Glimpses of Long Ago: Growing up in Wartime England

Glimpses of Long Ago: Growing up in Wartime England

By Chris Long

Published by 3 Generation Publishing at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Chris Long

ISBN 978-0-9810579-4-1

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DEDICATION

Socrates said An unexamined life is not worth living. In examination of my life I have been constantly amazed at what a wonderful job my Mother and Father did in creating such a happy home for their children in a world racked with economic and physical uncertainty as it was in the 1930s. This writing is dedicated to their memory.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Basic Chronology

Thanks be to fortune and her treacherous wheel

Birth

Baptism

First Walk

Spanking

The Monarchy and Three-legged Races

Grandparents

Aunt Grace

Uncle Bert

Aunt Jenny

Sister Pauline

Parents

The Bicycle

Football Boot Attack

School Lessons

Sports and Other Games

School Days

Dress Code

East Challow House

Electric Light

The Garden

Blackberrying

The Farm

Milk Round

Jack the Epileptic

Smoking

The Vicar and the Church

Wartime England

Evacuees

London

Ice Cream

Diseases

Telephone

A Broken Arm

Dental Memories

Radios

Daisy the Cow

Felix the Dog

Prospero the Kitten

A Tortoise

I-Urky the Game

Back Scratching

Canals

Railways

Weather

Yew Trees

Conclusion

About the Author

Footnotes

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INTRODUCTION

As I sail past my prognosticated lifespan, glimpses of long-ago days and events flood through my mind. They say it is a sure sign of aging when you can remember with clarity things that happened to you 70 years ago but have difficulty remembering where on earth you left your reading glasses this very afternoon!

What a totally different world existed in England in the 1930s and ’40s from that of the 21st century in North America. Some of the culture, beliefs, spirit and lifestyles of those faraway days deserve to be recorded and acknowledged as they were seen through the eyes of a young boy struggling to find out who he was and where he fitted into the scheme of things.

This is not an autobiography as it lacks the thread of chronology; the panorama of personal memories makes a mockery of linear time. It might be described as memoirs, but each memory only comes as a fleeting and often incomplete picture. It is certainly not a confessional as, unlike St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I have no desire to inflict the details of my miscapades on others.

My title of Glimpses perhaps describes best what I am trying to portray. These glimpses are facts shining out through the mists of time, like glowing nuggets of still hot coals in an otherwise grey fireplace. We can empathize with Plutarch when he noted: Nor is it to be wondered at that in events of such antiquity, history should be in disarray.(1)

Charles Lamb writes in his essay Dream Children that Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children(2) so hopefully these pages may be of interest to my descendants. I have tried to draw in some of the history of the time and, in answer to critics who may complain it is too early to write a history of England in the 1930s, I claim: The lack of the perspective of time . . . in the field of contemporary history is more than compensated . . . by the experience of having lived through the events themselves . . . by the feel one gets for the nature and mood of the country.(3)

The unemployment and social discontent of the 1930s led to tumultuous politics. In addition to Conservatives (split between Churchill supporters and the rest), Liberals and Labourites, there were movements such as Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Lady Sunne’s Imperial Socialist Party, the Commonwealth Party centred in Devon and Cornwall, and of course various Communist affiliated parties. (Mosley was interned as a traitor when war broke out.) They all had unique plans; one advocated rents be reversed and that landlords should pay rent to tenant farmers for farming the land, rather than tenants paying rent to landlords.(4) The ultimate aim of them all was to break out of the economic depression without breaking into another war; efforts that seemed, in retrospect, more Sisyphean than Herculean.

It is interesting that in France the Third Republic was also going through confusing times, but in their case the lack of stability in the political parties resulted in the government changing almost as often as the seasons of the year. When war finally and inevitably did arrive, France did not have a Churchill to pull everything together and so it quickly collapsed. England had Winston Churchill and survived; France had Marshal Petain and did not.

Meanwhile in Germany the old Teutonic cry that war and conquest are a biological necessity was not allowed to die.(5) The double-crossing of the French by America under Wilson, by failing to ratify the Treaty of Guarantee signed in 1919, encouraged the German dreams of conquest and revenge. This was the start of the slow, inexorable march to the Second World War that coloured the politics of the time and entailed the endless tug-of-war between anti-Fascists and anti-Communists.

On a personal note, my Mother kept the letters I sent home from boarding school, as well as later ones from other places, and re-reading them has jogged my memory. (Quotations from them are written in italics.) When reading them one is reminded how important letters once were, not only as a form of literary expression but also as a fundamental expression means of communication. In a time before telephones and automobiles, the habit of writing was cultivated by the educated classes as surely as any other social grace;(6) the letter, which remained for centuries the most swift, certain, and cheap vehicle of long distance communication.(7) By keeping the letters did Mother have a precognition of these memoirs?

The earliest letters from my prep school, which I attended as a weekly boarder, were written just as I had learnt to write, and the carefully scribed (scrawled?) letters demand attention as they march across the pages in a desperate effort to reach the other side. They are more humorous than informative. For example:

Dear All

We saw an

elephant.

I hope one of

them got the

scholarship.

Love

Christopher.

