大象传媒

I was born in Epsom Hospital, Surrey, on Sunday morning 15th January, 1939, and christened that afternoon because I was not expected to live.

My father Arthur John Donhue, (known as Steve after Steve Donoghue the champion jockey), struggled through the snow and ice to get to the hospital. He was a disabled soldier from the 1914-1918 war, and could at this time only walk with the assistance of walking sticks. My mother May (Mary) Donhue, formerly Chilvers nee Flynn, was 38 and my father 44. They had been married eight years and my impending arrival was a great shock to them.

I doubt whether my father was able to work by this time. He had been a painter and decorator. My mother, who had been in service, cleaned for a very nice lady Miss Emily Mildred Parker and continued to do so for some time after I was born. My parents rented a council house in Hook Road, Epsom, Surrey. This had a large front garden and larger back garden. They never had a telephone or a car.

My mother was from Scotland and my father from London. They met on a train between Edinburgh and London. My father had been in military hospital (Craigleith I believe), and my mother was housekeeper to a wealthy widow Mrs Grace Coppinger who lived in Oakley Street, Chelsea, and also had a bungalow at Cooden Beach, Sussex. My paternal grandfather had moved from London to Epsom to work at one of the newly built L.C.C. (London County Council) asylums The Manor, in the late 1890's.

My earliest recollection is waking up as I was being lifted out of bed, wrapped in the eiderdown and carried down stairs by my mother. Our Anderson shelter was immediately outside our back door and down the wooden steps we would go into the dark interior pulling the wooden door over the entrance. We must have had the cleanest and best kept Anderson in the country. My mother kept the grass over it cut and the inside spotless. She found a dead Hedgehog inside it once and spring cleaned the entire shelter.

My mother also had to help my father into the shelter which took some time. His health was deteriorating and he had a wheelchair. Eventually he said that if he was going to go then he might as well be in bed and not in the shelter, as air raids were often underway by the time my mother got us all in there.

One night the raid was overhead or so it seemed. I was being carried by my mother and she stood in the kitchen back from the open door and we watched puffs of smoke bursting across the night sky. The back of our house faced towards London and it seemed too close to risk diving into the Anderson.

Next door to our house, in the grounds of the old isolation hospital was an A.R.P. (Air Raid Precaution) Centre. Sometimes the A.R.P. men would take my father round there, joking "mind my bike" as they wheeled him away. This joke was a classic from the B.B.C. Radio show I.T.M.A. (It's That Man Again) featuring Tommy Handley. After the war my mother and I went to a concert at Horton Hospital and Tommy Handley was top of the bill. The huge hall was packed and people standing in the aisles. Horton hospital was another L.C.C. Asylum but was used as a military hospital during both World Wars. (There were five L.C.C. asylums in Epsom, besides the Cottage and the District hospitals.)

My mother worked in the Post Office canteen at the main office in Epsom High Street and I remember sitting on a high stool "helping" to sort the mail. How she managed financially earlier in the war I do not know. My father received an Army disability pension of about 9/- (about 45p) a week.

I was never allowed to play anywhere but the back garden. We had a high side gate kept bolted and one day I managed to get my toes on a ledge and unbolt the gate. I wouldn't dare leave the front garden, but I climbed onto the front gate so I could look up and down the road, there being a high fence between us and the A.R.P. centre.

I don't remember any warning, but there was a plane approaching and my mother was looking for me. I only remember that she came running down the path wearing a tin helmet, grabbed me off the gate, ran back up the path and squashed me hard against the wall of the house, trying to share the helmet with me and shielding me with her body as the plane passed over. I don't know whether it was one of ours, but to this day whenever I hear a certain drone of an aeroplane I always think - is it one of ours?

I still have the metal dog tag which my mother had had engraved with my name and my health number CNWH.291-2 which I wore on a chain around my neck.

I had a Mickey Mouse gas mask with its cardboard box. Then I had a very special bag to keep it in. I think Miss Parker must have bought it because we could not have afforded it. It was a silvery grey material, dark on the inside, wider at the top and tapering towards the base, with a shoulder strap. But best of all it had a teddy bear, the complete front half top to toe, stuck on the bag. He had a red waistcoat and blue trousers. I loved that teddy bear and took him everywhere. One day an official looking man in a dark suit appeared at our front door and wanted to check my gas mask. All my mother's coaxing could not get that gas mask and teddy from my arms. When I realised that he only wanted the gas mask well that was all right, he could have the silly old mask any day. These cases must have been rare because I have never known anyone who had one or had even seen another. A few years ago one was pictured in the B.B.C. Homes & Antiques magazine and had been sold for several hundred pounds.

How my mother coped with everything I do not know. She cooked, cleaned, gardened, shopped, mended, knitted, brought me up and nursed my father and went to work. My father could not manage the stairs so the dining room became his bedroom.

Fortunately our bathroom was downstairs. There were two bedrooms upstairs. The roof was not insulated and sloped steeply so that the bedrooms were more into the roof space. They were baking hot in Summer and freezing cold in Winter. It was a cold house. We had a kitchen range in the living room which had an open coal fire on the right and an oven we never used on the left. It was flat across the top forming a deep shelf and my father kept a pot of spills there. It had a high mantlepiece. The whole fireplace was blackleaded regularly.

When my mother was at work and my father sitting in his armchair I decided I'd better make up the fire. As I placed coal on the fire I put my hand on the rim of the bucket that had been against the firebars and burned my hand. I cried, my father was annoyed and frustrated at not being able to do anything. When my mother returned she took me to the Doctor. I then got a lecture because it had cost 6d for the Doctor and she had to buy fresh dressings.

Besides keeping an immaculate house and growing lots of vegetables, my mother was a good cook and made jams and jellies and bottled fruit in Kilner jars. Nursing my father, she used to lift him in and out of the bath or bed and dress him. I can remember the smell of burning when she singed his hair.

Under the stairs in our house was not a cupboard but space in the kitchen where a big "copper" as we called it stood. It looked like a giant galvanised dustbin with a round wooden lid. It stood over a large gas ring set on the concrete floor. Behind it on the wall was a large wooden board and fixed to this was a wooden handle rather like a beer pump handle. My father used to hang his razor strop on the pump handle and slide his razor up and down the leather to sharpen the blade.

The copper was filled from the sink with buckets of water then the gas ring lit. It took about an hour for the water to boil. Then, having made sure the plug was firmly in the bath, water was pumped with a squeak through to the bathroom. Friday night was bath night and hair wash. Though we sometimes had a bath in the tin bath in front of the fire. This was nicer as it was warm. Our bathroom was freezing in Winter. Once my mother washed my hair with rainwater and it was very soft afterwards.

When we sat round the living room fire our fronts would be warm and our backs freezing. In our bedrooms in Winter you could draw pictures in the ice on the inside of the windows.

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