A Tale of Four Hemispheres: the life story of John Sheldrick

By John Sheldrick

‘A Tale of Four Hemispheres’ is a highly engaging, thoughtful and extremely readable memoir about a man orphaned in infancy, who survived a childhood bedevilled by ill-health and went on to achieve world ranking as an athlete before moving to the Antipodes to open up a completely new chapter in his life. All the emotions of a full life are revealed here in elaborate detail that plunges you directly into John Sheldrick’s life. It’s a life that features twists and turns of fortune and many adventures. Albert Camus, the French existential writer, said that each of us is the sum of all of our decisions. This is certainly very true in John’s life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781839786594

Book preview

Introduction

Before I launch into my life story, perhaps I should to provide some information concerning my family background. As will become clearer later, there were good reasons for my not being familiar with it myself at the time.

Today, of course, with the aid of the internet, it is possible to conduct extensive genealogical research. Lacking that facility, I would be unable now, at the age of eighty-one, to tell you the names of my great-grandparents.

It was not until 1970, when we, my wife Prue and our two elder boys and I spent a few months in England on holiday from Australia, that I was able to sit down with an elderly uncle and establish Sheldrick family history, as far as he was able to do so.

I gathered from him that my great-grandfather had been a farmer in East Suffolk, but with a large family of sons who wanted to follow in father’s footsteps. His part of East Anglia has some of the world’s most fertile and therefore productive land. His idea was to sell up and thereby be able to purchase a greater acreage in the lighter soils of West Suffolk. In this way he, it was supposed, would be able to provide for more than just the one family.

Uncle Fred then suggested that I should make a visit to the village of Isleham (pron. Eye-z-luhm), where most of the Sheldrick forebears had been born, married and died. This tiny village is but a few miles from Mildenhall, where the current crop of Sheldricks have lived their lives, and where I was born on June 27th, 1939.

I took myself there subsequently, with a view to gaining access to the Parish Register and, as a result, compile a family tree. The Parish Register is essentially a record of the births, marriages and deaths and the vicar, who is the custodian of such a volume, gave me access to it, providing I crossed his palm with silver; in this case the princely sum of one guinea (1 pound and 1 shilling Sterling).

There being no such coin, I proffered a one-pound note and one shilling coin. He told me that the records dated back to ‘only’ 1758, as there had been a devastating fire in the church at that time and all records were incinerated. What had disturbed my composure as I wandered through the churchyard was the number of headstones in the cemetery surrounding the church bearing the name Sheldrick and, furthermore, any number with either my Christian name or that of my only male Sheldrick cousin, Tom. Quite an eerie sensation, I can tell you.

I came away with many pencilled notes in a large notebook, with numerous question marks where I was unsure as to relationships, dates and so on. I had assigned an arbitrary thirty years to a generation and worked accordingly. These scribblings were taken back to Australia at the end of our six month Sabbatical and were thrown into a drawer or cupboard, where they remained for some twenty years.

Then they were mailed to a Sheldrick relation by marriage - I only knew him as ‘Brian from Hawkhurst’ (this is a place in Kent). He, I was given to understand, was embarking on the compilation of a definitive family tree. Several more years passed until a vast cylinder came by post, revealing the fruits of his labours. He’d managed, pre-Internet days, mind you, to trace the family back to the very early seventeenth century. This would have been at about the time when The Pilgrim Fathers left Albion’s (England’s) shores for The New World - North America. Some Sheldricks were very early settlers on that continent.

This document, when unrolled, revealed no great names or indeed anything of great interest to anyone outside the family. My attention was drawn to a family from about the middle of the 17th century. John and Elizabeth had twelve offspring. Little in the way of birth-control in those benighted times. There were three Williams and two Elizabeths among the twelve. This gave one an indication of the likelihood of infant mortality in those far off times.

The graves of the previous generation of Sheldricks (previous to mine, that is) lie in a cemetery in Kingsway, Mildenhall. Certainly those of my grandparents, Rosetta and Walter William, my uncle Fred and his wife Edna, uncle Elliott and Winnie, great-uncle Frank, cousin Sally and her brother Robin, their father, Tom and his wife Vera. My father’s name is to be found on the Roll of Honour in Mildenhall parish church and is also inscribed on the war memorial just off Police Station Square in the middle of town.

Dick, my father, (he was christened Dick Rupert) died in France in February 1940, having been a member of the British Expeditionary Force. This was at a time of the so-called Phony War, in the sense that there was no real action/fighting. In the somewhat insanitary conditions in theatres of war, my father developed a middle-ear infection which, in those pre-antibiotic days, proceeded to spread and resulted in meningitis and his subsequent death.

I have in my possession only one letter of his, written to his brother Fred, referred to earlier, and who had served in WW1. In that letter, my father makes reference to Fred’s service, in which he was quite badly affected by mustard and /or chlorine gas and suffered symptoms of that for the rest of his life.

The letter is written in pencil and no details of where he was were given, in case it came into German possession. All letters were censored for that kind of thing. In it he sounds very optimistic and goes so far as to say that he’d love to get Hitler in his sights with a .303 rifle.

