Annals

Annals Early Years Chapter 1 (1935-1950) 1935 was the year of my birth. I do not remember it. But Baldwin was the British prime minister; Mussolini was in Abyssinia killing the natives who resisted his operatic army. The first antibiotic was discovered. To me 1936 was similar but it saw the end of life for Hamilton Fish , one of the first recorded serial killers, whose exploits fascinated readers of the New York Times. Perhaps the first bogey man! “He was born in Washington DC as Hamilton Fish, to Randall Fish (1795-1875) of Kennebec, Maine and his wife, Ellen (1838-?), of Ireland. His father was 43 years older than his mother. Albert Fish later stated that his family had an extensive history of mental illness. He was the youngest of four, accompanying siblings Walter, Annie and Edwin. Randall Fish died in 1875 in Washington D.C. Albert claimed much later that his mother, unable to care for him, put him into an orphanage where he was ruthlessly whipped and beaten. He said that he was the only child who looked forward to the beatings. By 1890, Albert had arrived in New York City as a house painter. In 1898, he was married to Anna, nine years his junior, with whom he had six children: Albert, Anna, Gertrude, Eugene, John and Henry. He also married on February 6, 1930 at Waterloo, New York to "Mrs. Estella Wilcox" and divorced after one week. Fish had been arrested in May 1930 for "sending an obscene letter to an African American woman who answered an advertisement for a maid." He had been sent to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in 1930 and 1931 for observation, following his arrests. Fish, a house painter, claimed to have drifted across the United States, murdering at least one person in each of the twenty-three states he had visited as well as various other victims along the way, although this claim is not supported by any of the known documents on his life. Doctors examining him for his later trial claimed that he was a sadomasochist, indulging in self-mutilation, driving needles into his body, mostly around his genitals. He said he tried sticking a needle in his scrotum but it was too painful, and there were needles in his pelvis that were permanently embedded. He would stuff cotton balls soaked with lighter fluid into his rectum and set fire to them. He is said to have consumed not only the flesh of his victims but also their urine, blood, and excrement. He attributed these tendencies to the abuse he suffered in childhood. He also claimed God sent him on "missions" to kill. His murders often involved slow torture. He would tie children up and whip them with a belt cut in half with nails sticking through to tenderize the flesh for cooking. Fish called his weapons "implements of hell." The term boogeyman was at the time in reference to him.”

Some of the many people who oversaw my early years often appealed for better behaviour by threatening me with the “bogeyman”. They left me to imagine what he was like and what kind of threat he represented. Perhaps something like this happened during Stephen King’s childhood! 1937. as a two year old there is nothing I can personally remember but it provides us with evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. Piedrafita de Babia is a village in the mountains of Leon, northern Spain. They remember November 5th not for fireworks but for a fascist mass murder. For many years fear prevented local people from mourning for the dead. Thirty five thousand people were killed and thrown into a mass grave by Franco’s troops this year. Recently relatives have been able to gather here to look at last for the bodies of relatives. It’s taken the best part of a century for Spain to come to grips with the depravities of Franco’s regime. Its government is still resisting any concerted attempt to pay homage to all the ordinary people killed by Franco. The twentieth century saw a lot of human progress. We lived it without fully appreciating that progress was a mixed blessing. Killing took place on an industrial scale never before seen and often with scarcely imaginable beastliness. Two seminal events dominated 1938. The English prime minister was Chamberlain and he returned from a meeting in Munich with Chancellor Hitler promising “peace in our time” whilst in the US Orson Welles broadcast version of H G Wells’ “War of the Worlds” managed to create panic amongst his audience. These seem to herald two public themes which run through my life; misguided politicians and powerful media influences. The latter here seem to be relatively benign but as Mcluhan was later to emphasize: “The media is the message”. Despite what has happened in Spain, the Vatican recognizes Franco’s government. Eventually I am to become an agnostic with a cynical attitude to religion. Self-serving decisions like this justify such cynicisms.

Munich Agreement

Chamberlain holds the paper containing the resolution to commit to peaceful methods signed by both Hitler and himself on his return from Germany in September 1938. He said: “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” The Munich Agreement was an agreement regarding the Sudetenland Crisis between the major powers of Europe after a conference held in Munich, Germany in 1938 and signed on September 29. The Sudetenland was an area of Czechoslovakia where ethnic Germans formed a majority of the population. The Sudetenland was of immense strategic importance to Czechoslovakia, as most of its border defenses were situated there, along with a huge armament facility, the Škoda Works. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the future of Czechoslovakia, and it ended up surrendering much of that state to Nazi Germany. It is considered by many as a major example of appeasement. Because Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference, the Munich Agreement is commonly called the Munich Dictate by Czechs and Slovaks. The phrase Munich betrayal is also frequently used, especially because of military alliances between Czechoslovakia and France and between France and Britain that were not taken into account. Because Hitler soon violated the terms of the agreement, it has often been cited in support of the principle that tyrants should never be appeased. Kristnallnacht (also known as Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht and the Night of Broken Glass) was a pogrom against Jews throughout Germany and parts of Austria on November 9–10, 1938. Jewish homes and stores were ransacked in a thousand German cities, towns and villages, as ordinary citizens and storm troopers destroyed buildings with sledgehammers, leaving the streets covered in smashed windows — the origin of the name "Night of Broken Glass." Jews were beaten to death; 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps and 1,668 synagogues were ransacked or set on fire. The Times of London commented: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."[ Events in Czechoslovakia were heeded and in the UK, we created on November 1st 1938, the Balloon Command which added an important element to the nation’s defences. Its primary function was to act as a defence against low flying aircraft and in doing so, add protection to heavily populated areas, factories, dockyards & ports. We were getting ready. Balloon Command was under the control of Air Vice Marshall O. T. Boyd OBE MC AFC (also in command of the Observer Corps.) and was based at R.A.F. Stanmore, North London. From here it could integrate more efficiently into the reporting chain and operational structure of Fighter Command, as was to be proven during the summer of 1940

Balloon Winch Truck

As with Fighter Command, the country was divided into Group or Sector areas under separate command and controlled from Stanmore. There were five Groups, each responsible for a number of balloon squadrons within their area. At the start of the War approximately 800 balloons were in service, but by 1942 there were well over 2000 operational. As a small boy I remember seeing them in the sky over Kent and Essex two counties I lived in during the early forties. As the Battle of Britain progressed, the effect of the balloon barrages around the coastal defences of southern England became evident. Many confirmed reports were made relating to Luftwaffe aircraft lost due to collisions with the cables but also, sadly, so did Spitfires and Hurricanes. Often, balloons became distracting “play-targets” for Luftwaffe fighter pilots unloading their guns on return to base or due to the frustration of not encouraging British Fighters up to fight

Barrage Balloon

Later during the War when the V1 & V2 flying bombs were launched against Great Britain, the balloon barrages claimed nearly 300 of these deadly weapons

before being removed during 1944. Just after the War in Europe had ended, Balloon Command was disbanded on June 15th 1945 with a smaller Balloon Wing remaining to undertake existing operations and requirements

It should not be forgotten that this form of “Home Defence” and the men & women who served within it, made an important contribution in defending Great Britain during those dark days of World War Two I am alive and its 1939, and I don’t know what is going on but what is does eventually affect the course of my life. In March German troops move in to Czechoslovakia. The Germans claim Bohemia and Moravia. In the same month Stalin asks Chamberlain to join a coalition against Hitler. Chamberlain says “No.” In April the Spanish Civil War ends as Madrid surrenders; General Franco takes charge and Spain becomes Europe’s third Fascist dictatorship. In the same month, Great Britain and France guaranteed to protect Greece and Romania with armed help if necessary should the Germans attack them. Shortly afterwards the same guarantee was extended to Poland. April is a very busy month as the Italians invade Albania and Germany breaks its earlier treaties of non-aggression made as recently as 1934 and 35. Roosevelt asks Hitler and Mussolini to attend a conference to end the violence. From May to September 1939 Japan and the Soviet Union fought a fierce, largescale undeclared war on the Mongolian plains which ended with a decisive Soviet victory with two important results: Japan reoriented its strategic emphasis toward the south, leading to war with the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands; and Russia freed itself from the fear of fighting on two fronts, thus vitally affecting the course of the war with Germany. Germany and Italy sign "The Pact of Steel," a formal alliance. The operatic Italian army was always something Hitler could do without. The alliance was always doomed. Hind sight makes it easy to see that rogues are guaranteed to fall out. Beau Geste (1939) was a film that had a great impact on me. The director/producer William Wellman's superb, high adventure tale set in the desert - a classic melodramatic, rousing film of the late 30s from Paramount Studios. The screenplay by Robert Carson was based on the 1924 novel of the same name by English soldier/author Percival Christopher Wren (1885-1941). The themes of the film, involving three Geste brothers who disappear from England to avoid scandal and become members of the French Foreign Legion, include brotherly loyalty, patriotic honor, self-sacrifice, and treachery. They were uniquely appropriate to a fifties teenager. This is the best-remembered film version of the novel. The story was to seem real to me when eventually I became a teenager. On September 1st 1939 at 04.45 the Germans invaded Poland. Blitzkreig rapidly destroyed the Polish army though not without casualties. A large section escaped to Hungary (90.000) and eventually became part of the force which would wreak revenge on Hitler and his ghastly empire. Polish airmen fought with distinction in the Battle of Britain. On September 3rd Britain and France declared war on Germany.

At this time I believe I lived in Chelsfield in Kent. Chelsfield is a traditional Kent village with a long history sufficient to have inspired someone to write a book: “The Chelsfield Chronicles”; a title posh enough to make the place sound more important than it really is. The title is apt enough but it promises more than it can deliver. I can remember riding a little boy’s tricycle. I lived in a bungalow with an Anderson shelter in the back garden. My parents did not get on and I can recall eventually living here with another family. My father had made an arrangement with them whereby they were allowed to live rent free on condition that they looked after me and my brother John. He was a couple of years younger than me. He had a tougher life. More of that later. There is a rather unpleasant story in my head about two rather intolerant people who sent me to school with an abscess in my ear. It burst whilst I sat at a desk and the teacher was amazed at the quantity of puss and the negligence of the adults who could send a child to school in such a state. In my head there is a court scene. The place is all wood polished panels and men in academic gowns with solemn voices. One of these men in a large formal court room asked me who I wanted to live with? Mother or Father. I do not remember my answer but it does not seem relevant since at the time I was in a house with a strange family I did not know with a wet Anderson shelter in the garden. They did not care for us and sent me to primary school with an abscess in my ear. It burst. The teachers could not comprehend it and that is why it sticks in my early memory. I remember the pain. My memory of the war years is not clear and neither is it coherent. The events are probably not in the right order either. However the abscess led to both of us being moved from the Chelsfield family. It was the start of my progress through twenty different primary schools. Looking back its something quite amazing; a change of school more than once a term. Perhaps I should be listed in the Guinness Book of Records. During that time I met some strange people. In May 1940 the British and Allied Forces were desperately fighting to stop the German advance through Europe. By the middle of the month Hitler’s Armies had swept west from Germany through Holland, Belgium and France forcing the British & French to retreat. Ten days later the German spearhead had reached the sea cutting off the Allied Forces in the North from the main Army in France and cornering them into a small area around Dunkirk. A BBC announcement on 14th May: "The Admiralty have made an Order requesting all owners of self-propelled pleasure craft between 30' and l00' in length to send all particulars to the Admiralty within 14 days from today if they have not already been offered or requisitioned".

This sounded like a request but was in fact an order. Preparations were underway for the greatest evacuation in British history…the retreat from Dunkirk. The government’s name for this operation was 'Operation Dynamo’. Boats were collected all over southern England. Some were taken without their owners’ consent. They were taken to Dover and crewed by experienced seafaring men, naval officers and ratings. “The Mrs. Miniver story of owners jumping into their Little Ships and rushing off to Dunkirk is a myth. Very few owners took their own vessels, apart from fishermen and one or two others. The whole Operation was very carefully co-ordinated and records exist of most of the Little Ships and other larger vessels that went to Dunkirk “. On and around the 4th of June, these ships rescued 338.000 British troops together with 100000 French men from the strafed beaches of Dunkirk. Of course I only heard about on a bakelite radio many years later I met a retired postmaster with vivid memories of Dunkirk. Frank Smith recalled being in charge of a signals post in Belgium erecting a communications mast with a squad of Indian troops when the order came to leave. Together with his men he was rushed away leaving behind all the equipment they wee working with to fall into German hands. He spoke of the panic and the chaos of a disorderly retreat and of an aspect of the affair that’s not been reported elsewhere. British troops went in for plenty of looting. Their behavior had an important influence on what happened to them next. Clambering onto small boats under fire was no easy task. Men who traveled light were more likely to escape and Frank witnessed a scene where men who were loaded with loot drowned as they were unable to clamber aboard the small boats. Frank thought what he saw was a strange kind of poetic justice. The British have since frequently celebrated this glorious defeat. Not many days later Churchill delivered his “Finest Hour” speech: “The Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin, upon this battle depends the survival of the Christian civilization and upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire” Winston Churchill 18th June. I distinctly remember the gruff nature of Churchill’s voice. You could almost feel the drink. Some time around this period John and I moved to Sidcup where my father had found another woman to live with. Even now I do not remember her Christian name. Mrs. Entwistle lived in Hadlow Road and had a daughter called Heather. I went to a Catholic primary school. There are several in Sidcup. I cannot bring to mind its identity but I walked up the road and across several streets near the High Street. The school does come back to me as being not particularly or too overtly catholic. I cannot recall prayers or propaganda. But at this time I was not a receptive pupil.

Heather was someone who though obviously lower middle class always thought of herself as something special. Airs and graces came naturally to her. She comes back to me as being rather like Just William’s sister in the novels of Richmal Crompton. I saw every time I read a Just William story. The airs, the graces and the affectations were all there. Sidcup was close to the Kent countryside and much of the Battle of Britain must have been above and around us. Biggin Hill was just down the road but I was too little to remember much. Many years later I met Bunny Austen when he was a distinguished gentleman of a mature age. ”Not the Bunny Austen, Fred ]erry’s partner the last time we won the Davis Cup in 1936.” “I am afraid I am not that Bunny Austen but I was a Battle of Britain fighter pilot” Daft statistics that sit in my head informed me that the average life expectancy of a Battle of Britain fighter pilot was forty eight hours. Bunny must have either been an excellent fighter pilot or a lucky man. I don’t recall anything about 1941 except Sidcup but on the world stage Roosevelt was busy creating the: THE ATLANTIC CHARTER (1941) where the ideals written down were the forerunners to those that initiated the United Nations. We are cynical about the UN, but, it has already proved to be the most successful international organization in human history. The United States did not enter the war until after the attack on Pearl Harbour which did not take place until December. But by the spring of 1941 Congress had approved the Lend Lease program, and the aid Roosevelt had promised at Charlottesville had begun to flow to Great Britain, where Churchill was now prime minister. In July 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met for the first time in Argentia Bay off Newfoundland, to issue a joint declaration on the purposes of the war against fascism. Wilson's Fourteen Points delineated the first war; the Atlantic Charter provided similar justification for the criteria for the second. The notion of "one world," in which nations abandoned their traditional beliefs in and reliance upon military alliances and spheres of influence, did not appeal to Stalin so the Soviet Union did not sign up to the charter. Churchill was not all that keen either. Roosevelt, who had been a member of the Wilson administration, truly believed in the possibility of a world governed by democratic processes, with an international organization serving as an arbiter of disputes and protector of the peace. Many of his successors in the US presidency have proved not to be as keen as he was on this idea. The powerful nations have frequently failed to see fair play and some religions have proved to be actively hostile to any “one world” idealism that does not cede dominance to their faith.

