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Chapter 1
The Early Years
I was born on 13th December 1933, the middle one of three boys, in the Military Hospital in Aldershot. My elder brother had been born in Gibraltar whilst father was serving there in the Artillery. My birth took place shortly after mother arrived back in England. My younger brother followed some eighteen months later at the same hospital.
My first reminiscence was when I was about four or five years old. One night I had found a pair of scissors and just had to try them out. The only thing that I could find to try them out on was the blanket on my bed. On the folded blanket I cut out a piece with two snips of these lovely shining scissors that left a diamond shaped piece when it was unfolded. I then realised that I could not put it back! Not wanting to be caught I hid the scissors and the offending piece of blanket inside a papier-mâché model of Popeye the Sailor Man which had originally housed toffees. Unfortunately for me, mother found the hole in the blanket when she made my bed. After suitable corporal chastisement, I admitted the offence and handed over the scissors and the piece of blanket. As we lived in married quarters and the blankets were W. D. (War Department) Property, mother had to report the damage to the Barrack Warden. As a punishment for her son’s heinous crime she had to sit outside the Main Guard Room, in full view of all entering or leaving the camp, and sew the offending diamond back into the blanket. As she was the wife of a Lance Sergeant, this was a particularly embarrassing event for her, and I was definitely not her most favoured son for quite some time.
I had my first schooling at the age of five in an army school. I had so wanted to join my older brother at school and to be with the other boys that, if ever mum couldn’t find me, she just had to walk down to the school and there I was, little face pressed to the bars watching the lucky boys at school. At that time we were living in at Blackdown, one of the Aldershot garrison towns.
In early 1939, father was posted to London to join the City of London Militia (Territorial Army) as a gunnery instructor. The possibility of a war was in everyone’s mind and the setting up of anti aircraft guns around London was important. We were therefore found married quarters, not in an army camp as before but in a reasonably fashionable area of London (Ealing). I therefore had to start at the second of the five schools that I attended - Northfields Avenue Primary School - just down the road from our house at No 66 Leighton Road. It is amazing how certain numbers stick in one’s mind - our house at Blackdown camp had been No 8, Victoria Terrace. The other number that stays with one for life is your Service number. Ask any ex-serviceman his service number and he (or she) will rattle it off immediately. Mine was 4095376.
I remember the outbreak of the war on 3rd September 1939 (also my maternal grand father’s birthday) not only because of the King’s speech to the Nation, but that when the first air raid sirens were sounded, mother fell down the stairs and broke her arm! One of the main things I can remember was sticking strips of brown paper over the windows in a criss-cross pattern to stop the glass shattering in the event of a bomb. We were also issued with a special metal ‘table’ that had iron mesh sides, under which we were expected to sleep in the event of an air raid.
As soon as war broke out, father had to go down to Somerset to Watchet where he was a gunnery instructor. Because “there was a war on” married quarters were a peacetime luxury. We were allowed to stay in the quarters that had been provided when we came to London but we could not go to Somerset to join father. Mother decided to join the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) as a member of the permanent staff as opposed to many who were recruited later as volunteers. My younger brother still has her ARP badge, which, because of some bureaucratic error was in fact a hall marked silver one as opposed to the silver coloured ones that should have been supplied! Because of her ‘War Work’, we two older boys were sent to the country to live with our maternal grandmother just north of Reading. My younger brother stayed with her and although a bomb destroyed the house they were in, they escaped. After mother had found a new house in London, she sent him to join us in the country until she joined us after the Battle of Britain and the main Blitz was over. She continued her work with the ARP locally until the war ended.
