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Bombing, Evacuation and Street Games.

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

PART 1

My father was William Marshfield (1907—1996), variously a bricklayer, a sapper in the Royal Engineers, a riveter in an aircraft factory and a navy mess waiter. My mother was Dorothy née Waterman (1904—1974), a corset machinist and housewife.

I was born in 1933 at 11 Riga Terrace, Portsmouth, Hampshire, in my Aunt Elsie’s house, since the head of the house in Waltham Street where my parents had two rooms said my mother couldn’t have her baby there. Riga Terrace was the western side of Wellington Row, deep in a close-packed maze of streets that ran nor’-nor’-east between the Lake Road end of Church Street and Sultan Road. The area has changed since the slum clearance there, though a few of the street names remain. Riga Terrace was between modern Wingfield Street and Hertford Place (which was then Hertford Street, a through-street). My father in his cups once told me it was a ‘street of whores’, though he added a rider that was typical of his storytelling: ‘We didn’t know it at the time.’ The parallel Hertford Street, as it then was, was full of pubs—The Constitution, The Halfway House, The Queen Alexandra, The Wycombe Arms. All gone, but in those times nearly every street had pubs in it.

During World War Two, when I was about seven, I had scarlet fever, which meant a pleasant stay in a country hospital in Alton, Hampshire. There was a mixed-sex children’s ward, vividly remembered. We had two games. One was jumping on our beds and pulling our gowns up. The other was a spelling quiz. Since the only thing most of us could spell with certainty was our own name, we asked the others to spell that, so that we could get it right. One sly girl asked me to spell ‘Alan’ and then said I was wrong, it was spelt ‘Helen’. That wrong-headedness stung me.

Childhood brought the universally memorable experience of losing milk-teeth, nosebleeds and knees scarred from falls. When a tooth was loose you waggled it until it was nearly ready, then you looped a length of cotton over it, wound the other end of the thread round a doorknob, and slammed the door. Nosebleeds would come on in the most embarrassing places, like classrooms. As for knees, one fall happened when I was with my brother and parents in Victoria Park. I must have been slow to learn, and perhaps I was clumsier than most. These knocks gave me an enduring dislike of rough sports.

How old was I when I did another daft thing—grab a bar across the back of a lorry as it turned the corner into Waltham Street? Five or six, I think. The lorry picked up speed and I felt I couldn’t let go so I clung to it, dangling and taking giant steps behind it. What’s more, it didn’t stop when it got to the end of the road, but crossed St Johns Road and continued along Harley Street until it slowed to turn the corner into Clifton Street. Many of these streets have disappeared. St Johns Road is now Holbrook Road. I believe that was one of the biggest frights I ever had. And they say that children used to play in the streets in safety!

Street life was endlessly interesting. When the rag-and-bone man came round with his horse and cart, crying ‘Rag-a-Bo-ah’, we’d rush out with a shovel and bucket to scoop up the horse dung. What was that for? The garden, but the most we ever grew was potatoes and cabbages. The winkle man also came round and my mother would buy a half-pint scooped up in a tin cup from the box tray on two wheels that was the front of the peddler’s tricycle. Rent collectors came round weekly, and occasionally the insurance man from the Pru. Coalmen were a sight kids enjoyed, heaving onto their backs the hundredweight sacks from the flat back of a horse-drawn cart. Dray carts with their loads of beer barrels were also a sight. Those were the last days of horse-drawn transport. The houses and streets were lit by gaslight. I didn’t notice when electricity came along. The changeover had started before I was born, but until the beginning of the war all I remember was gaslight. I have no sense of gaslight when we came back from the country in the middle of the Blitz in 1941.

Early radios were battery-operated, but by the time war was over in 1945, when I was twelve, we were living in a house lit by electricity. In the early years of my life I believe there were trams travelling along rails in the roads, but by the time I started secondary school in 1945 trolley buses were common, getting their power from electric lines that hung overhead.

The war started in 1939 when I was six, but there are many things before that to record. In Waltham Street, where we lived then, we filled every day when it was not raining with street games. Rolling glass marbles in the gutter to hit others was a contest, like conkers, that everyone who was young then remembers. And there were games with cigarette cards. You showed off your incomplete, crumpled sets. I don’t think anyone was serious about getting whole sets. There was a picture on one side of a card and a description on the other. I can remember famous cricketers and film stars. There must have been cars and aeroplanes too. We constructed peeping theatres from shoe boxes: a hole in the top for light, eye-holes at one end and a slot at the other through which a card was lowered. And we also flicked cards to knock a propped-up one over. When we could we drove up and down the pavements in box-carts made by our fathers from fruit crates, pram wheels and skipping ropes. Once I ate pie-dish scrapings on our doorstep and was offended when another kid refused to share it.

