22. James and Tessa King
As with Mr. Clover, I will record for now my personal encounters, leaving further considerations for later. Whatever you say about Mr. King, he could not be accused of throwing standardized solutions at the children. If anything, he was overly cautious about moving before he felt he understood the single child’s needs. Nevertheless, my first meetings were a virtual rerun of those with Mr. Clover. Mr. King took my hand on the football field and, with his extra long legs, ran even faster than Mr. Clover. Just occasionally, with a free ball right in front, he would let me go and say, “Go on, kick it”. He even planted me in front of a gaping goal and almost had me score. But there was no way to make me even a passable amateur footballer. The only thing I found in favour of the game was that cricket was worse, a boring waste of an afternoon. Just possibly, if the right moment had been seized, I might have developed a mild enthusiasm for tennis and I did sometimes take a ball and racket and play against the Colt House wall, till the “big boys” got sick of me coming to retrieve the balls that went over the roof.
Back to Mr. King. He also took Mr. Clover’s place at the dinner table and here, too, history repeated itself when he sent me up to my dormitory and spanked me even harder than Mr. Clover. Legend has it that Mr. King did not use corporal punishment, but my bottom does not fantasize. If I was his sole excursion into corporal punishment, before deciding there were better alternatives, perhaps I (and my bottom) should feel honoured. Slightly less drastically, Mr. King reckoned to cure people of the desire to put their elbows on the table by seizing the offending elbow and crashing it onto the table with all his force. At the same time, he explained to us that people over six feet high (such as himself) were allowed to put their elbows on the table – something to do with the extra arm length, if I remember rightly.
Mr. and Mrs. King were initially in charge of The Paddocks, and later oversaw the move to Lacton Hall, so for quite a few years I had only sporadic dealings with them. Sometimes we were taken to The Paddocks for an afternoon. I found the atmosphere there strange, almost as though those who stayed there were temporary occupants of a house that was not theirs, which in a way was true. Mr. King sometimes took us out for excursions. He had a Dormobile even more ancient than the Community one, a real Dormobile, the seats being proper beds squeezed around a small kitchen. On a flat road with a rear wind, it occasionally reached 40 mph, but Mr. King gave no sign of frustration and seemed to enjoy cruising along. He drove like a tourist in new territory, admiring the familiar scenery along the A20 and offering occasional droll comments as though he had never seen it before.
I must have been around Colt House age when the Kings were brought back to the Hatch and a new couple, John and Leela Hort, were installed in Lacton Hall. Shortly after, he was appointed a Co-Director*. His unflappability defused many situations, though his responses sometimes resembled those of Eliza, the 1960s forerunner of AI diagnostics. As in the following exchange overheard on the East Wing stairs:
Mrs. Warrington: “That Miss Hill, she drives you round the bend!”
Mr. King: “It depends whether you want to be driven round the bend or not, doesn’t it?”
A lot of us felt that he showed a bias towards those who had been at The Paddocks or Lacton hall with him – most of them came back to the Hatch when he did. I am sure this was not deliberate. Rather, an innate cautiousness caused him to wait and watch before intervening on those who had not previously been under his direct care. If I conclude that Mr. King did little for me, I do so regretfully, since I know he was an enormously positive influence on the lives of many. Most of those who speak of him in this way seem to have been at Caldecott after my time, however. His stated wish to be a “father to the fatherless” was clearly a response to the felt need of many children but, to coin an Eliza-like phrase he might have used himself, it depends how fatherless you are. I had a father and a stepfather and felt something like hero-worship towards both. It was here that I sought a father, though whether I found one, at least until much later, is another matter. For those who had no father, a father who was inadequate or worse, or who blatantly did not care, Mr. King was doubtless a tower of strength.
There could be no greater contrast to Mr. King’s languid tones and occasionally droll humour than his perennially energetic wife. I suppose it was thanks to her that he never completely dozed off on the job. My first encounter with Mrs. King was on a half-term holiday on which we were accompanied by Mr. Christie and Mrs. King, who drove us in the ancient Dormobile. We had not gone very far when Mr. Christie remarked admiringly, “This van always seems to go faster when you drive it”. Seems was the operative word. She had a nervous, jerky way of driving which made the van yaw about like a boat running against the wind, creating an illusory impression of speed. It was perhaps on this same outing that Mrs. King came out with one of those little phrases that influence your life. I had a passion at the time for “Models of Yesteryear”, a slightly cultish offshoot of the famous Lesney Matchbox toy cars, dedicated to vintage vehicles and with a little potted history of each one on the box. I spied in a shop in Hythe or Folkestone a couple that were no longer in production, their series number now being occupied by another car. I splashed out my pocket money on them. “Oh, I love doing that!” exclaimed Mrs. King. It came as a sort of official seal of approval, and whenever I find something still in the shops as new, though actually discontinued – books and scores rather than toy cars – I tend to think of Mrs. King.
My other memory is that Mrs. King taught me to drink tea. She did not know she was doing this. I had been despatched to the sickroom with a bout of flu in the interregnum after Miss E had left and Mrs. Warrington had not yet been found. Mrs. King bustled me into a bed, said in brisk, head-nurse tones “I’ll bring you up a cup of tea later on” and whisked away before I had time to say I did not like tea. It had always been an unchallenged truism of my mother’s that tea was a revolting drink, and I had never thought to question her wisdom. Miss E had known this, and always brought me warmed milk when I was in the sickroom. A little while later, Mrs. King breezed back in, plonked a mug of tea beside me and bustled away before I had time to say a word. My mouth was pretty dry by now, so I sipped it suspiciously and found I liked it. Incidentally, I think it was a spell in hospital that made a tea-drinker of my mother. In her later years, she seemed to have a cuppa permanently on the go.
The Kings had a dog called Tosca. Like her master, she seemed most at home with those who had been at The Paddocks or Lacton Hall. Perhaps she was getting old and looked back to better times. It had apparently been a tradition in the family of one of the Kings to name their dogs after operatic characters. Fortunately for Tosca, there was no lyrically-minded member of staff to buy a Rottweiler and call it Scarpia. The tradition seems to have come to an end with Tosca. The next dog was called Bella. I suppose there must exist, somewhere in the vast repertoire of Italian opera, a heroine called Bella, but I do not know of one.
* The Kings were installed in an apartment newly constructed at the end of the East Wing in autumn 1967. Mr. King was appointed a Co-Director in late 1968 (information from Gerald Moran).