There is something seriously wrong with my brain, I have known it for years and first came across the trouble when I started the cram course preparatory to entering the Entrance Examination for Queen’s. I can’t be taught, I much prefer to read books and find out for myself. Whether, as I suspect, the droning of another voice hypnotises me, or whether I just nod off, all I know is I tend to get on better on my own. This attitude does not go down to well in academic quarters, for example, that paragon of all virtues, patience personified, that teacher above all teachers, Sophie, was a bit miffed when I found it easier to teach myself French than avail myself of her renowned accomplishments, although I did allow her to correct my exercises..
The guy I went to for a cram, who had a classroom over the Fifty Bob Tailors at the Junction in Belfast, was also none too pleased when another student and I started to teach him mathematics instead of the reverse. In Sophie’s case I realised that most of what I had to learn was pure memory and it was a waste of her time to sit at my shoulder as one would a child, revision is not like that. In the case of the Crammer, he was so far behind current day thinking in mathematics, he was practically using the abacus to calculate what we owed him in fees.
This other student was a real character, he was doing the same exam as I because he had been in the Naval Commandos and been demobbed at roughly the same time. We would only meet at the Crammers’ and then go for a drink afterwards. We discussed our relative careers at first and when that palled we worked at examples we were sure the Crammer was making a mess of.
Slowly the time drew near, we were both working hard and comparing notes when we met, and on one occasion he showed me some Benzedrine tablets he had which were left over from beach-landings he had taken part in. He was using them from time to time so he could study through the night without sleep. I warned against it without success, in my case I was merely resorting to coffee and tobacco.
The day of the Exam dawned and I entered the world of the university for the first time. We were to sit in the Great Hall, an old part of the building with darkened oak or mahogany woodwork, stained-glass windows and a gnarled, stained, wooden floor. The little desks were in rows in isolation. The atmosphere was what I had anticipated, austere and not a little intimidating. I think for the short time I was seated before we opened the papers, I was mesmerised just by being there, in a place I knew all my family in England would revere. Sophie had trod those boards two years earlier. We had been given examination numbers and when I looked across to where I expected to see my friend his desk was empty and stayed so. I found later he had succumbed to the Benzedrine and when he should have been at Queens he was in hospital. I have said he was a character, that is true, he was larger than life and when his name hit the headlines in Northern Ireland it only went to prove the point. Failing to get into Queen’s he had left and gone to the rigorous climes of Northern Canada and it was there he walked for days in the harshest conditions of blizzards and ice, without food, to fetch help when he and some of his work mates had been involved in an accident. The feat was so extraordinary it was even carried in the press here.
Month: December 2010
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1946-50, Study and the Benzedrine pill
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1946-50, Army Documentation
When I started the job I forgot the one lesson I had learned in the Navy which stated ‘what was good enough for Nelson is good enough for me’, which being translated means, since Wolf took Quebec, we have arrived here by trial and error, mainly error, so don’t tinker. I tinkered and the Army suffered. Perhaps that saying should be in poker-work over the bed of every ambitious politician.
My boss was another demobee called Captain Something-or-other, let us call him Captain Small. He had been a captain in the army but like me was also an HO and so not really entitled to the title, if you follow me, but insisted on it nonetheless, which was a comment in itself. It was he who explained the archaic documentation system and my role. I really think the problem stemmed from it being too easy. I was not under enough pressure, I had too much time to think and criticise. The ‘idle hands’ syndrome.
Each soldier had about six record sheets which set out every imaginable action he had performed or which had been performed on him during his service career, from arriving late on parade to having his appendix out. These were kept by me, alphabetically, in separate books, and when he arrived and when he left I had to note the fact on practically every sheet. All the records of a group of soldiers would arrive together, I marked them all, put them in the separate books, and so on in reverse when they left. As it was a ‘Holding Unit’ people came and went like sales-reps at a convention hotel, here today and gone tomorrow.
