoke and required the complete works when taken to the toilet.
‘David, you are such a disappointment to your father and me. I don’t know what he’s going to say.’

My father closed the door of his study and pointed to the chair beside his desk. I was nervous because I knew this preceded a lecture. I was ready to march out of the room if he challenged my decision.
He spent ages lighting his pipe, observing me over the top of the bowl. ‘You’ll be a long way from home and South America is going to be very foreign to you.’

This was good. He had accepted the inevitable. ‘I hope you’ll be careful.’
 
‘Careful? About what?’
 
‘About girls.’

That got me thinking. A continent of dangerous girls, but what did he mean by ‘be careful’? Was he referring to contraception, or was it an instruction to avoid girls altogether? I waited for him to continue, but he refilled his pipe, struck match after match and tried to puff it alight. After what seemed like minutes, he removed it, still unlit, and looked at it as if it were a naughty child. He nodded towards the door.
This was hardly parental approval for my decision, but it was the first recognition on the part of my parents that I was now in charge of my life.

I booked myself on the 20,000-ton Royal Mail Lines’ Arlanza. My ticket arrived with information about the journey to Buenos Aires and a postcard photo of the ship approaching Rio de Janeiro. Painted ice-cream white, this was, for me, an ocean liner from the movies, churning a foamy wake on a blue sea.1 I imagined a palm court orchestra and women with cigarette holders, tripping over their pearl necklaces. Gentlemen in blue blazers. The captain’s table. Deck quoits by day, love affairs by night.

The Arlanza was one of Royal Mail Lines’ three ships on the London–Buenos Aires route. The other almost identical ships were the Amazon and Aragon. They were all passenger ships with refrigerated holds. On the outward journey, cork was loaded in Lisbon. On the return to London, the massive fridges were filled with beef for Vesteys who were ranchers, meat importers and owners of Dewhurst, a chain of butcher shops. Vesteys had their own shipping company, Blue Star Lines, but there was plenty of Pampas beef to transport.

We set sail in mid-January. My family piled into the Morris to see me off from King George V Dock which, along with the Victoria and Royal Albert, were the largest in London.

My sisters were allowed on board and taken to meet the Captain on the bridge. I think they were almost as excited as me and would have joined me if they could. I walked down the gangplank with them and, as they and my mother hugged me, my father stood on the quayside, looking anxiously at his watch. I went back on deck and blew kisses to them as my mother dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. This was a repeat of Waterloo station four long years earlier.

It took ages for the ship to manoeuvre into the river and by the time we had exited the lock gates, my waving family had long gone.
We moved down the Thames and out through its estuary, the islands of Sheppey and Thanet and the massive oil depot at Thurrock receding into the damp winter mist.

We passed the mouth of the Medway and I looked back at Rochester where my father belonged to the sailing club. I could see the familiar sights of anchored naval reserve ships which he and I had sailed round in his Enterprise dinghy. I hoped I would be a better sailor than he’d been. I remembered the day he had steered our boat through the telephone and electric lines connecting the Arethusa, a Royal Navy training ship, to the shore. The Ministry of Defence had sent him a large bill.

Soaring birds followed us out into the North Sea. That month the water had frozen one mile from shore at Herne Bay and as far out as four miles at Dunkirk. Before I left, the BBC had expressed a fear that the Straits of Dover would freeze over. By now, it was too cold to come back on deck and check this out, but we got through.

After a brief stop in Cherbourg, we headed south into the grey mist of Biscay, the sea surprisingly calm for this time of year. I’d never been further from home than Brittany, so setting off to the other end of the world was both scary and exciting. I stood on the deck staring at the horizon, wondering if I’d made the right decision. The nervousness I felt was calmed by the ship’s engines which are the marine equivalent of a mother’s heartbeat to an embryonic child, a comforting throb.

The trip was to take three weeks via Vigo, Lisbon, Las Palmas, Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Montevideo. Off the coast of Spain, the weather brightened. By the time we reached Lisbon, the sun was out and the city was sparkling white. After loading cork, the next stop was the Canaries. Winter was over. At Las Palmas the officers and crew changed into their tropical whites.

The South Atlantic was calm the whole way and I spent a lot of my time at the stern, looking back at the wake and thinking of all I’d left behind. If I felt any sadness, that emotion soon disappeared when I considered the alternative: a new term at Canford.

Crossing the Equator, we had the Neptune party with the purser dressed up in a white sheet and carrying a trident. Traditionally, this involves a harsh initiation ceremony for those ‘crossing the line’ for the first time, but not for us. We were given certificates that allowed us two free drinks at the bar.

