At Last We've Found You

By Rosemary Richards

Born to Change

How do you tell a life story? Hmmmm. Well, suppose you are me and have lived two lives? Now, imagine you are writing for understanding from people, including your only surviving child? How do you tell it? I tell it this way. Painfully. Honestly. Completely

. In 1939, I was born a rather self-aware boy in the UK and was given the name Richard Lockley by my parents. I lived the adventurous life of a well-off world traveler. I was a rugged man riding the outback and sailing the various waters, including the Greek islands. Eventually, I married and had a son and a daughter. But, I was never quite comfortable with who I was. I never felt...right. In 1997, at age 58, I gave myself the name Rosemary and surgically switched my gender. I had finally found myself. I went from never feeling at home in my body to euphoria.

At Last We've Found You is my story. Love made me write it. Please read it for a personal, unexpected experience of truth and triumph.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carolyn Lam
• Release date: Jul 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9780995353404

Book preview

AT LAST

WE’VE FOUND YOU

by Rosemary Richards

Smashwords Edition

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1      9/39 to 1/12/52      Finding my true self

Chapter 2      2/12/52 – 10/58      Adjusting to my secret life

Chapter 3      10/58 – 08/62      University with no ambition

Chapter 4      11/62 – 5/63      Voluntary work in Algeria

Chapter 5      5/63 – 12/63      Voluntary work in Iran

Chapter 6      12/63 – to 3/64      Travel in Indian sub-continent

Chapter 7      3/64 – 10/65      Australia

Chapter 8      10/65 – 11/67      Europe, & back to University

Chapter 9      11/ 67 – 1/ 69      Iran again and Marriage

Chapter 10     1/69 – 7/71      2 Boats to the Mediterranean

Chapter 11     2/71 – 9/75      Sailing to Tragedy

Chapter 12     9/75 – 88      Back to Australia and Divorce

Chapter 13     1988 – 1997      The big Decision is made

Chapter 14    1997 to 2012      Comparative contentment

© Copyright, 2016 Rosemary Richards

The author reserves all rights. None of this book can be copied, reproduced, or in any way transmitted in any manner or form, using any methods, electronic digital, mechanical or photocopying, or by any audio recording, or any form of storage of information without the written consent of the author

Dedication

Dedicated to Sophie … my Angel

Chapter 1      9/39 to 1/12/52

Finding my true self

On the 19/9/1939, just sixteen days after WWII had been declared in the UK and while Hitler and Stalin were completing their invasion of Poland, I was born at 9:30 in the morning at our home in The Avenue, Richmond Yorkshire. Neither my father nor mother was Yorkshire ‘born and bred’. We were living in Richmond as my father; a Quantity Surveyor was working there in a civilian capacity with the British War Office at the nearby Catterick Army Camp. My sister, Janet, had been born two years earlier, and Roger came along as a younger brother, two years later in August.

Naturally, my first memories of Richmond were not until a couple of years later and only sketchy at that, as we left there when I was four to relocate to the south of England. We three children did return to Richmond for a week’s visit when I was about 10. We had often seen photographs from when I was small and along with my parents’ constant talk about the ‘Richmond Days,' I think I remember it well. But of course, I don’t! Maybe I do remember our dog, a Red Setter called Windsor, but again was it because of the photos we had, or my parents’ reminiscences? Apparently, Windsor died while trying to augment the food we gave him, which in wartime was very difficult, by scavenging other people’s rubbish and getting a bone caught in his throat. Interestingly, we never had another dog and from then on were always a ‘cat family’.

I started life as a happy and fit baby I am told, but when I was around 15 months old, I became very ill. After several months of trips to doctors and specialists, it was finally determined that I had Coeliac Disease, also known then as Malabsorption Disease. My parents were simply advised that if I lived until the age of seven, I would grow out of it; but how little the Specialists knew then. I discovered that it is not only a childhood ailment, as they told my parents it was in 1941 when I rediscovered it at the age of 49. I will mention it again later as it does continue to influence my life and interestingly, not just from a health angle.

However, while still living in Richmond, I began to become conscious there was a war on. Although the whole concept of war is difficult to imagine for a toddler, I did become aware. My father’s work at the beginning of the war was classified as a ‘reserved occupation’, which prevented him from enlisting, but in 1941 I, think, he was finally allowed to join up and was soon in uniform as a Lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. He was sent overseas in 1943 just when I was beginning to know him well. Dad’s return from the war was just before Christmas 1945 and he was now an acting Major, My brother Roger was too young to remember his daddy, and he was extremely scared and apprehensive of him for a while.

