Dad’s family history

This is a verbatim copy of a document written by my dad in the early 1970s, recounting his life from 1923 when he was born, through to around 1948 when he met my mum.

Early years

Amongst the archives there’s a photo of me aged about 2yrs sitting on the front step of the “entry” to the house in Factory Road, Hinckley, where I was born, a house that belonged to my maternal grandmother, Eliza Kirkham. She was a Houghton, had cousins at Tile Hill, Coventry, we used to visit occasionally. Her husband having died young, in 1910 I believe, she’d brought up two sons, Herbert and Sidney, and a daughter Minnie, my mother, on her own, together with several of her sister’s children, her sister also having died young; though no doubt Eliza had had help from the very extended family of those days. For us that extended family were mostly Foresters, whose descendants must by now spread all over Hinckley, to say nothing of further afield. What Little Gran, as we called her, did for money I don’t know, nor do I remember the Factory Road house at all, except as I saw it later. I do remember the road, as I later had a school friend who lived not far away.

Before her marriage to my Dad, William Percy Powell, in 1917, My mother Minnie Kirkham had been an elementary school teacher; there’s a photo of her with one of her classes in the archives. She was born in 1889, Percy in 1887, so she would have been 28 at the time of her wedding, late for those days. I’m told that for him the marriage was on the rebound from another woman who’d married while he was away in France (Mary, my sister, said not too many years ago that the other woman was then still alive in Hinckley). About Pop’s war service I don’t know very much; he never talked about it, though much later he may have talked to Alan, perhaps because Alan had by then experienced the later war in France too. Pop enlisted in the RAMC, probably in 1914, to become a stretcher bearer, rose to Sergeant, was commissioned during active duty in France in 1917 (a fairly unusual thing in those days), and sent back to OCTU in England for officer-training, after which he had a weeks leave during which he and Minnie were married, then back to the front, now as an infantry officer, to end the war as Acting Major (I think) but still actually a 2nd Lieutenant — any infantry officer who survived received acting-promotions to fill gaps left by casualties. He was wounded three times, one a head wound though I don’t know in what way. He was decorated twice, a DCM during service in the RAMC (collecting wounded in no-mans-land) and an MC as an infantry officer. Everyone who knew him says what an inspiring NCO and officer he was, as well as an inspiring teacher, and certainly “his boys” never seemed to forget him, nor he them,and after his death there was an article about him in the ‘Hinckley Times and Guardian’ entitled ‘Unforgettable Sir’.

So he came back to Blighty early in 1919 a local hero, with sundry British and foreign decorations, having spent a couple of years holding his own playing bridge in the Officer’s Mess with the sons of the landed gentry, but was now reduced to moving into his mother-in-law’s house in Factory Road and returning to his old school-teaching post. Pop once said that at the end of the war he’d considered making the Army his career, which if he had done he’d have been a near-contemporary of Montgomery.

My sister Barbara was born in March 1920, me in December 1923, and another sister Mary in September 1925, with another son still-born, but near to full-term, in 1922, between Barbara and me, who’d have been named William had he lived, the combination of that experience with those of changes in her husband devastated my Mother, and from which she never really recovered. When Mary was 1yr old we moved into a new house, The Croft, on Leicester Road, Hinckley, not far from one of Mother’s brothers, Uncle Sidney (Sid) and Auntie Pemberley (Pem); her other brother, Uncle Herbert, had already left Hinckley, first to train as a teacher and then to teach in Yardley, Birmingham. When I now think about the house in which I grew up it seems a bit pretentious for a school-teacher, and I wonder if there might not have been some competition involved with Mother’s relatives along the road. It was built with Pop’s demob money plus the sale of his mother-in-law’s house, maybe plus a loan, and partly on Pop’s allotment and partly on that of his father, our Grandad. I don’t really remember the building process, though I have a vague memory of a bricklayer working on the walls going up around the kitchen, larder and pantry, with the bathroom above them, the building being done from old-fashioned wooden scaffolding, of planks supported on thick wooden poles fastened together with lengths of rope. I also have a faint image of the lime-pit, used on all building sites at that time for slaking lime to make plaster, probably because when about three years old I fell into it, or so the family story goes.

Both of my Kirkham uncles seemed to have married “above themselves”, or at least their wives appeared to me to be ‘posh, although I don’t know the background of Little Gran’s husband, after whom I’m named George. Auntie Pem was the daughter of Uncle Sid’s boss, a factory owner named Puffer, and in my memory was always away travelling, being a kind of link-man between the factory the Puffers owned in Hinckley and linen mills they owned in Antrim, Northern Ireland. The Kirkham family lived in a big house and garden with a gravel drive winding up to and all round it to where wide steps between pillars led up to a big, heavy front door; so that our house had to have pillars too. Tje Kirkham house had been built on a plot carved out of one of several fields bordering Leicester Road owned by the Puffers, who were horse riders, though not I think to hounds. There was a separate vegetable garden to one side, a barn with a dovecote in its loft (complete with doves, some of them tumblers), and in one of Puffer’s fields a stable where my Kirkham cousins, Betty and Esme, kept a pony. In the field behind the vegetable garden (which I don’t think belonged to the Puffer’s) there was a pond on which we and other local kids used to go sliding in the winter and sailing toy boats in the summer. No doubt it was filled in long ago, being much too dangerous in the middle of what had by then had become a residential area. Sid and Pem always had a maid, who of course changed regularly as they each in turn left to get married, but one of them, Mabel, I could remember until some years ago, probably because, I’m told, at the time we first moved into our new house she used to take me out in her spare time. I may still remember the push-chair in which she took me out, swinging my legs in excitement, and perhaps had a fading image of her standing in Auntie Pem’s kitchen the other side of the table looking at me. That would all have happened at the time when Mother would have been fully occupied with Mary, still a baby, together with coping with a new house on the outskirts of the town, when she’d been used to being near the centre where she’d have had relatives in and out all the time. What I am sure of is that Mabel was important, attending to my wants as no one else did, at least not till later, when Mary would look out for me, at least until her puberty. There was a story told at about that time of my having been frightened by three dogs when walking along the road to the Kirkhams’ house, “Shot’an’Peter’an’a’nudder dog”, as I’d reported the event, and though they were probably playing I grew up afraid of dogs; which was unfortunate as on the way to school I had to pass the homes of several imposingly large beasts. My memory of cousin Betty is more than a little hazy compared with that of Esme, just an impression of someone very tall and lady-like who’d suffered some illness in childhood as a result of which she was sent away to a school in Bournemouth. Cousin Esme’s image is much clearer because she often came round to play with us, at first primarily with Barbara, but then later as we all grew up with me and Mary. She attended a High School for Girls in Nuneaton, a town about 5mls away, and was a regular tom-boy, clumsy and slap-dash and always bandaged or bleeding from somewhere, her knees or elbows grazed, or fingers cut or scraped, and eventually came out as gay.

My Uncle Herbert Kirkham, mother’s other brother, lived in Birmingham after training as a teacher, first at a primary school, then at a senior school, and eventually became it’s Head. We used to have a postcard album at home which amongst many other things contained some of the cards he’d sent to his mother in Factory Road, our “Little Gran”, during the time when he was at teacher-training college and on student-teaching practice, as well as on holiday, one of which had been posted in Harrow of all places (his card pictured the High Street up on the Hill in the 1900's). In those days people sent postcards at the drop of a hat. Even if they were only out somewhere for the day everyone would send cards which, it seems amazing now to report, might have been delivered even before they’d returned from their day out. I don’t know where Herbert met his wife, Auntie Eva, but she wasn’t from Hinckley and was from a step or two up the social ladder. They lived in Stoney Lane, Yardley, and had a son and a daughter, Reg and Muriel, who we thought were brought up to behave and to speak a bit “posh”, as their mother did, “with a plum in her mouth” we used to say. I remember their accents. Both son and daughter went to University in Birmingham, which in the thirties was quite rare. I remember Muriel as a “flapper” and Reg as a “toff” in plus-fours and smoking a pipe. He later became a civil engineer, an expert on reinforced concrete, latterly working at the Roads Research Laboratory, until his early death from a heart complaint.

Pop never got on with Little Gran, which may be a gross under-statement — he probably hated the sight of her. I expect there was some resentment at having been dependent on her after the war. I remember her as being very old, a bit down-to-earth, or perhaps a bit uncouth, even before she started going senile, around the time Mother died in 1935. I can still hear the noises she made eating and drinking, sucking an orange for instance, with a lump of sugar stuck into the middle; and slurping her tea from a saucer; and when I’d mildly misbehaved she’d threaten me with “I’ll cut your tail off”, at which Pop would click his teeth with disapproval. She read a great deal, mostly trash, Warwick Deeping for instance, borrowed for a few pence from Boots’ or from Smiths’ libraries, choices I’m sure Pop wouldn’t have approved of. But he wasn’t at home much, probably no more than he could help, out teaching at the senior boy’s school during the day, and in the evenings teaching at an Evening Institute for factory workers that he’d been partly instrumental in starting after the war. He was also still studying, for which he had to travel to Birmingham, studying both technical subjects connected with the town’s factories and also music, for he was choir-master at the Congregational Chapel and also musical director and conductor for the local Operatic Society, and at some stage must have played the oboe with some orchestra. I remember Mother taking us to dress-rehearsals of one or two of the Operatic Societies’ productions and being bored stiff (it would have been The Geisha, A Country Girl, Maid of the Mountains or some other such). On top of all that he had what seemed at the time a large garden (1/2 acre?) with two green-houses, one quite large, so he was pretty much out of sight except for meal times, which may well have been the way he wanted it. I don’t remember how the house was run, whether it was run by Mother or by Little Gran or by both of them in harness, in which case Mother must have felt sandwiched between two warring parties. As I suppose we all did.

We lived mostly in what we called the breakfast room, six of us sitting round a large table in front of two windows that looked out over the garden. It must have been beautiful in fine weather — and of course I remember no other sort. Most mornings we had porridge for breakfast, followed by a fry-up of some kind with bread from the bakers own ovens. No cereals, which came later, the first we had being Shredded Wheat; only in the mid-30’s did I come across “Force” at a friends house, a cereal rather like corn-flakes, but we never had such new-fangled stuff. We went to a primary school that was probably about a mile away, going there with Pop, two or even three up on his bicycle, since he taught at the adjacent senior boys school. We came home for dinner (lunch to you — we’re in the frozen north), then back again for afternoon school. Before travelling back Mary and I had to rest lying on the breakfast-room floor to let our food “go down”. I remember liking that, a cosy ten minutes! I also remember Mother going through our hair with a fine comb and, I think, eucalyptus oil, every Friday night, looking for the nits we’d inevitably collect from other kids each week.

Towards the front of the house were the two main rooms: on one side a so-called dining room, mostly used for sitting in the evenings, rarely for eating except when we had visitors, which was rare; and on the other side a study, with a proper desk. The dining room had a coal fire which in the winter would be lit in late afternoon, and I remember Mary and I sitting in front of it for ages, watching the changing patterns made by sparks in the slow-burning soot on the fire-back. The room also had a baby-grand piano Pop had bought, his pride and joy, which Barbara took to Canada when she went after the second war. There were two large pictures hanging in that room, one each side of the fireplace, by which I was always fascinated. As paintings they were terrible, so where they came from I can’t imagine, and only recall that the one on the left, behind the wireless, presented a landscape of mountain and valley, which I used to dream of as another world in which I had another life. I suppose the wireless set too represented another world too, that of Children’s Hour, of which I don’t remember much, only ‘Uncle Mac’, Toytown plays, L.du Garde Peach history plays with Richard Goolden always playing the “fall-guy”, and occasional classical music concerts.

The study had a gas rather than a coal fire. Gas fires made a very satisfying, even comforting, noise, a cross of gentle roar and a hiss, whereas coal fires crackled and spat and were liable to drop live coals on the carpet, which was protected by a wire-mesh fire-guard. The study was used much less than the dining room, where we almost never dined, and had several bookcases with many of Pop’s books that he’d bought in Birmingham when he’d been studying, together with a few wartime momentos — spent shell-cases for instance. Later on after Mother’s death and so in our step-mother Moggy’s time a lot of it’s contents were cleared out without so much as a mention. Between the breakfast room and the back-door was the kitchen, with pantry and larder leading off. Outside the back door was a paved yard, where all three of us children spent a lot of time playing, throwing or batting balls against the wall of the house, skipping, whipping tops and so on. There was a well under the yard from which soft water was pulled up by a hand-pump to the kitchen sink for washing-up and for the laundry, done in a smelly gas copper the other side of the sink before being fed through a big wooden mangle and then hung on washing-lines strung on posts all the way up the garden, and even across the end. At first all the sheets were done at home but, as Mother became ill, from the late twenties on, they were sent to a laundry every week.

