Tea, Tennis, and Turbulent Times: A Slice of Life

By Simon Watt

This is a true story of an ordinary boy who grew up to have what I believe to be an extraordinary tale to tell. This is the tale of a lad growing up in post-war Britain and of the trials and tribulations of life in a boarding school and an attempt to earn his wings at Cranwell.

This is also the account of how letters sent home over a fifteen-year period prompted the author to write his memoirs of these years spent in what is now Bangladesh and of the exciting, but often dangerous times of being caught up in the Indo-Pakistan War and the birth of a new nationa slice of history barely remembered today.

This is about his experiences as a young tea planter adapting to the vagaries of a strange language and living conditions in a Third World country as well as the droughts and cyclones that at times resulted in so much loss of life and infrastructure, learning to live and adapt to the harsh and often bone-wearying humidity and heat of the monsoons but relishing the beauty and the blessing of the cooler winter months.

Its a factual story of how tea in the 1960s and 1970s was produced fromtwo leaves and a bud to a perfect cup of tea, how sport and club life played a major part in helping to dispel the loneliness he felt at being often the only Britisher for many miles, and how his friendships were made, many of which endure to this day.

Simon Watt sets out the tale of his first thirty-five years in a frank and candid way. It is an honest, often moving account of his life up to that time. It is a book written with sincerity and humour while revealing a fascinating story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Dec 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543404838

Book preview

Tea, Tennis,

and

Turbulent

Times

A Slice of Life

Simon Watt

Copyright © 2017 by Simon Watt.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2017916492

ISBN:            Hardcover                 978-1-5434-0485-2

                      Softcover                  978-1-5434-0484-5

                      eBook                         978-1-5434-0483-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 12/20/2017

Xlibris

1-800-455-039

www.Xlibris.com.au

757289

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Letters Home

A Budding Dynasty

Life Begins With A Bang

School—A Sporting Start

A Flying Start

Pakistan

Getting To Know Tea

Tea-Tasting Time

Planting, Pruning, and Planning

Blasted By Shotgun

Bunking Down in an Outgarden

A Different Life

Padding Up and Kicking Goals

The Promised Sport

Playing Rugby Abroad

The Car with Golden Gears

Testing Time Behind The Wheel

The Association

Royalty? No One Asked Me

Tackling Tea Thieves

Arranging a Happy Marriage

First-Class Holidays

Cashing-In in Ceylon

Gavin Campbell’s Twenty-First and More

Leopards and Other Wild Animals

Dynamic Dam Builder

Another Brick in The Wall

The Reign of Niaz Khan

Problems at Shamshernagar Airport

Assam

It’s War

Aclubbing We Shall Go

Food Parcels for The Troops

Good Health

Expert to a Tea!

A Bureaucratic World

Sailing into The Wind

Jumping Up The Promotion Ladder

Clocking in to Switzerland

Droughts, Floods, and Cyclones

Dictatorships, Divisions, and Deportations

Like Sitting Ducks

All-Out Assault

Back to Bangladesh

On The Throne at Last

In Raleigh’s Footsteps

Permanently in Starvation Mode

The Hitchhiker

Allynugger Burning

Bye-Bye, Bangladesh

Safe Landing

Those Foreign Words You Didn’t Understand

In memory of my mother, whose thoughtfulness in keeping my letters has enabled me to write about my early life for future generations of the family to read and enjoy.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’d especially like to thank my wife, Sandra, for her encouragement and forbearance when I needed solitude and time on the computer to do my writing; to my dear friend Wendy, who told me to just write and let somebody else sort it all out; to my neighbours Lee and Hazel, who independently took over my draft and spent a lot of their time doing just that; to Raihana, whose own book about her experiences on neighbouring estates brought back many memories of my time on Shumshernugger; and last but not least, to my old friend Azim in Bangladesh, who over the years has kept me up to date on the news of the dwindling number of colleagues from my years spent in Sylhet.

LETTERS HOME

A Machete under the Bed

I think we all want to leave something for future generations to remember us by. In fact, a popular subject among our womenfolk is that having a son ensures that one’s surname continues down through the ages. However, no doubt much to my parents regret, it was not to be in my case, as I have no direct descendants of my own.

As you get older, you find time to reflect on the history of one’s antecedents, and the publications I have read on mine have made for some captivating reading—much helped, I might add, by the wonder of the Internet.

I remember being fascinated by a book published by my Aunt Liz, containing my grandfather’s letters to his mother while he was a midshipman in the Royal Navy during the 1890s. They tell of life on patrol in the Chilean sector of the Pacific and the landing of marines on the Natal coast of South Africa to fight in the Zulu Wars.

