The Langley Boy: A Trilogy Part 1

By Charles Tyrie

Surviving the might of the Luftwaffes attacks on Hawkers aerodrome and the doodlebug flying bombs, the Langley Boy is an eyewitness account of a working class boy, growing up in the rural village of Langley, Buckinghamshire, during the period of wartime austerity and rationing until the more prosperous Rock n Roll years. It is a boys own story of gang warfare, trolley racing and escapades in an adventure playground of a rubbish dump, a surplus army vehicle compound, the Grand Union canal, a gravel pit, cherry orchards and open meadowland. On a more sombre note, it deals with the tug-of-war relationship with his parents, their jealousies, harshness, love and affection.

It provides a perspective on the strict teaching regimes at Langley primary and junior schools and the overpowering influence of the dreaded 11+ examination. It describes family weddings with aunts dressed in flamboyant hats, and annual family holidays on the beach at Jaywick Sands and Llandudno. It recalls the memorable Saturday morning trips to the Granada cinema to see Roy Rogers, Laurel and Hardy and the delights of boys comics, and it relives the thrills and spills at Pelhams fair and Langley fete, festive bonfire night celebrations, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth the 2nd and the advent of television.

The painful voyage from boyhood to manhood takes place at Slough Grammar School for Boys, marked by the struggle to master the sciences with ultimate academic and sporting success in the sixth form. It covers the social impact of the Teddy boy era, the influence of the church, the advent of pop music with Bill Haley and Lonnie Donegan and life behind the bar at the North Star public house in Slough. In short, the book is about a boys determination to escape from his roots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 12, 2006
• ISBN: 9781467017718

Charles Tyrie

Charles Tyrie lives in Nottinghamshire with his wife Hilary. He is a chartered civil engineer and has spent most of his career in local government, where he worked in Manchester, Swansea and Rushcliffe. He is now retired and has written, The Manchester Vendetta a work of fiction, inspired by his work in Manchester and the summer holidays spent on the island of Anglesey. His first publication is The Langley Boy, part one of a trilogy, which covers his childhood years in Langley, Buckinghamshire, and captures the life of a small community in wartime Britain and growing up during the post war years of austerity.

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© 2007 Charles Tyrie. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/4/2007

ISBN: 978-1-4259-6403-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-1771-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren Naomi and Beth, my son Jonathan, my wife Hilary, my cousins, who have waited patiently for it to be published and all the relatives, friends and acquaintances, who enriched my childhood.

Contents

MY WAR

POST WAR AUSTERITY

LANGLEY INFANT SCHOOL

LANGLEY JUNIOR SCHOOL

FAMILY, COUSINS AND FRIENDS

GANG WARS AND ADVENTURES

FAMILY AND SOCIAL EVENTS

GRAMMAR SCHOOL

THE EARLY YEARS

THRILLS ON WHEELS

GRAMMAR SCHOOL

THE O-LEVEL YEARS

WORK AND PLAY

GRAMMAR SCHOOL

THE SIXTH FORM

THE ROCK AND ROLL YEARS

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Definitive Map of Langley 1945 - 55

MY WAR 

The early hours of the 21st of February 1941 were punctuated by the sounds of exploding German bombs, the noise of ack-ack guns defending Langley airfield and Dr Woods’s announcement that I was a healthy baby boy weighing 7¾lb. My father William Milliken Tyrie and my mother Florence Gertrude Tyrie, better known as Bill and Floss, were proud of their new offspring and decided to call me Charles Rowland after my paternal grandfather and one of my father’s workmates. My birth took place in Granddad Andrews house, at 103 Meadfield Road, Langley, Buckinghamshire, which formed part of a neat row of terraced houses, perilously close to the perimeter of Hawker’s aircraft factory and aerodrome, where the famous Hurricane fighter planes were being manufactured to support the war effort. I hadn’t chosen the safest place to be born in wartime England with Hitler’s Luftwaffe carrying out heavy overnight bombing raids on London and military targets in the Home Counties but I survived my terrifying entry into a dangerous and war-torn world.

Earlier that night my father had visited old Dr. Woods to let him know that my mother had gone into labour and in the small hours of the morning and at a great personal risk to his safety, the doctor had braved the bombing and cycled almost a mile to attend my delivery. Aunt Annie provided generous help and encouragement to my mother and she boiled copious quantities of hot water in saucepans and kettles on the gas hob in her cramped tiny kitchen, while the Nazis, who had no respect for such a momentous and historic occasion, callously decided to bomb Langley airfield. Despite the fearful noise and the crump of falling bombs, my aunt with true British phlegm, leaned over my cradle and physically protected me with her body, until the sirens announced the All Clear and the departure of the bombers.

Perhaps I should explain how my parents came to be living with my maternal grandfather. My father, who had been living in Perth in Scotland, came to England to look for work. He was a carpenter and joiner by trade and leading up to and immediately after the outbreak of war, had found himself working on various major civil engineering contracts, including airfields, barracks, ordnance depots and other military installations. He had then moved to Langley to work on a runway contract at Hawker’s aerodrome and took lodgings with Mrs. Jacobs, who lived next door to my grandfather. Apparently, one day while he was looking out of his bedroom window, he caught sight of my mother hanging out her smalls on the washing line and was so struck by her attractiveness and her fine pair of legs that he asked her if she would like to go to the cinema with him. My mother, who was working as a maid at Eton College accepted his invitation; their romance blossomed and they were married on the 26th January 1940.

There was a shortage of rented accommodation in Langley at that time and my grandfather offered to put them up until they could find somewhere more suitable to live. His house comprised a front parlour, a small dining room, a tiny kitchen, four bedrooms and an outside lavatory and washhouse. My parents lived in the front room and Granddad, his eldest son Uncle Frank, Aunt Annie and their children Frankie, Dorothy, Lillian and May in the remainder of the house.