I thought the whole business was a bloody waste of time for everyone and promptly went about changing it. As every sheet had to be annotated with all comings and goings of the man, it occurred to me that an envelope with his vital statistics and his arrival and departure on the outside would mean only two notes, one on arrival, and one on leaving, would be sufficient. Obvious to anyone, but unfortunately Captain Small could see my point of view, poor deluded fool that he was. He was too easily persuaded
Within a week I had scrapped the cumbersome books, introduced the envelope system with everything one normally required on the outside and the sheets within, one envelope per soldier. I sat back feeling virtuous and smug. Unfortunately I was now the poor deluded fool. I had omitted to take into account one vital consideration, namely the inherent laziness of the regular serviceman and the fact you can’t beat the system – any system.
The various men from the different departments who required the records were, according to my scheme, supposed to take the whole envelope, leave a slip which had been provided, which would tell me when and by whom it had been removed. That was too difficult, instead they took the single sheet, gave no indication where it was, with the result that panic reigned by the time the first batch were ready for departure. Many of the envelopes were nearly empty and so commenced the Great Paper Chase.
In the end I had to revert to the old, tried and trusted system and by the time I left to take up my studies once more, the Army was still in a state of shock and minor chaos. Good intentions are never enough without hindsight and experience. Oh! If only the current wave of shakers and movers in The Palace of Westminster had been at Palace Barracks when I was there, how different things might be today. -
1946-50, The Shootong Flane
One Christmas, shortly after poor old Ned had died, my nephew, Ian ,came to stay. His visit coincided with that of my mother. We always had Christmas Lunch rather than a dinner in the evening and after everything was cleared away it was our custom to walk round the district to settle the corporate stomach before the next onslaught. We were not alone, it seemed that half North Belfast were out trying out their Christmas presents, there were tricycles, new prams, dolls, and on the older people the regulation tie or pullover. I had elected to stay in with Ian and finish the clearing.
We then sat either side of the fireplace and chatted. The room was resplendent with Christmas decorations and Christmas cards on every available level surface. Suddenly I noticed the fire was nearly out and if the family came back, feeling righteous but cold, this would be frowned upon. I went in search of the paraffin to sharpen it up. The can was empty, but not for the first time I decided to take the risky course of using turpentine.
Back at the fireplace I added fresh coal sprinkled turps and then discovered that the Christmas cards had usurped the matches on the mantelpiece. By the time I returned with a box several seconds had elapsed. Through all this time Ian had been standing beside the fireplace watching the proceedings silently, taking all in but reserving judgement.
I struck the match and offered it to the fire. For a second nothing happened and then, between Ian and myself, a sheet of the most orange flame I had seen in a long while came from the fireplace and out some four feet into the room and then just as quickly returned up the chimney. Ian’s expression intrigued me momentarily, once I was over the shock of our personal flame-thrower. It was not so much the expression as the lack of it. He stood there and his head followed the progress of the flame out of the grate and back in with total equanimity, with total trust in his stupid uncle John. What had happened and what had been completely predictable was that the chimney and the fireplace, together with an area within the room had become filled with evaporated turps, while I was looking for the match.
The next phase was less dangerous but much more troublesome. For an instant after the flame had disappeared there was silence and then there was a rumbling like one hears standing in a house built over the Tube Railway in London when a train is passing below. Soot, buckets off soot descended into the grate, into the fireplace and spilled out further. Not only that a cloud of the stuff settled on every available surface throughout the room.
Above, a wavering voice was trying to question what was going on. My mother was in bed with a severe migraine and her bedroom shared the same chimney stack so she had been party to the rumble. I said there was nothing to worry about, knowing full well there was and proceeded to clean up which really meant a full Spring Clean of the place.
Ian and I sat back with a newspaper over the fireplace to encourage the fire into life, when there was another rumble and yet more soot. The moral would seem to be that if there is no choice between using turps or suffering the disfavour of the family then the latter course is safer, and also that some nephews should regard uncles and their decisions with a keen suspicion. -
1946-50, Old Ned
Staying with us in this expandable house where all were welcome was yet another member of the clan, Old Ned and he and Linda often had a running battle. He was close to or in his nineties and behaved like a child himself. He sat in the corner of the room behind the door leading to the scullery in a cane armchair. Alec occupied the one on the other side of the fireplace. Linda would sit on the floor and play with her wooden bricks, building them higher and higher, as carefully and meticulously as she still does things, with the result they reached considerable heights when one considers her age and dexterity.
