Growing up in Lee-on-the-Solent Page 5

  In a conversation that a group of us youngsters ‘accidently’ overheard (well, you know what kids are like) which happened as we passed a conspiratorial gaggle of housewives standing in a queue outside one of the shops in Elmore, the topic of the gossip was one of the ‘toffee-nosed’ officers’ wives. ‘She’s no cause to be so hoity-toity .... all fur coat and no drawers.’ Us youngsters all assumed that they were referring to the subject of the gossip going out inappropriately dressed, and thinking that the expression must be an upmarket version of ‘red hat no knickers’. We all thought it was very amusing. It was much later that I discovered that both the expressions referred to behaviour and not attire, and that a red hat was almost part of the uniform worn by the women that Dad would eventually warn me about.

  Apart from the provisions purchased in the High Street and a few local shops, there were other things, such as bread and milk, which were delivered by the same delivery vans that had called at the house when we lived in Stubbington: Sandy’s the baker, Williams from Titchfield and Tom Parker’s milkmen from Cams Alders. Williams only came round once a week, but milk was delivered every day (except Sunday), and bread was delivered every few days. Milk was delivered to just about every house, but not all families had the bread delivered because some of them preferred to buy their bread in the High Street or at the baker’s in Elmore.

  Among the small collection of shops in Elmore opposite the Inn by the Sea was a Post Office, which had one of those cylindrical red postboxes standing outside. During the war it had its top painted a pale green, and we were told that this paint would change colour in the event of a gas attack, in which case we had to put on our gasmasks. I think it’s almost certain that by the time anyone noticed the change of colour on the top of the postbox, provided that you were tall enough to see it - which I most certainly wasn’t - everyone in the area would already be dead.

  In those days a Postmaster was a highly respected person and widely accepted as a character referee. On at least two occasions I went to see Mr Aguter, the Postmaster, to sign forms to attest to my good character, which he did. How little he knew!

  The Odd Bomb or Two

  As the war had progressed we had all become a bit blasé about air-raid sirens. During a daylight raid on Grange aerodrome, we hadn’t bothered even to take shelter under the table downstairs; in fact I was watching from our back bedroom window as the bombs ‘tumbled down’. I had expected them to be a dull brown, as I had seen on many newsreels at the cinema, but to my surprise these were glistening silver.

  Towards the end of the war, when the doodlebugs appeared upon the scene, our attitude to the hostilities definitely changed. Most people including myself considered these to be the most frightening of all the bombing episodes. Pat was on her way home from school one afternoon when the dreaded siren sounded. As she ran along Anglesea Road from the Raynes Road end, she heard the rough unmistakable motorbike sound of a doodlebug engine and she burst into tears of fear. Believe me, that sound really did strike fear into you. Suddenly she heard a voice calling out to her ... it was me. I had also heard the sound of the approaching flying bomb (to give it its correct title) and had taken shelter in the space underneath a brick water tank on the corner of Anglesea Road and Seymour Road. The tank was built on small brick support walls and it had a shallow void underneath, and a lot of fine rubble. I yelled at her to come and take cover. She quickly scrambled underneath the water tank with me and shortly after that the motorbike noise stopped. The silence was almost as bad as the sound of the engine. No, in truth it was even worse, because you knew that something unpleasant was going to happen very soon and very near. We heard the explosion, but it was not in the immediate vicinity and we sighed with relief.

  My sister Pat

  After the war it was acknowledged that on the night of 25 June 1944 a flying bomb had fallen on Stubbington and totally destroyed the picturesque buildings on the north side of the Green. This is just an illustration of how devastating the doodlebugs were - maybe not as bad as the aerial mines, but nonetheless bad enough.

