For Pete’s Sake: Part I – 1939 to 1970, Entertaining Tales of Providence

By Peter F Barry

In this extraordinary memoir, Peter Barry recounts a life full of misdeeds and misadventures, tough times and unexpected pitfalls, shot through with many magical moments of providence, coincidence, absurdity and sheer good fortune.
From a childhood on a hilltop farm – as the landscape of rural Northern England changed forever – to building the legendary Snowy Dam in Australia, from playing gigs in Lancashire village halls to recording albums in Australia and entertaining troops in the Vietnam War, Peter Barry’s long and colourful life has bumped up against history, time after time, in a truly remarkable way.
This is the first volume of a story – from 1939 to 1970 – in which the ever-resourceful, ever-hopeful Peter observes the end of an era in England and the start of a new one in Australia, falls in love with the East and, again and again, finds himself in the right spot at just the right time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Nov 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781543780611

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Copyright © 2023 by Peter F Barry.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Intellectual property rights concerning the memoirs of Peter Barry belong to Peter and Ling Barry and their children, Stephen, Tanya, Simon and Anthony Barry.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/singapore

For my

mother and father

my wife, Man Ling

and my children, Stephen, Tanya, Simon and Anthony

Contents

Chapter 1    First Memories

Chapter 2    Arriving at the Farm 1945

Chapter 3    House Routine

Chapter 4    Schooling

Chapter 5    Growing up and up

Chapter 6    Farming

Chapter 7    The Dance Band

Chapter 8    In Australia

Chapter 9    The Sound of Music

Chapter 10   Sydney

Chapter 11   Vietnam

Chapter 12   Back in Vietnam

Photographs

Acknowledgements

The Author

Chapter 1

First Memories

The date on the birth certificate says 12th April 1939. I am quite proud of this official document, as it was the only certificate I would be awarded for a long time.

My earliest memory is also my first brush with danger; it happened when I was two years old. One sunny day I joined the other children pushing pieces of wood across an outside swimming pool, which was filled to the brim of dirty brown water. Lying on my tummy, I pushed a piece of wood, like everyone else, except I fell in. I remember wondering why I couldn’t touch the bottom, no matter how fast my legs were pumping; my eyes were first of all fixed on the water above, then on the water below.

Suddenly I saw a black shoe right above me, it touched my head, and so I reached out to it with both hands. When I looked up, the shoe turned out to be attached to my eldest brother Victor’s leg. He was leaning over the water, whilst in turn holding onto my next-to-eldest brother Christopher, who in turn was holding onto a railing, and thus was I pulled out of the water. My brothers were hailed as heroes but me… I was a drowned rat.

Looking back, it was definitely a sign of things to come: I could never quite touch bottom, and when sinking into the unknown, there would always be something or someone there to give me a leg-up, something kind of spiritual, like providence. Having survived this drowning at two years of age and the memory forever with me, I caught scarlet fever at the age of three. The rest of my brothers and sisters caught it as well, along with my mother, who was pregnant at the time.

Much to our delight, us children were all admitted to the Birkenhead Royal Infirmary. It was a great adventure for us and I remember clearly being bedded outside with many other boys, under a glass canopy; it was the recommended treatment at the time. The sensation of being in bed under cover outside while it rained, was extraordinary. My tonsils were the next to get attention and after the operation to remove them, it emerged that the scarlet fever bug had not finished with me. I’m told the situation became critical, but luckily, during the war, Birkenhead’s hospital was the main bank for the recently discovered drug, penicillin. It was administered by a very large thick needle in the bare bottom, every three hours. I can never forget that one! I distinctly remember starting to scream on hearing the loud clicking of the nurse’s shoes on the floor as the footsteps approached from outside. Several folk were pressed into service to hold me down when the dreaded plunger hit me and the screaming didn’t stop until long after they’d pulled the monster out. I overheard someone witnessing it after a couple of weeks of treatment saying: ‘The poor little fellow, his bottom looks like a battlefield!’

This long illness meant that I missed out on most of my kindergarten schooling. This was a gap of two years, and I never caught up; I was always with students two years younger than myself, right up until I left school at 17, with no qualifications.