The keeping of letters must have been a family trait because my mother, unbeknown to me, kept all the letters I had written to her over the years from overseas. Following in the family tradition, I married very late in life and, at the grand old age of forty-six, took Sandra home to meet my parents for the first time. My parents were moving out of their home of thirty years in Ireland to return to the UK.

We spent much of our time with them, clearing out all the rubbish that they had accumulated, much of which had never been moved out of the attic since being put there in 1958. My mother took the opportunity to pass on to Sandra all the letters from me that she had kept. Perhaps she felt that, now that I was married, she was handing over the responsibility for her son to another woman or that perhaps, by handing over my letters, Sandra would have a better understanding of who I was.

It didn’t really work out that way because although we made an attempt to transcribe them into a readable form, Sandra struggled with my handwriting and the many unfamiliar names. With the coming of the computer age, retirement, and time on my hands, I was able complete the task myself.

I was never a prolific writer. At prep school, we had to spend an hour every Sunday writing to our parents, and I really struggled to put more than half a dozen words to a blank sheet. In fact, putting a sheet of paper in front of me was a sure way of numbing my brain. What can you really write about the constant life in a boarding school that might interest parents so far out of reach?

During my first few years in Pakistan, I wrote, for me, a lot of letters. There were, of course, a lot of interesting things going on. But the number dwindled with the passing of the years. There were naturally big gaps when I went on furlough—after all, I did get six months away every three years. And who anyway was going to admit to their parents that they lived on an international border between two warring countries or that, in the latter days of Bangladesh, you lived with a machete under your bed as a protection against dacoits?

The chapters ahead have many excerpts from these letters and form a background to much of what I have written.

A neighbour recently commented that she never read autobiographies. They were just avenues to brag about one’s wonderful life and how well one had done. For me, I don’t really see it quite like that.

The very last time I stayed with Aunt Liz, we sat that night in Twickenham over a bottle of whisky. She was one woman I could really relate to, much more so than my own mother. She seemed to understand me and treated me like a son of her own. In the maudlin mood that alcohol could bring on, I reflected on my life and whether I had lived up to the expectations of my parents and my expensive education.

My mood wasn’t helped by my just having had a particularly difficult parting from my mother. I don’t know why, but I had never been able to do wrong in her eyes. On that trip home, this had changed; she had not been happy with my having wanted to borrow her car for a few extra days.

Family partings are never easy, especially knowing that this could well be for the last time; as indeed it turned out to be. So this particular parting had been emotionally charged after she told me she had changed her will in favour of her grandchildren. It didn’t actually matter and financially made no difference to me. It was family money passed down through the generations on the maternal side of the family. She had every right to do with it what she wanted. And to be fair, she always went out of her way to treat both her own children equally. But I think this act of cutting me out of her will was for both of us a severing of the umbilical cord.

In Twickenham, Aunt Liz brought me back down to earth. She rightly pointed out that I had had a really interesting and different way of life in places that other people had only ever read about. I had really nothing to be regretful about. She was right as always.

Memories can be fickle. Names, dates, and foreign words in this account could be wrong or mispronounced. Some of the stories might not be entirely factually correct. Emerging countries like to rid themselves of names acquired through colonial rulers. I have tried to keep them as they were in my time.

The Internet has also proved invaluable in placing times that were hazy in recollection and in providing background information to the events of the times. Much of what I write about is, after all, a lifetime away.

Looking back, I am still amazed at what I have seen during my life. In my early years, I seemed to stumble or fall at every hurdle. I failed my exams, failed my flying, and fell into planting only because my parents met a planter they liked.

I have never been particularly adventurous, and I am ultraconservative with everything I do. Yet during my fifteen years in what is now Bangladesh, I managed to get caught up in the Chinese invasion of India, several Indo-Pakistan conflicts, and the Bangladesh War of Independence. I was probably in far greater danger during those times than I would ever have experienced if I had stayed in the RAF.

I then spent four great years in Malawi before immigrating to Zimbabwe to live for eighteen years close to the landmined border of Mozambique, another country under civil strife. The general population in all the countries I lived in were on or below the poverty line, but amazingly they had been happy to be employed and housed in what the materialistic Western world might well describe as slave labour conditions. In our world, we really don’t appreciate how lucky we really are.

Not all parts of this account may be of interest to everyone. It is as much a collection of short stories as an autobiography. Humour me! Skip from bit to bit, as you will. It is also a history lesson of events in foreign climes that happened well before many of my readers were born.

