A Lucky Life: the memoirs of a 1950s lad

By Neil Robetrs

September 1940. A four-year-old London boy gazes at a night sky lit by burning London. Eighty years later, in another emergency and a hugely changed world, the same lad is persuaded to write about his ordinary life that has occasionally been quite extra-ordinary.

Vividly described with much laughter, wit and occasional trenchancy is a rewarding career in education, great pleasure in the arts and in sport and all in a world that has now passed into history. In addition, with often moving directness, the author reveals his home life which over eight decades has provided a joyful safe haven for his forays into the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839782756

Book preview

Preface

The widely read may notice in the second title above a deliberate reference to a famous autobiography, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, by Siegfried Sassoon. It, together with Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and R.C Sherriff’s Journey’s End, was an unforgettable literary response to an event which overwhelmed them and the world in which they lived.

My life has had no such experiences to relate. So, when my eldest son suggested I put on paper the numerous anecdotes of mild interest which my children and their late mother had patiently listened to over the years, as I rolled them out endlessly to anyone who would politely care to listen, I saw it simply as a stratagem to keep his old man’s grey cells from decay during the period of self-isolation from coronavirus.

I scoffed at the idea, thinking such a trot through well-aired memories likely to bore even me, never mind anyone unwise enough to read them.

I don’t believe particularly in signs or in fate but what followed was truly rather eerie. The next day I rang a friend who had been a student of mine in Leicester to let him know that the man who had been his headmaster and my boss had passed on, perhaps, as would have been his due, to some educational Valhalla. We talked at some length about those days when my former boss and I first came into contact, the chat was concluded and I put the phone down.

Now, I had not mentioned anything about the conversation with my son, so when the phone rang seconds later and this former student and friend, who now runs a large publishing house, was on the line with an offer to publish a memoir of my fairly ordinary life, it did seem as if something was afoot which I had better not ignore. This was particularly so that afternoon, when sitting in the garden pondering these mysteries, I noticed on the thermals above my head two buzzards circling high. What would the Delphic Oracle have made of that, I wondered?

Finally, as if this was not enough, that very evening I watched a film of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending, the gist of which I had quite forgotten only to be reminded how it is centrally about the fallibility of memory of an ageing English Literature graduate and how even basic facts can become distorted in the telling of a story.

After all this it seemed to me that I had better get on with reeling out my story such as it is, however uninteresting and questionable in accuracy it may turn out to be. Of course, like everyone else in raconteur mode, I don’t really believe that what I shall relate will be anything other than the sovereign truth.

Neil Roberts, Leicester, March 2021

Chapter 1

A wartime child

My name is Neil Thurland Roberts and I was born on April 19 1936. My mother would often tell me that the particular day was called Primrose Day and that it was a very special day. She neglected to tell me why it was. Not even I thought it so because I had come into the world. Later it emerged that it was the day in the previous century on which Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister, leader of the Tory party and favourite of Queen Victoria, shuffled off this mortal coil. It seems that this one-time dandy liked primroses especially and that his monarch made sure that he was plentifully supplied with them from her gardens at Windsor. As a result, the date became a day of remembrance for all good one nation Tories.

Alas, by the time I came to understand such things by studying A-Level History I thought of Shelley’s wonderful sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ in which a traveller contemplates the way a ruined sculpture in the desert unwittingly illustrates how power and its memory often fades to the point of nullity. It finishes:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Of course, it has to be admitted that in the last two centuries Egyptian archaeology might well have changed the picture.

No, the real significance of my birthday lay not in the day itself but in the year, three years before the outbreak of a second world war. It meant that, unlike my sister who was born seven years before me, living in a world at war I had no recollection of living in a world at peace. I took as normal that everything basic was rationed, gas masks were always carried, sandbags propped up major buildings, air raid shelters in gardens were almost a norm, the roads were empty of private cars and my family’s garden most mornings delivered a hefty hoard of shrapnel from the gun posted in the local railway yard firing into the air, without as far as I can remember apparently hitting anything in the sky above.

However, from that sky there was always the chance that some very unwelcome thing would fall. In the event, just one house in the road was hit by a bomb, I think without casualties, and when fully demolished became simply a hole in the tidy row of houses in a suburban street. In addition, my family was distinctly unmilitaristic. Only my mother’s brother was in military service, with the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy.

