GROWING UP. 

Preamble. . They all said that the war was nearly over and it would be safe to cross the Atlantic to England. They also said schooling would be much better in England. They were wrong on both counts! I have to admit though, for a fourteen-year-old, war in the North Atlantic had been an incredibly exciting adventure. Also, within a year the young teachers, who were away fighting in all corners of the globe, had returned to England and replaced the old fossils who were sending us asleep at our desks. But I still have fond memories of the African, Indian, Chinese and English teaching team at Queens College, making grammar and algebra flower even under Amazonian heat and Caribbean humidity. So we survived the Atlantic, Mother settled Tim and me into English schools, Dad came over for Christmas and they both returned to Guyana. After that, they visited England a few times before retiring permanently in Sussex.

For the photo, Grandad had been dragged away from his vegetables, Granny was knitting next to the tea trolley that always tinkled, and Aunt Dorothy and Anthony were visiting. Tim and I spent our early school holidays here at Waterperry, in Pevensey Bay on the English Channel. In later holidays we stayed with Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Jack Bavin at Windyridge, a few miles inland at the small village of Hankham where, later, Kate, John and Madeleine will go to school for a term.

On our way to and from school the London Aunts, Marjorie, Nell and May, took us out to lunch. Mother and Dad finally left Guyana and settled at Martlets in 1956. In 1961 I married Joan Hogan and we migrated to Australia with three children in 1967. But right now it is 1945, England is still at war, so let us meet the English branch of our family.

OUR FAMILY AT WAR. It was in 1066 that William the Conqueror invaded, landing at Pevensey Bay, and in 1940 my English Granddad had expected the Germans to do the same. He was an air raid warden, and also drilled in the home guard, with wooden stakes because they didn’t have guns. The voyage across the Atlantic had already introduced us to war and now we were to share its last three months with those who had experienced more than four years of it. We had docked just inside Tower Bridge, opposite the Tower of London and, next morning, we got our two cabin trunks and bags to Victoria Station. A train called a Southern Electric rattled its way through South London and Granddad met us at Eastbourne Station. Taxis were a rare luxury then, but he had one and it brought us to Waterperry and to meet Granny. I think dinner that first night was rabbit pie; in those days rabbits were plentiful and un-rationed. We ate at a strange square steel-topped table. Its real name was a Morrison air-raid shelter which Granddad had converted into a dining table. “We all have to crouch under it if we hear the air raid warning” Granny said after dinner. Then Granddad explained that air raids had by now been replaced by the new V2 rockets and “They are supersonic so you can’t hear them coming until it’s too late”. So tonight, after living with the dull rumble of steam pistons and the monotonous hum of generators for the last 100 days, Tim and I found sleep difficult. Total silence and pitch blackness were something quite new to us.

 

Next morning Granddad proudly showed us the little sunken rockery (see photo) that he had made early in the war. “A German bomb made this crater so I used it”. And he then explained how, instead of taking his nap one afternoon, he had gone out to watch a dog fight spinning vapour trails high in the sky. When he went back to bed he found hole in the ceiling and a machine-gun bullet in his mattress. Lucky Granddad. That night he took Tim and me out in the garden to watch an amazing sight, a 1000-bomber stream droning overhead on its way to Germany. Later, they would switch all their lights off and, later still, most would come back. That was the night shift and the Americans had the day shift. Sometimes we saw the Yanks flying back low in the afternoon sky, gaps in the formations, one of the survivors in trouble with torn aluminium flapping and oily smoke pouring from the starboard engine.

DIGGING FOR VICTORY. Granddad’s war effort, apart from home guard and air raid warden duties, was ‘digging for victory’ in a vegetable allotment. Rectangles of cabbage and carrot nestled behind the 13^th century pub, known as The New Inn for the last 700 years. Across the road from the pub, between the ancient Norman church and the walls of the Roman castle, was the little churchyard where Granddad and Granny (Great-Granny) now lie buried together. “That’s how I got that big cheese in the larder” explained Granddad. “Had to roll it all the way up the beach”. This was when Granddad and the other villagers forgot their war efforts and raided a torpedoed cargo ship washed up on the point. Going back to their ancestry of ship-wrecking and beach-combing, the villagers had quickly filled their larders and workshops with whatever the tide had brought in, including cheeses.

Soon an old green double-decker bus, its windows criss-crossed with tape in case a bomb fell near, took us to the Civil Defence office in Hailsham. Here we were fitted with gas masks, and ration books and clothing coupons were explained to us. So, Tim and I were now ready, though half a term late, to start in our new schools. And, at the end of our first school year, Dad came over from Guyana and the four of us spent Christmas 1945 at Bay House. Behind the house, in another world which, for me, was half a lifetime ago, Grandad had taught me to ride a bike. In front of the house, some 200 years ago, the army had built a Martello tower, one of a string of forts anticipating yet another invasion that did not come, by Napoleon. That Christmas Uncle Jack, Aunt Dorothy and Anthony had also arrived in England, from Calcutta, and Uncle Jack’s son Alan, a Spitfire pilot, came down to see them. “Crashed once when I forgot to put the wheels down. Wrecked the propeller. Got court-marshalled” he told me. But he was still my hero, as was my other uncle Jack, Waterfield, who died fighting in Burma in 1942. He had gone forward to help some ‘refugees’ dressed in white, only to find they were Japanese soldiers in disguise. His platoon heard the machine guns but never saw him again.