Six weeks later...

During a visit to England for a school reunion in 2000, I made a nostalgic visit to the cemetery referred to above. As a little chap of three or four, I well remember walking along the wall bordering the cemetery, holding my grandfather’s hand. This was rather nerve-racking, as there was a drop of about ten feet on the other side.

When I approached it, I was horrified to find that it was virtually an impenetrable jungle of briars, nettles and weeds of all description. It was so dense that I was quite unable to thrash my way through to where I knew my relations lay. A telephone call to the vicar assured me that the airmen from the local U.S. airbase come annually armed with all manner of kit and clean it up and make it look presentable.

I was further informed that it was now ‘full’, but there was by-law which meant a period of twenty-five years had to elapse before all the headstones could be removed and then attached to the surrounding walls. Then the ‘ground’ would be unconsecrated and landscaped to provide a park-like amenity.

I think that’s enough background for now and move to my very beginning on this Earth.

I have simply no knowledge of the hows, whys and wherefores of my parents’ meeting. What I do know is that my mother, Nellie (nee Nicholls), was one of six siblings, three ‘transmitters’ and three ‘receivers’, using radio-signalling parlance. The Nicholls family lived at Summerpit Farm, part of the vast Guinness family property at Elveden, some four miles from Thetford on the A11 main-road. Summerpit farm (also known as Lower farm) was home to a herd of Jersey milking cattle.

Grandfather Bill was employed, I think, as a groundsman for the golf-course which formed part of the Guinness (the Irish brewing family) estate. At some point the family patriarch had been ennobled, taking the title Lord Iveagh (pron. Iver). I seem to remember the estate extended to some 30,000 acres and Elveden Hall, their family seat, was reputed to have 365 windows. It was vast, so there was little doubt in my mind that this could have been so.

Bill had died some two years before my birth, so I never knew him. My mother’s eldest brother, Billy, enlisted for WW1 and fell in Belgium in 1917. Nellie told me that upon hearing of his death the family was dumbstruck, quite literally, for a full month afterwards. Not a word spoken. Nellie would have been about 10 at the time. Upon leaving school, to which they all walked across the cow pastures, about half a mile, at probably about fourteen years of age, she entered what was known as ‘service’. that is she was taken on by a wealthy family of bankers, I think they were, by the name of Cunliffe.

These people lived in grand style at a place called ‘Woodlands’, some five miles distant from Elveden. She almost certainly rode her bicycle there and back, but ‘lived-in’ during the week, probably having alternate Sundays off so that she could spend that time with her own family. I have a feeling that my mother quite enjoyed the camaraderie provided by her fellow staff-members. Although not quite so much when she accompanied the Cunliffes on their summer holidays on the Suffolk coast - Southwold? - when the other ‘gels’ on staff pulled her into the North Sea and out of her depth, where she struggled for breath and apparently damn’ near drowned.

Woodlands was situated roughly half-way between Elveden and Mildenhall and this was where my future father lived. Pure conjecture here on my part: maybe they met at a dance at a village hall, but who knows. In later life I never felt free to make any enquiries about my father, whom I’m quite sure Nellie loved till the day she died, because the very mention of his name brought her to tears. I was sensitive enough from quite an early age to realise this was a ‘no-go’ area.

Suffice to say there was one of the longest engagements to be married that I’ve ever heard of. It went on for some twelve years.

Marry in haste and repent at leisure, they say. No fear of that here. The nuptials took place at Elveden Church, a lovely flint-built one, but certainly not ancient. Its pews are most beautifully carved, as are the outspread wings of the wooden eagle which forms the lectern. When I was taken there for matins every Sunday I recall asking the adults what the inscription Sursum Corda meant over the entrance to the cloister. Their basic 3 Rs education had not included Latin, so I was left in ignorance for some years until I found it meant: Lift up your hearts.

As a little boy I had to undergo this purgatory of sitting still while the service proceeded and Aunt Ivy would be a constant thorn in my side: ‘Sit still, John. Have you got ants in your pants?’ Perhaps this was her way of guiding me along the straight and narrow rather than following the ‘primrose path to everlasting damnation.‘ I say this because this aunt had me marked down as an Anglican vicar from an early age.  Whenever I’ve mentioned this ever since, people seem to detect some latent ability, hidden from my senses, lending some veracity to her prediction from all that time ago. And it possibly led to my pronouncements over the supine body of the family cat at a later stage of my development.

I presume that after the wedding Nellie would have left Woodlands and I know that their first marital home was in Wamil Way in Mildenhall. The Sheldricks were for the most part engaged in mixed farming, that is growing wheat and sugar-beet and running some cattle and certainly pigs, which I loved. But I have a suspicion that Dick took a different path. He was very keen on cars and especially motor-bikes, according to my dear late cousin Tom, his nephew.