Though aware, naturally I did not fully realise what the war was about but was soon to learn when my Mother decided we should move to the South of England. I believe the reason for this was the trouble and cost for her of running a household in such hard times. My mother’s cousin, Cicely was going through similar problems.

Thus, when I was four we moved to New Malden in Surrey to my Aunty Cicely’s, whose house we shared for the latter two years of the war. Her husband, my Uncle Dennis was away in the army in India, so we were five in all: Aunty Cicely, my mother, my brother, sister and myself. The area southwest of London, where New Malden is, was commonly recognised as being close to, the ‘Flying Bomb Alley,' usually simply called ‘Bomb Alley’ named after the Doodlebugs, or the V1s, which were the German pilotless flying bombs, aimed at London from occupied Belgium. New Malden was not geographically in ‘Bomb Alley’ but nevertheless vulnerable from strays, and there were quite a few of those! These flying bombs did not always make it all the way to Central London but would simply veer off course and drop out of the sky when their engine cut out. They generally caused more structural damage than the loss of life, as one knew to take cover immediately the droning engine suddenly stopped.

I do remember one day how we were caught unexpectedly in broad daylight by an air raid warning. Mum felt we did not have time to reach the safety of an air raid shelter and made us lie down in the gutter in the road. Luckily, it was a dry day! I wonder to this day what she would have done it had been raining. ‘Do we really have to get in the gutter?’ Janet asked, but Mum was adamant. ‘You will be alright, this is a very effective ditch unless the bomb should land on top of us so just do it, we don’t have time to lose, the engine could stop any minute.' Fortunately, the Doodlebug droned on a while before dropping to earth to wreak damage I would never learn about or even comprehend.

Another wartime memory was to stand in our back garden and watch hundreds of planes circling overhead as they grouped in preparation for raids over Germany that night. We could hear the droning of their engines, would look up, wave, and shout out Good luck Johnnies, come back safe! To think how those airmen would have felt now makes me sick yet they were off to inflict on Germany what was happening to us in England. Maybe I even cheerily and innocently waved off the raid which firebombed the city of Dresden!

Many nights we would sleep under the special dining room table because of the regularity of the bombings from enemy planes dropping real bombs, quite different from the Doodlebugs. It was called a Morrison Shelter (named after the then Minister of War, Herbert Morrison). This was basically a heavy steel table with welded though removable, steel mesh sides. Some houses had a little shelter in their back garden instead, called an Anderson shelter which was a very strong, inverted U-shaped corrugated iron structure, about six feet by eight feet, and a small doorway at the front.

In our Morrison, my mother and aunt would sleep on two of the sides closest to the mesh and the three of us children would be ranged alongside my mother. If any bomb had landed rather close to our home, there would have been a lot of damage so we also had tape on the windows to prevent flying glass. I would think the Anderson shelters offered more protection on account of their curved sheets of corrugated iron and as they were half buried in the ground with the displaced earth piled on either side, usually well separated from any building. Later I gathered that these shelters were not too successful, as most of them seemed to be half full of water most of the time, and very few were regularly used. Generally, the Andersons did not have electricity and were certainly much damper and colder than a warm house, which may have been a deciding factor in their unpopularity.

The Morrisons were not that comfortable either as I heard recently from my sister how often my mum and aunt would wait until we three children were asleep, and with the All Clear siren sounded, they would go upstairs to their own beds as we fidgeted and moved around so much.

This room stays vividly in my memory to this day and the thing that most sticks in my mind, was the picture hanging on the wall over the fireplace. Years later, I came across it in a book which brought the memories of that room flashing back to me. The picture that hung in our living room was a print of a Rembrandt painting called The Man with the Golden Helmet (ca. 1650). For those who recall the picture, there is a glint on his armour, but I used to think the picture was there in honour of one of our brave firemen with a piece of an incendiary bomb or some spark from an air raid having fallen onto his shoulder from his helmet. Apparently, this picture is now attributed to being by another artist, but it does not alter my childhood memory of whom it really represented.

While we were living there, I had to have my tonsils removed. The special care I received from my mother and aunt on arriving home from the hospital was memorable because I was spoilt with specially prepared food not normally available during this time of strict rationing, food that features in every child’s parties these days like jelly and ice-cream.

