My Memories
Chapter 1 Plum Jam and Jeyes Fluid
I have, down through the years, extolled the merits of the 1930's model. It was built to last. “Engineered with quality” might be another way to put it. Perhaps these are phrases I have used to describe my own self image. I suspect that what I am really acknowledging is that the statues of Queen Victoria tend to cast very long shadows. Victorian values, epitomised by the raising of one's cap to acknowledge an adult and giving up one’s seat on the bus, were held in great regard and I am still more concerned with taking part than I am with winning.
Perhaps it is for this reason that I find the idea of sledging on the cricket field incongruous. I mention these things because if you are going to follow my journey it is only right and fair that you should have some idea of who I am. That means, as I see it, understanding something about my background and my views on things and with that in mind I will begin at the beginning or nearly so.
Upminster has very little of note save its windmill to distinguish it from those many other townships which have long since disappeared into the dreary bureaucratic concept of an anonymous London Borough. I was brought up there in the days when it was part of the County of Essex. That meant that its cricketers wore three scimitars on their sweaters and were put to the sword by every other cricket team including Somerset. However we always lost gloriously and with an appropriate amount of humour.
I was born in August 1938 and a year later World War II broke out. These two facts were ones which my father always spoke of in one breath. When old enough to do so, I drew the obvious conclusion about the unanticipated nature of both events. I did so particularly bearing in mind my father's decision in 1937, when he and my mother married, to buy a house not far from Hornchurch Aerodrome and directly under the flight path from Pienemunde whence came Hitler's rockets and doodlebugs
For a young male growing up, World War II had interesting aspects. I spent much of my early life in a cupboard under the stairs of our 'three up two down' semi-detached house. I knew no better and assumed that all children slept in cupboards. I now realise of course that mushroom cultivation, as practised by the enthusiastic home gardener, is conducted on a similar basis and that furthermore middle management in commerce has yet to emerge from similar treatment. The door is opened, food is thrown in and the door is closed again.
The Second World War became far more serious for me when our next-door neighbour was provided with an Anderson air raid shelter. This was built in her back garden and was given to her because she was the oldest inhabitant in our road. It so happened that she also subsisted, for the purpose of treating some deeply mysterious ailment, on a diet comprising in its major parts of cabbage and milk stout. I was of course too young to appreciate the full significance of these facts at the time. I only learned of them later when my mother told me about them.
Because our family was next-door to the air raid shelter, we went into it last but one and I therefore ended up positioned immediately to the rear of the senior citizen who came in last. I cannot begin to describe the full horror of the long hot summer nights in that confined space and that precise location. All I will say is that they left a lasting impression on me and coloured my view both of cabbage and milk stout for a very long time! It took my parents some considerable effort, when our own Anderson shelter arrived, to persuade me that it would not also generate the unforgettable aroma which I had come to view with such dread.
Apart from this, the remainder of the war passed uneventfully, although there were moments of alarm such as the discovery that a gift of "new laid eggs" to my father from a grateful client had lions stamped on them. This meant that they were in fact in his possession illegally. This caused my father several sleepless nights dreaming about the arrival of the food police.
It had been necessary for my father to acquire eggs whenever possible due to his slaughter of the chickens so carefully raised by my mother. She had planned to provide us with a steady supply and to have some left over for bartering purposes. Saturday was the day when I had to go and purchase straw for the chicken coop and on this particular day, because my mother was poorly, my father was commissioned to clean it out. This involved removing the old straw to go on the compost heap and scrub the floor of the coop ready for the fresh straw. Unfortunately my father had used neat Jeyes fluid and didn't remove it from the tongue and grooved flooring and so the chickens drank it. Fifteen laying hens and their two mothers died that day. News of the impending tragedy came from the unnatural crowing sounds emerging from the chicken run. When I went to investigate I observed the hens seeming to lean up against each other before one by one dropping to the ground until all was silent. This did not include my mother who, having heard the racket and arisen from her sick bed, came to investigate. Her description of my father and his activities is best described as colourful, protracted and very uncomplimentary and left at that.
There was a silver lining. I buried the chickens in a circle round the plum tree which the following year provided an over- abundance of plums. We had plum jam for the next three years which seemed to me to be a bit excessive. It also kept reminding my father about Jeyes fluid.
Chapter 2 Confirmation or long trousers?