On Saturday mornings one of the jobs we children might have to do was to clean out and black-lead the coal-fired grate (with it’s oven and back-boiler) in the breakfast-room; after clearing the soot from the fire-ways round the oven we’d cart it to where Pop wanted to store it for use around the garden. Another job we did, though not every day, or even every week, was pumping sewage from the septic tank deep underground beyond the greenhouses, since the house originally had no main-drainage. The sewage, no doubt well decomposed and very nourishing (to growing plants at least), was channelled along old pieces of guttering propped up on boxes to where it would fertilise the vegetable garden. The smell was quite something. There was a swing nearby on which we each in turn spent a lot of time. I remember Barbara once fell off, probably while trying to jump when it was high in the air. Perhaps she still bears the scar. We did other jobs in the garden as well: fruit-picking, digging, weeding, planting seeds and potatoes. I hated blackberry picking because there were always big spider’s webs, with very large hairy spiders hidden somewhere near. Very scary. It may have been picking raspberries and getting a lot of unripe ones that first revealed my colour-blindness, though it might also have been my inability to understand why in painting at school tree-trunks had to be a different colour from the leaves.

I don’t have many memories of Mother. In my mind she was always very thin and gaunt, though pictures of her when younger show her as a very attractive young lady. One occasion I strayed into her bedroom one morning just as she began to dress and got shouted at in no uncertain terms to “get out”. I think I would have been more than five but less than eight. It may have been after she’d become ill, though I’m not too sure when that happened. She’d apparently suffered with St.Vitus Dance some time before she was married, and I remember some form of shaking as still being evident later. Then she had a slight stroke which affected her down one side and made walking difficult, even for a while making talking and eating difficult, as a result of which she had a nurse in to give her massage, at first daily and then weekly. It’s my impression that she never really recovered, perhaps from the miscarriage of William, and from then on drifted slowly downhill. Apart from the memory of seeing her dressing I have just four images of her: looking for nits in my hair; at the kitchen sink trying to soak off a bandage put on one of my hands at school, which had stuck to the scab; sitting at the breakfast-room table sometime after her first stroke, laughing in a twitchy one-sided sort of way at a joke someone had made; and later of taking her one of my library books to read as she sat up in bed. I think that would have been not long before she died, so I’d have been over ten by then. The books I was reading at the time were quite serious stuff, such as popular science (James Jeans, Eddington, Einstein’s pot-boiler), travel, in the Himalayas and Tibet, and the associated Buddhism. All other images I have are inseparable in my mind from the photos I’ve seen of her.

Pop’s musical activities had started well before the war. He was following a family tradition, though it may have been common. Grandpa played the ‘cello, Uncle Sid the double-bass, Uncle Herbert the organ, and Pop the oboe, while everyone played the piano and sang. I’m told Mother was quite a good pianist and singer, and I believe started teaching each of us in turn to play, though I never got anywhere with it, I don’t know why. Mary and especially Barbara progressed and subsequently had lessons from a proper teacher. Two of Pop’s major musical productions before the first war (his war) were outdoor performances on Hinckley’s Castle Mound of Gluck’s Orpheo and (I think) Elgar’s Caractacus. There are photos of the assembled company, orchestra and chorus, with Grandpa and Uncle Sid in the orchestra, and Mother and Auntie Em, among dozens, in the chorus. There was also a photo of Pop, which seems to have gone missing, standing alone on the Mound in sports jacket and flannels, his hands in his pockets — an early version of the “angry young man”. Pop also organised a lot of outdoor activities with his school classes, at least before the 14–18 war, such things as nature rambles and cross-country paper-chases. One of the boys in his senior school class, Scrivener, used to make wooden models of aeroplanes for me, sea-planes mostly, it being around the time of the Schneider Trophy Races. Both Pop and Mother, as well as Auntie Em, had been Sunday-school as well as day-school teachers, and Pop’s knowledge of the Bible was immense, winning him Scripture prizes. There’s a picture postcard of him somewhere, perhaps 16 or 17yrs old and so in the middle 1900’s, walking with his Sunday class in decorated procession through the town on the Sunday-School Treat, so-called, wearing his Sunday-best, including one of those enormous 1900’s caps. At that time he was said to have always had a girl on each arm (as reported by Mrs. Cooper, Mary’s ex-neighbour in Sharnford)! It may have been an exaggeration but certainly he was a lady’s man, a bit of a performer, at least when away from home and from the gaze of his mother-in-law. Barbara insists that he was always very playful with us when we were young, giving us piggy-back rides and letting us climb up him, and I do vaguely remember it happening.

Pop taught in the Senior Boy’s school in Holliers Walk. We all started in the adjacent Elementary school, a mixed school, Barbara and Mary going to the same one, though I’ve no memory of them there. I remember my induction into the school, in a large room amidst lots of tall mothers with children down among their skirts, many of them crying, all crowded round a high desk. I was with Mother, also crying of course, it being infectious, feeling quite lost. My first teacher there was a Miss Hetherington who, I’m told (by Mary), remembered me years later for some reason (a good reason I’m assured). Mary and I left before reaching the age to move to the Seniors, but Barbara attended the Girls Senior for a couple of years. I best remember the play-grounds, two separate ones, though not segregated between girls and boys. I recall sliding on the ice in winter and playing fag-cards and other card games there in the summer; also my last classroom, a long high room divided into three by sliding partitions, perhaps 50 of us sitting at the usual double desks of those days reciting our tables in unison over a low rumble of sound coming from the adjacent rooms. That was probably my last year, when I got slightly stigmatised because I was going to “the grammar”. One day there was some sort of fight set up after school, I don’t remember how, me against one of the Ankers boys, with lots of others crowding round to see this whipper-snapper, teacher’s pet, pounded to a pulp! Fortunately it fizzled out.

Pop cycled to school on a very sit up and survey the world bicycle with a three-speed gear and a chain-guard or oil-bath. I remember going with him either sitting on the crossbar or later standing on the “back step”, when Mary would have been on the crossbar; and later still riding beside him on my own little bike. Riding home one wet winters night his bike was run into from behind by a lorry with very poor lights (I can still see them glimmering faintly through the rain and hear Pop shouting at me to go ahead). None of us was hurt; the driver was one of “his boys” of course. But sometimes, perhaps often in the summer, I must have walked home, because I remember playing marbles along the gutter; I would all the time have been scared of meeting that crowd of roughs the Ankers Gang, and also of meeting the large dogs along Leicester Road, an Airedale and a Dalmatian I recall. At one point in that walk there was a “jitty” I could go through that avoided passing the Ankers house, where the nails on the heels of my shoes striking the cobbles would echo between high brick walls backing onto factories (Mary assures me they still do). Near-by was the Co-op where on Saturday mornings Mary and I went for groceries, butter and sugar and bacon and flour and so-on, all weighed out behind the counter from big bins, and into the butchers next door for the invariable shoulder of lamb (New Zealand) which lasted six of us half the week. I also passed Kavanagh’s the greengrocers (known as Kavvies, later to be Blower’s) where I could buy sweets if I had a penny. Bread, milk, fish and green-grocery were delivered home direct, by ‘roundsmen’ with horse-drawn carts. In early days the milk was carried in large churns, transferred into a smaller but still very heavy churn to be brought round to the door, from which it was “dipped” with a measure into Mother’s jug; meanwhile the horse chomped grass from the verge. Later on, after milk came in bottles in crates, I once had a ride on the milk dray, high up above the horse’s rump. I don’t know where we got eggs from but they must have been delivered in bulk, then to be preserved in icing-glass in a big pan on the tiled floor of the larder. In the summer ice-cream came round in a little horse-drawn trap, the driver ringing a hand-bell, the ice-cream stored in a tub kept cool by an ice-and-salt mixture. Though almost all delivery vehicles were still horse-drawn, there were a few trucks in use, even a few steam-wagons, which left a trail of sparks from the ashpit beneath the firebox.

Moving to ‘The Grammar’

I transferred to Hinckley Grammar School in September 1932, when I was 8, nearly 9. There would have been scholarship entry at 11 but Pop didn’t bother with it as he’d have had to pay the fees anyway, the princely sum of £10 pa, but I remember having to take an entry exam of some kind. Pop had been to the same school some 30 or more years before, though in those days it had been very much smaller, and to allow for attendance by children from the outlying villages had been partly boarding. In our day children cycled in from up to 5 or 6 miles away. In my first year it was still quite small, having only 9 classes each of about 30. The Head when I started was a Mr. Coxhead; I later learned that his daughter Elizabeth was a rock climber and early member of the Pinnacle Club (a ladies-only climbing group), and was also a published novelist. Mr. Coxhead was a classics man, though for some years already there’d been physics and chemistry teachers and soon after I arrived a biology teacher. The school was beginning to undergo other considerable changes too. A new Form 2 had opened the year before I arrived, and for my year there were Forms 1 and 2b as well as 2a. I suppose they were sort-of preparatory years, probably introduced because the Elementary School didn’t at that time advance it’s pupils sufficiently. But as there was no space in the buildings for the new entrants, Form 1 assembled for lessons in all subjects in the Main Hall, and 2b in a room of the adjacent Head-master’s house. I still remember my first teacher, a Miss Edwards, with fair, wavy, bobbed hair. I’m told that I was a favourite (no doubt why I remember her), but I can’t imagine why unless it was because I had the little waif look; though it may have been because I was the youngest in the class. In fact most of the way up the school I was a year under-age, being only two years behind Barbara when I should have been at least three. Mary later on had the same problem, staying in Form 1 for only a couple of weeks before moving up to 2a, then later having to move from 4c one year to 4a the next so as to stay back a year (though she says it was because she got in with a bad-lot in 4c). Even then Mary didn’t catch up with herself, and eventually had to stay in the Sixth Form for three years instead of two before going to University. The pressure of being under-age all those years can’t have done either of us any good at all; I was usually around 22nd out of a class of about 30. I can’t imagine what they and Pop were thinking of.

Mr.Coxhead retired after my first two years, but during that time extensive re-building had started so we were surrounded by a fair amount of chaos. What affected us most was the loss of the “bun boy”: for years a boy from a local bakery had cycled into the play-ground before morning break with a big basket of buns, plain 1d, iced 1½d. But you only got the chance of an iced bun if you were near the front of the queue, and at the front would of course be the Sixth Form. I remember a game we played in that same playground those first years, but never later, a game that in memory it seems all the boys in the school played. A few would line up, hand in hand, across the middle as “catchers”, while everyone else ran in a group from one side to the other trying to avoid being caught. Everyone caught turned into a catcher, so that it got harder and harder to avoid them. Playing that game I once got kicked so hard on the ankle I could hardly walk for the rest of the day. I remember creeping along a corridor leaning on the wall for support and having to stop every few paces.

In Form 2b I had a crush on Connie Simmonds (of whom more later). Her brother, known as “Square” (he was distinctly rotund), was in Barbara’s year. He had a pet jackdaw which I had to pass every day on the way home from school as it waited on a gatepost for it’s master’s return. Rumour was that it would perch on your shoulder in order to peck at your dangling ear-lobes, but he never got mine. In that year also I lost a copy of “Black Beauty” which had been either a Christmas or a birthday present, and which I’m sure I’d taken to school solely to show off, or maybe at teacher’s request, so it was her fault that I lost it. And I got a Saturday morning detention for telling Miss Locke a lie. Miss Locke used to cycle to school every day and left her sit-up-and-beg bike-with-a-basket leaning against the wall for some boy to take it to the cycle-shed. One day she’d asked me to take it, but I didn’t go at once and by the time I got there it had gone. I did nothing, just forgot about it; but Colin Ghent had seen teacher’s bike and sucking up as usual had put it away in the shed and then went and told her what a good boy he was. By that time she’d unfortunately asked me if I’d done it and in my confusion I’d said yes. I’m sure there were behind-the-scenes conferences, maybe with words to Pop, and I was interviewed as well as detained. All a bit traumatic.

Connie Simmond’s father was a Hinckley builder, and many years later Jean and I and our children (this is now mid-60’s, Beatles-time for Janice) came across them while on holiday at Sandbanks in Dorset. At dinner in the hotel on the first evening I heard the accents of old Hinckley, really broad, quite unmistakable, from an oldish man at the next table, and then saw that a younger man at the same table was wearing an Old Hinckleyan’s blazer. On enquiring I discovered he was “Shonner” (a corruption of John) Wright who’d been captain of cricket in my later school days and quite a force in the (school) world. He and Connie had eventually married, and she was the girl at the table, though I hadn’t recognised her, and still didn’t. They’d come away with their two children and Connie’s father who lived with them, and as the week went on I began to feel more and more glad that I’d “got away” (not from Connie, from little old Hinckley). That Sandbanks hotel had theatrical connections, having for years been used as lodgings by stage folks working Bournemouth theatres. The landlady had a back-room decorated with signed pictures of “stars” round the walls where she occasionally held parties for selected guests, and our first week there we were honoured to be included in one, mostly drinking home-made wine. I don’t know what prompted her to think a party would “go” that week, but it seemed to. She didn’t hold one the following week, so we waited for it in vain.

