A Ha’p’orth of Sweets - A child's 1930s - 1940s

MY STORY is made up of incidents, recorded because they are what childhood is like, and was like (particularly for Brightonians) in the 1930s, and the early 1940s which was the Second World War (that brought violence to me personally). Also, portrayed are my family, above all my mother and father, who were typical of parents determined to shield their offspring from the hardship of their own youth, and to help them to a life better than their own without that being at the expense of others.

Dedicated to Avril, without whose support this account wouldn’t have been written
October 1997

The Mischievous 1930s

MY MEMORY is like most people’s, poor, with only scatterings left from my earliest days. One recollection I do have is of me sitting spread-legged on the ground in my gran and granddad’s back garden in Brighton, intent with toddler’s unsure fingers on getting mud into the gaps in the brick wall of their outside toilet. The mud is black from the soot, of decades of having the kitchen chimney swept, which had been spread on the narrow beds along the boundary walls to help the bushy plants there grow. But the mud won’t stay in to mend the wall as I wanted.

Another memory, from further down that same Brighton street, is of that same little boy, but now somewhat older, standing with a toy wheelbarrow filled with wooden bricks in the back garden of his own home, to knock yet again at the back door, but on the frame, as by now the door has been left open, to call “Milko!” just as he’d heard the milkman call at times outside the front door. My mother who is shucking peas at the sink plays along with that patience only mothers have, with, “One pint, please, Mr Milkman.”

In those days, the early thirties, besides the regular milkman there was also a late one who seemed to me as a child to do his round in the middle of the night, walking a horse which pulled a small cart with a big churn in it. Memory of him is with me because I’d just seen him go by as I stood in the dark in my pyjamas looking out from our front door, alone, frightened, not knowing what to do – as in a big store after wandering off, suddenly finding your mother was not there! But I was at home, it was night and my mother was not there. I was about to rush into the now empty street…

Then, hurrying towards me, there she was! I rushed into her arms sobbing fit to burst. As she comforted me, my mother was full of remorse. I’d never known her to leave me alone in the house before. It had been no more than to take advantage of my being in bed asleep to slip to the corner grocer’s in Dinapore Street, a street later condemned through bombing to disappear, to get something she’d forgotten for my father’s tea. My mother was to suffer remorse again some years later after she’d left me to go shopping.

But for now, back to roundsmen. In those times bread was delivered to the door, the baker standing there with his arm through the handle of a big basket full of all sorts of loaves. Both the baker and the late-milkman used live horse power, and other horses and carts went through the streets. An alert neighbour would rush into the street with shovel and bucket after a horse had passed, to collect what it had left behind for spreading on the garden.

My uncle Ernest, who was a serious man with a hoarse voice, delivered milk by handcart. His round was east of St Peter’s cathedral-like church and included the hills so steep that pavements were ridged to save people sliding in icy weather. The only way my uncle could get up those hills with his heavy pushcart was to rely upon another working-man noticing and shouting, “Give you a hand, mate?” It was in a street on my uncle’s round that I lived as a child, in Belgrave Street, which runs between Albion Hill and Southover Street.

BREAD AND ‘AXLE GREASE’

Another tradesman who walked the streets was the fishmonger, who came with a flat barrow, the inner-side painted white and spread with shiny locally-caught fish, which he cut, boned and skinned on a flap. Now and again came the ragmen. Their arrival had the children flying indoors. “Mum, Mum, quick – old clothes! They’re giving away gold-fish!”

On a Sunday there were different vendors. One carried a deep wooden tray covered by a green cloth on his head, and swung a handbell. He was selling crumpets, which were considered a luxury and therefore not for us, but my dad did buy once in a while from another man with a big circular basket of winkles. A street seller I can now hear more clearly than see is the woman with newspapers in our shopping centre of London Road who shouted, “News, Star, Standard – Aaar-gis [Argus]”, which were the evening newspapers. Other Brighton characters when I was a child are a woman who pushed her dog in a pram – even covering it up like a baby – and another elderly woman who walked about the streets with a parrot on her shoulder.

The house of another old woman touched me with dread. Because the streets are terraced down Albion Hill I could, whilst on tip-toe, peer down on that house over the wall of our back garden. My mind was filled with imaginings because the garden of that old woman’s dark cottage was full of empty tea chests and boxes. Perhaps they’d been used to bring her little boys who’d been snatched away when their mothers weren’t looking. Also, when in our garden on my own, even when I was older, I would be compelled to turn and look up at the second floor spare room of our house, at the window, dark as night, the glass old and rippled. Beyond it I could imagine an unseen unknown figure staring down at me. Suddenly chilled, I would go back indoors to the reassurance of my mother’s presence.

In our back garden when I was no more than knee-high to a hedgehog, I was bitten by one. It was a pet hedgehog. I’d bent over and stuck out a finger. “Probably thought your finger was a cabbage stalk,” suggested my Dad, fighting to suppress a grin, after I’d finished yelling. Also, later, I was bitten by a monkey. My mates and I were walking down the beach, and seeing the pet monkey sitting on a woman’s lap, I stuck out a finger… The woman’s look said, “Serves you right for sticking your finger where it wasn’t wanted!” I didn’t cry out because I felt foolish and my mates would have laughed at me. As we went on down the beach I used the secrecy of a pocket to soothe the hurt.

Before then, whilst I was still small, one day when I peered down over our garden wall onto the old lady’s garden, the tea chests and boxes had gone. ‘They’ had come, my mother told me, to take her away because she could no longer look after herself.

I couldn’t look after myself either on the sixth of March 1930, because that was the day I was born, in Brighton General Hospital, which externally still looks the grim workhouse it had been. I was to be an only child. This was by my mother’s choice. Her mother had died whilst she herself was still a child, and to her had fallen the drudgery at the age of 14 of bringing up her two brothers and two of her sisters, one, Hilda, no more than two years old. So by the time she’d married, my mother had already brought up one family, and she’d known the poverty that could go with a brood of children. Sometimes dinner for her had been a slice of bread and margarine, a spread so awful it was known as ‘axle grease’. At times my mother served us what to her had been a treat – a dish called ‘tombstone’ from the moulded shape of the rice mixed with, not milk, but water. To make it appealing, on top went jam, which in her childhood would be bought by the spoonful from the corner shop.

‘POLLY ALLEY’

After their mother had died, my mother’s middle sister, Ada, was adopted by their Aunt Nell and Uncle Jack, who had no children of their own. Uncle Jack was a regular soldier from well before the First World War, finishing up as sergeant major. Unlike the popular image of a sergeant-major, he was to me a warm man, but perhaps a bit gruff. His qualities as a soldier had earned him an offer of promotion to officer. He had refused. The problem was that as a married man he couldn’t afford to serve first as a lowly second lieutenant, as the mess bills were on the basis that junior officers enjoyed a private income, and, of course, men of my uncle’s birth were as likely to have an inherited income as to have an old school tie.

My mother’s father was what she described as a ‘respectable man’, clean and always smartly dressed, which got him the job of porter at a leading jeweller’s in Brighton. This meant going by coach and horse with trinkets to the homes of the rich for the lady to make a choice, which he enjoyed because there could be tea and cake with the servants. During the First World War he’d had to sleep under the counter in case a Zeppelin dropped a bomb on its way to London and opened up the jeweller’s shop to pillage. His weekly pay, as for most people, was pitiful. As with most men then, my grandfather’s pastime was drinking at his local. My mother had blamed him for being heedless of his wife, like so many, by spending on himself money badly needed for the family, and allowing his wife to take in ironing to make ends meet. She died at the age of 42, ‘worn out’ as my mother said.

Another side to my mother’s father, a Cole from Lewes, was his love of the countryside. Taking one or more of the children with him he would walk for miles over the Downs. He knew where the best mushrooms were to be found, where to pick the tiny wild strawberries, and where the violets hid. Sales from these to local shops produced some small coins. My mother was, I am sure, right to have softened her view of him after his death, as he should be judged against his contemporaries and not against men of these easier times.

It was through an incident involving her father that my mother would laugh at her own naivety as a child. She was setting off with a jug for the corner pub, to the bottle and jug department for him. Just about to close the front door behind her she realised she’d forgotten what was wanted. Without stopping to think, except about avoiding the embarrassment of the neighbours knowing her errand, she turned and shouted back indoors, “Do you want R-U-M, (G-I-N or W-H-I-S-K-Y,” as though those inside could, but the neighbours couldn’t, spell! My mother would recall the general drunkenness; the violent shouting between husband and wife from the house right next door in Apollo Terrace (known as ‘Polly Alley’), which she still remembered frightened her, particularly as her close friend was the daughter of that house. However, she would sing from those days with a smile a verse from the Temperance League whose meeting she must have gone to:

O MOTHER STOP AND THINK,
O FATHER STOP AND THINK,
WHICH DO YOU LOVE THE BEST OF ALL,
THE CHILDREN, OR THE DRINK?

My mother knew the shame of poverty. Charity boots were given for children in need, and were distinctively marked so the parents couldn’t pawn them. My mother beseeched my grandmother not to get her charity boots because she believed that humiliating brand would catch every eye. Because her children’s feelings meant more to her than scrimping yet further her mother didn’t insist. She’d have been aware how sensitive children can be. I can remember the to-do over my ‘heir to the manor’ outfit. My parents had a belted, herringbone tweed overcoat made-to-measure for me at a shop known as Sammy Gordon’s in Trafalgar Street. It had a man-style cap to match. That cap I would not wear – “Mum, the boys will laugh!” My ideal in head-gear was a navy blue school cap. That, I now agree, would have spoilt the effect (and I didn’t get one).

Besides pawning their children’s charity boots some people would ‘pop’ the old man’s Sunday best on the Monday to get it out again on the Saturday. There was also the money-lender, who would often be a neighbour who’d scratched a few pounds together. A neighbour some doors up on the opposite side of my early childhood street used to lend out money at a price, and tell fortunes, and there was otherwise community help as from the woman who would lay out the dead, and the woman who would collect for the street funeral wreath. Another neighbour, to earn a few halfpennies, would occasionally turn out toffee apples for the children. My grandfather would bake the wedding and birthday cakes.