Ned was lame and walked with a stick. He dozed a lot, but when he was awake he would reverse his stick and hook the handle round Linda’s tower and topple it, at which time he would cackle with laughter and she would get cross. She was resourceful, nonetheless, and on one occasion waited until he was a sleep with his head supported on a hand, itself supported on an elbow, on the arm of the chair; then she attacked. She drew back the door behind which he sat and then hit his hand with it as hard as she could. The shock must have been devastating, he complained to everyone as they entered the house I have a feeling the toppling stopped after that encounter.
Ned was both a character and a knowing old devil. He was Liza’s father. In his late eighties, tall but stooped, severely rheumatic, lame and rheumy of eye, he was nothing if not amenable. His gratitude to his daughter and son-in-law, for taking him, in were expressed almost daily.
He set out on his travels round the world on a sailing ship. He had served his time as a joiner and ship’s carpenter in the shipyard in his home -town shipyard at Carrickfergus where he had also learned to drive a ‘Donkey Engine’. The type of Donkey Engine he was referring to would be called a steam driven winch or capstan today. A ship, with square rigged sails, had been launched and the skipper was looking for a carpenter cum donkey man, and Ned rushed home to tell his mother that he was applying. Back at the yard his boss recommended Ned and, in short, off he went to sea to sail in a sailing ship round the Horn, with all that implied in hardship in those days.
Ned And The HaircutBecause he was so lame the time came when he could walk very little; so Liza employed a hairdresser to cut his hair at the house. It seems the visits were too far apart to suit Ned and one Sunday, when the rest of the family were out with the children for a walk, Ned insisted that I should cut his hair in spite of my protestations that, not only was I not qualified in any way to do so, the result would be a disaster. Nothing would deter him and I, still complaining, put a towel round his neck and proceeded to operate in the best way I could with the cutting-out scissors.
When I had finished, or rather, when I dared not take any more off, we went through the ritual with the two mirrors, as in a reputable hairdressers. Ned was delighted, I was relieved and for a while he kept eulogising my many talents, the greatest of which was as a hair-cutter supreme – unfortunately his eyesight was not of the best. In due course the rest of the family returned and he immediately showed off his tonsorial transformation, explaining who had done it. I tried to intervene and explain that I had been press-ganged against my will, but the hoots and roars of laughter at the remnants of the poor old man’s white locks, drowned me out.
I have never seen such a transformation, it was lightning, it was quick-silver, it was instantaneous and it was virulent. Now I was cast in the roll of the villain who had taken advantage of a poor old pensioner and made a mess of his hair. Fortunately his memory span was as poor as his eyesight and next day all was sweetness and light once more.
I have implied he was an old rascal, which he was. He would sit in his corner and think up statements designed to shock and there were none he liked to shock more than maiden lady visitors.
The family always had someone on duty in these circumstances – they knew him of old.
There was an instance, when a lady of similar background went to talk to him about his travels round the world and he admitted having visited quite a few places in the Southern Hemisphere, ‘Like that sharp place,’ he said. ‘You know, wallop you’re arse with a razor.’ He was referring to Valporaiso, and we were sure he knew the name as well as his own, he was just out to stir the pot, it was all the fun he had left
Linda and the flowers Linda and I had a problem with the word ‘flowers’, which for me illustrated better than anything the working of the child’s mind when it came to language. Linda, shortly after she started to talk, called flowers, ‘swowers’ She was in the garden with me while I was working, and was hunkered down smelling the flowers which were quite profuse, they were a border of pinks which had a lovely sweet smell. I unconsciously mimicked Linda’s interpretation, as some stupid parents do when they shouldn’t and was immediately reprimanded. I had referred to the flowers as ‘swowers’. Linda’s face suddenly became stern, as if chiding a child, and in a strong, loud voice, filled with emphasis, she said ‘Not swowers, swowers.’ -
1946-50,Alec and the Shop Part 2
York Road suffered damage in the Belfast Blitz and the Family went to Carrickfergus to stay with relatives, ultimately returning to No 18, yet another numerical address. It was there that I met Sophie, and there that we lived until we moved a few hundred yards to No 15, not three streets away.
