What a Life!

By Marianne Stevens

   Beginning life in Northern Ireland, Marianne grew up in London during the fun-filled ‘60’s. After working in beautiful Bermuda she became a naval wife and travelled extensively between New Zealand, England, Australia and Europe.

   Overcoming breast cancer 30 years ago she was determined to follow her buc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linellen Press
• Release date: Dec 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781876922917

Book preview

MARIANNE STEVENS

Copyright © 2016  Marianne Stevens

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1535270764

ISBN-13: 978-1535270762

Produced by Linellen Press

265 Boomerang Road

Oldbury  Western Australia

www.linellenpress.com.au

DEDICATION

To my wonderful husband Peter, my beautiful daughters and grandchildren and to all my friends, of whom I have so many. I have been very blessed.

.

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty one

Chapter Twenty two

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Peter for keeping the details accurate, and to Scribblers Writing Group in Mandurah who are an enormous source of encouragement. I couldn’t have written this book without their help. 

Also, I am most grateful to Professor Arlene Chan, my oncologist, without whom I would not be around to write this memoir.

Chapter One

The Early Years

Looking down from the BOAC plane window, I wondered what on earth I was doing, starting a new job in far-off Bermuda. Now the islands lay below me isolated in a sparkling sea and my knees were knocking together with fright. It was 24th May 1965 and apart from a couple of short holidays in Europe, I had never left home before. The previous night I had looked at the atlas, to see where I was heading. Bermuda sounded so exotic it had caught my imagination, but where was it?

I soon found out it was in the Atlantic and not in the Caribbean where most people believed it to be. Working as the Chest Secretary at St Thomas’s Hospital for three years, I had become bored with London and, finding that Peter was being posted to Borneo with the Fleet Air Arm for eighteen months, I decided this was the ideal opportunity to travel. I had applied for a job in Bermuda at the hospital and been accepted. I left St Thomas’s on a Friday and was due to start work there on the Monday. Each time I wavered in my decision, I became resolute, not willing to give Peter the satisfaction of saying ‘I told you so.’ So here I was, looking down on these fishhook-shaped islands where a new job awaited me, and it looked an awfully long way from anywhere. However, this was further on into my story and it all started much earlier, before I was born.

My parents, Gerard and Anna (Isabel) were married on 21st December in 1939, the year World War 2 was declared. They met working at St Mark’s Hospital in London before Gerard joined the RAF and Anne did some private nursing. His was a prominent Roman Catholic family; many of his relations became monks in Yorkshire and South Africa, and their graves are to be seen at Ampleforth Abbey and Ceres in South Africa. Our forebears had arrived in Norfolk from Repentigny near Lisieux in the 12th century, founding an abbey in the village of Pentney. The name was ‘anglicised’ from de Repentigny to Pentony, my maiden name. I wish they had kept the original of course.

My parents, on right, 1940, at a pub with friends

My parents, on right, 1940, at a pub with friends

My paternal grandfather, Alfred, was a silk buyer in London and, due to the Great Depression, the family migrated to South Africa. Gerard was sent to a Marist College in Johannesburg before the family had to move to Cape Town. My grandmother said they had to put the table legs in tins of kerosene to stop ants devouring their food. One night she had ventured outside and, to avoid being mugged by a local, threw a bag of pepper that she always carried into his face.

The job my grandfather had been offered didn’t materialise and they were very hard up. The family managed to rent a farmhouse near beautiful Mostert’s windmill and because of their precarious circumstances, my father had to leave school. He worked for the Groote Schuur Hospital board and they lived mainly on peanut butter sandwiches. Eventually they managed to scrape together the fares to return to Britain. This made my father rather bitter as he lost the opportunity to train as an engineer, blaming my grandfather for their predicament.

The Campbells, my mother’s family, were Presbyterians from Whitehead in Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland where she was christened Anna Isabel, but became known as Anne in England. My mother wanted to nurse but her father wouldn’t agree so she worked for six months in Hoggs’ beautiful china store in Belfast. After his sudden death she thankfully went into nursing. On finishing her training she was sent to Catholic homes to help deliver babies whilst Catholic nurses went to Protestant families.

There was so much poverty many could only afford newspapers instead of sheets on the beds. Finding a job in Northern Ireland, particularly with the biggest employer, the shipyard Harland and Wolf, was almost impossible for a Catholic. My mother’s best friend was Catholic and she went to stay with her in Rosscommon where it was noted at Mass she isn’t one of us.