There was a woman in our street who kept herself to herself, which in itself was not unusual, in fact it was probably the norm. It meant being on good terms with your neighbours in not making a lot of noise, smiling and commenting on the weather in passing but never ‘getting thick with anyone’. This neighbour, a widow, was always neatly dressed, her net curtains crisply white, the pavement outside her front door regularly swept. She was what ‘The Street’ thought of as a shining example of its respectability. Then one morning her curtains remained closed. She was found at the foot of the stairs, dead from a fall. What shocked the neighbours when the inquest was reported was that alcohol had been found in her blood. ‘Under the influence’, it was said, she had tripped and fallen to her death. Heavy drinking was shameful, felt ‘The Street’, as a reaction to what had gone on before when fathers (and sometimes mothers as well) had made poorer many a childhood by their drinking. My mother, who had suffered that poverty personally, shared the abhorrence, but “Poor woman,” she said sadly, “how lonely she must have been.”

Belgrave Street was the family street in the 1930s. Some doors up from number five where we lived, were my paternal grandmother and grandfather at number thirteen with one of their daughters, when she was home from being a cook. She had been christened Florence but she was always known as Flo, or Floss. This shortening of names spread over the whole family. Opposite my grandparents lived another daughter, married, with the sparse familiar name of Lou, who was more or less next door to her brother who got cut down to Ern. Lou’s husband had been lavished the name of Charles, but of course my family were not going to use a name as grand as that – so it was Char. Unfortunately, Char was also the name of the husband of another daughter, who had been slimmed down to Min. With two Chars there could have been confusion, so run together as though a single name, one was Min’s-Char and the other was Lou’s-Char.

‘LARKIN’S ICE-WELL’

To avoid my name being shortened my parents gave me a brief one – John. So people lengthened it to Johnny! This would make me squirm as it was a name for little boys, but children in those days were discouraged from taking issue with adults.

My mother had been impressively named Violet Corona Caroline, but she was always known as Con. Her eyes were that rarity, green, and her hair was fairish; she was pretty, energetic, her tread was firm and her personality bright.

Although loving me as she showed in other ways, I don’t remember my mother giving me many hugs and kisses as I grew from toddlerhood. The reason, I now realise, lay largely with me. Violent protests would follow any move to show affection towards me. “I’m a boy!” I’d object, wriggling. At a family wedding when I was four and had been forced into a pink blouse with frills down the front as the pageboy, I scowled under my fringe, as a wedding photo shows, and refused to hold the hand of the little girl bridesmaid. Something else that would have me struggling to get away from my mother was after she’d produced a handkerchief whilst we were out, delicately moistened it by her lips and tried to wipe a mark off my face. A compromise might be if I was allowed to supply the moisture.

When small I believed my mother when she said, “I can read you like a book.” An example for me was after she’d told me not to go swimming as I’d had a cold, I did go. As soon as I got indoors she slapped me. “You naughty, naughty, disobedient boy!” How could she have known? Little boys don’t think of hair damply flat after swimming.

My mother had colourful sayings, probably local. So she could feel ‘all mops and brooms’ (out of sorts), it could ‘look dark over Dick’s mum’s’ (if the sky was threatening), or it could be ‘as cold as Larkin’s ice-well’. It wouldn’t rain, so she said, if there were ‘enough blue sky to make a cat a pair of trousers,’ and if rain fell whilst the sun shone, it was ‘a monkey’s birthday’. Having dropped something and broken it she would explode with “Oh, buttercups and daisies!”

“ACTORS – TOFFS, BUT CHORUS GIRLS!”

My father was a modest man, but he could stick up for himself. Like his father he was bald, starting to lose hair in his twenties; his skin seemed weathered, and he had hooded, round brown eyes. He was brave in all things but illness, and was cursed in his final years with severe asthma, the breathlessness frightening him and making an attack even worse (he died from it in his early 70s). Like his father he was intelligent, but having been born working class he lacked the confidence that can come from a successful family background, and would not risk being ambitious, except to the extent of being determined to stay in work. He was another Charles, but not known as Char as could be expected, but as Arthur, in full! (his second name).

As a hard working, home-loving man, each week my father had money to give to his parents up the street, as children had to do then when the father had retired. Fear, for the old, so I was told, was of being sent to the workhouse where the men and the women, who could have spent 50 years together, were separated up. Fear for the sons was of being out of work, and of the poor law. And there was fear also of being ‘laid-up’. In the absence of a national health service, the prudent like my parents, joined a friendly society to provide some help. Also, there would be a ‘penny-a-week’ life policy, with the amount collected at the door, to ensure a ‘decent burial’.

For men like my father work could be uncertain. More than once, both my father and my mother’s brother George worked at Harrington’s, the vehicle body builders that was in Old Shoreham Road, Hove. “It was like being in prison,” my father recalled, “with foremen patrolling catwalks like guards in the pictures. A watch was kept on how often you went to the toilet, in case it was an excuse to slip off for a smoke.” My Uncle George had an unhappier memory.

As a carpenter, George Cole was helping to build a bus which was to be displayed at an exhibition in London. Time ran short, so the men had to work into the early hours to finish. My uncle walked the several miles home to Whitehawk and had a short sleep before catching the bus back to be at work the next morning early. When he arrived at Harrington’s he was given what was known as ‘one minute’s notice’, which meant he was sacked there and then, not because he’d done anything wrong but because there wasn’t enough work. No one had had the humanity to tell the men the night before to save them a wasted journey.

My mother’s other brother Arthur was the black sheep of the family. Not for anything criminal. What he’d done was to leave his bride at the altar so to speak. The wedding dress was ready apart from some minor alterations, the reception had been booked and the wedding cake ordered. It was then Arthur disappeared. “It wasn’t he didn’t want to get married,” my mother maintained, “he really loved Maud.” What had happened, so my mother said, was that Arthur had told Maud during their engagement that he was putting money in the building society every week towards the deposit on the little house they both dreamed of owning. “On what he was earning, he couldn’t put money away like that,” said my mother. “He’d just wanted to please Maud, and he couldn’t face her when the lie had to come out – so he ran away.” That’s not the end of the story.

Years later, by chance, miles away in London during the Second World War, Arthur and Maud met. They had a drink together; the romance was rekindled. And they did marry. Arthur looked after Maud in their final years, dying shortly after her.

Long before Harrington’s, my father had been faced with the problem of what work to do. As his sisters were ‘in service’ and he had no better idea, my father got himself employed as a page-boy at Lion Mansions Hotel (later part of the Royal Albion Hotel) on the sea front at Brighton. One of his jobs was to iron the newspapers. But my father wouldn’t have been suited to hotel work as he had within him a fire that would have flared up if he had been treated high-handedly.

A later job my father had was as assistant to the diver who was working on the piles of the Palace Pier. My father remembered helping him into his deep-sea diver’s suit and lead-loaded boots, when the man, who liked a drink, would have an ’emergency’. According to my father, rather than go through the rigmarole of getting him out of the boots and the suit and back into them again, this meant working a special bottle on a string down inside the front of the suit for the man to use. Whilst the diver was under the sea my father would tend the pump that supplied air to him.

It was also on the Palace Pier that my father had a part-time job in the theatre at the pier-end of operating the stage limelight. My father remembered, “The actors and actresses were real toffs. It was the chorus girls who thought they were something.”

A RARITY – A WIRELESS

My father’s main work was what was known as coach-painting, but by that time was motor car painting. It was by hand, and the finish was by thin decorative lines. To produce these lines a brush more like a bundle of bristles was skimmed along. It took skill and confidence, and at first my father used to turn the round dining table on its side at home to practice (wiping the result off straight away), so my mother recalled. It was he who told me one of the secrets of the coach painter. If the finish once in a rare while turned out poor they would catch a fly and throw it on to the paint, so that it could be blamed. Competition was fierce, and, once, the only way my father could keep the labourer in work was for the two of them to do overtime without pay. The man remained my father’s friend for life.

Once my mother took me to that little workshop in Brighton’s back streets where my father was foreman. In his arms, my father showed me where he worked – no more than an emptiness with a wooden bench down one side scattered with bits and pieces. What a disappointment! Proudly he showed me off to his workmates, who I was too shy to answer.

At an earlier time my father worked at a garage where there was a petrol pump, and on the forecourt, without thinking, he threw down the match he’d used to light his cigarette. To his horror he saw a flame flash along a trail of spilt petrol towards a man standing some yards away. As my father opened his mouth to shout a warning the flame reached the man. He was standing, luckily with legs apart, so the flame passed between them without touching him. “I can laugh now,” said my father, “but I never again forgot about matches and petrol.”

For my mother, working life began at Dubarry’s perfumery, whose length of buildings still stand near Hove Station, and from the railway bridge the firm’s name can be seen in mosaic below roof level. My mother didn’t like factory work, and recalled that they went home strongly smelling of the cheap perfume they’d handled which made her aware of people’s sideways glances if she travelled on a train or bus. As for most women who didn’t work in a factory, the only other choice was service. At one time she worked for a refined trio of a mother and two schoolteacher daughters, who could just about afford my mother’s services to look after the house daily, but when they wanted her to be the maid and serve afternoon tea to visitors, that was a duty too far. She recalled that when rayon stockings had come in, she had worn a pair to work because she was going out afterwards. It was inferred that this was not acceptable, as it looked as if she were trying to pass herself off as one of ‘her betters’ in their silk stockings.

When my mother was later a housewife and mother we had something of a rarity in those times – a wireless. My father had put it together. It was in a cabinet taller than me with the loud-speaker hanging by a chain from the picture rail above the mantelpiece. On the wireless my mother liked to listen to Jack Payne’s dance band about tea-time, but as this clashed with Children’s Hour she would give me the choice. Annoyingly, as children will, I would almost be persuaded to listen to the music, before plumping for Children’s Hour. Then I would change my mind and want the music – to change my mind yet again. “This is the last time,” my mother would say, “otherwise it’s the music.” As soon as I’d become absorbed in the doings of Larry the Lamb, Mr Groucher and Ernest the Policeman of Toy Town, my gran would turn up. She would sit stolidly and talk, and I couldn’t hear my programme properly.

