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Don McDouall was evacuated from London during World War II when he was five years old. He was sent to the small country village of East Hanney to live with Grans and Grampy at a house called Tamarisk. When the war ended nobody came to take him home and he was sent to a children's home. When the children's home closed he was given the choice of returning to Tamarisk or to live in another home, he chose Tamarisk. He now lives in Australia.
We were all starting to grow up. The autumn of 1949 came with a rush. Us adolescent boys would go around the villages with our arms around each other's shoulders singing on winter's evenings. We had started to take notice of our own appearances and started to feel awkward even around girls we knew well.
I had progressed from parting my hair in the middle to smothering it with 'Brylcream' trying to stop the curls sticking straight up and applying 'Vaseline' to help to attain a DA (Ducks Arse!) look at the back, which never worked. With our first wages we were buying Harris Tweed type sports coats and Gabardine trousers. We wore cowboy style shirts and had ties of imitation silk with scantily clad girls painted on them!
In the summer we wore those short 'shower proof' coats that let your midriff freeze and if it rained you got soaking wet! On our feet were crepe soled brown shoes, the crepe perhaps two inches thick. We went to Oxford on the bus trying to chat up City girls. I cannot recall any of us succeeding in this either.
Sadly the girls we had known all our lives now didn't want to know us anymore. They were chasing or being chased by boys much older than us. Now the younger girls that we had never noticed, suddenly looked very enticing.
Most girls wore kerchiefs over their heads and Taffeta dresses with multi petticoats and brassieres that made their bosoms look like ice cream cones! They wore stockings held up by suspender belts and those who couldn't afford such luxuries penciled in the seams on the backs of their legs. Plucked and penciled eyebrows were seen along with bright red lipstick. To us they looked smashing!
One night there was a gang of us over in West Hanney. It was raining so we found shelter in the porch of the church. We were larking around, smoking and such when someone dared one of the girls to lay down in one of the coffins. There were two Roman or Saxon stone coffins along the porch walls. With much ado the girl took up the dare. Then someone dared me to do likewise so I got into the stone coffin and lay down.
There was a niche cut into the stone to take the dead persons head. I put my head down in this niche where most likely a dead Romans head had been, perhaps two thousand years before and promptly got my head stuck! Well you can imagine the cold sweat I broke out in. There I am, held by my head, when everybody else ran away. I was scared to death! I cannot remember how I got unstuck but I guarantee the next time I lay in a coffin I will be dead and it will be my own!
Don McDouall, Australia, 2001
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