As it was wartime, my mother went back to Belfast to give birth to me in her old teaching hospital. I was born on 22nd March 1941 and was lucky to survive as she had pre-eclampsia. I spent the first six months of my life in Whitehead while my father served in various parts of England, flying mainly Wellingtons against the Germans. My mother took me back to England, dodging the bombs around Liverpool then onto London that also was being bombed. My earliest memories are of the two air raid shelters -  The Morrison one indoors, and an Anderson shelter my father had dug in the garden. I recall being under the dining room table with my Auntie Mary (who was then aged about 17) as bombs fell around Streatham.

My father fell down the stairs when a bomb landed on the road almost opposite our house. His language I gather was quite colourful but he was lucky to be alive. Our house was on the hill but the valley below was called Doodlebug alley as that is where most of the mortars landed.

We moved around England while he was stationed in Norfolk, Cambridge, and even Bletchley Park, where the German enigma machine code was broken. I was baptised at the ancient church of St James in Aston Abbots nearby. My father also flew Lancaster planes and a Spitfire. He was awarded the caterpillar badge as his life had been saved baling out of his plane with a parachute. Returning from a bombing raid over the Ruhr dams, his plane had been hit and he was refused landing rights at the nearest RAF station back in Britain, so, running out of fuel, he had to crash-land the plane. He had asked his navigator if everyone had evacuated the plane before he did so, but sadly one crew-member was too terrified and went down with the aircraft. He felt bitter that he hadn’t been allowed to land at the first RAF station, but they were too scared to turn on the lights and thus invite German bombers in.

Another early memory was at an RAF station when a pantomime was taking place, which was quite incomprehensible to me. Aladdin flew across the stage on a long wire and I was quite bemused as I crawled under people’s legs. It was in Grantham, Lincolnshire, a town that became famous as Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace. Her father had a grocery store there.

After this we were ‘billeted’ with people called Hammond in a tiny village called Gayton near Kings Lynn in Norfolk. Unbeknown to us, Pentney, the village where our French ancestors founded an abbey, was very close by. If only we had known at the time.

I was friendly with a local child, Christopher Groom, and remember being taken to buy bread at the windmill in the village, the sails going around to grind the corn. One day a plane flew low overhead and we rushed outside to wave to my father as he dipped his wings to us.

It was very cold in the bungalow as it was only built with single brick walls, with an outside ‘copper’ for washing clothes. My mother told me even the eggs froze. I remember gas masks, blackout curtains (you were not allowed to show lights) and air-raid sirens and thinking the Germans were something that fell out of the sky and adults called them ‘Jerries"! The sound of those sirens still spooks me.

Adele, my sister, was born in 1943 in a private maternity home in Hampton Court, Surrey. Sadly, she was slightly oxygen-starved at birth. It was still wartime but life went on normally as much as possible. We had returned to Streatham at the end of the war and our house had an enormous garden full of fruit trees. We kept chickens so were never short of food but I hated feeding the broody ones as they pecked my fingers. I do remember worrying how I would cope with the ration books when I was older as they looked terribly complicated to my young eyes. My mother preserved eggs in waterglass and sweets were rationed. I loved playing with the local boys and particularly on a nearby bombsite with trees to climb. Children just thought bombsites were a normal part of the landscape and the pink ‘bombsite weed’ was actually a native rosebay willow herb! Girls’ games never appealed to me and I played with Richard, the son of Olga and Toby Macgregor, my parent’s friends. We ventured into the next door’s bombed-out house although expressly forbidden, dodging the broken plaster and nasty sharp pieces of wood around us. We seemed to come and go quite happily without worrying about paedophiles popping up around the corner or being abducted. From an early age I was allowed to walk up to his house part of the way along a back lane where the old stables were but had to cross a fairly main road en route. Of course there was little traffic around in those days because petrol was rationed and few people had cars. You either walked or used a bike.

My father’s sister, Auntie Mary was an attractive young woman and had been rather spoilt at home. She broke her parent’s hearts by deciding to immigrate to America as a GI bride after the war ended. She travelled on a liberty boat to stay with her fiancé’s family but on the journey over she fell in love with someone else. She married this guy, Charles Crowley, an Irish American who was very good-looking – this was typical of her rather flighty nature. They had a daughter, Veronica (Ronnie) and settled in New York. My grandmother went over to visit and to see the new baby and was in a drug store one day when an American smiled at her and said, ‘I bet you Limeys don’t get such big sandwiches back home in London!’ to which my grandmother retorted,‘No, we don’t have such big mouths as you!’ – something I always laugh about.