1940’S – ROAD RAGE

My gran was short and round. She always wore black, with a big white apron from her waist to, like her skirt, not far short of the ground. Her grey hair was pulled back from her face into a bun on top. Her lips folded in because she had no teeth. That isn’t strictly true, because she did have teeth, false teeth, but she didn’t wear them. That is, unless it was a formal occasion. Once my gran and Auntie Floss took me with them to a tea-garden somewhere in the countryside. I was fascinated by my gran’s gleaming white never-fading smile. Never-fading that is until the moment before we started our tea. Then into a white handkerchief she had taken from her handbag she discreetly deposited her teeth. And settled down to enjoy bread-and-jam and cake with her efficient gums. It was my gran who taught me how to drink tea from the saucer in private when it was too hot. Though Gran’s tea was usually only warm from having been left not to brew, but, as my father said, ‘to stew’, on the hob, and so was deep-coloured and very strong, and it was over-sweetened.

As my gran liked ludo, we played it whenever I went to tea. There was no question of letting the only grandson win – my gran had the killer instinct when it came to ludo. For a treat she liked a tram ride. Again, she and Aunt Floss would take me. The top deck was open, and we would travel up there from St Peter’s to Queens Park. We stayed on for the return journey while the seat backs were pulled to the other side (so passengers would be facing the new front) and, with a long pole, the driver turned in the other direction the arms that connected the tram with the overhead electric cables.

A tram almost saw the ending of me. Outside the mock-Tudor King and Queen pub opposite Victoria Gardens, one afternoon, for want of anything better to do, I stood like a statue in the middle of the road, all on my own, my toes close to the tram line. A tram came grinding into view. The driver saw me and clanged his bell. He clanged it again. Then, frantically he clanged it. I stood my ground. It was a daredevil idea of mine to let the tram just miss me. With the bell now clanging non-stop, the tram was soon on me. In those last seconds I realised for the first time that the tram widened as it rose from the lines – and it wouldn’t be the near miss I’d intended. It would be a hit. So back quickly I stepped. The tram passed me safely, the driver leaning out of the open side to swear at me to relieve his fright.

A GAMBLER WHO NEVER LOST

It was my gran who had a fright one Christmas. She’d knocked at our front door. Not knowing who it was and thinking no further than fun, I put on a Father Christmas mask, threw open the door – and shouted “Boo!” My grandmother just stood there. And the jug of milk she had been carrying slipped from her fingers to shatter on the pavement, sending out a wave of milk. Indoors afterwards, my gran said several times, “And it was my best jug because it’s Christmas.” A ‘nice cup of tea’ or as it was Christmas perhaps it was a glass of ‘British sherry’ eventually soothed my gran, but her glance in my direction was not yet grandmotherly. Like most young children I couldn’t sleep on a Christmas Eve for anticipation. From being street-wise I didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and I knew the presents were delivered by my dad. That Christmas Eve I heard metallic noises, presumably from the tin toys inside the pillow case, as Dad crept up the stairs. Alert, I waited. Then, as he entered the room, I sat up in bed and cried “Boo!” There was the rattle-rattle-rattle of his hurried retreat downstairs. It would still be dark when I opened my presents, and I would run with each into my parents’ bedroom to show them, even though most were from them.

Christmas cards clattering through the letter box would have me running to pick them up. Once, instead, I found a small cardboard container lying on the door mat. Opened, it revealed cubes of white, pink, yellow, black – a sample of dog biscuits. I wouldn’t have bought them for my dog, as on trying one of each, apart from the black which was bitter, there wasn’t much flavour whatever the colour

When I was older I once rode a horse. We were visiting rich Aunt Olive, who wouldn’t take no to paying for me to join my two cousins in a riding lesson. My cousins wore ordinary clothes, but with short, replaced by long, trousers. But that wasn’t to be for me. My aunt insisted on dressing me up. She put me in what were her jodhpurs and high riding boots, her checked hacking jacket, and finished off the ensemble with a riding crop and crocheted gloves in lemon yellow. I felt a lemon, even although somehow everything seemed to fit that nine or ten year old. “You look the part,” persuaded my aunt. But that was the problem: I felt a fraud. And felt that acutely at the riding instructress’s amazement that I didn’t know even how to get on a horse.

What I could ride was a lorry. The usual way was to run after one as it was moving off or had slowed down in our streets to jump up and hold on to the raised tail-board, sometimes finding with our feet a spare wheel under the chassis for support. Drivers were alive to this dodge and would pull up and lean out of the window to shout after us as we ran off.

Another game my parents would have been horrified to know about had to do with the nearby slum clearance. As it was completely enclosed by high wooden fencing we had to hunch and haul as a team to get in. It was with caution we explored, as the house fronts had been knocked down and upstair’s flooring would sag under our feet, a ceiling would look about to fall. Disturbed dust would make us cough. Climbing about those ruined houses wouldn’t have amused us for long but for having to be alert for the cry of “BBC!”, which stood not for British Broadcasting Corporation but for “Bunk boys, copper.” The threat was of a burly policeman hauling himself over the fence and giving chase with a clout round the ear in mind.

My gran and granddad’s house was very old, a rented industrial cottage, but sturdy. They spent much of their time in the kitchen. It was a small room, and it’s hard to believe a family of nine could have got round that table. The kitchen got so hot because a range, which was kept black-polished, was down one side, where the cooking was done. At the front of the range coals glowed redly behind a grille, and it was here bread was toasted, to be spread with dripping, the brown jelly added on top if you were lucky.

My granddad backed horses, but never lost money. In a small book he entered bets that were purely imaginary, and his equally imaginary losses, or occasional winnings. Money was tight even with the help from the children. That was why he wouldn’t go out for walks. “Dad, why don’t you go out more often and get some fresh air,” urged my father. The reason, he was told, was that my grandfather might meet a former workmate who would say, “Come and have a drink, Ted,” and he wouldn’t be able to buy one back.

AT THE BATH HOUSE

My grandfather was stooped from long hours of kneading as a baker at the local Lyons, so he was no taller than my little gran. As he was shinily-bald he often wore a cap, even indoors, and when he baked, a spotless white apron, which was like gran’s but also covering his chest. On his round face his spectacles were round, small and wire-rimmed, and he had a walrus moustache, touched by nicotine, which he had the habit of puffing out. When I visited, my grandfather was shy, making himself agreeable in smiling a lot and nodding, but clearly he was not comfortable. To ease the situation he would give me a piece of the treacle toffee he’d made himself, which he kept in a tea caddy, which looked as old as him. As the toffee was sticky and clung to the teeth it made conversation difficult. The voice my granddad used when we were talking together was the one that’s kindly but talks down to children. It’s used by some adults who’ve not experienced parenthood, but my grandfather had had plenty of experience, surely, as the father of seven children. Perhaps he’d had little to do with them because children in those days were thought of as women’s work, but, as importantly perhaps, because working hours were so long for most men there was little time for the gentler side of life.

When my gran came into the kitchen my granddad would hand over entertaining the grandson and hide behind his newspaper. My gran’s way with children was to treat them matter-of-factly, but deep down she had a soft spot for her only grandson, which could show itself in a rare gentle word and warm smile.

My grandfather’s schooling had been brief, but he was an intelligent man, and mild-mannered, who had he been lucky enough to have been born into a family with money, would have flourished in some profession where he would have shown great integrity and concern for his clients. On the kitchen wall was a certificate stating that he had been grand-master of some working-men’s mutual-aid society, a position he wouldn’t have sought but which must have been pressed upon him. My father also, was clever, particularly with figures, and had been recognised for training as a teacher, but that had been as financially fanciful as wintering in Aswan with the Aga Khan.

In my grandparents’ house, down the passage from the kitchen was the scullery. This had in the shadowy corner a brick-built whitewashed boiler for the family wash, heated by a fire. This reminds me of Uncle George’s escapade as a boy. “Go and see if the boiler’s alight,” his mother had told him. He didn’t go into their scullery and open the boiler fire plate to see, as she’d expected him to. Instead, he went outside into the yard, clambered up on to the extension roof – and peered down the boiler chimney.

My grandparents’ toilet was outside, and the toilet paper was squares of newspaper hung by string from a nail in the wall. Nearby, attached to the house wall, was a ‘safe’. No one in the street had a fridge, so the wooden box-like safe with its perforated, metal-panelled door served instead. In sultry summers the milk had to be boiled last thing to stop it from going sour. Also on the house wall hung a galvanised iron bath. I bathed in a galvanised-iron bath in front of our open fire at No. 5. My father would go to the public bath house. Once, I went with him. An attendant controlled from outside the flow of water into a bath. “More cold water,” would come the cry from a cubicle, and then “Enough.”

The front room in my grandparents’ house, as in our house and many other people’s, was the best decorated, had the finest furniture that could be afforded, and was kept perfect. But it wasn’t used – except on rare occasions such as weddings and funerals and perhaps at Christmas. On the walls of my gran’s front room were family pictures, including a large photo-portrait, tinted, of a self-conscious Margie. She had died young from asthma. Margie was the only child of Aunt Lou and Uncle Char. Auntie couldn’t bear to part with Margie’s books. At last she found she could give the hooks up, and knowing of my passion for reading she brought them down for me. But by then they were out-of-date.

A MORBID INTEREST

Lou’s-Char had a mournful face, but could have a tiny twinkle in his eyes when listening to a small boy setting out his view in answer to a question. But it was possible in that house to sense the long shadow cast by the death of Margie. Uncle Char had a secure job as a foreman-cleaner at Brighton Station, but a badly paid one, so Aunt Lou was careful, making one dinner sweet do for two days. Yet, once, having saved up, she put on a family party, with even whiskey and gin, which would have cost a lot by my family’s standards.