To protect us from the bombing, my father built a reinforced concrete, air-raid shelter in the back garden, complete with bunks and a small fireplace to heat the room and to brew the famous cup of tea, which sustained the nation during those difficult years. As soon as the air-raid sirens began their undulating and warning wail that enemy aircraft were approaching the neighbourhood, the family took refuge in the shelter, where they listened to the ominous drone of the bombers flying overhead and prayed that they would survive the night.

My father was a canny Scot and on the morning of my delivery, he promptly cycled into Slough to register my birth and to collect my ration book. Food was becoming increasingly scarce, because of the U-boat attacks on the food convoys and on his return journey; he made a beeline to our local grocery shop, where he stopped to collect my weekly rations. The shopkeeper queried my father’s entitlement to the food, because my mother had only been in his shop a few days earlier but on hearing the good news of my safe arrival, he offered him his congratulations and tongue in cheek asked him how I was going to eat the rasher of bacon and the solitary egg that formed part of my ration entitlement. With a knowing wink, my father assured him that he would help me finish off anything that I couldn’t manage.

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I MUST HAVE BEEN A BEAUTIFUL BABY

The Blitz on London ended in May 1941, but the bombing raids and V1 and V2 rocket attacks continued until almost the end of the war. During the early months of the Blitz, the intensity of the bombing had been so great that most families spent the night in air raid shelters, in the cellars of their homes or in underground railway stations, until the distinctive and welcoming sound of the all-clear sirens, announced the end of the raid and that it was safe to come out of hiding. It was because of the heavy bombing on the cities that large numbers of the civilian population had to be evacuated and decanted into homes in the countryside. In fact, the situation was so serious that by May 1941, almost 1.4 million people in London were homeless and 1.2 million houses damaged. Living on the outskirts of London, the attacks on Hawker’s factory increased to such intensity that my father sent my mother and me to stay with Granddad Charles Tyrie, who lived in Methven, just outside Perth in Scotland. It was a difficult time for my mother; she had milk fever and couldn’t breast-feed me and to compound her difficulties, I had whooping cough, which my grandfather allegedly cured by holding me over a tar boiler to inhale the fumes. We eventually returned to Langley, after Hitler switched his aerial onslaught on Fighter Command’s airfields to the nightly bombing raids on London. It was a reckless decision carried out in retaliation for a British air raid on Berlin and it provided our exhausted aircrews and overstretched air defences with a window of opportunity to regroup and take the offensive.

Like so many people of their generation, my parents had a number of lucky escapes during the Blitz. My father’s work at Hawker’s aerodrome entailed repairing bomb damage to the buildings and runways and measuring the distance between bomb craters, so that the boffins could estimate the height and speed of the German aircraft and the characteristics of the bombs. On one occasion, he discovered that a stick of bombs had left a line craters heading directly towards my Grandfather’s house. By some miracle, they stopped short, missed the house and continued on the other side of the building, where they exploded harmlessly in the local allotments. In another attack on the aerodrome, a bomb fell through the roof of a building where my father and his workmates were sheltering. It hit a roof purlin, split open and scattered its high-explosive contents, in the form of a white powder harmlessly over the floor, where it was later swept up and made safe. I like to think that the detonator was either faulty or that some heroic Czech, Polish or French patriot forced to work in a German munitions factory had sabotaged it, for without that small miracle I would have been fatherless.

After my birth, my mother and father had hoped to be allocated a council house in Slough, having moved up the housing priority list by my welcome arrival and the fact that they were living in cramped rooms with their in-laws, but it was not to be. In November 1938, the uncrowned King, Edward the Eighth, went to South Wales, saw the plight of the unemployed, and said, Something must be done, and so it was. The government commandeered all the new council houses that Slough Borough Council was building in Chalvey; reserved them for the unemployed Welsh families from the valleys and in doing so created social unrest and tension in the community. The Langley and Slough residents, who were expecting to be re-housed, found themselves deprived of their promised homes, which provoked a strong backlash of anti-Welsh sentiment in the community and frequent fights in the local pubs. Sadly, politicians and civil servants continued to meddle in areas in which they had little or no experience and they persisted in breaking up communities and creating new slums and social problems. They assiduously avoided the hellholes they had created, and preferred instead to isolate themselves by living in the more salubrious residential areas. Furthermore, they sent their children to public schools or the best state schools and shunned the problem schools they had created, which were not for the likes of their offspring. In the 1950’s, they continued their disastrous social policies and destroyed Langley’s rural character and charm, by building a huge London County Council estate on the former cornfields and blighted our pleasant village with a vast, soulless, and amorphous sprawl of urban council houses.

Denied the possibility of getting a council house, my parents learned from local gossip that Bill Piggot, a widower who lived at 17. St Mary’s Road, Langley had some furnished rooms to let. The accommodation was much superior to the cramped conditions at Granddad Andrew’s house and without further ado, they accepted the sub-tenancy and it became the family home for the next 25 years. The house was a substantial semi-detached farm worker’s cottage built from yellow and grey London bricks with a fine red tiled roof. It had a front room, a rear parlour, a scullery, three bedrooms and a lavatory that was situated in a brick outhouse, eight yards from the back door. My parents occupied the front room and two bedrooms and shared the scullery and the outside facilities with Mr Piggot.

My earliest memories of the war and my surroundings start from the age of two. Our living room was dingy and packed with old Victorian furniture, including a mahogany table with four oak dining-room chairs, a rather well worn, black, Rexine, ottoman, filled with horsehair, a large deep red mahogany tea trolley and two large threadbare armchairs. An oak sideboard contained our cutlery and the inevitable Willow Pattern dinner service, while a wall-mounted pendulum clock with a dull uninspiring chime, ticked noisily away in an alcove at the side of the chimney breast.