There were two aspects of the shop I found both surprising and amusing. One was the sale of Christmas cards and the other was the effect of television on sales. Some months before Christmas Liza would go to the wholesaler’s to chose from a vast selection of cards what she believed her customers would buy, she would order what she was sure she could sell and leave the rest to chance. That her choice did not coincide with mine or Sophie’s, was of no matter, she knew her stock better than we did. In due course, some time in late November or early December the boxes of cards would arrive and then the fun started. We, Liza, Jimmy, Soph , some times a friend called, say Lorna, and I, would sit round the breakfast-room table and open the boxes and take out one of each of the types of cards for sale. From that point on it was like a Dutch Auction. The manufacturer would have a recommended retail price and we would assess what the market would stand. Occasionally we marked up cards by at least fifty percent and sometimes we dropped the price because we knew the customers would not pay what the manufacturer thought the cards worth. When the arguments and discussions were over we would get down to the boring job of pricing each card at the corner in pencil. Liza was inevitably right about the pricing, but in my experience she never had the courage to order enough and the nearer we got to Christmas Eve the more difficult it was to buy extra cards, and the ability to mark up became less, more often in the later stages we had to cut the margin, but having cards was essential as they brought people into the shop.
I could never understand the mathematics used by the advisers to the promotional departments of sweet manufacturers. On several occasions the shop was warned, by the routine travellers, that there was to be a TV promotion and we should stock up with the respective bars, packets or boxes. In one case it was Mars Bars that were being promoted. Liza duly stocked up to the tune of two hundred percent extra and yet, with such a common commodity we were without stocks within a few days. What I found extraordinary was, both the impact the advertisement had, but also that when we went to the wholesaler’s, he too had run out
TOYS When Linda was old enough to be invited to children’s parties we were presented with yet another financial problem, how to keep up with the Joneses. The children Linda played with came from homes across the social spectrum, but as the trend was set by the more affluent, all toed the line, with the result Linda would come home laden with bits and pieces. Not only that, but she had to take presents which were on a par. We, as I have repeated often were skint and dependent to a great extent on the generosity of Jimmy and Liza, so when it came to funding Linda’s, and later Lizzie’s, presents, both to take and to give, I had to find a solution. At that time James came home from work with pieces of rough sawn timber, which had originally been part of long lengths used as templates to pattern the plates for the ships. He cut these, when their useful life was over, into manageable lengths and brought them home for firewood. In the first instance, using this wood, I made Linda a small Irish cottage with a hinged back, opening front door and a little porch round it, all on a small board and decorated with roses growing up the sides and round the porch. The next venture was to make small simple jigsaw puzzles out of the ply obtained from tea chests, with the pictures from colouring books. Very soon Linda could do them, picture-side down. These prototypes in the end solved our problem. It was not possible to buy wooden jigsaw puzzles with or without big pieces in those stringent days and dolls houses were scarce too. What had started as an idea in the end turned into a mass production industry with the houses and puzzles also being sold in the shop.
The next requirement was an assembly line and armed with a treadle sewing machine base, a grinder head-stock, some steel channel, I made a circular saw cum-lathe and produced the houses and other items by batch methods. True I have a nick in the bone of one finger where I inadvertently put my finger into the saw, but Sophie was never party to that bit if carelessness. Later the machine became electrified instead of the laborious treadling and later still I made dolls from broom handles – long lengths of dolls on the lathe, head to foot, with their arms from doweling and wool for hair. Not only had we solved the problem of the presents we now had a minuscule income. -
1946-50, New Family Part 2,
LIZA
Not only I, but anyone who had heard Liza sing in the fifties and sixties could not have failed to be certain that if she had been born thirty years later, when talent was more appreciated and there were more opportunities for talented people to succeed, she would have been a renowned opera singer. She was a soprano with the sweetest of voices.
Generous to a fault, not only with material things but with sympathy and encouragement, short, with a smiling face, over weight, hardworking and selfless, she sounds like a paragon, which I believe she was. She put her family and then her husband’s family before all else and worked for them all until she was quite old.
She had a sense of fun and a sense of humour and she liked a rough house. Once, she and I were having a wrestling match, but being plump and short, there were few places I could grab her without being imprudent, with the result that she, strong, hefty, and not afraid to be rough had me at a disadvantage until we arrived in a situation where she had me pinned to the wall with her shoulder, weak with laughter, unable to continue the battle.
