Hendon-Moscow-Dorset, a memoir (and Birmingham)

By Philip Hanson

Philip Hanson is a jazz fan, a cricket fan and a Russia-watcher. He has also been a husband for many years and is the father of two sons who are, let's face it, middle-aged, though you'd never know it. So now he is getting on a bit. His employment record suggests restlessness: the Treasury, Foreign Office, UN, Radio Liberty, Harvard, Michig

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upfront
• Release date: Jul 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781784567590

Book preview

Parents

For better or worse, I was brought up by my mother. My father died at sea, when he was 33 and I was five. He was on the Laconia and it was torpedoed by a U-boat. He had completed bomber-crew training in South Africa and was on his way home as a newly-minted Observer Officer. It is tempting to think that, but for that U-boat, he might have survived the war. But the survival rate of bomber crews was not high.

Hendon-Moscow-Dorset: A Memoir

My Father, Eric Hanson

Hendon-Moscow-Dorset: A Memoir

My Mother, Doris Hanson and my Aunt Iris (AKA: Jane)

I have a memory of standing beside my mother in the sitting room at 25 Newark Way, saying, ‘Don’t cry, Mummy.’ She was holding the telegram. I think that is a real memory; my mother would not have described that scene to me. I also have a single fragment of memory of my father. I was playing on the floor by some chair-legs, and he was with me. I like to think that this, too, is a real memory, but I cannot be sure about it.

So my knowledge of my father is second-hand. I can see from photos that he was handsome, and that he smoked a pipe. A survivor from the Laconia told my mother that he saw Eric Hanson helping others into life-boats at a late stage in the sinking. I was told that I have only one forename because he decided that being called Eric Hugh Cecil was a bit much, and his son should be spared the burden of too many names. He left school at 15 or 16, I believe, and joined Barclays Bank. He passed at least some of the banking exams and was a member of the bank’s inspection team before he signed up with the RAF.

I know of two survivors’ accounts of the sinking of the Laconia, Jim McLoughlin’s One Common Enemy, and a war-time pamphlet by ‘Nurse Hawkins’. I came to know another survivor, ML, a colleague’s wife. None of them has any light to shed on my father – he was, after all, just one of 2,700 people on board. ML told me that her fellow-nurses were particularly interested to know whether the Sikhs on board took their turbans off at night. She didn’t say whether they found out.

On my father’s character my two main sources diverge. To my mother he was the love of her life (‘If I’d had a choice, you’d have gone out of the window,’ she said once), and he was a rather serious person. In the 1930s, she told me, he was much influenced by the Quakers, and toyed with pacifism. But she also told me he had taken up rugby: ‘He was developing a bull neck,’ she said disapprovingly. The impression I had from her was that my father was rather earnest, and perhaps a little inhibited. To my Aunt Jane, his elder sister and only sibling, he was a joker, even a practical joker – cheerful and fun to be with. I believe they competed over him. At any rate they had competing images of him.

I prefer my Aunt Jane’s version. She taught history at Camden High School for Girls and, as a historian, she took sides quite shamelessly. She supported the Cavaliers against the Roundheads, for example. She had a Cavalier view of my father.

My mother was complicated. Another early memory of mine is watching her when we were seated apart on a crowded bus and she was not aware of my looking at her. I remember thinking that, in repose, she looked sad. This was probably a few years after my father’s death and I didn’t think that the loss of him was the reason she looked sad. My guess is that in general she found life difficult.

She was a hairdresser by training and early employment. She married at 26, comparatively late for her generation. She was two years older than my father. She spoke occasionally of holidays before her marriage, and they sound quite adventurous for the time – Switzerland and Corsica. She once enthused to me about the pleasure of hitting a tennis ball low over the net. I was never aware of her doing any of these things – taking foreign holidays, playing tennis or hairdressing – while I was around. The bank would have required her to stop working once she was married to my father, though I believe that for a while she continued to do some private work on the side. But in my memory of her, she was preoccupied with housework and cooking.