Around this time we lived in Sunbury on Thames in a house by the Thames. The house was on a kind of offshoot, a stream which was not very wide in front of our house. There must have been an island blocking our view of the main river. We used to play in a little band of boys and incidents I remember led us to create our own farcical mirror of the honours system whereby we appointed ourselves OKS, OLP. These acronyms stood for Order of the Kitchen Sink, and Order of the Lavatory Pan; obviously they appealed to small boys like us. Perhaps these were the beginnings of eventually becoming a paid up “Outsider” My memories of Pearl Harbour are coloured by having seen the film “From Here to Eternity”. I remember the characters as if they were the real protagonists in the war. Private Prewitt, poor southern soldier. James Jones based his first novel in 1951, From Here to Eternity, on his own military experience as a World War II veteran, and created a scathing portrait of peacetime military life in the U.S. army in the months before Pearl Harbor. The film production company refused several film scripts including one by Jones himself--before accepting a screenplay by Daniel Taradash that managed to retain the spirit of the novel and appease the censors by getting rid of the novel's profanity and its frank portrayal of prostitution. The character of Lorene was changed from a prostitute in a brothel to a "hostess" at a social club although the film left little doubt in the mind of the viewer as to what that hostessing was. To get the Army's crucial approval and technical support, two additional changes were made in the transition from book to movie: none of the brutal treatment inside the Stockade would be shown, and the novel's sarcastic promotion of an unethical officer was changed to a forced resignation. According to Zinnemann, it was writer Taradash and producer Buddy Adler who were instrumental in securing his services as director whilst Zinneman himself wanted Montgomery Clift as leading man rather than either John Derek or Aldo Ray: A contributor to an internet site has written that: “From Here to Eternity" contains the best performance delivered by an actor of any gender on celluloid. Montgomery Clift is assertive, funny, tough, sensitive and charismatic in the pivotal role of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the rebellious loner with the streak of nobility. It is easy to see why James Dean idolized him after seeing his portrayal in the film. It is also a shame modern actors don't mention his name more often when listing their influences. As often noted, he preceded Brando by two years (he first appeared in Red River, released in 1948; Brando bowed in The Men in 1950)and created the arch-type of the 1950's rebel. But due to his intelligence, Clift also informed his characters with a sense of purpose. He didn't simply

rebel. For instance, in Eternity, he apologises after an angry outbreak at his girlfriend. Instead of appearing weak, he impressed me all the more for doing so. It makes him appear more mature than the typical rebel. In another instance, when he feels his friend Maggio is being unfairly attacked, he "stares down" the attacker proving he looks out for his friend, another attractive quality. When the non-coms dole out extra punishment to him to force him to box, he refuses to file a complaint but likewise refuses to comply with their demands. Such moments distinguish Clift from other, more typically macho Hollywood leading men of the era and contributed greatly to Eternity's long initial run at the box office and its status as a classic piece of Hollywood cinema. It is time someone set the record straight and restored Montgomery Clift's name to its rightful place in the pantheon of Hollywood's great leading men. For proof, look no further than “From Here to Eternity.” The other major casting decisions also have their own interesting stories and myths; it appears that only Burt Lancaster was a clear and unanimous choice for the role of Sergeant Warden. In fact, Frank Sinatra--who would go on to win an Oscar for his performance as Maggio--had to fight and plead for the role, after first choice Eli Wallach backed out. Sinatra's marriage to Ava Gardner was in trouble, his career was in a slump, and throat problems made him fear his singing days were over. A favorite myth has it that Sinatra got the part because of his mob connections; a wild rumor that supposedly inspired the famous horse head scene in the movie The Godfather! In reply to that story, Zinnemann states in his autobiography, one would assume tongue-in-cheek, that "At no time were horses' heads involved in the casting decision.” The author of The Godfather was using poetic license." Whatever the real story, Sinatra managed to win the role of Maggio for a paltry salary of $8000, and then turned in arguably the best acting performance of his career, one that was uniformly praised and awarded an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor of 1953. The famous surf scene has influenced voyeurs ever since, Ziunneman writes in his autobiography: "That scene, regarded as sensational and extremely provocative a mere 25 years ago, seems harmless and friendly by today's standards. Although it was shot very much as written, the movie censors, who knew the script by heart, nevertheless insisted on deleting four seconds of it. In later years I found that even more had been snipped out by theater projectionists, as a souvenir no doubt. For many years the tourist buses used to stop routinely at this point on the Hawaiian shore to let people admire 'the spot where Burt and Deborah made love in the waves.' It is a curious contribution we have made to popular culture." When asked in the late 1980s what it was like shooting the infamous scene, Lancaster simply answered, "It was cold, and I was wet."!

Remarking years later on Clift's obsession with his role, Zinnemann said: "For many months after the end of filming, Monty continued to be possessed by his own creation-Private Prewitt. He was quite unable to get out of that character. By his intensity he forced the other actors to come up to his standard of performance." Marlene Dietrich when questioned about its success as it was opening with little or no publicity: “ No premiere, no limousines, nothing. It was midnight there but the Capitol Theater was bulging, people were still standing around the block and there was an extra performance starting at one in the morning! She was asked, 'How is that possible? There has been no publicity.' 'They smell it,' she said." Marlene Dietrich is an early presence in my memories for her rendering to the soldier’s song “Lili Marlene” although it was actually La La Anderson who sang it first. It is strange that I remember scenes from my life when I was around four and five but not much when I was six and seven before I get any continuity I am up to eight or nine. Why should this be so? My father was changing houses and child care personnel very frequently. Around this time though John and I met someone who would now be a target for social services and possibly the NSPCC. I cannot recall her real name but to us she was Nurse Barney Balls. She was sadistic. At this time John was wetting the bed probably because of emotional stress. Barney Balls remedy was….make him sit on a jeremiah outside in the cold whatever the weather. I can only imagine the pain he suffered. It was during this period that we were introduced to the cinema. We went to the Odeon in Finchley. It was this London community that hosted the dreaded Barney Balls. One day we went to see a film called: “Commandos Strike at Dawn” in this cinema. It has been described as another of the "common folk against Nazi invasion and occupation" films. It dealt with resistance against the Nazi forces in Norway. Comments about the film include a note that in reality the exploits of the Norwegian resistance were braver and more comprehensive than those outlined in this piece. When we went into the film the cinema was nearly full and the only seats available were widely set apart. As I was the older brother I was responsible for John but I did not immediately appreciate this. I was shown to a seat and John went off to another. Later when the film was over I could not find because I had not noted where he went. The cinema was large. It was dark. I could not see him anywhere. Barney Balls had to come out. Only when the film was finally over did a real search begin. John was eventually found in a central position slumped asleep between the seats in a position that could not be seen from the aisles ends. He was only discovered when people checked row by row. I received a good ticking off. The film was released in 1942 when I was seven. It’s my only solid memory from that year.

In 1943 we found ourselves on Canvey Island where we lived for a considerable time and I remember a number of things. The island was a strange place. The land was reclaimed a century or two earlier by the Dutch. Dykes criss crossed the island. In many places the bridges were only planks. Men were few and the place was populated largely by women. We were sent to a peculiar primary school which occupied a large house and was run by a couple of spinsters. They used to punish us with twig canes which broke when they hit us. Funny rather than painful. We found a large trunk full of cigarettes which we stole and smoked. Later when we had left the island my father received a phone call about the cigarettes. John and I denied all knowledge of the incident: “Not us gov” But our social relationships were more interesting. We belonged to Ben Cook’s gang. He was an older lad whose house was at the bottom of our garden; to reach it you had to use a path which ran down the side of our plot and round our toilet block which was about twelve yards beyond our back door. Beside the back door there was a large covered water tank. Ben’s house was some twenty yards to the right of our toilet block. To come and go Ben had always to follow the path close to our house and round the back of our toilets. One of the gang’s main activities was scrumping. The gang was up to forty kids strong and when it raided an orchard it could strip it bare. Locusts could not do a better job. The Canvey Island policeman always found it difficult to catch anyone partly because of his age but also because we were good at lifting plank bridges leaving the bobby stranded on the wrong side of the dyke. We used then to just run on laughing at the policeman’s predicament. All the time the war went on above us. There was one particular evening that sticks in my memory when we ventured into a large well protected orchard by cutting a hole in its fence. We were left then with only two exits from the orchard that we could use, one of them was the hole we had made whilst the other was through the coal shed in the corner and out through a hatch at shoulder height. We were not expecting to have to use this knowledge. So when we did, it proved quite an experience! I was high in a tree when the unexpected happened. The policeman appeared at one side of the orchard and the woman who owned it at the other. It looked as though we were trapped and so we were except for those two exits. Some of us escaped back through the hole we had made. I got out through the coal hole hatch. If you had been in the lane outside you’d have seen children popping through the hatch like cannon shells. We ran for it whilst the policeman came out of the orchard on his bike after us. He was catching us but we came to one of those plank bridges. We ran across it and pulled it away leaving our policeman stranded and frustrated. We thought it was a laugh. Later when we met up with other gang members we discussed the event only to discover that one or two members had been caught. They gave false names and nothing

further happened to us. We were apprehensive. But I suppose as it was war time, the authorities had better things to do than worry about scrumpers like us. Ben Cook had planned the raid which ended as a fiasco. His prestige suffered. We fell out with him and taunted him with a rhyme which must have appealed to nasty little boys like John and I. “Benny Cook done a poop behind the kitchen door The cat come and licked it up And asked him for some more.” Naturally Ben Cook took umbrage at this and regularly beat us up. We got fed up and ambushed him as he passed from his house under the toilets at the bottom of our garden; I dropped a brick on his head. Raging with anger he ran into our garden where John heaved a house brick at him. Eventually his mother came to our house complaining that we had bullied him. Mrs. Entwhistle could not believe it: “Ben’s nearly fourteen and these two are only little boys!” Looking back at the incident I realize that we could have killed him. Fortunately we left him with only injured pride and a sore head! Our dog on Canvey Island was a cairn terrier called “Rip”. I remember him because he was so fierce. I have visions of him seeing off a whole fleet of Alsatians; mind you, most of them were puppies. Perhaps they were wise because on another occasion I saw Rip kill a cat and take a chunk off the end of an Alsatian’s tail. Yes one was foolhardy enough to fight with this little terror. Canvey Island also introduced me to sex although I did not understand what was happening at the time. Some girls who were members of Ben’s gang invited us into their shelter where they expected us to perform. We were unable to satisfy them. You remember that water tank I mentioned earlier. John and I turned it into a tank and pretended to be taking part in the war. As a result I caught scarlet fever and was removed for a time to Rochford Isolation Hospital. All that comes back to me about that is a vision of fields and a feeling of being away from it all. It’s a kind of television flash back. Later when I returned to the island there is one memory which comes back clearly. One day I was out walking along the sea wall when I noticed activity in the estuary. A stray German plane was strafing a freighter and flying very low. It flew low machine gunning the ship and heading for the island. As it passed a few hundred feet above the vessel which had a Bofors gun. Gunfire followed the plane which was hit and blew up in front of me. Against low-flying aircraft, the now-legendary 40mm Bofors gun was not only imported in quantities from Sweden but was also built under licence in Britain. With an effective ceiling of 5,000 feet the Bofors could track an enemy plane and pump out rounds at a rate of 120 per minute. One such round saw to that German plane.

But you would need more than a Bofors gun to deal with the next visitors from Germany, the flying bomb called a doodlebug to be followed by the V1 and the V2 which you could not see. These weapons were developed by Werner von Braun who eventually went to the US to help them go out into space. The Second Battle of Monte Cassino January 17 - February 18, 1944 is something I remember mainly for the dulcet tones of Wynford Vaughan Thomas. I heard his radio commentaries regularly much as we hear sports commentaries today. “Wynford Vaughan Thomas reporting from the slopes of Monte Cassino” that was his strap line. I can hear it still. By September 1944, the Second World War had almost reached a conclusion. The Allied armies had rapidly pushed the disorganized Germans almost completely out of France and Belgium, and it was here that the front line stood, several miles short of the Dutch border. This rapid advance had caused the Allies crippling supply problems and, despite their best efforts, all the armies did not have the resources to keep advancing at their present pace. Given the view that the Germans were almost on the point of collapse, it was agreed that a single army should be given priority of the supplies to enact a plan that would deal the final blow and win the war before the end of 1944. This honour fell to Field Marshal Montgomery and his 2nd British Army. Montgomery proposed a highly ambitious plan to fly three Divisions of glider and parachute troops (35,000 men) and land them in various parts of Holland to capture no less than five key bridges. British tanks would simultaneously break through the front line and link up with the Airborne Divisions one by one to properly securing these bridges. Once they were all taken, there would then be no further river obstacles between the British and Germany, and a quick conclusion to the war would surely follow. The plan, the largest airborne assault in the history of warfare, was codenamed Operation Market Garden. D-Day was set for Sunday, 17th September. Two of the Airborne Divisions selected to capture the bridges were American. The 101st were to take two bridges around Eindhoven, while the 82nd would take a further two at Nijmegen. It was estimated that they would be relieved by British ground troops after only a matter of hours, and one or two days respectively. The final bridge at Arnhem, the ultimate goal of Market Garden, was entrusted to General Roy Urquhart and his 1st British Airborne Division with the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade under command. Urquhart and his 10,000 men were to be dropped 60 miles into enemy territory, and it would be 3 days before British tanks reinforced them. We all know it went wrong and the Germans won the ensuing battle. It all came into my life through another voice, Stewart Macpherson. BBC voices then had great distinction, Alvar Liddell, and Valentine Dyall come into mind in this instance. The

voices I still hear. The commentaries from Vaughan Thomas and Macpherson return to me like sports broadcasts but of course they were more serious than that. They seemed to be reporting victories for the goodies so to speak. The baddies lost and this was not always so in history. Macpherson was a distinguished war correspondent who left a lasting impression even though after the war he became the question master on a radio quiz programme ”Ignorance is Bliss” But my father wanted to remove us from the scene. We were sent to a Catholic boarding school somewhere in Hertfordshire. I cannot remember where although I know we only lasted one term! But it proved to be quite a term! When we arrived we were asked what variety of religion we adhered to. The nun said “Religion .Catholic, C of E, any other” “English without anything: C of E then” So we were officially C of E and English too. That meant we were in St George’s house. You’ve guessed it; the other houses were St Andrew, St David and St Patrick. It was wartime so sleeping accommodation as I remember it was underground in close up bunks and there was an airbrick at the top of our cell through which curious boys could get a partial bird’s eye view of what was going on in the girl’s sleeping quarters. Giggling eventually led to the girls twigging the situation and paper was plastered over the holes. We all tried removing the paper with varying degrees of success. The most abiding memory is being in church morning, noon and night every day. As a privilege, we were allowed to sleep every third Sunday till 7.a.m. At all other times it was praise the lord before and after every meal. It is not a happy memory. There was a scandal when two girls ran away and turned up back on Canvey Island. In blacked out Britain their journey must have been very scary. The school was so awful their actions were understandable. Mother Superior was quite a nice person. I can remember a walk in the woods with her leading us like a latter day religious pied piper. We did not take to it and disappeared to do our own thing. Eventually though we had to report back to her. Everyone was caned but when it came to my turn, she used her hands and swept me into her skirts. When I think about it, I recall the strange sensation that initiated, only a few seconds but remembered as a weird event. As I came out of her skirts, the next boy was being caned. Caning was a popular activity in the school. At the time to us kids it was a fact of life but looking back it can be seen as the obvious result of sexual frustration. One nun who wasn’t a teacher but a kind of teaching assistant was particularly vindictive. She patrolled the lines of children waiting to go

into the refectory. If she caught you talking you were caned according to a menu: four strokes for Catholics, five for C of Es and six for Greek Orthodox, Jews and the rest. John and I were just the last two boys at the end of the St George line. Every day in the quadrangle there were four lines, one for each of the saints listed above. Ours was a very insignificant position at the end of the line. I cannot remember why John was expelled at the end of the term but I went because of something that happened with a charade involving Robin Hood. In an English lesson we asked to create charades. My group chose Robin Hood and I had to kiss Maid Marian. I did. Our teacher nun objected and I swore at her which meant I was once again in front of Mother Superior. “Reluctantly”, she said, “We’d have to leave” We thought it was a mercy to be sent back to Canvey Island. To teach in a Catholic school, teachers (who are already fully qualified) must be approved by the Catholic Church (usually the local bishop). In the past, this meant that to teach in Catholic schools, one had to be a Catholic. In our school all staff members were members of a religious order. Even as primary school children we understood and appreciated the bias. We did not recognize the nuns’ behaviour as child abuse and they, I am sure, were not conscious of their activities as cruelty to children. We went back to Canvey Island and the doodlebugs. But now the sky at night was amazing. Around 9.p.m. thousands of lights sparkled in the sky as bombers in massive fleets headed for Germany. In the late early hours of the next morning the noise came back as most of the planes returned after bombing Germany. Maybe I was a child down there when the planes responsible for fire-bombing Dresden passed over head. Even children like us were aware of rationing and ration books. They brought a kind of equality to everyone because we all needed them. Buff gray ones for food and different ones for clothing. People had to change what they ate in wartime. Lots of food was not available during the war, so people had to eat what they could get. Presumably preparation was a problem and there were loads of problems that children did not know about. Shops did not always have the same food each week. People could only buy what was there. Some food such as meat and bread and some fruit would only be in the shops for a day before it was all sold out. Queuing for food when it was available was inevitable. Shopping was different too. You had to take your ration coupons to the shops you had registered with. You could only buy what you had enough ration coupons for, as well as what you could afford. People living in the countryside were the luckier ones as they had land to grow vegetables for their own tables. From my point of view I can remember school dinners with a certain amount of horror. We often got pork with loads of fat on it. Teachers tried to make us eat it. I said: “If you make me it, I’ll be sick”. They did and I was. The main vegetables we had to eat were cabbage, turnip and parsnip with cabbage predominating. We also seemed to be swimming in oceans of tapioca which we referred to as “frog spawn”. I can still taste it. If you can imagine eating frog spawn, you’ll get the idea.

