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Chapter 5. Back to Landport
Mr. and Mrs. A and their sons lived in a house mid-way along Evelyn Rd on the Landport Estate. Mr A had fought in France in The Great War and fired our imaginations with his stories of trench warfare. Having decided to breed rabbits for sale and to eke out the meagre meat ration, he built a number of wooden hutches and these adorned various sections of the back garden. His carpentry skills were also employed in making toys. In the evenings he liked to listen to the wireless from the comfort of his fireside chair whereas the stout and jovial Mrs A relished her nightly trips to the Tally Ho public house nearby. The youngest son, Gerald, was about the same age as Maurice and still at school. An older son worked as a baker’s roundsman for the Co-op and Maurice used to help him on his Saturday round. Apart from the duties of the round itself, this involved a trip to the stables, located behind the shop, to muck out the horse. Two other sons were in H.M. Forces.

Life at Mr and Mrs A’s was fairly uneventful but Sundays were memorable because suet pudding seemed always to be a feature of the mid-day meal. A thick, elliptically-shaped, white slab of suet pudding would appear in the gravy accompanying the roast or, failing that, with some kind of sauce for ‘afters’.

Sometimes in the meal-time conversations I gained the impression that Mr A thought me slow-witted because I asked those childhood questions that are bound to baffle adults, such as. If God made the Earth, who made God?’.

During our stay Mum decided that she no longer wished to be parted from her boys so she came down to look for lodgings near us. She happened to mention this when she visited a shop at Landport run by Mrs D, who then agreed to take her in.

A short time later we three boys moved in with her. There would be no more long anxious periods spent by the weigh-bridge, just inside the main door of the railway station, waiting for our parents to appear at the barrier leading to the platforms, on the days they came to visit us on trains delayed by air-raids.

Mrs D was an elderly, white-haired, bespectacled widow to whom age had not been kind. A pronounced stoop added to her frail-looking appearance and her hands were bent and twisted by arthritis. She had once owned an off-licence in Walthamstow but had moved with her daughter to Lewes in 1937 when she had bought the grocer’s shop on White Hill that had been so close to Miss H’s house on Castle Bank. As part of a proposed council-redevelopment scheme that shop had been demolished shortly after we left Miss H’s house and Mrs D had moved to new accommodation at the corner of Lee Rd and Bridge Green.

The premises comprised a house and two adjoining shops with a connecting door. One of the shops was used for selling groceries while the other, its windows whitened, was used as a stockroom.

Mrs D occupied the downstairs front room of the house and the main bedroom. She needed no more space as her daughter was, by then, engaged in war work in a Slough factory. Mum and we three boys occupied the back room downstairs, which included shared kitchen facilities, and the other two bedrooms.

In the beginning, Mrs D was somewhat guarded with her new ‘family’ so when Mr Churchill gave a speech on the wireless we were invited to listen to it standing outside the door of her room, rather than in the room itself. However, as time passed the relationship grew more relaxed and she came to assume the mantle of a grandmother rather than a landlady. She told us how Lewes had been before the war, about the assizes, the crowds of people on race-days and the splendid costumes of the Zulu warriors and Red Indians in the torch lit processions of bonfire night.

Mrs D’s life centred around the shop and she did her best to please her customers. That included selling cigarettes two or three at a time to the hard-up wives of those who had gone away to war and being discreet with gossip, though she was generous in passing on snippets of news gleaned from reliable sources such as Mr S. He was the chief air-raid warden of the town and lived next door. In his morning visits to the shop, to buy some pipe tobacco or some other small item, he would chat to Mrs D about air-raids that had taken place the previous night in the Sussex area.

On Saturdays and during school holidays, Maurice helped in the shop. Apart from serving customers from the small section of counter not occupied by the glass display cabinets, a set of scales and the bacon-slicer, this involved counting up the variously lettered coupons cut from ration books and sorting out the jumble in the stockroom where cartons of toilet roll fought for shelf-space with boxes of soap, cases of tinned vegetables and bottles of Paraquat.

Mrs D had no regular delivery boy so, on a particular day, the most available able-bodied lad was approached to take on the task for a small reward. In that way Mrs D was able to keep some of the customers in Wallands Crescent and Prince Edward Rd that she had had at her previous shop. One day I was the most available lad and duly mounted the heavy trade bicycle with the goods to be delivered loaded in its huge front basket. Unfortunately, I managed to fall off when cycling along the stony lane leading off the estate and had to return, shamefaced, to the shop with precious eggs that had been broken in the accident. That was not the only cycle accident I had while staying with Mrs D. Maurice and I had acquired bicycles, towards the end of our stay with Mr and Mrs A, and used to ride them to school with our friend Robbie, who had transferred with me to Mountfield Rd School from St John’s Hall. One day, on the way home to lunch, my chain snapped so Maurice and Robbie rode by the side of me and took it in turns to propel me forward with a push. After each push I free-wheeled till one of them caught up with me. Following one particular push I glanced around and, in so doing, veered into the path of an oncoming cyclist. He and I both crashed to the ground but were uninjured. Fearful of the consequences, I rushed from the scene pushing my bicycle as I went. When I arrived home I pretended to be unwell so I would not have to go to school in the afternoon for the headmaster, Mr Bowley, had a reputation that was summed up in a piece of schoolboy doggerel which ran:
Old Pim Bowley is so holy
Goes to church on Sundays
Prays to god to give him grace
To whack the boys on Mondays
.
In the next school assembly, Mr Bowley asked for the boy who had knocked Councillor P off his bicycle to step forward but the guilty person was not present.

The accident was strangely coincidental. Mrs D claimed that before moving to Landport she had been given to understand that hers would be the only grocer’s shop on the estate and was aggrieved when a shop owned by a certain Councillor P, and run by his son, opened up at the other end of Bridge Green selling grocery items. Our lives at Mrs D’s took on a comfortable routine. On her days off, Mrs D liked to be taken out. She relished her visits to Holloways, near the White Hart Hotel, for a silver-service tea and enjoyed occasional trips to Brighton with us. She was present when I won a basket of fruit in a raffle at a garden fete held in the grounds of Glynde Place.
In out-of-school hours, Ronald sang in the choir at St John’s-Sub-Castro and Maurice built model aircraft, some of which were exhibited in the window display of a High Street shop. I spent my spare time in the company of Robbie who had moved with his parents to a new house in Pellbrook Rd. Nearby, somewhat later, German POWs worked on some allotments.

One day I was informed that I had done sufficiently well in the Scholarship Examination, which I had taken with others sometime previously, to go to a ‘Central’ school. That was a surprise because I had not paid much attention to schoolwork and my reading had been confined largely to the popular comics, ‘Beano’, ‘Dandy’, ‘Adventure’ and ‘Hotspur’.

In the spring of 1942,I left Lewes to go as a boarder to a school in Crowborough that had been evacuated from Croydon, but each Friday afternoon I took the train back to Lewes for the weekend. The list of stations read like the last line of a prayer;

Crowborough, Buxted, Uckfield, Isfield, Barcombe Mills, with Lewes as a concluding ‘Amen’. As the engine puffed its way across the bridge over Lower High Street, past familiar landmarks such as The Tabernacle Church and the Library I knew I was ‘home’ once again.

At weekends I was told about things that had happened while I had been away. These included the burning-out of an English bomber that had crashed just off the Offham Rd and Maurice’s diving for cover in a Station St pub, despite being under-age, when a German aircraft swooped low overhead, its guns blazing as it strafed the town.

In 1943 my school moved back to Croydon and Mum and my brothers moved back too. Our evacuation to Lewes was over, but our links with the town were to persist. However, that is another story.............

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