There were many things she disapproved of: sloppiness, bad manners, sex outside marriage, late nights, the lights being left on all night at Hendon Technical College… One of her remarks that I recall rather fondly was this: ‘When I see a man with grey hair wearing jeans, I go, Oh-oh.’ She claimed not to be able to sleep a wink until I came back at night. Once, when I was twenty and still living at home, she went through my wallet and found some condoms. That discovery caused shock and outrage. On her part.

She seemed not to have a high opinion of me. Being clever was not enough. (Well, it isn’t. I agree with her there.) Much later in life she said to me, in honest puzzlement, ‘I don’t know how you produced two such lovely boys.’  Did she induce in me a sense of low self-esteem? Certainly not. I wouldn’t give houseroom to such a fashionable affliction. I just know I’m not up to much.

Grand-parents

Now I very much regret not asking questions about my parents when I had the opportunity to talk to people who knew them. Those people are now gone. I feel this even more acutely about my grand-parents – my paternal grand-parents in particular. My father’s father, Albert Hanson, died in his late fifties. I have only the most sketchy memories of him. He was a barber who had a small barber’s shop in Southampton Road in Belsize Park. He was a slight, smart man who by all accounts loved the theatre and liked to dress well. I have a pair of silver cufflinks engraved with his initials. He did not prevent – maybe he even encouraged – his daughter, my aunt Jane, taking a History degree at London University.

Hendon-Moscow-Dorset: A Memoir

My Grandfather, Albert Hanson with Eric and Iris

He and my Nanna Hanson lived, at any rate as I remember it, behind rather than above the shop, in a snug apartment. She was a kind, placid and stoical person whom I never really got to know well. In later life, in Dorset, I recall her sitting patiently in the car while Jane, my uncle John and I went off on botanising and bird-watching expeditions. Jane said that her mother liked Thomas Hardy. I never knew whether she sat and read Hardy’s novels or sat and had them read to her. In my image of her the latter is more likely: being read to, stoically.

Hendon-Moscow-Dorset: A Memoir

Nanna Hanson

I saw vastly more of my maternal grandparents. They had bettered themselves by moving in the 1930s from Primrose Hill to a three-bedroom semi-detached house in Hendon. Social geography changes over time, though I admit that I don’t know whether they owned or rented in Primrose Hill. They certainly owned in Hendon. My parents, when they married, behaved in what anthropologists would call a matrilocal fashion: they settled in Hendon, renting.

When I was growing up, my mother and I would always go for Sunday lunch with my Grandpa and Nannie Ward, a tenminute walk away. Also present would be my mother’s unmarried sister, my Aunt Gwen, who lived with her parents. After lunch the men (my grandfather and I) would go for a walk in Sunny Hill Park, stopping in the summer to watch the Buccaneers play cricket. Later Gwen, my grandfather and I played table-tennis on the dining-room table. That table was a bit shorter than a proper table-tennis table. To this day my return of service tends to be slightly short.

Nannie Ward was an accomplished maker of feather-light sponge cakes, and could slice bread wafer-thin for the most delicate sandwiches. At six or so I would test her on the identity of various birds pictured in my bird-book. She answered knowledgeably. A few years later I learnt that she had done this by surreptitiously reading over my shoulder.

Hendon-Moscow-Dorset: A Memoir

PH, Grandpa Ward, Nanna Ward, Paul, my Mother

The family story was that she was a foundling, and the place where she was found was the Sandringham estate. ‘Didn’t you ever wonder,’ my aunt Gwen once asked me, ‘Why your mother looked so much like the Queen?’ The official record of her marriage does not support this story but my younger son Nic, exploring the family tree, found that the information on the marriage certificate did not square with census details on the family she supposedly came from. A case of identity theft, perhaps? I think that if there was some subterfuge involved, it was a case of borrowing rather than theft: a sly tweak in a good cause, respectability, and not a million miles away from reading the names of birds over my shoulder.