The bombing of Dresden led by the RAF and involving the United States Army Air Force which took place between February 13 and February 15, 1945 remains one of the more controversial Allied actions of World War II. The American historian Frederick Taylor has commented: "The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany. It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th Century warfare" The bombing of Dresden although initially approved by Churchill, eventually led him to query the legitimacy of choosing targets without reference to the civilian nature of some of them. He wrote “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests.” Our century has to a greater degree than previously involved civilians in war. This kind of challenge is all round us today and rightly so when you read the following descriptions from two people who were there. There are a number of first hand accounts from civilians who present when the raids took place. Margaret Freyer, recalled: “The firestorm [was] incredible, there [were] calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around [was] one single inferno...suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream[Ed] and gesticulate[d] with their hands, and then - to my utter horror and amazement - I [saw] how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen. They fainted and then burnt to cinders. “ Another survivor, Lothar Metzger, provides an equally visual account: “We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub. We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.” . I have lived most of my life in the twentieth century which has witnessed not only the continuance of the industrialization of much of the world but also the development of industrial methods of mass murder ranging from gatling guns to bombs and ultimately the H bomb. These horrors have been added to the penchant for religious killing which has

been with us for centuries to make our century probably the bloodiest in human history. As small boys neither John nor I were aware of all this. Memory is strange since I can recall all kinds of incidents and images from Canvey Island but not a lot from Coventry where I went in 1946. It must have been September because I found myself in the first form of a secondary school. But in January on the 10th the first meeting of the United Nations (UN) took place on San Francisco. As an international organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, and social equity. It was founded in 1945 at the signing of the United Nations Charter by 50 countries, replacing the League of Nations founded in 1919. The UN was founded after the end of World War II by the victorious allied powers in the hope that it would act to prevent and intervene in conflicts between nations and make future wars impossible or limited. The organization's structure still reflects in some ways the circumstances of its founding, which has led to calls for reform. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, each of which has veto power on any UN resolution, are the main victors of World War II or their successor states: People's Republic of China (which replaced the Republic of China), France, Russia (which replaced the Soviet Union), the United Kingdom, and the United States. Back in Coventry for 46 and 47 I experienced a lot of bullying. The locals were convinced that the city was the most bombed place in Britain. I disagreed. London for me. Coventry for them. I was one. They were many. They won. With some friends we behaved as nasty little boys. Our favourite activity was cat hunting with catapults. There were huge allotments left over from the war where people grew vegetables. Many of the plots had sheds often with tin roofs where the cats used to sleep: that is until we disturbed them with stones fired from our catapults. In 1947 we experienced the worst winter of my life, memorable for the vast quantities of snow that fell. From 22 January to 17 March in 1947, snow fell every day somewhere in the UK, with the weather so cold that the snow accumulated. The temperature seldom rose more than a degree or two above freezing. In mid January 1947, no-one expected the winter to go down in the annals as the snowiest since 1814 and among the coldest on record. After two cold spells that had failed to last - one before Christmas 1946, the other during the first week of January - the weather had turned unseasonably mild. The cold, snowy weather continued through February and into March. Any breaks in the cold weather were short-lived. •

On no day in February 1947 did the temperature at Kew Observatory top 4.4 °C, and only twice in the month was the night minimum temperature above 0 °C

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The mean maximum temperature for the month was 0.5 °C (6.9 °C below average) and the mean minimum was -2.7 °C (4.6 °C below average) On 26 of the month's 28 days, snow was holding its place. South of a line from The Wash to the River Dee, mean maximum temperatures were everywhere more than 5.5 °C below average and, in some places, more than 7 °C below average Mean minimum temperatures were more than 4 °C below average everywhere in the south and south-west of England, and almost 6 °C below average in some places

I remember looking out of the bedroom window and seeing the snow level with it. We had to dig our way out of the house and quarry a path down the street. I never saw snow like this before and I have never seen anything like it since. In these days no one talked about global warming. Later in 1947 my father moved again. This time we went to Holybourne a village in Hampshire between Farnham and Alton. HOLYBOURNE, a parish in the upper half of the hundred of Alton, county Hants, 1 mile N.E. of Alton. It is situated on the river Wey, and contains the tything of Neatham. The living is a vicarage not in charge, annexed to that of Alton, in the diocese of Winchester. The church, dedicated to the Holy Rood, is an ancient structure, and has been enlarged. There is a free school in the parish, founded and endowed by Thomas Andrews in 1719. It has an annual income of about £200 per annum, a portion of which is appropriated to the apprenticing of boys. Lord Sherbourne is lord of the manor. The principal residence is Holybourne Lodge." [Description(s) from The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868) - Transcribed by Colin Hinson ©2003 Mrs. Entwhistle became the teacher in the primary school which was attached to a grand old Queen Anne house which was bigger than the school building. Behind the house there was a large orchard which eventually featured in my life here. Coming from a secondary modern in Coventry I was sent to the local secondary mod in Alton. But Mrs Entwhistle was a county council employee and this got me an interview at county hall in Winchester where they asked me about India. I knew about Gandhi and Nehru and company. They transferred me to Eggars Grammar School. When I got there I justified the selectors’ faith in me by consistently coming bottom of the class and earnt my spurs as a bad boy. But I was good at history and came top in that. This prowess enabled me to win my first school prize and on speech day I was rewarded with handshake and a bauble from Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. He lived in at Islington Mill, a large oast house style home near Bentley, a village between Holybourne and Farnham which I came to know well.

One day I was sent out of an English class and in the school hall I took fifteen minutes out of the master clock. The clock controlled the school bells. As a result everyone left school early and I was rewarded with six of the best. We also had dirty tricks that we played on the chemistry master. He was quite a pleasant man and did not deserve the treatment we gave him. One of the worst was to blow down the Bunsen burners, a most dangerous thing to do. Life in Holybourne was vibrant. I attended church, supported the village football and cricket teams and my father created the local dramatic society which eventually created the Holybourne Theatre which is still there today. Laurie Lee when writing about the twentieth century comments on the rapid growth of noise particularly after the First World War. Slad before the war was a place where only moving water and birdsong were extant. Holybourne in the forties was a pleasant but noisy place although the noise came mainly from a huge rookery in the dip in the London Road below the White Hart. It was a natural noise, the kind of noise Lee was referring to in his reminisces about Slad. I envy him his mellifluous writing and it’s my candid opinion that “As I Walked Out One Mid-Summer Morning” represents the peak of his abilities rather than “Cider with Rosie”. My memories of Holybourne bring back to me the feeling that Lee’s books evoke. My most dangerous escapade was to try to ride a carthorse without realizing how dangerous that was. I got out of a large tree onto the horse’s back. Surprised it galloped away at speed. Its action gave me a shock so I jumped off and rolled in the grass. Now I look back and realize that one hit from the horse’s enormous hooves could quite easily have killed me. Just luck I guess. A friend who was with me at the time could only look on with obvious amusement. In one respect for much of my time in Holybourne I felt I was back in the Hertfordshire convent. It was back to church morning, noon and night. At least I did not have to get up at 6a.m but I did have to report to church at 11 and again at 6.30; in between times it was Sunday school in the village hall. At the church I was part of the choir even though I could not sing. This choir was very small three boys and half a dozen girls. However the choir usually outnumbered the congregation. We were presided over by a very old clergyman, well past retirement age. I don’t remember much about him except that he was kindly. He died. His replacement was much younger with an ambition to improve the choir with practice sessions. The boys amongst us protested; after all we were already engaged much of Sunday. More time on church business did not appeal to us so we left in the face of parental objections. Andrew’s Endowed school is still in Holybourne. It’s where I lived for the eighteen months I stayed in the village. In front of the house there was a large bush like a big tent. Some of the boys in the village used it as a play camp. Inside you could imagine all kinds of things. Current pictures (2006) show that this complex plant has gone. The school building was very large. We did not have much furniture and my bedroom contained nothing but a bed. In winter it was always cold. I remember getting in to a

liberty-bodice in November and out of it the following March! In summer, it was worse as the difference between day and night temperatures gave life to the building. One evening when I was alone in the house the contractions sounded like footsteps to a twelve year old and really frightened I ran out of building, out of the grounds and off into the village. That’s my first memory of “fear”. Having escaped from Sunday in church I was able to join other village boys watching the village teams in football and cricket. This took me to other villages in the Alton district: Four Marks (Holybourne’s principal rival for local supremacy), Medstead, Alresford, Bishops Sutton, Ropley, Froyle, Selborne amongst the competitors. Alresford I remember as being deep in the watercress country. The football won the district league championship and as a reward they earnt a game with Aldershot, then a football league team. I saw them loose 26-0 despite the best efforts of the team’s star who played centre half. Teams did not have fancy formations then- two backs, three half backs and five forwards. Watching the village cricket team was more fun. Joe Piper, the barman at the White Hart was the local cricket star regularly hitting hundreds on Sunday afternoons. The ball was frequently hit into the nearby orchard. In late summer this meant that we could all go and look for the ball and eat as many apples as we could manage. A little research lets you discover that in March 1813 the gentlemen of Holybourne took on the gentlemen of Alton in a cricket match in Holybourne, the locals won by 102 runs. The following week the replay took place in Alton when the town team came close to revenge but still lost by twelve runs. Binsted, a village close to Holybourne has a firm place in my memory because of the unique nature of its inhabitants in the late forties. Records show that eight inhabitants were mentioned in 1086. At least 6 of the 22 people taxed in Binsted, Madehurst, and Tortington in 1296 were probably resident in Binsted, and Binsted may have had up to half of the 15 taxed in Binsted and Tortington in 1327, and of the 20 in 1334, and of the 31 in 1524. Forty Binsted men signed the protestation of 1642. Twenty one adults were reported there in 1676, and the parish had 20 families in 1724. Its population, numbered 100 in 1801 and 111 in 1841, it increased to 139 in 1871, but had fallen back to 105 by 1901. It fell further to 87 in 1921 but had risen again to 107 in 1931, the last year for which it was separately recorded. When I lived in Holybourne I knew that at least forty one people lived there. Two fecund families produced numbers redolent of Victorian England: nineteen Knights and twenty-two Skeins. The women concerned must have a hard life! Going there was always an adventure and on one occasion when riding my bike downhill towards Binsted, I came off and pitched head first in a large bed of stinging nettles with results I leave you to imagine. My athletic career began in Holybourne when there was a race between the secondary modern school and Eggars. I would probably have won but the secondary modern boys decided to prevent me from overtaking them by blocking my path and threatening “violence” if I tried to overtake.

On another occasion along with several other boys from the village we decided to scrumping in the school orchard. We were having a good time. But it did not last long. Mrs. Entwhistle and my Dad came into the orchard and I dived over the back wall into a cornfield where the wheat was ripe and high so I kept my head down and crawled through to corn until well away from the orchard. For some reason not now clear to me I decided to run away. The kit I had was not really appropriate. I was wearing nothing much merely shorts and skimpy top with plimsolls on my feet. I ran out of Holybourne and on to Bentley and thence to Farnham Station where I boarded a train for Waterloo naturally without a ticket. When the train arrived in London a shock was waiting. Getting out of the train a hand fell on my shoulder: “Where are you going son?” “To see my aunty at 447 Waterloo Road” “ “Where is your ticket?” “You haven’t got one” “The address you have given does not exist” “You had better tell me what you are up to” At this point the man produced a police warrant card. Shortly thereafter I was locked up in a police cell in Cannon Row police station. The next morning my father came and retrieved me and delivered me back to Eggars with a suitable reprimand. That afternoon a girl in my class said: “I saw you running through Bentley last night”… “Must have been someone else” I said. She looked at me sharply disbelief in her eyes but she left it at that. Not so long after this I chose to return to the custody of my mother and I moved to Hampton in Middlesex and to Hampton Grammar School and a whole new chapter of my life reunited with my brother John who had gone back to my mother a year or two earlier. I was not her favourite son but as brothers we got on quite well and I was glad to see the back of Mrs Entwhistle. Hampton Grammar School could not have found me a satisfactory pupil as you will discover in the next few pages. I was now a second year student and was placed in 2D. The school’s streaming system was odd running as it did A, C, B, and D. If this was meant to fool pupils, it didn’t. I arrived close to a year end and was such a bad pupil that when the year end came I was promoted to 2B! Not much promotion was it. Hampton Grammar School was founded in 1557 by Robert Hammond, a prosperous London brewer; he left a house and land worth £3 a year to support a free school at Hampton. Richard Alcocke, Vicar of Hampton, at that time became the first headmaster. But he was removed in 1573 when Elizabeth 1st came to power. The school closed. In 1612 Nicholas Pigeon with the assistance of the Charity Commission set the school going again. Later Nicholas’s grandson reconstructed the school in his stables. In 1900 the school adopted the Pigeon arms and crest as its own, a tribute to its second founder. A. S. Mason was the headmaster during my time in the school. Apparently he was both a scientist and a linguist who from the first cherished the history and traditions of the school. Just before the war the school had a new building constructed at Rectory Farm on the Hanworth Road in Hampton. The opening of the new school coincided with the

outbreak of the Second World War. I came to it just after the war. Nearly 700 boys were in the school at that time. I had the dubious honour of being caned by Mr. Mason after scoring 3 marks out of three hundred in a maths exam. I could have scored more but I decided to write nonsensical answers to the questions including a definition of a polygon as a barmy parrot and the use of a blackboard duster to prove that the external angles of a triangle added up to 360 degrees. Mason asked me: “If I thought the answers funny” My swift response was “Yes” The consequence of that was half a dozen strokes of the cane. Receiving the cane in this school became a regular event in my life. It happened at least once a fortnight at the hands of a Mr. James, the deputy head, a brave man who I believe held the V.C. He was actually rather lenient with me since I always told him the truth and this he appreciated. On one occasion after we had plagued the chemistry teacher to distraction, my friend and I were sent to James. Four strokes came to me and six went to him. The reason for the disparity became clear in the conversation that followed; my friend “You were worse than me” “I know but I admitted it” “What did you do?” “You tried to deny responsibility and James gave you two extra for prevarication” “S’not fair” “Nothing ever is”. Every year the school held a “Summer Fair”. 2D’s contribution was the “Pyramus and Thisbe” scene from “Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Boys had to play the female parts as they did in Shakespeare’s time. What happened next was appropriate to us and to the story of these mythical lovers. Pyramus was the handsomest youth, and Thisbe the fairest maiden in all Babylonia, Their parents occupied adjoining houses; and neighborhood brought the young people together, and acquaintance ripened into love. They would gladly have married, but their parents forbade. The parents could not prevent them from loving one another. They conversed by signs and glances. In the wall that parted the two houses there was a crack, caused by some fault in the structure. No one had remarked it before, but the lovers discovered it. 'What will love not discover? It afforded a passage to the voice; and tender messages used to pass backward and forward through the gap. As they stood, Pyramus on this side, Thisbe on that, their breaths would mingle. "Cruel wall," they said, "why do you keep two lovers apart? But we will not be ungrateful. We owe you, we confess, the privilege of transmitting loving words to willing ears." Such words they uttered on different sides of the wall; and when night came and they must say farewell, they pressed their lips upon the wall, she on her side, he on his, as they could come no nearer. The story is a tragic one but 2D’s version turned into farce. Our stage was in a classroom made of desks pushed together and covered in sheets. The classroom chairs were turned into seats in a makeshift auditorium. We filled it. But right in the middle of our performance whilst Pyramus was commenting on the “cruel wall” the desks parted and several cast members fell into the resulting fissure. The audience laughed but they were not sure whether this chaos was part of the plot or merely an accident. Anyway the resulting hilarity meant that was that.

