Growing up in Lee-on-the-Solent Read online

  Title Page

  GROWING UP IN LEE-ON-THE-SOLENT

  by

  John W Green

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2014 by

  Chaplin Books

  1 Eliza Place

  Gosport PO12 4UN

  www.chaplinbooks.co.uk

  Digital edition converted and distributed in 2014 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © 2014 John W Green

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of the reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in the contents.

  Dedication

  In memory of

  Robin A Money

  1956-2013

  A Vision of Beauty

  It was that day - the embarrassing one, the one when the father takes his son to one side and talks to him ‘man to man’ about the facts of life. ‘Well son, you’re going out into the big wide world and in places like London there are women who will get money from you by other means than robbing you, so take care.’

  This was the day that I was leaving to join the RAF as a Radio Fitter Apprentice. So much for the sex education! It was not as descriptive or lurid as the version given to me by the older boys of the various groups that I had been knocking about with for the last few years. ‘Right Dad,’ I replied. He gave me a pat on the shoulder and that was that.

  Those past few months had been a period of reassessment, one of those times in life when fate unexpectedly dictates events. It was the summer of 1949, and I had taken my School Certificate the previous year, but to my utter surprise, against all expectations, and to my parents’ disappointment, I had failed. I had passed in seven out of nine subjects, with two distinctions, four credits and a single pass, but I had failed English Literature and - more importantly - I had failed English Language. A good performance in the other subjects counted for nothing: without a pass in English Language, the School Certificate was not awarded.

  As a consequence of this failure, I could not progress to the sixth form and ended up in an educational limbo for the first term of the new educational year. Instead of attending Lower Sixth lessons, I had to prepare for the re-sits which would take place in the December and then, unlike today, all subjects had to be retaken.

  The re-sits were held in the Municipal College building which was situated behind Portsmouth Guildhall. Later the ‘Muni’ became a ‘Poly’ until its eventual elevation to University status. Together with the other re-sit candidates from schools across Portsmouth and the surrounding area, I entered the foyer of the imposing Victorian edifice to be directed to the rooms where the exams were to be taken. Initially, the size of some of the rooms was quite daunting. The re-sit exam that I remember most vividly was ‘object drawing’, which was part of the Art exam. I was a pupil at St John’s College in Southsea, which was a single-sex school. Schools were known as ‘mixed’ or ‘all-girl’ or ‘all-boy’ schools, avoiding that awkward ‘sex’ word. I found all the re-sit exams to be quite exciting because they were held in rooms with girls! The object-drawing exam was especially exciting because we sat in a circle, with the object to be drawn arranged in the middle, and opposite me was a ‘vision of beauty’, a girl from either the Portsmouth High School for Girls, or the Southern Grammar School. I sat staring at the ‘vision’ for ages, pretending to be looking at the object to be drawn. Suddenly I came to my senses and realised that there was only about a quarter of an hour to go before the work had to be handed in, and I had hardly made a mark on the paper. I remember the object to this day - it was a cylinder vacuum cleaner - but not the girl. With the sudden realisation that I had to do something PDQ, I started drawing at high speed without time to think; it was virtually eye-to-hand without intervention or interruption by the brain. When I looked at what I had drawn I was immediately aware that it was easily the best art that I had ever done. It was almost like a black-and-white photograph. I suppose that I was inspired: I never saw my inspiration again, but I achieved an excellent mark for object drawing. Despite this, when the results came out, once again there was disappointment. This time no distinctions - only three credits and four passes which still did not include English or English Literature. However, this time I was given a ‘compensated pass’ and awarded my School Certificate. I wondered why that could not have happened the first time when my results were better. In fact I was not to pass English at this level for another sixteen years.

  Although I joined the Lower Sixth for the rest of the academic year, because I had effectively missed the first term, life was quite difficult and I was playing catch-up all the time and not making the progress to which I was accustomed. I decided to rethink my future, and instead of continuing with my Higher School Certificate studies I decided to apply to take the entrance exam to become an officer cadet at RAF Cranwell. Shortly after applying I realised that it would have been a good idea to have talk about it with Dad. When I told him what I had done, he said to me: ‘Look son, if you take the exam I’m sure that you would pass without too much trouble, but once you got there you wouldn’t’ fit in. You don’t come from the right background. Believe me, I’ve seen it and know how it works.’ As he had served in the RAF for more than ten years I listened to what he had said to me, took his advice and withdrew my application.

  Nevertheless I knew that, because conscription was still in force, if I just left school I would be called up anyway, and directed to any of the Armed Forces at random and to any trade from cook to infantryman. So in order to choose the service and trade that appealed to me, I applied to become a Radio Fitter Apprentice in the RAF, and that was how I came to be at the point of ‘going out into the big wide world’.

  Raising the Flag

  Perhaps before I tell you about how I set out on that journey, I should go a little further back into my past. When I was born in 1931, Dad was in the Royal Air Force serving at RAF Cranwell. He was later posted to RAF Manston in Kent (my sister Pat was born in Kent in 1936) and then to RAF Lee-on-Solent. To begin with, we lived in Southways in Stubbington, but moved to Lee after Dad transferred in 1939 to the new Fleet Air Arm: the base became HMS Daedalus.

