What a Clever Man was he

Memory focus on one

Today, rather than write about a broad range of memories involving many characters I’ve decided to focus my attention on just one person: my father.

He was a man of many talents, in my eyes he could "fix anything".  Without harping on how poor we were, a found broken alarm clock became a treasure after he had applied his magic.  New shoes for four children were a luxury that we could not afford, so when a hole appeared in the sole he was there with his repair leather and cast iron last anvil, to make the footwear usable again.

One like this repaired many, many shoes in our household.

Make a suitcase, mend a purse, polish a floor, cook a dinner he could do it all.

It was nothing unusual to see him down on his knees applying polish to the shiny cement floors in our apartment, or to see him in the kitchen making Sunday dinner.  My favourite was when he made Liver and Onions, he made the best gravy in the world.  He was a good cook, (perhaps he had learned from his mother).  He was a man with a modern attitude well before his time.   He was more than willing to do chores that at the time were considered woman's work and he never hesitated to teach me how to hold a hammer or use a handsaw.  Some of the many skills that I learned from him I have found to be very useful in my later life; one being how to keep a bunch of brad nails in my mouth without swallowing them. 

No doubt if you’ve been reading my outpourings you are aware that while there must have been times when money was available, there were times when we were as poor as church mice, nevertheless, we always had a piano in the house. Both parents could play without sheet music.  This was referred to as “playing by ear”. As a child it was a phrase I couldn’t understand as they both seemed to use their hands – not their ears. Dad’s favourite rendition was: "Let Me Call You Sweetheart", played with a lot of gusto, gestures and dramatic hand movements. The following YouTube By Max Bygraves is the closest I could find to his version.
v=ej4WwbmdX8M&list=PLrS5x6Peorjvo_XK2q0AbB1Ua6Y0JOi-iPLrS5x6Peorjvo_XK2q0AbB1Ua6Y0JOi-i

Mum’s style was more jazzy and fast.

When I think of a pianist hands I imagine long slender fingers. Not so with Dad.  His hands were stubby, large and callused with a clubbed feature that intrigued any doctor who saw them; his nails fully turned over to follow the tops of his fingers.

This being a time when record players were not fully utilized or popular or available meant that both parents were in great demand at parties for their musical skills.  Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor at the side of a piano listening and learning all the words to the latest "sing-along" tune.  Then later that evening I’d fall asleep astride my father's shoulders as he carried me home.

At the start of World War II he was in the Territorial Army. 

Dad - trained and ready!

As far as I could discover the TAs were a part-time army that practiced "in case" of conflict, consequently, they were the first to be called-up when the war was declared.  After all that practicing it’s ironic that he left the army prior to the war's end due to damage to his hearing from working with the big guns in the Royal Artillery division.  Nevertheless, he always kept an interest in what was happening because when the enemy bombers made their nightly actions over London, he would be outside watching the English fighter planes involved in dogfights taking place above him.  The following link will give you a little idea of what these fights entailed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mITx8SPNyhU

  

When we were young he would delight in telling us what he thought of as a funny poem but what we thought of as something that scared the living daylights out of us! Especially since he would usually recite this at bedtime in a voice made deep and throaty. I recently discovered an old Victorian picture depicting this poem

One night he awoke, a candle he lit,
he saw his revolver and soon loaded it.
No longer I'll stand it, he savagely said.
Then he blew out his candle and went back to bed,
Ha, Ha, he laughed, Ha, Ha, he cried.
What a clever man am I.

If any of this sounds as if he was an ideal parent with whom I had a wonderful relationship then I've given you the wrong idea completely.  In truth, we were similar in so many ways, that it led to constant clashes of temperament.  He was stubborn and he had many rules.  I was stubborn and I hated his rules.  I hated not being able to wear lipstick, I hated that he wanted to know too much: where I was going, what I was doing.  He made my life miserable!

He loved to have a few or more drinks at the local and consequently when he walked in the door full of liquid bravado his rules became loud enough for the neighbours to shudder,   Although he was very loud I can't truly remember him actually hitting any of us.  Perhaps I've blocked it out, but I doubt it.  I can still see him as he pulled off his leather trouser belt with a flourish -then make it into a loop that he would snap together with an enormous BANG!  This would scare us kids into a corner.  The belt never touched us! It would then be followed by a huge THUMP with his large fist onto whatever table or surface that was near.  These arguments only got worse during my teenage years when I knew everything.

Yes, he could do everything, fix anything,  but he couldn't beat the effects of too much smoking.  He died of cancer in 1960, the year that my son was born.  I wanted to travel to England to see him in the hospital or attend his funeral, but due to the problems with that pregnancy my doctor thought it would not be advisable.