I’ve always liked Cuba Libre and associate this cocktail with my first sexual experience. An indirect one. I had a single cabin on the inside of the ship. It had no porthole and was claustrophobic, but I soon discovered that it had its uses.

A young couple who were in four-berth cabins started a shipboard romance. When they found out about my cabin, they asked if they could use it in the afternoons. I was paid with a rum and Coke in the bar each evening. The vicarious reward was that I went to bed each night savouring the woman’s Chanel No. 5, presumably the only thing she wore in my bunk.

Eight Cuba Libres later, the Arlanza arrived in Rio where I swam off Copacabana Beach. Looking up at Sugar Loaf with its enormous Christ, I couldn’t believe I had now arrived in South America.
I’d become friends with the only other young passenger, Joseph Moreno, a Jewish communist who could trace his family back to Spain and Morocco. He was returning home after completing an engineering degree at Manchester University. We would sit on the deck for hours talking politics, and he told me of his fears that the Argentine elections due that July might result in a military coup. Joseph was out by 13 years.

I told him I wanted to see Buenos Aires before heading for the Boyer’s estancia and Joseph invited me to spend a couple of nights at his parents’ home in Calle Tucumán. On the first evening there was a family gathering. His mother cooked fried fish with cilantro and parsley, rice-stuffed peppers, couscous, lentils and chickpeas, followed by date-filled pastries. After the meal, Joseph and I headed for the bars in Puerto Madero. He persuaded me to try fernet and Coke, a bitter, syrupy liquor mixed with herbs.

The next day I set off for the Boyers’. I had trouble finding my way to the bus station as I spoke no Spanish. It was pouring with rain. Clutching a disintegrating map of the city Joseph’s mother had given me, I decided to walk there. Many of Buenos Aires’s pavements were being replaced and I kept tripping into large muddy puddles. I missed the early evening bus and finally set off at midnight.

After the sprawling suburbs, we were on an empty highway heading towards Córdoba province with occasional stops in darkened, dusty towns that looked like film sets for Gunfight at the OK Corral. I expected to see Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster riding out of the gloom toward the night-stop cafés from which I bought choripán, a spicy sausage sandwich, and tepid coffees.

After ten hours we arrived in Rosario in the centre of the Pampas, the town where Che Guevara had been born. Norman and his father, Bernard, met me at the bus station and drove me to their home in the family’s 1942 Ford V8.

Four hundred and fifty kilometres north-west of Buenos Aires, the ranch was set in the middle of a copse of white cedars, Osage oranges, figs, native walnuts and ash trees. At the end of a dirt-track avenue lined with eucalyptus, we arrived at their house. Its garden had lawns and shrubs and was full of roses, wall flowers, petunias and begonia creepers. At a distance from the house was the dormitory for the farm workers, cattle dips, corrals and a 14-metre-tall wind pump that drew brackish water from 20 metres down.

This estancia was an oasis in the middle of the Pampas grasslands. The lush island of vegetation and woodland encircling the farm house and its outbuildings giving way to the plains. In the distance you could see the next island, the next oasis.

On the first morning, Norman woke me at 5.30am. At six the cook rang the ‘bell’, a steel bar and a bit of railway iron. I was introduced to the foreman, Juan Gómez, and the other eleven peons: six cattlemen, three tractor men, a blacksmith and the cook.

The men were gathered around a half-side of barbequed beef, slicing large cuts off with their facones, a knife they kept tucked into the back of their rastras, wide belts decorated with silver coins. I was handed a knife and joined in. I was conscious that they were all looking at me as I copied them. There were no plates, and you had to cut into an upended slab of meat to slice away each mouthful. I was frightened that I was going to cut my nose as I leaned forward to feed myself.
Norman gave me a piece of galleta, unleavened bread, and the cook came over and offered me a dried gourd with a metal straw. Inside was mate cocido, a tea made from the yerba plant. ‘Bienvenido,’ the cook said and the others nodded their welcome. 

Norman took me to the paddock and called Hilacha over. Hilacha means ‘frayed thread’ or ‘rags’, but this six-year-old mare was anything but. She was a small pony with beautiful black-and-white markings. She was very gentle and lowered her head for the bridle. I was shown how to saddle up. The saddle was made of leather, a ridge at the front and rear, and covered with a thick sheepskin to make the ride comfortable.

