Free Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn Page A

got into the bath and couldn’t see the children, she noticed that they were on the bar of soap being rowed about by Tubby. Tubby also went to school with them, causing endless trouble, and even went out one day and put butter on the street so that the buses skidded and couldn’t get up the hill. He had two cousins – one who lived in France, called M. Tubbé, and an Italian called Signor Tubbia – and was able to travel through the water pipes to visit them.
    It was at Buddy’s house in Harlow that, aged eighteen, I spent the last night with my brother Michael, sleeping in the same bed; our rest was disturbed because I had severe cramp and my brother dreamed that I was attacking him and reacted most vigorously. The following day I went with him to the airfield at Hunsdon in Essex where he was stationed, and he took me to the railway station for my return to London. My very last memory of him is as he cycled away when the train set off. Six months later he was dead.
    Buddy continued to live in Harlow in her little house and we visited her there when she was bed-bound and could hardly speak, cared for by one of her nieces, to whom she had been immensely kind when that niece’s marriage had broken up in South Africa and she had returned to Britain alone and without friends. Buddy died in 1992 and I spoke at her funeral, meeting again many of her family whom I had got to know as a child.
    It goes without saying that Nursey was a very influential person in our young lives. My brothers and I had breakfast with her in the nursery. We had one meal a day with my parents in the dining room, the food being brought from the basement kitchen by a hand-operated lift. We were waited on at table.
    I detested the food. I never liked meat and I loathed most of all turnips, parsnips and rice pudding. Many a time I was told I could not leave the table until I finished my rice pudding, which by then was cold and had a thick disgusting skin on it. It turned me against rice pudding and, to some extent, food itself ever since.
    Life revolved around tea – early tea, breakfast tea, mid-morning tea, lunch with tea, dinner with tea and late-night tea.
    When we were little we were sent to bed early every night. We had a small Bakelite radio in the nursery on which occasionally I used to listen to programmes such as
Monday Night at
8; my father had a great walnut veneered radio in what was called the Green Room, which actually belonged to the house next door, but which Father rented and entered through a connecting door in the party wall.
    Mother would come up at night and tell us Bible stories and hear our prayers, which included prayers for the Spanish republicans during the Civil War and, when Father was out of Parliament between 1931 and 1937, for ‘Father getting back into Parliament’; and for ‘the wall at Stansgate to be repaired’ (being next to the Blackwater estuary, the land was prone to flooding). When Mother tucked us up in bed she would say ‘Goodnight Darling, another happy day tomorrow’ even if we had had a flaming row that afternoon; the assumption that every day would be happy provided a framework of security which was very reassuring.
    I never remember being taken to a concert or the theatre, except once to see
Peter Pan
. Although we lived next to the Tate Gallery, I cannot even recall having been inside. My brother Dave told me that when Father passed the Tate and considered going in, what clinched his decision not to was that it would cost him sixpence!
    We were not allowed to have pets at home as children, but I had three toy animals of which I was extremely fond: Big Teddy, Little Teddy and Doggie. Doggie still lives in a cupboard at Stansgate.
    It was a happy childhood, but it changed when Dave fell ill and went away to recuperate with Nurse Olive, leaving my brother and me very lonely. Dave’s illness was treated by our family doctor, Alexander Bromley.
    Our original doctor was a Dr Attlee, a relation of