The Telegraph – Mar 25th 1984

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Memories II

Years of Innocence

Building sites, rubbish tips, frantic kittens, emptied bottles of aspirin, school and an introduction to religion. In his second article on early childhood, actor Dirk Bogarde remembers the “rich haul” of experience gained in his years at Twickenham

My father grew restless in the grey-yellow brick house and decided that he wanted to move out to a quieter area. He suffered from catarrh; and also from hideous nightmares, which his experiences only a few years before on the Somme and at Passchendaele had engendered.

These of course I knew nothing about. Sudden shouts in the night; I can remember those – and my mother’s anxious, caring face the following morning as he set off to his work at The Times, where he had become the first Art Editor at an absurdly young age.

So we moved away from the grey street in West End Lane, Hampstead, into a small but pleasant house among fields just outside Twickenham. It was the talk of the family, and of its friends, that the sale was a “snip”. He had bought it extremely cheaply for some reason, and everyone was amazed. The reason was soon to become apparent.

One morning the dirt road in front of the house began shuddering with trucks and lorries of all descriptions; they droned and rumbled all day long, and when they left in the late evening we discovered the fields before us, and around us, stuck with scarlet wooden stakes and draped about with sagging ropes. My anguished father discovered too late that he had purchased a house in the exact centre of an enormous building development – which was the reason why it had been, as everyone said, “so ridiculously” cheap. A “snip”.

We were buried among bricks, lime, cement and piles of glossy scarlet tiles. The road was churned into a mud-slide and the windows rattled all day with thudding trucks.

Within the year the fields in front had yielded up a row of semi-detached villas, with bay windows and Tudor gables, their roofs as yet untiled looking like the pale yellow bones of a smoked-haddock.

My father was in despair.

I was fascinated by all the work and upheaval and spent as much of my time as I possibly could clambering about in the unfinished foundations of suburbia. Although the workmen were friendly, and seemed not to mind me being among them, there came a time when they shouted at me to “bugger orf”, and once someone threw a half brick.

Another time I got a hod-full of lime full in the face, rather like a custard pie. It was, of course, quite accidental, and all I can remember is that it burned appallingly and I fled, blinded, from the half-built house, screaming at the top of my lungs, across the battered field and the rutted road. My distracted mother could not understand what had happened, naturally, and I was unable to tell her because I was yelling. She washed my face and hair and tried to get me to explain what had occurred, to no avail.

At that moment an enormous man burst into the kitchen, pulled me on to his lap and licked, with his naked tongue, the lime from my eyes. Had he not done so. I have been assured, I should in all probability have been blinded for good. Counselling my distraught mother to bathe my eyes with milk and not let me out of her sight ever again, he left. I have often wondered who he was, and thought of him with gratitude.

I only stopped going to the half-built houses because I was warned that I’d be given a thrashing I’d never forget if I did. So I wandered off up the little path towards the deep rubbish-tip in the quarry. It was quieter there, no one came near, and I could explore the tumbled rubbish of Twickenham with complete freedom. Boxes and crates, broken chimney pots, old tin cans, a battered pram; pieces of wood, quantities of smashed tiles and earthen drainpipes; nothing smelly.

I remained always just at the edge, for it was very deep and I had a fear of falling in; which, one day, I did. I heard a kitten crying down at the bottom. Leaning too far over the slippery edge of broken tile and chimney pots I slid rapidly to the bottom and found the kitten, a skinny creature which had managed to get out of a sack, leaving the dead bodies of its companions. I sat down cradling my find, confident that someone would collect me.

I tried to clamber up, but found that impossible. Each step I took up the jagged slope of rubbish sent me slithering backwards; and there was no possibility of climbing, to me, the sheer sides with a frantic kitten.

Calling had no effect, either, I was soon to discover. For my thin voice never reached the lip of the pit, and my wretched mother, who had quickly discovered my absence, passed and repassed my prison without having the very least idea that her first-born was sitting below among the debris.

Eventually a search-party was formed from the builders and masons on the swiftly-growing estate. I was discovered and dragged to the surface with the kitten. I think that my mother had been so frightened that she forgot to punish, or even scold, and I was permitted to keep the kitten, who grew into a fine creature which we called “Minihaha”, unknowingly getting his sex wrong.

The little path through the grasses was not exactly out-of-bounds, although now the quarry was. But along the path a jungle of most attractive plants and grasses grew, and tiny green crickets scissored in the sun. I picked handfuls of bright black fruits from a small bush, ate them and stuffed my unprotesting sister full – with Deadly Nightshade.

Both of us, this time, went into a coma. There was a nurse and a doctor and enemas and thermometers; and the moment I was well enough to do so I upended the nursery fire-guard, shoved my sister into it as a patient, and we played “Hospitals”. It was very exciting, but pretty dull without “pills”.