Those were great days! On the radio there was ITMA , we avidly followed the exploits of Paul Temple, the detective, and the Saturday Night Play was a must. The first TV programme we ever saw was in the house next door when they bought a nine inch, black and white set for the Coronation of Elizabeth. We, some other neighbours and the owners of the set were all crushed into their breakfast room, entranced.
Alec and the Shop Part 1
In 1921 the family, Liza, Jimmy and Sophie moved from Alexandra Park Avenue into the shop which they had purchased as a source of employment for Alec, James’s brother. He suffered from spinal curvature and as a result was undersized, with a severe hump on his back to torment him through life. Apparently when he was very small his sister Agnes, not one of the greatest intellects, had dropped him twice, when once he had fallen under a moving cart, it was this which was held responsible for his disability. There were so many indignities people suffered in that condition, from the cheeky remarks of ignorant children being funny in front of their friends, by being bold enough to run up, say something offensive and run away, to the insensitive people who touched his poor back because they thought it was lucky to touch the hump of a hunchback.
The shop was one of a row, bordered or one side by the grocers in which I had telephoned the Castle in my days as a Wireless Mechanic, on the other by a fish shop and then the butcher’s shop owned by the Johnsons, including Jim Johnson of Covent Garden Fame, the tenor who sang throughout the world after he had been discovered and dragged from behind his counter. At rush times, over all the years the family owned the shop, when I was available, I served behind the counter. The shop was a tobacconists, news agency and sweet shop, which expanded its trade to carry cards, toys, and all the allied temptations every anniversary could muster. Easter and Christmas were the times when remaining open was finally justified. It took the takings of those seasons to provide the jam, otherwise they might just as well have closed.
Anyone who has not served in a sweet shop has absolutely no idea of the work and frustration meted out to generate such small returns. In its most simple terms the system operated as follows and I believe that today, with petty pilfering being the norm rather than the exception, life is even worse. We’ll say three children enter on their way to school. Things become rowdy between the two without money and they have to be watched in case they are after a freebie or two. In the meantime, moneybags, with his two or three basic coins has his eyes roving over the stock to decide which selection will be most profitable. After a few hints from the service side of the counter he decides, and inevitably it is bound to be the heaviest jar on the top shelf. It is brought to the scale, the bag is selected and opened and the top is taken off the jar, – Hold everything! There ‘s a change of heart! No, not the humbugs, instead he will have the brandy balls. Still trying to keep a watchful eye on the other two who are now getting up to date with the contents of the new comics at the back of the shop the sweets are weighed out, put in the bag, change is given and the jar replaced. With gross profit of the order of twenty percent to cover all the overheads, the family worked hard for the living and without the shipyard at the back of it I believe the shop would have foundered in those early days.
I can see Alec now, standing in the doorway of the shop, cigarette in hand, shoulder against the jamb, one leg crossed, taking bird-like drags on the cigarette and nodding to the regulars as they passed the shop. All his actions had a quick, staccato movement. I don’t think people appreciated the pain he was often in which sometime made him fractious. Liza and Jimmy certainly did, they had attended him after the numerous operations he had been through, but many didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt and some of us who knew, could still lose patience, even knowing and appreciating his disabilities. -
James and the Early Troubles
The first time I ever heard any deep discussion on the Northern Ireland political theories, apart from being warned during the war not to go up the Falls in uniform, was one night when there had been some trouble or other in Belfast, long since forgotten. That night Jimmy told me of the twenties and thirties. He was not a political animal, and, as will be seen in the next instance, he held no brief for discrimination. He knew the form in Ireland, how could he not? But he did not have to conform and he did not. He told me of how, in the early thirties, the men at the shipyard were worried for their jobs as so many had been laid off, even to the extent that through lack of traffic passing along the Queen’s Road supplying the shipyard, grass was growing between the granite sets. He said that there had been marches to Stormont and the City hall and the interesting part of those marches was that both factions had buried the hatchet, and Catholic and Protestant were marching in unison. He alleged, that when this situation was realised, a false wedge was driven between the two factions so that they went back to addressing their separate grievances and left the unemployment problem alone. James was never given to hyperbole nor political extremism, therefore I believed him and with hindsight I am convinced he was right.
