My Memoirs
By L.R.Clay
When I reached the age of 70, I realised I had seen many changes in my life. In the past 50 years science and technology have made such rapid strides that today it is like living in a different world. In my young days I was not interested in history, and when my father or grandmother talked of the past, I did not really listen. When I got older I regretted not having
taken more notice. If my gran could have written the basic facts of her life, it would make interesting reading today. So I wondered if things that had taken place in my life would be of interest to my children and grandchildren, as they grow older. I therefore decided to jot down things that had occurred in my life as I remember them, together with a bit of family history.
I was born to Sydney Robert Clay and Lucy Violet Clay (nee Mawer) on the 6th February, 1928 at North Street, Stamford, in a row of four cottages long since demolished. My sister Dorothy was 7 years older than me, and was born at West End Road, Wyberton, where Mum and Dad lived with my grandmother. My gran, Mary Elizabeth Jessup, was born at Stickney in 1859. Her parents lived in a smallholding on Hall Lane next to the Drain. A double tenement has since been built on the land. They were buried in Stickney church yard. Thomas William Jessup died in 1911, and Mary Jane died in 1925. Their grave is in the third row on the left not many yards from the gate. After they died, Gran’s brother lived in the house until he died in 1950.
My grandad’s mother was a Langley before she married, and she named one of her sons Langley; he was Dorothy’s dad at Horncastle. Grandad’s sister named one of her sons Langley; he was my mother’s cousin at Doncaster. Then my mother chose the name for me, and my sister chose the name for her son, so there have been four generations of Langleys. I dislike the name, but I have been stuck with it.
My gran spent little time at school as education was not compulsory in those days, and by the time she was 8, she spent most of her time at home helping her mother or working on the land. She spent a bit of time at school each winter but never went to school after she reached the age of 12, so when she wrote a letter it took quite a bit of deciphering.
However, she left home at 13 and went into service, working for a Doctor Day at Revesby Bank for which she was paid £5 a year. In her younger days she used to travel from Stickney to Boston on a boat called a Steam Packet. This was the main means of transport, plying the local drains. There was also the Carriers’ Cart but this was a slow job as he was always stopping to make deliveries. On market days people brought pigs, sheep and chickens on the boat with them, so it was not a very elegant way to travel. The boats used to moor up at the steps near Bargate Bridge.
As time went by, railways were laid to most of the villages, and took all the trade from the drains. Gran told me, that until the 1880’s there were no houses on Horncastle Road past the Ropers’ Arms, and no houses in Norfolk Street past North Street, which is the road between the factories. From there it was high boards on the left, surrounding a private park which covered the area surrounded by Hartley Street, Tawney Street, Thorold Street and Tunnard Street.
Cattle and sheep were always brought to market in droves, and this went on until the mid 1950’s. After Fay and I got married we used to get woken up on wednesdays by mooing and baaing as they were driven along the road, and when you went out you had to be careful where you put your feet as there were cowpats and droppings left in their wake. Boston had a big cattle market in those days stretching from Bargate End to the Post Office with cattle pens taking up the whole area, including the road running through the centre.
To get back to my grandmother, she had a son out of wedlock, Albert, who eventually married Annie and had two sons called Frank and Reg. Gran soon met and married William Mawer who worked on the railways locally. However, he then took a job at Rowsley, Derbyshire where there was a large rail depot, and he drove an engine shunting trucks into the various sidings to make up the trains. He got lodgings there, and Gran got a job in the kitchen at Chatsworth House. She often boasted of cooking for the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Then they got a house at Two Dales, Darley Dale near Matlock where my mum and Auntie Gertie were born. They spent some years there, but moved to Boston before the 1914-1918 war, taking a bakery shop in Red Lion Street. During the war she told me she saw a Zeppelin fly over, and stood outside the shop whilst it dropped a bomb in the middle of the street. Luckily it did not go off.
After the war they took a smallholding at West End Road, Wyberton where, at the age of 62 my grandad died of cancer. My mum and dad married that year, and lived with Gran and Gertie, and the next year my sister Dorothy was born. My Uncle Albert was brought up at Stickney, then worked as a plumber for Sherwins of Boston. After he married they lived in Daisy Dale where their sons were born. My mother was born in 1897, and when she left school she worked for Mr Fisher who converted a house in Sleaford Road in a business making labels. Later he merged with Mr Clark and they build a factory in Norfolk Street, Fisher Clarks which was taken over by Norprint in the 1960’s. Auntie Gertie was born in 1899 and worked for Willer & Riley, a canning factory on London Road, which produced the Lin-Can brand.
My dad was born in 1900 at 37 Church Road, Boston. I never knew much about his side of the family. Grandma Clay still lived at Church Road where all the family were born, but my grandad died before I was born. They had four children, Henry, Ernie, Sydney, and Kate, in that order, but Dad never had much to do with them. He would visit them, and took Dot and I along when in Boston, but they were not a close family like my mothers side. My Grandad worked for Tuxfords Iron Foundry at Mount Bridge. I have a number of cousins about the town, but over the years, I have lost track of them. The only one that I knew was Ernie, who lived on Wellington Road.
When Dad left school he worked for Dunmores near Bargate Bridge. At that time, they were builders of horse drawn carriages. As an apprentice it was his job to varnish as many as fourteen coats, rubbing down with pumice powder between each coat. There was no ‘wet or dry’ paper in those days. Wanting to see more of the world he ‘took the King’s shilling’ and joined up when he was sixteen. He of course ended up in France, and was not in the front line for long before they were overrun and he was taken prisoner. I have a letter from Buckingham Palace confirming this.
After the war he got a job with the Progressive Bus Company. There was another company that I can’t recall the name of, but he said that they used to compete by racing each other up the road to try to pick up passengers first. It would have been quite a bumpy ride on solid rubber tyres! In 1926 he took a job in Stamford as chauffeur/handyman for a local doctor and rented a stone-built cottage in North Street, where I was born. When I was about two years old he got a job with the Cream Bus Service owned by W.H.Patch who had about a dozen coaches. They then moved to a house in Newboults Lane off Cemetery Road, which is now called Radcliffe Road. The council estate was not built then and I remember going to fairs and circuses on those fields. The house had two bedrooms, but the kitchen/wash-house was only a corrugated lean-to. Mum would strip me off and sit me on a stone-topped copper while she gave me a wash, before putting me to bed. The copper was a brick-built fireplace about a metre square, with a cast iron bowl which held about ten gallons of water set into the top of it, with a wooden lid. It was the only way to heat large amounts of water, and also a way of getting rid of rubbish on the fire. Friday night was a real treat. The copper would be lit and Dot and I shared a tin bath in front of the living room fire. No wonder the air was thick with smoke with all those coal fires.
In 1932, Dad was promoted to Inspector, so he was not popular with the other drivers, but could now afford a better house with a better kitchen. It was only a few hundred yards away at 8 St. John’s Terrace, and with three bedrooms Dot and I had our own rooms and there was an enclosed garden at the front to play in.
My earliest memories are of being taken around the town in my pushchair, and one day, a Mrs Price who was rather posh, peered under the hood and said to my mother, “Oh what a lovely little girl!”. I remember pulling a face at her, but at that time, I did have long blonde ringlets. Then there were the two visits to the hospital in my pushchair; one where I fell off the copper top and cut my chin whilst being washed, and another where I fell down some steps and cut the back of my head, and this time I screamed all the way there because I knew that this time, I was going to have stitches!
Speaking of stitching, I remember one day Dad took Mum shopping and treated her to the latest in sewing machines, which I still own. It was fully enclosed in a cabinet and cost over £5, which would have been over two week’s pay at that time.
Dad had a motorbike when he first went to Stamford, but after he was promoted to Inspector he bought a Singer car. It was a two-seater with a fold-back hood, but it had a boot lid which when lifted revealed a ‘dickey’ seat, as it was then called. Dad took us for rides in the country and picnics on his days off. They were shielded from the wind in the front, but Dot and I got a good blast sitting in the dickey as we bowled along at 25 m.p.h. flat out. Petrol was 1s to 1/2d (one shilling to one shilling and ‘tuppence’) per gallon. It could be bought in 2 gallon cans, or you filled up at a garage, where a mechanic would have to down tools to attend the pump which was operated by winding the handle. This brought a cogged rod out of the top of the pump, and it took about five turns in each direction to deliver a gallon.
In his spare time, Dad made Crystal Sets. These were radios without batteries, but which needed an aerial as high and as long as possible, and a copper tube about 3 feet down in the ground for an earth. In dry weather water had to be poured down the tube. The set consisted of thin copper wire wound closely around a cardboard tube about two inches in diameter and ten inches long. A brass slider traversed the tube to select the wavelength and the station was finely tuned with a ‘cat whisker’. This was a thin wire on the end of a lever through a ball joint enclosed in a glass tube. The ‘cat whisker’ touched the crystal in the end of the tube, and with patient manipulation a station was tuned. Dad sold these for ten shillings each to make a bit of pocket money. You had to listen to them with headphones, and I remember once there was a broadcast from America of a fight between Tommy Farr and Joe Louis. The headphones were in an enamel bowl on the table to amplify the sound. Dad was so excited that he got us up in the early hours and we all sat with our heads over the bowl listening to the fight. This was like a miracle to be able to hear America on the short waveband!
When I was about five, Mum started getting a lot of pain in her back and had to go into hospital, so Dot and I were brought to Boston to live with Gran and Auntie Gertie for a while. They had moved from Wyberton around 1931 as they could not make the smallholding pay, and were now living on Horncastle Road. Dad was now running an Austin Seven with side screens, so we were shaded from the wind but it was still very draughty. Once we were settled in, Gran started us at the St. Mary’s Catholic School which was just along the road. The teachers were all Nuns dressed in long black robes with hoods and I was taken to my class in the morning. I was running about playing games at playtime when someone blew a whistle and everyone stood still, and I carried on running about, then a Nun took me by the collar and led me down a passage in the school to a door where the Mother Superior appeared, she held my hands out and whacked them with a cane and I was taken back to class crying. When I was let out at dinnertime, I ran home to Gran and showed her bloodweals on my hands. She took me straight back to school and gave the Mother Superior a fierce verbal lashing, so my first day at that school was my last. We had about a month in Boston, then Dad fetched us home, and Dot went to the Fane school and I went to St Johns where I stayed for about two years.
At first Mum was doing jobs around the house, but then as her health deteriorated she spent a lot of time in her chair, but then she could not manage the stairs, and the bed had to come downstairs. Dad did a bit of driving and sometimes took me on the bus with him to give Mum a rest. One winter evening he stopped the bus at Corby and we watched as a furnace was tapped and white hot iron ran into gullies in the sand, like a river with tributaries, men were blocking these off with sand as they filled. Another time he took me in the car to Wittering aerodrome, where Gloucester Gladiator biplanes were taking off and landing. One came in low over the road near us and caught the top wing of one parked near the hedge, and they both ended upside down, but the pilot crawled out safely.
When I was about 7, Dad bought a wind up gramophone. All the records were 78 r.p.m and the price labels on them were 1/3d to 1/6d for 10 inch and 2/- to 2/6 for 12 inch and Mum used to get me to play them for her. Then we had a 4 valve radio which had a 90 volt battery, a 9 volt grid bias battery, and an accumulator which was a 2 volt glass square box with terminals like a single cell car battery. The batteries fitted into the radio but the accumulator always stood in a separate dish in case it leaked acid, and you needed 2 of these as one was always at the shop on charge. The accumulator man always called on Friday. Of course we did not have mains electricity, all the lighting was gas. Even the streets were lit with gas lamps, and the lamplighter came around every evening with a long pole with a hook and a light on the top to light the lamps and again in the morning to extinguish them. In the 1930s electricity power stations were built throughout the country and pylons straddled the countryside carrying it to the towns. Boston Electricity Supply Company was set up and bought it from the national grid and one of their first customers was the council, who in 1937 had tall lamp standards erected in the market place with fluorescent type lamps, and everyone seems to have white faces after the old yellow gas lamps.
Dot finished school at 14, and Dad kept her at home to help Mum who was spending most of her time in bed. I did not realise how ill she was, but learned later she had cancer of the spine for which there was no cure. The doctor would come round regularly and give her an injection to ease the pain, and gradually she became paralysed from the waist. I used to play cards with her on the bedside table until her sight went, then she would get me to read to her and helped me with my sums and spelling etc. The auntie Gertie came to stay for a few days., I was 7 1/2 years then, and after much discussion it was decided that I should return to Boston with her.
I went to Park Board School, so named when it was built because of the boards that were round the park. I had a few months in the infants, but when I got the junior school my education really began. The emphasis was on the three Rs, I liked that and also Geography but found history and R.E. boring. Once a week we walked down to the Nelson Fields for Sports, mostly football, which was off Liquorpond Street, which in those days was a back street, which ran off High Street where the bridge is now. The Lord Nelson Pub was on the corner and fields were behind it and covering the area of where the roundabout is now, and the industrial estate beyond.
I made friends with Brian Blakey who lived in Grand Sluice Lane. He was two and a half years my junior, but I envied him because he had so many toys. They included a Hornby ‘O’ gauge train set, Dinky toys, cars and aeroplanes, plus a large tricycle which I used to ride in the lane. There were about a dozen of us who played games in the lane. We would rush through our meals so that we could get back out to play with the gang. In those days you always had to belong to a gang. Girls and boys together played ball games, Whip & Top, Hula hoops, and we had a skipping rope the width of the lane, with up to six at a time skipping. If boys were caught playing hopscotch they were called sissies. We were always getting into trouble with the neighbours, but I suppose we did make a hell of a noise.
At the bottom of the lane was O’ Hara’s Field. Mike O’ Hara was Brian’s grandad, and he kept chickens in the field, but it didn’t stop us playing in it. There was a big rusty lorry with no body on it, and one day I fell off and landed in about four feet of nettles. Wearing short trousers meant I got covered in stings.
Dad paid visits from time to time, and sometimes took me back to Stamford for a week. He now had an Austin 7 saloon which was a real luxury, and sometimes he met me from school to the envy of my mates, as none of their families had a car.
Mum was very weak and could not move herself in bed, and when she spoke you could hardly hear her. Dot did the cooking and ran the house, but was more interested in boys, so as soon as Dad came home she was away! I sometimes followed her and then the boyfriend would have to buy me sweets to get rid of me.
In November 1936, Mum died and Dad came over to break the news. There were no telephones then, except for businesses or the wealthy. In those days you sent telegrams, and all Post Offices employed telegram boys. (If you wanted a job at the Post Office you started as a telegram boy when you left school at 14). So, the day before the funeral, Gran, Gertie and I went to Stamford on the train. I remember looking at Mum in her coffin in the front room and could not believe she was dead. I said, “Perhaps she’ll wake up soon”, and that is the only time I saw my father cry. But next day at the funeral, when I saw her lowered her into the ground and earth put on top, I shed tears and Auntie cuddled me as I realised now it was the end.
After that Dad took Dot and I to Auntie Nan’s who lived in Finchley, North London (a cousin of Mother’s), so we had a week of sight seeing , all the usual places of interest, and we were going to Crystal Palace, but the night before, it caught fire and burnt down. We heard it on the radio, so went outside to watch. It was about 2 miles away, but still a huge blaze in the sky. It was a huge complex built mostly of glass in 1851 for the Great Exhibition, but that was the end of it. In 1951 there was the Festival of Britain to mark the century, it was an exhibition built on the north bank of the Thames on land which had been flattened by bombing in the war, and on the south bank was a huge funfair. Special trains were laid on from all over the country and many millions visited it. Fay and I went, and out of all the people there we met Uncle Albert who had gone on a coach trip.
In the summer of 1937, Dad had a week’s holiday and took a workmate with him. They toured Devon and Cornwall in the Austin 7, and Dad was quite chuffed that it had climbed Porlock Hill, - I think it is a 1 in 4 gradient, and a long way to go in that car. There is a brochure I have that he bought then.
After Mum died it seemed I was to live with gran permanently. She took in lodgers, and during the summer, hundreds of Sheffielders came to Boston to fish the drains. They worked in steel works or mines, and loved the fresh air of our fens. Sometimes there would be up to a dozen coaches parked between Hospital Bridge and Cowbridge. But gran had her regulars, there was Mr Wood, a Cutler from Sheffield who had a stall on the market every Wednesday. Often he and his mate would stay overnight and go fishing on Thursday, but if there were already two staying, Gran and Gertie would make a bed up on the floor in the front room. In those days no-one frowned upon two men sharing a double bed, and I had the back bedroom to myself.
There was a Yorkshire range in the kitchen and one in the living room, and Gran had them going all day. She really enjoyed cooking and at dinner there were a choice of meats, loads of vegetables and 2 or 3 puddings, then in the afternoons, she’d bake bread and cakes. To me there seemed to be an endless stream of mostly strangers, sleeping and being fed, and fishing baskets all over the back yard.
Auntie Gertie worked at the canning factory on London Road. She biked home for dinner, then I would enjoy her company for half an hour. She was always a kid at heart and we had plenty of fun and games when she had a few moments to spare. Schools always closed for dinner, so all the kids went home from 12.00 to 1.30pm, but did not leave till 4.00pm. Although Gran ran the house I looked to Gertie as a mother, as she was the one who took me shopping, bought my clothes, washed me, and put me to bed.
Homework for Tag-Craft was slave labour, you either strung labels or pierces, Gertie preferred pierces, and those were metal, pointed at one end with a hole in the middle. The string was threaded through the hole, the ends brought together and knotted, then tied into bundles of 250, then 4 bundles tied together - 1000, for which you were paid 4 1/2 pence. They were used for fastening labels onto sacks. When I got older I sometimes took the work back to the Factory in Norfolk Street, where there was a loading bay, and one on the left a hatch with a sliding door upon which I would knock. Eventually the door would open and I slid the boxes through, then I had to wait whilst the man sorted out the pay packet for last week. The amount was on the front, - on a low week it would only be 3/9d. but on a good week as much as 5/3d. (about 26 pence) then he would pass the boxes through with next weeks work in them. This was a Friday job after school, and was the result of Gran and Auntie sitting tagging all week. Any visitors would be given a tray with string and pierces while they sat chatting, but they did not object.
When these houses were built, there was no mains water laid on, but they had water toilets built in readiness. The only water was in cisterns in the yards which stored water from the rooves. Water for drinking or cooking had to go through charcoal filters to clean it, and drinking water had to be boiled. My grandma’s brother, George Jessup was responsible for bringing the first water to Boston. He was paid one pound per chain (22 yards) to lay a pipe from Revesby reservoir to the town, and had a gang of eight men and had to pay them out of that. This was in the 1890’s and his son, George who also worked for Boston Waterworks as it was called often related this story. When water was laid on to the houses, there was a tap in the yard in between two houses but some terraced houses had only one tap for four houses. It was about 1936 before Gran had a tap and sink in the house, and I was always getting into trouble for playing with water, and getting my clothes wet.
One lodger who came to stay, John Deans became a permanent dweller and I had to sleep on a camp bed in the front room for a while as he took over the back bedroom. But then Gran stopped taking in visitors because Uncle Albert left his wife and family in Daisy Dale and came to stay, so I then shared a three-quarter bed with him in the middle bedroom.
John worked for Artindales Nurseries. They owned land on both sides of Robin Hoods Walk, which at that time ran straight to the cemetery, and across to Sherwood Avenue which had just been built. It was all open land. Where the Secondary School is were fields of vegetables and on the other side of the road were the nurseries, producing acres of roses and shrubs. John came home at 12pm on Saturdays. He then opened his wage packet and paid Gran his board. He would then give me half a crown (12½ pence) to fetch his smoking requisites from Van Toen’s newsagents to the right of the King William pub on Horncastle Road. He had three ounces of ‘Afrikander Flake’, ten ‘Player’s’ cigarettes, a three-penny razor blade and a box of ‘Swan Vestas’ matches. He always gave me the 2½ pence change so my next call would be O’Hara’s sweet shop next to the chapel in Norfolk Street, where I would spend ages looking in the window deciding which five kinds of sweets I could buy for a halfpenny a time. Sometimes I cleaned Auntie’s bike, and if I made a good job of it, she gave me 3d. In the evenings if I had money, I could go to Wilson’s Fish Shop, which is now a private house between the Catholic Chapel and the King William pub. There I could buy a piece of fish for 1d, a bag of chips for 1d, or two large scallops also for a penny, but when I came out of the shop, my mates would always scrounge some from me. In old pence of course there were 240 to the pound.