The focal point of the room was a black-leaded, decorative, cast iron fireplace with a painted stone surround and mantelpiece, a brass fender decorated with small spherical knobs, a coal scuttle and matching companion set and a fireguard. A varnished wooden mantelshelf crazed by the heat of the fire and blackened by smoke was mounted over the fireplace and displayed Mr Piggot’s collection of dainty porcelain statuettes of milkmaids, shepherd boys and other bric-a-brac. The fire threw out a prodigious amount of heat to those sat directly in front of it but it was bitterly cold on the far side of the room and like all coal fires, it was messy and dusty. My mother’s first chore, when she came downstairs in the morning was to rake out the overnight ashes, deposit them in the dustbin and then lay the new fire with screwed up sheets of newspaper, wood kindling and small pieces of coal. As soon as the wood and the coal had started to burn, she would create a forced draught, by holding a sheet of newspaper up against the fireguard to get fire blazing and the room warmed ready for breakfast.

A gas lamp was mounted above the fireplace by means of a swan-neck, tubular bracket and town gas was burnt inside a delicate, lacy, gas mantle, enclosed in a spherical, glass lampshade, which emitted a soft, warm, yellow glow. A penny-in-the-slot gas meter was located in the cupboard under the stairs and when the lamp began to dim or pop as the gas ran out, my mother would make a beeline for the mantelpiece and a pile of pennies so that she could feed the meter before we were plunged into darkness. I think that every house in the country must have boasted a print of Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen and ours was no exception. I would often gaze thoughtfully at the huge stag with its magnificent antlers, starring back at me from the picture and with the innocence of a small child, would ask my mother what it was doing. A large, brass, oil lamp stood on the sideboard next to a walnut-veneered wireless set, the loudspeaker of which was housed behind a fretwork of interlocking, pointed, wooden arches resembling a church window. Brown Bakelite knobs controlled the on/off switch, which lit up a small rectangular panel with an orange glow when the set was switched on, as well as the volume control and the tuner, which moved a pointer along to the Home Service or foreign radio stations such as Hilversum.

The floor was covered with a horrible, tan, square of lino, nailed down with dozens of blue steel tacks where the feet of heavy furniture had cracked and damaged it. Pride of place was given to a rag rug that my parents had made, which was lovingly placed in front of the hearth, only to become dotted with small scorch marks caused by sparks jumping out of the grate, when the fireguard was removed to feed the fire. The doors and skirting boards were painted dark brown and bore a striking resemblance to the Great Western Region Railway Company’s livery, which prompted my father to maintain that the paint had come from Langley railway station, where anything that wasn’t made from stone or brick was painted GWR brown.

Strict wartime blackout regulations, stipulated that no light should escape from a dwelling during the hours of darkness, to prevent the neighbourhood from being targeted and bombed by enemy aircraft and to comply with those instructions; the population used dark blue roller blinds and hung thick, heavy curtains over the windows to avoid prosecution. My mother took great pains to avoid chinks of light appearing when she drew the curtains, because any transgression would incur the wrath of the local air raid warden, who would stand outside an offender’s house and bellow, Put that light out! He wielded considerable power and anyone who regularly disregarded the regulations, would be fined for endangering the safety of the community, as well as being ostracised by their neighbours for their anti-social behaviour.

Although the living room was gloomy, my mother kept it as clean as a new pin. On cleaning day, she would wear a turban to keep the dust out of her hair and could be found on her hands and knees, polishing the lino, blacking the grate with a graphite paste, cleaning the fender and fire irons with Brasso and changing the net curtains and dusting the furniture. The windows would be cleaned both inside and out and the front doorstep whitened with pumice stone. Her motto was, Cleanliness is next to Godliness.

The scullery was about eight foot square with a cold, red brick floor and spartanly furnished. It contained an ancient New World gas cooker with a small oven and four cooking rings, a deep, white, pitted, stone sink and a wooden draining board, on which stood a chipped, enamel bowl. A lead cold-water pipe snaked around the room terminating in a wall-mounted brass tap above the sink and because burst pipes were regular occurrences during the cold winter months, when temperatures dropped below freezing point, it bore a series of silver bulges where the plumber had carried out emergency soldering repairs. In fact, the winters were so intensely cold that when I woke up in the morning I couldn’t see out of the windows, because ice had formed on the inside of the windowpanes.

The kitchen also contained a narrow wooden table, which was used for the preparation of food and ironing clothes, the result of which meant that the end of the day it had to be vigorously scrubbed with a hard bristle brush, a cake of Fairy Sunlight soap and tin of Vim scouring powder. My mother’s heavy smoothing irons were kept on a shelf above the sink to be used for pressing and ironing our clothes. They were heated on the cooker’s gas rings and because there were no gauges on the irons, she estimated the temperature by touch and allowed them to cool to suit the different fabrics she was ironing. We had no hot water supply and if hot water was required for the preparation of food, washing up and personal hygiene, it had to be boiled in a kettle or a saucepan. My mother kept her groceries, pots and pans in a green and cream dresser, while the meat was stored in a gauze meat-safe, to keep flies and other insects away from the food. It was almost impossible to buy replacement-cooking utensils in wartime Britain and if a tin kettle or a saucepan sprung a leak, it had to be repaired with a proprietary metal and rubber washer, supplied by the village hardware shop for this purpose.

The brick outhouse contained the lavatory, the washing copper, the mangle, two zinc-coated steel baths suspended from hooks in the wall, a brown, fluted, salt-glazed sink with a cold tap and an area for storing coal and wood. A wooden chopping block stood immediately next to the coal heap, into which Mr. Piggot stuck a small hand axe, which he used for cutting kindling and breaking up large lumps of coal. Unfortunately, our coal heap was situated outside the outhouse, where it was open to the elements and possible pilfering and because my parents were too trusting, it took us a long time to work out why Mr Piggot had fewer coal deliveries than we had, despite the fact that he kept his coal fire burning continuously. Our neighbour’s overhanging laurel tree provided some protection against the inclement weather but during heavy and prolonged periods of rain, the coal heap inevitably became saturated with water, which made it very difficult to light a fire.

