Cool Among the Flames

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COOL AMONG THE FLAMES

 

 

This, Sixth Edition published March 2021

First edition published June 2006

© Noel C Bailey: Sydney

All rights reserved: No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied in part or in whole or stored on any electronic retrieval system, on-site or remote, or transmitted by electronic, mechanical or other means, for any purpose, without the written consent of the publisher and author.

ISBN 1-4116-2414-9

General Retail: SIC Classification 5942

Non-Fiction

uds3@hotmail.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOREWORD

Do you play Chess? Wonderful pastime. So simple in concept, so complex in execution. I’ve been playing the same game with God now for seventy-five years. I’m presently in ‘check’ but the game’s far from over. Sure, he’s sitting pretty having taken most of my pawns, one rook, a castle and both bishops, but while I’m on the board, the game lurches on. “Cool Among the Flames” is the story behind one man’s rise to total obscurity, a lesson in skewed destiny or to put it more succinctly, life in the break-down lane.

You pick up an autobiography and would most certainly assume you must know the person, or at least be familiar with some of his or her finest achievements, be it in sports, science or the arts. In this case, my having achieved nothing of prominence, such assumption is sadly misplaced. What we have here are memories as opposed to memoirs, sustenance rather than substance and living as opposed to existing. My life has been a cruelly amusing pastiche of “Every Which Way But Loose,” “Fox On the Run.” “Bad Moon Rising” with perhaps a dash of “Edelweiss.”

I would like to say that this book was inspired by some particular person or event in my life, but why lie? I have absolutely no definable reason for writing it, other than my daughter’s constant harping as to “What DID you do over the past forty years daddy?” I must admit that it has provided free therapy during its compilation and serves if nothing else, as the surrogate diary that I vowed to maintain, but never did.

I would however like to dedicate this work to my current wife Katie and our children, Michael 10 and Emmalyn 8. Their names are real of course. Those of other friends and acquaintances who have made guest-appearances in my life at crucial, often comical times, have by necessity, occasionally been changed – purely to protect the guilty you understand.

But enough of this – I can hear my primary school teacher now “Never start a sentence with a conjunction Noel.” Whoever reads “forwards” anyway? Let’s get on with it.

Noel Bailey” Longmont, Colorado March 2021

Table of Contents Page

 

Forward 3

 

Check-In 8

 

For the Term of His Natural Life 18

 

Winds of Change 30

 

Changing of The Guard 57

 

Worlds Apart 92

 

It’s Hard Saying “Orstraya” 116

 

Marqued For Death 166

 

The Long and Winding Road 197

 

Becalmed 226

 

Nothing Succeeds Like Failure 251

 

Epilogue 292

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR JOYCE AND COLIN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author’s Note:

 

The events in this book conclude in 2005. A great deal has happened in the last sixteen years and the story needs updating. That is actually underway as I have a contracted offer from a British publishing company located in New York, to republish “Cool Among the Flames,” once the update is completed. That is no small task however with two young children, business and domestic obligations and an imminent move to a new house in the next six weeks. I’m looking at a publication date of late 2023 currently.

 

 

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C H A P T E R O N E

CHECK-IN

 

Mid afternoon December 12^th 1945, just another day in the life of the 2.28 billion people then living on this strange little planet. I don’t actually recall if it was raining or not. Let us for the sake of argument suppose it was, it bequeaths a rather more atmospheric feel to the events at hand. Careering along a near-deserted A449 in an army Humber Super Snipe which many years later, I learned my father had “borrowed” outside normal channels from his CO, loomed the mini-township of Raglan, midway between Usk and Monmouth inside the Welsh border. Whether of my own doing, natural causes or the Humber’s dicky suspension, mother went into labour. It wasn’t so much a case of “No room at the Inn” as “No Doctor in the house”.....basically no houses. Remember this was backwoods Wales post-war, barely four months since the destruction of Hiroshima and barely seven following Germany’s unconditional surrender. No cellphones, medical centers, only the occasional street light! The mystique of the birthing process to the average male in those days was such that most fathers still leaned toward the stork theory. If anyone had asked me at the time, I would probably have suggested heading south for Cardiff, but no one did and since the parents and families of the disaster-struck duo all lived in Watford, North London, it must have been quite a trip. Whilst without the benefit of modern motorways, “traffic jam” was a term yet to be coined and it is doubtful whether they encountered more than a dozen sets of traffic lights the entire trip, not that anyone would probably have noticed with the accelerator flat to the floor.

They tell me it was touch and go - for both of us! Evidently I did not appreciate the intrusion of forceps into my personal domain. I was quite content in the snug little room I had come to call home and proved quite a formidable adversary. Eventually, forced to vacate, I dragged certain things with me which were to ensure I would never have to cope with potential sibling rivalry. Perhaps the worst pain was suffered by my father (Colin) who was presented with a bill for fourteen pounds three shillings and sixpence, ten and sixpence of which was for circumcision (I could have saved them that one!)

Colin, one of four children, born just four years before the Titanic went down, taking with it the myth of class superiority, had a privileged childhood. Educated at prestigious Harrow University, he left in the early thirties with an architectural degree. Here was a man with an IQ well above one hundred and forty, a multi-talented dreamer equally at home playing the piano, re-building a gearbox, inventing household gadgets, composing poetry or cooking a four-course meal for six. He was also a keen sportsman, genes of which have filtered through to the current generation. Despite the foregoing, this highly educated twerp was content to sell eggs at a nearby farm until his father Harold seeing little return for his substantial educational investment, took stock of the situation and under the impression that the army might better channel his son’s talents constructively, packed him off to boot camp.

My mother Joyce, was a curious pastiche of model femininity and stiff upper lipped Thatcheresque determination. The daughter of a successful insurance executive, she had the previous year, received unusually early promotion and high commendation in the Women’s Land Army to which she had been billeted shortly before her nineteenth birthday. Demobbed in ‘43, she had obtained employment with a thriving grocery import/export business in her home town of Watford, owned by Harold Bailey unbeknowns to her, soon to be her Father-In-Law. As she explained to me years later, it was a case here of “love at third glance!”

 

“I was sitting at my desk filling out invoices when this strange army officer walked in, sat on my desk and started fiddling with my typewriter. I told him I was busy and had to finish my work but he wouldn’t go away! Just then Harold walked in and said, “I see you’ve met my other son Colin!” He was still messing about with the keys when he told me that he had one more night before he had to go back to HQ and would I like to go to the cinema with him. I didn’t go and wasn’t even that keen on him, in fact I thought he was a bit odd but he was very persistent, and his next weekend off he asked me again and we went out for the first time.”

 

Their courtship, like so many others at that time, was by necessity limited, being dependent on weekend passes and the occasional furlough. In time however, the wedding was set down for November 1944. Harold Bailey was delighted, he believed that he had found in Joyce the opportunity to safely pass-on the custodial keys to Colin’s future safekeeping. Following the wedding, Colin still had three years of army duty to serve and found himself on transfer to a base in Kent, just south of London. Joyce remained with her parents in Watford working her old job.

Around the same time Hitler was taking both his own and girlfriend Eva Braun’s life with a pistol in a bunker in Germany, Joyce would have been receiving confirmation from her doctor that she was “with child” no less and that my E.T.A. was pretty much expected to be Christmas day ‘45.

Sadly I was never to meet either my paternal grandfather or maternal grandmother. Just three months prior to my birth, Harold suffered an unexpected heart attack and died. He was just fifty-four. A fortnight later, Joyce’s mother Louisa, already diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, was unable to further repel the malignancy, and died herself, aged only forty-nine, the ages of both having particular significance later, all of which brings us back to the speeding Humber.

Following mum’s discharge from Broxbourne nursing home in Watford that Christmas Eve, we were despatched to live with a distant Aunt Clara in Abbey Wood, relatively close to the army base. My clearest memory there is the early morning ritual wherein my rest period was disturbed when the milko would crane his head into my pram and perform his “goo-gooing” routine. I can still recall those approaching milk bottles! I retain too a clear impression of being trussed up in my small folding chair watching dad climb through the kitchen window on more than one occasion. Never did discover the story behind that one! Life at Abbey Wood was uneventful although there were pointers that my life ahead was unlikely to follow anything resembling simplicity. Legend has it that at eighteen months I wantonly emptied an entire can of treacle over a lounge suite ruining both the material and our welcome there. That Christmas, while chancing my arm with a ball I brought down a new chandelier. Surrounded by shards of glass, I was unhurt, a trend that was to continue unchecked through many life-threatening situations in later years.

