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

  Rebel

  The policeman had been and gone before I arrived home and Dad was not best pleased; he had been shown the screwdriver by the policeman but he had not identified it, because it had a broad arrow stamped on it. Apparently the policeman had returned to the derelict shop and had discovered that all of the ‘evidence of the crime’ had disappeared, so no further action was to be taken, and of course he kept the screwdriver. ‘You are not to play with that Ronnie again!’ Dad said, and no doubt Ronnie was told never to play with me again. But we did.

  The policeman knew Anglesea Road quite well. He occasionally visited a house in the road where the man who managed the NAAFI in Daedalus lived. Of course, during the war we were limited in the amount of food that we could have because of the rationing, and there were certain rumours and murmurings about these visits, and mutterings about ‘black market’. I did wonder if Dad had hinted about this to the policeman, who was not known for his leniency, because from then on, the policeman was not seen making any more visits to the NAAFI manager’s home. Perhaps they rescheduled their rendezvous location, or maybe the purpose of their alleged meetings was just gossip.

  During the winter following our return from Scotland, Dad was taken to hospital to have an emergency operation which was needed to make good an appendicitis operation that had been performed over two years earlier at Haslar Hospital. On this occasion he was taken to Park Prewett Hospital near Basingstoke. Before the war it had been a mental hospital, but it had been seconded, in part, for use as a surgical hospital during the war.

  Visiting Dad was very difficult, but Mum took Pat and me on at least three occasions. It meant very early starts. Because it was winter we left in the dark and came home in the dark. The journey from home to the hospital took nearly three hours. We had to walk from our house to the bus stop and catch a bus to Fareham bus station, then a walk of nearly a mile to the railway station, a train ride to Basingstoke, and finally a bus ride of about a mile, which seemed much further because the bus was very old and slow and it struggled to get up hills. It really did seem to take forever to get there. It was during the coldest part of the winter of a year that was particularly cold. On one of these treks, early in the morning, we were huddled on the station at Fareham trying to keep out of the bitterly icy northerly wind that was blowing down the platform. We had been there a little while, getting colder and colder, when a serviceman (I think he was an army corporal) came on to the platform. When he saw Mum’s plight with two children in tow he went straight to the ticket office and demanded quite forcefully that they opened the waiting room, which had been closed and locked up till then. Although there was no fire in the waiting room, it was a great relief to get out of that wind.

  To compound Dad’s problem, while he was in the hospital some complication resulted in him having to undergo a throat operation, within days of the initial surgery. It so happened that this operation took place on a day that we were visiting him and we saw him not long after he came out of the operating theatre. He looked dreadful and I thought he was going to die. We were sitting round his bed staring at him, probably as white-faced as he was, when what must have been the Matron came into the ward: ‘What on Earth are these children doing here?’ she demanded of the ward nurse ‘Get them out of here!’ That turned out to be a very short visit for a very long journey.

  On our next visit it was such a relief to see him looking much better and sitting up in bed. While he was recuperating, for his occupational therapy he learnt how to make soft toys, and because he was well-skilled in sewing, he produced some excellent sewn items. Dad had learnt how to sew as a young man working on trawlers, when he had to repair the nets. One of the proud claims of Mum was that, when I was born, Dad had knitted most of my baby clothes. It was virtually unheard of for a man to do anything like that in those days. When we left that day Pat had a colourful toy elephant, and I had a hand-sewn leather wallet. Within a month, Dad was back on duty at Daedalus.

  Between the ‘B’ and the ‘ang’

  Eventually so many youngsters returned from being evacuated that Lee Junior School found a location and re-opened. The new location was required because the school buildings had been taken over for some other purposes. For a while lessons were held in the rooms above the Lee Library for the senior classes and, for the younger pupils, in what was called ‘The Bungalow’ on Portsmouth Road. It was on the same side as ‘Cornerways’ but nearer to the seafront. It was there that Pat went to classes. She said that there were brick walls in front of the windows to prevent them from being blown in by bomb blast.

