Chapter 14
Dearest Tom
All is well here. Summer has arrived, the skylarks wake me up most mornings and the swifts are in full fettle – the streams are full, Tom, and I’ve eaten like a king on trout, perch, and so forth.
I saw Miss Gillespie last week in Gatehouse, she asked to be remembered to you and says to work hard and mind your P’s and Q’s.
I’m not a great one for letters as you know, dear boy.
Please write to me, I long to hear from you about your new life and the exciting things you are doing and the great lessons you are learning, Tom.
I shall not think about the past ; we were happy, weren’t we, old thing, but instead shall set my course to a time when you are a grown man and can look back and see why I did what I did.
You will remember your old father I hope and understand that, though at times he made a catastrophic mess of it all, he was earnestly trying to do right by his son.
Cheerio, old thing, and do not look back with sadness but forward with a smile
Dad
I would love a short note from you to let me know how you are getting on.
That first year in Montpelier Crescent Tom grew used to feeling sad, or, if not sad, then in a state of perpetual shock.
He was being told, after all, he was someone completely different from wee Tom Raven who walked back from school swinging his satchel over his head and who knew the fieldfares and the thrushes by their individual song, who knew where the otters played and the best, plumpest blackberries grew.
32 Montpellier cresent
London W.
16 July 1955
Dear Dad
Thank you for your letter.
Please past my best on to Miss Gillespie.
I’ve just broken up for the holidays after one term at Knoll Hall – that’s my new school. We go on longer here in London but I still have some time off for sumer holidays. Dad, can I come and see you?
I have a posh uniform: it is a blaser and a cap with a wee eagel sown on but most of the boys dont know what an eagel looks like, even though they jaw on about the comic.
Most of them are soft, Dad, they cry when they fall down.
I dont cry. School lunchs are grand, dad, there’s boiled beef and marro peas all you can eat and last week treacl pudding. I eat all the time.
I like Maths and History and I hate the rest of it. I hate spelling I like my books but hate spelling and rugga because I’m a weed compared to the rest of them they say. But I don’t cry lots of them cry for their mas when something doesn’t go their way.
There’s a bomb site round the corner from the hous and I know two of the boys who play there, they live a few strets over and they are called Tony Powl and Johnny Hilman.
Tony is meen and says wild things. Johnny’s brother is a teddy boy you heard of them, Dad?
He has slicked hair and he carries a knife, dad.
He’s called Robert, I dont like him. I have a friend, called Gordon, he is from Trinna dad, he has dark skin.
He sais Robert holds the knife up to people like him and whispas bad things at them.
But Johnny’s ma is kind and works at the pie and mash shop on a road off an impotant road called Portobello Road.
I think there was a battle or a river or somthing there they do like to talk about it.
Aunt Jenny works at a Church of spirichual inlight ment and I don’t know what that is. She goes and prays there and hands out soup. It’s digusting soup, I had to help her one time.
Uncle Henry goes off on important busness most of the day I dont know what. He’s funny, but I don’t think he likes children.
Aunt Jenny has taken me to the library and I’ve got my card.
I go in there all the tim when there is no one at home when I get back from school.
Sometimes I go for a cup of tea with Gordon and he gives me tost. Gordon says he knowse you dad, and that he knew my mother.
He says my mother was remakkable. Gordon works on the buses, and people ask him for help.
He is kind even if he is a bit strict about sitting up strait and the Ps and Qs like Miss Nye.
One more thing I am drawing with the pastils you got me for my birthday. I am drawing our hous and the hills and evrything so I never forget it. I can’t tell you where it is a secret and I’ll get in trouble.
Well Dad Id better go.
Your loving son Tom xxxxx
I’m to post this letter now. Please dad write to Jenny about when I can come and see you.
Tom’s world was smaller geographically – less than half a square mile all told – but within that world were infinite possibilities and events and stories, from the bomb site to the school to the streets off Portobello, the garden squares, the houses jammed with new arrivals, the noise of building everywhere.
Sometimes it was overwhelming. As the days stretched into months and life in London assumed some kind of shape, Tom spent most of his spare time with Gordon, or with Tony and Johnny on the bomb site, and then, when they cleared it of rubble, at the library.
His other refuge was his room. He had his pastels from his father and a couple of pencils he’d snaffled from school and he’d embarked on a project.
He didn’t allow himself to think of home but for some reason he found it easy to draw it instead.
Drawing was assembling a world, building it just as the men were building blocks of flats and houses around here, brick by brick.
It was a record, accurate and true, of his own place.
When he felt so lonely that his thoughts ran around his head like rats, he quietly unhooked Helen Caught Bathing , rested it carefully against the chest of drawers and began to draw on the wall, an intricate world that would become so vast that he was running out of space.
He had the endless skies and the swathes of cloud hanging over Solway Firth towards the Isle of Man.
In one corner, behind the bed, he had drawn the full Milk moon, hanging low over the firth in May, not milky so much as amber-gold, the sea liquid metal and still.
That was the only piece of colour he wanted for the wall, he thought.
A tiny touch of gold, for the moon, plump like a snowberry, waiting to be plucked.
He had seen Smithers, Uncle Henry’s friend, repairing an old mirror with gold leaf so he could sell it on to someone as a Renaissance masterpiece or some such, and Tom had watched fascinated at the fluttering, blinking feather-light gold, like an insect wing held between tweezers.
Yes. He would paint the whole wall and then beg or steal a scrap of gold leaf.
The painting stretched from behind globular, beaming Helen, snaked along to the bed and then round the headboard, which Tom got used to pulling out very quietly in case he was disturbed. But neither Jenny nor Henry ever came up to ask what he was doing.
He had swiftly put away the dream of a Matchbox crane, much less a visit to the factory in Shacklewell Lane, E8. There were ten streets on either side of him, then another ten, and they were all still in W11. E8, East London, was another world away.
The carved wooden cottage lived on the windowsill, which Tom placed there because he had a compass that faced north, back towards Scotland.
He did not dare take the cottage to school again: on his fifth day some older boys had held him upside down to shake out his pockets because they said all Scots hid money.
He had managed to scrabble to pick it up and hide it, and that evening he had put it on the windowsill behind the curtains, and touched it every morning and night. One day he would go back.
Tom told himself he was fine and didn’t miss his father, which was good. His father didn’t write back. Tom kept writing, though he couldn’t tell him what life here was really like. Partly because he didn’t want him to worry, but partly because Tom didn’t understand it, any of it.