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ME
1940-60
I was born in Canterbury Kent in 1940, my earliest memories
are of
1:- an uncle who came home on leave from the Navy, (I was being bathed in
a tin tub in front of the fire, he was killed when his ship was
sunk in the Med in 1942).
2:- having my head stuck up the chimney (learning how
to be Father Christmas), then the air raid warning started (Germany trying to
get revenge for Cologne Cathedral), it was the first and last time my eldest
brother ever worried about his little brother.
3:- another raid which opened all the
windows when a bomb landed in front of house, closed all the windows when
another landed out the back, only broke windows that did not open.
4:- a
returning Jerry opened fire on a hop-garden where mum was working, nobody was
hurt, but a lot of Tally-baskets were upset before they had been counted, were
those women mad? if someone could have shipped them to Germany, the war would
have ended that day, and us kids behaved the rest of the day.
I am not sure as to when I learnt to identify which were
German planes and which were ours, I can remember the confusion I experienced
when they stopped (my whole life had been war and that was normal, the change was something I could
not comprehend).
I learnt when that if you heard a V1 (doodle-bug), it would not
hit you (they glided for about 5 miles after the engine switched off).
Food was
something you did not take for granted, you accepted what was there, bread and
dripping, powdered egg etc was the norm, but then I did not know any different,
not that it would have mattered if I did..
Christmas dinner was always different, I wonder
if people today realise what they have lost now that it is available every day?
When sweets came off ration, I went through another bout of incomprehension.
There was always Christmas presents. my father worked in a foundry, and one year
he made me some solders, Lead solders, most likely with Lead paint, today it's
illegal.
In the summer we used to bike to Herne Bay to play on the beach amongst
the barbed wire and tank traps. I can remember one trip when mum's eldest
brother was on leave with his friend Ginger, his friend would be sitting on the
beach talking, then he would suddenly get up and walk away for a while, come
back, then off he would go again. It was years later that I found out that he had been
with Army Intelligence and he had been one of the first in to Belsen and had
been involved with debriefing the prisoners.
When I was about 6, I fell
over a railway sleeper and put a 6 inch rusty spike through my thigh, I ran back
to my Gandfathers and Mum put a bandage round my leg, we walked 300 yards to the
bus stop, caught the bus to Canterbury, then the bus to the Hospital.
Today,
people complain to their MP if an ambulance is not at the door in 15
minutes.
I can remember Grandfather coming
home one day laughing about the local copper catching someone nicking swedes the
night before, he made the thief pick up one bag (of 3) carry it up the hill and
down to the village Police station then back up and down the hill to the farm
where he had to apologise to the farmer, then do the same with the other 2 bags
(each weighing about a 100lbs), he was never charged with stealing, but that was
how the old time coppers worked, lessons like that did not make martyr's or
heroes, and it worked.
School was a place you went to because you had to, truancy was
unheard of, because your parents would know before you got home, and when you
did get home the boom would drop.
It did teach one very valuable lesson that is
sadly missing today, that life consists of white lines within which you could
operate, kids being kids we pushed our luck but we learnt where you could push your
luck and where to back off (most of time), having said that, we still managed to
get in to trouble.
Climbing trees was a great past-time, ambition to progress
halted by getting caught climbing a 120 foot 24,000 volt pylon, dad's 2inch
leather belt settled the matter. I wonder how many kids would still be
alive if dad's could use a leather belt today?.
My affinity with trees created some sort of record by getting the cane within
the first two hours of starting at the secondary school, the school was on a
dangerous bend on a hill with a tree in the playground. We was warned not to go
out the gate, and not to climb the tree, yeah right, play-time came and the kids
made a break for the door. Another kid and me headed straight for the tree, we
was swinging on the top branches when the teachers saw us. Everyone back in the
class room, 6-of-the-best established several things, the main one being that
when a teacher opened his mouth he was not exercising his jaw for the fun of it.
By the time I was 12, I
was doing a paper round before school and helping on dairy farm in the evenings
and weekends, the tone was set for the next 47 years.
