大象传媒

The story starts in 1939 in Hastings, with my family, father, mother, brother, me aged 7 and Joyce who worked in the house while my mother helped my father in the shop.

Mondays always smelt of wet washing and cabbage. A mains radio was big and made of wood and Bakelite. Only the very rich had a radiogram and that was usually a floor-standing piece of furniture. We had a wind up gramophone that played 78 rpm records using steel needles or rose thorns. My father ran his business without a telephone, as did most of his contemporaries.

Over my head, world events were moving to a climax. My brother, at 17, had joined the Territorials, much to my parents' dismay.
On the outbreak of war, he was sent immediately to France and was posted missing some days after Dunkirk, in an action that halted the German advance for the first time.
We subsequently found that he must have been killed in that action but, until my mother received a photograph of his grave, she kept alive a spark of hope, questioning returning prisoners of war for news and writing to any organisation that helped trace missing soldiers.
Until death entered my adult life, I did not realise how necessary it is to bury your dead and mourn.
Grow through the grief and live on. My parents must have suffered deeply and, as far as I was concerned, as a child, in silence. As for me, I didn't really comprehend my brother's death.

Later, after my father died, my mother told me that I had never really known him as she did.
My brother's death had changed him radically. In fact, it was in that year, I was 7, that our lives were changed, for better or for worse, irrevocably.
In 1940 France fell to the Germans and England was about to be invaded. Hastings was evacuated, and became a ghost town.
Hoping against hope that my brother would return, and needing to nurse the business, my parents sent me away and stayed at home, but as hope faded and, when one day's takings amounted to two old pence, they too left for Somerset and Joyce returned to the Isle of Wight.

Out into the World
Meanwhile, I had been evacuated with my school to Welwyn Garden City, a town that had already seen an influx of evacuees from the East End of London come and go during the 'phoney war' in 1939. Billets were hard to find, and with a name beginning with 'W', I was last in line.
I just remember a very long day, with two volunteer women (and me in tow) being turned away time and again, eventually, sitting on a doorstep, very tired, while adults argued my fate over my head.
A little Scottie dog came out to be friendly and I petted it. "He likes the dog," someone said, "All right, we'll have him."

I was seven, armed with 'William the Bad', a toy pistol and a luggage label identifying me.
Two toys were our ration.
I cried a bit in my camp bed that night, but no one noticed.
However, my previous experience with grown-ups was all-good. I had every expectation of being treated properly and I reckon I was. Whether my mother would have agreed, had she known the full extent of my 'freedom' that summer, is a different matter.
The 'adults' in charge of me were, in fact, two teenage sisters married to soldiers who had immediately been posted abroad. They had set up house together and what they knew about cooking and child management between them could have been written on a postage stamp, without obscuring the King's head. Boiled eggs with curry powder!
It was years before I attempted Indian food again.

I found friends and went out with them at weekends. I'd come back at 6 or 7 o'clock and the sisters would say, "Had a nice day?" And I had. No harm came to me except cuts and bruises and I learned self-reliance and independence.

Our major sins were smoking cigars stolen by one boy from his father or, more disgustingly, dog-ends picked up from the gutter, and stealing apples to disguise the smell (and to tell the truth, the taste!)

Between the ages of eight and fifteen, boys went around together; girls were excluded. Occasionally we might show off by fighting, shouting or swaggering in front of a pretty sister.
But we were really into adventure.

The Garden City had its own abandoned gravel pit and brickyard. The Home Guard had turned it into an assault course, where we naturally 'assaulted' each other. I recall being caught by a rival gang and stuffed down a barbed wire filled trench and pee'd on. I doubt that was part of the standard Home Guard training!

It was also a rifle range and a source of live ammunition. We discovered that cordite burned without exploding outside the cartridge case, but putting a bullet in a vice and hitting the detonator with hammer and a nail wasn't a good idea.
Newspaper soaked in weed-killer and sealed in a steel tube made a dangerous bomb, and why nobody I knew wasn't killed is still a mystery to me.
Cuts and bruises were commonplace (my knees were always scabbed), but we all thought ourselves immortal.