In the summer of 1948, dad obtained his army discharge and we moved to Welling, a town on the main road south to Dover, just inside the Kent border. Only six minutes from Blackheath and little more than ten from the Greenwich Observatory or today the Millennium Dome, life at 88 Selwyn Crescent was idyllic and then some! Dad finally put his architectural skills to good use, taking up a position in the newly created Government department, The War Damage Commission. Here he was responsible for surveying and/or redesigning buildings, both commercial and private, that had suffered direct bomb damage or secondary shock during the war. Funny how some things remain lodged in your mind. I can still recall trips to London on the number 89 bus and the relatively few instancies of bombed and derelict buildings to be seen. I remember queuing up at our local grocers with ration cards (some food was still in restricted supply) waiting for the man to stamp that well-used little cardboard folder. We seemed to get more stamps than other people, which as I found out later was the result of dad using his army-officer status to arrange a few dodgy deals with other Government departments.

Then there were the Christmases! In 1949, I received my first gramophone record - Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer by Gene Autrey, an old wax 78, for those whose memories stretch back that far. Also that year mum gave me a boxed ‘Cussons’ soap” Bambi from the 1942 Disney film. I still have it, being my most treasured possession. Every decade or so I treat myself to a few moments bliss by unwrapping the small figure and holding it up to my nose, the scent transporting me back to another period, another time. One that has no place or meaning in the dispassionate “make it happen” society of the new millennium.

Thus it was that the most coveted house in Welling, at least in terms of location, came to dad’s attention by way of being listed for survey. Amazing just how “severe” the damage that house had sustained. Structural “faults” you’d never know were there and that were barely worth fixing! at least, as set out in the report dad filed. Within weeks the property was listed on the market for a song.

Whether or not the public ever got to know about it is a moot point, but dad had the house under contract within a week. It was Spring of 1950. To look at it, the house in Danson Lane was just another semi-detached home, one of hundreds in Welling and a common sight throughout the south of England. It wasn’t what it was so much as where it was. At the very end of a row of semis, Brookside as it was called, shared a common boundary with the sprawling Danson Park. The irregular shaped garden was large, almost twice the size of most everyone else’s in Welling. The rear fence was bordered by a dense forest, the palings and woodlands evidently jostling for dominance. Beyond neglect, the garden itself offered an impossible challenge to any but the most committed and talented of landscape architects. Apple, plum, peach and elderberry trees ruled the air-space, not just in close proximity, but in many places firmly entwined as if inseparable old friends. At ground level, blackberry, raspberry, redcurrant, gooseberry, rhubarb, strawberry and native bramble, grew in defiance of any master-plan, obviously with unchecked delight and having their own notions as to where they would next spring up. Amidst the chaos, grass grew where it was able, but to be realistic, it was hard to tell where a tuft ended and weeds began. For all its botanical dereliction, that first vista of wild magnificence is as clear to me now as that cool morning in 1950 we first saw it - an Aladdin’s cave to a wide-eyed four year old with imagination.

The ‘Wild Wood’ as I called it, the absolute realisation of Kenneth Graham’s fictional backdrop in The Wind In The Willows was home to a plethora of creatures great and small. Over the years to come, badgers, moles, hedgehogs, squirrels, even the odd fox dropped in, either for food, a chat or both. A few deer and wild goats also lived in the upper reaches of the forest, but were not sufficiently socially-orientated or disposed to breach our fenced perimeter. The two-way animal traffic was helped not a little, by dad cutting a gate for me in the rear fence and which gave us alone, access to the entire forest and park after closing time.

Besides friends with fur, hair or spines, the garden was filled with birdlife who had made the woodlands their enviable home. Robin redbreasts, thrushes, starlings, blue-wrens, sparrows, cuckoos, blackbirds, wood-pigeons, kestrels, finches, owls, ravens and woodpeckers all bore witness to Brookside’s new owners and their shrill calls of vital communication were a lasting treasure. Each Spring I would watch the nests being built within the privet hedges which bordered each fence, wanting to climb up and look in, touch the eggs, but not doing so for knowledge that the birds would desert their home. Oh dear reader, if you could only understand - all the magic in the world was here. Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, Pooh Bear, Eeyore, Ratty, Mole, Merlin and even during those silent snowfalls, The Little Match Girl…..I knew them all. Whilst all of us must grow and develop as we experience the best and worst life has to offer, in many ways I had the misfortune to be cast amongst utter perfection to begin with, an ultimately extended ladder on the topmost rung - there was no way up.

 

 

The house itself was drastically short on magic however! Dark, desolate and cobwebbed to such a degree it could well have been mistaken for a film-set left over from The House on Haunted Hill. How long since anyone had lived there was open to speculation and the first weekend we moved in, everyone pitched-in stripping stained unsightly wallpaper and dingy brown paint which had unaesthetically been introduced to every portion of exposed woodwork in the house. Even by daylight, you needed a torch to see your way round the house. In fact, dad’s assessment of localised war damage wasn’t a complete fabrication.

Less than quarter of a mile east of the house, in Danson Park itself, had been located an active gun-site, one of the largest in Kent. In daily use up until five years earlier, repelling nightly raids by the German Luftwaffe, shock-waves from the guns had caused substantial cracking and stress fractures in Brookside’s eastern and northern walls. As a highly competent builder however (as were all the Bailey clan), the damage was minimised and rectified within months. Vast amounts of building materials and supplies found their way to Danson Lane from Government stores, that something tells me were officially “lost in transit.”

Up until September 1950 then was seen unprecedented activity on the home-renovation front. Room by room the house was handed a new identity. Bedrooms became livable, mine becoming a haven for forest artifacts, stones of interest, fossils, last year’s bird’s nests, etc. Somewhere we found a lounge-room, with rotting carpet, dipping floorboards and bile-green ceiling, but it did offer twin French-doors which opened proudly onto the rear garden. All-up, barely a challenge to dad’s wizardry with plaster, a paintbrush and electrical re-wiring skills. Brookside was back!

We come now to the nerve-center, the very pulse if you will, of my existence - Danson Park itself. What words to describe this unequalled slice of childhood wonderment? What is a park? A piece of grass with a few benches? A memorial to some forgotten politician or local identity? Something the size of New York’s Central Park?... perhaps, but Danson Park was something else. A timeless tribute to happiness, freedom and innocence. Here somehow, man and nature had worked together with inspired ability to conjure up a place that stood as an epitaph to each’s full potential. Maybe only I can see it. Maybe only I ever had to! Walking through it today, it isn’t the largest, best equipped, most historic, visually stunning piece of recreational reserve to be found, but in my childhood it was “The Pyramids,” “Mount Rushmore,” “The Colosseum,” “The Taj Mahal,” “The Grand Canyon,” and “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon!” Just some thirty or forty yards from the rear fence, a gentle brook wound its way east to the Lake, a man-made landmark built long pre-war which had originally been water-cress beds. Legends abounded of buried treasure from the middle ages which some years later beckoned my own involvement as I will detail a little later. The Lake being marginally less than a mile in length was a third of that at its widest point. A miniature railway ran its full length on both sides, doing brisk business on Sundays especially, with six open carriages packed with excited and expectant young children, often accompanied by parents who looked thirty years older than today’s equivalent and smelt of tobacco and home-baked pastries. I never heard the “f” word! The cost of the ride? - threepence (return!). Those kids without the necessary funds, had as good a time running along the small-gauge track behind the rear carriage or, waiting around a bend, the bravest hanging back until the last second to jump off the line before a close encounter with the engine.

The driver spent hours each Sunday morning polishing the three engines in their steel sheds right at the water’s edge having lit the boilers and waiting for a full head of steam. This was life! Barely anyone had television, even less had a car, everyone rode a bike. With no coffee-bars, ‘Game Boys,’ ‘Play Stations,’ ‘Nintendos,’ rave parties, or even a ‘Shopping Mall,’ the park was always looking good as an entertainment venue. People of course were always willing to talk in those days. Families spoke with one another, children wanted to be with their parents who in turn wanted to spend time with their children. If anyone was “gay” they were just happy! When did the wheels fall off?