WATERPERRY really means “Water-Prairie”, an appropriate name for the Pevensey marshes and also for Waterfield, our grandparent’s name. So, for Tim and me, the little white stucco house was to become our home in the school holidays. Up over the hump of the shingle beach, still protected by rusty steel posts and concrete pillboxes against the invasion that never came, heaved the English Channel, usually grey, always cold. To the West rose the dreamy undulations of the Sussex Downs. To the North stretched the damp flatness of the Pevensey marshes, still straddled by three enormous radar towers. To the East lay Hastings of the famous battle. Actually, historians got that one wrong; William landed at Pevensey Bay, not Hastings, and defeated Harold at a town called Battle, north of Hastings. The village of Pevensey Bay sat on pebbles, called ‘shingle’ there and ‘crumbles’ up near the gloomy deserted murder cottage on the Eastbourne road. I soon took over Granddad’s paper run which included the Elliots and colonel Moss. Moss was very stiff, pukka ex-Indian army and it must have surprised them when their daughter Snooki (or was it her daughter?) ran off with Salman Rushdie. I did meet some of Snooki’s student friends who used to argue in high, fluty voices about some place called Utopia. Mrs Elliot came from the Australian Lawson explorer family, and part of the doodle-bug that blew out all their windows landed in Granddad’s paddock. It was still there, twisted and rusting, next to Granddad’s small haystack where, on the first day of my first school holidays, I lay on the warm hay in the sun and ate my entire month’s ration of chocolate. I remember that Easter holiday as fine and sunny, but more likely I was just pleased to be on holiday. The local train had stopped at Pevensey Bay Halt, a pair of short, lonely platforms with a hut in the middle of the marsh, and Mother, who had been looking out for me from the kitchen window, walked through fields of buttercups to meet me. That holiday Mr Sharp, one of very few neighbours to have a petrol ration, drove us to a bluebell wood. As we sat eating our picnic the misty blue haze of the flowers was quite beautiful, but the trees were lousy for climbing. It took me a while to realize that, unlike those at the Casuarinas, trees in England were often rough-barked, damp and grimy, and also the grass and undergrowth wet most of the year.

I think Tim and I were having some difficulties adapting to living in someone else’s house after the freedom of our own living spaces in Georgetown. Looking back, Granddad was incredibly patient when we invaded his garage and tried to build our own dreams with the tools and timber we found there. Being only a block from the sea, we had tried to build boats. But both my canvas canoe and Tim’s slab-sided barge proved unstable when we finally pushed them out into the English Channel. Frustrated, we eventually dragged them back, up over the shingle, and then they lay for a long time rotting in the paddock. Two years later Mother gave me this Ex-Air-Force inflatable dinghy. Equipped with only one paddle it tended to go in circles but was a lot of fun. But meanwhile, a little Persian kitten arrived from somewhere and, as happens, it was female and became pregnant. Granny, as midwife, encouraged me to watch the birth, “you will have to get used to this someday” and I did. By now Mother had bought us bikes, mine a drop-handlebar racer, and the three of us roamed the criss-cross lanes of the marshes looking for mushrooms and, in late summer, blackberries for bread-and-butter pudding. In those long summer evenings of double daylight saving even Granny joined us playing cricket next to the rockery after dinner.

SchoolDAYS.  “We’re pretty easygoing here. If you can wash up and make your own bed you’ll fit in all right.” My new housemaster Mr. Colthurst, a kindly man, was trying to reassure me. Perhaps he could see the confused nervousness in a raw colonial who had arrived, ten minutes ago, wearing an American suit, at an English public school. That evening my mentor explained, in complete seriousness, how you wipe up “Take ten plates, wipe the top of the top and the bottom of the bottom and stack them over here.” Many schools had been evacuated from the London area to places of safety in the country. But my school, taken over by a radar research unit, had been moved in the other direction, to London. So, I had the excitement of seeing a V1 flying bomb (doodle-bug) chugging along past our classroom window and hearing a V2 long range rocket landing in some unfortunate nearby suburb. “You’re lucky, you’re too late to be tested for choir” said Chandler as I unpacked in the dormitory, half a term late. Fifty years later, when I started singing, I wished they had. At first I was regarded as an eccentric, a West Indian wearing a brown suit bought at Macey’s Department Store in New York instead of black school uniform, and with a pet miniature turtle with the Stars and Stripes painted on its back. Acceptance came when they found I could pole vault and was quite good at swimming.

Meanwhile I was finding out about English eccentricity. The elder South brother (nicknamed Notus from the Greek for South Wind, and because he farted) had burnt out part of the changing rooms last year. This term, the younger South brother blew up half his study with a chemical experiment. “Oh well, I suppose it runs in the family” said our urbane housemaster. Compared with the directness of the school reports we got in the West Indies, English ones were whimsical. Bulmer’s parents were told briefly, but probably accurately “He gives and takes no trouble.” I soon discovered that the strange schoolboy language I’d read in the Boys Own Paper (“I say, old chap”) had gone out of the window during the war, though it remained the popular Hollywood image of Britain for at least another 50 years. That stiff upper lip was still there however, as I found after colliding in a soccer game. The sports master’s usual impassive mask cracked into a rare smile of approval as I gasped for breath and Michael Mills lay in the mud with a cracked rib. Michael, I discovered, lived at Eastbourne. So we met up in the Easter holidays, walked up to the Downs and watched a spitfire overhead. Apparently just having fun, weaving and rolling in the soft blue spring sky, but he was always facing south, just in case. The war was to run for two more months but hit-and-run bombers still crossed the channel and the spitfire was watching. We met again in the summer holidays to watch an unexploded bomb being detonated, buried deep down in a park off the Hastings road. These events were always exciting, as the crowd usually broke the safety barrier to get a better look, and then we all had to run fast as a shower of pebbles clattered behind us.