The tap water in Langley was very hard and it was almost impossible to produce a good lather with the type of soap available in austerity Britain. My mother obtained soft water to wash the household’s laundry and the family’s hair from a deep rectangular, brick, underground cistern that collected roof water. It was covered by a rotten, wooden deck and was situated outside Mr. Piggot’s room at the rear of the house. My mother often stood on the decking while she gossiped to our next-door neighbour, until one day it collapsed under her weight and she was only saved from a ducking by hanging onto the corrugated iron fence with her fingertips and finding a toehold to pull herself to safety. It was here that we discovered an enormous toad living in an inlet pipe. How it survived there remains a mystery but it was huge and about the size of my mothers hand. A long-handled, village pump was attached to the outside wall of the outhouse, which had been used to supply the cottage with water prior to the provision of a mains water supply but despite our attempts to prime it with buckets of water; we never managed to get it working again. It was only many years later when my father demolished the outhouse that we discovered that the circular brick well supplying the pump was dry, because the water table had fallen when the clay was excavated from the gulley at the bottom of our garden, which had been the site of a former brickfield.

It is difficult to imagine how basic our lives were in those days without the luxury of central heating, running hot water and a modern, low level W.C., which didn’t freeze up during the wintertime. Our lavatory was situated in the outhouse and comprised a cream pedestal water closet with a wooden seat, which was reasonably warm to sit on during the depths of winter. A high level, rusty cistern was attached to the wall at ceiling height and in the winter, my mother had to place a candle on the floor to prevent it freezing overnight. The walls were painted with white distemper, which flaked off with the dampness and left a carpet of small white flecks around the perimeter of the concrete floor for my mother to sweep up when she next cleaned the lavatory. It was extremely difficult to buy toilet paper during the war and we had to make do with neatly cut rectangular pieces of The Daily Mirror, hung from a nail in the wall. When oranges were available, the soft tissue papers in which they were wrapped were a prized commodity.

It was not possible to use the outside lavatory in the middle of the night and so we had to use a chamber pot or po, judiciously, hidden under the bed. We had various types of chamber pots including china ones decorated with floral patterns or utilitarian, pale green, enamel ones. One of the de luxe variety bore the humorous ditty, Wash me well and keep me clean and I’ll ne’er tell what I have seen, with an ominously large eye peering up from its base. My mother’s most distasteful daily chore was to have to carry the chamber pots across the yard to the lavatory, discreetly concealed under a cloth, where they were emptied, washed and disinfected, ready for re-use.

A tall and magnificent magnolia tree with large waxy evergreen leaves grew outside my parents’ bedroom window and in the springtime it was covered in a mass of white tulip shaped flowers with the most evocative and fragrant smell. Their bedroom was furnished with a large, black, iron bedstead equipped with a decorative carved head board, a tall three drawer, yew dressing table with a rotating mirror, a mahogany washstand with a mottled pink marble top, on which stood a china washbasin and jug, tastefully decorated with roses, two mahogany, balloon-back chairs, with sagging Rexine covered seats and a modesty screen, behind which my mother could wash and change in private. The bedroom was so cluttered with furniture that there was no space for a wardrobe and so a corner of the room was curtained off to provide hanging space for my parents’ clothes. A small fireplace was built into a corner of the room but this was only used in times of illness. The room had no gas lighting and at bed time it was illuminated by either a candle, in a Wee Willy Winkie candlestick-holder, or by a short, stubby candle called a night-light, made from slow burning wax and placed in a saucer of water to prevent an accidental fire. When Granddad Tyrie came to stay with us and my father was in the army, my cot was moved into my parents’ bedroom to release the small bedroom for his use.

The garden was a quarter of an acre in size, much of which was cultivated by Mr. Piggot for growing vegetables. He grew Majestic potatoes, winter cabbages, scarlet runner beans, onions and Brussels sprouts and he sold his surplus to the customers of the Red Lion pub, which was his local. The garden paths were surfaced with cinders from the coal fires and edged with old clay beer bottles. Mature apple trees grew at the bottom of the garden, including the delicious King of Pippins, Blenheim Orange and Egremont Russets. Other varieties included a splendid and gnarled, heavy cropping Coxes Pippin tree, situated conveniently close to the back door, while hidden behind the outhouse stood a mature Golden Noble cooking apple that bore prolific quantities of fruit. Its small pale cooking apples made excellent pies; they rendered down well, were light and fluffy and so sweet that they required very little sugar to sweeten them, an absolute boon with sugar strictly rationed at that time. We were not allowed to pick the apples from the fruit trees but Mr Piggot had no objection to my mother using the windfalls. She couldn’t resist the temptation however, to sample the large Victoria plums, which she converted into windfalls by the skilful use of the forked tip of her clothes prop. The mouth-watering and juicy, purple plums were absolutely delicious, confirming the old adage that stolen fruit tastes sweetest. Her other vice was to plunder Mr Piggot’s redcurrant bushes while he was in the pub and while she was doing this I would play hide and seek among the tall overgrown bushes and sample the fruit’s rather unusual and distinctive flavour.

The front garden was spartan and poorly maintained and the only colour was provided by the annual, mass, spring display of bluebells, a scrubby red rose and a magnificent, tall, heavily scented, yellow rose bush called Peace, which had apparently been cultivated and named to celebrate the end of the First World War. A large peony with beautiful clusters of purple flowers completed the planting but these had such an incredibly short life span that within days of the plant coming into bloom, the garden was covered in a colourful carpet of bright petals.

Bill Piggot would have been about sixty-five when we moved to St Mary’s Road. He was a tall man with a military bearing, which was surprising for a man of his age. He had served in the army in South Africa during the Boer War, which may have accounted for his ramrod, straight back. He had untidy white hair, a tanned, wrinkled, weather-beaten face and a white General Kitchener moustache discoloured by pipe tobacco smoke. He wore an open neck, cream and striped, collarless, tunic shirt, which betrayed the top of his woollen vest and a dark worsted waistcoat with an accompanying Smiths pocket watch and fob. His trousers were black serge with a shiny seat and grubby from his work as a part time gardener. On his feet, he wore a pair of darned grey woollen socks and black, leather, hobnailed boots.

