Category: General

The Home Guard And Buck-HousePresumably, as a morale booster, some genius at Whitehall thought it would be a ‘terrific idea’ if the HG were to mount guard at Buck H, not realising what the poor devils would suffer at the delicate hands of the Guards’ Drill Sergeants. An edict was sent to the platoons and read out at parades. I assumed it was to combine an honour for the HG while paying homage to His Majesty, KG6. They wanted men over six foot in height and it was up to the platoon to provide the ‘volunteers’. Skipper set about this by making us fall in, putting us through arms drill, finally picking those he thought would disgrace us least – I was one.
We reported to Wellington Barracks on Birdcage Walk each evening for about two hours, to be trained in the finer art of guarding. This involved stamping the feet at every opportunity until the Achilles tendons ached, carrying a rifle at the ‘slope’ and marching back and forth, in fact doing everything old Skip had taught us but with ‘snap’. ‘Put a snap in it, lad’, was the cry all round the parade ground. There was a S’nt Mayhah, not a sergeant major, with his dress cap placed parallel to the ground, the black peak flat on his face so he had to hold his head back to see where he was going and a device under his left arm, called a ‘pace stick’. To give a guide to the level of detail these guys entered into, the S’nt Mayhah invariably held this pace stick parallel to the ground, with the point held between the first finger and thumb of the left hand, with the remainder of his fingers extended, while, as he walked, his right hand was loosely closed with thumb extended on top and the arm raised to shoulder level on alternate strides. Someone in our platoon wondered who had time to wind them all up before we arrived.
The S’nt Mayhah had a voice like thunder and a penchant for abusing his own sergeants, I assume to impress upon us civilians the yawning gap there was between a soldier and a Home Guard. That we were held in complete contempt was patent on arrival and I’m sure the fact that the S’nt Mayhah probably had additional duties in consequence didn’t help our cause. One other odd peculiar particular was the Officer-In-Charge. Dressed like the S’nt Mayhah in his uniform but with a Sam Brown across his chest, his hat also had the flattened brim. He marched back and forth, parallel to the railings of the parade ground on Birdcage Walk, swagger stick like the pace stick, under his arm, precisely held, but he looked neither to left or right, he ignored what was going on beside him, of which he was in charge, and just stamped his feet as he turned round at each precise end of a the exact course of pacing. Periodically a sergeant or the S’nt Mayhah would stand in his path, sufficiently far along the track so he could put on the breaks and stamp to a halt. They would salute one another for the umpteenth time, shout something completely unintelligible at one another as if they were a field apart, salute yet again and then after a few ritual stamps of the feet they would part company and the officer would start his pacing again like an automaton. In fact I remember as a child seeing a German automaton on which a soldier came out of a sentry box, move jerkily to the other end on a straight track, rotated and then disappeared into another sentry box. Later this was copied but instead of soldiers they had designed it with a railway engine which went into a shed, perhaps because this made more sense.
It was June and the weather was so hot even for London. I had only a singlet on under my battledress tunic, a great mistake. For hours on end, night after night, we sloped arms and ordered arms and we tried to ‘put a snap in it’, but achieving that was almost impossible towards the end of the evening because our collar bones were sore with the repeated battering they had received from the rifles as we obeyed the instruction, shouted in our ear, strength five, ‘don’t put it down, slap it down’. Add to this the fact that we had done a full day’s work before reaching the parade ground and also that we were being abused as if we were raw recruits and this was our chosen profession, you can imagine the build up of resentment among us. My friend Farrer, who had also been conscripted, was becoming as miserable and bolshie as I was . The whole thing came to a crunch, on a Saturday I think it was, when they were trying to put the finishing touches to our education. Now, not only my collarbone, which had been broken years before, but the skin over it was so sore I could barely take the rubbing of the uniform on it. Therefore at each order to ‘Shoulder arms’ I tried to find a spot on my shoulder on which to lay the rifle and this took time. Unknown to me a sergeant, taller than I and a great deal stronger, was standing immediately behind me watching me as I laid the rifle down tentatively. Another sergeant gave the order to ‘Present’ (hold the rifle in both hands upright in front of the face), which I did with alacrity and relief and immediately we were ordered to ‘Shoulder arms’. This time the man behind me hit the rifle on the barrel when it was about six inches from my shoulder, so that it literally crashed down on all the pain – “I told you to smack it down not lay it down”, he bellowed in my ear. For a moment I was staggered both by the pain and the brutality. One minute they were implying we were a useless bunch of no-hopers who would never make the grade and the next we were treated as if we were fully trained but malingering. I took the rifle off my shoulder and turned to the sergeant and explained rather tersely that I was a civilian trying my best but as my best was not good enough I was resigning from his care. After all these years I have no idea what I really said, I more or less just walked off the parade ground. Whether the automaton saw me is unlikely, whether he cared is a definite negative, we were all probably an interruption in his social round. Farrer either left or was weeded out because there was none of our platoon at the Gates of Buckingham Palace in June when the pictures were taken for the Press. Perhaps we were all dismissed in the end and real Guardsmen were dressed in our awful uniforms and set out there, pretending – serve ’em right!