To me she was affectionate and indulgent. To my grandfather she could be less indulgent. She had, I believe, instilled in her daughters the view that he was insensitive and heavy- handed in his dealings with the women of the family. For a time, as a child, I was persuaded of this; indeed, there was something in it, but not perhaps as much as she, my mother and Gwen made of it.

Here is an example of the sort of thing they complained of. Gwen was twelve years younger than my mother so in my earlier memories still, by the convention of the time, of marriageable age. I recall my grandfather urging her to join a table-tennis club. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’d only be the rabbit.’ ‘Well, someone’s got to be the rabbit,’ he said. One can think of more tactful answers.

Still, Ernest Ward was not an unkind or domineering person. Born in 1887, one of ten children, he started his working life as a messenger boy for Nobel’s Explosives in London and concluded it as Personnel Manager for the Pearl Assurance company (now the Phoenix Group) at their head office in High Holborn. He took elocution, piano and singing lessons, was commissioned in World War One, and, in general, rose in the world. He never owned a car but he did own shares. His house was semi-detached, part of an inter-war ribbon development on the A41, but it was well-maintained, had a fair-sized garden and backed on to the park. He was short, stocky and sociable. He was fond of chatting to people when he went on his local walks, and he seemed to know everyone in the neighbourhood.

He also had a French connection. He had served in France in the Great War – to my shame, I never found out anything about his war experiences; I have a vague idea that he didn’t serve in the front line, but I can’t vouch for that. Anyway, he learnt French and stayed in touch with French friends. One of them, called Margot, used to visit from time to time, from the US. She had married an American who didn’t travel himself but was said by the women of my family to finance her tourism (‘Probably only too glad to have her out of the way for a while.’) I think her main sin in their eyes was Extravagance. My grandfather used occasionally to visit a French church in London. He took me a couple of times to carol services there. I suspect it was the Protestant (Huguenot) church in Soho Square, designed by Aston

Webb, but my memory does not extend to either the denomination or the architecture. All I remember is a Christmas tree.

My Grandpa Ward outlived his wife and my mother. I remember him as hale and hearty in old age, reportedly running for a bus in his nineties. Gwen looked after him for a while, and then he moved into a council retirement home in Colindale, where he seemed to get a new lease of life. He refused to disclose his income to the home’s administrators, and therefore paid the top rate.

Childhood and Hendon Prep

I started school at St Mary’s Primary, at the top of Greyhound Hill behind St Mary’s church and close to the south-eastern corner of Sunnyhill Park. I remember three things about it: a picture in the classroom of a bottle tipped up to pour out milk, with the words, ‘The bottle goes b-b-b’; the name of the playground bully: Edgar Walkden, and the way of starting a game in the playground: marching around with your arms spread out, chanting, ‘All join on for cowboys and Indians,’ hoping other people would link arms with you to form a quorum.

The reason I recall so little about it is that I was there for less than a year. When my father died, the Bank Clerks’ Orphanage Fund stepped in. They paid for me to go to Hendon Preparatory School, in Downage near the junction with the Great North Way, a little bit further away from home but still within walking (later, cycling) distance. Hendon Prep no longer exists, nor does the Victorian mansion that housed it. But it was in its time a sound institution.

In my day it was run by Mr and Mrs Williams. I think their qualifications may have been as much entrepreneurial as educational, but the school worked. It prepared us for the Common Entrance exam for entry to public schools, and we all got in somewhere. We learned French, starting with a book called Monsieur et Madame Souris (‘We’re doing Mousey French,’ I told my mother). We did Latin from the age of eight. And we did all the usual other subjects, I had the importance of historical connections expounded to me with visual aids: ‘Links, my boy, links,’ Mr Molony would say, flourishing his cuff-links in front of my face.

