Who I Am: A Memoir Read Online Free Page B

windows like a strange, trapped animal. Mum and Dad had given her their bedroom, which she’d filled with the sad booty of her years as Mr Buss’s mistress – sterling silver hairbrushes, manicure sets and Ronson table-lighters. I wish I could say I felt sorry for her, but I don’t believe I did.
    Around this time I became a fire-starter. I went door-to-door borrowing matches from neighbours, claiming Mum’s oven had gone out. I didn’t set light to any houses, just to piles of rubble on bomb sites, or old cars. One day I misjudged things: I created a city with building blocks underneath a refrigerated van I took to be abandoned, then stuffed the city with paper and set it alight. The van’s occupant came out screaming: ‘Petrol! Petrol! You’ll kill us all!’
    On another destruction-minded day Jimpy and I laid a huge piece of steel across the railway tracks under the bridge and stood back. As the train approached we ran away, waiting to hear the sound of a terrible train crash. This could have not only injured or killed a lot of people, but led us into a very different life, in the penal system. Thank God the train passed without derailing.
     
    At home our chief entertainment was radio. Television had arrived on the scene in 1952, but our family, like millions of others, waited until 1953 and the Queen’s Coronation before buying a TV set. I also read a lot of comics and enjoyed Enid Blyton’s Noddy books, which first appeared in 1949 and were still pretty new. Dad made a model sailing boat that we sometimes took to the Round Pond in Hyde Park on Sunday. He also took me greyhound racing, which I found magical, especially at White City Stadium. And he always gave me far too much pocket money.
    Berrymede was in a poor neighbourhood of South Acton, and one day in my first term at school I told a boy in the playground that Dad earned £30 per week. He called me a liar – the average wage was less than a third of that – but I stuck to my guns because I knew it was true. We nearly came to blows over it before a teacher intervened, warning me to stop telling lies: ‘No one earns that much money. Don’t be stupid!’
    Dad may have been well paid, but there was little sign of it in our lifestyle (beyond Mum’s clothes). I wore grubby grey shorts and a Fair Isle pullover, with long grey woollen socks drooping around my ankles, muddy shoes and a white shirt that was never quite white. We had no car, lived in a rented flat and rarely went on holiday or travelled unless it was part of Dad’s work; we had a gramophone but listened to the same twenty records throughout my entire childhood, until I started buying new ones myself.
    One of the only children’s records available was ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’, backed with ‘Hush, Hush, Hush! Here Comes the Bogeyman’ by Henry Hall with the BBC Dance Orchestra. I played it a lot, but even then I preferred the sound of the modern big bands, including the orchestras of Ted Heath, Joe Loss and Sidney Torch, with whom Mum was guest vocalist for a time before her marriage. My life with Denny in Westgate had left me disliking Broadway musical tunes: every day I was there the eerie strains of ‘Bali Hai’ from South Pacific had crackled from Denny’s big radiogram, a gift from Mr Buss. There was only one South Pacific song I liked at the time – ‘I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right out of My Hair’ – but thanks to Denny’s bathroom brutality, even that had sinister overtones.
     
    1953 was turning out to be one of the happiest years of my life – but then Jimpy moved away. Until then, even though we were no longer going to school together, he had still been the centre of my existence. Now he was gone. My parents decided to replace him with a Springer Spaniel puppy. I remember waking up sleepily on my birthday and being introduced to this adorable, snoozing puppy curled up in an armchair. We called him Bruce.
    Bruce became my great joy, although he was shamelessly