My schooling began in an air raid shelter but continued in more normal surroundings at the conclusion of the war. I should mention in passing that our garage roof proved to be an excellent collector of shrapnel because of the gunfights which took place between aircraft overhead. This proved to be useful in the bargaining processes which took place when I started school. For example the right sized piece of shrapnel could acquire three good conkers or 10 cigarette cards.
The street party which was held to celebrate the end of hostilities began a gradual return to normality with the arrival home of brothers, fathers and uncles. It also led to England being bowled out by Australia for 52 runs. I learnt this from an elderly gentleman to whom I listened for some time while eating an iced lolly. I didn't understand much of what he said, largely because I knew nothing about cricket, but it was enough to impress upon me that the game was important. Clearly 52 was not enough and there was a gentleman whose name was Jack Crapp who I was told had lived up to his name and was therefore not worthy of his place in the England team.
Reflecting on that incident I am reminded that I had walked a mile each way on my own to get my iced lolly. That is something which I would never have allowed my own children to do a generation later although at the same time the situation cricket-wise had not changed much although Mr Crapp had retired.
A year or so earlier in 1947 there came a significant moment in my life. It was probably engendered by a number of events like, for example, the replacement of something called "nutty slack" by proper coal. Nutty slack was a substance produced by the National Coal Board to keep people amused during the long winter nights of wartime. It constituted a challenge both to combustion and patience alike. People spent many hours attempting to generate the first at the expense of the second and, even when ignited, nutty slack failed to produce enough heat to warm a bath of water. It did however generate an awful lot of smoke. The water for a bath came from an item called a copper. This was ordinarily used to boil clothes but performed a secondary role as a water heater.
Bathing in wartime had taken place in a zinc bath and was somewhat akin to a severe form of physical punishment. Sitting in a kitchen, unclad, in a zinc bath did untold damage to many young and impressionable minds. The physical impression created on the hindquarters was equally unfortunate and could be compared with an encounter with a rasp file. Thus the restoration of real coal meant a first acquaintance with a real bath whereupon I discovered that I could sing.
The importance of this discovery cannot easily be exaggerated because it opened up for me a whole new world. Not least this was because our school was situated opposite the parish church of St Lawrence. This magnificent edifice, whose earliest parts went back to its Saxon origins, was famous for being so high in its liturgy that the Roman Catholic priest from across the road would occasionally drop by to refresh his memory about "the way things used to be done".
Miss Kylik, the Music Mistress at our Junior School, sent boys who could sing to Captain Sykes who was the organist and choirmaster at St Lawrence's and ran the whole organisation with awesome military efficiency. Choristers attended for rehearsals on Tuesdays and Thursdays and were paid for these attendances as well as for at least two services on a Sunday. However the real perk was weddings. At half-a-crown at time and with sometimes six weddings on a Saturday, this was a hobby worth having!
It will come as no surprise to learn that, when faced with the choice between the income to be gained by a chorister and the outdoor rigours of scouting, I chose the former. The reasons were not exclusively financial however because I actually enjoyed singing and did not much care for tents. The latter seemed to have a nasty habit of leaking and every time I put one up it seemed to me that the heavens responded by opening to disgorge a deluge. Having spent one Saturday morning (part of a “This is Scouting” day) standing in 6 inches of water in a waterlogged field I decided that being a cub constituted quite enough experience of outdoor activities for me. So I settled for knowing how to tie a reef knot and called it a day.
It is interesting to reflect that God played little part if any in my decision to join in his worship on a robed and formal basis. Nobody, least of all me, thought to consult him or indeed appeared to see any reason for doing so. It seemed to be taken for granted that I believed that there was a God and that worshipping him was a good idea. As to the words I was required to say and sing and the ideas and concepts that played their part in worship, I jumped through the hoops they constituted and accepted them as required activity. I understood little but assumed that, like so many other things in my young life, all will become clear in the fullness of time.
I did puzzle over some parts of what I had to say in church and especially the bits about the Holy Ghost. The idea of 'holy' and 'ghost' in juxtaposition struck me as odd. However I was the only person going to church in our family therefore discussing it at home did not seem worthwhile. Indeed discussing religion and church never occurred to me in any context. My peers were interested in living here and now and my elders and betters required hoops to be jumped through not unnecessary questions. Thus I thought I believed in God, certainly said I did and I assumed that, since “holy” came in front of both "ghost" and "Catholic church" there was a relationship which was kept secret until we were confirmed. Having got this far in my thinking I gave up and slept easily.