Beyond the north-eastern border of the forest the park grounds rose rather majestically towards their highest point, providing a commanding view down across the lake. Twice a year, at Easter and the August (Summer) holidays, the fairground came to Danson Park. As the first of the semi-trailers loaded up with the disassembled Octopus, Cha-Cha, Bumper Cars and Big Wheel rolled through the huge gates, further up Danson Lane I and my best friend Peter, would high-tail it through the gate in the fence, following our well-worn trail through the forest to come out at the top of the rise. There we would stand for hours watching the rides being put together so expertly. The Big Wheel particularly was an eye-opener. What appeared to be a truck full of girders, seats and nuts and bolts, became a fully recognisable entity within hours. The ultimate jigsaw! Hand in hand with the advent of the summer fair was the traditional firework display alongside the lake which due to the fact dusk in England is so late mid-summer, could not commence until complete darkness had fallen, right on the stroke of 10.00 p.m. The Baileys of course had the shortest of trips home - down the hill, alongside the river and through the gate, which was totally undetectable from the outside.

To the south east of the Lake over towards the park’s southern gate, lay Danson swimming pool, a Mecca for sun-worshippers who would take up residence along the many grassy verges or tiled areas bordering the wading pools and the children’s play-center- a pastel blue scalloped fountain, down which water cascaded in ever-widening circles and under which a child might crouch, watching sheets of water crashing down and drowning out his mother’s shouts to be careful there. Where now are those young girls in their one-piece, tanning themselves unmercifully and taking care not to actually get wet, thereby ruining the whole illusion? Looming imposingly over the whole complex was the refreshment kiosk, an impossibly huge building, some twenty feet to its domed ceiling with wooden floor and an interior large enough for a ballroom. Still I smell the sun cream and chlorine cocktail wafting across the room as both children and adults queued up at the counter, so dwarfed by the architecture surrounding it, to buy their Wall’s Ice Cream, Mountain Maid ice blocks or cheese and cress sandwiches, which by mid afternoon were usually suffering from advanced rigor-mortis! the water dripping off the eager little customers and invariably turning the floor into a skating rink. At the far end of the main pool, an Olympic-size diving board where the young men could be seen contorting their bodies every which way in an effort to impress their young companions, laughing off the occasional belly-flop with some difficulty considering the agony coursing through their bodies.

Directly opposite, across the Lake, perhaps some three-quarters of a mile from the pool was to be found the Mansion House, a Gentleman’s residence built in the eighteenth century long before the zoning of the park itself. The second storey was, in my earliest recollection, given over to a private museum of weaponry from the middle ages - lances, armour, shields, picks and swords. It was home undoubtedly to many a spectral ancestor, as indeed I later discovered. Long since given over to the Local Council for maintenance, the ground floor was a pleasant enough tea-room where older couples would sit at carved tables staring out across the acres of clipped grass sloping down to the Lake and look at a world passing them by, perhaps regretting the children they never had, the places they never visited, while young couples with all their hopes and dreams ahead of them passed by, sometimes nodding pleasantries, others so caught up in their own emotional distractions that they didn’t see anyone there. It remains such a paradox - youth, with so much promise but not the knowledge to forge the way and old-age, all the knowledge, but not the youth to see it through.

Immediately to the rear of the Mansion stood (and still stand) the Olde English Gardens, a veritable monument to the best of British gardening expertise. Fully surrounded by high brick wall, the gardens in the summertime begat a riot of glorious colour. Azaleas, Delphiniums, Salvias and Hollyhocks competed for attention, gently swaying to the cross-breezes and nodding to their compatriots in flower beds across the way from the crazy-paving pathway that circumnavigated the walled enclosure. Towards the center, a shallow fish-pond filled with carp and goldfish, mostly covered by water lilies yet presided over by an elegant fountain that sent sprays of water skywards at regular intervals. In this place, the full spectrum of nature’s talents were on aromatic show.

Could anything possibly have interrupted this life of new experiences and discoveries? Indeed it could - school! What were my parents thinking? Surely I knew all I needed to know already? The best and quickest way through the forest, the difference between a blackbird and a starling, how to tie my shoelaces....what else was there? Unfortunately, come the new term in September 1950 I found out - they sent me to primary school - Danson County Primary to be precise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C H A P T E R T W O

FOR THE TERM OF HIS NATURAL LIFE

 

It wasn’t that I resented authority particularly, I simply could not condone the rude interruption to my daily routine. Getting up when I felt like it, playing with my train set, jumping off the garage roof into the sand pit by which time, all things being hunky dory, breakfast should be just about ready. Fried tomatoes, three strips of bacon (middle rashers) and two pieces of fried-bread cut diagonally, never down the middle, sitting in their regular spot on the right hand side of the plate. One glass of orange juice at room temperature, slightly away to the left of the cutlery, right alongside my HP sauce! “What? Is he for real?” I hear you say. “Spoilt little bastard, should have been on his way to reform school!” Well dear reader, I make no apologies, think about it? I was an only child, they loved me - wanted to spoil me no doubt, who was I to shatter their delicate psyche and knock back their attentions? Besides my come-uppance was at hand - school, remember? Precisely three hundred and thirty-seven footsteps, after crossing Danson Lane, and turning left, brought us to the main entry-gate of Danson County Primary School (DCPS), another bummer, living closer to the school than anyone else, I never had any decent excuse in subsequent years for being late! That first morning, mum left me at the entrance and walked off. Halfway home, she recognised the footsteps and carted me back. Not usually given to crying, I didn’t, I began screaming! This was murder, straight-up neglect, child abuse if not dereliction of duty. This time she saw me into the playground and into the care of Miss Attorano, who if I’d been twelve years older, would have had no problem holding my attention, I’d have gone in early! As it was though, watching mum retreat through the gate and my wrist in the vice-like grip of my teacher - I was history!

Speaking of history, American forces in the Korean War, pulled off the daring Inchon landing on September the 15^th and just seven weeks later on Nov 2^nd playwright George Bernard Shaw died at his home in Lawrence, Hertfordshire.

Thus, the new recruits were paraded before the School Principal, a towering, humourless woman, the type memory can only recall in black and white. Probably an ex-marine, she had me pegged from the word go as “the one to watch.”

“My name is Mrs Gunson.....Mrs D. H. Gunson,” she intoned, looking directly at me, “I welcome you all to Danson Primary, (now, she was definitely looking at everyone but me!) Work hard, behave (she was back fixing me with a death stare) and we’ll get on just fine. Go to your classrooms now with your teachers.”

Like, what else were we going to do? snort a joint? start up a game of touch footy - prison rules?

It was embarrassing enough having to take sandwiches and an apple, but at least they were mine. Wrong again! “Now children,” said the rather daintily constructed Miss Attorano, “Some of you I know, don’t have any lunch, so we’re going to put everyone’s sandwiches and fruit into this bin which we’ll share out at recess,” she indicated an enormous metal drum behind her that would have done World Vision proud. All the children traipsed over and dropped their food in - God knows what it did to some of the apples.

“Noel,” she said, smiling sweetly, “Yours too!” She sat there expectantly. Now, there is no way anyone and I mean anyone, was having my sandwiches. It wasn’t a case of hygiene, although thinking back, who knows where some of their grotty little hands had been? This was basic civil rights! I returned her stare. For a moment she looked bemused but quickly clicked into “take-charge” mode. “Is there something wrong Noel?” she asked in her best little-girl voice.

“Yes Miss,” I answered truthfully, “I want to keep my own lunch.”

“We have to think of others Noel, don’t we?” Big mistake, appealing to my sense of fair-play on this issue. I didn’t say “Do we?”, but I thought it.

“Now come on Noel, just drop the sandwiches into the bin.” So saying, she had moved to within striking distance. Both our hands darted into my satchel at the same time - hers were unfortunately stronger. I bid a silent farewell to my brown paper package as it fell into the abyss, feeling a sense of loss one tends to associate with a family funeral.

Victorious before her new assembly, Miss Attorano sat all of us at our newly appointed desks and proceeded to outline school policy and what we would be studying in Year one. I wasn’t listening by then, wondering instead if they’d finished taking down the Big Wheel yet. She was on about English now, how important it was to spell properly and had we noticed all the hard words spelt out for us hanging round the walls? yada, yada, yada!

I wondered if it was lunch yet. Glancing around at the clock, I noticed it was barely a quarter to ten. I looked at Miss Attorano, she was pretty, no doubt about that. Then I thought about Mrs Gunson, Mrs D.H. Gunson. There had to be better things to think about.

Suddenly from way left-field, “Can you spell 'should' Noel?” I was jolted out of my reverie, but composed myself quickly... “S-H-O-U-L-D” I replied.