The school tried to produce academic excellence through a fortnightly report card system based on the following code: VG Very Good G good S satisfactory P poor and VP very poor. The codes were translated into house points running from 2 through to minus 2. Anyone with an overall minus score or a VP on the card had the inevitable with meeting with Mr. James. I rarely had a minus score but I always had at least one VP which led to the meeting and a few strokes of the cane. Throughout my nearly two years here I made no apparent progress and I did not count the number of times I was caned. The school though was meticulously kept clean and we all had to change into plimsolls on arrival. This was to keep the corridors scrupulously polished, tidy and shiny. Many of us appreciated this when we used our satchels as vehicles for sashaying along. One day whilst doing this at some speed I collided with the senior classics master at a junction. He was bowled over and his books were scattered far and wide. Mr. James saw that I was suitably chastised. My principal companions in schoolboy pranks were Connell and Crawford and Latin was not our favourite lesson. It wasn’t the teacher’s fault. We were the bad guys. The worst plot we hatched involved white mice. We persuaded everyone to get some. We managed a few each which we brought to a lesson. At an appropriate time we released them. The resulting chaos gave us all a great deal of fun before the inevitable meeting with Mr. James. Maths lessons were always with Mr Bacon. Yes, you should have guessed. He was called “Streaky” In one of his lessons which was held on the stage, we all hid for most of the lesson between the curtains and the safety wooden doors which closed the stage. At the end of the lesson Streaky asked out loud why his lesson had been so peaceful. Our presence in hiding became apparent but this time there was no meeting with Mr. James. My last lesson in the school before departing to Guildford was with Streaky, it began with him leaning into me as he said something like: “This is your last lesson but I am watching you, waiting for an opportunity to get you into serious trouble”. I wasn’t frightened but I had a quiet lesson. One teacher here I remember well was the P.E man. He regarded me as a round shouldered second class citizen in need of remedial P.E. This meant reporting to him at frequent intervals for remedial work on wall bars. He was right at the time but the work was painful. I had to hang from bars whilst others pressed into my back and raise my legs to a right angle with my stomach muscles. The physical defects he recognized have been with me all my life. Our English teacher told us his joke at Xmas. I am not good a remembering jokes so it is rather surprising that I recall his. It concerned a Scots shepherd and his dog and a public house in Scotland with a split bar area. It went something like this. The shepherd was in the bar with his sleek and most attractive dog taking a wee pint. An American comes into the bar and compliments him on his dog. He then offers to buy the dog: “I will give you £20 for him” the response he gets:

“I wouldn’t part with Jock” The American raises the stake in successive bids to £120 pounds always to the response “I wouldn’t part with Jock” The American retires to the other side bar behind the divider but where he can still hear conversation in the bar occupied by the Scots shepherd and his dog. An Englishman comes into the bar and admires the dog. He too makes offers which draw the response “I wouldn’t part with jock” until he reaches a sum of £100 which the shepherd accepts. The American having heard this re-enters the bar and is extremely angry that the shepherd has turned down his bid but has accepted an inferior one from an Englishman. The shepherd’s response is: “Aye son, do not worry, Jock will soon be back; but, he could not have swum the Atlantic” My sole claims to any kind of excellence whilst here were confined to physical activities. I won the relevant age group 880 yards in a time of 2mins 36 secs; a performance which I later discovered would have been adequate for a girl of thirteen. Later I won the school’s junior cross-country running championship in Bushey Park principally because I ran through a stream at its most shallow point whilst everyone in front of me plunged into deeper waters. The senior championship was won by G.P Eastland who was separated from his pursuers by a herd of deer. Running for Hampton a large inter school event in Richmond Park I received a card with 117 on it, hardly a distinguished performance. On speech day, the school proudly paraded young men who had succeeded in reaching Cranwell and Sandhurst. I was impressed at the time but later I came to recognize that this was not a very good level of academic performance. We lived in a block of flats called Norman Court on the Upper Sunbury Road. Our neighbours included a motorcycle enthusiast with a willowy wife and a savvy Alsatian dog. We often went walking with him. He was accomplished at coping with cats and anyone else who threatened his welfare. I remember the crowds passing on their way to Kempton Park and the strange tipsters in the crowd. One of them was Prince Ras Monolulu, the most famous black man in Britain at this time. Between the wars, he was a national icon renowned for his eccentricity, a racing tipster of such theatricality that even in the days when newspapers carried few photographs and television was in its infancy, he was still the most recognizable racing personality other than the top jockeys. I can remember seeing him pass along the Upper Sunbury Road on the way to Kempton Park. Everyone knew that he wore a bizarre costume of massive baggy trousers, and a headdress of ostrich feathers atop ornate waistcoats, and colourful jackets. Prince Monolulu would be at all the important race meetings where he would sell his tipping sheets in envelopes. He was very funny, and would have the crowds in stitches with his banter - just like a market trader, only with much more style. His catchphrase became "I gotta horse!"

Newsreels frequently featured him.

He claimed to be the chief of the Falasha tribe of Abyssinia, but in reality he came from British Guyana and was of Scottish descent - his real name was Peter Carl Mackay. According to his memoirs, called, funnily enough, "I Gotta Horse", he started out as a sailor but re-invented himself as a Prince after being press-ganged aboard an American ship in 1902. He was told princes were important people, and he figured a prince wouldn’t be shanghaied again.

“The Maze at Hampton Court, the royal palace on the Thames to the west of London, is probably the most famous hedge maze in the world. It was planted as part of the gardens laid out for William of Orange between 1689 and 1695 by George London and Henry Wise. The Maze was planted in the Palace Gardens in 1702. It still attracts people from all over the World, and every year thousands of them are happy "to be lost" in it. It was described with great wit in Jerome K. Jerome's novel 'Three Men in a Boat.' Now it’s possible to download a version from the internet which you could play at home. In the late nineteen forties we often visited the maze, played in it, got lost in it, though we did not recognize it as the “most famous hedge in the world” We used the palace as a posh playground and we always enjoyed the Easter Fair which took place on the green in front of it. The inside of the palace was also well known to us so we became familiar with Henry VIII and the Tudors in general. This gave us a good grounding in history and an immediate familiarity with landscape design. The flower garden behind the palace and the water canal which stretched away towards Kingston were places and sights we enjoyed frequently. It is still redolent in my memory.

My knowledge as a small boy about events in India led me to follow Gandhi and his “satyagraha” methods of peaceful resistance to what he considered unjust oppression. In 1945, the British government began negotiations which culminated in the Mountbatten Plan of June 1947, and the formation of the two new independent states of India and

Pakistan, divided along religious lines. Massive inter-communal violence marred the months before and after independence. Gandhi was opposed to partition, and now fasted in an attempt to bring calm in Calcutta and Delhi. After independence (1947), he tried to stop the Hindu-Muslim conflict in Bengal. On 30 January 1948 he was assassinated in Delhi by a Hindu fanatic, Nathuram Godse. Even after his death, Gandhi's commitment to non-violence and his belief in simple living--making his own clothes, eating a vegetarian diet, and using fasts for self-purification as well as a means of protest--have been a beacon of hope for oppressed and marginalized people throughout the world. I remember the news bulletins. My memory is blank apart from one or two memorable films: Olivier’s Hamlet and a version of The Three Musketeers with June Alyson and Van Heflin. But research indicates that Angela Lansbury of “Murder She Wrote” played a small part in the latter! Most of 49 I spent in Hampton. I found my first girlfriend Freda Boswood and later May Briggs. Eva and I went to the Kingston Empire to see amongst other people Issy Bon. “Let by gones be by gones” was the kind of song that Bon would sing. He was a music hall star with a distinctive style and a somewhat maudlin appeal. I only went one but I remember it well. The cliché adequately rejuvenates the reminiscence. The words and the music for this piece wee written by J G Gilbert. I am not sure of the moment when we left to live in Guildford but by 1950 I was I was a student at the Royal Grammar School where I remained until 1955 but in academic terms I was a year behind everyone else. This was not surprising since by this time I had changed schools twenty-two times and had attended nineteen different schools. I have often wondered whether this might not be an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. Skinny and round shouldered my girl friend’s father was to call me “Spindle”! I think I spent some time in IIIB before being promoted to IV Arts, the class to which you went if you had a poor science record like me. Entering big school was quite an experience. You could imagine how it had been for boys down several centuries many of them with only a couple of masters and perhaps half a dozen monitors. In big school in 1949 you could feel the history and see it on the emblazoned names on the walls. They stood out against the black wood and the generally serious disposition of the room. Nicholas Orme is Professor of History at Exeter University and a Canon of Truro Cathedral. His book recent book “Medieval Schools” gives us a picture of what life might have been like for boys like me several hundred years right here in “big school”. Pupils in schools like this were encouraged to write in Latin about their everyday life. The schoolroom was a large oblong with benches facing inwards. The boys sat on these benches, side by side, and there was much pushing and grabbing. One boy says, 'Sit away, or I shall give thee a blow.' Another complains, 'He hath taken my book from me.' When the master left you can imagine the scene.

Another scene described in the book shows a master shouting to keep order: 'Cease, thou wanton boy! Put out of thy mind that wantonness here, for and if thou do not, thou shall say hereafter that thou hast a great cause to complain.' Masters could pass recalcitrant boys to ushers “monitors” for punishment. Chastisement generally took the form of a good thrashing. Professor Orme’s book tells a story which will hardly be credible to the young men of today. The boys went to the toilet to escape boredom. After all translating Latin all day must have been tedious. Apparently they could also leave the room to drink or even just to go home. “One boy describes how he played truant for a whole day, but there was a painful sequel.’Yesterday I took my pleasure in the town, walking to and fro into the castle and about, but today, when I came to school I was welcomed in the new fashion!' “ He probably received a good thrashing. The masters made attempts to keep the boys interested by allowing them to translate insults and expressions we would consider mildly obscene “ 'I am almost beshitten', 'Thou stinkest', 'His nose is like a shoeing horn', 'Turd in thy teeth!' and 'He is the veriest coward that ever pissed'. “ No doubt this kind of thing appealed to the boys. Professor Horne continues: “Even sex was not forbidden territory. One translated sentence runs 'He lay with a harlot all night'. William Horman, a fellow of New College who became headmaster of Winchester and Eton, got pupils to translate 'A common woman liveth by her body' and 'He gropeth uncleanly children and maidens'. This does not mean that schools were encouraging vice - far from it - but they were willing to handle the subject more freely than schools were to do for many centuries afterwards.” What we might call popular culture came in the room through proverbs; Horne cites, 'Betwixt two stools falls the arse down', 'He that cometh last to the pot is soonest wroth', 'Pepper is black but has a good smack', 'I proud and thou proud, who bears the ashes out?' and 'Was he never good swain that left his errand for the rain'. Horne is writing about schools in Oxford but his comments appear appropriate for Guildford’s “big school”. They help my imagination create a time warp which enables the mind’s eye to see what it must have been like when the RGS stood behind a cobbled street and the church and the birch played a very powerful role in the lives of the boys. I found myself enrolled in Beckingham House. The houses with their colours are: Austen (yellow) Beckingham (red) Hamonde (dark blue), Nettles (light blue) Powell (maroon) Valpy (white). Only four houses existed when I joined the school. These six are there now. The Royal Grammar School was founded in 1512. It was part of the Tudor ‘educational revolution’. Boys were taught Latin – ‘grammar’ – and the classics, before going on to the Inns of Court or the universities. The free grammar school in Guildford was founded with money from lands given for that purpose by Robert Beckingham, a London grocer who had died in 1509. He had by this time already given the town a property in Castle Street and the school was probably housed there, with perhaps twenty or thirty pupils and one schoolmaster.

Unfortunately, the rules of the school required the pupils to pray for Beckingham’s soul, and this effectively made it a chantry. The abolition of chantries in 1547 led to the school’s endowment being confiscated. Nevertheless, Edward VI recognized the value of such schools and re-established Guildford’s Grammar School in 1552, granting it a royal charter. It was around this time that the boys of the school were recorded as playing ‘creckett’: the first reference in English to the game. In 1555 the Mayor and Approved Men bought an area of land at the eastern edge of the borough (now the Upper High Street) and began building a schoolhouse there in 1557. At this time, however, there was trouble brewing. Archbishop Heath, Queen Mary’s Lord Chancellor, thought it and other such schools were nurseries for Protestantism and demanded the surrender of the school’s charter. However, the death of the Catholic Mary and the succession of the Protestant Elizabeth enabled the school to survive. The building was not completed until 1586, by which time the two wings for the Master’s and Usher’s houses had been added, with a gallery linking them along the High Street frontage. The gallery contained the books bequeathed to the town by Bishop Parkhurst of Norwich, an old Guildfordian, in 1573. In this way the chained library was created. The Guildford I knew had all the characteristics of a Surrey market town from the ornate clock which dominates the high street to the Angel, the Eashing farm diary café and the Lion hotel complex You could almost feel the earlier times and that you were part of a continuing community infused with a tradition which was soon to disappear. Walking in the high street, drinking coffee in the Eashing Café was part of every day life. It certainly was not 24/7 something that would eventually dominate English everyday life. In 1812 the National Society for promoting the education of the poor in the principles of the Church of England founded a school in Guildford at the foot of Pewley Hill. It was also known as Holy Trinity and St. Mary’s School. By my time the school was simply known as Pewley, it was a superior kind of secondary school considered higher in the pecking order than Stoke and Onslow, the bog standard schools of the day. The pecking order of schools in the Guildford area at the end of the forties was as distinctive as the levels in our honours system. RGS was at the top of the food chain followed by Godalming and Farnham grammar schools. Stoke and Onslow were at the bottom. The eleven plus system caused havoc in middle class homes. Girls who passed the eleven plus could go to the County Grammar School on the Farnham road. Its status seemed only to apply to girls. In was in the pecking order but out of it too. It did in our house but more of that later. In the playground behind big school and below Pewley were the “fives” courts and a large room which passed as a kind of gym because it had a few wall bars and some quire mats. Most boys played fives in breaks and at lunch time. The quire mats had a particular purpose; they were at the heart of Sergeant Major “Stinker” Stent’s physical education lessons if you can call what he presided over “lessons”. He was principally involved in just two activities; boxing and war ball. This latter pursuit was Stinker’s contribution to education and peculiar it most certainly was. When we arrived at the “gym” we had to get hold of two quire mats and place one at each end of the room, split

ourselves into two teams, grab a large medicine ball and after that we had to play what amounted to indoor rugby without any rules. Push, shove, pull, wrench, use any method you saw fit to get the medicine ball on the opposition’s quire mat. Each time the ball was landed on a mat a team scored a point and the team with most points was the winner. The activity would make the All Blacks “haka” look tame! Whilst I was at the school, Stinker retired and was awarded the BEM. Such an award seemed eminently suitable to his station. Some of us thought it confirmed his social status but he was happy enough. But my time in the school altered the course of my life and here at the end of 49 seems a good place to conclude the first chapter.

Chapter Two (1950-55) I remember coming home from school in the fifties to find my mother always listening to the first post-war soap on British radio. It was Mrs. Dale's Diary. . Who could forget Marie Goossens' harp introduction to the programme or the reflective comments of Dr. Dale's rather serious wife? The title character was a pleasant middle-class doctor's wife, Mary. She lived with her husband Jim at Virginia Lodge in the Middlesex suburb of Parkwood Hill. They had a son called Bob played by Nicholas Parsons, Hugh Latimer, Derek Hart, and by Leslie Heritage for nearly twenty years. and a daughter called Gwen who was successively Virginia Hewitt, Joan Newell, Beryl Calder and (for many years) Aline Waites. Bob was married to Jenny and they had twins. One does not need any further commentary to get the tenor of the quintessentially fifties radio soap. My Mum liked it. They set the scene for the evening which was later illuminated by Dick Barton and his sidekicks, Jock and Snowy. My brother and I used to practice tennis strokes against the walls in the small yard beside the house. The crinkled bricks made sure that the balls came back at awkward and difficult angles. We played imaginary games against the great players of the day and wrote our own ranking list in chalk on the breeze block in the garden shed: Hoad, Rosewall, Trabert, Gonzales, Sedgeman, Drobny. Et al. Sedgeman, Seixas and Drobny were the winners at Wimbledon in this period. Some time around this period I joined a local tennis club even though I wasn’t very good. They had a ladder system based on age and I found myself giving three points in every game to younger boys who were better than me. This made for a losing streak which was frustrating and tedious. I did not persevere in the tennis club but continued to while away hours with tennis balls in the yard. From our house to the school was around one mile. I usually only had a few minutes to spare when going to from one place to the other, an early sign of my dislike of mornings, especially early ones. I was fortunate to have been given a place at the grammar school partly because I had come to the town from another similar school and partly because my mother’s husband was a Pendry. The Pendry family was well known in Guildford and the sons had all been to the grammar school. Later rather sadly, they all died of cancer. Sam Pendry was a local builder who had built the house we lived in as

well as many others in the neighbourhood and the one where he lived high up close to Pewley Down. He played a big part in the town’s life as secretary of Guildford Cricket Club. Every year the club in Woodbridge Road hosted county matches usually between Hampshire and Surrey. Another county chosen at random usually played against Surrey during the second week of a two week inter-county season. This was a period when Surrey under the leadership of Stuart Surridge dominated the cricket county championship. In this period one of the most popular activities for youths was cycle racing on dirt tracks. For a short time the sport was very popular. The boys imitated motor-cycle dirt track racing on small oval tracks leaning into the corners like motor cyclists, skidding hard and swerving the rear wheels with as much élan as they could manage. There was a league and a great deal of enthusiasm amongst the town’s young people. The other youth league was a soccer league. I played in it as a winger in the Holy Trinity scouts team. We were awful and I cannot ever remember us winning a single match; scores against us usually ran like this Northway 5 Holy Trinity nil, Southway 6 Holy Trinity nil. We did not have a coach or a manager so there was no one to sack or blame. If there had been a prize for fair play we probably would have won that because it was usually the other teams that did the fouling. They had the ball most of the time after all. At the grammar school the classes were split into “Arts” and “Sciences”. I have the impression that if you weren’t very good at science subjects you ended up in the “arts” class. That’s naturally where I went but having come from “2D and “2B in Hampton, I wasn’t academic, period. I was dropped at once from Latin and Greek since my knowledge went only as far as “ammo, amass, amant” and to epsilon in Greek. My French was better but not much better so they placed me in the Spanish class. Our teacher was the Revd Joseph O’Dwyer, “Holy Joe” to us, the class of language duffers. For a couple of years I was just one of a bunch of bad students in “Holy Joe’s” mob. He wasn’t a good teacher although he was not an unpleasant man. I don’t know what he had done to deserve his class of desultory students. When it came close to fifth year exams my form teacher Mr Malleson or “Mally” to the boys suggested that it would be a good idea for me to pass the “O” level exam. If I didn’t the passage to a university was impossible. At that time such thoughts were not on my horizon but I listened and went to Holy Joe and promised to follow his instructions. That was barely six months before the exam was due. Franco was in Spain then so culturally our family was anti which did not make my task any easier. We arrived at the mock exam and with the exception of one boy, Brian White, we all failed. My practice concentrated on vocabulary. Every whack with a tennis racquet carried a new word. I could read and translate from Spanish back to English, going the other way was difficult and I never was able to achieve any competence. Eventually the real exam arrived and with one exception, we all failed only this time the exception was me. On speech day I felt like a proper fraud as I received the Spanish prize! My brother John did not have my good fortune and he had to go to Onslow Secondary School, a place that would now be called a “bog” standard place. He had taken the 11plus twice and failed. He took the 13 plus and failed that too. My mother was distraught and John didn’t have much option except to be in receipt of an “inferiority” complex. He was given a private tutor and he went for some classes to