There was another alarming state of affairs which Jimmy got himself into through his broadminded attitude to religious bigotry. The situations in the twenties and thirties were very much similar to those we have been experiencing over the last decades but it lasted only a short time. People were shot on the doorsteps or put out of their rented houses simply because they were of the wrong religion, and people who had the lack of foresight to marry someone from the other religion, even if they never went to church, were also shot.
On more than one occasion customers of his, who were Catholic, living in a mainly Protestant York Road area, came to him to be helped across sectarian lines of demarcation to get to their own kind in safety and James was so well thought of by both communities that he was able to ferry them, not in a vehicle but on foot, by his own routes to the Catholic districts. On one occasion though, things were not so simple.
James had been standing in the door of the shop one evening when he heard a shot coming from the shop on the corner of Alexandra Park Avenue. It was an off-licence owned by a Catholic, Paddy Blaney. Most pubs, bars and off-licences were owned by Catholics. Without thinking James entered the shop to find Paddy lying dead on the floor of his shop and at that moment the door opened and a policeman entered, gun in hand, to find James leaning over the body.
“Think yourself lucky it was me who came in.” said the constable, “If it had been anyone else who didn’t know you they would have shot first and asked questions after.’ -
!946 – 50, THE NEW FAMILY
Economics, the queue for housing, the fact that I was unemployed and we were now three rather than two, all conspired to ensure that we stayed with Sophie’s parents and their other limpets.. In the first instance, of course, Linda’s condition had been the overriding consideration and then, somehow we got into a rut and never again parted from the family bosom.
We had put our names our down for a prefab on the Westland Road, corrugated asbestos dwellings with all mod cons, built rather on the lines of a railway carriage, but none the less better than most accommodation we were likely to be able to afford.
JAMES
James was the head of the household, a position he clearly shared with Liza, this was not an autocracy, we all had an input and equal rights, all but Linda, she was special to us all. Jimmy worked as a Leading Plater, in the shipyard, a job where both skill and strength were called for and one where the pay was probably higher than most other trades.
He was a quiet man, never given to raising his voice or the exhibition of temper. I only remember once when his calm even tenor was disturbed and I believe I was the only one in the family he told of what had happened. The squad of platers James led operated on a semi-contract basis, paying themselves out of the kitty in an agreed fashion. Apparently some young buck who had only recently joined his squad was throwing more than his weight about and required to be taught a lesson and it fell to Jimmy to do the necessary. James was more than capable, he was strong, tough and had been a sportsman for much of his early manhood, playing football for the local team, the Crusaders, and running in cross country races, but psychologically I believe it took a lot out of him, it was not his way.
There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that James was the bookies friend. He would enter competitions in newspapers, convinced he had all the right answers and if he was wrong would go to great lengths to prove why the adjudication was correct and it was he who had been wrong,. He had a passion for the horses and it was a family joke that he would go over to England to Aintree or the Derby, with a fortune and lose it all. No one objected, the family never went short and if they thought it a waste, they kept it to themselves. As far as Liza was concerned, he earned his money in a tough job, he gave what was needed, what he did with the rest was his own business. These days, probably a unique outlook, but not uncommonthen, among the wives of men in similar circumstances..
James loved to do the Football Pools and had copious records related to practically every aspect of the previous results. There was no doubt in his mind that he would strike it rich one day, in spite of having won the Treble Chance Pool on about five occasions and netted no more than 80 pounds, gross. Being Jimmy, he was planning for the family, the whole family not himself. I believe that he was so contented with his life as it was that he would have found excessive wealth an encumbrance.
On Saturday nights he and I had a ritual. In those days there was a newspaper published by Bairds called the Ireland Saturday Night which was a melange of sport, entertainment and titbits of anecdotal material, and was the bible for James when it came to preparing for the onslaught on the Pools for the following week, only supplemented by the back pages of the News Of The World, the following day. The ritual was always the same – at about eight o’clock, there was no television in those days – we would set out ostensibly to buy the ‘Saturday Night’, but in fact we were off to a local well- known hostelry call the Shafstbury Inn on the Antrim Road. There we would set them up, turn about.