While at elementary school I’d had no particular friends, being already rather a solitary, though I do remember having a party at home before I went to “the grammar” to which at least some children from my class were invited. It’s stuck in my memory because I was extremely put-out at Mother and Little Gran being excessively complimentary about one boy’s dancing (age 8), so much so that I can still see him skipping about in his sandals, short trousers and pullover. But at secondary school I was friendly with two boys, Phil Bailey, the son of one of Pop’s colleagues, and Bill Tracey. Although both were in the same year as me, neither were in the same class, and I don’t see now how I got or kept friendly with either of them, for we were very different. But for whatever reason we spent a great deal of time together. It was Bill who lived near Factory Road, where I’d been born. I remember his father as being a great big man and his mother a tiny little thing, and their house as most of the time being enveloped in an atmosphere of hardly-suppressed violence. All three of us had Hornby train-sets, and one Christmas I remember Bill had been given a large LNER 4–6–2 loco, of which I was very envious. I only had a little tank engine, though I was very fond of it. Both boys had air-rifles too, Bill’s being fairly new and Phil’s old and not very powerful; one or other of them eventually had an air-pistol too. We used them to shoot at targets on the shed door, at sticks in the garden, and at birds, though we never managed to hit one. Phil’s rifle wasn’t very accurate and we rarely hit much; it was so weak that you could sometimes watch the pellet whizzing out towards the target, dropping as it went. Once I astounded everyone by hitting a bottle at about 10yds by sighting along the side of the barrel instead of using the proper sights. Both boys also had fishing rods, though fairly old ones, whereas when we all went fishing in the canal together I had to use a bamboo cane with cotton and a bent pin (why-ever couldn’t I have saved up my pocket money and bought one?). One day when I was preparing to go fishing with them I complained of the unfairness of things, and Pop under pressure from Moggy (so this must have been later) immediately took me to Wightmans’ sports shop in The Borough (outside of which there’d been a great yo-yo jamboree the year those toys first came into fashion) and bought the necessary gear. It was still embarrassing, partly because Pop wouldn’t buy it for me until he’d been pressured into it by someone else, by my step-mother of all people, and partly because the rod when I got it was so shiny and new, made worse by the fact that I didn’t catch anything (only Phil Bailey ever had, just the once, an inoffensive little perch). My attitude to such things might be called feeling deprived. Perhaps as a result I at times indulged in petty stealing, mainly florins or half-crowns from Little Gran’s purse which hung from a peg on the hallstand, often hanging conveniently wide open. Mary said later that we both also stole from Mother’s purse, which lay on a shelf in the corner cupboard of the breakfast room. They must have known money was going, but nothing was ever said.

The Kirkhams, Sid and Pem, had a rather posh car, an Austin, probably a 16, and we eventually had a car too; I expect by that time Pop needed it for his job, which had changed, but it still felt like trying to keep up with the Kirkhams yet again. Our car was second hand, though only a couple of years old, and I think I can remember Pop fetching it from Dudley Bedford’s garage. It was a blue and black saloon, a 1926 Humber 12(?) known as OM from it’s registration. In it we often went picnicking to Bradgate Park near Leicester (Uncle Sid maintained that was the only place it could find it’s way to), down the Fosse Way, to somewhere beside the Grand Union canal, to Wirksworth where a relative of Mother’s was in charge of the level-crossing at Gorsey Bank (Mary and I sometimes turned the big wheel to operate the gates), to Uncle Herbert’s at Yardley (though not very often), along the Watling Street (A5) to Hintsford, where there was an actual ford to get wet in, and to some of Little Gran’s other relatives, perhaps at Shearsby. Down the Fosse we often went to one particular field near which there was a gate across the road, and usually a tramp nearby who’d open the gate for the few cars that came along and get a penny for his trouble. One day when he didn’t seem to be about Mary and I opened the gate to let a car through, but after one of us had pocketed the penny the tramp appeared from nowhere (perhaps from taking a pee in the hedge) and was duly abusive. On another occasion we must have met up with the Kirkhams there because I remember Uncle Herbert showing me how to make a whistle out of a length of ash shoot; it seemed a bit like magic, and I never managed to do it very satisfactorily myself. In springtime the field beside that road was full of cowslips in a way almost never seen now-a-days.

Three years in a row, probably 1929–31, we went on holiday in OM to a hotel near Putsborough, at the south end of Woolacombe Bay, North Devon, a big steamer-trunk full of luggage strapped onto a folding grid at the back of the car. The hotel was a sort of pre-fabricated timber-frame and asbestos-board building facing out past Baggy Point to the sunset behind Lundy Island. Both Mary and I have been back since, and of course the hotel and the beach with it’s rocks is much smaller and less interesting than we remember, especially the rock that we considered to be “ours”, where Mother sat knitting or reading while we played either on our own around the rocks and pools or in games organised by the hotel. We always stayed there the last two weeks of the school summer holiday so it was getting towards the autumn equinox, and as the days went by the tides and waves became larger and more fearsome. In fact one year little Mary was bowled over by a breaker when no-one was looking, and after that Pop was very cautious about Mary and I going far into the sea, though Barbara, at least in the last year, was allowed to swim in the breaking waves even near the end of the holiday. She was by then a ‘big girl’. I also remember her arguing that she needed a proper costume, the woollen ones knitted by Mother or by Gran not being decent when wet. I didn’t yet appreciate how ignorant we were, or I was.

One year, associated with the Depression, probably 1934, all Civil Service employees including teachers had a cut in salary, and as a result we couldn’t afford a proper holiday so Pop bought a tent. We went and camped at Sutton-on-sea, Pop and Mother sleeping in the car, Barbara and Esme (who’d come with us as company for Barbara) in a small tent he’d borrowed from somewhere, and Mary and I in the big one. I don’t remember much about the holiday, though I’m pretty sure Mother wasn’t well by then. Another very adventurous year (1935?) our family and Uncle Sid’s went in the two family cars to Scotland, stopping at Moffat on the way up, staying in Oban, and stopping in Otterburn on the way back. At Oban there was no beach worth the name so we had to drive along the coast a mile or two. We also toured around elsewhere, and one very hot day climbed Ben Cruachan. I still remember looking down the other side into Glen Shiel. Another day we went to Siel Island, which involved crossing the “bridge over the Atlantic”; I remember it for my being very out-of-sorts that day for some reason. Then Uncle Sid began to develop some problem with one thumb, and there was a question about him being able to drive back. Later it developed into something like gout, starting in the thumb and slowly spreading; he never seemed to recover but died from it, or from heart failure, probably in about 1943.

Sometime in the early 30’s was also when Pop and Grandpa went off to Wales on their own to find Grandpa’s illegitimate half-brother, who’d lived and worked in the quarries in Stoney Stanton, but then had left to live in Wales somewhere, and the family had lost touch with him. Grandpa had somehow found him, and his now extended family, living near Llanbedrog, where there was a granite quarry with the kind of work available he’d been used to. We stayed with them a few times, maybe to save money again, and later still, probably 1940, Mary and I cycled the 150mls there from Hinckley on our own, putting up at B&B’s in Llangollen on the way there and Shrewsbury on the way back. Quite a feat for 15 and 13 year olds on the bikes of those days. A bit crazy too. Mary says it came about because I’d planned a cycling holiday of my own somewhere else, probably hostelling, on which I’d refused to take her though she’d wanted to come. Where-upon Pop insisted I change the destination and take her with me. I expect I was in a bad mood, at least to start with, having to drag this infant all the way to Wales, but I don’t recall it that way (Mary does). I do remember that on the way there we found going up Crackley Bank, a long, long uphill drag on the A5, extremely hard work, until a lorry stopped beside us, loaded our bikes onto the back, and took us to the top.

Actually my bike wasn’t bad. It was I think one I’d had new after Alan had had a new bike and Barbara one that was supposed to be exactly like his, a Saxon with three-speed gear and North Road Level handlebars. For some reason that I never understood (and never asked about, good heavens no) Barbara’s bike didn’t come with the right handlebars, though nothing was done about it. But as a result of her having a new bike, I had one a year or so later, having up to that time been riding a pavement bike that had been Barbara’s and after I’d finished with it was passed on to Mary. My new bike was an Elswick, cost all of £4.15.0 or so, had dropped handlebars but no three-speed (I didn’t want one for some reason, and usually rode it with quite a high fixed-gear). What happened to it in the end I don’t know, it may have rusted away in the garage during the war. Sometime before that OM had been replaced by a more modern Austin 12, which lasted us until well after the war. Pop had owned a motorcycle and sidecar early in his marriage, which he and Mother had used when they had only Barbara to cart around, to go to Robin Hood’s Bay on holiday, a long way from Hinckley on the roads of those days. They probably went there because of the interesting geology, another of Pop’s passions, and also the reason we’d been to Lyme Regis for an earlier holiday, to Criccieth, and later to Barmouth, though where they all fit in time I can’t work out. I’m told there’s a snap somewhere of Mother wearing her motor-bike gear — a long heavy leather coat and a back-to-front flat cap.

Somewhere around 1932 Pop moved on from teaching in the Senior Boys to be Principal of a newly built Technical College, taking with him some of the part-time staff from his Evening Institute, including as chief engineer Mr. Bailey (Daddy’s nick-name of Pop came from somewhere around that time: he and Mr.Bailey became known as “Pop and Uncle”, I believe after comic-strip characters). The teaching at the College was largely related to the town’s industries, which were boots-and-shoes and hosiery (machine-knitting, dyeing, sewing) with some general engineering. Pop was a keen and knowledgeable photographer, winning exhibition awards with his prints, both in Hinckley and more widely, and in the basement of the new building there was a photographic darkroom where I used to go and print some of his negatives, and eventually my own. Pop eventually bought one of the early Leica cameras, though he also used both plate and sheet-film. Much later, after he’d stopped using it, I borrowed the Leica from him for a period, and was most upset when he asked for it back to sell. It never occurred to me to offer to buy it off him; I wonder what he’d have said. There was also an extensive workshop in the basement, and at weekends Phil Bailey and I, under his Dad’s supervision, started constructing a 3½ins gauge steam loco. It never came to anything, but I learned something about working metal with machine-tools. Mr.Bailey also took us to a foundry somewhere, probably in Leicester, where parts were being cast in sand from molten steel for a College project; and also arranged a visit to Griff Colliery in the Warwickshire coalfield where we went down in the cage and then in a “tub” along a “road” to the coal face, which was about 2ft. high as I remember it, hands and knees stuff. Whatever would today’s Health and Safety Inspector say?

At some time Pop must have been a tennis player because I remember going with him, in his whites, to The Outwoods Tennis Club and from the veranda watching people playing. What I most clearly remember about it is a feeling of being in a foreign country surrounded by strange natives in stranger clothes and not understanding the language. Later I took over one of his old racquets, used it in fact for many years, though Pop never taught me to play; I think he did teach Barbara, and maybe she played there, though I can’t be sure. That club probably had something to do with the College, and further along the same lane there was a cricket field to which Mary and I sometimes went with Pop which was certainly connected with College; and while he talked we played in the long grass outside the boundary making tracks and tunnels in someone’s hay, no doubt ruining it. The College also had an active athletics club, with one or two star performers who Pop used to “follow”; I remember going with him to a meeting at Loughborough where, I think, all the Technical Colleges in the Midlands were competing together.

The Butt Lane Family

Pop’s sister, Auntie Em, the only daughter of Grandpa and Big Gran Powell, automatically became the one to look after her parents in their old age, in their semi in Butt Lane about half-a-mile from The Croft. Although the Powell family were much less well-off than the Kirkhams, Big Gran was still a very matriarchal figure and at least to me seemed physically large, whereas Grandpa seemed quite a small and insignificant man, though always smartly dressed. Big Gran was ‘lady of all she surveyed’, as they say, and Grandpa of little account, especially if he hadn’t polished his shoes or brushed his hat sufficiently carefully. I can see Gran now, sitting in an armchair holding court in the corner of the living room, in front of the only window so you couldn’t see her clearly against the light. It didn’t help that she, along with most other old people, always wore black clothes, or perhaps just very dark ones. Auntie Em was much younger than Pop or Uncle Edgar, Pop’s brother, but did eventually marry after Gran died (which I don’t remember, may never have been told of). She married Watson Green, who I’ve no doubt Auntie met through Chapel since all of our extended family (Mother’s too) attended the same chapel on a regular basis. Pop and Auntie Em and later Barbara sang in the choir (as Mother had done earlier). Pop eventually gave up being choirmaster after apparently falling out with a new minister over the choice of music, which the minister considered high-church stuff, though Pop’s rather too-rapid re-marriage after Mother’s death may have had something to do with it. Watson worked in, was eventually manager of a branch of the local Co-op. Uncle Edgar also worked for the Co-op, though not the same Branch.

So Watson settled into married life with Em in her Dad’s house, and just as Pop had his garden and greenhouses Watson had in his garden a pool where he bred fish and an aviary where he bred budgies, and also a greenhouse for chrysanthemums and tomatoes. In due course Auntie Em gave birth to a boy, ‘Little’ John, her confinement being in the local hospital where she developed sores on her legs from which one leg never recovered. Mary and I seemed to spend a lot of time at Big Gran’s, later Auntie Em’s. Partly they were important in continuing to support us, as Em had supported Mother’s move from the centre of town to the outskirts, and during the years when Pop was occupied either in his career, though he’d never had used the term, or in his garden. She had once told Auntie Em that she might as well never have married.