In my gran’s front room, which like the rest of their house was lighted at night by the pure gently-hissing light of a gas-mantle, my gran would sit in the afternoons behind the net curtains, which looked directly on to the pavement, to watch the life of the street. On one occasion, the neighbour who made toffee apples had made toffee sticks, and one of the kids wanted me to buy one. “Perhaps my gran will give me the money,” I said, with little hope. So, as I’d never done before out of the blue, I called on my gran. Never would I have asked, so I just silently wished – and she gave me the ha’penny. Long afterwards I realised she must have been behind the net curtains and heard my childish need.

One of my gran’s interests was a morbid one – funerals. She could be counted on to swell the numbers at the service for a neighbour, and she’d put on her best black coat with the dyed fur collar, and plump black hat, to go to enjoy the spectacle of an important funeral passing along one of the main streets. When she died, as her hearse passed a mounted policeman, he saluted. “She would have liked that,” said my mother.

HEAVY SMELL OF HOPS

My infant school was of grimy brick with a tall wrought-iron gate which led from Sussex Street. When it was the Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary in 1935, a party was held in the school hall. Not at all like my mother, we were late, and they tried to sit me at the only remaining seat which was with the very youngest children. The humiliation was such I can still remember my heartfelt sobbing, and my shouting when they tried to insist. They did this gently, as violence was out because the mothers were outside the hall watching through the windows. My cousin Irene, who was working at the school as an assistant, led me away by the hand, and some more docile child was moved so I could have his seat with the bigger children.

In class you were given a star on your card if you pleased teacher. When the card was filled you’d get a prize, we were told. What would the prize be? It took so long to fill the card the prize had to be worth the having. Likely a book. When at last my card was filled, I was told to go with it to the headmistress. Now, was the moment. The headmistress said I was a good boy – and put a dolly mixture on each of the stars as my reward. THAT was all! The headmistress, Miss Combe, once told my mother, “John hasn’t done so well lately.” I was crestfallen, but didn’t know where I’d gone wrong.

My next school was Hanover Terrace, from where we in the junior choir stood on the brightly-lit stage of the Dome at Brighton’s competitive music festival knowing nothing but our teacher’s conducting, watching intently especially her facial expressions. After, in the stall seats we hurrahed and waved our arms on hearing we’d followed in the school’s tradition of choirs, and had won our class. The only other memory of that school remaining is of another teacher putting his arm around our woman teacher in class! “Children take it all in,” as my mother would say, nodding.

In those days, from junior level, children took themselves back and forth from school. Traffic was far lighter and less hurried then, and there was not the same fear of attacks. But the warning was ‘a little boy was poisoned by a wicked man’. This meant when we were on the fish market at the sea front and some very young men chucked my mates and me some rolls of sweets on passing, we were faced with a problem. Sweets were not for throwing away, but they could be poisoned. Compromise was some were chewed and swallowed, while others were sucked briefly and spat out.

Another happening involved sweets. Ronnie wasn’t a particular pal, we just went to the same school, so I should have been suspicious when he held out an open sweet bag. Inside were baby’s dummy-shaped gums half covered by yellow powder. “Lemonade powder,” said Ronnie. With a dummy-shaped gum I scooped up all it could carry and popped the lot in my mouth. The ‘lemonade powder’ was mustard powder! I think I punched him.

Every day before I left for school I was given a ha’penny to spend on sweets. Because the street gang I belonged to had decided for some reason to go to the eleven o’clock service at St Peter’s, my mother gave me a penny, half for sweets and the other half for the collection. If she’d given me two ha’pennies I would have been spared embarrassment. As it was, I didn’t buy sweets beforehand, so when the collection came round I had the one penny. After dropping it into the bag, I said nervously, “And a ha’penny change, please.” The collector gave me a straight look, I went red, and he passed on. So I didn’t get my sweets that day.

It wasn’t just church collections I came to dislike. Heaven didn’t attract me. Alone in bed I would think about living for ever; and ever, and ever… existence never, never, never coming to an end. It was too horrible. I would cry, but soon fall asleep. Also, in the world of thought, becoming grown-up was frightening. How did you know where to find a house to live? How did you know how to work? How did you know when it was Saturday and Sunday? It was nicer being looked after.

A boy who was a particular pal was Peter who lived farther up our street. I have a twinge of conscience when I think of him because of a bottle of orangeade which he took with him when the gang went to the Wild Park and about which his mother had said, “Give John some – he hasn’t got any.” I drank my share early on. It was a hot day which led me to give way to temptation, hoping he wouldn’t notice, and drink some more. When he saw the level in the bottle, he accused Dick, another member of the gang. Dick’s denials got him nowhere. To my shame I didn’t own up. But I felt a cheat.

St Peter’s is just down the hill from where we lived. The bells I can hear now, specially from the practice evening – doleful and intrusive. Since then I’ve not liked church bells. Also I associate them with Sundays, which were boring because I wasn’t allowed out to play. Instead, it meant going for a walk, more often than not along the sea front. Or it could be to St Ann’s Well Gardens where a military band could be playing, and I would fret if my parents wanted to stop to listen. A memory of another building at the bottom of the hill is of the heavy odour, said to be from the hops, coming from the tall chimney of Tamplin’s brewery.

If it were high summer we might go on a Sunday by bus for a picnic, perhaps to the Devil’s Dyke, carrying a heavy raincoat over one arm as it was the only rainwear then. There would be a ginger beer at the Shepherd and Dog at the end after the climb down the hill.

SAUSAGE ON A STICK

Once or perhaps twice we had an annual holiday, with family, camping at Camberley, just outside Arundel Park. As it was a camping club, which were popular in those days, at Bank Holiday a party would be held with the campers gathered around a bonfire to sing community songs and entertain each other by its light. One act got laughter of a loudness it couldn’t have expected. The one camper was sitting on the ground playing a piano-accordion while the other crept up behind him under a white sheet. “Look out, Mithter,” cried my cousin Michael with his little boy’s lisp, in true alarm, “there’s a murtherer behind you!”

Once, on a visit to us at the camp, cousin Roy, who was tiny at the time, found among the grass two chicken eggs. Believing chicken eggs, like blackberries, came free in the countryside, his face lit up as the finder. “Put them back,” anxiously called the women, “they belong to the Lodge.” Roy, who’d expected “What a clever boy!” and instead was being shouted at, reacted in his disappointment. One after the other, he threw the eggs – smash, smash – on the ground. Quickly our party moved on, the women with suppressed giggles.

Behind the camp were chalk cliffs which were crying out to be climbed by we three older boys who’d made hides in the undergrowth, climbed trees, shot off arrows from home-made bows and were looking for something fresh to do. So we tried the ascent. Areas of loose chalk had us sliding back at the lowest level, then holds on the steeper faces broke under hand and foot, and greenery clinging to the precipice came away when hauled on. At last brute endeavour gave way to thought, and exploring found some grassy slopes that let I us on to the cliff top quite easily. From on high we shouted down to attract our parents’ attention to our achievement. Their reaction wasn’t what we’d expected. They became agitated. Both my father and my uncle tried to scramble up the cliff face, whilst my mother and my Aunt Olive frantically shouted, “Stay away from the edge,” and waved us back. My father and uncle found climbing the face as impossible as we had. So we directed them to the easy way, and walked down to meet them. They looked a little foolish at that, but we had to promise never to go near those cliffs again.

Another camp I went to one year was a cubs’ camp somewhere in Sussex. One of the attractions held out had been cooking over a camp fire, which to me meant browning a sausage on a stick as in the comics. It didn’t, nor did it mean cooking of any sort for long for me, as the cub master decided the fire was too dangerous for a small boy to be leaning enthusiastically into with a frying pan. I was allowed to wash up, but the novelty of that soon wore off.

Shortly after I’d joined the cubs I’d had to ceremonially swear the cub promises, to finish with the cubs’ salute with my right hand. Problem was, I wasn’t sure which was my right hand. My mother helped me out. Just before I had to salute, I fingered, as she had suggested, my navy blue cub jumper which buttoned to the right at the neck, and so pointed to the right hand. After, I was presented solemnly with my cub scarf. That seemed odd to me as my mother and not the cub master had bought the scarf, and I’d already been wearing it previous evenings

“MY TEACHER’S GOT A BUNION”

Outside of cubs, in the street gang, I and my pals were not always likeable. Having exhausted other pastimes during the long summer holiday, one day we went to pick a fight with the boys in the street next down the hill, Lewes Street. At least the only weapon taken was one broom-handle, and that was just waved about. Nothing much came of the confrontation except I as the youngest of our gang, and one of their smaller boys, had to have a fight. It was more puff than punch.

It was that broom-handle I would use with my roller-skates, because the streets were steep and bearing down on the broom-handle would stop me. Because of the steepness of Belgrave Street, as a toddler I’d had my small red tricycle taken away from me after my father had seen me racing down with window sills only just missing my face. Then I had my green scooter taken away too, and every time I asked after it, was told, “Your father can’t find the screw yet.” The reason for the scooter going the way of the tricycle was because I’d sped down the street and careened around the corner into Albion Hill. The strain had been too much for the scooter, and off came the handlebar – taking me with it. Running home, I shouted on coming through the front door, “Mum, I’ve cut my throat!”

A pleasanter sound than my crying would come from the Lanes, often Neapolitan music. It was played by Marc Antonio on his harp with two of his Italian compatriots on violins. Later the trio had become a duet, with the harp and Just one violin. Much later it was a solo performance. Then gone for ever was even the enchanted sound of the harp.

For dance band music people would go to Sherry’s in West Street, where my mother’s brother, Uncle George, in the search for steadier employment than carpentry, was steward. A dark attraction of Sherry’s for some was its reputation as the haunt of Brighton’s race gangs, who used open razors on rivals so it was said, but most couples went to dance or just to listen to visiting bands. Uncle George, of quick brain and wiry hair, was yet another man, just from our one family, who would have benefited himself and the community had further education been available to him instead of only to those whose parents earned better. Besides being intelligent and well read, he was a natural artist.