I started this account over ten years ago without realising that my retirement was going to be as full of interesting things to do as my working life had been. However, recent misfortunes to some friends and relations have made me appreciate how fickle and short life can be. So I’ve decided on a break, putting a colon, so to speak, between my earlier life and Africa. My hope is that you find this episode of my story intriguing.

A Life Is Brewing

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A BUDDING DYNASTY

A Banker, a Mayor, and a Knight

Dad was born in Argentina from English-speaking stock. Our original home was in Scotland. Family folklore has it that we are somehow related to Robert Erskine, one-time great chamberlain of Scotland, and also to the MacGregors from my great-grandmother’s side. My great-grandfather John, along with brother Jimmy, lived in St Andrews of golf course fame before emigrating from Broughty Ferry to New Zealand after the 1861 census. However, rumours of cheap land in Argentina led them to another sea journey in 1865 to Chile and then over the Andes to acquire land near the township of Fraile Muerto, situated roughly halfway between the present cities of Cordoba and Rosario.

Unfortunately, the land they settled on was completely unsuitable for the sheep they had hoped to farm thanks to the native Indians and the number of wild panthers and vultures. The only crops they could grow were wheat and maize. They seemed to have settled enough by 1869 for John to return to Scotland to marry my great-grandmother. Unfortunately, our records show no further mention of what happened to Jimmy.

Another crop they grew was alfalfa, a forage crop of the pea family and tolerant to harsh conditions, which neatly brings us to the Benitz family and my paternal grandmother, as a biography of Alfred lays claim to the fact that he introduced this crop to the region.

The Benitzes originally emigrated from Baden Germany in 1832, with stopovers in Texas and Fort Ross in California before moving to Argentina in 1874, where they also were attracted by the availability of cheap land. They acquired a large block for their cattle ranches in the same rough area as the Watts and named their ranch La California. Fraile Muerto nearby was eventually renamed Bell Ville after another branch of the family helped rid the area of the bandits. So the Watts and the Benitzes were, by the standards of the day, neighbours.

My grandfather Al was the son of John Watt and went on to marry Hattie Benitz. They had six children evenly spaced between 1906 and 1920. My father told me that Al frittered away his inheritance playing polo and gambling on horses. The result was that the first three sons got expensive educations but, by the time it came to educate the other three, money was so tight they were sent either to the local schools or had no schooling at all. Grandfather had to find a paying job and became the night editor of the Buenos Aires Herald.

My father, aged eleven, was sent to Bective College, a private school in the Buenos Aires suburb of Hurlingham. From there, in 1924 he followed brother Percy to the English Public School of Clifton, being the same school his father had attended. I was also supposed to go there as well, and my father was upset that I was not allowed to have a second try at the Common Entrance exam after failing the first time. Being so far from home and at the same school, the boys would have been very close to each other such that my father was devastated when Percy was killed in an air accident in 1939.

My father went back to Argentina in 1964 to say goodbye to his mother and father, neither of whom he had seen for some twenty-five and forty years respectively. By modern standards, that is an extremely long time to be away from one’s parents. Based on my own experience, I know how homesick a kid can get. I cried my eyes out when my mother joined my father in Aden in 1950 for just two holidays.

What does the loneliness of no home life do to your character? Does it make you stronger? To paraphrase something I’ve read recently, it seems as if you are abandoned by your family, and the school becomes your life. You sleep in a dormitory with fifteen other boys, and you share classrooms with another twenty-five boys, along with open-plan changing rooms and showers which afford no privacy whatsoever. Added to this, if you are lucky, you get a parental visit on a long weekend once a term. The result is that you and your parents finish up with no common ground and few shared family experiences, ‘living separate lives and coming together as polite strangers’. No wonder Percy and Alpin, ‘sent off like pieces of luggage’, became so close and my father so introverted.

The extended-family system was very strong in those days, and the better-off members of a family looked after poorer relatives. Aunt May said she spent a lot of time at the La California ranch. Her memories of living there meant so much to her that she refused to return after the family destroyed the old adobe buildings in exchange for a modern bungalow. She only agreed to visit for the family’s 125th reunion 30 years later.

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La California, 1934.

My Watt grandparents retired to Bournemouth in 1916, eventually dying in the late 1920s. I assume they were also roped in to help with my father in the UK. Certainly, letters show he was very close to his aunt Tommy, who was also living in England. My dad followed Percy into the Royal Air Force via Cranwell. From the Argentinian side of the family, both Jimmy and Frank served in the RAF, with Jimmy losing his life piloting a Stirling bomber over Europe in 1943. After the war, Frank flew general cargo around the States and was one of the original pilots for Austral, which became a major Argentinian domestic airline. May became a Mohr-Bell when she married a prune farmer with a small property at San Rafael, south from Mendoza near the border with Chile.