My father led a very different life from us in those last two years of the war when he was posted to Kenya to help supervise Italian prisoners of war engaged in building railways and maintaining the infrastructure. He ate well, was promoted to Acting Major, played sports and was never required to fire a shot in anger. At home, our family knew full well the reality of war. This was not just from the nights spent sleeping under our dining table, but we would see the wreckage the morning after the bombing raids such as from attempts to bomb the railway bridge over the main road in New Malden. Although I would not have been aware of the brutal and tragic personal effects at the time, each one of those buildings in rubble would have meant the loss of life or injury to some unfortunate people.

I have never begrudged my father’s war life compared to ours, as it was very much the luck of the draw in those days; you simply had to go to where you had been sent. I know that, for him, those couple of years in Africa were the most exciting of his life, despite a severe bout of pneumonia and a car accident. Until his death in 2002, aged ninety-three; he never forgot his War experience for a moment. Roger has not been so forgiving, maybe because he too went into the military for several years as a Royal Navy Fighter Pilot and felt that Dad should have played a more active part in the War. Interestingly, I never was able to find out my mother’s view on Dad’s wartime service.

We did not eat as well as my father in those war days because, as I have already mentioned, we were stringently rationed. I was a little better off than my brother and sister were, as because of my coeliac condition, I was allowed the equivalent of two and a half children’s meat ration each week, which had to be lean meat. My diet also required me to have fruit but as that was hard to find I was given imported dried bananas, which I hated. My mother was asked by the Specialist to keep a record of everything I ate in an attempt to find what was causing my constant stomach problems. I received a partial copy of this journal from my father before he died. The trouble was that, although the sickness had been identified, knowledge of how to treat it was unknown. Despite the additional rations, at every meal, I was eating gluten, especially from that common food ‘the staff of life’, i.e. bread, which was slowly trying to kill me.

Certainly, I was not a very well child. I hadn’t grown to the height I should have been, so much so that my mother would get fed up of being constantly asked by strangers if my brother and I were twins as we would often ride in the pushchair together.

Despite my health problems, it was a happy time for me, but it couldn’t have been much fun for my mum and aunt with their husbands away for an indeterminate time. Coupled with the exigencies of wartime existence, I believe life must have been extremely difficult for them. Aunty Cicely managed the local Citizens Advice Bureau, which would have been very harrowing sometimes with the problems that bombing and hardships were causing people; maybe it is why I remember her being a heavy smoker. My mother, a trained Primary School teacher, did not work in paid employment; I think that looking after the five of us was work enough though she did not feel the need to smoke to cope.

We are inclined to forget how difficult it must have been then, but I do remember a story, and whether it was just that or an apocryphal tale of the time, I am not sure. However, the story is that one morning Aunty Cicely opened a milk bottle to find a top of a human thumb in the milk. After complaints had been made, the excuse was given that the Dairy had no idea where the thumb was after the accident. They took the chance on it not being discovered rather than lose the entire milk production for the day; which given the rationing would have been a major disaster.

My sister Janet went to the local Primary school, which was next door to our house. She only had to go through a gap in the fence to get there each day. I wished I too could join her and would enviously watch the games and fun in the playground each school day.

However, it was not to be as we moved in the last few months of the war to an old Customs Officer’s Cottage within view of the English Channel at Angmering on Sea in Sussex. The beach was just a few minutes’ walk away, but it might have been miles, as we could not gain access to it as was still heavily mined and fortified to prevent landings by the enemy. We could even see mines on the beach from time to time, which had come adrift and floated ashore. We were often startled by the sound of explosions as the soldiers detonated them or when they had firing practice. Just as we were ready to leave for our new home bought by my mother in Croydon Surrey, the beach began to be cleared by the soldiers, and so we never were able to have a paddle or a swim. We did get back there for a visit a couple of years later. At the access to the beach, there was an old empty pillbox that strongly smelled like it seemed to be used as a public toilet. And, there were still some remains of the beach fortifications, and it was not a place for children to have fun.

Our new house in Croydon was immediately opposite Uncle Fred and Aunty Ivy’s in Lower Addiscombe Rd, in the suburb of Addiscombe. Uncle Fred was the elder brother by eight years (and only sibling) of my father. They had two children who were both quite a few years older than we were. Although they were our cousins, because of the age difference we did not see them much, and it was not long after that, they moved to the newer Croydon suburb of Kenley.

This Addiscombe house was to remain my home for 17 years until I finally left at the age of twenty-three, never to return, except to recently view it externally. It represented a very stable time for us as a family following the difficult war years. I certainly loved the house but for me, the time was a realisation that I was very different from other people and that I learnt something about myself that was too difficult to tell to absolutely anybody at all.