When these houses were built, the Gas Works was well established, so gas was laid on. Gran did not have a cooker to start with, preferring to cook in the side ovens, but there was gas lighting in the living room, front room and wall brackets in the kitchen and bedrooms, but we never used the lamps upstairs, I suppose candles were cheaper.
In Winter you went to bed with a candlestick in one hand and a hot water bottle in the other. These were earthenware with a screw stopper, but I usually ended up with the cast iron oven shelf wrapped in newspaper. But for the visitors there was the copper warming pan with a lid and a long handle, which hung on the end wall in the kitchen. Gran used to shovel hot ashes from under the fire into this, then it was slid under the covers and moved up and down to warm their bed before they retired.
Bedrooms were like freezers in wintertime, the wind blew through the loft under the slates. There was no loft insulation, and the sash windows were very draughty. They were never free of condensation which froze into pretty patterns on the glass.
B.E.S. Co. was Boston Electricity Supply Company, and in 1938 they canvassed the area to sell electricity, they charged 2/6d per light and 3/- per socket, so Gertie ordered six lights and one socket, so the house was wired for 18/- and that included cable from the road to the meter. Gran was very much against it, saying it was dangerous and the shock could kill us, lots of older people were frightened of it, but Gertie insisted and got her own way in the end.
There was a lot of headlice in the schools, and the “Nitnurse” paid regular visits, so if I started scratching Gran would sit me down between her skirts and comb my hair with a fine-toothed comb and crack the nits between her thumb nails. Then once a year a doctor and a nurse came to the school, and everyone had a full medical examination. He also checked our teeth and if necessary, we would be sent to London Road Clinic to see the dentist. My teeth were crooked and Gran took me, where I had 8 teeth out in one go. I was scared stiff of dentists after that. The Clinic was at the old London Road Hospital, which was then a Sanatorium treating people for Tuberculosis. This was a lung disease, which was a killer, and remained so until the 1950s, when the discovery of streptomycin wiped it out. The TB ward had a covered veranda, and the beds were pushed outside from morning to night as they said that fresh air was the best treatment. People who could afford it went to clinics in the Alps for that reason, but very few found a cure.
When I lived in Stamford, Dot used to take me to the “Pictures” on Saturday afternoon to the kids matinee, we called it the twopenny rush at Dodmans. This was the Corn Exchange during the week and the seats were wooden benches, but in 1937 the Central Cinema was built. It was a modern building with a curved front and covered with large cream tiles. It seemed like a palace after Doddys, with carpeted floors and plush velvet seats priced 1/-, 1/9, and 2/3..
At Boston there was the Scala Picture House, which had fix fold down seats, and the Saturday matinee was 3d. There was a balcony, but only the ground floor was used for the kids. The films then were all black and white, and always looked as though it was raining because they were so scratched. Gran said we were lucky as in her day, a magic lantern show would have been a treat.
There was also the New Theatre, which had live shows and films. It was pulled down and replaced with Marks and Spencers. Uncle Albert took Barbara to the last show there, which was the Billy Cotton Band Show in 1958. The Regal cinema in Boston was built in 1937, followed by the Odeon the next year. It was quite posh and they had a Mickey Mouse club for kids on Saturday mornings, which cost 6d. You got a talk on things like road safety, a sing song, and a couple of films, for example, Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin, or the Three Stooges. This would be followed by a western and a cartoon. For the main film, the doors opened at 1.30pm, and then it was a continuous performance until 22.30. You could watch a film round a couple of times if you wished, and in the intervals, girls came round selling ice-cream, which was a novelty.
Until 1937, there was a row of cottages on the left of North Street, which runs from Norfolk Street, between the factory buildings. These were known as the Irish houses, as they were occupied by Irish labourers who worked in the canning factories, and on the land. However, Fisher Clarks bought the land to extend their factory, so these houses were pulled down. One day, Brian and his cousin Gordon and I were searching through the rubble when we found a length of lead pipe. Thinking it could be worth a bit, we tried to break it off where it went into the ground, when suddenly, it fractured, and a jet of water went about 20 feet into the air. So we took to our heals and ran, and as we looked back, there was a copper in the distance, approaching on his bike, so we ran down Grand Sluice Lane. Brian and I hid behind a garden fence, next to the water tower, but Gordon shinned up the gas lamp opposite and sat on the top. The copper rode down the lane, looking from side to side, turned at the bottom but still missed seeing Gordon on the lamp. At that time, police were in order to give you a clout for minor offences.
Before the war, religion played a big part in life, with prayers in school at morning assembly, and in class before we left in the afternoon. We also kneeled at our bedside and prayed before going to sleep. This was a daily ritual, and Christmas was a religious celebration, with most people going to church on Christmas morning. Dad was not a churchgoer, and I think that rubbed off on me. Christmas cards we only sent to close friends and relatives, and presents were very minor to what they are today. You hung a stocking up, and got sweets, nuts, apples and oranges in it, plus one or two small presents. One year I got a tinplate twin engine clockwork aeroplane, which a battery and lights. I had seen it in Marks and Spencers for 2/11 and said how much I liked it, but that was a lot to pay then. If I had it now, it would be priceless.
Woolworths had a sign over their shops “Nothing over 6d”. A wind-up tinplate toy was only 6d and lead soldiers only 1d. You could even buy a camera, which was 6d for the body, 6d for the lens, and a film was also 6d. A bar of chocolate was 2d and wrapped sweets were 10 for a penny. But farm workers pay was only 30 shillings a week, and factory and shop workers 2 pounds to £2/10, so life was only an existence.
On Sundays, most people went to church, and afterwards went for long walks. John and Gertie used to do a lot of cycling, and John would ride me on his crossbar or I sat on the carrier on the back wheel of Gertie’s bike. One Sunday, when I was about 9, Gertie and John took Dot and I on the bus to Freiston Shore for the day. It was a lovely summers day, and we had packed sandwiches. It was like being at the seaside, but the sand was all mud. The tide was out when we arrived, and there were people all over the marsh, paddling in the creeks. Dot and I had our swimming gear on, and were covered in mud from head to foot. Then the tide came in and everyone retreated to the bank. There were two hotels which were flourishing businesses, The Marine, and the Plummers with people sitting outside supping pints. Much of the marsh has been reclaimed over the years by the Borstal boys from the prison camp nearby, but in those days, the tide came right up to the bank. Gertie fetched a bucket of water and washed us down, then we laid down on the bank and ate our sandwiches, and that was a good day out at the seaside.
We often went for walks down the seabank on Sundays and watched the ships come in. Most of them were laden with timber and if they had had a rough crossing, sometimes their load had shifted, and they would have quite a list on. It was interesting watching them negotiate the locks with timber hanging over the side. The timber was unloaded manually, by a gang of about 50 men with a leather pad over one shoulder. They walked onto the ship on one gangway, then the timber was loaded onto their shoulder, and they carried it off on a second gangway, and stacked it on the quay. Working continuously for hours at at a time, it was very hard work. There was a coal hoist where coal trucks were lifted up a tower then tipped, so the coal ran down a chute, into the ships hold. On the opposite side of the dock, the ships unloaded cargoes of fruit which were stacked into warehouses along the quayside. There was apples, bananas, oranges, tomatoes, etc and the railtrack ran the length of these building, where men were working all hours, loading wagons. With everything being loaded manually, the dock was one of the towns largest employers.
When the dock was first opened in 1884, Gran was 25 years old, and helped with the catering. She said it was a huge celebration with trestle tables set up at the end of the dock, and the towns dignitaries, councillors and businessmen were served teas.
In the summer months, Drings canning factory, which later became Lockwoods, and which is now an Industrial Estate in Norfolk Street, used to work through the night, canning peas, beans and fresh fruit. It was a terrible din, with conveyor belts screeching, as cans were filled, put into metal crates, and cooked in huge retorts. After which, the lids were clamped on, and then came down a chute into crates, waiting to be labelled and packed. It was a continuous clatter, and I always had trouble getting off to sleep on those nights. On our way to and from school, we used to run after the trailers carting peas and grab a few pods off the stalks. There were 4 canning factories in the town. Beaulah’s had two in the Bargate area, one on the top of Horncastle Road, and the other, was on the right of the drain, looking from Bargate bridge.
On summer nights, when the weather was hot, and I couldn’t sleep, I noticed that Gertie was always last to bed, and she spent a long time in John’s room saying goodnight. Then he would often take her to the pictures, and sometimes I caught them cuddling in the front room, so John changed from the lodger to one of the family. When I was about 10, he bought an up-to-date radio which plugged into the mains. It was a Marconi, in a bakelite case, and reception was quite clear, so the old battery set was dumped, as most people were getting electricity now. So sometimes I came in early from playing in the lane to listen to certain programmes, Arthur Askey in Bandwagon was my favourite.
Empire Air Day was when most of the R.A.F. airfields were open to the public, and in 1938 John took me to Cranwell on the bus. It was my first air display, and what I remember most was standing behind the latest fighter, the Spitfire, and leaning against the wind it created while it revved up with its brakes on, lifting its tail off the ground.
In the summer of 1938, I was on holiday in Stamford, and Dad had taken me on a bus run with him. When we got back to the bus depot, Dad said we needed some eggs so we went to the Egg Depot just across the yard. After we bought the eggs, he spent ages talking to a woman called Nellie, little did I realise she was to become my Step-mother.
The same year we were issued with Gas masks, as war loomed ever closer. Kids were issued with theirs at school, and as there were different sizes we had to make sure they fitted. As you inhaled the rubber fitted tight around your face, and air came in through the canister on the front, but when you exhaled, the flap on the inlet closed and the air came out by your cheeks. By adjusting the tension it was possible to make farty noises,so with the whole class practising gas-mask drill we had some good laughs, much to the annoyance of the teacher.
In September 1938, it looked like we were going to war, but Neville Chamberlain signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler and it gave us a little time to prepare. In the cities, Anderson shelters were issued to Householders to erect in their gardens, but in Boston a large air raid shelter was built in the park. It was an L shape dug out of the grass area, but it was never used as it kept flooding,I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time, a lot of it was trial and error.
Grown ups talked of world affairs, i.e., German planes bombed Spanish cities during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis took over the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia then started a purge on the Jews. King George V died, Edward VIII took the throne, but then abdicated and married Mrs Simpson, George VI was crowned so we had 3 kings in a year. As a 10 year old, I took little notice of these events in 1938. I was more interested in the “Mallard” breaking the world steam record on its nonstop run to Edinburgh at 126mph, and taking on water from troughs in the tracks en route.
I was quite happy living with Gran, but early in 1939 Dad came over with Nellie and introduced her to the family. He still had the Austin 7, and I had to go with them as he took her to meet his mother, brothers and sister. He told them all that they were getting married in April, but it was only a quiet wedding at St. Michaels, Stamford with a few guests, excluding me. Dad said that after the wedding I was to go back to Stamford and live with them, so I therefore took an instant dislike to Nellie. Probably because I knew it was going to change my life, after all, I liked the Park school, and it meant leaving all my mates behind. I begged Dad to let me stay with Gran but he would not hear of it, so it made me quite miserable.
Dot had met an airman from Wittering and was going quite steady with him, but I think it hastened her romance when she saw how things were going. Dad had been bringing Nellie home for a while and Dot could not stand her, and she was pregnant anyway so she married Syd at the registry office, and they rented a little house in Conduit Terrace.
So Dad and Nellie married in late April, spent a few days with some of her friends in York, as she came from the area, then after a few days came over and took me back with them. Gertie had been like a mother to me for the past 3-4 years so it was a very tearful goodbye. Dad said I must now call Nellie, Mum, so that put my back up from the start. I felt that no way could she take the place of my mother.
Stamford was such a dull cheerless place in my mind, everywhere there were grey stone buildings, which did not help my frame of mind. Dad had already booked me into St Michael’s school, so on my first day he took me to school and introduced to my teacher, a Mr York, who introduced me to the class. I sat next to a lad called Ray, who was always knocking my arm when I was writing, until one day, “Yorky” caught him and made him stand in the corner. He then called me out in front of the class, asking me questions about the Docks, and getting me to address the class with my replies, so in fact I was telling them what life was like working on a Dock. People did not travel much and most kids had not seen ships, so I felt quite superior for a while. The standard of education was way below what I had been doing in Boston, so I used to sit day-dreaming a lot and getting into trouble for not paying attention.
Most days when I left school, I would call at Dot’s, as she lived near the school, and at least with her I felt at home, so we had a few laughs. I got on fairly well with Syd, and he had a sister called Flo with whom I got on with even better. She came to live with them for a while, and I suppose I fancied her in a way, as we grabbed hold of each other at times when we were larking about, but she was about 5 years older.
At weekends I played a lot with the lad next door, Ron Carzon. It was a big house with a massive garden that reached right down to Scotgate, with trees that we climbed, and we had war games with our lead soldiers. His family was wealthy and he went to the Grammar School.
After Gran’s selection of food, Nellie’s was terrible, as she had lived at home and never done any cooking, so every meal was a trial and error job, with few successes, and sometimes Dad complained it was not fit to eat. Things gradually got better, but her meals were always very plain.
I had a couple of weeks holiday in Boston that summer, travelling by rail on my own. It meant changing stations at Peterborough, as Stamford was on the L.M.S. line (London Midland and Scottish), and Boston was on the L.N.E.R. (London, North Eastern Railway), so it meant walking across Peterborough carrying my case.I had been there a few times with Dad on the bus and when he had waiting time we walked around the town so I knew my way, but felt quite grown up travelling on my own. Well it was great spending time in Boston with my old mates. But everyone was talking about Hitler and the threat of war in Europe, remembering the last one. The holiday soon went and Auntie Gertie shed tears when I left.
So it was back to Stamford and its drab buildings, and I did not appreciate the history of the town at the age of 11. The A1 ran through the town, then known as the Great North Road, and there were often large loads passing through, and it was interesting watching them negotiate the narrow bends. There were still quite a few steam lorries on the road, but in 1939 the Government put the tax on them up to £100, and that gradually phased them out.
One good thing about St. Michael’s School was woodwork which we didn’t have at Boston, so I enjoyed that, but the down side was we played football on the Recreation Ground opposite - not very interested. Then there was swimming, when we had to walk through the town to the Baths near the railway station. It was an open-air Baths and the water was freezing cold, well I could not swim, and one day the instructor grabbed me saying “You will learn to swim”, and chucked me in the deep end, I kept going under and would have drowned if he had not jumped in and got me out. That really scared me, so one Saturday, Ron and I went down the Meadows, where there were two places that people used to swim, known as Big Cobblers and Little Cobblers, this was no more than 2-3 feet deep. It was quite a warm day and after a couple of hours we found we could do a dog paddle, and I thought at least I can’t drown now. The next time we learnt the breaststroke, and after that I enjoyed swimming.
Towards the end of the summer holiday, Hitler’s troops marched into Poland and Britain and France had signed a pact that we would go to war if that happened. So on the 3rd September, after an ultimatum had been given to Hitler, we heard on the radio that an announcement would be made at 11am. It was a lovely Sunday morning, and everything was so peaceful, when Neville Chamberlain came on the air and told us we were now at war with Germany. I expected within days we would see planes coming over dropping bombs, but as time went by life carried on much as before, the only difference was that we always took our gas masks with us wherever we went.
With the war came the Blackout, when all streetlights were switched off, and everyone had to use heavy curtains or make blackout shutters. Air Raid Wardens were appointed to go round and make sure no one was showing any lights, and if you went out at night you always took at torch to see where you were going.
At Christmas, Dad bought me (second hand) a twin cylinder stationary steam engine, mounted on a base about 6 inches by 9. Also a set of Meccano, so I spent a lot of time that winter building models and driving them with the engine, so a lot of my pocket money went on buying methylated spirit. On my birthday I got a Dynamo which I drove from the engine, and then I could light a string of bulbs from it. Dad used to join me and help me with it, and looking back, in the few years I lived with him, he taught me a lot of basic things, showing me how to use tools etc., which I have always put into practice.
In the first months of the war all young men between the ages of 18 to 30 were called up, and Dad’s firm lost half its drivers, so he had to go driving full time. Even though they took on some older men there were times when Dad had to work 7am till 11.30pm. Nellie hated to be on her own at night and often kept me up till he came home. Unknown to him she heard him life the latch on the back gate, then she would rush me off upstairs with my candle before he got through to the living room. In the spring of 1940 she had a miscarriage, they thought I didn’t know, but I came home for dinner one day, and she was in bed and her mother was in charge, the midwife was upstairs so I put 2 and 2 together, and with the scraps of conversation, I knew she had lost the baby.
After that Dad had a weeks holiday. and took her to Bridlington, and I had to stay with her parents at 34 New Cross Road. I had to call her Nan, but he was Mr Walker to me, but it but it made me smile when she called him “Willie”, short for William.
All iron railings were requisitioned by the Government, apart from schools, so the first year of the war there were gangs going round with acetylene torches cutting the railings off in every street. Almost every house had railings then, so it made the streets look very bare when they went. The iron all went towards making arms and ammunitions. All road signposts were taken down so strangers never knew where they were going. The idea was that if we got invaded the Germans would not know either, but they need not have bothered as it transpired after the war that the Airships from Berlin to New York on a regular service, took a slightly different path each time and had photographed the whole of the country before 1939.
In the cities, more than half the children were evacuated to country areas and small towns, so the evacuees as we called them were not very happy kids. People with room to spare had these kids thrust upon them, for a small payment, and if they did not take to them it was a miserable time for all concerned.
In the spring of 1940, I had just left school when I heard a plane flying low from the east, as it got nearer, I noticed a black cross on its fuselage as it released a bomb, I ducked down behind the school wall waiting for the bang, but the bomber disappeared behind trees on the Recreation ground and all went quiet. It was the first enemy plane I saw and it scared me to death, so I ran non-stop to Dot’s, really frightened and told her. We learned later that the bomb landed in St Leonards Street, but did not go off. No sirens sounded so the whole of the town was taken by surprise.
We were issued with ration books and also Identity cards, which you were supposed to carry at all times, and food was rationed within a few weeks of the war being declared. There was not much to spend money on and people were encouraged to buy War Saving Certificates to help the war effort. Most towns set a target, and at Stamford it was to pay for a Spitfire, which was £5000, so there was a large thermometer type recorder erected at the end of Broad Street, which was numbered 0 to 5000, and every week it was marked up in red paint, but it only got to halfway up by the time I left the town in October 1940. Because poison gas was used in the 1914-18 war, it was expected to be used in towns and cities, so we had to carry our gas masks at all times. In most streets there were large boards about 2 feet square put up on the posts about 3 feet high, and they were painted a lime green colour. If there was gas in the air they were supposed to change colour as a warning, but of course this never happened. For the first two years we carried our gas masks at all times. But as time went by, we gradually left them at home and hoped for the best.
Many older men not conscripted to the armed forces volunteered for the Home Guard or A.R.P. Wardens (Air Raid Precautions), later known as Civil Defence. One day at St Michaels, two of these wardens came to demonstrate how to put out an Incendiary Bomb with sand. It was dangerous to use water as they contained phosphorous and magnesium, and water made them volatile, spreading the burning contents in all directions. With the tail fin they were about 2 feet long and 3 inches in diameter, just like a large firework. Most streets had a fire point with shovels and buckets of sand, supplied by the Council, I still have one such shovel which I acquired from the ambulance station on Carlton Road, (where the new school is now).Incendiaries did as much damage as high explosives, as they had enough impact to go through a roof, and then set fire to the loft, and a whole street could be burned down with these, while people were in air raid shelters. There were people appointed as Fire Watchers, but they could not be everywhere.
