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My Aunt became a Christian Scientist, influenced by an artist friend who lived in Manchester. She passed her ideas on to my mother and after a while my mother became a wishy-washy version herself, never quite at the heart of the movement, but reading a lot, which was a necessity, because Mrs Mary Baker-Eddy based the whole concept on a philosophical dissertation. In short, the theory, as I understood it then, stated that as we, according to the bible, were made in the image and likeness of God, there could be no such thing as matter, and if that was accepted, then there could be no sickness as that was brought about by the degeneration of matter, which, of course, did not exist. The big fallacy to that theory, but I was too young at the time to see it, was the question of who had thought up matter in the first place? They would probably say the Devil, but then who and more importantly why had he been thought up? Deep stuff! Ultimately too much for yours truly. The one part of the whole scenario I found disturbing was my mother’s illness culminating in death. She had contracted cancer and because of her beliefs made no call upon the Health Service.

With My Aunt a mover and shaker in the local CS church and my mother a willing, if part-time, acolyte, it was pretty well ordained that I would have to attend, and as I had tried everything else I had no valid excuse for back-sliding. I was enrolled in the Sunday School. The parishioners, if one could call them that when they hailed from a number of electoral parishes, were drawn from the ‘haves’, rather than the ‘have-nots’. It was and still is very much a middle-class religion and certainly a degree in philosophy would help in understanding the finer points of its doctrine. In my case I was a have-not, tagging along as a ‘have’ on the coat tails of my Aunt, so I had to mind my P’s and Q’s – although my Aunt would never have seen it that way.

I think the only real experience I have brought with me from those years is the memory of the hours I spent contemplating the balcony in the church hall where we held the Sunday School before joining the adults in the main body of the church to hear the readings from the Bible ‘with key to the scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy’. ‘Why the balcony?’ you might ask, and it would be a fair question.

Our teacher was extolling the merits of mind over matter and the fact that everything was a figment of our imagination because we were one with God and so we were a figment of his imagination and therefore our thoughts were his thoughts, so everything was OK. (Are you with me so far?) I completelyunderstood what she was getting at although my interpretation was a little different. To me she and the rest of the class did not exist, I had just conjured them up in a sort of dream. It therefore followed, according to her theory, which, of course had to be really mine, by definition, that if I chose to go up to the balcony and jump off I would land like a feather and be no worse. So I put it to her and she said that was true, providing – there is always a ‘providing’ – providing I had enough faith. From then on I kept trying to assess exactly how much faith it would take to achieve the impossible, but I never had quite enough to put it to the test. From then on I steadily edged toward agnosticism and then atheism and Sundays became a day of rest.

Floss was a handyman at Ramsgate’s huge funfair called Wonderland. He worked on the Big Dipper. Early every morning he sent two cars round the track loaded with sand bags, watching the reaction of the wooden structure as the car went round, to gauge any weaknesses. Next it was my turn for a free, if solitary ride, as a third check. Can you imagine what Health & Safety would make of that today?

Evening was the best time to be there, it was vibrant, with a cacophony of sound and a kaleidoscope of coloured lights winking on and off, and I absorbed the hectic atmosphere of the constantly eddying mass of humanity, along with the excitement of it all. When I went on these protracted holidays it was my practice, even duty, to return home with a small present for each of the family. This time I had had so many incursions into the wallet I was almost totally broke. What with the cinema trips, smoking, the funfair at Ramsgate and the even more expansive funfair at Margate, called Dreamland, I had only pence left and was at my wits end – well almost, I still had the slot machines to fall back on. Families descended like locusts on the one-armed-bandits. They were impatient to win and when the pickings were poor they too, like the locusts, moved on. It was then that I moved in, with just the odd penny here and there. I would give a heavily patronised machine, the opportunity to play one or two more games. Most times it worked. On the last evening I could not waste money on bus fares and cycled to the fairground. There I set about making enough from the slot machines to give me a fighting chance to win prizes at the stalls. Buying presents was out of the question, just a matter of playing the odds and knowing when to stop. Having increased my shilling into something like five, I went in search of other games of chance where I had reasonable odds, I won a glass bottomed tea tray, plaster of Paris elephants of all sizes, coated in black mica, a milk jug, toffee, and chocolates for Val. The things were equally disparate and cheap, but I was no connoisseur, merely a boy trying to get himself out of a jam. That night I cycled back to Pegwell Bay with the tyres birring happily along on the tarmac, a smile on my face which could not be rubbed off by the passage of the wind, no matter about the lonely days and the long hours spent touring for its own sake, the elation of that evening put it all behind and made that holiday one I never forgot,

It was at this time that I bought a packet of Will’s Goldflake cigarettes and sat in the cinema, in the afternoon, in the dark, enjoying a taste I was only once again able to enjoy. There is something about the taste of those first cigarettes one smokes which is indescribably satisfying – like the taste of real Naval rum, never to be experienced again. In fact it was many years later, when I restarted smoking after a longer than usual period of abstinence, that I savoured for a brief period that wonderful sensation and taste once again.