1948 was the year the Olympic Games came to London and on the feast of the Transfiguration I was taken to Wembley to see one day of what I was told was a great occasion. As I have already explained my family was not deeply religious and so the actual reason for going off on August 6 was because it was my birthday and I had achieved double figures!
We, that is my father, a neighbour named Bill Robson and I, had seats in the open air high up on that side of the stadium most remote from any activity. We sat down, the heavens opened and we got very wet. Outdoor sport had, I reasoned, a lot in common with camping.
Arthur Wint and Fanny Blankers- Koen performed some heroic deeds I was told by our neighbour who had a pair of binoculars. The record books subsequently confirmed the value of binoculars at sporting events. I also strongly recommend a kagool or some other form of waterproof clothing
It was in 1949 that my career as a boy soprano "peaked" as it were. I won the treble section of the Ilford Festival and this carried with it the prize of auditioning to sing on Children's Hour on the BBC's home service. So it came to pass that on a Saturday morning my mother and I attended at broadcasting house where we met “Uncle” David Davies. However when I opened my mouth to sing, out came a resounding bass voice. This is not what Mendelssohn had in mind when he wrote “Oh for the wings of a dove”. On the way home my mother said that she felt that I was responsible for the débâcle because I wanted to grow up too quickly!
It was also in 1949 that I passed what was known in those days as "the Scholarship" and as a result in September that year I went to Hornchurch County High as it then was. As the only boy in my class (1 Alpha) whose voice had broken I purely and simply by chance had to read all the leading male roles in the Shakespeare plays that we studied in our English lessons with Miss Laycock.
My days as a boy soprano were fast coming to a close with all the economic consequences that ensued. It seemed fitting to me to leave the choir when I got confirmed but suddenly a major obstacle cropped up in the form of my father. He adamantly refused to allow my confirmation and was equally determined about the wearing of long trousers under the age of 14 (he later took a similar view about the wearing of jeans at any age).
In an effort to change his mind I invited the curate from the parish church, Father O'Callaghan, to come to our house for tea and a game of bridge. Bridge was a game that I had learnt by watching seemingly endless games which were played in our house during and after the war. Latterly if a player were late arriving for a game, I was allowed to sit in for a practice hand or two. As a result I became reasonably proficient.
Father O'Callaghan turned out to be a less than effective player. He was also quite incapable of changing my father's mind either about confirmation or long trousers. Furthermore, having forgotten a cigarette he had left on an ashtray burning, it landed on the tablecloth and succeeding in scorching the table underneath. As a result of these disasters I decided to abandon confirmation and to concentrate on long trousers. After all, whoever heard of a choir bass in short trousers?
Chapter 3 Golden Virginia and liquorice paper
There is no doubt in my mind that being at a grammar school was a great privilege. Sadly however it also divided our family because one of its number was selected for a different form education from his siblings. Curiously enough my brother Adrian had no desire whatsoever to join me and much preferred eventually being head boy at the secondary school he attended.
I learned very quickly at Hornchurch Grammar as it became in due course, that I had to step up a gear or two and fortunately they were there to be used. I also realised that it was necessary to be adaptable in order to get on with folk.
I encountered people whom I now recognise as embodying the embryonic form of the “British character”. They did what I regarded as being incredible things. One such character managed to hold a cigarette in his enormous hand with the smoke going up his jacket sleeve while carrying on a conversation with the headmaster. The latter could smell the smoke but was completely unable to identify its source. That same fellow pupil was extremely tall for those days (today he would be much nearer average) and his hands were strong enough to enable him to pick up a 7 pound medicine ball single-handed and toss it to a classmate. The classmate in question not unnaturally, thought that it was a football and so headed it. As a result he spent the rest of the physical education (PE) lesson 'resting'. Some people seem prone to accidents for the same lad who headed the medicine ball subsequently discovered a dead body in a ditch while out on a cross-country run and as a result all his hair fell out with shock.