The Blitz

The Blitz

It’s well to remember that most of these stories take place with the war as a backdrop, and to acknowledge that these war years were not all chocolate bars, trains and Downton Abbey footman.  

It’s hard to forget the BLITZ of 1940 (from the German word Blitzkrieg meaning a violent surprise offensive by massed air forces).  That was the period when Hitler let loose his mighty Luftwaffe over the skies of London.   For sure it was a surprise and it was definitely violent! 

If you really want to know more about this time then a little GOOGLE search will get you all manner of serious and detailed information. My stories will be less detailed and will be merely based on my memories. 

Suffice for me to say that Londoners are a hardy bunch and our family was no exception

It might have been at that time or it could have been later when the government realised that perhaps we needed a little protection from these heavenly handouts!  As a consequence brick shelters were erected on streets.  If you had a grassy patch behind your house you had an Anderson Shelter installed. It was half sunk into the ground and built of curved sheets of steel.  In a nice dry environment these would have been a great idea. See picture! 

England however does not fit that description and being flooded out was a regular occurrence.

If, like us, you had a concrete yard with no grass that could be dug up then you were the happy recipient of a brick surface shelter with a concrete roof.  Flooding was not such an issue for these – the rain ran in one door and out the other.  The main problem with these was the workmanship; bad construction and substandard mortar.  Some of them collapsed without even smelling a bomb!

Now that you've seen the outside here's a peek at the cozy inside:

It may be worth remembering that our particular shelter is featured in a couple of upcoming stories; one that involves LS and a set of dentures, another that shows the happy go lucky play of all three siblings.

As a family we were very happy to have this shelter because it did double, sometimes triple duty.  For Mum it was a storage shed for items that she really did not know what to do with. For LS, LB and LLB it was a playroom both inside and on the roof.  I found it to be a quiet retreat for reading a book. One thing I do remember however is that it was never ever used to shelter us from bombs!  From my recollection the shelter of choice for us children was under the kitchen table!

So to get back to the BLITZ:  Saturday, September 7^th 1940 was a typical London day – CLOUDY!   Londoners were nervous and on edge.  France had fallen and the threat of a German invasion hung heavily in the air.

It’s been said that if Hitler had chosen this time to send his troops across the Channel they would have been met by the Home Guard and the ARP!  The Home Guard was a group of older men who were too old to join the army. (They were nicknamed "Dad's Army".  I think there was a BBC television show called this at one time.)
The ARP stood for the Air Raid Patrol.  They had no uniforms but they had helmets for their heads and some other interesting equipment that can be seen HERE. Generally, what they did was to keep looking at the sky to see if enemy planes were coming over.  Their other big job was to run up and down the streets in the evening yelling at people to close the drapes so that no light could be seen from the sky. It’s not difficult to imagine that if these groups had come head to head with Hitler’s Panzer divisions I for one would probably be speaking German today!

But, instead of that, Hitler decided to soften-up the Londoners before parachuting his Panzers.  Between five and six o'clock that Saturday evening, just as my Dad was about to tuck into his sausages and mash, prior to his pint at the local, the sky became black with almost 1000 bombers and fighter airplanes as they flew up the Thames estuary toward London where they dumped bomb after bomb after bomb on the city below.

For 57 consecutive nights, from September 7^th until November 2^nd 1940 the bombs rained down!  In London 43,000 people were killed, 51,000 seriously injured and 88,000 slightly injured.

Many houses on our street were completely demolished, but our family was very lucky, no one was injured and no one died. But I was scared. 

This occuured in BALHAM - which is on the south side of Thames - close to where we lived.

Every night, like a good little girl I would say my prayers and beg God to kill Hitler.  Each morning I would go outside where I would see scattered all around large and small pieces of shrapnel, (pieces of metal from the bombs that had been dropped) strewn all over the sidewalk. After the fire blitz, when incendiary bombs had been used, there were pieces of charred and burnt objects floating down from the sky. We kids collected the shrapnel and even vied with our friends as to who had the biggest or best looking piece.  Apart from collecting shrapnel the war also influenced the games we played. 

There was no T.V. to watch so a great deal of time was spent outside, running and jumping. But the games that are worth telling about involved imagination and . . . well, I’ll leave it at that. These games will be the subject of an upcoming post.

Evacuation to Wiltshire – the Manservant

Much of the action in these tales takes place during the period of WWII. 

When war was initially declared there was much panic and concern regarding the children of London.  It didn’t take long for the powers that be to decide that the men will tote the guns and the women will run the factories and the children will be sent out of harm’s way.  Called Operation Pied Piper, millions of people, most of them children, were shipped to rural areas in Britain as well as overseas to Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. 