Evelyn Waugh once said “Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in a prison”. And John Mortimer once described his school as “a small penal colony on the east coast”. Both were fair descriptions of the Victorian barracks we slept, ate, and studied in once our school had moved back to Malvern. But, at Harrow, our accommodation was an elegant Georgian mansion, commandeered as were many superb houses during the war. Set in sloping rhododendron gardens, it was perfect for hide and seek, a game which was re-badged “second childhood” to make it respectable for us teenagers. There were several distractions during homework in those long summer evenings. The dreamy sound of church bells drifting across the valley from Harrow-on-the-Hill, and late sunshine, extended by double daylight, always left us enough time for a game of second childhood in the garden before bed. Hunched over our books, the boredom of Latin increased the temptation to make faces across the refectory table. Ian McKay was always an easy target, starting to giggle while the rest of us turned pained innocent faces to the interrogating prefect. Since enrolments were down in doodle-bug alley, as London was called, we shared facilities with Harrow school, but not without some friction, as when my friend Walker’s East-end accent was mimicked by those with West-end accents and flat straw hats. Winston Churchill was one of Harrow’s famous pupils and I sat once at a desk carved with his name. They say he was not good at exams, remaining in that fourth form for three years. But, the story goes, he learned grammar and oratory there of a power that made his patriotic speeches famous in World War Two. Years later my friend Mike Toogood told me how his family and friends had resigned themselves to invasion and defeat until Churchill’s Shakespearian speech called upon them to “fight on the beaches…in the fields…in the streets…and never surrender”.

But a less than patriotic Brentnall is now complaining “This soup tastes just like soggy cardboard”. School cuisine was indeed tasteless, cabbage and potatoes that had been boiled ten minutes longer than they should be, and something grey and gristly which the butcher called “boys meat”. Rationing actually got worse for a while after the war, with bread and potatoes in short supply. We used to write the date on bread crusts, but the hint was ignored and the character-building crusts always turned up again next day. Our favourite occupation was asking an elderly teacher, who had lost a testicle in some earlier war, where he had been wounded. “The reply was always “Once in the arm, once in the leg, and once in Mesopotamia”.

I wish I’d known about the tunnel. I gradually came to terms with an England in which, so it seemed, grey sky merged into grey land or sea, except when it snowed, when the land was white, or when it was sunny, when the sky was white. But, with the school now moved back to Malvern, younger teachers were returning from the war, improving tuition in both studies and sport. And there were these dramatic hills rising abruptly out of the Severn’s river flats. The guide books, which are always written on clear sunny days, said you could see 12 counties from 1300 feet up on the Malvern Beacon, and so I did one day when the Black Mountains of Wales were drawn sharp as a knife against a sky, washed clear by the showers of an April afternoon. Years later, Joan and I climbed Midsummer Hill, at the southern end of the Malvern range, appropriately on a lovely midsummer day, and were nearly knocked over by a man chasing butterflies with a huge net. We had lunched in an old, half-timbered pub in a lane in Ledbury which reminded me of the annual 9-mile school race from Ledbury, climbing and puffing over the steep 1000-foot pass through the Malverns near an old Roman camp, for some reason now called British Camp. “Hey, do you know which horse won the 2:30?” asks Terry Simmons of the curious crown watching us toiling up the pass. Not being a gambling man myself, I overtook him and won a place. There is a railway tunnel under the hills and once a boy ran through the tunnel, came first and was disqualified. But now Joan and I were actually heading towards another hill, Bredon Hill, made famous in ‘A Shropshire Lad’ by A E Houseman and in a song my singing teacher, Robert Bickerstaff, taught me. We stopped for tea at the farmhouse of one of Robert’s ex-pupils, and didn’t get to Bredon Hill, maybe one year. Later still, Tim and I were to reach the top of the Malvern Beacon just before a heavy rainstorm drove us down to the shelter of a pub and a glass of Hereford cider.

But alternating with these schooldays were school holidays and, as with later holidays, they were usually centred on that crossroad of our family’s global perambulations: the county of Sussex.

SUSSEX had provided homes for our grandparent, parents, and then for Tim and me at Waterperry, Windyridge and Martlets. Windyridge was perched on a hill on the edge of Hankham, a little village in which, years later, Kate, John and Madeleine went to school for a term. Windyridge was a beautiful house and garden but, as with Waterperry, Tim and I may have tried to put down roots and taken things for granted. Finally, when Aunt Dorothy suggested it was time for me to remove my trunk from the attic, I felt another pang of insecurity. My bed-sitter in Bristol at that time had no room for a trunk and my mode of transport was only a motorbike. But Uncle Jack, full of infectious humour, had been a good surrogate father, though this led to other problems of family dynamics I will come to later. Having left school and waiting to start my apprenticeship, I made pocket money working in Colonel Sartorius’ vegetable garden. One of Hankham’s many eccentrics, he had fought on the North-West Frontier (Afganistan) where he invented a motorbike with three wheels in line, suitable for those mountains. He also studied the music of mountain people which he said was similar across the world.

