In the English pub

I have always enjoyed playing billiards and snooker right from my teen years, Oh so very long ago.
In fact my father had been the last but one billiards champion at the Men's Institute in the town where we lived while I still wore short trousers.
It was my young uncle who was only three years older than myself who introduced me to the game soon after I was old enough to frequent inns and hotels in England in the 1950's.
We would play on the tiny Bar Billiards table all evening with me drinking a light beer or shandy and making it last as long as possible.
We hogged the table by the traditional ruse of placing a coin on the tables edge that the table had been booked after we had finished whilst having the billiard cues in our hands all the time.
Of course we were pressured off the table if the newcomers looked angry and that was our cue to go and play darts in another corner of the bar as our long lasting drinks got warmer in those days before refrigeration!

Image found at www.mercuryleisure.co.uk

A long time ago

                               

                              The house as it is now but it wasn't painted in my day

Such a long time ago I was born at home in a small house at the end of a rough road halfway between two towns in southern England. It was five o’clock in the morning and I cried as most babies do when greeting the world.

The address was No 1 Bentley Cottage, Reeds Estate, Heath End, Farnham, Surrey, then (but isn't anymore) and it was the best place to grow up with a field at the bottom of the garden and a stream running though the copse a bit further off.

Us kids ran free then even though it was wartime with army bases close by and planes flying overhead but we knew no other life. We climbed trees waded streams and caught tadpoles in ponds and played in the haystacks and pretended we were soldiers with sticks for guns just like our dads and uncles.

I went back there a few years ago but of course it is changed with a school in one field and dozens of houses in the others with everything looking so neat and tidy and I wondered where the kids were and what they do now for fun and so I sadly shook my head.

 Image found at www.zoopla.co.uk

Weird war for youngsters

Toddler in peacetime
Then schoolboy when the bombs fell
But we had free milk

Food was very scarce
Everything was rationed then
Except mothers love

Kids ran wild and free
Bus to school and Ma to work
Dad in London town

His job was great fun
Dowsing incendiary bombs
Dropped by enemy

Eyes on the skies 
Looking for the hostile planes
No that's one of ours

Empty grocers shelves
Food was short and so was I
Cold damp bomb shelters

Wrapped up in blankets
Waiting for all clear signal
Let's get back to bed

Wrote childish scrawl note
To uncle in Italy
Cheered him up he said

Another aunt sad
This uncle's not coming home
So she cried a lot 

All kids at school fence
Army trucks and tanks pass by
Heading for the coast

Us kids played in the fields
Doodlebug flew overhead
Good it has flown on

The tide was turning
We found out how bad it was
For millions more

We all cheered at last
For peace was finally here
Weird war for youngsters

I started school in 1941 quite unaware of life in peacetime so I have here tried to show my memories and feelings of wartime Britain, the planes, the soldiers, the tanks, the shortages, the rationing, the fear and the tears for I was only nine when the Second World War ended in 1945. Despite that I am getting old and forgetful but I do still remember my wartime National Registration Identity number DLMI 30/4! That is weird but at least is was not a tattoo!

Image 1 found at www.dailmail.co.uk
Image 2 found at www.stuff.co.nz

At the Station

              A restored locomotive of that era

When I was boy not yet in my teens our family moved to a small market town in Hampshire, England. The war was over but not the privation of those dreadful years. The town we moved to could with all honesty be said to be at the end of the line for it was the terminus for the electric trains that ran regularly from London, The trains on reaching the settlement not quite 50 miles away looked around and horrified rushed quickly back to the metropolis again.

I am lying of course which is what storytellers do best!

Being a market town it held a market every week on a Tuesday to market things that were not available in the shops, such as live sheep and cattle and pigs from the farms nearby together with feathered friends too. In school holidays it was a major attraction for boys my age to walk around the pens and view the weighing of the stock on the weighbridge and run and laugh with glee when a when pig or cow or best of all a bull somehow escaped from his handler and chose to go home by himself to avoid being taken to the nearest slaughterhouse. Usually they avoided the street and chose the narrow lanes and walkways to terrify the town’s inhabitants. Us boys thought that was even better than going to the movies.

In those days there was not much of anything in the shops, rationing continued in Britain for a few years. Everything too was still in black and white. There was a cinema in the town, given a name exactly opposite to its character it was of course the Palace!  With no television our great pleasure was to pay a visit twice a week on grey Wednesday and Friday evenings to watch a mostly grey film in that grey town in a very grey country in our grey times.