Tom, being fifteen years my senior, was one who was able to provide me with some background. He told me that my father was something of a dare-devil.  This is one character trait he hasn’t handed down to me. To this end I think he became a motor-mechanic and I do recall that he was somehow involved with what was known as Webb’s Garage in Mildenhall, over which premises I was born. In those days most births took place in the home, with a mid-wife, as she was called, in attendance.

Nellie was of quite diminutive stature, probably about 5ft 2in tall (1.58m) and slim. I emerged from her womb scaling ten and a half pounds, not far short of five kg. This must surely have been some delivery.

After a very lengthy engagement, there was clearly no haste to begin a family, as there was a hiatus of about four years between wedding bells and my birth. I have no way of knowing the reason for this delay.

Just over two months later World War Two  was declared and Dick either volunteered (he had been a Boy Scout and that’s part of their code, I suppose) or was enlisted and found himself in France in short order as part of The British Expeditionary Force. Some five months later he had succumbed to the ravages of meningitis and lies in a tiny Commonwealth War Graves cemetery at Escoublac-La Baule, a village just across the mouth of the River Loire from Nantes.

Some sixty years later I was able to visit his grave and pay a son’s respects to the father he never knew. It was an utterly overwhelming experience for me and I was very glad of the support of Prue and Dominic and his wife, along with Oliver, their one-year-old son. Nellie had died only a year previously and I sprinkled some of her ashes on his grave and left a bronze plaque there with a suitable inscription.

1 Infancy

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uch of what follows from this stage of my life will naturally be mostly hearsay, since I understand that the human capacity for memory only begins from the age of about three, at the very earliest. Any claim to the contrary most probably stems from the individual’s having confected their ‘memory’ from hearing events being related over and over by parents and other close relatives.

Shortly after the hideous news of her husband’s death, Nellie then, I imagine, returned to her mother’s home at Elveden. My grandmother, Ellen, already had her youngest daughter, Ivy, living with her, as Ivy’s husband, Harry, was a senior NCO in the RAF, stationed at Honington which was not far removed from Elveden. I suspect Harry rode his bicycle to and from the RAF station, where he worked in the medical section. He probably had either 36 or 48hr leave at weekends.

It is beyond doubt that living as I did in a very matriarchal house, mother, grandmother and aunt, I would have been spoilt rotten in some kind of compensatory action over the death of my father. Tales of my babyhood include those of the three females who danced attendance on me taking up to two hours each morning getting me dressed.

Here, I feel it pertinent to mention that in spite of being a ‘forward’ (in advance of developmental norms) child, I was very slow to walk; over two years of age, I was later told. I was, by all accounts a very strong little chap, both physically and as far as my will was concerned.

A prime example of the latter was concerned was when I was helped down the steps of a bus at age three, or thereabouts, I lost my temper and told my helpers that I wanted to do it all by myself and proceeded to run as fast as my little legs would carry me, back in the direction we had come, fully intent on, I presume, running all the way back to Bury St Edmunds, about ten miles, in order to get on another bus, so that I could, indeed, do it all by myself.

I do know, from hearsay, that concerns for my hearing and social development were held. I  think that I was quite a withdrawn little chap and made little effort to communicate. I could hear quite well but perhaps the infantile way some adults treat little ones had happened in my case. Somehow this introspective nature has remained with me to this day and I live more of what I’d called an internal life, rather than one requiring external ‘show’. So, maybe in that sense, it was good training for the future. When I learned to read it was revelatory. I could use my imagination to escape.

Clearly, from what I’ve been told, I had a sense of honesty from an early age. When queried about some untoward activity or other, I would ‘come clean’ straight away and plead guilty by saying, ‘Ass I did.’ ‘Ass’ may be interpreted as ‘yes’. In early attempts at the language I was known to refer to rabbits, of which there were plenty in the fields and woods surrounding my Nanna’s house, as ‘bunny-rat-rats’. We lived off them, along with pheasant and partridge, during those war years.

I was fascinated with my grandmother’s efforts in skinning and gutting the rabbits and I took some pleasure in poking their eyes once the animal had been beheaded. The rabbit skins were nailed to a board, fur down, and this was hung on a sunny wall to dry out. Moles caught in traps in the vegetable garden were skinned and the pelts dried in the same way. No, their flesh was not eaten. Someone would come, perhaps each month, and take the dried skins away and a few coins exchanged hands.

Occasionally a pheasant would find its way onto the table, either via road-kill, or else had been purchased from the estate game-larder, about half a mile walk along an unsealed path/road to the village. These birds would have been part of the proceeds of a shoot which had been held on the estate during the season.

Elveden estate had one of the very finest pheasant shoots in the country. Certainly King George V attended these during his reign. I used to love watching Nanna plucking the birds, then singeing bodies over a lighted taper in order to remove the last vestiges of plumage. I can smell it as I type.

While on the subject of rabbits, I was on one occasion not to be found and there ensued quite a hue and cry in order to locate me. Finally my red dungarees (you’ll have to look it up if you don’t know) were seen bulging out of the rabbit wire which formed part of the hutch of the tame rabbit. I guess I wanted to find what it was like being a rabbit.