During our adolescence Mother and Dad had visited England occasionally. Then, there were rare moments of communication with Dad, like sudden flashes of summer sunshine: his interest in my purchase of A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, and his pride in my swimming and Tim’s cricket achievements. And, much later, I was to see his look of astonished amusement when Kate, aged five and skipping busily from one activity to another, poked her head round the door where he was writing at his desk and said briskly “How you getting on, Granddad?” But this now brings me to Martlets and family dynamics.

Mother had always wanted a big garden and Martlets was also an attractive, colonial-style house. I think Dad would have preferred to retire near the sea front at Eastbourne where he could have walked along the front amongst people, observing rather than having to talk to them. In the end he got neither. But since the flat roof leaked he did have to get to know the local builder quite well. Staying weekends there with Tim, and later with Joan, the three of us watched family problems emerging like grey clouds, blowing in from two directions. From the north, Aunt Marjorie announced she was leaving London and suggested building a cottage in the paddock belonging to Martlets. In the end, sensing Mother’s silent opposition, she moved to the next village, but relationships remained prickly. From the east, over the hill at Hankham, it was Uncle Jack’s enthusiastic magnetism which drew Tim and me on visits to Windyridge, leaving Dad, who had seen hardly anything of us for ten years, feeling neglected and left out. Much later, traveling with three closely-knit sisters through Turkey, a country in which (like all countries I know of) there are new and exciting shopping opportunities, I did develop some understanding of Dad’s position.

After leaving school I worked in Bristol, studied at Cambridge, moved to London, married Joan Hogan and we started a family. During all this time, and even after we went to Australia, I associated Sussex with visits to grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts. These associations will crop up in later chapters, but for now we go to Bristol.

APPRENTICESHIP The aircraft company had accepted me as an apprentice, paying me two pound twelve shillings and six pence a week. My lodgings cost two pounds, canteen lunch was ten pence leaving a surplus which accumulated into the price of an old motorbike. My landlady fed me well, washed and ironed my clothes and lit a coal fire in the front room on Sundays so I could study for exams. I played waterpolo on Monday evenings and, returning one night, asked the older daughter Pat what she was listening to on the radio. “There was this Prince Ivan walking in a garden.” she tells me “He chases and catches the Firebird who begs for his life. Ivan agrees to release him if he will help her win the princess. Then an evil spirit called Kashchei sends magical creatures after Ivan. But the Firebird bewitches them and makes them dance. Then the Firebird tells Ivan how to kill Kashchei. So Ivan finally gets the princess.” This was the first time I had had classical music explained to me, and I wrote about it in my weekly aerogram home. So, next time Dad was in England, he took me to hear Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite at my first Prom concert. My apprenticeship had started with a six-month training course on fitting and turning where I worked alongside Johnny Stainer and Michel Worms. Later, they were to start up the Paramount Jazz band which Acker Bilk made famous.

After training school I worked for six months in the Assembly Hall where aircraft are finally put together. “Here’s a spare mug, chuck the tealeaves on the floor after, and hang it up here” were all the instructions I got, the rest came from following their example on the job. There were several hundred men working there and, if one left or got married, aluminium panels were beaten like gongs to send him off after collecting his pay on Friday afternoon. After a year in the factory a place became available in Clare College Cambridge and I rode my motor bike, which by then worked only in third gear, slowly across England to Windyridge. In Uncle Jack’s garage I took the gearbox apart, figured out what needed doing and walked down the lane to the blacksmith. He was shoeing a horse at the time but welcomed a challenge. “Bring it over here son and I’ll see what I can do.” So he built up the worn down selector slots with weld, I filed the slots to fit the pins, and the gearbox worked perfectly. So I must have learned something in training school. Apprentices were expected to work in the factory during the university summer vacations, so I shared a series of flats with Johnny (from Canterbury) on trumpet, Michel (from France) on banjo and Geof (from Ireland) doing the cooking. During breakfast and after work Bunk Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and others with titles like King, Count, Earl and Duke, would emerge shimmering from old, scratched 78s. Full band rehearsals meant frequent complaints by neighbours, hence the need to move flats frequently, and hence the need for me to keep track of where they were whenever I wanted a bed there in the Cambridge vacations.

CAMBRIDGE. Someone once said “Students go to polytechnics to enter the establishment, and to universities to tear down the establishment”. The Lady Clare was certainly of the established aristocracy and she intended the college she founded to go “by the name of Clare for ever and ever”. Next door, Kings College chapel had also been illustriously founded, by King Henry VII, and all around is evidence of massive wealth donated in bequests over the centuries for the preservation of established privilege. I suppose I did seek to enter the establishment, by stroking (leading) an eight (a rowing boat) on the river Cam. And I did meet a girl having problems with her father, a psychologist, and she had, probably as a result, joined the Heretics Club in order to help tear down the establishment. She was from Sydney and said “shake on it” when she found I was another colonial. Much later, I found out she played tennis in Sydney with Helen Webber, presumably having reentered the establishment, as one does in middle age. But meanwhile war and gender had been at work. In college there was a large group of irreverent war-hardened ex-service men, and one night a big ex-commando fell off the Clare Bridge carrying a crate of beer to help him with his homework. Comparing notes in the Hydraulics-One lecture next morning, the splash had been heard as far away as Jesus College. Lady Clare might have been surprised that there were now two women’s colleges, and that there were two girls doing the Mechanical Sciences Tripos (engineering).