Guildford Technical College. Eventually he went on to achieve amazing “A” level exam results. In passing he won the 220 yards in the Surrey Tech championships. He was Surrey Chess champion and he played for the Oxford University chess team. His academic prowess was a great deal better than mine. But he was never a lucky man. At this time too I was in the school cadet corps. Other kids in the town used to ridicule us in our uncomfortable serge uniforms. The school thought it important that we play at being soldiers. Suddenly school masters were officers: Colonel Bowey, Lt Col Burns, Lt Martin and the sergeants were prefects from the Upper Sixth. My most graphic memory is of an all night exercise on Blackheath, a stretch of heath like ground near Wonersh. There was a hamlet there and a cemetery as well as the heath. My sergeant told me to climb a tree and fire on the “enemy” when I saw them. In the early hours of the morning the referee told me to come down. I had officially been shot and I was allowed to go back to Blackheath village hall for a cup of tea and a kip in my sleeping bag. I was glad being both cold and damp though officially dead. I guess it was kind of adventure. Some time later the officers decided that we should take responsibility for a 303 rifle, clean it, polish it and generally nurture it. This task did not appeal to me so I declined the order. My sergeant reported me to Lt Martin. He reported me to Lt Colonel Burns who reported me to Col Bowey. He remonstrated with me and threatened me with the “Squash Mob” the place where less valued boys went. Eventually I was sent to Mikey, Mr. Hallowes, the headmaster. He told me that if I didn’t clean my rifle I would be demoted to the squash mob. I resisted these pressures and went to the squash mob where it was forecast I would not have a successful school career. I resisted the threats but the prophecy for me turned out not to be true. As an adolescent my concerns at the time were mostly involved with authority and sex. I needed justification for the first and knowledge about the second. These were not easy to work out. For some time during this period Mikey tried without much success to persuade my mother that she should become involved in Moral Rearmament. The basic tenet of MRA is that the reformation of the world can only be achieved by creating a moral and spiritual force, by convincing all men of the necessity of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. To help themselves achieve this members were expected to practice these cardinal virtues. It was suggested that members engage in the exercises of sharing, surrender, substitution, and guidance. MRA sought to involve people who held prominent positions in social and political life. My mother did not fit the usual stereotype and Jim Pendry, my stepfather, regarded the exercise with a good deal of cynicism. The guru of this fervent religious group was Dr Frank Buchman. He thought the world was in need of moral and spiritual awakening. Buchman put his case in striking phrases. But that was only words. He thought that man should turn to God to achieve this revival. My mother was not convinced. To me MRA seemed to be a way of keeping the peasants under control. To quote him: “Now I find when we don’t know how, God will show us if we are willing. When man listens, God speaks. When man obeys, God acts. The secret is God-control. We are not out to tell God. We are out to let God tell us. And He will tell us. The lesson the world most needs is the art of listening to God “ I was an agnostic when I listened to this and nothing has changed much since.

One night at around six in the evening after I had been home I was out walking in the town when I was spotted by a prefect. He gave me a detention for being without a cap. I protested and landed up in front of Mikey. When I explained the circumstances he sympathized and he said: “I’ll have words with the prefect but I am afraid you’ll have to have the detention because I must be seen to back our prefects. You’ll be one some day and you’ll know you have my support. The school did not have a physical education department but I witnessed the extraordinary leadership of the school captain who without any staff help created one of the best school rugby teams in the south of England. Chris Thorne was remarkable. His abilities were even more praise worthy when you knew that his brother and his mother were killed in the Lynmouth disaster . Headline: 1952: Flood devastates Devon village “Twelve bodies have been recovered and 24 people are missing feared dead in the flood which has swept through Lynmouth in north Devon. The normally picturesque holiday village was evacuated early today as troops and council workers were brought in to begin clearing the devastation. Hundreds of people have been left homeless. There is no water, gas or electricity supply. All the boats in the harbour have been washed out to sea. Four main road bridges have been swept away. The flood followed yesterday's torrential rain. In the 24 hours before, some nine inches (22.9cm) of rain had fallen on Exmoor, just four miles (6.4km) away. “ No one mentioned global warming but now this particular disaster is forgotten because we have had many more since. Chris introduced members of the rugby team to the connection between training and performance. Team members were expected to train every day! They did. But more than that Chris’s methods were tough and hard, so hard that sometimes the odd injury occurred during training. The results were spectacular. His team won all their matches bar an encounter with the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Mikey used to love recounting the scores in big school on Monday mornings: RGS 25 Portsmouth GS 5, RGS 40 Purley GS 5 and so on, results like these were usual. Many of the victories came in the last twenty minutes of games as opponents were overwhelmed by superior physical fitness.

His example inspired those of us who were runners to train hard like his rugby players. We did and we had considerable success eventually. In the school yard one day in June we listened to a radio commentary on the final of the 1500metres in the 1952 Olympic Games. The event was amazing, extremely competitive with just over two seconds covering all the competitors: 1. Josy BARTHEL (LUX) 3:45.1 OR 2. Robert McMILLEN (USA) 3. 3:45.23. Werner LUEG (GER) 3:45.4 4. Roger BANNISTER (GBR) 3:46.0 5. Patrick El MABROUK (FRA) 3:46.0 6 Rolf LAMERS (GER) 3:46.8 7. Olle ABERG (SWE) 3:47.0 8. Ingvar ERICSSON (SWE) 3:47.6

The commentary made it clear how close it was with the lead changing hands regularly. As far as I know Josy Barthel is still the only athlete from Luxembourg ever to win gold and certainly the first and until now the last one to win this particular event.

The commentary was fascinating and together with Chris Thorne’s example played a large part in motivating me. Life would never be quite the same again. Looking at the times set in this event it does not now seem particularly outstanding against the low 3.30s which are now needed if you are to be considered world class. On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister became the first sub-four-minute miler when he covered the distance in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Six weeks later, John Landy, an Australian, followed suit with 3:58, breaking Bannister's record Since then sub four minutes has become routine. New Zealander John Walker traveled round the world regularly running the distance in less than four minutes living in a caravan most of the time. As an athlete I never managed to cover the mile in less than four minutes. But in 1954 I won my first championship, the Surrey Schools senior cross-country championship. Bill Bowey was the history teacher. The Pendrys didn’t think much of him but he was an enthusiast. He taught lower levels in a didactic fashion which would appeal to out-reach branches of the Open University but his real ability became plain enough in the “A” level years. His favourite story concerned Frederick, the oldest son of George IInd. According to Bill Frederick was killed by a cricket ball in 1751. Bill reckoned he was quite a talented man and he would have handled the situation with the American colonies wisely without a war, and if that had occurred the history of the world would have been different. George IIIrd reigned for longer than any other monarch in British history. Eventually he declined into madness. Having been defeated on land by Washington, British power was under mortal threat when Admiral Lord Rodney won the Battle of All the Saints on 12th April 1782 off Dominica in the West Indies. The battles produced by accident or design a new naval tactic, one which Nelson used so dramatically a few years later. As the French line passed down the British line, a sudden shift of wind let Rodney’s flagship Formidable and several other ships, including the Duke and the Bedford, break through the French line, raking the ships as they did so. The resultant confusion led eventually to the surrender and the retreat of the French fleet. Rodney had managed to produce a situation using the wind that enabled the British ships to fire on the French without receiving any return fire. Rodney’s ships could also sail across the bows of several ships effectively holing them at or below the water line. The British lost 243 killed and 816 wounded, and two captains out of 36 were killed. The French loss in killed and wounded has never been stated, but of captains alone, six were killed out of 30. An estimated 2,000 French sailors were killed or wounded. This is one of the most important victories in British naval history and its importance has always been underestimated. If the French had won there would have been nothing to prevent an invasion. Cricket balls and naval tactics were not the only arcane subjects that interested Bill Bowey; he was fascinated by the national traits of the French and Germans particularly as illustrated during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The war began over the ascension of a candidate from the Hohenzollern royal family to the vacant Spanish throne as Isabella II had abdicated in 1868. This was strongly opposed by France. They issued an ultimatum to King Wilhelm I of Prussia to have the candidacy withdrawn. Aiming to humiliate Prussia, Emperor Napoleon III of France then required Wilhelm to apologize

and renounce any possible further Hohenzollern candidate for the Spanish throne. Bismarck was the German chancellor at the time and he tampered with the diplomatic messages to help the war along a bit. Napoleon IIIrd declared war on Prussia. The efficient German army under Von Moltke easily won the ensuing struggle which was concluded in 1871 with the resignation of Napoleon IIIrd. Bill’s particular interest was in the behaviour of the soldiers on either side. Despite being on the losing side, French soldiers were better at making decisions based on an individual initiative than the Germans. The latter were better at obeying orders. It is interesting to me that this judgment was echoed nearly a hundred years later in the disturbing writing of the Italian Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi though he was writing about Germans and Russians. Geography did not have the same allure as history but the teacher was excellent. Tom Tillett once complained that our essays were too short, .so between us we decided to “sort him out” by giving him a lot of extra works. Six of us produced essays thirty odd pages for him to mark. He took it in good heart and mildly suggested that “There was no need to go over the top”! Before getting to the last two years at the school, I had to appear in an historical pageant directed by Mr. Malleson, the principal English teacher and the man who most influenced me. I don’t remember much about the pageant except that I had to wear some ill-fitting clothes and speak about three lines. The event was promoted to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the school. The event was staged in the Guildford Rep North Street theatre which has long since disappeared following what we might politely call the “yuppification” of the town. The atmospheric Surrey market town disappeared under a swathe of gilded concrete, the usual signature of modern suburbia. Mally probably did not approve then and certainly would not now as the concrete has continued to flow. Personally I tend often to be a rather noisy person. Mally was quiet and rather selfeffacing. He never gave orders in the traditional schoolmaster fashion. He made modest suggestions and was always embarrassed by the sexy bits in Chaucer and in Shakespeare. We often brought blushes to his face when we tried to provoke him into comment on these passages. Usually his comments on the literature and the writers we studied were effulgent, competent and interesting. The works we studied included Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, Thomas Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge”, and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Earlier we spent time with the poems of John Masefield which reminded me that in Hampton we spent time on the poetry of Alexander Pope particularly “The Rape of the Lock”. What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, What mighty Contests rise from trivial Things, I sing-This verse to Caryl, Muse! is due; This, ev'n Belinda may vouchsafe to view: Slight is the Subject, but not so the Praise, If She inspire, and He approve, my Lays.

Pope’s poetry was important in Hampton because he was a local man. He was very small and he suffered from several disabilities which coloured his outlook and led to his verse being terse and even acrid. I appreciated his mastery of rhythm which is why I remember him. By contrast Masefield, poet laureate then, was fun with his passion for the sea encapsulated particularly in Sea Fever:

"Sea-Fever" I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a gray mist on the sea’s face, and a gray dawn breaking. I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

And

John Masefield (1878-1967). (English Poet Laureate, 1930-1967.) These very different poets followed an earlier introduction to the muse: Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore No doubt you have heard the name before Was a boy who never would shut a door! The wind might whistle, the wind might roar, And teeth be aching and throats be sore, But still he never would shut the door. His father would beg, his mother implore. These lines proved to be eminently suitable as an introduction for small boys to poetry. It turned out to be particularly appropriate for me since I have retained the ability to leave doors open. Perhaps there is a gene for this since my sons appear to have inherited it. The writer of this poem is not someone well remembered but his name William Brighty Rands seems apt enough. But over the years we spent more time on prose than on poetry although we considered a number of well known English poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Gray, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oliver Goldsmith, A E Houseman and others. . Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” was written in 1902 and we were studying it half a century later. The book set out to expose the tenuous nature of "civilization" and the brutal horror at the centre of European colonialism. Conrad's crowning achievement recounts the physical and psychological journey of the protagonist, Marlow, as he ventures deep into the heart of the Belgian Congo in search of the mysterious trader Kurtz. This is a book that lives with you for life. Amongst the many people whose lives have been influenced by it, we find Francis Ford Coppola and his enigmatic film “Apocalypse Now” where the story is brought to life by Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz, Martin Sheen as Marlow. Robert Duval adds a bit more menace and Coppola uses it to express horror at US involvement in Vietnam. Mally’s classes were an introduction to life. In pursuit of involvement in English outside the classroom, we did not go out very often but we did go to the Hammersmith Empire to see Philip Massinger’s “A New Way to Pay Old Debts” with its powerful central character Sir Giles Overreach played by the surprisingly energetic Sir Donald Wolfitt. The part is nearly caricature and was made famous in an earlier age by one of our greatest Shakespearian actors, Edmund Kean. Wolfitt as this time was an actor-manager a role that had a long tradition dating back to Shakespeare’s time. He was a larger than life character whose presence is with me now more than half a century later. Philip Massinger’s life overlapped with Shakespeare’s and he often collaborated with Thomas Dekker. I mention Dekker because my stepfather’s brother, Eric Pendry wrote a book about him. Eric was an itinerant academic who worked in Japan, Finland and the UK. He had been the school captain in Guildford in the late thirties and he inherited the Pendry family cancer gene which killed him prematurely when he was a professor in Bristol University. Marlon Brando was a sour name in our house because I argued about his surly performance as Antony in the film of Julius Caesar. My mother thought he was too American to play the part of Antony but I was rather taken b his performance. We argued about it frequently. The film was an excellent aid to the academic study we had to make of the work. Ever since I have found Brando’s performances to be charismatic. Thomas Hardy stands out as possibly the greatest British novelist of the nineteenth century with perhaps only Dickens as a rival. Hardy for me always creates a most evocative “sense of place”; something many modern writers of crime fiction can do; consider Simenon and France, Donna Leon and Venice, Ed McBain and New York, Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles. Hardy’s “Dorset” is perhaps different in so far as the sense of place is so strong that in “Return of the Native” in particular it is an additional character. Hardy also tackled the unique English class system, a problem that did not face the other writers mentioned above. Henchard in the Mayor of Casterbridge is an example of the “driven” man unable to get to grips with himself; the central theme of the novel may be as enigmatic as "anything is possible at the hands of Time and Chance, except, perhaps, fair play. The novel's subtitle, “A Study of a Man of