Dad was working 12 hours a day and Nellie was always nagging him because he was never at home, so he started looking for another job and eventually got an interview at Leicester for a job as an ambulance driver. He was successful, so Dad and Nellie moved to Blaby, 6 miles south of the city in October, and left me staying with her parents for a week while they got settled in. I went by train to Leicester the following week, whence Dad met me at the station. The city seemed such a busy place after the quiet life in Lincolnshire, as we walked to the bus terminal and took a bus to Blaby. There was then a mile walk from the village to the Isolation Hospital. Our house was at the entrance and was called The Lodge.
The ambulance cover the whole of Leicestershire excluding the city, also taking patients to two other isolation hospitals, one at Hinckley and the other at Markfield. the city had its own hospital at Groby Road. At that time there was a lot of diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, meningitis, scabies, and others which meant people had to go into hospital to prevent the spread of infection. Dad was on call 24 hours a day, six days a week, and when he had a day off the gardener took over. Up the drive from our house was the boiler house and opposite that was the nurses home where the nurses lived. Behind these were two main wards and behind those was a ward for emergencies.
As a child I remember there were sometimes kids off school with scarlet fever and diphtheria, but during the war people were living in more cramped conditions with houses having been bombed and evacuees swelling the population in the country areas, so diseases were spread more easily. Dad was out at all hours ferrying cases to the three hospitals but he did not go out after dark unless it was urgent as driving in the dark was dangerous with headlights masked, and with a thin slot of light you could not see where you were going and were only just visible to other drivers.
I did not like living in the country after being in a town. The nearest farm was half a mile away and the hospital was down a 200 yard drive of the lane. After a couple of days, dad took me to the nearest school to get me on the register. This was 2 miles away at South Wigston, a secondary modern school built just before the war. I had never seen a school like it with over 1000 pupils, it was built in two identical halves. There were separate schools for boys and girls but the boys were not allowed to talk to the girls. 100 yards of grass separated the playgrounds and it was out of bounds. I never dreamed in those days that they would be mixed schools in the future.
Before we left Stamford Dad bought a bike from one of his workmates and he had to put wooden blocks on the pedals for me as I could not reach them, and I needed a bike to get to school. I want it 2B and on my first day I was absolutely lost as at the end of each lesson bells rang and we changed classrooms so we have a different teacher for each subject. I have had an easy time at Stamford but now had a lot of catching up to do. All the lessons were interesting, but very intensive. On my first lesson I sat near a lad called Keith Humphries. At playtime the usual bullies started picking on me, wanting a fight as they always did with anyone new, but Keith came to my rescue. He was the tallest lad in the class and well respected so I hung around with him most of the time and felt safe. The school had a large catchment area and about 20 buses ferried kids in from villages of up to 10 miles away. In the centre of the school was the kitchen, with the girls dining room on one side and the boys on the other. Most kids stayed for dinner which cost 5d a day, 2/1d per week (2p a day, 10½p per week). This was collected by the form teachers on Monday mornings after we had assembly in the main hall. This was where the day started with prayers and hymns which were all Church of England of course. Most of the lads had milk at break time which cost a halfpenny for a third of a pint, but I never liked drinking milk. Dinner was a really good meal with a pudding, and it helped out with rationing at home. I enjoyed it far better than Nellie’s cooking! We had P.E. twice a week and a double period for games once a week. More often than not it was rugby, and we always showered after these activities so I always had to have a towel in my locker.
In June 1940 when our troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, morale was very low and most people felt it was only a matter of time before Hitler invaded our shores. Then the heavy bombing of our cities began and that put everyone in a defiant mood. Throughout 1941 there were raids on most nights when the weather was favourable, and Coventry was bombed regularly. It was only 15 miles from where we lived, and dad and I used to stand on the back porch watching the planes being picked out by Searchlight. The anti-aircraft guns fired dozens of shells at them but we never saw one brought down.
After they had dropped their bombs we were in the flight path of their return run, and ate a few odd bombs ended up near us as they closed bomb doors and dislodged odd leftovers. One landed in soft ground about 200 yards away and made a deep crater, but we were surrounded by trees and did not even lose a window pane.
In the summer of 1941, I started going to Keith’s home after school where I met his family. He had an older sister Margaret, and three younger brothers, Barry, David and John. They made me welcome and I soon felt like one of the family. Keith did a paper round every morning and evening and I often helped him with the evening round. Sometimes he came with me to the hospital where there were eight acres of grounds for us to play in, and there were plenty of fields around to explore as well.
At school we used to tie notes to stones and throw them across to the girls’ playground, and by this method we started seeing two girls, Betty and Mary. There was a large park at South Wigston and we used to meet up with them there in the evenings. Sometimes we went for bike rides in the country and did a bit of exploring. We also practised a bit of snogging but that is all it was. We did not have sex lessons then so it was all uncharted territory.
The ambulance had a bench seat and when I was on holiday, Dad sometimes let me go with him. I sat between him and the nurse so I got to know Leicestershire at an early age. The ambulance was a 25 hp Vauxhall with a 1930 Morris Commercial as a standby, but after a year he got a Humber Super Snipe and this was absolute luxury. The ambulance had to be ‘stoved’ between each type of infection. This was done by mixing two chemicals together in a tin, then adding water, and leaving it just inside the back doors and shutting the doors immediately. It was like a poison gas it was supposed to kill the germs.
When Dad was not driving, his job was maintenance, so he did all the minor repairs and had a workshop in the boiler house where I spent many hours watching and helping him and picked up quite a lot of DIY know-how this way. Next to the boiler house was the laundry where all the nurses uniforms and bedding were washed and pressed. The boiler also provided heating for the nurses home and had to be stoked all day and banked down at night. Next to the laundry were two rooms for the disinfester, which was a large cast iron cylinder with half protruding into each room. One room was for infected clothing, blankets etc and the other was for the sterilised material. A cradle was pulled out either end and once a week the infected stuff was loaded into it then slid into the outer cylinder. A hinged door on each end was sealed tight with eight screw clamps tightened around its outer edge. A steam cock was then opened and it pressurised to 60 pounds per square inch. After an hour, the cock was closed and a valve opened which vented the steam out of the roof. When it cooled, the material was taken out of the other side and it was quite dry. This proved to me that steam is not wet and only vaporises when it’s in contact with the air.
Blaby Hospital only took diphtheria and scarlet fever cases; up to 20 of each with a spare ward for other cases in an emergency. Visitors were allowed on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays but they had to walk a mile from the village and when they got to the hospital they were not allowed on the wards. There was a bed at every window, and outside each window there were steps so that children could see into the ward. The beds were turned to face the windows and conversations took place through the glass, as windows were kept shut out visiting times. In winter visitors stood outside in all weathers, shouting when it was windy to make themselves heard. Those with diphtheria could hardly speak, as their throats were so swollen and inflamed, so they used to write notes on pads. Visiting hours were from three till four p.m. and if it was cold and wet, Dad would let them into the boiler house to get warm and dry before they set out for the village to catch the bus.
By L.R.Clay
When I reached the age of 70, I realised I had seen many changes in my life. In the past 50 years science and technology have made such rapid strides that today it is like living in a different world. In my young days I was not interested in history, and when my father or grandmother talked of the past, I did not really listen. When I got older I regretted not having
taken more notice. If my gran could have written the basic facts of her life, it would make interesting reading today. So I wondered if things that had taken place in my life would be of interest to my children and grandchildren, as they grow older. I therefore decided to jot down things that had occurred in my life as I remember them, together with a bit of family history.
I was born to Sydney Robert Clay and Lucy Violet Clay (nee Mawer) on the 6th February, 1928 at North Street, Stamford, in a row of four cottages long since demolished. My sister Dorothy was 7 years older than me, and was born at West End Road, Wyberton, where Mum and Dad lived with my grandmother. My gran, Mary Elizabeth Jessup, was born at Stickney in 1859. Her parents lived in a smallholding on Hall Lane next to the Drain. A double tenement has since been built on the land. They were buried in Stickney church yard. Thomas William Jessup died in 1911, and Mary Jane died in 1925. Their grave is in the third row on the left not many yards from the gate. After they died, Gran’s brother lived in the house until he died in 1950.
My grandad’s mother was a Langley before she married, and she named one of her sons Langley; he was Dorothy’s dad at Horncastle. Grandad’s sister named one of her sons Langley; he was my mother’s cousin at Doncaster. Then my mother chose the name for me, and my sister chose the name for her son, so there have been four generations of Langleys. I dislike the name, but I have been stuck with it.
My gran spent little time at school as education was not compulsory in those days, and by the time she was 8, she spent most of her time at home helping her mother or working on the land. She spent a bit of time at school each winter but never went to school after she reached the age of 12, so when she wrote a letter it took quite a bit of deciphering.
However, she left home at 13 and went into service, working for a Doctor Day at Revesby Bank for which she was paid £5 a year. In her younger days she used to travel from Stickney to Boston on a boat called a Steam Packet. This was the main means of transport, plying the local drains. There was also the Carriers’ Cart but this was a slow job as he was always stopping to make deliveries. On market days people brought pigs, sheep and chickens on the boat with them, so it was not a very elegant way to travel. The boats used to moor up at the steps near Bargate Bridge.
As time went by, railways were laid to most of the villages, and took all the trade from the drains. Gran told me, that until the 1880’s there were no houses on Horncastle Road past the Ropers’ Arms, and no houses in Norfolk Street past North Street, which is the road between the factories. From there it was high boards on the left, surrounding a private park which covered the area surrounded by Hartley Street, Tawney Street, Thorold Street and Tunnard Street.
Cattle and sheep were always brought to market in droves, and this went on until the mid 1950’s. After Fay and I got married we used to get woken up on wednesdays by mooing and baaing as they were driven along the road, and when you went out you had to be careful where you put your feet as there were cowpats and droppings left in their wake. Boston had a big cattle market in those days stretching from Bargate End to the Post Office with cattle pens taking up the whole area, including the road running through the centre.
To get back to my grandmother, she had a son out of wedlock, Albert, who eventually married Annie and had two sons called Frank and Reg. Gran soon met and married William Mawer who worked on the railways locally. However, he then took a job at Rowsley, Derbyshire where there was a large rail depot, and he drove an engine shunting trucks into the various sidings to make up the trains. He got lodgings there, and Gran got a job in the kitchen at Chatsworth House. She often boasted of cooking for the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Then they got a house at Two Dales, Darley Dale near Matlock where my mum and Auntie Gertie were born. They spent some years there, but moved to Boston before the 1914-1918 war, taking a bakery shop in Red Lion Street. During the war she told me she saw a Zeppelin fly over, and stood outside the shop whilst it dropped a bomb in the middle of the street. Luckily it did not go off.
After the war they took a smallholding at West End Road, Wyberton where, at the age of 62 my grandad died of cancer. My mum and dad married that year, and lived with Gran and Gertie, and the next year my sister Dorothy was born. My Uncle Albert was brought up at Stickney, then worked as a plumber for Sherwins of Boston. After he married they lived in Daisy Dale where their sons were born. My mother was born in 1897, and when she left school she worked for Mr Fisher who converted a house in Sleaford Road in a business making labels. Later he merged with Mr Clark and they build a factory in Norfolk Street, Fisher Clarks which was taken over by Norprint in the 1960’s. Auntie Gertie was born in 1899 and worked for Willer & Riley, a canning factory on London Road, which produced the Lin-Can brand.
My dad was born in 1900 at 37 Church Road, Boston. I never knew much about his side of the family. Grandma Clay still lived at Church Road where all the family were born, but my grandad died before I was born. They had four children, Henry, Ernie, Sydney, and Kate, in that order, but Dad never had much to do with them. He would visit them, and took Dot and I along when in Boston, but they were not a close family like my mothers side. My Grandad worked for Tuxfords Iron Foundry at Mount Bridge. I have a number of cousins about the town, but over the years, I have lost track of them. The only one that I knew was Ernie, who lived on Wellington Road.
When Dad left school he worked for Dunmores near Bargate Bridge. At that time, they were builders of horse drawn carriages. As an apprentice it was his job to varnish as many as fourteen coats, rubbing down with pumice powder between each coat. There was no ‘wet or dry’ paper in those days. Wanting to see more of the world he ‘took the King’s shilling’ and joined up when he was sixteen. He of course ended up in France, and was not in the front line for long before they were overrun and he was taken prisoner. I have a letter from Buckingham Palace confirming this.
After the war he got a job with the Progressive Bus Company. There was another company that I can’t recall the name of, but he said that they used to compete by racing each other up the road to try to pick up passengers first. It would have been quite a bumpy ride on solid rubber tyres! In 1926 he took a job in Stamford as chauffeur/handyman for a local doctor and rented a stone-built cottage in North Street, where I was born. When I was about two years old he got a job with the Cream Bus Service owned by W.H.Patch who had about a dozen coaches. They then moved to a house in Newboults Lane off Cemetery Road, which is now called Radcliffe Road. The council estate was not built then and I remember going to fairs and circuses on those fields. The house had two bedrooms, but the kitchen/wash-house was only a corrugated lean-to. Mum would strip me off and sit me on a stone-topped copper while she gave me a wash, before putting me to bed. The copper was a brick-built fireplace about a metre square, with a cast iron bowl which held about ten gallons of water set into the top of it, with a wooden lid. It was the only way to heat large amounts of water, and also a way of getting rid of rubbish on the fire. Friday night was a real treat. The copper would be lit and Dot and I shared a tin bath in front of the living room fire. No wonder the air was thick with smoke with all those coal fires.
In 1932, Dad was promoted to Inspector, so he was not popular with the other drivers, but could now afford a better house with a better kitchen. It was only a few hundred yards away at 8 St. John’s Terrace, and with three bedrooms Dot and I had our own rooms and there was an enclosed garden at the front to play in.
My earliest memories are of being taken around the town in my pushchair, and one day, a Mrs Price who was rather posh, peered under the hood and said to my mother, “Oh what a lovely little girl!”. I remember pulling a face at her, but at that time, I did have long blonde ringlets. Then there were the two visits to the hospital in my pushchair; one where I fell off the copper top and cut my chin whilst being washed, and another where I fell down some steps and cut the back of my head, and this time I screamed all the way there because I knew that this time, I was going to have stitches!
Speaking of stitching, I remember one day Dad took Mum shopping and treated her to the latest in sewing machines, which I still own. It was fully enclosed in a cabinet and cost over £5, which would have been over two week’s pay at that time.
Dad had a motorbike when he first went to Stamford, but after he was promoted to Inspector he bought a Singer car. It was a two-seater with a fold-back hood, but it had a boot lid which when lifted revealed a ‘dickey’ seat, as it was then called. Dad took us for rides in the country and picnics on his days off. They were shielded from the wind in the front, but Dot and I got a good blast sitting in the dickey as we bowled along at 25 m.p.h. flat out. Petrol was 1s to 1/2d (one shilling to one shilling and ‘tuppence’) per gallon. It could be bought in 2 gallon cans, or you filled up at a garage, where a mechanic would have to down tools to attend the pump which was operated by winding the handle. This brought a cogged rod out of the top of the pump, and it took about five turns in each direction to deliver a gallon.
In his spare time, Dad made Crystal Sets. These were radios without batteries, but which needed an aerial as high and as long as possible, and a copper tube about 3 feet down in the ground for an earth. In dry weather water had to be poured down the tube. The set consisted of thin copper wire wound closely around a cardboard tube about two inches in diameter and ten inches long. A brass slider traversed the tube to select the wavelength and the station was finely tuned with a ‘cat whisker’. This was a thin wire on the end of a lever through a ball joint enclosed in a glass tube. The ‘cat whisker’ touched the crystal in the end of the tube, and with patient manipulation a station was tuned. Dad sold these for ten shillings each to make a bit of pocket money. You had to listen to them with headphones, and I remember once there was a broadcast from America of a fight between Tommy Farr and Joe Louis. The headphones were in an enamel bowl on the table to amplify the sound. Dad was so excited that he got us up in the early hours and we all sat with our heads over the bowl listening to the fight. This was like a miracle to be able to hear America on the short waveband!
When I was about five, Mum started getting a lot of pain in her back and had to go into hospital, so Dot and I were brought to Boston to live with Gran and Auntie Gertie for a while. They had moved from Wyberton around 1931 as they could not make the smallholding pay, and were now living on Horncastle Road. Dad was now running an Austin Seven with side screens, so we were shaded from the wind but it was still very draughty. Once we were settled in, Gran started us at the St. Mary’s Catholic School which was just along the road. The teachers were all Nuns dressed in long black robes with hoods and I was taken to my class in the morning. I was running about playing games at playtime when someone blew a whistle and everyone stood still, and I carried on running about, then a Nun took me by the collar and led me down a passage in the school to a door where the Mother Superior appeared, she held my hands out and whacked them with a cane and I was taken back to class crying. When I was let out at dinnertime, I ran home to Gran and showed her bloodweals on my hands. She took me straight back to school and gave the Mother Superior a fierce verbal lashing, so my first day at that school was my last. We had about a month in Boston, then Dad fetched us home, and Dot went to the Fane school and I went to St Johns where I stayed for about two years.
At first Mum was doing jobs around the house, but then as her health deteriorated she spent a lot of time in her chair, but then she could not manage the stairs, and the bed had to come downstairs. Dad did a bit of driving and sometimes took me on the bus with him to give Mum a rest. One winter evening he stopped the bus at Corby and we watched as a furnace was tapped and white hot iron ran into gullies in the sand, like a river with tributaries, men were blocking these off with sand as they filled. Another time he took me in the car to Wittering aerodrome, where Gloucester Gladiator biplanes were taking off and landing. One came in low over the road near us and caught the top wing of one parked near the hedge, and they both ended upside down, but the pilot crawled out safely.
When I was about 7, Dad bought a wind up gramophone. All the records were 78 r.p.m and the price labels on them were 1/3d to 1/6d for 10 inch and 2/- to 2/6 for 12 inch and Mum used to get me to play them for her. Then we had a 4 valve radio which had a 90 volt battery, a 9 volt grid bias battery, and an accumulator which was a 2 volt glass square box with terminals like a single cell car battery. The batteries fitted into the radio but the accumulator always stood in a separate dish in case it leaked acid, and you needed 2 of these as one was always at the shop on charge. The accumulator man always called on Friday. Of course we did not have mains electricity, all the lighting was gas. Even the streets were lit with gas lamps, and the lamplighter came around every evening with a long pole with a hook and a light on the top to light the lamps and again in the morning to extinguish them. In the 1930s electricity power stations were built throughout the country and pylons straddled the countryside carrying it to the towns. Boston Electricity Supply Company was set up and bought it from the national grid and one of their first customers was the council, who in 1937 had tall lamp standards erected in the market place with fluorescent type lamps, and everyone seems to have white faces after the old yellow gas lamps.
Dot finished school at 14, and Dad kept her at home to help Mum who was spending most of her time in bed. I did not realise how ill she was, but learned later she had cancer of the spine for which there was no cure. The doctor would come round regularly and give her an injection to ease the pain, and gradually she became paralysed from the waist. I used to play cards with her on the bedside table until her sight went, then she would get me to read to her and helped me with my sums and spelling etc. The auntie Gertie came to stay for a few days., I was 7 1/2 years then, and after much discussion it was decided that I should return to Boston with her.
I went to Park Board School, so named when it was built because of the boards that were round the park. I had a few months in the infants, but when I got the junior school my education really began. The emphasis was on the three Rs, I liked that and also Geography but found history and R.E. boring. Once a week we walked down to the Nelson Fields for Sports, mostly football, which was off Liquorpond Street, which in those days was a back street, which ran off High Street where the bridge is now. The Lord Nelson Pub was on the corner and fields were behind it and covering the area of where the roundabout is now, and the industrial estate beyond.
I made friends with Brian Blakey who lived in Grand Sluice Lane. He was two and a half years my junior, but I envied him because he had so many toys. They included a Hornby ‘O’ gauge train set, Dinky toys, cars and aeroplanes, plus a large tricycle which I used to ride in the lane. There were about a dozen of us who played games in the lane. We would rush through our meals so that we could get back out to play with the gang. In those days you always had to belong to a gang. Girls and boys together played ball games, Whip & Top, Hula hoops, and we had a skipping rope the width of the lane, with up to six at a time skipping. If boys were caught playing hopscotch they were called sissies. We were always getting into trouble with the neighbours, but I suppose we did make a hell of a noise.