This was in the 1930s, during the economic Depression when work was hard to come by. My father, who had left the army soon after marrying my mother in December 1931, worked, as many of Mum’s male relatives did, as a bricklayer’s labourer and roof tiler. There was never enough money and rows were frequent. On marriage, Dad was a stammering young man of 24 with exaggerated feelings of maturity born from service in the British Army of the Rhine at Wiesbaden. These manly feelings were tangled with deep-seated insecurities regarding his birth, not to mention the baldness he had acquired from yellow jaundice in Germany. My mother was cleverer and older by three years, with a quicker tongue. In the rows over money he would lash out at her, and at me too when I tried to get in the way and defend her. I have written two poems about him. This is one of them.

DAD

My father hugged the hod
that tore his ear.
Tiles up to tilers. Brickie.
The penniless thirties.

A man’s man. Hands like shovels.
He graduated, laid,
course upon course, the skins
of homes. Nailed slates.

Lorried from St Lazaire
in the war to Lille.
A horse corpse for shelter
on Dunkirk’s escape beach.

Angry, half Irish. Pay-day
a weekly rage-bout.
Bastard. Half something else.
False grit. Sober.

Mythic and bloody well
all too human, shouting.
Struck my mother and me.
I hated him.

But he laboured, riveter.
His wages, hers, got me
taught to sixteen.
French. Mathematics.

Ignorant, pigheaded,
hurting like hell
that I despised him and
did college despite him.

It took decades, mother’s death,
drunken loneliness,
for the wound between us to seal.
I a father. He our guest then.

Ignorant, thankful, with
his hod and Dunkirk tales.
Love seeped between.
I the hard one.

We took him out,
drove him round
the changed familiar streets
where they’d torn down his homes.

How much can a man take?
Testicle cancer,
wife gone, sons done well,
condescending bastards.

Miss him. Talk to his ghost.
Takes two lives for one life to mature.
I told the priest to say
he worked hard. By Christ he did.

Yet he has said the happiest days of his life were when my brother Bill and I were young. Although Dad hit me around a bit, I have lots of good memories of my parents. They would let us bathe in the sea at Southsea in baggy, hand-knitted swimming trunks. She was embarrassed about how skinny we were. We enjoyed strolling out with them. Sometimes a walk along Arundel Street would end in The Spread Eagle, a pub on the left-hand corner as you stood and looked south down Cottage View. On one stroll, close to the Landport Draper Bazaar where Arundel Street met Commercial Road, I walked behind the rest of the family, holding a fist before one eye to block out the moon.

In the early days of the marriage my parents would pay frequent visits to my mother’s mother, ‘Little Gran’, who lived in Mary Street, just off Arundel Street. Her husband Teddie (Edward James Waterman) had killed himself by putting his head in a gas oven at the Connaught Drill Hall a week before Mum and Dad married on Christmas Eve 1931. In fact, at the end of 1931, the disposition of Little Gran’s children was as follows:
Elsie (b. 1903) was 28 and had been married to Frederick Jerome for about 7 years
Dorothy (Mum herself, b. 1904) was 27 and had just found some rooms in Somers Road with her husband, Dad
Ena (b. 1906) was 25 and still living at home with her mother
Edwin James Jr (Ted, b. 1908) was 23 and still at home
Charles (b. 1909) was 22 and still at home
Nellie (b. 1911) was 20 and still at home
Alice (1913) was 18 and still at home
George (b.1919) was 12 and at home
Gladys (b. 1925) was 6 and at home
My mother, in fact, as the eldest sibling, had been a little mother in the crowded Mary Street household, Little Gran’s right hand in helping to run the place. She also had a job as a stitcher in a corset factory, and no doubt five of the other children worked too and brought home their pay packets. Did Dorothy’s departure hasten the death of her sick father (he had TB and may also have been gassed in World War One — family legend is unclear about this)? The loss of a diligent helper, who did the ironing for the men in the house, was no doubt a blow to Teddie Sr, even though he was said to like my father. One photograph survives: he was a small, dark, dapper man with a thin toothbrush moustache. He looked like his son and namesake, Ted. Photos of Ted Jr exist too. Mum’s small stature and dark complexion came from her father.

By the time I was about four many of these aunts and uncles had married, and I reckon that only Edwin (Ted), George and Gladys still remained at home. I remember weekly visits to 8 Mary Street, where there was always some aunt or uncle also visiting. The weekly call was also made so that Mum could do her shopping in the grocer’s, greengrocer’s, butcher’s and sweetshop just round the corner in Arundel Street. The Post Office was opposite the end of Mary Street too.