  Although I had enjoyed my time at Mrs Good’s school, it was good to be back at Lee Junior School, especially when we moved back to the proper premises. It was just after the school returned to its normal site that I first met Ronnie and we started getting into mischief. Also it was about this time, in the summer of 1941, that free school milk started to be given out at school. We used to get a small bottle of milk - one third of a pint. One of the duties I had for a while was that of ‘milk monitor’ which involved giving out a bottle of milk and a straw to each pupil, and when everyone had finished, collecting up the empties and putting them back in the crate.

  Another role which I filled for a short while was that of ‘ink monitor’, and filled is a most apposite word because my role was to fill the inkwells from a large bottle of ink. The filling task was carried out on an ink-stained wooden tray on a bench at the front of the classroom. I then had to carry the tray of filled inkwells to each desk in turn, slotting an inkwell into the hole that was made for this purpose. The lifting of the large bottle of ink was a surprisingly difficult task for youngsters with small hands, like mine. You could always pick out the ink monitor; it would be the one with the most heavily ink-stained hands. The ink was as malevolent as ever. I remembered it from my days at Stubbington School. It was an evil liquid, which had the capability of jumping off your pen, on to your exercise book. It could even sneak unseen on to your fingers and then spread itself just about everywhere. The pens were of the same style that we had used in Stubbington, with round wooden shafts, which had the uncanny knack of being able to attract the ink. The nib was slotted into a metal fixing at the end of the shaft. To say that this was always a messy lesson is rather like saying Mount Everest is quite a large hill.

  There was one occasion when a policeman came into the classroom to talk to us. When he addressed the class, he said that the police were aware of the fact that some of the boys in the school had been ‘acquiring’, and had in their possession, ammunition. He then added that if we handed in any ammunition, then no further action would be taken. Of course, as he was a policeman we all believed that if he told us to, we would all have to empty our pockets and turn them inside out. There was a prompt line of boys making their way to the front of the class. In one class alone, on that one day, there were over a hundred rounds of live rifle ammunition, in the form of 303 bullets, handed in. I didn’t have any, and I turned out my pockets to prove it. The reason I didn’t have any was because my stash was at home, hidden in a suitcase under my bed. My hoard even included a couple of cannon shells which I had acquired by a bit of ‘astute’ trading. These cannon shells were about six inches long. That evening after dark I went to the beach and threw the lot over the barbed wire into the sea at Elmore.

  At school there was one activity that I particularly enjoyed and it was the mental arithmetic sessions of twenty questions. It was how Mr Nixon, the headmaster, would start each day. I was proud of my mental arithmetic, and hated to get anything less than twenty out of twenty correct. To this day there is a standing joke in our family regarding a question that occurred during one session.

  ‘If it takes three minutes to boil one egg, how long does it take to boil four eggs?’ ... my contention was that it must be 12 minutes. Mr Nixon said the answer was three minutes. I put up my hand up and was told to stand up. I said that the lesson was supposed to be m
ental arithmetic, and not cookery. ‘What if it was only a small saucepan?’ This was sternly dismissed. I sailed pretty close to the wind that day and was told in no uncertain terms to ‘Sit down.’

  On the subject of eggs, some of Dad’s resourcefulness must have rubbed off on Mum because in 1942 we were the first family in our area to use the new dried powdered eggs, which became available to supplement our egg ration. Quite a few families were very wary of ‘dried eggs’ and in some cases it was many months before they even tried them.

  At school on another occasion, sometime later, Mr Nixon brought a grass snake into the school and passed it round the class so that everyone could feel that it was not slimy, and was in fact quite pleasant to handle. Most of the girls and even some of the boys were none too keen to handle the snake, but I was quite keen to give it a try: it was soothing and I enjoyed holding it.