For children, pastimes varied with the seasons. Conkers came in the autumn when the horse-chestnuts could be knocked down from the trees. Weather must have had a part in the seasons for other games, as the action was in the street. ‘Fag cards’ seemed to be around most of the year. The cards came in the cigarette packets for collecting in sets, such as great footballers, British warships, film stars. But they were not collected by the smokers but gambled by their sons. The most popular form was flicking the cards on to the pavement to try to cover part of a card already there to win the lot. Alleys, which in other parts of the country is known as marbles, seemed to have been another all-year-round contest. Unhygienically it was played in the gutter, with cigarette ends hazards to be got around, the aim being to hit an opponent’s alley to claim it. Whip and top would have but brief popularity. Otherwise, play involved chasing each other, and tripping over as the scars on my knees remind me.

There were rhymes to pick out someone to be ‘He’ for a chasing game such as:

DIP, DIP, DIP,
MY LITTLE SHIP,
SAILED ACROSS THE OCEAN,
YOU’RE NOT IT.

Along with the children’s games came rhymes such as:

MY TEACHER’S GOT A BUNION,
A FACE LIKE A PICKLED ONION,
A NOSE LIKE A SQUASHED TOMATO,
AND LEGS LIKE MATCHSTICKS.

We had superstitions besides not walking under ladders. It was lucky to see a spotted dog, but only if you didn’t see its tail! On seeing an ambulance you had to hold your collar and mumble a rhyme, which was something about not catching a fever.

When I learned to whistle is uncertain, but I was very young. I’d heard the whistling in the streets of those days, loud, shrill and cheerful, and it seemed a grown-up thing to do. Men had whistled on their way home, and builders had given passers-by renderings of tunes of the day while they worked instead of just whistling at passing girls as today. I asked my mother how you whistled. But she couldn’t whistle, she said, except by drawing in instead of blowing out, but you put your tongue behind your front teeth. So I tried. On and off during that day I tried. Then, “Mum, Mum, I can whistle!” This was with the same bubbling-over delight as from tying a bow for the first time not too many years before. Never, it had seemed before then, would it be possible to tie your own shoe lace – you hadn’t the right sort of fingers – until that marvellous moment (even if the lace did come undone only minutes later).

Surprising, looking back now, is the excitement caused by the Oxford and Cambridge boat race, an event by, and for, people of a class remote. Nevertheless, the sweet shops sold, and the children wore, either a light-blue or a dark-blue favour. It was another excuse for rivalry. Professional foot-ball was an outlet for the men. My father remembered a time when at the Goldstone Ground, where Brighton and Hove Albion played, the East Terrace was not terraced. So the crowd in the excitement of a cup-tie swayed up and down the slippery hill, and he and his mate, who had started shoulder to shoulder, had found themselves so separated they were able only to wave to each other. Careful with money as he had to be, my father seldom bet, except for a small weekly sum on the football pools, but he could enjoy a day out at the races, say at Plumpton. Much of his pleasure was going around the bookmakers looking for the best price. Once I was with him when he was overjoyed to have picked a winner, but on going to collect his winnings he found the book-maker had made off.

A pastime for children that had to be paid for was ice-skating at the stadium then existing in West Street and known as SS Brighton which was home to the Brighton Tigers ice-hockey team. Ice-skating for us was an occasion. The smell of interval hot-dogs had us raising our noses like the Bisto kids, and like them we had to be content with the aroma. Sometimes as children we sought for free, entertainment that adults paid for. By hanging about the performers’ caravans of the circus which pitched its big-top on The Level, we were rewarded by seeing the ‘giraffe women’ whose necks had been stretched by adding brass rings over years, but we were disappointed to find that otherwise they acted just like other women around their caravans. Also glimpsed by patient waiting was the tattooed man, but he was well covered up, even wearing a balaclava-helmet although it wasn’t winter.

“ANY MORE FOR THE SKY-LARK”

Free shows for everyone were to be found in the open air on the lower promenade west of the Palace Pier. A man with no arms would paint with his feet. Black Africans, who were otherwise never seen locally, would perform wild dances in straw skirts and feathers in return for a penny or two. A sculptor would display a full-sized crocodile and other amazingly realistic creations made in sand. Brighton also supported a fair on the Race Hill, which included a flea circus. The insects were made visible by coloured ‘clothes’ but I could see them clearer when my father lifted me up to look through a magnifying glass fixed at the edge of the platform. The fleas pulled carriages many times their own weight, pedalled bicycles, tight-rope walked, danced …

Also, there was the beach to enjoy. Summers always seemed to be hotter and longer than today, as everyone seems to say. Tar melted into tiny pools on the roads and front doors in our street were protected from the effect of sun on paint by a curtain brightly-striped like a deck chair. If it was my mother I went to the beach with there might be a ‘bean-o’ pie, still warm, from a cook-shop in St James’s Street to take. After playing with the wet sand and splashing in the wavelets of the popular Palace Pier beach, any sort of food was eaten with gusto and thirstily followed by orangeade. Lying back then on a towel, warm and dreamy, above the murmur of the sea drifting in and drawing back on the pebbles, the mumble of mothers and occasional shrills of children, you would hear, “Any more for the Skylark?” and “Motor boat going … Motor boat going …” To my wonderment, some of the pleasure-boats weren’t propelled by a motor, but by a man with brawny, brown forearms. He made the boat rise and sink back to the rhythm of his oars, on a trip to nowhere out at sea and return to shore. Paddle-steamers made longer voyages along the coast from the Palace Pier.

MAX’S TWINKLING BLUE EYES

It was usually on that Palace Pier Beach that Londoners would spend their day-trips, the fathers sitting on the pebbles dressed in their best navy blue suit but with the relaxed touch of white plimsolls. Sausages, onions and mash from a cook-shop at the bottom of West Street was one of their treats. Beer was drunk inside or outside the roistering pubs, perhaps under the promenade, the children playing outside. For those staying longer, coaches lined the promenade, notices chalked on boards standing on the pavement stating where they were going on excursion, the coach drivers in long white overall-coats and uniform caps, cheerily touting for business. Visitors on a week’s holiday would find ‘digs’ in the streets, and some people in our street let out their front bedroom to ‘make a bob or two’.

Visitors would go on the piers. We ourselves rarely went on either the Palace or the West Pier because of the admission charge, but if we did, it would be on the Palace Pier which was livelier. Sometimes, however, we would go to the theatre that each pier had at the end, to a seaside play. One summer my parents went away on their own, leaving me in the care of my Auntie Floss. My Auntie Floss was a thin woman of the kind people described as ‘highly-strung’ which meant she was easily upset. I now realise the thyroid condition she suffered from was probably the cause.

My parents had pressed upon Auntie Floss some money to look after me while they were away. We splurged the money together on the Palace Pier. Penny-in-the-slot machines swallowed the money without any resistance, the best fed those in dark wooden cases from an earlier time offering mechanically-operated scenes. In a churchyard as the clock struck twelve a ghost or a skeleton would appear from behind a tombstone or at the opening church door, or, with another machine, the miser would be visited by apparitions, one appearing out of the grandfather clock, another from behind a painting while another picture slowly rotated on the wall. Another machine featured a guillotining, the head falling realistically into a basket as doors closed quickly on the sight. With another, the fire brigade using an extending ladder on big wheels rescued a baby from an upper storey of a burning house.

Yet another of the machines showed one scene after the other of love, marriage and finally of the husband in his night-shirt and wearing a night-cap pacifying a baby on his shoulder whilst turning the handle of a mangle. This penny-in-the-slot machine was a favourite of young men with a friend in their midst about to get married. I wasn’t allowed to see ‘What the Butler Saw’, only the comedies. The most fun was got from quickly turning, the handle which flicked through the cards to simulate movement, to speed the figures of people up. Many a coin was lost to the gambling machines which involved trying to trigger a ball-bearing into a winning cup.

Years before on the Palace Pier, as a toddler I’d been frightened by seeing the sea below through the slats of the decking. Later, I so much wanted to be on the sea in one of the red speed launches that took people from the Pier’s landing stage on a sweep of foamy white to speed hair-raisingly between the piles of the Pier itself. Another thrill, but which was for free, was a spectacular act by a Professor Somebody-or-Other who cycled off a gang-plank whilst he was enveloped in flames, to plunge into the sea.

An indoor pleasure for me was reading from the public library about William, the boy who didn’t mean to but was always getting into trouble, and about Dr Dolittle who could talk to the animals … And of course, there were comics: Dandy, Beano … How difficult it was to see properly even the drawings in those comics when drops had been put in my eyes over days to enlarge the pupils for the optician to check them! And on things unpleasant, how painful was the dentist’s drill, because it was slow as it was operated by a foot-pedal and because there was no numbing injection!

The ‘pictures’ were popular in those days, so popular that on a Saturday evening there would be a queue not only outside but another inside the Regent picture palace, patrons standing in a side gangway to watch the film whilst waiting for a seat. Film shows were not separate programmes, but continuous. So you would go in part way through the B-film and have to wait to see the beginning before you left. The programme would include a news reel and sometimes a cartoon or a travelogue. Often popular tunes were played on a theatre organ which would have risen from the orchestra pit and glow from within in pastel shades, whilst on the cinema screen a blob would hop from one word to the next in time with the music so the audience could sing along. My parents took me with them to the cinema every Saturday evening, except as a special treat when it was the Hippodrome variety theatre. Once I saw there Max Miller, who’d learned his trade with the Jack Sheppard concert party, which still played on a small covered stage to an audience in deck chairs near an east Brighton beach. As a child I didn’t understand Max’s jokes, but I can still see his blue eyes twinkling. More to my liking was the Great Dante, Illusionist, who even made a real elephant disappear!

SHAPING BUTTER

Sometimes I would go with my pals to a Saturday morning children’s film show at a cinema in New Road. Once we took with us a catapult. We believed the screen to be a white sheet which was tightly pulled and so could be pierced. To our disappointment we found we couldn’t tell whether our shots had had any effect or not.

A cinema in Brighton that is memorable is the Arcadia in Lewes Road. It was so run-down that if you leant back the seat back might fall off and land you in the row behind. At another cinema there was an event for me as a small boy which still seems remarkable. My mother and I were treated by my rich Aunt Olive to afternoon tea at the Regent complex (then near the corner of Queens Road and North Street). Tea was taken not in the restaurant on the floor below the ballroom, but whilst actually sitting in the stalls of the cinema watching a film. The shiny metal teapot and complements were on a huge shiny metal tray and we drank tea and ate toasted tea-cakes, surely to the annoyance of patrons around who were not having afternoon tea.

