The remarkable true life story of Peter Newman (Part 3)

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"A Thief I'll Be"

My Grandad used to be a drunkard. People would make up songs about old Wally Newman who could be seen staggering along the streets of London, night after night after night.

He wasn't a down and out; he had a good business brain even though it was in a state of pickled animated suspension most of the time! No, Grandad owned coffee stalls. He paid men to dish up the brew while he quietly got sozzled on the profits.

His life was dramatically changed the night he walked past a mission hall somewhere in the East End. There was something very different about the singing which drifted through the half-open windows. Now old Wally Newman loved a good sing, so in he went, in his usual drunken state, to see what was going on.

He had barely pushed open the doors when he had a vision of Jesus. He broke down, cried and was instantly converted. He stayed for the rest of the service and then went post haste to the Embankment to tell his mates what had happened to him. And he didn't just tell them the once. Day after day he would go to his old haunts and tell his former drinking pals of the Christ who had cleaned up his life and given him a brand new start. Many of them used to sit and weep with him as he told them of the day he met Jesus. Grandmother, however, wasn't quite so touched by her Wally's experience. She couldn't deny the change in him, but she liked a bit of fun herself and she didn't go in for "all that religious stuff".

My two sisters and I went to live with my grandparents when we were very small, our own mother having abandoned us when I was only eighteen months old. By this time the converted Wally Newman had a small cottage, called Kosicot, in the countryside. I never knew my mother, but my father worked in a nearby town and would come and visit us quite often.

Every night Grandad would say prayers with us, and I will always remember him lining us all up in the garden to teach us the choruses he loved so much. He called Sunday "the Sabbath" and we all had to be on our best behaviour from getting up to going to bed. The Sabbath was always the longest day of the week.

He would often go out preaching at local chapels and churches. The minute he was out of sight at the lane end, Grandmother would wind up the old gramophone and dance on the lawn, beckoning all of us to join in her forbidden revelries. "Now don't you go telling Grandad what we're up to," she would say with a twinkle in her eye. "This is our little secret." We'd all nod solemnly and then carry on enjoying ourselves. Grandad never found out about our little games because everything would be back to its usual sober self by the time he walked up the garden path, Bible in hand.

Those were happy days, but storm clouds were gathering. Everyone seemed quite pleased when Dad brought this woman to Kosicot to meet Daphne, Clare and me. She seemed quite pleasant and not too many weeks had passed before Dad decided he wanted to marry her. That decision meant a great change in our lives: we kids were going to live with the newly-weds in a big house in town. The prospect of life in town appealed to my eight-year-old mind. We were going to be a real family again; surely life was going to be even better than it had been at Kosicot.

I was in for a rude awakening. My step-mother would have much preferred to build her new life without Dad's three children hanging round her feet. Children to her meant dirt, expense and inconvenience, and she was quick to show her dislike for us. I don't know if my father ever realised how unhappy and insecure we felt. He loved her and I often wondered if he just conveniently turned a blind eye to our unhappiness. With our grandparents we had known kindly discipline and love. We lived for our grandmother's visits. But then, for some unknown reason, Grandmother was not allowed to come to the house. Once a week though, we used to meet her secretly when she was in town shopping.

I remember the house was like a palace, but never like a home. The only time we were allowed in it was for food and bed. We never knew what it was like to sit by the fire or to play indoors. Meal times were frightening: to drop a crumb was to invoke harsh punishment. Our house gleamed and shone with wax polish. A finger mark was a crime. Other people noticed our unhappiness and would invite us into their houses, but we always had to return home. I sometimes had to be escorted back because I was so afraid. Occasionally neighbours talked of reporting our treatment to the authorities, but nobody got round to doing anything.

As we weren't allowed to spend much time in the house itself, I made the garden shed my second home, or rather, my real and only home. I remember spending hour after hour shut away in my own little world reading anything I could lay my hands on. The real world didn't seem to offer very much so I compensated by immersing myself in books, hundreds of them. My shed was packed with biographies, autobiographies, classics, and "Penny Dreadfuls", as the cheap novel used to be called.

I stayed out of my step-mother's way as much as I could, but she was always accusing me of some misdeed or other. I was regularly punished for crimes I'd never committed. I used to spend hours dreaming about the day I would escape from that house and all its misery, but I knew I would have to wait until I was a bit older to make the break. Eight was, after all, a little young.

The same ambition burned within my sisters. When I was ten, Clare ran away and never returned. She was given a home with a farming family and lived happily ever after. "Lucky thing", I thought. Daphne was next to escape. She went into service at fourteen to get away from the house, leaving me lonelier than I'd ever been in all my life. By this time I had two step-sisters and their lot seemed much better than mine. I'd long since stopped praying. I reasoned out that if God allowed me to be so unhappy and miserable, He couldn't be the nice, kind person Grandad had said He was. So I couldn't see much point in even trying to talk to him.