“Well, isn’t he a good little boy? He didn’t even look at the wall.” She beamed at me. I was beginning to like her a lot.

“Barry,” she asked, “Can you spell the number ‘eight’ please?” Poor old Barry, I doubt he could have counted that far! Summoning up all his mental resources, he shifted awkwardly in his chair.

“A....’em, T- E?” He sat there, pleased with himself.

Miss Attorano looked disappointed, then turned to the class.

“Who knows what’s wrong with that?” she asked demurely. I put up my hand.

“Yes Noel,” she inclined her head. “It’s E-I-G-H-T Miss.” I sat back, resting my case.

I don’t think Barry and I spoke the rest of that week. No big loss from my viewpoint. Thus the morning wound its inevitable way down and Miss Attorano, true to her word began to dispense the lunches. I saw my beloved cheese sandwich passed to Milly, a small and very shy coloured girl, my apple to Gordon, the class fatty, while into my hands was shoved some disgusting mayonnaise creation which was last seen heading skywards behind Miss Attorano’s desk. Though decades ahead of diagnosably potential food allergies, vitamin supplements, special food requirements and such like, I was not about to embark on a course of stuffing someone else’s culinary trash down my throat to please anybody. I walked out to the playground. While the others were holding hands, playing hopscotch and making new friends, I walked down to the southern boundary of the well-grassed playing fields, and with my face pressed up against the mesh stared at my distant home, the furthest I’d ever been from it. I remember so clearly wave after wave of hot tears coursing down my face. My world was just shattered. I remained there sobbing and staring into the distance until some twenty or thirty minutes later when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Miss Attorano. I couldn’t talk to her and pushing her away, I just ran. Not yet five hours at school and it was my first face-to-face with the dreaded D.H. Gunson (Years later, I called her ‘De Havilland’ after the fighter aircraft!)

She waved away her subordinates and I was alone - with Satan!

“What appears to be the problem Noel?” she asked imperiously. “Don’t you like it here?”

“I want to go home,” was all I could stammer.

She looked at me for a moment with about as much compassion as the head of a firing squad. Probably in her case however, the extent of her maternal capability.

“Nonsense boy, now grow up and get back to class.”

Such was her unique understanding! I should comment in my defence, I was only just over four and a half, by far the youngest in the school, having only made selection by a matter of weeks, else I would have had to wait until the following summer. Many in my class were almost eighteen months older.

I made my way back to class and sat out the afternoon. I recall when Mum came to take me home that night, she and Miss Attorano exchanged words with Mrs Gunson. It hadn’t been my finest hour. That night Mum suggested I try to make friends with some of the other children, my seemingly anti-social tendencies having been noticed.

The second day was much better. I only lasted three hours before falling off a low brick wall and exposing my knee-cap almost to the bone. I actually got to ride in Mrs Gunson’s blue Morris Minor as she had to drive me home after the First Aid room had patched me up. Hopefully I bled all over the upholstery.

Gradually things fell into a routine. Though for days I stared out from that wire mesh, eventually I found something better than misery - marbles! The mini championships that went on in the playground knew no limits, they had to drag us back to class when the bell went.

Just one other incident a fortnight later earned me a few more demerit points and a trip to the Headmistress. Gordon, the class fatty you will recall, was not only a full-time slob, but also an oversized racist pig. During Craft, he would take delight in picking-on and insulting little Milly, the Jamaican girl. The day in question he had twisted the neck of the little camel she was making out of a framework of wire, and broken it. Milly just sat there crying. I lost it and shoved him headfirst into the nearby drum of papier-mache, which unfortunately for him, was over half full. Had not Miss Attorano knocked over the drum and dragged him out by the legs, he may have been “glued to death,” a fitting end in many ways. Back in “The Oval Office” Mrs Gunson let me have it from both barrels. She was going to “note this on my report card,” “speak to my parents,” and “keep a sharp eye on me.” We really weren’t close!

In America, Charles M. Schulz had just published his first “Peanuts.” Who would have guessed that Linus, Lucy and Charlie Brown would become the most successful comic-strip characters of all time, still going strong December 11^th 2000 when Schulz died, just hours before his last strip was published?

On the academic front I must have seemed such a smart-ass! This wasn’t the case at all but I had been given such a huge advantage over most my age. Mum had read to me since my second birthday. Noddy and Big Ears to start with, then advanced Enid Blyton. I went on every adventure with The Secret Seven, knew where half the buried treasure in England was. I was an honorary member of The Lost Boys, backed up Peter Pan during the final showdown with Captain Hook, and flew over so many lost reefs I’ve forgotten. I could draw a map of Pooh Corner, knew where Piglet, Kanga, Baby Roo, Tigger and Eeyore lived, not to mention Tom Sawyer and Huck. By four I knew every nook and cranny of Toad Hall, had cried my eyes out with Mole when he reclaimed his old home in “The Wind in The Willows,” one of the all-time emotional and moving episodes in English literature.

There could be no stopping now. All those nights I lay there, mum’s voice bringing to life the very essence of centuries of literary magic. Hans Christian Anderson, Grimm’s fairy tales. I walked alongside every famous character that was ever conceived, the good, the bad and the ugly! The Grecian heroes - Perseus, Heracles and the whims of the Gods on Mount Olympus itself. Invariably she would ask me questions on what we had just read. Words and phrases were explained, key points emphasised. I came to know other cities, other ages. Modern New York to Ancient Egypt, Venice to Carpathia. Queen Hatsepshut to Count Dracula. By six we were into detective novels, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, Edgar Wallace etc. While other kids were doing Blinky Bill, I was studying up on all the available evidence to figure out “whodunnit” before Mum would hit me with the final chapter. Fact is, she wouldn’t read it until I’d at least come up with some logical suspect, based on what had gone before. Sometimes I was right, sometimes not but I was getting better. This was not a normal childhood, albeit the only one I ever had.

From dad I learned to use my brain cells. Whilst in less concentration than his own, my formative years were spent poring over a multitude of puzzles and mind-twisters. At one stage I recall, he designed and built a pair of portable battery-operated morse-code receivers enabling us to send messages from one room to another upstairs. Amazing how fast you can build-up from “Hi dad” to “Is mum cooking chicken again?” The rudiments of mathematics he taught me, such that I could comprehend at least, even before I went to school. How many 4 year olds know the formula for the circumference of a circle or how to find the area of a rectangle, pre-school? How many should? There is a time and a place for all things and I remain unconvinced that knowing what I did, when I did, was ultimately a good thing. Eventually Miss Attorano phased out my existence altogether. It began with “Not you Noel, you answered the last question,” moved on to, “Can anyone think of six words ending in ‘ough’ - except Noel,” and finally “Put your hand down Noel, we all know you know the answer!”

All this rejection may otherwise have set me up for a serious childhood complex, but fate had been unusually kind in other ways. It had orchestrated events such that I was sitting next to Gillian Cooper, which totally distracted me from feeling neglected or in any way sorry for myself. I may only have been six or so at the time, but I knew quality when I saw it! Somehow we were to stay together pretty much through Primary school. Gillian was an appealing mix of intellect and fun - we shared a common wavelength and played together during many warm summers and long winters. I can still see her standing by the steps leading up to the sports lock-up, laughing herself stupid after a snowball I threw at her, lodged in her hair somehow - you had to be there! Her pretty light-blue eyes lit up when she was happy and if there was ever a more perfect example of youthful innocence then I never saw it! Gill’s personality was matched only by her immaculate presentation and my memory of our times together are tinged with a sadness that they couldn’t just go on ad infinitum.

 

As the early fifties rolled on ever thus perceptively, Brookside became a haven of unparalleled charm. The garden’s wild nature was tamed, surrendering its years of autocratic rule, in the face of subtle brickwork, concrete paths, flowered borders, rockeries but more significantly, design and planning. New turf was laid, perennials planted, new fences and clipped trees became part of the new order. The air was rent by multiple replays of Dean Martin’s That’s Amore, Rosemary Clooney’s This Ole House (Poor old nephew George wasn’t even yet in the planning stages), Patti Page’s How Much is That Doggie in The Window? and Guy Mitchell’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to name but four heavy metal head-banging classics of the period.

From my earliest youth, weekends spent up at Raymead, Dad’s family home in Park Road, North Watford, were a treat to savour, as was the steam-train journey to get there. Just standing on the platform at Kings Cross station, watching the approach of the platform-shaking clanking steel dinosaur as it drew alongside its ten coaches of corridored wood and leather, far exceeded the joy to be had travelling in today’s coldly impersonal though efficient electric or diesel train.

