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September 1939 -1945

Eight years old standing on the gently sloping Rye-hills of Lutterworth in Leicestershire overlooking the meandering river Swift lazily belieing its name as it threads its way from the Hall in the far distance on my left, then on and under the railway viaduct on my right. This exciting vista was to be, for a short time, my playground, my territory, my kingdom. All mine.

Not to be visually confined by the dark towering lapping tide of boxed in Hammersmith market. Not to be encompassed by the blackhole of the backstage of the Lyric while finding wonderment at the bric-a-brac of stagecraft mechanics and trying to imagine what it was for - had been for. Not to have the dank echoes of authority amplifying in the gloom the now obvious dangers of leaping from ponderously banging and booming floating barge to floating barge moored in the gloom of the under-belly of Hammersmith bridge.

No, this vista of a place was to be where the German landmine tore a huge exciting hole in the sledge run. Where snow, on a cloudless, brilliant, cold, sunlit day, blinded and bedazzled as you shot downhill stopping just short of the Swift. The place where the airplane crash-landed; German or English, who cared! It was a plane to touch, to feel, to own, on a temporary proprietorial basis. The Place! The place where the Tiger Moth, just landed, and took off.

What was it about these gentle, rolling, sloping hills? What was it that attracted adventure and fuelled her imagination so that she could fuel mine?

The place where at the end of a cloudless, brilliant, hot, summers day, the bend in the river was full of wet glistening bodies, mottled with camouflaging mud from the river banks. The place where sliding, splashing, wading, screaming, shouting boys were in a paradise of no authority, no inhibition and no prohibition. The place where the Jenkins' knew what boys would do, what they should do, and trusted them to do it with gusto.

The place where on a cloudless, brilliant, moonlit night at the Hall we slipped and slithered on the silent black ice whose scratched grooved surface recorded 'mute' distorted screams of terror and delight. The place where the stream that fed the lake was a-tangle with branch and root, piercing and protruding from the ice. Ice black as pitch, mottled with misshapen organic opal moons, whose delicacy you knew would splinter and tinkle at a wounding touch, and through which a dark well of water would ooze to drown the opal moon and fill your boot with iced water.

The place that for too short a time seemed to have been specially made for an eight year old spirit. Too free a spirit, for it was moved on to a middle-aged, middle-class, childless couple who knew not freedom, life, love, or adventure. Unlike the working class Jenkins' who had big hearts, big minds and boys horizons.

The house of Jenkins the council worker, the steam roller driver,the man who needed help to put his charge to bed, to light his paraffin lamps and place them around the roadworks. The house of Jenkins the allotment holder, whose allotment was close to the south side of the Swift and from where the heady scent of the red currant bush still reaches out and unwraps its many layered favour for me. The house of Jenkins the son, the bakery van driver, the man who also needed help, help to deliver bread and cakes to the outlying villages and houses around Lutterworth on a Saturday morning. The man of forbidden telling and listening to, and consequently giving rise to great imaginings about his unuttered tales of intrigue and mystery in the Palestine police. Those imagined forbidden tales made outlandishly real by the touchability of the redundant pith helmet hanging insolently and mockingly silent in my attic bedroom.
All so unlike the brief encounter with the first body selectorate, the middle-class corn merchant and his wife, with their Voyseyed house and bedroom of art deco linoleum, rising sunned carpets, and front door panel, their Daily Express and Rupert Bear, their things, their things material, their things instead of them, their middle class values that did the 'right' thing, instead of those things, those things that feed bumps in the night. My attic, a warm textured life exposed in the floorboards a traffic worn polish, a cosily ordered ranking of honest slate bearing lathes, a well-worn oil lamp and its odour of snuffed out wick, a battered black painted tin trunk at home in the corner, (certainly not Port Out Starboard Home), a camp bed, or at least a bed that looked as campbeddish as made no difference, but which assisted in the derring-do of a thousand potentials, and, AND, a magnificent entrance up through the floor, eminently defendable against the barbarian hordes, to my attic, my castles in Spain. However, this marvellous world of mine was not to everyones taste as the three additional lads who were later foisted on the Jenkins’ upped stakes and made a dash for freedom down the London road.