Whilst we were in Waltham Street, Mum’s brother Charles (Uncle Charlie) and his wife Dorothy lived with us for a short while. It must have been from late 1937 to early 1938, when I was four, since later, in September 1938, their first child (John Edward) was born. I don’t think the baby was born in our house, though it may have been—a birth certificate would tell. They lost this child when he was six months old, by which time they had moved to Shrewsbury. For Christmas 1937 (I think it was 1937!) Uncle Charlie carved a large wooden dwarf from a thin plank, perhaps with a fretsaw, for Bill, and made a plywood aeroplane for me. We were proud of these toys. I believe I came across him working on one of them in the front room of the little terrace house (No.4) but was not told what he was doing.

My earliest school must have been St Johns Road (‘St. John’s Street’ on earlier maps) Infants’ School, where St Johns Road (now Holbrook Road) met Garnier Street. To get to it from Waltham Street I had to pass an anglers’ shop where Coburg Street came into St Johns Road. We would stare, appalled, at the worms and maggots in glass troughs in the window, mounds of them. In that school teachers dunked biscuits in their tea as they patrolled the playground. Older boys told younger ones like me to run though the open-ended brick outhouse which contained the girls’ lavatories. The giggling girls led me out. Vast concertinaed partitions were pulled across two long halls to make classrooms, and we were taught to write copperplate between guidelines. Art lessons were not colourful affairs with powder paints. We had chalk and slates and I knew better than my teacher how to draw a wall. While she was demonstrating on the board I was doing my own version, a grid of crossed lines. I was told to pay attention in future and I think I did try, though it was easy to be distracted or to daydream.

The second school I went to was Ridgemede Infants’ School in Bishop’s Waltham, a village halfway to Winchester to which my mother, brother and I were evacuated in 1940. Bill and I were lucky to be with our mother, and luckier still to be lodged in a road in the village close to the monks’ priory and farm. Attached to the priory was an army transit camp where my father was billeted after returning from Dunkirk. (See his own account in The Dunkirk Memories of William Marshfield.)

The country was a magical phenomenon to townees. Mum didn’t like it, and nor did her sister Alice who lived in the same road with her two sons, my cousins Johnnie and Kenny Barr. After that first billet came Shore Crescent, and then we left soon after Christmas 1941 to return to Portsmouth at the height of the blitz. From Bishop’s Waltham we could see the fires from the bombing of Southampton dimly lighting the skyline.

From that village school three things remained. The lavatories were called ‘the offices’, and the boys’ urinals were open-air troughs full of what we confidently avowed was pig dung. I’ve never discovered if this was common practice, or if the mixture was used in the war effort. The smell didn’t deter little boys from sizing one another up.

My mother sent a letter to the teacher of our fetid and overcrowded class. In this she’d written that I was neither simple nor badly behaved. The woman must have told me off me and my mother, bless her, had come to my defence. The letter had an effect. I was no longer just one face amongst fifty, but a little boy called Alan who wanted to learn. I was beginning to spell out words for myself. There was a large wall map. I wondered about the large country which was called (as I mouthed it silently) ah-mer-RI-ka.

At home I got my mother to help me to read and she tried with a book she chose in good faith, though she knew nothing about teaching a child the basics. The book was Robinson Crusoe, the adult text. I tried to read it by learning all the words on the first page by heart, working away for a couple of nights before flinging the book across the room in frustration. ‘I’ll never learn to read!’ I was seven by then and it was another sixteen years before I looked at Defoe again.

It was in Bishop’s Waltham that brother Bill actually started his own education. He had to go to the Priory Infants’ School, which was closer to where we lived. When I passed the railings of that school one day he was quite by chance on the other side, holding the bars and sobbing his abandoned little heart out, calling to me. This would have been in 1940. He was always a tender boy and at this time I felt very protective.

I fared better a year later, for in 1941 we’d been forced out of this house and were all living in one room in Shore Crescent. One day when shopping in the High Street we stopped to stare through the window of a bookshop. I knew by then what a dictionary was so I pestered Mum to buy one, and persuaded her to throw in a copy of the New Testament. I found The Acts of the Apostles easier to read than the acts of Robinson Crusoe. The story of Pentecost and the tongues of flame was magical.

Before the dismal Christmas of 1941 we went back to Portsmouth by bus to attend the funeral of Big Gran, Dad’s mother, who had died on the 18th November of a cerebral haemorrhage. She was laid out in her open coffin at 37 Mayles Rd, Milton, and I was taken to look at her dead, waxen face. I was eight at the time and I don’t recall having any special emotion. In the cemetery I spoke to Auntie Reenie (Irene, Kenneth Marshfield’s wife). It may have been this visit which confirmed Mum in her intention to return to Portsmouth, probably early in 1942.

[END OF PART 1. Continued in Parts 2 and 3.]