My mother was one of three daughters and a son. Aunt Peggy was born in 1907, Uncle Tom in 1909, my mother in 1910, followed by Aunt Liz in 1911. Both of my grandparents were in the Royal Navy with Laurence Archer Tawney, finishing up as a captain after being involved in the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War, and service on the Chilean coast. My grandmother’s father, Thomas Greet, finished up as an admiral, dying in 1947 at ninety-three, and I still have a christening mug from him engraved with ‘GGFG’.

Further back in time, one line of the family had been astute business people around Oxford. They opened the Gillett bank (now a branch of Barclays) and one of my great-great-aunts was the first female mayor of Oxford. Ben Greet was another famous ancestor. Son of a Royal Navy (RN) captain, he was born on board the recruiting ship HMS Crocodile moored on the Thames at the Tower of London. He went on to become a famous actor, being knighted in 1929 for making the Old Vic Theatre in London a centre for Shakespearian plays. An earlier Greet ancestor was eleven times mayor in the early 1800s of the town of Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent and is buried in a monument that dwarfs the graveyard. As a landowner and a local magistrate, he made himself so unpopular that the populace danced in the streets when he died. I call that fame!

Living on a naval pension, my maternal grandparents had little money to throw around, though they did have a grand house at Canford Cliffs in Poole on the south coast of England. I have no idea where my mother went to school. But I believe that, like my father, the girls were parcelled out within the extended family to spend time with their great-aunts.

My uncle Tom went on to become a banker in Montevideo, and I followed his example in having a late-age marriage to a divorcee with a ready-made family. A lovely family story tells of Tom being packed off to boarding school with strict instructions to post a card when he safely arrived. However, he’d pop it into the letterbox at the end of the street on his way to the station. No one was ever sure whether my grandmother twigged.

Of the rest of the family, Auntie Peggy remained a spinster and became a schoolteacher on Vancouver Island, while my Aunt Liz married a City of London banker.

My father followed Percy into the RAF and signed up as a flight cadet at the Royal Air Force College Cranwell in September 1927 and was commissioned in 1929. He then flew biplanes in a fighter squadron for fifteen months before becoming a flying instructor. This qualification led him back to Cranwell to teach. It was when writing from here that he told Auntie Tommy she would really like the girlfriend who would eventually become my mother.

While courting my mother, my father would make sure he arrived for a date early and would wait at the end of the road, watching the church clock. He would time his arrival at the front door to coincide with the chimes as they rang out. My grandparents were obviously impressed enough to accept him into the family, and he and my mother were married in December 1933. The RAF, however, was not so impressed as they reckoned that marriage at the age of twenty-four was an unwelcome distraction for young fighter pilots, and my parents had to do without any form of marriage allowance or assistance until my father turned twenty-seven.

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My parents’ wedding, 1933.

Their honeymoon to the continent also caused problems. My father couldn’t use his RAF ID, as it was a private trip. He needed a passport, but the British government wouldn’t give him one. It seems they deemed him not British! My great-grandfather, the admiral, was furious since my father had a commission from King George. And since when did Britain employ mercenaries in their armed forces? A passport was subsequently issued, but having looked at his service records, I can understand the problem faced by the bureaucracy. Proof of identity to join the forces was based on a baptismal certificate and a statutory declaration. He had no British birth certificate or even any naturalisation papers, which he must have been entitled to after living for nine years in the UK.

Another interesting fact has emerged from his RAF records. During my early life, he was always known in the air force as Willie, a nickname I believe he had acquired from being the eldest son after Percy was killed in 1939. When he retired, my mother decided that he should now be known by his middle name, Alpin. This incidentally caused me a bit of confusion because there was a well-advertised muesli at the time that was called Alpen and I always had trouble remembering how I was supposed to spell the name.

I have since become even more confused after reading his service records. Not only do these show him to be Alpine, with an e on the end, but also both Anita’s and my birth certificates show our father as Charles Alpine Watt. I had always somehow assumed that it was my class-conscious mother who had decided that Alpin, without the e, was a more desirable name to have. But I was wrong, for I have come across a letter my father wrote in which he signed himself as Alpin, without the e. So that is in fact how she had always known him.

After they were married, my father was posted to the Flying Boat School at Calshot on the Solent on the south coast of England. This posting was to affect the direction of my father’s career. He flew the Supermarine Southampton on coastal reconnaissance duties for the next two years. After my sister Anita was born in August 1935, they were moved out to Singapore. We used to have photos of KaiTak, looking nothing like the Hong Kong airport that it became, with its long runway into the sea and jumbo jets frightening passengers by coming in below the tops of the skyscrapers to land.