I can’t remember Barbara being with us on our visits to Butt Lane, though she must have been sometimes. Or perhaps our visits were mostly on Sundays when she would have been involved with the chapel choir. Tea at Auntie Em’s on Sundays always meant ‘Chocolate Juniors’ (miniature swiss-rolls), and dinner meant ginger beer in ‘barrel’ glasses, the beer being delivered each week in a large stone jar. The kitchen at Butt Lane had a coal range and a large shallow brown stone sink, with cold water brought up from a well by an ancient manual pump. Eventually, though only after Grandpa died, the range was replaced by a more modern fire with a back-boiler, giving them a sink with hot-water on tap for the first time. Until then there’d been no bathroom, just a tin bath on the floor in front of the fire in the living room (if there was a fire), filled from kettles. But with the changes in the kitchen came changes upstairs, with a bathroom and inside loo. Luxury. Their front room or parlour was only used at Christmas or for visitors, if any; on it’s hearth were two large conch shells, in which Mary and I used to listen to for ‘sound of the sea’. The back or living room had a clock on the sideboard with variable chimes, perhaps a wedding present. At ‘The Croft’ we had neither clock with chimes, only one with a striker, nor a sideboard. There was also an upright piano, and for Grandpa’s papers a roll-top desk which Mary and I liked sliding the top up and down — the way it ran along curved tracks to disappear somewhere inside seemed like magic; Pop’s study only had a flat desk. Grandpa was secretary of the local branch of a benevolent (or insurance) society, the Manchester Oddfellows.

Christmas Day, at least until Mother became ill, we had dinner at home but tea at Butt Lane. As I recall it, after breakfast (stockings hung on the end of the bed and presents on the floor having been opened earlier) Pop took us children out for a long walk while Mother and Little Gran prepared our Christmas dinner (chicken, never turkey). Then a walk to Butt Lane for tea followed by games round the large table. After Mother became ill we children had Christmas dinner at Butt Lane too, Mary and I with cousin Jack sitting at a little table in the corner separate from the grown-ups gathered round the big table, our Christmas pudding helpings invariably having thrup’ny bits hidden inside. In that corner we were right beside the under-stairs larder where the ginger-beer jar stood, keeping cool on the quarry-tiled floor.

Boxing Day we went to Auntie Pems. We ate in one enormous room, and then went across the spacious hall, past a grandmother clock standing underneath the equally grand staircase to play games in a slightly smaller room. Both rooms had big bay-windows with heavy curtains across the bays, behind which we played with balloons, and also played dressing-up games. I seem now to be aware of slight reluctance on the part of the three men, Pop and the two Kirkham Uncles, Herbert and Sid, sitting round the fire full of dinner, to get too closely involved in any of our games, though they laughed about their reluctance. I remember too that sometimes the games got a bit complicated for me, so that then I was reluctant too. I don’t remember Reg and Muriel being there, perhaps they were already “out”; nor Betty, Esme’s older sister. The atmosphere of the rooms in that house was all a bit dream-like, but at the same time intimidating; Sid and Pem lived a rather hung-over Edwardian life-style, not at all like the life we were growing-up into. The Puffers would I’m sure have been true-blue, while Pop was a lifelong red. Well, maybe pink.

Sometime in the thirties Moggy had appeared. She was one of two part-time teachers at the Technical College, Miss Hodgkin and Miss Beddingfield. They were definitely not Hinckley, travelling in from near Leicester in their little cars to teach one day a week. Miss Beddingfield taught office subjects and Miss Hodgkin sewing, embroidery, dress-making and tailoring. Several summers in the thirties the College organised group holiday trips to the mountains of southern Germany or of Switzerland, on which Pop usually went, and these two teachers went too. Mother went once, and in the snaps I’ve seen appears a bit separated, being neither staff nor student. In some Pop appears wearing a beret and looking quite one of the boys. In those years there was a deal of contact between the Hinckley factories and German machinery suppliers because that was where the best machines were being made, so there were always engineers from the manufacturers visiting factories somewhere in the town and advising the College on what it should install for training. And according to German wartime radio (Lord Hawhaw), it was as a result of the hospitality those engineers received that Hinckley avoided being bombed, except by accident (a likely story).

But to get back to the teachers, they and Pop’s secretary, Kathy Briers, a typical Hinckley girl, appear by all accounts to have set their caps at Pop, or he at them. Maybe by that time it was becoming obvious, to them all as well as to others, that Mother was not likely to live long. It wasn’t obvious to me, would never have crossed my mind. Both teachers having classes on Thursday afternoons and evenings, with free time between, Pop invited them home for tea. I believe they’d already have met Mother on her German trip. I have only one image of such a teatime. I’ve no idea if there were more. Even to me Mother seemed embarrassed and awkward about it, her twitching getting worse, while Pop was obviously anxious, sitting clicking his teeth when anything went wrong, probably involving Little Gran, though in memory I don’t see her. None of us was used to outsiders at table, or elsewhere, and these strange women with their posh accents and manners were definitely outsiders. Barbara was probably more anxious than I was, more aware of what was at stake.

There’s a gap here because I don’t know the course of Mother’s illness, nor quite what happened at it’s end, but one Sunday morning in June 1936 after Mary and I had gone off to Sunday School, presumably having gone into Mother’s bedroom to say goodbye, as we always did, and leaving Pop and Barbara getting ready to go to Chapel and join the choir, Pop suddenly discovered that Mother had died. He got a message to Chapel, I expect by Barbara, so that after Sunday School had finished Mary and I went into morning service to sit with Grandpa in his pew, and to go with him afterwards to Butt Lane for dinner as well as tea. Then in the afternoon, instead of going back to Sunday School as we usually did, Grandpa took us along the lane to view progress on Uncle Edgar and Auntie Gert’s new house, further down Butt Lane, which we’d seen at various stages before, and on the way back he told us that Mother had died. He was in tears; Mary too; at the time it didn’t really register for me. We stayed at Auntie Em’s for the whole of that week, going to school as normal every day except Wednesday morning when the funeral was held. Barbara attended the funeral, Mary and I didn’t; that was the way Pop wanted it, no doubt to avoid any kind of emotional scene to which he wouldn’t have known how to react.

That week he was unusually busy at College because of having to deal with a major inspection in the form of a team of H.M.Inspectors doing their rounds to see if his efforts to get the College up and running measured up to,their standards. Perhaps that was partly why neither he nor Barbara came to see Mary and me the whole of the week, so in a way it meant we lost father, mother, elder sister and Little Gran in one go. No doubt they didn’t have time, what with sorting out the house, arranging the funeral and arranging for Little Gran to move into her son Sid’s house; and Pop at least wouldn’t have known what to say or to do. A very inexpressive man, though far from unemotional, and being his son, I didn’t know how to react either. I remember on the Monday morning sitting in school assembly as usual and hearing the whisper of a boy behind me, before being shushed by his neighbour, did you know Powell’s mother died. I also remember Mary and I sharing the back bedroom at Auntie Em’s and talking to each other in bed, and my saying, of all things, that “it wasn’t our fault”. Whatever did I mean? Nevertheless Pop managed to find time to see Miss Hodgkin, driving over to Leicester to do so and taking Barbara with him, presumably as chaperone. By this time Miss Beddingfield and Kathy Briers had dropped out of the race (if there was a race). Kath was still his secretary, and stayed so till he retired. It was always clear that there remained some tension between her and Moggy.

Mary and I returned home the next weekend, but how we lived for the next year or so I’ve no idea. We had more hours per day of our “daily help”, a Mrs.Hooper, but there was really no one looking after us kids unless it was Barbara, who in effect became first lady. Mother’s name was never mentioned from the day she died, except by Auntie Em, not by anyone, not until years later, and never by Pop; she might never have existed. Little Gran still lived with us at first but as soon as it could be arranged went up the road to live with Uncle Sid and Auntie Pem. I also remember a trip to Llanbedrog during that period, at the end of which Aunt Mary (Grandpa’s half-niece) was in tears as we left, which I, taking my cue from Pop this time, was very embarrassed by. I also remember discovering a possible reason behind the trip, and also behind Pop’s clearly evident good humour during the drive there, when on a couple of occasions I suddenly came on him in a clinch with Beth-Ann, once among the sand-dunes and once in the bedroom I shared with him. Beth-Ann was Aunt Mary’s daughter, and so grand-daughter of Grandpa’s half-brother, a girl probably in her early twenties. No doubt at the time she saw herself as suffering the fate common to youngest daughters, like Auntie Em, of having to stay home and look after aging parents, and was in the process of searching for a way out. Eventually she ran away, during the war, apparently turning up out of the blue at Butt Lane to claim asylum of Auntie Em, and in due course married an airman she’d met at an RAF camp in Pwllelhi, what had been Butlins. After the war they settled somewhere in Lincolnshire. Pop visited them years later.

About two years after Mother’s death, while walking with us into the town to Chapel one Sunday morning, Pop told Mary and I that he and Miss Hodgkin were to be married. I was struck dumb. I’d no expectation of it, though I understood later that Barbara had. She was concerned about how we were going to refer to this interloper in our midst, and had talked to Alan about it. She’d no intention of calling her Aunt, and certainly not Mother, so a nickname was derived, perhaps by Alan, from her initials of MGH, and from then on we called her Moggy. The wedding as I recall it was to happen within a few weeks (though others’ memories differ), and though I’m not sure where they were married it was at a church somewhere in Chelsea, with a reception held afterwards at the Onslow Court Hotel. Mary cried throughout. Afterwards she and I stayed with Enid for a week, Moggy’s sister, near Eastbourne. Then Mrs.Hooper moved out and Moggy moved in, though I’ve no memory of the transition, or of how rapidly changes began to be made. It was then that a phone was installed, which from the start I found an intimidating device, and avoided any contact with the thing as much as possible. Most of the calls I took and probably all those I made were from or to Pop; it was said of him that he didn’t need a phone, you could hear his voice quite clearly from half-a-mile away without it, so with the phone you had to remember to hold the ear-piece several inches from your ear or risk permanent deafness whenever he was on the line.

Before they were married we’d been taken to Moggy’s home in Kirby Muxloe, near Leicester, to be introduced to her parents; Pop had visited several times already of course. I’m told our visit was on Christmas Day, after Pop had taken us three children out in the car to Derbyshire walking, probably along the Manifold valley which was one of his favourite walks. On the way back home it was suddenly sprung on us that we were going to Kirby Muxloe for Christmas dinner. Pop had probably been agonising for days over how to tell us, so it got left to the last possible moment, perhaps to avoid both him and us worrying about it. On first acquaintance Moggy’s father seemed a bit remote in his black suit and starched collar, while her mother seemed a charming Edwardian lady; they were in fact always very nice to us, though we were totally out of our depths (which spoon do I use now?). I’m not sure whether her father had then retired or not, but his business, which had been very profitable, was in the process of failing, and did eventually fail. Moggy’s mother, Mrs.Hodgkin, in spite of how she appeared to strangers, was a gorgon to her own brood, against which her husband eventually rebelled with violence and went for her with a carving knife (or so we were told). She promptly had him confined to an institution, where he later died. Someone else whose name was never mentioned, which was also true of Moggy’s eldest sister, Janet, who’d left the family home years before, as soon as she’d been able to support herself. She’d never managed to do anything right for her mother, while Moggy, the second born, grew up as Mother’s Little Darling. Many years later Moggy tracked down her big sister, with Pop’s help, which allowed Enid (the third sister of whom more anon) to make friendly overtures, in response to which Janet made it clear that she’d no wish to be found.

In addition to the three sisters (as in Chekov, or perhaps Macbeth) there was a much younger brother, John (around 8yrs younger I think). He’d grown up with four combative women above him and minimal fraternal support from his father, and on leaving school at 15 had started work in his father’s business. But when this was clearly going to fail he left, in 1935, to join the Navy, training as a Sick-Berth Attendant, and when I first heard of him, which wasn’t for some time, was serving on a mine-sweeper in the North Sea, HMS Hebe. At some stage we were also introduced to Mrs.Hodgkin’s sisters, known as “the Camberley Aunts”, (‘shown off to’ would be nearer the mark). There was also a black-sheep brother, Uncle Harry, whom none of us ever met. Apparently he lived with his house-keeper, and guess what — his name was never to be mentioned either.