Jimmy would have a John Jameson Irish and a pint of draft Guinness, while I was content with a pint of the latter. He would drink his whiskey, shake the remains into the beer and then slowly and deliberately we would lower the pints. It was on these occasions I began to know the man, respect him, and I believe we became very close. He would tell me stories of the troubles in the twenties and thirties..
When ERNIE bonds came out James, the gambler, had to buy a few, but he received nothing until the day he died. On that day his number was up in more than one sense, he won two hundred and fifty pounds, although he was never to hear of it because notification only came the day of his funeral and if the draw had been made a day later, his family would never have profited.. -
The Final Days
I had had companionate leave, for the birth of Linda coupled with Christmsa leave. After Christmas I had to say good-bye to them both and head back, but it was not to be for long. Within two weeks I received a telephone call to the effect that Linda was seriously ill and I was to come home at once. I was allowed home leave indefinitely. It transpired that Linda had a very unusual illness for which there had been no successful cure in the UK although there had been some success in America with a procedure which our doctor was adapting. The disease was called Sclerema and took the form of the thickening of the cells of the skin so that the pores ceased to function and therefore any change in temperature was immediately transmitted to the body. Pneumonia and death could follow almost automatically.
The treatment carried out by us was to keep Linda in an even temperature, twenty-four hours a day, and rub the affected skin which covered her back with olive oil to keep the skin supple. That was all we could do, although some also prayed. Liza and I were afraid to be hopeful, we had been told that the chances were one in ten thousand for recovery and no one in Britain had been known to survive
Slowly the thickness began to recede, we were afraid to hope and still Sophie did not realise the seriousness of the situation and then, one day, the doctor said he thought we were out of the wood and with a little more time Linda would be cured, as indeed she was.
The outcome of this story was that Linda had now become a bad sleeper, she had learned that if she cried she would be lifted. I spent hours in the night rocking her and singing the only songs I knew, which were not suitable for a young lady of pure upbringing, but the alternative was unthinkable. We did discover she had a propensity for diluted whisky and that it helped her to sleep. When we bent down to kiss her it was not uncommon for her to belch whisky fumes into our faces and so she was christened Drunken Diane for a while.
I never did go back to teaching, I merely returned to collect my gear and be demobilised officially. A farce if ever there was one. After all the form filling and the medicals we were marched off to a huge hangar somewhere in Portsmouth where we were let loose to find ourselves our demob clothes. The problem was that the group I was with were not passed through until late in the day when everything had been picked over and stocks were rock bottom. I came away with a sports jacket the colour of strong, milked tea and an emerald green raglan overcoat, the rest was equally embarrassing.
At last I was free. When I had returned from compassionate leave a well meaning officer had suggested I should sign on as a candidate for Dartmouth and a commission, but I had had all I could take of the Naval straitjacket and anyway Sophie and Linda called loudly.
On my way home from leaving the Service I had called in with Willie and at the same time I went to see Cluttons with the result I have already mentioned. They had an embarrassment of riches, a surfeit of staff, not enough of us had been killed to allow them to honour their promise, a statutory one in fact, and as I now seemed content with the thought of working in Ireland they had taken the easy way out and agreed it was best for us all. The only thing they did not do in my presence was wipe their corporate forehead in relief
When I returned to Ireland I had barely scratched the surface of my training as a surveyor, so I had no job in any professional sense, but I did have a fair knowledge of radio repair I decided that I would do that, repair rados, after all I had been teaching it for years on sets which were a hell of a lot more complicated than the common domestic radio. I bought a newspaper, and scanned the pages. Clydesdale’s, a Scottish-based radio retailer, not the bank, was advertising for a repair man and I went along immediately. Not interested! The manager said, in so many words, that Service personnel were useless, knew nothing and I was wasting my time and his. The attitude was so positive, almost belligerent, I suspect he had had some bad experiences. I found no other advertisement and gave up on that tack.