If there was nothing they wished to see at the cinema or the theatre my parents would compensate me with a ‘bumper’ comic and a jaffa orange. A present came also if I was sick. Because doctors cost money my mother had a home medical book which she would check for the symptoms and only take me to the surgery if she had diagnosed for herself the measles or mumps, for the doctor’s confirmation and for the medicine. Symptoms not recognised were carefully monitored until they went away, which saved money, or if they got worse then it had to be the doctor. If I’d gone off my food, bread-and-milk would be served up warm in a bowl – ugh! If the trouble was no more than a tickle in the throat which was keeping me awake, the remedy was a butter ball, which was a knob of butter rolled in the sugar bowl.

On food … Once or twice my mother took me with her to Boots’ cafe over the store which was then in Western Road. The waitresses wore a uniform, and a trio of ladies in long dresses played genteel light music on piano, violin and cello. Usually the weekly shop was in London Road, partly at Sainsbury’s, which in those days wasn’t a supermarket. In the hygienic long narrow shop a continuous counter ran down each side, pale marble topped, with the cashier’s shiny wood kiosk at the shop end. Here and there on the customers’ side of the counter was a lightweight wooden chair, which puzzled me as a child as nobody seemed to sit on it. Above the neat piles of rashers, tawny sides of bacon hung from rails. Big round cheeses were on display, with wedges cut out. On another section were slabs of butter. An assistant would chop out a lump of the selected butter and between two bats, which he wetted in a container, he would shape the butter into a neat oblong for wrapping.

Part Two – The Troublesome 1940s

WHAT HAS BEEN WRITTEN SO FAR has been mainly about the 1930s. Now the Second World War is imminent. It is late 1939 …

Most people didn’t believe there would be a war. Wars only involved other countries. Screaming dive-bombers, exploding bombs and flames belonged to the picture palace news reels.

But I did want a gasmask. My parents took the line that in the unlikely event of a war, that would be soon enough. “But if there is a war,” I argued, “they could run out.” Resignedly my parents gave in. Our gas masks were issued at a school building next to the wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Circus Street. The market was where we children had scavenged once – darting in, feeling daring – for bruised fruit, not from need but from the universal attraction of something for nothing.

Before a gasmask was handed over it was adjusted to the face, a card placed over the filter and the instruction given to breath in. If the card stayed put when the fitter’s hand was taken away, the gasmask was yours. When on, the mask smelt of rubber. Possibly later, for the smallest children an attempt was made to make the mask fun by being red and with a floppy nose and round eye pieces. Dreadful to realise now is that although millions of gas masks were issued to adults and children, in those early days there were none for the babies. Later, for the babies there was protection which completely enveloped them, the mother needing to use an attached hand-pump while anxiously watching through a clear panel.

In the schools during the war, gasmasks were worn by the children for practice. Teachers would have to snatch off their own mask to shout at the inevitable boy who, by pressure on the sides, could get a fruity raspberry out of the mask. Laughter from inside the masks came out as snorts.

Possible use of gas had to be taken seriously as the Germans had released it during the First World War against soldiers in the trenches. My Great Uncle Arthur, a mild pink-faced man, suffered a chest condition from having been gassed in that war.

The standard gasmask of the Second World War came in a more or less square cardboard box, with string so it could be hung from the shoulder. As it had to be taken everywhere, shops soon sold cases to give a touch of fashion and to protect the cardboard. Sensibly, my parents got me a metal canister with a tight lid.

‘DAD’S ARMY’

That container made a prop for the clown that is in small boys. My audience was not big, but special. It was made up of only one, a small girl called Jean, who had thick gleaming brown hair that turned up at the end and sparkling brown eyes, surely a lively colleen-to-be. She was my avowed sweet-heart in the notes passed around when we were in class, though we weren’t in class but outside her home at the bottom of the hill, where the pavement was my stage. I sat on the canister elbow on knee and chin on hand in exaggerated thought. Then I balanced the canister wobblingly and briefly on my head. Suddenly, I was embarrassed in glancing up to find I was under the blue-eyed gaze of her mother, who was leaning, bare arms folded, against the door-frame with a small smile that was touched with sadness. Perhaps she was comparing the joyousness of childhood with what can become of an adult relationship.

That gasmask container really earned its keep once. It fell into the pond at Queens Park during play, but stayed afloat to be fished out by its string. An illicit pleasure in that park was playing hide-and-seek among the bushes, the excitement heightened by the risk of the park-keeper arriving, to holler and wave his stick, when the gang would scatter. In the Queens Park pond during the War the fishermen’s boats lay half-submerged, brought there from the beaches which had been mined and barb-wired off. As further defence, on the coast road at East Brighton great naval guns were positioned, and it was intended to hold up invaders further by the Army having blasted out a middle section of both of the two piers.

Because of the danger from air raids, children, mothers and the disabled were evacuated from the big cities even before the war started, an incredible 1.5 million of them over the short period of the first three days of September 1939. Sussex was a host county, with most of its evacuees from London. Some children from slum areas knew nothing of flushing toilets, nor of the country, nor of the seaside. Stories are recorded of child evacuees being amazed that cows were bigger than dogs, that children slept in their own bed and not under their parents’ bed, that the sea was not boiling, that it was not customary to use a corner of the living-room as a toilet… Billeted on us were two boys from London – brothers I think – whose background was similar to mine. We acted reserved towards each other. They didn’t stay long, as like most others they returned home because the blitzkrieg which had blasted Warsaw to rubble had not happened – yet.

Early on in the war came a blow that might have finished Britain but for the civilians who used their boats to help rescue the men of the British Army from Dunkirk. Called in were pleasure steamers (both the Brighton Queen and the Brighton Belle were sunk), beach boats (two of Brighton’s Skylarks were sunk), fishing boats, sailing dinghies … After the Germans had settled the French coast opposite, Brighton instead of being a haven for evacuees became a place for children to be sent from, away from the expected invasion. I fancied evacuation, which must have hurt my mother, the attraction being not escaping from home where I was happy, but the adventure of going away. Canada, so far off, called enticingly, and I cried loudly, arguing, “But other boys are going!” It was probably as well my mother didn’t let me go, because the liner City of Benares was sunk in the Atlantic by a German torpedo, seventy-three of the children, ironically thought to be sailing to safety, being killed. The scheme was abandoned.

Because of the danger of invasion my father joined ‘Dad’s Army’, the LDV (Local Defence Volunteers, shortly after re-named the Home Guard). For a uniform he had an arm-band with ‘LDV’ on it, but he had no gun. Later when they did have rifles and were guarding the cliffs, the men had no bullets. The bullets were stored some distance away at the command post. My father imagined that if the enemy suddenly appeared he would be asked politely to hold on whilst the guards ran and got their bullets.

FAIRY KING’S CROWN

Much later on in the war, when the Home Guards’ khaki overalls had been replaced by sturdier uniforms and the flat caps and bowlers recorded elsewhere as worn with the uniform-overalls had been replaced by army caps, my father was entrusted with an automatic weapon, a sten-gun, which came with a manual. So we used the manual to strip it down. “Let’s do the trigger mechanism,” I said. My father doubted our ability. “But it tells you how,” I persisted. So we ‘did’ the trigger mechanism. And it stayed done. No way could we get it back together again. “We’ll have to hope the Germans don’t invade tonight!” commented my father, not looking forward to taking the weapon to his sergeant with, “Please, can you mend my gun for me, sarge!”

In the early days of the war my class was moved to Elm Grove School, and I believe it was part-time schooling. It was there I was picked to be the Fairy King in a play, a choice that was to help me in a difficult situation. That came after a cub meeting when I went to get my new brown overcoat, to find the only brown overcoat left was a worn-out one, the lining torn. A boy of about my own age stood in a new brown overcoat with his mother. “That’s mine!” I said with the directness of the young. The mother – I still remember her, bespectacled and sharp-faced – wouldn’t agree. However, my protests, which became more and more hopeless, my eyes beginning to fill with tears, did bring a cub mistress. Because the mother could hardly refuse, I was allowed to try on the other coat. Despairingly I pushed my hands down into the pockets. The fingers of my right hand curled around some pieces of card. I pulled them out, and shouted in triumph, “This is my coat! This cardboard I cut out to make my Fairy King crown.” I got my coat.

FACE ROUND AND ROSY

Revealed at another time is the other side of that shining boy. Always I was involved, but not that day, when notes were being passed around the class, “Norman loves Betty” and the like. Up went my hand, “Please Miss, they’re passing notes.” Afterwards I felt a worm.

The August of that glorious summer of 1940 saw the climax of the Battle of Britain by which the Luftwaffe intended to destroy the RAF before the German conquest of Britain. On one weekend of the Battle my parents and I were picnicking on the Downs and so had a wide view. High above our heads in the clear blue sky were white vapour trails, with the sounds of occasional zooming and the rat-tat-tating of machine guns. It was too remote to be really frightening, but at first we felt vulnerable in the open and moved to sit among the gorse.

One day, after the Battle of Britain, I was fascinated on my way to school by the pock marks left on houses and a shop where I sometimes used to buy my sweets. They were from machine-gun bullets fired by a German fighter which had come in low from the sea, as they were wont to do, and there were stories of local people fleeing ahead of enemy aircraft bullets.

Terror bombing was another weapon against women and children. On Saturday 14th September 1940, a bomb scored a direct hit on the Odeon Cinema in Kemp Town, and in that raid fifty-five people were killed, most in the cinema. One boy lost two fingers, as a tiny member of the cinema audience, and I was to know him in hospital shortly before he was allowed to go home. My journey to that meeting at the Royal Sussex County Hospital began a week or so after the Kemp Town bombing, to be precise on 24th September 1940.