Luckily for us, he was posted home in November 1938, in time for me to be born in March of 1939 and well before the Japanese invasion, which proved to be such a disaster for the Allies. He came home full of the expectation that, with a war looming, he would be assigned to one of the new Spitfire or Hurricane fighter squadrons; he was to be bitterly disappointed. He later told me that his age counted against him, and his experience of flying only biplanes was no grounding for the new high-speed aircraft.

During the early stages of the Second World War, he was involved on the ground in the organisation of the Battle of Britain. As my mother put it in a letter to Uncle Frank: ‘Better a live husband than a dead DSO.’ In February 1941, he was made squadron commander of 240 Squadron, which had recently been issued with Consolidated Catalinas. I have a letter written by my mother to Uncle Frank in August 1941, where she told him: ‘He seems to be a very successful squadron commander from all accounts and certainly seems to find the job just what he wanted. It is very lonely without him but nice to know he is happy and successful. The children are grand, both getting colossal and very full of fun.’

Another squadron from Loch Erne in Northern Ireland at that time was involved in the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, which was eventually sunk by a torpedo delivered from the air. My father was flying protection to a troop ship at the time, and its naval escorts abandoned the ship to hunt for the German battlecruiser.

After a short spell back at the Air Ministry, Dad was promoted to group captain and moved to command RAF Oban on the west coast of Scotland. Various squadrons of Sunderland flying boats operated off the coast there. Nothing is left of the RAF base, the slipways and surrounds having been swallowed up by housing estates and a holiday camp. We lived in a house on the seafront with a safe route down to a pebbly beach through a culvert under the road.

Anita and I went back in 2008, and the house, now a guest house, was exactly as we remembered it. I used to stand on the beach and watch the Sunderlands taking off and imagine my father at the controls although I now realise that it would have been highly unlikely, as he was the commanding officer (CO). We searched the local museum for any mention of him but to no avail.

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Our wartime quarters in Oban, visited in 2008.

His next posting was to Freetown, now Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa, where he was basically responsible for administration. He was away for sixteen months, and it was during this time that my mother found herself a job as a school matron. Back in the UK after the war, he went to Bracknell Staff College, followed by an office job with Transport Command. It was during this time that my parents bought a house in Southampton.

In January 1948, he was made station commander of RAF Felixstowe, yet another air force base to disappear, being built over by the container port. But at that time, it was part of Coastal Command and was home to the Saunders-Roe SR.A/1, the only jet seaplane fighters ever developed for the RAF. Only three aircraft were ever made, and they were the first to be fitted with the new Martin-Baker ejection seat. One of these prototypes was written off when it dived straight into the water in full view of a crowd gathered for an RAF Open Day during our stay there. Neither the aircraft nor the pilot’s body was recovered.

Then in July 1949, my father was transferred overseas to Aden as a senior staff officer and then became station commander of RAF Khormaksar for six months before returning home in September 1951. My mother flew out to join him during this posting.

Aden is situated in a strategic position for British shipping travelling through the Suez Canal at the southern end of the Red Sea. In 1967 the British had to give up control to the communist-backed National Liberation Front. It was eventually absorbed into a united Yemen in 1990. However, after the loss of the Suez Canal in 1956 (several years after my parents had come home), it became the main British base in the region. In the 1960s, Britain tried to exert influence against Egyptian-backed Yemeni forces prior to granting Aden independence and was also involved in settling a civil war in Oman. The result was that Khormaksar became RAF’s busiest ever station, with nine squadrons based there. It was during this time that Anita was posted to Aden and, being in a codes-and-cipher unit, had to pass on many secret messages.

As far as I remember, my parents had lots of fun during their time there. Work hours were 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., which gave them time for sports, swimming in the afternoons, and partying at night. Khormaksar was home to 8 Squadron, flying the Bristol Brigand, a ground-attack dive bomber. The aircraft proved a bit of a disaster with many technical problems, not the least being prone to losing a wing when air brakes failed. The squadron eventually replaced them with the DH Vampire.

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My father in Aden in 1951.

Late in 1951, my father was posted home as station commander of RAF Abingdon, not far from Oxford. The base was a regular Transport Command station as well as being the home of No. 1 Parachute Training School. In 1952 it was also home to the RAF Ferry Unit, and we were there when the first fifteen North American F86 Sabre fighters made in Canada were ferried in Operation Bechers Brook through Iceland and the Shetland Isles to the UK. They went on to be stationed with the RAF in Germany. Some four hundred aircraft eventually made the very long and hazardous journey across the North Atlantic. We were warned not to worry when we saw them overhead because their engines were very inefficient at low altitude and produced so much black smoke that you could imagine they were on fire.