The Changes to Naval Life In1940, Part 1 Prior to 1940 the Navy in today’s terms was a cross between a monk’s seminary and a football supporters club. Lower Deck life aboard ship was hard, totally masculine, and without any privacy. Shore leave was limited, often only a few hours and lived at strength 10. The sailors were proud of the Navy and proud to be in the Navy, but their relationship with society was varied. Allegedly, notices on establishments in towns adjacent to a dockyard read – ‘Dogs and sailors not admitted’.

WW2 was tough on the regular Navy and even tougher of the poor innocents joining. Prior to it, most of the Navy Lower Deck was recruited as ‘boys’, many from orphanages. More than their home, it was a secure haven, they had camaraderie, almost every need was catered for, and every year was like the rest. For those with ambition there was a limited ladder to climb. The chasm between them and the Wardroom, not only didn’t bother them, they accepted it. From the Wardroom aspect, there was a glass wall and no matter how high a promoted man might rise as an officer, there was an unwritten view expressed or not, ‘he was Lower Deck, you know!’

Then came the HO’s – Hostilities only – volunteers or recruits, of every class. Round pegs in square holes, some found their vocation, and then the rest. In the beginning all HO’s were resented by the Regulars. The phrase HO was an insult. a put down, and it took several years for the stigma to be dropped, because the HOs had proved themselves. We, from sheltered civilian life, in our teens, knew nothing of life,. Four letter words interspersed into sentences and even between syllables were rare in the ’40s at that age. Talk of brothels, sexual deviance in all its forms, living in crowded conditions for weeks on end with little respite, having to guard food because of hunger, or mis-appropriation, all had to be accepted. Punishments through ignorance, misunderstanding, or with good reason, could be cruel and unnecessarily harsh, all without putting a foot on a ship. This is no exaggeration as later pieces will give proof. One had to be a tortoise, with a thick shell, keep one’s head low, preferably close to the ground for scuttlebutt, say little, be cautious of whom to trust and go slowly.

JAIL I had been a quasi-sailor for all of three weeks when I was put on cell duty, at cells which contained two men accused of attempted murder. We had a Chief Gunner’s Mate who took us for drill. His favourite punishment for serious offences like talking in the ranks, being incompetent, not obeying orders properly was to make a man run round the parade ground with a rifle held above the head at full stretch. Be assured it is very painful after a while, especially in pouring rain without an oilskin. The two men had attacked him, one with a knife, the other a bayonet on different occasions, our sympathies were with them. Naval Jail in those days included picking Oakum – teased out hemp rope, used on tall ships for filling the seams of the deck planks. A piece of rope about a foot long and two inches thick was weighed, then the prisoner, with just his fingers had to reduce the twisted rope to its original hemp fibres, the wear and tear on the fingernails had to be experienced to be appreciated. At the end, the huge pile of fluff was weighed again. The prisoners were only given meat on one or two days a week and had to eat with a spoon. To an innocent civvie, this all seemed extreme and as I was sympathetic with the prisoners, I smuggled proper meals into them, begged from the Wren kitchen-staff and helped them pick oakum, hardly realising that if I was caught, I would be in there beside them.