Character”, suggests that it must be related to Henchard's capacity for suffering, since for Henchard--in part owing to his failure to communicate his true feelings, "happiness is but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain". Hardy seems to imply in this novel, that to meet the vicissitudes of life heroically or defiantly is not enough--one must do so with love, compassion, and charity. We were given time to read other Hardy novels not in the curriculum giving us a breadth of reading not accessible to similar adolescents today. A E Housman was a poet of great ability though he did not ever really appreciate the quality of his talent in his own time. He was a homosexual at a time when being one was extremely difficult. Although we studied a number of great English poets from Chaucer onwards, his “The Shropshire Lad “ collection made a lasting impression perhaps because with this poem in particular he appealed to me as an athlete. Any ambient glory briefly achieved would indeed be brief. But life itself is a bit like that; something you appreciate when you have had your three score years and ten! To an Athlete Dying Young by Alfred Edward Housman The time you won your town the race We chaired you through the market-place; Man and boy stood cheering by, And home we brought you shoulder-high. Today, the road all runners come, Shoulder-high we bring you home, And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town. Smart lad, to slip betimes away From fields where glory does not stay And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose. Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut, And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears: Now you will not swell the rout Of lads that wore their honors out, Runners whom renown outran And the name died before the man. So set, before its echoes fade, The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up The still-defended challenge-cup. And round the early-laurelled head Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, And find unwithered on its curls The garland briefer than a girl’s In the fifties youth clubs were an important influence on the lives of young people and there were lots of them. Some were based in church halls but others were just clubs like the one I went to for a while in Onslow School which then was a secondary school and is now only a primary establishment. The clubs promoted the soccer teams and the cycle speedway and we also did quite a lot of country dancing both English and Scottish. The basic idea behind youth clubs was to keep teenagers off the street but clubs without hidden agendas did a lot more than that. I shall come back to this subject later in this book. In 1954 I won the Surrey Schools senior mile championship at Motspur Park in what was at that time a new county record of 4min 28.2 seconds (twenty or more seconds less for 1500metres) It was a remarkable win because I had been eliminated in the heats of the Surrey clubs championship an event eventually won by W F Corneck of Polytechnic Harriers. But during 1954, I actually had the benefit of a coach Geoff Daniels or “Danny” as I called him and a tough training partner Dick Haskell. Dick won the Surrey clubs 880 yards after running the distance twice in 2minutes each time in the same afternoon. There were athletes who could run faster but they could not produce two excellent performances in one afternoon. So Danny set about getting me over my poor performance in May in preparation for a better one in July. He concentrated on upper body work and speed. As the Guildford champion I had no heats to run as it was a straight final. Danny told me to run the third lap as fast as I could and hang on during the fourth. The fashion then as now was to pursue for three laps and then run as fast as you could over the last lap and the fastest finisher would win. I followed Danny’s advice and at the end of the third lap, I had a substantial lead and the pursuit began led by Mike Tomsett, the Croydon champion. Off the final bend he was on my shoulder. I felt him there and ran wide off the bend to maintain maximum momentum. Finally I won by a very small margin less than half a second. Both of us were well inside the national standard but Tomsett was not chosen to go the English Schools. After such a brilliant race with both mothers as well as the crowd screaming at us, it wasn’t justice. This was the one and only time that my mother watched me race. The final event was held in Northumberland in Ashington. I reached the final after a good performance in the heats but I was felled in the final where after being left last I managed to get up and come seventh. In early 1955 our club team won the South of the Thames cross-country team title. During a discussion with my mother’s father, Grandad Morgan, I mentioned this, he told

me that he had run in this event in 1905 exactly fifty years before my participation. He had worked for the Post Office throughout his life, much of it at the main sorting office in Mount Pleasant. He lived in Mitcham and he regularly walked to work. It’s a long way from Mitcham to Mount Pleasant. The information inferred that his life had been tough. He was eighty-four when he died. Granma Morgan was really tough and eventually she came to live in Dunsdon Avenue where my mother said she was preserved in alcohol. She could be found frequently drinking milk; milk laced with whisky. Finally she went to a home where she informed my mother she was going to marry again. She was ninety-five at this point but she died shortly afterwards without being able to go through with her plans. We lived in Dunsdon Avenue where the house we occupied had been built by Sam Pendry. Jim Pendry was my stepfather. In this house John and I got a political education. For me this was an important addition to the cultural education that came from the school. It was perhaps that I learnt that in many important ways I was an outsider even though being in a grammar school it appeared that I was inside. People who are genuinely to the left will always be regarded as outsiders perhaps because capitalism is a right wing creed. Jim helped us think about politics by talking to us about what he called the political forward line: outside right = fascist; inside right = conservative; centre-forward=liberal; inside left=labour; outside left=communist. Taking the forward line as a circle instead of line, you get extreme right and extreme left touching each other at the point where they become totalitarian. This gave you a simple structure to use when thinking about politics. To a schoolboy this was helpful. We could see the point of it in what was happening elsewhere. Stalin died in 1953. Franco ruled in Spain. In our house Franco was anathema. Eventually Franco was to become something the Spanish would rather forget, an ugly family secret, a massive skeleton in the cupboard. To help make ends meet my mother had a foreigner stay with us. He slept in our bedroom; three of us in the same room, John, Juan Manuel Travesedo and I. Juan’s family owned the bus company in Salamanca and they were wealthy fascists, so every night we had the same litany: From Juan: “Franco is a wonderful man” ; from John “Franco is a fascist pig”. The show ran for several weeks that’s why the litany has stuck in my head. The reality was awful, more dreadful than we really knew in that bedroom in the fifties. Picasso’s “Guernica” commented on the first whole sale civilian bombing. Manuel Azana was a Spanish left wing politician who was briefly prime minister before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Writing in the Diario de Burgos in the early thirties Azana’s words echo down the years with greater authority than Franco ever possessed: “Today to be a republican, purely republican with no fascist or communist adulterations, is to believe in tolerance, transigence, respect for ideas, the superiority of reason over strength, peaceful processes, and good manners, in other words it is to believe in a liberal spirit that is the crowning achievement of centuries of civilization and culture … We cannot suppose that all that humanity has learned will be swept away by Marx, Lenin and Mussolini. We have to believe, if we want to preserve our faith in the higher destiny of man, that today’s fascist and communists movements are fleeting and superficial, a moment of barbarism in the history of civilization”

These sympathies were common in our house. However my mother in particular was rather like Tony Blair’s government, she promised more than she delivered. Jim was given an OBE which he was reluctant to accept but my mother wanted to go to a royal garden party, so he accepted it. Later when we were operating a sanctions policy against South African goods whilst members of the African National Congress we found her buying South African oranges. When we protested, she just said: “They are the best”! In 1955 I passed a sufficient number of “A” levels to win a county major scholarship which meant that Surrey would pay for me to go to university. Eventually I went but only after spending a year doing a variety of other things. My results included an A pass in history and as the best historian in the school I was awarded my third academic prize, the Sir Philip Magnus Memorial Prize, some heavyweight books. I suppose I thought that after my eccentric school career such a result was reasonably satisfactory. I left having been elected house captain, won the sports “Victor Ludorum” and qualified for university entrance. But this was a blemished record when compared to my brother’s performance, he managed six straight “As” at A level with marks in the nineties and an open scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford and all that without the assistance of a grammar school education.

CHAPTER THREE. 1955-56. A VARIETY of THINGS. During the year I spent between leaving school and going to university, I was occupied in numerous ways. They all added to my education. The first jobs we had were in Bentalls, the department store in Kingston on Thames. It was like being part of the TV series “Are You Being Served” complete with Mt Gerald, the rather effete boss. I worked in Bentall’s post office with another young man who was as daft as I was. People would buy things and come to the post office to send them to friends and relatives. Behind us at the back of the counter area was a large parcel cupboard with a chute leading to a lower level. It was capacious and could take a large number of parcels of all sizes. From time to time one or other of us would shuv the other into the cupboard and close the door so that only one of us would be left serving. We were very unsatisfactory employees fooling about all the time. On one day when we were in the mood, we both treated some most the customers in an idiotic manner. I remember quizzing someone about a tuppenny ha’penny stamp in a silly voice. “What you want some tupenny ha’penny stamps” “Really” How many?” “What she wants tupenny ha’penny stamps” “How come?” “What for?” “Are you sure?” The voices were really silly and the customers amazed.

Elsewhere in the store there was a young couple recently married; one of them the woman in the food department, the other the man in hardware. We used to go and look for them to see what state they were in. The bags under their eyes would allow us to calculate how much sex they had had the night before. Some days they appeared to have difficulty keeping their eyes open. My mate’s comment: “They must have been hard it last night”. “They are in a bad way. I wonder whether Mr. Gerald will notice” Everyone was in awe of Mr. Gerald. He was almost royalty in Bentalls. The company was founded in 1867 but is now part of the Fenwick group although the Bentalls name has been retained. There will be no Mr. Geralds any more though and I guess the employees will not have as much fun as we had. Bentalls’ world would later be seen in the in the TV programme “Are you being served?” The slogan “Are you free” could be ascribed to Mr Gerald. It suited him. My mother thought having a “Bentalls’ charge account was a status symbol. Now of course we know that charge accounts are just a marketing tool to keep the cash rolling through the retail tills of companies who sell regularly to the same customers. The name Bentalls still exists but it now belongs to a retail chain. The family sold out. At this time we lived in a large bed sit in Surbiton with a couple of really weird people from a clerical background. The couple whose house we lived in were very old and frail. The man had been clergy. The wife was tiny shriveled up and she wore a wig. She stays in my memory because one day when passing in a train across the bottom of her garden which backed onto the Waterloo-Portsmouth-main line, we saw her stark naked without her wig, totally bald. It was as if she had come from another planet. It was a picture you could never forget. From July to August 1955 I was a commuter from Guildford to London where I worked in Fenchurch Street for Escombe and McGrath, shipping brokers for amongst others P and O. It was a clerical job filling in customs forms and visiting various embassies around London with documents to be verified. There was enough freedom for me to be able to continue to train most of the time in Queen’s Park. The only problem I had was the occasional remark to the effect that I had been “a long time”. “Hold up in the Cuban Embassy” was a popular excuse with me. It was immediately obvious that in this family firm progress was a privilege reserved for people called either Escobar or McGrath. But after a few weeks I came to conclusion that “commuting” was not a way of life that appealed to me and I left to become a railway porter on Guildford’s main railway station. I did three months with British Rail at a time when trains on the Waterloo, Portsmouth, and Isle of Wight line were described as the best and most reliable in the world by some of my American passengers. Little did I know at the time that the line would eventually end up in the not very tender hands of Stagecoach with the result that some of the trains ceased to run at all, that half a century later our railways would be in every way inferior to those of our neighbours, that in 2006 only 2% of European high speed lines would be in the UK. My duties included shutting doors and mundane platform tasks. But for several weeks when on morning shift, I had to get up at 4.a.m.

and being in the station by 4.30. to board the down train to Petersfield to throw out packets of daily papers in Farncombe, Godalming, Witley, Liphook, Liss and Petersfield before returning on an up train to the station to continue the shift. Inevitably I used to doze off on this journey and one day I woke up as the train stopped at Woking Station, its last stop before Waterloo as it was a fast train. Now I had to get a down train back to Guildford where the foreman greeted me with “Where the hell have you been?” My explanation did not receive a friendly reception. In October 1955 I signed up in the army for three years only because by so doing I would get paid properly and not just get pocket money for doing national service. I spent three weeks in the service and they are engraved on my memory as if it had all taken place yesterday. A long time later I met a brigadier who had retired from the parachute regiment who asked me about my military service. “What was wrong with it” ”Very poor discipline” “I do not believe it, Explain please” When I went into the army I was very disciplined indeed. As an athlete, I trained hard every day; I did academic work; I went to bed at ten and slept soundly every night. I needed the sleep to sustain me. Eventually it would be the sleep that was denied me in the army that led to my medical problems. It was to be a momentous three weeks. First things first, the army took my clothes and I got army gear in return. To have one’s clothes removed, it felt like going into prison but in my case, in view of my athletic prowess, I got to keep my training kit. Eventually this would prove to be a godsend. I could not leave the garrison in army gear but in running kit no one recognized me and I was free to come and go whenever I wished. There were times when I needed to get out of Blenheim Barracks. I had joined the Royal Army Service Corps only one degree better than the Pioneer Corps and this was to be basic training Aldershot style. Perhaps my step-father’s joke about the football team also applied to the RASC “oughta shot em ages ago”! My first fortnight was a long one and I spent it in a room that came as close to bedlam as any sane person would ever want to be. The group in the room was dominated by what could best be described as a Glaswegian gang. The rest of us were frightened. The gang particularly picked on the Welsh amongst us. Later as a teacher I learnt that groups of young people require supervision 24/7. The basic problem in our barrack room was that during the night in the absence of any supervision, the Glasgow gang presided over what amounted to a reign of terror. They forced everyone, almost everyone, (they left me alone), to join them in card games. They were forced to gamble and of course the Glaswegians always won and then expected to be paid. The noise went on for hours and sleep was not possible. Sleep was hardly ever possible for days an night on end. As if the Glaswegians were not enough tribulation on their own our immediate NCOs were real bastards. They used to invade the room in the early hours to get us

moving. The room was not comfortable and they insisted that it always be spotless; something that was impossible to achieve in the circumstances. The room’s floorboards were very narrow, about ten centimeters across. The cracks were quite wide and dust issued forth in clouds. Just walking there brought forth the dust. Each morning the NCOs insisted on cleanliness and each morning they were dissatisfied. They threatened us with “extra early rising” each time they were dissatisfied. Early rising was what we received, earlier and earlier, day by day. Eventually we were reduced to only four hours of sleep only we did not even get that because the Glaswegians were busy bullying us all. One day I discovered that one of the Glaswegians had stolen my cutlery set. Losing it was an offence which could put me in hot water. So I dressed in running kit and took a training run to Woolworth’s in Aldershot to buy a replacement set. No one molested me and the exercise was simple enough. The result was that fatigue gathered momentum. This was amplified by the nature of our daily life, marching up and down, sweeping up leaves each day; more came down as soon as we cleared the area. Always more were waiting to be cleared. NCOs shouted at us the whole time in the stereo typical way most people think they do. The guy in charge of our room was nuttier than the rest. A young man hardly much older than me was the senior officer in my section. Two or three middle-aged NCOs, one wearing the Korean War star, seemed to be in possession of commonsense which then as now was in short supply. As the days went by I got more and more tired. The officers set us an intelligence test and the marks I got would not have done justice to a zombie. I was sent to see the local psychiatrist who told me I could say whatever I liked to him. He told me: “I have no rank; you don’t have to call me sir. You can speak your mind” I told him about our bonkers barrack room, the bullying and the fatigue. I said to him: “How would you manage an intelligence test if you were deprived of sleep for several nights on end?” It was not a question he could answer. He agreed with me that my grades at “A” level were a better judge of my abilities than the army’s tests. After about ten days of this my inability to march in step became a nightmare for those around me. They were often caught out of step. I never was until one day when it became apparent to the officer that I was the platoon culprit. I was balled out: “You fucking idiot! What the hell are you doing! The words came at me through the haze of fatigue. Very suddenly I became awake. Enough adrenaline came from nowhere to get the blood running strongly and the anger rising. The orders came from one of the NCOs. “Squad shun” “Squad left turn” “Squad quick march”

I remained rooted to the spot.

The subaltern I have already mentioned appeared in front of me. His cool was gone. His exact words I don’t remember but a torrent of swearing and abuse came my way. He got angrier and angrier. I remained rooted to the spot in absolute silence. He got so angry; he jumped up and down on the same spot yelling that I was a bastard etc. I did not move or speak. Just how long this would have lasted no one knows. But after several

minutes the sergeant with the Korean star approached the officer: “Excuse me sir, would you please come with me” The officer was led away and a corporal came for me “Come with me son”. The corporal told me that I was brave showing such defiance to an officer. He added that I had just ruined the officer’s career because he had lost his temper in front of the platoon and abused a ranker in public. These were not offences that could be forgiven or put to one side. A day or two later was pay day and I fainted in the queue. No one could understand this and the decision was made to discharge me from the army on medical grounds but before this could happen, I was transferred to a holding company and a barrack room even more diabolical than the one I had just left. The sergeant in charge of the holding company did not live in our barrack room but he was ever present one the less. Not long before this I had been studying the armies of Prussia in the Franco-German War of 1870. Our sergeant reminded me of this Prussian army, the army of Von Molke. He was a big man with a loud voice and a real military haircut. The hair that he did have was scarcely three millimeters high across the whole of his head, standing proud like the spikes of a fiery hedgehog... He obviously thought that being put in charge of a holding company was, to say the least, a humiliating experience. Beneath his dignity, it was an insult to his military status. This time our immediate corporal had a private bedroom at the end of the barrack room. Each morning he came flying out it and leaping onto the table in the centre of the room: “Get up you bastards, out of bed you fuckers. Rise and shine. Snap to it” and variations on these words. He had more terms of abuse than most of us will ever know and he used them all the time. In the week we spent here, we did not do much, plenty of cleaning and some marching and plenty of gossip. One lad told me he hated the army. He made a profession of running away. He lived in Doncaster and he spent most of his time either there or in military police cells in Aldershot. He told me: “It’s peace time. I hate the army. The MPs will eventually get fed up of coming to Doncaster to fetch me. I’ll get chucked out and that’s what I want” Someone else said: “Well that’s one way to get out of military service”. A collection of odds and sods and we were usually assembled as a line rather than a squad. One day, line assembled we were being inspected by the Prussian sergeant who paraded up and down the line tapping his stick on his heel as he went. He was muttering under his breath. He turned to our barmy corporal having inspected the line several times: “The buggers”, he said, “none of them is good enough for this job” “What job is that?” said the corporal. “Some bugger to hang the colonel’s washing on the line” came the answer. “No one in this pathetic bunch can appear in front of the colonel’s missus” “Can they?” The sergeant left the corporal to it and no one had to attend to the washing. When my release day finally arrived the sergeant came into the barrack. Passing down the line of beds he came to mine where my kit had been carefully and neatly assembled. “Bastards like you” he said, “should not be able to get out of the fucking army like this”. He kicked the kit all over the floor. “Now clear it up” I piled it up