  Apart from the devastating attack on Daedalus in August 1940, only a few bombs were dropped on Lee-on-the-Solent: we did hear the thud of some that landed in the fields about 400 yards behind - that is to the north of - Brickland Terrace. Possibly they were jettisoned by some Luftwaffe aircrew trying to make their way back to the Fatherland. I have sometimes wondered if they all exploded. About a week later, when I was walking along the track across the fields, I saw some mounds where I had expected to see craters, because it was in the area where I thought that the bombs had landed. Although I had not been able to identify any bomb craters in the fields, I can say categorically that there was a crater in the promenade near where the Skate Park is now situated. I was cycling around the crater the day after the bomb had exploded there. As usual I was showing off, which always seems to be my downfall, and once again, downfall is a most apposite word. The bike slipped and I fell into the crater, landing on my back with the bike on top of me and I was still in the cycling position.

  The Sound of a Dying Duck

  During the war, church congregations were much larger than they are nowadays. For our family, like many others of various denominations, the church was quite an important part of our lives. I daresay that you probably think that I needed it, or that going to church didn’t do me much good, in the light of my revelations (more to come). Irrespective of whichever of these was true, Mum, who was an ardent - more than devout - Catholic, took Pat and me to Mass every Sunday morning, and we were also sent to Catechism classes (Sunday school) in the afternoon. In addition to this there would often be a Benediction service in the evening. At that time, and indeed up to 1980, the Catholic Church at Lee consisted of an old asbestos shed-like building on the site of the present church in South Place.

  Even though not all families went to church, practically all families tried to keep Sundays as a bit special, even if it was only for a bit of relaxation and peace and quiet. Allowing youngsters to play outside on Sundays was frowned upon most seriously, and the vast majority of parents would not let their children do it. In spite of this prevailing attitude, the parish priest at that time, who was very keen on football, would allow altar boys and other young lads of the parish to have a kick-about game of football in the back garden of the presbytery on some Sunday afternoons. This definitely did not meet with the approval of many parishioners, especially the ladies of the parish, my mum included. ‘On a Sunday!’ was the oft-heard comment. And this was at a time when the Parish Priest was held in very high regard, and when criticising him was almost tantamount to blaspheming.

  Except for going to church and Sunday school, Sundays were days when you did practically nothing, which meant that they were very, very, very long days indeed. A few people would go to the cinema at Lee Tower for the evening performance, but as it would be work the next day, and work started early, these performances drew quite small audiences.

  During the 1940s and into the 1950s, it was the custom for some parishioners to have a seat in the church which they ‘sponsored’ and which had their name inserted in a holder at the front of the pew. It was ‘their seat‘. Our family finances did not run to this. So Mum, with Pat and me in tow, tended to be early for Mass, otherwise it meant a frantic scan to find three vacant seats next to each other.

  When I was eleven, by which time we had a new parish priest, I was given instruction on how to serve on the altar. To be an acolyte in those days was somewhat different to what it is today. First and foremost, an altar- boy (it would be many decades before girls would be allowed on the altar) had to learn by heart long tracts of Latin.

  This is how the Mass would proceed when there was just one altar boy. The priest, wearing his vestments and a biretta, a square cap with three flat projections (not a pistol!) would enter from the vestry, or ‘changing room ‘in lay parlance, and walk to the altar following the server. He would hand
the biretta to the server, who would place it on a side table and then kneel on the opposite side to the priest. The altar was on the very back wall of the church (furthest from the entrance) and the priest and server for most of the Mass would have their backs to the congregation. The Latin responses had to be said clearly and loudly enough to be heard by the whole congregation. Other duties of the acolyte included moving the Mass book, from the Epistle-side of the altar to the Gospel side, after the Epistle, and then back to the Epistle-side after the Gospel. Also, the server had to hold a silver salver under the chins of parishioners as they knelt at the altar rail for communion.

  Dad had recently become a Catholic. I am not sure if this was in some way connected with my eventually becoming a pupil at St John’s College in Southsea just under a year later. Shortly after I had started to serve on the altar, Dad was also taught how to serve at Mass by the parish priest. In return Dad tutored the priest in a rather different skill.