My next posting was to the Rent Department. Miss Veezey, a charming if slightly tentative young woman hated being brought face to face with the seamier side of life, presented by the area that we had to work in. The Management had decided I was a more robust specimen. The day I was appointed I was called into the Secretary’s sanctum. The sheer fact of being called was proof enough that one was either to be honoured or due for a dressing down. From long experience with Headmasters Studies and knowing I never did anything I was likely to be honoured for, I went with my tail between my legs..
“Ah! Riggs,” No suggestion of sitting down. A bad sign!
“Do you possess a hat, Riggs?”
“No. Sir.” I said completely mystified.
“You will understand that this Firm has a long tradition, it is not long since all the staff were required to wear frock-coats and top hats,” he said, or words to that effect, with total equanimity, and not a smile such the idea might engender. I just nodded, aghast at what might be coming next, my mind distracted with the vision of tens of my colleagues going in and out of the office in stove-pipe hats and frock coats. He continued, “If you are to represent us you will have to provide yourself with a hat. If you simply can’t wear it you must carry it, but never go anywhere on business without it.” Class dismissed.
As I went back to my new desk in my new department I was thinking it was a bit rich, making me buy a hat, when all I received was one half-crown per week less deductions, but consoled myself that I was lucky, my predecessors had had to pay in tens and hundreds for their tutelage, while I was being paid. They, poor devils probably had to buy a frock-coat and a topper. I bought a Porkpie Hat, and proud I was of it, too.
Rent collecting was a juggling act, especially in the rain. There was the rent book with its hard, damaged cover, with all the names and payments and a thick red rubber band to keep the place in the book. There was the pouch with the cash under the jacket, the inevitable hat, the pencil, the householder’s rent book and last but not least the rent itself, and only one pair of hands. The routine was to stick the hat either between the knees or on the head, get hold of the money, that was most important, hand back the change, mark up the main book, mark up the householder’s book, say a nice thank you, put the rent book under the arm and retrieve the hat. Easy? Try it with an umbrella as well. Miss Veezey was no fool.
That was only the basics, there were always the garrulous who were hard to get away from politely, withholdingthe book and cash until they had had their say. Short of wrestling with them one was a captive audience, There were the flats where one had to climb uncarpeted stairs which children had dampened and the atmosphere was thick to emphasise the point. In some cases an elderly, undernourished, bodiless hand with a greasy, brown paper covered rent book, mucky money, would appear through the four inch slit between door and jamb – Miss Veezey.’s horror. Once I had shown myself capable of collecting rent and knew what I was doing, I was transferred upstairs to the Holy of Holies, the Surveyor’s Department, where another, altogether different class of being was housed. These people spoke a different language, had more freedom of movement and dictated their own letters rather than have them corrected, like essay-time at school. The dictating machines recorded mechanically onto a rotating tube of a black shellac-type material, and the playback needle was of bamboo. When the typist had typed up the letters she would engage a shaving device which would scrape off a thin shaving and reveal untrammelled shellac to receive the next offering – we have come a long way in 60 years.
I learned other things, but my main job then was to take a taxi each morning and visit the areas of our property which had been damaged since my last visit and make a superficial estimate of the percentage of damage both structural and cosmetic which had happened and note it down to enable the registration of War Damage claims. Sometimes, when the raids increased and occurred in daylight as well as at night, I could actually be out recording when further damage arose.
The day came when I received my papers and was about to head off to the Navy. On the day I departed, I left a huge ‘Property Vacant, This Space For Sale’ standard notice. Poor Sam Clutton! There was a guarantee given to us that all members of staff who were called up or volunteered for war service would be reinstated. Cluttons was a renowned firm and anyone who had managed to get taken on was not likely to throw up the chance of rejoining. To keep the place going through the years with men leaving like leaves in the Fall, he was ultimately faced with the problem that not enough of them had been killed. On release I went to the office looking for my job back, he nearly had a fit. I suspect I was only one of a long queue. When he discovered I had married an Irish girl and was temporarily living in Ireland, the look of relief and the persuasion he put into his monologue was a slight blow to my ego. I had worked directly under him and we had a rapport, but I could see his dilemma and someone had to go to the wall. I was probably just one of many.