I have also been helped with these writings, as with so many other things in my life, by my patient sister Felicity. She has assisted me in filling in blank spots and jogging my memory here and there. I have relied on her to rein in my tendency to hyperbolize when necessary. My motto that a little hyperbole never hurt a good story should have no place in these glimpses of long-ago days.

In fact I have tried to be as truthful as memory allows and, if some things are not reported, it may be for good reason. After all, will the world be any better off for finding out I played the part of Little Red Riding Hood in a performance of that name at my all-boys’ preparatory school in Wantage? (All my schooling was at all-boys’ schools.)

While recognizing a pun is the lowest sort of humour, I have on occasion resorted to it in order to insert at least a little humour in the re-sorting of the stories of my life. Better low humour than none at all! Perhaps?

I have tried to maintain true English spelling where possible (mouldy not moldy) and to avoid the bastardized modern spelling. I have also been amazed at how many words have disappeared from modern dictionary usage, and that MS Word refuses to recognize words which used to be so familiar on the farm of my youth.

Rick is a clear example, not in today’s Oxford concise dictionary, but it is in the larger Oxford Dictionary and I found it in a 1940s Highroads Dictionary as an Anglo-Saxon word meaning a stack of grain, hay or straw. Exactly! It may signify the vibrant nature of the English language – a language that refuses to be tied down.

James Murray, in producing the Oxford English Dictionary, claimed: he would, eventually and once and for all, fix and enumerate and catalogue all of the English language, no matter if it seemed that he was thereby bound, endlessly, to be chasing the very same sun that Samuel Johnson so signally failed to reach.(8)

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BASIC CHRONOLOGY

August 1927: Birth at Marcham, Berkshire.

Late 1928: We moved to East Challow, Berkshire.

September 1932: Started attendance at King Alfred preparatory school in Wantage, as a weekly boarder and later as a day-boy.

September 1935: Felicity won a scholarship (only seven out of the thousand who took the exam were successful) and went off to boarding school at Christ’s Hospital in Hertford. At the school she went on to win more honours, becoming head-girl, captain of the cricket team, vice-captain of the field hockey team and champion high-jumper. There was a brief flicker of hope that I could emulate her achievement and attend the boys Christ’s Hospital school in Sussex – a flicker soon snuffed out by a puff of reality!

September 1935: Started attendance at Shaftesbury Grammar School as a boarder.

August 1938: Death of my sister Pauline.

September 1939: Outbreak of Second World War.

August 1945: End of Second World War.

September 1945: Left home for Colonel Ashton’s estate at Scotsgrove near Thame.

THANKS BE TO FORTUNE AND HER TREACHEROUS WHEEL(9)

Amidst all these memories it is interesting to note I nearly didn’t happen at all! Mother was in Winnipeg, Canada when the Spanish Flu epidemic hit in 1918-19 and, when talking to her good friend, known to all as Aunt Minnie, on the phone, happened to make a little cough, Aunt Minnie ordered her to bed immediately and came straight over to care for her. She had the dreaded disease and she always maintained it was only this fast intervention that saved her life.

In all our struggles these days with HIV/AIDS and our minds turning to the end times, because of the epidemic, we tend to forget the so-called Spanish flu probably killed off about as many people worldwide in a just over a year than HIV/AIDS has killed in 25 years.

Aunt Minnie, of Inuit descent, lived with Uncle Brock, a distant cousin of Mother’s who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Every year we would receive their picturesque calendar and the company, although much changed, has always retained some aura for me.

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BIRTH

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star.(10)

Like most babies at that time, I was born at home on a farm called simply, The Buildings, in Marcham, Berkshire. It was considered to be much safer and more sensible than birth at a hospital. No, I do not remember the event, but I do remember a story about it that was told me years later.

My Mother was in bed cradling her new infant, when one Aunt (I know not which one) took one look and declared, Oh Alice, he looks just like you! and, immediately following, another Aunt (it had to be my Aunt Lucy) came and declared, Oh Alice, he is SO ugly!

BAPTISM

My earliest memory, the possibility of which is denied by all psychologists and other knowledgeable people, is of my baptism; an event that presumably occurred when I was only a few weeks old. It is just a faint blur that funny things were going on, and some other baby was crying and making a fuss. The only confirmation I have that it might be a true memory is that my parents, while hotly denying the possibility of my remembering the event, could not otherwise explain how I knew that there had been another baby baptized at the same time. My memory is that while the other baby cried I did not.

According to beliefs that lingered on long after the revised Prayer Book of 1550 dropped the exorcism of the unbaptized child (a child doomed to spend forever in Limbo – the gloomy vestibule of hell), it is only by crying that the child was able to let the devil out.(11) So is the devil still within me? Probably!

FIRST WALK

An early memory is that of taking my first steps. This memory too was at first pooh-poohed by my parents as being beyond the bounds of possibility, but I was able to explain to them how it happened on a Sunday afternoon in the sitting room, while my sisters were upstairs, and I staggered from the outstretched arms of one parent into the outstretched arms of the other, as they sat across from each other in front of the fire. Following this major achievement, my Mother ran to the door and called upstairs to my sisters telling them the exciting news, leaving me wondering what all the fuss was about.

Later when I announced the memory to them, they asked on which side of the fireplace each parent had sat and I told them – Mother on the left, Father on the right. It turns out I was correct and shortly after the