Where now are the sliding doors that one may shut off the rest of the world from your own compartment? the steel-framed photographs of yesteryear above the seats? the card/games tables? the water decanters (always filled) with their cluster of glasses on hand? It was my privilege to have known such things, gone from all but the keenest of memories.

Following Harold’s death a decade earlier, the mansion, for such it was, had fallen into disrepair, Granny Bailey, being anything but an astute business person, had allowed herself to be taken advantage of and the family fortune had been frittered away in the cause of others. Even in its dying agonies though, Raymead was magnificent. A stone and brick, three story edifice built at the turn of the century, with ornate slate roof and gables, one could have organised a family barbecue on the front porch alone! The upper floors converted now to grotty little self-contained flats, containing for the most part, grotty little tenants, the majority of which might once have inhabited 10 Rillington Place. Only the ground floor retained its tarnished grandeur. Much like the British Empire itself, its best was behind it now.

Entering the cavernous hallway, a visitor would be struck immediately by the prolific woodwork, not unlike some gothic cathedral in solidarity. The high ceilings and oversize doors bespoke a period long gone. The first set of double-doors on the left, opened into the smoking room, fully forty feet long and twenty wide. Two full-size billiard tables in parallel were dwarfed by the intricate archwork, wood panelling and the enormous bay windows hung with faded velvet curtains. Cigar smoke from another generation hung about the room and implored the casual observer to be seated in one of the high-backed leather chairs, close their eyes and let the multitude of stories floating in that room be whispered aloud.

Glass display cases, such as you would see in a national museum, stood equi-distant along opposite walls. Diverse war mementos, rare silverware, medallions, marine treasures, personal items and souvenirs from multiple lifetimes sat proudly in their respective cases desperately trying to draw attention to themselves and willing the newcomer to at least glance their way before leaving again. The room’s centerpiece however was the hearth and open fireplace, midway between the billiard tables on the far wall. Large enough to step inside, Arthur, Lancelot...in fact the entire members of the Round Table would have been right at home there, carving up some roast venison before battle. These days however, the great hearth was partially boarded up in an effort to conserve heat when the winter chill began seeping down the chimneys in November. Temporary beds set up around the billiard tables provided weekend accommodation for mum dad and myself when we were to visit, which in my memory was far too infrequent. Further along the hallway was a series of rooms, Granny’s parlour being nothing less than awesome with an enormous dome mid-center of the ceiling.

Well into her late sixties now, Granny was everything a Grandmother should be. A fine lady in every sense of the word, she was generous, cuddly and selfless in all respects. Having children around her she glowed, holding their little hands, showing them the hidden cookie-jar, reading to them and none ever left at least five shillings better off than when they arrived. Even later when well into her seventies, and far from well, she would be down on the floor studying a doll or train or some other special toy belonging to one of the eleven grandchildren. Both Granny and her lodgings smelt of bakery treats, roast dinners, happy days long gone, safety, sincerity and welcomeness. She had no favourites, loving all equally. No-one was judged, hurt or embarrassed. By the same token, no family member ever treated her with anything but utter respect.

More often than not Granny would be seated reading, in the huge glass conservatory that opened on to the garden - “grounds” might be a better word! “Brookside” in its entirety would have fitted snugly into one far corner! Dominated by a colossal Cedar of Lebanon that stood mid-center of the grounds which but for the low branches, one could have erected a marquee beneath, the garden in no way reflected the disintegrating condition of the host building. Lawns remained clipped and edged, flowers in expertly designed and manicured beds flourished and gave the impression of a giant test-pattern one might see on a television screen. Park-like lawns shimmered with an emerald hue, some set aside for croquet which visitors, the children in particular would take great delight in attempting. What child could resist trying to knock a wooden ball through a hoop? Well over an acre in size, a hedged off crazy-paving pathway wound its way around the high-walled perimeter of the grounds, and it was here that the real wonder was to be found. Set sometimes within their own little tableaux, occasionally recessed within the hedgerow itself, and further along, elevated in a tree-walk, dwelt the main characters from Alice in Wonderland, hand built in plaster. They had been the creation of dad’s brother, Uncle Bill, arguably the most talented of the clan, a poet, mechanic, artist, writer, builder and raconteur extraordinaire, with degrees in mechanical engineering and architecture. He spent the majority of his life living in a broken-down bus on the south coast of England, dying probably alone, unknown and unfulfilled in the mid seventies. As it was though, Alice herself, the Cheshire Cat, the Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter and the whole assembly brought to life in full colour and movement, cavorted along that walkway when I was a child. Caterpillars, mushrooms, gnomes and all manner of creatures waylaid the visitor at strategically placed gaps in the pathway and from each of which views of the great garden were presented. Two thirds along, the path rose up to tree level and wending its way through higher and higher branches, came eventually to a multi-roomed wooden teahouse built within the trees itself, huge boughs rearing up through the floors and through the ceilings and around which seats had been built. Here, one might rest and contemplate the beauty of the place with light refreshment, before continuing on, the suspended walkway descending finally to ground level once more. At night, the entire “theatre” could be floodlit.

Christmases were invented for Raymead. Few families ever gathered in such splendour, a condition unaffected by worn carpets, dusty crevices and sagging downpipes, besides, what children would ever notice these things? The tree was huge, the blinking lights reflecting their yuletide message off the long strands of tinsel that enveloped its girth. More importantly, it was always stacked with presents beneath it. All the better, since the family assemblage was always set down for Boxing Day which meant for the eager children, this was their second bite of the cherry.

Year 3 was memorable mostly for the hot day in June ‘53 (2nd) when the entire school was shepherded up to Buckingham Palace in a fleet of buses to stand behind barricades and wave to Queen Elizabeth after her coronation. Seasons came and went. Summer would invariably see everyone making a regular trek to the Swimming Pool, bike riding and many leisurely hours spent in Danson Park. Winter saw the onset of freezing weather, darkness falling before 4 o’clock each afternoon and regular fog-banks that limited vision to a matter of feet.

Walking up the road to Welling shops was a slow process. In the densest of these fogs, it became a case literally of feeling your way along the sidewalk. Fun for children, but deadly for many older residents. The “smogs” as they came to be known - fog mixed with smoke from industrial chimneys, were responsible for many deaths amongst the elderly.

Aside from Christmas, the high point of each Winter was Guy Fawkes Night: “Remember Remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.” What English child of the 50’s could forget those words? Most shops would begin stocking fireworks in October and to watch your little pile of crackers, Roman candles, Mount Etnas, catherine wheels, aeroplanes, rockets and sparklers, grow, was the next best thing to eating. We bought most of ours from a unique little shop called “The Orange Library” in Welling High Street. Somewhat of a misnomer really since it was neither orange nor a library, but a remarkably well-stocked little stationery outlet. Eventually the great night would roll around. Always cold, foggy, often with friends over, that long wooden bench would be dragged out beneath the giant oak tree and dad would light the huge bonfire before igniting the first firework - traditionally a catherine wheel. As Mary Hopkins sang so many years later, “Those were the days my friends!”

 

Miss Attorano’s tenure had long since come to an end and we had a succession of new teachers - none of whom liked me. The feeling was mutual! Miss Gunson’s eye was beginning to turn inwards perceptibly, doubtless the result of fixing it upon me at every opportunity. I think I was winning, because she was starting to look so old. We still sang “All things Bright and Beautiful” and “Land of Hope and Glory” most mornings at Assembly but most significant of all, I still sat with Gillian.

Round about this time, I met Peter Dawson. In a grade above me, Peter and I drifted together, both being loners of sorts. From as different a pair of homes as could be imagined, we became absolute best friends, a relationship that was to last through most of our childhood. This entire book could be devoted to our many adventures as we roamed at first the forest and park, then when older, further afield. Peter didn’t so much stay over as “live over.” Homework played a very small role in my life when Peter was with me - actually, it played a very small role in my life altogether. In the next chapter we shall revisit one or two of our joint experiences but for now, let us return to the winter of 1954. It was the weekend following the marriage of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio (January 14^th). Cold enough for the most discriminating polar bear, snow having fallen steadily all night, it took a degree of will-power to get up at all. Peering through a frosted window, the back garden was a re-sculptured masterpiece. Trees bowing under the weight of their white splendour, the most remote of their twigs host now to a delicate frosting of newly formed ice-crystals. Flower beds, lawns, concrete, now a common finish, crests and valleys where snow flurries had smoothed over the differing surfaces in an attempt to bring conformity to bear. The forest beyond gave the impression of a mountain range - on loan for the day, the close knit canopy of tree tops now angling upwards as if multiple ski-ramps. All this I see now in my mind’s eye, then, as an eight year old, all I saw was - fun! Grabbing my anorak (“parka” elsewhere in the world) I was out of the back door faster than you could say “Noel, where are you going?” I believe someone did actually say that, but I was gone.