The Very Odd Home Guard ExerciseOur office platoon of the Westminster Battalion had to perform the odd exercises, which could take place in parks, on Wimbledon Common, anywhere. Of them all this was the oddest. They generally consisted of creeping about in an ill-fitting uniform with an empty rifle, drinking tea at an all night stall with big wedges of sandwiches and /or a pink and white coconut cake to fill the corners, and riding in the back of the Rolls.
However, one night we were told we were going to enter into an exercise with another HG unit from, I believe, Transport House. The idea was we would be the invading army and were to attack HQ, which was to be Transport House, while they, the enemy defending Transport House, would stop us. I forget the details but several things stand out clearly; there were no ground rules laid down about how the sortie was to be carried out, we were formed into groups of about four and sent out to follow different routes. We set off. Half way between our office and theirs, standing in the centre of a square, was a church that had recently been severely bombed. My mate and I, with a couple of others, started walking towards our objective and it soon dawned on us that there was absolutely no hope of passing undetected in those streets unless one could hide. There were a few buildings with steps leading down to a basement entrance, but they were traps for sure. Then we saw the church. Immediately we realised that if we could climb into the half-torn bell-tower and stay there undetected, the defenders would pass us by, which is exactly what happened, although our perches were precarious, to say the least, and today the Health and Safety Act would preclude soldiers from being allowed to take cover like that for merely a practice, We duly arrived at our goal and said that we had captured it. This was obvious as there was only one man there manning a telephone, and there were four of us. When we retired to the basement of our office we felt pretty satisfied with our evening’s work.
During the following week all hell broke loose. We thought we were going to be praised for initiative and inventiveness, instead we were castigated by the powers-that-were for not playing to rules they had thought up after we had beaten the enemy, though not by Sir, who agreed that we were right. The British Military seem to be totally crazy and have strange ideas about war. I sometime wonder if it has dawned on them even now, as it seems to have done on every other nation, that the idea is to kill the other side by any means at all and not get our own chaps killed at all – after all dead is dead. I often think they have always had it the other way round – ‘it’s not cricket, old man, to hide in a church.’

As far as I was concerned I could never be bothered to get out of bed unless the bombing was so heavy my mother insisted and then she and I sat in the cupboard under the stairs. It was there that I witnessed real fear, almost to the point of terror for the first time. My mother had always been a cool customer in all circumstance. Whatever her emotions, and I have seen her white round the mouth with sheer anger; she was always dignified, usually kept her own council and apart for some slight indication as I have just described, one would not know her real reactions. On many nights when she insisted I join her, in what she referred to as the ‘cubby-hole’, we would hear bombs falling, windows rattling, but on only one occasion when I was at home did a stick of bombs actually threaten us. There were about six in a row. We could hear each explode with barely a second between them, which seemed an age, and there was a steady increase in the vibration of the explosion and in the noise each made. Inexorably they came, as steady as time itself and we were both sure one would hit us. It was then I saw my mother, she was white knuckled, rigid with such a fixed look on her face that I was more worried for her than where the next bomb might fall. It landed beyond us and the house shook. In the light of the torch, with the drama increased by the oblique shadows and sharp contrasts cast by it, I saw her slowly relax, but it was some time before she fully recovered.

The Balham Tube Station Disaster A considerable number of people in London generally, and our district in particular, took shelter from the blitz in the underground railway stations, sleeping on the platforms. There were other shelters, there were brick structures with heavy reinforced concrete roofs, a very common sight on the street corners of Belfast when I arrived there in ’42. Some people used Anderson shelters, made from corrugated steel and provided by the ARP for the householder to erect. You had to dig a hole about half the depth of the shelter height, then the body of the shelter which was like a tiny Nissan hut was put in place and covered with sandbags. The idea was fine if the base of the shelter could be drained and water prevented from getting in, otherwise within months of being erected they were useless. My grandmother was issued with a Morrison shelter some way through the war. This was nothing other than a dining table made from steel and capable of supporting beams and similar debris, should the house be damage. The idea was that the family slept under this thing every night.