Parents used to make strange decisions, with the best intentions and even self- sacrifice, but with little realisation what they were condemning their children to. Single parenting is not, and never was, easy, conscience has to be weighed against pragmatism, welfare, economic resources and what is possible. My mother decided, I should not be kicking my heels throughout the summer holidays in London, so twice she sent me off, for a month on my own for a Holiday. Summer jobs were rare so vocational work was the exception. In the countryside, there was fruit picking or harvesting for nothing or a pittance, On the first occasion she took me to a boarding house in Worthing, introduced me, stayed a day or so, bought me a season ticket for a seat at the bandstand and left, giving the woman my pocket money to be doled out, a shilling daily, I was bored out of my mind, lonely, made no friends, and I sat and listened to the brass bands night after night.

The experiment was dropped for a year or two; then I was sent to stay with Floss and Val at Pegwell Bay, in Kent. Val was a roly-poly, rosy faced lady, with a sense of fun and generous nature, who had a handful of guests, mostly friends of the family. Floss was small, tough and rugged, an ex-regular soldier with service all round the world in various regiments He had laid paths round the house in concrete, with regimental badges picked out in coloured cement. He and Val amicably shared the house and one another when visitors were not in residence, but cohabitation was something only whispered. The house at Pegwell Bay was furnished with brass ornaments from India and the Middle East, colourful china, and rugs which Floss had brought home from his travels, and there were flowers everywhere, both inside and out. The hangings were of rich colours – Val herself was colourful, like a Gypsy, with red cheeks, dark hair and huge earrings always dangling to her shoulders.

The house below, on the road leading to the beach, was occupied by an AA man I found interesting, who covered the district on his yellow motor bike and sidecar. He had small children I played with, although I think I preferred to play with Val’s goat which I milked, and was tethered beside the house in a small pasture. The goat, knew me so well it would baa even when I was a quarter of a mile away. It always wanted to play butting games and its forehead of solid bone often caught me unawares in the thigh. The goat’s milk I accepted with tentative caution as I did the vegetable salads which contained fruit, more colourful than Mother’s – Val liked colour. I liked the salad no more than I did the milk but the outdoor life gave me an almost insatiable appetite.

Feeding birds, cats, the goat and a tortoise which hibernated in the cupboard over the cooker through the winter, together with Floss’s influence taught me much about the wider aspects of life – full justification for the working holiday experience, but much of it solitary. There was wonderful hay making, the hay transported in horse-drawn wains and stooked. The fun of building ricks with horseplay among the youngsters, the lunches brought to the field and the smell of the hay itself. I liked guiding the horses by the bridle when on roads, but was always fearful of their huge hooves. I also got jobs as a way of filling in the day, plum picking up tall rickety ladders, with a sort of apron bag in which to put the plums and filling wicker baskets, we were allowed to eat all we liked while we worked, and were paid on the number of baskets we filled. I didn’t get rich, but I did lose time with diarrhoea on the second day. I cycled to some of the Cinq Ports, Sandwich and Canterbury,. and wandered through the remnants of the invasion defences left from the First World War and to Manston and watched the RAF planes taking off and landing.

Down the road beside the bungalow I found another road running parallel with the beach and when I was cycling along there I was assailed with the marvellous scent of fresh lavender. I went into the lavender fields, which, like those in Grasse, in France, stretched in rows to fill the huge field. On the middle of one edge of the field was a gloomy wooden barn-like building which was store and shop and in there one could buy sachets to sweeten sheets in drawers, bottles of essence, hair grease in boot-polish-like tins, solid perfume blocks and sprays of all kinds and above everything was the concentrated smell of lavender. I was allowed to pick lavender and received sachets and hair grease for my trouble.

If you are a conscience ridden single parent, worried if your child should have a holiday, please make certain it is accompanied, or else forget it!