carefully and neatly again and waited for him to kick it all over again. He simply stormed off, his boots clicking as he went. My discharge papers simply said “Ceasing to fulfill army medical requirements” I had been a member of the RASC for precisely three weeks. Some time later I received ordinary national service papers telling me to sign up again. I pointed out that I had ceased to fulfill army medical requirements but before the army would forget me a question was asked in parliament by the Conservative member for the Langstone division of Portsmouth. Considerably later my army record was to catch up with me again, but more of that later. Now back in Guildford, I decided I would go to university and from the places offered to me I selected Exeter because Devon appealed to me as a good place to live for a while. Then I had to find some work to earn a living from October 1955 through to October 1956. The time would be spent “On the buses”. I worked for the London Transport Executive (LTE), and then simply called London Transport. I was a bus conductor: a meticulous late middle-aged driver I called Ted was the other part of my crew. He was an excellent driver. I was a pretty awful conductor. . The organization was created by the Transport Act 1947 and replaced the London Passenger Transport Board. It was in public ownership. It became part of the British Transport Commission, which meant that London Transport and British Railways were under the same management for the first and last time in their histories. A great deal of the early work of the LTE was spend repairing and replacing stock and stations damaged during the war as well as completion of delayed projects such as the Central Line eastern extension. The London Transport Executive started direct recruitment of staff from the Caribbean in the early fifties. Although London has been a multi-cultural city for a long time, this development perhaps marked an acceleration in the process which has continued to this day. Perhaps with conductors like me they needed to. As a result of labour shortages following World War II, London Transport began a major recruitment drive; in 1956 this recruitment was extended to the Caribbean in conjunction with West Indian governments. As a result many thousands of people made the decision to immigrate to Britain and begin a new life working on London’s public transport but none of them arrived in Guildford. If they did, I did not meet any. My driver and many other staff members in the Guildford garage worked with a sense of service to the public. Ted was particular enough to want to operate his buses exactly to the minute. One morning passing along the main street in Send, it was amazing to see doors open and people rush out waving at the bus. Most of them managed to catch us but they all complained that the bus was early. Ted told me to tell them it was exactly on time. “Well then”, the passengers said “It’s usually late”. I told them they should not count on that. Later when the bus reached the terminus near the

mainline station in Guildford people came off the upper deck complaining. “You are late, I’ll miss my train” “No we are exactly on time” “Then you are usually early”. Most drivers arrived early to get a longer tea break, not Ted, a stickler for time keeping, more important to him than a longer tea break. I worked on three main bus types; the first was a route master type as seen in the picture; the second I call the 463 (which I will describe in the next sentence) and finally a single deck coach style which was the easiest to work. The principal route operated by the latter was the 425 –Guildford to Dorking. This route was great fun particularly early in the morning when the scenery was at its most attractive. The 463 was operated by a particular kind of squashed double deck bus purpose built to navigate bridges lower than usual. It had the upstairs corridor along one side let bin to the lower deck. This meant that upper deck passengers all had to sit on long seats and those people close to the far window were a long way from the conductor. Collecting fares was a difficult task and an embarrassing one reaching across people to get money and deliver tickets. Passengers downstairs sitting beneath the upper corridor were liable to crack their heads when leaving the seat. On top of all that the buses had ineffective springs. Working on them was an unpleasant experience. When offered overtime, I always asked on which route and when told 463, the answer was always “No”.

My misadventures were inevitably on board the 463. The 463 ran between Guildford and Stains via Addle stone. One day when we had been busy we took our lunch break in the Addlestone garage canteen. The food was good but the garage was several hundred yards away from the route so a walk was required. After eating we had some resting time and I went to sleep. Ted woke me up with a start and we walked back to the bus stop to board an incoming 463. As the bus moved away from the stop on its journey to Staines, I discovered that I had left a lot of necessary equipment on my seat the Addlestone canteen. No ticket rack, no waybill, no bus key, no ticket punch, all I had with me was the money bag. This was an age when automation had not arrived. To operate as a

conductor, you needed a rack of tickets; each ticket was about two inches square and was pinned to a rack with springs; you needed the ticket punch to put a canceling hole in the side of the ticket; you needed the bus key to change the indicator panels at the front and rear of the bus; you needed the way bill to record your ticket sales and calculate the amount of ticket money to pay in at the end of the shift and to present to any inspector who might board the bus. Oh dear! What a shambles! Suddenly realizing my predicament, I pulled the emergency cord and stopped the bus. Ted was informed but he could only remonstrate about the incompetence of young people. We could not return to Addlestone and passengers to Staines had a free ride. When we got there, I borrowed a key from another bus and changed the indicator panels and an inspector arrived. I could only recount my forgetfulness to him. He was a remarkably tolerant man. He simply said: “Let’s forget I have ever seen you”. A phone call was made to the Addlestone and they said they would see I got the missing gear back. When we arrived back at the relevant Addlestone stop, a large red route master came around the corner and a man got out and gave me back my gear. “No one was gonna walk up here” he said. Amazing, rescued by a big red bus. Eventually the long day was over and I was able to get of the serge uniform which itched just as my cadet corps gear did when I was in the grammar school. The episode would have done justice to the TV series “On the Buses”. But my strangest experience on the buses was very different. Being a bus conductor and completing athletic training was not easy and during this period I was not fit for competition. Nevertheless as the only athlete working on London Country Buses and Coaches I was asked to take part in the London Transport athletic championships. The teams had unique names: Metropolitan Line, District Line, Central Line, Central Road Services, Circle Line, HQ Staff and several more whose names I do not remember. I had to run 880yards and the mile. Central Line had a competent athlete, Robert Horne. He beat me in the 880yards. The mile was the last event on the programme and before it started it became clear that one more win for the Central Line and the championship would be theirs. If this did not happen then the championship would be won by the Metropolitan Line. Many coloured athletes had competed for the Metropolitan Line including a man called Robert Charles who covered the quarter mile in 47 seconds, a time which would rank him near the head of the current ranking list. He did it on a grass track too. As the mile race progressed the Metropolitan line team embers and supporters, mostly Caribbean people, began to chant “Come on zee man in zee black!” The chant gave me enough inspiration to win the race and ensure that Horne was beaten and that the championship was won by the Metropolitan Line. Looking at the cup I got I noticed that it listed several well known British athletes who must have worked for London Transport in the thirties. London Transport at this time was publicly owned and contributed to the social lives of the people who worked for it. Presumably when she destroyed it Margaret Thatcher was not aware of the traditions and values of this institution. It was one I came to appreciate even though I worked for it for such a short time.

425 was my favourite route especially in early morning. The first village the bus arrives at on its way to Dorking is Shalford. On its way there it traveled along the A281 which is also the main route from Guildford to Horsham. Although only a small village its railway station escaped Beeching and is still there. A number of commuters who go to London actually start their day’s work by catching a train from Shalford. The village is part of the borough of Guildford and is an old enough to have been recorded in the Domesday Book when it had three watermills on the River Way, and mills continued to be built and operated there for hundreds of years. One still survives today, although it is now only a tourist attraction. We pass Shalford Mill situated in the centre of the village opposite the Sea Horse public house. Its not that old though having been built in the 18th century. It is currently a National Trust property. Part of the route we follow runs through the Tillingbourne valley, the river itself joins the River Wey in Shalford close to parish church. For centuries, the river provided an important source of income for the village as the northern terminus of the Wey and Arun Canal. It is difficult to imagine that this quiet village was once a landing place for barges, and continues to be visited by boats today — but for pleasure rather than trade. The village also became well known for its " Great Fair" which was created following a charter issued by King John. In its heyday, it was said to have covered 140 acres and attracted merchants from a wide variety of places across southern England. There is even a story that the author of The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan, once lived in this village and drew his inspiration from the fair, and from the ancient route known as the Pilgrims' Way, which passes nearby, on its way to Canterbury. Much of my training was done on another section of the Pilgrim’s Way, the trail across the Hog’s Back from Guildford to Farnham. The village despite being close to Guildford enjoys a rural atmosphere because of the many open spaces still there and the olde world houses which can still be found. We have now turned on to the A248 and are passing through Chilworth, the next village along the Tillingbourne where we can find out what life was like in some cottages close to the main road during the fifties from the work of Alan Edwards who has made a record of life there at this time. He writes about life in his cottage: “No 6 Magazine Cottages had 3 rooms upstairs and 3 rooms downstairs, you went up a small passage to get to the back door. If you hadn't got a key you would find it high up on a ledge in the outside loo, a very cold place in the winter! Once inside the cottage, the first room you came to was what we called the scullery, we had one of the low stone sinks with just a cold water tap, a gas stove, I can remember my Mum making Treacle Toffee in a large saucepan. There was also a gas copper for washing the clothes, we also had an old wringer, which I know that I pinched my fingers in, but only the once! There was a step up into the next room, which was known of as The Kitchen, it had one of those old fashioned kitchen ranges which was regularly black leaded with Zebo Grate Polish, the top of it used to get red hot when we had a good fire

going, there was always a kettle steaming away. We used to put the spent ashes along the back garden path. In my younger days we still had gas lighting, with chains to pull which lit the mantles, when we had electricity laid on; we still kept the gas light fittings over the fireplace in the front room. There was a large table in the centre of the room, we had all our meals on this table, also in this room we had an old wind up gramophone it had two doors on the front, which when opened let the sound out, then below another two doors which stored the pile of old 78 records, some I remember had music only on one side, some of the record labels had the name "Regal Zonophone". Under the lid would be a couple of tins of gramophone needles. When the records seemed to a bit more scratched than usual, we would change the needle and imagine that it sounded better. The other form of entertainment other than boxed games was the wireless set, which worked with the aid of accumulators, and I remember them as heavy glass containers that were filled with acid, and whenever they needed recharging were taken up to Mr. Thompson in his Garage up the lane, later when Thompson's closed down we had to go all the way to Shalford to Schupke's. There was a cupboard under the stairs, but as it was so very dark, the only time I went in there was when there was a bad thunderstorm going on. As you can imagine, the Front Room as it was always known as was only used on high days and holidays, and the fireplace was only lit during the Christmas period, and memories of the lighting of the fire using large sheets of The Surrey Ad' to cause enough draught to get a really good fire going, and then at the end of the day the unforgettable smell of red hot cinders, scorched lino and singed rugs when it was time for the embers to be carried out of the front room on a coal shovel and into the kitchen to be placed into the kitchen range. When it was time for bed, or "up the wooden hill, or 12 steps and a few yards" as it was often said, the left hand bedroom was Mum and Dad's, my room was the right hand one, and beyond that, down a couple of steps was a spare room, used by my Brother, Roy when he came home on leave from the Air Force, he was doing his National Service at RAF Cosford. My Dad's job was a gardener, he used to work for Mr. Slocombe at Corner Oaks, Halfpenny Lane, and also at Postford House, between Lockners Farm and Bottings Mill. He also used to do the garden for The Selmes family in Dorking Road, then later at Wonersh when they moved away from Chilworth. After school and on Saturdays I used to do some odd jobs for Major and Mrs Poole who lived at Red Eaves, Blacksmith's Lane, they had a son called Godfrey. I used to polish the big brass door knocker that was shaped like a Lion's head. I also had to fill the coal

scuttles; this gave me some pocket money. I can remember they used to have an AGA cooker in the kitchen, it had big lift-up lids on the top of it, I had never seen a cooker like that one before. I can also remember the aroma of cooking porridge that came from the kitchen on some mornings. “ The picture below illustrates the type of railway locomotive that passed through Chilworth when I was conducting my 425. They were en route from Reading to Brighton. via Redhill.

“The view from the front of Magazine Cottages where I was born and lived for 26 years looked out across the railway line which ran from Reading to Redhill, all the trains in the 1950's were hauled by steam engines, my ABC book of locomotives was well underlined as I was a keen loco spotter”. On quiet evenings it was often possible to hear the sound of the trains making hard work of climbing up the hill from Chilworth to Gomshall, there was a long goods train that used to go through at about 7.10 p.m. One of the trains ran each way on weekdays between Birkenhead and Margate, Dover and Eastbourne, this train was affectionately known as "The Conti" short for The Continental Express, but Mrs. Selmes next door to us called it "The Big Two"' maybe because it was a big train, often of 12 coaches, and went past in one direction at just after 2 p.m. On Saturdays in the summer months there were many more of these holiday trains running between the Midlands and The Sussex and Kent Coast.” And here is a final contribution from Alan Edwards who gets us into the character of Chilworth in 1955.

Henry Downing, the Porter / Signalman at Chilworth Station scratches his head and can't believe his eyes when this train was being loaded up with Honey and Wheat and was ready to depart for the Quaker Sugar Puffs factory. Our next village is Albury. We drive past the Drummond Arms, the principal public house. Albury is in fact divided into a village and two hamlets, the village being Albury and the hamlets Farley Green and Little London, each separated by woods and heathland. The river Tillingbourne runs through the centre of the village and in the recent past fed the flour mill at the Chilworth edge of the village, which has now given way to a small estate of houses. The small village offers one post office and general shop and a pub, the Drummond Arms. Another pub the William IV in close by Little London dates back to the 16th century Albury Estate covers about 150 acres; it includes a Saxon church, the mansion (now a retirement home), a few houses and what is left of the old village of Albury. It is owned by the Duke of Northumberland and was once the home of his Duchess With gardens designed by Evelyn the place is ancient enough to remind us that not so long ago it was part of feudal England. Driving through it in a misty early morning one can easily believe that as time appears to be standing still. Having left Albury the pass makes a right turn on to the A25 which it will follow to its final destination in Dorking. The main road has come down the hill from Newlands Corner, the turn back point of many of our training runs from the grammar school. Shere is probabbly the most photographed village in Surrey! Shere might once have been a well kept secret but when our bus regularly passed through it was well known for its picturesque qualities; the flow of the Tillingbourne between the Downs and Surrey Hills, its quaint atmosphere, attractive buildings, superb scenery which includes ducks and a ford through the stream. Our bus drove along the main road which was called Middle Street. It was lined with old fashioned shops which sold most things. The photographic qualities of the place are well enough known for Shere to have featured in numerous films and televison shows, so much so that the village church has hosted quite a number of film weddings. Houses attributable to the famous architect Lutyens can be found distributed along Middle Street. The old Shere fire station sits right on this main street and is now used to house the "Ladies" and "Gentleman’s" public convenience. The building, which is wooden, still keeps the appearance it had all those years ago when it served a higher purpose protecting the local area from the hazards of fire. This village is possibly the most famous single place in the Surrey Hills one of the most attractive places to be found in close proximity to London. Next stop…Gomshall.

Gomshall (locally pronounced Gumshall) is appealing though not classy; it’s left that role to Shere. We see the Tillingbourne again and an old house which dates back to the time of King John and there is a railway station and a packhorse bridge. Gomshall does however make an early appearance in history as the Manor of Gumesele, a Saxon feudal landholding which originally included the present day Gomshall. The 1380 Poll Tax shows that Gomshall had 267 names registered. The occupations written beside the names show land-holders and the usual country crafts but also a high proportion of skills relating to the wool trade; there were spinners and weavers, fullers and pelterers and many tailors. The village is no longer the hive of industry it once was but is now occupied by commuters to elsewhere just like many other places in this corner of the United Kingdom. Then we arrive at Wotton, a place without much history and apparently merely a suburb of Dorking adjoined to large buildings owned then by Friends Provident, an insurance conglomerate which was the providers of our own index linked mortgage which did actually work. . Some of the description here would be appropriate enough for my wife’s parent’s house in Falcon Road, an area of Guildford where such houses have been demolished. Our flat in Guildford at this time did have an inside loo and was probably a better property than those described above which overlooked Guildford cricket ground. Sam Pendry presided there then. One of the funniest happenings occurred when we made ginger beer in considerable quantities from plants we generated ourselves. Some of bottles exploded during the night leaving a nasty sticky mess. Sounding like gunfire they could also be disturbing.

CHAPTER IV UNIVERSITIES Two of the Pendrys had been to university but no one in my family had. So I was the first to be followed shortly afterwards by my brother John. Our generation must be considered one of the luckiest ever. In Surrey if you won three decent “A” levels you were awarded a scholarship which paid your fees and also gave you an allowance to live on. At this time universities demanded two decent “A” levels but Surrey were more stringent and demanded the three. Everyone in the Upper Sixth at this time, with the exception of my training partner Eric Hawkins. was fortunate enough to gain entry to a university Eric had two but wasn’t eligible for a grant. He went on to obtain a commission in the Royal Army Educational Corps.