At the bottom of the lane was O’ Hara’s Field. Mike O’ Hara was Brian’s grandad, and he kept chickens in the field, but it didn’t stop us playing in it. There was a big rusty lorry with no body on it, and one day I fell off and landed in about four feet of nettles. Wearing short trousers meant I got covered in stings.
Dad paid visits from time to time, and sometimes took me back to Stamford for a week. He now had an Austin 7 saloon which was a real luxury, and sometimes he met me from school to the envy of my mates, as none of their families had a car.
Mum was very weak and could not move herself in bed, and when she spoke you could hardly hear her. Dot did the cooking and ran the house, but was more interested in boys, so as soon as Dad came home she was away! I sometimes followed her and then the boyfriend would have to buy me sweets to get rid of me.
In November 1936, Mum died and Dad came over to break the news. There were no telephones then, except for businesses or the wealthy. In those days you sent telegrams, and all Post Offices employed telegram boys. (If you wanted a job at the Post Office you started as a telegram boy when you left school at 14). So, the day before the funeral, Gran, Gertie and I went to Stamford on the train. I remember looking at Mum in her coffin in the front room and could not believe she was dead. I said, “Perhaps she’ll wake up soon”, and that is the only time I saw my father cry. But next day at the funeral, when I saw her lowered her into the ground and earth put on top, I shed tears and Auntie cuddled me as I realised now it was the end.
After that Dad took Dot and I to Auntie Nan’s who lived in Finchley, North London (a cousin of Mother’s), so we had a week of sight seeing , all the usual places of interest, and we were going to Crystal Palace, but the night before, it caught fire and burnt down. We heard it on the radio, so went outside to watch. It was about 2 miles away, but still a huge blaze in the sky. It was a huge complex built mostly of glass in 1851 for the Great Exhibition, but that was the end of it. In 1951 there was the Festival of Britain to mark the century, it was an exhibition built on the north bank of the Thames on land which had been flattened by bombing in the war, and on the south bank was a huge funfair. Special trains were laid on from all over the country and many millions visited it. Fay and I went, and out of all the people there we met Uncle Albert who had gone on a coach trip.
In the summer of 1937, Dad had a week’s holiday and took a workmate with him. They toured Devon and Cornwall in the Austin 7, and Dad was quite chuffed that it had climbed Porlock Hill, - I think it is a 1 in 4 gradient, and a long way to go in that car. There is a brochure I have that he bought then.
After Mum died it seemed I was to live with gran permanently. She took in lodgers, and during the summer, hundreds of Sheffielders came to Boston to fish the drains. They worked in steel works or mines, and loved the fresh air of our fens. Sometimes there would be up to a dozen coaches parked between Hospital Bridge and Cowbridge. But gran had her regulars, there was Mr Wood, a Cutler from Sheffield who had a stall on the market every Wednesday. Often he and his mate would stay overnight and go fishing on Thursday, but if there were already two staying, Gran and Gertie would make a bed up on the floor in the front room. In those days no-one frowned upon two men sharing a double bed, and I had the back bedroom to myself.
There was a Yorkshire range in the kitchen and one in the living room, and Gran had them going all day. She really enjoyed cooking and at dinner there were a choice of meats, loads of vegetables and 2 or 3 puddings, then in the afternoons, she’d bake bread and cakes. To me there seemed to be an endless stream of mostly strangers, sleeping and being fed, and fishing baskets all over the back yard.
Auntie Gertie worked at the canning factory on London Road. She biked home for dinner, then I would enjoy her company for half an hour. She was always a kid at heart and we had plenty of fun and games when she had a few moments to spare. Schools always closed for dinner, so all the kids went home from 12.00 to 1.30pm, but did not leave till 4.00pm. Although Gran ran the house I looked to Gertie as a mother, as she was the one who took me shopping, bought my clothes, washed me, and put me to bed.
Homework for Tag-Craft was slave labour, you either strung labels or pierces, Gertie preferred pierces, and those were metal, pointed at one end with a hole in the middle. The string was threaded through the hole, the ends brought together and knotted, then tied into bundles of 250, then 4 bundles tied together - 1000, for which you were paid 4 1/2 pence. They were used for fastening labels onto sacks. When I got older I sometimes took the work back to the Factory in Norfolk Street, where there was a loading bay, and one on the left a hatch with a sliding door upon which I would knock. Eventually the door would open and I slid the boxes through, then I had to wait whilst the man sorted out the pay packet for last week. The amount was on the front, - on a low week it would only be 3/9d. but on a good week as much as 5/3d. (about 26 pence) then he would pass the boxes through with next weeks work in them. This was a Friday job after school, and was the result of Gran and Auntie sitting tagging all week. Any visitors would be given a tray with string and pierces while they sat chatting, but they did not object.
When these houses were built, there was no mains water laid on, but they had water toilets built in readiness. The only water was in cisterns in the yards which stored water from the rooves. Water for drinking or cooking had to go through charcoal filters to clean it, and drinking water had to be boiled. My grandma’s brother, George Jessup was responsible for bringing the first water to Boston. He was paid one pound per chain (22 yards) to lay a pipe from Revesby reservoir to the town, and had a gang of eight men and had to pay them out of that. This was in the 1890’s and his son, George who also worked for Boston Waterworks as it was called often related this story. When water was laid on to the houses, there was a tap in the yard in between two houses but some terraced houses had only one tap for four houses. It was about 1936 before Gran had a tap and sink in the house, and I was always getting into trouble for playing with water, and getting my clothes wet.
One lodger who came to stay, John Deans became a permanent dweller and I had to sleep on a camp bed in the front room for a while as he took over the back bedroom. But then Gran stopped taking in visitors because Uncle Albert left his wife and family in Daisy Dale and came to stay, so I then shared a three-quarter bed with him in the middle bedroom.
John worked for Artindales Nurseries. They owned land on both sides of Robin Hoods Walk, which at that time ran straight to the cemetery, and across to Sherwood Avenue which had just been built. It was all open land. Where the Secondary School is were fields of vegetables and on the other side of the road were the nurseries, producing acres of roses and shrubs. John came home at 12pm on Saturdays. He then opened his wage packet and paid Gran his board. He would then give me half a crown (12½ pence) to fetch his smoking requisites from Van Toen’s newsagents to the right of the King William pub on Horncastle Road. He had three ounces of ‘Afrikander Flake’, ten ‘Player’s’ cigarettes, a three-penny razor blade and a box of ‘Swan Vestas’ matches. He always gave me the 2½ pence change so my next call would be O’Hara’s sweet shop next to the chapel in Norfolk Street, where I would spend ages looking in the window deciding which five kinds of sweets I could buy for a halfpenny a time. Sometimes I cleaned Auntie’s bike, and if I made a good job of it, she gave me 3d. In the evenings if I had money, I could go to Wilson’s Fish Shop, which is now a private house between the Catholic Chapel and the King William pub. There I could buy a piece of fish for 1d, a bag of chips for 1d, or two large scallops also for a penny, but when I came out of the shop, my mates would always scrounge some from me. In old pence of course there were 240 to the pound.
When these houses were built, the Gas Works was well established, so gas was laid on. Gran did not have a cooker to start with, preferring to cook in the side ovens, but there was gas lighting in the living room, front room and wall brackets in the kitchen and bedrooms, but we never used the lamps upstairs, I suppose candles were cheaper.
In Winter you went to bed with a candlestick in one hand and a hot water bottle in the other. These were earthenware with a screw stopper, but I usually ended up with the cast iron oven shelf wrapped in newspaper. But for the visitors there was the copper warming pan with a lid and a long handle, which hung on the end wall in the kitchen. Gran used to shovel hot ashes from under the fire into this, then it was slid under the covers and moved up and down to warm their bed before they retired.
Bedrooms were like freezers in wintertime, the wind blew through the loft under the slates. There was no loft insulation, and the sash windows were very draughty. They were never free of condensation which froze into pretty patterns on the glass.
B.E.S. Co. was Boston Electricity Supply Company, and in 1938 they canvassed the area to sell electricity, they charged 2/6d per light and 3/- per socket, so Gertie ordered six lights and one socket, so the house was wired for 18/- and that included cable from the road to the meter. Gran was very much against it, saying it was dangerous and the shock could kill us, lots of older people were frightened of it, but Gertie insisted and got her own way in the end.
There was a lot of headlice in the schools, and the “Nitnurse” paid regular visits, so if I started scratching Gran would sit me down between her skirts and comb my hair with a fine-toothed comb and crack the nits between her thumb nails. Then once a year a doctor and a nurse came to the school, and everyone had a full medical examination. He also checked our teeth and if necessary, we would be sent to London Road Clinic to see the dentist. My teeth were crooked and Gran took me, where I had 8 teeth out in one go. I was scared stiff of dentists after that. The Clinic was at the old London Road Hospital, which was then a Sanatorium treating people for Tuberculosis. This was a lung disease, which was a killer, and remained so until the 1950s, when the discovery of streptomycin wiped it out. The TB ward had a covered veranda, and the beds were pushed outside from morning to night as they said that fresh air was the best treatment. People who could afford it went to clinics in the Alps for that reason, but very few found a cure.
When I lived in Stamford, Dot used to take me to the “Pictures” on Saturday afternoon to the kids matinee, we called it the twopenny rush at Dodmans. This was the Corn Exchange during the week and the seats were wooden benches, but in 1937 the Central Cinema was built. It was a modern building with a curved front and covered with large cream tiles. It seemed like a palace after Doddys, with carpeted floors and plush velvet seats priced 1/-, 1/9, and 2/3..
At Boston there was the Scala Picture House, which had fix fold down seats, and the Saturday matinee was 3d. There was a balcony, but only the ground floor was used for the kids. The films then were all black and white, and always looked as though it was raining because they were so scratched. Gran said we were lucky as in her day, a magic lantern show would have been a treat.
There was also the New Theatre, which had live shows and films. It was pulled down and replaced with Marks and Spencers. Uncle Albert took Barbara to the last show there, which was the Billy Cotton Band Show in 1958. The Regal cinema in Boston was built in 1937, followed by the Odeon the next year. It was quite posh and they had a Mickey Mouse club for kids on Saturday mornings, which cost 6d. You got a talk on things like road safety, a sing song, and a couple of films, for example, Laurel and Hardy or Charlie Chaplin, or the Three Stooges. This would be followed by a western and a cartoon. For the main film, the doors opened at 1.30pm, and then it was a continuous performance until 22.30. You could watch a film round a couple of times if you wished, and in the intervals, girls came round selling ice-cream, which was a novelty.
Until 1937, there was a row of cottages on the left of North Street, which runs from Norfolk Street, between the factory buildings. These were known as the Irish houses, as they were occupied by Irish labourers who worked in the canning factories, and on the land. However, Fisher Clarks bought the land to extend their factory, so these houses were pulled down. One day, Brian and his cousin Gordon and I were searching through the rubble when we found a length of lead pipe. Thinking it could be worth a bit, we tried to break it off where it went into the ground, when suddenly, it fractured, and a jet of water went about 20 feet into the air. So we took to our heals and ran, and as we looked back, there was a copper in the distance, approaching on his bike, so we ran down Grand Sluice Lane. Brian and I hid behind a garden fence, next to the water tower, but Gordon shinned up the gas lamp opposite and sat on the top. The copper rode down the lane, looking from side to side, turned at the bottom but still missed seeing Gordon on the lamp. At that time, police were in order to give you a clout for minor offences.
Before the war, religion played a big part in life, with prayers in school at morning assembly, and in class before we left in the afternoon. We also kneeled at our bedside and prayed before going to sleep. This was a daily ritual, and Christmas was a religious celebration, with most people going to church on Christmas morning. Dad was not a churchgoer, and I think that rubbed off on me. Christmas cards we only sent to close friends and relatives, and presents were very minor to what they are today. You hung a stocking up, and got sweets, nuts, apples and oranges in it, plus one or two small presents. One year I got a tinplate twin engine clockwork aeroplane, which a battery and lights. I had seen it in Marks and Spencers for 2/11 and said how much I liked it, but that was a lot to pay then. If I had it now, it would be priceless.
Woolworths had a sign over their shops “Nothing over 6d”. A wind-up tinplate toy was only 6d and lead soldiers only 1d. You could even buy a camera, which was 6d for the body, 6d for the lens, and a film was also 6d. A bar of chocolate was 2d and wrapped sweets were 10 for a penny. But farm workers pay was only 30 shillings a week, and factory and shop workers 2 pounds to £2/10, so life was only an existence.
On Sundays, most people went to church, and afterwards went for long walks. John and Gertie used to do a lot of cycling, and John would ride me on his crossbar or I sat on the carrier on the back wheel of Gertie’s bike. One Sunday, when I was about 9, Gertie and John took Dot and I on the bus to Freiston Shore for the day. It was a lovely summers day, and we had packed sandwiches. It was like being at the seaside, but the sand was all mud. The tide was out when we arrived, and there were people all over the marsh, paddling in the creeks. Dot and I had our swimming gear on, and were covered in mud from head to foot. Then the tide came in and everyone retreated to the bank. There were two hotels which were flourishing businesses, The Marine, and the Plummers with people sitting outside supping pints. Much of the marsh has been reclaimed over the years by the Borstal boys from the prison camp nearby, but in those days, the tide came right up to the bank. Gertie fetched a bucket of water and washed us down, then we laid down on the bank and ate our sandwiches, and that was a good day out at the seaside.
We often went for walks down the seabank on Sundays and watched the ships come in. Most of them were laden with timber and if they had had a rough crossing, sometimes their load had shifted, and they would have quite a list on. It was interesting watching them negotiate the locks with timber hanging over the side. The timber was unloaded manually, by a gang of about 50 men with a leather pad over one shoulder. They walked onto the ship on one gangway, then the timber was loaded onto their shoulder, and they carried it off on a second gangway, and stacked it on the quay. Working continuously for hours at at a time, it was very hard work. There was a coal hoist where coal trucks were lifted up a tower then tipped, so the coal ran down a chute, into the ships hold. On the opposite side of the dock, the ships unloaded cargoes of fruit which were stacked into warehouses along the quayside. There was apples, bananas, oranges, tomatoes, etc and the railtrack ran the length of these building, where men were working all hours, loading wagons. With everything being loaded manually, the dock was one of the towns largest employers.
When the dock was first opened in 1884, Gran was 25 years old, and helped with the catering. She said it was a huge celebration with trestle tables set up at the end of the dock, and the towns dignitaries, councillors and businessmen were served teas.
In the summer months, Drings canning factory, which later became Lockwoods, and which is now an Industrial Estate in Norfolk Street, used to work through the night, canning peas, beans and fresh fruit. It was a terrible din, with conveyor belts screeching, as cans were filled, put into metal crates, and cooked in huge retorts. After which, the lids were clamped on, and then came down a chute into crates, waiting to be labelled and packed. It was a continuous clatter, and I always had trouble getting off to sleep on those nights. On our way to and from school, we used to run after the trailers carting peas and grab a few pods off the stalks. There were 4 canning factories in the town. Beaulah’s had two in the Bargate area, one on the top of Horncastle Road, and the other, was on the right of the drain, looking from Bargate bridge.
On summer nights, when the weather was hot, and I couldn’t sleep, I noticed that Gertie was always last to bed, and she spent a long time in John’s room saying goodnight. Then he would often take her to the pictures, and sometimes I caught them cuddling in the front room, so John changed from the lodger to one of the family. When I was about 10, he bought an up-to-date radio which plugged into the mains. It was a Marconi, in a bakelite case, and reception was quite clear, so the old battery set was dumped, as most people were getting electricity now. So sometimes I came in early from playing in the lane to listen to certain programmes, Arthur Askey in Bandwagon was my favourite.
Empire Air Day was when most of the R.A.F. airfields were open to the public, and in 1938 John took me to Cranwell on the bus. It was my first air display, and what I remember most was standing behind the latest fighter, the Spitfire, and leaning against the wind it created while it revved up with its brakes on, lifting its tail off the ground.
In the summer of 1938, I was on holiday in Stamford, and Dad had taken me on a bus run with him. When we got back to the bus depot, Dad said we needed some eggs so we went to the Egg Depot just across the yard. After we bought the eggs, he spent ages talking to a woman called Nellie, little did I realise she was to become my Step-mother.
The same year we were issued with Gas masks, as war loomed ever closer. Kids were issued with theirs at school, and as there were different sizes we had to make sure they fitted. As you inhaled the rubber fitted tight around your face, and air came in through the canister on the front, but when you exhaled, the flap on the inlet closed and the air came out by your cheeks. By adjusting the tension it was possible to make farty noises,so with the whole class practising gas-mask drill we had some good laughs, much to the annoyance of the teacher.
In September 1938, it looked like we were going to war, but Neville Chamberlain signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler and it gave us a little time to prepare. In the cities, Anderson shelters were issued to Householders to erect in their gardens, but in Boston a large air raid shelter was built in the park. It was an L shape dug out of the grass area, but it was never used as it kept flooding,I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time, a lot of it was trial and error.
Grown ups talked of world affairs, i.e., German planes bombed Spanish cities during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis took over the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia then started a purge on the Jews. King George V died, Edward VIII took the throne, but then abdicated and married Mrs Simpson, George VI was crowned so we had 3 kings in a year. As a 10 year old, I took little notice of these events in 1938. I was more interested in the “Mallard” breaking the world steam record on its nonstop run to Edinburgh at 126mph, and taking on water from troughs in the tracks en route.
I was quite happy living with Gran, but early in 1939 Dad came over with Nellie and introduced her to the family. He still had the Austin 7, and I had to go with them as he took her to meet his mother, brothers and sister. He told them all that they were getting married in April, but it was only a quiet wedding at St. Michaels, Stamford with a few guests, excluding me. Dad said that after the wedding I was to go back to Stamford and live with them, so I therefore took an instant dislike to Nellie. Probably because I knew it was going to change my life, after all, I liked the Park school, and it meant leaving all my mates behind. I begged Dad to let me stay with Gran but he would not hear of it, so it made me quite miserable.
Dot had met an airman from Wittering and was going quite steady with him, but I think it hastened her romance when she saw how things were going. Dad had been bringing Nellie home for a while and Dot could not stand her, and she was pregnant anyway so she married Syd at the registry office, and they rented a little house in Conduit Terrace.
So Dad and Nellie married in late April, spent a few days with some of her friends in York, as she came from the area, then after a few days came over and took me back with them. Gertie had been like a mother to me for the past 3-4 years so it was a very tearful goodbye. Dad said I must now call Nellie, Mum, so that put my back up from the start. I felt that no way could she take the place of my mother.
Stamford was such a dull cheerless place in my mind, everywhere there were grey stone buildings, which did not help my frame of mind. Dad had already booked me into St Michael’s school, so on my first day he took me to school and introduced to my teacher, a Mr York, who introduced me to the class. I sat next to a lad called Ray, who was always knocking my arm when I was writing, until one day, “Yorky” caught him and made him stand in the corner. He then called me out in front of the class, asking me questions about the Docks, and getting me to address the class with my replies, so in fact I was telling them what life was like working on a Dock. People did not travel much and most kids had not seen ships, so I felt quite superior for a while. The standard of education was way below what I had been doing in Boston, so I used to sit day-dreaming a lot and getting into trouble for not paying attention.
Most days when I left school, I would call at Dot’s, as she lived near the school, and at least with her I felt at home, so we had a few laughs. I got on fairly well with Syd, and he had a sister called Flo with whom I got on with even better. She came to live with them for a while, and I suppose I fancied her in a way, as we grabbed hold of each other at times when we were larking about, but she was about 5 years older.
At weekends I played a lot with the lad next door, Ron Carzon. It was a big house with a massive garden that reached right down to Scotgate, with trees that we climbed, and we had war games with our lead soldiers. His family was wealthy and he went to the Grammar School.
After Gran’s selection of food, Nellie’s was terrible, as she had lived at home and never done any cooking, so every meal was a trial and error job, with few successes, and sometimes Dad complained it was not fit to eat. Things gradually got better, but her meals were always very plain.