You’ll notice the underlined words in the above paragraph.  Yes, most of them were children, but some were like my Mum who had come very close to losing part of her brood and under no circumstances was she about to do so again. She insisted on being part of the evacuation process.

I would have been about 7 years of age and LS a small toddler when we made our first foray into wartime evacuation. Oh yes, we did it many times, after all “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”!

There must have been preparations but I don’t remember them but I do recall the noise of the train station, the pushing and the shoving, the crowds of children and people.  The uncomfortable cardboard box strung with string around my body added to the confusion and fright.

I can’t honestly say whether it was on this train trip or another of our evacuation flights, with hindsight it probably occurred later after a long period of “sweets and candies” deprivation. Nevertheless, the memory stands out very clearly: when I, along with other children, was given a chocolate bar wrapped in purple paper, I could not believe it was all for me – the whole bar just for me. It must have made a tremendous impression, because to this day I still love “Cadburys”!

But I digress.  We arrived in the area of Wiltshire know as Castle Combe.  If you’re thinking “Eh I know that name from somewhere”, you’re right. The movie Doctor Doolittle was filmed there in the 1960’s.

From my very young and rickety memory I gather we were billeted in a large Manor house said to belong to the Wills Tobacco Company. It must have been very large because I’ve always thought of it as a Castle!  I think it might have been what is now The Manor House Hotel shown in this picture:

It was not a hotel at that time, it was a one family dwelling.  As you can see from the image this is a very imposing structure, especially to a young mum who was used to living in a one bedroom flat, ground floor, no grass just a stone area at the back called “the yard”.  

I’m not going to pretend that I remember everything about our stay but I do recall at least one meal.  We were seated at a long, long table which to my young eyes looked to be about the size of our “backyard”.  It was highly polished and shiny and we three, Mum, LS and I, were the only occupants sitting at one end.  This was our first introduction to what I now think must have been a footman (I’ve watched Downton Abbey).  We were served our meals by this very stately figure.  

Wow, you may be thinking, how terrific!  Not so.  To my very cockney, very impressionable and totally overwhelmed mother it was scary.  More scary than the bombs back home, you say?  I guess so.  Fortunately, the trains ran both ways and before you could say: “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner” we were home.

Clearing Up This Cockney Confusion

Many London people call themselves Cockneys, but you only get the real stamp of approval if you were born within the sound of Bow Bells. 

Figure1 .Cheapside_and_Bow_Church_engraved_by_W.Albutt_after_T.H.Shepherd_publ_1837_edited

I can do that.  I was born at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital well within the sound of those bells. Neither my mother or father or my three siblings can do so. That’s not surprising since the bells are located in a built-up non-residential area of London and Barts (as it is affectionately called) no longer provides neo-natal services.  In 1993 it was recommended that hospital service should be delivered closer to where people lived. Barts was identified as a hospital with a catchment area that had a low population and the hospital was threatened with closure. 

This would have been tragic for a hospital that was founded in 1123 and is the oldest hospital in Britain.  Its long and colourful history deserves more space than I can allot to it here.

Figure 2 The King Henry VIII Gate at Barts was completed in 1702

So, I’ll exercise my legitimate right to call this blog “A Covey of Cockneys”, because the person telling the tales is me and the people I’ll be “Telling Tales” on (mostly my family) who all consider themselves Cockneys.

So, I might as well start out by filling in a little background on what it means to be or think oneself to be a Cockney. As I’ve had to explain to many a person over the years the term has nothing whatsoever to do with roosters or genitalia.  Like so many other words in the English language it is ascribed to many different sources. Not surprising when it’s said to have been around for hundreds of years.  It’s probably derived from the word “Cockayne” or a similar French word which was applied to the city dwellers, mainly Londoners I guess, and its meaning was not exactly flattering.  So, let’s leave that and move on to map out Bow Bells.

Because of its name, the district of Bow is often labelled as being the Cockney designator, but it can’t be because it sits 4.6 miles east of London’s centre.  Whereas, the church of St. Mary-le-Bow is in the city centre and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital where I was born is considered to be within the sound of the church’s bells.

Here's a link if you would like to hear the Sound of Bow Bells.  Not sure if this counts as a Cockney designator if played as a baby is born?

So now that we’ve got that settled, the question arises: Why am I doing this?  This telling tales out of school, this public airing of the family linen?   The answer is very simple: I’m getting old.  Soon it will be time to relinquish my space on this marvellous planet to make room for someone yet unborn.  But, before I go I’d like to leave a little record to show that I did pass through. Although these tales will mainly be of interest to my immediate family, if you’ve strayed this way by accident or design – please come in – you’re welcome to read about our lives, perhaps you’ve had similar experiences.