4. Rochford, then RAF Bridgenorth
After the voyage back to England, us kids were initially sent to my nan and grandad’s house in Stambridge Road, Rochford, the place where I’d spent my infant war years. There I went to Rochford Secondary Modern while Ray and Derek went to the primary school. I hated the Rochford school and bunked off as much as I could. I made friends with Scotty, Milky and Dinger. We used to walk out at low tide on the mud of the River Roach with our feet hooked into metal dustbin lids. When the tide was out there was only a thin stream of water in the middle of the mud flats and the fish were concentrated there. We would spear them with metal rods and take them home to cook.
When the tide was in we swam in the same river from the wharves of Stambridge Mills. One boy dived off a gantry and never came up again. They found his body further down river a week later. There were stumps of posts in the river, you could see them at low tide, and I suppose the diving boy struck one of them on entering the water, knocked himself senseless and then drowned.
When we weren’t swimming, we were gathered in Milky’s back garden shed, feverishly turning the pages of Spick and Span. This half-foolscap black-and-white magazine displayed photographs of naked women with their private parts blanked out. We used to draw in the genitals and after a while we were probably on a par with Picasso when it came to that part of the human anatomy. The nude female body was a source of great wonder to us at that age, especially since our own bodies were going through changes which both amazed and excited us. These days we would be regarded as late starters, I know, but at fourteen I had only Spick and Span, and mail-order magazines that sold ladies underwear, to give me any sort of information on what these soft, wonderful creatures looked like without their clothes on.
School days were ghastly. I was both bored out of my brains and felt lonely and lost. I had few friends at the school, though I did pal up with a boy named Bob Nottage, whom I was to run into quite coincidently a year later, when I joined the RAF.
The caning master at the school was the woodwork teacher, who enjoyed handing out punishments. My uncle Peter had been thrashed many times when he attended the school, once for climbing on the roof of the building and throwing roof slates down to shatter in the playground. Peter Kilworth was infamous at Rochford school, both for his frequent absences and for his bad behaviour. Naturally as a Kilworth I got tarred with the same brush. Uncle Peter was only a few years my senior, perhaps seven or eight, so several of the same teachers that had taught him were also teaching me. Peter had destroyed many a music teacher in his time and myself and others carried on this fine tradition. I was sent with a couple of other boys to receive six strokes, but it was winter and we stopped by a hot radiator, pressed our palms on it to give us red weals, and returned to show the music teacher the results of our ‘caning’.
The market town of Rochford is just outside, almost tagged-on, to Southend-on-Sea. I thought Southend in those days was a great place, full of excitement and wonder, and spent many weekends wasting time and money there. The ‘Longest Pleasure Pier in the World’, one and a quarter miles from shore to end, was a big draw to teenagers, as were the promenade fairgrounds and Peter Pan’s Playground. Then also there were amusement arcades full of penny slot machines. Westcliff and Leigh-on-Sea were a little too far away in those times, to pull me away from the magic mile, and I certainly never travelled to Shoeburyness or the posh Thorpe Bay end, where I was to meet my future wife.
It was at Rochford that I built my first bike out of separate sections, purchased with money I had earned at potato picking alongside gypsies and newspaper rounds, or from parts cadged from uncles. Uncle Charlie, being a postman, had a really wide comfortable saddle which he gave to me and then requisitioned another, saying the old one was damaged. Peter gave me some cowhorn handlebars, which were really cool. I went everywhere on that bike, especially to Canewdon and Stambridge, with Milky, Scotty and Dinger.
A bicycle in the ’50s was cheap transport to travel to distant regions, and of a weekend we might find ourselves in far Paglesham, or Foulness, or Fambridge, one of those remote villages at the ends of the earth where men spoke with a strange dialect and savage dogs chased you along the lanes, snapping at your ankles. I could do many tricks on my bike too, like steering with no hands, or standing on the crossbar going down a steep slope. We came off, we took tumbles, but no one broke their neck. They should have, I suppose. Boxcarts too, were great fun, and since there were few cars in those days we could zoom down Stambridge Road hill four abreast in a boxcart race.