I had a couple of weeks holiday in Boston that summer, travelling by rail on my own. It meant changing stations at Peterborough, as Stamford was on the L.M.S. line (London Midland and Scottish), and Boston was on the L.N.E.R. (London, North Eastern Railway), so it meant walking across Peterborough carrying my case.I had been there a few times with Dad on the bus and when he had waiting time we walked around the town so I knew my way, but felt quite grown up travelling on my own. Well it was great spending time in Boston with my old mates. But everyone was talking about Hitler and the threat of war in Europe, remembering the last one. The holiday soon went and Auntie Gertie shed tears when I left.
So it was back to Stamford and its drab buildings, and I did not appreciate the history of the town at the age of 11. The A1 ran through the town, then known as the Great North Road, and there were often large loads passing through, and it was interesting watching them negotiate the narrow bends. There were still quite a few steam lorries on the road, but in 1939 the Government put the tax on them up to £100, and that gradually phased them out.
One good thing about St. Michael’s School was woodwork which we didn’t have at Boston, so I enjoyed that, but the down side was we played football on the Recreation Ground opposite - not very interested. Then there was swimming, when we had to walk through the town to the Baths near the railway station. It was an open-air Baths and the water was freezing cold, well I could not swim, and one day the instructor grabbed me saying “You will learn to swim”, and chucked me in the deep end, I kept going under and would have drowned if he had not jumped in and got me out. That really scared me, so one Saturday, Ron and I went down the Meadows, where there were two places that people used to swim, known as Big Cobblers and Little Cobblers, this was no more than 2-3 feet deep. It was quite a warm day and after a couple of hours we found we could do a dog paddle, and I thought at least I can’t drown now. The next time we learnt the breaststroke, and after that I enjoyed swimming.
Towards the end of the summer holiday, Hitler’s troops marched into Poland and Britain and France had signed a pact that we would go to war if that happened. So on the 3rd September, after an ultimatum had been given to Hitler, we heard on the radio that an announcement would be made at 11am. It was a lovely Sunday morning, and everything was so peaceful, when Neville Chamberlain came on the air and told us we were now at war with Germany. I expected within days we would see planes coming over dropping bombs, but as time went by life carried on much as before, the only difference was that we always took our gas masks with us wherever we went.
With the war came the Blackout, when all streetlights were switched off, and everyone had to use heavy curtains or make blackout shutters. Air Raid Wardens were appointed to go round and make sure no one was showing any lights, and if you went out at night you always took at torch to see where you were going.
At Christmas, Dad bought me (second hand) a twin cylinder stationary steam engine, mounted on a base about 6 inches by 9. Also a set of Meccano, so I spent a lot of time that winter building models and driving them with the engine, so a lot of my pocket money went on buying methylated spirit. On my birthday I got a Dynamo which I drove from the engine, and then I could light a string of bulbs from it. Dad used to join me and help me with it, and looking back, in the few years I lived with him, he taught me a lot of basic things, showing me how to use tools etc., which I have always put into practice.
In the first months of the war all young men between the ages of 18 to 30 were called up, and Dad’s firm lost half its drivers, so he had to go driving full time. Even though they took on some older men there were times when Dad had to work 7am till 11.30pm. Nellie hated to be on her own at night and often kept me up till he came home. Unknown to him she heard him life the latch on the back gate, then she would rush me off upstairs with my candle before he got through to the living room. In the spring of 1940 she had a miscarriage, they thought I didn’t know, but I came home for dinner one day, and she was in bed and her mother was in charge, the midwife was upstairs so I put 2 and 2 together, and with the scraps of conversation, I knew she had lost the baby.
After that Dad had a weeks holiday. and took her to Bridlington, and I had to stay with her parents at 34 New Cross Road. I had to call her Nan, but he was Mr Walker to me, but it but it made me smile when she called him “Willie”, short for William.
All iron railings were requisitioned by the Government, apart from schools, so the first year of the war there were gangs going round with acetylene torches cutting the railings off in every street. Almost every house had railings then, so it made the streets look very bare when they went. The iron all went towards making arms and ammunitions. All road signposts were taken down so strangers never knew where they were going. The idea was that if we got invaded the Germans would not know either, but they need not have bothered as it transpired after the war that the Airships from Berlin to New York on a regular service, took a slightly different path each time and had photographed the whole of the country before 1939.
In the cities, more than half the children were evacuated to country areas and small towns, so the evacuees as we called them were not very happy kids. People with room to spare had these kids thrust upon them, for a small payment, and if they did not take to them it was a miserable time for all concerned.
In the spring of 1940, I had just left school when I heard a plane flying low from the east, as it got nearer, I noticed a black cross on its fuselage as it released a bomb, I ducked down behind the school wall waiting for the bang, but the bomber disappeared behind trees on the Recreation ground and all went quiet. It was the first enemy plane I saw and it scared me to death, so I ran non-stop to Dot’s, really frightened and told her. We learned later that the bomb landed in St Leonards Street, but did not go off. No sirens sounded so the whole of the town was taken by surprise.
We were issued with ration books and also Identity cards, which you were supposed to carry at all times, and food was rationed within a few weeks of the war being declared. There was not much to spend money on and people were encouraged to buy War Saving Certificates to help the war effort. Most towns set a target, and at Stamford it was to pay for a Spitfire, which was £5000, so there was a large thermometer type recorder erected at the end of Broad Street, which was numbered 0 to 5000, and every week it was marked up in red paint, but it only got to halfway up by the time I left the town in October 1940. Because poison gas was used in the 1914-18 war, it was expected to be used in towns and cities, so we had to carry our gas masks at all times. In most streets there were large boards about 2 feet square put up on the posts about 3 feet high, and they were painted a lime green colour. If there was gas in the air they were supposed to change colour as a warning, but of course this never happened. For the first two years we carried our gas masks at all times. But as time went by, we gradually left them at home and hoped for the best.
Many older men not conscripted to the armed forces volunteered for the Home Guard or A.R.P. Wardens (Air Raid Precautions), later known as Civil Defence. One day at St Michaels, two of these wardens came to demonstrate how to put out an Incendiary Bomb with sand. It was dangerous to use water as they contained phosphorous and magnesium, and water made them volatile, spreading the burning contents in all directions. With the tail fin they were about 2 feet long and 3 inches in diameter, just like a large firework. Most streets had a fire point with shovels and buckets of sand, supplied by the Council, I still have one such shovel which I acquired from the ambulance station on Carlton Road, (where the new school is now).Incendiaries did as much damage as high explosives, as they had enough impact to go through a roof, and then set fire to the loft, and a whole street could be burned down with these, while people were in air raid shelters. There were people appointed as Fire Watchers, but they could not be everywhere.
Dad was working 12 hours a day and Nellie was always nagging him because he was never at home, so he started looking for another job and eventually got an interview at Leicester for a job as an ambulance driver. He was successful, so Dad and Nellie moved to Blaby, 6 miles south of the city in October, and left me staying with her parents for a week while they got settled in. I went by train to Leicester the following week, whence Dad met me at the station. The city seemed such a busy place after the quiet life in Lincolnshire, as we walked to the bus terminal and took a bus to Blaby. There was then a mile walk from the village to the Isolation Hospital. Our house was at the entrance and was called The Lodge.
The ambulance cover the whole of Leicestershire excluding the city, also taking patients to two other isolation hospitals, one at Hinckley and the other at Markfield. the city had its own hospital at Groby Road. At that time there was a lot of diphtheria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, meningitis, scabies, and others which meant people had to go into hospital to prevent the spread of infection. Dad was on call 24 hours a day, six days a week, and when he had a day off the gardener took over. Up the drive from our house was the boiler house and opposite that was the nurses home where the nurses lived. Behind these were two main wards and behind those was a ward for emergencies.
As a child I remember there were sometimes kids off school with scarlet fever and diphtheria, but during the war people were living in more cramped conditions with houses having been bombed and evacuees swelling the population in the country areas, so diseases were spread more easily. Dad was out at all hours ferrying cases to the three hospitals but he did not go out after dark unless it was urgent as driving in the dark was dangerous with headlights masked, and with a thin slot of light you could not see where you were going and were only just visible to other drivers.
I did not like living in the country after being in a town. The nearest farm was half a mile away and the hospital was down a 200 yard drive of the lane. After a couple of days, dad took me to the nearest school to get me on the register. This was 2 miles away at South Wigston, a secondary modern school built just before the war. I had never seen a school like it with over 1000 pupils, it was built in two identical halves. There were separate schools for boys and girls but the boys were not allowed to talk to the girls. 100 yards of grass separated the playgrounds and it was out of bounds. I never dreamed in those days that they would be mixed schools in the future.
Before we left Stamford Dad bought a bike from one of his workmates and he had to put wooden blocks on the pedals for me as I could not reach them, and I needed a bike to get to school. I want it 2B and on my first day I was absolutely lost as at the end of each lesson bells rang and we changed classrooms so we have a different teacher for each subject. I have had an easy time at Stamford but now had a lot of catching up to do. All the lessons were interesting, but very intensive. On my first lesson I sat near a lad called Keith Humphries. At playtime the usual bullies started picking on me, wanting a fight as they always did with anyone new, but Keith came to my rescue. He was the tallest lad in the class and well respected so I hung around with him most of the time and felt safe. The school had a large catchment area and about 20 buses ferried kids in from villages of up to 10 miles away. In the centre of the school was the kitchen, with the girls dining room on one side and the boys on the other. Most kids stayed for dinner which cost 5d a day, 2/1d per week (2p a day, 10½p per week). This was collected by the form teachers on Monday mornings after we had assembly in the main hall. This was where the day started with prayers and hymns which were all Church of England of course. Most of the lads had milk at break time which cost a halfpenny for a third of a pint, but I never liked drinking milk. Dinner was a really good meal with a pudding, and it helped out with rationing at home. I enjoyed it far better than Nellie’s cooking! We had P.E. twice a week and a double period for games once a week. More often than not it was rugby, and we always showered after these activities so I always had to have a towel in my locker.
In June 1940 when our troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, morale was very low and most people felt it was only a matter of time before Hitler invaded our shores. Then the heavy bombing of our cities began and that put everyone in a defiant mood. Throughout 1941 there were raids on most nights when the weather was favourable, and Coventry was bombed regularly. It was only 15 miles from where we lived, and dad and I used to stand on the back porch watching the planes being picked out by Searchlight. The anti-aircraft guns fired dozens of shells at them but we never saw one brought down.
After they had dropped their bombs we were in the flight path of their return run, and ate a few odd bombs ended up near us as they closed bomb doors and dislodged odd leftovers. One landed in soft ground about 200 yards away and made a deep crater, but we were surrounded by trees and did not even lose a window pane.
In the summer of 1941, I started going to Keith’s home after school where I met his family. He had an older sister Margaret, and three younger brothers, Barry, David and John. They made me welcome and I soon felt like one of the family. Keith did a paper round every morning and evening and I often helped him with the evening round. Sometimes he came with me to the hospital where there were eight acres of grounds for us to play in, and there were plenty of fields around to explore as well.
At school we used to tie notes to stones and throw them across to the girls’ playground, and by this method we started seeing two girls, Betty and Mary. There was a large park at South Wigston and we used to meet up with them there in the evenings. Sometimes we went for bike rides in the country and did a bit of exploring. We also practised a bit of snogging but that is all it was. We did not have sex lessons then so it was all uncharted territory.
The ambulance had a bench seat and when I was on holiday, Dad sometimes let me go with him. I sat between him and the nurse so I got to know Leicestershire at an early age. The ambulance was a 25 hp Vauxhall with a 1930 Morris Commercial as a standby, but after a year he got a Humber Super Snipe and this was absolute luxury. The ambulance had to be ‘stoved’ between each type of infection. This was done by mixing two chemicals together in a tin, then adding water, and leaving it just inside the back doors and shutting the doors immediately. It was like a poison gas it was supposed to kill the germs.
When Dad was not driving, his job was maintenance, so he did all the minor repairs and had a workshop in the boiler house where I spent many hours watching and helping him and picked up quite a lot of DIY know-how this way. Next to the boiler house was the laundry where all the nurses uniforms and bedding were washed and pressed. The boiler also provided heating for the nurses home and had to be stoked all day and banked down at night. Next to the laundry were two rooms for the disinfester, which was a large cast iron cylinder with half protruding into each room. One room was for infected clothing, blankets etc and the other was for the sterilised material. A cradle was pulled out either end and once a week the infected stuff was loaded into it then slid into the outer cylinder. A hinged door on each end was sealed tight with eight screw clamps tightened around its outer edge. A steam cock was then opened and it pressurised to 60 pounds per square inch. After an hour, the cock was closed and a valve opened which vented the steam out of the roof. When it cooled, the material was taken out of the other side and it was quite dry. This proved to me that steam is not wet and only vaporises when it’s in contact with the air.
Blaby Hospital only took diphtheria and scarlet fever cases; up to 20 of each with a spare ward for other cases in an emergency. Visitors were allowed on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays but they had to walk a mile from the village and when they got to the hospital they were not allowed on the wards. There was a bed at every window, and outside each window there were steps so that children could see into the ward. The beds were turned to face the windows and conversations took place through the glass, as windows were kept shut out visiting times. In winter visitors stood outside in all weathers, shouting when it was windy to make themselves heard. Those with diphtheria could hardly speak, as their throats were so swollen and inflamed, so they used to write notes on pads. Visiting hours were from three till four p.m. and if it was cold and wet, Dad would let them into the boiler house to get warm and dry before they set out for the village to catch the bus.
The garage for the ambulance was in the boiler house block, and the petrol was stored in 2 gallon cans down one side. There were about 80 cans in all and dad used to get a chit for 100 gallons at a time which he used to fetch in the ambulance from the local garage in Blaby. This ensured there was plenty of petrol for nights and weekends. After one of those trips when I went with him, I got into the driving seat and Dad showed me the controls, so I practised on the tarmac outside the garage. I soon picked it up and had little excursions around the hospital grounds when the matron was out, and so at age 13, I learned to drive. There was no petrol for the general public. Everyone with cars had to lay them up. You had to be someone special like a doctor to get a petrol ration, and people were selling their cars for £10 or £20 as they could never see them being used again.
In the spring of 1941 it was noticeable that Nellie was pregnant again, and in July the midwife was called to deliver Peter. There was no such thing as going into hospital. There were no maternity wards in those days and the doctor did not attend for normal births. On the second day the nurse noticed that Peter had an anus, but it was grown over so the doctor had to be called. This meant a trip to Leicester Royal for a minor operation but he was home and doing fine after a couple of days, apart from a sore bum!
In the summer of 1941 I went by train to Stamford and spent the night with Dot. Averil had been born in January and she was about seven months old. Syd had been sent overseas and Dot was struggling to bring up two kids of her own. Letters had to be sent to and fro as we did not have phones, so arrangements took time. Anyway, I helped Dot with the kids, and we went to Boston on the train for a week, so it was great to spend time with her and my old mates. Gran had plenty of friends in the country that kept chickens and pigs, and they would sometimes bring her the odd rabbit. She was also 'well in' with Morley the butcher up the road. I never knew a house like Gran's. Every day there were people dropping in, and even with all the rationing she never seemed short of food, unlike Nellie where the rations ran out every week. Bread and milk were not rationed, so we filled up on that if there was nothing else. John, of course, had been called up and was serving with the Grenadier Guards, and Gertie did not know where he was. She was only given a field post office number to write to. So, after a lovely week in Boston, it was back to Stamford on the train, spending a night at Dot's on the way.
The egg ration was one per week, but half the time we only got "National Dried Egg" which was made in the United States and Canada, and issued in waxed cartons. It was reconstituted by mixing with milk or water, put fried it was just a leathery omelette. Most of our food came from across the Atlantic on a lease-lend agreement, which left us in debt for many years after the war had finished.
The egg ration was one per week, but half the time we only got "National Dried Egg" which was made in the United States and Canada, and issued in waxed cartons. It was reconstituted by mixing with milk or water, put fried it was just a leathery omelette. Most of our food came from across the Atlantic on a lease-lend agreement, which left us in debt for many years after the war had finished.
If Dad got called out in the evening with an admission to Markfield or Hinckley, he could be gone for hours, as driving in the blackout with no headlights was a slow job. So I kept the boilers going for him, and if he was not back by 10 pm, I would rake the clinker out and bank them down for the night. I used a large torch for this to find my way around, and one night I had just finished and was on my way back to the house. There was an air raid on, and Leicester was getting a bit of a pasting, when suddenly I heard a plane coming low from that direction. My torch had a good beam on it so I shone it towards the oncoming sound. A machine gun rattled into life and bullets went through the corrugated iron fence near our house. I soon put my torch out and ran back into the house trembling, not daring to say anything. The next morning before going to school I saw bullet holes in the fence and months later Dad dug some bullets out of the garden. I then told him what had happened, and after calling me a silly bugger, we had a laugh about it.
During the summer of '41, Keith and I did quite a lot of cycling, mostly on Saturdays when we had more time. We would take a sandwich and a bottle of drink and toured the whole area around Leicester. Our favourite places were the hilly parts on the Loughborough side of the city and the best scenery was in Swithland and Woodhouse area. Nearby was Bradgate Park where we climbed up 'Old John', the highest place in the county. Of course, signposts were taken down during the war so we often got lost on the back roads. We always carried tools and a repair kit in case we got a puncture, and one Saturday we went to Melton and stayed the night with Mrs Humphries' sister, exploring the area and returning on Sunday afternoon. Another time we cycled to Wicksteed Park near Kettering, and we once went to Stamford and stayed the night at Dot's. If you went to stay with anyone you always took some food with you to help with the rationing. It seemed that we were always at each other's houses, and on Sundays I'd have tea with the Humphries and then go to evening service with them. I enjoyed singing the hymns but had a job to keep awake during the sermon.
Most people lived in terraced houses at that time, and around Leicester the terraced streets had air raid shelters built in them large enough for 200 people. The walls were three bricks thick with a reinforced concrete roof, and took up half the width of the street, but not many people used them. Some had Anderson shelters built in their gardens. They were thick corrugated iron buried in the ground but they got flooded in wet weather. The Humphries had Blast Walls in the back yard. They were over 6 feet high and about 2 feet apart, and pushing your bike along on its back wheel there was just enough room to zigzag around them. There was also a large baulk of timber across the living room ceiling supported with uprights at either end fastened to the walls, and this was their refuge during the air raids, but most people just huddled under the stairs for safety.
The first two terms at Wigston were quite hard, having dropped behind at Stamford, and all my school reports said that I was not trying hard enough, but I thought I was doing okay. Science covered a wide range, from heating chemicals over a Bunsen Burner, examining microbes under a microscope, to building electric working models like Morse tappers, buzzers, doorbells and motors. Then we had Metalwork, where I remember I spent two or three periods hammering a sheet of copper over a dolly until I shaped it into an ashtray. I also made of brass toasting fork, and in Woodwork, I made a wooden puzzle, an oak bedside lamp, and a tea tray. In Geography, the teacher always had a stack of heavy books on his desk and if you were not paying attention, he would hurl one of these at you. Getting sent to the headmaster's study for 'six of the best' across your backside was all part of everyday life in those days.
In the summer we were allowed time off school to work on the land, providing you were over 13. So it was that in 1941, Keith and I with about a dozen others went potato picking, following the tractor as it spun them out, and putting them into a 'molly' - a wicker basket. For this we were paid five pence an hour, but we were only allowed to work six hours a day. This meant we could earn half a crown a day, or 12 shillings and sixpence a week. Later in the year we helped with the sugar beet harvest but that was a horrible job, as you had to hold them by the tops and bash them together to knock the soil off, and some mornings there was ice on them!
The winter of 1942 was severe and in January the hospital was cut off from the outside world by snowdrifts up to 6 feet deep in places, so I helped Dad and the Gardener to dig a 300 yard track from the garage down the drive to the lane. Then in the afternoon we took the ambulance to Blaby to fetch bread, milk and groceries, as tradesmen could not get through. It was hard work for a while but then we joined up with local farmers and the extra help keeping the road clear made it easier. After that I had a few days off school to nurse my blisters!