It was the afternoon of that Tuesday, and my mother had left me to go shopping, as she had done once before on an unhappy occasion. I was in Belgrave Street where we lived, playing in the street as we all did. Unusually, for some reason I was on my own. I was idling on the corner with Albion Hill, outside Mitchell’s shop which sold a little of everything from paraffin (pumped from a drum, the smell always in the shop) to butter, the home of my pal Dick and his brothers and sisters. It had been in that shop doorway some years before that Dick’s youngest sister, June, a toddler at the time, had been sitting up the steps. She had beckoned me to her, and had bitten me on the cheek for no apparent reason, to send me back home again ‘howling’ as the expression was for loud crying. So it was a familiar corner. That particular afternoon I was standing there wondering what to do to amuse myself without the other boys …

There was no warning – it came like a thunderbolt. I don’t think I heard anything. As I was thrown to the ground, I do remember, however, seeing the facia board of the shop shattering and the bits flying, and being enveloped in dust. The cause was one of the bombs dropped in Albion Hill and Dinapore Street by a German warplane. As I lay among the debris from the fascia board and the glass from the big shop window, there came the sound of running metal-shod boots. It was from soldiers who were training in the Congregational Church hall at the top of the street. I must have told them where I lived, because they took me there. The front door having been blasted open, they laid me in our passage, on the run of carpet. I asked for, and got, a glass of water. For some odd reason I wanted to turn it upside-down on the floor, but someone gently stopped me. I was driven to the hospital by a curate from St Peter’s, in his car, laid along the back seat. I was ten years old.

In the ward after I’d arrived at the hospital, I lay isolated behind screens. Excited voices of two little boys playing, reached me. A young nurse said, “Shush, a little boy is dying behind those screens.” I would like to say along with Douglas Bader when he heard a similar remark and went on to fly fighters again with tin legs, that writing me off like that made me determined to prove her wrong. Truth is I wasn’t concerned one way or the other. Just one thing had bothered me. It was the smell – a smell I could recall for years afterwards, sweetish – on my skin from the explosion. An understanding sister had told two nurses to wash me, but carefully.

It was so appropriate that the one to give blood for a transfusion for me was my Uncle Bill. Among my uncles he was the favourite, firstly because he was a giver. He’d given me money or bought me sweets or an ice-cream whenever we met him. Once it was a bucket and spade, which made me cry because when I filled the bucket with sea-water it slowly leaked away. I wasn’t really consoled after a repair had been made with plasticine. Also my uncle was a favourite because on seeing his youngest brother, sister-in-law and nephew, he beamed. His generosity didn’t come from wealth as his home was on the council estate at Whitehawk and he was employed at Brighton Station on the platform staff, a job he did with pride, being official but not officious, standing short in his uniform, his face round and rosy, his head with hardly a hair on top covered by his big uniform hat. My Aunt Rose, his wife, was darkly continental of hair and eyes as she was originally Belgian. She had met my uncle during the First World War, not in Belgium but in England where she was a refugee. To her fell the task of keeping my uncle’s generosity within bounds.

It was not until later that the pain in my leg began, and after that it rarely left me. Relief had to be reduced to dissolved aspirin as there was concern I would become addicted to hard drugs. My left leg had been shattered – from the scars it appears that it was from shrapnel smashing through the thigh. The right had been badly slashed. There was another wound in my side that literally got lost sight of and looked after itself when I was put into plaster-of-paris from the waist, down my left leg to over the foot. I could only lie on my back, and I had to drink from something like a small teapot, and be fed.

SWEETS FOR A HA’PENNY

My mother suffered from the belief, for a long time, that she should not have left me that afternoon, no matter how much I tried to convince her that she had no reason to torture herself. It was like a mother blaming herself because her child had been injured by a car careening off the road and mounting the pavement. In those dark earliest days my mother was soothed by hearing in her head Brahms’ Lullaby.

On that day of the bombing, so my parents told me whilst I was in hospital, our newsagent, Mr Vincent, was killed in his corner-shop and one of my school friends, Joan Osborne, was hit in the chest by shrapnel. The little sweet shop in Albion Hill, next to Mitchell’s grocer’s, was severely damaged. It had been run by two anxious sisters, who’d had to bear without impatience the serious business for a child of choosing from the rows of sweet jars what to buy for a ha’penny. Now those sweet jars were broken, and so was that child.

After months in a hospital bed, I was being taken with my leg in a splint and stuck out in front of me on a board in a wheelchair to X-ray or Massage. We went by way of the basement tunnel, dingy, with mysterious doors each side, over-head white pipes, fat and thin, and pervasive the stale smell of boiled cabbage. Back in daylight again, the porter stopped at the top of a slope to chat with a nurse. I turned the wheel-chair and started down the slope. It went faster than I intended. The nurse cried out in alarm; the porter ran after me. Although I tried grabbing at the chair’s wheels I couldn’t stop it. The chair swerved and crashed into a side wall. I tumbled out. It was back confined to bed again, either in more limited plaster or traction. Unlike today, nobody sued for negligence. Even if they’d thought of suing there was no money for a solicitor, and, anyway, it would have harmed a fellow working-man, and he hadn’t done harm purposely.

A mixture of memories remain of my stay in hospital. Anxiety was evident with the nurses when Matron, as popularly portrayed a big woman of unbending presence, was due to carry out a round. The white counter-panes were pulled up on the beds with the patients told, “Keep tidy,” rather like the story of the army hospital where soldier-patients were ordered to lie at attention for an officer’s inspection. As a concession I was allowed to keep a model aerodrome on my bedside cabinet, to be hidden for matron’s rounds. To my disgust, a sailor patient gave his old hat, with the ribbon-bow made around a silver three-penny piece, to a smaller boy in the ward.

The tedium when it wasn’t a visiting day was broken only by the doctor’s round and the meals, not that many were hungry, but wondering what was to be served-up was an interest. Early on I was put on a special diet which included what my family considered a luxury, chicken, though to a child it was uninteresting. Eggs were scarce, and visitors would bring in an egg, which had the name of the patient written on it by a nurse for the communal boiling. Not having been told hospital food was supposed to be dreadful, I liked it, particularly the rissoles we had for supper sometimes.

Because I was a victim of an air raid there was no argument about my receiving treatment at the Sussex County, which was a subscription and charity hospital, as the Government paid for me. People were refused by such hospitals and had to find a bed somewhere else, probably in a poor law institution. The long-term sick would be lucky to find a bed at all.

For some six months I was in hospital that first time. Christmas saw the nurses in their dark-blue capes with red linings going round the wards in a choir to sing carols. A consultant surgeon, Mr Fletcher, was in a staff pantomime, and amazed the nurses that such an exalted figure should act in a mock operation where a pink plaster-of-paris heart was produced and thrown down on to the stage. He was my surgeon, his services given free for those who were charity patients as was the way in those days, and a kindly man who twinkled over his spectacles at me, and who, on learning I was collecting foreign stamps after I’d left hospital that first time, would keep some in his wallet from letters to give me when I came for a periodic check-up. As a special joke, that Christmas he called in with his family to carve, as a surgeon, the ward’s turkey.

The war was going on outside whilst I was in hospital. And it was from 1940 that park railings, front-garden wrought-iron gates and even the decorative chains around graves went to be made into war weapons. The lifts at the hospital were not being used, which had something to do with the danger from bombing, and I was carried up the stairs in a stretcher to the operating theatre. I was so scared that I was going to slide off into the stairwell, as one end of the stretcher had to be edged over the bannister to get round the angles of that crooked staircase. In the operating theatre, a nurse bent over as I lay on the operating table, the lower part of her face covered by a mask, and said, “Hallo, remember me?” Her brilliant, blue eyes were unmistakable. “Nurse Starr!” What an appropriate name! The anaesthetic was given by a cup-shaped gauze mask being put over my nose and mouth and a liquid dripped on to it from a bottle, whilst I counted until I knew no more. On waking from an operation it was usual to be sick.

In a bed near me a man lay isolated behind screens as I had done. He was a Salvation Army insurance collector who had been knocked from his cycle by an army tracked bren-gun carrier. He did die. At another time I was dismayed that the boy who had been put in the bed next to mine in this adult ward had been moved. He had become, as expected, a close friend, even to my sticking my head through the screen and talking whilst his dressing was renewed. What the staff knew that I didn’t, was that he was about to die.

On one occasion when I was up and about there were explosions near, bombs or anti-aircraft fire, and terrified I slipped to the ward floor. A tall man with a black moustache, a guards’ sergeant I think, crouched over to protect me.

A DREAM OF PEACE

My convalescence was in that strange-sounding Defliss Ward. It was for me as a small boy a wonderful world of soldiers, also recovering, who wore red ties, white shirts and bright blue suits, all very patriotic but seeming to mark them out like film convicts in case they escaped! In that world I learned to play billiards, being the only one allowed to have both feet off the ground when lying along the edge of the full-sized table to make a difficult shot. Although in the streets I’d occasionally smoked cigarette-ends, here smoking was regularly, as I was offered cigarettes from the men’s allowances. If alcoholic drink had been allowed in the ward it’s for sure I would have been looking for my share!

Again I must have hurt my mother by my child’s thoughtlessness, as when it came to leave for home I wasn’t keen to go. As an only child I’d had for the first time day-long companionship, and having been with servicemen had been made to feel grown-up. Also I wouldn’t be returning to Belgrave Street and my pals.

My parents had moved to a rented house in Portslade, in Downsview Road (off Southdown Road). The countryside began at that road – so different from the streets of Brighton. To my mother this was a dream come true. It was a modern house with a bathroom, part tiled. A long garden with a lawn, flower border and space to ‘Dig for Victory’ by growing vegetables, looked on to a meadow with cows at the back, and there was even a small garden at the front. A bonus was that as my father then worked at Portslade for Sims’ milk collecting business he could cycle home for midday dinner.

Going home was with a wheelchair and with sticks. Those sticks, I was embarrassed to learn later, belonged not to the hospital but to another patient, an elderly man who had been left unable to get about without them. My left shoe was built up. Some relearning to walk had gone on in hospital, with my dressing-gown pinned up, waddling along on the arm of a nurse.