The house we had moved into was a palace compared to our earlier domiciles, it was huge! The story was that my mother had bought it cheaply because of its size at the end of the war with her own money from a legacy. Maybe most people were wary of wanting such a big house with all the attendant costs of heating, lighting, and maintenance. It had been built in the 1890’s I believe, and is still standing and is now home to several pensioners.

For us children, however, it was a dream home: there was a large back garden, fully brick-walled, a garage at the bottom with access from a side street, along with other mysterious little sheds and an old chicken coop. There were several old fruit trees, which yielded abundant fruit after my father had done a lot of pruning on his return from the war.

In the house itself, there were two large cellars with low ceilings, the front one had a coalhole, and there was another separate little coal cellar (with a coalhole by the side of the house, to where our coal was delivered). There was what looked like a cupboard door on the stairs down, inside of which provided my parents with more storage room. It also gave us access to the foundation area under the house and a completely new set of ‘rooms’ which parents never bothered to visit. Though to be honest, we did not go there much as there was evidence of rat holes in the earth, but it was a very private and secret area. I even knocked some bricks out to make our access a little easier, which my father later found and lectured us about possibly undermining the safety of the house.

Dad was a keen gardener, and there was easily enough space in it to give each of us children our own little patch, but none of us never did that much with it. But we did enjoy all the produce from that garden which included apples of various types, pears, asparagus, strawberries, raspberries, loganberries, gooseberries, red currants and rhubarb. Well, these are the various goodies my father grew, I am sure there were more. I seem to remember he did try mushrooms on occasions in the old chicken coop before it fell to pieces with age and there was a very tempting cherry tree next door whose branches hung over our garden. It was easy to stand on the sturdy brick garden wall and pick them but Mr.Prashka the neighbour was aware of this and would condescendingly toss us some whenever he was picking them.

Our house had a grand appearance from the front with two sets of double gates and a semi-circular gravel drive to the front steps, which were red-tiled. One of the bedrooms, as well as the front attic, had an ornamental balcony, both accessible only by clambering over the sill of the open windows.

There were many rooms on the ground floor, variously described as: kitchen, scullery, walk-in pantry, hallway with a door to the cellars, a lounge room to the left of the front door (with a walk-in cupboard my father called the library), plus a double-sized lounge room from the front to the back of the house to the right. This large lounge had parquet flooring which my mother loved to keep waxed and polished with Kleeneze, a product which a salesman would regularly deliver to us. We did not have enough furniture for this room, but it is where we put the piano. We later bought a full-sized table tennis table, and all learned to play quite well, except for my mother, who for some reason, never played at all. Arguments about rules were common, and we always had a book of rules attached by a length of string to the side of the net. It was rare for games between us children not to be interrupted with cries of ‘You cheated’ or ‘that touched the net’ and so on.

The staircase with its elegant wooden banister rose from the tiled floor, complete with a dado. In this hall, there was still a bell on the wall that had previously been part of the system for summoning a servant to the relevant area using bell pull wires. We kept this bell to summon the family to Elevenses and meals. Upstairs to the left, we had a bathroom with toilet, plus a separate toilet and two bedrooms off a little hallway. To the right of the head of the main staircase was another few stairs up to three more bedrooms and a small dressing room off the main bedroom, which had its own washbasin. From this landing, the stairs went on up to another little landing and an attic at the back of the house, then up a few more stairs to a long room facing the street. In this attic, there were small doors into the roof from both sides, which were another area of storage and mystery for us to explore and get dirty. If this sounds complicated and confusing, just imagine how much fun it was for us children to live in and invite our friends into.

A very clear memory for me in the early years in Addiscombe was that when in bed, I used to experience what I later learnt to be called out-of-body experiences. Some nights I would float all over the house; sometimes even outside, then later, gently return to my sleeping body. It was not a mystical experience and only happened every now and then. I would not drift far from the house and usually stayed within it, it was not frightening; it was just something I did! I was probably between the ages of 6 to 9, and after it stopped, I never replicated the experience nor tried to. Well, there was just one more time that it happened, which I will mention later.

It was in this main attic that we kept the box of dressing up clothes, mostly female, that I secretly loved but could not openly show my enthusiasm for. I was always envious of the other children at parties enjoying dressing up with these clothes; some of them would have been almost turn of the 19th century. I would have loved to be able to enjoy it too, but could not refuse to take part, and would just feign enjoyment. For me, dressing up was not a game but a morbid realisation that I could not be the person I truly felt I was. This was the kind of thing that made me understand, from a very early age that I was not like other boys of my age.

