大象传媒

From 鈥� Michael Taylor
The Garden Cottage, Ruchlaw, Stenton, Dunbar EH42 1TD
Telephone 鈥� 01368 850291
Email 鈥� LusbyTaylor@aol.com
10 November 2003

Recollections 鈥�

These memories are of a period from before the Second World War to about 1947 as they include the influence both world wars had on my life. I am now 74 鈥� (I will be 75 in January 2004).

My father was born in 1900 and my mother in 1901. He had been conscripted in the last year of the 鈥楪reat War鈥� into the Wiltshire Regiment (the Moonrakers) and was posted to Phoenix Park in Dublin after training on Salisbury Plain. He had a very bad and unhappy experience of the army but at least he missed the horrors of any of the battlefields. He said the training was brutal and the food appalling.

My earliest memory is of the airship R101 shortly before it crashed in October 1930. I remember sitting up in my pram when I was about 18 months old and seeing it crossing over. I did not imagine this as it was years before I told anyone and no one had ever told me about it.

Later memories include my mother and her mother getting very upset about the abdication of King Edward VIII, though I do not think the general public had then got any idea of the repressive upbringing the young princes had had nor what they got up to either.

By 1939 I am sure that my family were well aware of the danger of yet another war with Germany. I clearly remember relatives and others who had fought in the 1914-18 war and even as a child realised now horrible it had been.

On either August 31st or September 1st my school was evacuated to Monmouth where I was billeted on the town blacksmith with another boy from our school. Again I can remember how upset my mother was putting me onto a bus to go the assembly point at the school. Possibly she wondered if she would see me again? She could remember all to clearly the carnage of the first world war.

Early in September we saw recruits 鈥� volunteers 鈥� marching off to camps for their initial training.

Monmouth was a mixture of enjoyable freedom to explore the wonderful countryside where things like butterflies and amphibians were still abundant and some lack of empathy with our hosts. I had a bike my father and I had made out of parts and I cycled to places like Chepstow on the nearly empty roads.

I occasionally helped in the forge and remember the smell of horses and burning hooves.

The people who had us as evacuees kept pigeons and I experimented with sending the scores from away matches of the local team at half and full time home by pigeon.

This ended hilariously with a visit from the police when a bird got lost and captured as sending messages by carrier pigeon in wartime was illegal, though we did not know that. The cryptic nature of football scores had apparently baffled the police.

For two weeks or so, when our landlady was temporarily unwell, I was moved to the town slaughterman which was certainly an experience though I did not learn to like some of the more unusual bits that were the slaughterman鈥檚 perks. I have since realised that this was because of the unskilled and unimaginative cooking rather than any intrinsic un-palatability of these parts of the animals鈥� anatomies. The slaughter house was at the top of the town half way down the wall above the river not far from where the statue of Rolls is to be found.

Drainage from the animals, including blood and anything else you can think of went straight into the river. Added to the abundant biodiversity perhaps?

The other interesting thing I did during the summer of 1940 was to go round with the man who was responsible for testing whether hayricks were heating or not. He was a farmer himself and what he did was to insert a thermometer into the centre of a rick on a long sectioned steel shaft. These were the days before hay balers, though bales can heat too, so haystacks were made of loose hay raked up onto carts/ haywains and then stacked. The idea was to ensure no unnecessary loss of animal feed in war time. If the stack was too hot he could order that it be dismantled to stop the heating, spoilage or even a possible fire. This was in the farmers鈥� best interests too of course.

After a year I went back home to Birmingham and was one of the first boys to go into the new buildings of King Edward鈥檚 School Birmingham in Edgbaston in September 1940.

The best of the school鈥檚 staff were at war. Their replacements were worthy enough but did not have the skill and experience to handle us. We could sometimes be horrid to women teachers, which was inexcusable. To refugees from Nazi Europe we were also not sympathetic if their English was poor. One, Herr Deutschkron, was I believe the headmaster of a school in Germany and was a very good language teacher and I wish I had kept up with German as I enjoyed his lessons. Herr Weikesheimer may have been an eminent physicist but was a very bad teacher and was given a hard time. In neither case was there any anti-German feeling or anti-Semitism though.

One memorable character was Kenneth Tynan later to become a renowned theatre critic. He was the illegitimate son of someone or other called Peacock but father gave him things like a sports car which was unheard of in those days. I was in a school play with him - Abraham Lincoln. He was Lincoln and I was a soldier with little to say. Later in the early stages of fame he wrote an interesting and misleading entry for Who鈥檚 Who. He said he had been 鈥渆ducated privately鈥� before going to Oxford. Strange to want to disown a school like KE, but then snobbery and insecurity are funny things. KE was, and still is, the best boys鈥� school academically in Britain.

My father was a mechanical design engineer creating machinery for making things like armaments (as was his father in the same firm) and so he was in a reserved occupation as well as probably being too old anyway for the early years of the war.

We had heavy air raids at night at times but even so I would sometimes be allowed out during them. I wonder whether my parents were being fatalist? Anyway I came to no harm. On the mornings after I would sometimes collect shell fragments and nose cones from AA shells, and sometimes find that a building perhaps a mile away had been hit by a bomb. Really dangerous were the unexploded incendiary bombs 鈥� especially the ones with an additional nose cone with TNT in it, designed to kill people. We did crazy things which I cannot explain.

At school I was a Boy Scout for a few years and learnt useful things about knots and camping and outdoor cooking. I then joined the School JTC (the old Officers鈥� Training Corps), which I enjoyed. Voluntary war work included packing Red Cross parcels for PoWs in Germany in the basement of Birmingham Town Hall. It was important not to be so misguided as to include additional unapproved items. This also enabled me to hear and enjoy the rehearsals for concerts in the hall above.

Life was so governed by the war and the need to win it that it also seemed to create a state of mind in which peace could not be imagined. Certainly I did not work hard enough to achieve my then ambition of becoming a doctor.

So when I left school I decided to join the regular army. This is not as silly as it sounds as I remember that at Sandhurst there were a lot of us who thought of it as a career in keeping the peace. Initially I joined the Black Watch, partly because of my Scottish ancestry on my father鈥檚 side. After Sandhurst I joined the Royal Artillery.

I have no idea if these are the sorts of memories the 大象传媒 is looking for?

Michael Taylor

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