The men rode with the reins held in the left or right hand, leaving the other arm free for work. To turn the horse, both reins were pulled across to the new direction, unlike the individual left- and right-hand pull in England. There was no raising and lowering of your bottom from hard leather. You kept it firmly on the sheepskin. The cowboy system of riding, common across the Americas, was designed for those who had to work. The English system, by contrast, is ceremonial and deliberately uncomfortable: hard, unyielding and fixed. A bit like public schools. 
   
The horsemen still dressed like the gauchos of a hundred years earlier. They wore loose-fitting trousers, known as bombachas, belted with a sash and carried a rebenque, a two- foot-long leather whip with a metal handle. Some had lassos. Each of them had, of course, their knife.
I was given denim trousers, a brown cotton shirt and felt hat. Norman’s father supplied me with leather riding boots.

And Norman turned out to be right. I learned to ride in a day. Left foot into the stirrup and up and over into the saddle. ‘Follow me,’ Norman said. ‘Grip your knees into the side of the saddle and give her a little kick.’

I didn’t need to do anything to Hilacha. She followed the other horses as they went from walk, to trot and then into a canter. I stayed on and was even galloping by the end of the day.

A day’s work involved riding long distances. We’d move cattle to new pastures, young steers had to be brought back to the corrals to be de-horned, marked and castrated and all of them, from time to time, vaccinated and dipped. Others had to be prepared for market.

It was tough work, but I enjoyed every minute, except when herding took us close to the 380 hectares of mosquito-infested marshy lakes. We had to use our hats, themselves covered with insects, to beat them away from our faces and eyes. There was hardly any point as we’d arrive back at the estancia, scratching at the bites.

On Sundays, we started with an enormous English breakfast made by the family’s maid, Dominga Arias, a Ranquel Indian. She also cooked us Sunday roasts with Yorkshire pudding, which she called ‘ocho puree’.

Between that breakfast and the ocho puree, Norman and I would drive out on hunting expeditions in an old Jeep. I can’t remember what we were going to shoot, but I do remember we never killed anything.

Sometimes the Boyers would take me to visit their neighbours. The nearest oasis was an estancia called Fortin Las Tunas. The family there were Afrikaners who’d emigrated to Argentina from the Witwatersrand. They’d decided to be cattle farmers in a country without any kaffirs. They were awful and I remember the farmer’s two daughters, Johanna and Lettie, looked like Cinderella’s ugly sisters.
Las Tunas had an interesting history, probably not lost on its new owners. It had been a staging post for travellers going to and from Chile, and a lookout encampment for raiding Ranquel Indians. At least that is how the Boers would have described its history.

One day a lorry arrived with the six-monthly delivery of Mendoza wine. The driver asked me if I’d like to go back to Mendoza with him. He said he’d be passing through Arias in a week and would drop me home. I didn’t want to abandon Hilacha and turned him down.
After he left, I realised I’d refused a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Andes and that the farm work was becoming a comfortable option to everything else the world had to offer. It was time to leave.

I told the Boyers I was going to try and get to the USA and that I’d go to Buenos Aires for a few days to check out the possibilities of a job on one of the shipping lines that sailed from Argentina to the US. I took the bus to the capital and stayed again with Joseph and his family.

The US shipping firm, Moore-McCormack, offered me a job in the purser’s office on their cruise ship, the SS Argentina. On the wall above the main desk I saw a photo of Tony Curtis and Vivien Leigh, standing on the deck of this ship. Two years before, in 1961, the two actors had travelled on this vessel en route to film Taras Bulba in Argentina.

Moore-McCormack said to come back the next day to complete the paperwork. The Argentina was sailing to New York in six days so I would have time to take the bus back to the estancia and say my goodbyes.

When I returned to their offices on the Plaza Mayor, they informed me that the US consular office wouldn’t allow me to enter the USA or work on a ship. They had been given no reason as to why my visa had been refused and apologised.

I had no choice but to try and work my return back to London so I went to the Royal Mail Lines’ office. Did they have a job? They did, and on the same ship I’d arrived on. One of the two laundry boys had jumped ship in the Canaries. I was warned that it would be tough work as the laundry was almost as hot as the engine room. It was in the stern which, along with the bow, is the worst place to be in bad weather.

The Arlanza had just docked and it was going to take seven days to load with its new cargo of chilled beef. I was to report to the office the day before departure and someone would take me to its berth at Dock Sud.

I took the overnight bus back to Rosario to spend my last few days with the Boyers. I was sad to leave them and my fellow workers. I had been warmly welcomed there and Norman’s parents had treated me like a second son.

I didn’t have a camera in Argentina and have no photos of my own from my time there, but I can see them all vividly in my mind. Norman’s father was a small man who never lost his temper, or expressed the many worries that must have come with running such a large ranch.