I left school at Easter after my 14th birthday, and when I look at today's level of education and compare it to mine, I believe that we were better educated at 14 than today's kids are at 16. In my day it was all talk and chalk, and there were no mixed classes. There were seven periods per day and each day you went home knowing that you had learned something.
When I left school it was mostly factory work in the Wigston area which I did not fancy. Dad made some enquiries and found that they needed a lad at the Co-op in Countesthorpe, about a mile south of Blaby, so I went to see the manager there and got the job. It was 14 shillings a week for a 44 hour week. Dad thought it was a good job because his theory was that people will always need food so you will always have a job. He still remembered the Depression between the wars when so many people were out of work.
So now I had to cycle one and a half miles to work, starting at 8:30 AM, with an hour for dinner and although the shop closed at 5:30 PM, by the time we had got the bacon machine cleaned and the provisions counter scrubbed, and the floor mopped, it was usually nearer 6 PM by the time I left. My finish time was supposed to be 5:30 PM, but as we were never finished by then I ended up doing a 48 hour week. I had been keen to leave school, but after my first week at work I was wishing I was back. Out of my 14 shillings pay, I paid two pence Health Insurance and two pence Unemployment Benefit (known as dole). If you were sacked you were given your cards which your employer kept and stamped every week. The stamps were purchased at the Post Office, and until you were 16 you paid four pence a week. At 18, it went up to 8 pence, but at 21 you paid one shilling and eight pence because you were then on adult pay. (Before the NHS, most people had to pay one pence or two pence just to see a doctor). So, out of the 13 shillings and eight pence that I took home, Nellie would allow me just two shillings pocket money. It was not much after I had worked about 48 hours.
The first morning at the Co-Op the manager asked, " What's your name, lad?" to which I replied, "Langley". " No, I mean your first name", he scoffed. I said, "That is my first name". He laughed, telling me,"That's a silly name. We can't call you that. Haven't you got another name?" I replied that my second name was Robert. " That'll do. We'll call you Bob!". I hated the name Langley after that.
None of the dry foods were prepacked as everything came in sacks and had to be weighed out, so Monday was spent weighing and wrapping sugar, flour, rice, sago, lentils, dried peas, prunes, all dried fruits, lard, butter, suet, and many others. I had to learn all this on my first day, but of course I was the Errand boy so at least I got a break from it from time to time. I had to load the carrier bike and do deliveries around the village, which spread a mile in each direction. That was okay when the weather was fine, but not too good in the winter. Also, I sometimes had around eight stones of weight in the carrier, and only my seven stones of weight to balance it and cycle around at the same time!
On Wednesdays the delivery came from Leicester. Most of the three ton lorry I had to unload myself, because the women did not carry, and the manager had a bad back. The sugar was in 16 stone sacks and I had to carry them on my back, but with the manager assisting on one side and one of the girls on the other I was able to stagger in, and after a few weeks I did it on my own keeping it upright on my shoulders.
I used to bike home for dinner and then after tea go down to Keith's. He was still at school as he had applied for the fourth form, and luckily was selected. I did not mention it before but the average number in class then what about 45. Nowadays teachers can't cope with 25. Anyway, we had started going out with a couple of girls and we had dated while I was still at school, by chucking notes tied to stones across to their playground, so by this method we used to meet up in the park. Sometimes there would be a gang of us larking about, but as the evening wore on we split into couples and went our own way. I was supposed to be in by 10 PM and I often got into trouble for being late. Well, we didn't own watches, did we? That was my excuse.
During 1942 I got a bit depressed as there did not seem to be anything to look forward to. I did not like my job, and there were air raids three or four nights a week, so we lost a lot of sleep. There was still the threat of invasion, and we knew if the Jerries came we did not stand much chance of fighting them off. Having seen newsreels of what had happened in Europe, and thinking that could also happen to us, and knowing that when I was 18 I would be called up, it made my future looked rather bleak. Working at the Co-Op did not help, as my mates all had Saturdays off, and as it was six o'clock before I got home, I missed out on the bike rides I had enjoyed when I was at school. In those days you did not get a week's holiday until you had worked for an employer for a year. Nobody had more than one week anyway, except for schoolteachers, so there was no chance of getting a day off work.
During the winter, Keith and I had widened our search for girls to the south side of Wigston, known as the 'Monkey Run'. This was a road that lads and lasses paraded looking for a bit of 'fresh'. It was a pitch black night. There were no streetlights of course due to the blackout, but we picked up a couple of girls and arranged to meet them on Sunday afternoon, but when the time came and we met them we could not believe how ugly they were! There was no getting out of it as they recognised us two, being short and tall, so that taught us a lesson!
When I was 15 I got two shillings pay rise, so Nellie put my pocket money up to 2 shillings and sixpence. However, I was now smoking Park Drive cigarettes at four pence for 10, and to go to the cinema cost one shilling, so it did not go far. Dad still bought my clothes, but of course clothing coupons curtailed spending in that area.
In the spring of 1943 I had a week's holiday, so Keith and I biked to Boston where we had a great time. We even cycled to Skegness during our stay, and had lots of fun with Gertie. When the time came for us to cycle back on the Sunday morning, it was raining with gale force westerly winds. We left Boston at 8:30 AM and it wasn't too bad up to Grantham, but from then on we had to walk up all the hills and by the time we got to Melton we were knackered. I remember lying on the wet grass verge a few times with all our energy spent, but we kept urging each other on and eventually got back after 8 PM in the dark, more dead than alive! Mr and Mrs Humphries were really worried as no one had telephones then, so there was no way of letting them know.
Shortly after this, I was fed up of working Saturday afternoons, and the play at the trouble was so low that I looked in the adverts in the Leicester Mercury, and applied for a job with a grocery wholesaler south of the city. It was 30 shillings a week so I said to Nellie that if I got it could I keep 10 shillings a week for myself, to which she agreed. So, I went for an interview and got the job, and during a conversation with the boss, a Mr Pepper, he asked to look at my shoes. This baffled me, but he explained he always judged people by their footwear. If they took care of their shoes they were usually of good character. I have found this to be generally true over the years, but at that time shoes were all leather, well polished, and you got them soled and heeled regularly to make them last. Today, you chuck them away when the soles are worn, and besides, half of the population wear trainers now so that rule doesn't work any more.
So I started work at Peppers, from 8 AM to 5:30 PM, but now I had to bike 5 miles to work, and for the first few weeks I also used to bike home for dinner, but that only gave me 20 minutes in house. There was a baker's shop near Peppers so I started buying bread rolls there, and nicked a bit of cheese when nobody was looking, so that made things a bit easier. There was a dart board in the rest room, and in no time at all I was scoring 'three in a bed'. Four of us would play '501' at a penny a game and it usually paid for my bread rolls.
Peppers had customers all over the county and city, as well as Rugby, Nuneaton and Coventry. Every street had its corner shop, and for a while I was collating orders with an occasional ride out as Driver's Mate. After a while two of the older lads were called up at 18, and I was out on deliveries full-time, so I soon got to know most of the roads in the county and a bit of Warwickshire as well.
There were young lasses in office on which I lost no time in dating one after the other. I would take them to the cinema, or the 'Pictures' as they were known then. I usually managed to secure a double seat on the outside or back row, and we could have a good old snog. But that's as far as it went back then.
In the summer of 1943 Dad got fed up with the ambulance work, being out at all hours and Nellie's dad persuaded him to take a job delivering timber for Rose's Sawmills at North Luffenham. Her dad worked there in the office so that's how it came about, but it was the worst move that Dad ever made. If he had stuck it out, and stayed where he was, he would have retired on a good pension, but Nellie thought it would be nice to be nearer her mum. Well I did not want to live in the country as I'd like my job and enjoyed life the way it was. So I looked around for lodgings but with only a week's notice it was difficult, and in the end Mrs Humphries offered to take me in for 30 shillings a week. I went to the boss and asked him for a rise, and keeping my fingers crossed, when he admitted he did not want to lose me, he put my pay up to 37 shillings and six pence.
Margaret Humphries joined the W.R.A.Cs (the army), so that made an extra place for me. Keith and I slept in a double bed and Barry in a single bed in the middle bedroom. David and John slept in the back room, and of course Mr and Mrs Humphries slept in the front.
At this time Keith and I joined the Air Training Corps, as I knew I would be called up at 18 and wanted to go into the RAF. There are about 50 of us in the squad and we all knew each other from school days. We met twice a week at the school, and a couple of other ex-teachers were officers. We had lessons one night a week, and paraded in the playground on Sunday mornings. I felt quite important in my uniform, marching behind the Drum and Trumpet Band. Keith became Drum Major marching in front and directing with his mace. There were visits to airfields about four times a year, when we often got the chance to fly. My first trip was from Leicester Forest East in a Tiger Moth. The Tiger Moth was a biplane which was flat out at 60 miles an hour. The air speed indicator was on a wing strut, and was basically a flap that was pushed back by the wind with miles per hour marked off on a segment behind it. I sat in the cockpit behind the pilot and communication was through a flexible speaking tube, with a whistle plugged in each end. When you wanted to speak you removed the whistle and blew, then put your ear to the tube waiting for a reply. Before takeoff he told me to rest my feet lightly on the rudder bar and gently hold the joystick, and after we had been flying for a while the whistle went and replying to my hello, he told me I was flying the plane. He was waving his hands in the air, so I pushed the stick forward a little then pulled it back, and it worked! But then I tried banking so he quickly took over again. Sometimes we went to Stoughton, and on one occasion we had a flight in a Dakota which had just been serviced. We were issued with parachutes, and while we were waiting to get on the plane one of my mates pulled the ring which let the drogue chute out. Not wanting to miss the flight by returning the chute to the stores, I shoved it back and put the clip back in place, but during the flight as we were over Market Harborough a fire developed in the port engine and flames were streaking along the side of the plane. We were all ordered to stand and clip a cord from our chutes to a centre rail in the roof in case we had to bail out. But luckily, the pilot shut down the engine, feathered the propeller, and the flames were extinguished, so we flew back on one engine much to my relief.
On a couple of visits we flew in Hawser Gliders. These were a wooden frame with a plywood body and carried up to 50 troops. They were towed by Dakotas which normally had a speed of 250 mph, but when towing only achieved half this speed. When the cable was released at about 500 feet it felt as though you have come to a halt, but then the pilot at the nose down and we dropped like a stone. We had to hang on to our seats or we would have rolled down to the front end, but after levelling out at 100 feet we touched down on the field at 50 mph. Another trip I had was from Wymswold in an Avro Anson, which was very smooth but uneventful.
At this time Keith and I joined the Air Training Corps, as I knew I would be called up at 18 and wanted to go into the RAF. There are about 50 of us in the squad and we all knew each other from school days. We met twice a week at the school, and a couple of other ex-teachers were officers. We had lessons one night a week, and paraded in the playground on Sunday mornings. I felt quite important in my uniform, marching behind the Drum and Trumpet Band. Keith became Drum Major marching in front and directing with his mace. There were visits to airfields about four times a year, when we often got the chance to fly. My first trip was from Leicester Forest East in a Tiger Moth. The Tiger Moth was a biplane which was flat out at 60 miles an hour. The air speed indicator was on a wing strut, and was basically a flap that was pushed back by the wind with miles per hour marked off on a segment behind it. I sat in the cockpit behind the pilot and communication was through a flexible speaking tube, with a whistle plugged in each end. When you wanted to speak you removed the whistle and blew, then put your ear to the tube waiting for a reply. Before takeoff he told me to rest my feet lightly on the rudder bar and gently hold the joystick, and after we had been flying for a while the whistle went and replying to my hello, he told me I was flying the plane. He was waving his hands in the air, so I pushed the stick forward a little then pulled it back, and it worked! But then I tried banking so he quickly took over again. Sometimes we went to Stoughton, and on one occasion we had a flight in a Dakota which had just been serviced. We were issued with parachutes, and while we were waiting to get on the plane one of my mates pulled the ring which let the drogue chute out. Not wanting to miss the flight by returning the chute to the stores, I shoved it back and put the clip back in place, but during the flight as we were over Market Harborough a fire developed in the port engine and flames were streaking along the side of the plane. We were all ordered to stand and clip a cord from our chutes to a centre rail in the roof in case we had to bail out. But luckily, the pilot shut down the engine, feathered the propeller, and the flames were extinguished, so we flew back on one engine much to my relief.
On a couple of visits we flew in Hawser Gliders. These were a wooden frame with a plywood body and carried up to 50 troops. They were towed by Dakotas which normally had a speed of 250 mph, but when towing only achieved half this speed. When the cable was released at about 500 feet it felt as though you have come to a halt, but then the pilot at the nose down and we dropped like a stone. We had to hang on to our seats or we would have rolled down to the front end, but after levelling out at 100 feet we touched down on the field at 50 mph. Another trip I had was from Wymswold in an Avro Anson, which was very smooth but uneventful.
One Sunday in 1944 we went to the Odeon cinema in Leicester when all the squadrons attended. All the seats were filled and we were given a talk by Frank Whittle, the chap who invented the jet engine. He told us he made a model prototype when he was a cadet at Cranwell in the mid 1930s. The Air Ministry took it up and asked the government for funding for research, but it was turned down. If they had not been so shortsighted we could have had jet planes flying very early in the war. So, we had to wait until 1940 before a company called Power Jets was set up to research project. They had a factory at Market Harborough, but trials were carried out at Whetstone just over a mile from where we lived, and the screeching of these engines being tested could be heard for miles around.
I was quite proud of my three years in the ATC, and enjoyed marching in the parades, sometimes with brass bands through the streets of Leicester. By the summer of 1943 the war was turning in our favour and the Germans were in retreat, but I can imagine how proud the Hitler Youth movement must have been in their early days.
At Peppers I was out most days driver's mate and got to know the area pretty well. At the warehouse I used to back the plans in for loading, and is shunt them about the yard, when one day the boss caught me. He came to me in the yard, and I thought I was in real trouble, but he said to me that if I wanted to drive I should get a license. So he gave me five shillings and sent me down to the Motor Taxation Department (each town had its Vehicle Tax Office). I was only 16 and a half but there was such a shortage of drivers that age was not mentioned. Driving tests were started in 1936 but were abandoned during the war, so I did not have to take a test. You just went out with a qualified driver until he was satisfied that you could drive, but lots of folks did not bother. I went out on a three ton Commer van with Len, who had been driving instructor in the Army, and he'd got a job with Peppers after a medical discharge. The first few days were a bit hair-raising, as trams plied all the main roads in a 2 mile radius of the city centre. They travelled down the centre of the road except when picking up passengers, then the track veered in towards the pavement so you overtook on the left, but kept an eye on the track to make sure that the tram did not cut you off. After three weeks Len said that I could drive on my own, but added, " Don't call yourself a driver until you have had five years experience". I smiled at the time but later realised how true his words were. So now I felt quite grown up. I was a driver and I had a 14 year old mate with me.
About this time I went on the Fire Watcher roter at work. Most businesses had fire watchers. They were usually staff that paraded the premises at night during air raids, in case incendiaries were dropped, because if they were tackled straight away they could easily be smothered with a bucket of sand and a shovel. So, once a fortnight I stayed on at work from 5:30 PM until we opened again next morning, but never did weekends. For this we were paid seven shillings and sixpence per night (subsidised by the government), and many nights I got paid for sleeping on a camp bed, but of course if there were raids on then we had to patrol the area.
I was quite proud of my three years in the ATC, and enjoyed marching in the parades, sometimes with brass bands through the streets of Leicester. By the summer of 1943 the war was turning in our favour and the Germans were in retreat, but I can imagine how proud the Hitler Youth movement must have been in their early days.
At Peppers I was out most days driver's mate and got to know the area pretty well. At the warehouse I used to back the plans in for loading, and is shunt them about the yard, when one day the boss caught me. He came to me in the yard, and I thought I was in real trouble, but he said to me that if I wanted to drive I should get a license. So he gave me five shillings and sent me down to the Motor Taxation Department (each town had its Vehicle Tax Office). I was only 16 and a half but there was such a shortage of drivers that age was not mentioned. Driving tests were started in 1936 but were abandoned during the war, so I did not have to take a test. You just went out with a qualified driver until he was satisfied that you could drive, but lots of folks did not bother. I went out on a three ton Commer van with Len, who had been driving instructor in the Army, and he'd got a job with Peppers after a medical discharge. The first few days were a bit hair-raising, as trams plied all the main roads in a 2 mile radius of the city centre. They travelled down the centre of the road except when picking up passengers, then the track veered in towards the pavement so you overtook on the left, but kept an eye on the track to make sure that the tram did not cut you off. After three weeks Len said that I could drive on my own, but added, " Don't call yourself a driver until you have had five years experience". I smiled at the time but later realised how true his words were. So now I felt quite grown up. I was a driver and I had a 14 year old mate with me.
About this time I went on the Fire Watcher roter at work. Most businesses had fire watchers. They were usually staff that paraded the premises at night during air raids, in case incendiaries were dropped, because if they were tackled straight away they could easily be smothered with a bucket of sand and a shovel. So, once a fortnight I stayed on at work from 5:30 PM until we opened again next morning, but never did weekends. For this we were paid seven shillings and sixpence per night (subsidised by the government), and many nights I got paid for sleeping on a camp bed, but of course if there were raids on then we had to patrol the area.
The war ended on May 8th 1945, at least in Europe. Victory in Europe was named VE Day. We finished work at dinnertime, and my work mates took me with them for a drink. It was the first time I had been in a pub and everyone was wild with excitement. At night there were lights on everywhere, and people were dancing in the streets. There was music and singing and most streets organised parties where all the residents mucked in and provided what food they could, with tables set out in a row in the middle of the road.
Auntie Gertie wrote and invited Keith and I over for a week's holiday in the summer, and so it was arranged. John was still in the Army, in occupation in Italy, and when the time came, off we went on our bikes. When we arrived in Boston, by some coincidence, Averil and her friend Kathleen Slater were also staying the same week, so Gertie was trying to do a bit of matchmaking. And so it happened that I hit it off with Kathleen and Keith with Averil, and the front room got well used during that week. After the holiday many letters passed to and fro. Then we went to Doncaster for a weekend, after which we still wrote but distance cooled our ardour. Keith started seeing June and I went out with Muriel who work in the office at Peppers. Sometimes I had tea at her house and then she would come and have tea at the Humphries. Even though I still wrote to Kathleen I went out with Muriel until I was called up.
Life with the Humphries gave me a good grounding, because before I went to live with them I had never done any washing up or household chores at all, so it came as a bit of a shock, but Mrs Humphries had warned me that I would have to muck in and do my share the same as the rest. On Mondays we all got up early. Dad Humphries was up at about 6 AM and got the copper lit, and by the time the rest of us got up around 7 AM the water was nearly boiling. If it was a fine morning the Dolly tub was in the back yard and as soon as we had had breakfast we all got stuck in with the washing before we went to work or school. The socks were put in a small bath with a rubbing board, soap was rubbed into the toes before they were rubbed vigourously up and down the board and then chucked into the Dolly tub, where they were given a good bashing to and fro with the dolly peg. They were then rinsed in a tub of cold water, before being put through the mangle (a large cast iron wringer with wooden rollers) which lived in the yard. A line was put up each side of the path to receive the washed clothes, and we always got the socks done before we went, as Mrs Humphries hated the job. All the coloureds were washed in the Dolly, and the whites were boiled in the copper, but with seven of us to wash for it was a huge task. There were always two pairs of sheets to start with and they were a job to get out of the tub, and put through the mangle, but we all did our share before we went to work. Of course there were no detergents, so it was all soap and soda, and on a wet day they all had to be dried around the fire. Mrs H would spend the whole day on Tuesday doing the ironing, and if it was not done when we got home then we all did our share. The irons were heated on a hob in front of the fire so to make sure you did not scorch the clothes you tried them on newspaper first, so living there was a real eye-opener for me. Then Friday night was bath night, so after tea Mr H got the copper lit and the tin bath which hung on a nail in the yard, was brought into the kitchen, and we all took it in turns. The scum was ladled off in between each bath, and a handful of soda, and another bucket of water was added from the copper, to be replaced with a bucket of cold water from the tap, so it was a full evening's job. You could not go out on bath night.
