大象传媒

Bombing, Evacuation and Street Games.

Childhood War Memories of Alan Marshfield (b.1933), in four parts

PART 4 (continued from Parts 1, 2 & 3)

In Cooper Road just off Stanley Road lived a girl called Marjorie. We enjoyed bumping into her because girls were so terribly infrequent in our lives, but we were shy and so was she so she never became one of our gang.

A nicer stretch of water was Baffins Pond. This had an island in the middle, swans, a paved walk around it, lots of willow trees, and a few stumpy growths in the water near the shore which we called islands. We colonised them. We named them. I believe there used to be a Baffins Farm but that had long ago gone. It was on Tangier Road. Along this road there were the usual shops and a few pubs (the Tangier and the Baffins Inn). There was a Chemist鈥檚 and a Lending Library but we never got to know the shops here the way we鈥檇 known those in Arundel Street, where Mum still shopped. A library in a shop was a usual at that time but I never used it. Adults went to it for romances and mysteries. I was soon to discover the main Town Library in the centre behind the Guildhall.

Some of the houses along Tangier Road had small forecourts not more than a foot or so deep in front of their bay windows. Low walls protected these tiny spaces from the pavement, and on them we would walk when we fancied. The practice stopped after an angry owner clipped me round the ear. I ran across the road to a policeman, but he told me to shove off or I鈥檇 get another slap. I was aggrieved.

From a Tangier Road shop near Copnor Bridge, on the corner of St Piran鈥檚 Avenue, I bought a small pocket notebook of some twenty or so pages. In this I wrote a novel! One chapter a page, in large handwriting. I have no clue now what it was about, but I was proud when I鈥檇 finished the task. At a guess it might have been about wild deeds on Mars, inspired by the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

It was in this part of the world I remember seeing, in 1945 just after the war, huge billboards displaying government warnings about VD. Venereal diseases were being brought home by soldiers to wives in aprons with hair up in front-knotted scarves.

My father left the army before the end of the war. I have him on audiotape saying that from the Bishop鈥檚 Waltham posting he was sent to another camp, but he was out of the army by 1944, working at an Airspeed factory in Hilsea, and later in their main factory along the Eastern Road, where eventually he was a riveter.

When I was twelve, at about the time I started to go to the Technical School in Hilsea, my parents found a house (in Station Road, Copnor) which was occupied by an old man, Mr Roberts (not his real name), who wanted a family to look after the place and pay him rent. At first he expected to sit with us and have Mum cook for him, but Dad made it clear that neither was going to happen. His room was above the kitchen and to get to it he had to go through the bedroom which Bill and I slept in. We didn鈥檛 like this, since he rolled home drunk and smelled of beer and cigarettes. He was a shambling hulk of a man whose only entertainment, apart from drinking in the Sportsman鈥檚 Rest on the corner, was a weekly visit to the Empire music hall to see the chorus girls.

It was in this house that I read on the kitchen table a newspaper describing the atom bombs which had been dropped on Japan. It sounded like science fiction. I discussed the end of the war with jubilation with Bill and another friend as we crossed the waste land at the end of Tangier Road opposite the playing field. On that field, by the way, we would sometimes mount three stumps against the cross-hatched wire fencing and defend them with a cricket bat against a tennis ball. Just three of us. The A-bomb and later nuclear devices went on to haunt our dreams for the next twenty or thirty years鈥攑eople had nightmares about them. I certainly did.

There was a narrow bomb site between our house and the next, and further down the road a bigger bomb site. Opposite this lived a boy called Tom who had bad facial eczema. We played with him sometimes. It was still a time for playing. Puberty had not yet arrived. At school I used to wrestle with Bill on the field by the side of the playground. Old school friends later told me this wrestling was all they could remember of us from that time. At home I used to bully him too, I鈥檓 unhappy to say. This never occurred to me at the time as especially wicked. My sensitive brother started to go his own way. Deep down we respected each other tremendously, though in later years we had many philosophical differences of opinion.

The house had no bathroom. Few working-class houses did at that time. Instead, a tin bath hung in the scullery. The large scullery was off the quite large kitchen, in the joint of the L-shape which was the form of the house. In the scullery corner was a lavatory, a coal-heap, a shallow sink which we never used, the tin bath on one wall, odds and ends against another, and a high skylight. The bath would be placed in front of the fire in the living room. Bill and I were in bed when our parents took their baths, but he and I used to have them, one after the other in the same water, in front of our parents, who would soap our backs.

We started to take the trolley-bus once a week to the Municipal Baths behind the Guildhall in Park Road. The Baths comprised an indoor swimming pool and rows of steamy cubicles, each containing a bath, a wooden-slatted, movable half-deck, a wooden wall-seat and a few clothes-hooks. The place was always full of kids like ourselves and a few grungy old men who went about cleaning up after us. We didn鈥檛 pay much and had to take our own soap and towel. We came out smelling of soapy steam: a walk in the fresh air would help, but we only really felt better for the experience after we鈥檇 got home and changed into fresh clothes.

That house had three rooms downstairs and three up. Our 鈥榤iddle鈥� room downstairs was devoid of furniture. My parents never had a completely furnished home of their own until they moved into a two-up, one-down council house when I was 22 (with father 48 and mother 51). In that middle room, through which we walked to the kitchen, we kept our bicycles and, in a wall-cupboard, our collection of comics, especially The Mickey Mouse Comic and The Boy鈥檚 Own Paper. I also kept some drawings of space-women that I鈥檇 done to illustrate a library copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs鈥� Thuvia, Maid of Mars:

Upon a massive bench of polished ersite beneath the gorgeous blooms of a giant pimalia a woman sat. Her shapely, sandalled foot tapped impatiently upon the jewel-strewn walk that wound beneath the stately sorapus trees across the scarlet sward of the royal gardens of Thuvan Dihn, Jeddak of Ptarth, as a dark-haired, red-skinned warrior bent low toward her, whispering heated words close to her ear.
鈥淎h, Thuvia of Ptarth,鈥� he cried, 鈥測ou are cold even before the fiery blasts of my consuming love! No harder than your heart, nor colder is the hard, cold ersite of this thrice happy bench which supports your divine and fadeless form! Tell me, O Thuvia of Ptarth, that I may still hope鈥攖hat though you do not love me now, yet some day, some day, my princess, I鈥︹��

I depicted her divine and fadeless form in black ink (I was good at art) in a sketchpad full of similar fantasies. Dad discovered this one day and showed me that he had found it, in admiration, I think. It mortified me that he had discovered anything so intimate and had been so crude as to reveal the discovery.

But the war was over and I was beginning another phase of my life.

[This is the end of the four parts.]

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