It is only as the years have gone by that the true price, of what the Continentals and Russians paid in the Hitler War, has come to light. It dwarfs what I write here, but at the time we, on the receiving end, thought ourselves hard done by. On the night in question my friends and I had been off somewhere and were on our way home when we heard the air raid siren wail. Almost as soon as the guns opened up we heard the most awful bang and reckoned rightly that a bomb had fallen in Balham High Road, but we didn’t hang around to find out what had happened, for once discretion took over. It was therefore the following day before we heard of the disaster and the full extent of what had happened. The story we heard was that the bomb had fallen in the centre of the High Road over the platform area of the tube station, but that was all the damage that was done at that moment. Unhappily though, almost immediately, one of the last buses of the evening ran straight into the hole left by the bomb and burst a huge water main, this in turn poured gallons of water into the tunnel.

It was a disaster contrived by contributing circumstances, each of which, while serious would not have been catastrophic. The authorities knowing about the water main, had taken it into account in the planning. They had assumed that if the pipe received a direct hit the water would flood the street and then descend the escalator, so to avoid that eventuality they had installed water-tight doors which were shut at night. Coupled with this the station was at the lowest part of the line so that any water entering the station could not flow out, and last but not least, it had been designed as a station in peace-time, it was therefore merely an emergency measure, not a purposely designed air raid shelter in the accepted sense. I don’t remember the death toll, it is a matter of record, but most people knew someone who had experienced that awful night or perhaps perished.

I finished up with a Mr Bailey and his wife. He was a retired electrical engineer and had graduated from Oxbridge. His wife too had an academic background but her main interests were Craven A cigarettes and Bridge in that order, she was a chain smoker and had a small brown stain on her upper lip, just below her nose, to prove it. Bailey was a most interesting man. He had spent his latter working years before retirement designing under-sea armoured cables to carry telephone wires to the Continent and America, some were about six inches in diameter. He had short sections cut and mounted in brass and covered in heavy glass to act as doorstops and paper weights, but in fact they never stopped any door nor weighted paper, they were just left about, to trip the unwary. He was a semi invalid and his wife a tall ascetic woman of stern countenance and mien, as thin as a lath, always heralded by cigarette smoke, controlled us all, including Bailey, with a rod of iron. The house was actually a bungalow, set in modest grounds with macracarpa hedges and windbreaks of the same hedge set at angles in the lawn so Bailey could sit out there in shelter throughout most of the year
I was billeted with another man I’ll call Jim. He was more heavily built than I, with black hair and a dark complexion. He was very popular with the girls. Unsurprisingly I was not of the same opinion, but because we were billeted together, we were automatically friends. We cycled together to school in the mornings but rarely returned together, he generally had other fish to fry.
Mrs Bailey might have offered a stern appearance to the world and indeed was a stickler for discipline in every sense, but basically she was kind and above all patriotic to a fault – so much so that one day she committed what I thought of later as patriotic vandalism.
Patriotic Vandalism I have said elsewhere in the text that Ellen, my mother, had taught me to value articles, even to the extent that I hated playing marbles because I knew the lovely glass balls with their intricate patters of twisted, coloured glass would become chipped, so, when I was told by Mrs Bailey to start to punch holes in beautiful solid copper preserving pans and the like with a pick, I was appalled.
The war was not going well, Dunkirk had either been evacuated or was about to be and those of us living on or near the South Coast were convinced we would be invaded any time. We were all a little despondent but Mrs ‘B’ was in deep despair and it was about this time that the Government made another of its asinine edicts – the collection of gates, railings, copper, brass and aluminium for the war effort. Even at sixteen I could see the ramifications of such an instruction, it left the way open for abuse on a massive scale, any bent second hand dealer could lay down a store of brass ornaments and items which would fetch a fortune when the war ended, even if the Germans were victorious, and I pleaded with Mrs ‘B’ not to give her beautiful brass candlesticks, copper warming pans and the like, but her patriotism coupled with her feeling that Britain was about to disappear without trace made her blind to all I said. It only made the wound open again years later when the truth of that edict was made public and my schoolboy reasoning had been vindicated.
Fish Pie. I believe that normally the Baileys had a large bedroom and slept in separate beds because when we arrived our bedroom was separated from theirs by a folding timber partition. Jim and I slept in a double bed but everything either we or the Baileys said was discernible through the wooden wall so we devised a method of talking which made our speech sound like a vague mumble. We spoke using only the roof of our mouths, with our mouths open and we fuddled the consonant, with the result when we talked of Fish Pie it came out like ‘Igh Hi’
Although the Baileys had all the trappings of wealth, I don’t believe their income was what it had been before Mr Bailey retired. They were never mean, on the contrary, but I had just come from the Tates, and guessed this might have accounted for the regular appearance of Fish Pie on the menu. Jim and I ate separately in the glass conservatory overlooking the garden, an ideal place for a meal. The Baileys ate elsewhere. What they ate is unclear but we had Fish Pie until we were beginning to grow scales. Rationing was in force and there was certainly a shortage of basic food, but we lived in a village and there, I’m positive, some form of barter was the order of the day.
The fish pie was made from potatoes and pink salmon with a crusty top. Perhaps we made the mistake of praising it the first time we had it, but get it we did; and so at night when we went to bed we started talking about Igh Hi and then laughing to the point where sometimes we were almost hysterical. The more we laughed the more Mrs Bailey shouted through the partition and this only fuelled our sense of the ridiculous, especially when she asked us what we were talking about. It is strange that amidst all the momentous happenings during those years, that something as insignificant as a fish pie should stand out enough to be remembered with amusement if not affection.