During the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965, they proved to be a dominating factor for the Pakistan Air Force for, in spite of their age, they were found superior to the Russian fighters flown by the Indians. But apparently they proved vulnerable to the little Folland Gnat; I could have been involved in its manufacturing if I hadn’t persisted in my desire to go to Cranwell.

The Parachute Training School had large cranes and other devices from which you jumped off to practise landing, and there were static balloons hanging over the airfield for trainees to jump out of. The final stage of training was to parachute from a Handley Page Hastings or a C-119 transport aircraft. At the end of the course, participants received the coveted red beret as a paratrooper. The PTS was later to form part of my training with the RAF as I was sent on a course during my time at Cranwell.

Two years later, we were moved to HQ Transport Command at RAF Upavon in Wiltshire. The command has been renamed as Air Support Command. This was the only station we lived in where there were plenty of teenagers to mix with during the holidays.

Dad’s last posting in October 1955 was to RAF West Kirby in the Wirral, close to Liverpool. The station was a national service basic training camp where recruits spent just eight weeks before being moved on to trade schools. I remember much of my father’s time being taken up with addressing passing-out parades.

One of the recruits included a lad that had just left my house at Malvern College, and we spent the day together.

With the end of national service, RAF West Kirby was closed down in February 1958. At that time, my father was a couple of years from retirement age for general-duty officers and, with the cutback of the RAF, was offered a golden handshake.

For some time, my parents had been eyeing country houses in the West Country suitable for their position in life, but after having put two children through expensive education, I doubt if their bank balance met expectations. After an idyllic holiday in the Bantry area of Eire, my father decided that was where he wanted to be. He commuted some of his pension to raise funds to buy an acre of land, built a house, and my parents spent the next thirty years at Rinn a Chuain.

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Rinn a Chuain, 1963.

I think my mother was not that happy and regretted later that, for once in their marriage, she hadn’t been the one to make the decision. The age of fifty is too young to sit back and do nothing. The RAF pension would not be index-linked until many years later, and the lack of money brought strains upon the marriage. In 1969 my father got a job taking Customs out to supertankers delivering crude oil into Whiddy Island’s bulk tanks for Gulf Oil. That job ended ten years later when the tanker Betelgeuse broke its back while unloading, which led to the end of the facility. My mother meanwhile found a secretarial job with a local architect to keep herself busy.

Even so, the atmosphere was so charged at home, and my father was obviously so unhappy with life that, at one stage, we suggested to him that they split. But my mother was his rock, just as Percy had been, and he couldn’t see having a life without her. So they stuck it out and made the best of their retirement with new friends and new interests.

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My parents in their sixties.

Then in 1984, forced by ageing and the prospect of ill health, they moved back to a retirement set-up in Cirencester. I suspect it was a little lonely for them as they had left all their friends behind in Ireland and it would not have been easy at their age to form new relationships. My mother died three weeks before their diamond wedding anniversary in 1993. My poor father was moved to a nice retirement home near Anita in Hereford, where he had his own room, but by all accounts, he felt rather lost and lasted only another year.

LIFE BEGINS WITH A BANG

In a letter written by my mother in January 1939 to my grandmother Hattie in Argentina: ‘Our addition to the family is expected on March 29th, so I hope I am going to produce a good sturdy boy for your arrival in March. I have booked a room at Springhill Nursing Home in Southampton, where I had Anita.’ I was a few hours late into this world.

In accordance with tradition, presents at my christening included silver mugs, a silver cigarette case, as well as a pusher and spoon set. As small kids, we used the latter to eat with, which set us up for using a knife and fork in later life.

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Myself with Anita and my mother at an early age.

I only have vague memory flashes of my early life, which mirrored the nomadic existence of my parents. Being just six months old at the outbreak of the Second World War, I don’t remember much of the war itself. In the early days, we had servants, and when I was only eighteen months old, one nanny left me sitting on a potty too close to an electric fire; as a result, I ended up with second-degree burns covering both my front and back. I had obviously spun myself like a lamb on a spit. Apparently, my mother spent all day and night by my side until I was out of danger, which perhaps explains how it seemed I became her favourite child and could never do any wrong. As a youngster, I can remember this burnt patch on the front covering from well above my nipples to my waistline and on my shoulders at the back. Now it hardly covers my potbelly or my shoulder blades. Luckily, I’ve never had much trouble although the burns on my shoulders did itch for a while when I first went out to the tropics.