I spent much of my time grammar school avoiding Game's and PE lessons. This required genuine ingenuity since stray lads and lasses (ours was a co-educated school which was unusual in those days) were very soon rounded up and subjected to punishments such as detention after school. The secret was to "melt" and reappear subsequently with out attracting attention. To do this single-handed was boring; to be able to make up a pontoon school however was exciting. There was no shortage of people willing to join forces and obey instructions and so I developed my knowledge of those places which afforded facilities from card school and were unlikely to be discovered. We managed to avoid detection.
Most of my successful hideaways were developed with the assistance of a lad from the form above ours whose father had access (or so he said) to Golden Virginia and Old Holborn tobacco which was “ex-customs and excise”. This he sold to me for half normal retail price. I, in turn, rolled cigarettes which I sold at two old pence each. Filter tips were a halfpenny extra as was licorice paper. Thus with complete innocence of the health implications I kept myself entirely self-supporting financially and probably undermined the health 25% of the junior section of our school.
I admired many of my teachers who seemed to me to teach from a professional standpoint and to live their lives accordingly. Looking back I have even more respect. Interestingly enough most of them have travelled from other parts of the United Kingdom to teach in Hornchurch where our school was located. “Taffy” Roberts, whose first class degree was from Oxford, came from Wales and taught us sixth formers 17th-century history. The fact that I did not know until I left school that he was a Roman Catholic was an amazing tribute to the unbiased nature of his teaching.
Religious education was taught by a Methodist lay preacher who studied to obtain a mathematics degree with first class honours during his spare time. He was one of the many whose education had been disrupted by the onset of the war. “Sid” as he was privately known to us all, for what reason escapes me for his actual name was Wilfred, had an enormous Adam's apple which got larger and more mobile or so it seemed, as his anxiety increased. Such is the cruelty of youth that we did little to encourage the tranquil atmosphere that he so obviously desired but what can one do when a teacher points to his calculations on the blackboard and says “watch the board while I go through it “.
But this was the man who taught us the General Thanksgiving from the Book of Common Prayer and I have never forgotten it. Indeed, there have been times in my life when nothing else would emerge and I have used that prayer with gratitude. It's curious to think that in those days it was just words and another hoop to test my agility. “I believe” words are cheap. I did believe there was a God, the “eternal” however seemed to require a great deal more faith than I had, so what was wrong with saying “thank you”? They were only words said with the head and not the heart but perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, they were better than nothing and they kept the lines of communication open.
As school-days unfolded so did my ability to understand something of community spirit. It also taught me the value of example and the damage that can be done by a vindictive teacher but above all else the merit of laughing at oneself.
My first encounter with the opposite sex at a deep emotional level came to an end leaving me with a liking for the poetry of John Donne and the desire to keep to my own company. As a result I learnt that we are not designed to live on our own and that we need companionship, the feeling that we are part of the community. A form at school can be such a community, something to which it is good to belong and I was happy to rejoin mine after my period of self-imposed exile.
Chapter 4 Reflections on wartime London
With reasonable frequency my mother took me and my sister Madeline, who is nearly 4 years younger than me, to visit our grandparents in Poplar in the East End of London. This involved a trip on the District line which is the green one on the London Underground map. The train took us from Upminster to Bromley-by-Bow and then there followed a walk down Brunswick Road to number 159. This was a Victorian house like all the others in the street except that, in this case, the front room window announced that it was somewhere where one could have shoes or boots made or repaired. Alfred Cockurn Kidd, my father's father, was a cobbler. The income from his occupation had supported not only his own three children but in earlier times some half-brothers and sisters from his father's second marriage.
The walk down Brunswick Road revealed much evidence of the bombing that destroyed or made unsafe many parts of London's East End. The devastation produced an eerie atmosphere for a small boy and I remember not only this but also the strange aromas which often filled the air on these journeys following the air raids on houses, wharves and factories alike. One of my earliest memories was of the smoke still rising from Sun wharf which, we were told, had been bombed the previous night and the aroma of burnt flour from a warehouse on the site. I would have been four years old at the time.
It took time but as the war progressed I came to make the link between the aeroplanes I saw going over our house in Upminster as being the same ones as delivered their bombs on these sites I walked past in Poplar. Later I recognised the same situation when I watched doodlebugs (V one's & V two's) going over our house.