Imagination fed and nurtured by the Jenkins and helped further by the house, a converted sweet shop, a fitting establishment from which to sally forth to conquer. The house which should not have had the misfortune to be next door to the Crown, or was it the Bull, at the bottom of the high street just where the road forks right to the Secondary Modern school and left down the hill to the bridge over the Swift. A sterile dead coaching inn in whose yard nothing happened except that cars parked. Instead of being next door to the Greyhound, a place worthy of being the Jenkins next door neighbour

The Greyhound yard! Watching the sheep having their throats swiftly and expertly cut ,then laid in line with military precision on a forever static conveyor bench, there, huddled together in death as in life, but with their wheeling panic gone forever. Looking down and peering through the steam of the pig house to catch a glimpse of the mechanics of slaughter that separated the pigs scream from its carcass. Horse riding bare backed for each agonising minute after minute, for mile after mile, over metalled exercise road, refusing no well meant hardship in case it barred me from the delights of the Greyhound yard; its tackroom polishing, its stable cleaning, its vigorous grooming and its slaughter house watching.

Lutterworth, who if seen again will no doubt try to deny and diminish the breadth of my many childhood images of time, place, and people, the best of which were crammed into such a short but exciting few Jenkins months. The like of which would not be rekindled until the London short return. Not a very shrewd personal safety move in war time but what adventures.

The preparation and organisation required to camp out in Gloucester road tube station. To sleep on the tube platform whilst a front of warm fetid air proclaimed the arrival of the last or next to last tube for the night to the platform. Those nights when for some inexplicable reason it was deemed OK to stay at 44 Aspenlea Road (off of the Fulham Palace Road) rather than go to the tube. This was followed, of course, by the whistle and crump of falling bombs, followed by the rumble of falling rubble while we - Mum, Aunt Aggie with Mavis, Aunt Molly with Pat and Geordie, with Bill their dad dying of TB, as was mum, and not able to get out either to Gloucester Rd Tube or the brick built street shelter - stayed at ‘home’ so that solidarity left us crouched and listening helplessly in silence on Uncle Bill's bedroom floor wondering if we were next.

That awful rumbling noise that made it seem as though the world was about to fall in on you, but which in the full glare of day was mercifully always at least two or three streets away. Then the walk back after the raid alone, (youngsters were safe then to walk the long walk home at 3 or 4 in the morning but always with plenty of firelight to see by) for mum stayed at 44 and I stayed at grandad’s in Wilsons Road in Great Church Lane to view in the full glare of sundry fires the especial delight of the school fire seen beyond the rec. it would have been a crowning glory if it had been Brook Green School, but then you can't have all the luck. Reality is brought home to how near a near miss is is when you see your pillow with a two foot coping stone lying on it, which was often my resting place when, as said, I would have often been asleep during the raids at Wilsons Road.

Which hastened the escape down to Windward House, with Aunty Belle and her four: Gloria, Sheila, Barbara and Anita at St.Briavels on the Wye, followed on by Newcastle on the Tyne.

Each place to have more than its fair share of adventure and happiness and to which I always seemed to arrive in time for the Spectacular.

(In the process of moving around I attended six schools and never sat an exam - I always just missed them.- quell luck! I eventually opted for 5 years in the RAF as a Wireless Mechanic and then went on to the London College of Printing and read Graphic Design. Could I have done better with paper work? I doubt it, though my writing may have been better for it.

At Windward looking straight down the Wye over the Severn to Bristol City to see it a mass of flames. But never with my sister, for she was safely billeted with Mrs Bolland in Lutterworth not only for the duration of the war but until a house could be found in London which we were eventually allocated along with Aunt Aggie and her family in Lakeside Road, Shepherds Bush (formerly called Railly Road which had to be renamed Lakeside because of its bad reputation).

But, Lutterworth, their village, their bricks, their mortar, their facades, their choice, while we, the ‘lucky innocents’ of war, lined up shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, stood and waited. Waited, while their choice of hell or heaven was beckoned by an 'angelic' face or smile. ‘It’ left standing against the the railings trapped between the corn merchants on the left and the British Legion Hall on the right, with rough allotment ground and the setting sun to our backs and the glorious smithy to our front (a place where I spent many wonderful hours watching ‘Dobin’ being shoed and cursed at) ‘It’ to be eventually, through some arcane hastily convened committeed ruling, assailed and confronted by an irregular wave of advancing intending in locus parentus. Each locus wheeling and swooping across the wide grass verge from the road (who would be the lucky one to get the motorbike and sidecar?), or making darting, flanking sorties from left and right to gather, in a velvet clad iron clutch, their choice. The clutch that wrenched brother as brother from sister as sister.

I enjoyed my war.

God rest their souls.

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