DAVOS. So now in first year I had a room in Old Court and we had to hump our own sacks of coal up from the cellars. David, next door, showed me that, for this purpose, “you wear your black academic gown over football gear in order to keep your clothes clean”. In the first Christmas vacation I joined a student ski group at Davos, and here we are at the top of a ski lift. In second year I was in digs in Green Street above Frank Pereira, a half Sri-Lankan medical student. Medicos seem to hang out in the Greene Man next door and, over a pint, I find out that Frank’s older brother once shared digs in Cambridge with another Guyanese, Frank Austin, one of our own relatives. Frank Austin’s father, disappointed when three baby girls followed Frank, named them Dick, Joey and Buller. You will meet Dick in later chapters. “Quick, write down this recipe” says Frank (Pereira). Lunch is not served on Sundays, we have a gas ring and a packet of spaghetti, and Bowes and Bowes bookshop is open. And a cookery book tells us to “Hang a clove of garlic on a thread in the sauce. When cooked, throw away the garlic”. We didn’t throw it away and I have never done so since. In third year I am in New Court, sharing a room with another Frank (Ruhemann). His father is a museum curator and always reading, and I hear the story of Frank’s parent’s honeymoon. “Let us talk in the evenings”. “All right, you talk and I’ll read”.

SWIMMING. At school we had come second in the public schools relay race, and our Bristol Aircraft Apprentices swim team (photo below) had done well in a British Youth Athletics Festival. I learned a lot there. First, when Frank, the extrovert on my right, claimed that Lucknow Boys was definitely the best school in the world. Second, that English accents are so bizarre that I had to act as translator between the Bristol and Glasgow athletes. At Cambridge I found myself in the relay team, though not fast enough to get a Half Blue. But later I found out that two Guyana boys had swum in the Olympics. The Spence family, with whom we are distantly related, lived upriver on the Demerara and, the story goes, learned to swim very fast there on account of the piranhas (a name derived from the Latin for scissors). Though Walter Spence did lose a toe, he got into the 1928 and 1932 Olympics. I saw the other Guyanese Olympian, name forgotten, when we had come down from Cambridge to swim against a London club called The Otters. Showing off with his head high up in the air, he left our crack sprinters a lap behind. In my last summer at Cambridge we toured swimming clubs along the south coast, ending up on the island of Jersey. Above is the team and here is me on the three-metre board. Around that time I can remember two attacks of acute home-sickness for the West Indies; one while lazing on those hot sunlit beaches of Jersey, the other, in a later London winter, grey and cold, when I heard Harry Belafonte singing “Island in the Sun”. In Bristol Michel and I had played water polo in the factory team, touring the clubs of Wiltshire and Somerset. They were heavy, tough and rough, those farm lads, and sometimes I would see Michel swimming backwards as a hefty farm boy had him by the ankle. But some in our own team were also impressive, in their own way. At Bradford-on-Avon baths the match was delayed by the absence of our two large full-backs. They eventually turned up. They had only drunk five pints of beer, each. Much later, swimming there with Tim and Kathy, I tried to stop Joan jumping in at a very deep deep-end. But she did surface, ten seconds later. Though my diving was mediocre I did once enter a diving competition as a joke, and I did win second prize (there were only two entrants), and I did confuse the officials when I asked for The Republic by Plato as my second prize. Since they didn’t have Google in those days they took six months to find it.

AEROBATICS.in a CHIPMUNK. The University Air Squadron is really a recruitment drive for the Royal Air Force. So undergraduates are paid two shillings and six pence an hour to learn to fly, a double dividend for adventurous and impecunious students from Guyana, Trinidad and wherever. After going solo, we cadet-pilots are assigned different exercises each week, sometimes with an instructor in the seat behind. “Today I’ll show you a stall turn” says Squadron-Leader Wright, taking the Chipmunk up to a safe height. He suddenly cuts the throttle and pulls the nose up and up until the plane literally stops in mid-air. The motor has cut out altogether so all I hear above the silence is aluminium panels shuddering and groaning as the plane starts falling, first into a turn and then into a dizzy spin. The first time this happens to a cadet-pilot he tries hard to not to exhibit terror. And, reading the body language in front of him, the instructor tries hard not to smile. He knows, but you don’t, that the slipstream always restarts the motor and kicking the opposite rudder bar always straightens out the spin. Even more uncomfortable is flying upside down when, if you hadn’t tightened your straps, your head rubs the Perspex roof and your feet can’t quite reach the rudder bar. Apart from these two, aerobatics is popular, tight turns, barrel rolls and loop-the-loop. When your assignment is the Low Flying Area this means practicing a forced landing while not actually doing one. We have all seen films about flying aces, usually with a nonchalant Gregory Peck, in goggles and shiny leather jacket, leaning on the propeller or against a cannon sticking out from the wing. But, waddling out in baggy standard Air Force canvas flying suits, parachute dangling off your backside, we probably look more like something out of Wallace and Grommet, but anyway! And so today, as Gregory Peck of Hollywood (alias John Streetly of Barbados) and I walk out to our Chipmunks, John suggests a variation, a sort of Dog Fight at the Low Flying Corral. Then, as we chase each other’s tail round the Cambridgeshire Fens, we press the radio transmit button rapidly, making a noise like machine gun fire. But the fun stops when we hear an irritated voice “Control Tower calling. Will you please make a proper radio transmission.” During the final approach on a night-flying exercise my instructor said, above the noise “You have control”. I thought he said “I have control” and I let go the joystick. That the Chipmunk landed all by itself is a tribute to its designer, though I learned a few more swear words that evening. Often in the winter I would have to climb up through a 2,000 foot layer of black rain cloud. I never failed to be astonished when I burst into a magical dome of cerulean blue above a dazzling fluffy white carpet.