His companion was Pete, a mongrel with white straggly hair and a black face and when he wasn’t asleep indoors in his basket, he was tied to an iron post next to the path leading to the outhouse. The length of his lead just stopped him from reaching the edge of the path, which was just as well, because he would rush towards me barking and snarling furiously whenever I went to the outhouse. Mr Piggot was a man of habit and every day at the same time, he would walk to the Red Lion for his daily pint. We could set our clocks by him. A loud yawn would emanate from his room; he would get out of his chair, don his coat and with Pete obediently in tow, he would make his way to the pub.

He worked part-time as a gardener for Miss Bumby, an elderly and regal lady, who wore expensive, wide brimmed hats and who lived in a large detached house, opposite her smallholding in the Langley Road, from where she sold seasonal vegetables. Customers had to ring a small silver bell to attract her attention, if she was collecting produce from her garden, and this was hung from a hook at the side of the hut, where she kept her scales to weigh out the potatoes. The bell was fascinating and had been made from metal recovered from a shot down German aircraft and it was embossed with the heads of Churchill and Hitler. She nearly made me buy it once when I shook it so hard that the clapper flew off but I was rescued from this penalty by a fingertip search of the surrounding area, where much to my relief I found it and returned it to its menacing owner. She had been a well-travelled woman and her house was full of antiques, although I never learnt the story behind the two beautiful and enormous Chinese vases decorated with dragons that stood in her hallway.

Mr Piggot’s room was spartanly furnished. It had cream painted brick walls, a dark blue quarry tile floor and some old rugs. It was the original kitchen of the house and was equipped with a black cast iron range, containing an oven and cooking hob and stood in the corner of the room in an alcove below the chimney. There always seemed to be a large kettle simmering away on the top of the range and stew and beans cooking in the oven. His furniture comprised a Welsh dresser, a wooden high backed armchair with loose cushions and a pine table covered in a piece of green felt and an oilskin tablecloth. Two plain kitchen chairs, a wall mounted pendulum clock and a picture of the Charge of the Light Brigade completed the furnishings. His bedroom on the other hand was furnished in the same style as my parents but smelled of old dog.

There were few houses in our road at that time, the principal buildings being the flint and brick church of St Mary the Virgin, an adjoining ivy-covered, brick cottage, possibly the original vicarage and a row of almshouses next to the graveyard. The Red Lion public house stood opposite the church and was a place of sanctuary for the congregation after a particularly long and tedious service, a wedding or a funeral. The churchyard ended with another row of almshouses known as Seymour Cottages built in the 18th century, one of which hit the headlines in the Slough Observer, when one of the families alleged that their cottage was haunted. They complained bitterly about being awoken in the middle of the night by strange knocking noises, eerie footsteps and violent drops in temperature and claimed that they had witnessed objects unaccountably falling off furniture due to a poltergeist. Much to the surprise and cynicism of the locals, who thought that the family were fabricating the story to get themselves a council house, the church took the situation very seriously and Reverend Lord performed the rare and unusual service of exorcism to lay the troubled spirit to rest. It must have done the trick for there were no further reports of strange occurrences and shortly afterwards the family moved away.

A grand detached house, also owned by the church, was rented to a senior ranking naval officer called Commander Hamilton-Hill and this stood on the opposite side of the road to the almshouses. An allotment separated this property from No. 15, the semi-detached tied cottage next to ours, which was occupied by the gardener, who worked for Gilbeys, the famous gin family, who lived in a farm at Middle Green. The Cryer and Bishop families occupied nos. 19 and 21 respectively and beyond these was the gulley, a low lying piece of land and former clay pit, used by the RAF for a barrage balloon site. The gulley belonged to the Johnsons, who lived in a bungalow next to the railway bridge and who owned the fruit orchard immediately opposite our house. This contained a fascinating jumble of chicken sheds and pigsties, cold frames in various states of dereliction, an old water pump and a copper boiler for cooking chicken feed and pigswill. Mr and Mrs Sadler and their neighbours Mr and Mrs Black lived opposite the Cryer family in two ugly, characterless semi-detached houses, which adjoined a short row of terrace houses called the Yard. The Horse Chestnuts public house completed the settlement.

Fear was the strongest emotion that I remember from my early childhood days, particularly my mother’s irrational response to the air raid sirens, when they warned the population to take cover from the approaching German bombers. My first experience of this was when I accompanied her to the churchyard, to water the flowers on the graves of her mother and sister Lucy. Lucy was my mother’s sister, who died during the First World War while Granddad Andrews was fighting in France. She had been named after the famous, new, transatlantic passenger liner the Lusitania but it was an unfortunate choice of a name and perhaps a bad omen for the girl, for the ship was sunk by a German submarine resulting in the deaths of many innocent passengers. Sadly, Granddad never saw his daughter, apart from a black and white photograph, taken when she was lying peacefully in her coffin.

My mother had just finished watering the flowers when the air-raid sirens began their undulating, warning wail, which prompted my mother to shout, Quick run, and with that, she dashed off in the direction of our house. I was terrified at having been abandoned and I chased after her as fast as my little legs would carry me, shouting, Mummy, Mummy, wait for me, but she was already indoors by the time I caught up with her.

Occasionally when the sirens sounded their warnings, we would join Mr and Mrs Cryer and their children Ernie, Sylvie, Olive and Maureen in their Anderson shelter but more often than not, we would take refuge in the cupboard under the stairs. It was a damp, cold and dark confined space with a musty smell of gas and we sat on an old metal trunk filled with books for what seemed like an eternity until we heard the sirens’ long continuous all-clear signals and could return to the relative comfort of the living room. During the war, there was always the fear that the Germans would bomb the civilian population with poisonous gas and as a precautionary measure; everyone was issued with a gas mask, which they had to carry around with them in a cardboard box. My mother’s gas mask was made from black rubber, with a wide clear plastic eyepiece and a metal cylindrical filter. I found it absolutely terrifying when she put it on and I cried, screamed and refused to go near her when she was wearing it. The worst was yet to come, for I too had to wear a gas mask specifically designed for children. It was pink and looked like the face of Mickey Mouse and I hated it; it was claustrophobic and I felt as though my mother was trying to suffocate me when she forced me to wear it. She was terrified that if poisonous gas bombs were dropped, her precious son would be killed, because he wasn’t wearing his gas mask and so the situation became extremely fraught when I threw a tantrum to avoid putting it on.