  Our new home in Lee was at 24 Anglesea Road. As coincidence would have it, our new next-door neighbours, Mr and Mrs Cottrill and Brian their son, who was just six months older than me, turned out to be related to the Knowlton family - at Stubbington, in my last year at the school, I had shared a bench seat with Brenda Knowlton. Our desk was at the front on the right-hand side. I had enjoyed my time at the school, but maybe I had not always been as good as I pretended to be. I remember kissing Brenda in class when everyone was there (except the teacher). The Earth didn’t move but I’d won the dare.

  One of the first jobs that Dad did when we moved to Anglesea Road was to put up a post for the washing line. After duty one day he called in at a smallholding near Marks Road in Stubbington that sold, among other things, long poles for clothes-lines. He bought one that must been over fourteen feet in length, lashed it on to his bicycle and wheeled it along the road (on the airfield) to Anglesea Road, following the same path taken by Mum when she had, on one occasion, pushed Pat
in her pushchair, with me in tow, from Stubbington to Lee. At home, Dad constructed an angle-iron triangular support which he set in a concrete base. Then the pole was raised, just as if we were explorers raising our flag on a newly discovered land. Instead of a flag, we had a clothes-line that was fixed to the house at the other end. Both ends could be raised or lowered by means of pulleys, which Dad had fitted. The clothes-line was fixed about two feet from the top and above this, at the top of the pole, Dad fixed a wire aerial so that we could receive programmes on our wireless. The aerial had ceramic insulators at each end and I thought they looked like white walnuts.

  Within a few weeks of us moving to Lee-on-the-Solent, World War Two was declared. One of the popular comedians that we would listen to on the wireless at that time was Robb Wilton, who would start his droll monologues and sketches with the words ‘The day war broke out.’[1]

  Well, on the day that war broke out it was sunny and warm. Jim Palmer, a lad of about my age who lived in Gosport Road, about a hundred yards away, ran out into the road and called out in an excited, cheerful voice: ‘we’re at war!’ As we were young and did not understand how serious it was, we were quite elated about it, thinking it would be a new exciting adventure. We were very soon to be disabused of that notion. The first effect was the introduction of rationing of bacon, butter and sugar, then up went the blackout curtains and the tape (similar to masking tape) that was put in criss-cross patterns across the windows, as if imitating the lattice windows of country cottages. The tape was intended to reduce the chance of people being injured by flying glass by keeping it in one piece, or at least large pieces, in the event of the windows being blown out by a bomb blast. Then we were issued with gas masks, which came in little cardboard boxes with a string attached as a shoulder strap.

  Even with these changes in place, things remained much the same, and initially life carried on as normal. Lee-on-the-Solent was a village of two halves: those who lived on Marine Parade or in Manor Way and to west of it, who were the well-to-do and influential people. Those who lived at the eastern end, including Elmore, were neither well-to-do nor influential. During the war there was some feeling of community, but not perhaps of shared hardship.

  I started at Lee Junior School after the summer holidays. I enjoyed school, but it was a case of ‘not getting too comfortable,’ because, shortly after I had started there, the ‘powers that be’ decided to close the school and evacuate the children to safer places, away from the military establishments. Although many of the children in Lee-on-the-Solent were evacuated, Mum didn’t want Pat or me to be sent away and so we stayed at home.

  Although the war seemed to get off to a quiet start, it was not long before we were given a rude awakening, and a foretaste of what it was going to be like. It was during the first air-raid, though as no bombs were dropped in our immediate area, I suppose it didn’t really count as an air-raid. It was at night and Dad was not at home because he was on duty in Daedalus. The rising and falling wailing pitch of the siren had alerted us to take cover. Mum grabbed Pat and me and we all went next-door and took shelter with the Cottrills in their hall. We all sat huddled on the floor and I stared at the rectangle of lino that covered the middle of the hallway and at the varnish on the remainder of the floor up to the skirting boards.

  We could not hear any bombing taking place - all we could hear was the throbbing drone of squadrons of German bombers overhead, as they made their way to targets elsewhere in the country. This sound was accompanied by the irregular and intermittent sound of anti-aircraft gunfire. We had been sitting in the hall for a little while when someone said ‘Hush - I think I can hear machine-gun fire.’ We all held our breath and listened, but the cause of the noise turned out to be my Mum. She was sitting with her knee resting against the panelling under the stairs, and because she was trembling so much it produced a rat-a-tat noise. We all laughed about it later .... much later.

  1 www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robb Wilton

  A Canny Teacher

  As Lee school was closed, Mum enrolled Pat and me in a ‘private school’. There were about a dozen others enrolled in this ‘educational establishment’, including my next-door neighbour Brian, at fees of 2/6 a week per pupil. In reality it was a large shed at the rear of the bungalow at 62 Raynes Road, and the whole enterprise was run by Mrs Good, assisted by her husband. She was a tall, angular, quite imposing lady with a beak nose. On reflection, she had a presence that reminded me a little of Queen Mary. Her husband was rather short and certainly not imposing. Inside the shed there was a large trestle table with wooden benches down the sides and along one end. Mrs Good would sit at the other end, at the top end of the table. On one wall there was a large poster showing all the ships of the Royal Navy in the 1937 Coronation Fleet review in the Solent.