It required considerable exertion to push open the rear door in the fence, snow having drifted up against it during the night, but I was in no hurry. The main trail had long since been covered up, but I could have navigated my way blindfold and fairly bowled along, at least as fast as deep snow permits. Emerging at the rise, I headed for the ‘swings,’ actually a combination playground containing two sets of swings (junior and advanced), a large roundabout, horse, huge slippery dip, twin see-saw and a rotating monstrosity called the umbrella that could seat at a pinch sixteen children. Only the bravest of the brave rode the umbrella - it was never full.

Except for an old man who appeared to be asleep on one of the long benches where the mothers usually sat, relaying their mostly plebeian experiences of the previous week, there was no one around. I headed for my favourite. It was always a challenge grabbing hold of the rail and running around until the roundabout was well up to speed and then attempting to jump aboard where the centrifugal force was such that even if you could get on, there was no guarantee you’d be able to stay on! Many were the kids, showing off to their mothers or younger siblings who ended up airborne rather than seated, usually copping a grazed arm or leg. Had any enterprising person set up a band-aid stall, they’d have made a fortune at the weekends. After a few whirls, I realised that this was my problem, no-one to show-off to. The old man certainly wasn’t too interested in my performance, in fact he didn’t look quite right somehow. I climbed down from the roundabout and slowly approached the bench where he was propped up at one end. He was very old, and I remember wondering why there was so much snow on his shoes - they were almost covered. His face now a frosted blue, his wispy hair was stirring perceptibly, blown by the gentlest of breezes that had sprung up. He looked peaceful enough, one hand clutching a newspaper to his old coat as if he had decided to try and keep his tummy warm. Something told me the man was dead and I sat beside him for a while as tears came to my eyes- I couldn’t stop them nor did I really want to, as all manner of emotions crowded in upon me. It was my first encounter with death. A short time later, I returned home and told mum. Dad went up there straight away. When he came back, he was quiet but said to me, “He’s alright now son.” whatever that meant. Mum knew what I needed - to be left alone. She was always right!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

C H A P T E R T H R E E

WINDS OF CHANGE

 

School was getting on my nerves. Surely someone could have come up with something better than this? Perhaps surgery at birth to insert a microchip within the brain, an implant of all the stored knowledge of mankind up to that day, for instant recall as required. All that would then be necessary would be to supplement it as we write our own history, both personally and communally. As if to reinforce the many years of drudgery ahead, bulldozers, caterpillars and pile drivers moved on to the gun-site directly opposite the school gates early ‘54, to lay foundations for what was promised to be the last word in educational excellence - Bexley Grammar School. Personally I was sad to see the gun-site go, having spent many happy hours wading through the mud over the years, picking up spent shells and the odd rifle part. Even a couple of the old gun carriages themselves had been left for children to clamber over - blissfully unaware of the true horrors of war and many of the fatalities these old weapons undoubtedly must have wreaked, some might consider deservedly, upon the enemy, less than a decade earlier.

 

If then I had to partake of a secondary education, this was where I wanted to go for several reasons. Firstly, it was on the same side of the road as Brookside, probably only 329 steps - a total education just up the road! Secondly, in those days, anything but a Grammar School condemned one to a ‘secondary’ education in every sense of the word. No problem if you’d planned on being a builders’ labourer but the only possible avenue for any student wishing to pursue his or her professional career or perhaps a higher education at University. Thirdly, I knew that Gillian would be going there.

Nothing is simple however and there was a catch. A big one! The only way of gaining admission to a Grammar school back then, was from success in the ‘Eleven-Plus,’ an unpleasant exam sat by every student in the country at the conclusion of Primary school and which sifted the “brains” from the “drains.” Thus one day late July ‘55, just days away from the start of the summer holidays, I was standing near the gates, watching the men put the final touches to BGS, as it was called already. I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me.

“Don’t waste your time thinking about going there Noel, you won’t pass your Eleven-Plus. You’ll never make anything of yourself.”

It was Mrs Gunson, looking younger with the passage of every syllable. Today she would probably be up on charges of verbal assault, discrimination or psychological abuse. I just remember standing there looking up at her and thinking “What a twisted and nasty old woman - but I wonder if she’s right?” Sixty-six years later, I’m still wondering!

But hey, the day of reckoning was a year away and this was no time to dwell on such things - the summer vacation was here, seven weeks of freedom and time for self-indulgent excesses. I was out of there!

Rock’n roll was in its infancy, Chuck Berry was riding high with Maybellene, Little Richard was shaking his bon-bon with Tutti Frutti, Dean Martin was crooning all the way to the bank with Memories Are Made of This and newcomer Pat Boone had hit number two on the charts with Ain’t That a shame?

Two things happened that summer which changed our lives. We subscribed to television and the telephone was connected (Bexleyheath (BEX) 2434 as I fondly recall - all ‘timed’ calls too!) As far as the TV was concerned it was a genuine case of “Nice cabinet, shame about the screen!” A discard from a neighbour, dad had been tinkering with it for days, finally isolating the bum valve which he replaced. Even so, we had always to poke another valve with a ruler, around the back of the set before it would come on. In time, we all became expert at avoiding full-time electrocution. Set within a quite magnificent walnut frame, the smallish twelve inch screen was not exactly digital entertainment in full blown Dolby sound! True, the picture was only black and white, grainy and with a dicey vertical hold that in time induced severe eye-trauma, but it was still high-tech entertainment with a capital ‘E.’ Thousands still did not have it, preferring to stick with the old radio shows (“The Archers,” “Peter Brough & Archie Andrews,” “Journey Into Space,”) and quiz shows. This old friend sat in its appointed spot in the dining room and never once let us down for our remaining years in England. In those early days, TV audiences howled their way through I Love Lucy, Hancock’s Half Hour and cowered in fear from the BBC’s The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit - the most frightening sci-fi trilogy ever screened and inarguably decades ahead of their time. At the conclusion of the third it was estimated well over three-quarters of Britain were tuned in.

This narrative has unintentionally bypassed up until now a significant influence on my life, the holidays spent up in Yorkshire. Most years, Mum and I would retrace our steps to a small stone cottage on a farm in the “blink and you’ll miss it” micro-township of Wilsill, population less than fifty, itself six minutes from the larger and beautifully preserved center of Pateley Bridge - a village frozen in time some thirty-five minutes from Harrogate itself. Owned for generations by the Bentley family of which mum’s late mother Louise had been a member. My earliest recollections are of being greeted by Aunt Janie and Uncle Reg and whisked into the kitchen for hot bread and freshly cooked rhubarb pie. Still without electricity, sewage or any other modern convenience, this was as far away from modern England as you could get and I let myself be lulled into a world of tranquility, beauty and folklore. Uncle Reg would wake me at 5.00am. to help him round up the cows for milking. I’d mutter something about breakfast to which he’d invariably reply, “By gum lad, you get now’t t’eat wi breakfast ‘till them cows yonder be milk’d ‘n fed.”

I loved it, frequently unable to understand a word he said. Still, we got those cows milked, the fresh-laid eggs collected, fresh straw in the boxes and cow pats all over my Wellington boots. You couldn’t walk but half a dozen yards in any direction in some of the fields without stepping in them. The farm itself was not large, though it rates a mention in King William’s “Doomsday Book” of 1086 - the two-volume index drawn up that year by Royal survey covering the length and breadth of England, showing tax and revenue liabilities of landowners and feudal estates. Five or six main fields connected principally by gate or stile, the property sloped at its southern boundary down to the beautiful river Nidd, where even in summer the crystal clear water was always icy cool. A wooden ‘swing bridge’ that permitted only one abreast at a time, gave access to adjoining properties the far side of the river. Anyone with river frontage was free to issue a fishing licence and a common sight back then was to see interminably old men hunched up over their fishing gear, whiling away the hours in peaceful contemplation. As far as one could see in all directions, typical Yorkshire stone walls separated field from field, property from property, legend from legend. Nights would find us all snugged up in the tiny lounge, not twelve foot square, reading by gaslight and well fed after some freshly baked treats. An ultimately narrow stone staircase led to two upper bedrooms, host to little more than a bed and solitary cupboard, nothing else having room to fit. From the deeply recessed windows of each, a view across the farm and down to the river imparted such untainted beauty, perhaps an inkling of Utopia itself, Nature bidding its gentle goodnight with an assurance it would keep an eye on things while you slept. This was a world so far removed from bitterness, racial prejudice, politics or even crime, you could well understand the locals’ disinterest in world news, the latest fads, fashion or even strangers. So long as those stone walls sat there, there was nothing much to worry about. The 20^th century has had little impact on Pateley Bridge, probably no more so than the 21^st will! If and when Jesus returns, it won’t cause much fuss up in Wilsill.