PARIS Looking back to the 30s, and the way children accepted discipline almost unreservedly, and taking into account what we got up to in Paris, I am amazed that teachers still take School excursions today. One Easter we had a school excursion to Paris. We went everywhere and at or some places I think the teachers wished we had not gone, including the British Consulate. We were received royally given refreshment and shown great courtesy, but as luck would have it, they had an automatic passenger lift, which none of us had ever experienced before. All I remember was looking through the glass doors at frustrated people, standing on the landings, as the cab full of schoolboys, hurtled up and down at great speed.

We went to the Fete de Pains d’epice, The Gingerbread Fair, held on the outskirts of Paris. We went on every thing and did everything and came away with the conviction that the French, generally, could not throw. At some stalls we threw bundles of rags to demolish piles of tins arranged on a shelf, to win a bottle of cheap sparkling wine made up to look like champagne. As far as we were concerned we couldn’t lose and returned to the hotel armed with a great quantity of fizz. Obviously the corks came out immediately with interesting results. One boy was found leaning on a railing on a landing, overlooking the glazed dome over the dining room, saying, ‘I am a feeding the fishes,’ while scattering stale bread. I and another boy took a trip on the Metro and promptly got lost, causing a certain amount of worry, but it seemed not too much. The whole trip in fact was pretty laid back with the highlight of the trip to the Cluny Museum with all the excesses of the Revolution on display.

The journey home was a complete pantomime, firstly some were hobbling about with cigarette lighters in their shoes, not wishing to pay duty, and one in particular had a hypodermic syringe, in the days when drug abuse had not even been heard of. One of our party was very greedy, and had been the bane of the people whose table he shared. On the boat, about mid Channel, we consumed our generous packed lunches. Prior to that we followed the boy with the syringe to the washroom, where he proceeded to make a huge amount of strong soap suds, with which he filled the syringe, produced an orange, and injected it thoroughly. During the meal, he casually set his orange on the bench and said generally, ‘ Anyone fancy another orange?’ We all shouted that we wanted it. Predictably, Tubby grabbed and gobbled. He was fine when he hobbled painfully off the boat trying vainly to walk normally, with his shoes full of the contraband cigarette lighters he intended selling when we got back to school, but was not very well on the Dover to London train.

SWITZERLAND The trip to Switzerland was remarkable because we saw the real Switzerland, the country as it had been for tens if not hundreds of years, where women carried huge trumpet shaped baskets on their backs up rocky, unmade paths, where the houses they lived in were made of dry-stone walls with horrendous gaps between the stones, and mud floors. These hovels were probably their summer homes when the cattle were on the high slopes, but to us, straight from London, it all seemed terribly primitive.

Another find was the cigar, not in packets but on the broad naked thighs of peasant women high up there. Years later, in the Navy, I was to become familiar with leaf tobacco. On that trip I saw it for the first time in the raw, at a cigar factory in the mountains of Ascona. Some of the girls were stripping the leaves, others were doctoring them and moistening them, while a row of girls would form the leaves in a pattern, and having placed a fine stalk through as a mouthpiece, and positioned it at the end of the cigar tobacco, with a deft rolling action away from them they would start to roll the cigar on the bench, finishing it on their thigh, which, itself had become a deep rich brown, partly natural but mainly from the tobacco juice. Since all the later furore about cancer and nicotine, I have often wondered whether these women suffered in old age. On this trip I first rode in a charabanc, the open, petrol driven coach, where each bench seat had its own door, approached from the street, and the body of the vehicle extended some six to eight feet beyond the back axle, to give the necessary short wheel base for cornering. When the vehicle was going round a mountain pass and met another in the opposite direction, which ever lost the decibel war of the motor horns had to back up until the back wheels were on the edge of the chasm and the last two or three rows of passengers were poised over nothing for several hundred feet. You can imagine the way the schoolboys scrambled to get into those back seats and the thrill of hanging on to the collapsed
canvas hood while looking down over the end of the bus into the void. When I went back in 1956, things had changed little but in ’64 when we went as a family, Switzerland was much better organised and, worse luck, more sophisticated