I don’t know if it was my Uncle Frank, who caused my fear of heights or what subsequently happened to me identified a problem with my sense of balance. During one of our visits to see Granddad Andrews, Uncle Frank playfully picked me up and held me upside down by my ankles. It is the sort of fun that uncles have had with their nephews for generations but I was only a toddler at the time and I shrieked with terror as my whole world was physically turned upside down. I was completely disoriented and petrified that he would drop me and despite my cries for help, my mother didn’t come to my rescue. Sadly, ever since that awful experience I have suffered from vertigo.

Other wartime fears were caused by the anxiety exhibited by adults. Uncle George was the youngest of my mother’s brothers and he and his wife Aunt Bertha and their daughter Pat lived at No. 142 Meadfield Road next to Hawkers aerodrome. One evening when my mother and I were visiting the family, there was an unusually early air raid warning and we had to take shelter in the house and stay there overnight. Uncle Bill, another of my mother’s brothers, his wife, Aunt Mildred and daughter Marjorie were also visiting Uncle George at that time and all the women and children had to take refuge inside the family’s Morrison shelter, a large cage made from steel mesh that fitted underneath the dining room table. This protected its occupants from injury if a bomb hit the house and enabled the emergency services to rescue those trapped inside. It was very uncomfortable lying inside the shelter and I remember being squashed up against its sides and reprimanded by the adults for fidgeting. We also had to sleep in our clothes and I could smell the adults’ fear, as they listened to the drone of the enemy aircraft flying overhead and the sound of bombs exploding in the distance.

I should at this point mention spies. At the beginning of the war, Uncle George and Aunt Bertha innocently let one of their rooms to a married couple, who were looking for accommodation. One day my uncle heard strange noises coming from their bedroom, which sounded rather like a radio transmitter. Placing a teacup against his bedroom wall to overhear what was going on; he confirmed his suspicions and because the house was close to Hawkers aircraft factory, my uncle prudently decided to report the matter to the police. I don’t know how the couple were forewarned but after he left home, the couple departed in a hurry, possibly having overheard my uncle telling my aunt of his suspicions. Thanks to his foresight they didn’t get far and were apprehended as they waited for a train at Langley Railway Station, where a search of their luggage revealed the incriminating transmitter they had been using, to report to Berlin the effects of the German bombing raids on Hawker’s aerodrome. They were indeed spies.

My mother had a good friend called Maude Watts, who had a daughter of my age called Beryl. Her husband Mark worked at Lindsey Thompson Ltd, a factory making electrical transformers, situated between the railway line and the Grand Union canal. One day while we were walking across the meadows completely exposed to the open skies, the air raid sirens began their warning wails. In a blind panic, we ran to seek shelter behind a hedge bordering the spinney, not that it gave us any physical protection. We heard the unmistakable roar of aircraft engines and saw the flash of an airplane’s fuselage above the trees accompanied by the chatter of machine gun fire. Normally this would have had my mother cowering in fear but on this occasion she jumped up and ran into the open field shouting, I’ve got ants in my pants, and stood there frantically trying to brush the small red stinging creatures from her clothing and legs, completely oblivious to the danger posed by the lone, strafing, German intruder and impervious to the worried calls from her friend to get back under cover.

My cousin Jean Balding told me of another occasion when my mother deserted me. It happened while we were visiting Aunt Min, my mother’s eldest sister, who lived in a terraced council house in Mead Avenue that backed onto the railway line and half a mile from where Granddad Andrews and Uncle George lived. Aunt Min was married to Uncle Bill Balding and they had four children, Margaret, Jean, Brian and Michael. We were standing in the back garden at the time, when a V1 pilotless glider-rocket, or a doodlebug to give it its nickname, flew overhead. Much to the disgust of Aunt Min, my mother, with her unerring sense of self-preservation, ran indoors and abandoned me, only to receive a severe reprimand from her eldest sister for her cowardly behaviour.

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MOTHER AND SON

While my father was serving King and Country, Granddad Tyrie and Alison Souter, came to live with us. Alison was about 12 years old and her story is a skeleton in the family cupboard. She had gorgeous long and wavy auburn hair, was a pleasant lass with a broad Scottish accent and wore a kilt. She used to keep me amused by playing bus conductors on the stairs and she went to the local school with my older cousins. Her past was a secret and all I knew was that Granddad Tyrie had accepted her into the family and looked after her. When my father died, my mother told me that Alison had told her that she was my father’s daughter, a fact he had allegedly hidden from my mother in order to protect her. It came as a bombshell to learn that the person, whom I had assumed to be an aunt was apparently my sister and so I asked Aunt Peg, one of my father’s half sisters if there was any truth in the story and she sent me a comprehensive letter from Australia, detailing what had happened at that time, which was also confirmed by my father’s cousin Peggy Cairns. The story according to both sources, was that a local girl called Jean Souter arrived at my grandfather’s door with her newly born baby and told him to take it, because it was my father’s child. Alison was accepted into the family by Granddad Tyrie but kept her mother’s name. My father never acknowledged Alison as his daughter during his lifetime and it remains a sad and highly unsatisfactory state of affairs to all concerned.

Granddad Tyrie was a carpenter, joiner and cabinet-maker by trade and he worked at the Admiralty’s premises at Ditton Park, where he made wooden instrument cases for compasses and bombsights. My father was always generous with his praise for Granddad’s craftsmanship, especially his beautifully fitting mortise and tenon joints in the cabinets and furniture that he built. He was a distinguished looking man with a grey moustache and twinkle in his eye but his most memorable features were the serious injuries he had sustained from a fall through a factory roof, the result of which was the loss of the little finger on his left hand and the removal of a circular area of bone from his skull, which had left a soft, hypnotic area of flesh about an inch in diameter in his forehead that pulsated with his heart beat and which held me spellbound when I sat opposite him at the table. He was a typical dour Scot and although I can never remember him laughing, he had a dry and subtle sense of humour, which was lost on my mother.