I have only two memories of the early part of the war. One must have been from soon after the day war broke out.

There, before I have even got started, I must digress since the very phrase I have used came suddenly from the depths of memory. Robb Wilton of the doleful voice and the face of a man always encountering insoluble problems was one of a number of great comedians who came from the world of the music hall and was one who over the radio made the war memorable for its laughter. The catch phrase became the thing by which you were launched into a world far away from titanic struggle. I searched in Wikipedia for the actual words of the start of one of his monologues and I wonder whether anyone of this century who reads this will collapse in helpless laughter as I did even after seventy years on hearing in my head the slow lugubrious northern tones of a man in thrall to his dominating wife. It went like this:

The day war broke out, my missus said to me, 'It's up to you. You've got to stop it.’

I said, 'Stop what?'

She said, 'The war.'

‘Ooh, she's a funny woman!’

To return to my first memory. I was in the back of what must have been my uncle’s car (my father had a boat but no car!). There was a torch beaming into the car and behind it lurked a policeman. It was very dark since cars were expected to tape up their headlights and street lights were turned off. This must have been during what was called the phoney war, the period when everyone expected air attack but nothing happened. The Blitz came after Dunkirk. Whatever, with my sister I was sent off to stay, hopefully safely, with a great aunt who lived in deepest Sussex.

On a Rocking horse, 1938

On a Rocking horse, 1938

My second memory is much clearer. The family was together again and it must have been shortly after the bombing raids on London began. My father was exempted from military service primarily because he worked in the City of London for the Union Castle Line which was the main shipping line to South and East Africa. He had been in the previous war at its end as a Royal Flying Corps dispatch rider in France. That night he took me up to the front bedroom which faced north to look at the sky. It was almost totally red and we were fourteen miles from the centre of the capital. I remember him saying that that was the port of London in flames and the scene was imprinted on the retina for ever.

And that is about it for the critical first two years of the war. It was later my mother laughingly showed me the cache of tinned food which was under the floor of the sitting room (keeping it from Adolf, she said) but when I grew up that in itself showed to me the pressure people were under in those critical years, expecting an invasion at any moment and the sound of jackboots in suburbia.

My father was fire warden for the street and his stirrup pump, his bucket of water and sand was ever at the ready. Even as a small child I found it odd that my daddy was fighting the Luftwaffe with a stirrup pump particularly when its habitual use was to decimate the aphid population on his roses

However, there was one last irony awaiting in the story of the stirrup pump. Well into this century the BBC ran a series of programmes about the effect of the air attacks on Britain’s provincial cities, many of whom thought they had had a really raw deal when it came to the air defence their cities had against attack. The programme on Bristol told, in one instance, how the fine church of St Mary Redcliffe was saved from annihilation by churchwardens standing on the roof with their stirrup pumps at the ready to put out the flames of the incendiaries which were falling from the sky. It seemed that the flames of these bombs, not meant to destroy but to light the way for the bombers proper and make fires, were easily put out with a good dousing. So, my father might well have tackled the Luftwaffe after all.

It was, though, a measure of my parents’ care that I cannot recall a moment of real fear in those early years even when a Morrison Shelter was erected in the lounge, essentially an iron cage designed to protect from falling masonry. Not even that came over to me as a serious matter.

Perhaps that was because my tiny turret-like bedroom at the front of the house, where I was meant to sleep the sleep of the innocent, in winter would have served as the refrigerator, which in common with most we did not have. My mother made this inadvertently worse by following the current medical wisdom that one should never sleep without a small window being open, this apparently even when there was the appalling pollution of a peasouper fog outside.

It was not surprising therefore that every cold I contracted developed into sometimes severe bronchitis which became quite my worst memory of the war, especially when immediately after its end my grandmother who lived next door but one died of the same illness. Therefore, the iron cage in the warm lounge became a joyous refuge not just against bombs, particularly when I had it to myself because my sister convinced herself there was a mouse lurking and preferred to take her chance at the back of house in her own bedroom. Our parents typically took their chance at the front of the house.

In passing, it strikes me now rather touching how so many of the wartime initiatives were given the names of the people responsible for them. Morrison was a Labour politician, Home Secretary in the wartime cabinet, and he should be remembered also for initiating the Southbank Festival of Britain which in 1951 for most signalled the country’s emergence into the sunlight again five years after the war and its almost as grim aftermath. The building of the Royal Festival Hall was going to have a huge influence on me but that will be for a later chapter.