I have had to exercise discipline on others, I have been the recipient of it being implemented in almost every form, from lines to a leather belt, and more than anything I have had to exercise it on myself, often unsuccessfully. I therefore believe punishment in any form is transient, and in excess is self defeating. Take a simple example of shock treatment – having, in the past, worked daily where swearing was filthy and as constant, I am no prude. I was in charge of a large team of men, rarely if ever swearing, and bad language was rarely used in my presence, not because of rules, but I assume, out of courtesy. Something was either done or said which was so criminally stupid that I swore,. The atmosphere was electric and still, and the expressions on the faces of the staff were enough to show the point had been thoroughly made. I was caned regularly in all my schools, by teachers and prefects, not for villainy, more from making fun, mild rebellion, or not suffering fools gladly. We all had to bear canning without malice or stress and accept it as the norm. Life was too absorbing to do otherwise. There were, though, sadists, especially in the teaching profession with egos out of all proportion. One primary teacher, was very keen on ‘may’ being used instead of ‘can’. When a child of nine put up his hand and asked could he go to the toilet, he went through endless torture until he used the word ‘may’ and some in extremis embarrassed themselves. The smile on the teachers face said all. One can only assume that no parental protests were made because taking the child from that school was worse for a parent than the child’s ordeal. Now, on reflection, I believe self -discipline is the nub of the problem; there is no possibility of ‘imposing’ discipline, it can only be administered by oneself, a concept which rarely seems to be taken seriously and certainly never aired in the general context of the matter. I am firmly convinced from my own experience that a beating serves only to put a temporary full stop to a situation; it introduces a feature, so violent, that what went before it is dwarfed. Beating has a minor roll, and is only valid if it is then followed by persuasion to impose self-discipline – though not in those terms. The follow-up is rarely implemented and if there is no other outlet for the energy which has engendered the anti-social behaviour in the first place, and no self-discipline to quench the fires, the punishment as such ceases to have any validity.

The Secondary School Part 2 The educational system, so hacked over today, was relatively new to secondary schools when I started, (See LCC and the Secondary School ) and the philosophy of parents doing everything to ensure their little darlings got the best education was, if anything, more prevalent then than it was in the post-war years until now, the 2000’s. When I was very small my grandmother pushed me to and from school, four times a day, a mile or more away, to ensure what I went to was considered to be the best elementary school, and later when I was able, I walked it on my own. Next, I cycled four miles or more in heavy traffic, suffering two accidents during that time on the way to school, in order to go to the best secondary school in the area. Incidentally I do not believe any legislation, outside a totalitarian state, will ever remove the desire for personal choice completely.

Discipline By The Prefects At my Secondary School, with a prefect hierarchy and the school captain at its head, they had authority to thrash, in certain circumstances – I use the word ‘thrash’ advisedly. The system was severely flawed. The original crime was insignificant, the miscreant was awarded lines to be handed to the prefect by a certain time. I was both a customer of, and part of a syndicate, which wrote lines for a fee, using a number of pencils taped together, the teachers and prefects never checked closely. Failure to hand the lines in on time doubled the dose. Failure again meant that one was called before the Prefects’ Meeting. This was a dragged-out pantomime, scripted to enhance the status of the prefects and belittle the criminal. One stood outside the library, laughter issued through the door, then there would be the serious mutter of voices and finally the door would open and the lamb would be led to the slaughter. The indicting prefect read out the charge, the School Captain asked if the transgressor had anything to say – pointless, the decision was already made, any comment would be taken as insolence, and being harangued further and even receiving extra punishment. The malefactor was then asked if he wished to be caned by the prefects, which meant the biggest and strongest one there, with a lust for blood, or have the matter referred to the Head Master, a personage on conversational terms with God, both because of his Doctorate of Divinity, but also because of his exalted position – it was really a rhetorical question. Even though one had taken the opportunity of putting on two extra pairs of gym shorts, it hurt.

We finally moved from the awful flat to a house we all called ’76’. My brother could now come home to be educated. 76 was close enough to 88, my grand- mother’s house, for her to help out when Willie had to work late. Unless one has never lived in a terrace house on the bend of a road, and a tight inside bend at that, one cannot possibly imagine the consequences. As far as the house is concerned, the bend starts at the kerb on the far side of the road, then there is the road, the footpath, the front garden – however meagre, only then does one arrive at the front face of the house, which, for road symmetry, must be the same width as the rest of the houses on the straight. The house is like a slice of sponge cake, wide at the front and narrow at the back and the degree of squeeze is determined by the depth of the house and the tightness of the curve. 76 had a front room, a second room on the ground floor before arriving at a side entrance to the
garden, the kitchen and then the scullery, and throughout this parade of rooms and spaces, the width narrowed inexorably. It was as if the house had been squashed in a ‘V’ shaped vice. Don’t get me wrong, it was a palace to what we had been occupying previously, the freedom, the independence, the joy of a place all of one’s own was immeasurable. It was just a funny shaped house with an even funnier shaped garden. It was just our own personal slice of speculative mismanagement.