As to the war itself, supposedly one evening I was found by the window happily watching a nearby factory on fire thanks to a sneak bombing raid after the all-clear had sounded. My earliest recollections, though, are probably from a visit to London. We were staying in the Howard Hotel in Central London at the time when a bomb went off nearby, and my mother found both Anita and me under the covers at the foot of the bed. I can vaguely remember going down into the London Underground and seeing the bunk beds installed in the stations for people to use during air raids as well as the air raid sirens going off and, more importantly, the all-clear being sounded.

I have clearer memories of our life at Oban in 1943. I’ve mentioned that we went back to see our old house in 2008 and the culvert under the road. Uncle Frank had given me a little boat that I sailed on the stream that went through it. The very pebbly beach could be dirty, covered with bunker oil from torpedoed ships, which was difficult to get off and therefore wasn’t very popular with mothers. There was also the danger of sea mines broken from their moorings although I never came across those until after the war was over.

With so many men being involved in the war effort, there was a push for women to join the workforce, and with my father away in West Africa, my mother went to work at various boarding schools. We were at a school in Malmesbury for a while. I had my tonsils and adenoids out there. Like circumcision, they were regarded as parts of the body that were better out than in. I was carried across the road to the hospital and back by taxi. And yes, I did get fed on jelly! The school roof must have needed repair because I remember everybody dashing around with buckets to catch the drips during downpours.

My mother became friendly there with Jane Steer and followed her to Penn Street near Amersham in Buckinghamshire. Two boys’ preparatory schools in the south coast had been evacuated at the beginning of the war to stately homes in the area. Jane went to work at Emsworth House School, while my mother finished up working for Forres School, housed in Penn House, the stately home of Lord Howe, the racing driver.

For the uninitiated, Preparatory schools were basically privately owned primary schools whose pupils were being groomed for the English Public School system. In typically confusing British terminology, public schools are actually fee-paying private schools and had a completely different way of operating to government schools. If you were in the government sector, you took the eleven-plus exam, which determined whether you were streamed to a grammar school, a secondary modern, or a technical school. From a prep school, you took the Common Entrance at the age of thirteen or fourteen to get into the Public School of your parents’ choice.

At Penn House, we lived in the servants’ quarters on one side of a three-sided quadrangle at the back of the house. The only memory I have of those days was damaging my knee when I tripped while running across the quadrangle on what must have been my sixth birthday. The result was stitches to my knee and a scar for life.

Not long ago, when staying with Anita in the UK, we reminisced on our early lives. She rather importantly reminded me that she had had to go to boarding school at a very early age, while our parents had waited until I turned ten to send me off. I was a little surprised because I had assumed I’d been sent away earlier. Since the distaff side of our family was always right, I didn’t think of arguing the point. So letters written by my mother turning up all these years later clarifies the matter.

In February 1945, she told Uncle Frank:

Earning one’s living isn’t all a bed of roses. However it might be a lot worse and won’t be for much longer. Both kids are at boarding school; Anita still in Cornwall and Simon at Amersham. I see him every week but the weather has been so bad that I thought it was foolish to have him hanging about waiting for buses. He’s very happy and well looked after but it hasn’t made me feel better about things as I worry all the time about whether he is happy. In a way I suppose he is better looked after than he was here because I am working so hard that with the best will in the world the kids were getting neglected. My work isn’t so strenuous because I have temporarily been promoted to assistant matron, but the hours are very long. I start at 7am and don’t finish until 8.30pm with about an hour off in the afternoon, if I’m lucky. Since arriving home from spending Xmas in Oban where everyone gave us a wonderful time I have come back down to earth with a bump as amusements have been practically nil. There is a quite pleasant pub in the village with good beer and atmosphere. And I have a friend working about 1½ miles away and we used to forgather at the local about once a week but lately the weather has been so awful that we haven’t turned out at night. It’s after 9pm before either of us can get away and even on my half day I have to be in from 6.30–8.30pm to put the boys to bed and in bad weather it really isn’t worth the effort of turning out after a hard day’s work. Yes maybe I’m getting old; let’s hope I rejuvenate when Alpin gets back.

Tomorrow we are going to London. And as it is a year since I said goodbye to Alpin we intend to drown our sorrows in a little gaiety and return with the milk.

When Alpin returns I intend to give up my job here as soon as he arrives and spend his leave with him, though I may have to return here when he goes to a unit till he finds us accommodation but all that will settle itself when he gets back.

So in a kind of family one one-upmanship, I can happily record that in August 1941, when my sister was six, she was still at home, whereas in 1945, when I was only five, I had already been dispatched to boarding school, although I would have to admit that Anita in Cornwall was a lot further away than I had been at Amersham.

