Free Henry Cooper by Robert Edwards Page A

was rather illogically drafted into the Royal Army Medical Corps and, after initial preliminary training in Edinburgh, was dispatched as an orderly to the XIV Armyin Calcutta from where he would join the rest of the forgotten army in Burma. His family would not see him for nearly three years.
    At Farmstead Road, life went on, after a fashion. The weekly rent was a guinea, let alone household utilities, and Lily’s income, including government supplementary payments to compensate for Henry senior’s absence was only £ 3.10s. A scandalised correspondent reported to The Times in early 1940 that there were newly created single mothers whose husbands were serving with the forces, with two children to raise, who were being asked to live on less than £ 1 a week.
    So, in the tradition of her forebears, Lily worked. At one stage she was holding down up to three jobs and the simple strain of it all, fret ting over the task of feeding her children, not to mention dreading the arrival of the telegram from the War Office, which would be the only way of knowing the state of her husband, wore her down. Never a bulky woman, her weight plummeted as she denied herself food in order to feed her hungry trio. ‘Mum would queue up at the butcher’s and buy a sheep’s head for ten pence, and out of that she could feed us all,’ recalled Henry. ‘It was amazing what she could do with it.’ Clearly, Lily like most women who lived through the war, was an inventive cook. Nothing that could be used was thrown away. Unheard-of dishes today, like brawn and shinbone soup, made from the cheapest cuts of meat, were made to stretch a very long way.
    The wartime diet, with all its rationing restrictions, actually produced an extraordinarily healthy generation of children. Henry and George grew quickly and were clearly two of the largest attendees at Athelney Road School. Thefact that they were identical twins was a novelty, but one that also rather served to draw attention to them. They were neither bullied nor did they bully, but they learned quickly that the numerous scraps and incidents in the school playground would often be attributed to them simply because of their very high profiles and they learned very quickly to look after themselves. They were quick to respond.
    Henry achieved his first knockout in the playground at Athelney Road School, during a handball game: ‘Suddenly a little fellow called Bridges jumped on my back and started throwing punches. I got a bit of a temper on and dragged him over to me and punched him in the eye. I knocked him out. Another fellow rushed over but George held him off.’ This would rather serve to define the later relationship between the Cooper twins: absolute and unquestioning loyalty.
    Academically, the only subject that could raise even a twitch of interest from Henry was history, and this mainly by virtue of the imaginative skills of the staff; the experience of role-playing (very contemporary) rather served to bring out something of the actor in him and he discovered that he enjoyed the limelight rather a lot. Neither history nor the limelight is an interest which has ever really left him.
    But school was merely an inconvenience compared to the risks of urban life during the blackout, which covered Britain like a giant wet blanket. During the day the neighbourhood was an extraordinary maelstrom of commercial opportunity and all three Cooper brothers worked, and very hard. Before school would be a paper round, after school would be errand-running and atweekends would be a busy round of collecting for the household commissary, whether liberating scraps of coal and coke from the local power station or joining the ever-longer queues at the various food shops, or collecting the randomly packaged relief parcels from the American Red Cross, or recycling horse manure, of which there was no shortage. Occasionally there was a chance to ‘recycle’ golf balls on the Beckenham course, too; they were free to the