The Guns I came home from evacuation in time for the blitz on London, so all the hassle of evacuation was totally negated, except it had been an incredible experience and I had learned more about life in one year than I would have in three or four, at home. At the time, among the younger people there was a level of excitement, which I suppose, was the same hysteria felt by our fathers, twenty-six years earlier. We were dying to get into the war, to join the others we had known at school who were two years older and already in uniform. Our only recourse was second best, if we couldn’t get into it, we would watch from the sidelines and perhaps also try to join the Home Guard. If my mother had known what we were up to in those early days of the blitz she would probably have tried to chain me to a water pipe, but she thought I was playing Ludo or some other parlour game in a friend’s house, as did all our parents. Fortunately, then, the telephone was the exception rather than the rule. Our little subterfuges, lies if you like, were easy to make convincing.
Around where we lived there were Ack Ack gun emplacements, there was one handy to Clapham South Station, on Clapham Common, and this was often our substitute for a night at the cinema. We had a rough idea when the raids would start and would go up to the Common and hang about outside the fence within which were several guns, manned by soldiers. We would hear guns and see the searchlight beams in the distance. Next there would be a sudden hiss and crack as our searchlight would arc-up and a huge, bright beam would shoot up into the air and move with a stiff but steady motion, like a bright stick of light, a gigantic pointer sweeping the sky, then the guns would open up and the immense noise of the first salvo was both startling and exciting.
What goes up, of course, must come down. The shells were timed to explode and designed to shatter into red-hot shards of jagged steel about four inches long and about three-quarters of an inch square in cross section, twisted and bent – lethal. These would fall to earth during an Ack Ack bombardment, hitting the pavement at speed, creating sparks and then ricocheting off into the darkness in any direction. Sometimes one could hear a sort of purring noise as they hurtled through the air. Everyone picked up their first when it was too hot to handle, but experience is a great teacher.
We wore tin hats we had scrounged because there was no warning when a shower of steel was likely to fall. It was not our guns that were the problem, they were making steel rain for someone over Wandsworth or Streatham. We were getting someone else’s shrapnel, and it was on you before you were aware. The cacophony of the guns obscured how close or distant the action was and therefore where the metal rain might fall. The strange thing was we were not afraid, merely afraid of missing some momentous historical moment, which we did. We were too young and too stupid. When something really serious really did happen, fortunately we were several streets away from Balham Station.
I remember the Parachute Mines, as we called them, they could clear a good many houses if they exploded . About half a mile from us, after a night’s raid the woman of a house in Upper Tooting went into her front, first-floor room to find a mine hanging by the ‘chute’ cord in the room. It had come through the roof but not exploded. Fortunately the army defused it.