The abandoned workings included a narrow gauge railway running down into the pit. By propping the broken rails on drums, we engineered a braking slope and, Sisyphus-like, endlessly pushed a little wagon to the top, leapt in, overflowing the sides, and entrusted ourselves to gravity and luck!

The road down into the pit was cut through high banks and spanned by a water pipe; 30 feet above the roadway in the middle, and maybe 30 feet from side to side. We shinned across this, sloth-like with our arms pulling out of their sockets. Extreme fear kept our hands closed when physical strength gave out!

Close by was the Twentieth Mile Bridge with an outward sloping parapet protected by two strands of barbed wire. Walking on the roadway was dull, so we walked on the parapet outside the wire or, for variety, on our toes on the semicircular decoration on the outside wall of the bridge, holding on to the parapet with our hands.

The brick-works bridge, long gone, was deserted and just the place to stand and try to drop half bricks down the smokestacks of trains passing underneath. We trespassed on the railway lines and stokers hurled lumps of coal at us. We put pennies and ball bearings on the lines; the first got flattened and the second drove wiggly channels along the relatively soft metal of the rails. On the Hertford line, which was little used, we found snakes and lizards under the corrugated iron sheets by the rails and took them home as (very temporary) pets.

When my mother finally caught up with me by visiting, staying and telling my Dad he'd better come too; she thought I'd become a 'street Arab'. I guess she was right.

School was tough and, as a new boy, I was picked on often. In self-defence, I joined a street gang and life improved.
I used to have breakfast and go to the gang leader's house to go on to school with him. There I was given fried bread, (a welcome piece of junk food).
I was an adult before I realised I'd been sharing a poor family's only breakfast. They also used to give me 'bacon bones', thin rib-like bones that could be chewed for the marrow. In war-rationed Britain, this was better than sweets!

Rationing meant very small portions, unless you knew a black marketer and had money. Two ounces of butter per week was just a scraping on bread, so I mostly had dry bread and jam and saved enough butter that way to have at least one slice thickly covered.
The dripping from beef was favoured as a coating for bread, especially with the brown jelly at the bottom of the bowl, liberally sprinkled with salt.
Incredibly unhealthy by today's standards, but such items were so small and distantly spaced, they were necessary treats in a dull but healthy diet.

Air raids were a way of life and every holiday, summer and winter, I would be sent to our friends in the Isle of Wight "to get away from the bombs". My mother knew little of radar, and the big aerials at Ventnor, a constant target for the bombers.
I didn't tell her, I enjoyed the holidays on the farm too much.
To get to the Isle Of Wight, I travelled by myself from home to Portsmouth, caught the ferry, and met at Ryde by my hosts.

Our Island friends were Vi and Ron. Ron was the carter on the farm. He was a highly skilled man. Carter, Vet, Ploughman, Mender of harness and gear, Thatcher, Corn Rick maker, and, at a pinch, Cowman. He easily turned his hand to every task on the farm. He needed to, too few men and no diesel, meant the tractors were laid up and horses came into their own again.

Two shire horses worked as a pair and I used to walk behind them learning to plough, harrow and reap. Before the reaper could get onto the field, we had to scythe the first swathe, stand the sheaves on end continue behind the reaper, stooping the corn (five sheaves to a stoop) to dry. To make a sheaf we grabbed an armful of corn stalks and wrap a twist of stalks round it. To make a stoop, we piled five sheaves in a wigwam shape, jamming the heads together.
There was always someone with a shotgun riding the reaper and a couple of hands with their dogs waiting for the rabbits to bolt from the last patch of standing corn usually in the middle of the field.

After several days, the drying sheaves were thrown by pitchfork into a horse-drawn hay-wain, Constable would have recognised the scene immediately. When I tired of forking or stacking on the wagon, I was allowed to drive it. Long, gradual turns were needed; I was warned it was all too easy to overturn although I never saw it happen. The corn rick was built to a traditional design. All the sheaf heads pointing inwards, and tunnels left through the rick so that heat didn't build up and cause a fire. The rick was then thatched with bright straw and willow pegs, and left in the field until dry enough to thresh and store in the granary.

I wish I could say I still remember how to do it, but the return of peace, petrol and American mechanisation has long rendered that knowledge redundant.

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