In this house, we always had a cat or cats and the first one I recall the old tomcat that we inherited with the house. He became Davey, named after the Davis family, from whom my mother had bought the house. The next cats were Pitch and Toss, who we had from the time they were kittens. They used to love this house as well as I did and they would have great games chasing each other from top to bottom. One of the funniest moments would be when they would race down the staircase from the attic to the first landing, which was covered with linoleum. As they tried to turn 180 degrees at full speed their back legs would not grip the lino, and it would take many skids before the turn was completed, and they were on the next flight down. Pitch, the black one lasted many years. Unfortunately, we had a succession of Tabby companions for him, and he outlasted them all.

I would like to, but I cannot claim my childhood was perfect; However the events that I am about to write about did not affect me much at the time as I was ignorant of the intent and behaviour of the perpetrator.

Upstairs, next to the bathroom I previously mentioned there was a single toilet. This ‘little room’ had quite a lot more floor space than in the average toilet.

I think I would have been about seven or eight at the time when a relative who was several years older than I was, sexually molested me. This was in the guise of playing a game, and I thought it was some big secret between the two of us. This happened two or three times, but I did not feel I should tell tales on him to my parents. Decades later, I discovered he was also molesting my sister, probably around the same time.

Up to then I had admired him as an older relative and did not realise that what he was doing was wrong but rather thought that maybe he was simply having fun at my expense. Strangely, I continued to look up to him for quite some while until I realised that what he had done was more than abnormal.

I do not think I should describe what he did, but it was not the act of buggery. In retrospect, it was equally disgusting, and I am positive it did not scar me in any immediate way but as an adult, I ceased all contact with him but will later mention an effect his behaviour had on my life.

But back to happier times!

All three of us children went to Ashburton Primary school, which was about a mile from our house. We generally used to walk to school unless the weather was too harsh, and we were given money to return by bus or to spend if we were to walk home. This walk to and from school holds more memories for me than the school itself. Every morning was another adventure as we walked along our street, Lower Addiscombe Rd, to the school.

That daily walk along the shopping strip holds so many memories for me from infant school in 1945 until I left Addiscombe forever. The first block on the way to school housed a Hardware store, a bank, (later to hold my first bank account), a bakery, the local Post Office, an optician, and a bicycle shop, there were others, but these, in particular, had meaning to me. We always used to buy our bread fresh from the oven first thing in the morning from the back door of the bakery before the shop opened. Over the years I would have spent a lot of my money at the bicycle shop, and the local Post Office intrigued me as at one stage I could have sworn that one of the female counter staff was a man because she was so big and had big arms and hands, but I was probably wrong. The Optician was also visited regularly, and I was never happy to enter it.

Then as we went further towards school, there was another bank, later to hold my second bank account when the manager, on the other hand, was very rude to me. Dad was not happy, and he ended up quitting the bank itself and moving his mortgage to my new bank, then a dry cleaner and an electrical goods shop amongst others. The shops on the other side of the main road at this point were just that: they were on the other side and therefore on the wrong side and did not get so much business. These included a Hairdresser, which we used to use, a dress shop and a new car salesroom on the corner of Bingham Rd.

Our trip to school continued on, under the railway bridge and past a newspaper kiosk, which was competition for the one I later worked for. The next memorable shop was Sainsbury’s, not the modern type supermarket it is nowadays in the UK but an old style traditional Grocer. The staff used to wear long starched aprons, and the customer had to go from counter to counter for service. Butter was made into pats the size you wished in front of you, and you bought many provisions like sugar and flour in pounds and ounces, carefully weighed into paper bags.

One hot day, on the pavement outside Sainsbury’s, we met up with our next-door neighbour Dyllis, a girl about my sister’s age. She was sucking an iced-lolly and as we were chatting she put it in her mouth just as a large housefly landed on it and she put it right inside before she realized what she had done -- maybe from the horrified look on our faces. It’s strange how such a trivial incident is stamped indelibly for me on that piece of pavement.

Then there was Woolworth’s, just a general store then, where we used to buy lollies and the like. One afternoon when returning from school a friend surprised me when he showed me, very surreptitiously at the back of the store, a little plastic airplane. I hadn’t seen him buy it and when he told me he had ‘pinched’ it I was dumbfounded. He soon had me at it, and we used to stop there quite regularly and help ourselves. We did not steal for need but for the thrill as much as anything, and it was only when my mother one day found a fountain pen hidden in one of the drawers in my bedroom that she dragged the truth out of me. I was hauled off to Woolworth’s to return the stolen goods as the pen was not the only item discovered. The manager went on about having a big policeman out back; ‘If I take you inside to him he might take you away, if not this time, but definitely if you ever do it again’. That approach did not impress me as much as it should maybe, and although I did stop shoplifting from there on, it really did not help me to appreciate, or respect authority in any way.