Harry and Ivy had a black cocker spaniel by the name of Nigger (no PC in those days!) and I had a ready companion for walks in the nearby woods. Nigger would ‘put-up’ a rabbit and set off in hot pursuit, yelping and shouting as he went. Of course he was no match for the rabbit’s speed and would be found digging like, well, a spaniel, at the burrow’s entrance.

I was probably only about 4 and I returned home in tears to tell them that Nigger had vanished. He had dug so deep that only his furiously wagging tail was visible. As a little aside, Nigger had doubtless been given that name because a celebrated RAF officer by the name of Guy Gibson had a black spaniel also called Nigger.

Harry was someone I looked up to from my earliest days. He was amusing and quite a teaser. He told me that if I wanted to catch a bird, all I needed to do was to put a pinch of salt on its tail. Naturally I found they simply wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to do that. On another occasion he kidded me that if I planted a pheasant’s long tail feathers in the ground, much as you’d set a plant, a baby pheasant would grow. I fell for that one too. Similarly, if some herring purchased from the fishmonger, were put in a pail of water, they would spring to life again. Yes, I tried that, much to the amusement of all present.

My aunt Jessie, my godmother, for God’s sake, used to tease me mercilessly. Thank goodness she lived in Kent, overlooking Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s residence, therefore we saw little of her. I’m sure I recall being walked into a stand of stinging nettles which were about head high for me, then being abandoned by her. She found it great fun that I yelped in pain from the stings. She was always trying to frighten me by saying such things as, ‘Look out, John, there’s the Boogie Man.’ Then again, ‘Look out John, there’s a policeman.’ Who needs ogres when you’ve got a Godmother like that.

She and her husband, Ted, had a succession of Pekinese, all named Mooshie. She teased them, so they were all evil-tempered little dogs. I still bear the scar from one of these which bit my finger when I’d been idly drumming it on the arm of a chair.

For some peculiar reason I did seem to be the butt of some of my aunts’ and uncles’ jokes. I was surrounded by about three of my uncles by marriage on a particular occasion and they were taking the mickey out of me, good naturedly - giving them the benefit of the doubt - when I thought, I’ve had more than enough of this, hauled off and punched one of them with all my might straight in the you-know-whats. Don’t mess with me.

I’m unsure of how the next matter came about, but when I was about 3, judging from pictures taken at the wedding, my mother remarried. I presume she felt that I needed a father figure and my step-father, Leonard (Len) Charles Hobden, entered our life. He had seen war service as a soldier and had been taken off the beaches at Dunkirk. I think he’d been in a tank crew, but I’m not certain. Like many returned servicemen he had very little to say about the war, but on one occasion he told me he’d seen men weeping with fear on those Dunkirk beaches. Little wonder; they were being mercilessly strafed by German dive-bombers.

At this time I think they lived in Bury St Edmunds, my grandmother’s house not being large enough to accommodate an extra couple. This meant that I was left at Elveden with Aunt Ivy and my grandmother because it was deemed too dangerous for me to live in what was a city, therefore a legitimate bombing target for Jerry (the wartime nick-name for the Germans/Nazis). During bombing raids, which for months were a nightly event, the air-raid warning siren would sound.

This was a rising note and went on for some time, to warn householders to put the ‘black-outs’ up at the windows, so that no lights would attract Jerry’s attention from the air. Quite often the whole household would scuttle over to the farm manager’s house where there was a cellar and remain there until the ‘All-clear’ was sounded. This was a mirror-image of the warning signal, i.e. a descending note.

2. The War Years

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other and my step-father would motor over from Bury at the week-ends to spend time with me and I would hate it when I, in bed, would see the lights of their car illuminating my bedroom ceiling as they left for Bury on Sunday evenings. I knew I was in safe hands, but you only have one mummy.

This state of affairs went on for the whole of the war and when time came I attended Elveden parish school, probably being walked there in Ivy’s company. She, unlike her elder sister, Jessie, was always kindness itself to me. My memories of that time are indistinct, but I recall morning assembly and prayers and had my own mental version of what I thought was being said during The Lord’s Prayer. It didn’t quite match what eventually I came to know.

Playtime was I think a solitary time for me. As an only child I didn’t know how to mix with other children. I had no idea that there were lavatories at the school. No one had thought to let me know and on one awful occasion I soiled myself and had to be taken home by one of the older boys, sitting on the cross-bar of his bicycle.

I was a bed-wetter too and had to sleep with a rubber sheet underneath the bedclothes. This could very easily have been attributed to my inner turmoil, having to be parted from my mother every week. Anyway, I can hear myself now saying to my grandmother, ‘I’ve done it again.’ She was never in the slightest bit perturbed and would say, ‘Oh, never mind.’

The heir to the Guinness fortune, Benjamin, was also educated at Elveden and at a very early age we learnt from the newspapers he’d had seven million pounds sterling settled on him. This would have been a colossal fortune then and equivalent to I should think at least fifty million in today’s money. Benjamin was, I discover, roughly two years older than I was and I recall that when I was about six we were confined to the classroom for lunch as the weather was inclement. Benjamin announced that he wanted to ask everyone a riddle.