He also had a sense of history and one night he took Alison and me to the front door to show us the searing red glow on the horizon, which he explained came from the terrible fires raging in London from the overnight bombing. London was only some 25 miles away from our house and I can still remember him telling us with a note of concern in his soft Scottish voice that, London is getting badly hit again tonight. Later in the war when the Germans launched their pilotless V1 flying bombs against London, my grandfather told us how to identify the distinctive and intermittent noise of their ramjet motors. He assured us that we were perfectly safe when they were flying overhead and we could hear the audible buzz from their motors but when their engines cut out and they began their deadly and silent descent to earth, no one knew where they were going to land and we were all in danger of being killed.

Granddad Tyrie and my mother often went cycling in the countryside and being only a toddler, I occupied pride of place in the carrier perched on the back of my grandfather’s bike. On one occasion, we stopped on a grass verge next to a bluebell wood where I was allowed to wander amongst the breathtaking blue flowers, which stretched deep into the shady woodland. Even today, they remain one of my favourite wild flowers and bring back those wonderful and happy memories, when I roamed without a care, in a sea of blue. What I didn’t remember was being so tired after my exertions that I fell asleep on a blanket near their bicycles and when it was time for them to leave, my grandfather forgot to put me back into his carrier and it was only as they began to cycle away that my mother noticed I was missing and shouted out, Where’s my baby?

Although I had no grandmothers to dote on me, Granddad Andrews would often visit his youngest daughter and join Granddad Tyrie in a deckchair on the small lawn at the back of the outhouse, where they sheltered from the sun under the canopy of the apple tree. The two men were not dissimilar in appearance, both wore grey flannel suits and flat woollen caps to protect their heads and each had a distinctive moustache, although Granddad Andrews moustache drooped somewhat more than Granddad Tyrie’s. The two men would spend their time chatting about their experiences in the First World War and puff away on their briar pipes, occasionally sharing a small quantity of tobacco from their leather pouches. They constantly had to relight their pipes using a box of Swan Vestas matches and like all children; I was fascinated by fire and would bring them a supply of birds’ feathers to set alight for me. They didn’t burn very well but my grandfathers were happy to amuse me, which resulted in the grass around their deckchairs becoming covered in a heap of discarded and charred matchsticks, until they became tired with that game and told me to run along and play, because they had run out of matches.

The radio gave everyone vital news of the progress of the war and the BBC with its news and variety programmes played an important role in raising the nation’s morale. We were not supposed to listen to the German propaganda broadcasts by the infamous Lord Haw-Haw but foolishly, my mother tuned into the transmissions and was often brought to tears by his gleeful and exaggerated announcements that British troops had suffered major setbacks and huge casualties. It was a very difficult and emotional time for her with my father fighting in Europe and it would have been much more sensible if she had remained tuned to the BBC.

The wartime singers kept us well entertained and Gracie Fields, Vera Lynn and Flanagan and Allen lifted our spirits with songs such as Keep the home fires burning, Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye, and Underneath the Arches. Lili Marlene, a popular German song, was translated into English and soon became a great hit amongst our troops, as well as among the civilian population. One song I cannot forget is the poignant rendering of Pedro the Fisherman, which always reduced my mother to tears, as she fondly imagined my father opening the front gate and walking up the garden path into her welcoming arms.

My mother frequently played host to my father’s brothers and sisters, who did their duty to King and Country by serving in the army. My Canadian uncle, another Charlie Tyrie visited us, as did my aunts Peg and Bet, my father’s half sisters and they would arrive in their smartly dressed uniforms to see Granddad Tyrie and sleep overnight on the ottoman before going back to their units. During one visit Aunt Bet gave me a book of cut-out, miniature, cardboard, grocery packets for my birthday and patiently helped me to make the small cartons with a tiny pair of scissors. She also showed me how to make a bandit’s mask from the side of a cardboard box, complete with two small holes so that I could tie it around my head with a couple of pieces of string. Much to my dismay, the only string available in the house wasn’t long enough and when I asked my granddad to help me out, he mischievously suggested that I should nail them to the side of my head with a couple of tacks he produced from his pocket. I looked at them suspiciously, felt their sharp points and concluded that my grandfather was winding me up and was definitely not a man to be trusted.

A major rift broke out between my mother and Aunt Bet during one of her visits to see her dad. I remember the incident well but have only the haziest idea of why it occurred. Apparently, when Aunt Bet entered the house she was so pleased to see her father that she momentarily forgot to acknowledge my mother’s presence. My mother’s pent up anger at being snubbed, reverberated through the house and she exploded with a vituperative attack on my aunt’s behaviour, concluding with the unforgettable words, Do you see that door, get out! My aunt departed and for many years they had very little contact. I cannot believe that such a minor incident was the real reason for the rift and I suspect that something deeper had been boiling up inside my mother and that Aunt Bet’s faux pas was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. After the war, she frequently complained to my father that his relatives would frequently arrive unannounced and expect to be fed and would eat her rations without handing over their ration books but this was the distortion of an unfortunate isolated incident.

Travel during the war was another exciting experience for me, especially the journey into Slough on the green, London Transport, No. 458, single-decker buses, or No. 417 double-decker buses. It was impossible to look through the windows, because they were covered in an opaque, sticky fabric to prevent the glass from shattering in the event of a bomb explosion and the conductor could only see where we were going by looking through of a small square of clear glass where the fabric had been removed, with the result that she would have to call out the name of each bust stop, to enable the passengers to dismount at their required destination. The bus tickets were made from small rectangles of coloured card, each one stamped with a different price, which depended upon the length of the journey and whether or not it was for a child or adult’s fare. These were retained by mousetrap-like springs in a wooden holder and were clipped or punched, to the ting of a small bell in a chromium plated ticket machine, suspended from the conductor’s neck.