Most of the villagers worked in or around the village, mainly in the local farms and of course the woods. I was used to working in the woods, as my relations, in my grandmother’s village, were all woodsmen. My great grandfather, Jonas, had owned the timber rights to most of the local woods, the actual ground being owned by Westminster Abbey. I was the middle one of the family and the apple of my grandfather’s eye. His name was also Jonas, but everyone referred to him as ‘Joe’. He was a pig breeder, a cottage gardener and a lorry driver. As a cottage gardener, he was well known locally for his sweet peas and his polyanthus. He was regularly asked by a large local seed merchant to trial some of their new varieties. He was one of the first cottage gardeners to have the primula denticulata growing in his garden. One year he put up some sacking at the road end of his sweet pea canes. His sweet peas normally had no less than six blooms per stem. He spent a lot of time with them: every evening he would go down the row and tie in each plant to the cane and remove the tendrils. When the plants got to the top of the canes he would cut all the ties, lay the plants down and then start to re-tie them to a cane about five foot further down the row. Well, one morning the sacking appeared to have become undone and behind it, having previously been screened from view, was a pale green sweet pea! The ambition of all sweet pea growers is to produce a green sweet pea, just as rose growers have tried since time immemorial to produce a black rose and bulb growers - a black tulip. Many get close, but this was a winner! That evening he received a visit from one of the senior staff of the local seed merchants. This gentleman said, “Well Jonas, I see you’ve managed to get the green flower. Can we buy all of the seeds that these blooms will produce, and then grow them on?” Grandfather said, “I suppose I could sell them to you, but I cannot guarantee that they will produce a new green variety. They may have been crossed with some of the other blooms.”
“I realise that,” said the man, “but we will take that risk. What we would like you to do is to cover the blooms with a paper bag just before they open and self-pollinate them by hand. We will send one of our own men up to do it for you.” “I could take your money” said grandfather chuckling, “and what you have offered me is a lot of money, but I am glad that I’ve been able to fetch one over on you. What I’ve done is to inject some green ink into the stems every evening after dark and so dyed the flowers green, just like the children do in spring with the snowdrops!” They both had a good laugh and then went down to the local for a drink. Although granddad was a very moral man, he had a wicked sense of humour. I suppose that came from our ancestry: the earliest record of one of his fore fathers was a marriage entry in the local church records in the early 1700s of a Jonas Collins, horse doctor from County Tipperary in Ireland.
My grandparents lived in a small thatched cottage built nearly 700 years ago. This house still stands in the hamlet of Chazey Heath in the parish of Mapledurham. The door to the house was only five foot high, so most had to lower their heads when entering. It had two main rooms: one was the living room and the other was the bedroom. This had been divided into two with a wooden partition. One half of the bedroom had a double bed in which Jonas and his wife, Emily, slept and the other side had two single beds where we three boys slept. When she joined us Mother slept in one with my youngest brother and we other two slept head to foot in the other. If dad came home from the army on leave, he and mum slept on the sofa in the living room. Often my single uncle and two married uncles and aunts also stayed there and I think they slept on the floor. The kitchen was outside, built from kipper boxes on their sides and covered with corrugated iron. (Jonas, my grandfather once drove for a fishmonger in town.) The toilet was a wooden outhouse with a bucket. There was no water or electricity; our water we got from a spring at the bottom of the garden, cooking and light was based on paraffin. The house was heated in the winter by an old iron range set in an inglenook.
My granddad had a great influence on me. I followed him round all the time whenever he was home, learning much about the country and country lore. When we planted seeds in the spring he would cut a little stick four inches long and show me how to use this and count out the seeds, using the stick to keep them the same distance apart across the garden. Beetroots were planted in fours and parsnips in sevens. He used to quote the little poem: -
One for the rook and one for the crow,
One for to rot and one for to grow.
Jonas always smoked a pipe - he had many different ones in all shapes and sizes. Once he got a new pipe that was carved like a bull’s head with horns. When his pipe went out he used to put it in his back trouser pocket. The first time he did this with the new pipe he bent down to do a job, he gave a loud shout and jumped up. “That there bull’s just attacked I,” he said, and went straight up to the shed, got a chisel out and set about de-horning it. There was one old woodsman who was always reckoning he had left his ‘baccy’ at home and used to ask Jonas for a fill, saying ‘any time you want a fill, if I got my ‘baccy’ with me, I’ll let you have one’. One day, we were in the local when this woodsman came in. Jonas asked if he could have a fill. When the old woodsman handed over his tobacco pouch, Jonas took out a very large cherry wood pipe he had made to fill up. When the old chap saw it he said, “Blimey Jonas, t’would have been easier for me to buy you a couple of ounces to fill that un up.”
As I said earlier, granddad was a pig breeder and from this grew my great affection for pigs. They are the most intelligent of all the domesticated animals, including dogs. Although granddad never chastised us physically, he had a way of making you learn things fast. Once he was selling some young ‘porkers’ and you can imagine the scene. There was granddad and the potential buyer both leaning over the side of the sty with their pipes in their mouths and me, a seven year old who knew everything, standing between them, peering through the bars. “Well Jonas,” said the buyer, “they looks great and their coats look bright and shiny.”