Each summer we camp for a week on some airfield, each one with an unexpected learning experience. In Norfolk I forget to salute an officer and, more seriously, forget to un-box my compass, landing skew, and earning a report in my log book “Must pay more attention to general airmanship”. In Cornwall I forget to put the prop into fine pitch when taking off, but remembering just in time. In Wiltshire “Doggy” Barker (another graduate apprentice from Bristol Aircraft) and I discusses the odds for getting court-marshalled if we fly under the Bristol Suspension Bridge, and wisely decide the odds are too high. But accidents do happen and one of our Chipmunks grazed a Cotswold stone wall, I think it was near Cold Ashton, during a low flying exercise. Though the plane was a write-off, officer and cadet were unhurt. The Flying Officer was an old hand and knew exactly what to say at the inquiry: “A sudden unavoidable downdraft reduced the aircraft’s altitude. It was not pilot error,” Case closed.

I flew a total 167 hours mostly on Chipmunks and I never got further than a radial-engined Harvard, a kind of 1930s American ‘Pursuit Ship’. I suppose my ambition was to fly a spitfire, while the expectation of the RAFVR was for me to do a jet conversion course after graduating and then join the RAF. In fact we were all there just for the fun of flying, none of us went on into the air force, the experiment failed, and the squadron was therefore folded up. Just as well, perhaps. At an air display at Farnborough I had seen a test pilot fall to his death as a deHavilland 110 banked too sharply and broke up in front of 20,000 spectators. Then, before we knew what was happening, the twin jet engines broke loose from the falling debris and shrieked in close formation over our heads and then dug long twin furrows in a nearby field. But there was to be one last contact from my flying instructors. I had always particularly enjoyed the dare-devil challenges of flying with Flight Lieutenant Lucey, and he once said of me that I was “shit-hot on aerobatics”. So, a few years later, he phoned offering me a job as a test pilot with Hawker Aircraft. But by then I was on another career path.

THE GANG OF FIVE. Now back in Bristol we were in the fifth and last year of apprenticeship. By this time Chris Richardson, who was building a small racing car out of an old Austin seven, entered the circle and we planned our first major escapade. Marshall Tito was visiting England from Jugoslavia at the time and, without any political motive, indeed without any understanding of international politics, around midnight the five of us scaled the eastern pylon of the Clifton Suspension Bridge and hung an effigy of Tito from the top. It just seemed fun, and though only half the size of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, we had some scary moments. “You must hang on with both hands on this outside slab” hisses Michel who, at the best of times, looked like a Corsican bandit. Chris, who, along with his BSA Bantam motorbike, was once squashed between two buses on the Gloucester road, had to crawl laboriously up the suspension chain and meet us at the top, on account of his permanent limp. Next day there were photos in the papers of the swinging effigy and we learned, delighted at the unexpected ramifications of our adventure, that members of several political organizations were being questioned by the police and MI5. Our next escapade was the removal of a large wooden tiger from an Esso billboard. We were rumbled and fled, all except for Chris whose knee slowed him down. At lunch in the canteen next day we all agreed to share the costs of Chris’s court appearance and about a week later Chris called round one evening. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to hide the evening paper from his father (another ex-Indian army colonel) and, when he heard the explosion from his father’s armchair he quietly slipped round to our place. He had inherited some of his father’s acting ability and, with a fair grasp of the Bristol accent, dramatically entertained us with the policeman’s evidence: “I was proceeding alang the Glaaster road in the vicinity of the aforesaid billboard when I eart the sound of a andsawl. Upon further inspection I observed three youts running down Fishponds road and a further yout descending down the billboard holding the aforesaid andsawl. I proceeded to apprehend the yout and secured the andsawl in evidence.” It was worth the fine. In our third tangle with the law, Geof and I were caught one night riding a motorbike without lights. Geof, who was Irish, hit on the idea of reducing the fine by swapping identities. For the life of me I cannot remember the logic of Geof’s plan but, when a policeman arrived later to take  , Geof complimented me afterwards on my Irish accent. But we still had to pay the fine.