When I was 13 I would go
round the farms with milk lorry, it was an ex-Army 6 ton with crash gears, a
clutch that required 70lb push, I was 4ft 8inch and 75lbs, so I learnt to drive
without the clutch, marvelous what you can do if you have no other option.
I was extremely lucky in
the teachers at school in that as I was determined to be in dairy farming and
could not see the point in a lot of the lessons until the math's master asked me
" If you have 20 cows producing 4 gallons a day, how many churns do you
need? and how much feed do you need to last through the winter?"
It worked.
We were given an integrated project involving carpentry, technical drawing and
math's, we had to make basic survey equipment in carpentry, survey the local
playing field, calculate angles and distances in math's, and draw it to scale in
technical drawing. Once we had mastered the flat areas, we then did the local
church to learn how to measure unreachable heights and distances from different
positions. We also learnt not to give an answer until we had obtained the
relevant information required to formulate the answer.
I left school when I was 15 with a good basic schooling,
to start work on a dairy farm. It was hard work, 7 days a week and more hours
than most people today even know, but it was good, and hard work never killed
anyone.
The farmer moved to another farm 10 miles away, and when moving the
stock, the Shire horse put his foot through the lorry floor, so I was instructed
to walk him through Canterbury to the new farm, in the town the traffic lights
turned red so I stopped and "wow", which he did, on my right foot.
Never, but never, stop before the horse, especially when they are that big.
One
harvest I jumped off the combine to get some more bags, I threw the bags up and tried
to climb up in front of the wheel, I slipped and the combine ran over my
foot, across my lower leg, and as I threw my body backwards, across my
thigh, I carried on working, but I had to bike 6 miles to and from work
for 2 weeks using one leg because I could not bend the other one, and you should
try milking cows with a leg that won't bend.
Cows DO NOT run much on sympathy,
massage by cows hooves do not improve the healing, I was kicked all over the
cowshed until I could bend it again.
The farm had a Fordson van, I am not sure of the model, or the origin of it,
but it had the throttle between the clutch and the brake, steering that had a
half turn of slack, crash gears, a concrete block on a piece of rope for brakes,
it ran happily on paraffin (after starting with petrol). Heaters and de-icer's
were the stuff of dreams, the indicators were the non-functioning semaphore
type, in the summer you had a long piece of wood with a glove nailed to it which
you poked out the opposite window, in the winter, f***-um, they'll have to
guess, it was too cold to drive with the windows down and took five minutes with
a screwdriver to open or shut them.
The antic's we got up to with it I could
write a book on (but I will not), and it most likely gave rise to the Motor Vehicle
Regulations and the M.O.T. To look in the mirrors you had to take your foot of
the throttle to stop them vibrating, to stop you had to think 500yards in front,
which gave rise to a lot of fun in narrow country lanes, diversions into a field
were hardly the stuff of legends when they happen twice a week, disgruntled cows
and hedge-brushing were the norm, yet we never had an accident.
I think that
bloody van gave birth to my perception of inverse
logic.
The boss's daughter and I fell in love, whether it had anything to do with that
I don't know, but he did not pay me the annual wage increase, perhaps he thought
having my mind on his daughter I would not notice, either way he got it wrong. 4
years at 7 days a week and no holidays, pulling a stunt like that got me mad, he
would not change his mind so I got another job, gave him a weeks notice, and put
the Union on to him.
The romance lasted a month longer than the job had.
The next job was on a fruit farm, up to this point I was very naive
as far as women are concerned, and very easily embarrassed, that was going to
change. There is nothing like a gang of women to rectify that problem.
One of
the women was a lay-preachers wife and she tried to protect me, fat chance, if
they had had their way the women would have had me naked and tied to a tree,
they tried a time or two, put I was too fast for them, I had to survive so I
learnt to grin and give as good as I was given. The lay-preachers wife had to
change to survive as well, I liked the Mk11 better than Mk1, although I do
wonder how her marriage with stood the change.