“Course they do” says I. “We oiled them this morning.” Jonas took his cap off and gave me a cuff round the ears - “Speak when you’re spoken to, Boy,” was all he said. I soon learnt to hold my tongue when business was going on. (One way to make a pig look good and healthy is to put some raw linseed oil on their backs. They lick this off each other, giving their coats a lovely shine whilst at the same time removing ticks and dust.)
We once had a young gilt (a female pig who has not had a litter) and although we had our own boar, Jonas decided that he would use the services of a neighbour’s boar. The neighbour lived about a mile away through the woods. I went with granddad and drove the gilt up to Mr Parker’s small holding. I had to wait until the job had been done and then bring the gilt home. One day, after she had had her litter and they had been weaned, I went down to the pigsties and saw the gate to her sty open and no sign of her. I ran back and said that the young sow had gone. “Aha” said granddad, “you’d better get up to Parker’s and bring her back. She knowed what she wanted and where to get it.” Apparently she had come into heat and, ignoring the boar in the next sty, had lifted the locking bar with her snout, pushed the gate open and gone through the woods to where she had been the first time! When I got there the job had been done and I brought her home again. In the autumn, one job we had to do after school was to take the pigs into the woods where they fed on fallen acorns from the oak trees. They would also root around and eat the beech mast (nuts).
Jonas built us rabbit hutches from pine off-cuts and set each of us up with a pair of Belgian Hare rabbits. From these we bred young rabbits, raising them until they were large enough for the table. These young were then killed and skinned. The meat was taken to a restaurant in town (remember, it was war time) and we stretched out the pelts on boards and cured them. These were sold to a local furrier who made them into fur coats (Coney skins). We also used to make our own gloves from them. To feed our rabbits, we took a sack to school and, on the way home we had to collect green food for our rabbits. This consisted of dandelions, horse parsley, hogweed and clover. We were not allowed to have our evening meal until the rabbits had been fed!
The school we attended was at Mapledurham, where mother had taught as a girl, about a country mile (longer than a town mile) away so we had to walk there. In the winter, grandma would bake us each a potato, which we then carried to school to keep our hands warm and then ate at dinnertime. There were no school dinners, only a third of a pint of milk each at break time. In the autumn we would pull a worzel mangold or a turnip from one of the fields and eat that on the way to school. After a couple of years we had to go to another school some three miles further away at Goring Heath. As it was on a bus route we didn’t have to walk, but we still had to pick rabbit food as soon as we had got off the bus in the evening.
Sometimes we used to make ‘camps’ in the woods and we were joined in doing this with some of the other village children. These camps were made of branches fallen from trees placed around a slender tree wigwam fashion and then covered with leaves. The entrance was a small tunnel to give some privacy. It was in one of these camps that I first learnt that there was a difference between boys and girls!! We also perfected the art of making bows and arrows that were later used to great effect killing squirrels for money - the start of our ‘poaching years’.
While I was at the new school the time arrived for me to take the ‘eleven plus’ examination for grammar school. One morning I was at the end of the lane waiting for the bus when the postman came. Mother read the letter and coming to the gate, shouted out that I had passed for the grammar school! At that time there were no children from the village who were at the grammar school. Obviously, when I got to school I was very proud and during registration was telling my best friend next to me all about my news. Incidentally we were all taught in one big room in blocks according to our age. The headmaster would have three or four different lessons going on at the same time. My talking was seen by the headmaster who called me out front for talking during lessons (a terrible crime in his book). He asked what I had been talking about and I replied that I had got to grammar school. “Liar!” he said, “I haven’t got the results yet and I would know before you! Hold out your hand!” He then gave me six with his cane. Later that morning he got his letters and realising that what I had said was the truth, called me out again in front of the whole school and apologised for making a mistake. It didn’t stop my hand hurting though. There were only two of us from the whole class who had passed.
Living with my grandparents was a good guidance into the accepted rules of civilisation. My father was very strict, being a Regimental Sergeant Major, but Granny and Granddad were strict in a very strict ‘old-fashioned’ way. Although we had very much a ‘free rein’ we had to obey the ground rules. Obviously these were needed because we lived in such a small house.
