Peter Travis was born in 1823 in Liverpool, Lancashire. Liverpool was then the largest port in the world. The battle of Trafalgar in 1805 ensured the Pax Britannica and the battle of Waterloo in 1815 meant that peace in Europe was assured. Peter Travis is listed in the 1851 census as a bricklayer. In the building boom that lasted for the whole of the century millions of brick houses and structures were built throughout Britain.
The vast expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century drained the country of skilled and unskilled labour, building mines, railways, factors, ports and roads throughout the world. This kept wages rising throughout the century at the same time as free trade and an undervalued currency led to trade expansion.
He married Anne Milne who was seven years younger and came from Salford in Lancashire. In 1851 they had one child, William aged one. Anne’s father was George Milne, born 1800, the son of George Milne and Mary Rigsby.
The census was then based on a head of household who filled in the census form for all the persons living at the house on the night of the census. The first police force was established in London in 1829 and until then it was the head of the household who effectively answered for the keeping of law and order.
Edward Albert Travis was born a year later in 1852 in Liverpool. His Christening Cup is now owned by Edward Travis, born in 2009 and is in the keeping of his father Robin Travis.
By 1881 Edward Albert is listed as a Master Guilder which was a craftsman skilled in the gilding of picture frames and ornaments. Becoming a Master Gilder took seven years, so he started at least as early as 1874 at the age of 22 as an apprentice. In late Victorian times every middle class home had gilt-framed paintings and etchings and demand for master guilders and their products was high.
In the census he is also listed as having four employees. He had a shop and workshop in Kensington, then a wealthy suburb in Liverpool. In 1878 he married Anne from Birkenhead in Cheshire. In the 1881 census they are listed as having a daughter, Emily, aged 5, a daughter, Anne, aged 4 and a son, Frederick, aged 2.
In the 1891 census, it appears that Anne had died as Edward Travis was then married to Mary Ann Hodson, born in 1862, in Sheffield Wednesday, Kings Hill, Staffordshire. As a boy I met this remarkable lady on several occasions before she died aged 98 in 1950. She was born before the Franco-Prussian War and she was 37 when the second Boer War broke out.
She was the daughter of Richard Hodson, born 1838, and Mary Ann Pittaway, born 1840, who was the daughter of John Pittaway, born 1802, and Sarah Walker, born 1806, and John was the son of Moses Pittaway. Pittaway was the name of a tool used for quarrying and there is a photograph of a Pittaway family member who was dressed as a Master Freemason so one of the Pittaways, probably a great uncle, almost certainly owned a quarry.
Richard Hodson was the son of Charles Hodson, born in 1807, and Mary, born in 1808. A “hod” is a trough carried over the shoulder for transporting loads such as bricks or mortar.
Richard Hodson and Mary Ann Hodson in the 1861 census have a daughter, Sarah Jane aged 2 and a daughter Hester, aged 10 months. Mary Ann Hodson who married Edward Albert Travis was born a few months after the 1861 census was taken in April.
The age of consent in England since the 16th century was 10 for girls and it was raised to 12 in 1860s. Men are not mentioned in Common Law.
In the 1871 census the Hodson family must have fallen on bad times, probably through the death of the father, a miner, as Mary Ann, age 9, together with her sister Esther, age 11 are listed as living in a Workhouse. These were dreadful and feared institutions. However, a Pittaway uncle seems to have taken the family in so that Mary Ann received an education. She was also brought to the Pittaway household in Liverpool and thus had the opportunity to meet her future husband, Edward Albert Travis. It was first in the 1890’s that the bicycle became widely accepted and until then 95 % of marriages took place between persons in the same parish.
There is a photograph of Edward Albert Travis in the uniform of a staff sergeant, aged perhaps 35, flanked by two corporals. He also appears to have what looks like a campaign medal. There were several auxiliary and territorial organizations attached to the Army and Edward may have been in one of these, probably attached to the The King’s Regiment (Liverpool), an infantry regiment, perhaps owing to the prestige of this regiment which offered part-time and voluntary employment.
These often served as training organizations and as manning and policing of the Regiments’ home bases. This is one of the oldest regimens as it was founded in 1685. His son, Albert Edward apparently also joined this regiment as the cap badge can be seen in one photograph as that of the The King’s Regiment (Liverpool). I myself joined the Territorials as an instructor for a year, attached to the Combined Cadet Force at Clifton College, in 1958, having completed Naval Cadet Training as a Chief Petty Officer.
It is unlikely that as a Master Guilder with a firm he would have volunteered for active overseas service. The Crimea War ended in 1877 when Edward Albert was 25, and he would have been too old to participate in the Boer War in 1899. Campaigns taking place in the 1880’s were the Second Afghan campaign, fought by the Indian Army, and the Zulu wars fought in the 1870s, the best known battles being Isandlwana and Rourke’s Drift.
In 1881 there was a Great Exhibition at Liverpool and Edward Albert was represented there. I have a photograph of this item and also saw it often during my visits as a child. It was a scene based on the Punch and Judy or Commedia del Arte figures all in a billiard hall comprising sculptured figures playing billiards, drinking, or conversing with a rather louche female figure. Both through his trade and through his clientele Edward Albert would have met artists requiring picture frames, and the art world in Liverpool, perhaps advising clients on suitable paintings or etchings.
I once asked to play with what seemed to me to be a cabinet of Punch and Judy figures, but was sternly rebuked: the cabinet was not to be touched, let alone played with. As my great-grandfather was long dead I thought this sensitivity odd and took my bow and arrow out to the sands, already then covering half of the back garden. I lost one of my very expensive arrows and thus well remember that day.
They had one child, Albert Edward Travis, in 1888. Albert Edward is also pictured in several photos as in the uniform of the The King’s Regiment (Liverpool), the 9th. These photographs appear to have been taken while under canvas on field exercises. He is first pictured as a very young cadet, perhaps as a runner, and then later as a corporal. This advance may have been due to the fact that he was literate as many cadets were not. There is a postcard from 27 July 1908 from Albert to his mother when she was on holiday in Southport from Hook in Hampshire where he had apparently taken part in a summer YMCA camp. He writes that he came there on a boat which was perhaps the fastest route from Liverpool in those days. He is there depicted in a photo as a corporal in the 9th Liverpool.
In 1906 Albert Edward was offered a studentship at the City School of Art at the Municipal Technical School in Mount Street which he took up. This School later became the art college which the Beatles Paul McCartney and George Harrison attended. The City School of Art then placed great emphasis on the ability to draw. The School offered several practical courses such as sketching which was essential in the mapping of the coasts of the Empire for shipping, the drawing of species which were flooding in from all corners of the globe, and a course in drawing engineering structures. Once completed, the course served a range of possible professions and trades.
There are some flamboyant and debonair photographs of Albert Edward, probably taken during his School of Art days. He appears to have been strikingly good-looking.
When I met him in my childhood he always stressed the fact that he was an artist although he was working a chauffeur at the time and there his paintings on the walls of the sitting room. As far as I can remember these were landscapes in the rather muddy tones. My knowledge of art at the time were limited to one lesson a week at my preparatory school, two van Gogh reproductions on the stair-walls of our house, my father’s drawing class books of red crayon figures and a repetitive book called “Art” by Clive Bell which my father made me read.
My mother indicated that Albert Edward wasn’t quite right in the head and as he stood in a corner of the room reading a bible on a lectern I was inclined to believe her.
Albert Edward married Sara Hilda Taylor in 1909. I was never told how they came to meet, but Sara Taylor came to live in West Derby, a part of Liverpool, in 1901 from Hesketh Bank on the Lancashire coast. My father, in his sixties, wrote down for me that she came from Derby, but he must have known she came originally from Latham and that West Derby was part of Liverpool, but I cannot see the reason for his apparent deception unless he was suffering from some lack of memory.
Sara Taylor, born in 1889 at Otterhead Farm, was the daughter of James Taylor, born in 1850. James was a farmer with 104 acres of land, and employed four farmhands, and two boys. They had nine children. Sara had a six-year older sister, Helena who was shown in the 1901 census as living in Liverpool in 1901. It may be that Sara met Albert Edward through her sister Helena. Helena married the chief clerk at Crawford’s biscuit factory, then a national name for biscuits. When I went to see Helena and her husband in 1958 he told me he also courted another younger Taylor sister which may have been Ruth or Sara, but that in the end he married Helena. He told me James Taylor gave him an hour to court the younger sister, but that Helena put the clock forward so that he only saw the younger sister for half-an-hour. I was amazed to hear that that still rankled after sixty years. They had no children.
Albert Edward married Sara in 1909, perhaps when he had finished his course at the Art School. They appear to have lived with his parents in the house they had bought on the seaside in West Derby. The family was probably prosperous as it was the Edwardian period when the Empire was still expanding and they seem to have visited Other’s Head farm often. There are later pictures of my father with James Taylor’s prize Shire horse and with his cousins and a pony at the farm. The family owned a car in the 1920s which put them firmly in the middle classes and they probably bought it earlier, before the Great War.
Unfortunately Sara had goitre which was apparent in early photographs, though it is unclear whether Albert knew of this before his marriage as Sara covers it with a high collar in most photos.
It is not clear what Edward Albert did in these years between 1909 and 1914, though all indications are that he tried to contribute to the household by selling his paintings which he told me he did with success. He may have worked in the family gilding business, but I never heard him mention that.
In 1910 King Edward VII died and George V came to the throne. Times were still prosperous and although Edward Albert Travis was then 59 the business still thrived. The Art Nouveau movement and the Arts and Crafts movement required different frames than previously, but there was still a demand for frames for the new painting styles.
On November 5, Guy Fawkes’s day, Philip Edward Travis was born. I never heard of any problems with the birth or the baby. The earliest photograph is dated 21 June 1913 and shows a bonny boy with an intelligent gaze and a grin on his face.
In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and as Britain had a treaty with Belgium that if Belgium were attacked Britain would go to her aid war was declared with Germany on August 4. Initially it was seen as a localized war in which an expeditionary force would force the Germans to leave Belgium. In fact, on the day war was declared the British Cabinet spent much of the day discussing the Irish question. The Boer War had taught the British Army the need for swift movement and horses, so little had been done to mechanize the British Army. Officers left for the front with their horses, a groom and a batman to join their regiments. For the first two years there was no conscription and the Army consisted of career Army officers and volunteer other ranks.
The Royal Navy was the largest navy in the world and a blockade of German ports was started in November. Winston Churchill as First Sea Lord had taken the brave decision to switch the British Fleet from coal-fired to oil-fired in 1912. While the changeover took place over the next year Britain was vulnerable. However, the change was highly to the advantage of the Royal Navy in WWI.
There is a photograph of Albert Edward in the uniform of the Royal Engineers with his son Philip aged perhaps two. It is highly probable that Albert Edward volunteered sometime in 1915 when it became apparent that the Great War was not going to be over quickly. Perhaps he chose the Royal Engineers rather than The King’s (Liverpool), the 9th, where he had been a cadet in the Territorial’s as the course he took at the Art School included drawings of three-dimensional objects and engineering. As the family also had a car he would have been more aware of mechanical matters than most of the populace and probably enjoyed driving as well as being able to drive. Driving a car was in those days as much a matter of keeping the vehicle going as of driving it. There was no compulsory driving test although there was a voluntary one, but there was a driving licence issued by the local authority. This was only in case an offence occurred and to raise revenue.
In all events he became a driver with the Royal Engineers and was sent to France. It soon became apparent that the British Army needed vast quantities of supplies moved up to the front and lorries must have comprised the major part of this transport system although there were a great many horses in use as well. The Army had had a great shortage of horses and mules in the Boer War and had scoured the world for animals. They had also seen the need for highly dynamic tactics. These were the lessons they learned and the Army was poorly equipped to conduct a mechanized war on an industrial scale statically in trenches.
I never heard my grandfather discuss his time in the Great War. There are some photographs that seem to be taken around in 1914 or 1915 and some later photographs where he appears to have been attached to an ambulance unit at a hospital. He is shown with a red cross or medical corps armband and with a large number of nurses. There is a photograph of Albert Edward probably taken in 1918, standing in front of a military hut. He looks older and thinner and worn out. He has the same military moustache that he wore as a student. His eyes are two slits squinting in the sunlight.
Sara Hilda Taylor was the ninth child of ten of James Taylor, born 1850 and Jane Rimmer, born 1853. Nine of the ten children survived to adulthood. Otterhead Farm comprised 104 acres, with four men, two boys, and three indoor servants. The Taylor’s appear to have been prosperous. James owned a Shire horse and he was presented a medal from the king, perhaps George V, for this horse. The farm lies near Hesketh Bank on the flat country in Lancashire between the River Ribble and the sea. The girls appear extremely well-dressed in the extravagant clothes of the Edwardian era, one photographed on what looks like a picnic, another under an oak tree and another on top of a hillock.
Rimmer is a very common name in the Southport, Lancashire area and many of the neighbouring farms are owned by farmers named Rimmer. It is possible that James increase the size of the farm or at least gave himself the opportunity to exchange services by marrying a local farmer’s daughter. The farm seems to have nearly doubled in size from the 1841 census through to the 1901 census.
James Taylor can be traced back in the male line to his great-great-grandfather W.M. Taylor who was born in 1700. The farm may therefore have been passed on from eldest son to eldest son for five generations when Sara Taylor was born. There is a photograph of the farm in genuine timber-framed Tudor style so that the farm itself goes back at least to the 16th century. A feature of Tudor buildings was an entrance with four openings and a very large central hall.
My father spoke with affection of the times he went fishing in the scenic River Ribble with his father and he may well have gone fishing when staying with his grandparents. When we visited my grandparents each year some members of the Rimmer family usually came to see us and my father seemed to know them well. One Rimmer was an undertaker and buried all the family. On learning what he did I prayed that I need not shake the hand of a man who handled dead people, but of course I had to do this. Much of these visits were taken up with my father’s attempts to sort out the family connections with the Taylors and the Rimmers, usually with little success.
If Albert Edward hoped he was marrying into the wealth of a big local farmer he was sadly mistaken. Sara Hilda Taylor suffered from a goitre and this condition became steadily worse. Then the only cure seemed to be large doses of iodine which had unfortunate side effects. As bad was the large expense that the condition incurred as there was no free health service in the first half of the 19th century.
My father told me that his father was ruined by the bills of the doctor. It was only through my great-grandmother owning the house they lived in that these bills could be afforded at all. By the time I visited my grandparents my grandmother’s goitre had grown as large as a football that hung, purple-coloured, below her chin making her look like a grotesque turkey. During our visits she sat silent in an invalid’s chair staring straight ahead, a result my father said of all the medicines she took in a vain hope of limiting the condition. It was always pointed out to me that she had been a beauty in her youth although I cannot see this in photographs at a younger age.
During these visits my mother talked to my great-grandmother, granny Travis, and my father discussed his relatives from the farm, while I had little to do but hope that tea would be done with so that I could go out onto the beach onto which the house backed and walk on the sand. It was so flat that the tide went out so that you could no longer see the sea. The wind blew sand onto the houses so that the owners fought a hopeless fight against the sand which seeped into their gardens. I was told the granny Travis had bought the house more cheaply than those further from the sea due to the risk of windblown sand. I was surprised that they took so little care of their garden that sand covered the cabbages planted in the soil in the garden.
When I looked for the house on Google Earth I saw that the whole street with the houses was no more, a mere line in the sand where once the road had been.
Philip Edward had a younger brother, Gordon who was born in 1923, eleven years after my father was born. Considering my grandmother’s health this must have been an unfortunate and perhaps unintended occurrence. When my father was twelve the burden of my grandmother’s goitre and the work with an infant was considered to overwhelm the family and my father was sent to live with his aunt, Helena who had married Herbert the chief clerk at Crawford’s biscuits. I visited Aunty Lena and Uncle Bert and found them living in an enormous detached house in a leafy avenue in Liverpool. They had no children and had little to do, but dote on their new-found protegé.
My father appeared bitter over this exile, but it must have been advantageous for his studies for he won a scholarship to the Merchant Taylor’s School in Liverpool as a day boy.
My father was doubly disenchanted with his younger brother as he was spoiled during the 1920’s economic boom. There are pictures of Gordon in a fine model motor car as well as in the driving seat of my grandfather’s sports car with Philip in the back seat. Later, my father darkly told me his brother was a gambler, a term I then had to have explained to me. Apparently Gordon spent all his money as well as other people’s on betting on horses, then illegal as well as unprofitable, though he appeared to me to be a quite ordinary and pleasant young man. In fact, I had some trouble thinking of him as my father’s brother as he was so much younger. He lacked however my father’s strong features and direct gaze and had inherited his mother’s plain features.
He went on, in 1930 to win a scholarship to Liverpool University to study Biology and Zoology, leaping up the social scale of the day. Only 0.1 % of the population at that time went to university. Biology and Zoology both required drawing skills at that time and indeed for the next fifty years for the microscopic examination of organs and animals required accurate drawing of what was seen in the microscope for later reference. When I studied Geology in the 1960’s we were still required to draw the sections we saw, as no photographic means of recording the images was yet available. It may have been my father’s interest in drawing that drew him to the subject, while it may also have been his happy days on the farm or his mother’s illness or even his fishing trips.
Philip Edward had the perfect environment at his aunt’s to study as she seemed when I met her to be an intelligent woman while her husband was a wealthy man. As far as I can remember she was a secretary when she met Herbert. He lent my father money to supplement his studies and being what would later be called an economist he arrived at my father’s home in 1959 to demand repayment of the loan made nearly thirty years earlier.
My father never told me he did well at any sport at the Merchant Taylor’s School, but he must have been proud of it as he often wore the old school tie. At Liverpool University he was president of the debating society, one of the principal offices of the university and one which often led on to a distinguished life in politics or the civil service. However, my father obtained a research scholarship although he had only achieved a second class Honours degree in 1933.
Unfortunately my father’s research studies coincided with the Great Depression of the 1930’s. He told me times were so hard that he could not sole his shoes and had to walk around with newspaper in them. He also could not afford lodgings and had to sleep in the laboratory.
He eventually earned some extra cash marking the examination papers of his professor’s students at one shilling an examination paper. This enterprise succeeded so well that my father could buy a second-hand Austin Ruby, a tiny car with a 747 cc engine. He always drove with the long leather gloves his father had used in France in the Great War.
His research subject was plaice. No one knew where they spawned or how they travelled if at all. My father therefore took his bottles of formaldehyde and his slides and went to Iceland where he spent a year catching plaice. He found where they spawned and how they travelled and came back to Liverpool. Plaice was an expensive fish and the study had great economic value. According to my father, his professor set about stealing the research project from him, in my experience a not uncommon experience.
Philip Edward had a girlfriend. She was from down the road in Liverpool and he had known her since they were children. He was older than she was, but when she was eighteen she took a job in Liverpool while my father was at the university. Her name was Patricia and he carried a her photograph with him till he died.
In 1937 Philip Edward was walking down a glass corridor that connected the university with the biology lecture theatres at Liverpool Royal Infirmary. A nurse came by whom he knew and with her was a pretty nurse with jet-black hair. The nurse introduced Philip to the other nurse and he asked her to go out with him someday. She agreed and they arranged to meet. That nurse was Phyllis “Polly” Peters.
Within a few weeks Phyllis had persuaded Philip to become engaged to be married. Philip bought an engagement ring that must have taken a large chunk out of his research grant as it was a large round ring with rubies for love surrounding a centre of diamonds for eternity.
Phyllis Mary Peters was born in 1913, the daughter of a railway worker, Henry Peters, born 1871 and his wife Mary Wynne, née Barnes, born 1874 in Whitford, Wales. Mary Petes lived at 8 Lightfoot Street, Chester, a road running parallel with the railway tracks, a hundred yards from them, and not separated by any fence. Henry’s father was Thomas Peters, a brickmaker, born in 1837 from Lower Kinnerton, Cheshire. Thomas married Mary Hughes from Lower Kinnerton, also born in 1837. Thomas’s father was Edward Peters, also a brickmaker, born 1804, from Mold in Flintshire, Wales, a few miles from Kinnerton. Edward’s wife was Prissilla, born 1808 born in Buckley, Flintshire in Wales. She died in 1895.
A brickmaker was a demanding trade as unfired bricks were stacked in a pile the size and shape of a small cottage with a coal fire in the centre. The bricks were fired for several days during which time care had to be taken that no holes developed that would give an outlet for flames and a resulting drop in temperature which had to be kept very high. If the firing was successful the bricks were ready for sale, but if the firing was unsuccessful the whole procedure had to be repeated. Brickmakers supplied the expanding industrialization of Britain as well as the growth of housing in all large cities. A brick veneer for a one storey house could require as many as ten thousand bricks.
Mary Barnes’ father was Joseph Barnes, a coal hewer who started work in the mines when he as 13, born in 1839 in Whitford, Flintshire. Mary Barnes’ mother was Mary Williams, born 1837 in Whitford. Joseph’s father was George Barnes, born 1809 in Whitford, a lead miner. He was a devout member of the Welsh Methodist religion and he later financed the building of a Church at Holywell. George started as a miner at the age of 12. Without knowing of George I myself worked at a coal mine in Wrexham 16 miles from Whitford 139 years later. It is hard to imagine how he amassed sufficient funds to build a church, but my Aunt Florence showed me the original papers.
The Methodists are a Christian evangelistic movement founded by John Wesley in the 1740’s. They were teetotalers, were opposed to smuggling and the slave traffic and their members were found in the working classes. The Welsh offspring, known as Welsh Chapel was stricter than the Methodist Church. Each Chapel had Elders who at Sunday services encouraged parishioners to come forward to confess their sins in front of the congregation.
The Elders also encouraged parishioners to inform them if members transgressed, for example by being alone with a member of the opposite sex. The prayer book and the services were in Welsh. It thus may be said to be an extreme form of English Methodism which had mellowed since its formation.
The Welsh are a Celtic people. When the Romans conquered Briton the ancient Britons, Celts, fled to the inhospitable, rain-swept Welsh mountains beyond the reach of the Romans. The Romans eventually subdued the Welsh, but they did not settle in the country and it kept its language and its culture.
The Welsh, then as now, are known for three things: thieving, singing and sex.
In the 1881 census Mary Barnes is listed as a servant girl at the age of 12. In the 1891 census Mary Barnes was staying with cousins in St. Helens in Lancashire in England. The English and Welsh censuses are on different databases so it was hard to find her as I expected her to be in Whitford in Wales where her parents lived. Mary had been a servant girl since she was 12, and she may have been living with her relatives St. Helens as a servant girl, but she also may have been visiting.
In 1895 George Wynne was born, Mary Barnes, my grandmother, having married James Wynne sometime between 1891 and 1895.
I do not have Mary’s marriage certificate. However, Mary Barnes had an elder sister, Amelia, who was mad. In the 1901 census George Wynne, aged six, is shown as living with his grandfather Joseph Barnes, his wife having died, and Amelia Barnes. John Barnes. Mary’s brother also lives in the household. In later censuses George Wynne also lives with his grandfather. I therefore believe that George Wynne may have been the illegitimate son of Amelia Barnes and that my grandmother Mary Barnes married James Wynne from Whitford to give the baby a legitimate name. She also escaped her life as a servant.
James Wynne and Mary had two “more” sons, Joseph born in 1899, and James Wilfred born in 1900 and a daughter Edith born in 1903. My mother always insisted that she had three step-siblings, Joseph, James Wilfred, and Edith with Florence as a full sister. This also indicates that George was not the son of Mary Barnes, though my mother most often refused to answer questions about her family at all. She would however talk much about them as long as she chose the subject and the way the story was told.
It is, however, hard to explain why Mary Wynne had no children during the three years 1896, 1897 and 1898, especially as her first child was with his grandparents. Contraception was not available to the working classes. Rape in marriage was not a legal concept until 1991 in the United Kingdom. The principal concern in the overcrowded two-up, two-down cottages of the working classes was incest as up to sixteen persons lived in these small cottages, that is to say too much sexual activity, not too little.
The answer also may lie in Kassowitz’ Law. Kassowitz was a German doctor who observed that if the mother had syphilis the first child could be sickly, or so weak that it “failed to thrive”, as the doctors expressed it on death certificates, having congenital syphilis. The following pregnancies resulted in miscarriages or in children who failed to thrive and died after a few days or weeks. After five or six pregnancies the children started to be free of congenital syphilis and grew up normally. George may have been sickly and required the attention of his grandparents while it was not until five years after the marriage that healthy children were born.
Mold was in Wales and both James and Mary were Welsh and spoke Welsh in the home.
In 1903 or 1904 James Wynne died and Mary Wynne moved to Lightfoot Street, Chester where she bought a boarding house, her guests being mainly railway workers. Quite how she managed to raise the money to buy a boarding house is also a mystery as she by then had two children. She was certainly a personality with both cheerful and ruthless sides to her nature.
Chester in England was rich while Wales across the border was poor. Unemployed Welshmen often immigrated to Chester to find work although they only spoke Welsh. There was thus something approaching a Welsh mafia in Chester. As Mary Wynne spoke both Welsh and English after working in England as a servant girl she found herself to be an important person for both Welshmen and Englishmen looking for cheap labour. Mary formed a servants’ agency and bought four tobacconists which all were at the centre of the Welsh community in Chester.
In 1905 Mary Wynne became pregnant with one of her lodgers, Henry Peters, a tall, handsome railway goods guard with copper red hair born in Kinnerton in England on the border. Mary was only four foot ten inches tall so her account of Henry as tall may have meant he was perhaps five feet five inches tall. She married him and in 1906 Florence Peters was born.
Mary Peters was busy with her lodgers, her four tobacconists and her servants’ employment agency. Henry was injured in an accident on the railway and he then worked as a conductor and in the office, but finally became an invalid, staying at home. Mary was then 32 years of age, had been working for 18 years, had at least four and perhaps five children. Her grandfather Joseph died in 1901 and Mary had brought her mad sister Amelia to live in a house two numbers down the road, in effect a further member of her household.
Mary had her own bicycle to travel to her tobacconists’ and a small dog to keep her company. It is extremely unlikely she wished to have more children.
In 1913 Phyllis Mary Peters, my mother, was born when Mary was 39 years old, seven years after Florence was born. She was called Phyllis after an English actress of the time called Phyllis Dare, a theatre actress in musical comedy plays who eventually married an aristocrat. Henry may have seen her play in Chester in a music hall and, being taken with her, chose her name as the name of the new baby. It was, however, entirely appropriate.
Mary and the Wynne children spoke Welsh and went to Welsh Chapel each Sunday. Henry was English and spoke no Welsh, while Florence spoke English, understood Welsh, but did not speak it. This must have made for an odd life at home for Henry. Though he was born in Kinnerton in England, he worked on the railways in Mold in Wales before moving to Chester and might well have understood some Welsh.
Women ran and dominated working class households in the industrial north of England. The men worked, gave their wives their pay on a Friday night, were given spending money, and went to the pub and bought beer as long as their spending money lasted. This system was still in force when I was a teenager and staying with my Aunt Florence in Chester in the 1950’s. About seven each evening Uncle Owen, a Welshman, would wake up in his armchair by the fire and say, “Hey up, lad”, look at me and ask me if I wanted to go out to the pub with him. This I did and he sat and drank a couple of pints until a few tears ran down his cheeks, saying little. He bid his mates goodnight, made a joke with the barmaid, and then we walked home together. He drove a steam crane in the railway yards until four o’clock, and then came back to close the shop, clean up and do the orders.
My Auntie Flo worked in the shop for board and lodging for herself and her husband. During her thirty-four years’ work while my grandmother lived she was never paid any wages. When I asked her why she had not asked for wages, she replied, “I didn’t dare to”.
Mary acted as did most landladies as a bank for the lodgers as they could not open a bank account and all wages had to be paid in cash by law. She thus had a considerable amount of money to look after, but at the same time this made her credit good. Some lodgers left in a hurry or died and their wages got left behind.
There was a woman who cleaned the house every week, called a ‘skivvy’. Mary Peters avoided manual labour as even in the working class there was a hierarchy with manual workers in the home being at the bottom of the ladder. Mary no doubt also had a woman who
‘did for her’ which is cooked and made the beds. Working men who were her lodgers came in with their work clothes and boots on, and kept these on as they had no other clothes. Houses were draughty and cities were covered in soot from domestic fires and factory chimneys. A house beside a railway yard was especially dirty as steam and coal dust came in from the locomotives and steam cranes used for unloading goods trains.
Mary was keen to have the children working as soon as possible. James Wilfred started as an apprentice to a garage in 1912 to become a mechanic, the school leaving age being 12. He also showed a talent for music and played the piano in the upstairs parlour where the large family joined in a Welsh sing-song on some evenings. Railway workers were exempt from the Great War conscription, railway work being a reserved occupation.
Mary and Henry were both politically active, Mary going to the weekly meeting at the Whig club on a Saturday night and Henry going to the meeting at the Labour club.
The job of looking after the new baby fell largely to Edith and Florence as did most of the running of the household which perhaps numbered ten or twelve persons including lodgers, George living with his grandfather and Joseph having left home. The baby was called Mary, but as this was confusing with her mother being called Mary too, the baby was called ‘Polly’ which was a familiar, spoken name for those called Mary.
When Polly was three Florence was carrying her down the stairs. Florence was herself only ten and she dropped the baby. Polly’ arm broke at the elbow, but Florence did not dare tell her mother that she had dropped the baby. Florence kept this to herself until she told me about this eighty years later, shortly before she died.
Without attention, the arm set at an angle and Polly always had difficulty in using her right arm as it was stiff and slightly crooked and hurt on and off. She was always confounded by this arm and looked puzzled when it hurt as no one ever knew the truth about it except Florence.
The new baby was however very pretty and soon became the darling of the household. Perhaps Florence was more than attentive due to the guilt she felt about dropping her.
In 1918 the Spanish Flu pandemic swept the world, killing about three percent of the population, more than died in the Great War. It struck down young and old, healthy and unhealthy. It is now known that it was a retro-virus where good health gave no protection. The Wynne-Peters household was petrified that someone would get Spanish Flu as they assumed it was contagious and my grandmother and aunts still spoke about it fifty years later.
They were lucky and no one caught the disease.
Meanwhile Edward Albert Travis returned from the Great War to Peel Common in Hampshire. These photographs show him at the establishment which appears to have been a hospital. There is a post card from which it appears that Edward had been wounded or injured. He always appears at the end of the photograph. He might have been an ambulance driver at the end of his convalescence as he appears with a Red Cross armband in some photos.
Edward appears ten years older rather than four years older by the end of the Great War. He was then thirty-seven years old. The family business that Albert had built up collapsed during the Great War as no-one bought gilded picture frames and Albert is said to have entered the grain trade. He may have been influenced in this by his father-in-law who ploughed with prize shire horses on his farm. However, the motor car was by now the coming method of transport and the sale of grain for horses for transport and agricultural work declined. The business was wound up and Edward was without a firm and without a job. Using his School of Art qualification Edward obtained a post as custodian at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, one of the country’s major art galleries.
However, Edward’s appointment came to an end, perhaps as the connections his father had made in Liverpool came to an end and perhaps due to the Great Depression in 1933. Edward was for a time unemployed, but obtained a post as a chauffeur, using his Great War experience as a driver in the Great War.
Gordon Travis was born in 1921. There was no state health care and Sara’s health problems due to her thyroid deficiency took most of the income of the family. There is a photo of the sports car the family owned so that at least in 1924 the family’s income was substantial. Albert Edward died in 1926 aged 75 and the family’s fortunes appear to have declined rapidly.
In 1926 Philip could no longer be supported by the family, or was no longer able to be housed with the baby, and he went to live with his mother’s sister Helena, called Lena, and her husband. They had no children of their own, but the couple was wealthy as Herbert was chief clerk at Crawford’s biscuits and they lived in a large detached house with servants. I remember as a child in the 1950s that we always were sent a tin of Crawford’s biscuits for Christmas. Here Philip could study at leisure and visit his family whenever he wished as Helena lived a tram-ride from Philip’s home in Everton, a suburb of Liverpool. While I was staying in Chester as a fourteen-year-old my father asked me especially to go and see Aunty Lena and Uncle Bert which I did, taking a tram out to their house. Liverpool was my father’s home town and he underestimated the difficulty with which I managed to arrive at their house having been cloistered in a boy’s school in the country in Hampshire. I felt that my father always resented this expulsion although it was to his advantage and probably led to his ability to obtain a scholarship to Liverpool University.
My maternal grandmother, called Nain which is the Welsh for grandmother, wanted the children to work as soon as possible in a trade. She threatened them with the words, “If you don’t do as I say I will put you into service”. My grandmother had herself been in service when she was twelve and knew what a desperate position it was.
A servant would have difficulty meeting a husband as she would at once have to leave her employment and have nowhere to live if she appeared to be going out with a young man. A young man in his turn would not consider a servant girl unless he could find no other wife as she could never work in service once they married. Wages were minimal and often not paid as fines were often given by the head of the household.
A servant was also at the mercy of the head of the household and particularly of the wife as the servant would not get the necessary reference that was needed for another job in service if she caused any displeasure. She was, if pretty at especial danger of being seduced or raped by the sons in finer houses. If a child was born she would be put onto the streets and have little option but to prostitute herself.
Service was as near to slavery as you could get without actually being slavery.
The Great War improved their position somewhat as the shortage of men due to the millions killed in the war gave a shortage of workers in all fields.
Wilfred became a mechanic eventually with his own garage, although he wanted to be a musician as he was gifted played many instruments. He played the organ in the chapel the family attended as well as at a local asylum on Sundays, perhaps where his aunt Amila now might have been. In 1915 Edith left school at the age of twelve and became an apprentice to a cook at her mother’s insistence. Edith hated cooking and was never any good at it. Later she often said, “When it’s brown it’s done, when it’s black it’s buggered”, which was about the limit of her cookery skills. He mother wished to have all the household’s needs met by as many of the children as possible to avoid the expense of employing someone to do any work.
The family members all had a lively sense of humour, the mother Mary being a cheerful and amusing person. Henry alone seems to have been a mysterious figure with a sadistic streak. My mother told me he would stir his hot tea and if my mother was not looking would put the hot spoon on her hand or arm and laugh when she cried out. She also spoke little of him when I questioned her, saying, “He died when I was young so I don’t remember him”. In fact, she was twenty-three when he died in 1936. Being an invalid he was also at home all the time and Polly must have known him well.
Florence was twelve in 1918 and left school to become an apprentice to a dressmaker. She had no interest in clothes, could sew only badly and was entirely unfitted to be a dressmaker. She had an ungainly body, was as plain as she was good-hearted and wore a pinny all her life from dawn till dusk. However, the family needed someone to make clothes and mend and darn. Her mother Mary bought a Singer tramp sewing machine for Florence to work with. She still used this machine to sew with when she was ninety for clothes for her great-grandchildren.
Mary ran the home as much like a business as a home. Everything had to pay for itself. The children were to help by learning a trade while Mary collected rent from the lodgers, often illiterate Welsh-speaking workmen who relied on her, collected the weekly takings from the four tobacconists, riding round on her bicycle to collect the takings, and earning commission on the servants’ agency. Mary was by now a well-known and well-respected figure in Chester, her energetic and cheery nature appreciated by all the business people and customers she met each week.
In 1921 the school leaving age was raised from 12 to 14. Polly was then eight. She could thus look forward to another six years at school without the fear of being “put into service”.
Polly was extraordinarily attractive and was spoiled by both the lodgers and the family. Many of the lodgers would give her a small tip, especially if they were drunk as they always were on a Friday and Saturday evening. She had jet black hair, bewitching brown-green eyes, and long eyelashes. She had an open cheery laugh like her mother’s. Mary was, however, doubtful about whether all the money she banked and kept in a Welsh dresser was all there all the time. She also heard too often from Polly that she had been short-changed by a tradesman. Mary took to keeping her cash in a tin under her bed and adopted an openly wary attitude towards her as I was to see when they met alone in later life.
Once, with the house to be cleaned, Edith and Florence asked the young Polly to help. After the cleaning was done Edith and Florence asked Polly why she had not helped them. Polly replied, “Well, I moved the fire-brush”. For a while after that she was called ‘Polly moved the fire-brush’ by her sisters.
At the local school Polly showed her intelligence and personality. She got top marks in all subjects, and could play the piano. When she was fourteen she gained a scholarship to study to Chester Grammar School, thus being able to gain the coveted School Leaving Certificate when she was eighteen. The world would then be open to her. She was still threatened with being “put into service”, but her intelligence at school meant that she could ignore this threat.
Wilfred formed a band in his spare time and played at village halls, making money from this activity. Polly started going to these dances when she was fifteen. A dance at a village or town hall always ran a lottery with a prize for the winner. A dance was started and the packet with the prize in it was passed from couple to couple. When the music stopped the couple holding the packet, and it was usually the girl, got the prize.
Wilfred’s surname was Wynne and Polly’ surname was Peters so no one was to know that they were step-brother and step-sister. Together they ran a lottery scam. When Wilfred saw that Polly had the packet he stopped playing. The prize could be opened and later wrapped up again for the next dance.
Polly often told those who would listen, including me, how amusing she thought it was when everyone came up and congratulated her. She did not care about the prize, but clearly was delighted at the attention and the envy. She appeared to have no second-thoughts about the morality or justice in this so that the visits to the Chapel each week cannot have had any effect.
Polly excelled at the school, enjoyed English and played the leading role in the school play. After her success on the school stage Polly decided that Phyllis was a more fitting name and she used it whenever she could. From now on, Phyllis divided the world into those who adulated her and the rest.
When she was about sixteen or seventeen she began to go out with a boy at the Grammar School called Paul who was the son of the Chester City treasurer. Her grandfathers had been a brickmaker and a miner and now she could take a gigantic step up into the upper middle class. In Chester you could not rise much higher than City Treasurer and no boy was more eligible than Paul. Perhaps, as well, Phyllis may for the first time genuinely have been in love with another person than herself.
Paul was nineteen when he left Chester Grammar School, perhaps to become an accountant after the summer holidays. His father bought him a car to drive around in.
There was a small, shallow lake near Chester where you could hire a boat or a punt. Paul and his friend and Polly went to the lake for picnics. Phyllis stood on the bank while the boys punted and she took a photo of them standing up in the punt with Paul’s new camera. Much later my Aunt Florence showed me the photograph. The following Sunday they again went to the lake. Phyllis stood on the bank while the two boys rowed out into the middle of the lake. Paul stood up to wave, a breeze rippled over the water, and the boat capsized. Neither Paul nor his friend nor indeed Phyllis could swim. Phyllis watched in horror as the boys splashed around for a few seconds and then disappeared into the depths.
Phyllis never took another photograph, did not like having her photo taken, and looked away if she was in time to see someone taking a photo of her.
She passed her School Leaving Certificate with good grades. However, she had planned for an engagement and a marriage after school, not for a trade. Neither my mother nor any other Peters relative ever mentioned that Nain had suggested my mother become a nurse and I think the decision must have been my mother’s alone. Her father, Henry, was an invalid after injuring his hand when it became squashed between the buffers of two railway wagons. Henry died in 1929 when Polly was sixteen and his illness and injury may have influenced Polly in making the choice she did. Edith wanted to become a nurse and she may also have played a part. Also, the weekly visits when her mother took her to see her mad Aunt Amelia may also have influenced Polly. Also, there were few openings for young women of intelligence which required excellent exam results. Nursing was one of these.
Phyllis took the entrance exam to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, then the largest hospital in the world and one with a first-class reputation.
As with Edith and Florence, Phyllis could, however, not have selected a more unsuitable profession. However, there was no National Health Service then and any medical care had to be paid for in cash so that the choice would have been of help to the family so she may have received some moral support from them. Any medicine had to be paid for, whether the doctor prescribed something of use or of no use. With four children, her husband and Mary herself there was always the risk that a medical bill would wreak havoc with the household’s financial future. A sick lodger got no pay and if he needed a doctor Mary had to make a difficult decision: she had to decide whether to let the sick lodger stay or throw a sick man out onto the street. On the other hand, she had to make money from her lodgers. A nurse in the family would solve these problems.
Also, Henry was constantly in pain after the injury to his hand. Mary had to pay for a doctor to attend to him from time to time. Then the only pain killer was Valerian which was a drink made up of wine mixed with opium or morphine.
A trained nurse could do much to prevent the need for a doctor, and could tell what was serious and what was trivial.
Phyllis took the entrance exam and six hundred candidates passed and were accepted. Phyllis told Florence that she had achieved the best marks of all, though Florence, gullible, was in no position to tell whether this might or might not be the truth.
Once passed, and living in Liverpool Phyllis decided that the slightly comic name of Polly could be left forever and never mentioned again. Phyllis, a name of sophistication with theatrical connotations. Polly was to be no more. She used her theatrical skills to talk like the doctors talked, not like she had talked at home and not with the Liverpool accent of the other nursing staff.
Liverpool was then a city of nearly a million inhabitants and the Liverpool Royal Infirmary was the largest hospital in the world.
With her cape and uniform with the nun-like headgear, Phyllis looked like a nurse. Unfortunately though Phyllis did not like people, and especially not sick people. Nursing was then carried out according to the precepts of Florence Nightingale. A patient was first and foremost someone to be nursed, this requiring that the nurse devote herself entirely to the well-being of the patient. With little in the way of effective medicine available and antibiotics yet to be discovered nursing was indeed largely a matter of helping the patient to be as comfortable as possible and as determined as possible to become well.
An empathetic but effective nurse could make all the difference between recovery and illness and death. While mastering reading, writing and mathematics Phyllis was the last person to devote herself to nursing another. It was she who was to be the centre of attention, not some ill person who smelled and was incontinent or whose injuries needed dressing.
However, Phyllis was good at tennis and played for the hospital. The injury to her right arm meant that she played a forehand stroke equally well with both her right arm and her left arm, a tactical advantage in tennis. Here, she met many doctors who she partnered and who she willingly went out with for outings or to a tea-shop. She learned how to avoid a pregnancy, using a rubber bulb which was filled with a mixture of water and vinegar, an effective contraceptive if used soon enough. She bought a cheap engagement and marriage ring from Woolworth’s which she kept for visits to hotels with doctors during away tennis matches. When Paul slid below the waters her brief encounter with true love for another was abandoned forever.
Phyllis and Philip seemed to have slid into an engagement. I never heard of any formal date and I never heard them discuss any event which led up to it. I do not know when they did get engaged, but my mother had a very expensive engagement ring which she always wore. Philip was a man who usually thought long and hard about his decisions, but who at times could be wildly impulsive.
Phyllis may well have seen Philip as her last chance to become married before she finished up on the shelf as did so many nurses. Nurses had to leave the profession when they got married, so many chose to remain unmarried if they liked nursing enough and many did. She may have seen him as having prospects. In particular, Aunty Lena and Uncle Bert were clearly wealthy, had no children and were fond of Philip. Uncle Bert may have appeared to have a similar position to that of the Chester City Treasurer.
Philip took Phyllis to the annual May Ball at the university. He designed a red dress for her which Edith and Florence cut and sewed. At the Ball Edith and Florence stood outside a window and looked in to see Phyllis dancing in her red dress. Phyllis noticed them, went outside and, according to Florence, berated them for standing there.
“Someone might think that you are something to do with me!” said Phyllis petulantly.
Phyllis may have felt she was emulating her successful mother, but her mother had a genuinely friendly side while Phyllis, like many an only child, lacked any real feelings towards other people. In fact, being so much younger than her siblings she was like a baby with five doting parents all her childhood.
Diseases of the lung were the most common as all men smoked and most men worked in smoky industries full of dust, or in mines full of particles that stayed in the lungs. Every second man died of bronchial disease or lung cancer, a long, drawn-out death with continual coughing and spitting.
Trainee nurse Peters smiled willingly at patients who got well as they were fee-paying and usually tipped a pretty nurse, while the plain nurses stuck to nursing. If the patient died the mourners tipped nurse Peters in their grief as she played the dramatic part of the sorrow-struck nurse. She got a tip. Nurses also took care of the personal effects of the patients who died and often relatives had little interest or knowledge of how much money their relative was carrying in their wallets or handbags when they went into the Liverpool Royal Infirmary. The hospital was so large that few outside an individual ward would know who worked where. However, the unmarried, hardy ward sisters and matrons, unmarried, had no illusions about the qualities of the young nurses working under them.
After four years, in 1935, nurse Peters became Sister Peters. The coveted State Registered Nurse qualification was hers. Soon after Sister Peters became a Ward Sister with her own ward. Here it was she who decided who got morphine as a pain killer and how much they were given. When life ebbed away and it was pointless to prolong suffering it was common practice to ease the pain forever by giving a dose of morphine that that was slightly above the limit so that the patient slipped into unconsciousness and death.
Sister Peters was often on night duty and as Ward Sister was in charge of the ward although the matron above her would officially be finally responsible for the ward. Morphine was used plentifully to ease pain and in particular to ease the pain of terminally ill patients. Sister Peters would administer morphine during her night duty and was obliged to stay on in the ward if a patient died to tell the relatives of the patient that he or she had died. This she did readily as grieving relatives often gave money to the nurse who had been with their loved one during their final hours.
This was sometimes a tip, and sometimes a request that the money be handed on to some cause such as a fund for cancer research. Sister Peters began to find these handouts to be substantial and after a while an unseemly number of patients would die during her night duty. The dose of morphine required to kill a patient was very close to the dose needed to relieve pain, and it would be a difficult task to prove that Sister Peters had given the patient a deadly dose.
Finally, trainee nurse Peters after the four years course passed all the written and practical examinations. She was now Sister Peters.
Her mother, Nain was now sixty-four years old and could look forward to her nursing needs in old age being taken care of.
After the war Florence always told me that the Germans had bombed the Liverpool Records Office and it had caught fire, destroying the records about everything and everybody. The records had, however, been moved and I have checked whether nurse Phyllis Mary Peters had obtained a State Registered Nurse qualification. The records were there, but there was no Phyllis Mary Peters who was registered as obtaining the S.R.N. at the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, or even of being there.
Phyllis then decided to leave Liverpool Royal and took a three-year course in children’s nursing at the Heswall Hospital in Cheshire. It was surprising that Phyllis took this course as she disliked sick children as much as she disliked sick adults. She probably took the course to be closer to her family in Chester. In those days there was a tunnel under the River Mersey, but a journey from Liverpool to Chester was expensive and took half a day.
Phyllis was eighteen in 1931 and seven years later the year would be 1938.
Meanwhile, Philip Travis was having problems with his doctorate. He viewed these as a temporary setback as he had never failed anything in his life before. He had bought the two large green books to write a doctorate in the required two copies, but had trouble getting started. He had in a way been two successful in that he had found where plaice spawned, a discovery of some academic merit and some financial importance to the fishing industry. The value of the results was too much of a temptation to his profession who managed to steal them.
His professor did this, a fairly common happening in the academic world, by publishing the results in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society before Philip could finish his thesis. The thesis would then either have to written to some extent around the important conclusions that were already published, or he would publish what would be viewed as a repetition of his professor’s work. Philip would find collaborating with his professor in the writing of his dissertation, as was usual, difficult as his professor had already stolen the core of the thesis by presenting it in public.
Another problem was that Philip had done hundreds of drawings of the plaice which would have to be pared down for a doctoral thesis. As he was interested in drawing this had taken too much of his time although the drawings were superb as I could see when my father showed them to me.
A further problem was that Philip had used up his research grant and was now correcting exam papers for his professor at one shilling per paper which also took time which should have been used to write up his thesis.
Philip was a pedantic person which is an advantage in a researcher, but can be a problem when you are writing a thesis where much must be left out. The thesis must be defended too, which Philip would not like to enter without much preparation. Having been President of the university debating society he did not like to lose an argument.
This success and interest in debates was to lead to two sinister failings in his character that were to cause him problems. He believed that to win a debate was to win a scientific argument which is not at all the same thing, especially when his rank in the Royal Navy allowed him to win many debates without any proper argument as his subordinates had their hands tied. He also slipped into the trap of feeling he could lie as long as he won debating points which led to his becoming increasingly distrusted, something that contributed to a succession of failures in his postings and career as well as to caution from his family and friends.
Phyllis took much of his time too which he later told me was the reason he failed to write up his doctorate. There was a great deal of truth in this, but a more ruthless man would have admitted that he had made a bad mistake and ended the engagement. Instead, he spent time and money many a Sunday motoring down from Liverpool to Heswell and then to Chester with Phyllis.
Florence had married a Welshman, Owen, who also worked at the railway yard in Chester and who was thus a fellow-worker of Henry Peters. He was a kind soul, an old schoolmate of Florence and a driver of one of the steam cranes that unloaded the railway trucks. His father was a groom to a gentleman, a reserve cavalry officer, and he had joined the Army with him in 1914. Three weeks later they had taken ship to Gallipoli to fight the Turks and both had been killed soon after landing. Owen thus never knew his father.
Florence told me that the boys chased her around a tree in the school yard and that Owen was the only one who never caught her to steal a kiss from her. They had had a daughter in 1936 and the baby, Glenys, had Henry’s copper red hair, freckles and sweet looks. The baby now took the place in Philip’s heart of Philip’s much younger childhood sweetheart as an idealized, innocent female.
Philip began to persuade himself that he wanted a daughter. Philip was also persuaded that he could emulate this cheerful and happy family who lived with Mary Peters above a shop Mary had recently bought in Upton after the death of her husband, a suburb of Chester on the main road to Liverpool. Florence worked in the shop with board and lodging in lieu of payment.
Philip had started at Liverpool University as an undergraduate in 1930 and it was now about 1938, obtaining at any rate a second class Honours B.Sc. in Zoology and Biology in 1933, and spending five years as a research student. Philip decided to try for a teaching job in a grammar school somewhere, taking his large chest of specimens, his microscope and his two empty books in which to write to the thesis with him.
Philip was offered a position as Maths master at the Bentley School at Calne in Wiltshire, a Saxon town in the South of England, miles from Liverpool, to start in the Winter term of 1938. He obtained digs with the French mistress at the school, Marion Rogers, married to the paymaster at Harris’ bacon factory in Calne.
The Rogers were a very decent family with three girls and two adopted boys whose parents had died in a fire in a car while the two boys were in the back seat. The family lived in a lovely white house built in the Art Deco style by a missionary couple who have retired after a lifetime of work in China. The house, on the Oxford Road, was called ‘Kuling’ which means Cool Winds, the name of an English-built settlement in the mountains in China used as a rest home for missionaries. ‘Kuling’ was written vertically in green paint in Chinese characters down the East side of house, making it something of a landmark, standing as it did on the outskirts of Calne.
Phyllis was now left in Heswell, secretly grieving for an illustrious past as the daughter-in-law to the Chester treasurer, a past which had disappeared as suddenly as a morning mist. Her three years training at Heswell was now at an end, and once again she finished with an examination in a profession which she disliked. She decided to follow her fiancé to Wiltshire, obtaining a position at the hospital at Melksham near Calne where she had board and lodging and weekly pay. With a population of about ten thousand Melksham was a great change from Liverpool.
The farmers’ daughters who formed the nursing staff at the Melksham hospital had no time for the la-di-da accent and manners Phyllis had adopted, or for her lack of empathy towards patients, of whom many were related to the staff. When she relapsed into the northern dialect spoken in Chester they did not understand her at all. They knew and cared nothing for the long training Phyllis had had at Liverpool Royal and Heswall. In the pig farming district of Wiltshire her beauty counted against her rather than for her.
Philip, loath to admit a mistake of judgment, seemed to convince himself that he had invested so much time and money in the relationship that he must go on. His artistic side was also still fascinated by Phyllis’ good looks and beauty. He knew no women in the district and there were no longer the enormous number of young nurses and secretarial students available to men in Liverpool, even if he had an Austin Ruby.
Following the Great War there was an excess of women, both widowed and unmarried due to the million dead and one and a half million wounded young Britons. This led to a post-war preponderance of married men over married women in the big cities which had never before occurred in British history. By the 1930s half of men aged 30 were married.
This was partly a result of life expectance being about sixty years. Additionally, if a woman was to have three or four children before she was thirty-five which was then considered to be late for a successful pregnancy she must be married before she was about twenty-eight. After that women were described as being “on the shelf”.
Philip had been content to put off a decision to marry. He had by now realized that Phyllis’ charisma went hand in hand with, and was powered by, an inability to love anyone but herself. The centre of attention, she was fascinating; as a bystander she was insignificant. As a leading lady on stage she was magnificent; without the grease paint and the play she was nothing. Philip admitted he had been tricked, but was too proud to admit he had deceived himself.
Phyllis situation was becoming acute as war approached. As a qualified Sister, and all nurses then were unmarried, she would be expected to join the Army or one of the services, engaged in a profession she hated where there would be no glamour and considerable danger and away from the only marriageable bachelor she knew. If the coming war dragged on as long as the Great War she would be thirty years old when it was over, years past the age when most women were married. Philip might be killed or posted elsewhere and she would be marooned in the wilds of a southern farming district, far from home.
Philip finished his first year at the Bentley School in the summer of 1939. Philip was an intelligent and astute man, even though he lacked the common touch, perhaps because he had been an only child until he was ten years old. He was a complex man, torn between the artistry of his father and grandfather, the military and war experience of his father, the farming heritage of his mother, and his own training as a research student in Zoology and Biology. He always claimed a great belief in Science which bordered on a religion, not uncommon in the previous century, a belief which combined some but not all of the aspects of his character.
After war broke out in September 1939 Philip was thus forced to consider what his future would be and to plan for a war that might last four years if the Great War was anything to go by. Now 27 he was also at a marriageable age. He also remembered the idyllic family life of Florence and Owen with their daughter Glenys, now aged four. My mother told me on several occasions that my father married because he wanted a daughter, but my father told me that my mother had wanted no children. Whether this was a self-justification of what might become the inevitable, or a real desire I do not know.
She never mentioned her own expectations from the union, but I was to find that she sulkily and regretfully saw it only as a means of being provided for, not as a responsibility. Philip realized this too, but too late.
The reality of war was brought home to Phillip one afternoon when he was on lunch duty at the Bentley School. It was usual to take the boys around the square after lunch for a short walk. One day it was raining and Philip decided, unusually in such circumstances, to keep the boys in the school instead of going to the square. A German bomber came over and dropped a bomb into the middle of the square. No-one was hurt, the only damage being to a stone horse trough. His casual decision had saved the lives of a hundred boys.
Phyllis situation was now dire. Philip had put off first her hints about marriage, then her indirect requests for advice from Marion Rogers, and finally her entreaties for a decision. He hoped events would move on towards war so that either Phyllis or he himself would be separated and the matter resolved with no blame placed on anyone.
Phyllis devised a scheme based on her belief that all men were fools, and that would play on Philip’s refusal to believe that his own fiancée could lie outright to him. The plan would contain as much truth as possible and an enormous lie. It was also drastic as it meant that Phyllis would lose the nursing qualification she had spent years obtaining. However, such a loss Philip would take to indicate devotion to him, while in fact it only gave freedom to Phyllis herself and lifelong entrapment for Philip.
One Sunday in the spring of 1940 she told Philip, as he recounted it to me, and as I also heard it from myself from my mother, was that the staff had ganged up against her. The Matron, she said, had ordered her to clean the washroom floor with the red tiles where the bedpans were cleaned the next day. Phyllis, as she apparently said, would never do such a menial task. If true, this was indeed a menial order as even student nurses were then never required to clean floors.
But if true it must have meant that Sister Peters was no longer a Sister: she would be in a state of suspension from the nursing profession. The situations in which such a state could have occurred would have been an accusation of intentionally causing the death of a patient, a medical mistake of such magnitude that she was dangerous or dishonesty. In those days, pain killing was only carried out with injections of morphine. Washing floors was a task carried out by hospital orderlies and Sister Peters would not have been required to do that even as a student nurse.
A ward sister such as Sister Peters would make decisions on a routine basis about how much morphine to give. She, as did doctors, would also make decisions about when it was pointless to prolong terrible suffering, and suffering could be terrible in those days. An overdose of morphine was regularly given to end intolerable pain and an inevitable death although this was in law murder or manslaughter.
However, it would be quite possible that Sister Peters had been used to going one step further and ending rather too many lives. Sister Peters’ contempt for the weak went deep in her character. At Liverpool Royal Hospital such a thing as too many deaths would be missed in that gigantic hospital. At the Melksham Hospital many of the patients were personally related or known to the staff.
It is unlikely that such an intelligent person as Sister Peters with knowing would make a gigantic medical mistake.
Sister Peters had in her teens shown herself to be proud of carrying out frauds on those around her and then to derive both pleasure and profit from robbing dead patients.
Whatever was the truth, and the whole incident may have been dreamed up by Phyllis Peters, she found a way out that relieved her of being in a profession she disliked, becoming married, and being safe from being drafted into the Royal Army Nursing Corps which is what would have happened to an experienced Ward Sister in if war broke out as seemed increasingly inevitable.
“Would Philip”, he later told me she said, “collect her in his Austin Ruby that night as she climbed over the wall around the hospital carrying her little suitcase?” It must have sounded such a little favour on his part.
Philip indeed would do it. He perhaps found the idea of arriving like a knight on a white horse, albeit a driver in an Austin Ruby, to save a maiden in distress irresistible, despite his previous reluctance to take on a woman he increasingly had ceased to trust.
There was a full moon that night and Philip waited at the agreed place. Phyllis climbed over the hospital wall. At that moment her nursing career was over forever. Marion Rogers was forced to agree to let Phyllis share Philip’s room in her home.
In June 1940 Philip married Phyllis in the registry office in Calne. The rubber prophylactic device, a bulb filled with water and vinegar used by nurses as a cheap and practical method of birth control, then lay unused on the shelf in the bathroom, Phyllis performing her one and only part of the bargain. There are no photographs of their marriage and I never heard my parents discuss it at all which rather left me with the impression that it was something they both viewed with shame. They later excused this lack of evidence to others as: “it was a war marriage”.
Phyllis missed two menstrual periods by September 1940 and in May 1941 I was born.
My father left to sign up for the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve after the school holidays. His decision to volunteer was based on several factors, the most important being that he could choose which of the armed services he would be in for the war. Secondly, he had spent a year on an Icelandic trawler doing research in 1925 which experience he enjoyed. Thirdly, he told me that if there was a war on the safest place to be was on a mobile vessel, armed against attack by the Germans.
My father’s decision to join the R.N.V.R. was an all-or-nothing decision in tune with his personality. If a ship is attacked by larger ships or aircraft during a war they either come through it more or less unharmed, or they get hit, sink and the crew drown.
On September 30 1940 Philip joined H.M.S. Ganges, a shore establishment on the east coast where all recruits were kitted out and introduced to Naval Life. At the recruiting desk the officer said to Philip, “I see you have a Bachelor of Science Degree. You will therefore join the Electrical Branch, first as a seaman coder.” Philip did not disclose that his degree was in Zoology and Biology and that his knowledge of things electrical was zero. He always thought the incident highly amusing.
After being kitted out he was given shots against several diseases and then told to swim five hundred yards in the freezing water of the swimming pool. My father could swim well, but the injections made him feel ill and at times he believed his career in the R.N.V.R. would be a short one. However, he swam the five hundred yards and clambered half-dead out of the pool. Next the recruits were told to climb the mast at Ganges to see if they suffered from a fear of heights. Philip was not scared of heights, but once again he almost fainted from the effect of the injections given in the morning. This mast was infamous as several recruits fell off it to their death each year.
For two months he was given basic training, consisting of Naval square bashing, navigation, Morse code, signaling with flags, ranks and knots. Throughout this period the recruits slept in hammocks in large dormitories called messes. Here they ate, slept and spent any spare time they had.
Philip passed out and was then an Ordinary Coder, the lowest rank in the Navy, and equivalent in the Electrical Branch of Ordinary Seaman.
He was appointed then to H.M.S. Hastings in December 1940, a sloop which was rather like an armed trawler. H.M.S. Hastings patrolled the North Sea, protecting shipping, the most part of which were coalers and tramp steamers running down from Newcastle to London. Hastings was based in Rosyth in Scotland, some six hundred miles from Calne. The Home Fleet was based in Scotland as this was furthest from the German Navy and from German bombers.
As a Seaman Coder he spent most of his time in a radio cabin coding and de-coding messages. The Hastings operated the hot-bunk system, where when one seaman went off a four-hour watch he slept in the hammock of the seaman taking the next watch. My father later told me that he found this routine of four-hour watches the hardest part of the work as he never got any proper sleep.
The other irksome duty was passing up shells to the gunner at cannon in the fore from the magazine below as these weighed a lot and had to be passed up entirely by hand. At times he was on watch duty which meant standing on the bridge for four hours, looking mostly at an expanse of grey sea. Here, he found it hard to keep awake as nothing happened, but his career would be at an end if he slept on watch as he was then the only man keeping the ship safe.
The Hastings was in a collision and put in to Chatham for repairs. Here I first met my father, though I remember nothing of that.
In 1941 Philip was recommended for a commission and he went to H.M.S. King Alfred in Hove in Sussex as a Midshipman, the lowest rank given to those aspiring to be an officer. Here he was fast-tracked and trained as an officer in the Electrical Branch, passing out as a Sub-lieutenant. The Royal Navy needed officers fast as much of the fleet had been scrapped in 1929 in the London Agreement disarmament conference, but was now building ships as fast as the shipyards could produce them. In addition there was attrition of active serving regular officers wounded or lost at sea due to the huge losses at the beginning of the war. More and more electrical equipment was being pushed into ships to replace mechanical systems, making the need for officers in the Electrical Branch ever greater.
The R.N.V.R. in the war comprised 80% of the wartime Royal Navy.
Philip was posted to H.M.S. Dryad in Portsmouth to learn the electrics of a ship, and especially the new naval RADAR and ASDIC systems. When he arrived he was told that the systems were so new that no-one knew anything about them: he would have to teach himself the systems and design a course for subsequent officers. A zoologist, Philip fortunately arrived at Dryad with Sub Lieutenant Stephen Spens, a natural scientist, as his junior officer, and together they designed a course in RADAR and ASDIC. Then they held a rapid succession of one-week courses.
While at H.M.S. Dryad my father stayed in Fareham with a couple called the Arnolds with whom my father appeared to have been inordinately happy and they took him in as a son. Throughout his life he mentioned the Arnolds with affection although he appeared to me to have been seeking the parents that had eluded him in his childhood. He appeared not to have thought that such adulation made my mother uncomfortable and uncertain about the care she had provided for my father at home in Wiltshire when they married. Calne is not far from Fareham, but with petrol being unavailable in the war and train tickets only available from the government my father did not appear at home. Troops being given leave were often left to hitch-hike with military transport if they wished to travel and anyone in a car always picked up a hitch-hiker.
On 16 May, 1941 I had been born in a private nursing home in Chippenham. I later wished I had been born in Calne as whenever I had to fill in a form with “place of birth” on it I had to spell a ten-letter word of a place I never lived in, while Calne would have been much easier. There is a picture of me as a baby with my grandmother Nain who travelled down for my birth. As the widow of a railway employee she had free rail travel.
After completion of his RADAR and ASDIC courses my father returned to HMS Hastings which was then patrolling the Western Approaches. These were a rectangular area west of the British Isles where U-boats attacked British shipping sailing to and from America and Canada. My father told me that one of the more horrifying aspects of this convoy patrol was that no ship could stop to pick up survivors, some of whom the Hastings passed as they cried out for help. My father said survivors only lasted four minutes so their death was quick. My father got his first campaign medal for this Battle of the Atlantic, a battle against U-boats that lasted until 1945.
One day my mother told me my father was coming home. At last I would meet my oft-mentioned Daddy! He came and it was marvellous to have a Daddy at last. He had plenty of time to play with me and was also great fun. What my mother had not told me was that he was only coming home for two weeks. The day he left I felt as though my world had fallen apart. My hero, my friend, my support, my model, my father disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared. Neither he nor my mother seemed to be certain that he would soon come back either.
In May 1942 my father was promoted to Lieutenant and posted to HMS Stalker, an escort aircraft carrier being fitted out for the British in America, in San Franscico. The USA had not yet entered the war and my father was therefore formally transferred to the US Navy as a Lieutenant. He took ship to Canada and then took a rail trip via New York to California.
Life in Calne returned to normal. I grew up slowly extending my knowledge of my surroundings yard by yard. There was plenty to see in the Oxford Road: farmers driving pigs or sheep or cattle to market on a Wednesday, horses and wagons with loads of hay or turnips, a farmer’s boy with a long stick sitting on top of them to see nothing fell off. The occasional lorry with troops passed by. Once a military band came along the street, playing as it marched. It was a mighty moving sight which made me wish I was old enough to join the Army. Few of the neighbours had cars though the Rogers had an old black Lancaster car which was parked across the road when it wasn’t in the garage.
My father was for the time being safe in San Francisco and my mother felt less nervous when the postman came to the door. Housewives dreaded the telegram boy with a message of a missing husband or son. It was clear though that she resented being stuck in Calne while her husband was enjoying California on American pay and with a fancy uniform. During this time my father made friends and canoed up the Colorado River, sending us a photo of this.
In October 1942 HMS Stalker left San Francisco and via the Panama Canal travelled across the Atlantic to support Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. Stalker carried Seafires, the marine version of the Spitfire. For this operation my father got his second campaign medal.
In 1943 women between the age of nineteen and thirty had to register for war work. As my mother was then not yet thirty years old she was sent to work at Sharp’s ammunition factory in Calne. Thus it was that the girl who, when seventeen had seen herself as joining the Chester upper classes sat at a bench in a factory and greased the threads of shells.
England was desperate for nurses, but my mother could no longer be a nurse, let alone a Sister, any nursing after she deserted from her post at the Melksham hospital being impossible. What she did was punishable in law, but in the chaos of the war such a charge was forgotten.
If I could not be with the Rogers across the road my mother locked me in the bedroom while she was at the factory.
My father sent her a fixed sum each month for housekeeping, but she was also desperate for an income having become used to having plenty of personal spending money. The Rogers family across the road, Auntie Marion, looked after me sometimes when she wasn’t teaching while most often my mother locked me in the bedroom when she left for her shift at Sharp’s. I spent long, boring hours there waiting for her to come home. The only toys within my reach were her many shoes which I spent hours rearranging, my other occupation being trying to climb on the bed and then sliding off the pink silk bedspread.
Women could avoid war work if a family was billeted on them and my mother applied for this. A military policeman from RAF Yatesbury came to live with us with his wife and a baby, Eric and Joy. This meant I wasn’t locked in the bedroom anymore. However, my mother, too mean to hire a baby-sitter, took up the practice again after the war whenever she went into town.
My upbringing was harsh with the war as a constant excuse for smackings and beatings. My mother was resentful of the blows fate had dealt her and seemed to revisit them on me. It was only her broken right arm and inability to strike hard that from saved me from any permanent damage. She was, however, a woman I early learned to understand and with great effort to manipulate to avoid at least extreme punishment and violence. She was, however, highly unpredictable and never forgave a slight.
Once she crept up and hit me, as a small child, on the head from behind. I asked her, “What was that for?” She answered that it was for something I had done the day before, as though a young child could remember such things. Creeping up on me from behind seemed a curious way for any person to behave and particularly for an adult. I could not imagine anyone at the Rogers’ household doing any such thing.
Although I never liked her I could glimpse the occasional signs of, at least feelings of professional guilt towards me which I assumed she had acquired during her years of childrens’ nursing at Heswell. It was to this sense of duty that I always addressed myself when dealing with her, couching my needs in the terms of medical necessity.
Nain’s new grocers in Upton thrived under rationing. Florence and Owen were happy with Glenys, red-haired and freckled. Owen early in the morning was busy at his steam crane in the reserved occupation at the Great Western Rail Company, all of them living together behind and above the shop.
Children in the war were often treated with some irritation due their being in the way and not part of the war effort whilst at the same time being part of the raison d’être of many families for the nation’s sufferings and privations. There were few other children around and I in vain constantly searched for other children of my age. It was not a good time to have children, though some young men departing for the war left a pregnant wife behind as some lasting remnant of themselves should they be killed.
Nappies were made of old toweling, there was no soap, and it was essential that a child early be made house-trained. I once shitted in my nappy by mistake when I was one year old and I cried with fear as I waited for the inevitable punishment, feeling the large lump of shit banging between my legs. My mother bent me over her knee and beat me with the back of her hair-brush, her usual punishment.
All children’s clothes had to be made and it was easy to see the children of poor children. They were dirty and all the girls of all ages wore just a thin dress with no underwear, although no child I knew wore underwear then.
My mother wore long woollen knickers which went down her leg a bit. These became much stained with blood and as she hung them on the radiators to dry after an ineffective attempt at washing them they formed part of the household.
These knickers were a strange contrast to the elaborate make-up my mother wore whenever she went shopping. She would sit at her dressing table in her slip spending hours putting on make-up, brushing her jet-black hair and transforming herself to my constant surprise and incomprehension to some other woman than she really was. I would wait impatiently on the bed for the exciting walk into town and this make-up seemed to take an eternity while being in my eyes entirely unnecessary.
Once satisfied she would then try on various dresses and ask my opinion, “Do I look pretty?” Strangely, as I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had seen, she seemed to value my opinion as I once said, “No” and was at once beaten. After that I always answered, “Yes” to her enquiry. Then she would try on shoes, asking me firstly if I had played with them, forcing me to lie, and then changing from one to the other, sometimes several times over. If she was finally satisfied she put on a hat and then, most oddly, carefully pulled a veil of fine black netting over her face, concealing all the work she had spent in transforming herself. This, she explained, was how a lady dressed when she went outside the house.
As soon as I could walk I always was rapidly dressed in a romper suit, winter and summer, a red harness given by the Rogers connected to me and we left the house. The harness had bells on the front and my mother held the reins which prevented me from moving away from her. Tired, coming home, I would hang on this while my mother told me to stand up straight and not pull on her. If she stopped to exchange pleasantries with one of the few women who would talk to her, I would swing on the harness to distract myself from the endless, pointless chatter of the women.
“It’s a bit close today”, my mother would say, and receive the reply, “Yes, but not as close as yesterday”. Wiltshire was hot and sticky in the summer and freezing cold in the winter as the west wind swept across the treeless hills and through the houses. As I grew up in the summer of 1942 England had a long succession of sunny, rainless days.
In the town centre we once passed a cluster of frightened, forlorn unwashed girls in such threadbare dresses that you seen their skinny bodies through them. I had not seen these children before in Calne and I asked my mother who they were. She answered, “They are Jewish refugees, don’t go near them, or you will catch a disease”.
There were other groups of children, often siblings who had been evacuated from some large city and distributed among the townspeople of Calne. These too were to be avoided “As you never know where they come from. You might catch polio”. There was some truth to this as many evacuees came from the slums and were covered in lice and dirt and many had rickets. Many did not have a toilet at home and soiled themselves as they were used to having no trousers or knickers and merely a long cast-off man’s collarless shirt, so they weed or shitted where they happened to be standing. There was still an open drain that ran along the High Street in Calne and they used this as a toilet which was the original purpose of the drain. Some children, however, came from good homes and were merely lost in strange surroundings.
It was only later that I was to discover the real reason for my mother keeping me apart from these and any children: she did not think they belonged to the class of which she now considered herself to be a part. If the children were from better homes she did not wish to run the risk of being snubbed as ‘common.’
There were still many wounded soldiers from the Great War who would stand in the street selling matches or shoelaces, begging being illegal. One with one leg wearing his old Army greatcoat always stood at the corner where Oxford Road turned into the square and my mother always dropped a halfpenny or a farthing into his cup.
Edward Travis, too old for service in the war, began work at de Havilland’s, his wife Sara becoming sicker by the day. Gordon had trained as a joiner and also started work at the de Havilland plant near Liverpool where they made the Mosquito fighter-bomber. He was an addictive gambler, perhaps in an attempt to emulate the success of his praised elder brother. Bookmaking was illegal, bookmakers were criminals, and Gordon could not escape their clutches once he was in debt to them. However, he was very much his mother’s son, a Rimmer with the Rimmer ugliness in his face, and was to lead an unhappy life with one disastrous escapade after another, while losing any money he made to the bookies. He finally made bets for which he could not pay and took to crime, spending some time in prison.
My father despised him and had no understanding for his weaknesses, always when I asked only briefly observing that Gordon was, “a gambler, I never knew him as he was ten years younger than me and I left home when he was two”. I had the impression he blamed Gordon for his expulsion from the family although he may only have been distancing himself from this black sheep of the family.
Gordon always came to the annual visits we had with my father’s family, though I have but the vagueness memories of him. He would make jokes in a heavy Liverpool accent to me, though I hardly understood what he said. I was puzzled about his accent, trying to comprehend why my father’s brother spoke so differently from my father who had adopted the slightly nasal accent of the Royal Navy, the only time he gave away his origins being when he said, “Gayla” instead of the Southern English “Gaala”. Had I known my father better I would have corrected him, but he was disinclined to accept any criticism. When he returned from the war I had once joked as he made a long-winded and dull attempt at translating the Marseillaise for me. His face became stony and he went quiet. I felt that it was after that episode that he decided to send me away to school, determining that the attempt to love his son was one on which he would no longer waste his time.
He never did learn to love me and I certainly never loved him and indeed hated him. As yet, however, he was a far-off figure in a ship which I could not visualize in a place never revealed by my mother, but said to be secret.
My Uncle Owen’s brother John worked at the de Havilland as a photographer. He showed me photos he had taken from another aircraft of the Javelin jets, describing how hard it was to get a good photo with the equipment and negatives then available.
Calne lies in the South Downs and there were a great number of R.A.F. Bomber Command aerodromes in the area, RAF Yatesbury lying a mile outside the town. I would lie awake at night and listen for the long drone of a bomber. At first it sounded like a car approaching far away on the Oxford Road, and then it got steadily closer until it was overhead. Then it would not slow down as car must at the turning at the end of the Road, but would fade away in the distance, hopefully towards Germany to kill Germans, though it might as well be a German on his way to bomb Bristol or Coventry. I found this slow aero plane sound most soothing and always fell asleep soon afterwards.
I had no fear of bombers, but a great fear of German soldiers whom my mother painted in vivid and earnest awfulness. If nothing else, my mother had a way with words which made you believe whatever she said. Fortunately she never found out how impressed I was with her descriptions of Germans, or she would have frightened me with them.
I often dreamed of Germans surrounding the house while I desperately looked for something to kill them with. In my dream, my rifle emptied, I would hold it up and the bullets would hit the wood of the butt and the metal of the barrel. Finally there would be so many Germans that I could not stop them and I would wake up screaming just before they shot me. The image would stay with me all my life; I was not to know that I would have cause to defend myself from an enemy as unrelenting as any German.
Aunty Marion across the road was a house full of excitements and always a welcome change from the nervousness and sudden moods of my mother. The Rogers raised boxer dogs and there were often puppies you could play with. Ginger Rogers, the elder boy was a man in my eyes, but Keith Rogers who was about ten was my friend, protector and substitute father. He made, or obtained for me a box of wooden bricks made of oak. These I made into castles, villages, houses or roads or anything that took my imagination. I would lay them out on the floor of our lounge and play with them for hours, offering an endless supply of play compared with the horrible boredom of my mother’s bedroom.
Keith also made a cart with a handle for me, painted yellow and red and with my name on the back. Keith would pull me in it, but I could never find an adult who would not soon tire to pull me. These rides only went down the concrete path of our garden between the potato patch and the shed and up to the patch with the glass seed frame where my mother grew mint which smelled so strongly. At the bottom of the garden you could also turn left instead of right and the path went down beside the neighbour’s house to the side gate on Oxford Road which was never used.
There was a girl about my age who lived at the house next door, but my mother said they were, “not our class” and I could not play with this girl. We stared at one another through the railings if we happened to see one another, but as I did not know why my mother had forbidden me to talk to her I had little to say. So much was forbidden that I could not know what was merely a whim of my mother’s and what was a fearsome law sent out by the government.
The Gough’s lived on the other side. They were apparently “our class” as I was in theory allowed to play with Christopher Gough whose father was a bank manager. However, Christopher was a hemophiliac and I was told he would bleed to death if he got a small cut. This meant he could not fall over or hurt himself in any way which made playing with him frustrating. He also knew how to take full advantage of his illness as he would hit me in the eye and stand there expecting not to be hit back, unlike any other boy. I would tire of this one sidedness and I would break off our game, knowing that the pleasure of it all was very one-sided.
Such were the children of our neighbourhood, or at least of the bit that I could reach by walking around. At the back of our house were fields with cows and across the road were a row of houses backed by fields as well.
Down the road was a blacksmith’s and cooper’s shop which heated up the rings that went round wheels. My mother forbade me to visit this workshop, but I stole there when I could. The workmen were either old men or boys not much older than Keith, and they were friendly and explained the process of heating the iron and then setting the ring onto a wooden wheel to cool. It was easy to understand expansion and contraction if you saw it happen like that and I learned far more physics from these men and boys than I ever learned from my father. They did not bother to tell me to stand away from the hot coals as my mother would have done, but seemed to trust to my good sense to avoid them. It was I saw as clear as it could be and I ran away from the heap of red coal when they carried a ring and dropped it into the fire. It was a wonder to see how they carried the red-hot ring between them with iron clamps, keeping it off their trousers, to the wooden wheel laid out on the ground. The wood hissed and smoked and if it burst into blame they doused it with an ordinary water-can.
A pony came with a trap with the milk on it each day. The bread van with its smell of new-baked bread was pulled by a horse. For some reason the bread van horse had a nosebag. The coal truck with its heavy load was pulled by two carthorses with blinkers. They all had wooden wheels clad with an iron ring and I could see why these were needed. The milk and the bread came once a day and the coal once a fortnight and I eagerly looked out for their arrival. The milkman was sour and short-tempered, but the breadman was cheerful and always asked my mother if she wanted Hovis though each day she said, “No, thank you”. The coalmen, with their blackened faces and leather back jerkins were impossible to talk to and they were too busy with their loads to listen to children. I did not realize these were old men, doing the work usually done by men in their prime, men now sent to the army, or the navy, or the air force.
I had by now the measure of my mother and I was able to ignore the worst of her moods and threats and sudden violence, with the delicate senses of a child treating her as the egocentric, unhappy, selfish child she was and was to remain throughout her life. Like a conjuror’s trick once revealed she was boring for the most part, only retaining the uncanny ability of the manipulator to size someone up in an instant. I saw, too, how the down-to-earth townspeople she met soon avoided her until her only companions were those billeted on us by the government or those with whom she did the daily business of buying and selling.
We went for walks in the fields to collect blackberries together with Sally, our spaniel. I looked forward to these outings immensely. When we could get a lift we went to Bowood to walk among the huge chestnut trees. Away from people my mother seemed to relax.
Eric and Joy had left. The young men staying with us were usually there for only a short time, often young couples so engaged in their impending separation that they had no time for a young child. I remember only one attractive and intelligent girl called Jane who kept me cheerfully engaged for many an hour until her young man too disappeared to another billet or perhaps forever in one of the bombers that seemed to surround the village on all sides, Lyneham, Wootten Bassett, Yatesbury, every place around us seemed to have an aerodrome. But I remember her as the sort of girl I would myself one day like to have as a mother, ignoring for the moment the reality of the world in which I lived, while not daring to think of having such a wife. But somehow I thought they must be too good a couple to die as my mother told Aunty Marion that this or that man had died.
My mother often went across in the evening to play gin rummy with Uncle Sid and Aunty Marion. It was then that she mentioned that she was getting a new couple billeted on her, perhaps as a politeness as it was their house, but perhaps as the tittle-tattle of war where death was not mentioned, only hinted at. “Poor girl, I wonder what she will do”, or, “Poor chap, he was so polite, such a pleasure to have around”.
These billets had an economic side, as my mother had her rent paid by my father, but the billet money she kept herself, calling it always as with all her little thefts, “her pin-money”. She also took, as she had a right to, their ration books, selling the coupons to Ginger who seemed to have connections with the black market, and economizing on their food. Many of the men preferred to eat in their messes anyway which gave an extra coupon to be used. There was usually a gap before the food ministry demanded the books back, a back which my mother used to her advantage.