However all was not bad for boys as the station where the electric trains terminated was also the terminus for two little branch line railways that headed off into the country to find their way to meet other mainlines at Winchester and Havant. These single track systems were of great interest to young boys because the trains were pulled by steam locomotives.

After school each day and at weekends much time was spent at the station or by the side of the track, or on the track, or under a bridge or placing pennies on the track for the train’s wheels to make them bigger while we hid in the bushes so the engine driver couldn't see us. Not that that mattered as he couldn't stop his engine just to chase after us and in those days hardly anybody had phones or portable radios, let alone mobile (cell) phones which wouldn't make their appearance for at least another 30 years.

Not all stations had turntables for engines to turn around before making a return journey so a special provision was made for the engine at it’s country terminus to uncouple from its carriages and on an adjacent siding would go to the other end of the waiting carriages and re-couple with them there to take the train back to its original starting point. However, now the engine was facing the wrong way for the return trip to pull the train home. Some improvement was made to this method by having the rear carriage fitted with a communication device with the engine and the guard would every few seconds indicate to the driver at the back of the train that the track was clear in front as it was pushed backwards. The engine of course was travelling in reverse and without gears could travel forward or back at the same speed.

Sadly those branch lines are now closed to the public and I wonder what adventures boys of today have without them. Oh yes, I remember they have an iPad for a friend.  

Recollections of a Warped Mind (No 9)

5) My involvement with Fighter Command in 1940

The indoctrination that took place during the war affected everything we did. It was one thing to be bombarded in the newspapers with acceptable news, but even in peripheral things there was the subversive mind twisting of our young brains. On one hand the bad news was reported obliquely. “Bombing raids took place in several industrial centres in Britain overnight,” not telling us where, as though that was reassuring. At the same time advertising happily talked of winning through, we were urged to save for victory, dig for victory, and to be like Dad and keep Mum! The jungle telegraph however was quite effective, it took next to no time for the news of heavy raids on the cities of Southampton and Portsmouth to be passed word of mouth across the country and the bombing of London we knew about because Dad would tell us about it the evening after work or in the morning if he had been on fire watch duty the previous night.

One incident in our own family which brought the war very close to us was the tale of the egg. One poor chicken in our backyard run laid and enormous misshapen egg. This egg was raffled off to the neighbours and friends of the family and the proceeds were sent to the “Buy a Fighter fund” which many a local Council had organised. So our poor chicken unwittingly helped the war effort and contributed in some small part to the building of a Hurricane or a Spitfire fighter plane.

The elements are not conscious of the deeds of man and the summer of 1940 was a glorious one. For Britain however there was little joy, having had to endure a defeat of massive proportions when the allied forces finally came up against Hitler’s advancing armies and escape from them at Dunkirk. It was at this time however that Chamberlain the lame duck Prime Minister had been replaced by the far more dynamic and forceful Winston Churchill. As a peace time politician he was regarded somewhat as a renegade or a stirrer. In war it was essential that he was in control as he was clever enough and strong enough to see the whole situation and to take the unpalatable decisions when he had to. His fighting spirit, his rhetoric and charisma and his ability to inspire trust was what was needed when defeat seemed so close to the nation at that time.

As that summer drew to a close the German Luftwaffe had for weeks been pounding the cities and industrial centres of Britain and our embattled fighter planes were being knocked out of the sky almost faster than they could be replaced, either by machines or manpower.

In September 1940 just before children returned to school for the new school year we made a trip down to a small village between Alton and Winchester, where a friend of my Father, Charlie Humphries had a small pub on the main road. This pub which was named an unlikely, “The Shant” was the place that I witnessed a dogfight between German and British fighter planes high above the rolling chalk downs of northern Hampshire. It was impossible to tell the planes apart as they were so high above us. Their tiny silhouettes and their vapour trails were all we could see. But it was there then on that hot summer afternoon in September that I too was part of the Battle of Britain.

It was fortunate then that our chicken had done her deed and the money contributed to the Fighter Fund had been put to good use. By the 15th September the major aerial dogfights were over, the Battle of Britain had been won. Winston Churchill talked later about how much was owed by so many to so few but our long suffering hen got not one word of praise.