Isobel was like my own mother, always concerned for me: ‘I’m sure your mother would want you to have a haircut,’ she’d say and Norman and I would be piled into the back of the Ford for the obligatory trip to the barber in Arias.

The cowboys were also like friends to me, even though I hardly spoke any Spanish. The estancia was a happy place to work and I knew that if I didn’t go, I would stay.

When I arrived back in Buenos Aires, Royal Mail Lines told me they’d been unable to get me an exit visa for working on ships. If I was prepared to be smuggled on board and hidden in the hold until we reached international waters, I could still join the ship’s crew. An officer escorted me through the quayside gates and told the guard I was collecting some documents for the Buenos Aires office.

I had to sit in the dark between two of those enormous refrigerated containers. At dawn the next day I was brought up on deck. The first thing I saw were the masts of the German battlecruiser the Graff Spee, sticking out of the mud in the middle of the Rio de la Plata. I had seen Anthony Quinn in Michael Powell’s The Battle of the River Plate at school, but hadn’t realised that the German warship had been scuttled in such shallow waters.

The Arlanza was now a very different ship to the one I had travelled out on. No more Cuba Libres or the smell of Chanel No. 5 as I drifted off to sleep. No more political discussions, only long, sweaty hours leaning over a steam press. I shared a cabin on the waterline with the other laundry boy, John Turner, a young man who farted a lot and was obsessed by his next sexual encounter.

After Montevideo we headed for Santos, the port town for São Paulo. The ship’s engines had been faulty since we left Uruguay and we were told we’d have to berth in Santos for a few days while the ship’s engineers fixed them. John and I headed for the waterside bars which doubled as brothels.

Santos was where I lost my virginity. The cantinas were full of whores of every shape and size. We sat at a table and a woman who looked about the same age as my mother came over to me and grabbed my scrotum. I don’t remember it being a sensual experience at all. But after a few drinks, which must have been laced with Mickey Finns, I staggered upstairs with a young prostitute in a tight, red dress. She left me in a small room and disappeared. There was an iron bed and a small cupboard. Its cracked plaster walls were painted faeces brown. The window was partially covered with a broken wooden blind which had once been white. A bare, bright ceiling light celebrated this cheerlessness. No red lights here, no concession to the room’s purpose.
After all the drinks I’d had, I was desperate for a piss. The corridor was dark and I couldn’t find the toilet so I opened the drawer of the bedroom cupboard and relieved myself there.

The woman returned and we had sex. I remember that she kept her dress on and that I, and no doubt she, wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. There was a lot of fumbling about in the light.
When I went downstairs to wait for my shipmate, the barman grabbed my arm and marched me back to the room. He opened the damp drawer. ‘Is that you, senhor?’ I acted dumb. He must have felt sorry for me because he let go of me and returned to the bar.
I was at the top of the stairs, ready to go down, when I heard John screaming from a nearby room. ‘Help, help!’

I opened the door to see a naked woman straddling him, holding a razor to his throat.

‘I don’t have enough money!’

I threw 30 real onto the bed. She made a dive for it. John pulled on his trousers and we ran back to the ship.

Safely on board, he thanked me for saving him with the money. ‘I owe you. Tell you what. I’ll pay for your next fuck.’

‘No thanks, John,’ I said. ‘That won’t be for a long time.’

I decided to stay with the crew who had no need for those bars – the gays. Chris was a waiter who was about 40. He was short, balding and permanently cheerful. When he smiled, his face was an ear-to-ear grin.
After I told him about my adventure in the whorehouse, he took pity on me. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘you made the wrong decision.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.
 
‘It’s not too late, you know.’
 
‘Too late for what?’
 
‘You’re a handsome boy. You’d have no trouble finding yourself a partner.’ A pause. ‘Among us.’

I turned down his invitation to a party in his cabin. John had plucked up courage and returned to the brothels but, after another night of sitting alone on deck and listening to distant laughter and the bossa nova, I gave in to the next invitation. ‘I’ll come by for a drink tonight, but I am not—’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll leave you alone.’

His cabin was covered with photos of his boyfriends, all of them taken on beaches and all of them wearing budgie smugglers. ‘Pretty boys, aren’t they? All much more handsome than me. Aren’t I the lucky fellow?’

He was true to his word, that night and every other. Neither he, nor his two companions, the cooks, flirted or made advances. We drank and played poker and for the rest of the long journey, I was always welcome for a nightcap in his cabin.