Both sides of my parents’ families lived on the Wirral (Cheshire), and on both sides, the grandfathers worked in Liverpool. My mother’s side, the Lewis’s were naturally tall and we’d call them Big Papa or Big Gaga (so named by my eldest brother as a toddler, which became our family’s way of calling our grandparents). On my father’s side, the Barrys were shorter and were called Little Papa or Little Gaga.

Little Papa, Charles Barry, was a stylish man with an infectious laugh. A good allrounder in sport, horse riding, tennis, cricket, golf, skiing. And a decent artist too. Great at sketching animals and landscapes. He was a cigar smoker and us grandchildren loved the smell!

Little Papa’s home was exotically named ‘Zenobia’, after the third queen of the Palmyrene Empire in the third century AD. Under his watch, the family’s dried fruit import business, Barry Brothers, prospered. Some time between the two wars, he bought a plush hotel with over 90 rooms called Westlakes on the Isle of Man, right on the promenade in the then popular beach resort of Douglas. Little Gaga died shortly after her first grandchild, my eldest brother, Victor was born. It was a time of great sadness for the family, understandably.

Every summer Little Papa would treat our family to a ten-day holiday at Westlakes. Graceful steam powered ferries King Orey, the Lady O Mann and others, carried us from Liverpool across to the Isle of Man in choppy swelling conditions of the Irish sea. The passage took over four hours, invariably making everyone seasick. I’m proud to say, I loved the rough seas. Sitting at the stern among piles of coiled thick ropes with seagulls flying overhead, put me in a state of what my father would call, ‘blowing the cobwebs off!’

Douglas Beach is not a sandy beach but almost a mile long of mainly flat stones ideal for skimming across the water. At low tide, my younger sisters Mary, Susan, Sara, and youngster Andrew would spend hours searching the many rock pools for seaweed, creatures and fancy curly yellow shells.

On Saturdays at Westlakes, live music played in the ballroom downstairs and people danced. This was my first experience of live dance band music. My brother Christopher and I were told that pretty girls will dress up for the occasion. Panic set into us as we put on our Sunday best and Brylcreem in our hair. At boarding school mixing with girls wasn’t part of our education, so when faced with the enemy, we crumbled and danced with elderly ladies instead.

On Sundays a large audience was entertained by a variety concert with many singers and poets. Muriel was a tall and slim singer performer with an unusual deep contralto voice. She and Little Papa were so well suited to each other. Many years had passed since Little Gaga passed away, and Little Papa and Muriel got married. Many years younger than him, Muriel was a devoted wife and the entire family loved her. Little Papa would refer to his mother-in-law as ‘the old lady’, when in fact he was quite a bit older than her. In the 1980s I learnt that Muriel was fading, so my father, my wife and I made a special trip by air to see her. My father leaned in and softly thanked her for being such a wonderful companion to his father. For the occasion, I learnt to play and sing the song she would often open with for her performances. With the guitar, I sang ‘Blow the Wind Southerly, Southerly, Southerly…’ As this moving moment was happening, a voice from the other resident in the care home shouted, ‘She doesn’t like that sort of music!’ Muriel passed away the next day.

The history of the Barry family can be traced back to Persia, and from there to Turkey, and then Greece to Liverpool. The original family name was Bhari and somewhere along the line they changed it to Barry, presumably to blend in better with English names. Towards the end of the war in 1944, we moved from our first home in Burlingham Avenue on the Wirral to the superb Hilltop House (for that was its name) near Birkenhead, a rambling home with large gardens. I have wintertime memories of snow, of sliding down the hill on toboggans to Mass at the church at the bottom, and playing hide-and-seek among dense rhododendron bushes. I also have the most vivid memory of a little aeroplane dropping silver strips overhead to mark the end of the war in early 1945; we looked up in wonder and tried to catch as many as we could. I was five years old then. Food was still rationed long after the war was over and only a year or so after moving to Hilltop, my parents, in their wisdom, thought it would be a good idea to buy a farm. The reasoning, I think, was that with a large and still expanding family, we wouldn’t be short of food.