So I consumed, because it was my turn to be a patient, a full bottle of aspirin. Another coma.

My mother was told that nothing could be done, I had taken such a massive overdose that I should either die or recover. All that she could do was lie with me, her hand on my heart, and if she felt the least change of rhythm she was to call the doctor instantly.

I slept like a lamb, my heart beating contentedly.

I do not think that I had suicidal tendencies. Certainly I had no murderous ones, then. However, my parents decided that the time was ready for me to have some kind of supervision and discipline in life: I had been altogether far too spoiled.

Miss Harris and her sister ran a genteel school for young children in a square Victorian house overlooking The Green. In their back garden, down among the laurels, and where the teachers parked their bikes, there was a long tin shed, painted dark red. This was the kindergarten.

I landed up there.

A blackboard, a big iron stove, tables. I remember nothing else. I imagine that one was instructed in the very basics: but I never bothered to learn them. Which has had serious consequences for me throughout my life.

Jealousy seething, anger mounting, I sat and thought only about “Minihaha” or how best to build an aquarium, or when we should next go down to Teddington Lock with net and jam jar to fish for sticklebacks.

I simply did not bother with Miss Harris and her silly kindergarten; my brain absolutely refused to see the connection between “cat” and “mat”, and I frankly didn’t give a damn which sat on which. As far as I was concerned it was a wasted morning.

My parents found it to be the same thing after one caustic report from Miss Harris herself: “He doesn’t try. Won’t put himself out at all”.

He was not about to.

Stronger medicine was needed, and it was found in the form of a tall red building along the river, almost next door to Radnor Park. A convent school a-flutter with smiling nuns.

I was captivated by their swirling grey habits, by the glitter and splendour of the modest, but theatrically ravishing, chapel, the flickering lamps beneath the statues of the Virgin Mary and Joseph. It went to my head in a trice and I felt passionately in love with convent life.

I liked, above all, our classroom, a high-ceilinged, white-painted room with great mirrored doors which reflected the river, the trees beyond and the boats. I worshipped Sister Veronica, with her gentle hands and the modest mole from which sprouted, fascinatingly, a single hair; and Sister Marie Joseph, who was fat and bustled, and stood no nonsense, but taught me my catechism and let me come into the chapel whenever I felt the need, which was often (not to pray, you understand, but to drown in the splendour of lamps, candles, colours, a glowing Christ, and the smell of something in the stuffy air which reminded me of Aunt Kitty).

The colours, the singing of the choir, the altar-cloths shimmering with gold thread, filled my heart and my head with delight. I was lost: and decided, there and then, to be a priest.

Religion – certainly the Catholic religion – was not taught in our house. My father was born into a strongly Catholic family, with a staunch Catholic convert mother, and it was as a Catholic, firm in his belief, that he went to war in 1914. His belief, like that of so many other young men of that time, was shattered on the Somme, in Passchendaele and, finally, for all time when he pulled open the doors of a chapel after the battle of Capoaretto in Italy and was smothered in the rotting corpses of soldiers and civilians who had been massacred and stuffed high to the roof.

“Jesus”, he once told me, many years after, “does not have his eye on the sparrows. But you follow whatever faith you wish. It is your life, not mine”.

And so Elizabeth and I grew up and flourished in a vaguely ambiguous atmosphere. We were sent to the convent on the riverside; I was allowed to have my own altar, which I built with intense care in a corner of the nursery; and we mumbled our “Gentle Jesus” and The Lord’s Prayer without interference. We were left to make up our own minds about God and Jesus, Joseph and The Virgin Mary.

It was not a difficult process for me, because I had fallen quite in love with everything that Catholic teaching had to offer: without, of course, realising that what I had actually fallen in love with was the theatre. Not religion at all. The ritual, the singing, the light, the mystery, the glowing candles: all these were theatre, and theatre emerged from these things and engulfed me for the rest of my life. Learning my catechism was, after all, merely the prelude to learning my “lines”.

Like my father before me I laid aside my belief – not that it had ever been very strong, to be sure – for ever in my war.

Whenever I make a declaration of this kind I am inevitably swamped with letters from well-meaning people, usually women, who want to convert me to “believing” again. I am bombarded, literally, with religious books, usually American paperbacks, of all possible permutations and persuasions.

One which turns up regularly is called “Wrestling with Christ”; which appears to be an enormous bestseller but fails to answer any of the questions which have concerned me over the years. I have absolutely no wish to wrestle with anyone: especially with Christ.