The hall leading from the front door to the living room had a kink where the staircase started. On the wall at the kink was fixed above head height the shilling-in-the-slot gas meter which had all sorts of interesting pipes, name plates, covers and seals, each with its own resonance when hit by a lead air-gun slug. So the Wyatt Erp Era of gun law opened, and also open season on gas meters. I had swapped something or other for an air-gun pistol and it was my pleasure, especially at holiday times when I had the house to myself, to sit at breakfast and practice the ‘quick draw’. The target was the gas meter, not as a whole, but the various units, and success was signalled by the sound each gave off when hit. As you can imagine, this palled after a while and I advanced to using a mirror and shooting backwards over my shoulder.

All the years I knew her, Willie was subjected to fearsome migraines and never more so than at 76. It had never been a severe problem for me before, when she was ill I fed myself, but when my brother joined us circumstances changed. We started having greater choices; this included roasts, Yorkshire puddings, boiled salt beef and carrots and so on. The problem was we had no refrigerator, only the wooden ‘safe’ in a cool place in the garden, with its wet cloth in the heat of summer, wet earthen crocks with dripping towels and other devices to prolong the life of meat, and milk in particular. Willie would buy a roast for the weekend but often the migraine would strike and I would have to provide the dinner. In this way I learned to cook anything, stews, roasts, even pastry when my interest had been awakened enough for a meat pie. I spent the morning running up and down stairs receiving orders for each stage as it arrived, given in a weak, pained, wavering voice, but in time it became routine.

By comparison, in about 1935, my Aunt Min, our school-teacher aunt, had a marvellous one-room flat in Russell Square which I envied. For its time it was well in advance of the norm. To start with it was approached by a lift and was so high one could see right across London to the East. Off a tiny hall was the bathroom, a wardrobe, a general storage cupboard and, what interested me most, was a small cupboard which contained the refuse bin which was emptied by the building staff from the corridor through a small door into the corridor. The room itself was not exceptional except for the cupboard in the lounge which opened to reveal itself as a tiny kitchen with stove, sink unit and storage. To me it was the life to aim for. At 76, aged about 14, for the first time ever, I was given a room in which I could do what I liked, and it was then I started designing multi-function furniture for the bed-sit, some of which I saw later in magazines. There were two pieces in particular, one impracticable, one later commonplace. The first was a rotating wardrobe with doors back and front so in one position it was a wardrobe, in the other it was a larder – totally daft, although years later, in a one-(tiny)room flat I was to use a wardrobe for both functions. The other was a bed with a bed-head for sitting up against when in bed, which folded down to form an occasional side-table when the bed was transformed into a divan as part of the seating arrangements. I believe it was ahead of its time.

I was on board a corvette in Belfast Harbour; while repairing a set and talking to the wireless operator, an officer stuck his head into the office and said “Williams…” and then he stopped. “I thought you were Williams, ” he said, “You sound just like him.” I smiled, he left and I got on with the job. Then Williams turned up. I discovered I knew him, he had been in my class at school. It was strange meeting him under those circumstances, and later, thinking about what had happened it led me to believe that schools have a stronger moulding influence on their pupils than they are credited with.

In our school, situated as it was in the heartland of the cockney accent every Friday during a pupil’s first term, all the new entrants were gathered together and taught phonetics and what amounted to elocution. We mimicked the vowels, the consonants, silly phrases about cows, peas and pace which stressed the difference between what was said inside and outside the school. We mimicked the master, Oxbridge to the teeth, so we too were now receiving an Oxbridge slant.

To extend the theme of mass moulding even further, both geographically and educationally, when I started at Queens University Belfast, as a mature, ex-service engineering student, there were only a few English students, most were Northern Irish with just a smattering of foreigners and members of the Commonwealth. Out of forty of us I believe there were something like fifteen of us who were ex-service, many married, some with children, all on grants, all with only one chance, no second bites of the cherry, all ambitious with ground to make up, all studying like mad. For the rest, they were straight from school and within a few weeks they found we were a force to be reckoned with.