My father and his brother Hubert inherited the long-standing Liverpool business ‘Barry Brothers’, which had for many generations imported dried fruits from the Barrys’ original homeland in Persia (today’s Iran). The business was now coming to an end as middle-men like the Barrys were side-stepped when bigger shops and bakeries traded directly with Middle Eastern suppliers. My father and his brother struggled to keep it going for a few more years.

Hilltop House was sold in order to buy the farm. The sale of the house happened before the farm purchase though, meaning that we could have ended up sleeping on the street! Fortunately, help was at hand. The ancestral Barry home was in Birkenhead, on Park Road South: an Elizabethan terraced street of opulent houses. In his later years, old man Barry had made his two daughters promise never to marry and stay put in the house, a wish they’d dutifully fulfilled. I can imagine what a bombshell it must have been to these two old ladies, then in their late 80s, when my father arrived cap in hand to ask if they would mind if a family of five moved in until they found a farm. But these saintly ladies, Madeleine and Eva, welcomed us all with open arms.

It really was a beautiful mansion of a home: you entered through massive green faded doors into a hallway, where the most ornate of carved bannisters wound its way to the top floor. All the rooms were in near darkness, with huge heavy drapes hung over every large window; beautiful objects adorned mantlepieces and window sills, there was a great carved table and chairs, and a walnut piano, while a tiger skin and head lay spread across the floor. The thing that always struck me was the smell: something I can only describe as the smell of age; something, I imagined, like the smell that hit the explorers when they opened the tombs in Egypt.

We stayed with these old ladies for at least six months. Madeleine was the voice for the two of them and she told us all about their travels to Arabia and Smyrna, where, no doubt, all the drapes and ornaments had come from, and where, once upon a time, our relatives had made their home. Madeleine played the piano and taught us songs in the evening. Eva kept in the background, smiling through her thick-rimmed glasses. Going to Mass with them always made a Sunday very special.

One day, it was time to pack all our belongings. My parents had finally bought the farm. Dyson, my father’s lorry and truck driver came, and I’ll never forget the two old ladies saying farewell beside the big door. Madeleine said her last goodbye with a concerned look, adding, ‘Does anyone want to go round the corner and spend a penny?’

Chapter 2

Arriving at the

Farm 1945

I recall arriving at ‘Bracken Lea’ when I was six. It was a farm of 127 acres, a couple of miles or so from the picturesque village of Scorton, in north Lancashire at the foot of the Pennine Hills, bordering Harris End Fell. Blackpool Tower was visible in the distance, as was the Irish Sea and, on very clear days at sunset, the Isle of Man.

These were the twilight years of traditional farming that hadn’t changed much in centuries. If it had carried on not changing, I could well have been there today. God had different plans for me, though, and indeed like great moments in history, that whole way of life was about to receive an almighty shake-up. Still, within the first couple of years little changed, and I hope readers will allow me to recollect some memories of these bygone days.

Before going further, I would like to mention that I am writing this in China, the year is 2008 and the place is Zhaoqing (Pronounced Shui Hing in Cantonese) Guangdong Province. China, agriculturally, has many parallels at this present time with England in the late 40s and 50s. Like the China of the present, England had an extensive road and rail network, along with domestic and international air connections. In spite of that, the English farming of the period, and China’s at the time of writing stayed largely unchanged for centuries, with human- and animal-power in the place of machines. Where we had shire horses, China has water buffaloes, pulling wooden, single-furrowed ploughs, as described in Bible times. As I travel about the countryside in China, I am often taken back to my boyhood in Lancashire, and that might be why I find my memories of that time so sharp. To continue…

The old farmhouse had a date carved in the wood on the dining room wall – 1668. It was solid, but despite the two-foot-thick walls, riddled with damp; there was no running water, no electricity or telephone and the window frames whistled permanently in the draughts. The roof was made of stone slabs, ill-fitted – there was daylight showing through in many places in the attics.

The toilet was fifty yards outside, down a path bordered on either side by nettles; the destination was a rickety, tin-roofed and tiny shed whose door wouldn’t close. Spider webs and creepy crawlies everywhere, with a worn wooden seat, and a bucket underneath, which ‘the men’ had to empty every day.