My youth was my salvation. It was not in my mind that I could be disabled for life, so I walked. And I also climbed trees in the copse near the bottom of the road. My mother didn’t know about that until later, which saved her heart-flutters. The danger of a distorted spine passed as my left leg grew to the length of the right, and the layers of heightening on my shoe could be removed. Because I was eager to learn, school wasn’t so difficult after about a year away. However, some of the teaching I’d missed, such as fractions, I wasn’t to make up until adulthood. Otherwise at school at first, a boy was allotted to be my minder in the playground. But it wasn’t too long before I was in among the rough and tumble and arguing with a playground prefect, which resulted in my reluctantly accepting – egged on by the other boys – his challenge to a fight after school. This I quickly lost, as this wasn’t a street scuffle but a trained sort of fighting by him.

Over the next two or three years I had to return to hospital two or three times for minor operations on my left leg.

After I’d left hospital that first time the Germans had already turned London and other big cities into a night-time hell of flames through the Blitz, against which there was little defence. As a frightened child I would lie in bed in Portslade hearing enemy planes overhead, by the engine sound unmistakably enemy bombers. I couldn’t be sure that that time horror wouldn’t rain down on us. I would try to imagine what it would be like when peace did come and it would be possible to go to bed and sleep through without fear. That seemed no more than a dream. But my misery was but a single tear against the terror of those bombed for up to fourteen hours at a stretch, and night after night. Over the months of the Blitz 43,000 civilians were killed.

‘SHOP LIFTING’

Later on when the sirens sounded at night it was possible to sleep in the Morrison shelter, made of steel in the form of a huge table with a metal-slatted bed beneath, which had to be erected by the recipients. One patient when I was on a return to hospital had a badly crushed hand from the steel table-top falling on it while he was trying to get the shelter up. Shelters at what was usually known as ‘Windlesham’, the senior boys’ school in upper Portslade, had been formed under the playground like tunnels, the boys sitting on slatted benches down each side, happy at the break from lessons. And there was a surface shelter, smelling of cement, in Southdown Road, which never seemed to be used.

Whilst we were living in Portslade, one night fire bombs fell on the nearby convent and rumour had it that firemen had been held back by the nuns from fighting the fires. We dug out the nose-piece of one of the incendiary bombs from a field the next day.

A souvenir the boy next door had was a live bullet, which he invited me to join him in firing in his father’s shed/workshop. The bullet was put into a vice, the point of a large nail was stuck into the detonator cap and the head of the nail was struck a sharp blow. Nothing happened. He struck it again. There was a sharp crack, and the bullet went through the back of the shed and off across the meadow. Thankfully, nobody was shot. War souvenirs were a natural draw for boys. Earlier, whilst we were still living in Brighton, a display had been put on of parts of German aircraft shot down, laid out on trestle tables, piles of junk really. How I longed for a momento! So with heart pounding I snatched up a piece. My prize was an inch or so of yellow insulation tape.

EVEN THE ALOOF STEPPED DOWN

Rationing of sweets concerned me, but not of soap, nor of prunes, nor was I miffed by austerity clothing, which meant, for instance, a limit to the number of pockets in a suit (said by a government minister later to have had a bad affect upon men’s morale) and women having a choice of only six designs of knickers (women’s morale was said by the same minister to be high). Along with rationing of soap came the direction not to use more than five inches of water in the bath, and it has been recorded by a visitor to Buckingham Palace that the Queen’s bath had a line painted on it to ensure no over-filling by her maid. Following on food rationing came an order tying the customer to one shop, so a grocer who before had been all smiles and politeness was given captive customers and could become, in the words of my father who helped with the week’s shopping, a “little tin god”.

From the greengrocer we once claimed an issue of oranges for children. The fruit was so precious that Fryco, the soft drink makers at Portslade, offered to skin it, to pay to keep the skin to make orangeade. Younger children had never even seen bananas.

Women had been conscripted. My cousin Joan joined the WAAF, and so met a New Zealander in the airforce to later marry him and go south of the Equator to live. Her sister Irene, who had been the assistant at my infant school, was in the Women’s Land Army who wore an unglamorous uniform of blown-out trousers like jodhpurs, a green jersey and a man-type hat. My mother was directed into war production, in her case at the Old Brewery at Portslade, where her machine took the burrs off a thingumajig which was part of a who-know’s-what. She would come home smelling of oil but pleased to be playing a part, and both my parents appreciated the extra income. She had to fit in the house-work, which traditionally on Mondays meant putting the clothes in the electric boiler and then turning the big wheel of the mangle to crush the water out of them.

The Old Brewery served at another time as a billet for the Canadian Army. As young men who had left their girls behind, the soldiers decided something more was needed to attract the local girls beyond the North American accent, which to the locals sounded like an American movie star’s, and the chewing gum, so they arranged a film show at the brewery. Entry was by open invitation. The response was not what they’d hoped for. Ahead of the start, a queue had formed outside – of local children. My particular friends and I were curious about the inside of the brewery as we’d been able to find an opening only to the dark underground area which seemed to have been used for storage. But if the troops were disappointed so were we, because the picture we watched from hard forms was about LOVE, with SINGING!

Those young soldiers around us were to be sent on the Dieppe Raid from which many were never to come back.

Brighton had become at the beginning of ‘bomb alley’, named from the route the German’s first secret weapon, the V1 flying bomb, took on its way to London. The sound of its engine was unmistakable, like that of a motor-cycle which hadn’t been serviced. If the engine cut out, which it was to do over Sussex, with bated breath one waited. A distant explosion meant the pilotless ‘doodle-bug’ had not been meant for you. It was largely beaten, the most spectacular way being by a fighter aircraft using its own wing to tip the flying-bomb over into the sea.

Spirits were lifted as the war neared its end to see in the sky the constant, always a pair, of British or American fighters frightening away the tip-and-run raiders. Those raiders once had me tumbling off my cycle, face down on the ground, in mistaking the outburst of a Bofors anti-aircraft gun on nearby waste ground by Station Road, Portslade, for the explosions of a stick of bombs. Another morale-builder was Glenn Miller’s orchestra, which was looked forward to on the radio every week.

I have a small but local memory of D-Day, when many thousands of men sailed to free the Continent. This is of the enormous drumlike-structures, higher than a house, that al-though made of concrete amazingly floated in Shoreham Harbour. They were the caissons due to be towed across the channel for the building of temporary harbours as the Germans were pushed back from the French coast.

With the ending of the war in Europe, the blackness that had lain over the country after sunset so German bombers wouldn’t be guided by any lights, was lifted, and children under the age of six were wide-eyed at night turned to day by the street lamps. At the defeat of Japan, long tables were laid in the streets and covered with all the goodies neighbours could get hold of for the children to celebrate. Games were played in the road. A wind-up gramophone was produced and there was dancing, mostly by mothers partnering each other. In the evening those fathers who were not still away joined in the rejoicing. Pubs overflowed in Portslade village. There was singing in the streets and knees-ups. Even the aloof stepped down to join in.

A PARENTS’ LOVING GIFT

More importantly, with peace came the social changes demanded by the people. Their cry was that they had been good enough to die for their country, now they were good enough to share in its riches. This led to hospitals being opened to all, without the need to plead for charity. A right was established to unemployment and retirement benefits not tied to the demeaning poor law. Universities were no longer to be the privilege of the moneyed.

A gift from my mother and father’s love was that of further education. Despite their hatred of charity, common to those of their generation, they persuaded themselves that I had a right and applied successfully to the Brighton air-raid victims’ fund for payment of the fees for Clark’s College, which was in a tall tired house in the Old Steine, for me to study commercial subjects. Although the fees were paid, my parents willingly continued the financial strain of my not earning, to give me a start in life.

UPDATE

People sometimes ask what I did for a living before my retirement. My reply often is:

“You’ve heard the phrase, ‘He’s something in the City’? Well, I was a nothing in the City!”

But my parents were proud.

POSTSCRIPT

Writing this account made me want to learn more about that air raid. Who were the people, some I would have known, killed and injured with me?

A way to find out would be through the local newspaper which had long ceased publication, the Sussex Daily News, from over fifty years ago, from the 25th of September 1940 to be exact, the day after the bombing. On the front page, as seen on micro-film at Hove Reference Library, was the report.

It said children playing in the street were injured whilst “the womenfolk” were out shopping – this I can vouch for as true on both counts! What was a surprise was that the bombs came not from a fighter-bomber on a ‘tip-and-run’ raid as I’d always believed. According to a reporter he himself saw a four-engined bomber which did not hurriedly drop its bombs and make off, but instead “circled round and round over the town” for several minutes, and after the explosions “flew slowly round once more, presumably to survey the damage …” No sirens sounded, no guns fired and no British fighter appeared. I hadn’t realised just how defenceless Brighton had been at that stage in the war.

Although the report says “A number of casualties were caused, some of which are fatal…” no names are given. Another lack of detail is where the bombs actually fell. The one is said to have “crashed on to a road junction” but the roads are not named, and the other “heavy calibre” bomb is said to have fallen in a garden, but no address is given. Also referred to is something called an “oil bomb” which splashed houses identified only as “nearby”. The reason must be that naming the roads affected was thought to be able to provide information helpful to the Germans. The Evening Argus of the day of the raid was even more tight-lipped. The Germans were not going to learn even that they had succeeded in bombing Brighton. All that newspaper would reveal was that it was a “SE Coast Town”!

Perhaps the names of victims would be recorded in the weekly newspaper, the Brighton and Hove Herald, which is now extinct, as a few days could be necessary for the details to be assembled. But no. All that is stated is that two people were killed and several children were injured. What was startling about their report was the front page headline: HOMES OF THE POOR AGAIN BOMBED. Although nobody in our street even dreamt of owning their own house, and running a car was as unimaginable as chartering an ocean-going yacht, it was thought of as a ‘respectable street’, and to be called ‘poor’ must have hurt.

No lists, official or otherwise, of who was injured and killed and of the buildings destroyed on 25 September 1940, appear to exist. What is known is that in Brighton over the period of the war there were nine hundred and eighty-eight civilian casualties from air raids, of whom one hundred and ninety-eight were killed. Hove suffered twenty-nine dead and one hundred and fifty-three seriously injured.