  AEROBATICS in an MG SPORTS. Uncle Jack had sold me his old four-seater MG for 100 pounds. Though 17 years old (there were still very few new cars after the war) it was still shiny black and it had a canvas roof. “Probably best not to fold it down” Uncle Jack had advised, but I did, could never re-erect it, and then found my RAFVR canvas flying suit handy for winter driving after that. That the speedometer never worked had been no problem to Uncle Jack, previously a boy chorister at Westminster Abbey: “At 30 miles an hour the engine hums at exactly middle C.” By that time I was sharing a tiny flat with Andy Mustard and we went to stay with his parents one weekend. We must have made some mistake in servicing the MG’s steering because, on a test run, the wheel stopped steering, we climbed sideways up a hedge, turned upside-down and rolled back onto the wheels again. Since I had shouted “MayDay” (SOS) and since Andy had also been a cadet pilot, he knew to bail out, even while upside-down. We towed the car (photo, minus windscreen and headlamps with Andy’s Mum at the wheel) to the wreckers, and Andy had an anti-tetanus jab for the scrapes on his head. But when his mother overheard him offering to help rebuild the MG, she had a quiet word with me and drove me down to the scrap yard next morning. As could only happen in those mechanically simple days, I found a greasy old Morris steering linkage, borrowed some spanners and, since there was now no windscreen, borrowed a beret and goggles from Andy and drove back to Bristol with steam coming from the radiator. Next, from a network of sports car enthusiasts, including Phil Green who was also rebuilding an MG, I acquired replacements, a windscreen, radiator and headlamps. Then, from a process known as ‘making a foreigner’, the factory provided me with a new steering hub. I had already worked in the drawing office, also as a production planner and on most of the machine tools. So, the process worked like this: you draw the sketch and take it to a friend in the drawing office. He produces a blueprint, the planning office plans its manufacture, the machine shop makes it, and then the planning office issues a cancellation, to remove all trace of the illegal transaction. So I repaired and sold the MG and bought a Riley Nine Special. (As you can see in

the photo, with Andy and two girl friends, the word “Special” means home-made), and the Norton 350 motorbike.

It should be fairly clear by now that most of my friends were interested in motor sports with two being directly involved. And so I occasionally acted as mechanic for Andy’s 650 cc BSA bike at Warminster and at the sprint meeting shown below left. .

When I acted as mechanic for Phil Green’s 500 cc racing car at Brands Hatch (below right), I towed his trailer with my next car, an Alvis Speed Twenty (for the technocrats: six cylinders, three carburetors, two ignition systems, and P100 headlamps the size of small searchlights)

 

RECONNECTIONS. As Madeleine, Chris and Tim well know, Bristol combines interesting docklands, canals, and old suburbs with graceful ironwork balconies. And as my memory now traces these combinations I am reminded of a film about six degrees of separation. For example, the Peter Hubner I went to school with occupied the next bed to Chris Richardson in hospital. Both had crashed their BSA Bantam motorbikes and both attended evening art classes run by a Mrs Faithfull whose daughter (or was it Grandaughter) became a famous singer. Anyway, the two-cylinder diesel on Mrs Faithfull’s Kennet-and-Avon canal barge had broken down. Chris offered to repair it in exchange for occasional use, providing us with slow Sunday trips far up the Avon valley. I sometimes met Chris, Peter and Phil at the Llanddogger Trow, a dockside pub that served the rough cider that inflicted the ‘scrumpy twitch’ on the old dock hands who had drunk too much of it. Colonel and Mrs Sartorious in Hankham had given me the address of Mike and Molly Windrum, and they introduced me to the wrought iron balconies and elegant terrace houses on the steeps of Clifton. Chris Richardson and fiancee Gillian and I had seen Molly play Lady Windermere once and Joan, pregnant with Kate, first met the Windrums when we were invited down from London for a magical summer weekend at their “Keepers Cottage” near Castle Combe.

But since I was enrolled as a graduate apprentice in a sandwich course, life at Cambridge had alternated with these Bristol experiences, and it was years later that I caught up with some of their lives.

Michel’s father, working in France for British Intelligence, had been caught and executed by the Gestapo. His mother and brother Jean-Pierre (Jimpy) lived on a small pension in London. To help out, Michel saved money for them. For example, he had made an arrangement with the kindly old ladies behind the canteen counter that, substituting extra gravy for meat, he paid five pence instead of ten for lunch. A wild French boy, he eventually married and Joan and I once visited to admire his children. Joan still has the Irish Fruit Bread recipe that his wife Lisa gave her (1 cupful tea, 1 lb currants or other, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 egg, 2 cups SR flour. Soak fruit and sugar in tea overnight. Next morning add well-beaten egg and flour and mix well. Put in greased tin and bake in middle of oven at 150 celsius for about 2 hours. Leave for a day before using. Then slice thinly and butter). I was best man for Chris and our paths continue to cross. For example, when Joan, Chris and I met up with trumpeter Johnny in London, Acker Bilk had long since taken over his jazz band. And John was defraying the costs of his small plane by writing article for flying magazines. Geof, the mad Irishman, married and he now works in that part of Scotland that faces the Artic circle, occasionally coming as far south as Turkey to thaw out and sail with Chris on the Black Sea. I did hear that Phil had crashed his racing car at Crystal Palace and had not survived. To my astonishment I bumped into Andy on the platform at Wynyard, and heard the story of Donald Campbell’s Bluebird. Andy, by then a Dunlop racing tyre specialist, had come out from England to help Campbell with the world speed record attempt on Lake Eyre. Frustrated by Campbell’s hesitancy, Andy offered to drive Bluebird, and actually rallied some support. But Andy’s bid for fame failed, probably just as well as speed eventually led Campbell to the bottom of Lake Windemere while Andy is still alive, “a-drivin up in Queensland, but we don’t know where he are”. When Molly Windrum was going blind we visited her in hospital in London and, years later, when they lived in a picture-postcard bow-fronted cottage in Clifton, she was delighted to meet our four children when we were driving through to Hereford. And years after that, Madeleine and Chris were to help guide us down the steep little valley at the bottom of which lay Keepers Cottage.