The same person who taught me to shoplift temporarily also showed me how to make gunpowder when I was eleven and in the last year of the Primary School. The ingredients for this were bought from a gardening shop just across from the Black Horse Hotel. It was quite powerful, but we did not really make too much. I did, however, come back to it later when I was in my teens. More of that later!

Just past Woolworth’s, there was a fruit shop of which I only remember that when they used to sell grapes in season, they came from abroad packed in crushed cork. This is the way the grapes were packed to protect them on their long trip from a warmer climate to the UK. We used this granulated cork when at children’s parties for the ‘lucky dip’ in the bran tub; it was a lot less messy than bran.

A little further along there was then a watch repair shop at which my father was once ripped off by the owner on a repair job and we ‘hated’ that shop from then on.

Further on the shops became less frequented by us but the Co-operative was a large grocery store from which we felt we were forbidden to enter, and it held for us almost a taboo. My father was an extremely dyed-in-the-wool Conservative voter and the Co-op represented all things evil, as it was Labour supported and therefore maybe even Communist sympathetic.

My paternal grandfather had been a tiler in his early years and a little further, just past the Black Horse Pub on our way to school we would pass two of his earlier ‘jobs’. These works of his were the tiling of the entrance to the shops just where Black Horse Lane meets Lower Addiscombe Rd. He would have done this work probably about forty to fifty years previously. He was proud of his work, but these were the only examples that I recall having been pointed out to me.

After the Black Horse and my grandfather’s shops, we would pass a couple of blocks of private dwellings, and then came the Ashburton Park. Here there was a Municipal Library and a pond that was reputed to be full of leeches. It was not a natural pond, and why it had been built, I don’t know, maybe for model boats. We would sometimes make detours into this park on the way home from school, to visit the library or to play in the children’s playground next to it. There was still a bomb shelter there when we first started going to the school and one day, on the way to school, I was witness to its demolition by a crane swinging a heavy ball against the sides.

We were told to stand well back as this large crane swung a very heavy looking ball around and aimed it one of the side walls. It crashed with a great Bang, but nothing happened, but they kept at it, but we had to move on to school. When we came back from school, it was now just a pile of rubble and I could not help think that it would have been pretty safe to be in during a bombing raid if it was so difficult for these men to knock it down with such a heavy ball.

Croydon had been the heaviest bombed County Borough town in the UK and now, with the war over, all the signs of this damage were fast disappearing. It was still possible to see the places where the bombs had landed and destroyed houses but for the most part, these were repaired or rebuilt fairly quickly.

However some bomb-sites remained for years, and one could also see numerous signs of the bombing such as pockmarks on the facades of buildings. Roofs were the most noticeable signs of bomb damage as repairs were made quickly with any available tiles which would not match adjoining buildings. These different coloured roofs are noticeable to this day around London.

Another lingering evidence of the war was in one of the other local parks our family visited in 1946. We went to Lloyd Park as we had been told by a neighbour how good it was but we were not too impressed as it seemed to be nothing but a giant wheat field. On enquiry, we were told that it was part of the war effort and that the park would be back to normal after this crop has been harvested.

But back to the school, we used to walk to each day … I do not have too many memories of Ashburton, but an amusing one sticks in my mind from the infants’ school. We had milk every morning in little bottles and had to supply our own cups. One morning the teacher happily announced that drinking straws had finally become available again, (which was not the case in the war) and opened the lid of the box and cooed about how all the straws in it made it look like a honeycomb. Not for long however as she tilted it towards us a little too much and they all landed on the floor, We laughed our heads off and then we all helped in picking up the straws and they were put back in the box: nothing was allowed to be wasted in those days!

One day, during a game in the playground, I came to realise that I could not see out of one eye as well as the other. I would have been about six then, and when I arrived home, I asked my mother whether everyone had one good eye and one bad one. Well, did that cause a furore! When my father came home from work, he came into the bathroom where my brother and I were having a shared bath. He had not stopped from getting in the front door, racing up the stairs and with a very worried expression, asked me to cover my good eye and tell him how many fingers he was holding up. I could see that all right, it was just that I could not read with it.