Barbara didn’t really want anything to do with Moggy, who had in a sense supplanted her, almost driven her into the wilderness: from being favourite daughter and first lady to being superfluous in two short steps. Mary on the other hand seemed to get on with Moggy alright, although she was soon spending even more time than before at Auntie Em’s. But while Barbara was in any case at the awkward teen-age when, quite apart from having her nose put out of joint, no oldie is good for anything much, Moggy was able to make some contact with Mary through her being that much younger. I on the other hand was awkward as hell to her, her little brother all over again, so we did not get on. Pop’s attitude to our arguments seemed strange to me, in being primarily an effort to avoid taking sides or holding an opinion, let alone doing anything about it. Unfortunately I also became rather estranged from Mary sometime during this period. This was no doubt partly inevitable since girls mature at a different rate from boys, but was made worse by her developing closer links with Butt Lane, from where I began to feel excluded. So far as I was concerned it was made a great deal worse when one weekend Em and Watson with their young son John took Mary with them on a trip to London. Much later, after it had become clear how upset I’d been at Mary being so obviously preferred, Auntie Em said they couldn’t possibly have coped with both of us, but felt they needed somebody to help Em with John.

One of the jobs in Pop’s garden that I didn’t mention earlier was cutting and delivering flowers for sale. He can’t have needed the money, which would have been very little anyway, so it must have been a hobby or to help one the family-owned shops that took them, who he knew from Chapel. Sweet-peas I remember, and pyrethrums. The shop, down in the town, was run by two sisters, and had an associated market garden two or three miles out of town that had lots of heated greenhouses growing cucumbers, tomatoes and goodness knows what else for the shop. It had a stream running beside the plot that had been dammed up to form a reservoir of water, which was pumped to all the greenhouses, and a boiler-room that supplied steam to heat them. The garden was run by their brother Steve, whose office was over the boiler-room, nice and warm, sometimes too warm, where he also ate, but except in the depths of winter he slept in a ex-Army bell-tent in an adjacent field. Being way out of town the whole was guarded by a dog, an Alsatian, whose chain was secured to a ring running on a long wire lying along the ground; I remember when the dog ran about, the stretched chain made a very special sound, a cross between a chime and a shriek. Somehow or other Phil Bailey and I got invited to Steve’s market-garden one school holiday, first to work and eventually to sleep over in the bell-tent, while Steve moved into the office. We would probably have been fourteen or fifteen. I don’t remember doing all that much work around the place, though I do remember fetching his milk from a nearby farm, but the arrangement went on for quite a few weeks, even extending into the next school term because I remember doing my homework in the office and cycling to and from school. I remember our breakfast eggs being boiled in a little pan in one of the greenhouse heating boilers, perched on a shovel having a handle long enough to reach right inside the glowing firebox. It was all a bit queer, and that was the trouble; he was gay, or that’s my interpretation now of the situation then, so that although Pop had agreed to the arrangement I was told later that no one was very happy about it. Except Phil and me. Because he was good fun, much better fun than our families; except just occasionally when he would suddenly get angry for no reason at all that we could make out, coming out to the tent for instance at some unearthly hour of the morning saying it was time we were up and tipping us roughly out of our beds, which were no more than planks set-up on boxes. I had no notion of homosexuality at the time, how could I have had, unless someone had told me about it, and no-one was going to do that.

Holidays and the War

From 1936 to 39 there were school camps during the Whitsuntide holidays (May half-term) for the boys of the upper Forms at the Grammar School. The 1936 camp was near Dolgellau, in a flat field having a steep bank all along one side and a stream/river along the other. There was a deep pool in the river a hundred yards or so upstream where we all had to go for a dip every morning; exceedingly cold, no costumes allowed, neither for us nor the masters, which was quite a shock. Often when nothing else had been arranged I remember we played a kind of football on the steep bank, with the tent-leaders ranged along the top and the rest of us trying to kick the ball up and past them. No rules, great fun. I also remember one day we had to collect stinging-nettle tops to be used as a green-vegetable at dinner; that was not fun, either the collecting or the eating. One day we walked up Cader Idris, and the Head was surprised I kept up, being such a little tich. Both in 1937 and 1939 the camp was a mile or so up a coombe across the estuary from Salcombe in Devon. The two years are confused in memory, but during one of them most of us went on a trip down the estuary in launches to see the wreck of the square-rigged barque Herzogen Cecile lying ashore in a cove at the entrance. The previous winter, near the end of the grain race from Australia, she’d been holed on an outlying rock in fog and had to be beached in this cove, and at the time we were there had not yet broken up. I remember that as our boats crossed the bar to reach the cove the waves were really steep and exciting, so that from one boat we sometimes had a view of the underside of the others. The second of those two years I was recovering from some illness or other on the Saturday that everyone else travelled to camp (always by train of course), and had to follow on my own on the Monday, having to change trains at Birmingham, then to change railways at Bristol (LMSR to GWR), to be finally met at journey’s end in Salcombe (which still had a station) by two boys from camp. They skived off at once, knowing that I’d been there before and so could find my own way across the ferry and to the site. That year I and another boy, Jack Orton, shared the leadership of a tent, I presume because neither of us was considered competent on our own. In the intervening year, 1938, the camp had been on the edge of Exmoor in a valley inland from Porlock. I remember that several times that year I went off walking on my own, up towards Dunkery Beacon, which surely must have been against the rules but was apparently tolerated. On a track in a plantation on one of these walks I almost came face to face with a deer, to our mutual surprise, though no one back at the camp believed me when I told them. I also saw a snake of some kind, probably a grass snake, sunning itself on the path.

Before the war there were three family holidays on which Moggy accompanied us. One was a return to Putsborough, which with the changes in the family and the hotel was a mistake. That was Easter 1937, which being before they were married involved, I’m told, Mrs. Hodgkin coming along as chaperone, though I don’t remember her there. Later that same year we all went hostelling in the Lake District, including Alan. That was not a great success either, and not only because of lousy weather. We started from Grasmere and on the first day went north over Hellvelyn to Keswick: the hell of a first day, even though we caught a bus for the last few miles into the town. Later on in the week, about halfway round our circuit, we stayed at Blacksail, a very isolated little hostel that really took our fancy; a bit like the Welsh cottage we eventually had but twice the size. The following day we had to cross two passes to get to Eskdale, and going over the first one to Wasdale Head we met three cyclists coming down the path carrying their bikes, a rare form of mountain-biking, one that in those days was probably picked up from the Hitler Youth.

The following year, 1939, Pop and Moggy rented a self-catering cottage in Mount Hawke near St. Agnes, Cornwall, most of us travelling in the Austin and Alan driving Barbara there separately in his little car, coming from Haywards Heath where he was working and they were planning to live when married. Moggy’s sister Enid and her husband Stanley were also staying in the area, no doubt to provide moral support. The weather for that holiday was better, so it should have been a better holiday, but it wasn’t. Barbara and Moggy were at loggerheads, with Moggy having terrible migraines and the risk of fainting fits as a result, while I was in the throes of teenage agonies so was usually out of sorts to say the least. I remember one exciting day though. We were in the Perranporth sand-dunes playing tin-ay-aki (it’s a bit like leevo! — ask me later) and Stanley must have been “on” but had strayed too far from the tin, so that when Mary came racing down the dune and he raced back to touch it first they collided head-on and she broke her best tooth on his skull. End of game. Also end of holiday, because it was the end of August 1939 and we had to cut it short and get home to the wars: Pop to get back to College, Barbara to rejoin Alan, who was in the Territorial Army and due to be called up at once, and the rest of us to Hinckley where evacuees would soon be descending on us.

On leaving school in 1935 Alan had gone into local government as a trainee civil engineer, while continuing to study so as to get his chartered engineer ‘articles’. His family had moved to Hinckley in early 1934 from, I think, Belper, his father being another factory owner. His mother had died, and his father brought along his house-keeper as partner. Alan, his younger brother, Reg, and a still-younger sister Gwen, about my age, all started school in 1934, Gwen in my class. I think she sat next to Connie Simmonds. After a year or so, having lost interest in Connie, I took a shine to Gwen, apparently much to everyone’s amusement since Barbara was already linking up with Alan. We used to pass notes in class (whatever did we say?) but that was about all, and for me it was another relationship (if it could be called one) that went out “with a whimper”. Gwen and I re-met 55-plus years later at Barbara and Alan’s Golden Wedding, when she turned up all the way from Australia not all that much changed (apart from the usual ones).

Alan’s first job had been at Market Bosworth, to which he travelled by motorbike until a car came round a corner on the wrong side of the road leaving Alan little choice but to go over the car’s bonnet and into a hedge, which at least softened his landing, though having been lucky once he thought afterwards he’d better buy a car. Then in 1938 or 39, just before the start of the war, he moved to Haywards Heath, Sussex, still in local government engineering, and he and Barbara began the routine of setting up house there preparatory to getting married. They rented a house on a housing association estate, very progressive, and were starting to furnish it when Alan was called up and they got married at a couple of days notice by special licence. I suspect Barbara had no intention of taking the risk of getting trapped for the duration in Moggy’s house, in fact as Alan didn’t go far for a few months Barbara lodged near his camp wherever it might be, until he went to France in spring 1940, when she occupied the house they’d been preparing.

Back at Hinckley we had evacuees from Birmingham dumped on us almost as soon as we arrived home from Cornwall, pupils of Saltley Grammar School with whom we were to share our school buildings, one school to use them in the mornings, the other afternoons. Our particular evacuees were two boys named Bill and Ted, of about Mary’s and my ages, totally different from one-another. It seems to me in memory that we all got on quite well, the four of us doing our homework together round the breakfast-room table, then playing Monopoly or cards or doing jigsaws or something; but that may all have been blindness on my part. There was no choice about having evacuees, one’s house was assessed for size and was assigned either one, two or more bodies, though you could within limits choose age and sex. Phil Bailey’s folks chose to have a girl and received Barbara Luker, a red-head, auburn really, lovely hair, while a blonde friend of hers, Hilda Watkins, went to the house next-door which had no children, a bit hard on all concerned. We didn’t actually spend much time with these girls, it just seems like it in retrospect. Delayed wishful thinking. I remember a few evenings round Bailey’s sitting-room fire gossiping with them, Hilda sniffing into a handkerchief apparently with a bad cold. I had a crush on Hilda for quite a while, but she soon got wildly homesick, hence the sniffing I expect, not a cold at all, so when it seemed clear that there weren’t going to be any immediate air-raids Hilda, together with a growing number of others, returned home to Brum, despite there being no school to attend there. In fact so many drifted back over the next month or two that they had to reopen the school in Birmingham and by Christmas the whole evacuation plan had collapsed. A few children stayed on, and in the autumn of 1940 when raids did start in earnest more came back, this time to be crammed into the one school day. Hilda didn’t return, though Barbara Luker did, again to Phil Bailey’s house. In the interim Phil and I had once been over to Birmingham on our bikes to take tea at the Luker home, at which I found Hilda’s presence rather a strain. Silly me.

By the time of the war Little Gran had begun to get a bit senile, wandering out of Clovelly, the Kirkham house, over to ours, forgetting where she lived, or taking it into her head to go off into town, or to the cemetery. Somehow or other she managed to take over Bill, one of our evacuees, getting him to shepherd her about. That may have had something to do with Bill’s being keen on Mary, seeing helping Gran as a way of getting (or keeping) in her good books; but it would have been difficult for him to refuse anyway. He was a nice lad in many ways like that. Much later, sometime after the evacuees had gone back so it might have been during the summer of 1941, I remember harvesting on a farm near Henley-in-Arden with either one or both boys. Perhaps it was the farm of someone’s relatives, Ted’s probably, though I don’t know quite how it came about. But it’s extremely hazy. In 1939–40 I was in Lower Science Sixth so must have been in the Upper Sixth by the time of the return, though neither Bill nor Ted returned. I don’t think we had any evacuees in our form that year, but Mary in Lower Arts Sixth had several. They included one guy who was always known as Pooh, because his surname was Winn, but at the time I’d never heard of Winnie-the-Pooh. Another was Archie Lusk, who Mary went out with quite a few times, though she says she was only second best as he was keen on another girl, a mate of Dorothy Hirst, who I knocked off her bike one day while out learning to drive. I was driving along Station Road when this girl, who’d borrowed someone else’s bike, not knowing how poor the brakes were, came down a side road, couldn’t stop and crashed into the near side of our car. She wasn’t hurt, but the bike’s front wheel was. I think it was as much of a shock for Pop, my supervisor, as for her, let alone for me; I can see the scared look on the girl’s face now, looking across at me as she and the bike went over. I can also hear Pop shouting at me, “Stop it then!” The car, that is; because although I’d turned the car away from the impact I’d somehow forgotten to put on the handbrake, so we began drifting on a bit. I never enquired of her afterwards if she was alright, or what had happened to the bike. Partly I was so embarrassed at having knocked the girl over, but it was also yet another occasion on which I didn’t seem to inhabit the same world as others.