With no car or bike, and buses running every two hours or so, invariably anywhere but where you’re headed, it is a good idea to use the transport God gave you - your size nines! How far mum and I walked in those distant days is anyone’s guess, however and I’m sure my feet will back me up here, it was a long long way! Starting straight after breakfast, we would head across field, navigating the gates and ancient stiles heading towards Middlesmoor where grazing sheep, disinterested cows and the occasional horse would be the only evidence of life. We would refresh ourselves at various natural springs, mum, having spent the greater part of her childhood there, knew of course where they were located. The things we saw! “Two-Stoops” - a Norman ‘folly’ - an unfinished building project, commenced to give the unemployed of the time something to do, of which now only two sides of an archway remain, visible atop the moor from the farm and indeed twenty or thirty miles from multiple directions. “Brimham Rocks” a unique collection of natural outcropping rock formations, wind-eroded over countless centuries into fantastic shapes - ‘The Boat Rocking Stone,’ ‘The Cradle’ and ‘The Dancing Bear’ who will still be waltzing long after humanity has moved on. “Stump Cross Caverns,” an underground limestone cave wonderland. Then of course there is Fountains Abbey, the best preserved of its type in the world and nearby Bolton Abbey - haunted as it is reputed to be.

To the west we walked to Hawarth, where the Bronte family are buried in the tiny church there and where the ghost of Heathcliff walks his windswept Wuthering Heights still, the ever present heather still being caressed by the breeze. We walked and walked, across the valleys near Ripon even to the very ends of time it seemed. Only problem was, we had to walk back! The Yorkshire moors are the most beautiful spot on earth - they can also be the most dangerous. Mists sweep down unheralded, blanketing what was just moments before a view to near infinity. Visibility is cut to just a few feet and all sense of direction is plucked from the unwary. Locals can predict such events and know when such rambling is unwise. Not only visibility is denied, the dense mists bring with them an unnatural silence and to the uninitiated, the numbing of the senses can be a frightening experience. No way of knowing what direction you are taking, where the break in the wall is and worse, what may be lurking the other side - either weighing several hundred pounds with horns or wet and several feet deep. The fog can lie at ground level for many hours and in winter with the onset of darkness so early, the moors are not the most hospitable of environments at such times. Many is the legend of tiger or wild beast up on the moors. Again, the locals will not be drawn into such argument, you either heed the warnings or you laugh at superstition - it’s your throat! Once, many years later when walking with what was actually my first girlfriend (second, if you count Gillian) we found ourselves trapped in just such a situation and at the precise moment the silence was broken by an uncomfortably close splashing sound at the nearside of the field we were crouched in, followed by a loud ‘roar’ for lack of a better word, that surely emanated from no local animal I was familiar with. Something large passed us by in the mist at close quarters and we were off, over the wall uncaring as to what might have been the other side - it would have had to be better!

Thus the second week of those summer holidays we all (dad came with us this time) boarded the Pullman steam train at Kings Cross station for the long haul to Harrogate, after which we caught the local bus to Wilsill. From memory, it was raining - a not uncommon occurrence during an English summer. We stayed for a week. It was not enough, it was never enough!

 

As I intimated in the last chapter, most of my waking time outside school and holidays away, was spent with my best friend Peter. Sharing a common yearning for adventure, the forests and the park provided the perfect counter for our rampant imaginations. When reality would sometimes bring an unwelcome halt to current proceedings, we were able to cross-over to a world of fantasy and keep the dream alive, whatever it may have been. The tree-houses we constructed way up high in the branches of the sycamore tree at the extreme north eastern point of the garden, and which we stocked with “essentials,” tins of food, lollies and even a few pennies, to survive with, when the great flood came - we were sure it was just a matter of weeks. The “time machine” we constructed from some packing crates, fence wire, bicycle parts and bits off an old car dashboard, was in my memory at least the equal of anything Steven Spielberg could come up with. Sitting in it, with levers and dials you’d be wasting your time now telling us we didn’t go anywhere. We saw dinosaurs, visited ancient Egypt, the Great Circus in Rome and witnessed the Great Fire of London. We even watched them raising the great uprights at Stonehenge and all through the safety of the wire mesh.

That summer of ‘55 however, we really thought we had stumbled across the real mccoy. Mum had sent me up the road on an errand and I had taken Peter with me. Some quarter of a mile or so up the road, workman had been laying a new pavement and had roped off an area of sidewalk to be upgraded next. Thus, boys being the halfwits they tend to be, we cleared the rope with a flying leap and hop-scotched the next half a dozen squares. Peter, slightly ahead of me, appeared to slip and he went sprawling. On closer inspection it could be seen that the square he landed on was unbalanced and had tipped slightly when he struck it with his feet. Although most of the paving squares had been loosened by the workmen ready to be replaced in the next day or so, this one was so loose we were easily able to drag it to one side - halfwits remember? The vaguest of shiny edges glinted in the sun and bending down we flicked away some muddy soil and retrieved what looked like a very old coin. Smaller than a penny, Its edges were corroded away and only a vague imprint of a head was visible on one side. Hoping to find more, we scrabbled away at the surface until we had unearthed to almost a foot deep. I couldn’t see much use in wasting further time, besides we had nothing to dig with and already both of us looked like we’d been given coloured-hand transplants.

“Just a bit further,” Peter said, and turned back to our handiwork.

I let him amuse himself for a few minutes and was somewhat surprised to hear him call out, “Hey Noel look - there’s something here!...it’s metal I think.”

I knelt down and looked closer. A flattish edge could just be made out beneath the dirt and tapping it, it was obviously metal of some sort. Gradually we loosened the clay and dirt around the object, and some ten minutes later were able to pull the thing free. For our trouble, we were now the proud owners of what appeared to be an old and very heavy metal box, about eight inches square.

We filled in the hole and replaced the paving stone. Where at one time there looked to have been a lock of some sort, the metal had all but rusted away, but in doing so had also rusted together! Thus, completing mum’s errand, we returned home and took the box in to the garage. With a screwdriver, it took but a few moments to prise the lid open. Hoping (and half expecting) to find more coins, perhaps wrapped up - after all the box was quite sturdy and may well have contained treasure of sorts. All we could see however, was a folded piece of parchment, greatly yellowed and obviously very old. Unfolding it, we could see a vague outline of something hand-drawn, a map of sorts. Symbols for trees were fairly recognisable as were three distinct crosses. Such wording as could just be seen was indecipherable and didn’t appear to be in English. Two or three arrows might have indicated the points of the compass but nothing more.

I suggested to Peter that we take the box and the coin to the Park Warden and Gatekeeper, who was something of a historical expert . He was also custodian of the museum at the mansion and also happened from memory, to be the father of one of the boys in my class, Martin Eul. We then headed into the park and climbed the rise to the Mansion House where we found Mr Eul in the rear grounds. He looked first at the coin and told us it was some coinage from the sixteenth century - he asked where we found it. The box appeared to greatly interest him. He turned it over inspecting every feature before declaring it to be of about the same vintage.

He then took us inside the Mansion, upstairs to rooms where items from hundreds of years past, sat on shelves, in glass cases, hanging on walls even crammed into desk drawers. Books, coins, weapons, trinkets, silverware littered the place. The dust had shown no preferences. Any antique dealer would probably have passed-out with excitement just walking in there.

After studying the parchment for a good two minutes, Mr Eul handed it back to us and sat back.

“Do you two not recognise this?” he asked, fully aware obviously of something we weren’t. We looked again, no seed of understanding coming to us.

“It’s the park lads, or at least the area where the park is now! When this was drawn it would have been open fields for miles, probably right the way to Blackheath.”