Days were spent out in the fields, hunting rabbits and hares and poaching pheasants with my Uncle Peter. I learned to whistle shrilly with two fingers in my mouth and any hares hiding in the ruts of the ploughed fields would prick up their ears, thus informing us of their whereabouts. I also had the aforementioned ferret Pugerchov, which I would send down rabbit holes to chase up the rabbits into the nets. These I was taught to skin and gut with a razor blade by my grandmother, Nan Kilworth. I was allowed to fire Peter’s 12-bore shotgun occasionally, though it hurt my shoulder like hell, always leaving a bruise.
On those days I spent alone, I would lie down in lush meadows and watch the clouds scudding over a summer sky and roll in the snow of a winter’s day with just as much enjoyment as I now feel when I go to see a show in London. The year 1955 marked a beautiful period for me, when sex had not quite put its head above the parapet and boyhood had not yet completely vanished. Time itself seemed elongated then, the years like decades and a long long life stretching ahead.
Still, the hedonistic existence of a boy without parents to curb his excesses continued only past conker time, then my brothers and I were sent to join mum and dad at RAF Bridgenorth in Shropshire, where dad was now a drill sergeant training National Service recruits.
In Aden I had wanted to live the life of Kipling’s Kim but in Rochford I did indeed live the life of another of my heroes, Richmal Crompton’s William Brown.
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Bridgnorth Married Quarters, where we found ourselves living, were separated from the main camp by playing fields. I quickly made friends with a boy with rufous coloured hair. To my disgrace I can’t remember his name now, yet he was my best pal for the next year. I called him Ginger. Well, you did in those days. I found a another girlfriend, also named Rosemary, but I guess I really only wanted to be with her because of her name. She insisted I join the Ballroom Dancing Club at school, which wasn’t half as much fun as the Bee Club had been at Robert Thoreton School. I learned to do the waltz, foxtrot and quickstep.
My school was St Mary’s Low Town Secondary Modern. It was situated close to the River Severn. Bridgnorth is split into two halves, Low Town and High Town, with a connecting hill or a funicular railway to choose between to get from one to the other. The headmaster was Mr Gower – the kids called him Donkey, as kids will always find a suitable nickname for headmasters – and I believe he was a relation of David Gower, the ex-captain of the England and Wales Cricket Team. Mr Gower was not a man I liked. When I left the school a year later he took his pipe out of his mouth and called after me, ‘You’ll never amount to anything, Kilworth.’ I pretended I hadn’t heard him.
There was the usual mix of pupils at the school, mainly farmers’ boys who often failed to turn up for lessons on market days. Looking at my old school report, I see two subjects on there which reveal the nature of the area: Rural Science and Agriculture. I see I got Good for both in July 1956. Surprising. The only subject I got excellent for on that report was Maths (note the abbreviation – not a posh school at all) which astounds me as I’ve always considered myself a bit of a dunce at mathematics. English has Very Industrious beside it. Any school that equated English with industry was not the school for me.
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Ginger and I used to walk home over a wooded hill called the Hermitage. There was a school bus, but we only caught it if we felt we wanted to riot with the rest of the kids. I was becoming intensely interested in sex at the time. I had no courage at the game and here I confess that I never touched a girl in a sexual way until I reached the age of 18. I did a lot of kissing and cuddling in the back seat of the bus, and in the long grass around the playing fields, but nothing more. I wanted to do more, I dreamed every night of doing more, but I was scared of rejection and being accused of molesting a female. I didn’t know in those days that many girls would have liked to experiment just as much as I wanted to. I thought they were above it all and only let boys touch them because they wanted to be cherished by someone. I was good-looking, but only five feet tall at fourteen, so my pick of the girls was restricted by their respective heights. The tall ones only wanted to mother me.