The rival shelter, the Anderson, was built outside in the garden, which obviously meant that you had to have one, and involved digging a pit in lawns and flowerbeds, roofing it over with steel and making it as habitable as possible. That was usually a vain effort. Sometimes they finished up flooded and they were certainly appalling places in which to sleep. One has to wonder whether they didn’t kill as many people through the damp cold as were saved from bombs. It appears that post-war assessments came to a similar conclusion as to the comparative effectiveness of these domestic shelters.

For all this, one thing which never occurred to me was that the war would be lost. The reason for this was quite obvious. The press was censored and carried largely upbeat news about any military campaigns. I received cards from my uncle in North Africa where the tide had turned after El Alamein and Rommel was on the run. The fall of Singapore in the Far East was, well, far away and in any case the Yanks were in the country in huge numbers, ‘over here and over-sexed’ as the saying went. As important were our gallant Russian allies. Looking back, it was bizarre how Stalin, a tyrant quite as bad as Hitler, became affectionately known as Uncle Joe and that in a very conservative household one birthday or Christmas I was given a story about an heroic soviet ice breaker.

In addition, I had been brainwashed by my enthusiasm for Biggles who in every book which my Mother bought when it came out saw off the formidable and dastardly Erich von Stalhein who was always on hand to do the dirty. These probably fired my love of literature if only to make me realise how, for all their action-packed plots, how inferior they were to Arthur Ransome’s books also bought for me in their entirety.

As well, I was surrounded in my patriotic zeal and certainty of the superiority of all things British by my father’s beautifully bound pre-Great War stories of sea and empire. Also, in my grandparents’ house I discovered a hoard of The Illustrated London News covering the Great War which was full of stirring paintings (note not photos) of gallant British soldiers putting cowardly Germans to flight as they stormed the enemy’s trenches. Curiously the one picture that has stuck in my mind had highlanders in kilts doing the necessary as if to suggest how romantic it all was. It not until long after adolescence that I came upon a rather different picture and realised why my father never once spoke to me about his experiences of the last few months on the western front before the ceasefire.

Despite this juvenile thinking, the irony of all this is that it seems agreed now that the escape at Dunkirk, The Battle of Britain and finally and most importantly Pearl Harbour and Hitler’s foolish assault on Russia made the eventual defeat of the Axis powers inevitable and that the household calm I remember in the years that followed immediately may not have been thus entirely forced. When my mother one morning in early June 1944 rushed into my little bedroom and told me there had been landings in France, it appeared that peace was just round the corner.

Chapter 2

The end of war

In 1943 I had experienced the first family holiday in what was then a small village outside Reading called Theale. There’s a photo of me and my father with branch and a piece of string standing by the Kennet Canal apparently ‘fishing’. However, that holiday did have one of those experiences which stick in the mind. There I was standing next to the railway track of the route to the West Country seeing The Cornish Riviera Express thundering towards me pulled by the locomotive King George V, famous for the bell it carried on its front presented apparently when it had toured America before the war.

Then in 1944 we had a second holiday in which mother, my sister and myself travelled up to the Lake District. This was an extraordinary episode. Before the war my parents’ next door neighbours had been an American family, the father of whom had been shipped across the Atlantic apparently, at least so the story went, with the brief to introduce Kellogg’s Flakes to an eager Britain. So eager had Britain been to put it on their breakfast table that by 1944 the family were living in what was a mansion by the side of Lake Windermere.

I had never seen mountains before nor indeed had I seen the inside of a domestic house like this. There was a boathouse by the lake from which one could fish and swim, that is if you could swim. I have pictures of my sister in bathing suit with the daughter of the house similarly dressed and me still in short trousers. Enough said! There was boating out on the lake and I remember seeing my first pike, caught by the owner of the house. Years later I read Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Pike’ which resurrected the awe this fish created then. Even when they are little fish, they are

Perfect

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

Killers from the egg…

The whole holiday experience for me was magic. Hence my surprise when it was terminated early. Later my sister suggested to me that Mother and our hostess had fallen out and indeed we never saw the family again. This was an example how, as I grew from being a child to being a boy and the war seemed beginning