How much else stuck? Not a lot. The odd mnemonic has stayed in my mind, like BROM for Marlborough’s battles in the War of the Spanish Succession: Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet; but I have yet to find a use for it. I learnt enough French to translate part of the signature tune of my favourite radio show of the time, ’Take It From Here’:

Prenez-le d’ici

N’allez-vous en pas quand vous pouvez le prendre d’ici,

I suppose I was a sort of scholarship boy amongst boys from wealthier families, but I wasn’t aware of any significant difference. One friend, GT, was the son of a surgeon; I visited their house, out in the country near Totteridge, and could see that it was grander than 25 Newark Way, but I was not especially impressed or envious. Another friend, JC, was related to the great batsman, Wally Hammond, and that did impress me. JC impressed me even more, however, with his cartoons. There was one of his mother – a rather large lady shown in rear view, bending over while making a bed, and saying, ‘I’m all behind today.’ Then there was AJM, a gifted all-round sportsman who could score centuries if the others between them stayed in with him, and who was capable of boxing without getting hit. Later, at Highgate, he won the school cross-country race on Hampstead Heath, coasting in equal first with a friend, PG. (My best was 35th out of about a hundred starters.) Later still, as a footballer, he had a trial with Arsenal, but professional football in the 1950s was not financially attractive for a middle-class lad.

My local friends from Newark Way, CC, CW, DG and some smaller hangers-on, were my main company outside school. I have no gift for, or inclination towards, leadership, but I seem to have been, by default, the informal leader of this gang of 8- and 9-year-olds. CW once said, ‘We should call ourselves the P Club, after Philip.’ We didn’t in the event call ourselves anything. It is now hard to recall what we did, apart from knocking on one another’s doors and saying, ‘Can Chris/Christopher/Dave/Philip come out to play?’ We did jump off the top of the local air-raid shelter and play cricket in the park – that much I recall.

We were free to roam the neighbourhood. A bit later, at 10, 11, 12, I was roaming Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire by bike, sometimes alone and sometimes with JI, going out on the A41 past Edgware, Watford, Kings Langley, Berkhamsted and sometimes Aylesbury, sometimes Hertford and Ware, into the Chilterns. I have a strong memory of one occasion when I gazed at a stretch of downland and was moved to tears. Later, music occasionally and unpredictably had the same effect. I would also go on more local trips to two favourite places, Scratchwood and Moat Mount. I once saw a tawny owl bathing in a stream in Moat Mount, and timed a nuthatch’s visits to its nest-hole to feed young. We made a camp deep in the bushes and were distressed to find that the oranges we stored there went mouldy.

Highgate

In due course I went, on a Bank Clerks’ Orphanage Fund scholarship, to Highgate School. My mother made the final choice between University College School and Highgate, opting for the latter since she felt UCS might be dangerously progressive. Fortunately, she under- estimated the dangerous progressivism of Highgate. It wasn’t dramatically progressive, like Dartington, where you could abandon maths if you didn’t warm to long division, but it tolerated eccentricity and, within reason, dissent. It was still boys-only in my time but the majority were day-boys and I reckon that in many ways it was more like a metropolitan grammar school of its time than the more traditional sort of public school.

I started in Form 3B and moved on to Shell (which would have been 4A if it hadn’t been Shell), 5A, Classical Sixth B and Classical Sixth A. Three teachers made a particular impression on me: Chas B, Mr Stephenson and Freddy Fox. Two outstanding science teachers, Mr Bateman (Physics) and Dr Moody (Chemistry) did their excellent best, but I just wasn’t up to the hard sciences, and had dropped both subjects by O Level; (the old GCSEs).

The teacher who guided my school career was the Reverend C.H. Benson (Chas B), who was my housemaster and who, as senior classics master, helped to steer me into classics and into his old college, Jesus College, Cambridge. He was, I think, a shy man, who performed many duties – such as demonstrating a forward defensive shot with his umbrella – that did not come easily to him. He certainly

Reviews for Hendon-Moscow-Dorset, a memoir (and Birmingham)

[James Collinson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hi. I was googling the hairdressers 9 Southampton Rd and your article came up. My mother was born at 11 Southampton Rd in 1934 where her grandfather ran Kewley's Cycle shop. My mother's father Eric was keen on the girl from the shop next door. The street was full of shops then but I think it was the hairdressers daughter he was keen on. James Collinson