  I have very fond memories of this ‘school’ and still remember - over seventy years later - some of the things that we were taught there. We would chant out loud ... Northumberland, Newcastle on the Tyne, Durham, Durham on the Wear, Yorkshire, York on the Ouse ... and so on, to include all of the forty English counties and county towns and the rivers on which they stood. We also learnt our ‘times tables’ (eventually up to thirteen) by repeating them over and over again.

  On a few occasions at break times we were taken to ‘Cornerways’, a house, which was run as a refined tea-rooms, on the corner of Queens Road, facing the Inn by the Sea on one side and Downing’s Garage (now ‘Fine Cars’) on the opposite corner, where we each were given a real homemade lemonade and occasionally a cake.

  I thought that Mrs Good was a first-rate teacher, bearing in mind that she had a group of children whose ages ranged from about four to fourteen. She would sometimes smoke when she was teaching, and as I have said, she had a rather large nose, and on quite a few occasions she would sit with a dewdrop hanging from the end of it, which was always a source of amusement to us pupils. It was a matter of speculation as to when, or if, the dewdrop would drop off.

  One morning (records show that this was in July 1940) when we were having our lessons in the shed, we heard a succession of several explosions. We may have been a little startled, but as the siren had not sounded we didn’t take too much notice. Eventually we discovered that the explosions were the sound of the Army or Navy blowing up sections of the ironwork of the pier at Lee Tower. Later we were able to see exactly what had been done. The pier had two ruddy great holes made in its ironwork structure. Or, as the papers reported it, the pier had been breached in two sections to prevent it being used by the Germans in the event of an invasion. A few years later when the Allies were preparing for D-Day, a temporary walkway was erected from the promenade to the jetty near the end of the pier: it took just a matter of hours.

  In school, as well as learning our times tables by rote, we would, if the weather was fine, go outside for drawing lessons. My best-remembered outside lesson was when we went to the cliff tops opposite the end of Portsmouth Road and we had to draw ‘Tower House’, a hotel with a turret. It was on the west corner of Portsmouth Road and Marine Parade East.

  On another day when we were at the school, the siren sounded, but we remained calm, and we all - more than a dozen of us - filed out and went across the waste ground at the end of Raynes Road to a Morrison brick air-raid shelter in a garden at the bottom of Seymour Road. I believe that the name of the family that lived there was Packer, and their son Eddy went to Mrs Good’s school. We all sat in the shelter clutching our gasmasks in their little cardboard boxes. At some point we were told to put our gasmasks on and we discovered that by breathing out hard we could make the rubber side flaps vibrate and produce farting noises, which is exactly what we did. The trouble with this game was that it made the visor mist up. Three or four of the older boys and girls were up to something else in the shelter - although it looked very interesting I never found exactly what they were doing, but there was a lot of giggling and guilty looks. The newspapers at th
e time noted March 1941: practice for an ARP simulated gas attack at Lee.

  During the spring and summer of 1941, Mrs Good devised a competition to see who could grow (at home) the biggest crop from a single potato. We were each given a potato and told to cut it up so that each piece had an eye. I managed a row about nine feet long, and when the crop was harvested in September I won the competition with 22 pounds of potatoes. But Mrs Good was quite canny. She kept all of the potatoes that were taken in for weighing. For my prize I was awarded half a crown. With it I bought Mum a large bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut chocolate, and a packet of five Woodbines for Dad from Bennets’s paper shop, which was in Portsmouth Road between Ryde Place and Wootton Road. Children at that time could buy cigarettes if they said the cigarettes were for their parents, and if the shopkeeper believed them. My honest face came to my aid. The cigarettes certainly weren’t for me: in fact, I have never been tempted to smoke. I put this down to the fact that when I was young I saw a tramp in Gosport bend down and pick up, from a really dirty gutter, a discarded smouldering ‘fag end’, put it in his mouth and smoke what was left. This had a lifelong impact on me.

  In the front room of the bungalow, hanging over the fireplace, was an ornate sword together with a photo of some relative of Mrs Good being presented with the sword by a member of the Spanish Royal Family. Mrs Good’s bearing, attitude and speech created the impression that she was from a rather well-to-do family and the sword and picture tended to reinforce this impression. The front room was sometimes used as a classroom by Mr Good to teach spelling, but unfortunately it was usually in the afternoon and he’d occasionally had a pint or two over at the Inn by the Sea at lunchtime, so it was not unknown for him to nod off during the afternoon lessons. On one occasion, a small group of us were having a spelling session which consisted of Mr Good saying a word, and us writing down how we thought it was spelt. This lesson was of the snooze-foreshortened variety. Just after Mrs Good’s shorter half had woken up with a start, we spent quite a few minutes unsuccessfully trying to contain our laughter when he asked us to spell the word ‘piston’. We didn’t get many words spelt that afternoon.