Mary and Charles later divorced and Mary worked as a medical secretary in New York before being offered a job as secretary to the head of the NASA space administration in Bermuda. She had to take American citizenship to do this particular job and in those days it meant you gave up your British passport. Oddly enough fate must have been in the wings as I was also a medical secretary and Bermuda became important to me too. Her daughter, Ronnie would then visit in the holidays, a decision that was sadly to lead to her getting a malignant melanoma years later.

After the war my father went into the motor business and teamed up with Michael Lawson, who was married to Eve (neé Moss). Stirling Moss was her nephew so we knew the Moss family well and Stirling bought his first car from my father. Michael Lawson and my father loved doing hill climbs and one of his cars had only one headlight so was nicknamed ‘Cyclops.’ Only last year did I meet up with Stirling Moss again and we reminisced about the old days.

In those days, the milkman and the baker delivered their goods with horses and carts, and an old woman opposite our house would rush out with a bucket and spade to collect the manure for her garden.

Streatham was a very pleasant suburb then and much smarter than neighbouring Clapham. Brixton and Balham were very poor in comparison. There was an excellent theatre, a department store, Pratts, (a branch of John Lewis’s) and a very good delicatessen. Our next door neighbours were Belgians who had come to live in London at the start of the war. They had a television long before anyone else – my sister and I watched the Coronation in 1953 on it. It was quite small with a large magnifying screen in front and of course the images were only in black and white. They had a Belgian barge dog that didn’t have a tail and they teased us that they had come over in a rowing boat and a fish had bitten it off! Of course as children we believed them.

We continued living in Streatham but moved from Valleyfield Road to a bigger house with a lovely garden at Belltrees Grove. The back garden bordered the former Tate & Lyle country house (the sugar people) which then became a convent where the nuns kept cows and chickens in the extensive grounds. In later years a school was built on the fields and the lovely old house became apartments. My mother often took us up to Streatham Common, close by to the attractive Rookery area and the White House where we would have picnics. Adele and I would kick a ball around while she sat on a nearby bench knitting and keeping an eye on us. Life was pretty idyllic. After the war things were not flash economically and the only person who had a dishwasher was my parents’ friend, Eileen Levy. That was a tabletop model and most unusual. Petrol was in short supply but thankfully we always had enough to get us down to the coast at weekends. In a way our lives were like Enid Blyton books.

The kitchen in our first house was a lawnmower green colour and we had one of those ‘sheila maids’ where the washing could be hung from the ceiling. There was no such thing as central heating until well after the war and we relied on a coke boiler and then solid-fuel combustion stoves for heating. We only had one black Bakelite telephone on a table in the draughty hall. Domestic chores took so much longer with old-fashioned washing machines, no dishwasher or tumble-dryers. My sister and I would argue about whose turn it was to wash up. Our family was unusual as we had a fridge, a very large commercial-sized Frigidaire. The only other one I have seen is in the Castle of Mey in Scotland a few years ago. The Queen Mother was obviously a bit of a skinflint keeping such a relic! The fridge had double doors and the underneath part housed an enormous motor.

My parents had an eclectic group of friends, including Dr Bullie Ram, an Indian doctor with a practice in Kennington, who became part of our family. Many were motor racing or car trial enthusiasts as my father took part in many car trials or hill climbs. Friends included Colin Chapman who founded ‘Lotus’ cars and others. The house was littered with silver cups and trophies. He was also very friendly with the Jewish community and was a Freemason. Freddy Levy was Jewish and had a jeweller’s shop in Streatham where years later I would choose my engagement and wedding rings. Bullie Ram often came for dinner and came out sailing with us. He used to call me his ‘Hot House Plant’ – for someone born in Ireland, I hated the cold and adored the hot weather.

Adele and I attended a small private school (St Helens) at the bottom of Streatham common and I had one particular friend called Sheila Tittensor. It was here that Richard MacGregor sat behind me and pulled my plaits. The two women who ran the school were obviously gay but we didn’t understand such things in those days. My sister got into awful trouble for swearing once and when the head mistress, Miss Tarry, overheard her she asked where she had heard such language.

‘My father,’ replied Adele quite truthfully.

We then went onto Fidelis Convent: that I really enjoyed. I would have crawled to school if I were on my last legs! It was an imposing gothic-looking building with an inner garden, the opposite side to the school being forbidden territory. The nuns lived out their lives here next to the large church. We had to attend Benediction, kneeling on the hard wooden floors but I grew to love the Catholic service and the scent of incense. The nuns