These were glorious days for us; although the rest of the family concluded that my parents had completely gone off their heads, having ditched the comparative lap of luxury for the primitive conditions of the farm.

An old Ford 10 and old Ford V8 shooting brake (today’s station wagon) were our cars. All farm implements were horse-drawn, everything was done by hand or horse, with the exception of the one-cylinder Lister petrol engine that drove the decompressor for the milking machines, and another one pumping water from a well by a stream (a ‘beck’ as it was called locally) to a tank in the roof of the barn in the farmyard above.

These were the twilight years for the working Shire horse and, yes, with hindsight, something of a picture-book, romantic time where everything seemed to have its place and everyone knew their own part in it, too. I think we were fortunate to have witnessed and indeed participated in this wonderful era of English farming history. These remarkable animals really were the centrepiece of the farm. Even keeping the stables in tip-top order was an art in itself. Nothing received more attention than the Shire workhorse.

The harness, and keeping it in pristine condition, were of great importance to the handlers. The very smell of it – the leather mingling with scented hay, crushed oats, and the sweat and the heat from the animals themselves all seemed to have an effect upon everyone involved. It was the sign of a job well done.

I can remember vividly the expressions of these old-time Lancashire farmers, and the first time I heard the term, ‘Cob tackle’ was something they said whenever something unusual had happened on the farm (which was quite often). ‘Cob tackle is that’, they might say, when the daily grooming of these big animals was interrupted by a fly landing on a horse’s rear end, and a long job suddenly became a dangerous one! After such things occurred, there’d be much discussion and joke-swapping and declarations of ‘cob tackle is that’.

The horses worked hard, and so did the men who cared for them. The Shire horse was the mainstay of the farm, and keeping them in top condition was their constant worry. There was the daily inspection and cleaning of their huge hooves, the replacing of horseshoes at the blacksmith, maintaining and repairing the harness and tackle and the continuous grooming, feeding and watering. Before being led out to plough, the handler would spend hours combing the horses’ manes and decorating the tails with colourful ribbons before linking a pair or a trio together for ploughing. This was not done for public viewing or showing off, but out of sheer pride in the job. Every task seemed to be done to a rhythm, without rush or panic.

The biggest thrill for me was to be lifted up for a ride on the back of Boxer, the largest horse in the stable, down to the drinking trough after he had finished a day’s ploughing or carting, the sweet-smelling sweat showing as white lather on his neck and sides. He was so enormous he probably didn’t know I was there; his back was so wide I nearly had to do the splits to straddle him.

This was a wonderful time of working with nature, and with no noise but the jingle of harness, of iron-rimmed wheels on stone cobbles, the birds singing and at times, the men also not shy of raising their voices in song. Athletes and explorers have gained much renown for covering huge distances, sometimes in a short space of time, but their feats would be overshadowed by the distances covered by a farmer and his horse, walking up and down the furrow day after day, sunrise to sunset, as they ploughed or sowed or harvested the field. They are the unsung heroes of the past.

COWS ‘N BULLS

Another labour-intensive job was housing and caring for the cows. Thirty-odd dairy cattle spent six months of the year in shippens (cow sheds), each one tied up at the collar facing its feeding area, two to a stall, in long lines preventing them from coming into contact with each other. The cattle seemed perfectly content with this arrangement. In the summer months when they were put to grass, the cows would be rounded up in the fields twice a day, and they would happily walk back to their own place for milking. Some cows would even calve in this position, into a wooden wheelbarrow. Their rear ends lined up, allowing for all the muck to fall and collect into a centre pathway, which was cleaned twice daily before milking. Maintaining hygiene in the mucky surroundings wasn’t easy!

On many small fell-side farms at the time, milking was still done by hand. We used a milking machine which collected the fluid into a bucket – a very modern development. The noise of the one-cylinder ‘Lister’ engine that drove the little decompressor still rings in my ears, with its exhaust pipe and worn-out baffle sticking out of the wall. Looking back on it now, cleaning the cows and the sheds at 5:30am every day