Encyclopaedia, make no mention of Evacuation, which affected 5 million children, in June ’39, disrupted families whose children were dragged off into the depths of the country, but also the poor devils who had to look after them. Evacuation is a sort of two way mirror, showing each group how the other lived. Not all of us were small with labels tied to our lapels, some were in their last year at school and had to go because the school went. In Sussex I lived in four different homes, three far outside my own experience. We were taken to a Sussex village, assembled in the church hall where we camped out until fixed up with digs. My first home was in a children’s orphanage where I was very happy helping the older children look after the little ones, but that was only temporary until an ordinary billet was found. Next I joined the Assistant Headmaster and his wife at the home of a senior member of the Stock Exchange and life really did change. The house, was mock-Tudor, standing in vast grounds, with a ‘shoot’ attached. The owner, Tate, had the sort of life-style common today, but one I had only seen at the cinema. It was a two car family, with a gardener-chauffeur and live-in maid. We dined off polished mahogany with lace mats, silver of the highest quality, each with his own napkin-ring and linen napkin. Brought up to protect the wood of our dining table under all circumstances, passing glasses, salt cellars and dishes, one to another on this highly polished surface, was like scraping an open wound but I soon acclimatised and decided I liked the life. I was treated as one of the family, but I had to earn my place by helping the maid, cleaning the car when the chauffeur was off and acting as a sort of gilly when Tate went shooting in his private shoot, which was a fair size. We hunted pheasant, partridge, rabbit and hare I was beater, gun carrier, and clack when Tate managed to hit anything, which was not too often. In search for rabbit, Tate saw one; I saw a flutter of grasses and suggested he shoot between the rabbit and the grasses, which he did and killed three rabbits. At length he explained to me how he did it – several times, never once mentioning my part in the operation. He told the tale to everyone in the house, including the maid, finally telephoning all his friends with news of the carnage. Generally, however, he was a poor shot and maimed more than he killed, with the result I mostly had to dispatch the poor things.
We were evacuated prior to when Chamberlain was doing his diplomacy and the rest of us waited with baited breath. I remember the day war was declared, it was a beautiful sunny day in August, we listened to the fateful words spoken on the radio and then, those like the Assistant Head and Tate, who had seen it all before, looked meaningfully at one another and no one spoke for a while. On an errand for Mrs Tate, emptying the cigarette machines in the district of cigarettes – she expected the cost of tobacco to rocket – I heard air raid sirens for the first time, it was eerie, but an air raid in that beautiful countryside on that beautiful day was really unimaginable,
I was in matriculation year – working in Tate’s house under the eye of the Assistant Headmaster’s wife, it was like a correspondence course because there was nowhere the senior boys could be accommodated. We met occasionally but most of our work was done individually, with the consequent drop in standards. Those days would have formed the summer break under normal circumstances, so when it was time to resume schooling in the proper environment we were all shunted off once again to join the locals in a grammar school. I finished up in Lewes, a lovely part of East Sussex, for a period of my life I’m glad I did not miss.
The Incident Of The Adder I was almost totally a town boy. I loved the country and found pleasure in walking through the shoot and across the fields. This day I came across a short grass snake, it was light fawn and dark brown with markings in a ‘V’ pattern on its head. Twelve to fifteen inches long it looked positively beautiful and I could not resist it. Apart from those I had seen in Africa I had only seen snakes in glass cases at the Zoo. I picked it up and stroked its head and back and after a while put it in my jacket pocket. In successfully frightening the maid with it, I decided to put the grass snake up my sleeve, and then reaching for the salt; the snake would glide down my arm, slither across the shiny mahogany – Surprise!!
The grass snake had other ideas. Firstly it mysteriously transformed itself into an adder, next, bored with games, it bit me in the thumb and finally it poisoned me. It must have been a Sunday because Tate was at home. When he saw the snake he realised it was an adder and promptly killed it. Next he telephoned the local doctor, some 5 miles away and then drove me to him at speed. By the time I arrived a lump had formed in the lymph gland under my arm and even though he gave me an antidote I could not use my arm for days after that – serve me right for my ignorance.