Sometime during the war we had London evacuees as well, a mother and two little girls from the East End, probably in late 1941 and so after I’d gone to College (though returning home in vacations). They were assigned one room in the house but ate all meals with us, otherwise living their own lives in our midst. It was more or less of a disaster, their room getting to stink like a pigsty. Father being away at the wars, though he did visit once, mother took to going out in the evenings to live it up with all and sundry in pub and club. I don’t know how long they stayed, but the room needed fumigating after they’d gone. We only had one stick of bombs anywhere near us throughout the whole of the war, probably in 1941, falling to earth about 200yds away. I expect the ‘plane was supposed to be dropping them on Coventry, and having got driven off by the ack-ack decided to drop them where they could see a road. All I remember is the shriek they made on the way down and Moggy gathering up the cat in her arms and diving into the cupboard under the stairs (known as “the glory hole”) as the house and the windows shook. One bomb in the stick didn’t explode at once but went off about 7am the next morning, a delayed-action that was quite common. I was still in bed asleep when it did go off, waking me up. All the other houses locally had been evacuated, but either no one had told us or more likely Pop had decided that he at any rate wasn’t going anywhere, so we all had to sit tight with him. The morning after air-raids I’d taken to cycling over to Coventry or to Birmingham to look around, partly because I was fascinated by the scenes of destruction from the bombs, and partly being still fascinated by that blonde Hilda. I did manage just once, quite early on, to walk home with her from school, and when we reached her home she invited me in, but I wouldn’t go. Oh dear. Silly boy.

I didn’t really have any special friends in the Sixth, for the most part we all mucked in. Phil Bailey and Bill Tracey had left school as soon as they reached 16 (or was it 15?) to go out to work. The same year, because I’d failed French in School Certificate I had to stay down a year and do the whole lot again; but having been under age all the way up the school repeating a year was undoubtedly a good thing. Phil, Bill and I had always done a lot of cycling together, all over the Midlands, to say nothing of interminably riding round and round the garden paths. So after they left to go to work I naturally continued on my own or with others. I had a bet with one boy, Digger Knight I think, that it was possible to cycle to Derwent and back in a day, about 150mls total. Unfortunately the day we tried it together was very hot, and knowing nothing about dehydration we failed miserably, getting about halfway there before having to lie in the shade of a bridge to pass out and recover. He wouldn’t try again, so I went on my own, but as I took just over 12hrs he said I’d failed and wouldn’t pay up. I’d also started hostelling on my own, Derwent Hall being amongst the hostels I visited, just before it was torn down to disappear under the waters of the new Ladybower Reservoir (and to reappear a couple of times in recent years during droughts). Another boy I remember was Dawson, who was an absolutely brilliant chemist; his attitude to the subject gave me my first glimpse of what it might be like to be able to treat the whole thing as an extremely serious game. Eventually (I’m told) he became a Fellow of a Cambridge College and a member of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences.

One thing I remember from wartime with particular nostalgia was the brilliant night skies that resulted from the blackout, especially in winter, the stars being much clearer then than later, even in such remote spots as our Welsh cottage. It’s almost impossible now to imagine the way they seemed to stick out on stalks against the jet-black background. As a result I became really keen on star-gazing, buying bits and pieces to make telescopes with which to look at Saturn’s rings, Jupiter’s moons, various double-stars, variable stars and such nebulae as were visible, getting thoroughly frozen in the winters. I also got hold of a book describing how to build a spectro-helioscope in your own backyard with which to study the Sun. It sounded easy, given access to a workshop for a few little things, which I did have in the Technical College basement. I never built it of course. I wasn’t practical enough, or grown up enough. Also I couldn’t have faced the arguing with Pop that would have been involved in getting his support to take over a piece of his garden, but for whatever reason it stayed a dream.

After my last year at school, 1940–1, I was aiming to go to Imperial College to study physics. I don’t know why or how that had been picked as my destination, I expect it was the Headmaster’s idea, but it would have been much more sensible to have gone to Birmingham. I even took Imperial’s special scholarship examination, for which I’d had no preparation whatever and so failed miserably. Sometime over the summer I had a letter from the College saying the physics course was full, and offering me instead a place in electrical engineering. So that’s where I went and what I did. Even at that late date it might have been better to try and swop my entry to Birmingham, but I don’t recall there being any discussion of the matter, though there may have been. It seems now like a typical case of leaving other people to organise the world around me, and after the event doing my best to cope with whatever happened, because otherwise nothing at all would happen.

Over the Christmas of that last year at school there was a lot of partying, which was probably a bit unusual for the time. It was partly in people’s homes but sometimes involved the hiring of a hall where we could dance to a record-player and pretend to be grown-up. The school and some parents (of the girls’ mainly) were a bit worried by it all and so eventually it stopped, or was stopped. For me it was foreign territory. I didn’t know what was going on or what I was expected of me, and though I knew all about having crushes I wasn’t about to grow-up and do anything about it. However I did learn to dance, my little sister (who was in many ways much older than me) being my teacher. She admitted later that I was quite good, even though I wouldn’t ever be seen dancing with her in public.

During the war Pop’s College changed quite a lot, partly because the needs of the town’s factories changed, with less need for training in hosiery and boot-and-shoe manufacture and more in engineering for munitions work, but also because the College gradually got drawn into actually producing things as a sub-contractor to munitions factories in Coventry. I remember seeing the delivery of a fancy new grinding machine said to produce parts to fantastically fine tolerances. Pop also commanded a local Air Training Corps Squadron based at the College (Sqr.Ldr.Powell no less), going off in his uniform to parade with them every Sunday and occasionally at other times too. Moggy for her part ran a canteen in a house adjacent to the College, taken over for the use of staff and students (so we weren’t too short of rations). But by that time I’d left home to attend Imperial College, in the autumn of 1941, aged 3mths short of 18.

College and Farnborough

Sometime in the first winter of the war Alan had gone over to France and so in 1940 had to get back through Dunkirk, which he did by the skin of his teeth and by driving off in someone else’s car. Following regrouping he was seconded to the Indian Army and sailed out there on a troopship via South Africa to spend 3yrs as an instructor in an Indian Army OCTU, teaching about the building of camps, parade grounds, bridges and air-strips (which he followed up later in Canada by building super-market car-parks and sewers), together with demolition of same if the Japs got too close. Barbara had moved into their house in Franklands Village, and in due course gave birth to a daughter, Helen; and although while at College I’d first lodged in a guest house in South Kensington, near the bottom end of Queens Gate (which Pop had travelled up to find — again I’d had no part in it’s selection), early in 1942 I left there and moved out to stay with Barbara. So for the rest of my time in London I travelled up and down by train from Haywards Heath every day, using Alan’s bike to ride to and from the station, which was quite a distance away. I travelled week-ends as well as weekdays because I’d taken up rowing on Saturdays and had to do Home Guard duty on Sundays: drill and weapons training inside in the morning, and mock patrols throwing thunder-flashes at each other around Hyde Park and in the squares and avenues of South Kensington in the afternoon. Just once we went to Bisley to fire live ammunition and throw live grenades. Sometime during that period my unit was involved in a parade of all London units during which we marched round the West End to reach a final saluting base in Park Lane, at which the King, George VI, took the salute. I thought he looked like an over-made-up actor; well I suppose he had to be an actor, but there was no call for such heavy make-up.

Because the 3yr degree course at College had been crammed into 2yrs I was only there for the years 1941–3. I can’t say that I enjoyed it much, except for the rowing, whether at Putney or elsewhere when we raced as for instance in regattas at Reading, Marlow and even Henley (though it wasn’t the Royal, being wartime). It was nice to find I was good at something, getting into the 2nd Eight but being neither strong enough nor experienced enough for the 1st (it was full of public-school boys who’d rowed for years). Most of the few friends I made also travelled to college every day, but from their homes in the London suburbs, so apart from the fact that that year there were only two girls in all of the engineering courses put together, College turned out to be a continuation of school, not at all my idea of being at university (whatever that might be like — really I had no idea whatever!).

During the summer vacation of 1942 in the middle of my course I had like everyone else to do war-work, and I went to GEC’s switchgear testing station in Birmingham; I lodged with Uncle Herbert and Auntie Eva, cycling about a third of the way round Birmingham each day and then home to Hinckley most weekends. I didn’t much enjoy my stay with them, I was clearly supposed to be part of a family, only it wasn’t a family, or not one I recognised as such — though what did I know. One thing I remember: I had a record (a 78) of Stokowski’s arrangement for orchestra of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor with which Uncle was totally disgusted, and with me for having bought such an abomination. Being no mean organist himself he considered it almost insulting to have the thing in the house, but my rudimentary musical taste at the time didn’t allow me to appreciate such things. I saw a little of Archie Lusk while I was there. He didn’t live far away, and I learned a lot about jazz from him (since forgotten). His call-up had been delayed because of a weak eye. The job I did at GEC was quite interesting, and the folk I worked with there were unlike anyone I’d had contact with before, which was good for me. That summer, 1942, there were only a few air-raid warnings and no bombs anywhere near.

In my second College year all students went before a board (the chairman of which I later realised was C.P.Snow) to decide what we wanted or were to be assigned to do for the war-effort following our finals. I said I wanted to join the Army, the Royal Corps of Signals in fact, so after final exams I went on a Selection Course involving the usual sort of team games, assault courses and interviews. But I can’t have done or said the right thing at some stage because they decided I was a “back-room boy” and directed me to the Radio Dept. of RAE, Farnborough. Probably the decision was a result of my first brush with a psychiatrist, because during my interview with him he pointed out that on one form I appeared to be muddled as to whether it was my mother or my father who’d died. Before that however I’d been Youth Hostelling up the Thames valley with a rowing friend from College, during which he went off on a Royal Navy board (which I later learned he’d passed), while at home I’d often cycled to Leicester to go out on the river there with the Leicester Rowing Club, sometimes coaching one of their eights, which I really enjoyed, largely because they obviously enjoyed it too.

Mary was still at school until 1943, then went to University College London to do French. The College was evacuated to Bangor, her digs were miles along the coast at Llanfairfechan. She rapidly decided she hated the whole thing, but stuck it for one year, then gave in and joined the ATS to train as a driver. After initial training, which everyone had to do, she went to the driver training unit at Camberley, and as by that time I’d left College and gone to Farnborough she wasn’t far away. We did meet a few times, but it wasn’t a great success. This was partly because we had no transport and her camp was out of town (excuses, excuses), partly because in war-time the mixing of services and civvies was a big no-no, but mainly because as an organiser of anything I’ve never even made the starting line. Incidentally who should be on the course following hers but Princess Elizabeth; and who should be on her course own but Hilda Watkins, the Saltley blonde (Bordesley Green actually) who I’d been more than a bit gone on a few years before. I did of course do nothing about it. Mary did at one point meet one of my girl-friends at Farnborough, the three of us meeting in a pub in Aldershot for some reason) and thought the girl terrible (she was too). I had a much nicer one a bit later, another Mary, who unfortunately but understandably went off me, me still being so impossible. I also spent occasional weekends at Haywards Heath with Barbara, where I must have been a bit of a nuisance without realising it by getting in the way of her affair with Jack Leblanc, although I did act as baby-sitter for them. One such night, Helen aged 3 or 4yrs made a mess in the bed, which I duly cleared up: my education had begun. I think I met Jack once, an extraordinarily smart Canadian Army Sergeant (New Brunswick Rangers), the polish of his boots and the creases in his trousers having to be seen to be believed. Mary after completing her training had two postings in the UK during the war, to Oxford and then to Leeds, mostly driving officers’ staff cars about, after which, when the war was over, she went with the Army to Cairo for a year, still driving staff cars.

At Farnborough I’d been assigned to the section that had for several years been associated with the development of “Queen Bee”, a radio controlled “Moth” acting as air-tug to a drogue used for target practice. At the time there was a lot of rivalry between that section and a USAAF group at Wright Field who had been pursuing the same objective by a different route. Both groups had also begun getting into radio controlled weapons and automatic aircraft navigation and landing, all of which should have been, and no doubt was, very interesting; but it all went rather far over my head, and I didn’t begin to understand what was involved until many years later. Also on the same project was a guy who used to go up to Manchester to try and work out on a very early computer the stability equations for an automatically controlled aircraft. At the time nobody really understood system stability in the abstract, the maths being rather fancy; it wasn’t until about 1970 that I began to learn about it for an entirely different purpose, by which time it was pretty old-hat. The Manchester computer was always said to be an integrating machine, but we all knew it was electronic and top secret. During that period and in the course of my training and in the testing of various things I flew in a Flying Fortress, Boston, Avro Anson (which had so many windows it was known as a flying greenhouse), but mainly in a Lancaster; about 110hrs air-time altogether, which I’m not likely to forget, especially the dicing around at a couple of hundred feet. On one trip we flew back from Malvern at no more than a hundred feet (or less), having to rise to get over a railway embankment as a train was passing! On another we gave some air-combat practice to a USAAF Whirlwind (by prior arrangement), which was interesting. But generally the pilots on our automatic approach and landing tests used to get thoroughly fed-up with our failure to avoid weaving about the sky as the runway approached, and would on the slightest excuse cut the auto-control and take over manually. All in all the work I did was pretty useless. I did manage to invent one circuit, but it wasn’t very practical; I was still, as for many years after, a little boy in the nursery playing with a Meccano set.