  I suppose it was the Jekyll and Hyde nature of my character that between the age of ten and twelve, in the winter months I was very much a loner, but in the summer months I wanted to be part of a group or gang and to ‘hang out’ on the beach or ‘up the Tower’ or to go scavenging over the Ranges or on the beach. To join the gang that eventually I was allowed to ‘tag along with’, both Brian and I - who were initiated at the same time - had to demonstrate our suitability to be members by doing a running jump off the cliffs near the red-flag hut at Elmore. It was a drop of over twelve feet on to a sloping shingle beach. That part of the beach was known as the ‘Rocks’, but actually there were no rocks, just a collection of large concrete blocks. The largest were about 30 feet long and 6 feet wide and deep arranged in an irregular heap. The tides and shifting shingle over time had shuffled them into a disarrayed but interesting jumble, which appeared to be slightly changed by every tide. Brian and I passed the test without any breakages and were accepted as ‘affiliated members’.

  Sometimes when I think about it, I am quite surprised that so many of us managed to eventually become pensioners, not so much because of enemy activity, but because of the sheer stupidity of what we did. When I think of all the stupid things that I have done in my life (and by the time you get to my age you have done quite a few), I would say that number one must be standing on what we believed to be an unexploded bomb. It was rusty, about four feet long and about a foot in diameter with fins and it was lying on its side just above the high-water mark on the beach towards the Stokes Bay end of the Ranges. Several of us stood on it in turn as an act of bravado or a dare. I think that we had the childish belief that we could jump clear between the B and ANG of the explosion if it went off. Not long after this, there was a rumour in circulation which made us think about what we had done. According to the rumour, a sailor was killed when he disturbed an unexploded bomb and it went off. It was alleged to have happened on the beach opposite ‘Skippers Garage’ on Marine Parade East, not far from where the old derelict building had once stood.

  Although we had got away with our game with what we thought was an unexploded bomb, there was an occasion the following year when things did go with a bang. Over the Warren there was an area where the military practised hand-grenade throwing. Obviously we were not supposed to go there, but of course we did (when it was not being used). There were quite a few trenches that didn’t seem to have any purpose. A couple of them were about six feet deep, three feet wide and about twenty-five feet long. Brian and I managed to lower ourselves into one of these deep ones, then discovered that it was not so easy to get out, and we were only able to do it with great difficulty. Eventually we succeeded by grabbing on to the roots of nearby gorse bushes which were growing out of the side of the trench. There were other trenches in the area that were only about four feet deep with longer runs, so we stuck to playing our war games in them after that. During one of our games we found what Brian said was a hand-grenade fuse. He had recently joined the Army cadets, and was pretty certain what it was, so we took ‘our find’ home. We were messing about with it in his back garden when Brian suddenly yelled ‘Run!’ I jumped over the wire fence between our gardens but didn’t quite make our back door; Brian scooted indoors and slammed their back door, and then there was an almighty bang. The exploding fuse made a half-inch deep crater in the concrete about six feet from their back door. This small crater was to be a reminder of our ‘near miss’ for quite a few years after that. At the time we were suitably chastised by our mothers. Needless to say, it didn’t stop us from continuing our quest to find more ‘items of interest’.

  Despite the earlier school visit by the constabulary, many young lads, including me, resumed ‘acquiring of ordnance’ by scavenging on the firing ranges in the evening, after the soldiers had finished for the day. Mostly we would get on to the Ranges from the beach. At that time the cliffs extended further towards the sea and near to where the angling club clubhouse is now situated was the red-flag hut. In this hut there would be someone on duty whose responsibilities included hauling up a red flag when firing was in progress to let everyone that they must ‘KEEP OUT’, and also to make sure that no-one went past the red flag.