From my perspective as an outsider, both from origin and age, I discovered unconsciously that the men and women who had come straight from school seemed to fall into categories conditioned by their schooling. Their attributes and outlooks seemed the same within each group and yet so disparate group by group. Without being specific, there were schools which produced people who were relatively innocent to a point of being almost naive. One group could have been classed as puppyish; another had the insouciance of the English Public School. There were some who had suffered such a strict and rigid regime that now they were out from under the repressive supervision, they did not seem to know quite what to do with their freedom. There was a tough crowd, polite but hardy, nothing would get past them and there were others who seemed so reserved as to be non-existent. To generalise is unfair to the individual, and probably many would not agree with my assessment. However, the fact that I have convinced myself that I discovered this apparent segregation in attitude and approach subconsciously, and that I believed it to be true at the time, must say something for the mass moulding of character and the responsibility the teacher has for the end product of his school.

Oxbridge and ex-Public School staff ran our school on Public School lines – as closely as one could for a day school. We had PT every day, vaulting over boxes, doing running somersaults, walking the high beam and everything one can imagine doing in a fully equipped gymnasium, including a shower afterwards. We played seasonal games twice a week, assembly with hymns every morning. Prefects were allowed to thrash, yet no one complained. A strong sense of pride, fostered by a good academic success rate both at school and after, ensured the popularity with parents. The pride was greatly publicised by names on mahogany-faced boards in gold leaf in the Great Hall, that could be read when the message from the platform was too banal. This pride was dented a bit when some Hitler Youth came over on exchange, taught us hand-ball and thrashed us, then proceeded to beat us at tennis. If cricket had not been beyond the German vocabularies of our upper sixth, we could well have be beaten at that too.

There was snobbery between us and other schools in the area which we thought beneath us, which I place squarely at the feet of the staff. We had a woodwork department in which the woodwork master was replaced by a teacher who spoke with a working class accent, worked very much with his hands and had probably come from an artisan background. I suspected he had started life apprenticed to a trade in the North and then had worked hard to reach an academic level. One never saw him in the staff room and rarely, if ever, in the company of members of staff. He taught maths as a subsidiary subject but woodwork and metal work were his preoccupations. We had to choose between learning Classics, or Woodwork and metalwork for Matriculation, I chose the latter, and have never regretted the grounding which has helped me throughout my life, and which made training in the Navy considerably easier. Looking back though, I think tuition in both subjects would have been more beneficial,

It was in my second year the new crafts teacher arrived. Below average height, built like an international rugby hooker, he had hands like vices. He appeared dour. Looking back, and taking into account later experiences with him when we were evacuated, I believe he was probably just reserved. In two terms he single-handedly ripped the workshop to pieces, built steel covered metal work-benches, installed a forge, a lathe, a vertical drilling machine and a plethora of new implements we had never seen before’, while teaching. Then he proceeded to teach us to make EPNS pierced napkin rings, twisted pokers for home fires, the dangerous art of spinning copper – improperly set up, one could lose fingers, ears, chunks of cheeks, as men in the engine Sheds at Crew did, spinning the copper domes for the valves on top of the steam engines. To me it was a period of my schooling I looked forward to every week.

In his store he kept all the expensive and or dangerous bits and pieces which today would walk the plank. Stealing then was not a problem, there was the odd thief who was generally caught and expelled, but nothing was locked up anywhere in the school, except the school shop and the tuck shop. With permission, we were allowed to fix things, as a privilege, and if we had taken on a project which was behind or took more time than allocated, we could work at it in free periods. It was then I discovered him sitting in his office with a cup of tea or sandwiches for his lunch, something the other Staff would not have dreamed of doing, they were entitled to school meals, even when they were not on ‘dinner duty’. I felt sorry for him, a childish presumption based on my own gregarious outlook. In fact, later, I was to find he was a very sophisticated man with cultured tastes and he probably preferred his own company to the racket of the Staff Room.

When we were evacuated in Sussex, he had to try to maintain our progress in metalwork without proper facilities as we would be examined not only on written work but a half-day practical. That first winter in ’39 was fierce and the snow was heavy. One day he came upon some of us trying to make a toboggan out of scrap timber, fruit boxes and the like. He called us into his house, produced some decent wood and guided us in the making of one which would seat three grown boys at a time and was properly constructed with metal runners. Once the ice was broken, we went there on several occasions for tea with his family and it was then that I really appreciated the worth of the man. I have often wondered if he was ever really accepted by his peers at the school, or even whether he wanted to be. All I know is that I owe him more than just matriculation in metalwork