Being Boycie, page 2
My parents told me I couldn’t stop talking about it for months, and it’s no coincidence that nearly sixty years later every Christmastide sees me wigged and hooked, enjoying myself in that same role in pantos all over the country. I think, probably, that I enjoyed mimicking and entertaining from a very early age. It was certainly the dominant characteristic of my schoolboy life, but the first time I was truly conscious of the acting ‘bug’, the thrill of pleasing an audience – or at least extracting a little applause from them – occurred not long after I’d seen Peter Pan, when I appeared as Michael Darling in a youth club production of the play, put on by my mother at the village hall in Tadworth where we lived.
I didn’t need much encouraging and I loved the experience. From then on, although a grown-up career on the stage had to compete with the possibility of playing cricket for England, tennis at Wimbledon or lead guitar in a rock’n’roll band, it continued to lurk in my consciousness as a desirable option. However, while my mother, Joan, was happy to go along with the idea, my father always made it clear that it wouldn’t please him.
As a young man Alec Challis had committed himself to carving a decent career for himself. The son of a Sheffield steel worker, he had made the most of a good state education and managed to get himself a job in the Civil Service. This led, when he was twenty-two and war had broken out, to his being posted to the Admiralty in Bath, where he soon mastered the mysteries of the Royal Naval stores. He’d been desperate to sign up for the army, but his rotten eyesight precluded that option, and he regretted enormously that he hadn’t taken part in the Dunkirk evacuation. Nevertheless, he was in demand for his special organisational skills and had an important role to play. It was here in Bath that he met a pretty young female ambulance driver from the city, whom he courted and married in the autumn of 1941. On August 16th the following year, they welcomed baby John Spurley Challis into the world (‘Spurley’ after a Sheffield football grandee my father admired).
We were living in Bristol, in a rented house in the salubrious hilltop surroundings of Clifton, where my father soon became leader of a Home Guard platoon. He used to love telling stories with great gusto and laughter about his duties with his intrepid troop. The highlight of his military career occurred one night in the semi-rural surroundings of Lansdown outside Bath. The patrol heard sounds of serious activity in the woodlands which, in their excitement, suggested to them the presence of a detachment of invading German paratroopers. Unarmed, but alert and braced for confrontation, they stood their ground on the edge of the copse..... until a bemused, and very lost cow emerged.
When Dad was eventually given a pistol – the only weapon in the platoon – he was very pleased with himself, although his pride was somewhat diminished by having no ammunition for it. After a while, he told me, he’d been issued with half a dozen bullets – not enough, one might have thought, to stop the Wehrmacht marauding up the Avon Gorge.
About a year after I was born, my father’s job was transferred to London, so I had to go too, the only child moving into the metropolis while tens of thousands of kids poured out of London in the opposite direction, evacuees from the Luftwaffe’s target area. As a result, of course, I have no memories of those early days in Bristol, but because my mother was from Bath, I’ve always retained a connection with that fair city and the West Country. In London we seemed constantly to be on the move from one rented house to another. For a while we stayed in Sidcup and Bexleyheath, where I dimly recall German bombing raids, wailing sirens, searchlights piercing the night sky and the raucous blast of the ack-ack guns on Blackheath. I have a distinct memory of being grabbed from my bed one night and carted downstairs to be shoved under the kitchen table until a raid was over. I can’t imagine that the tabletop would have protected me much from a direct hit, but I suppose it reassured my mother.
Later she told me how once she’d come back home after popping out for a short while to find I wasn’t there. She panicked, launched a hue and cry, and eventually found me with a small girl, a year or two older than me, sitting at a broken table amidst the rubble of a bombed out house. We were acting out a tea-party scenario, in which she was pretending to pour me cups of tea and hold polite conversation – my first liaison with an ‘older woman’.
By the end of the war, my father had progressed up the Civil Service ladder. It seemed that he was one of the few who knew where all the Royal Navy’s stores were located and what was in them. He was promoted to the Ministry of Energy, going on eventually to become secretary to the Minister. Now he was in a position to buy a house and settle permanently at Cherry Cottage, Epsom Lane South, in Tadworth. Here, on the south west fringes of London, I lived with my parents for the next fifteen years.
Cherry Cottage was a comfortable 1930s semi, at the top of a hill with views across the lane to the other side. In the snow-filled winters that seemed the norm in the late ’40s and early ’50s, I loved tobogganing down the hill with Rosemary, our neighbours’ daughter, and my friend Christopher from over the road. The gardens behind the house were covered in a rash of sheds and outhouses, among thick shrubs and what in my younger years seemed like a forest of cherry trees. These provided loads of scope for a kid like me who enjoyed fantasy, and my memories of early childhood there are mainly of carefree, contented days.
As far as one can judge these things from a child’s perspective, my parents’ marriage was happy enough during those immediately post-war years, when they were still enough in love to obscure the rifts sometimes created by their differing personalities. Photographs of them strolling arm in arm along seaside promenades show two young people clearly enjoying each other’s company. However, my father – jovial, certainly, and well meaning – could also be pedantic and cautious, whereas my mother had a distinctly cavalier, artistic side to her.