  If the firing had apparently ceased and the flag was still up, it was customary for youngsters, myself included, to sneak along the beach close to the cliffs and then try to clamber around the end of the perimeter wire fence that extended down to the low tide water’s edge. Alternatively we would follow the fence inland and crawl under the wire in places where small gullies had been dug out by wild animals. As the gorse-covered bank that sloped down to the rifle range on the other side of the wire was a giant rabbit warren, it was most likely rabbits that had dug the holes, and which we had enlarged. These ‘entrances’ were much more difficult to get to unobserved when anyone was on duty at the hut.

  On our scavenging expeditions to the Ranges it would be most unusual not to find at least a couple of live rounds on each visit. Nevertheless, even with our most diligent scavenging, we never found all of the lost bullets, as a later occurrence would show.

  Not only were the Ranges a source of illicit ‘finds’, they were also a great adventure playground where, instead of slides and see-saws, there were the target-raising mechanisms in front of the butts, the turntables on the narrow gauge railway and sometimes even a railway trolley. Also the area was frequented by sailors and their girlfriends, and on a number of occasions we came across couples engaged in alfresco amorous activities. When the older lads in the group explained to the rest of us, in very descriptive (coarse) language, what was going on, I became appraised of the details that would be missing from the talk which Dad gave me, several years later, when I was about to venture out into the ‘big wide world’.

  Gorse fires over the Warren and Browndown ranges were a regular occurrence and it was recorded in the press in September 1946 that during one of these gorse blazes ‘bullets lost during training operations went off a frequent intervals but no-one was injured.’ I witnessed this fire at close range and the most awful thing about it was watching how the fire was spread. At the bottom of the gorse-covered embankment was the narrow-gauge rail track, and it was expected that it would provide a fire break. But many rabbits, with their fur in flames and fleeing the fire, jumped across the track and set fire to the gorse and grass on the other side.

  The Lost Goldmine of Lee

  The more we learnt about our neighbours after we moved into Anglesea Road, the more we realised that there were extended families all living in close proximity to one another. At the Gosport Road end of Brickland Terrace there was Granny Sherwood and in the bungalow effectively next-door in Gosport Road, just 25 yards away, was her son with his wife and two daughters. At the other end of the Terrace lived Mr and Mrs Goodwin; her brother ‘Young Mr Horne’ lived opposite, with his wife and son, in the first bungalow in Wootton Road, which backed onto our house. Next to the Terrace was a pig farm, complete with barn, that belonged to the father of ‘Young Mr Horne’, and of course he was known as ‘Old Mr Horne’. Fortunately for us we lived up-
wind from the pig farm. That is, when the wind came from the normal prevailing quarter - the south west. On the rare occasions when the wind blew from the north east in the summer, it tended to pong a little.

  Old Mr Horne was often to be seen with his horse and cart as he went to and fro between his farm and HMS Daedalus to collect swill for the pigs. One day he passed a bunch of us lads as he was on his cart on the way back from the kitchen on the base, complete with a cartload of old drums filled with swill. He called out: ‘do you like ship’s chocolate?’ The answer obviously was yes, at which he threw down to us several unwrapped bars. To this day I am not quite sure what ‘ship’s chocolate’ was - it certainly wasn’t Cadbury’s. Anyhow we thanked him, wiped off any excess pieces of extraneous material, ate the ‘chocolate’ and more or less enjoyed it. In those days we didn’t wash our hands quite so frequently. This is probably how we built up our immunity against many illnesses ... and of course in other cases how we caught them.

  Behind the pig farm there were fields that stretched to the Warren, which later became known as the Wild Grounds. Following on round from the pig farm, along Wootton Road, on the field side, there was a smallholding where it was possible to buy vegetables. This was at a time when the population were urged to ‘make do and mend’ and to ‘dig for victory’. To this end, the Council ordered that part of the Recreation Ground should be ploughed up so that the land could be used for the growing of vegetables. Further along Wootton Road where it curves, on the field side and about 20 yards from the road, there was a large hole about 50 yards in diameter and about 30 feet deep. It had a great deal of rubbish in it, and at one time it may have been as a rubbish tip as it was known at the ‘Dump’.