Grants of about two hundred pounds per annum were being offered for ex-servicemen and women to resume their education. I discovered there were no courses anywhere in Northern Ireland for Valuation Surveying, but I was eligible, with my London School Matriculation to go to Queens University Belfast, with one proviso, I would have to sit their Entrance Examination in French and Mathematics. I suspect it was a test of my ability to study rather than an entrance exam per se, after all it had been six years since I left school, nearly seven years previously It was March 1946 and I had six months in which to get up to speed.
We were without any income, other than the dole, and I knew I would need to study hard to reach the required standard, there would be no second chance. We decided I would get a job for three months and study on the dole for three, and in the ways of the world, members of the family fixed it for me. I got a job as a documentation clerk for three months and then wangled my way back on to the dole for the last three without all the rigmarole of the waiting time. How it was worked I forget, even if I knew at the time, all I can say is that I was grateful to the relatives who rallied round. -
Fear
Going up pipes, down manholes, through tunnels, into dark dank corners, beneath the sea, beneath roads and ground, deep or shallow, in compressed air or in sludge and sewage, was ever the lot of the inspection engineer, Nature has instilled in us all an instinct for self-preservation, which translates to reactions varying from being startled through apprehension to blind terror. The degree varies from person to person and from situation to situation. Controlling fear is second nature, helped by adrenaline, and often called upon for the most unprepossessing reasons.
Take one instance. I was Resident Engineer on a large contract, constantly under the eye of all of the site workmen. Men in heavy engineering, with their own values, judge you by their own competence, not yours. You have to be prepared to go where you intend sending them, and understand and, within reason, be able to do, what you expect of them. Hesitate and authority is gone. A sheet steel cofferdam, – a steel box – had been constructed off shore to resist the waves and the tides. Access consisted of a slightly springy, eighty foot long, U shaped pile, providing a foot wide walkway over a twenty foot chasm without a hand rail. The men were used not only to running up and down this ribbon of steel but on the tops of the piles and thought nothing of it. For my part, I was in a blue funk. Constructed from birth with a high centre of gravity, I have no confidence without a handhold. With something to grip I’ll go anywhere, up ladders, factory chimneys, I even went to the top of a mast of a ship at sea. Ask me to cross a band of scree or rocks up a mountain or at the sea shore and I become tentative. Under scrutiny I had no choice, I went up that beam and returned. Technically the walkway was not safe, it had no handrail – but I had to make the visit, honour demanded it, to do otherwise would have been a clear admission of fear. The next time I went, and for ever after, there was a handrail. My self-esteem had been upheld, but at some psychological expense.On the destroyer, at Action-Stations – mostly in alleged mine fields – my station was in an office in the lowest part of the ship, and we were battened down as was everyone else below decks. On the first occasion I was acutely apprehensive, but one can’t remain afraid for ever and it became just a routine. On a ship on the Russian Run, a man I trained with drowned in similar circumstances as the ship was holed but not sunk. During the Blitz in London, if I wasn’t off fire watching, I rarely got up, but one night our district in South London was getting a battering and my Mother and I sat under the stairs. A stick of 6 to 8 bombs, exploding successively, started some considerable distance away and we heard them getting closer until they crossed us and continued away from us. My Mother never normally evinced emotion, but that night I witnessed almost stark terror. By comparison, at 16-17 I and my friends were not so much fearful, as excited by everything to do with the war, the guns on the commons, the shrapnel falling like red hot rain, and fire watching at nights. ‘Crossing the line’ at the Equator, on our way to Africa, aged six, I was afraid of the ceremony to come, and had to steel myself. Fear is as much in the imagination as anything, and those among us with vivid imaginations, suffer more than others, and have to control their anxieties more.
In the past we have been burgled six times in all, and as a result I have what I refer to as burglaritis. If something creaks or bumps, even if I’m asleep. I cannot rest until I have prowled the house to be sure no one has broken in. Because I subconsciously think I’m wasting my time I have no fear, what I would be like faced with a couple of masked men in the house would be something entirely different – probably extreme rage, with murder in my heart.
Fear, I believe, is a reflex, given us by nature for protection and self preservation. Time and experience modifies it, even to the point where we are not aware of fear in the most hazardous circumstances, when urgency, concern for others and experience takes over. To denigrate fear in others shows a lack of appreciation of the make up of fear and the degrees to which it can affect, even paralyse.