  In addition to scavenging for ammunition and collecting shrapnel, I - like my contemporaries - also collected barrage balloon elastic, which came in the form of what could best be described as stretchy ropes of about half an inch in diameter and which were composed of about 50 sixteenth-of-an-inch square elastic strands.

  To this day I have a lasting picture in my mind of Dad and the priest competing to kill flies at a range of about a yard with strands of this elastic by ‘pinging them’. There did seem to be a lot more flies around then. Nevertheless it was quite an eye-opener to see the priest in a less ecclesiastical light.

  In the church there was a harmonium which added a great deal of feeling and spiritual uplift to the Latin hymns during the Benedictions, but on other occasions I must admit that it was not quite so uplifting. There was a bit of a problem with the harmonium and the organist needed an assistant to lift some of the keys, which had a tendency to stick. On one notable occasion during a wedding, the assistant was either missing or rather slow in performing their task. The result was unintended musical variations which, for those who were attempting to sing the hymns, proved to be very tricky to follow; in fact the congregation failed miserably. The expression ‘the sound of a dying duck’ comes to mind.

  A Pink Testimonial

  With some help from our parish priest, the one who had studied ‘fly swatting’ with my father, I was accepted to be a pupil at St John’s College Southsea. Mum Dad and I were collectively interviewed by the Brother Director. I must admit it felt more like an interrogation, probably because of my guilty conscience. Nevertheless I was accepted, and I started at the college in September 1943 in the Upper Third form. From then on I had to be careful not to get up to mischief, or at least not to get caught.

  I enjoyed my time at St John’s immensely. In the college there was a mixture of boarders and day-boys. I was a day-boy. From the very beginning it became apparent that this was to be a whole new experience. To start with, when writing in ink, I now had my own fountain pen; not as messy as the old pens, though it was still possible to get a little ink on unguarded fingers, especially if the top of the pen had not been screwed on properly after use. When I used my brand new ‘Waterman’ for the first time, I recalled my stained and strained introduction to writing with ink, five years previously. It had coincided with the introduction to the mysteries of that foreign language which was known as joined-up writing: how we had to copy into our books, over and over again, a letter of the alphabet as written on the blackboard by the teacher. No more of those comfortable capital letters. Once we had reached the letter ‘z’ we moved on to some two- and three-letter words. I had become ‘fluent in the ‘joined up’ writing language, in fact I was now adding my own ‘accent to the language’ with my own flourishes. At St John’s, classwork was far more rigorous and demanding, and there was always plenty of homework, with at least two subjects to be completed each night.

  On every page of written work, in the top left-hand corner, we had to write the letters JMJ (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph). This illustrated the Catholic ethos that underpinned the teaching of the De La Salle Christian Brothers in St John’s.

  As well as Monday to Friday, we had to attend college for the first part of Saturday mornings. On these Saturday mornings all pupils were given a written testimonial for their week’s performance, which took account of their classwork, homework, and behaviour. A pink testimonial was good, a blue one was fair, but a white one was poor. Three white testimonials in succession, and, the parents would be sent a letter, summoning them to visit the headmaster. In addition to the overall mark there was the position in the class, and these were read out.

  I remember my first testimonial was a blue one and I was twenty-first in the class, the next week I had a pink testimonial and was fourteenth, the following week was pink again and I was seventh, and the week after that I was first, and stayed first or thereabouts for the rest of the year. At the end of that year I jumped a class and went from Upper Third to Upper Fourth, and started my ascent again, eventually reaching the number one spot. However, as luck would have it, despite continuing my good performance for two more years, when it came to the School Certificate examination I failed English language.

  At St John’s College there was a small contingent of pupils who travelled from Lee-on-the-Solent and Gosport and who, although of different ages and in different Forms, had some kind of collective identity. I often went to school with Denis Lazarus, whose family owned the ‘Quick Turnover’, a greengrocer’s shop in Lee-on-the-Solent.