It was only in my teens that the strains became visible, while my father was becoming more bitter, and less forgiving of his flighty wife. He was commuting every day to London, to the Ministry office on Millbank, while my mother pursued her love of amateur theatricals, and a moustache-twirling visitor, known to me only as ‘Uncle Charlie’, who often came round in his sports car to play tennis with her. He would bring small presents for me, and linger in the house while I played on my own in the garden.
The growing discontent between my parents became more evident to me as I grew up, through my father’s increasingly cantankerous manner, to the point where the only emotions he ever showed me were disapproval and anger; his only communication through pursed lips or gritted teeth. I couldn’t understand what had happened or what I was supposed to have done. I yearned for his approval and felt guilty that nothing I did seemed to please him. There was no longer any apparent affection in him and no warmth, and I became a little fearful of him and the sporadic physical chastisement he dished out. When I was younger, as I lay in bed, I would hear my parents arguing about whether or not I should be beaten. My mother was clearly against it; he disagreed. ‘You’re too soft! It’s about time that boy had a bit of discipline,’ he said. ‘When I was growing up, if I put a foot wrong, my father let me know with the back of a brush. And I didn’t forget.’
It was only after he’d died and I was reading his diaries that I realised just how hard he had striven to move himself on from his Sheffield working-class background, with entries like ‘Learn to speak English’. This referred to a conscious suppression of his South Yorkshire accent, which did indeed diminish a lot, although never completely, especially in anger. It was clear that he knew he had gained a big advantage by having been to the Grammar School, and he was determined to make use of it.
A tall, trim, handsome young man, he kept himself fit with his love of hiking, and broadened his mind by taking an interest in everything around him. He’d learned to dance, and played hockey and badminton for the Civil Service. But, already by nature an introvert, when he first met my mother he’d been acutely conscious that she was a few rungs up the more clearly defined social ladder that existed then. Presumably with this in mind, he worked hard at learning how to play tennis, at a time when membership of the local tennis club would have been a sure sign of upward mobility for him.
I was always comfortable with my mother – an extrovert, brave and, I suspect, passionate woman. She was an admired teacher of drama and elocution in several local schools and to private individuals; she was even called on to help the Surrey Cricket skipper, John Edrich, to overcome his reserve and master the art of public speaking. Like my father, she enjoyed physical activity too, especially tennis, riding and dancing. She was much more outgoing than my father. She even intimated to me how he lacked confidence and how she’d often had to reassure him in his efforts to ‘better’ himself. But, strangely, my mother wasn’t particularly touchy-feely – not very physically demonstrative, perhaps thinking it ‘not quite the thing’ to show too much affection. It was her mother, my grandmother, whom I remember as the most tactile and inclined to give one a cuddle. As a result I always felt very close to her and missed her enormously when she died.
For a brief while at the end of the war, we’d lived in Harrow, where I went to my first school. I had a nasty experience there when another boy picked up a brick from a partially demolished air raid shelter outside the school and threw it at my head. He ran off, and as soon as he got home he blurted to his mother, ‘I never threw a brick at John,’ which was thought to have confirmed his guilt. It could be that blow to the tiny Challis bonce which led to charges of lack of concentration at my next primary school in Tadworth.
Even at that early stage, my fondness for observing the world and the people around me and doing my best to imitate them were already getting me branded as ‘childish’ in school reports. However, I was developing a good ear for taking off any interesting sounds or voices, and my mother would have to tell me off for staring at people, when I was just studying their behaviour and mannerisms. I was fascinated, for instance, by the dozens of different ways in which people smoke cigarettes – the short sharp puffs, the long luxuriant drags, the clasping between the tips of index and ring finger, or keeping the fag hidden between thumb and forefinger – all distinctive and clear expressions of the inner self. I remember clearly a chap who always placed his ashtray in a precise spot where he could knock off the ash without having to alter his posture, while at the end of each inhalation, he waggled the tip of his tongue as he sucked in the remaining smoke.
I would also study the way people walked and afterwards try to imitate them as closely as I could. This instinct to observe and replicate behaviour has never left me. All the time, I still take note of how people sit or arrange their legs, pick up a wine glass, eat peanuts or speak on the phone, and these are all stored away, often for later use.
However, at school my antics were perceived as low concentration and were not appreciated by my teachers. My propensity for reproducing what I’d seen and heard in front of other children didn’t excuse me at all in the teachers’ eyes, but it kept me in with the kids. Playing games – cowboys and Indians, maybe – I was much in demand because I could do the best ‘deaths’. I could, and did, fall from the branches of trees and land on the ground, writhing around in agony and moaning in a way that thrilled and convinced my playmates. That mattered, because even at primary school, I was always eager for the approval of the girls. There was a tiny, special girl with Bambi eyes and a naughty smile called Christine Shaw, whom I especially liked to see and show off to. I would wait to make sure we were on the same bus to and from school, and would get very upset if I missed her. I was rewarded for my persistence with my first ever kiss, a tentative effort behind a shrub on Burgh Heath.