We all had to join the table when we were told that the meal was ready. We were never allowed to eat until all of the rabbits, pigs and chicken had been fed. No one was allowed to start until granddad had sat down and Grace had been said. He normally said this but occasionally we were allowed to say grace. House rules were that all food taken by us and put on our plates HAD to be eaten and we were never allowed to leave the table until all the food on our plates had been cleared. If we had been sensible and not taken enough food, we were allowed a second helping. Sometimes if we had said that we couldn’t clear our plate at that time we were told that it had to be finished at the next meal. This ruling was rigorously enforced. Although any scraps ended up for the pigs, we were reminded that a) there was a war on and b) that food should not be wasted, especially as there were those who had not enough to eat. We were not allowed to speak at the table unless spoken to by our grandparents and certainly never with food in our mouths. Knives and forks had to be held correctly, always being pointed towards the plate and never waved around whilst talking. I shudder now when I seen some of the eating habits of today’s children.
We were never allowed to leave the table until everyone had finished and then we had to thank Granny for the meal and ask if we could leave the table. Permission was never given until we had all listened to the six o’clock news. As we had no electricity, the wireless was run on a large ‘High Tension’ battery and an ‘accumulator’ (a small lead/acid six volt battery which we had to take into the local town four miles away to a shop where it was ‘charged’. We had two so that there was always one awaiting collection at the shop. This was a weekly job for one of us boys.
Because there were always guns in the house, certain rules had to be obeyed. These were that guns, even toy ones, must never be pointed at another person. This meant that in boy’s games such as ‘Cowboys and Indians’, ‘Cops and Robbers’ and ‘War games’ only imaginary weapons were allowed! Other rules such as always checking that weapon was not loaded on picking it up, looking down the barrel of a gun and cleaning it when it had been used were strictly obeyed. At the age of seven I was allowed, in fact encouraged, to shoot with an air gun at a target. By the age of eight I was allowed to shoot with a ‘four-ten’ as this was used to shoot rats. Being a smaller bore there was a smaller spread of shot when used to shoot a rat of which there were always some around the pigs and chickens. I always remember one day when the local ‘poacher’ put his shotgun over the gate and stood talking to my grandfather, he had done this as the local constable was walking up the lane with his bike. Although there was no law about carrying a shotgun on the road, one never advertised too openly that one had been out shooting. As the three men were talking I decided to look down the barrel. Grandfather whipped off his cap, clipped me with it saying, “Never look down the barrel of a gun, Boy.” This adage has stayed with me all my life.
I was the only one in the family who had managed to get to the grammar school and therefore had homework to do once I got home. As we only had one paraffin lamp, the homework had to be done as soon as I got home. I had to sit at the only table and complete all of the set work. During the summer time I always thought that this was a bit hard because I was working and my two brothers were out playing but things were evened up during the winter they also had to partake in work such as mending and sewing. With three boys in the house, grandmother thought that we should all play our part. We therefore had to learn to sew on buttons, patch torn trousers and darn the holes in socks. As additional recreation during the winter we were taught to embroider. My elder brother and myself were quite good at this but my younger brother was never happy at such work. My eldest brother was so good at it that when he left school at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a gentlemen’s tailor and after four years went to Saville Row, London as an ‘improver’. After his National Service in the Royal Air Force he gave this up and trained as a window dresser and later as a display manager.
Soon after starting at the grammar school, in 1945, father bought a small house in the hamlet of Gallowstree Common, using the money he had received after serving twenty-eight years in the Army. The house had three bedrooms upstairs, a front room, living room and scullery downstairs. The toilet was outside and there was no bathroom. It did have electricity and water connected. I always remember going to school from Chazey Heath on one school bus and coming from school to the new house, which I had not seen before. I think I must have been quite relieved when I arrived at the new house and found the rest of the family there. My Great Uncle Arthur and Great Aunt Daisy lived next door but one in a bungalow he had built himself when he came home from the First World War. To pay for the building materials he had dug a huge pit in the garden and sold the gravel. In this gravel pit he grew strawberries, because they were sheltered from the wind. His plot of land was twice the size of any other in the road and measured a full half-acre.