One evening each week I sang in a male-voice choir run by a Scot in the RAF. As he’d sung before the war in the Glasgow Orpheus Choir it wasn’t suprising that much of what we sang were arrangements Hugh Roberton had made for them. I enjoyed it all , though the music was a bit sentimental, and Pop being a bit of a purist didn’t think much of them. A bit of the Uncle-Herberts again (and of myself in later years of course). Also during that period I began to do some running, partly along roads in the evening, usually up towards Blackbushe where of course there was no traffic worth the name, and partly around the Sports Club’s rugby pitch. I even once ran in a departmental relay team. I also attended, along with a dozen or so others, a gym run in the evenings by an Army PE Sergeant who got bored if he wasn’t in his gym. After the usual limbering up exercises which always included at least one extra for the King and then another extra for the Queen, he took us through all the routines for which he had apparatus. It, and he, was good fun. I even managed a back spring a few times.

In spite of all that exercise I was a heavy smoker and drinker, my favourite fags being WD&HOWills (the only brand) Three Castles and Lambert&Butlers Straight Cut (never heard of them?); and, as a regular prop to the Staff Mess bar, anything up to, I think on one occasion, 14pts of ale. I sometimes got involved in playing Cardinal Puff, which meant drinking an awful lot even though in that bar it was always played with half-pints. A bit of a lout I was, and I don’t blame my boss’s wife (well, not much) for taking a distinct dislike to me. I was once sick down the stairs of my digs while trying to get to the outside loo (none inside) and not making it; the next morning I was woken up with a bucket of water, a cake of soap and a scrubbing brush. I can’t imagine why I wasn’t thrown out. In those digs there was only gas lighting, no more than a “bats-wing burner” in the bedroom I shared, and we could only have a fire in the sitting room after eight in the evening. On another occasion when I’d taken one of the guys I worked with, Bob Sproul, a Scot from Cambuslang, home to Hinckley for the weekend, on the way back we missed our train at Nuneaton. The next one wasn’t until the middle of the night, so off we went into the town to pass the time drinking whisky with beer chasers. Scotch was hard to find during the war, so we had to go from pub to pub all round Nuneaton searching it out, making good use of Bob’s accent, which I expect he exaggerated, and ended up after closing time sleeping on benches in the station waiting room. I was very, very ill. Thirty or forty years had to pass before I could again stand the smell of the stuff. Incidentally my bosses name in that Section of RAE was W.C.Campe; naturally he was known as “Closet”!

One of my colleagues had done some sailing before the war, and as war’s end approached he decided he would like to do some more, and three of us agreed to join him in a week on the Broads if he would choose a boat for us. He selected a traditional Broads type, wide, long and shallow with very little headroom, distinctly crowded for four, and with a short bowsprit and an enormous mainsail having a very long gaff. It was wonderful. We found the rivers almost deserted, though that also meant there were almost no facilities and few pubs open. Before the war I’d read every book on sailing I’d been able to get my hands on, including most of the classics of the time, and had in my imagination been round the world several times to end up on a coral atoll in the South Pacific. It was nice to find that the book-learning made sense in practice, though it was still a few years before I sailed again (and then not to the Pacific).

At war’s end in 1945 I was offered the opportunity of going to a new unit being set up in Suffolk to work exclusively on automatic landing. I’d once flown to a nearby RAF station in the Lancaster, to what was known as a crash strip, an enormous area of concrete supposedly big enough for even a badly disabled bomber returning from a mission to get down onto. But I decided I didn’t want to stay in the Civil Service in peacetime and so was moved to another section working on communications equipment. The guys I worked with there were quite different. Several were classical music buffs and, having been brought up on Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven I soon got involved. One of them was a viola player who’d been swept off his feet by Beecham’s conducting of Sibelius, so it was Sibelius morning, noon and night; at least it seems like that in retrospect, though I’m sure other composers were mentioned just occasionally. He was married already, and apparently drove his wife mad by putting on a Sibelius record as soon as he got up every morning.

Sometime during that year the centenary of the founding by the Prince Consort of Imperial College was to be marked by a Celebration Ball in the Albert Hall, with the King and Queen in attendance. Here was an opportunity to take out my now ex-girl-friend Mary again: surely this Ball would be a bait to which she’d rise. It was, and she did. At the time she was already due to leave Farnborough and return home to Northwood Hills, having only been drafted because she had to do war-work somewhere. As a child she’d had glandular fever, and had now managed to make use of that fact to raise herself up the priority queue. Anyway, her home being in the London suburbs we could stay there over-night after the Ball. I think I must have been to her home once when we were closer, though I’m not too sure of it. I vaguely remember walking with her to what I later realised must have been Pinner Hill Golf Club, and also going to the pictures at the Regal, Northwood Hills. But the trouble about the Ball was going to be getting from Kensington to Northwood after midnight with no transport. Fortunately there was at Farnborough another older ex-Imperial-student I knew slightly who had a car (and also petrol, which wasn’t easy) who would be going to the Ball with his wife and who agreed to make a diversion to drop us in Northwood on his way back. Of course his route home was nowhere near ours, and I’ve often since felt thoroughly embarrassed about not being sufficiently grateful to him either at the time or later, taking his kindness entirely for granted. I didn’t even enquire as to whether or not he’d got lost trying to find his way home in the dark with no sign-posts. It may not have been out-and-out selfishness but, perhaps worse, was again a result of my being completely oblivious of the world around me. However, Mary did get to dance in the arena of the Royal Albert with Royalty, managing to touch Queen Mary’s gown, so something good came of it. The Queen, Queen Mother of today of course, looked much like a younger version of how she looks now (which is hardly surprising), making King George look like the fellow who just happened to have been assigned to escort her that evening. I did actually see Mary once more a few years later, when just after I’d moved to Kodak I happened to be passing through Harrow station on my way to a concert in London: there she was, by the ticket office, all dolled up and waiting, she said, for her fiance.

War’s End and Back to Work

Back in 1945, the war over, I should of course have been applying myself seriously to the problem of what I was going to do when I left Farnborough, an event fast approaching; but right in character I didn’t do a thing about it until a possible solution just happened to materialise before my very eyes. One of my colleagues had heard of a small business being set up in Wembley to develop and market sound-reproduction equipment, and three of them had already proceeded to get jobs there. As vacancies were still being advertised, and I’d no better idea (no idea at all of course), I applied and duly went there too. Scientific Acoustics it was called, very grand, a subsidiary of Truvox, sited in the industrial estate behind Wembley Stadium. But I stayed there less than a couple of years before moving on to Kodak.

Meanwhile (back on the farm) John Hodgkin, who you may remember we left before the war on a minesweeper in the North Sea, had been involved in the evacuation from Dunkirk, during which his deck space as well as his berths were crammed with wounded of all sorts and degrees. I don’t know exactly what happened, though Moggy said later that his superior officers, the ship’s Doctor and Surgeon, both became useless and disappeared with bottles leaving John to cope. After a period at Haslar, Gosport, he was assigned to the sick-bay of the Royal Marines Band School on the Isle of Man, where amongst other things he learned to play the clarinet by sitting in on their rehearsals, once he’d got good enough, then to North Africa (still playing the liqourice stick) and on up through Italy to return to Haslar at the end of the war. Being a regular who’d signed on for 12yrs he still had two to go, and the Navy didn’t know quite what to do either with him or the many other regulars in the same position. He went in fact to a Naval Air Station at Bramcote, near Coventry, which was convenient as he was able to live at home until his discharge. Sometime in early 1943 Mrs. Hodgkin, his and Moggy’s mother, had been bombed out of her house in Kirby Muxloe and had moved in with Pop and Moggy for the duration, but now she and John were able to buy and share a house in Burbage, a few miles from Hinckley.

Also in 1947 Mary came back from Egypt for her discharge. She found a job in Grantham at a leather processing plant, and as a result whenever I saw her she tended to smell like a tannery and to be coloured purple or something equally exotic from the leather dyes used, though I think she wasn’t in the plant but had some kind of Personnel Office job. After John’s discharge he got work with a motorcycle sale and repair business in Hinckley, Ross Motors, so Mary and John must have met up during this period. John had taken to riding bikes when he was in North Africa and then at Haslar at the end of the war, competing at scrambling and in trials, and then at Bramcote he’d joined the Hinckley Club and gone in for what was called short-circuit racing. At Ross Motors he started racing a Vincent500 Grey Flash over a period of quite a few years, being supported by his employer as advertising for the business. He rode in the Isle of Man TT races four times, his best position being, I think, about 14th — pretty good. One year he came off at Windy Corner and an onlooker took a quick snap which showed the Vincent standing up on it’s megaphone (exhaust) and John standing up beside it though upside-down on his helmet. The snap, of which John was sent a copy, is still somewhere in Mary’s archives. But he didn’t get much support from the bike’s manufacturers as they had their own rider, and only erratic support from his employer, and eventually he changed to a BSA Gold Star because that was a bike the business could sell (there was one displayed for sale in the window of a motor-cycle shop in Cheltenham the other week). All of that was after he and Mary were married of course, which was in January 1950. They first had a house in Hinckley, staying there for several years, where they also acquired an Alsatian, Witch, John often taking her for a run on his motor-bike. Later, Ross Motors opened a branch in Narborough, a suburb of Leicester, which John managed and where they lived over the shop; Susan and Jane had by then arrived on the scene. The shop was on a corner site which was not a place you’d choose to live, being rather noisy, and living over the shop, which proved to be altogether a bit of a pain.

Alan arrived back from India in 1945 after having completed his 3yrs, and as that was before the end of the war he got back before Jack Leblanc returned from Europe. Alan had known about Barbara’s boy-friend because she’d made no secret of it ( nor had he made a secret of his own affairs) nor of her doubts about her marriage, so he came back not knowing the state of play. Nor did anyone else, Barbara not having made up her mind which of the two she wanted to live with (or perhaps neither). She had, after all, married a school-friend when very young, partly at least to get away from home (haven’t I heard that story before?). So one day when Alan was at their home in Franklands Village cleaning or oiling the latest car or something (he was.continually changing his car even then), Jack arrived to collect the gold watch he’d left for safe-keeping with Barbara before D-Day, so there-and-then she had to make a decision. It took an hour or two, but she decided to stay with Alan, and from that day Jack’s name was never mentioned (very Powellish) until a month or two ago. Then he (Jack) suddenly announced he was turning up from Canada to attend VE Celebrations in Holland where he’d ended his war, no doubt intending to relive some of it once and for all and to search out some of the Dutch people he’d met and who had helped him, and his mates, some of them killed, and so dispose of his war. Everyone had of course changed immeasurably over the years, so while all concerned were duly apprehensive, neither Jack nor Barbara nor Mary, who’d also known Jack from visiting Haywards Heath while still at school (1942–3), really recognised the others, which may have been just as well, and the re-union passed off without incident. Jack wrote later to recount his visit to Holland, and his wife wrote to thank them all for helping him to bury the past (do we ever?).

So in 1946 life for the Buntings began for real. They already had one daughter, Helen, and soon begat two more, Kit and then Sarah, and had to move from the small house in Franklands Village to a larger newly-built one called Marriots nearer the town center. The house has been knocked down since to make way for a supermarket carpark: c’est la vie. I remember spending a holiday there during it’s construction, nailing down floorboards and fixing up ceiling and wall boards according to Alan’s instructions; that must have been 1947 or 8, but as usual my dates are vague. Alan on his return had gone back to his old job with Haywards Heath U.D.C., but he had to keep moving to be able to step higher up the promotion ladder, and so after a few years they moved to Thetford, which had been designated a “new town” and so required expansion to accommodate a lot of so-called “overspill” population from London. There they bought a big flint-faced house, an old vicarage I believe, with a lovely walled garden whose soil was extremely fertile so that the weeds’ rate of growth was absolutely phenomenal: having pulled them out you only had to turn your back and they were back. That too has been demolished then built or concreted over for a car-park. Then they moved to Kings Lynn where Alan became Deputy Borough Engineer, at which point he realised he might have reached his limit for quite a while, as from then on it would become a case of waiting for “dead men’s shoes”. So they started thinking about emigration.