From that day the long battle with glasses, drops in the eyes and specialists started, they tried patches on the good eye yet in the end when I was about 16 I was told to go home and stamp on my glasses, as nothing ever seemed to work. I gather that nowadays, lazy eyes are repaired more often than not. They put the delayed non-diagnosis of this problem down to the war. That War got the blame for a lot of oversights I think.

A big influence in my life then and now, as it is for so many people, was music. I am not sure whether to think that we now live in a better age than our predecessors did, as we have an incredible accessibility to music nowadays which is something that was not the case in the not so distant past. The difference is that people used to have to make their own music, as it was difficult, rare and expensive to be able to hear the truly professional performers.

My introduction to music was not through the school but via the radio. In the forties, I do not remember too much about it except we did not understand the magic of it. My brother and I thought there miniature people in the radio, and if you twiddled the knobs correctly, an instant replay was always possible. We did have a wind-up record player and a few records, which were the thick vinyl 78-rpm and had only a few minutes playing time. They became easily scratched or warped and if you wanted to listen to a symphony you were constantly swapping records all the time as the multi-stack type player did not come on the market until the fifties.

Popular songs seemed the most accessible, yet when we were very small I do remember Sparky’s Magic Piano, and there was another one too of this annoying American sounding youngster, called Sparky and the Talking Train which he was on when the train told him a wheel was falling off. As a result, he got the train stopped just in time and became a hero. There was also Alice in Wonderland records and Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Maybe that is why I do not like ‘Peter and the Wolf’ any more having heard it to death as a youngster, coupled with the plethora of personalities nowadays who feel they are entitled in some way to perform it as the narrator.

Primary school continued to foster my interest in music, as we would sing many songs, religious and otherwise. One of my favourites was ‘Nymphs and Shepherds Come Away’. I would never have publicly said how I liked singing songs like that, but I still love that genre of music and only wish I could competently sing it these days.

I took piano lessons from a neighbour but never really had the application, I suppose because boys considered playing the piano a ‘sissy’ thing to do. My sister however persevered and although she never became extremely accomplished, she could at least claim to be able to play the piano, which I never did. I did, however, join a local church choir and enjoyed it, and will write more of its influence on my life in pages to come.

My father was an ardent Gilbert and Sullivan fan and would love to practice scales and music from time to time accompanying himself on the piano often greeted by howls of abuse and groaning by the rest of the family. He would take us to Gilbert and Sullivan performances put on at the Grand Theatre in the High Street in Croydon, which I pretended to dislike, but really quite enjoyed, as I do to this day. The Grand was a lovely old theatre, and we would also go there to the traditional pantomime each Christmas. Interestingly, the fact that the Dame was always a man in drag meant nothing to me, and I have never felt comfortable with drag or gone to a ‘Drag Show’ - ever.

Later at the Grammar School the music master, Mr.Spratt was a mixture of good and bad characteristics. He obviously passionately loved his work and yet could be very hard on the children and treating us in a brutal way that surely would not be condoned these days. He did, however, inspire in me a growing appreciation of classical music, and I also began taking violin lessons at the school and think that I could claim to play it better than I ever could the piano. Why did I give it up? Probably the old excuse, that it was a ‘girlish’ thing to do, and I did not want to give myself away at all.

I did get my own back a little for his brutal side when one morning I had to see him before assembly. I noticed that his underpants were sticking out from his buttoned flies. I was too embarrassed to tell him as his temperament was very volatile. At assembly, he sat in the front row on the stage to help lead the singing in a loud and strident mix between bass and tenor and sometimes to give a talk to the school on classical music appreciation. He must have soon realised his predicament. The whole six hundred boys were watching him and laughing amongst themselves until he took a moment during prayers to redress the situation. And I could have saved the poor man if I had felt so inclined or dared!

It would have been worse for him if it had of been one of those days when he spoke about music. I remember the time he attempted to tell the whole school the difference between 3/4 and 6/8 time by beating a stick on the floor and stamping with his left foot, all the time shouting how it was to be understood with a very confused face. We did not learn anything from that demonstration.

But, I get ahead of myself; I must return to Ashburton School. Because my birthday fell on September nineteenth, I had not been eligible to go to school in New Malden. The following year I started school at the age of five but was six two weeks later so I was wrongly put in with a class who had started their schooling during the previous year. When I was ready to sit the Eleven Plus exam along with all my classmates, I was told I was too young and would have to repeat the year. To soften the blow, I was told I would be a prefect in the new school year’ but that never happened.