SOME REFLECTIONS. I had journeyed from the sunny, warm, easygoing West-Indian way of life, through a brief encounter with war and extreme cold, into the archaic traditions of an English boarding school. The next transition was equally abrupt, immersing me in the English working class system in a factory. From there, I went back into another archaic tradition, a 500 year-old university system that was only just starting to unravel at the seams. The West Indies had taught me about multiculturalism, the voyage had introduced me to warfare, and England was now teaching me about class. So here and now, from the vantage point of the 21^st century, are some reflections on my “attempts to understand each journey and its meanings”.

REFLECTIONS ON CLASS. The Queens College of British Guiana was, on reflection, surprisingly multicultural and egalitarian. Beyond the school walls of course blacks were servants and East Indians were shop keepers in a class system we did not question. But Mrs Froude in England, who came from three doors up the street to clean for Granny, was white, and a white servant was something new to me. When the Japanese war ended and Pevensey Bay turned out for a celebratory bonfire, I was astonished when some teenagers picked on me, asking what school I came from. It could not have been on account of my accent which was still West Indian; perhaps it was my sports jacket which was different. I don’t remember any traditions or privileges at Queens College but, at Malvern College some of these still survived from a Victorian era, though increasingly ridiculed by the levelling effects of war. Some of my school friends did hold strong views on the new Labour Government but, then, I didn’t even know what a Conservative was. The thousands that worked in my factory rubbed along together, and the charge-hands and managers had all risen from the ranks, so that was OK. And on the rare occasion I heard a company director speak he had a Bristol accent. I once faced a working class revolt in the form of a picket line at the factory gates but, to my relief a union man recognized me “its all right he’s an apprentice, let him through.”

At Cambridge there were quaint names for the servants who made your bed (Gipps), the academic who asked if you had had a good vacation and then took no further interest in you (Tutor), and for those that punished you for not wearing your gown or trying to climb into college after hours (Proctors). Though class distinctions were fast disappearing, there were still and will always be English aristocratic eccentrics, unpredictable, bizarre and entertaining. The undergraduate from Eton whose Austin seven carried an anemometer made of split tennis balls on one wing, the stub of a candle on the other, and a printed card on the back window encouraging you to vote for Gladstone. The suave-tongued and urbane professor of Greek, having spent some of the war years crawling around Yugoslavia, face blackened, knife held in his teeth, behaving in a manner we would describe today as terrorist, who now returned to his “chair”, and to dinners, cigars and fine wines at the “Fellows” table.

Was class perhaps something connected with the King’s English as spoken in London and the Home Counties? Certainly Bernard Shaw had said that whenever an Englishman opens his mouth some other Englishman despises him. But accent was just a badge covering something deeper. Karl Marx had had a lot to say about the effects of monopoly capitalism, and I have a lot to say about the effects of another monopoly, that of landed aristocracies and elites. But Kate has suggested I do not pursue such matters in my memoirs. So I will hide further mention of closely related problems such as poverty, human rights, the environment and conflict resolution in obscure notes at the ends of later chapters where they might escape Kate’s scrutiny.

REFLECTIONS ON WAR. Crossing the Atlantic we had experienced something of warfare at sea and, now in England, we had seen briefly the tail-end of warfare in the air. From then on, everyone I now met had war stories. At the drawing board next to mine the tall, distinguished Pole had flown spitfires in what was called a Free Polish Squadron. Fanatical, dare-devil pilots, they were always in trouble with their British Commanding Officer for “jabbering away” in Polish to each other during dog fights. The manager of the Spares department had been skipper of a MTB, a motor torpedo boat. Highly vulnerable to air attack, they cheered when the little Pom-Pom guns on the stern opened fire. “They weren’t much good, but at least we were fighting back.” Andy, teaching me how to do a fuel tank pressure test, was objecting to the strike next week. “Our job in the Fleet Air Arm was to keep the buggers flying”. For him, the transition from patriotism to the politics of class solidarity was proving difficult. And there were other transitions. In the aftermath of war, millions of refugees, in those days they were called DPs, displaced persons, were wandering throughout Europe, trying to reconnect. Two from Poland arrived suddenly in the bed-sitter next to mine. In London he had advertised for a Polish wife, married, and come to Bristol. The wife had a tightly-pinched face devoid of any expression, except on one occasion. My motorbike had seized up, skidding spectacularly past the Horsefair bus stop. The wife found me washing out the gearbox with Rinso in the shared kitchen sink. There was just a momentary flicker of concern across her face before the mask fell again. Less psychologically damaged than her, the husband eventually escaped back to London leaving my landlady to comfort a distraught woman who could speak no English.

REFLECTIONS ON THE ENGLISH SEASONS

SPRING. Mother, Dad, me, Aunt Marjorie outside Great-Granny’s house, called Millcrest since there is an old windmill at the top of the hill across the road. In the background is Gallows Lane down which Kate later rode one of the Sacrets’ bikes. Stone Cross, where Uncle Jack played the organ on Sundays, is behind the photographer. Westham, Pevensey and Pevensey Bay away to the right.

SUMMER at Millcrest with Tim, Aunt Marjorie and me. Beyond the hedge a narrow lane wound its way past Foxglove Cottage in Hankham and down to Windyridge.

AUTUMN in a field somewhere in Sussex. Tim, Aunt Marjorie, Mother. They don’t stack stooks of corn like that anymore. Great-Granny loved going to auctions in Eastbourne and the furniture, like the seasons, would be different each time I stayed at Millcrest.

WINTER with Mother shoveling snow outside Millcrest. Mother loved the changing seasons, Dad put up with it, while Tim and I still hankered for the tropics.