Ginger and I learned a strange game from someone. We would squat down, hunch up, and breathe very quickly in and out about a dozen times. Then we would stand up suddenly and put a thumb into our mouth and blow hard, without actually releasing any air from our lungs. This would result in us blacking out and having subsequent liquid dreams that lasted only for a minute or more. One of us would always stand behind the other to catch him as he fainted, so that he didn’t hit the ground with a bang. I don’t know why it felt good to play this probably medically dangerous game, but it did, and no doubt the weird dreams had something to do with it. Our preoccupation with the fainting game didn’t last long. I bought a 0.177 BSA air rifle and we went round shooting things instead. Poor bloody rooks and magpies mostly, which the farmers boys told us were better dead than alive.
Like most stations, RAF Bridgnorth had a cinema called the Astra. Astras were always very cheap, being subsidised entertainment for the National Servicemen, who were paid a pittance. I went at least three times a week, sometimes more. It was that lure of fiction again. Movies filled my head with a desire to write stories.
I won a prize at school at the time for a story about a woman pilot (I was influenced by reading about the aviator Amy Johnson’s feats) who flew round the world and stopped in fascinating lands like Aden and Rhodesia. Mr Hough, my form master, thought I showed great potential at creative writing and encouraged me. I’m sure the story was fairly colourful but still my spelling and grammar were very weak and because of the kind of education I’d received so far, I saw no real reason to study to improve them. I just didn’t make the connection between writing stories and good English. It was the tale that counted, not the way in which it was told. Once I linked the two together, I was on my way to becoming a writer, but it took quite a long time to do that.
My interest in pop songs was beginning to grow. Pat Boone brought out ‘Love Letters In The Sand’ which I went around singing to myself and there were some good songs coming from another American group called Bill Haley and the Comets. For the most part music in the early fifties did not interest me a great deal. We had a wireless of course, but no television and I spent most of my time outdoors. When we did get a telly, we had a wire coat hanger for an aerial and the monochrome picture was too fuzzy to entertain.
In those days hardly any youths had cars. If they had a car it was an Austin 7, a vehicle which looked as if it was a coach that had lost its horses: boxy, black, with thin metal and cable brakes. You had to wind it up with a starter handle and if you were lucky the engine fired just as you were about to pass out from exhaustion. The wheels were very narrow and the springs non-existent. A long journey in an Austin 7 was for wild, careless adventurers, not for ordinary people who wanted to get to their journey’s end.
As I was approaching fifteen years of age I remember becoming very interested in weapons of singular destruction. For my final experiment with explosives I made a pipe bomb out of Swan Vesta match heads and iron filings, with a fuse from a piece of string soaked in liquid saltpetre. My bomb managed to blow a hole in the coal-shed door. I was awestruck with the power of the device. My mother was a lot less impressed and I got whacked with the cane that was used to adjust a slope-backed wooden chair. My best friend Ginger and I also fashioned a flame-thrower out of a horseshoe-shaped pipe, filling the middle bend in it with white spirit, and tying a flaming rag to the exit hole. When you puffed down the pipe a huge flame shot out and singed the bushes. I shudder now to think that if either of us had accidentally sucked instead of blown, we would not have seen our fifteenth birthdays.
Before I reached that fifteenth birthday I got it into my head that I wanted to walk to the Welsh coast. Indeed, I did, with a tent and cooking stove on my back, ending up at Barmouth, some seventy miles away from Bridgnorth. I camped on the beach and then walked back.
It was during this period at Bridgenorth that I owned the only dog in my life, Chota, a midnight-black King Charles Spaniel. He was a lovely dog and my brothers Ray and Derek adored him as much as I did. I understand that chota means ‘small’ in Hindi. Chota was small in stature but he had the heart of a Rhodesian Ridgeback. If I was Just William at that time, then Chota was my Jumble. We went everywhere together. Eventually I had to leave him to go to military school.
Around about my fifteenth birthday I broke my leg doing handsprings: the bone still aches in the cold weather.