There were street parties to mark the end of the war in Europe, and I can well remember going into lower Amersham and the celebrations in the town square on VE Day, 8 May 1945.

After the war, we rented a house near Henley while my father was at the Staff College. The house had a sloping lawn, and Anita and I learnt to ride a bicycle by freewheeling down the hill through a slalom of barrels. And although she doesn’t remember the incident, Anita took a tumble on a ride in the woods and finished up in a bed of stinging nettles. Ow! We lived near the Thames and had picnics on the riverbanks, often hiring small motor launches for the day. I went to the local primary school but really only remember climbing frames plus getting into serious trouble because I took my father’s penknife to school one day and had probably been caught by a teacher showing the knife off to my friends.

Jane Steer owned a house in Totton, and after the war was over, we went there to help open the house up, which gives some clue to why my parents bought the only home they ever owned during their working lives at 72 Alma Road in the Southampton suburb of Portswood. They must have felt a need for a more settled existence. Perhaps with the post-war rundown of the RAF, they felt insecure or perhaps they wanted to bring some stability into our lives although in the end it didn’t quite work out like that. Who knows?

By the time Anita was seventeen, she had lived in twenty-one homes for six months or longer. And as a result of this perpetual motion, my mother was the most fantastic packer.

In Alma Road, we had four bedrooms, and Anita and I got to have our own rooms. Anita was growing up, and I remember being banned from going into hers. We had a 1938 ‘sit up and beg’ Austin 7, which we used among other things to go on picnics in the New Forest. We also had bicycles and took rides into the country. I used to go to the Common across the nearby Avenues Road, where you could ride ‘cross-country’ in the muddy ups and downs of the woods there—kind of BMX riding of the day. It was all quite safe as vehicles were few and far between just after the war. And there would have been no need for parking on the road because I remember the lamplighters on their bicycles turning on the streetlights in the evening. Things were different when I went back to have a look at the house in the 1990s as the street was crammed with parked cars on either side.

Many reading this story will have spent their lives in constant contact with their parents when growing up. Things were different during the war, so I would like to compare our life then with the life now for the families of fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) working on the mines here in Australia. By all accounts, the average FIFO worker is away from home for two to three weeks at a time and then gets a week or ten days off. After working day and night switches of twelve-hour shifts, they come home tired and are then disappointed by their families’ rather-lukewarm reception. The problem is that while the working family member has been away, the others have had to get on with their own lives and become busy with other things. Everyone is obviously happy to have their breadwinner home, but their presence breaks up the run of normal life. And it must put a big strain on marriages.

Now put this into the context of our lives in the services. From the letter quoted above, you will see that my mother went off to spend the evening ‘celebrating’ the anniversary of my father’s departure. We saw little of our father. He had been away in West Africa for sixteen months just before war’s end, then lived with us at Henley. I don’t remember him being present until we went to Felixstowe in 1948. Later, he was away in Aden for over two years, which meant he wasn’t really part of my early life at all. So we had Mother Christmas because Father Christmas was away at the war, and it was a fact of life that during this period mothers were central to everything.

One day I was out at the back of the Alma Road house, getting the bicycles ready for a ride, when the front door bell rang. Anita went off to see who it was and raced back down the corridor, crying, ‘It’s Daddy! It’s Daddy!’ There was this complete stranger standing in the doorway, and I remember being slightly disappointed that we’d missed out on our cycle ride. My parents, if still alive, would be horrified by this revelation, but that is how it was.

By the end of the war, I was six years old and was twelve when my parents eventually sold the house. Although we didn’t live there the whole time, I do have some good memories of our life in Southampton. I joined a Wolf Cub Pack, the entry into the Scouts movement, and dressed in my uniform, I lined the route that Prince Philip and the then Princess Elizabeth took from their wedding in Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947 for their honeymoon at Romsey, eight miles away. As the royal couple passed, I gave a smart regulation two-fingered salute, and Prince Philip apparently responded, which thrilled my parents to no end. Personally, I was probably too overawed by the occasion to notice.

One winter, my mother caught pneumonia; as a result, I was sent to stay with Jane Steer, who by this time had moved to another area of Portswood. She was supposed to send me home by taxi. Instead she put me on the tram which ran past the bottom of our road. Instructions were given to the conductress to make sure I got off at the right stop. But I was forgotten, and so I sat until turfed out at the end of the line. Nowadays, I suspect duty of care to a child would have ensured that someone looked after me. But in those days, I was left to get home on my own.

As I’ve said elsewhere, what you remember is not always quite real. I remember being thrown out at the docks, but in fact, my research into this tale proves otherwise. I’ve always wondered how I got all the way from the docks back home. But in fact that particular tramline only went