I started at the bottom as a
gang-mower in orchards, so I learnt how to sharpen the blades to get the best
cut, which gives you more acres a day.
We had 10 acres of orchard to fell and
grub, the bailiff told me to take the chain-saw and go and fell the trees with
his nephew (who was very likable but did not like work), our first half day's
work received "Do you think you have done well?" from the bailiff as
he walked off.
After lunch, when he walked in I said "No. I want an extra
hand now, the buck-rake at 2, the winch at 3", everyone held their breath
while he stared at me for, what felt like 2hours, he then said OK and gave the
orders.
That morning we had cleared 2 trees, that afternoon we cleared and
grubbed 20. That bailiff was one for, if you want make a Pratt of yourself I'm
not going to stop you. I didn't, I'd never used or even handled a chainsaw
before, yet we cleared that orchard in what everyone said was a farm record, and
with no injuries.
I had made a point and everyone knew it.
A gang of us were having dinner in the workshop one freezing winter day, we
were sitting around a "Sally" (a waste oil burning fire), freezing on
one side and scorched on the other. One of the men said "I reckon I must be
getting a cold or the flu, I'm sweating like a pig", no one paid much attention, apart from the
comment "Lucky bugger, I'm freezing".
Any way, a bit later he said
" I'm sweating buckets", the fitter raised one eye brow, casually
walked over to the gas welder which was behind the bloke who was sweating, wheeled
it up to the door, which he opened, with the rest of us yelling abuse.
He pushed
the trolley out, laid one of the cylinders down on the ground with the neck
against a steel girder. Curiosity got the better of me, and I walked over to the
door as he came back in and picked up a sledge hammer, he said stand back and
swung the hammer at the neck. The cylinder took of like a rocket, bounced of two
trees and hit the third, knocking it over. By this time we had all forgotten the
cold as he said "the cylinder was alight, it would have exploded and killed
all of us", I asked why didn't he just tell us to run?, he said that if you
were working in the bottom of ship and the cylinder caught alight there is
nowhere to run too, you take it top-side, aim it over the side, knock the top
off, and take bets on how far it would go.
The fitter was a friend of my grandfather, they had both been Chief Mech' in
the Navy, and he had got me the job. When I say fitter, I mean an engineer, what
he could do with a piece of metal had to be seen to be believed.
One time the
boss had a piston go through the block on his Bentley, he rang Ray and asked him
what he could do. Ray drove down to Devon to pickup the bits out of the road and
brought them back, welded the block up, turn new big and little end
bearings out of blocks of metal, rebuilt the engine and run it in on the lathe.
The "old man" did love that car.
Ray did not talk a lot, but when he
did say something it was worth listening to, one day he watched me spraying in the
orchard, when I went in to the yard to fill up, he said fill up and come to the
workshop.
I did that, and he told me to start the fans and drive round the
block, as I drove off he pulled the tanker draw-pin out and waved me on. I drove
right round the block, and part of it was up hill, back to the workshop where he
dropped the pin back in. He never said a word, and none was needed, I had towed
a 200 gallon tanker by the power shaft, which meant the torque had held it
together and that I had not greased the shaft that morning, and he knew
it.
One day the bailiff told two of us to go and disc a newly planted orchard,
heavy rain was due that night and we would not have another chance for weeks. We
had only done about half, when the blackest clouds you ever seen started rushing
across the sky, we both looked at each other as we passed, and waved our arms
like cracking a whip, shoved the tractors up a couple of gears and wound the
throttles open.
By the time the bailiff turned up in his van it was as dark as
the middle of night, we still at it flat out and and we did not have any lights.
The next morning he
walked in the shed and chewed out the men who had planted the trees, he said
"When I tell you to PLANT trees, I expect to have them planted IN the
GROUND, last night I saw them running out of the way of two idiots discing at 20
mph in the dark, the only reason they did not get damaged is because they moved
out the bloody way which they couldn't have done if you had put them in the
bloody ground".
He was a dry stick old stick and we reckoned he sat up all night
thinking that one up.
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