Although my qualifications were insufficient to get me a place at Oxford or Cambridge, they were good enough to get me offers from a number of universities in various parts of Britain. I eventually chose Exeter probably because Devon and Dartmoor held more appeal than the Black Country and Leicestershire. But before this happened I passed a written exam for entry to the London School of Economics. This of itself was not enough to gain entry; there was an interview as well. Having chatted with me the interview panel turned me down most probably because of my flippant comments on the British press as true today as they were then. Perhaps some panel members were readers of one or two of our more meretricious dailies. My first year in Exeter was hectic. We were all dead scared of being sent down at the end of the year. We all covered a variety of subjects including the principal subject we had engaged to study; mine was Sociology, the Media Studies of its day. Then it’s intellectual status was subject to doubt; now the same kind of doubt applies to Media Studies and a plethora of other suspect areas of study introduced by the battalion of new universities which have been created; some of them with most peculiar titles. In the late fifties the then new universities were anxious to establish their academic reputations and their behaviour witnessed the resultant anxieties. In Exeter for instance the Physics department was known to have places in its second year for only five students yet nineteen were given first year places. Obviously then fourteen would have to be sent down no matter how good they were. That was the situation more than fifty years ago. Now universities need students because they bring cash. Does anyone believe that academic standards can possibly be the same or similar? My department was reckoned to be preparing to get rid of at least ten per sent of us and we were all anxious not to be included in that ten per cent. We felt the tension because some of the lecturers weren’t very good which made it difficult to get to grips with some of the subject matter in Economics and Statistics. I particularly remember Stigler’s “Theory of Price” and correlation co-efficients in Statistics. Study and training were difficult too because the hall of residence where I lived was chaotic with too much noise a constant hazard to both. I traveled frequently back to Guildford to study in the local library returning to the university for exams and athletic events. The effort I made was rewarded. I avoided being part of the “removed” ten per cent. During this year I did win the “Rushmere”, the university’s cross country run and I was chosen to represent the UAU at both its national events, competitions against the Midland Counties and the RAF and a separate event all against the Army. As usual we were good enough to beat the services but not up to the counties who were then led by one of the best distance runners in the world, the Coventry gardener, Basil Heatley. 1956-57 was my first year bat University, it coincided with the Suez Crisis. It was a bad time for the West because at the same time as the Hungarian uprising took place in

Budapest. The middling European powers felt they needed control of the canal with its connection to the Middle East. Built between 1859 and 1869 by the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, it was acquired largely by Great Britain in 1875. By the provisions of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, Great Britain enjoyed the right to maintain defense forces in the Suez Canal Zone. Egyptian nationalists repeatedly demanded that Great Britain evacuate the Canal Zone, and in 1954 the two countries signed an agreement, superseding the 1936 treaty that provided for withdrawal of all British troops, and in 1956 all British troops left. When Egypt concluded an arms deal with Czechoslovakia, the U.S. Secretary of State John Dulles announced the withdrawal of all U.S. funds and assistance for President Gamal Abdel Nasser's, who had come to power in the 1953 nationalistic revolution, development program. In response to this treatment by the United States and the refusal of Western powers to fund the Aswan Dam on the Upper Nile River, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal on 26 July 1956. The nationalization of the canal surprised the world, especially the British and French stockholders who owned the Suez Canal Company. Although Nasser promised compensation to the company for its loss, Britain, France and Israel began plotting to take back the canal and overthrow Nasser as well. When attempts to reach an agreement with Egypt on a new form of international control for the Canal failed, Israel accused Egypt of planning an attack and sent the Israeli army across the Sinai Peninsula toward the Canal. (Britain, France and Israel had united in secret, something that they denied publicly for many years, and made arrangements for Israel to make the initial invasion of Egypt and capture one side of the Suez Canal.) When further British and French diplomatic initiatives failed, they sent troops to occupy the canal. The United States opposed this action as a violation of the principle of selfdetermination. The American delegation at the United Nations voted in favor of a General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of the invading troops. Great Britain, France and Israel eventually accepted these terms. In March 1957, under the supervision of a U.N. police force, the Suez Canal was cleared of wreckage and opened to shipping. The canal was returned to Egypt, and reparations were paid by Egypt under the supervision of the World Bank. Overall the actions of Britain and France served to draw Nasser and Egypt into further relations with the USSR. The fight over the canal also laid the groundwork for the Six Day War in 1967 due to a lack of a peace settlement following the 1956 war. In January 1957, President Eisenhower asked Congress for authorization to use military force, if requested, by any Middle Eastern nation to check aggression and, second, to set aside a sum of $200 million to help those Middle Eastern countries that desired aid from the United States. Congress granted both requests. This policy became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine.

In Exeter our student body took part in this international affair. We staged a protest. We stopped the traffic in the main street. I was nearly arrested after climbing onto the roof of department store. I escaped by sliding down a convenient lamp post. We were elated. We were naïve enough to think that the student protests throughout the country actually influenced the outcome and persuaded the US to withdraw support from the misguided Europeans. We had actually helped to bring down a prime minister. At the time I thought we had had some influence. As an outsider I ought to have known better. Having passed into the second year life would be easier and more interesting. I continued to travel up and down the country racing up to thirty times a season. I also joined the university newspaper “The South Westerner” and became the sports editor. That was fun. One of my headlines would not have been out of place in “The Sun”. The word SLAMMED scrawled across the page recorded a massive rugby defeat at the hands of the students of St Luke’s College. Then a separate entity, now part of the university. The College beat the University at almost every sport except athletics and cross-country. The newspaper involved a lot of work. We had to collect the scripts, layout the pages, choose the typefaces and collate al this for submission to the printers and then read the proofs before it was printed. Work went on throughout the week. But Sunday nights were always the busiest time. Alistair Cooper was the Editor, a position I was to fill the following year. Athletically we had a good year winning every race held on our own course which was particularly vicious for visitors. There was very little level ground and some very difficult hills included a nasty V turn on a very steep down hill section which wrong footed our opponents. We enjoyed a good outing at the Hyde Park “Serpentine Relays” in London where at one stage we were in the lead before relapsing to finish sixth in an event won by Manchester University led by Ron Hill who later won acclaim as the Commonwealth marathon champion. During this year I began to make acquaintance with the leader of the Sociology department, Duncan Mitchell eventually professor Duncan Mitchell sometime stand in Vice-Chancellor of the University. He was a Methodist though this did not prevent him having a grand funeral in Exeter cathedral. He thought that we should all be introduced to sociology through a thorough knowledge of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”. The Waste Land is much concerned with life, death and the tentative possibility of resurrection, it is difficult to see what if any is the connection between it and the subject matter of sociology. It is more a comment on the state of Mitchell’s mind than on anything else. He was a religious man. It was difficult to understand the connection then. It remains so to this day. He found me reading Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” which he regarded as “pop” literature. Kerouac remains in publication. Duncan Mitchell’s textbooks have passed their sell-by date. One of our lecturer’s was Dr Margaret Hewitt who enjoyed a little acclaim as an authoress of a book about the lives of Victorian women. She was a good lecturer. We only had eight lectures a week, her’s was first thing on Monday mornings. Not being good at getting up, she was frequently absent guaranteeing a frustrating start to the

week. Another woman who lectured on statistics did not understand what she was taking about, neither did we. It was anthropology which most interested me perhaps because the lecturer was good. Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture was standard reading for anthropology courses in n universities for years. The essential idea in Patterns of Culture is, according to Margaret Mead, "her view of human cultures as 'personality writ large.'" Each culture, Benedict explains, chooses from "the great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics which become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture. For example she described the emphasis on restraint in Pueblo cultures of the American southwest, and the emphasis on abandon in the Native American cultures of the Great Plains. She used the Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus for her thought about these Native American cultures. She describes how in ancient Greece, the worshippers of Apollo emphasized order and calm in their celebrations. In contrast, the worshippers of Dionysius, the god of wine, emphasized wildness, abandon, letting go. And so it was among Native Americans. She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, personal preferences amongst people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a "personality" that was encouraged in each individual. Other anthropologists of the personality and culture school followed through on these ideas--notably Margaret Mead in her Coming of Age in Samoa which was another book we had to read. Benedict, in Patterns of Culture, expresses her belief in cultural relativism. She desired to show that each culture has its own moral imperatives that can be understood only if one studies that culture as a whole. It was wrong, she felt, to disparage the customs or values of a culture different from one's own. Those customs had a meaning to the persons who lived them. We should not try to evaluate people by our standards alone. Morality, she felt, was relative. As she described the Kwakiutls of the Northwest Coast, the Pueblos of New Mexico, the nations of the Great Plains, and the Dobu culture of New Guinea, she gave evidence that their values, even where they disagree with the values of the anthropology student who is reading Patterns of Culture, belong to coherent cultural systems and should be respected. Whatever ethical imperatives have since been described by anthropologists as universal, not culture-bound, Benedict's work as a pioneer in describing whole cultures, and as an advocate of cross-cultural equality, has lived. Critics have argued that particular patterns she found may only be a part, a subset, of the whole cultures. For example, David Friend Aberle writes that the Pueblo people may be calm, gentle, and much given to ritual when in one mood or set of circumstances, but can be suspicious, retaliatory, and warlike in the opposite situation.

Nevertheless, while disagreements with Benedict are in the literature, her brief descriptions are felt to be vivid, readable, and relevant to every human being and as far as they go, penetratingly perceptive and accurate. During World War 2 she produced a pamphlet for the US Army arguing against racist beliefs. Benedict’s influence on the way I think about things has lasted to this day. She particularly makes you repeatedly ask just “What is civilization ?” Can we dismiss primitive societies as swiftly as Orson Welles dismissed the Swiss as mere producers of cuckoo clocks! Are we civilized? Kenneth Clark .s monumental series of programmes produced some time ago tried to answer the question! It remains debatable. Human behaviour more often than not is group behaviour. Our actions often cannot be understood except within the context of the groups we inhabit. My interest in group dynamics dates from this time and from my own involvement in youth clubs and athletic teams. I was particularly impressed with George Homans book “The Human Group”. Homans proposes that social reality should be described at three levels: social events, customs, and analytical hypotheses that describe the processes by which customs arise and are maintained or changed. Hypotheses are formulated in terms of relationships among variables: such as frequency of interaction, similarity of activities, intensity of sentiment, and conformity to norms. Using notable sociological and anthropological field studies as the grounding for such general ideas, the book makes a persuasive case for treating groups as social systems. This approach to groups particularly youth groups is I think vital to the way we deal with young people. Teenagers are extremely difficult to deal with as individuals. At this stage of life the most important influence on them is peer group pressure. Our establishment and our politicians seem totally unaware of this simple fact. Living in ignorance of this has contributed to a number of unpleasant developments. Amongst them an increase in crime with a subsequent expansion of the numbers in prison to a position that records more people in prison here than any other country in the European Union. We have also seen an expansion of our Under Class something that we were working to reduce half a century ago. Although I have seen great improvements in my life time, it is not all progress. Globalization by market forces and a naïve belief in the benevolent power of those forces accepted by Clinton, Bush and Blair has had ugly consequences for the poorest people in our societies. The only real beneficiaries have been the ultra rich who have grown richer. They have become a rampant new upper class which Milovan Djilas would have recognized. It is commonsense to believe that very large differences in wealth between the poorest and the richest must feed alienation and ultimately give rise to crime as an expression of frustration on the part of some of them. It is a severe handicap for any society to be saddled with a large Under Class. This book will come back to these questions in a later chapter. For now it is enough to point out that although capitalism Adam Smith style might be the least bad system of social organization, the variety based on the sanctity of market forces and the

privatization of public resources has ugly consequences for us all. We can only hope that sooner or later commonsense will persuade politicians that public management is not always inferior and that every problem requires a commonsense solution not necessarily one dictated by a consultant with a Harvard MBA. For now we live in hope. . This is of course is being wise with hindsight and is not relevant to my life as it was in 1957-58. Social Psychology interested me a great deal at this time. Freud has to be mentioned as the founder of modern psychology before I go on to talk about Karen Horney who has influenced my thinking. He was influential in two related but distinct ways. He simultaneously developed a theory of the human mind and human behaviour, as well as some clinical techniques to help cure psychological pathologies. Horney believed that we have two views of ourselves. The "real self" and the "ideal self". The real self is who and what we actually are. She wanted to take some of the emphasis away from Freud’s “id” “ego” and “super-ego” Her Psycholgy is straightforward and initially anyway simple to follow. Examples would be parent, child, sister, etc. The real self contains potential for growth, happiness, will power, gifts, etc. The real self has deficiencies that we do not like. The ideal self is the type of person we feel that we should be and is used as a model to assist us in developing our potential and achieving self-actualization. This is a simpler version of the “egoe” and the “super ego” Self-actualization is something that individuals strive for. It is important to know the differences between your ideal and real self. Since the neurotic person's self is split between an idealized self and a corresponding despised self, individuals may feel that they somehow lack living up to the ideals. They feel that there is a flaw somewhere in comparison to what they "should" be. The goals set out by the neurotic are not realistic, or indeed possible. The despised self, on the other hand, has the feeling that it is despised by those around them, and assumes that this incarnation is its "true" self. Thus, the neurotic is like a clock's pendulum, oscillating between a fallacious "perfection" and a manifestation of self-hate. Horney referred to this phenomenon as the "tyranny of the shoulds" and the neurotic's hopeless "search for glory". She concluded that these ingrained traits of the psyche forever prevent an individual's potential from being actualized unless the cycle of neurosis is somehow broken, through treatment or otherwise. Reading her work helped me get to grips with some key elements of the subject as well as some insight into my own life’s purposes and ambitions. Influenced by Freud she nevertheless did a great deal to elucidate his ideas in a way that made them easier to understand whilst at the same time placing less emphasis on the sexual roots of Freud’s thought than he did himself. We perhaps needed this change of emphasis. The most important sociologist we studied was Emile Durkheim. He was concerned primarily with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence. It was already clear to him a century ago that societies could no longer rely on such things

as shared religious and ethnic background to maintain equilibrium. . In order to study social life in modern societies, Durkheim sought to create one of the first scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, Durkheim was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to what function they served in keeping the society healthy and balanced, and is thus sometimes seen as a precursor of a functional approach to sociology. Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts. Thus unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, he focused not on what motivates the actions of individual people but rather on the study of “social facts”, a term which he coined to describe phenomena which have an existence in and of themselves and are not bound to the actions of individuals. He argued that social facts had an independent existence. Durkheim also made some influential comments on the types of society that we can observe which are relevant today. Some societies emphasize law he describes as mechanical and the law is generally repressive and is used to punish deviant behaviour. On the other hand, in societies with organic solidarity the law is generally restorative; it aims not to punish, but instead to restore the normal activity of a complex society. Our politicians could still learn from this observation. We could well ask ourselves what kind of society we are? Rapid social change which has been a feature of modern life has continuously broken down the patterns of behaviour previously established. Durkheim describes the resulting social state which is distinctly impersonal as one of “anomie”. The increasing impersonality of our social life has been a feature of our life over the last one hundred years. This interest led him to produce his great work, probably still the finest sociological classic, “Suicide” The work was published in 1897 In it, he explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, explaining that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. We could look at this though in a Freudian manner. Catholics can confess their sins and receive absolution. Protestants had to accept personally responsibility for their actions. Durkheim was also very interested in education. Partially this was because he was professionally employed to train teachers, and he used his ability to shape a curriculum to further his own goals of having sociology taught as widely as possible. More broadly, though, Durkheim was interested in the way that education could be used to provide French citizens the sort of shared, secular background that would be necessary to prevent anomie in modern societies. It was to this end that he also proposed the formation of professional groups to serve as a source of solidarity for adults. We can look now and see that there is plenty of anomie about together with a good deal of religious fanaticism in our societies.. Crime was another subject which interested him: he thought that crime was a way in which social tensions were released, a cleansing took place. It had a purging effect. He further stated that "the authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be

excessive; otherwise, no-one would dare to criticize it, and it would too easily congeal into an immutable form. To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself .[even] the originality of the criminal... shall be possible" We all suffer from a deficit in this kind of authority. Durkheim took what was called a positivist approach to his subject. He thought that Sociology was the science of society. This brings me to the controversy that benighted the undergraduate careers of all of us in my cohort which centred on whether or not Sociology was a science or an art; additionally we were concerned to decide what exactly was a social fact and whether it was possible ever to view anything entirely objectively. Our view was that one’s point of view was a kind of tool; it was almost always impossible for anyone to act objectively in the fullest sense of that term. Social facts would be observed and commented on in ways which would differ according to one’s initial viewpoint be it catholic, marxist, socialist or islamic. Your value judgements would colour all your observations and you could use them as your tools. Currently this view is commonplace but in the sixties Mitchell thought otherwise and we all suffered accordingly. Our degrees were classified as BA but Mitchell thought it should be BSc. My thoughts were that as an outsider “What more could one expect?”