First they considered Australia, where Alan’s sister Gwen had gone with her husband (also from Hinckley and the Grammar School). But Barbara failed the medical, being found to have an X-ray “shadow” on one lung, a scar from childhood TB which no one had known about at the time but which, all things considered, wasn’t really surprising. To make sure that it healed completely and didn’t recur she was prescribed six months convalescence, and in spite of their differences Moggy took her in and she stayed in bed (more or less) for that time. I don’t know exactly when that was, early 50’s perhaps. I recall that Alan with daily help somehow coped with the children on his own, but I seem to have been out of touch at the time, coping (or not) with my own problems. Then some time in the mid-late 50’s B&A decided to try again, this time applying to emigrate to Canada and being accepted. Alan went first, job-hunting in Toronto, Vancouver and somewhere in the middle (I think), the rest of the family following when he’d fixed a job and they settled into an apartment in Mellanby Place, North York, Toronto. That must have been after Pop died, perhaps 1957. I remember going to Kings Lynn after Alan had left and Barbara was trying to decide what to take and how to pack it and what to forget about. I was riding a motorbike at the time, I think I’d travelled from Hinckley, so I couldn’t take much off her hands. In the meantime though nothing had been said (nor asked, no of course not) Pop had been gradually losing the use of his right hand and now the weakness had begun to spread up his arm. A little later (1952?) he went to see a specialist at The London Hospital (somewhere in the City or the near-East End) where I remember visiting him, a rather remote and impersonal visit during which we hardly spoke, as I wanted him to be pleased to see me, which wasn’t of course evident; I expect he was pretty overcome by the bleak outlook implied by the tests he was having, but about which I knew nothing and showed little interest. I understood much later that the consultant had given him a couple of years to live, which turned out to be pretty accurate. At the time we didn’t know what the trouble was but in fact he had Motor Neurone disease, for which there was (and is) no treatment, so it progressed steadily to eventually confine him first to a wheelchair, then to bed, and finally to hospital. He didn’t want any fuss made, so I for one had no idea of the state he was getting into, and he died without anyone but Moggy knowing it was even imminent. I still feel guilty about not having visited him much — ignored him really — but angry for it being typically his own fault (that’s not a very helpful thing to say). I heard of his death by Alan phoning me at work, and went up to stay with Moggy until after the funeral, about which I remember only a very few things: being asked by the funeral director if anyone wanted to see Pop in his coffin or should he screw the lid down; standing beside the grave (which was also Mother’s grave and would later be Moggy’s) and suddenly realising that as chief mourner everyone was waiting for me to make a move; going to the bank for Moggy because they’d closed the account even though it was a joint one; and the usual family wake. I don’t remember much else. He was 66, but had had to stop work a couple of years before. Moggy was not entitled to any pension from the super-annuation he’d contributed to all his life, a fact of which she was unaware until it happened and so about which she was very upset; partly perhaps at the idea that Pop had made absolutely no provision for her. Nor was she entitled to a widow’s pension, because she wasn’t quite 50 herself. Fortunately, since she was still relatively young and had a certain amount of local clout, she was able to get a job quite quickly, teaching needlework and art in a local Secondary Modern school. Some of that she enjoyed, some she didn’t: she didn’t find it easy to fit into a secondary school staffroom, and was a bit out of touch with the youth of the day (or any youth of any age).

Before the war her sister Enid and her husband Stanley had lived in the outskirts of Eastbourne where he was a GP, but at it’s start he also was called up into the Army. Mary and I had visited them once, though I don’t remember much about it. I suspect the visit’s purpose was to relieve Moggy of some strain and to begin our social education, which, at least in my case, certainly hadn’t started (nor has it yet — too late now). We didn’t enjoy it much, except for walking “up the Downs” (at the time we thought of that inanity as our private joke) with Betty, their Alsatian. They had two children, Robert and Jo, though I don’t remember seeing them on that occasion, why I don’t know, they would still have been very young and must have been at home. In the Army in France Stanley was attached to a field hospital and when it was over-run by the German advance he stayed with the patients and so was captured and sent to POW camp with them. While there he occupied himself by learning Russian, and probably other languages, but became seriously ill and was repatriated through Sweden before the war’s end in a prisoner exchange. Afterwards he first got a job editing a medical journal in Toronto; he with Enid and Robert were living in a very swish high-rise apartment when Barbara and Alan and family arrived; after which he went to the WHO in Geneva, which I gather Enid liked a lot, and following that to do PR for a Swiss pharmaceutical company. I don’t know much more about his life, except that he and Enid divorced after he at some stage (I’m told) took up with his secretary. They married and settled in South Africa, where he died not long ago. Enid settled at first in a very nice place in north Oxfordshire, not far from where Jo was at the time, her husband Wadham teaching music and being housemaster in a private school at Kingham. But at short notice Wadham lost his job and so also his school-house, and with Jo and their two children moved north to Newcastle, partly because Robert lived nearby and he and Jo had always been very close and Jo, who’d had a breakdown earlier, now needed support more than ever; and partly because Wadham had contacts with the excellent University music department he’s since worked there successfully, writing and broadcasting, and teaching and playing music. After a while Enid followed them, but has never really come to terms with the frozen north, and is now in a home. Robert died a few years ago, I remember Susan and Jane going to his funeral.

Uncle Watson too was in the Army during the war, Catering Corps I think, but never went abroad. So Little John (to be distinguished from Cousin Jack, Edgar and Gert’s son, their only child in fact, who at the Grammar School was in the year between Barbara and me and who must I suppose by a process of elimination be Big John — he always was far big too), Little John grew up with his father absent and Grandpa taking his place; and though the two were quite close, Grandpa seems to have been pretty demanding and critical and they were often at loggerheads. Perhaps as a result John never seemed to develop much confidence and after leaving school didn’t manage to hold interest in a job for long. I remember that amongst other things he was a fireman for a time, also a hospital porter, maybe other things; I presume he met his wife Beryl during the spell as porter, she being a nurse. She’s continued to work on and off as a nurse since, though I presume they are both now retired.

During my two years at Farnborough so much seems to have happened that it’s almost unbelievable I was there for so short a time; but in fact the same also applied to my subsequent job in Wembley. I’ll name just a few of the happenings. I lodged with a couple of whom the husband was blind, which should have been at least a bit of an education; but I soon found that in the wife’s eyes at least I wasn’t measuring up to the situation, not paying her husband enough attention (they wanted a stand-in son I expect, as usual) and our relations slowly deteriorated. I bought my first car, a J2 MG Midget, which was a disaster, first because when I bought it the engine oil leaked out nearly as fast as I could put it in, and later because I failed to drain the cooling system prior to a particularly sharp frost and the block cracked. I joined a choir, Wembley Philharmonic, having to pass an audition to do so which involved singing a piece of my own choice (which I hadn’t anticipated and so hadn’t prepared), singing a second piece at sight, and tapping out the extremely complex rythm of a third; it was a bit of a nightmare, but I somehow managed. On one occasion the choir, with others, sang in the Royal Albert under Malcolm Sargeant. I went to lots of concerts, mainly with a Geordie colleague I’d known since Farnborough, and also to chamber music recitals for the first time; Szigetti and Cortot I seem to remember — it was stunning. I also interviewed for a job at the BBC, but failed to impress (being still in the nursery playing with my Meccano), but at least it had been my decision to try and not someone else’s. Then I saw in a Watford-line train an advert for jobs at Kodak. Perhaps, I thought, I might in that way get back to doing physics, so I wrote and after an interview was offered a job in the Research Laboratory there (I nearly lost it again a few years later). I also got engaged during that period to one of the secretaries at the job in Wembley, Joan something-or-other. It happened of course almost by mistake, casually as you might say, one weekend we were at Hinckley. It was not a success. Joan was an only child and the apple of her Dad’s eye. He was ex-Navy. I didn’t like my almost-father-in-law-to-be, and he didn’t like me. I did nothing whatever about finding anywhere for us to live, not living in the real world. I scratched her Dad’s car once and childishly tried to cover it up. It didn’t help one bit.

Kodak

At the time of my interview at Kodak, 1947, Jim (or Hank or Willie) Houghton, my prospective supervisor, was in the States, so I didn’t meet him until I eventually turned up to start work. He was a funny mixture of a man. As supervisor, me being new both to physics and to research, he was useless. What I needed was a helping hand, or a foot to kick me out of the nursery, and he wasn’t about to provide either. But it took me 6 or 8yrs to realise what was wrong and even then it wasn’t me who initiated the move to another supervisor. During that period I did some appallingly infantile work; some of the ideas may have been OK but their working-out was terrible; useless. I’m not surprised they seriously considered asking me to move on. I wasn’t the only one to suffer in that way. There was a guy named Williams who also worked under Jim, and even though he eventually moved out to a factory job he wasn’t able to overcome his unfortunate start and left under a cloud for much the same reason as I’d failed.

Jim did however find me some digs in Harrow Weald. Through his design or consulting activities he knew of someone in the Camera Department who had someone working under him whose parents were looking for a lodger, and I became that lodger. I think they weren’t looking for a lodger really but for a stand-in son (you’ll remember that had happened before, it often does). Again I didn’t measure up, and from being on reasonable terms with them at first things went steadily and in the end rapidly downhill. They were not in my view very nice people, looking pretty disagreeable even on a quick glance. He worked on the Daily Sketch, and they were both politically blue, even violet, about as far to the right as you could get; the original fascist pigs. At the same time other things were going downhill too, like my relationship with Joan and her family, and I felt under some strain. At one point I was thought to be developing a stomach-ulcer and went to Edgware Hospital to have an X-ray after a so-called barium meal, though nothing was found. I was then referred to a psychiatrist, who said I ought to learn to play the violin; maybe that was what he played, so he considered it to be everyone’s salvation. Things came to a head when Joan’s engagement ring turned up in my post one morning as I ate breakfast; the landlady said she wasn’t surprised, it was probably no more than I deserved; so in the middle of breakfast I got up and left, went to work, and found other digs.

After staying in the next place for only a short while (though for some reason I did start doing some drawing there) I was asked by an acquaintance in the Lab, Lionel Gilbert, if I’d share two rooms with use of kitchen and bathroom that he’d found. This was with the Earl family, Mr., Mrs. and a daughter we hardly ever saw. It worked out well and I stayed there with a succession of different colleagues until getting married.

The first guy I shared with I’d met through starting to climb. It was a period in which Kodak was recruiting a lot of new research staff, and almost the same week that I started several others did including Lionel and also Doug Jopling and Johnny Muir. Doug had a friend not at Kodak, Graham Powell, who’d already begun climbing, and as Johnny had too back in Scotland the group of us plus a few others very soon started going away to climb most weekends, at first on some sandstone outcrops near Tunbridge Wells, among them Harrison’s Rocks. What made these sandstone outcrops especially good at the time was that it was possible then, though not later, to camp overnight nearby, often as part of a group of no more than ten or fifteen from all parts of London. We usually travelled down by train, though a few times I went on the back of Doug’s tandem, or on the back of Johnny’s motor bike (an ex-Army Ariel-350) when he could get petrol, which was still in very short supply. Now and again we managed to get to North Wales, which might take 9 or 10hrs, longer if we were hitch-hiking, but after some time the Kodak group began hiring a coach to travel in, selling seats to climbers from all over London, leaving for Wales from Harrow station on Friday night and back Sunday night. That was how we first met the Brownsorts. Twice we took a coach-load to the Lakes as well, one of which I organised. One of those trips was a disaster because the weather was terrible, making climbing impossible and camping thoroughly miserable. Six of us also went to the Lakes for a week, camping and climbing, and I remember that at Johnny’s suggestion we always ran along the tracks between the various crags. The night before we were due to leave, camping up in the mountains somewhere, in the dark I carelessly trod on the remains of a corned beef tin and cut my foot open, but still had to walk 4 or 5 miles to catch the bus to the station. Several of us spent more than one Christmas climbing in Wales, camping by frozen lakes in which we had to break open a water-hole every morning. Sometime in the afternoon a crowd of other climbers would often appear, probably on their way back to the hostel, and proceed to play football on the ice. I also remember walking over to Lliwedd in the snow and crossing Llyn Lydaw on the ice, but because the water-level under the ice had fallen since the freeze there was quite a steep climb up to reach the shore, beneath which we knew there’d be a few feet of air and then feezing water, with the ice not floating and so being of uncertain strength. It felt a bit scary at the time. Jean came on the bus trip to Wales once, also a snowy weekend though it wasn’t deep anywhere; we stayed in the Midland Climbing Club’s Hut near the head of Llyn Ogwen. Another week-long trip that four of us made was to Arran, though that wasn’t so successful from the climbing point of view, and the midges were terrible.

During this period Lionel, the guy I’d been sharing Mrs. Earl’s rooms with, left Kodak, and Johnny moved in to take his place. By this time his job had moved from the Lab into the factory, but it wasn’t long before as a Scot from Paisley he decided he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life working among foreigners in England, and went back north, enrolling in teacher training college and eventually getting a job teaching science in or near Johnstone. I seem to remember that for a short time Doug took his place before he too left, to marry Bunny, and his place was taken by Peter Maynard, who out-lasted me. I never saw much of Peter, he always seemed to be out. What I remember most clearly about him is the noisy fuss he made about getting into a cold bed in the winter: he maintained that the more noise he made the quicker the sheets warmed up. Then some time during this period Jim Milne came to Kodak from BP and joined the climbing group, but as he was already married we didn’t see all that much of him either.

Marriage and Family

It was during my climbing period that I met Jean. She’d come from school to interview for a job at Kodak early in my first summer there and remembers seeing me, and she started work that same autumn also with Jim Houghton as supervisor doing lens-design calculations for him on a little hand-operated calculator. Apart from working in adjacent offices, we got better acquainted around Christmas 1948, when “Bill” Jones the laboratory receptionist and her husband held a party in their flat. Bill was a bit of a match-maker, and I wouldn’t put it past her to have arranged the party largely with the intention that we would benefit. Later the same winter I held a party at the Earl’s, or at least a group of us gathered there to eat before going on to Olde Thyme dancing, which we did regularly. The only things I remember about that party were that I baked a cake for it, and also that I borrowed Mrs.Earl’s best china, only to discover too late that it was thick with dust!