He took the map and laid it out on his desk.

“Here,” he said, pointing with his fingers, “These symbols - you knew they were trees didn’t you?” we nodded. “They represent the forest right behind Noel’s house, It were much bigger in those days, but that’s it alright. See here?” he pointed to a wavy line, “there’s the stream that runs across the park into the Lake. ’Course there were no lake there either hundreds of years ago....and this,” he went on, “That there, be some building where the Mansion stands now, most likely some great Feudal estate, there were several round these parts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”

I looked at Peter as if to say, “Told you he was pretty knowledgeable!” He hadn’t finished.

“You see that arrow here with the writing underneath it?” we peered at where he was pointing, “That’s the old way of writing “Dover” - it’s showing the direction the road ran then, same as it does now, the old Roman A2. That’s it running along behind the swimming pool up yonder.” He waved a hand, indicating the far side of the Lake.

“Now where exactly did you find this box lads?” he asked in earnest. I told him again and he thought for a moment, studying the map. He looked up. “Yes, well there you are then....If this here is the forest,” he pointed to the shaded area with the symbols, “this spot here would be Noel’s house, well approximate like, and this cross is more or less where you say you found it ...way up the far end of Danson Lane?”

He was right! Allowing for distance, rather than any recognisable feature, it was pretty much exactly where we dug it out. This was coming along nicely, an adventure the ‘Secret Seven’ would have liked to unravel! We asked him about the old stories of buried treasure in the park that had been going around for years He smiled, “Aye lads, heard that story myself. Fact is, some fifty or sixty years ago, a group of historian folk did actually come to Welling and spent weeks so it’s said, researching these stories. Actually came to the park as well, but nothing came of it. ‘Course they didn’t have this box, but there again, what does the map mean? Could be anything, couldn’t it?”

I looked hard at the other two crosses. “Where would you say these were?” I asked. Mr Eul frowned.

“Well, the lower one looks to be pretty much center of where the Lake is now. Even if there was anything there still, it’d be under twelve to fifteen foot of water. I think we can forget that one lads. The other? it’s hard to say. It could be somewhere close to that old storehouse, way over the western border where they used to keep the old boats. Hasn’t been used for years now. Problem is, there’s acres of grass there now. Where would you start? even assuming you could get permission to dig up the fields which you can’t. Sorry boys but looks like this is as far as you’re going. I’ll pass this on to the local historical society, if you leave it with me for a while, but that’s all I can do.”

I looked at Peter, he shrugged and we departed the Mansion, leaving the map with Mr Eul. On the way home we took the western route and walked the half-mile or so to the old boat house. Mr Eul was right, nothing but flat grass for as far as the eye could see and even if by chance the building covered the marked spot, there was no way in. Peter still has the coin I imagine, it was his discovery and was therefore rightly his. So, the adventure ended and the ‘buried treasure?’...well, just a tale still, passed down through generations of local children. Maybe one day, they’ll drain the Lake! We never did see the map again. Mr Eul died I believe, from a recurring heart condition and vagrants are alleged to have been responsible for a fire which destroyed the boathouse not long after. The collapsed rubble was an eyesore for months.

The remainder of the holidays saw to it that not a day, nary an hour was wasted in anything but enjoying to the full the temporary freedom afforded us by the seven week sojourn from the clutches of D. H. Gunson and Co. A film buff from way back, probably since sitting in awe of my first movie. Mickey Mouse in the late forties. 1955 saw many movies destined to be classics of their genre, come to the local Odeon and Granada cinemas. Among them, The Ladykillers, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, and Mister Roberts. Even Clint Eastwood got his first break with a bit part in The Creature Walks Among Us. July 18^th of that year saw the opening of Walt Disney’s $17 million dollar “Disneyland,” the ultimate fantasy theme park for children the world over.

Time has no respect for high living however and despite our prayers, that third week of September rolled around right on clockwork. New blazer, new badge, new shoes, new tie. Same teachers!

“I would like to welcome you newcomers to Year six, a special year as you all know (Mrs Gunson had so far managed to avoid eye-contact with me). We must work and study very hard the next three terms, as we head towards our Eleven-Plus in July.” Did I detect a wicked sneer in my direction at this juncture? Why do teachers always use the terms “we” and “our” at such times? Are they going through hell the next twelve months perched on spine-challenging wooden chairs, writing essays, singing daft songs like “Who is Sylvia?” simply to end up twelve months later losing their breakfast as those exam papers are placed face down on the desk. So small yet so deadly!

Mrs Gunson was continuing her “message to the people” speech.

“And I say to each and every one of you, what you do this year and the results you obtain next, may well shape your entire future. I can remember when I was a child...(“Oh God,” we thought, “we’re all going to be here till recess”)...my father was a very strict man (from the looks of her now, I’d say he tied her to the table and branded her with a hot poker if she got her sums wrong!)...he made me understand that study comes first - fun later.” All the pointers were that she must still have been waiting to get to that one.

Eventually she ran down, and we were able to return to classes. In all honesty, I don’t think I knew a single thing more at that point, than I had the day I started school. Whether that was an indictment of the education system or my own disinclination to pay attention, I couldn’t say. Even during her speech, I was far more interested in Gillian’s attentive little face with its high cheekbones, neatly turned cuffs and let’s be honest, her physical attractiveness, than Ms Gunson’s pre-programmed monologue. You study what you like I always say.

 

Conkers! Now what sort of a time-tripping revelation would this be without reference to that most British of playground traditions? Late September, early October each year the Chestnut tree bore its wondrous fruit across the land. All we cared about though is where it bore its fruit, specifically in the park! It so happened that to the immediate rear of the Mansion, a corridor of chestnuts fronted the road to the south-eastern gate, and here could be found each year, groups of young boys, armed with heavy sticks, hoping to dislodge the best of the best from the higher branches. Most of them were wasting their time poor buggers, Peter and I having taken first option a few nights previously after the park’s closing time. Yep, that rear gate sure did come in useful.

Encased in its pure green spiked seed-case, inside would nestle a fresh chestnut, looking as snug as an astronaut in a space capsule. Mind you it was still to be many years before even they existed! The “professional” conker exponent would naturally select the freshest, and largest, having regard also to the shape. Wide and thin you didn’t need, well-rounded and having some weight - those you kept. Having maybe a dozen specimens the average player would kill for, the next step was to very lightly bake the chestnuts, drill a hole through the center, pull a piece of string through about eight to ten inches long and hold the chestnut in place with a knot. Then a coating of linseed oil and let it dry, the more coats the better. Armed and ready you then swaggered to school with that “Guess what I’ve got in my pocket?” look. At recess one boy would challenge another - one alternate strike each, one chestnut ‘conked’ against the other. By lunch you could have a ‘twoser’ or even a ‘sixer’, depending on the number of (witnessed) victories. A few of the ‘super-bakes’ hit ‘twentier’ status. It was always sad to see a tournament-winning conker finally brought down (probably having sustained so many cracks and fractures in battle) by a fresher conker of half its potential, wielded by a novice, neither of whom would ever make the big time.

September bade farewell to 1955 when, with only hours to go on the 30^th, James Dean wrote both himself and his Porsche Spider into history, on his way to a car rally in Los Angeles. He was just 24.

 

In hindsight, Year 6 was like any other year. Emerging from a cold winter, the prospect of a return to cricket, baseball and all that good stuff, was of greater prominence than worrying about the ‘big one’ just around the corner. That ‘corner’ came around mighty fast though and the fact is, I don’t remember the slightest thing about it. There was a general consensus that it had been ‘one of the most difficult’ ever, a belief given some credence by the fact that only four people at the school passed, as opposed to the yearly average of twenty five to thirty, some ninety odd sitting for it. The trend was evidenced in Primary Schools across the country as it turned out, incurring the wrath of many parents and eventually finding its way into the Press who conducted a soon-to-be-forgotten “what happened?” expose. Unfortunately for Mrs Gunson - I was one of the four! Doubtless she heaved her Tarot card collection and dumped her astrologer. Probably also did herself some serious dental damage, gnashing her teeth in fury when she read the names of the successful candidates. The only outward sign of her troubled soul was at Assembly the day after the results were published. She congratulated the other three (of which Gillian was one), never once mentioning me and afterwards staring my way, daring me to speak. We never exchanged a solitary word again and our paths never re-crossed.

That was a preview of Cool Among the Flames. To read the rest purchase the book.

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