It was a bitter blow for me as I had suddenly lost all my school friends and as I had done the same work the previous year, I became bored and disinterested. I was not made a prefect and was in constant trouble. During this repeat year, I was even sent down to a lower level for a while, which only served to alienate me further from the education system. I began to get the cane from time to time, which had not happened up to this date.

The headmistress, Miss Taylor before the punishment, would give me a lecture on what would happen to me if I continued to misbehave: ‘I do not enjoy doing this, and so I feel I have to encourage you to change your ways. Are you right or left-handed?’ ‘Right, ‘I would say and hold out my left which I had rubbed with soap beforehand to help lessen the pain. Usually, she would administer two blows, and I would sulkily return to class.

Many years later, I met the caning Headmistress when she was on holiday with her female partner. She could not avoid me as I was serving her drinks in her holiday hotel in Guernsey and of course, lesbian relationships were not so acceptable then as nowadays so I was a little amused by her embarrassment at having been ‘caught out’ by an ex-pupil.

My parents had great hopes for me and had sent me to sit for scholarships by way of Entrance Examinations to a couple of the so-called better Grammar Schools in the town, but my heart was never in it and I obviously never did do well enough to get one of these places. So it was up to the Eleven plus exam. I passed this satisfactorily, and my mother later told me what my IQ had been rated at because she was teaching in the same school at the time. It was very surprising that she did that, as she was very correct in all her behaviour. She was not a religious woman if church going is deemed the criterion for such a description, but nevertheless, she was a Believer I feel.

While still in the Primary School, a friend suggested that I join the Cubs. I went along a few times, decided to sign the dotted line, and was soon in the uniform. This uniform did not please me in the same way as the one at church did. I remember going for some badges. In particular, the Model maker’s badge for which I made a bathroom out of papier-mâché with the taps made from silver milk tops. My cubbing days didn’t last that long, and a friend and I were both requested to leave for making smutty jokes about the tales at story time. There was nothing I really missed about the Cubs yet I ended up joining the Sea Scouts when I was eleven. This was different, and I did stay with them until I turned 16, which helped me get through some difficult years

I eventually went to Selhurst Grammar School in September 1951, which for me, and so many others my age, was a very bad school indeed. I have already made mention of the music master, but there were still a few old teachers who had not fought in the war, and there was the new, younger breed. Some of these were ex-forces people but overall not, I should think. The standard of teaching was poor to abysmal especially for the non-achievers who were given the worst teachers.

The school, now closed, was a municipal Grammar school, which had modelled itself on the old public school image of tradition single-sex schooling and submission by fear. I found it to be almost Dickensian in its approach, but it had only been in existence a few decades: I don’t know the reasons for its closing, but it certainly did not deserve to remain in existence.

My Parents have had very little mention so far. I just wished I could have shown them the affection I felt for them both, but one had to be careful not to be labelled as a sissy at any time, and I could not allow my true nature ever to manifest itself.

My mother was born in Rhodesia (now Zambia) on 13/4/1905 and was four years older than my father (b 30/3/09). I always felt that this must be a magic secret to making a marriage successful as my parents always seemed to be so happy and so much in love with each other compared to so many of my friends’ parents.

Mum had left Rhodesia and travelled by ship to England, just before World War I, to stay with an Aunt as the marriage of her parents had broken up. The reason for this she explained to me much later was that her father was an alcoholic. This had the result of making her a teetotaller at an early age as, she was obsessed with the fear that in some way alcoholism was hereditary, which was partly the reason why she was older than most of her generation when she finally married. She did not seem to feel there was a need for her to worry about Janet, but for Roger and me she swore she would shave our hair off if we should ever arrive home drunk when we were older.

After I rediscovered my coeliac condition at the age of forty-nine and joined the local Coeliac Society, I learned that the condition could heighten the effect of alcohol and could easily be mistaken for alcoholism if one was a regular drinker. As coeliac disease is hereditary, but often only seems to affect about one in ten of the family, I could only assume it must have been my mother’s father from whom I would have most likely inherited the gene. I just wish I could have told my mother this, but I only found about it a few years after her death in 1985.

Some of the happiest family memories were of our annual holidays. I don’t know how Mum and Dad managed to afford it, but they did, and it was good for us to be together. The first ones I remember were going to Folkestone on the South Coast in Sussex. We would stay at a hotel on the front, but the weather never seemed great as I do not have too many memories of messing about on the beach. We did make a trip once to the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. I just checked Wikipedia on the Net, which to this day is