  The journey to school was always interesting. We travelled by the Hants and Dorset bus from Lee to the Gosport Ferry, then the ferry across the harbour. I remember the names of three of the ferry-boats at that time, Vesta, Vadne, and the Venus. The captain would stand at the ship’s wheel steering the ferry, in his pulpit-like bridge. His ‘mate’ and a deckhand were in charge of the hawsers that tied up the ferry, and the chains between the stanchions on the port side of the foredeck. The tying up of the ferry when it arrived at the pontoon was quite impressive to watch, especially if the sea was a bit rough. The hawser would be thrown, up to six feet, to lasso a bollard on the pontoon, and then deftly looped in a figure of eight around the pair of bollards on the foredeck to take the strain as the ferry tried to escape the restraining leash. It was a performance worthy of any wild-west rodeo show. Not until the ferry had been made fast would the chains be released by the captain and undone by the ‘mate’ or deckhand, and woe betide anyone else who had the temerity to try to undo the chains.

  Embarking and disembarking at certain times of the day could be a pretty chaotic affair, with foot passengers vying with cyclists for the next position in the queue. The cycles were stacked on the foredeck against the chains on the opposite side to where the boarding took place. It was a system of ‘last on first off’. The most hectic times were just after clocking-off in the dockyard. The vast majority of the dockyard employees owned bicycles and travelled to and from work on them. When it came to clocking-off, they emerged through the ‘gates’ like a swarm of angry bees coming out of a disturbed nest. Those cyclists who travelled across to Gosport on the ferry were in somewhat of a quandary, not wishing to miss the ferry but at the same time not wanting to be first on. If the sea was a bit rough it also meant that the bikes, especially those against the chains, were thoroughly dowsed with the spray.

  Once we had disembarked on the Portsmouth side it was another bus or trolleybus ride. The number five trolleybus was the one that we would take if we had missed the bus to Elm Grove, because it went to South Parade pier with a stop at Handley’s corner, which was near the present junction of Osborne Road and Palmerston Road, and not too much of a walk to the college. At ‘The Hard’ near the ferry, it was quite fascinating to watch when the conductor, with a long pole, changed the trolleybus connectors to a different line, for a ‘return journey’. The connectors consisted of two long parallel flexible poles, fixed on the top of the trolleybus. They protruded like a
n insect’s antennae, and it was by means of these that the vehicles were connected to the electrical supply that was distributed by means of a series of pairs of overhead cables supported by tall poles along the various routes. There was a network of these cables spread like a giant cobweb above the streets of Portsmouth and Southsea. When the connectors were being changed to a different line, on most occasions it would be accompanied by a series of sparks, especially if it was raining.

  The Gosport Ferry

  On one cold, icy, finger-numbing winter’s morning, as we were on our way to school, several of us had run down the slope to the pontoon on the Gosport side, attempting to catch the ferry before it cast off. The pontoon in those days had no cover or railings at the edge. There had been a heavy frost on this particular morning and it was very slippery underfoot. Although I had stopped running when I reached the pontoon, my momentum caused me to continue to slide and, in an instant, I could see the ominous threshed-up water between the ferryboat and the pontoon literally beneath my feet. As I was mentally preparing for the icy shock that I thought I was about to suffer, I could see and hear the propeller of the ferry that was thrashing away, straining to keep the stern of the ferry close to the jetty, just a few feet from where I thought I was about to enter the water. I had both feet on the narrow metal strip at the edge of the pontoon, when Denis grabbed hold of me by my satchel. Although I was quite a good swimmer, I was wearing heavy winter clothes, and had a satchel heavy with books over my shoulder. Dennis was much heavier than I was, and he brought me to an abrupt stop. I took a rapid step back from the brink. I believed then, and still do, that he most probably saved my life that day.

  Apparently when he got home that evening and his parents asked him about his day he just said: ‘oh I stopped John Green from getting wet.’