The teacher in charge invited him to do so and when no-one could provide an answer, after some considerable thought, Benjamin said that he’d forgotten the answer too. I think he was quite embarrassed. For my fifth birthday I was given a brand-new two wheeler bicycle. Despite the gulf which separated our lives, Benjamin took a particular shine to that bike and virtually commandeered it.

It seems appropriate here to indicate that classroom facilities before the middle of the last century were not  as they are now. Every pupil was issued with a ‘slate’ - yes, exactly the same material used for roofing - framed in wood.  These measured about 20x15cm (8’x6’). All computations and writing were done on this. Erasures were effected by the use of a dampened cloth. I recall learning how to write in a cursive hand by describing a succession of connected letters ‘e’ and ’s’. So called running-writing is now a lost art in that most people, even adults, get by without connecting letters, the result being a rather juvenile-looking ‘hand’.

It was only later that one graduated to the use of pen and ink in an ‘exercise’ book, one for each subject. A couple of more responsible pupils would be nominated as ‘ink-monitors’, charged with filling each pupil’s ink-well, located in a recess in their desk, each week.

The pen was essentially a pencil-sized length of wood with a replaceable nib at one end. When dipped in the ink-well a little reservoir of the liquid would establish itself above the business end of the nib and allow for the writing of several words before the process had to be repeated. Every schoolboy and girl of that era sported tattoos of ink on their fingers for the majority of their schooldays.

The Summerpit Farm manager’s son, Michael, and I became very friendly and I still have a snap of me sitting in a goat-cart that he’d been given by his parents. This was drawn by, naturally, a billy-goat, complete with a vicious-looking pair of horns. He was quite ill-tempered, as I recall; the goat, that is, not Michael.

It has just occurred to me that I ought to provide a description of what life was like for a working-class family living in the English countryside, albeit during a most unusual period of time. After all, my mother, her father and mother and her siblings had lived through the privations of the First World War (the war to end all wars, as it was described) and its decimation of Britain’s youth on the battlefields. Then, hard on the heels of the carnage of that, came the Depression with its associated social upheaval and outright poverty.

When some kind of economic recovery had been set in train, lo and behold we find another global conflagration in the name of the Second World War erupted. I’ve often thought that people who survived those momentous events must have developed vast reserves of physical and mental fortitude. It’s often said that the toughest steel is forged in the hottest fire. To put it in some perspective then, in the thirty years spanning the outbreak of WWI to the cease-fire at the end of World War Two , half that time was spent by the long-suffering Britons, and countless millions around the world, engaged in those tumultuous affairs.

But at least, those living in rural areas had the advantage of having gardens where vegetables could be grown and wild-life - mainly rabbits - could be snared or trapped. And, it has to be said, these were vermin. As an aside, while I think of it, an estate game-keeper used to have a couple of ferrets kept in a cage, and these would be taken out with him and put down a rabbit burrow on the end of a lengthy leash.

The ferret, having done his duty (killing a rabbit) would then be hauled to the surface by way of the cord and the poor old rabbit, once removed from the ferret’s jaw, deposited in the ‘keeper’s bag, slung from his neck. One more for the pot! The chief task of the gamekeepers was to oversee the breeding of pheasants for the peerage and gentry to kill during the organised ‘shoots’. 

Pheasants lay their eggs in nests on the ground, usually hidden from human sight and well disguised in undergrowth. I’ve seen any amount of these and, from memory, as many as a dozen eggs form what is known as a ‘clutch’. I assume, because I don’t really know, that large estates would purchase either fertilised eggs or chicks from vendors who specialised in the trade. I say this because thousands of birds are mown down with shotguns, having been ‘driven‘ from their coverts by so-called ‘beaters’.

These latter are estate workers who, working as a team, make enough noise to persuade the cock and hen birds to leave their sanctuary, take flight and provide sport for the ‘guns’. This is the name given to the shooters themselves. The actual guns are almost invariably double-barrelled and are designed to fire cartridges which each contain a hundred or more tiny balls of lead shot. And these are the things that bring the birds down, killing them.

Specially trained ‘gun-dogs’, often Labradors, setters or spaniels, are sent out at the end of each ‘drive‘ to pick up the dead birds and return them to their masters. The lead shot often ends up in the mouths of those who eventually eat the bird. Each ‘gun’ is allowed to take home a brace (two birds - a cock and hen) or two for his own consumption.

Any left over after the landowner has taken what he needs for his own table, are sent off to the estate game-larder, where they are hung, allowing the flesh to mature. These are then sold to the local villagers. One of my uncles was very keen on pheasant which had been hung for some time, so that the bird was ‘high’, in other words gave off a pretty powerful odour.

Quite often there would indeed be some maggot infestation when the bird had been fly-blown. That didn’t seem to worry Uncle Jim. And I have to say that I, too, found the strong flavour not distasteful. Perhaps I should point out that the game-birds were usually roasted in the oven, stuffed, of course. Yes, they certainly were.