He told me how he’d been married, had three children, but had had to drop the pretence and tell his wife, whom, he said, he still loved, that he was gay. She had kicked him out of their home. His children, now grown up, refused to see him. He went to sea.

With the engines at half-speed, our ship moved slowly across the Atlantic. There were storms and it was heavy going. After work, John and I would stagger out to the bow, clutching the crane davit. We attached ourselves to the bow rail with harnesses and whooped with excitement as the ship dipped beneath the waves and laughed as we rose again. Youth is fearless.

Vestey got their meat and I got home. Home, but worried and fearful. My scrotum felt itchy and I went to the STD clinic at Westminster Hospital. After an embarrassing and intimate examination, I was given the all-clear.

Norman left for Australia soon after my return to London and, for many years, ran a sheep farm at Binalong, northwest of Canberra. Isobel Boyer died of heart failure in her mid- seventies and Bernard committed suicide. He shot himself in Norman’s bedroom. He had never recovered from his son’s decision to emigrate to Australia and the death of his wife.

After 40 years, Norman tracked me down and, today, I am again friends with him and his artist wife, Fling. They run a small farm in north Devon.

I have no idea what happened to Joseph Moreno, but I hope he survived the years of repression and did not become one of the many thousands of los Desaparecidos. The Disappeared.

I have often thought about returning to Argentina, but the Pampas where I worked is no longer there. Today, most of the beef farms have gone, replaced by thousands of square miles of GM soya crops. In 1970, soya accounted for 3,000 hectares, only 400 hectares more than the Boyer estancia. Today GM soya covers 20 million hectares, 14 of the 20 million under the direct ownership of Monsanto.
In the years from 1990–2010, agrochemical spraying increased eightfold in Argentina – from 9 million gallons in 1990 to 84 million gallons twenty years later. Glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s sprays, is used eight to ten times more per acre than in the United States.

The result leaves people dangerously exposed to cancers. In a 2012 study, house-to-house surveys of 65,000 people in farming communities in the heart of Argentina’s soya bean business, found cancer rates two to four times higher than the national average, as well as higher rates of hypothyroidism and chronic respiratory illnesses.
Today, the countryside is an unhealthy corporate agro-factory, the old grasslands and crops replaced with miles and miles of soya. Massive silos stand where eucalyptus trees were once home to the burrowing owl and raptors. On the Pampas, the ostriches, iguanas, native weasels, deer and hares have all but disappeared. I can only return to the Pampas in my mind. 

Thanks to Norman Boyer for the La Arlanza estancia photos 

Now go to CHAPTER 5

NOTES

1 The Normandie, Queen Mary, Lusitania, Titanic, and for me, Arlanza. The mystique that surrounds these ships hides a reality; they can be uncomfortable; they can make you seasick and they can sink. Designed to look like expensive hotels to encourage rich passengers aboard, the crews weren’t fooled any more than the steerage passengers. A ship is a microcosm of society. The old liners represented Empire and class in a confined space and all the hypocrisy that goes with it. Behind the veneer of a white ship is the hideousness of empire and the intention to destroy and subvert. Beneath the sipping gin and tonics, the holds stacked with crates of bibles and guns.
2 These docks closed in 1980, and today the length of the George V Dock has been transformed into the single runway of City Airport. 3 ‘Argentina: The Country that Monsanto Poisoned’. http://overgrowthesystem.com/argentina-the-country-that-monsanto- poisoned-photo-essay/ American biotechnology has turned Argentina into the world’s third-largest soya bean producer, but the chemicals powering the boom aren’t confined to soya and cotton and corn fields. They routinely contaminate homes and classrooms and drinking water. A growing chorus of doctors and scientists is warning that their uncontrolled use could be responsible for the increasing number of health problems turning up in hospitals across the South American nation. In the heart of Argentina’s soya bean business, house-to-house surveys of 65,000 people in farming communities found cancer rates two to four times higher than the national average, as well as higher rates of hypothyroidism and chronic respiratory illnesses. Associated Press photographer Natacha Pisarenko spent months documenting the issue in farming communities across Argentina. Most provinces in Argentina forbid spraying pesticides and other agrochemicals next to homes and schools, with bans ranging in distance from 50 metres to as much as several kilometres from populated areas. The Associated Press found many cases of soya beans planted only a few feet from homes and schools, and of chemicals mixed and loaded onto tractors inside residential neighbourhoods. Yet Argentina doesn’t apply national standards for farm chemicals, leaving rule-making to the provinces and enforcement to the municipalities. The result is a hodgepodge of widely ignored regulations that leave people dangerously exposed.