From my father's parents' house we would walk on to Grosvenor Buildings which were blocks of flats built around a central quadrangle adjoining Manisty Street off the West India Dock Road. My mother's own mother lived in flat number 432 which was reached after a climb up some 72 steps. Grandma Vieira, as she was known, was a widow whose husband John had died in 1932 from the injuries he received in World War I while serving aboard HMS Tiger. By the time I was born one of my grandma's children had already died and two more and a grandchild would also die during her lifetime. One of the them the grandchild Doris was someone I remember with great affection. She died from tuberculosis which in those days could not be cured.
My grandmother's flat had two small bedrooms and from one of these I could look out across the entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel and into one of the West India docks. There I watched warships which were moored whilst they were re-provisioned before rejoining the fray. Incidentally both my grandmothers had been part of the crowd watching when Queen Victoria opened the Blackwall Tunnel in the late 1890s. That was before either of them was married to my two grandpas.
Later in life I reflected on the stories I heard from these two ladies about life in “service”. This meant, I discovered, working for a wealthy family on a “live in” basis. Both were immensely proud that they had been considered to have been raised well enough in manners and courtesy to be taken into someone else's home. It was also amazing to think of horse drawn carriages as the means of transport enjoyed by the large houses on either side of the Mile End Road when one sees what it is like today. The carriages were there to take families and servants alike to picnics on the green joining the pond in the centre of East Ham about which Grandma Kidd told me. She also mentioned travelling in the servants' carriage, down what would one day become the A127, a day ahead of the family carriage. This was so that the house at Westcliff-on-Sea could be got ready for the family holiday which would begin the next day.
Compared with Upminster the East End of London had much less traffic. In part this was due to the constant bombing raids and the shortage of motor fuel but also because roads were under constant repair. There were of course in those days many more horse drawn vehicles which were less affected by the circumstances. Nevertheless the atmosphere was somewhat subdued and disturbed only by the occasional bus or brewers dray.
My grandfather's shop was a warm and welcoming place with a radio always on in the background usually broadcasting music from the Third Programme. There was a wonderful aroma of leather which hung in sheets from the ceiling of the workshop and glue which bubbled in a metal pot on a small gas ring. It was a health and safety inspector's paradise.
By way of total contrast by grandfather and grandmothers' visits to our home in Upminster always involved a walk along our nearby country lanes. One such walk took us to a point from which it was possible to look down on the ranks of aircraft lined up ready for take-off at Hornchurch Aerodrome. The site I recall as a small boy has long since become a housing estate but in those days in the 1940s the grass was covered with Spitfires with maintenance engineers scurrying back and forth from the hangers and fuel lorries which adjoined the control tower. It was a picture of constant readiness.
We nearby residents always knew when an air raid siren would soon go off because minutes before, we heard the order to scramble broadcast from the airfield. It was loud enough to reach us as well. We could then see the Spitfires rising into the sky as we hurried to our shelters, although in the case of some of us not so much hurry as crawl!
Two entirely contrasting reflections represent for me precious memories in totally different settings but with a common feature. One is of my grandfather taking me from his shop on a walk to St Leonard's Church where the nearby war memorial stood on which was the name Charles Kidd. That was one of my grandfathers half-brothers who at the age of 17 was killed in the last few days of World War I. I was able to see how sad he felt even this many years later. By contrast I remember being page boy at the wedding of my father's sister Gwendoline when she married her childhood sweetheart Arthur Smith who was a corporal in the Army medical Corps. I was provided with a 'silk suit made from part of a redundant parachute. It itched prodigiously and to put it mildly I was not happy. I can say with absolute authority that suits made from parachutes and frosty days in February are not a happy combination. Nevertheless it was my first real encounter with St Lawrence's Church in Upminster and I noted it's war memorial. I did not know it at the time but in due course I would sing at that same memorial on a number of Remembrance Sundays as part of the St Lawrence Church choir.
My final reflection is upon the subject of food in war time and immediately into my mind this brings black bread. I was told that there is no such thing as bread which is naturally white and that the whiteness comes from added chalk. Since there was a shortage of chalk I was told we now had bread in its natural state which to all intents and purposes was black. What I also learnt was that it might not look good but when one is hungry and black bread is all there is one gets on with it and survives. I also learned there were much worse things, and paramount among these was cod-liver oil. When my sister spilt her dose on the electric hot plate of our cooker we had to give up having toast or put up with the aroma of burning cod-liver oil. My sister was not popular as the result of this and in due course a gas ring and toasting fork were acquired to get round the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment