By Ian Doucet — Feb 24, 2024

Not So Long Ago

It was very different back then, less than a lifetime ago, like a foreign country. Do they know this, my family? I start to tell them a few things, they laugh and are surprised. I can tell them more, it gets stranger still.

Winter Hill Circular, Maidenhead | Alltrails

This started in a café by the sea, a small group of us. As we talk my daughter is fiddling with her iPhone, she takes a photo of us then says it’s so hard to get photos off her phone. I say, but it’s a phone that can take pictures, better than a party-line! My wife grins and nods, the others are mystified, a what? a phone just to get invitations to parties? My daughter is not a youngster, she’s in her 50s but she’s never heard of party-lines.

Life was quite different not so long ago, how people lived, the details of everyday life. The past is a foreign country, but it is what made us. We should not be ignorant of that foreign country. So, before it's too late for me to tell this story, here are some of my travels in that foreign country.

Chapter 1

Harrogate

There’s not much that I remember about my first four or five years, of course, and some of that is surely mixed with bits I was told or overheard from parents, cousins and others.

I had a pedal car. I used to take all my clothes off, sit on them, and pedal from our house in Kings Road downhill into Harrogate. Presumably just in the summer. Or coast down the long slope to the Majestic Garage (which is no more). Concerned adults and sometimes policemen would bring me back. I remember the doorstep embarrassment of my mother.

I liked to climb on the big red buses, go upstairs and hide under the back seat. The bus would then set off, taking me far afield – to Wakefield once, I was told. I think I kept my clothes on. Police cars brought me back, very good fun. I must have known our address, or was I already known to the police? As a little tyke (not a word you hear much these days).

Around the house I saw some holes against the walls, so I got stones and filled them in. I told Mum and Grandma what I’d done, they laughed and Dad later removed the stones from the drains.

I remember being a source of amusement quite regularly, because I could not say “the door is ajar”, I could only say “the door is a jamjar” and I kept trying but couldn’t get it right. I have no idea what that was all about.

There was a motorbike often parked in the lane behind the house. When not on a bus or naked in my pedal car I could often be found sitting on this motorbike, brmbrming it. There’s a photo of me on it, big grin.

A few houses along, on a corner, lived a doctor and his family. They had an Alsatian dog, which killed their baby in its pram in the garden. I didn’t see this, but I remember it somehow.

Just past this house, across the side road, was a wooded area where I played and made camps and hid. Quite often my parents couldn’t find me. I went back there recently, it’s actually very small.

I remember kneeling on a chair at the kitchen table, watching Mum put a fried egg on top of a pile of mash, my eyes wide, and then the deliciousness of it. Probably the egg of the week. Rationing.

I went to school in my new school uniform. I remember being in a room with a man who was sitting behind a big desk, maybe the headmaster, and my parents sitting there talking to him, presumably about me. What had I done?

Cousin June tells me she came to visit us one day, and went into the dining room where all Grandma’s lodgers were having their dinner. June said, “Ian’s got so many daddies”. They all laughed. For my unmarried mother this probably wasn’t funny.

One winter it was very cold and the Stray, a large area of parkland around Harrogate, was deep in snow. They took me for a walk in it, Mummy and this man called Daddy. There’s a photo of me straining against the reins they’re holding; I’m grinning against the brightness and trussed up in clothes, like a mad little dog. This was probably the terrible winter of 1947.

Uncle Harry (no relation) and Auntie Pia (all adults were uncle or auntie) took me for a walk one day. When they brought me back later I was in Uncle Harry’s arms wrapped in newspaper because I’d shat myself. I can remember them all laughing about it on the doorstep. This was when I was very little, I hope. Perhaps they were practising for when they had a child; at least I didn’t put them off having Sandra.

Chapter 2

A Good Job and £20 On Tick

My dad had a good, secure job, a branch-manager in a hardware chain, Timothy Whites & Taylors. But they still had to borrow £20 to buy some basic furniture for their first house. After they had died I found the bill of sale, if it can be called that, a single pencilled sheet torn from a notepad, itemising the furniture to be paid off at 10 bob a week. Nothing more formal than this, no security, done on trust, which seemed to go hand in hand with not having much money, even a man with quite a good job.

When we moved from Harrogate, in 1950, for Dad to become manager of the Maidenhead branch, we lived first in lodgings, rooms in a bungalow on a corner on Pinkneys Green Road. I think an old lady lived there alone; I remember Rick and me being shushed, and us all tip-toeing around, and a garden full of rose beds. I started to go to Alwyn Road Infants School, a short walk away. A family story is that Mum and Dad walked around the narrow, terraced back streets of Maidenhead, near the police station (since re-located), looking for somewhere to buy a house, Dad saying “this is all we can afford”, Mum saying “I’m not living here”. Later they bought a detached house on Allenby Road, within sight of the bungalow we’d been lodging in. Allenby Road was an unmade track at that time, as was Farm Road which also branched off Pinkneys Green Road. Both had houses at the start then further along were still bounded by fields, a quarry and country lanes. I think houses had started to be built along them in the 1920s and '30s, then halted when war broke out.

This was on the edge of town; it wasn’t really in Pinkneys Green which was a mile or more further up the road, a village being absorbed into Maidenhead by post-war house-building. But Pinkneys Green sounded like a ‘good’ address, and did help to locate where Allenby Road was, as there were no postcodes then, not for decades to come.

Everything was budgeted for and planned in advance, by Mum, along the lines of “you’ll need a new school blazer next term”, which meant she was squirrelling away 5 shillings or so each week. Dad kept a pound for himself but handed over the rest of his weekly pay packet, a small brown envelope listing on the outside gross wage, deductions and nett pay, notes and coins on the inside.

While I was still at primary school, Mum announced that she was going to start working, as a hairdresser, which she’d been previously in Harrogate. It was enough of an ongoing disagreement (“my wife’s not going out to work!”) for us little children to realise what was going on. Eventually, Mum started ‘doing ladies’ hair’ in the very small third bedroom upstairs, that we called the box room. This, working but not leaving the house to work, seemed to be acceptable to Dad, no loss of face.

It always seemed to be ‘perms’, and certainly women-only. I asked, and perm meant permanent wave, she told me; but the ladies kept coming back, so it wasn’t permanent I told her! I was a little smart-arse. I remember the smell of peroxide, and the chemistry lab-type bottles and the “don’t you dare touch” warnings. Women then wore hairnets often indoors, whipping them off if they had to answer the door, and headscarves when they went outside, or daft decorative hats for posh events. They never went out uncovered, which in the current concern about muslim women covering themselves we’ve forgotten. It was about a woman’s sense of decency and propriety rather than religion.

Men wore them too, hats not headscarves. Dad wore a trilby for going to work. A solicitor or a bank manager would have worn a bowler. The porter at Dad’s shop wore a cloth cap. All these signals of small difference, showing where everyone stood in the social order, seemed so important. A racy, cheeky way for women to wear a headscarf was to knot it on the chin; convention observed, with a bit of defiance.

To special events, women wore gloves, usually white and thin, not very warm; men's hands didn't get cold so they didn't have to wear gloves when dressed up.

Mum and Dad drove to Soho in London to buy a hair-drier, a huge black helmet thing on a heavy stand. Mum must have found out where to buy this (how? - no Google), and scrimped together the money for it, then badgered Dad into the drive to Soho (“never again”, he said). A 25 mile journey, but no M4 then, into Slough one end and out the other and so on through all the towns and villages that were becoming the indistinguishable outskirts of London. There were no parking restrictions in those days, no yellow lines. So at least when they pulled up outside the shop they could just park on the side of the narrow city-centre street, in Soho in central London – unbelievable now.

Then she bought another hair-drier, silver this time. Another into-the-lions-den drive to Soho. I think her earnings paid for much that we did later, such as horse-riding, and helped her feel she could make decisions where Dad so often feared to take a risk or venture forth. They were very different characters; she seemed the stronger one, more determined and ambitious, but there was still the convention of wives deferring to husbands, or at least pretending to; I don’t remember her ever openly defying Dad.

A common female ailment was ‘nerves’; if a woman looked unwell, or unusually pale or quiet, or hadn’t been seen for a while, she’d be said to be “suffering from nerves”, and heads would be nodded in silent understanding, whispered conversations in the box room as hair was done and local female health was tutted over. The word 'pregnant' was never uttered, always 'expecting', like I was expecting a nice Christmas present.

The hairdressing affected Mum’s hands, the peroxide I suppose, but she carried on for years. By the time I was well into my teens she was doing far less, and I cannot remember what happened to the hair-driers. By that time I was having girlfriends to stay overnight, and sneaking into the little box room at night where they slept, the hair-driers had gone.

There’s not much to say about Saxon, sadly. It would have been Mum’s idea to get a puppy, “for the boys”. But my parents were not really doggy people. He was never allowed in the house, slept in the garage even in the coldest weather; I remember one winter evening Mum putting an old coat over him which, of course, did not stay on. Dad cleared up his shit in the garden, and generally took little notice of him. When we first got him, Mum asked me what we should call him. I said “Chucky” and she said no, later thought of Saxon which suited his colouring. Rick and I would have played with him in the garden, and we took him on occasional Sunday picnics in the Thicket, where he was tied to the bumper of the car. These outings stopped when rabbits on the Thicket got myxamatosis; the clearing where we used to park is now under M4-Henley link road, bastards.

Maidenhead Thicket seemed huge to me, dense woodland, clearings (secret clearings, of course), many winding paths so easy to get lost on. Robin Hood, adventure! I remember planning to run away and live in the woods, and looked in my wardrobe but couldn’t decide which jerseys, trousers etc to take with me, so forgot about it and went out to play. But years later I did adventure in the woods, on ponies, with Rick.

Timothy Whites & Taylors, hardware chain and chemists, is no more, nor is my Dad. Mum died first, suddenly. Allenby Road now seems to me just one more road in a suburb of new roads dense with new/old houses on the west of Maidenhead. Alwyn Road Infants School, where a little girl offered to show me hers if I showed her mine, was re-developed into posh flats long ago.

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My parents would have received a weekly family allowance of 5 bob (shillings that is, now 25 pee after decimalisation which was way off in the future) for their second-born child (Rick); there was also a new maternity benefit, unemployment pay for six months if a worker lost his job, sick pay and the new NHS of course. These forms of social support and security were brought in as the post-war Labour government started to implement the 1942 Beveridge report which planned a revolutionary new welfare system for Britain, to create a fairer society. Old age pensions had existed for longer. But I remember no talk of ‘benefits’ or a ‘benefits-culture’, and the insecurities that my parents grew up with pre-war were slow to slip out of mind; thrift and caution remained the watchwords of many families in the 1950s; post-war they were slow to lose the mindset of the 1920s and '30s.

Chapter 3

Sugar

Visiting Marlow, not far from Maidenhead and also on the Thames, a very pretty village, olde worlde, we went into a tea-shop. As a special treat for this outing, we had tea-cakes with butter to be put on them, in a separate dish. The butter was in fine curls, and it had white sugar squashed into it. I remember the delicious crunch of something sweet; not much was sweet in those days, and sugar was rationed. Puddings were stodgy and heavy rather than sweet, tapioca (frog spawn, I called it), custard, creamed rice. The waitress delivered the bowl of sugary butter-curls to our table with a flourish, and as a little boy I loved the rare luxury of it.

Most things were rationed when I was young in the early 1950s, so this was a special treat. We had won the war and ships were no longer being torpedoed in an effort to starve Britain into submission, but we still had next to no food or anything else, except very bad weather. Which is puzzling. Britain sent food to Germany, which was also devastated by the war, and for decades we were paying off a war-debt to the USA, while Germany and the countries it invaded received generous Marshal Aid funding (not loans) from USA. That’s why we had rationing for nearly 10 more years after the war-time rationing of 1939-1945; I don’t remember anyone exclaiming about the injustice of this indebtedness, then or now. I was quite hungry. We all were.

Why were we in Marlow? We went out for special treats and sight-seeing quite rarely. I think there must have been a relative visiting, itself a rare event. Maybe it was Auntie Helen, my mum’s older sister, who did visit us in Maidenhead several times when I was young, when she was between husbands. One time she insisted on buying me and my brother a scooter, the type you push along with one foot. We didn’t want it, we wanted bikes. I got a bike when I was 10.

Another time we went out for a special treat when I was about 14, a restaurant above a pub in Maidenhead on the road towards the river bridge. Quite a group of us, but I cannot remember the occasion, probably another relative visiting. Getting into the party mood, I said we should have some wine. Dad looked displeased, slumped down in his seat, and asked for a bottle of wine. The waiter didn’t ask what wine, just brought us a bottle of Mateus Rosé, not only the house wine but the only wine in the house. Those bulbous Mateus Rosé bottles were coveted (certainly more than the wine inside them) because people took them away to weave raffia around and make table-lamps.

Like garlic, pasta, olive oil, aubergines and a lot of other avant garde vegetables, there was very little wine about when I was growing up, until I was a teenager and we all had Lambrusco inflicted on us. I think no clove of garlic ever crossed the threshold of 57 Allenby Road, Maidenhead. I still have relatives, only a few years older than me, who describe Greek food with a shudder as being “greasy”. It’s olive oil, for christ’s sake! They’d prefer lard. However I did carry on liking a good lardycake (not sure if these still exist; I haven’t stumbled across one for quite a while). What was foreign and exotic and daring to our parents has become commonplace fare, and what was normal everyday grub to them seems a bit basic, stodgy, uninspiring today. However, the purpose of food was fuel, not inspiration or delight.

Somehow rationing kept me healthy, though, and I’ve heard that it made for a very healthy diet (except, you might die of culinary boredom). The bread we ate was white sliced, and we ate a lot of it. My job was to butter half a loaf and lay the diagonal slices on a plate in the centre of the table, for High Tea; this meant you got a thin slice of ham on your plate, with a bit of lettuce and tomato, to be followed by jam on as many bits of the sliced bread from the centre of the table as you wanted, all with a cup of milky tea. Yum. I think this was what happened on Sundays after we’d had a big lunch; during the week we had a cooked dinner after Dad got home at about 6.30 or 7.

Laying the table was one of my jobs, putting out side-plates, getting the cutlery and arranging it properly. This for every meal; it's probably only bothered with now in most families when guests are expected in the house. Were we having fish? - get the fish-knives and forks. Fish-knives seem to have become extinct now, like most of the bloody fish in the sea are becoming.

Everyone had a wireless, The BBC broadcasts were our main source of news, coming into our house in plummy voices better than ours. Broadsheet newspapers were not for us; if Dad had taken a Times into work it would have been thought pretentious, but a tabloid like the Daily Mirror unremarkable.

During the Sunday lunch we’d listen to the wireless (a big plug-in set, no transistors then). I remember listening to Round the Horn and being surprised my parents were OK with all the innuendo which I eventually grasped – Much Binding in the Marsh, etc, and all Kenneth Williams’ campness. The Goon Show was also on sometimes, and I never did get the appeal or humour of it; just a bunch of posh blokes speaking in silly voices and thinking themselves hilarious.

‘Wireless’ was one of things that puzzled me as a child. Why was it called a wireless, when there was wire plugging it into the wall? When I asked, my parents just laughed. Actually, I don’t think they really knew how the sounds got into the wireless, except that it didn’t involve wires. The wirelesses were bulky brown things, sometimes set into big bits of furniture called radiograms. The term radio wasnt really used until I was older and they had transistors and were smaller.

When either of us kids were ill, we’d be tucked up in bed and given a bowl of ‘bread and milk’, which was white bread torn up and soaked in warm milk, with a lot of white sugar on top. Probably what they’d been given as children. Basically just getting calories in. Poverty-medicine, from times when so much ill-health was rooted in chronic malnutrition.

Many decades later, I think it was when I had turned 50, it occurred to me that my mother’s older brother George was probably still alive and I decided to visit him and Aunt Marie. I was having one of my periodic find-my-family phases (about which there is quite another story). I cannot remember where I found their address, but I did and wrote to them, hired a car and went to visit. We sat down in their dining room to the exact same High Tea as in childhood, a thin slice of watery ham, bit of lettuce and tomato, sliced bread and jam, cup of tea. This reminded me of being vegetarian in the ‘60s and through to the ‘90s; you’d tell a waitress you were vegetarian and there’d be a look of either scorn or panic, and you’d be offered a sparse salad with cheese grated on top, or an omelette. Actually, it seems not much different in Yorkshire nowadays when I visit my brother, or maybe it’s just the places he frequents.

Mum spoke about Uncle George a few times when I was young, he was “bookish” and "clever"; at the time I heard this as a younger sister’s awe of her big brother, but later I found out that he was indeed clever. I don’t remember meeting him as a child; they lived in Manchester and I got the impression there was a frostiness between Mum and/or Grandma and Marie (Maari, it was pronounced) who he married. When I went to meet them all those years later he chatted about the family. I knew from odd things Mum had said that their younger brother Jack had been killed in the war, in a tank battle in North Africa; this apparently broke Grandma’s health. Uncle Jack’s memorial was, still is, on Harrogate Stray, which we visited sometimes. George told me that he couldn’t serve in the war because he’d lost his rifle finger in a building site accident; I wondered how he felt about that, tied up with losing his younger brother in combat.

He reminisced about where they had lived in Scotland, and being sweet on the vicar’s daughter, “but…” (as if, unspoken, the social divide was too great). He said when his parents, my grandparents, moved down from Scotland (in search of work?) before the war they went to Hull first, where one of his jobs was to go to the library every Saturday to look in the local newspaper for jobs for his father; I’d understood the family was poor, but they couldn’t afford a weekly paper? On marriage and other certificates I’d seen his father listed as Stonemason, then as Gardener, which sounds like he did whatever manual job he could get, and in those pre-war years of mass unemployment almost any job would do. Grandad Ross died before the war; I found one of the last places he, and they, had lived, a gatehouse cottage on a large country estate beside a road out of Harrogate; probably each time it was not only a job, but a job with accommodation they needed.

I relished hearing these snippets of his early life, more than I‘d heard from my parents, and wish I’d talked to Uncle George over the years, before I caught up within when he was a very old man. Mum mentioned him from time to time, but we never visited or met.

This was the background to ‘feeding the family’, the importance of it, the main parental duty. The tradition in our house, and generally in our circle I think, was for a proper cooked breakfast before setting out for the day, a cooked lunch, then a smaller dinner in the evening. At primary school I used to cycle home for lunch, and was expected to be there for lunch even in the holidays; the regularity of mealtimes was part of the fabric of family life. For years Dad used to come home for lunch; maybe the lunch-time hour was a bit short for this, because by the time I was helping him in the shop he and I went to a cafe in town where we had a proper three-course lunch. I remember the place, on Queen Street, being full of other shopworkers having a proper cooked lunch.

I also remember Rick as little boy, three and a half years younger than me, sitting at the lunch table with his mouth full refusing to chew, and Mum and Dad trying to hurry him along. Which seems to have heralded much of what was to come with Rick, refusing to do what was expected of him.

But "clear your plate!" had to do with our parents' experience of wartime and post-war rationing, the necessity not to waste food. Also, manners, which were a big deal in the 1950s (not much mentioned today), a social, almost a moral, code; even the smallest things could be 'bad manners' - a judgment which once uttered was unquestionable, a failure of 'breeding'. Leaving the dinner table before others had finished was bad manners; placing knife and fork neatly together on the emptied plate was good manners, and "may I leave the table?" I remember Mum would sometimes ask "have you had a sufficiency?" which seems ridiculous now, but was all about being 'well-to-do', what she thought an upper class woman might say at the end of a meal.

"Don't lose your temper" was a common reproach, not just in our house. This was about manners too, as was "don't let yourself down" - in terms of the standards you should maintain for yourself.

To an extent, it was a world of pretence, betterment and euphemism; your bottom was your 'btm'; someone was not fat or had a beer belly, they had a 'bit of corporation'; one never farted, one 'let off'.

It would have been thought very rude for anyone, especially an adult, to drink straight from a bottle as is common today; even in the most basic pubs this was not done; to do so in company, would have been taken as insulting.

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Of course what I remember from the late 1940s and the 1950s are fragments, without much context. Writers who lived through the war have revealed a lot more what it was like then, what life was like for people like my parents and others higher up the social scale. Writers such as Mary Wesley who only became an author when she was 70 so was writing in recollection of those times. Others like Marghanita Laski were writing and publishing during those years.

To go shopping you needed your ration book, stating (limiting) what you could buy. Until I was seven everyone also had to have an ID card (Mum had somehow fiddled things so that mine had my stepfather's surname rather than Doucet as on my birth certificate, I realised much later). As well as food, fuel and clothing, furniture was rationed and later still in short supply; ‘utility’ furniture (a basic, standard design) was almost all you could get. Paper was in short supply too; the government dictated paper quality, type sizes and margins, print length etc during the war years. Paperbacks printed in the 1940s and 50s are generally of poor quality and binding, narrow margins and gutters.

Rationing was not the whole story. There were differing views on the post-war Labour government’s welfare policies, including creation of the NHS, but overall there was a general dismay at the state of Britain, victorious but financially ruined by the war and struggling to feed its people. Some saw this as part of a long decline, and there was a surge in emigration to countries like Canada and Australia which offered more hope, prosperity, space, new-ness. In The Far Country there’s an interesting lengthy account of postwar Britain. One of the book’s characters, Jane Dorman, who had emigrated after marrying an Australian at the end of the First World War, receives letters from an aunt in Britain and reflects that:

“there was a menace in all the news from England now… In all her life, and it had been a hard life at times, she had never been short of [meat] … It was the same with coal… she had never had to think of economizing with fuel”.

The aunt, once well-off, then dies in poverty, malnourished, and Dr Morton reflects,

“The standard of living had slipped imperceptibly in England as year succeeded year, as war succeeded war…. In each year of peace the food had got shorter and shorter, more and more expensive… He was now living on a lower scale than in the wartime years; the decline had gone on steadily… Where would it all end, and what lay ahead for the young people of today in England?”

In the book, an official who cut off the aunt’s electricity (reluctantly, for non-payment) says:

“It’s getting worse each year. Sometimes one feels the only thing to do is to break out and get away while you’re still young enough… Canada, perhaps, or in South Africa.”

The main character, Jennifer, works at the Ministry of Pensions, and the author (Nevil Shute) gives a lengthy, balanced discussion between staff there of the pros and cons of rationing, other policies, and emigration, in this context:

“That was a time of strain and gloom in England, with the bad news of the war in Korea superimposed upon the increasing shortages of food and fuel and the prospect of heavy increases in taxation to pay for rearmament. In the week following Jennifer’s return to work the meat ration was cut again... only sufficient for one meagre meal of meat a week.”

In Derek Beaven’s Acts of Mutiny, set in the late 1950s, the extent of migration (driven by poverty and homelessness, and officially sanctioned) and attitudes to it are depicted; on the ship heading for Australia the “£10 migrants” are shut off from other passengers in ‘steerage’ behind a metal wall, and referred to as “white niggers”. The ship, also carrying a secret cargo for the UK’s nuclear testing based in Australia, is a “floating showcase” of English social distinctions, snobbery and hypocrisy; while furtive affairs are had, a couple who openly fall in love are shunned. The non-steerage passengers are colonials seeking retirement anywhere but an England ruined by victory, or young men pursuing better careers:

“...he would build a new life for himself, a better life than the grubby, rainy, pompous, clapped-out little island of his birth could offer”.

The grim post-war situation is also conveyed in a few films of the time, which started the genre of kitchen sink drama, realistic portrayals of everyday working life, which I watched in later years: It Always Rains On Sunday (1947), Look Back in Anger (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). I have found descriptions of grey, difficult years, the small everyday circumstances of individual lives, more vividly in novels and films than in the generalisations of social history; there are exceptions such as Maureen Waller's London 1945 detailing ordinary life at that critical time when the war ended:

"grimy, grey drabness. Buildings black with soot... Mean terraces... After five years of war, the people looked tired and worn... all pervasive smell. It was of coal smoke in the damp chill... Dust so acrid you could taste it in the mouth."

My parents brought us up in those years, but never talked about what it was like for them, and I never asked before they died, too busy with my own life in better times. Did it affect me, growing up in that atmosphere of the unspoken, of secrets, of grim constraint - and (I am still finding out) so many relatives denied? If they had not closed off the past, it would have helped me understand why they were the way they were, and appreciate much sooner how much they were doing for us. Instead, late in the day I have had to do that searching out work, and can only say posthumous thank yous.

Nevil Shute was one of the authors my parents might have had on the lounge bookshelf. He was born more than a decade before them, so his books would have been around as they grew up, and were popular. I never read them, wouldn’t have done because they were of my parents’ generation or earlier. But I find them interesting now, revealing about life then. Some of stories reveal the small details of life in war-time Britain, young men and women growing up, falling in love, facing separation, and death or injury: Requiem for a Wren, Pastoral, Landfall, The Chequer Board. Others portray individuals living through war elsewhere, and going on to make their post-war lives outside Britain: A Town Like Alice, and Beyond The Black Stump. Almost all the main characters are young, and he creates strong female characters.

Chapter 4

Branston

Back then it seemed a bit posher if your house had a name. Our address, 57 Allenby Road, Pinkneys Green, Maidenhead was good enough to get our post delivered, but a little signboard declared that it was ‘Branston’ that my parents were buying, when I was 5 years old, in 1950.

Why not ‘Ketchup’? I don’t remember anyone ever questioning or seeming slightly embarrassed that our house had the same name as Branston Pickle. When my mother and father wrote letters, they were addressed as being sent from Branston, 57 Allenby Road. This was the proper thing to do, and it was important then to conduct oneself in a proper way in the many small acts of everyday life.

In those early years in Maidenhead there national events written about exuberantly in the newspapers and by commentators since, the Festival of Britain in 1951 - "a tonic for the nation, a spectacular cultural event to raise the spirits of a country still in the grasp of austerity and rationing, and undergoing severe social and economic reform". And Queen Elizabeth's coronation in 1953. It seems there were street parties across the nation, but not in Allenby Road, nope, too common, that was for working class places.

Branston was a detached brick two-storey house with bungalows on either side. The front door was set back a little behind an arch, which seemed rather grand. There was a lounge with a bay window (another desirable feature) at the front, behind it the dining room and the kitchen. The kitchen was small and simple, with just space for a sink and drainer beside the back door and a cooker on the back wall; so different in space, facilities, and just comfortableness, from almost any kitchen you’d find nowadays in this country. You wouldn’t want to linger in the Branston kitchen. There was no heating, little light and no nice outlook; the only window looked onto the neighbour’s fence and later onto our new garage wall. Today it seems normal for a kitchen to have a pleasant outlook if possible, and there’s an expectation that it will be a pleasant room to spend time in. But in the 1950s kitchens were just functional, and not to be lingered in.

Upstairs there were two bedrooms, what was called a box room, and a small bathroom. Mum and Dad had the front, bay-windowed bedroom and we boys had the back bedroom; this had a cupboard within which was the immersion tank; they thought this would make our bedroom a little warmer (it didn’t, but it was a nice idea). Every morning, first thing, one of them would come into our bedroom to switch on the immersion heater so there was hot water for washing.

The bathroom was above the kitchen, the same size (small) and the same just-enough functionality: a bath, basin and toilet squeezed together; another room not to linger in. ‘Ensuite’ was light years ahead in the future, a concept unheard of – what, a bog just beside your bedroom? ugh, why? For my mother and father whose parents came from a time when the bog was usually at the bottom of the garden, having the lavatory inside the house at all was a sign of living in modern times (and ensuite is a strange adoption in English usage: it means ‘following’ or ‘next’ in French, like puis, so it is next in a temporal sense not a spatial, next-to-the-bedroom sense. But who cares?).

Our bathroom may have been small, just room enough for one person to turn around in. But we were in the modern majority in having a bathroom at all - in 1967, by the time I had grown up and long left home, a quarter of homes in England and Wales still lacked a bath or shower, an indoor WC, a sink and hot and cold water taps.

I realise now that my parents were ambitious, and confident, in buying Branston. Not only was it the only two-story detached house in a row of bungalows, it was quite modern, built in the 1930s on fields along a farm-track during a short-lived house-building boom. It had pretensions, this house, in what it presented to the world - the arch above the recessed front door, bay windows at the front, the elaborate mantle-piece in the lounge (where visitors would be entertained) – and in what it lacked: no kitchen with a range as the centre of the home. It was decidedly not a working class house, where a family gathered in the kitchen which however crowded, dingy or messy would be the warmest and homeliest part of the house. Instead, Branston had a small bare kitchen, its gathering places designed to be the dining room and the lounge, and thus less homely in my opinion, especially in the days of barely-heated houses. There were fireplaces in the four main rooms, but keeping them all fed with coal and cleaned would have been a major job, and no space for a servant here; expensive too. We never had fires lit in the two bedrooms. So for all its pretensions, Branston was probably quite a hard house to live in.

No washing at the kitchen sink for us, we had a bathroom basin; no tin baths in the kitchen with water heated on the range, we had a proper bath (in an unheated bathroom – you didn’t wallow, you shivered and scrubbed quickly). And no shower, or mention of ever getting one. I don't think we knew of anyone who had a shower, though we probably knew that Americans had them.

For years there were only the coal fires, in the lounge (lit at weekends) and the dining room (lit in the winter evenings). The house was cold; there was ice on the inside of windows on winter mornings. We’d often get dressed under the blankets and the candlewick bedspread. Blankets not duvets; you could pile more and more blankets on your bed but there was a point of no return, where the sheer damp weight seemed to start making you colder. At this time, there were jet engines, sputniks flying through space, nuclear weapons, but our houses still relied on lumps of coal in an open grate for heating. For gods sake. The same as houses in this country had been heated for hundreds of years. Never mind that 2,000 years ago the Romans here had hypocausts, heating the floors of their villas. In keeping-warm terms we were still back in the Dark Ages.

Most of the heat went up the chimney. To get the fire roaring, Dad used to hold a sheet of newspaper over the top half of the chimney, and whip it away just as the heat started to burn the paper. I think this was a common trick, and somehow the man’s job; I never saw Mum doing this. You were only warm if you were close to the fire, chairs were arranged around the fireplace (until we got a telly, which changed everything); armchairs had not only arms but sidepieces and high backs to shield you from drafts and the chill in the rest of the room. But it was nice to see the flames, somehow cheering even if you still felt a bit chilly. And the fire was useful for toast, made by putting a slice of bread on a toasting fork and holding it in front of the coals, then turning it to do the other side. There were no modern electrical toasters in those days, at least not for us. Toasting forks seem to have gone the way of fish knives.

We never burnt logs, only coal. Log fires would have been regarded as a real sign of poverty, a sort of peasant-poverty. Nowadays, people in cities and suburbs with their centrally heated houses have log fires for effect, not essential warmth. My parents would have laughed at this, the height of wastefulness.

Some years later, when storage heaters became popular, a couple of these were installed downstairs. They were better, but hardly a great technological leap forward in home heating, basically just heating stones to give off their heat slowly over the hours, which people have been doing since the dawn of time (and fire). The only difference was that the stones (bricks) were in a metal box, and heated by night-time electricity which was cheaper. They were bulky and expensive to buy (we may have got them on ‘hire purchase’, popular then). The modern concept of insulation hadn’t arrived by the late ‘60s when I was leaving home, and I’m pretty sure the house never had any roof insulation, certainly no double glazing.

But it wasn’t a cold house emotionally. We were kissed goodnight, and well looked after. Christmas was made much of; only one present each but a long sock full of goodies, chocolate, an orange, and a few other things. For a year or two on Christmas Eve they put a small fold-out card table at the bottom of our beds with a couple of mince pies and a drink for Father Christmas when he came down the chimney; after we’d gone to sleep they removed the mince pies, left a few crumbs and guzzled some of the juice. One year I tied a length of wool from my toe to the door-handle so I’d wake up when they came in with our presents. But I didn’t wake up because the door opened inwards.

The Christmas tree was placed in the lounge bay window so it could also be seen from outside; we decorated it with lights (Dad going “drat” as he removed each bulb to find the dud one). Rick and I licked and looped together coloured adhesive strips to make chains we hung on the tree and in the hall. As decorations we also used offcuts of the gold, silver and green foil stamped on the top of milk bottles at the dairy further up Allenby Road. I’d often be sent to buy an extra pint, gold top with all its cream on special occasions, usually silver top, never green top which would have signalled that we were having to watch every penny.

When I was older, 10 or 11, I helped the milkman on his round, running from the electric buggy to doorsteps with the orders he called out, and getting a pint of gold top for my efforts (no worries about cholesterol then; fatty foods were good, energy and warmth). By the 1990s the dairy had gone, too small to be economic and worth more as a demolition site for posh flats.

Mum did get fed up with the very basic kitchen. In the late ‘50s she persuaded Dad to get builders in to make it bigger by knocking the back wall into the outside toilet and coal shed, with a new wide window looking down the garden. Then there was room for a fridge; before, everything was kept in the cupboard under the stairs, which had a small mesh grill to the outside to keep it cool (bloody freezing, actually).

They didn’t get a washing machine until after I had left home; everything was washed by hand (no laundrette nearby, or did they exist then?).

There was a long garden. That’s one of the better things about these houses, they were not built on the squitty little plots that modern houses have. Behind the house was a lawn, shed to one side, hedge to the other, and lower down were large vegetable beds. Mum and Dad built a rockery and pergola between the two, and in the early years planted and grew quite a lot of vegetables there - a carry-over of the war-time habit of families growing food wherever possible to supplement rationing. At the end was a hedge, with a gap where you could look down into an abandoned chalk quarry; it looked very, scarily deep to us. Beyond that were fields and woodland, Maidenhead Thicket. Quite a bit later, when she had got some spare time (how?), Mum laboured away to dig out and concrete a pond to one side; not sure why, it wasn’t deep enough to splash about in much, and it was under trees so was usually green and leafy. I remember Dad telling her she’d have to dig a bit deeper in the middle and put an old milk crate in this drain-away hole, so the pond could be drained later. Isn’t this interesting?

He showed her how to mix the concrete (no small electric cement mixers then; just pile up the sand, stones and cement, mix, add water, turn it over and over). He knew how to do these things, he just didn’t do them very often. Ten or more years later there was still a pile of left-over sand in a corner by the shed; I have a photo of my toddler-age daughter playing in it, sea-side bucket and spade in hand, and big sunglasses.

At first they got a decorator in, and I remember the lower half of the walls in the hall being painted brown, the upper half a paler shade; the brown paint was textured and oiled somehow so the colour varied (deliberately, I cannot recall the name for this technique, but it was quite traditional at the time). Later, they did their own decorating, wall-papering etc, with lighter colours. They also had a modernising phase, where the banisters were boxed in with hardboard on both sides, painted white, and the rather fine frame-and-panel inner doors (solid wood, much prized today) were also given a smooth featureless covering of white hardboard.

Beside the house was a fence with a snicket gate (snicket isnt a word you hear much these days). At the momentous time we acquired a car, they had the fence replaced by a garage, filling the space between the house and neighbouring fence. I remember them discussing whether the garage walls should be double thickness, so that later another storey could be built on top, but this would have cost a lot more and couldn’t be afforded. There were other improvements. One day I came home from infants school to see a man on a ladder throwing stones at cement smeared on the brick walls. Pebbledashing was one of the trends then for improving houses, but all it did was change their appearance a bit. The short drive was tarmac’d, by a work-gang who turned up with a story about cheap tar left over from another job. This was a common con; within a few years the tarmac became loose blackish gravel. Not enough ‘left over’ tar to hold it together.

Mum nagged Dad into putting bookshelves in an alcove of the lounge, just a couple of shelves up to waist height, but he moaned about having to spend his Sunday doing this. Neither of them read much, but over the years Mum accumulated Readers Digest versions of popular books, and probably some classics. I never read any of them, even when I was old enough; they were boring, old-fashioned, grown-up books.

These and other changes to the house marked Mum and Dad’s gradual achievement of financial stability, after they’d started by buying £20 worth of secondhand furniture to move in with.

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Cold houses were normal in those days, and not just because no-one had thought about heating or insulation (in fact, house construction had gone backwards in that respect - thatched roofs were much better insulation than tiles or slate, and nothing had replaced that natural insulation effect). Double glazing? - nope. As the war drew to a close, 1945 started with:

"...the coldest January for 50 years. There were sheets of ice in the Straits of Dover and in London Big Ben froze. Children, wrapped in mufflers and mittens, returned to school to find the ink in the pots frozen. ... On the doorstep, milk froze in the bottles, which did burst. Thousands were suffering from burst water pipes... seriously hindered progress on the repair of war-damaged houses... Trains, which were unheated... [and left people] frozen to the marrow."
– Maureen Waller, London 1945

This continued in the next couple of years, and coal was in short supply (many miners had been taken into the military):

"The freeze started in December 1946, when fuel supplies were already running low, and as temperatures plummeted coal stocks dwindled to almost nothing. [This] ... inspired a fashion for electric fires. Consequently, the Electric became endangered too.... [As a result] Electricity was rationed along with jam and soap and margarine. Factories across the country were forced to close, television was off air, broadcasts on the radio were reduced, also the size and thickness of the newspapers... War was over but life was still a battle with rations even meaner than before... Vegetables had to be dug up with pneumatic drills. Sheep and cattle froze to death."
– Patricia Wastvedt, The German Boy

And similarly with 1948, reputed to be the coldest winter of all. That's when the photo of toddler me was taken, wrapped up and on 'walking reins' (gone out of fashion, good) on a snow-bound Harrogate Stray, Mum and new Daddy smiling behind me.

An English woman married to a German pre-war, and stuck in Germany, returning post-war wrote:

"In England there was so much to learn... I found myself trying to make out just what had happened to my country. England had won the war, the boys were coming home again... and yet it was so very dull... now everyone was simply tired out... the newspapers excelled themselves predicting one catastrophe after another... The coming winter was to be the coldest in living memory; an influenza epidemic of dire proprtions was also on its way... due to a state of near-starvation in Germany, the rations in England could not be kept the same level for much longer."
– Christabel Bielenberg, The Road Home

Len Deighton’s non-fiction book Bomber traces the wartime exploits of an RAF bomber crew (it’s easy to overlook that they are very young men) and then their various individual ways of returning to civilian life post-war, picking up old jobs, finding new careers, resuming young relationships or finding that girlfriends have moved on. But for the different location, these could have been the young adults around when I was a boy in Maidenhead. Nothing was ever said at the time about the recent war-years, so it has taken me half a century to learn about the adult world I was growing up in, who the people were around me and what their lives were like.

Chapter 5

Party-line

Our telephone was on a party-line, the only sort of phone connection you could get back then, years after we’d won the Second World War. I don’t know why. Was Bakelite rationed, or thin copper wire, or were telephone engineers rationed? Bakelite was a brittle, hard kind of plastic that everything was made of (unless made of wood or metal, of course, and even we didn’t have a wooden telephone).

Party-line did not mean that your phone brought you lots of invitations to parties. It meant you shared it with your next door neighbour. It could have been worse, with one phone perched on the garden fence and both us and Mr & Mrs Alexander next door rushing out in all weathers to answer it. No, we neighbours each had a telephone, but connected to the same wire.

This meant there could be a lot of nosey listening into other people’s conversations, and therefore a horror of this in ultra-respectable lower middle class definitely not working class Pinkneys Green. If the phone rang and you picked it up but the call was for the neighbours, or you picked it up to make a call and heard them talking already, you said in deep, bank manager-ish voice “I’m very sorry” and put the phone down quickly. Everyone listened for the click as the other phone was put down, checking that neighbourly proprieties were being observed.

It was expensive to make a phone call, there were no cut-price plans as now, and only one company so no competition. Long distance calls were called trunk calls; they had to be requested through the operator; phone exchanges had banks of operators (always seemed to be women) to make these long distance connections. Companies had smaller versions of the telephone exchange, women who connected your call to whoever in the company you wanted to talk to; what we call direct lines didn’t exist then. Trunk calls were much more expensive and made only in times of some major family event; there was a warning when three minutes had elapsed, to avoid people running up huge bills. I don’t know when this three minute warning was dispensed with, maybe by the time we were all living under a four minute warning, which was quite another thing.

As well as operators to engage with when making a long distance call, there was The Speaking Clock. If you dialled a certain number, a woman's voice told you the time. Why? Did they think we were so poor we didn't have clocks and watches? The voice was actually quite soothing in it's regularity - "at the next stroke the time is... at the next stroke the time is..." I think some people listened to it cos they were lonely, or bored as I was often.

International calls were an ‘almost-never’. Many more letters were written then than now, and it would not have occurred to my parents to make an international phone call; instead, they would have sent an airmail letter - very thin, blue paper which folds and seals on itself to become its own envelope, to save weight as overseas postage was expensive. Barely seen nowadays, but I was still using them to write home to Mum and Dad in the late 1970s (email still 20 years away) while I was living in Greece.

Except for the very rich, there was only one phone line coming into a house, and even ‘extensions’ were rare; we never had a second/extension phone in the house. Of course there were no mobiles, not even dreamed about except in science fiction; Dan Dare had something like a mobile on his wrist, that he used to speak into. Ridiculously far-fetched.

So phone calls were as brief and to the point as possible, not made for a casual chat, let alone anything personal or private. They were made to send or receive important information, and conducted in as near to BBC-English as any of us could manage. My parents spoke as if the telephone company required them to adopt as posh an accent as possible, clipped, very very polite, deferential. The message to convey in your voice was “I am not common, I have High Standards, this is a respectable house.” Even as a boy I winced with embarrassment hearing Mum and Dad speaking on the phone. Once, when we were visiting my cousin June on a housing estate in a suburb of Leeds, the phone rang while only Dad and me were there. He looked a bit panicked, eventually picked up the phone and said in a deep, butler-ish voice, “this is the Dean residence”, to the person phoning June’s second-hand car dealer husband. This became a family-reunion joke for years.

Dad often spoke to strangers as if to 'authority'. One time on a trip to Harrogate, we stayed at a pub in Knaresborough. This must have been before we started staying at cousin June's house on our bi-annual visits to Grandma Ross. In the bar, customers drinking, standing around, he went to the far end of the bar, beckoned the barman over, and said out of the side of his mouth, very discreetly "are you residential?". It sounded so furtive.

Our telephone was in the hall, on the hall-stand. You stood there in the chilly hall and used it when necessary, not for enjoyment. Hall-stands are pieces of furniture invented for this purpose, and probably not nowadays for sale in Ikea. Our hall-stand was narrow and upright, which seems symbolic now I think of it, with a space either side for umbrellas and walking sticks. Telephones then were not private, they were family possessions for family business. The notion of each of us having our own phone and ability to have private conversations - anywhere - as now with mobiles, would have been regarded with alarm and suspicion, underminng of trust within the family. Even years after I'd left home, was married, a child, job and mortgage, we had only one phone in our cottage. So much of a young person's life, even a child's, centring today on their own personal phone would have seemed very odd to my parents, disturbingly secretive, un-anchoring them from the family. I didnt get my own phone (a mobile) until about 2000, and then only needed it for work I was taking on.

I learnt only long after my brother and I had cleared out the house, Dad having just died and Mum several years earlier, that that hall-stand was a precious item of furniture; Grandma had bought it for her large house in Harrogate when she was making a go of having lodgers and then given to Mum when she and Dad made the big move to Maidenhead, as a sort of token of affection and support. Rick and I went through the house like a dose of salts, clearing out and sending anything saleable to the local auction. Even as I was then, thoughtless and worse, had I known I think I would have kept Grandma’s hall-stand. In our family, so little was spoken about family, or feelings, and what really mattered, but our telephone accents were quite impressive.

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Life before mobile phones was less stressful, I am convinced. In books set in pre-mobile times, the plotting and narrative are noticeably different. You could be wonderfully out of contact with other people for as long as you liked; another way in which kids today have lost the freedom we had.

Although mobiles have made a huge difference to how we live, and can do marvellous things (that we’ve never needed to do before), they did not suddenly spring into existence fully formed as they are now. I first experienced a mobile phone (to put it quaintly) as something of a surprise, when a girlfriend and I had stripped off for a bit of lunchtime sunbathing in the garden of the office I worked in, in Alton in the 1980s, and stretched out I heard a phone ringing seemingly from a car parked several yards away behind a hedge. Dressed, I went to investigate and met the guy who repaired cars there; he showed me the mobile phone that was in a car he’d just bought. It was huge, the size of a shoebox, and heavier than a brick; you could pick it up but no way would you carry it around with you. He said the military had them, but the batteries ran out in minutes. I was in my late 30s then, recently divorced.

Mobiles were smaller in the 1990s, but all they did was make and take phone calls, and then only from limited locations. When I lived in London briefly, businessmen would crowd outside Bow Road tube (and other tube stations where there was a mobile connection) making their essential business calls before dashing off out of mobile range. Kids didn’t have mobiles then, they were too expensive, and all the things you can do on a mobile now were still undreamt of.

Chapter 6

Going Up In The World

We moved to Maidenhead and then into 57 Allenby Road when I was five. I loved the wide unmade road for playing in, before there was much traffic and what there was moved slowly over the rough surface. There was no pavement. At the top of the road, where it merged messily with Farm Road (also unpaved) and Pinkneys Green Road there was a field with an old black and white carthorse in it. When walking back from the infants school in my uniform, I used to climb into the field, cross it and then climb out again, rather than walking around it more simply on the roads. In those days, even little kids walked to and from school, and were expected to. One birthday I lost the multi-coloured biros I’d been given while climbing in and out of the field, and spent ages looking for them, unsuccessfully.

Beside the field there was an area of allotments. These seemed to fall out of favour in later years of Thatcherite individualism, but in the '50s they continued the wartime and postwar enthusiasm for communal effort and growing your own food as much as possible. Too many were bought up by developers, but those that remained have became popular again.

A little further down the road, just past our house, there was another field in the triangle of land where Twynham Road branched off. With a couple of horses in it. Before I went to secondary school and acquired an uncaring persona about such things, a church (nasty, modern) was built on the carthorse’s field at the top of the road, and two semidetached houses on the triangular field. I hated these losses. And Allenby Road was tarmac’d and kerb’d and pavement’d; no puddles and no longer wild. Bastards. Each house had to pay towards the cost; I remember the figure of £120, and there was much muttering over garden fences, which was about as rebellious as any of the adults was capable of getting.

Dad was no entrepreneur. His job was secure and I’m sure he got salary-rises, but equally sure he never pushed for these, and resisted Mum’s urging to press for more promotion or a new job. Instead, they saved, and planned, everything from a new school blazer next year to building the garage and getting a car. Mum started hairdressing at home, investing in one then two hairdriers. At her urging, they did toy with other ways of getting on. There were a couple of money-making ideas they and other people experimented with in those years, such as Dad going door to door with paraffin (used for small heaters in houses, smelly but popular when there were so few ways to heat a home). Breeding mink in the back garden, to be culled for their fur, was another idea being promoted, and they considered it; perhaps the logistics, or possible problems with the neighbours and council put them off. Or they realised the only people likely to make money out of this were the suppliers of mink and hutches etc. I can see them now having serious talks in the lounge, him working out the figures with pencil and paper, and concluding too much risk, too little reward. He was probably right. They did OK as they were, carefully and gradually.

They had a few ready-made answers to what life might throw at them: “watch the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”, “never a lender nor a borrower be”, “don’t get above yourself”, “know your place”, “charity begins at home”, “do unto others as you would be done to”, “never volunteer”, “every cloud has a silver lining”, “it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good”... They had a basically Christian morality which was also a social-conformity ‘keep-your-head-down’ morality, but never spoke of religion and I don’t think we ever went to church; I’m pretty sure there was no bible in the house. We didn’t say prayers.

There were two postal deliveries each day; bills were delivered by post and paid by sending off a cheque, or by visiting suppliers’ offices in town; gas, electricity, coal companies all had local offices in each town at that time. Credit cards and online banking were far into the future; it was a cash economy, with cheques for large, occasional purchases. Mortgage payments were commonly made across a building society or bank counter, rather than by direct debit as now.

Because many people were paid in cash, weekly, they did not have bank accounts so could not pay by cheque. Instead, and to avoid carrying large amounts of cash around, postal orders were commonly used - 'sort-of-cheques' purchased at a local post office (of which there were many more than now); postal orders seem to have almost ceased to exist. They were also used to make bookings for hotels, boarding houses etc, being posted in advance as payment or deposit.

As the area went up in the world (that was the phrase then, and everyone’s aspiration, shared but always unspoken), so did we. We acquired a car. Surely this was driven by Mum’s ambition and what she earnt from doing hairdressing at home, but might have taken longer if my parental innocents had had to venture into the secondhand car business alone. By this time cousin June back in Yorkshire was going out with (married to?) Tony, a secondhand car dealer. He got Mum and Dad an old Vauxhall J-type, three gears, big bench seats front and back, with wings over the front wheels, doors that opened forwards, black as almost all cars were then. This was just about the time when new cars were starting to look like cut-down versions of American cars, full-width bonnets but with the same mechanicals underneath, bright colours, all flash and chrome, and crap, unreliable.

Eventually the Vauxhall got a re-spray, which they weren’t satisfied with, and visited the garage in Slough to complain. On the Bath Road, the straight bit of the A4 through Maidenhead Thicket, they got the Vauxhall up to 80mph on the flickering speedometer (couldn’t do that now, there’s a roundabout in the middle of it). Later on, Mum got a fur coat, a lustrous black fur coat, very full and sweeping. I can’t remember the details, but she must have longed for this for ages, saved and been determined to get it, as showing the sort of people they really were, respectable, not common. I’m not sure that she had many occasions for wearing it, but maybe that wasn’t the point. Being common was something to be avoided, but this was about behaviour rather than poverty. How they might have put it was that you could have standards even if you didn’t have much money. I remember them saying that they didn’t want to be rich (that was a bit ‘vulgar’, or to want it was), no, they wanted to be ‘comfortable’.

At that time, a woman called Lady Docker was in the news often, in the context of some scandal like being drunk in public or flaunting an affair; I remember them turning their noses up at this behaviour, she may be rich but she was vulgar.

People would talk of "Going up to Town" - that odd, English reverse-snobbery way of referring to London, a city - "to see a Show". Those were words used by people 'better' than us, and doing that was not for the likes of us.

The fear, overriding everything, unspoken but always in the air, was of unemployment and slipping into poverty; my parents’ generation had been brought up in this atmosphere, and the new post-war welfare system was slow to change these attitudes. This was the context within which everyone like us lived, our lives being the effort to rise above this. One accident at work, a business going bust, a chronic illness, could shatter the family’s survival system. Or it could be ‘character’ - alcoholism, or ‘playing away’ – the impact of sexual infidelity being on the family’s economics as well as social respectability. I remember so much of this from my primary school years, but it lived on, this fear our families all shared. When I was at secondary school, around A levels and me a kind of studious tearaway, I remember a friend telling me his dad had stood him against the wall and told him this (exams, grammar school) was his one chance to make something of himself. His family lived in a new house on a new housing estate, his father’s hard-won achievement and that family’s going up in the world. Those were the parental frames of reference then, which I scorned and rebelled against, but somehow my parents or the times infused me with a work-ethic and intolerance of laziness, without me realising it.

Character was a common frame of reference, and judgement. Laziness was regarded as a sin. Words you'd here then, seldom now, were 'malingering', 'dilatory', 'work-shy'.

Other moralistic phrases of the time were 'everything in moderation', and 'stiff upper lip' - it being as important to keep your emotions in check as to keep careful control of your financial outgoings. Mum and Dad would not have used those two phrases, but if they'd heard someone with higher social standing than them uttering those words, they'd have agreed.

Cycling to primary school I would pass the council house where a schoolfriend lived, on a corner of the new council estate which came after the ‘prefabs’ built quickly straight after the war. Roger’s family went up in the world too, moving from the crowded, semidetached council house to a much bigger, detached house in a ‘better’ area on, I think, Belmont Road, or near there. The measure of his success, status-social climbing in those days, was Roger’s dad becoming president of a local club (yacht club?). As skulking-about teenagers Roger and I went to some social event there, and I saw a portly man in a blue double-breasted blazer and slacks puffing a cigar as he gazed presidentially over the proceedings from a balcony; I laughed at the pose, the pomposity. Roger said, “don’t, he’ll see you, that’s my dad”. So, not bold independent Roger after all.

Only much later have I understood it, that they grew up in the 1920s and 30s when the absence of fathers, brothers and uncles lost in the First World War was still keenly felt, and other family members lost in the TB outbreak that followed that war. When they were young men and women meant to be making their way in the world there was the economic depression of the 1920s and continuing unemployment of the 1930s. Then there was wartime rationing, shortages and an uncertain future, contimuing into the 1950s. Our family life was shaped by this.

With most men away fighting the war, it was women at home who had to deal with the war-time privations, and like my mother they carried the habits of ‘make do and mend’ into their post-war lives where shortages and rationing continued for another 10 years.

Their thriftiness rubbed off on me. That’s why I never started smoking. What a waste of my meagre pocket money. As a teenager there was no chance I’d be able to buy a record player, or get one at Christmas, then afford LPs. So eventually I got a little tape recorder, much more sensible, and recorded from crackly Radio Luxembourg. But later on this sensible attitude faded, and the abandon and wastefulness of my young adult years sat badly with who my parents were. Badly and, on reflection, sadly. Their work brought us freedom, escape from their world. They died before I had it in me to show my thankfulness.

The Vauxhall J-type, the bigger kitchen, the garage and later the fur coat marked a big shift in their fortunes, from the time soon after we arrived in Maidenhead when they both had all their teeth taken out, to avoid the risk of future dentistry costs; this was common practice at the time. Barely in their 40s, and then for the rest of their lives a glass each side of the bed for the dentures, and mumbling to us kids in the morning until they’d put them back in. Today, still with my own gnashers though a bit off-colour and battered after 79 years, I find this shocking.

It was a priggish, prejudiced world too, my parents’ world, and quick to judge. Across the road from us and a few houses down, a single woman and her son, about my age, moved in. She was much spoken about but seldom spoken to. Her husband might have been killed in the war, or in Palestine or Korea or elsewhere that Britain continued to be involved militarily after 1945. But she was a single woman with a child, and was always referred to as “the divorcée”, without any knowledge that this was the case, I think. Never spoken of by her name, or befriended, that I saw. Pronounced “divorcy”, at which I would smirk, since I was doing French at school by that time.

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I’d forgotten, until reminded by something I read recently, the awe and admiration with which the USA was regarded in the 1950s. The later anti-war, anti-Vietnam, anti-nuclear-arms-race subculture had obscured that in my memory, but in the 194os and ‘50s America was regarded as a marvel of technology, can-do, sophistication and Progress. The phrase "it's not rocket science!" became a common exclamation, meaning something was not really difficult, because to us inventing rockets to reach outer space - rocket science - seemed the ultimate scientific achievement.

What reminded me of this was Nevil Shute’s Beyond the Black Stump where a young Australian woman marvels at the bright new world of things-American in magazines, then visits with her American boyfriend; this comes across as Shute’s own admiration of the ‘way forward’, a better future exemplified by America. Nevil Shute was a public school-educated Englishman, who after war service despaired like others of a postwar Britain stuck in poverty and debt. Similarly, in Ellen Feldman’s The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank the main character escapes post-war Europe to 'make good’ in America, and later takes pride in his children also thriving there, the USA as the place of safety and the ‘good life’. In the post-war years, living in war-torn, exhausted and impoverished Europe we were dazzled by American invention, energy and confidence. Part of that was the Space Race, the sheer thrill of those never-before possibilities opening up in our lives. In Britain we flattered by imitation, new cars sprouted tail fins, chrome, white-wall tyres, wrap-around windows, cars were called Zephyr or Zodiac or Cresta, motorbikes called Thunderbolt, Starfire. But we concentrated on styling and surface impression, neglecting engineering advances underneath the chrome, while in Germany and even France they focused on better engineering. You don’t see many Ford Zodiacs or Vauxhall Crestas around now, because they’ve rusted away; planned obsolescence, another thing we copied from the USA. In the late 1960s I bought a second-hand Cresta, less than 10 years-old; it was very cheap because it was falling apart.

Somehow, few people in Britain seem to have held a resentment at the way the United States treated us post-war. During the Second World War, Britain went from being a creditor country to a debtor country, using all its foreign reserves and borrowing from many countries, including from the United States in a Lend-Lease scheme. The U.S. ended Lend-Lease, not only cutting off financial support but triggering its repayment. Britain was on its knees financially, industry had been converted to military production, there was massive war damage to repair, civilian life had far from returned to a normal, productive working pattern. Maureen Waller writes in her social history London 1945:

"The problems facing the Labour Government were immense.... They were not made any easier less than three weeks after they came to power by the abrupt termination of the Lend-Lease agreement with the United States... without consultation... There was a popular suspicion that capitalist America had terminated Lend-Lease so suddenly [in reaction to] the Utopian vision of Britai's new Labour Government, with its socialist principles and promised - expensive - welfare state."

In December 1945 the economist John Maynard Keynes negotiated a massive loan from the United States, at 2% interest over 50 years; it was not all paid off until later than this (2006). Perversely, much of this loan was needed to settle the Lend-Lease debt to the U.S., and as part of the deal Britain had to open its home and Commonwealth markets to American business. Meanwhile, European countries including Germany were receiving Marshall Aid (not loans) from the United States to rebuild their economies.

Between the wartime allies, there was also an element of the United States looking to its future as the world's dominant power, welcoming the decline of the British Empire and helping to hasten that decline. An obedient, in-hock Britain was of advantage to the U.S., an independent economically strong Britain on the world stage was not.

I never heard a word about this growing up, not a word in my parents' conversation, on news programmes, at school. It was as if we were all living in a state of self-inflicted innocence of the realities. What I have heard repeated through all the decades, in crowing terms by politicians, is that Britain had a 'special relationship' with the United States. Yeah, right.

But as a boy I shared the excitement about space exploration, and this innocence was unspoilt by any knowledge of our huge debts to the U.S., nor by McCarthyism or what the United States was doing in Central America or elsewhere, the petty dictatorships propped up to serve U.S. interests. Newspapers and programmes in the 1950s and early ‘60s steered clear of anything controversial, and politics was treated in a narrowly national and party-political way. I think it wasn’t until the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was well underway that a more critical and sceptical view of the United States became widespread.

Chapter 7

Make Do and Mend

I grew up at a time and in the large part of the population which had a fear of falling into poverty and also a pride in rising above it, most of all a pride in hard work and being careful with money.

It made family life hard work; every penny was watched. This was the way of life for my parents in the ‘50s and had been for their parents in the more difficult years before. The paper from packs of butter was kept to grease cake tins, socks were darned (how many do that now?). Jerseys were knitted, never bought; old jerseys were unpicked to re-use the wool. My mother’s evenings were spent needles in hand or at the sewing machine, all skills passed through generations of women, ever-busy, literally home-making. Curtains were never bought ready-made. I wore clothes my mother had made, or scrimped and saved for if she couldn’t make them, like school uniforms or shoes which were a major expenditure to be budgeted for just because they couldn’t be made at home. Sheets were ‘turned’, which now must be explained: sheets were cut down the middle where they had worn most, so the less-worn edges could be sown together and postpone the cost of buying new sheets. The sheer time-consuming labour of this!

People like us had relatively few clothes, thought of as those that were everyday wear and those that were ‘for best’. Children’s clothes were often ‘hand-me-downs’ from older siblings and neighbours; it was an unusual event for a younger child to have a new item of clothing bought. Clothes were taken care of and made to last; the qualities and uses of different fabrics was considered; I don’t hear these names mentioned much now, they seem exotic: barathea, gabardine, calico, flannel, winceyette, serge, terry, seersucker… Denim is one fabric which was never mentioned and is everywhere now.

Men often wore long johns in winter, and not only for working outside because workshops and factories and garages were usually unheated. We wore vests almost all the year; T-shirts had not yet reached us from the USA nor those strange skull caps with peaks.

There was a finely graded and sharply defined class system, which has since blurred, and a fear of falling on hard times, but how people lived then was not simply driven by these things. Make Do and Mend was also a virtuous way of life, not simply forced on us by economics and class. And this ethos stretched across class boundaries, surprisingly so. Where now it is commonplace to buy all your clothes, often for novelty rather than for usefulness, and to accumulate a great many of them, my parents’ generation and their parents made many of their own clothes, as did well-off upper middle-class families. In Invitation to the Waltz set in the 1920s, for example, the Curtis family are rich enough for the husband to have given up work, well connected enough to be invited to dine with local gentry and for the daughters to attend hunt balls and ‘come out’ as debutantes. But the daughters have learnt to sew, they make some of their own dresses and underclothes; a 17th birthday present for Olivia is a roll of silk to make into a fine dress. The mother is much younger than her husband but seems to have accepted the maternal duty of passing on to her daughters the skills of home-making, while the males of the household (her husband, his errant brother and the young son) seem simply unengaged in the busy female business of living; they just seem to stand around, get in the way. As well as the physical work, Mrs Curtis also sets the standards of behaviour and language for her daughters.

Prosperous and middle class though the Curtis’s are described as being, their social standing is below that of the Heriots with their hunting and hunt balls, and further below Lord and Lady Spencer; these distinctions are evident in all they do. But ‘character’ crosses these important class divisions; Lady Spencer likes Mrs Curtis, thinks well of her and how she is bringing up her daughters, and is genuinely friendly and supportive across the class divide.

By the 1950s, thirty years after the setting of Rosamund Lehman’s novel, much had changed; very few families had nannies, maids or governesses as the Curtises had, nor lived in houses large enough to accommodate them; less deference was given to the better classes, and daughters were directed less to follow in their mothers' footsteps. But mothers of the 1950s were still the home-makers and the families’ fortunes rested on their physical home-work as much as the husband’s earning of a wage. And once the wage had been earnt and they had come home, men were still pretty uninvolved around the house; my dad was not unusual in this. DIY had yet to be invented. ‘Character’ remained as that hard-to-define quality which transcends class barriers; it seems not much referred to these days.

By the time Rick and I were well into our teens, Mum was doing less of the scrimping and saving; she was earning her own money from hairdressing and busy outside as well as inside the house, with our horse-riding and other activities. She still knitted us jerseys, but most other clothes were bought, and school uniforms made that necessary. The consumer society was emerging, people wanted more; a car and a summer holiday had become reasonable expectations for people like us (but not yet a foreign holiday). The valuing of hard work and (good) character remained, and had become fairly ingrained in me. Not that I’ve always lived up to my own high standards.

The sewing machine was an essential piece of domestic equipment in many homes over the generations. Times changed, there was less imperative to make do and mend, more clothing was available more affordably than before. As Rick and I became adults so much had changed as to make much of what Rosamund Lehman described seem quaint and distant; but when I was married in my 20s and we had a child, one of the first things we bought was a sewing machine, to make (for my wife to make, of course) many of our daughter’s clothes.

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Many of the books that have revealed to me the times I was brought up in are fiction, but that does not make them unreliable sources. Rosamund Lehman’s characters (and Shute’s, and Wesley’s, and Laski’s and so on) are fictional creations but she makes them believable by setting them in circumstances that the reader of the time would recognise. And when you examine it, a lot of purportedly factual social history is fictive to a degree.

Memoirs are maybe the best source of 'what life was like'. Such as Nina Bawden's In My Own Time:

"Although my parents were not poor in any real sense - we always had clothes and warmth and food - my father had a fear of poverty that to some extent infected us all.... He was a marine engineer... a chief engineer by the 1930s, but no one's job was secure in those days... We only had one family holiday... He had been born in the East India Dock Road and left school at eleven, worked as an apprentice in the daytime and went to evening classes...".

Pre-war, Nina's mother bought a small house on the 'never-never' (term for long-term loans with an affordable weekly repayment, ignorng that the interest compounded to a lot eventually), and when her father returned from working away, instead of being pleased he was "panicked" by the responsibility - what if the roof blew off, chimney fell down, how would they afford the repairs?

Class distinctions have blurred today, though they haven’t disappeared, are perhaps more potent because of their slipperiness and deniability. Invitation to the Waltz is revealing of how clear-cut, important and generally accepted class distinctions were in previous generations. They’re also evident in Rose Tremain’s memoir of growing up in the 1950s (Rosie), and so many accounts of those times; in Doug Gold’s account (The Note Through The Wire) of his father-in-law’s war-time privations as a New Zealand soldier in the Second World War, then as a POW and escapee: the awful snobbery he faced in post-war Britain, with added disdain for a colonial who’d just helped Britain win the war. Notably Patrick Hamilton’s (nasty, put-downable) The West Pier depicts not just the major distinctions between upper, middle and working/lower class with all their opportunities for condescension, exploitation etc, but also fine distinctions within the working class (“the submerged classes”) which the people trapped in these invisible prisons uphold and maintain and inflict on each other: the beautiful Esther is ashamed of her father’s lowly occupation, thinks of the area she lives in as a “near-slum” and will not let any of the public schoolboys picking her up on Brighton Pier escort her home but will entrust one of them with her savings, while her father as a railway porter reliant wholly on tips considers himself as having risen above his own father.

Class was the structural weakness that ran through Britain in those times, like cracks in a piece of timber. Class was myriad distinctions of ‘better than’ and ‘worse than’, keeping each person in his or her place, regardless of personal qualities, so much based on accidents of birth, the level of society you just happened to be born into; you might not be absolutely trapped there, but it was where you started from, struggling against the social pressures of class, of who you were born to, of how you spoke and dressed. You might be able to 'rise up', 'better yourself', but this involved buying into the fine distinctions of class, and apeing them.

This was the class-ridden world that formed my parents as they grew up:

"The pre-war world in which he had spent his childhood and youth had things cut and dried: people were clear who they were and where they belonged... This was a world divided into us and them, with many subtle and significant subdivisions... Speech and dress were defining factors; you listened, looked and allocated. To be working class was to recognize your own complex society, with its hierarchies and gradations... To be middle class was to see yourself amongst the chosen, but to be conscious of your own society's treacherous quicksands - the codes and rankings."
– Penelope Lively, Consequences

The best depiction of social class in those times that I’ve read is Marghanita Laski’s A Village. In the course of a very good story, this novel shows the finely graded social distinctions which structured village life in the 1930s, their blurring during wartime when they became more negotiable, and how class distinctions in the structure of society did not disappear but took new forms post-war, as a young couple defy convention and set forth optimistically in the changed circumstances of post-war Britain. Rather like my parents, a bit older than the novel’s couple, newly married, heading off from Harrogate to make a new life in Maidenhead. Uncle Harry and Auntie Pia seem to have done the same thing, moved away from old lives and started anew, with a sense of freedom even if money was tight.

Chapter 8

Television

The first televisions we got were rented, which everyone did instead of purchasing because they were expensive and unreliable, and new, better models were coming out regularly. There was a small screen but the TV set was large and boxy, as deep as it was wide. Remote controls had not been invented – you had to get up to switch channels.

There were only two channels, BBC and what my class-conscious parents called “commercial”, which was ITV, and thought to be more downmarket, unserious. Better people watched the BBC. Programmes ended earlier than they do now, and ended with the national anthem, as films ended in cinemas. No, we did not stand up at home for the national anthem.

Before we got our first television, in the mid 195os, dinner was eaten in the dining room, with conversation over the dining table, or listening to the radio, followed by playing cards or reading. Then early to bed because there wasn’t much else to do, and in winter it would be getting cold, the coal fires going out and the house had no overnight heating. Getting a TV quite quickly changed all that. It started off being in the dining room but was soon moved into the lounge which then was used much more. Meals started to be eaten off trays while we watched telly, silently except for the TV soundtrack and canned laughter. As a little boy I really thought if we could see them, on TV, they could see us, and for a time was careful what I did in front of the television.

The television replaced the fireplace, which had quite a nice mantlepiece, in the lounge, as the focal point of the room. About the same time we got storage heaters which made evening hours of inactivity in front of the telly more comfortable than they would have been before.

The aerial, a shape of twisted metal wire with magical properties, was sat on top of the TV, and was turned and shifted along when the picture disappeared or went fuzzy, which often happened. Another trick was to jolt the TV when there was interference; this punishment often worked. Although thumped sometimes, televisions were carried and moved with great care because they were delicate as well as expensive, or rather the long bulbous cathode ray tube sticking out the back was. Occasionally these would overheat and explode, quite an event in a family’s quiet evening in the lounge, more drama than anything actually on the box in those days.

The pictures were black and white, of course. When colour sets came in the rental was a lot higher, and it was quite a while before colour became the norm. Much later remote controls started to be supplied with the TV. We treated these little miracles with great care. This stuck with me; later, as an adult, it really annoyed me to see kids throwing remotes around, letting them be knocked off tables and chairs, these precious marvels

So our evenings became bathed in a flickering blue light never seen before; the street looked different too, blue-lit front rooms shining out in summer evenings before it got dark and curtains were closed.

This was the start of images predominating over words, our evenings gazing at pictures that had no concrete, tangible existence, and were momentary, ephemeral. This hadn't happened before. A big thing that, the change in everyday shared existence, in 'what is real'.

How we socialised was also changed by television. On the rare occasions we had visitors the TV was not switched off, and conversations were had side by side while my parents’ eyes remained fixed on the screen. I remember being embarrassed about this as I got older. Later, around O level time, visiting a friend’s house I was surprised to see a TV which was actually not on. I couldn’t take my eyes off this blank screen. In our house the TV was always on.

When my first girlfriends were visiting, after supper (not dinner, now), we’d slip out of the lounge to the dining room for some heavy canoodling, then come back, unremarked by Mum and Dad watching telly. Squashed into an armchair we’d carry on a bit, furtively. I never knew if they realised, or were deliberately ignoring the sly slurpings and squeakings.

TV programmes were mostly pap, endless cowboy films without an inkling of the complexity and cruelty of the American West. Quizzes like What’s My Line?, which my mother liked, or so-called variety shows like Billy Cotton’s Band Show, which had musicians blacked up as negroes. I think there were fewer dramas or thrillers than now. Dixon of Dock Green is the only one I remember; it always ended with a homily about observing the social norms. Television meant that on 31 December the New Year was counted down and welcomed virtually, and therefore more impersonally, not with friends coming together in the same house as they had before.

When I was married, in the 1970s, we had a small Sony TV, which we insisted gave a better picture than the big screens becoming available then. There was still far less programming available than there is now. There’d be just a couple of programmes we’d be sure to watch, such as The Wednesday Play, which became Play for Today (that title indicates how little drama there was on TV), The Old Grey Whistle Test, Monty Python, and TW3 – That Was The Week That Was. So, youngish iconoclastic programmes. We didn’t watch much, certainly not every night; most of what was on was conventional/parental, boring and not ‘us’. The rest of the time we read, or played Scrabble, or I was busy putting up shelves or making other improvements to the cottage.

Now, half a century later, we (a different ‘we’) still prefer a smallish TV so it doesn’t dominate the room. Often we’ll be watching different programmes on laptops, live or on catch-up, via the internet (Dad: “the inter-what?”, had he lived this long). But still we tend to sit together at 9 most evenings to watch a crime drama or something similar on TV, and spend more time reading than watching. Reading seems more active and engaging; I can nod off watching something imagined for me on TV long before I nod off reading a book.

With wall-size TVs and wall-to-wall telly, wall-to-wall channels and programming, not much chance of a revolution now; bread and circuses to sedate the masses seem feeble by comparison.

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The coming of TV changed how we ate our evening meals, how we used the lounge, and cut down family conversation, but it did much more too. Instead of spending our relaxing time in concrete ways with tangible things - books, cards, games - we gazed at a flickering screen, for hour after hour. There was also a shift from the auditory to the visual: where before we might have listened to the radio, which involved use of our imaginations, we watched - just watched what had been imagined by others and presented to us. The dominance of the visual has become so pervasive that even radio programmes are now referred to as 'shows' - people interviewed on radio now say "thank you for inviting me on your show", without anyone remarking on that peculiarity, that the radio programme has listeners not watchers.

I think this is a big change in how we function, though I don't hear it commented on, and it is quite recent. To think of evenings not spent watching 'the pre-digested, pre-imagined' on TV does not hark back to pre-war or some other very distant time; as a young couple my wife and I spent more time in the evenings reading, playing Scrabble, playing records or doing bits of DIY than having the TV on, and I don't think we were unusual in this.

Chapter 9

Dad

He went to work, he came home, and that was it as far as he was concerned. That’s an exaggeration, so it’s unfair, but not much of one. He was my stepfather (I discovered later), but he was Dad to me.

Dad was punctual and diligent at work, he got to Timothy Whites & Taylors, hardware store (and chemists), by about 8.30 ready to open at 9, and closed at 6pm, including Saturdays. Wednesdays were half-days, which applied to almost all shops then, but now only small family businesses seem to have half-days. If 'Tims' was open, Dad was there, and for longer when there was annual stock-taking (Dad walking around with notepad and pencil, for hours - no barcodes for tills to automatically stock-take), and when new stock arrived or the displays were being shifted, such as for Christmas or the annual sales. So he worked pretty hard, held onto the job, and did his bit for the family.

Dad was not unusual in this clockwork regularity of going to work and coming home. It was the pattern of day-to-day life for everyone. From early morning to late afternoon the roads were empty of men, none or very few to be seen, maybe just the postman or milkman; the only people out and about were women, headscarved, going shopping or taking pre-school children out to 'get some air' (very important). At lunchtime, of course, in towns shop- and office-workers flooded out for their break; there was very little of the modern half-break, half-work eating of a sandwhich at your desk over the lunch-break. Pubs and cafes did a good lunchtime trade. Schoolchildren too, were off the streets weekday mornings and afternoons, completely; there were truant officers (are there now, when really needed?) but they had an easy job - if a kid was seen on the streets morning or afternoon he was probably a truant and picked up. If any of us played hooky, and we did, we had to hide at home or in the garden shed, no chance of brazening it out, and no crowds to merge into.

Shops closed promptly at 5.30 or 6pm. There was no late-opening. If you hadn't bought what you needed by then, tough, you had to wait til the next day. Except for alcohol; off-licences were open in the evenings, so adults could by booze and cigarettes in the evenings. But in general after the shops had closed and people had got home, all was quiet, there were very few people out and about in the evenings.

That was weekdays; all so much more structured and uniform than the haphazardness of daily life today, and better, I think. Sundays were different; there were no shops open at all, none of today's family-visits to DIY mega-stores, garden centres and supermarkets, which seem to have become the modern form of weekend family recreation. That would have been frowned upon, the commercial-ness of it, because Sundays were home-time and family-together-time, a bit of pottering about in the garden, going for a walk, maybe re-decorating a bedroom, church for those so inclined. I think that way was better for children too.

At home, Dad had to be nagged by Mum to do anything out of the ordinary, such as putting up bookshelves in the lounge alcove, or decorating periodically. I cannot think of anything else he did, though there must have been more. It was not Dad who took the initiative, or saw how the house could be improved. Although 57 Allenby Road was not an old house, and it was detached, two and half bedrooms, it was pretty basic and ‘just enough’. The kitchen as it was when we moved in would shock anyone now. But I think Dad thought it was fine and he’d have not done much with it, on his own. Having seen where he grew up with his parents in Plymouth, an even more basic, small terraced house, and imagining the digs he’d lived in until buying this, his first house, in his mid-30s, I’m not surprised. It was probably more than he thought he’d ever have.

It was Mum who saw the potential in things, had the imagination and ambition he lacked. She’d decide what could be done, think it all through, then start a campaign of persuading Dad. As well as extending the kitchen she got him to agree to having the dining room window replaced with French windows opening onto the lawn; this was much later. (What do the French call what we call French windows?)

Mum wanted to move up in the world, though she wouldn’t have put it in those terms; ‘social climbing’ was frowned upon, something other people did. She saw a house for sale on the Bath Road, between All Saints Avenue and Castle Hill, where there are large three-storey detached houses set well back from the road, and wanted us to buy it. Dad said no, and that was that, he couldn’t be persuaded, it was a reach too far for people like us; one of the few times he put his foot down.

We didn’t buy that rather grand house, and it later became a dance school; so, a pretty big place. I remember it as being advertised for £2,400 or £3,000; I don’t know why I remember the two prices, but of that order anyway. Pity Mum didn’t get her way as she usually did; when we inherited, Rick and I would have had a lot more money to spend unwisely.

There was another thing Dad resisted and won. There was a time when she kept urging him to push for promotion to Area Manager. He refused, knowing what he was good at and not so good at, and was right about this. I remember the blustering back-slappery of the Area Managers who used to visit his shop, and that was not him. He didnt know how to josh with 'the boys' (men), share a few dirty jokes.

Dad was thin and fair, unlike me. He had a moustache, as many men did then; these moustaches were almost always small and trim. Beards were seldom seen, reserved for grandfathers, sailors and explorers if anyone, or tramps (who would now be called ‘the homeless’, but these guys did literally tramp the roads from town to town; nobody then thought about their mental health). Men’s haircuts were all the same, short back and sides; although hair was cut short, it was slicked down with Brylcreem, especially if you were an office worker ('white collar') or going out socially. Unless you were a manual worker, a tie was always worn; it was not until I was a teenager that Dad would not wear a tie on a Sunday. These were male uniforms of distinction and at the same time conformity. And disguises; at the most, a slightly out of the ordinary tie could show some individual taste.

Dad had poor digestion, from his time in a prisoner of war camp. He was loving but not demonstrative. The habit was for my brother and I to be kissed goodnight, but that was it, there was no hugging and little rough-and-tumble with Dad. What play there was was set up by Mum. She started going to auctions, and at one she bought a huge set of toy rubber bricks, like modern Lego, but rubber, and great fun. Dad got down on the floor some Sundays and joined in making things with these bricks. Another time she bought an inflatable dinghy, a large ex-wartime thing with oars and even a mast and sail. In the back garden Dad worked out that he could inflate it by fitting the hose into the back of the vacuum cleaner so it blew instead of sucking – smart! On summer Sundays we’d sometimes strap this to the roof of the Vauxhall and drive to Hurley where you could park by the river and then paddle about in this dinghy, and swim. I don’t remember any worries or restrictions in terms of safety, risk etc. We must have looked quite a sight driving off with this long yellow dinghy on top of the car, adventurous and a bit unconventional in don’t-stand-out Pinkneys Green. My memories of Dad don’t quite fit with the impression of him I’d formed by the time I was a teenager and took through my adult life, as being just passive and unimaginative. With Mum, he could be quite confident and adventurous sometimes. Very different, they made a team.

He had a sense of humour, laughed at radio and TV comedies; the American military comedy Sergeant Bilko was one of his favorites.

He could be selfish, though. Mum developed varicose veins which must have become painful because eventually she had an operation for them to be ‘stripped out’. I cannot remember the time while she was in hospital but when she came home she had to take care and particularly not let her legs get too hot while they healed. They had an electrical blanket on their bed, and it was winter. I overheard Mum later muttering to Dad that he knew he shouldn’t have switched the electrical blanket on and look what it had done to her legs.

And prejudiced, in that stupid superstitious way, sub-rational, sub everything. When my wife contracted TB many years later, I overheard him saying to Mum “there’s something wrong with that family”.

How she got tuberculosis we never knew; probably eating so little to become Twiggy-ish made her vulnerable. But eight months in a sanatorium, leaving a toddler to care for, my job made part-time, a half-renovated cottage, were a big deal for us, and “that family” (my then-wife’s) helped a lot more than mine did. The memory that sticks with me is my little daughter sitting at their kitchen table, making herself drink the nasty medicine (isoniazid powder, in milk, preventatively) out of sheer trust because her daddy was telling her she really must, darling.

Dad seldom swore, and he got exasperated rather than angry. “Drat” was the most usual expression, or “ruddy”, a softer version of “bloody”. In extremis, he might say “bloody” or “bugger”, but more often “blinking”. There was no effing and blinding, and I think this was not just a not-in-front-of-the-children thing. One time when I was maybe 12 or 13 we talked about something in the news; I remember us standing in the lounge by the fireplace and TV and I said “Dr Fuchs” pronouncing the name as fucks rather than fooks; they both stopped, looked, then carried on as if nothing had been said. Dr Fuchs was an Antarctic explorer of the 1950s. Mum never swore, that I remember.

That bit of conversation about a topical event was rare, though. I remember no mention of what was going on at the time, emigration to Australia, the ‘£10 migrants’, or the forced migration of orphans which went on into the 1960s, or any of the other newsworthy events of the '50s and '60s. Korea? Suez? Atom bombs? Cold War? Hungary? Berlin? Philby Burgess & Maclean? Cuba? - nothing was said at home. Nor at school, education as distraction from what’s going on around us. I have learnt of these events only many years after I lived through them. My parents watched the BBC uptight news, read the redtop Daily Mirror and voted Conservative. When I was 12ish I asked Dad why he voted Tory but read a Labour-supporting newspaper. “Nah”, he said, “you can’t believe anything you read in that.” Bonkers.

My parents voted on habit and feeling; who were other people like them voting for, which party was it safe and respectable to vote for - not safe in the sense that they'd be at risk, but safe in the sense that if anyone asked them there'd be no raised eyebrows at voting Tory. I remember no discussion of policies, of political priorities, of party leaders, before election time. If asked, I think they might have said Labour was the party of strikes, and shaken their heads at mention of trades unions, with no further thoughts on the subject.

We always called them Mum and Dad. Even in my rebellious teenage years it would never have occurred to me to call them Flo or Ron, though of course we heard them refer to each other that way. “Flossie” was what he called her when he was in a good mood and joking. He died before it became a common, unremarkable thing to buy water in small plastic bottles, but had he lived to see this, I know what his response would have been, a disgusted, aghast “Gahd! they’ll be trying to make us buy air next.” That was very him. I agree, and still don’t buy bottled water, just re-fill a few old bottles from the tap.

He wore suspenders to hold his socks up, which seemed weird to me. At some social event, there was a knobbly knees competition (which was unspokenly men-only). Mum said “Go on, Ron”, and he shuffled forward with his trousers already pulled up to his knees, sock-suspenders and knees displayed, shouting “look at these! look at these!” He won, so embarrassing.

Dad and I talked a bit about boxing when it was in the news. Rocky Marciano was the heavy-weight champion around that time. There was a French boxer called Georges Carpentier, and Dad would always pronounce the ’s’ in his first name, Georges, as if this man was somehow plural. I said to him many times that the ’s’ isn’t pronounced but every time he’d say “Georges”. He had been stationed in India during the war, at the start, I think, and told me that it was really hot there but the Indians ate really hot food called curry, which amazed him. Dad could be quite literal-minded, or maybe it was bloody-minded. Capital punishment was in the news too, with debates on whether it should be banned (it was eventually, in the late 1960s). Dad’s view on this was “an eye for an eye, it’s in the Bible”. I told him that this was the Old Testament not the New, to which he just shrugged, a complex moral issue summed up in a few words like a Christmas cracker motto. It’s a good job the capital punishment question wasn’t put to a referendum like Brexit, or we’d still be hanging people.

He had some funny habits, which he didn’t seem to realise were a bit odd. When we were driving anywhere new and were unsure of the way, he’d stop and call over to some kid nearby, “hey Jimmy where’s…?” The boy would ignore him or look around puzzled, because his name (probably) wasn’t Jimmy. Another thing he’d do if he was lost was to follow the car in front. I remember Mum asking him one time why we were following that car. He said, “well they might be going where we want to go.”

He pronounced some words oddly. Instead of saying beautiful, he'd say "bootiful" - though he seldom spoke about beauty, or booty.

When we had a car, he didn't take it to work, leaving it for Mum and catching the bus instead. I don't remember him ever cycling to work, but a lot of people did then. There was no special cycling gear, no Gore Tex, and no helmets, just waterproof clothes - and, often, yellow sou'westers - conical hats with large brims echoing Britain's naval past and surprisingly effective. Britain's naval history was still present in people's minds; many families had a father or older relative who'd beeen in the navy. On the radio you'd sometimes here the haunting tune "for those in peril on the sea...", and people would still talk hopefully, humourously of the riches they'd enjoy "when my boat comes in..." - a leftover from this country's maritime past (and triangular trade/slavetrading past). Equivalent now to "when I win the Lottery".

They used to take us to the swimming pool in Slough in winter, there not being a heated one in Maidenhead. One of the few arguments I heard between them was driving back in the dark, Dad telling Mum she was changing gear at the wrong speeds. He said you should change up from 1st gear at 10mph, from 2nd at 20mph, from 3rd to 4th at 30mph. This stuck in my mind as being typical Dad and much later I thought, what, with all cars/engines/gearboxes? And the Vauxhall had only three gears, which were ‘long’ – you could pull away on the flat in 2nd gear. Dad was in the REME in the war, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, but he didn’t give the impression of having much practical know-how, or the inclination, or maybe he was just an easiest-option person. He knew how to mix cement and concrete when he had to. But he’d never have taken on the work of extending the kitchen, or putting in the French windows, and after some initial (so-called) improvements, like panelling the nice doors and banisters in Branston, he settled into not doing much to the house while we were there. The modern habit of pretty much continual home improvement and DIY was beyond him. Building the stable at the end of the garden for our first pony was probably the biggest Dad-DIY thing he did, and he did do it willingly, as I remember, bringing home scrap wood from the shop.

I remember asking if I could help with odd things he was doing around the house, like the lounge shelves, but he said “no, you’ll only make a mess”. He didn’t let me help with anything practical or handyman-ish like that, so it’s surprising I got into it in my early 20s, or had to, being hard up and having a young family.

We didn’t do a lot in the way of father and son stuff. I remember going with him to the cinema once to see Ice Cold in Alex, and his disappointment; somehow the film didn’t match his memories of being in the 8th Army in North Africa during the war. Maybe it was too exciting, dramatic. I asked how he came to be captured and had to see out the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. He said he and some friends were walking along a wadi in the desert and came across some Germans, so they put their hands up. Great, my dad the hero.

But this was an isolated bit of personal information. Like all the adults, my parents just did not talk about the war or refer to it in any way, even though it was recent and its effects were still present; we had ration books and some rationing went on for nine or ten years after the war. Men wore their old army clothing for gardening, decorating and mucky work. But not a word about the war… sometimes there seemed an unspoken camaraderie among men of war-service age, unspoken because nothing needed to be said. Fine, but not so fine for families and children who might want to know something of what they’d gone through.

Dad was a single child. His own father worked in the Plymouth dockyards, a major employer at the time. I remember his dad as very old and white-haired, gentle-seeming, sitting quietly in the terraced house on Pennycross Park Road, Peverell. He died while I was still very young. His wife, Dad’s mother, was younger and very bossy. I can imagine Dad as a boy and young man being completely under his mother’s thumb, a thin, bony thumb. They lived in Gibraltar originally, with his father working in the dockyard there. That house in Plymouth was very cold, and I remember Mum’s dislike of it, though growing up in Scotland and Yorkshire she must have been used to cold houses. Maybe it was the emotional cold, as well. But as a little boy I was fascinated by the house, especially the front parlour, kept for best and seldom used. The small room was full of dark furniture, glass-fronted cabinets with leather-bound books inside, and many pictures and old photographs in frames, pictures of cannibals, of Stanley striding through the jungle to meet Livingstone, of old ships on stormy seas. There was a piano never played, draped in doilies and other pointless ornamental bits of cloth. The most that ever happened in that room was dusting. At the back of the house there was a narrow garden, with a raspberry bush I remember standing in the sun eating from, deliciously.

One of my earliest memories is of a long, dark and crowded train journey, with Mum and Dad; I was very little, and put to sleep in the luggage rack above the seats. This may have been in the long, bitterly cold winter of 1947 when victorious broken Britain froze; I have a mental picture of huddled overcoated figures crowded on seats in the clattering dark of an interminable train journey; trains were unheated then, and steam-driven so passengers endured coal smoke and smuts. I’ve assumed this was Dad taking Mum to meet his mother for the first time, a long, slow trek from Harrogate to Plymouth through dismal post-war England. With me as little toddler-bastard to explain to his strict, narrow mother. With every subsequent two-yearly visit it was apparent to me and I think Rick how much our mother hated that cold unwelcoming house. But Grandma Lee was always kind to me. These duty-visits became day-trips to beaches, then camping stays in Cornwall and Devon, with just brief call-ins to say hello then goodbye to Grandma.

Grandma lived on there long after her husband died, and after my mother had died too. One day, I must have been in my late 30s, Dad phoned me and said Grandma had died. She’d been unwell, a neighbour said she’d been out in the street after dark in her nightgown a few times, and taken back home (so maybe dementia?). I wonder now if Dad felt guilty about neglecting her, as I do about neglecting him and Mum. Perhaps this is a common regret. He asked me to go to the funeral with him, which I did; we were the only ones there. I don’t know what happened to the contents of the house, but wonder if he cleared out his childhood home as unregardingly as I did mine later. Grandma Lee outlived my mother by 15 years; no justice there.

Once Mum had died in 1975, suddenly, Dad was lost. He forgot to eat, fell down the stairs, was hospitalised (in High Wycombe, Maidenhead hospital having closed by then). The medical staff were worried about him; when I phoned they told me now was the time to visit him, implying it might be now or never. It seemed he’d lost the will to live. They must have looked through his diary or address book to get in touch with me initially. I contacted Rick (after many years) who’d moved back to Yorkshire, and passed the message on. With some urging, he and Gail visited. Dad came home, started having meals delivered, and I started driving over from Basingstoke a couple of times a week to see him. This was soon after I’d returned from living in Greece, which is where I was when Mum died. Later I looked for care-homes for him, a dismal experience, a life reduced to a room, and an institutional, rented room at that. There was one council care-home on Courthouse Road, at the far end of Allenby Road, which seemed best, close to where he knew and where I thought a few elderly neighbours might visit him, though I think they never did. I got him a room overlooking the fields towards the Bath Road. He moved in, and Rick and I sold the house after clearing it out. I kept a handful of old photos, as did Rick.

I continued visiting Dad; he looked sad, at a loss, as he surely was. I saw a sense of "where did it all go?" "was that it?", which I connect with much more now that I’ve got to that stage of my life, wondering what was the point of it all, all that effort. I took him out for drives, and for a pint sometimes. Walking into the house one time I found him rewriting their address book, and saw this as empty time being filled with an unnecessary task, all that empty time. I connect with that now; though I’m still busy, that’s probably not far away for me, though older.

I talked to him properly for probably the first time in my life, and realised also for the first time, I think, that I loved him. He told me how he joined up for the war just before conscription came in, as many men did, it being thought a bad thing if you had to be conscripted. Before that he had been an under-manager for Timothy Whites in Penzance, and smiled at the memory of walking along the promenade, looking down on the sea-water lido. I wish I’d asked him much more, and been a better son, step-son. Dad died in 1987.

After Mum’s funeral, when everyone had left and we were alone, he stood in the lounge of the home he and Mum had made, and said he’d meant never to tell me but I was not his son but he loved me. We hugged. I’d known this, vaguely, this unspoken. I never called him Stepdad, and even after finding my biological father much later, the stranger who actually did look like me, have not thought of him as step-anything.

Ten or more years after he died, I stopped using Dad’s surname by which I’d been known all my life, and around the time I turned 50 took my biological father’s surname, as on my birth certificate.

Mum never swore, that I remember. But in the lounge there he said, “I never knew she knew such language”. She was dying in hospital, raving in pain. I was not there.

__________________________________________

Apart from the conversation about the Daily Mirror and voting Conservative, we didn't discuss politics or voting. I never thought to ask them how they voted in the 1945 election. Surely, surely they voted Labour then - they benefited from a lot of the social reforms the new Labour government brought in.

During the Second World War Britain had a coalition government, with the Conservative Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. An election was due in 1945, and it was for Churchill to decide the timing; he decided to 'go early', in July, within a few months of the war's end (in Europe) in May. Perhaps he was expecting to benefit from his war-time leadership role, and many people did expect that, regarding him in heroic terms. Both Labour and Conservatives campaigned, Churchill's war-time bombastic style contrasting with Clement Atlee's quieter, moderate style of speaking. Labour won a landslide majority, which is still referred to today when discussing election outcomes. Social historians explain this momentous result, which set the direction for future governments - of both main parties - for several decades, in these terms:

"What the Conservatives, in their myopia, failed to understand was that the 1945 voter was casting his vote not such much in judgememt of the last five years, but in denunciation of the ten years before that... The war had radicalised people. They had not made all these sacrifices to return to the same old way of life as before the war."
– Maureen Waller, London 1945

Perhaps it was not such a strange result, the closest Britain would come to a revolution in modern times. People were certainly fed up with the status quo, and wanted a better future for their children than they'd had pre-war. Rationing, for all that people grumbled about it, was based on the principle of 'fair shares for all'; and what alternative was there in a country which pre-war had imported two-thirds of its food? The need to ration food (among other things) drew the authorities' attention to what constituted a healthy diet, and a realisation that half the population was undernourished. Though there was resistance to change, the wartime diet was healthier than pre-war. Attention was paid for the first time to the needs of expectant and nursing mothers, babies and small children, who received a pint of milk per day at half-price, or free for the poor, and free cod liver oil and orange juice. Surviving war-time conditions brought about and required a socialism-in-practice, a communal effort for the good of all.

Away from the ongoing conduct of the war, experts had been studying what would be needed to give the population a better future afterwards. This was an ongoing topic of discussion, 'how are we going to make things better?' When the Beveridge Report was published in November 1942 it was a best-seller. It recommended elimination of the five evils of want, squalor, greed, poverty and disease, a national health service, policies to avoid the mass unemployment of the 1920s and '30s, family allowances, and comprehensive social insurance to ensure a minimum standard of living for all, 'from the cradle to the grave'. There was also an Education Act in 1944 raising the school-leaving age to 15, and promising secondary education for all children. But there was general scepticism that the coalition government, associated with Churchill and the pre-war Conservatives, would deliver the social reforms and improvement needed. Hence the landslide vote for CHANGE.

If my parents didn't get the point and vote for this in 1945, at least plenty of other people like them must have done.

Regarding that train journey to Plymouth in the winter of 1947 when I was barely a toddler, it’s worth remembering what it was like in Britain in the years after the Second World War. Bloody miserable sums it up. These forgotten times are captured in some really good novels; Icelight by Aly Monroe is one; Rose Tremain writes about growing up in that war-torn, miserable Britain, and the drabness is there also in A Male Child (Paul Scott) and The Far Country (Nevil Shute) among others.

London in particular is remembered very differently from the impression given by pictures of crowds celebrating Victory in Europe Day in 1945. As being drab, dismal, depressing. William Trevor in The Story of Lucy Gault writes of:

"...the drab post-war capital, where victory seemed more like bad-tempered submission.... Dreariness was everywhere, in every face, in every gesture, only the streetcorner spivs and multitude of sweetly scented tarts were jolly. ...War had sucked the heart out of Europe: everywhere there was weary evidence of that. There had been too much death, too much treachery, too great a toll paid in the defeat of greed...".

Chapter 10

Family Visits Become Holidays

After we moved to Maidenhead Mum kept in touch with her mother, who was bedridden in a nursing home; they exchanged letters almost every week, short “yes we’re all fine thank you” messages, the fact of a letter being more important than the content. Grandma Ross had started a Post Office savings account for me, I think pretty much as soon as I’d been born, and perhaps because I’d been born, I suppose as a gesture of love and support to Mum; she put in a penny a week.

Dad wrote to his mother less frequently. I don’t remember that we made train journeys to visit the respective parents annually, or at all, apart from that first 1947 journey. But the old Vauxhall they bought a few years later really liberated Mum and Dad. Every year we drove either of the 200-mile journeys to visit one grandma in Harrogate or the other grandma in Plymouth.

Driving off on a summer holiday had become quite a common thing for families to do, but we were doing well to have a reliable car to do it in. It was quite usual to see motorbike sidecars, mother and kids crammed into the (cold, fragile) sidecar on the coast-bound roads in the summer, and three-wheeled bubble cars (either literally bubble shaped Isettas, or low and torpedo-shaped with the dad-driver in front and family in a line behind him, incredibly vulnerable by modern standards). Not every family had a car; when I was about 19 doing a holiday job at a tyrefitters (so this was much later than our family holidays) I remember the deputy manager fretting whether he’d be allowed to borrow the firm’s van to take his family on holiday.

Break-downs were common; AA and RAC men on their yellow or blue motorcycle combinations were seen frequently, and saluted cars with either an AA or RAC badge. There were AA and RAC 'boxes', like phone boxes or police boxes that Dr Who's Tardis was later based on, yellow or blue, because there was no other way for AA and RAC men (uniformed, always men, usually ex-services because they liked jobs that had military-type uniforms) could communicate with their offices. If motorists were AA or RAC members, they got a key to the boxes, so they could phone for help - "we've broken down!" Most car breakdowns were from overheating - you'd often see cars on the roadside, bonnet up, steam pouring out. When the first bit of motorway was opened in 1958, for a few miles north of London, lots of people took their cars there to see how fast they could go, and many overheated, conked out. There was no 70mph speed limit until December 1965. The next new models were promoted as 'motorway-ready', which really just meant bigger radiators.

As well as unreliable, many vehicles were unsafe – no MOTs at this time (and later only on old vehicles initially), children were often sat on adult laps, and seat belts were not mandatory until 1983 when I was about 40, a couple of decades after driving off on family holidays with my parents, and then only for the front seats, at first.

Many cars had orange, V-shaped insect deflectors on the bonnet, because windcreens got plastered with dead insects (doesn't happen now - which is not sign of progress). In the house there would be sticky flypapers hanging from the ceiling in summer - no longer needed.

Grandma Ross, Mum’s mother, had been bed-bound in a nursing home for many years; she had a cage over her legs on the bed (her legs were affected by standing for hours in damp basements doing other people’s washing, or so Mum told me, and her health really broke down when her youngest child, Jack, was killed in the war). She seemed always cheerful when we visited, and we wheeled her around the Valley Gardens in Harrogate or lifted her onto the Vauxhall’s back seat and took her to Knaresborough; Rick and I must have squeezed into the back with her. There we drove down a track across the river from the town and parked under trees, below the high railway bridge, to picnic and spend the day. Rick and I were given money to run back up to the road, cross the river bridge and go down the other side where skiffs were hired out. We would each hire a skiff and row across to Mum, Dad and Grandma, and up and down the river; not too far down because of the weir. No adult supervision, no life-belts or buoyancy aids, no parental anxiety that we were aware of or limited by.

For the summer trip to either Harrogate or Plymouth we would pack the night before, then get up really early, at about 5am, for the long journey. But then Mum and Dad would start hoovering the house, while Rick and I buzzed about, “why aren’t we going?”, got in and out of the car, to loud whispers of “don’t bang the doors you’ll wake the neighbours”. I never did understand why the house suddenly needed hoovering when we were just off on holiday.

Driving to Plymouth, us kids so impatient to see the sea: it would appear as a gleam on the horizon, disappearing as the road came down a hill, reappearing again and again, glimpses get nearer and nearer, the excitement, the red soil of Devon and the blue sea. What is it about the sea? Not just childish delight, some primal thing.

Plymouth had trolley buses, which I loved riding in, upstairs at the front. From Grandma’s house in Peverell the buses went down a long steep hill into the centre, the overhead trolley wires stretching out in front with the sea far off ahead. Exciting and a bit scary. Plymouth itself was disappointing, full of new concrete buildings because it was bombed flat in the war; the bit I liked best was the Barbican, a small harbour area of old houses and lanes that had escaped destruction, which I could imagine pirates and Drake inhabiting back in the bad old good old days.

Soon, the Plymouth trips were extended into ventures to the local beaches and then further, into Cornwall. Nearby Cawsand was one of the beaches we went to at first. There Dad warned me about quicksand; he said people had been sucked down without warning or any chance of rescue, and their bodies appeared somewhere else days or weeks later. Scary. He didn’t tell me how to spot quicksand, or where exactly it was, which might have been helpful, and we kept going back to Cawsand.

The visits to Grandma Lee got shorter and shorter, and as Rick and I got bigger the trip to Plymouth became a proper family sea-side holiday. We camped at Pentewan, never sure how to pronounce the name, marvelled at the whiteness of the stream flowing across the beach (from the local chalk quarries), and wondered if the car would get to the top of a nearby 1 in 4 hill (we didn’t risk it). People took note of these steepness warning signs, because not all cars could get up some hills, which is not something anyone seems to worry about today. Some steep hills had gravel run-out areas beside them, in case a car’s brakes failed on the way down.

We camped at Shaldon, and rowed the yellow dinghy on the River Teign. I have a few photos of this, although I don’t remember us having a camera and there are very few photos of our family times.

They had some nerve taking that old car down the steep narrow lanes to find out-of-the-way beaches. Not the cautious, uncertain people I tend to remember them as being. They were long journeys in those days, long and very different from car journeys today. No motorways, few bypasses or even dual carriageways; you drove along the A roads into each town on the way, through the High Street and out the other end, no separation of local from long-distance traffic; very few roundabouts, just traffic lights and backed-up junctions.

In The Road to Lichfield Penelope Lively’s main character takes a motorway journey remembering, and missing, the very different A road journey she drove there decades ago. It’s quicker and easier today, but from the motorway signs I know nothing of the places I’m passing, whereas driving into and out of these towns years ago I got to know them a bit, got an impression of their different characters. We have gained and we have lost. Our journeys to Harrogate and Plymouth took about four hours; not so different today when I’ve done those trips.

Likewise, when I drive to see my brother in Yorkshire, I know and learn a little about Aberaeron, Aberystwyth, Machynlleth, Dolgellau, Bala as I drive into them and then out on the twisting A roads of Wales, even if I don’t stop for a wee, or diesel or a coffee, or chips to eat en route. But when I get to the motorway jungle around Manchester, Bradford, Leeds I see and know nothing about these places, it’s stopped being a journey and become a hectic endurance.

The summer Devon/Cornwall-or-Yorkshire holidays came to an end when we were no longer children; I cannot remember exactly when. After a few years’ gap the trip to Scotland was our last holiday together, when Rick and I were teenagers; perhaps this was a last grasp at ‘family’ before we kids went our separate ways, and I don’t remember why we went to Scotland, perhaps Mum wanting to revisit where she grew up, near Loch Lomond which she’d spoken of fondly, occasionally. I think we drove to Leeds, and borrowed a more modern car from cousin-in-law Tony, a green Riley. I did some of the driving, got shouted at for too much overtaking. Once we got there I don’t remember any itinerary, or “we must stop at XYZ”, but maybe there was one and it just wasn’t spoken (typically). Near Drymen as we drove along a country road Mum said that was where she lived as a girl, pointing to a small bothy in a field. She said that in the river nearby she and her sister Helen used to swim in their knickers. As we drove past – I’m pretty sure we didn’t stop - we looked at the cold fast-running Scottish river, and the little building that had been her childhood home, and laughed a bit and passed on. This is another memory that brings on feelings of regret that we did not pay more attention, that a conversation was not started.

__________________________________________

Holidays had a special significance in the 1950s. First, they were family holidays, taken together by family members previously separated during the war, and for shared enjoyment - no other utilitarian purpose. And they were a new achievement and a new right - from the Holidays With Pay Act of 1938 (but barely enacted then because war broke out the next year). Trains were used, of course, but car ownership increased greatly in the 1950s, a sign of a family's progress in society and a better future. Rationing meant there was virtually no petrol for civilian use during the war, and after a brief relaxation this continued until 1950. So driving off on a family holiday was done with a sense of freedom, a new prosperity and pleasure achieved.

Chapter 11

Maidenhead

When I lived in Maidenhead in the 1950s and 60s there was no bypass, ring-road or M4 around it. The A4 was the main east-west route and it ran straight down Maidenhead’s very narrow High Street, mixed with buses, local traffic and pedestrians on the narrow pavements. It was slow, congested and probably dangerous. With leaded petrol used at the time, and vehicles’ emissions much higher than now, and coal smoke from chimneys, it must have been very unhealthy too, though I remember no-one remarking on air quality in the town.

All vehicles from the west on the Bath Road came down Castle Hill, through traffic lights into the High Street, on towards the river bridge and then to Slough, Heathrow, London. Traffic from the Slough and London direction was routed around side streets and up Grenfell Hill – all these were narrow residential or shopping streets – to rejoin the Bath Road at the top of Castle Hill (there was and is no actual castle there, just a crenellated garden wall, so ‘Castle’ Hill is typical of Maidenhead trying a bit too hard). Hitchhiking was common then, and if you couldn’t get a lift westwards one trick was to chase after a slow old lorry grinding up Grenfell Hill at night and leap on the back, then jump off at traffic lights in Reading; one of my school pals did this, and lived to tell the tale. I never did that, because I didn’t particularly want to go to Reading, and was there a similar hill there in the other direction so I could get back? Very practical, me.

In the late 1930s a bypass around Maidenhead was started but never completed because of the war. The route cleared for it could be seen, very overgrown, ending on the western side at Cannon Road near the railway bridge and Black & Decker factory (since redeveloped). Even with the lower traffic volumes of the ‘50s and ‘60s I find it astonishing that the main route west of London threaded its way through Maidenhead’s narrow streets. It was such a bottleneck that the first part of what became, bit by bit, the M4, was built around Maidenhead, in the early '60s; the sections coming out of London to link with this were not built for several more years (and no 70mph limit until late 1965). It was further out than the original bypass route, branching off the A4 at Burnham and rejoining it at the Thicket. The rest of the M4 towards Swindon and Bristol wasn’t completed for another 10 years.

One year as we set off for Plymouth on holiday, we drove through diversions on the corner of Maidenhead Thicket where excavations were being made for this first bit of the M4 to link with the Bath Road; returning two weeks later, even deeper holes, for underpasses.

The town centre was formed by the triangle of High Street, King Street and Queen Street, the latter two joining close to the railway station and clock tower. My dad’s shop was in the middle of the High Street, backing onto a sort of service lane where we used to park (no yellow lines in those days) when visiting him there. One time we returned to the car to find our dog, Saxon, had taken an egg out of the egg box on the shelf behind the rear seat and deposited it unbroken on the front seat.

Timothy Whites & Taylors was a chain of hardware stores which had merged with a chemists, so each business had a manager on the premises; Dad managed the larger hardware section. Behind the shop, with access onto the lane for deliveries, were old buildings used for storage. From about the age of 10 my holiday job was to bag up soda crystals, washing powder and other loose material ready to be displayed in the shop, and to generally fetch and carry. Very little arrived there pre-packaged; nails and screws were displayed loose in the shop, so you could ask for six nails or a dozen screws to be bagged up and pay for them. The staff tended to make a fuss of me, maybe to earn Dad’s favour. He had an awful memory for names, he’d call them Mrs Thing, or Miss Thingy if younger, but they all seemed to like and respect him.

The London to Aldermaston antinuclear marches passed through Maidenhead, the first in 1958. Dad came home and said, with disgust, someone had told him the marchers had stayed overnight in a church hall and it was “like a brothel”. Mum glanced at me as he said this to her. I wondered how he knew what a brothel was like. And felt a distance between my parents and me; all I saw pictured in the local newspaper was old, respectable looking people in duffel coats walking in the rain. Clergymen, and Bertrand Russell, a white-haired philosopher, ancient, looking a bit batty. In a brothel?

Dad’s shop faced another across the road, a shoe shop I think, which had a snooker hall above it; this was as far as Maidenhead went in terms of the disreputable and low-life; as a youngster you should definitely not be seen going into the snooker hall, and if you were a girl, well! In the side streets was the police station, and these were the days when a large part of policing was patrolling the streets on foot, especially at night; there were blue phone boxes which policemen had a key to, so that after manfully (no women police yet) blowing their whistle they could run to a police box to report any crimes encountered.

One of our neighbours, Mr Alexander, ran a small tobacconist shop at the start of the High Street. Smoking was so common that a shop selling only tobacco was a viable business. My parents each smoked 20 per day; that’s what they said, as if it wasn’t a lot, so they probably smoked more than that. Woodbines for Dad. Twenty fags a day seemed a lot to me even then, but smoking habits are something that have changed hugely; in the war, some factory workers were allocated 40 fags per day.

Everyone smoked, it seemed. Shops and offices had a fug of tobacco smoke. There were ashtrays on every table and surface. It was normal to smoke while eating, then stub the fag out on the remains of food on the plate (ignoring the ashtray). Normal and never remarked upon, but I thought it disgusting even then.

'Roll-your-owns' were common, cigarettes you made yourself by putting a thin cigarette paper in a small metal container, putting tobacco on top, rolling the rubber band inside, licking the edge of the paper to seal it. It was common in a class sense too, workmen did this but Mum and Dad never did.

There were old-fashioned butchers’ and grocers’ shops on the High Street, as you’d expect; old-fashioned in the sense that you stood at a counter and asked for things which the shop assistant took from shelves and cupboards for you. I remember standing with Mum while she asked for mince, which was minced there for her, and her pointing to tins on the wall behind the counter. Mum did food shopping every couple of days, not only because we did not have a refrigerator for several years after moving to Maidenhead but also because of rationing. She travelled into town for it; around Pinkneys Green corner shops were few and limited. Shopping had the air of an activity you took great care over, not only because money was tight but also because there was still scarcity and the memory of greater scarcity only a few years previously during the war; rationing continued until 1954 when I was nine.

By the time I was helping Dad in his shop, this traditional ‘have-to-ask-for-it’ way of shopping was changing and the fear of scarcity was fading. A small supermarket had opened on the High Street, and this really marked more than just a change in the method of shopping. It also marked greater availability, rationing becoming a thing of the past. But ‘malls’ had not crossed the Atlantic by time I had left Maidenhead nor for years afterwards.

Shopping then was functional, and usually brief, unlike today when it seems sort of recreational for many people. Nothing to do, bored? Let’s go into town and do some shopping. Pictures of crowds drifting about city centres and malls even during the covid pandemic present shopping as a way of life now, a time-filler. At which I harumph, like an old man.

On Sundays the town centre was quiet and deserted. Sundays were for family time at home or the occasional outing. No shops were open on Sundays.

Maidenhead was not a commuter town in those days. By train it was only about 30 minutes to London, but when he heard people were starting to commute there for work Dad was appalled. Exhalation of breath: “I wouldn’t do that if they paid me, what, £2,000 a year”.

Maidenhead was posh, somewhat; there were nice tea-shops where women would meet during the day. One of them, Brocks, on Queen Street, displayed gorgeous cakes in its window, and in my first year at secondary school I used to cycle there at lunchtime and buy the stale cakes and buns from the previous day, by the bagful. Then flog them for a penny each back at school. Maidenhead Grammar School was on the other side of the railway line, on Shoppenhangers Lane, an easy bike ride into town.

Where Castle Hill rose from the town there were some grand old houses which had mostly been turned into solicitors’ offices, estate agents and doctors’ surgeries, including the GP who my mother thought so well of and diagnosed her cancer as diverticulitis, prescribed Gaviscon and let the cancer spread until it was inoperable and she died. In 1975, while I was living abroad and knew none of this until too late.

On the other side of town, where the road descended to the Thames flood plain, were the cinema and bus station, and Maidenhead’s first coffee bar, the Kardomah (why were they all called that?). Long before I started hanging around coffee bars with strange names, I remember being taken as a little boy to see the river flooding whole streets between the bridge and Boulters Lock. This was a regular occurrence, and exciting. Now there is a major new cutting to divert river overflow and move the flooding to somewhere less posh downriver.

Just over the river bridge was Skindles Hotel, which had a reputation for racy weekend outings by monied Londoners in the 1930s, but had become rather dilapidated since. In the wooded hills above the river, on the Buckinghamshire side, was Lord Astor’s country estate, where later, in the early 1960s, Christine Keeler (a local girl), John Profumo, Stephen Ward et al shocked crusty old Prime Minister Macmillan and the nation by, wow, having sex (but this was before the ‘60s became ‘swinging sixties’). Outrage was all over the newspapers, with photos to fully inform (titillate) everyone, and we youngsters thought it was a laugh, as if to say: they were only doing what we’re doing and you hypocrites wish you could do!

Beyond the lane behind Dad’s shop was a stream, tree-lined, and a large park at the far end of which was the hospital. It was pleasant, a large park just a short stroll from the town centre. Visiting, decades later, I saw a multi-lane ring-road had been blasted through this park and the trees were gone. Between Castle Hill and the High Street, where there had simply been traffic lights, there is now a sodding great roundabout. King Street is no longer the route from the station to the town centre, but has been chopped into no-through sections, and replaced by a new dual carriageway nearby called, of all things, Frascati Avenue. Presumably all this was needed despite the M4 and the spur northwards to Marlow and Henley having already taken through-traffic away from the town centre. And perhaps the pedestrianised High Street is easier to shop in, but the town felt like it had lost its soul. Before, there was life in the town centre but now life had bypassed it, literally. You can whiz around the town centre in your car but the centre itself feels beleaguered. I cannot say the congestion and fumes of the old High Street should have just been left to increase and worsen, but surely some more sensitive changes could have been made. I noticed there were not many people in the centre, and the big modern shopping mall seemed rather empty; there is talk of Nicholson’s mall being replaced. A lesson in how to bugger up a nice small town.

Another difference is that after dark there used to be very little traffic. These days there may be few pedestrians to be seen in the town centre but the roads circling it are busy and bright with traffic until late at night. Do you feel you belong somewhere if you experience it only from a car, at speed?

Before I left for university, and on occasional returns in vacations, I spent a lot of time driving around Maidenhead and its surrounding villages in old cars with mates and girlfriends, venturing more widely. We used to go to pubs, there wasn't much else to do, and the more out of the way and un-popular a pub was the better, we thought. Over the river, in Buckinghamshire, closing time was half an hour later than in Berkshire, so we'd hare across to Bucks, maybe to Burnham Beeches, for a last pint. Such lads we were, thought of ourselves as.

From childhood to becoming a young adult I got to know the area well, and miss it, miss it as it was. I think that had I stayed in Maidenhead and lived my adult life there, as some school friends did, or had my parents not died young which removed the occasion to visit, I would have found the changes made to the place I loved unsettling and painful year in year out.

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Maidenhead's favourable pre-war weekend-holiday reputation is there in Patrick Hamilton's 1941 novel Hangover Square. It is idealised as somewhere pleasant and safe to escape to from London:

"Maidenhead tonight - away from everything... Maidenhead, peace, the river, an inn, a quiet glass of beer, and safety, utter safety. Maidenhead, where he had been with poor Ellen, the river in the sun, in the shade of the trees, his hand in the water over the side of the boat.... his white fllannels, tea in a basket, the gramophone, the dank smell of evening, the red sunset..."

With Patrick Hamilton, it's not just his characters that are a bit bonkers and overwrought, I think. But being able to bring up your family somewhere pleasant, leafy, safe, in the 1950s was something many parents took satisfaction in, after the war years of deprivation, danger and blackouts (no lights to be shown so German bombers could not navigate) and the post-war dirt of smashed houses, coal smoke and smogs in cities, especially London. Nina Bawden in her memoir In My Own Time, writes of:

"...the Thames valley where we lived while our family was growing up; commuter country, but with small towns that still had an identity, were not merely dormitories for London. Local shops that had been run by the same families for years... a well-stocked local library, good doctors and dentists... a safe walk for children with blackberries in the hedgerows and country, not suburban, smells..."

For Nina this was an escape from the awful conditions she remembers immediately post-war:

"...1948, the winter came in bitter cold. The November fogs were thick as soup and a dark yellow, toasted colour; nostrils stayed black inside, lips preserved the gritty taste of soot for hours, and outdoor clothes developed a permanently clinging smell..."

Our parents saved us kids and themselves from much of this when we moved to Maidenhead, and to the leafy higher ground on its outskirts. That may not all have been their conscious, worked-out plan; it may just have happened to be that Maidenhead was where Dad was offered a managership, and that Pinkneys Green was where they found an affordable house. But they did recognise they'd arrived in a pleasant, healthy place, were proud of it (and Mum got us horse-riding later because she said it was a healthy, outdoor hobby). But they did keep on smoking 20 a day; when I was a teenager, at one point she said to me that they did not know about the bad health effects when they took up smoking; I cannot remember what prompted that, but she said it in a tone of - "you're so much better off today". We were, in many ways.

Our good fortune, Rick's and mine, went further than Dad's secure job, it being Maidenhead that he was posted to, and the hard work our parents put in to making a good life for us all. Our good fortune, luck, happenstance, was also due to where and when we were born. Where was Harrogate, a relatively genteel, non-industrial town; if you'd 'made it' in Wakefield, Huddersfield or any of the other Yorkshire industrial towns, Harrogate is where you might retire to. Despite being near many British bomber bases, it was not bombed (except one German bomber, and British aircraft crashed in the area sometimes); there was no need for Harrogate's children to be evacuated, and many evacuees, adults as well as children, were sent to Harrogate during the war; some of them, Grandma took in as lodgers.

When was 1945 for me and 1948 for Rick; much earlier and elsewhere and we might have been among the many children evacuated at several stages during the war. Some evacuated children were treated well, perhaps in homes with higher living standards than they'd been used to (and many did not want to return); others were mistreated, exploited, regarded as 'lower' (as an elderly in-law of mine says he was) or sent back to the authorities as unwanted. When evacuees were able to return home, there were often family difficulties, exacerbated when demob'd fathers returned to the family as strangers to their children. The experiences of some such children are given in Maureen Waller's London 1945, and are harrowing.

Chapter 11

Brotherly?

One of my regrets, I have quite a few, is that my brother and I were not closer, then or now. Was I horrible to him, more than the usual older-brother horribleness? Richard, Rick, was born on 17 December 1948, about 3½ years after me. This was shortly before our parents set forth to make new lives away from Harrogate, away from the grim wartime years, and probably away from what had happened to my mother, as I discovered much later, pregnant by a Canadian airforce man she loved who couldn’t marry her because he was already married.

My mother had a very difficult birth with me, a breach birth, awkward right from the start. I can’t remember how I know this, what was said, when or by whom. I’ve wondered how anxious she might have been at becoming pregnant again. Anyway, Rick came forth and soon we all set forth southwards, away from the past.

We played together, rough and tumbled, were sometimes shouted at by Mum to be quiet, stop arguing as she permed someone’s hair upstairs. I remember being trusted to take him to Sunday School, at Alwyn Road Infants School, when he was little more than a toddler. We progressed through the same schools, Alwyn, Courthouse Primary, Maidenhead Grammar, but I cannot remember ever travelling to school with Rick, or this being remarked on or even expected. It seemed the age gap was just too wide. We looked quite different, me dark and stocky, Rick thinner, taller, blond, blue eyes like Dad. I think we always knew somehow there was a difference, a separation, though this was no part of our family’s idea of itself, never acknowledged.

Sometimes I was off doing things that Rick was too young for, but we did get up to mischief together, knocking on doors and running away, building castles from the stacks of bricks on building sites, and later riding ponies together. While we were still boys, new roads and houses were built on the fields between Allenby Road and Maidenhead Thicket, to our or at least my childish dismay. In the long summer evenings we played on the new building sites with other local kids. We explored the old farmhouse which was later demolished as new bungalows were built along the track-become-tarmac road to be called Highway Avenue. We ventured up the rickety, unsafe staircase to where a window overlooked the fields and woods beyond. We called it Dick Turpin’s farmhouse, with no idea or care if that highwayman ever lived in these parts. But this is not so fanciful, as Maidenhead Thicket was reputedly the haunt of highwaymen centuries ago, and it probably covered a much wider area, with the narrow belt of fields where the bungalows were built originally wooded. The large triangular field alongside the old Henley Road and Pinkneys Drive was cleared of trees in wartime for food production. This area is now called Highway on maps; I don’t recall it being called that, or anything, in the 1950s, so there may be a link there too, an old name revived.

The new red-brick squeezed-together bungalows I saw built on those fields stuck out like a sore thumb and I hated them. Decades later I revisited, and they had blended in, looked right to be there.

We fed the horses on the field where that same track joins the Bath Road, with a row of chestnut trees along it, forming the drive to a big old house, empty after being used for something in the war. When we were older Mum rented that field to graze our ponies. Years later, after I’d left, the fine old chestnut trees were cut down, a supermarket was built on the ponies’ field, new roads put through to build over other fields, more bloody houses, and the big house was demolished. What was pleasant, ordinary countryside, grass, brambles and trees, space, little disturbance over many years, has become just another over-populated busy suburb of Maidenhead. Even the old quarry below the end of our garden on Allenby Road has been filled in, and houses built there. Hard man-made surfaces replacing the soft and natural, all traces gone of what had been there without much change for perhaps centuries.

I wish I had photographed that unmade track off the Bath Road, with its chestnut trees bordering the ponies’ field, before it was ruined by ‘development’. But who then would have thought such a pleasantly ordinary scene would need photographing to record its once-existence.

I understand the new house-building of my childhood, the 1950s & ‘60s, was much needed after the war, but it has gone on for half a century without regard to what is lost and what we need in other ways. Pre- and post-war the house-building on this western side of Maidenhead was between Courthouse Road and Pinkneys Green, which is reflected in the road names, Blenheim, Wavell, Allenby, Halifax, Lancaster, Stirling, Winston even. Where building continued after the post-war need was met, further west in the Highway area, the new names are random and could be anywhere anytime, Marlborough, Camley, Kenwood, Truro... What were outlying villages, like Cox Green, Tittle Row, are now suburbs, built extensions of Maidenhead.

I think Rick suffered because our parents expected him to follow in my footsteps academically, though I was usually only about 27th out of 30 kids in the end-of-term tests. I suppose this was more about their awe of education, as school-leavers at 14, and the sight of me diligently doing my homework. This was half-an-hour for every year of secondary school, so by O levels it was 2 1/2 hours per night, 3 hours in the sixth form which I scraped into and there did much better. But Rick was much more practical, had a natural bent for tinkering with machinery. I was called the “bookworm” of the family, the fate of any vaguely bookish or imaginative child coming from families where the tradition was to follow their fathers into trades and skills rather than professions and academia. Rick was not much interested in books. One family joke was that when Rick had to write a story at (primary) school, it usually ended quite quickly with “and he fell into a hole in ground and died”.

Rick got a lot of hassle from our parents for not working hard at school, especially coming up to O levels at age 15. Understandably, he didn’t like having to do things that didn’t interest him. They bargained him into going to technical college to do his O levels, but I don’t think this worked well and he left soon after, getting various jobs. Businesses seemed to find him a hard worker, and soon he was managing a petrol station, then a few years later a tool-hire company in Reading.

When we were younger, Rick and I spent a lot of time riding our ponies and going to gymkhanas, where we joked that other riders said “oh no, the Lees are here, they’re going to win all the races again”. Which we mostly did. We loved tearing along paths on Maidenhead Thicket. In later life Rick has carried on riding, which I haven’t had the time or money for, though it’s not too late.

When we’d grown out of ponies and gymkhanas, in our mid-late teens, I drove a succession of old cars while he got a motorbike (with sidecar, so it could be a powerful bike even without him passing a test). I used to drive like the clappers but just knew that a motorbike would be the death of me, and anyway not much use for copping off with girls. On his bike Rick also used to go like the clappers, and did not crash or injure himself, and had his girlfriends too, including (he said) Susan George, then a young starlet living near the river in Maidenhead.

As we grew up we grew apart more. I went off to university, Rick went from one successful hard-grafting job to another. I started a series of long-commute career-ladder jobs. We got houses about 20 miles apart but saw little of each other and lived quite different lives, becoming the very different people we are. When we did contact each other, it wasn’t always pleasant.

I hope that, before it’s too late for one of us, Rick and I can hire horses and ride around Maidenhead Thicket again.

That’s heartfelt. So far, so nice. But there’s more, and here’s a little of it. Rick abandoned his wife and three small children when she had a stroke. I know little of the details, being out of the country in the aftermath, but assume Mum and his wife’s family (a big house in Medmenham) stepped in; then he had another brief relationship and child. I’ve lost the sequence of events: Stephanie’s stroke, Mum dying, my wife’s TB, the job in Greece, Rick moving to Yorkshire, but am shocked I was so detached from it all, busy elsewhere. There’s something else missing in all this. But if there’s one thing I could go back in time and change/help, it would be that, my non-involvement. Also, I remember nothing of Rick and Stephanie’s marriage; was I there?

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It‘s easy to ascribe the post-war need for house-building to war damage, but there was more to it than that. I’ve read that nearly half a million houses were destroyed by bombing, but there was also a great deal of slum clearance carried out as part of post-war recovery; one estimate is that 2.5 million people were re-housed between 1950 and 1960. Much of Britain’s pre-war housing stock was poor quality, poorly maintained, overcrowded and unsanitary, especially in the industrial areas where populations had grown rapidly. There had been a brief house-building boom in the 1930s (when the ‘Metroland’ districts of outlying London were created), but from 1939-45 there was little new building, of course. Housing “squalor” was one of the five social evils identified in the 1942 Beveridge report that laid the ground for the post-war welfare state. The post-war Labour government’s Houses for All policy saw 800,000 new houses built between 1946 and 1951, mostly by local authorities, despite the post-war shortage of materials; 22 new towns were created 1946-72 regardless of changes of government. There was a post-war consensus we’ve forgotten: Harold Macmillan, patrician and conservative to his core, continued housebuilding efforts and brought in many measures a Labour government would have been proud of: the Clean Air Act, Housing, Factories and Noise Abatement Acts; he supported the welfare state, reduced the working week and increased pensions.

Beyond the bare numbers of houses built, there was a post-war spirit of renewal and sweeping away the old and unsatisfactory, starting anew and doing things better. As well as slums, many grand old houses were torn down, too expensive to maintain, no longer possible to staff, not in the spirit of the times.

From the 1970s onward, it’s a different, less impressive story. Perhaps the communal spirit, from previous lives in crowded housing and from war service, was fading anyway, but this got a hell of a policy kick in a new, individualistic, private-profit-focused direction: with Thatcherism came the forced sell-off of local authority housing, the incredible banning of future house-building by local authorities, absence of government investment and handing over of new house-building to private companies. Since then house-building has consistently failed to meet either demand or make any strategic sense, or show much advance in terms of insulation, heating and energy efficiency; it has however made profits for private shareholders and Tory donors.

As the post-war communal spirit, houses for all, was replaced by individualism, each man out for himself, housing has become a personal ladder to climb in the same way you pursue a career and promotion. This has been a big change in mindset and how lives are lived. My parents thought of their house only as a home; they didn’t think of Branston as an asset to be calculated for profitable improvement with a view to trading it for a bigger and better asset/house/home. It was the only house they bought in their lifetimes, and they were the happier for that stability and sense of 'this is enough'. What we have lost, disregarded, could be a guide for our future.

I think that what attracted people to Maidenhead has been destroyed, literally built over, to house and service all those extra people. But something different happened later in the further-out countryside between Reading and Basingstoke, where I’d gone to live after university (years later but long before ‘uni’ had become the term used by students too busy or lazy to use several syllables where one would do).

In my 20s we were pretty skint, and one treat was to put an extra gallon in the minivan and potter around the very quiet country lanes. As I was renovating the long-empty farm labourer’s cottage we’d bought (damp, small, £2,800, 10% deposit, half borrowed from each family and never repaid, £30 per month mortgage) my interest was caught by the many deserted, abandoned cottages and small farmhouses falling into ruin in overgrown gardens we saw on our Sunday wanderings. Having some idea what was involved in renovation, I thought how picturesque, what a pity, but too far gone to rebuild and save; this was the late ‘60s. By the time we were soon to leave the area in the early ‘70s, for a marvellous and lucrative job-move to Greece, all these ruins had been bought up and renovated, or were in the process of. This Hampshire/ Berkshire border countryside, not so many years ago deserted as farms became more mechanised and farm-workers moved away, was being repopulated. Not by manual workers but by the ‘up and coming’, young executives working in nearby towns that were prospering, who were fulfilling the very English dream of a living in a country cottage, plus probably some retirees with the same dream; repopulating the countryside, but with no connection to it.

There was one pair of workers’ cottages beside a narrow lane close to Sherfield on Loddon where we lived; it was right on the road, dark and dank, overhung by trees and always-wet overgrown field boundaries, roof collapsed, that I thought no-one would waste time and money on. But years later I passed it, and now it’s a pretty, half-a-million quids-worth of ‘desirable’ cottage. The previous occupants of this once-damp and dismal hovel have not prospered from this, it's probably been a young couple with good jobs who bought it for tuppence.

The 1970s/80s renovations of ruined old cottages had cavity walls built when new walls were needed, but no insulation or much space for any later, and little in the way of damp-proofing (like the 1970s extension of the cottage I live in now, 50 years later, but am stuck with). But they were sealed so no longer were there the drafts that originally kept most damp at bay, and they had central heating installed which draws damp into the old stone walls. Since that time, those picturesque country cottages will have needed re-renovating.

Chapter 13

Mr & Mrs, and Uncle Harry

Back then, adults did not use their first names when there were children present, and neighbours were referred to as Mr and Mrs even after many years living next door to each other.

Our next door neighbours when I was a child growing up in Maidenhead were Mr and Mrs Over, older than my parents, very proper and very private, religious I think. I only ever heard my parents referring to them by their surnames, and probably never knew their first names. They had one son, several years older than me, who got his girlfriend (from up the road towards Pinkneys Green) pregnant, to parental horror, I imagine. In the days before the pill was available, this was a sort of family fear; sex would just keep breaking out, with awful consequences. It seemed the pregnant girlfriend was not allowed out in public; she was seldom seen. I remember her parents’ car being at a gymkhana on the Cannon Lane field we rented, with her in the back seat, not getting out, apparently not allowed to, restricted to the back seat of shame.

On the other side were Mr and Mrs Alexander, only ever referred to in that way in front of me, but I remember overhearing my parents referring to Mr Alexander as Les. He ran a tobacconist shop in the High Street and was a drummer in a dance band, so often arriving back late at night after the road was quiet, all curtains drawn and most lights out, which created an air of slight disreputability.

The Overs and the Alexanders never came into our house in all the years we lived next door to each other, and we never entered their houses. The unspoken rule was to live quietly and privately.

Mum and Dad were not unsociable, however; on some Sundays in the summer we’d go out to a pub at lunchtime (but not to eat). For a while it was the Pinkneys Green pub, then a pub at Littlewick Green, and they were chatty with the landlords; we kids were not allowed in, just kicked around outside or sat with them in the garden. We didn’t often have visitors to the house. One of the few guests was June, daughter of my mum’s older sister Helen. June, about nine years older than me, was working in London, as a sort of coder on the early office computers. At weekends she would often visit, sometimes bringing her Italian boyfriend Lorenzo, dark and handsome; I think they just visited on Sundays, for the day, rather than staying overnight (maybe because of the ‘issues’ – where do they sleep? together?). I remember we filled the rubber dinghy with water in the back garden and had Sunday splash-abouts and picnics sometimes. I wonder if she was serious about Lorenzo and this was the start of introducing him to the family.

Adults who were friends of the family, and who were invited into the house, were always referred to as Uncle or Auntie. There weren’t many of them. Uncle Jimmy was Dad’s assistant or trainee manager at the hardware shop. He visited maybe once a year, around Christmas, when sherry was drunk; in those early years soda siphons were an essential item of home-socialising, and we had one; it fascinated me, for its potential of squirting at Rick. When Uncle Jimmy called in, there’d be an hour or so of loud talk, jollity and laughter then he and his fiancée would leave, well before 9 in the evening. Even to me as a child, it seemed forced and somehow un-relaxed.

I don’t remember Mum wearing much make-up, just lipstick if she was going out (anywhere, even just the shops), and powder, from a ‘compact’ she kept on her dressing table with hairbrushes etc, and put in her handbag when going out in case re-powdering was needed. I never understood why women got sweaty faces and had to keep mopping it up. This went out of fashion; I don’t remember any of my girlfriends later wearing powder.

Uncle Harry was a friend of my parents in Harrogate before they moved to Maidenhead. I don’t know how they knew each other. This was soon after the Second World War ended, but they couldn’t have known each other from war service, as Dad was captured in North Africa and became a prisoner-of-war in Germany, while I assume Harry must have served in Italy (which was later in the war) because his wife was Italian. I don’t remember it ever being said directly but the understanding I got was that they’d met during the war in Italy.

Auntie Pia brought a touch of the exotic to grey and proper Harrogate before we moved south. We had a meal at their house, about which I remember nothing (was it meat and two veg, or pasta or pizza or something else ‘foreign’?), except gazing in wonder at the glass oven door where I was told an ice cream cake was being cooked. Ice cream, a luxury in post-war rationing, and in a cake, being cooked! An amazing idea for a little boy.

They had a daughter, Sandra, who I met again much later. I don’t remember if Mum and Dad had other friends, they must have done, but nothing that has stayed with me. And I don’t remember any keeping-in-touch with old friends after we moved to Maidenhead in 1950, except one occasion. We met up with Uncle Harry and Auntie Pia somewhere on one of our bi-annual journeys north to visit Grandma in Harrogate. So they must have moved from Harrogate too in the meantime. We met at a grassy parkland place, with a stream. I think I was 12 or 13, Sandra a bit younger. We walked away from the parents, on a wide tube across a stream, holding hands. We were both just getting to that sort of age, but we never met again.

I had long remembered my parents as being weak, or limited. I remember having formed that take on them by the time I was a teenager, probably before. But there's a photo of Mum and Dad, probably from soon after they'd married, when they must have been in their mid-30s, a few years post-war, and they look good, strong, a solid couple setting forth, impressive. What happened? Their lives surrounded them, made them smaller? Or was it me, the regrettable teenage turning-away from parents? Andrew Greig captures this at the end of his modern novel That Summer:

"And now she has gone into the silence to join the rest of her vanishing generation, whose code was sacrifice and whose quest was a decent normality... Who were so baffled by our turning away from what they made."

They were probably bigger as people than they were as parents. I caught glimpses of the people they were on a few occasions, but paid little attention at the time. When I was little my mum told me her father would coax out mice late at night sitting by the fire after everyone had gone to bed; many years later she pointed out the bothy where she grew up in Scotland. I never asked her to tell me more, and these were a few odd words spread over many years. When I (rarely) thought about it, I assumed Mum was about 19 or 20 when she had me. Only later did I discover she was 32. What was her young life like in Harrogate before the war, and during it? She never said. I never thought to ask. Dad was born in Gibraltar in 1911 (I have found out much later), then his parents moved back to Plymouth, working in the dockyards. What did he remember of Gibraltar as a little boy? How did he get a job during all the unemployment of the 1920s and 30s, and how come he met my mother (in Harrogate)? I never really knew those two people in that impressive going-forth photo. I wish I’d had the nous to ask questions, and they’d had the – what? confidence? – to tell us kids about themselves. What they did say, the very little, has stuck with me.

Chapter 14

Nipper and Husky

The story is that when Rick and I wanted to start going to Saturday Morning Minors – films for children every Saturday in Maidenhead’s cinema – our mother thought it was unhealthy to be skulking about indoors, so decided we should start horse-riding. Fresh air, and no possibility of getting into ‘bad company’. I don’t remember overhearing a conversation along those lines, or our horse-riding being explained to someone that way at a later date, but that’s the story I’ve got stuck in my head somehow.

We started going for riding lessons at Tony Sherlock’s small stables on Altwood Road, a short hack away from Maidenhead Thicket and not then separated by M4 links or other busy roads. We both loved it.

After a while Mum decided to buy a pony for us, and we got a tubby grey (which means white in horsey talk) pony we called Nipper, because she did nip. I cannot remember where we got her from. I think Mum and Dad’s intention was that Nipper would live at the bottom of our garden, where Dad built a stable; he built each side then bolted them together. For the first section, the back of the stable, he used boards from old pallets from the shop, but that wasn’t weather-proof so he had to buy overlapping timber. They must have intended to just feed Nipper on hay, or not really known quite what would be needed to keep a pony. But neighbours complained, presumably to the local council, and that started the regular search for grazing. Small fields to rent seemed hard to come by, and there was a lot of searching around. Mum saw a triangle of grass on Pinkneys Drive, where a lane branches off, and arranged with the grand house opposite to rent it. It was fenced with iron railings, spiked, and one stormy night the owner phoned us to say Nipper had impaled herself on the fence. Vets came, in the middle of the night, released and tended to Nipper, whose big belly had saved her from serious injury. God knows how much that all cost, what other budgeted spendings it set back, but I don’t remember there being any recriminations between Mum and Dad.

Mum had heard that near Burchetts Green, on the far side of the Thicket, a Dr McConnachie had a small stables with ponies that needed exercising. She called on Dr McConnachie to ask if I could go there regularly to help exercise the ponies. I remember her dressing up in her fur coat, and she probably put on her telephone voice, and she was rebuffed. I think she’d have done better if she hadn’t put on airs and graces. She felt very slighted, and that made her try again (phoning? visiting? I think it more likely she wrote to him). As a result, I was invited to go there every weekend and during school holidays. There was a grudging air about it, the older girls who rode there shunned me in the tack room so I’d spend a lot of time in the stables grooming the horses and ponies. But I got on well with Dr McConnachie’s grandsons, Ian, who was my age, and Robin, who was younger. That made it OK. We helped with getting hay off the small meadows there, and larked about. One time we found a bottle of lemonade Ian’s father had tucked beside a tree while going about the hot business of hay-making, and we drank some of it. Then Ian said, “oh no, he’ll thrash me tonight”. His father was in the armed forces, in Singapore, and I later heard he’d died diving into a swimming pool.

Rick did not come with me to Dr McConnachie’s. And I’m unsure now about the sequence of these events; it all started with lessons at Tony Sherlock’s but perhaps I went there alone, Rick being too young, and Nipper was bought after the McConnachie episode.

What I have no doubt about is how much nerve Mum had venturing into a world she knew nothing about in practical terms, the snobby, expensive world of horse riding in those days and in Maidenhead. It’s not so different nowadays.

A few years later I had outgrown Nipper and Rick was riding her, which led to finding a bigger pony for me, since I’d learned to ride well and was confident. We visited various places with ponies and horses for sale, but took to none of them until at one place near Marlow the people there said, oh and there’s this one we can do nothing with, or words to that effect. He was a slight, nervy pony, 14.2 hands, very dark brown, who was difficult to catch and flung his head around when you tried to put a bridle on him. I rode him up and down the lane; he wouldn’t walk but skittered along, and I loved that. We bought him for £30. We said he was a mustang – think I started that, and he probably was, being in the right height range, lean, agile, spirited and swift, a small muzzle, broad forehead, always on the edge of being wild but only needing and tolerating a gentle snaffle bit. You rode him by going with him rather than controlling him. I called him Husky, and loved him.

I rode him the seven or eight miles home, along the lane beside the river into the steep Quarry Woods, and the long road across Cookham Dean Common down to Pinkneys Green. How I found this route home, pretty direct, or was trusted to on a strange horse, I do not know. But they were quiet lanes, little traffic or danger other than losing my way. I went back there in recent years, and christ what a difference, and what an unpleasant ride it would be now. First through a concrete tunnel below the new dual carriageway booming with traffic bypassing Marlow, to reach Quarry Woods. This woodland along the steep scarp once gave a pleasant and peaceful vista across the river meadows to Bisham and Temple, the Thames and to the villages rising towards the Cotswolds; now front of stage is motorway-scale traffic, visually and noise-wise. Impossible to blank it out as you walk or ride the once peaceful woods. You couldn’t be a child here as I was once. Who thinks this has become a better place to live, for kids to adventure and thrive?

Yes, Marlow did need a bypass, but I notice the new road raised on embankments crosses (spoils) the river meadows to arrive on the east side of Marlow close to a council estate, not to the west where the big houses and ‘desirable’ villages are. I used to know a girl who lived on that council estate; it was a pleasant place, looking southwards across the river with Quarry Woods stretching away to one side.

On the old Marlow road at Bisham there’s still an old bridge crossing a stream; we used to pull in there sometimes, and swim in the deep pool beside a patch of gravel formed by the current. This is now mere yards from the new road bridging over and dwarfing what was there before.

On Nipper and Husky Rick and I would spend our spare time racing around Maidenhead Thicket, Quarry Wood, Winter Hill, scattering walkers out of our path. We had no falls or accidents that I remember. We would vault into the saddle, with a flourish; and could run beside the pony as it started to canter then vault into the saddle. I used to enjoy riding Husky bare-back; closer rider-horse communication, and I thought it looked very expert. Roads had to be crossed, but we managed safely, and were left to do this by our parents though what worries they had I do not know. The roads then were much quieter, and Maidenhead Thicket was bigger. Now it has been sliced smaller by the M4 spur that heads north towards Marlow and by new interchanges and underpasses. From a map it looks impossible to cross on horseback from the Pinkneys Green or Highway areas into the Thicket, and certainly the traffic noise will carry into what was a quiet and undisturbed large wood.

Our ponies were grazed on the field where Highway Avenue joins the Bath Road, where there was a line of mature chestnut trees and there is now a Budgens supermarket (arghh). It was here that I opened the door of the Vauxhall before we’d stopped, eager to get to the ponies, and the forwards-opening door crunched into one of the trees. The next grazing was on a field at the end of Firs Lane off Cannon Lane, where a mansion (now a college) could be seen behind a haha (I thought this ditch and bank idea brilliant, so you could see the horses from your house without a fence in the way, and I would have one when I was older; that hasn’t happened but I am doing the Lottery). Later Mum found more grazing along Cannon Lane, just past the railway bridge, which is still a field despite all the infill housing in that area. I remember walking around that field so many times trying to catch Husky, who after long enough would decide to stop and OK let himself be caught.

At one gymkhana on that field, I offered to help with a horse which was rearing and bucking, generally being unmanageable for its rider (female, young, attractive) who was standing beside it upset. I got into the saddle and we started to go forward; the horse reared, the saddle slid down its back with me on it, the horse then collapsed backwards onto my hand on the ground. The girl had loosened the girth strap which secures the saddle. My thumb was bent right back. An old boy there said he could fix it, I tottered to my feet and he put my hand on a fence post and suddenly swiped the dislocated thumb back into place, very painfully. Any thoughts I had of getting off with this girl, heroically, were gone, I felt sick. To this day, my right thumb joint sticks out a bit.

Our ponies were shod by a blacksmith, a bad-tempered old man, at a small smithy on a farm track off the Bath Road where it runs through the Thicket. This is now a proper road, leaving the A4 at a new roundabout, leading to a Business Centre. Nearby there is new housing. The Thicket has been much diminished.

During these years we met other people in our neighbourhood who had ponies, and rode with them sometimes, on the Thicket or to the many small gymkhanas. We always hacked to the gymkhanas, not being at the level where a horsebox or trailer could be afforded. This limited how far afield we could go, but one time I hacked to a gymkhana at Flackwell Heath near High Wycombe, and back, on Husky.

Our neighbour’s son, David, a few years older than me, also took up riding. But in a different way, with less of the actual riding. We never saw him at gymkhanas, and never raced through the woods with him. Inspired by TV westerns, he wanted a palomino pony, as ridden on films by Roy Roger et al. Palomino refers to the beautiful colouring, a creamy-gold coat with white mane and tail. His father indulged him, and at weekends David would sit on the pony on their drive, having photos taken. Either he was really bandy-legged or adopted that walk as part of being a cowboy.

We held a gymkhana on that Cannon Road field, for which I made the jumps and fences. All this kept us busy for years as a family, busy and tired and pretty happy, I think, with the secret (about me) well hidden (from me).

If we’d carried on riding, it would have been just hacking around the Thicket or for more excitement entering point-to-point races; that next stage was beyond my family money-wise and ambition-wise. For my parents riding had done the job of keeping us boys occupied; for me, I was getting more interested in cars and girls. But I wish I’d kept riding, or resumed later in life, as Rick did.

__________________________________________

Do not mistake some of what I write as just a lament about Change. Things do change, always have, always will, must; I know this. It is a regret and sadness about how these things of my childhood were made to change, how thoughtlessly, uncaringly, without regard to what was being lost and was of value on a collective and habitat scale. Rather like the care-less way Rick and I in a day cleared up and cleaned out the home Mum and Dad had spent 40 years making. We could have done better, and we could all have done better.

Chapter 15

Mr Lee and Mr Lee

When my brother and I sold Mum and Dad’s house, after they’d died, it was bought by another Mr Lee; a strange coincidence.

Branston, 57 Allenby Road, Maidenhead, was sold in 1987. Mum and Dad bought it in 1950, so they had lived there for 37 years. In those days it was quite usual for people to own and live in the same house almost all their lives, unlike the modern habit of moving every few years, making a profit on your house in order to buy something better in a better area; “how much is our house worth” or “how we’re going to improve it to make it worth more” had not become the main topics of dinner party conversations. No dinner parties then either, at least not in our social circle. Mum and Dad wouldn’t have understood the idea of a ‘housing ladder’ and getting your foot on the ladder. The achievement was to be able to buy your own house, and then sit tight, cling on, avoiding homelessness. Having to rent the house you lived in was a mark of relative failure, as it is now; I have discovered they, and my uncle aunt, were the first generation in the family buy their own house rather than rent.

This was understood in terms of security. I once asked Dad, who did the football pools every week and marked off the results on his Littlewoods betting form religiously every Saturday tea-time, as the results were sing-song intoned over the wireless, what he would do if he won. The top prize was an astonishing £64,000. “Well”, he said, “I’d put it in the bank for security, dear”. Not, buy a really big house, or a Rolls Royce or even a Jag, or go on a foreign holiday, or do anything exciting or new (except relax and stop watching the pennies, which actually would have been quite a new thing).

As for foreign holidays, we didn’t have them, nor I think did anyone we knew. Mum had never been out of this country, and Dad only for war service, until in the 1970s they and Mum’s sister Helen took a cheap package holiday to Spain; this would have been Auntie Helen's initiative, I'm sure. This was well after Rick and I had left home and were getting on with our own lives, the ponies sold, grazing finished and all things that had kept them busy for so many years had gradually disappeared. They were at a bit of a loose end, but had some money to spend on themselves for once, with the mortgage paid off. From the Spanish holiday, one photo showed them walking with a bit of difficulty through the building site around their hotel, this being the time when the Spanish coast was being built over with Benidorms; photos show the original villages still there, donkey-carts, tourists wandering amongst villagers going about their lives, so just as it was all about to be concreted over. Other photos show them sitting in the sun, Dad still in collar and tie. I think they didn’t quite know what to do there, or what they were expected to do.

We sold Mum and Dad’s house quickly and easily, as I remember it, for £80,000, in 1987. I don’t know exactly what they bought it for, 37 years earlier, probably less than £2,000. The mortgage was a burden for them; I remember as a young man, busy with my own family, career, focused forwards not back, but still noticing their relief when the mortgage eventually came to an end, in their late fifties, not many years before Mum died.

The new Mr Lee still lives there, I’ve looked this up; I’m tempted to get in touch, visit some time. The housing websites say it’s worth over ten times what we sold it for, a million quid.

__________________________________________

Had Mum and Dad, uncharacteristically, decided to sell their house before they died, they'd have been amazed at what it was worth even then. I don't remember them ever talking about house prices, or any other houses on Allenby Road having for sale signs outside. But, the amazing rise in house values, in half a generation, has shocked me and others. It has had big social effects, monetising the 'home' (whose value is surely not measured in £), increasing inequality and fixing in place as failures a class of people who can never afford to buy a house, making rented and social housing a marker of individual failure and more.

But how do we get out of it? The cottage my wife and I bought in 1966 for £2,400 sold less than 15 years later for about 80 grand. I'm not the only one to lament this enrichment which, somehow, hasn't made me feel richer:

"By the 1950s, houses cost only a little more than they would have done before the war... That house, in a wooded suburb, with a tennis court and five bedrooms, would probably have sold for between four and five thousand pounds, a price that was to be much the same twenty years later.... By the late 1980s, however, things had changed and the greedy and fascinated gaze of the English home-owning classes became riveted on the apparently unstoppable rise in house prices. Our house was 'worth' half a milion by 1990.... The real social change, both for individuals and the economy in general, was when the parents of middle-aged house-owners died, turning families who had no other money into capitalists for the first time."
– Nina Bawden, In My Own Time

Chapter 16

Eleven-Plus and Onward

The eleven-plus exam was the great divider of children, the educational feeder of the social class system which was so much more evident, and simply accepted, than it is today.

Paradoxically, it also fed into social mobility; if you passed the eleven-plus you went to a ‘better’ school (not only better educationally, better in terms of social cachet) and that led you to a better job, career and future, better social network, posher girlfriends and then wife. But it was a blunt, harsh educational/ social instrument, because on the basis of one day’s worth of tests your future path in life was, if not fully determined, strongly influenced. The friends with whom I’d gone through infants and primary school were divided into two groups, one which I’d continue to spend my school days with, the other which I’d no longer see, no matter previous friendships.

The eleven-plus was not a sort of level-playing field of identifying children’s different aptitudes and potential; it was, and was labelled as, success or failure. You ‘failed’ your eleven-plus, and then that sense of failure was added to the stress of moving to your secondary school. It was the crudest, momentary snapshot of a child’s potential. How well you did on that day depended on so many things, particularly your parents’ input; parents were hyper-aware of the make-or-break nature of the eleven-plus and surely this anxiety communicated itself to many children.

If you passed your eleven-plus you were said to be 'brainy', set for higher things, a ‘white collar’ job. If you failed you were directed to education and training for manual, technical ‘blue collar’ work. Work denoted in terms of work-uniform; where you stood in pecking order denoted by what you wore most days going to work; public signals of personal success or failure. These things were treated as either/or, black or white; children’s futures were treated in those binary terms. Thus my secondary education was academic, in (total) distinction from practical, even in subjects like physics which could well have been taught and taught better in practical, applied terms instead of wholly theoretically as at my grammar school. In later life I ran up against my limits academically, and just in the course of living, I mean not through any training, I uncovered my practical, hands-on abilities. But by then career-paths and cv’s had been established, invested in, and it was difficult to change course when a wage had to be earnt and a family fed.

What it boiled down to was a sorting of children (up) into aspiring middle class future lives or (down) into working class life, blighted by the pernicious English class system. The original intention of the eleven-plus was good, to provide the type of education that suits each child. But the technical colleges planned for kids whose eleven-plus results indicated that was where their potential lay simply did not materialise for lack of money. So in practice we got grammar schools (which aped private fee-paying schools) for the best, and so-called secondary moderns for the rest. The eleven-plus test would have had to be understood in terms other than passing or failing; in such a class-ridden society that was never going to happen. Bedevilled by C. P. Snow’s two cultures, equal worth was probably never going to have been accorded to the technical, pragmatic, non-academic.

As well as the many individual cruelties of it, there’s the sheer wastefulness and stupidity: other countries manage to value both the academic and the technical/practical; engineering for example is valued in Germany in a way it is not in this country, and apprenticeships need not be of lower value than undergraduate studies. This was one of the things that made Nevil Shute, himself an engineer, despair of Britain and up-sticks for less hide-bound Australia. My friend Roger’s dad was right to direct him from grammar school to an engineering apprenticeship, and he’s probably done very well as a result.

My younger brother passed his eleven-plus too, and suffered as a result, pushed along an academic path when he was an innately practical, hands-on, fix-it sort of person. Our parents and the system had academic expectations of him, because he’d passed his eleven-plus and that was the path I was following three years ahead of him, and they measured him in those wrong-for-him terms.

I seem to have both the academic and the practical in my make-up; it was the practical side that grammar school neglected and I uncovered and enjoyed later in life. But the academic or scholastic path was much more inimical to Rick. So it was good that he didn’t try to submit to it, round peg in square hole, and struck out on a different path which suited his abilities better, even though this has been difficult for him and others along the way. Rick has been much more successful in worldly terms than I have.

I think I passed my eleven-plus in large part because my parents didn’t let their stress about it affect me (or I was too thick-skinned). It was usual then for parents to promise their children a big reward if they passed their eleven-plus, often a shiny new bike (with the converse meaning of punishment if you did not pass); this might as often have been counter-productive, hyping up the importance of the eleven-plus (“don’t you dare fail”) and adding to the stress for kids unused to exams. Mum and Dad bought me a new bike, a fine green Raleigh, before the eleven-plus; I don’t know if they were being clever, or this was just happenstance, as children made their own way to school then and bikes were needed for this; there was none of today’s parental delivering of the little darlings to the school entrance. After I’d passed, my parents did ask me what I would like as a reward, and I asked for a desk, which my friends thought was boring, but I was thinking I’d need somewhere to do the homework we’d been told to expect, not the dining room table that had to be cleared for tea, and somewhere that was mine.

When I got on the bus on the first day going to grammar school, at the top of the stairs I passed a friend on the back seats who’d failed the eleven-plus and was on his way to the secondary modern school. He said hello. I hesitated and instead of sitting with him went to the front of the bus. I cringe at the memory of this, and the awful unintended symbolism.

I did keep in touch with one primary school friend who failed his eleven-plus, and in the holidays after the exam went to play in his dad’s builders yard, on buggies we rode down the steep slopes. After the holidays I think we went our separate ways, him living nearer Cookham and off to another school, our paths just not crossing any more.

My best friend through primary and secondary school was Roger, also known as Bogs or Boggy. We were both big as boys and a bit rough and tough, so we bonded. At primary school Boggy had a gang, and I remember him saying I could be leader of the gang every other day. I didn’t want to be the leader, but I also didn’t want to be a member of his gang. Typical of me. I cannot remember how this was resolved.

There was a polio outbreak while I was at primary school. I remember the sandpit in the playground near Courthouse School being filled in, presumably to limit the disease which is spread via infected faeces, animal or human. Poliomyelitis outbreaks had been widespread, and vaccines were only developed in the 1950s, leading to mass vaccination programmes. In secondary school there was a boy of my age who was lame as a result of childhood polio, as was Ian Dury the singer we enjoyed watching perform when we were in our 20s.

Courthouse School was on Blenheim Road, not on Courthouse Road, and Alwyn Road Infants School was not on Alwyn Road but a nearby minor road. Weird.

I remember Mum worrying whether to opt to send me to Maidenhead Grammar School or to Borlase, which was a grammar school between Marlow and Medmenham; Borlase had a very distinctive uniform which I think gave the impression it was a better class of school, almost a public school (meaning not open to the public in the strange doublespeak of the English class system). But going to Borlase would have meant a long bus journey including the steep road down Quarry Hill which was sometimes closed due to snow and ice in winter. There was no published information in those days indicating which schools got the best results; parental choices were based on gossip and impressions, like how smart the school uniform was.

At Maidenhead Grammar School there were tests at the end of every term; I was never even in the top half of the rankings. It was a boys’ school, and all the teaching staff were male, referred to as masters not teachers and who we called Sir. It was blackboard teaching; the masters would typically turn their backs on the class and chalk on the blackboard either an exercise for us to do or, in physics and chemistry, theory for us to copy down. There was very seldom any discussion, seldom any more than offering an answer to a question asked. It was rote learning, and though I was dutiful and tried I was bad at it, not much caught my interest. I don’t remember being taken to task by my parents for the lacklustre annual reports, nor were there any parent-teacher meetings that I can recall. I think they were bewildered by it all, felt out of their depth.

A friend was once threatened with being ‘sent down’ to the local secondary modern school if he didn’t improve (so, being sent there as a punishment). He was no worse in the termly tests than I was; I think he was picked on because he looked a bit scruffy, a bit working class. Most of our parents could make the effort so we looked like we fitted in, grammar school boys with much expected of them. Another friend told me he’d visited this boy’s house, in Cookham, and the toilet was at the bottom of the garden, he sniggered. This stuck with me, and later I thought of him as someone for whom passing the eleven-plus was a misfortune, sat too uneasily with his family.

Other than that, there was no snobbery, very little sense of social distinction between us boys although some had fathers in 'the professions', nor among the various masters, that I was aware of. No-one referred to their parents as Mater and Pater; they were simply Mum and Dad. Instead of social gradations between us, there was a sense of commonality and shared purpose, a post-war going forward to a better future, which I think the teachers shared too. The earlier eleven-plus weeding-out must have played a part in this, of course.

Every school had its uniform and not wearing this neatly was a major crime. Every town seemed to have its one shop which supplied school uniforms, at fixed prices above other clothing, and you had no choice but to pay; none of the cheap clothing shops we have now. Remember gabardine? We had gabardine macs for going to school (never used for just going out playing on rainy days). Later, in my 20s, we found gabardine macs in secondhand shops and wore them tightly belted, as ironic and knowing fashion statements, not really long after my childhood but many years in terms of how the freedom and finances to play and experiment with clothing had changed, and to cause outrage.

One early lesson was how to cover a schoolbook. When they were given out, we were told to take them home, find some thickish brown paper, and wrap a protective cover around the book (the masters demonstrated this), then bring it in for inspection the next day. Betcha that's not done today. They were all hardbacks, and the country was not long out of paper rationing, so books were a valuable commodity. Paperbacks were starting to proliferate but looked down upon, and were poor quality even well into the 1970s, even after decimalisation.

The masters routinely hit us. It was typical for a master to walk down a row of desks looking at what each pupil had written, and at least one or two kids would get a hefty cuff around the head, for getting something wrong. I remember the geography teacher asking Roger what subjects he was planning to do at O level and mishearing what he said, leaping from his desk at the front to land a blow which almost knocked Roger out of his seat. Nowadays, if that happened…!

For more serious wrongdoing, we were sent to the headmaster for caning. He was a tall thin man who had what I assume was a war wound which made him hold his head to one side; we called him Necko. He and his wife lived in a house at the entrance to the school, and we went to his study there for canings. The headmaster’s wife was a quiet woman, seldom seen. She kept to their rooms in the house on the school drive, the only woman amongst a couple of hundred assorted males. The school smelt of boys, and the staff room smelt similarly plus tobacco when the door opened for a master to emerge, gown flying behind him

Children were never taken out of school during term-time; if there was a gap in the row of desks, it was due to serious illness. But later, great pride was taken in any of us playing hooky, being being able to say we had.

The school was run on public school lines. We didn't play football, we played rugby, rugger. The school was built in red brick, ornate Victorian style; when a new large extension was to be built, the headmaster told us sorrowfully that this would have to be built in a plain modern style, the red brick and decorative detailing could not be afforded.

He told us this at morning assembly, which took place in the library, a rather grand first floor room. End of term assemblies were held there too, with a local dignitory invited to speak some platitudes for our benefit. One particularly boring time a few of us started slow hand-clapping the speaker and the whole school joined in; the masters ranged along the sides of the hall, like guards, glared at us all but could do nothing. Once the big extension was built, assemblies took place in the new gym; one year a couple of us got into the gym beforehand and put plant pots inside the upright piano. When the music master Mr Hammersley tried started the end-of-term assembly with the school song (yes, we had one of those, “Old Maidenheadonians” for gods sake) there was a terrible crash bang of discordant noise.

In my first year or two at grammar school the older boys and the prefects looked like adults to me. I remember the headmaster announcing that one of the prefects, Lipschitz (no first name, only surnames were used at school), was changing his name to Lister. Presumably his family had come to Britain as a result of the war. I don’t remember there being any other foreign-sounding names there; it was a very white, English school population. The games master stood out by being Welsh and sounding Welsh; he was widely held to be a bit thick. One boy at school stood out as being homosexual; he was bullied and ostracized, his first name used as a synonym for queer (‘queer’ in those days, not ‘gay’). I don’t think he ever did anything wrong, just felt different and seemed different to the rest of us. Though I know now it’s very unlikely he was the only homosexual boy in the school, he was the one who just couldn’t pretend enough. I don’t remember the word prejudice ever being used, or thought given to it, in all my schooling. Remembering is such a mix of pleasure and regret or shame.

Whatever trouble that boy had later in his life, we certainly added our casual cruelty to it. Homosexuality was illegal in this country until 1967, when I was 22, many years after those schooldays. Prejudice persisted for much longer, especially in institutions like schools, the police, armed forces. There was no concept of equality-in-diversity until recently; instead the mania for dividing people according to their differences into ranks of good, ordinary, bad and very bad persisted. That boy may have been intelligent or not, imaginative or talented in some way, compassionate and kind, but his whole character was obscured and vilified because he was homosexual; I gave that not a moment’s thought at the time. The effects of this prejudice continued for years; about 40 years later, one of the men I knew sharing a communal house in London would introduce himself to visitors like this: “hello, I’m X, I’m a solicitor and I’m gay”; so, what he was shunned for as a boy was stated proudly, but was still presented as his defining characteristic.

Diversity in its modern, human rights sense was another planet, far away. The idea of gender fluidity would have appalled adults then, would have been more subversive of their way of life and sense of themselves than communism, the bogey-man of those days, which I suppose it is.

I don’t remember my parents ever mentioning homosexuality, or us knowing anyone who was. Even after legalisation, nothing was said; my parents attitude was probably denial, similar to this:

“Jenkins could barely conceal his embarrassment. He was in no way anti-Jewish. He just wished they’d keep it to themselves. He felt exactly the same way about homosexuals. He wouldn’t ever knowingly employ them… but he accepted their existence. Providing they didn’t flaunt it...”*

There were no black or coloured children at school, and I don’t remember meeting or even seeing any all the time I was growing up in Maidenhead. If we had done, I’m sure my parents would have retreated into a very stiff, stand-offishness, because they wouldn’t have known how they were meant to behave. Homosexuality could be ignored (as long as not “flaunted”) but blackness of skin could not be.

Discrimination was not a term my parents and their friends would have recognised in its modern sense. Discrimination was a good thing, the ability to distinguish between things, the opposite of indiscriminate. I think with these changes of meaning we may gained something (like focusing on inequality and finding a language to deal with it) but lost something too - subtlety, nuance - in a new black/white, good/bad way of looking at the world.

There were none of the modern ‘isms’. However, an old one was still around, colonialism. Malta, Cyprus, Kenya, Rhodesia and many African countries, Jamaica and many Caribbean countries, were still colonies of Britain, and I got no sense from the adults at home or at school that here was a very chequered, problematic history and present day. History and Geography were taught in, not just a politically neutral way, but a politically ignorant way, with no ethical or ethnical dimensions.

There was also no sex education at school, and biology was not a curriculum subject. When I was about 12 Mum asked me if school taught us about “the facts of life” (avoiding the word ‘sex’). I quickly said “oh yes” and I think she breathed a sigh of relief. In fact, with sex what we all did was learn on the job, like riding a bike.

There was also no pornography. Or rather, there probably was, somewhere, if you knew where to get it, but not in general, small-town circulation. What there was instead were naturists’ magazines, photos of fat old hairy people with their genitals shaded out playing ping-pong or tennis; these magazines were kept on the top shelf of newsagents, and you’d be very brave to take one down and to the counter to buy, and then disappointed when you looked at it. Our imaginations, however, were vivid.

The curriculum included Art and Music, Latin and General Studies - the school was trying to provide a full, rounded education, not just narrowly vocational. Some kids (a few) prospered in Art or Music, while for the rest of us they were a more recreational and welcome change from the other subjects. The music was classical, of course, and pupils divided between preferring classical and popular music. None of us had much spending money, and even into the sixth form I don’t remember anyone buying records (therefore probably not having a record player at home). What one friend did, whenever there was a new Elvis Presley record released, was go into town at lunchtime to buy the sheet music, which was much cheaper than the record. He’d bring it back, and say to one of the kids who could play the piano, “Go on, Maxwell, see if you can play this”. And Maxwell would stand at the piano (some classrooms had an upright piano) with the sheet music in one hand and with no difficulty hammer out the (incredibly simple) Presley tune.

The year before O levels, age 15, we were asked which subjects we wanted to take the exam for. Without telling my parents I opted out of taking O level physics and chemistry. These subjects were taught in such a dry, rote-learning way that made no connection with the real world, nor with me. I remember Roger saying he didn’t want to do French, it sounded “poncey”, but wouldn’t mind learning German, it sounded stronger. Geography interested me, because I could relate it to the world around me, a bit, though it wasn’t taught that way. The only our-world connection I remember is the Geography master telling us to watch the weather reports on BBC to learn about isobars and not bother with the ITV weather reports with symbols for rain, sun etc because those were like comic books; he (another Mr Lee) would have a fit if he heard how much more infantilising TV weather reports have become today, along the lines of “ooo it’s going to be a bit chilly first thing tomorrow, wrap up warm everyone...”

I got some O levels, five I think, and had to resit Maths. This was at a time when there were no cheap handy calculators; smart kids or those with keen dads had slide-rules. Computers? - not yet, or only for code-breaking and the size of small houses. I do wish that I had persevered with Latin; the bits that have stuck in my mind have been very useful in later years, but it was taught like catechism, just chanting amo-amas-amat; Roman history is so interesting, and Latin would have caught the interest of us boys if it was taught in that context.

I thought of leaving school, and recall no discussions at all with my parents about ‘what next’; by then I was very much in making-my-own-decisions mode. Friends were leaving too, and when I saw what they were moving to – taking solicitors’ articles, trainee managers etc – I felt deeply uninspired, so decided to stay on and do A levels. That changed everything; doing just three subjects really helped, and I found subjects I was really interested in, like English Literature. The masters’ different attitudes helped too, suddenly they were more friendly, treated us as young adults and were interested in us. I flourished, worked hard (three hours homework each night) and enjoyed what I was doing, Geography, English and French. I really got into the English literature taught by Mr Stanley, Robert; I was amazed by the vivid imagery in Shakespeare and, unbidden, as bit of extra work, did an analysis of all the different types of imagery in Hamlet (or was it Macbeth?), to Mr Stanley’s appreciative surprise.

Essays, everything was handwritten, of course. Today I still think best when pen in hand. Composition involved thinking several sentences and even paragraphs ahead, a mental muscle that word processors have made unnecessary but I think was a useful skill and still is. We all used fountain pens; there were no felt-tips or biros in everyday use then. The wooden desks had inkwell holes but we'd gone past using pens that needed dipping into a pool of ink.

I noticed that as A level students we sometimes reminded the masters of themselves as students. They let us relate to them more as people than authorities, though they didn’t say much about themselves and we just caught glimpses. When I was talking to Mr Stanley about which university to go to, and realising that if it was Oxford there was also the question of which college (so much about that privileged world was difficult for working class kids) he frowned, looked unhappy briefly and the discussion drifted off. I thought of him having had a bad time there, as a working class boy possibly on a pre-war scholarship.

The senior French master (ginger beard, short, stocky, I have a clear picture of him but no name) who had been so fierce with us as little kids, now worked us hard at A levels but in a caring way. Just before the exam he gave a glimpse of himself; smiling in reflection he said he remembered sitting in the garden revising before his A level exams. I had a vivid mental picture of him sitting in the sun under a tree, with a book.

Mr Woodin had taught us French at the O level stage. He was one of the few masters who seldom or never hit pupils. Younger than most other masters, bearded, mild and quite shy. In my first or second year he took us on a school trip to France, to Tours, where he spoke to the people there in such a quiet voice he had to repeat everything. We had spare time, and a couple of us went exploring, down to the River Loire, all sandbanks and small islands, twice as wide as the Thames at Maidenhead; we had a stand-off with some local boys. There was a parade in the town, with people throwing masses of confetti; a girl standing next to me threw some at me playfully and I threw some back. As we laughed together, her mother (presumably) chided her, “sale, sale”.

Somehow I know Mr Woodin lived with his mother. He brought a girlfriend to the school fête one year; I remember her as being very summer-ily, flouncily dressed with a parasol and high heels that sank into the grass, being introduced to master after master, enduring it perhaps. After I’d left school I bumped into Mr Woodin on what became Highway Avenue, where he’d bought one of the new bungalows; he was filing down a small part for his vintage car, an Allard I think. We chatted, a nice man. I knew his first name was Eric, but I still called him Mr Woodin.

In my last year at grammar school, I and one or two boys started driving to school, which seemed revolutionary and raised eyebrows, as we’d hoped. We parked beside the masters’ cars. I had an old Citroen Light 15, a friend had an ex-War Department motorbike. Most of the masters had boring family cars, but one eccentric old boy had a pre-war Alvis Firefly that I admired.

A car was what we all wanted, as soon as we were 17 and had passed the driving test, or even before that while still learner-drivers. Like smoking (which I didn't), having your own car, no matter if an old jalopy, was a benchmark for independence and being 'grown-up' (which we weren't). We meaning us boys. I don't recall any girl of our age having her own car or even being able to drive. This one of the good changes since then: I see young women now as keen to get their own wheels as the young men are, and it seems to mean more to them, their not being dependent on boyfriends, brothers, parents for lifts, an independence young women did not have when I was growing up.

Roger and Eddie and I went around together, in school and in town. We got into fights with teddy boys occasionally. When one of my friends moved to a technical college for the apprenticeship his dad insisted he do, and he was worried about the exams, I helped him find a way to see the exam papers beforehand. Another friend was Beamer, so-called because he had an angelic smile always on his face, even when we were taking the piss out of him. His mum probably loved that smile on her boy.

We were all quite nihilistic, not that we knew the word then. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry was at a very hotting up stage of the Cold War; the Berlin Wall had gone up soon after our O level exams (and was not brought down, leading to the unification of East and West Germany, until I was well into my 40s). Then there was the Cuban missile crisis. I never saw On the Beach but heard this film of post-nuclear non-survival talked about by adults. I did read 1984, and Orwell’s imagined future was different but no more hopeful. We chatted periodically about what we were going to do workwise when we were grown up, and I remember Roger saying “we’ll all be dead by then”.

The school had three large playing fields (most flogged off for housing since then) and it was big on games. There was a cross-country run every year which everyone had to go on. I enjoyed that, and playing rugby, running around and bashing into people. In my last year, the three of us, Roger, Eddie and I, played a game for the school in the morning on a Saturday and in the afternoon played in a Thames Valley rugby team, then went drinking with the older Thames Valley players, then met up with girlfriends. Just the thought of all that exhausts me now.

__________________________________________

By time I was doing my eleven-plus, denazification in Germany had stopped so the many remaining old Nazis could apply their organisational skills, well honed in the persecution and slaughter of millions of Jews and others, to rebuilding German industry. We had helpfully bombed the old factories and infrastructure, so they built shiny, efficient modern manufacturing plants, funded by the U.S. Marshall Plan. I think most people in Britan had heard of the Nazi trials, Nuremberg etc, but few knew (or were allowd to know) that so many senior and middle-manager level Nazis were starting new professional civilian lives. Germany worked hard to rebuild, while this country seemed to just want a bit of a rest. Precise Germans, sloppy Brits, or complacent Brits. There was more to it than that, of course. For Britain, winning the Second World War had been a Pyrrhic victory.

Showing the world of young people I was growing up towards in the mid-1950s, about the time I did the eleven-plus, there’s an interesting film, Momma Don’t Allow, a short bit of cinema verité without dialogue, filmed at a jazz club, in the Wood Green suburb of London – but far in time and place from ‘swinging London’. It’s filmed in black and white, but that doesn’t account for the overall drabness and bareness. The male teenagers there, several years ahead of me in the growing up race, wear suits and ties, some with waistcoats and ‘best’ overcoats to the dance, the girls have long skirts and little make-up, everyone smokes, all the boys have a pint in hand, the girls seem not to drink, boys’ haircuts are short but there are a few teddy boy quiffs and duck tails; the atmosphere is friendly, fuggy and frenetic. Outside a pre-war limousine rolls up and several posh couples emerge to do some good-natured slumming; no-one objects to them; the driver takes the ornate radiator cap off the car (Rolls-Royce?) before going in so that it can't be nicked. The band is Chris Barber’s and they’re all just in a corner of the room, no stage, minimum equipment. Lonnie Donegan is part of the band. The trad jazz is unamplified but loud in the small hall, and every number they play is applauded; the American influence is there in the music (and film’s title) but the scene is very early 1950s basic-British. There’s a bit of smooching, not much, some rivalry to dance with the best girls, more boys than girls but no fights; there’s actually some decorum. An opening scene before the night’s fun shows the young men in their first jobs and young women in headscarves and baggy slacks finishing work, cleaning jobs. The youngsters don’t look that much different from the young adults around me as I was growing up.

I was about 10 when this was filmed, so things had moved on a bit by the time I was a teenager, but not a lot. The Windsor jazz club I went to was also basic (though the bands did have a stage), Chris Barber still played though only at bigger venues, Lonnie Donegan had left the band to play skiffle. We boys were not so smartly turned out, girls skirts were getting shorter, the smooching in corners was a bit more rampant. Teddy boys were not in evidence, that tribe having gone their separate way. Trad jazz as the music young people gravitated around was about to be ousted by rock and the blues (another import, but one that developed here and became established in its own right), but was still the best way to get off with girls out of parental sight.

*Ted Allbeury, Children of Tender Years
However, don’t take this as a simple recommendation of Ted Allbeury. He’s a very uneven author. Children of Tender Years is complex and unexpected in its characterisations as are some of his other spy thrillers, while other titles (Snowball, Shadow of a Doubt) are Buchan simplicities, devious dastardly foreigners versus upright resourceful Britons (born or adopted) who win through against the odds; for example, Aid and Comfort is a good story, but the baddies get their just desserts while the goodies not only win but are also good-looking, get the beautiful women and good jobs. There’s an overwritten future history/rant (All Our Tomorrows: pesky Trades Unions serving Soviet Union interests) and an autobiography as unrevealing as a c.v. about Allbeury himself (along the lines of ‘I lived here and did this job, I lived there and did that job.’ But was he married, a father, parents alive, happy, frustrated, lonely, poor, healthy…?). Allbeury was an intelligence officer in the war, then went from one job to another while turning out one book or more a year. There’s a book to be written about individualists like Ted Allbeury who never really fitted in or found their place post-war.

Chapter 17

Growing Up

There was a lot of social and cultural change as I was growing up. It was not simply a matter of passing your eleven-plus or not; exactly when you were born made a big difference to how you grew up. Reaching my teenage years in the late 1950s, I narrowly missed some rites of passage boys only a few years older passed through, big things like National Service, and smaller things like how you were expected to dress. Had I been only a bit older, I’d have been expected to slick my hair down with Brylcreem, and to wear a cravat as casual, young-man wear, and a signet ring. My mother wondered if she should buy me a signet ring, worn by young men on the left little finger (why?); I said NO!

I just missed having to do National Service, two years of compulsory military training for 17+ year-olds. My neighbour David had to do it, went away, came back (“waste of time”). Boys (not girls) had their teenage years (careers, social life, romance) interrupted by National Service until it was abolished in 1960. It was a form of conscription; there were lot of conflicts in the late 1940s and ‘50s, Korea, Cyprus, Malaya, Yugoslavia, Kenya, India/Pakistan, with Britain involved in some of them, and Germany divided with British forces stationed in the West, and the Cold War.

Perhaps National Service created a gulf between boys taught to respect authority and to follow orders, and us lot who came just after, who took pride in disrespect for authority, though National Service probably produced its own rebels. It was widely resented; you had to give two years of your young life, yet you weren’t old enough to vote until age 21 (that didn’t change to 18 until 1970). There were exemptions for boys continuing their educations, so it hit those who left school at 15, making it class-biased and another marker of eleven-plus failure.

There was a wider generational change going on. Boys just a bit older than me as they grew up tended to imitate their fathers, dress like them, become younger versions of them. To act like a grown-up was to act like your father. Some of my teenage schoolfriends were still caught up in this. But others were starting to make our own way, our own rules, ways of dressing and behaving; actually the last thing we wanted was to be like our fathers. Our parents were boring, old-fashioned, to be left behind instead of imitated. If what we wore, music we listened to, how we partied (all-nighters!) shocked them, all the better, this was good.

From what I could see of adult life, there was nothing much to get excited about. The few so-called bohemians of my parents’ generation seemed pathetic, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan and so on, shown drunk in newspaper pictures but actually just a bit dishevelled in suits slightly rumpled and ties askew, such rebels! And Labour minister George Brown pissed as a rat described as being “tired and emotional” when he’d fallen over in the street; all these euphemisms and deference to excuse not very much. However, we have our own euphemisms today, and now they're not sexual (lot of frank naming of the bits there) but economic; once people were sacked or fired, now we "let them go". Sounds like a nice thing.

In the mid-1950s I remember talk, maybe I caught a discussion panel on television, of ‘angry young men’; I never really got what they were angry about. John Osborne, he seemed the only one of these angry young men, looked to me not so different from my parents and other adults around, suit, tie, maybe a bit scruffier and younger, only difference was he was complaining a lot about, well, about something. When years later I saw the filmed version of Look Back In Anger, I still didn’t get what he was so angry about, or what he was looking back at. I just felt sorry for his ill-treated wife, who was rather pretty. But the film does show the miserable no-escape poverty of life for many people in post-war Britain.

Sadie Jones’ modern novel The Outcast seems to be set around the times I was growing up; from the description it seems a few years earlier, and a social level higher – the main character calls his friend’s father “Sir”, which I wouldn’t have been expected to do. But the deference expected by adults, and the insistence on social norms and outrage at teenage defiance, was much the same.

For girls, the convention had been for them to start wearing longer skirts, calf-length, when they reached 12 or 13, puberty I suppose. While I was a teenager that changed, a big change: skirts got shorter and shorter, as boys hair got longer and longer. This was real, visible, teenage rebellion. When tights became available, in the early ‘60s I think, the skirts got even shorter. Great.

Teddy boys were already around as I grew up, drainpipe trousers, drape jackets, long greased hair; already a teenage rebellion, but a working class, manual one. As it already existed, boys of my age tended not to adopt this style; it seemed not ‘us’, and they’d have beaten us up as being posh, clever dicks. I remember on one visit to Maidenhead Library seeing a scene in the window of a furniture shop (Courts, I think it was called) on the corner: a young obviously-pregnant woman was pointing to sofas, a salesman at her side, and a teddy boy (husband, surely) in his drainpipes and drape jacket a pace or two behind them, looking awkward and surly in his embarrassment.

If we’d grown up a few years later we’d have been mods – scooters, parkas – or punks. Between these two teenage rebellions, mods and rockers, some of us followed other paths: traditional jazz, then blues and rock and roll as they reached the middle class home counties, and hippiedom developed. I started wearing clothes indistinguishable for parents from what tramps and down-and-outs wore. I didn’t think it at the time but I suppose this was quite a rebellion against my parents’ world of respectability, keeping up appearances, propriety.

There wasn’t much music in our house until I started listening to Radio Luxembourg; popular music was Lonnie Donegan, skiffle, and Bill Haley with Rock Around the Clock, but to my eyes these were old men in suits. When I was older there came Billy Fury and all the other lads given daft names, who couldn’t really sing. Cousin June’s husband Tony was always playing jazz records and Frank Sinatra and all the other crooners; I really disliked that music, it seemed too knowing, adult, self-assured, con-man-corrupt. Years later I wasn’t surprised to read that Sinatra had been close to the mafia in the United States. The music that came later, in my teenage years, blues and hard rock, seemed much more raw, new, and ‘us’.

One summer when I was about 15 a couple of us decided to go to the Beaulieu Jazz Festival. There was no question of asking for parental approval, or thoughts about how we’d travel or how we’d get on there; in our minds this was where excitement and thrills were happening, where young people were gathering, and that was all we needed to know. We walked to where a long stretch of the A4 Bath Road started at Maidenhead Thicket, and I started to hitch, put out a thumb to get a lift from passing motorists. “You’re not really, are you?” said Roger, and I carried on, got lifts (I remember nothing about these) to near Southampton, walked and ended up at the festival (I cannot see quite how I did manage this). Of course, almost everyone there was older than me, and it was great to see a mucky, dishevelled, uninhibited scene of alternative life. I cannot remember if I’d told my parents where I was going, or just disappeared (pretty irresponsibly), but they were in a state when I walked in, appalled as well as angry. Mum wanted to burn all my clothes in case they were infected, and kept muttering “venereal disease”; Sodom, Gomorrah and Beaulieu Jazz Festival!

My mother was so upset, she said “I should have strangled you at birth”, which I had no way of taking on board. Normal life resumed, more or less; how could it not?

But while everyone was so concerned about young people possibly having sex, our so-called betters were shagging themselves silly. Rose Tremain’s memoir (Rosie) of her growing up in social strata many layers above us (private schooling, country estates, summers in the south of France) describes parents, aunts and uncles and friends bed-swopping blatantly, free from any social disgrace. The real toffs, like the Astor set, were at it too, picking up young girls for sex like Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies, who were only a year or two older than me. So the social rules around sex had an economic basis; if you had enough money you were pretty much free of them; if you weren’t rich you feared the social disgrace, with the financial consequences of pregnancy out of wedlock always a possibility.

That Beaulieu episode was the closest they came to expressing outright anger. I never heard them having a serious, angry argument between themselves; strong emotion was deflected. I grew up not knowing how to have an argument with someone else, how to express anger directly; discussion, debate perhaps, though not much of that, but not an emotionally charged argument. Or rather, I never learnt that it was possible for two people to come back from (survive) a serious argument and falling out. Years later I married a woman similarly limited by parental example, and that pretty much did for our ability to talk openly about our feelings or anything we might strongly disagree about. We skated on the surface for as long as we could, and then the thin ice broke and we sank into years’ worth of accumulated resentments.

A year or so after Beaulieu I got a Lambretta scooter briefly (£15!) as did Roger, a better one he kept for longer. But I found it wet, and pretty useless for girls and what I wanted to be doing with them.

Before I was old enough to drive, I arrived home in a car I’d just bought (£30) from a schoolfriend. It was an old Austin 8 much adapted, no roof, MG bits (radiator, rear end), lengthened bonnet with grilles, and painted British Racing Green (as I told everyone). I’m not sure who did all the adapting, maybe my friend Beamer’s older brother. My parents were surprisingly unfazed by this, apart from the fact that I’d actually driven it on the road; they promised to teach me to drive once I turned 17. The car was called Henry VIII, presumably because he was thought to be quite lad, having eight wives; we were a bit clueless in those days, unaware he was a murderous bastard with six wives, two of whom he had killed.

I drove Henry to and from the ponies’ fields, with Mum or Dad clinging on as we whizzed around corners; I was not a sedate careful learner driver. The car was on the front lawn with the bonnet up as I tinkered with the engine, when reflected in the lounge window I spotted a head popping out from behind a bush beside the front fence. For a while I pretended not to have seen her, as this giggling girl leaning on her bike dodged behind then out from the foliage. Then we had a “you knew I was there” “no I didn’t” conversation. She (wish I could remember her name) had cycled from the girl’s grammar school at the far end of Farm Road (she lived several villages away, quite a bike ride; did she really do that twice a day?). We liked each other, and flirted and more. She told me her friends had a numbering system for how far they’d gone (that was the phrase then, meaning sexually), and she wanted to get to number six before her friends. We did what we could, in my house and her house sometimes, nervously hoping parents didn’t intrude. That didn’t quite happen, but one time in her house her parents arrived home unexpectedly and rushed in (so, suspicious?); I managed to get out the back door and hid beside a shed. Just as I thought it was safe and stepped out, her father opened the back door, glaring at me. I must have hitched home, or did I have my bike, and maybe they had seen that as they arrived home.

Her father worked at the Aldermaston atomic research centre; they seemed to think quite highly of themselves, and were quite snooty with me (even before the homecoming event). There were two older brothers who went to public schools, I had been told, perhaps a point being made (no, I thought, the point was that the sons got the supposedly best schooling and the daughter was left to state schools.) But girls did generally have a worse deal; they were trouble, and could get into trouble (pregnant) and were much more closely watched by parents, while sons were expected to run wild (a bit) and sow their wild oats (nudge, nod, wink). Girls, young women, getting a harder time continued in adult working life – all the executives in a couple of companies I worked for much later were male and women were confined to the all-female typing pool. By the time I was 28ish and soon to leave for life in Greece, meanwhile working for another company in London, the new-broom go-ahead marketing director had one older woman executive among the 20 or so men, and one younger woman executive who didn’t wear a bra, to our delight, not that she really needed one. Those years later it was still that sexist - good-natured rather than nasty - but still sexist.

Technology has helped release women from typing pools, now that every manager has a computer on his desk and only the CEOs still have secretaries. And it has simplified office-work. When I used to take reports or letters to the typing pool, after the female joshing the typed document would come back with a white top copy and several 'carbon copies', or 'flimsies' as they were also called - because there were no photocopiers then, or not in everyday office use. Tipex, a little bottle of white gubbins with a brush insert, was needed to correct minor typing mistakes and avoid having to re-type the whole document - because typewriters do not function conveniently as word processors do now! It was a great leap forward when mechanical or early electrical typewriters were replaced by 'the Olivetti' - electrical, and with 'golfball' typefaces instead of the previous clacking keys on metal arms hitting the paper. Then to correct typos the typist would try to hold a piece of Tipex paper between the golfball and the letter in order to white-out the mistake, remove the paper and type in the correction. Talk about the Dark Ages! That was not so long ago, when I was in my late thirties. It was all more tactile then, fiddly but understandable which this laptop of mine isn't. But it was women doing all that faffing about, not men.

So, it was a win-win, women out of typing pools, and printed documents made easy enough for men to do! There must be a catch.

Rose Tremain talks of feminism having not arrived in Britain by 1960; instead, women were expected “to facilitate the dreams and ambitions of others, the male of the species". We youngsters thought we were changing that ethos, but we were barely changing ourselves. Still more years later, after I‘d returned from Greece, so the early 1980s, I recall a sight which struck me at the time: staff returning from their lunch break to the Natwest bank, in Alton, Hampshire; the women were walking back into the bank laden with supermarket shopping bags, while the men in suits sauntered in unencumbered, hands in pockets, probably from a lunchtime pint.

Back to that early sort-of relationship with the girl whose name I cannot remember; nor can I remember how it ended; possibly she was severely warned off me. A bit later when I’d turned 17 and was driving around the lanes in Henry on an L plate with Dad we went past their house without intending to, and I thought of calling in. I’d heard, somehow, that after we parted her two older brothers had been killed (in their Mini Cooper, or have I added that?) at the crossroads towards White Waltham, and that their mother had committed suicide. I couldn’t comprehend that, how it would affect them, or me if something like that happened.

One summer another schoolfriend, Dick, and I planned to go to Portugal; we had the route planned, ferry from Plymouth (or was it Southampton?) to Bilbao. We got a pre-war car, and because it would be sunny there, nice to get a tan, we decided to cut the roof off. We were doing this when Eddie arrived, and cackled at the sight of us applying Dick’s mother’s kitchen tin openers to the car’s roof; we had it almost off. Why Portugal? I don’t know. I think the preparations took too long, so it was too late to go. Dick Gardener lived with his mum in a big house facing the River Thames; no father present – I’m sure I never asked and Dick didn’t explain. He was big and bulky; when he made us a coffee I saw why: he used only gold top milk, no water. He drove a small Isetta three-wheeler; this tiny bubble car would pull up, the front would open (the only door) and this huge bloke would step out. Dick and I worked as labourers on building site by the Thames during the holidays. He didn’t do well in his A levels and failed to get into the Army, so stayed on to re-sit; we lost contact. Many years later I heard from the old boys’ school association that he had died, and was shocked.

I wish I’d kept in touch with Dick and others. Before I left school Eddie’s parents moved elsewhere and he left; much later I heard he’d emigrated to Australia. Roger I did keep in touch with for a few years, or rather he kept in touch with me, maybe curious about university life and its freedoms and excesses.

We youngsters were living in two parallel realities in the 1960s. Another schoolfriend’s dad, in their new house on a new estate, was standing him up against the wall, saying “this (A levels) is your chance in life”, meaning hard work, nose to the grindstone, something like - "grab your chances (more than I had at your age), and you’ll gradually achieve your own house one day." But people our age were beating a new path in defiance of our parents’ example; the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and so many others were sending us another message. Ray Davies of the Kinks was singing:

"the taxman’s taken all my dough,
and left me in my stately home,
lazing on a sunny afternoon..."

Casual, confident, profligate, laid back, don’t worry about the future it’ll all be OK (as long as the Bomb doesn’t go off, but hey that’s just another reason to enjoy yourself now). So different from what home and school were telling us. These young guys were already successful, making money, having fun, lots of drink, drugs and girlfriends (sex), groupies (sex!). What teenager wouldn’t have been tempted by that very different example?

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Missing from the excited onward rush of our growing up, in this new post-war Britain, was any sense of what it cost our parents, not just financially but in terms of adjustment, expectations, emotionally. Almost all the parents of us grammar school boys would have left school at 14 and gone straight into years of apprenticeship if lucky or casual low-paid work if not lucky; they would have had little alternative but to continue living under their parents' roof probably until they were out of their teenage years. They would have been expected to contribute from their pay to the running of their parents' house; little would have been left over to start an independent life. This was the situation of the James children as young men and women, and of my mother (still living with her mother at 26). I discovered old letters written by my mother to my grandmother, short keeping-in-touch letters, one said that as I was doing well at school I would be staying on rather than leaving and finding a job; the tone was mixed - this was a good thing, but something new to get used to. It meant, but unsaid, they would have to keep supporting me, instead of me starting to contribute to the family income. When at 18 (four years past the age they'd left school) I went to university (albeit on a grant) this must have been an even greater adjustment for them; good, but... None of this was said or even hinted at as I grew up; I had no awareness of it, think none of us did, I never heard a friend refer to these changes in family life.

Anti-nuclear sentiment became more widespread as I grew up; fear of nuclear war was already there of course, but seldom mentioned in conversation or news discussions when I was young. It came to the fore increasingly as I reached my teens and the decades following. I think it fuelled the hedonism and rebelliousness of young people then. In Moontiger Penelope Lively’s character Claudia, reflecting at the end of her life, utters what were quite widely held anti-nuclear views:

“I never expected to see Lisa grow up. For years when she was a child, I waited for the Bomb to drop. As the world lurched from Korea to Laos to Cuba to Vietnam I was simply sitting it out… I raged and feared… [but] Publicly, I behaved like a rational responsible being, I argued the pros and cons of unilateralism, I wrote my column, I marched and demonstrated… I kept to myself that curdling of the stomach I felt during the nine days of Cuba, and at a dozen times over those years.”

These were the years when the nuclear lingo became commonplace: fallout, radiation, half-life, chain reaction, nuclear winter, neutron bomb, bunkers, four-minute warnings (from 1953 we were under an official civil defence scheme of a four-minute warning of nuclear attack, and this lasted for 40 years!). Regional Seats of Government were set up, so the ‘important people’ might survive in sealed concrete bunkers underground; from 1960 there was one on the other side of Maidenhead Thicket, at Warren Row. I think this is being forgotten, slipping out of sight now. They were extraordinary times to grow up in.

I was 17 during the Cuba crisis of October 1962. Much later we discovered that the world was even closer to nuclear annihilation than news coverage of that time had allowed us to know. Edward Wilson’s novel The Midnight Swimmer is one depiction (soundly fact-based) of how close we came. Edward Wilson is an interesting writer, an American veteran (Vietnam) who became a British citizen and a teacher of English and Modern Languages. His books are set in the worlds of Whitehall, espionage, the Cold War; they circle around the English class system, its foolishness and vulnerabilities, the importance of going to the ‘right’ university and the tendency of a non-meritocratic system to indulge in mediocre decision-making. His books are a good read narratively, and even better for their circumstantial detail of the times.

Chapter 18

Sex and Rock’n'Roll

The drugs came later, they didn’t really feature in my life as a teenager.

Sex was in the air, and in the news. Lady Chattersley’s Lover was not published uncensored in the UK until 1960; I was 15 then and didn’t read it but coverage of the obscenity trial which allowed its full publication put sex in the news in a big way, and fuelled our imaginations. Then the Profumo affair came along, more sex and scandal in the news, this time showing the hypocrisy of our parents’ generation about sex.

As teenagers all of us were lads for the girls. Looking back, every encounter with a girl of about the same age reeked of a sort of mutual sexual sizing up. We were quite thick-skinned; it took extreme snootiness for us to lose interest in a girl any of us fancied. A bit of cheek and charm usually did the trick, and going around together seemed to help, so a girl had a bit of choice I suppose. Typical is this small event: one Saturday morning Eddie and I were crossing the school fields (for some reason), and came to a high gate opening onto Shoppenhangers Road. It was locked so, undeterred, we climbed over, and as we did two girls passed along the pavement; we must have called out, or they did, because they came over to the gate and without much ado each couple got into an extended clinch/snog/grope; then it ended and they went on their way, no names exchanged.

I had another friend who wasn’t always successful, though. He told me the trouble he was having with one girlfriend, who he really liked. I can’t remember her name, which may be a good thing. He said she was very keen to have sex but he just could not get his penis into her vagina; one night they were in the dark bus shelter near the Marlow turn-off from the Bath Road, she got onto the bench and tried to ram herself down onto his cock, but even that didn’t work.

I was usually quite responsible when it came to sex and not getting a girl pregnant. I think one of my first girlfriends was Mary who I used to to spend time with on the way back from school. She lived in a cottage on Desborough Road, and at the time there was a hedge and bank and fields on the other side of the road, where we’d do not much more than talk and laugh and hug. That farmland, across Bath Road from Courthouse Rd, sold for £180,000 around that time (which amazed locals, so much money) and it’s now housing estates, a dozen or more new roads on fields where I kissed Mary. And Altwood Road has been chopped into no-throughway sections to make new roads servicing this estate.

Or a girl from Marlow may have been the first; we were definitely very young. I remember tumbling with her on a Lilo at Maidenhead swimming pool, which may be where we first met, and visiting her at her house on a council estate. I think the distances and bus fares put paid to that.

Later came Linda, who also conveniently lived in a house along my bike ride to school. She would get very aroused when we were all-but having sex, and I really liked her so just about managed not to risk her getting pregnant. In those days, there was no contraceptive pill, condoms weren’t sold by supermarkets and asking to buy them at a chemists was scary when it involved asking a middle-aged woman to get them off a shelf or out of a cabinet. Condoms were 'johnnies' or 'French letters'. Linda lived alone with her mum; I don’t think I ever asked her about her father. Her mother caught us seriously at it in her house one day, and after I’d left she talked to Linda; all I know is that Linda became very reserved and quiet, and before long I ended the relationship. Over the years I’ve thought about this sometimes, saddened that I did not have the ability, the depth, to empathise and understand. If her mother had said something along the lines of “that’s all boys want”, I certainly confirmed it.

Among ourselves, we'd say about a girl - "well, I wouldnt kick her out of bed" - but actually in the company of girls we were far less boastful, bragging and callous - that was just how we presented ourselves to each other. It was important not to care. Mad! We were more real with them, girls, than we were to each other.

There was a girl from the small RAF housing estate on Altwood Road; thinking of her, I remember how easy and natural these casual pairings were. For all the girl-boy differences, the boasting/ boosting boy-talk of girls being loose, a goer, or tight, and despite the different parental pressures, what natural allies we were in relation to the adult world. She’ll be a grandma now; me too (grandad, that is, great actually).

We were generational allies, boys and girls, but there were still big expectation differences - although most boys longed to get a motorbike and many did, lusting after Norton Dominators and Triumph Bonnevilles, no teenage girl was ever known to ride a motorbike in our world, or rarely drive a car until much older; they were reliant on boyfriends for transport, a good thing that's changed now.

Other girlfriends came and went, only as serious as we were capable of being. But amongst them I realise there were some I felt a genuine affection for, which has lingered, rather than just fancied at the time, and this could have grown into something more, had we been older and me more sensible. There are a few where I feel regret and some shame, like the girl younger than me who I used to visit near Furze Platt when I just wanted sex, and was not kind to; she was willing, but…

And the girl who stripped off in the back of someone’s Morris Minor Traveller, to flash her tits at passers-by as a gang of us drove to Burnham Beeches for a bit of the al fresco. Another who unzipped me in the fold-out back seat of Roger’s old car as we drove to Marlow for some reason. There were others, longer or briefer. Girls who were young women but back then they were girls and we were boys.

As the weekend approached the question was “where’s the party?” and wherever there was one we’d go, invited or not. With parents out of the house, the game was to slip upstairs with your girlfriend into the parents’ bedroom. For most unmarried people then sex happened in cars, on the grass or in bus shelters, so the chance to have it off in a bed and take your time was a chance to be taken. Actually sleeping together, half-waking for a cuddle in the morning, was a rare event. All-night parties with parents absent were treasured for this.

Another party trick was to stand on the doorstep and ask people arriving for money for beer that we were about to go and buy for the party, and then bugger off.

I remember one of us referring to sex as “going the whole hog”; we winced, and decided not to put it that way again.

A couple of us started going to a jazz club in Windsor (I cannot remember how we got there; did we have cars by then?). Of course we despised Acker Bilk’s trad jazz band because he was on TV and our parents watched, may have liked it; instead we went for the purists, as we thought of them, Ken Collier’s band and a few others. At some point there'd always be a solo clarinet, the arty bit we were meant to clap. In the dark jazz club, an old scout hut, there was a bar that would serve us, a lot of dancing, and a lot of sex not quite had.

Then trad jazz was overtaken for us by the arrival of pop/rock/blues bands. In the same Windsor jazz club/hut new groups started to play; each played only about a 20 minute set because that was all the material they had. The Rolling Stones was one of them, quite unremarkable and no better than the others; Jagger flounced about, largely ignored by us all a bit pissed and busy in the darkness. The main booking would be a much more proficient group, like Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. Very good; how on earth did groups like the Stones become so successful and Georgie Fame not? Egos bigger than talent in most cases. It was the tradition then for the other musicians, at some point in the set, to stop and the drummer to go on an extended, frenetic solo bash, to be followed by applause. “Doing his nut” we called it, didn’t really get it, and Ginger Baker did look a bit demented.

One night as we all left the club, I found I was walking down the road with the Stones. Jagger (Mike then, not Mick – you wouldn’t have been called Mick in case someone thought you were Irish) was behind me. Brian Jones was in front, with a little posse of girls. He went into a pub and asked for a pint of bitter; the barman looked at him, said he wasn’t old enough and gave him a pint of lemonade. Which he stood there and glugged in front of all of us. Serious loss of cred, there. Nasty little shit, he was.

The contraceptive pill became widely available in my late teens; before that it was prescribed only for married women, but I know some young women got hold of it, and how it changed things. At the jazz-become-blues club what girls would do on a casual acquaintance changed pretty much overnight. Before the pill, sex was everything-but vaginal penetration. Oral sex was the next best; or you carried on and had ‘full sex’ and then worried. For us, sex meant vaginal penetration; this was true for the girls also, I think. We were all pretty unsophisticated and inexperienced, just getting started on sex, at our O level stage but working hard for A levels and honours degrees in Sex. But I suppose it was useful to start by finessing the fingering, before the pill arrived and we could plunge in.

In the year before university I had a bedsit (I called it a flat) in Maidenhead near the top of Castle Hill; very useful for girlfriends. Roger asked to borrow it one night, for the same useful/ girlfriend reason, and said I could borrow his old car, a pre-war Austin, in return. That day I had met a girl at the field on Highway Avenue where we used to graze our ponies; there was some event going on there, with musicians on bongo drums that this girl (name forgotten) was watching. We got talking, then wandered off together. She came from near High Wycombe (no idea what she was doing in Maidenhead), so I said I’d take her back. We walked the couple of miles to my flat, knocked and interrupted proceedings there, got Roger’s car keys. I drove her home, stopping near her house for an extended goodbye, and on the way back very late there was a storm; I skidded the old car into the back of a lorry, which just drove off. I then hitched home, and in the morning Roger and I went there on his scooter. A policeman was on the scene, an older man, who said he was pleased we’d pushed the wrecked car off the road, so he would not take any further action. Phew.

I was really attracted to that girl, but didn’t see her again because High Wycombe seemed too far, and there were so many other possibilities closer to home.

Every generation thinks it invented sex, I know, but what we did was get rid of the furtiveness and hypocrisy. What we were doing was different from the sexual status quo; here is one example of that status quo. When I was 18 and working a temporary job at a petrol station (petrol at £1 for 4 gallons) by Maidenhead river bridge there was a hotel across the road; I read in the local newspaper that a man had attempted to occupy a room there with a woman suspected not to be his wife, or words to that effect, and police had been called. That was a measure of how sex was treated in the 1950s/60s.

Sex outside marriage was frowned upon, strongly discouraged and if it happened it was in secret and deniable. Families turned a blind eye if the couple had got engaged and the wedding was planned; but among all the families and friends I knew, the engaged couple would not have been allowed to openly share a bed in either family’s house. So sex, when it was had at all, was had furtively and often uncomfortably.

Basically, in the world I was growing up in, young people got married because they wanted to have sex. Bonkers. Vowed to love, honour and obey for the rest of their lives, because they wanted sex now, at age 16, 18 or whatever. Nothing about those times was more ridiculous, cruel and counterproductive than that. Love, lust, fancying someone and sex were all mixed up together. If you wanted to have sex, you had to say you loved the woman, and she had to say the same or at least pretend to believe you; otherwise the woman was ‘cheap’ (not the man). In practice though, this was changing; girls seemed as keen as us boys and got even more carried away in the throes of. To say you were 'going steady' was to say you were having sex.

One of our neighbour’s sons got married young, at 18 I think, and quite soon divorced, then a few years later got married again. When the son of our other neighbours made his girlfriend pregnant, there was a sense of shame, and the young woman was barely allowed out in public. Another friend, a young woman we knew, several years older than me, likewise got pregnant and hastily married to make it respectable, even though her parents really disliked the man, a teddy boy. Her father bought them a maisonette to live in. Marketing was increasing the doublespeak; maisonettes were new; they were houses too small to be called houses, but were regarded as a step up from flats, which they were really; jammed together with other maisonettes, no garden, small rooms, cheaper to build.

Married couples still spoke of saving up to have a baby; there was a small family allowance for a second child but very few other benefits (a term not then much in use), nor years later when my daughter was born. So there was an economic side to fear of unplanned pregnancy especially outside marriage, as well as social conformity masquerading as morality. Many years later, my then-wife put our daughter on the pill when she was 13 or 14, very sensibly taking the pregnancy-mistake out of the confusion and hazards of growing up.

For all the seriousness I’m giving this, I remember how innocent we were in our first relationships and often how foolish. How much fun it all was, and how busy my teenage years were.

We thought we were so daring and different, but it is the fresh-faced innocence that I see in retrospect. And literally fresh-faced also – girls then wore no or not much make-up, some eyeliner maybe; they wanted to be different from their 'can't go out til I've put on my face' mothers, and we still had our parents’ idea of too much make-up equalling ‘tarty’, ‘cheap’, ‘trying too hard’. There was nothing like the variety of cosmetic products that are available today, nor the constant advertising of them with the ‘not-good-enough-as-you-are’ message. Later, girls did wear much more make-up, but in an exaggerated, extreme way, like stage make-up, and if it outraged the parents, got stared at in the street, all the better. Subtle and nuanced it wasn’t; those words didn’t apply to much we did.

We change so quickly as youngsters, unlike our parents going on much the same year after year; they get left behind repeatedly by their kids moving on to the next phase or interest, and have to clear up what’s left of what they provided previously. Completing my A levels I decided to wait a year before going to university. I’d long since lost interest in gymkhanas as had Rick, and our ponies had been sold. Mum had taken over looking after them, on the last of the series of fields rented for grazing, on Darling Lane. This was near the cottage on the Thicket where Richard Todd (1940s film star) lived, according to Mum. I helped her, a bit; she got to know the woman living opposite the field, befriending her, whose husband was having an affair.

By then I was buying old cars at auctions around Leeds, with the help of June’s husband Tony, driving them south (uninsured, untaxed) and selling them here. For some reason second-hand prices were lower in the north. I was quite unscrupulous in my doing up and flogging of old bangers.

One of the cars, a Jaguar Mark 10, old but a large powerful limousine, Roger begged to borrow so he could drive it to work; I think he wanted to show it off, as his, to his fellow apprentices. He brought it back jammed in first gear; I cannot remember how I fixed this before selling it, probably with a hammer. I had many others, mostly ordinary saloons which would sell easily, but also a Citroen Light 15 which I called a Maigret car, and a Triumph TR3a which I took to university later, with a Bedford Dormobile (useful for girlfriends). I wish I had the Jag again and the Triumph.

At this time I was also reading very widely, randomly, stuff not on any syllabus, Alan Sillitoe, George Orwell, D H Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck, Salinger of course, Colin Wilson ditto. And Herman Hesse, who was way off any syllabus. I read only ‘serious’ books. I did not read any popular or mainstream literature, my own brand of snobbery, and would have disdained plot-driven books that I now find revealing about the circumstances and politics of the war years and post-war years.

During my free year before university I worked for a while as a labourer on a building site beside the Bath Road; at this time fields interspersed between houses on the near-outskirts of Maidenhead were being built over. When we were rained off I sat in the hut with the others, reading Crime and Punishment, so not exactly fitting in. One man, about my age, kept trying to rile me, working beside me and doing less than his share so I’d do more. We had a row. On a Friday afternoon when we got paid he’d immediately hand over his wage packet to his wife waiting in a car on the road; so, his wife had him well trained, I thought, the tough guy who picked on the new boy on site. Class differences: working class to lower middle class.

I went on to university in Reading. Only 20 miles or so from Maidenhead, but there was no way I was going to live in my parents’ house and travel there. I had already left. And going to university or college in those days was all about leaving home, being independent and free to live your own life. So different and so much better than the modern, miserly, cramping practice of students having to start their adult lives living with their parents. Thank you Harold Wilson for all that expansion of universities in the 1960s, and the free tuition and maintenance grants, which in these more affluent times now we’re told cannot be afforded (so, who has siphoned off the money?). Thank you for the pleasure and careers we derived, and thank you for the social mobility, since closed off.

With the new ‘redbrick’ universities, arts courses proliferated and were accessible to many more youngsters than previously. Most degree courses were not thought of as primarily vocational; they were about a broad education for its own sake and value, developing our thinking muscles, rather than more narrowly training for a specific job or profession which seems to be the emphasis today. Meeting people in the various jobs I’ve done over the years, many times I have got a sudden recognition of someone with the same broad grammar school/ university education of that time as me, as being on the same basic wavelength somehow, general knowledge, broad outlook, language… something like that, a mind similarly formed. Regardless of whether we were agreeing or arguing, liked each other or not, just a sense of having come from similar places.

I was the first in my family to go to university, and with the three generations that have come after me I am also the last in my family to go to university. That’s not a success for any country.

So much of what has been good about this country was set in train by the post-war Labour government, and built on in the following 20 or so years by both major parties. Only in the 1970s did the conservatives start to deliberately wreck this post-war consensus, since when inequality has increased, opportunities have narrowed so we’re back to being ruled by old Etonians and others with a sense of entitlement (and not much competence). The prosperity they tempted us with has proved to be short-term, an asset-stripping exercise, so city financiers flourish with their gambling fictions but the majority just get by. More and more jobs lack the securities that had been established, not much is manufactured now in Britain, and there seems a general de-skilling in much of the working population. I was fortunate to have been born when I was.

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Another way my generation rubbed up against the adult generation was in jobs and job expectations. For them, if you had a halfway-good job you hung onto it for dear life. Dad was not unusual in doing the same job for the same company when he retired as he was doing as a young man in 1950 and in a deputy manager role pre-war; all that might have changed would be a promotion or two - and that mainly on the basis of having been around a long time (it was called loyalty, but it looked to me like lack of ambition, complacency). That was still the case when I worked for a pharmaceutical company in Horsham in the 1970s; all the managerial positions were filled by middle-aged men just holding on to their jobs until retirement; dynamic was not a word that would come to mind. Their only 'career-progression' could come when one of the higher-up managers, older, died; then there was a spark of activity - which of them would get his job? The real duffers were put in charge of the export department; so far from exporting being enterprising and go-getter as would be expected today, this was a backwater of form-filling, even more go-nowhere than the rest of the managerial culture there.

But us new kids wanted to get on quickly, get promoted, earn real money, and many of us changed jobs every couple of years, for a better job-title and bigger salary. We expected to have a car right away. Mum and Dad couldn't keep up with it: "where are you working now?" Often, for me and others, this involved long commutes (which had a cost that most of our parents hadn't needed to bear, so the earning-more was not as great as it seemed).

Chapter 19 Memory

Mum died in 1975, a hell of a long time ago. Since those days every cell in my body has changed, been renewed several times, and I have certainly changed. But whatever memory is, that knowledge and those feelings have lived on. What is memory, where is it?

When I die, the cellular renewal ceasing, my memory will die but my memories will not. They will live on, and in a sense I will live on in the memories of people who have known me. What I am writing here will add to their knowledge of me and the times I lived in. I remember my parents, but wish I’d known them much more as people rather than just as parents, and it’s those memories I’m missing. They did not speak, they did not leave me their memories, a more important inheritance than their house.

Mum may seem to me long gone, but those times I remember are really not so long ago and so much has changed in less than a lifetime; how we lived then is quite different from today, and this is being forgotten. It is wise to know how our parents and grandparents lived, who they were, what made them. One thing this can help us with, for the future, is to consider how the changes since not so long ago have come about (planned, anticipated, or blind?), to decide which have been beneficial and which not, and what could have been done differently, better. I had a pretty good childhood back then, with not much money and plenty of freedom, adventure; I couldn’t be a child around Maidenhead now as I was then.

It’s not immortality, not by a long way, but memory is a kind of extension of each life. The ancients revered their ancestors (bigtime, think of the many monuments they created, costly to build, and the traditions of reverence for where they had come from). We’re now in the habit of forgetting, leaving behind and rushing on; young people do this, I did that, but we shouldn’t be collectively stuck in a permanent adolescent/ young adult mindset, it's uncivilised. Stretching ourselves back across several generations makes us wiser and probably more grounded, less easily unsettled by events. Memories are the means of stretching across generations.

Ian Louis Ross Doucet
2018, 2024