In my first two years at Henley Grammar School, where I managed to be placed in the middle of the end of term results and tables, I was given the opportunity to sit an exam for a bursary so that I could go to Burford Grammar School. This latter school, although still a grammar school, was orientated towards the children of farmers. This bursary of sixty pounds a year, was to cover the basic costs of me attending as a boarder, the school being situated west of Oxford city on the Oxfordshire/ Gloucestershire border. This bursary did not provide for extra items, such as pocket money or travel to and from school at the start and end of term, although there was an element towards clothing. To get money for school I had to work on one of the local farms during my holidays, summer and winter. I did a sixty-hour week at one shilling an hour making three pounds for a week’s work. I had to get the horses fed, cleaned down and harnessed up before starting to work with them and to feed and bed them down at night. Many hours were spent lambing; why do so many of them choose to be born at night? I also did planting and harvesting and at one farm, helped the bird keeper raising pheasants for the eggs and the table.
To get to Burford the first time, I had to get a train from Reading to Oxford and then catch a bus from Oxford to Burford via Witney. Once I had started there I found that it was possible to book on a Black and White coach, which ran from Gloucester to London via Burford and Henley. The coach could drop off and pick up passengers at Nuffield on the A40 and I could get a local bus from there down to Sonning Common, a village about a mile away from Gallowstree Common. From there I had to walk home.
I enjoyed my time at Burford very much and found that instead of being about the middle of the class I started to come first in nearly every subject, except the one that I really needed, Latin. I had hoped to go on to university to study to become a vet but at that time, without a Higher School Certificate in Latin, there was no way of being accepted to university. Most of the boarders did extremely well in mathematics and geography. The housemaster, Mr Wright (known to the boys as ‘Kip’ because of the way his feet were placed, splayed out, on the floor) was a very good teacher. Living in the school cottage was the mathematics master, Mr Evans, know to the boys as ‘Old Taffy’. He had a wonderful way with all the boarders, was a strict disciplinarian in class, but would give additional tuition after school if requested by the pupils! Many went over to him if they had not quite grasped the intricacies of one of Euclid’s theorems or the working out of things like simultaneous quadratic equations. All of the boarders got very good exam results in maths.
One summer afternoon, several of the boarders sneaked off after school to go swimming in the river. Officially we were not allowed to swim if there was no master present. It was always difficult to get ‘Kip’ to come with us and the only other boarding house master was the French teacher, Mr Dyer, who was also involved in teaching the piano. We were in the river swimming when someone noticed Taffy walking across the fields. We all grabbed our clothes and swam over to hide in the reeds. Taffy came to where we normally were and sat down to read a book whilst we were getting colder hiding in the water and reeds. After a while he said, “It’s a good thing old Taffy’s nearly blind and can’t see you stupid boys hiding in the reeds. Come over here and get dressed.” He than asked why we were swimming without a teacher so we explained that both Mr Wright and Mr Dyer were too busy to come with us. He said that in future we should ask him and he would always come, and that on this occasion he would not split on us. I think that is why he was so admired by the boarders.
The matron, who looked after all the boys, was called Miss Rycroft. Her Uncle, Sir Nelson Rycroft, had the shoot on Lambourne Chases in Berkshire and always took a couple of us boys out with him on a shoot during the autumn. He paid us five shillings each and let us keep any hares that were shot. These we sold on to the local butcher. As our pocket money was two shillings a week we lived like lords for a few days. On one occasion my friend, Sid Jackson and myself were beating through one of the covers with Sir Nelson when a pheasant ran under a holly bush and set down. As Sid was closest he shouted to Sir Nelson that the bird had set down. Sir Nelson told him to beat the bush to make it fly. The bird just sat there. Then Sir Nelson told Sid to pick it up which he duly did. Sid then asked if he should break its neck to which Sir Nelson replied, “Throw him up boy, were shooting them, not murdering them!” Sid threw the bird up, Sir Nelson blasted off two barrels, ……. and the bird flew off unharmed! I suppose that shows a true sportsman. Mind you, Sir Nelson was nearly eighty years old at that time.
Later in my career I met a Diplomat, Charlotte Rycroft in Brussels who was a niece of our school matron – what a small world it is!
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 | | I am the one in thecentre | |
 | | First school photo | |
 | | Gran outside the huse we lived in | |
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