While on the subject of pheasants, I jump forward many years to my very early days in Western Australia and found myself on holiday on Rottnest Island, a few miles off-shore from Perth. I was awoken by the most distinctive cackle of a cock-pheasant. I really thought I had been dreaming of my youth, but no, the island was then still home to the remnants of birds which had been reared there for the sport of the almost exclusively English governors-general who came to the colony in the early days. I have never heard them since, so presume they have died out, maybe as the result of predation.

What follows is bound to seem somewhat disjointed, but I’m going to provide glimpses of what it was like to live in the depths of the English countryside in the middle of the last century.

The house in which my maternal grandmother lived was one of a pair (a duplex in Australian parlance) and these were mirror images of each other. The construction was of ‘clunch’, quite a hard, chalky stone with tiny shells embedded in it, having a creamy colour. The roof was tiled.

I should say the land area was about 1000sqm, surrounded by a fence on three sides and a flint-stone wall on the other, this latter separating the land from a wood, in which grew fir trees, beeches, oak, elm and chestnut and filbert trees. This was Nigger’s favourite haunt. The garden was mostly given over to vegetables: spuds, peas, beans - both runner and broad, marrows, cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes and, my favourites: black-currant, red-currant bushes and gooseberries. The borders were herbaceous; chrysanthemums and dahlias; the latter up against the stone wall. They gave a lovely display.

My aunt Ivy created a small patch in the garden, adjacent to the gooseberry bushes, which she taught me to cultivate, growing my own crop of vegetables. Just which ones now escape me, but it did create an interest in that aspect of gardening which has remained with me all my life. I’m not especially drawn to flower beds, but something to eat, yes.

My mother regaled me with tales of her time as a member of the Women’s Land Army. This ad hoc organisation was an initiative which enabled women who were otherwise unemployed, to help with the war effort. In her case this meant providing some labour on the estate. I very vaguely recall being taken with her for the day, I think sitting in a wicker baby seat on the back of her bicycle.

While my mum worked in the fields, possibly thinning out sugar-beet seedlings in their rows, I was settled in a shady spot on a blanket. Perhaps I was about 3 or 4, so possibly a genuine memory. There was understandably some lively banter and high-jinks which went on during those activities and mother was the butt of one of those practical jokes. She was driving a tractor, a German-made one, oddly, called a Lanz-Bulldog.

This machine was unique in that its steering wheel doubled as a crank-handle to turn the engine over. On one occasion mother was driving and one of the men had swung the handle to start the engine as women lacked the strength to do so, then the hay-carting began. At some point the steering wheel was removed and I got the impression that the tractor towing the trailer and the men stacking the sheaves aboard took on a life of its own and careered around the field with my mum unable to steer and in fits of laughter or possibly in wide-eyed terror.

Back to the house. The usual entrance was by the back door which gave onto a narrow vestibule, which masqueraded under the rather less than grandiose description: the ‘back-place’. the major content of which was a rather large mangle. This was an impressive piece of man-powered (woman-powered, really) machinery used to squeeze the excess water out of laundered bedding and clothing. There was a wheel with a handle at one end and I was able to help turn that when I was old enough. Nanna was terrified that I would get my fingers crushed between the hungry wooden rollers when I fed the sodden items into those jaws.

There was only one largish room on the ground floor, about 25sqm, I’d say, and entered from the afore-mentioned lobby. The centre-piece, if you could call it that, was the iron stove-cum-oven-cum fireplace. This provided all the heating and cooking facilities and must have made the little place like an oven on a warm day.

Fuel for this was coal, delivered about fortnightly by a lorry. It was my task at an early age to chop kindling wood for this fireplace. In the middle of the room was an unpolished wooden table on which all manner of tasks were undertaken as well as meals taken. A table-cloth was always used for meals and when four were playing whist - a form of bridge, but played individually - another more appropriate covering was put in place.

There were two leatherette armchairs, one on either side of the fireplace, some bentwood dining chairs around the table and a sofa under the only window. Quite an ornate Victorian side-board sat against the wall opposite the fireplace. It was all quite cosy and could also be quite noisy when a number of aunts and uncles and their families assembled for Christmas or during summer holidays.

Lord only knows how they all fitted in, especially as far as sleeping was concerned. Running parallel to the lobby was quite a large - comparatively - pantry/larder, where food preparation took place. Under a table there stood a covered pail. This contained a mysterious, to me, fluid called ‘water-glass‘. Into this were placed any excess hens’ eggs, to be preserved for future use when the birds went ‘off the lay’.

The floor was covered with linoleum with home-made rugs scattered about on it. These rugs were made by cutting up worn out clothing into strips and these strips were then doubled over and pulled through a stout sheet of hessian with a special tool. The finished item was really quite colourful and dare I say effective. The activity itself was called ‘pegging’. These rugs were to be found upstairs in the bedrooms too. That’s it for the ground floor.