Lewes – A Place Apart In retrospect there was something almost magical about the months I spent there. I was not aware of this at the time, I was often unhappy, but who is sublimely happy all the time, contrast gives colour. Lewes, the Town, was the hub, but it was really the district which was wonderfully anachronistic, such a revelation to the Town boy, contrasting to all he knew yet a living encapsulation of all he had read in novels, heard on the radio and imagined – it was pure Noel Coward and Ivor Novello
Incorporated into Lewes Grammar we resumed our education,. I was billeted in a village nestling against the South Downs in the Ouse Valley with a married couple, the Baileys. At first I didn’t like the idea of cycling 3 miles each way, every day, but later I realised I had been presented with a unique experience, one I would never have had if I had been billeted in the town. The village, just a collection of houses bordering the main street, itself a cul-de-sac, culminated in a path leading up into the Downs. There was a church hall for whist drives, the annual Christmas festival, the local drama group, in time the LDV; in fact, everything a village hall is expected to sustain. Opposite was the post office cum village shop, the hub of village gossip. In warm weather the village street acted as a funnel. Sitting high up on the hill studying, I found I could hear a conversation taking place below. Understanding what was said, I looked round and the only people in sight were women, half a mile below me, talking at the gate of the post office – they were gossiping. When they stopped and left, the sound stopped.
The Charm Of The Ouse Valley. On a map of the area between Lewes and Newhaven, you will see the Ouse valley with such lovely village names as North Ease, South Ease, Rodmel, and on the other side, Glynde with Glyndebourne. In 1939-40 it was an area given over to agriculture. There was a poet called Pound, who lived in Rodmel. Not Ezra Pound, but a local focus of interest. He had named all his children with Christian names beginning with ‘P’, so everyone opened the mail. This was typical of eccentricities I found in the Ouse Valley. There were marked social differences in the Valley. There were the farm labourers, maids and their families. Then there were the traders, the post mistress and shopkeepers in Lewes and also some of the farmers. Then there were the professional classes, the Baileys fell into this category, maybe the vicar, next came the gentlemen farmers, the inherited wealth and finally the dignitaries such as the MP and the squire. By association I was part of the professional group, but though I was never truly comfortable, I learned much through socialising. The general air of the whole area was ‘County’ with a capital ‘C’. In our own village was the local Squire. Whether he really was, I never knew, but with the name of Sir Amhurst Selby-Bigg he had every right to be. He and his wife would give out prizes at do’s and in the summer he generously threw his personal tennis court open to the village and we had tournaments there with breaks for Robinson’s Barley Water. There were wealthy farmers who were sociable and as we went to school with their children we had an ‘in’ to the higher echelons of farm life. We went to market with them, helped with the harvest and generally mucked in, but these were not the farmers we had helped prior to coming to Lewes, these were ‘gentlemen farmers’.
The winter of ’39-’40 was particularly severe, to the extent that when cycling to school the only way of turning the corner at the bottom of a particularly steep hill was to ride straight into a six foot high drift, extract oneself and then head off on the next leg. Later there was a sudden thaw followed by an equally quick freeze which left the roads coated in about an inch of ice. We evacuees made slides and the locals had ice skates and were to be seen pirouetting and twirling past us. We slowly integrated.
Even though the war had gone badly and there was the threat of invasion hanging over us, one cannot live in a state of frightened paralysis. Slowly our lives became normal as we entered into a routine and with the routine, helped by the friendship of the people of the Valley, came a wonderful period of my life which was totally foreign to what I had known before. While I was rubbing shoulders with the English class system at its most rigid, what I found there probably knocked any snobbery I might have had out of my outlook for all time. I think I must have seen it for what it was and eschewed it because instinctively, from a social aspect, I became classless.