It is particularly hard to retain a shred of “belief” standing in the middle of a battlefield, at the age of 23, watching piles of dead, frequently mutilated soldiers, their bellies bloated with the gasses of decomposition, being bulldozed into a mass grave. I watched them tumble, spill, slither like old shirts in a spin-drier, and as I walked away retching in the stench of death I knew that, at last, I had come of age, and that I could never recover the happy platitudes of immortality.

Whatever happened, I wondered on another occasion, to that loving, comforting phrase, “Suffer Little Children To Come Unto Me”? And my first, appalled, uncomprehending sight of a concentration camp, two of the women guards smiling brightly and wearing scarlet nail-varnish among the decaying mounds of bodies, shredded whatever belief I had to tatters and dispersed it in the winds of fact, and hideous truth.

I always, however, said my prayers. I still do to this day. But it is a prayer to a greater force than the simpering plaster figures to which I once prayed so ardently. However, to return to Twickenham and innocence: a priest I decided to be, and that was that. The fact that no one took my decision seriously, even beloved Sister Veronica herself, did not trouble me. I had time before me, and I was exceptionally happy.

There were other moments of happiness which I recall during the Twickenham years. Days on the river in a punt. My father in white flannels and shirt, poling us along, my mother lying among cushions, a Japanese parasol shielding her face from the sun, Layton and Johnstone on the portable gramophone, a picnic hamper among the bathing towels, the smell of boat varnish and the excitement of getting to one of the locks and watching the rise and fall of the water.

Opposite our house were the Howards. A family of four, three boys and one girl, called Jessie. Jessie was one year older than I was and I liked her because she had a small tent in their back garden, a wilderness still of rutted mud and cement dust, and invited me to come and play with her.

It made a change from my sister, because Jessie was really pretty daring. She showed me a secret box in which she kept cigarette butts, and we sucked away at these for a time, without, of course, lighting them. They made me feel sick. So she rustled about and produced another tin box, battered but secure, in which she had a hoard of rotten apples, bits of cake and a whole tin of baked beans which, with an opener in the shape of a bull’s-head (which I coveted instantly), we opened and ate cold.

I felt a little more sick, but better after a bit of mouldy cake. Then she pulled down her knickers and said that she would show me her “thingy” on condition that I showed her mine. This surprised me slightly – we had only known each other for an afternoon – but I was still feeling a certain unease in my stomach and anyway I had seen Elizabeth naked in the bath every night, just as she, indeed, had seen me: so I was not fearfully interested, for I could hardly believe that I was about to witness something extraordinary.

I complied.

We regarded each other in silence.

“My brothers have got one like yours”, she said.

“My sister has one the same as yours, so there. I think I’ll go home now”, I said.

Later I was extremely sick, and would not look at supper, which alerted my nanny to the fact that perhaps all was not well. She told my father that I had spent the afternoon with “those dreadful people in the new houses. It’s not fitting. They’ll spoil his ways, and there is nothing that I can do on account of the fact that I have only one pair of hands and no eyes in the back of my head. He wanders”. My father was a just and kind man, he followed my anxious mother down to my room and asked me what had happened that day. “We only want to know what has made you so ill, and then we can get it set to rights”, he said.

So I told him in detail, from sucking cigarette butts to eating mouldy cake and cold tinned beans and examining each other’s “thingys”.

He looked grim, but said nothing. My mother took my temperature, found that it was normal, and they said goodnight and went away.

A few weeks later we moved to Hampstead.

And that is that. The first seven years of my life recalled as faithfully as I can remember, aided by others who have filled in the gaps.

The years of innocence. These, I am told, are the impressionable years, the formative ones during which all the things which one discovers, or is shown, stay with one for the rest of life and, as it were, one is moulded. One sets like a jelly. Perhaps not quite the right word. Cement? That sounds too heavy. Moulded, or fixed, must suffice.

I discovered light, scent and, through Aunt Kitty, was made aware of colour and texture. Enduring senses for me all these years later.

I have, it would seem, left out a fifth most important one. Music.

Music was a constant part of my life in those years: my father’s passion was music. Not always the kind that I particularly cared for, it must be said. His studio at the top of the house was filled with what I grew to learn, and detest, as chamber music. It was the music to which he painted. We called it, naturally enough, “Po Music”.

But there was opera, too. Great ballooning sounds soared through the house; voices swept us from corner to corner, subliminally reached us in sleep. We were aware of music from our earliest moments, and in time, as is right and proper, the sounds which were incomprehensible between four and seven years, for example, began to take their own forms.

At the convent, of course, there were songs of praise and sonorous organs and those, too, became a part of the pattern of one’s existence.

Music was everywhere: but I agreed with nanny fervently when she said that she “did like a nice tune, something you can hum. And you can’t hum much of your father’s music I can tell you”.

But, anyway, music.

Light, scent, colour, texture, music. I entered the next phase of life with a rich haul