To ascend the stairs, one had to open a latched door revealing a small, dark space of no more than 1sqm, then the steps, no more than a dozen, with a sharp left turn for the final few before arriving on the landing. The stairs were totally enclosed in, guess what… a staircase.  The landing was built partially over the staircase - mind your head on the stairs! - and opened out, just a bit, to enable a double-bed, complete with feather mattress, to be accommodated. Off either end of the landing there was another bedroom, the one at the front of quite generous proportions and, wonder of wonders, had an open fire-place. This was only ever used when someone was unwell and in bed there, during the winter.

The back bedroom was where my grandmother slept. In each of these there was a wash-stand (a table) bearing a large, colourfully-patterned china bowl and a similarly large, matching jug. The jug would bring hot water from downstairs and ablutions would be performed in the bedroom. This was exclusively for the ladies, young and old. The men performed theirs at the outside cold water tap, near the back door.

Bath nights were probably weekly and water for these was produced in a copper, made of, yes, you’ve guessed it. This was a vessel set into concrete over an enclosed grate/fireplace, and was about 2ft (600ml) in diameter. The tin bath hung against a (wooden) wall in the laundry/shed, some 15m from the back door. When I say ‘tin’, this means thin sheet steel which had then been galvanised to inhibit rusting. The bath was roughly the shape of … a bath.

The copper did double service as the receptacle in which the week’s wash was done, usually a Monday. The clothes were then hung out to dry on the line, attached by wooden pegs, quite often purchased from gypsies, who did the rounds selling whatever they could and probably stealing whatever else they needed. The mangle of course did its work between copper and clothes-line. I mention all these facts in order to illustrate the marked difference between life nowadays compared with the middle of the last century.

There was, for example, no electricity laid on in those days and all lighting came from an oil lamp. This stood in the middle of the table and was fuelled by paraffin oil (kerosene). A wick drew the oil up from the reservoir to a mantle, which was a very delicate cap made of, I think, silk and which absorbed some of the oil. This oil then became an inflammable gas when a match was applied. The light given off through the glass cylinder surrounding the mantle (forming a kind of chimney) was very soft and contributed in no small measure to the air of cosiness. Electricity was not ‘laid-on’ until the 50s. It was almost impossible to read any small print by that rather feeble light previous to that time.

A battery/accumulator powered wireless (radio) sat next to the window. This was a smallish wooden affair with a kind of grill with a material backing over the speaker. There were but three programmes: The Light, Home and Third Programme. This last was for the high-brow music-lover - symphony orchestras and what-not, whereas the Light was reserved for lighter music (get the idea?) quiz shows and early soap-operas.

My nanna always made use of the wash-stand in her bedroom at mid-afternoon and descended the staircase enveloped in an aroma of lavender, courtesy of the 4711, the brand name of the lavender-water she generously sprinkled about herself post-ablutions. I, still to this day, am drawn to the smell of lavender.

At four o’clock, on the dot, she would settle herself down in her favourite arm-chair to listen to Mrs Dale’s Diary on the wireless. Mrs Dale appeared to be constantly worried about her husband, Jim, who was a general practitioner (doctor). My interest lay in the daily episode of ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’. Dick was a private detective, with accomplices by the name of Jock and Snowy. Mrs Dale’s concerns went on for a quarter of an hour, after which came a cuppa and maybe a jam tart.

There was then a hiatus before tea at about 6 o’clock. Some people referred to this, usually cooked, meal as ‘high’ tea, for whatever reason; possibly to give themselves airs and graces. This meal was taken while listening to the BBC News at this time. Doubtless that would be a litany of cities and towns which had been the target of German bombers the previous night, and bombing raids took place only at night, under cover of darkness. Only the middle and upper classes would sit down, somewhat later, say 7:30-8:00 pm, for what they called ‘dinner’, accompanied probably by wine.

The lower classes called the midday meal ‘dinner’, whereas the others termed it ‘lunch’, or if they wanted to sound really ‘U’ (standing for upper-class), it was ‘luncheon’, which could also be taken with wine. In my own circles wine was virtually unheard of. It was either room-temperature ale, beer or stout (Guinness) or water.

On high-days and holidays, spirits were broken out: whisky, gin (called mother’s ruin) and brandy, although this was usually kept for medical emergencies and was used as a reviver after some kind of shock to the system. I’m not sure it was medically advisable, but it often did the trick. Another remedy of the time used in similar circumstances were smelling salts. This was ammonium carbonate - I think - certainly an ammonium salt of one kind or another. It was contained in a small phial and this was passed under the nose and my goodness did it make one sit-up and take notice.

While on the subject of old wives’ remedies, one frequently in use was Friars’ Balsam. This was a sovereign remedy for ‘chestiness’ brought about via the common cold. This highly aromatic herbal remedy was added to a bowl of boiling water by the teaspoonful, then the patient (quite often me) sat with his head over the bowl with a teacloth over the head to concentrate the vapour. You’d sit there breathing this not unpleasantly scented steam for some ten minutes, then appear bright red in the face and dripping from the heat.

