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Archie Greenshields was born in 1920 and brought up in Chichester, West Sussex.
My father worked hard there is no doubt and having worked beside him between 1934 and 1937 I can honestly say that he gave an honest days work for his days pay. He was small in stature but very strong and rarely if ever took a day off for being under the weather.
Coughs or colds seldom worried him although he did suffer the effects of his hard work and inclement weather conditions. Mother used to worry if he coughed badly and intimated that his lungs were affected by poison gas used in the war. He never talked about that himself but she must have been told by him at some time.
He was a moderate drinker and enjoyed his beer mainly at weekends. He smoked tobacco and preferred to roll his own cigarettes, at one time an especially foul brand named Digger Shag. Very much to my surprise once and to my disgust I discovered he also chewed a wad of it whilst working. This dire results on state of his teeth and was more than likely to have been the cause of the intestinal cancer which eventually killed him in his early 70's.
He was also a hard swearer too, as I discovered much to my surprise, and would eff and blind with his co-workers when I started work myself with the builder that employed him. Of course he would let fly the lesser epithets at us children when he was 'riled' as Mother would say, but so could she - and often did!
As a man of resourcefulness he was beyond question, giving a good illustration to the adage that necessity is the mother in invention. Some of the skills that I have seen him perform include barbering (rather than hairdressing), minor poaching activities, shoe mending, rough tailoring (Mother was not adept with a needle and thread), cycle repairs, gardening, and of course any job in his actual employment.
His knowledge about the correct mixture of cement or mortar, whether for bricklaying or plastering, was beyond par. He could erect scaffolding in the old fashioned way with wooden poles and 'putlogs' (the latter gave support for the boards) the special knots for the ropes that held the cross stays. All these skills he endeavoured to pass on to me, but as really still only an under developed teenager had not the physique to carry them out. I must have been a disappointment to him.
I learned too, that during the latter stages of the War, he was ordered under the Re-distribution of Labour regulations to work in Norfolk for a period. It would have been the only time in his married life until then that my parents had been apart. How long he spent away from home I do not know and like most of his past life was almost a closed book.
He continued to work as a general labourer but not with the same firm as we both had. He was always in continuous employment and I feel he would have been completely at a loss if he had not been.
He had no outside interests and his outings were confined to either a visit to his local pub or with Mother to the cinema in Chichester, which was on a weekly basis. Eventually in the television era these visits became less frequent.
Mother and Father did not care to go away on holiday and their only trips away were coach outings or when members of the family took them out and about. It is a regret of mine that I did not possess a vehicle until he was too ill to be taken any where. He died in St. Richard's Hospital on the 25th May 1968. Mother was to survive him by nearly 24 years.
Father was cremated at Porchester Crematorium at Mum's wish but my brother Fred stayed away. It was my belief that rather than show the real remorse I am sure he felt, he presented the excuse that he had no decent suit to wear.
Archie Greenshield, West Sussex, 2001
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