Travel on the railways was even more difficult, because the name of every station had been removed from the platforms to confuse the Germans should they ever have invaded Britain. In fact far more confusion reigned among the poor travelling public, who had to strain their ears to hear the stationmaster or guard call out the name of the station every time the train stopped.

As a child, I suffered from weak ankles, which meant that I had to wear specially designed brown boots to support them. This involved regular visits to one of London’s children’s hospitals, where my feet were X-rayed in a machine that gave off a green glow. It was possible to see the outline of my bones and my feet in the equipment and this enabled the specialist to measure me for a new, larger pair of boots until my next visit. The train trips to London were exciting but I used to hate standing on the platform, waiting for a train. I had sensitive ears and I found the thunderous noise of the locomotive absolutely excruciating, as it drew to a halt accompanied by a loud hiss of steam. I pressed my hands firmly over my ears to protect them and often stayed in the waiting room or hid behind my mother’s skirts until the train came to a standstill and I could climb into a compartment to find a seat. Even during those difficult times good manners prevailed and a gentleman would willingly stand up and offer his seat to a lady, whereas children had to sit on their parents’ laps. On one trip to London, the steam train from Langley to Paddington had to stop, because a bombing raid was in progress. We were all terrified that a bomb would hit the train and we would be killed; we couldn’t open the doors or windows to see what was happening outside and we had to wait nervously and patiently until the sirens sounded the all-clear to allow the train to proceed into Paddington station.

The next episode of my adventure involved negotiating London Underground, used by families to shelter from the overnight bombing raids. The escalators terrified me. I had a very poor sense of balance and I found it very difficult to master the technique of stepping on and off the moving staircases and my grandfather didn’t appreciate the frightening perspective, the metal stairs presented to a toddler. All I could see was a moving floor, shooting off into space and I was expected to step on it. It was like walking the plank and a nightmare experience. A further terror awaited me when I had to walk along the edge of the platform next to the live electric rails, because the back of the platform was taken up with the beds and belongings of people, who would be sheltering from the bombing raids later that night.

The Underground trains were fascinating. On my first trip, I was mystified by the rows of black plastic knobs, which dangled from the roof of the carriage and swayed sympathetically with the movement of the train. It was only later when all the seats were occupied and I was made sit on my mother’s knee that I discovered the reason for those strange objects and watched the standing passengers grip them tightly to resist the lurching movement of the train. When we finally emerged into the bright daylight at street level, we passed blackened and burnt out shells of buildings gutted by the bombing and huge, circular, corrugated, water tanks built on areas of cleared rubble, because the heavy bombing had repeatedly damaged the city’s water mains and the fire-fighters needed additional water supplies to extinguish the fires.

The closest I ever came to a German bomber, was when we passed the wreckage of an aircraft partially buried in the rubble of a demolished building. Even though it had been rendered harmless, the sinister crosses and swastikas on its tail-plane and fuselage gave it an aura of menace. A kindly policeman wearing a cloak and a traditional beehive helmet was guarding the aircraft and he explained to my grandfather that it was a seaplane that had been trying to lay mines in the river Thames but had been shot down by the city’s anti-aircraft guns. My other memory of those visits was the vast canopy of silver barrage balloons, floating above me in a clear blue sky, to prevent enemy bombers making low-level attacks on strategic buildings and bridges.

Closer to home a barrage balloon site had been constructed in the gulley at the rear of Mr. and Mrs. Bishop’s house and comprised a large Nissen hut for the crew and several air raid shelters. The balloon was used to deter bombing attacks on the canal and railway bridges and may even have been part of a chain to protect the aerodrome but I always felt uneasy when that enormous and menacing, silver, primeval monster, emerged from behind the tall hedgerow at the bottom of the garden. When it first appeared, it was quite limp and its fins flopped lazily onto its body, then as more gas was pumped into its rubbery skin, it slowly grew in size until it climbed high into the sky to hover ominously over our house, tethered by a steel hawser.

I met my first American soldiers when my mother took me to a large mansion, close to the Crooked Billet public house at Iver Heath. The army had requisitioned it and we had gone there to visit Mrs. Black, who worked in the house as a cleaner. While we were there, a soldier showed us around the gardens and pointed out some pieces of shrapnel and a German flare or anti-personnel bomb, dropped during a bombing raid the previous night. He was a kind man, who warned me never to touch anything suspicious; because if it was a bomb it could blow my hands off and that the Germans were apparently dropping anti-personnel mines, which resembled innocent everyday objects such as fountain pens. A couple of American soldiers were also billeted in the house and they asked me if I would like to go for a ride in their jeep to get some fuel from the local petrol station. Following an approving nod from Mrs. Black and my mother, I went for my first car ride in the back of a khaki jeep. I was absolutely thrilled by the speed of the vehicle and flattered by the attention paid to me by the soldiers but I cannot remember if I was given any chocolate, because the ride was a much more exciting experience. The only other memory I have of the journey was when I watched the soldiers overfill a jerry can with diesel oil, which disappeared in a stream of pink bubbles into a drain at the base of the pump.

I can equally remember an aerial battle, which took place when I was playing in the garden with Mrs. Cryer’s children. It took place high over our rooftops but try as I might, I couldn’t see the actual aircraft as they weaved about, even though every effort was made to point them out to me.

Towards the end of the war, my mother worked as a part-time cleaner for Mrs Hamilton-Hill, who lived in the large detached house opposite the churchyard. I was allowed to accompany her to the house and while she was busy cleaning the rooms; I played with Deirdre, Mrs Hamilton-Hill’s daughter, who in later life married the actor Corin Redgrave. I was most surprised to discover that she made no mention of our brief relationship when she wrote her autobiography but presumably, this was because I didn’t figure a great deal in her life. Even more surprising was the fact that she never mentioned that during the war she had spent her early years in Langley. She did however influence my formative years in an episode, which was to have painful repercussions for me. We were messing about