This treatment was often reinforced by the application of some Vick’s Vapour-Rub on the chest and on the top lip which, it was believed helped in decongesting the airways and lungs.  A sore throat was dealt with in the following manner: a drink was prepared composed of honey and vinegar and a little warm water. This was sipped slowly and seemed to calm the angry throat down quite well.

After all this palaver, one was sent to bed, not with a hot-water bottle, at least not in my case, as I had as a little boy investigated what would happen if I unscrewed the plug. As you can imagine the bed became quite wet and warm, for a while, that is. Instead of a hot -water bottle, I was given a brick, which had been in the oven, wrapped in a towel. The brick remained warm for much of the night. And it didn’t leak.

Remember that there was no electric light then, so I would be given a candle on a holder to light my way upstairs to bed. How the place wasn’t burnt to the ground over the years I’ll never know.

I have made quite a thing of remedies, I know, but this was my lot in infancy and childhood. I was, as I’ve said many times in my life, the definitive sickly child. I seemed to catch any bug or virus that was going about, and usually exhibited symptoms at the very top-end of the range. I have little or no idea why this was so because I was an otherwise very sturdy little chap, giving very little impression of having a weak constitution.

Middle-ear infections plagued my younger days, a condition probably inherited from my father, whose death almost assuredly came about as a result of the disease, as you’ll find out later.    I suffered several perforated ear-drums over the ensuing years, caused by the build-up of pressure from the infection. The pain before the bursting of the drum was as intense as anything I’ve ever experienced, but the relief afterwards was sheer bliss. The stench of the suppurating matter emerging from the auditory canal was beyond description. Quite disgusting.

Mother was instructed by my doctor how to cleanse the ear. This she did by dipping a cotton bud – home-made, as they were unprocurable in those days - into some hydrogen peroxide, a powerful antiseptic. This she used to do the necessary, both in and around the ear. She would hold my head over to one side so that the fluid wouldn’t dribble down my neck and I have to say that the procedure was quite uncomfortable, perhaps owing to her over-enthusiasm. I realise that my ill-health must have been a keen worry for her, but, mother’s sons and all that.

One morning, soon after the ‘treatment’ began, she took one look at me and exclaimed, ‘On top of everything, you’re going grey!’

The poor old girl hadn’t realised that hydrogen peroxide was also a strong bleaching agent. In those days one often referred to unnaturally blonde women as ‘peroxide’ blondes. She had a good laugh when she twigged to what had caused my hair to go white.

I had almost forgotten this, but also taking refuge at my grandmother’s place, evacuees from where they lived in London, were my cousins Vida and Ann, one a year older than I, the other a year younger. Their mother came too and they, I’m told, all shared the double bed on the landing. The girls attended the little parish school along with me. Ann, the younger, has no memory of this apparently.

At an age when we were able, we three, along with our nanna, tried our hands at making butter. This was done by skimming the cream off the top of the milk which had been collected from the dairy, only about a 100 metres away. The Jersey cattle are to my mind the most beautiful of all cows and give milk which has always by far the most butter-fat (cream) of all dairy herds.

This cream was then put in fairly large bottles with firmly secured lids and shaken in a particularly rhythmic way, using both hands. Nothing seemed to happen for several minutes, but eventually the consistency of the contents would magically change and butter would form before our very eyes. Quite tiring, but nevertheless, rewarding work, helping as it did, to keeping food on the table.

One of the advantages of country life is that youngsters discover aspects of life that city or town dwellers are never exposed to. One example is that the chickens which provided eggs for cooking recipes and for the traditional English breakfast, were raised in situ (in place). A clutch (a dozen) fertilised hen’s eggs would be purchased from somewhere/someone and one of the current hens would be detected as being ‘broody’, i.e. appearing to be disposed to sitting on the clutch, thereby providing the warmth needed to hatch them.

The hen would be settled into a separate coop - a smallish box-like affair with a slatted front to it, so she could look out. The eggs were placed all together on a straw base, forming a nest and the broody hen would go about her business. It was quite fascinating to watch her settling herself down on the eggs and fluffing her feathers out to cover them all. One of the slats at the front of her cage could be lifted and held in place so that she could emerge to feed and so on. In order to prevent predation by rats, who, by the by, love eating hens eggs, and/or foxes, there was a wire-netting enclosure off the wooden hutch, to protect the bird and, in due course, the chicks, when they emerged from the eggs.

This occurred after about twenty-one days of ‘sitting’, from memory. What a delight these chicks were for we youngsters, those tiny fluffy bundles, cheeping away non-stop.

There was one way in which yours truly did not contribute to the food chain/supply. When old enough I was given the job of fetching the daily offering from the hen-house/run. I would ‘raid’ each nesting box, sometimes finding three or four eggs in one of them and perhaps only 1 in others, and none in some. There were about six of these separate boxes for about 10 or 12 layers. Having retrieved some eggs, I’d then run down the path to the house and hurl the eggs at my grandmother, eggspecting (sorry, couldn’t resist) her to catch