I got to be a regular church attender as they were so religious. When Barry was taking Communion classes I joined him and we were both confirmed at St Saviours Church on the south side of Wigston, so then I used to go to Communion on Sunday mornings with the rest of the family.
Before my 18th birthday I had a form to fill in regarding my enlistment. I had to state qualifications and preference of service, so I asked for RAF transport. However, when my call-up papers came there were no vacancies in the RAF and I had to report to Budbrooke camp and do my basic training with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment.
So having said my farewells, I boarded the train at Wigston for Warwick. After changing trains a couple of times, I found myself on a train with dozens of lads all heading for the same place. On arrival at Warwick, the station was crowded with recruits and there was a convoy of TCVs ferrying us to the camp. Names were called and we were split into A, B and C companies, with eight platoons of 30 men to each company. After dinner in the mess, (dining hall), we were kitted out at the stores and shown to our huts. Then we had to take a palliase and fill it with straw from a stack across a field. This was to be my mattress for the next six weeks. We put on our uniforms and within hours we were part of the Army. The training was tough basic infantry stuff, route marches, PE, assault courses, and at the end of six weeks we have learned to fire rifles, Bren guns, throw hand grenades, and were dragged out in the middle of the night to tackle the assault course under battle conditions. All this for just three shillings a day but we felt proud on our passing out parade. We were then allocated to various branches of the Army, and after a three day leave, I had to report to the Medical Corps, the RAMC at Fleet near Aldershot. On the first day's rollcall, as your name was called out you stepped forward, and when Clay was called, two of us stepped forward and we were in the same squad. His name was Alf and he came from Dagenham, and from then on we served together until our demob. About this time, John was demobbed after serving five years in the Grenadier Guards with Monty's 8th Army through North Africa, Italy, and finishing up in Austria, only a few miles from where I ended up.
Training in the RAMC was about 20% classroom work, and most of the time was spent on marches, PE and first aid treatment to casualties under battle conditions, then stretchering them to Field Hospitals. These were large marquees which we had to erect and equip as operating theatres, wards, mess tents and kitchens, where cooking was done over a trench about 12 feet long with metal grids laid over the top and a paraffin blower at one end. Ablutions (wash houses) and latrines (toilets) were open air jobs with a low canvas wall and a sheet of canvas to keep the rain off. The sitdown loo consisted of a trench 8 feet long with a plank suspended over it, upon which we all sat in a row. Usually, one Smart Alec would start bouncing the plank just as you were bearing down, and you had to hang on, or you'd end up in the trench. There was no modesty and even in camp you showered in a row with six or seven others. When on manoeuvres we slept in bell tents, 8 to a tent, with feet to the pole in the centre and if you had to get up in the night, you woke the others up as you stepped over bodies in the dark. Aldershot was thronged with troops, as there were so many camps in the area, so I think the locals must have been fed up with us. After another six weeks and a passing out parade, we were GDOs, or General Duties Orderlies, and our pay went up to 4 shillings a day, 28 shillings a week, and this was all pocket money.
After a week's leave, I was posted with four others to a 20 bed hospital and medical centre at Didcot, Berkshire. It was called a CRS or Casualty Receiving Station, and cater for the needs of thousands of troops in the ROAC. Our CRS was just inside the main gate, and each morning there were usually 100 or so reporting sick. After they saw the MO they came to us in the Treatment Room with a chit, so then it was our job to administer their various treatments. There was a medical ward and one for isolation, but anything serious was transferred to Oxford or Swindon. When drafts were made up for overseas, we had thousands come in for inoculations, and at that time syringes were made of glass and metal so they, and all needles have to go into the steriliser after each use. It was a busy little place, but I enjoyed my time there, going to Oxford or Reading on my days off. I befriended a chap who ran the films through in the camp cinema, so spent some interesting evenings in the projection room with him.
In December I was given 10 days embarkation leave so I did the rounds, visiting Leicester, Luffenham, and Boston. By this time, Alan had arrived and was about five months old, but Dad was looking for another job as he had fallen out with Nellie's old man, Willie. Anyway, my leave soon passed and I had to report to Dover Castle.
When we got to Dover the weather was terrible. Gales and blizzards made sailing impossible. We learned we were bound for Austria, but spent a week waiting for the winds to abate. This was the winter of 1947, which is recorded as one of the worst of the century. One morning all was calm and we packed our kit and march down to Parkstone Quay, where a small merchant ship was waiting for us, and within two hours we were leaving Dover. As soon as we got out of the harbour, a westerly gale blew up, and we listed heavily and bobbed up and down like a cork. Everyone was seasick and I made my way up to the deck, as they were being thrown about and vomiting over each other down below and stop I hung on to the deck rail with spray breaking over me, and I've never felt so bad in my life as I did then. We marched, or staggered off the ship to a transit camp in Calais, where a meal was waiting for us, but we could not face food. My mate Alf and I had a wander around the town but did not think much to it, as there was so much devastation, but there was still a red light district as some found out for the price of a packet of cigs.
After a night at Calais we boarded a train with half the windows missing out of the carriages. The seats were wooden laths and it just snowed non-stop. The journey lasted two days, so we spent one night on the train but it was too cold to sleep. We stopped three times each day for a meal halt, where army kitchens and dining rooms catered for us. After Strasbourg we crossed the Rhine into Germany, but the line to Munich was blocked so we waited half the night before being diverted through Switzerland. We kept changing seats as the ones facing the engine got all the wind and snow. In Switzerland we changed engines, as we were on an electrified line with rack and pinion gradients, so even though it was freezing cold the views were breathtaking, and we arrived at Villach transit camp in the late afternoon.
Villach was the camp where all troops came to for allocation to all parts of Austria. It sat in a valley with mountains all around. It was quite a pretty place in summer, but there was 6 feet of snow when we arrived and it snowed continuously for two weeks cutting us off from the outside world. The snow got to be 20 feet deep, and we had to dig our way out of the huts each morning, through a tunnel which got extended each day. The snow on the roof was over 6 feet, but snug and warm inside with two coke stoves, but we lost the coke heap under the snow and had to burn wood instead. This meant felling trees on the slopes around us, cutting it into manageable lumps, and dragging it into the camp, then cutting it into chunks to stack round the stoves to dry, so there was condensation dripping from the roof but a fresh pine smell everywhere. The snow packed hard on the roads, and even with chains on the wheels the army trucks got bogged down, but it gave the locals a laugh as they went by on skis and snowshoes, dragging their sledges. Whereas we plodded about in wellies full of snow and soaking wet feet.
The Ablutions were huts with no heating, where you collected an enamel bowl and filled it with a ladle from a 40 gallon drum with a paraffin heater under it. You put your bowl on a table, and with a temperature below freezing you washed and shaved as quickly as you could, shivering and shaking while you got dressed. There were showers but they were only lukewarm and the water froze on the ground as you washed under them.
On the third week trains began running again, and about 30 of us medics boarded a train for Klagenfurt, 30 or 40 miles down the track. We went to a 600 bed hospital at Lendorf, 5 km out of town.Named the 31st British General Hospital, it was originally built as a barracks for the German SS troops. The walls were 4 feet thick at the base, built of granite tapering to 2 feet on the third floor. There was an inner and outer window, so they were in fact double glazed but with the gap of 2 to 3 feet. It was so well built that I think Hitler's plan for a 1000 year Reich had been taken into consideration with such a sturdy construction. The hospital had a staff of about 400, which were billeted in the main block, with six beds to a room, proper bathrooms, central heating and we all had our own lockers so it seemed like living in a hotel after the transit camp.
Reveille was sounded at 6:30 AM each morning by the bugler in the corridor of each of the three floors, and within five minutes the Staff Sergeant came around whacking you with a cane if you were still in bed. ( I did not think much to the discipline at the time, but it taught me respect for my seniors, something that is very lacking in society today). Breakfast was 7 to 7:30 AM then duties started at 8 AM with staff change over on the wards, and all stores and offices opened. As new recruits we were mustered on to the parade ground to be given a run down of standing orders, (all the do's and don'ts) which had to be obeyed. The best of this was that we did not have to wear caps on duty, and did not have to salute officers, mainly because all the officers were doctors and we were in contact with them all the time.
The first six weeks were spent in school doing our nursing training, which was a waste of time to me, as I spent the rest of my time working in stores, but we all had to be qualified. With the rank of N.O. 3, we were paid another one shilling per day. Now on 35 shillings a week I felt really well off. I had just finished my training when I got a very bad case of tonsillitis. With a temperature of 104, and delirious, I was admitted to hospital and given penicillin injections every three hours for four days, but it was over two weeks before I was fit for duty again. Whilst in hospital the Red Cross came around and in order to aid with our recuperation, they offered physiotherapy. In my case they got me to do some embroidery, so I did our cap badge, and still have it somewhere. I had had tonsillitis every winter for years until then, but I've never had it since.
On our days off we borrowed skis from some of the old hands in exchange for a packet of cigs, (this was the local currency), and learned to ski on some of the slopes off the road to Klagenfurt. We had snow every day up to April, but by the end of the month the only snow left was on the mountain slopes.
My first job was Dispensary Assistant where my time was spent on packing and checking supplies, and helping the Pharmacist to mix up medicines.If you went sick you usually got a bottle of medicine, as there were no antibiotics. Penicillin was relatively new, and most drugs were sulphur-based. I spent many hours with pestle and mortar mixing powders with oils, and using a spatula to fill waxed boxes with these smelly ointments.I also made gallons of sedatives, stimulants, expectorants, gargles, and antiseptics, all under supervision of course. After a few weeks there was a vacancy in the linen store. As older blokes went home for demob, us young 'uns got moved around, and every six weeks there were new lads arriving. So off I went to work in the linen store with a Jock (Scotsman) for a few weeks, until he too was demobbed. He showed me a few of the fiddles on how to get a bit of extra cash on the side. When sheets were worn thin, we had to rip them up and tie them in bundles of 20 but we only put in 18. So these were sent back to Returned Supplies, and we received 20 new ones in return. Jock went home and I was left in charge of the store, which meant I had my own room in the store for security. There were five stores, each with a storeman, so we used to get food and tea and coffee from the kitchen, a few bottles of booze, and then invite some of the local girls in.
There was a chap called Rudy who came around each morning with a horse and cart to empty the rubbish bins. He lived half a mile to the rear of the hospital and he could get anything we wanted. He always had stuff hidden in his cart and you could get a wristwatch for 20 or 40 cigarettes. For a pair of sheets I got a radio, the old valve type of course, as transistors were unheard of then. During the summer I got a windup gramophone and a dozen records, and before the winter I had my own skis and a toboggan. Each day we had a 3 ton lorry laid on, when two of us took the laundry to the Wanga Washeri about 3 km down the road. While we unloaded and collected the clean laundry from the previous day, we dated some of the lasses. One girl I fancied, Irmgard Rossian, was 17 and could not speak English, and I could not speak much German. We went out together for a few months and taught each other until she spoke pretty good English. She then got herself a job in the local NAAFI which we shared with the RASC camp nearby, so then I lost her as she had the pick of both camps.
Payday was Thursday when you saluted for your pay which was in "BAFS", a currency specially printed for British Armed Forces which could only be spent in the NAAFI, Red Cross and Salvation Army shops. We also received 50 Players cigarettes free in a round sealed tin, a bar of chocolate or a tin of sweets free. This is when I started smoking about 20 cigarettes a day, as they were only 9d ( 3 1/2 pence) for 20, and in civvy street they cost three shillings and sixpence. I still blame the Army for getting me into this bad habit.
Apart from a few unpleasant duties life was one long holiday. When off duty in the summer, Lake Worthesee was a big attraction. It was only a 15 minute tram ride out of Klagenfurt. It was 3 miles at its widest and about 15 miles long. The town end of the lake was like a seaside resort and when the wind blew down the lake, waves lapped on a sandy beach. For 10 schillings four of us used to hire a row boat for the afternoon. One of us always stayed with the boat while the others went swimming. With each of us taking a turn in the boat we covered many miles like this. There was a pretty little village, Maria Worth, on an island across the lake and I once swam all the way. We could get a beer and a sauerkraut sandwich for a few schillings in the Gasthaus, so we had to flog a bit of stock to get some local currency. This was of course illegal to possess, as we could not exchange our Army money.
We had 19 days leave every four months, so on my leave I went to see Dad and Nellie, who had now moved to Bramfield, Hertfordshire. He was a chauffeur/handyman on an estate, but deserved a better job. I always felt that Nellie held him back, but they seemed happy enough in their own way. While I had been away Kathleen had stopped writing, but Averil wrote and told me that Keith had stopped writing to her, so I arranged a holiday with her at Boston on my first leave, when we got on really well. I also went to Leicester and called to see Dot at Stamford on my way to Boston. Syd had now left her and she was seeing Cliff, who I first thought was a funny little man but he later became like a brother.
On my first leave instead of going via Calais, we went via the Hook of Holland through Germany and one place that has always stayed in my mind was at town called Pforzheim, which was totally devastated with just a few shells of buildings left standing, looking like Hiroshima after the atom bomb. People were living in cellars and dug-outs among the ruins, and I was told that its main industry had been manufacturing ball bearings. It made me feel sick to think that so many civilians were killed by our bombs. I had delivered to shops in Coventry but the damage was minor to what I saw here. At all stations throughout Germany, women and kids lined the platforms selling souvenirs. Again, cigarettes were used as currency, so that 10 Woodbines would buy you a lighter, necklace or bracelet. You have to give them top marks for surviving.
After my first leave, Alf Clay took over my job in the linen store and I was put in charge of the 1098 store, which covered everything from pots and pans, crockery to furnishings and everything needed in the home, to supply the married families' quarters. It's used all the cellar space of one large building, over 100 yards long with a corridor down the centre and rooms on either side full of stock. Most of it was left by the Germans and was not listed, so there was plenty of stuff to flog but the problem was turning it into English cash so I could send it home. Auntie Gertie had opened a Post Office savings account for me but I dare not send home more than a £1 postal order every other week, or the army post office might check up on me, my wages being only £1.75 per week.
On my second winter I spent most of my off-duty time skiing on the slopes within sight of a hospital, as by this time most of my mates had acquired skis and there was always someone to go with. We never went alone in case of accident, but it was hard work sidestepping up the slopes which would take half an hour or more, (there were no ski lifts working then), but the descent only took about three minutes. Sometimes we went skating on Lake Worthesee, where on a windy day we could skate against the wind then hold our jackets open and and let the wind blow us back. In summer, I spent a lot of time sunbathing so that I could show my brown body off when I came on leave, but that was when I developed moles on my skin and they have grown ever since. Of course our knees were always brown because we wore shorts from May to September.
The NAAFI in town was one of the top hotels which had been taken over by the army and named the Alex club when they occupied Klagenfurt. There was a lounge which took up the second floor, set out with settees, chairs and tables, and with a stage at one end where a full orchestra played Viennese and popular classics every night. You could sit up there with your drink, close your eyes and imagine you were living a life of luxury. I became friendly with the Quartermaster's maid, Elisabeth, and during my last six months it developed into a serious relationship and we spent many happy evenings at the club and afterwards in my room. My quartermaster got to know about it and used to tease me, and when he got demobbed about a month before me he managed to find her a job in London.
All good things come to an end and my service came to an end in July 1948. Even though I had the chance to sign on for a further year I turned it down as I wanted to get back to normal life, but I later regretted it as life back in Blighty was not all that good. The thousands demobbed before me had taken all the good jobs, although my old boss had a job lined up for me at Coventry as manager of one of his stores I did not fancy starting a new life in a strange place so I turned it down. Dad and Nellie had moved again and were at West Mill near Buntingford, Hertfordshire and were living in a two-bedroom bungalow. There was no room for me there b but there were no jobs anyway, so I thought I had better settle in Boston as I had always been happy there. Gertie had married John, and the back bedroom was spare, so it did not take much persuasion for me to settle there. Auntie had finished work and was now a housewife, and was looking after Gran as well. Even though Gran was now 90 she was still very active and caught the bus from hospital bridge into town and did a bit of shopping. John had gone back to his pre-war job at Artindales nurseries. It was fortunate that he managed to find work, but he was just a common land worker. Uncle Albert was working as a plumber on the railway, which used to be the LNER but was nationalised and was now British Rail. He lived in a caravan in a yard on the left of Grand Sluice Lane, where there was a workshop which has since been converted into a house, and he used to come to Gertie's for his meals.
Whilst in Austria, I had been sending postal orders to Gertie, so every other week she had been depositing one pound into my new savings account which she had opened, so I now had around £30 saved. The first thing I did was go to Currys and treat myself to a new bike. It was their main stock at that time and I chose the best in the shop. It was a Raleigh racer with lightweight wheels, and with rat trap pedals, toe clips, bell, lights, and as saddlebag. It cost me £23, so it was a lot of cash to pay when most bikes sold for around £10. I now found myself with five weeks leave, so I divided my time between Wigston, Doncaster and Stamford, doing most of these runs on my bike. I also went to West Mill by rail where dad was working on a large estate as a chauffeur and handyman. After a month my Army pay came to an end and there was not much on the jobs market so I went back into the grocery trade.
I worked for a Mr Whittaker, driving a two ton van fitted out as a mobile shop around the countryside. I've worked around 60 hours per week and was paid just £4.12 shillings. To begin with, most of my pay went into buying tools, as I was keen on woodwork, so I built a bench in Auntie's shed and spent most of my spare time making all kinds of things mostly out of old furniture. For a year I was quite happy. Bill and Queenie Oliver came over in the evenings and we had a game of cards and listened to the radio. Auntie did her homework from Tag-Craft, and for a while that was my life. However, the Olivers had friends down Fenside called Gilchrist, and I started going there with them, playing cards at weekends. They had a daughter called Fay, and in no time we were going out together. She worked at Fisher Clarks in Norfolk Street and was soon a regular visitor at Auntie's where we made good use of the front room.
I bought a BSA motorbike from Uncle Albert and we used to go to Skegness and also Wigston, where I introduced her to the Humphries family. This was the summer of 1949, and a year later we were looking for somewhere to live. As luck would have it, Mrs Breathwick at number 44 next door had decided to give up her house with one month's notice and go to live with her son, so Auntie wrote to the landlady, and we got the house.
Next, we had to break the news to Fay's mother who was not at all pleased, but in the end accepted it. This was in mid July, and we were married at the Stump (St.Botolph's Parish Church) on 2 September 1950, with a reception at the White Hart and three days honeymoon in London, which was all we could afford.We then went to stay with Dot and Cliff at Stamford for four nights. We only had about £100 saved which bought us a dining room suite and a few essentials, but Gertie lent us £100 with which we bought A bedroom suite and other items, but we repaid her two pounds a week and were out of debt in a year. We also bought a radio on hire purchase which was frowned upon in those days. The motto was if you can't pay cash then wait until you can.
There was a coal house in the yard and an outside toilet. Next to that was a good shed in which I built a bench and spent most of my spare time in there making things for the home. Fay would often come out to me around 10 PM and ask me if I was spending the night out there! Of course there was a coal fire, so it had to be cleaned out every day and firewood chopped and kept dry otherwise it would not light. On Sunday morning, I used to rake out the flues and blacklead the grate, so Fay stayed in bed until that was done. There were friends of Fay's family called Tom and Kit Elsam. Tom had tuberculosis and went to Creaton Sanatorium at Kettering, where he had a lung removed and was not expected to live. However, while he was there a new wonder drug called streptomycin was found which within two years had stamped out this killer disease. Kit could not drive, but they had a car so most Sundays we used to take her to visit him so we became quite friendly. After he came home we used to go round in the evenings and play cards, as most people did in those days.