My next school was a distinct step up, although I don’t suppose I appreciated it at the time. My father had evidently decided to incur the costs of private education to reflect his higher status within the Civil Service. So, at the age of ten, I was kitted out in smart grey flannel shorts, long grey socks, blue blazer and cap, and sent off to board at Belmont Preparatory School, set in the Surrey hills at Westcott, near Dorking.
It was, in 1952, a traditional sort of place, housed in a comfortable Edwardian mansion, where doves cooed from a dovecote on the wall outside our dormitory windows. Most of the masters were authoritarians who sported moustaches and spurious heroic war records. The headmaster, Mr Sharples (who ten years later would undoubtedly have been known as ‘Ena’) could have walked off the pages of a Jennings book, and had no late twentieth-century qualms about physical chastisement; while the French master, a gimlet-eyed despot with a withered arm, whom we knew as ‘Foxy’, was known to use a long oval clothes brush to impose his will.
On the whole I was well behaved for this brief period of my life, but got led astray on one occasion with my friend Bracebridge. We were walking, as we often did, up an ancient track to the woods on Ranmore Common where the hedges were thickly clad in wild clematis, or ‘old man’s beard’, as we knew it.
A young know-all with us announced with the supreme confidence of boyhood ignorance that ‘people’ used the white fluffy weed as an alternative to tobacco. This seemed to present an opportunity for a very cheap thrill, and Bracebridge and I set about making a limp, loose roll-up using a page from a weekly comic and some old man’s beard. Someone produced some matches. I lit the thing, tentatively sucked in half a lungful of the disgusting smoke it produced, and immediately erupted in a convulsion of coughing, just as a junior master caught up with us.
‘Smoking, Challis?’
‘No sir, not properly,’ I gasped between coughs. ‘It’s jus’ the weed off the hedge.’
‘Smoking is smoking. I’ll have to report you.’
We knew we were in for a ‘whacking’. We just hoped it wouldn’t be from Foxy (who seemed to relish the job). As we’d been caught by a junior master, he reported us to Mr Sharples. That was a relief; Sharples, though a beater, was generally more relaxed about the process, diffidently announcing that, much as he’d rather not, he would have to beat me – for my own good. He proceeded to pound my backside for h alf a dozen strokes with a fairly flaccid gym shoe, certainly preferable to the clothes brush favoured by Foxy. In any case, I’d grown up with corporal punishment as part of my life, so it was no great shock to me.
We still had to suffer a lecture on the evils of smoking, and how, if it happened again, our parents would be told – which, in fact, was a bigger deterrent for me than the whacking, painful as it was.
Generally, though, I prospered at the school, and for a brief period in my life was happy to become engaged with what I was being taught. I experienced a slightly embarrassing moment, tinged with pride, when Dad played in the fathers’ cricket match. I was in the 1st XI and fielding when he came in to bat – too far down the order – and leathered our little bowlers all over the place. I tried hard at cricket, athletics and football, and was in all the top teams. One end of term report even describes me as ‘a credit to the school’. At the same time, I loved the open air time we spent learning fieldcraft, making camps and racing round across the Pilgrims’ Way on the wooded slopes of Ranmore Common. It was a happy, untroubled time of pre-pubescent innocence which I look back on with fondness, for it was all soon to change.
My education continued in 1954 at Ottershaw School, a strange hybrid establishment – a boarding school run by Surrey County Council along the lines of an old-fashioned public school (but with no fagging or flogging). It had been set up just after the war as a kind of experiment to provide boarding education for boys in tricky family circumstances, or anyone else who wanted the benefits of a boarding education for their sons, but couldn’t afford the fees of a regular public school. I guess this reflected in some way my father’s social aspiration to rise above his own background, although I never really felt that I’d been at a ‘public school’.
The school occupied an eighteenth century mansion called Ottershaw Park, surrounded by a park of 150 acres in which four boys’ ‘houses’ had been built. The founding headmaster, still in control when I was there, was Arthur Foot, an impressive chap (known to the boys as ‘Six Inches’), who had previously taught at the Doon School (the Eton of India, and as pukkah as any school in the world). He had introduced a lot of strange educational ideas, some of which strike me now as thoroughly flawed. A chap like me, for instance, who was strong on English and History but as much use as a haddock at the long jump when it came to Chemistry and Physics, was ordered to do less Eng. and Hist. and more Phys. And Chem. Talk about being made to play to your weaknesses! It certainly did nothing for my academic attainment, which ended up being no more than a short handful of O-levels.
My father, evidently concerned about my academic shortcomings, decided that I would stand a better chance of speaking French if I went and learned it on the spot. He liked to display his own grasp of the language by declaring, apropos nothing in particular, ‘Voici l’Anglais avec son sang froid habituel!’ This he translated as, ‘Here comes the Englishman with his usual bloody cold.’ As it turned out, when I set off for France, at the age of fifteen, I found no occasion to use this sentence.
The plan to send me to a kind of foreign lingo boot camp had been suggested to my father by one of his work colleagues, and my mother, always pleased to see me improve my communications skills, was right behind him. It was described to me as a holiday camp in the west of France to which kids from several countries would gather and share the experience of being abroad. It was also, without doubt, a chance for parents to offload their kids onto some other poor mug for a few weeks of the long summer holidays.