In the spring of 1952, Fay became pregnant, and in July she had to give up work as her water broke. Barbara was born six weeks prematurely on 31 August, weighing just two pounds and was very wrinkled. We had to sponge her with olive oil and wrap her in cotton wool and keep a hot water bottle by her to keep her warm. She could not suck and had to be fed just a 2 ounce feed every two hours with a mustard spoon. Feeding her and changing her was quite a long job, and for the first 10 days women were always kept in bed after a birth. And so, during the day, Gertie made up the feeds and after work I took over, but getting up every two hours really got me down and one night when she was crying I could have willingly thrown her out of the bedroom window, my nerves were in such a state. It was a great relief to me once Fay was up and about again and we shared the getting up in the night. It was a full-time job until she was six weeks old, and from then on she never looked back. In the summer of that year, Gran died suddenly. She had not been too well for a couple of weeks, and had stayed in bed until after dinner. On this day she had just finished her dinner and said to Gertie how much she had enjoyed it, when she just keeled over and that was the end. However, she went so peacefully it was as if she had just gone to sleep. She was 94 and have had a hard life in her younger days and many were the tales she told, but sorry to say I never took a lot of notice when she went on about the past.
Once Tom Elsam felt a bit better he was looking for a business for sale. He could not really work himself, but decided to buy the shop on the corner of Robin Hood's Walk. He asked me if I would help him with it, and we would share the profits, and like a fool I agreed. Never trust your best friend in business and always get any agreements in writing, which I failed to do. I gave in my notice to Whittakers, and went to work for Tom. For the first year I worked nights and Sundays rebuilding the interior. I took a cut in pay until the shop got going, and at the end of a year I had doubled the takings by selling a full range of groceries and provisions. I asked Tom if I could have £1 a week on top of the £6 I was getting, as I had spent what little I had saved and could not manage any longer. From then on there was a noticeable coolness in the friendship. He then decided to keep the shop open until 8 PM and expected me to go along with it, but I refused. I had worked like hell for the first year and the takings were steadily going up, and I did not see any need for it, so from then on the friendship died. So it was that in less than two years, in 1954, I took the job as manager of Hunters in the marketplace. They had about 250 shops around the country, and the Boston branch takings were down to £200 a week. I doubled them in less than a year, but it was only short lived, as by the September of the following year, they decided to sell all their shops in Lincolnshire, and modernise the shops in Lancashire with the proceeds. As their headquarters was in Manchester it makes good business sense for them. At the time, I was on £10 a week and they begged me to go across country and take a shop for £15 a week with accommodation above the shop. However, I reasoned that if the job didn't work out then I would also be without a home, so I turned it down.
When I started at Hunters I bought my first car, a 1930 Morris Minor for £37. It had a gravity feed petrol tank under the bonnet against the bulkhead. The main engine bearing was worn and a clutch used to oil up occasionally. There was a 2 gallon petrol can on the running board, so I used to flip the cover off the clutch and wash it out with petrol, then operate the pedal a few times until it had dried out, then off we'd go again! I ran it until the next spring, then sold it on 'The Green', (an area in the town centre used by auctioneers and stallholders), and bought a 1936 Ford 10 for £100 from Don Furse who ran a small garage business on the other side of the Maud Foster drain. (The garage was taken over by Ray Johnson, who expanded it and turned it into the thriving business it is today, run by his son). The Ford 10 ran very well, and would cruise at 60 mph quite easily. This was comfort motoring after the Morris but it took some holding on the bends with its transverse suspension. Of course there were no heaters at that time, but at least it wasn't so draughty. Very few people have cars in those days so you usually had the road to yourself once you were clear of the towns. We once drove to Leicester in an hour and a half, but at that time you could often go miles without even seeing another car. In the 1950s, cars were always kept in a garage and you seldom saw a car on the roadside. There were also few lorries on the road, apart from local ones carrying produce, as most things were transported by rail.
Mr Whitaker had sold his business in Main Ridge to a Mr Luesby and the last week I was at Hunters he came round begging me to go and work for him. I said I would not go and work for less than £10 and to my surprise he agreed to pay me that. Although it meant working more hours I took the job. So it was back to selling from the van again, but he had little interest in the shop, as he was a director of Boston United and spent much of his time there. He was often helping himself to cash out of the till, and wining and dining his football associates, so the profits went down until there was no cash in the bank to pay suppliers. Kath Lane, who had been there for many years got fed up with things and we knew it could not go on for much longer, so when I shop on the other side of the road came up for rent we took it. This was a dirty trick to play but in business that’s the way it goes, so I borrowed £200 from Auntie Gertie, as we needed a bacon machine and fridge display counter. I traded my car in against a 10 hundredweight Ford van and about a third of their customers came to us once we got established. I fitted the van out with shelving I had helped myself to from Hunters, and within two weeks I was going out into the countryside and setting up my own rounds. People did not have cars at that time and relied on tradesmen going round with their wares. For the first year, I’ve worked for two days a week for Ted Archer, an egg merchant in Hospital Lane, taking a five ton load of eggs to Leicester Co-op on Mondays, and a load to his son in Sheffield on Thursday’s, where he had a round supplying the shops in the city.
In January 1957 whilst loading the lorry in a blizzard, I slipped off the top of the load, stacked eight cases high, and fractured my skull, so my little job had not helped me much. They rang for an ambulance to take me to the General Hospital, where I lay unconscious for five days. When I came round the matron told me I had split my skull into two halves, so I was lucky to survive. If it happened now I would be able to sue for compensation, but it was unheard of then. There were no health and safety rules and if you had an accident at work it was your fault. So, after two weeks in hospital and a week at home, I went back to work. I certainly was not fit, but there was no State Benefit for self-employed people, so I had no choice. Fay was eight months pregnant with Robert on the way. It’s a wonder she did not lose him, as she was so upset while I was unconscious as they did not think I would live. Kath’s brother Walter had gone round in the evenings with the van and done the best they could, but I lost quite a few customers in the three weeks I was off, and it took me a while to build up the rounds again.
I had only been at work for two weeks when Robert arrived. Women did not go into hospital unless there were complications, and similar to Barbara’s birth, it was an all-night job. You rang for the midwife, then when she thought it was necessary, you rang for the doctor. Husbands were always kept busy boiling gallons of water, God knows why, as I have delivered a few in the back of an ambulance with only a flask of water available. But anyway, Rob arrived after Fay did a lot of pushing and shoving about six in the morning. He was such a big ‘un and Dr Usmar and I had just about run out of cigs, and drank endless cups of tea. Unlike Barbara, he took to his feed straight away, and after six months he ran off the top of the graph we were recording his weight on, and it was supposed to last a year!
Three years later, Fay was pregnant again, and gave birth to Barry on 1st August in Wyberton West Hospital, but he was very jaundiced with a liver problem and was taken to St George’s Hospital at Lincoln, but died two weeks later. It was a big upset at the time, and he was buried in the cemetery, but life has to go on.
In the first five years at the shop we did okay once we got established, but then ‘Sally Moreland’s’, one of the first supermarkets, came to the town. Also, Liptons moved into Dolphin Lane just up the road from us and the shop takings started to go down. This meant I had to work harder and longer with the van to keep the money coming in, but from then on things got gradually worse as people started to buy their own cars and came into town to do their shopping. By the eighth year we were only just making it pay, and putting in long hours to do so.
In 1961 Fay was expecting again, and with no problems this time she went into Wyberton West Hospital and Carol was born on the last day of the year. Fay stayed in hospital for 10 days, as that was the rule then, but we were now entitled to 18 shillings a week Family Allowance. You got nothing for the first one, eight shillings for the second, and 10 shillings for the third on, which never made sense to me as the first one was the most expensive because you have everything to provide. We had no problems with Carol apart from the fact that she was so noisy. Even as a small baby, whether crying or playing it was always at the top of her voice.
My sister Dot and her husband Cliff were very good to us during our hard times, and helped us out in so many ways. Cliff had a contract with the Canadians at Luffenham Aerodrome, clearing their rubbish each day and they threw out a lot of stuff which was as good as new, so he took it home and quite a lot of it ended up here. Apart from that, she used to have the kids over at Stamford in the summer for a holiday. I worked for 12 years without a holiday, but Cliff used to take them out a bit so it was at least a change for them will stop
These were our really hard up times; the shop was hardly paying and how to get out was the problem. By the ninth year in business, I was looking for a job. Fay was pregnant again and in October 1965, I applied for a job on the Ambulance Service which at the time was provided by the council. The county was split into three, Holland, Kesteven, and Lindsey, the Boston area being Holland. So I got an interview, and took my army credentials with me. There were three vacancies, and I thought I stood a good chance as I had done all this work in my training and had a Red Cross certificate to prove it. They grilled me with questions for half an hour and I thought I had cracked it, and I was already attending a six week evening course with St John’s. But I was turned down. The letter said I would be kept in view in case of vacancy occurred in the future.
On the morning of 10th January 1966 Fay started with contractions,and we had to quickly pack her case and get her to Wyberton West Hospital. She should have taken her record card with her, but in the rush we forgot, so I had to go back for it. By the time I got back to the hospital she had delivered a boy, so I went straight into the delivery room and saw them cleaning him up. We had chosen girls names and could not think of a boy’s name. The nurse on the ward was chatting about her boyfriend, so Fay asked what his name was. When she said Paul, we looked at each other and said together, “ that’s it”.
As a baby he was lovely, no trouble at all, and we all took time tending to him. Apart from us being so hard up, they were the happiest times. For over a year, we drew 28 shillings Family Allowance until Barbara left school. All four of them went to Park School in Tunnard Street, as I did when I was in Boston. For secondary schools, Rob went to the Grammar School, Barbara and Carol went to Kitwood Girls, and Paul went to Kitwood Boys, and I am sure they had a better education than the mixed schools of today.
At the beginning of April 1966, I was stood in my underpants ironing my trousers one Sunday morning, as we were going to Stamford, when the ambulance boss came up the back path! You could say that he caught us at our worst, as we were all getting ready to go out. I finished my ironing and pulled my trousers on while he told me that there was a job for me if I wanted it. Naturally, I accepted it but he wanted me to start the next day, thinking that I was out of work. Anyway, I told him that if he could wait two weeks I would take it, and somehow get rid of the shop. To cut a long story short, there was a grocer at Frithville called Les Brumpton, who was doing rounds like myself, and he was pleased to take on more customers. He took my rounds over, and also took our stock off us at cost, so that was a huge relief. The only trouble was that as time has gone by, we were in debt to suppliers for around £200, as the job had not been paying for some time, so I ended up in county court with a debt collector demanding payment. As my take-home pay was only £12 a week, they let me off with 10 shillings a week. Obviously, it would take many years to pay off at that rate, so once I got settled into the ambulance job I started going out in the evenings painting and decorating. Fay was doing a couple of cleaning jobs in the mornings, one of them being for the county surveyor, and they gave me my first job decorating their kitchen. They must have been satisfied because I decorated their whole house in the first year. They have many friends and neighbours to whom I was recommended, and in no time at all I had more work than I could cope with, but I got my debts paid off in 18 months.
When I first started on the ambulance service, my first year was spent on picking the ‘idiot kids’ up (as we called them, even though some of them were 60 years old) in the mornings, and taking them home at tea time. We have plenty of laughs and singsongs with them. They were a great bunch and I was as daft as them when I was with them. Up to 16 of them went to Allen House School on Carlton Road next to the ambulance station, and the older ones went to a day centre on London Road. Following that, my days were spent ferrying outpatients to and from the four hospitals in Boston, the General Hospital, London Road Hospital, Wyberton West Hospital, and the White House, which was still an isolation hospital and also used for the terminally ill. After six months I was put on the emergency rota which meant I had some nights and weekends ‘on call’. They installed a phone for this purpose, and they paid the rental on it. We just had to pay for our own calls. Not many people could afford phones then so it was quite a novelty. I received 15 shillings a night standby money, plus time and a half, or double time for call-outs, so that bumped my pay up quite a bit. When on call my mate was Bob Padley, a chap I had known for some years as he used to be a neighbour at number 47 when they first got married. Auntie Gertie had used her influence to get them a house as she was friendly with the landlady, a Miss Gray of Stockport.
I still had the van which I had used for the last eight years at the shop, which was a Bedford with a high top. Bob had been a mechanic at the Ford garage before he went on the ambulance service, and my poor old van was about clapped out, so he helped me to strip it down and recondition the engine. It took us the best part of a year, and by the summer of 1967 I had it on the road, and installed side windows in it and rigged it out for camping.
I should have mentioned earlier that my sister, Dot, got divorced from her first husband Syd Powell, as he found himself another woman and never came back to her after the war. She was having a hard time bringing up two kids on her own when she met Cliff in 1948, whose father had had a stroke and he had taken over his Dad’s haulage business with a three ton Bedford. They hit it off straight away and were married in no time. She was door-to-door selling for a credit company during the day when the kids were at school, so his earnings were a great asset. They had some happy years together, but in 1966 after they had had a holiday with friends in Devon and Cornwall, Dot was taken ill. In fact, she had been ill for quite a while but have kept it to herself as she was so much looking forward to the holiday and did not want to spoil it for the others. She had not been away for a real holiday before, but shortly after they got back she was in hospital with cancer of the womb. Although she went to Cambridge for radiotherapy, it had taken a real hold and she died in February 1967.
Cliff had bought a motorised caravan before Dot died, hoping that they were going to enjoy some touring holidays together, but it was not to be. Dot’s funeral was at a crematorium near Kettering, and I did not have a vehicle because the van was being stripped down. My friend Bob Padley lent me his Morris 8, in which I also took Gertie and John. It really struggled on the hills, and at times the hearse was a mile in front, but we made it there in time. Dad and Nellie came in a Land Rover which his boss had lent him. Words could not express the sadness we all felt on that day.
Langley and Shirley were married in 1964, and Carol was a bridesmaid at their wedding. Their first daughter, Angela was born in January 1965 and their second, Sandra was born only two weeks before Dot died.
Averil married Peter Rate in 1965, and Barbara was a bridesmaid at their wedding. They also had two daughters, Tracey who was born in 1966 and Diane in 1968.
Within a year Cliff had given up the house and taken a flat, because being on his own it was obviously cheaper. There followed a number of years when we did not see much of him. He met Fay, whose husband had left her, and she was struggling to bring up a family on her own. He went to live with her and after her divorce they got married. He sold his lorry business and went to work for a local haulage firm. He had always hoped for a child of his own, and his wish came true when their daughter Tracey was born.
Before Dot died, he bought himself an open reel tape recorder, which set me wanting one, so shortly afterwards I bought one too. This was years before cassettes were on the market, and we used to record messages and send them by post in the days before we had a telephone. On my grocery round I met up with a young lad, one Dennis Randall, who also had a tape recorder, so he used to come round and we swapped recordings as it was cheaper than buying records.
A year after Dot died, Dad had a heart attack. He had been retired for two years but was still living in his boss’s tied house. Our friends Brian and Joy had lived at number 47 and had just bought a house in Willoughby Road, so Gertie wrote to the landlady whom she had befriended over the years, and without too much persuasion she allowed Dad and Nellie to rent the end house. Alan and his wife lived a few miles away and he was away all week delivering furniture. Peter was abroad in the RAF, so Dad and Nellie wanted to be near us in case anything happened. I then found myself with the job of removing the old chimney breast from their kitchen, concreting the floor, and generally decorating the place throughout. So it was that after about a month, when Dad had recuperated, they packed up their things at West Mill and moved to number 47. It then became a constant job keeping an eye on them and tending to their needs, but Gertie was a good help popping round each day and doing a bit of shopping for them. After his heart attack, Dad made himself an invalid, afraid to do anything much in case he had another one, so they rarely went out unless I took them in the van.
After Dot died, Uncle Albert was taken ill with cancer and I got somewhat depressed, as my grandfather, mother and sister had all died from it, so I felt certain that I would soon share the same fate, but as the years passed my fears subsided.
One evening Bob and I were in the ambulance returning up South End towards the new bridge which had recently been opened. (John Adams Way was not yet built). We suddenly saw a woman knocked off her bike by a car which had come over the bridge going straight on into Rowley Road. When we got across to her, it was a huge shock for me because it was Auntie Gertie, unconscious with a head wound and bleeding profusely! We had to take her to London Road Hospital where she came round a couple of days later. She had been on her way to visit Albert who was in the General Hospital. After a week or so she was home again with little after-effects, but Albert ended his days in the White House hospital in 1969 from the cancer, the same as his son Frank had done a few years previously from tuberculosis. Albert had lived in a caravan on Willoughby Road at the end of the terraced houses directly opposite St Mary’s Church. His son Reg had the unpleasant task of clearing all his belongings. Albert left me £200 in his will, and I bought my first electronic organ with it. It was not very good and I must have sounded terrible trying to play it, but I persevered and learnt to play by ear. Dennis was impressed so he too bought an organ, but being single he could afford a better one. For many years after, we were always trading them in for a better model.
Life on the Ambulance Service was okay once I was accepted, but there were one or two who objected to me to begin with, as there had been 10 on the rota, and now there was 11, so their overtime was cut down by a tenth. The Station Officer also hated me for some reason and did his best to cut back my overtime, but he left in 1970 and things improved for me after that. Until that datethe only qualification you needed was a St John first aid certificate, but in 1971, all newcomers had to go on a six week training course, and our nearest training school was at Leicester. Those who had five years service under their belt only had to go for two weeks, and as I had just completed that, off I went for my two weeks training that summer. I paid a few visits to the Humphries whilst there and quite enjoyed the course.
In the summer of 1967 my first week’s holiday for 12 years. I had the van rigged out for camping, but Paul was only 18 months old, so we booked a flat at Croyde Bay in Cornwalland shared it with Langley and Shirley and their girls. From the Monday until Friday, Langley and I did it all down the coast and round Devon. Cliff had taken Fay and her family in his caravanette to a site just up the hill overlooking the bay, but it rained heavily on the first night. Some of them had slept in a tent, and being on a hillside the water had run through the tent and soaked their bedding so they brought it down to the flat to dry out. The rest of the week was good weather and we all enjoyed it. We met up with Cliff and co. a couple of times on our tour, but they had longer to enjoy it as they were there for two weeks.
We had some great times in the old van. To list our holidays, we went to Yarmouth in 1968, Filey in 1969, Yarmouth again in 1970, Croyde Bay with Dennis in 1971, North Wales in 1972, Wells & Runton in 1973; in 1974 we had a boat on the Norfolk Broads called Juliette, and another week in the van in 1975 at Wells & Sheringham. We also had many weekends camping in the van, usually along the east coast. The kids said that the best holidays they had were in the van, but the time came when I had to sell it. The tyres were the odd size of 600 x 16, and were no longer manufactured, so I sold it in 1976 and Carol and Paul were so annoyed that they barely spoke to me for a week!
My next car was a Ford Consul which I bought from a mate at work as he was scrapping it. I paid him £15 for the car and £15 for the battery which he had recently replaced. The bodywork was a mess, but a couple of tins of glass fibre brought that back into shape, then with some daubs of undercoat, a rub down and a top coat of Dulux gloss, it looked really smart. We had a good holiday touring North Wales with it in 1976 with Dennis, but the next spring Robert borrowed it to go to work at Moulton and the engine blew. However, the cylinders were not too bad, so with a rub down, and a new set of pistons and bearings, I soon put it right and it ran well up until I sold it in 1978.
The Ambulance Service was taken over by the National Health Service in 1974, but we stayed at the old station on Carlton Road until the new station was built at Pilgrim Hospital in 1979. The hospital was built in two stages. The first was completed in 1973 and included the Casualty Department, Maternity, and Outpatients. The main block was completed around 1976, and at both stages we spent a Sunday transferring all the patients. The other hospitals were then closed with the exception of the General Hospital which was kept open for geriatric cases.
When the NHS took us over we saw many changes. Our control room closed and moved to Sleaford, which then control the whole of the county. My mate Bob went to Sleaford, and I was promoted to Leading Ambulanceman with two others. That meant that one of us was in charge whenever the Station Officer was away. We went on to rotating shifts, which did away with standby, which meant no more call-outs from home to attend emergencies. This was better for everybody, as it was no fun getting out of bed in the middle of the night to attend road accidents. We also got a fleet of new vehicles and new equipment, as when the local council ran the service, they did not spend ratepayers cash unless they had to. The downside to it though was that we now had too many bosses. Office workers were made up to Officers and they knew very little of the job on the road. Because they were trying to tell us how to do our job, that did not go down very well. When I started on the service we had no radios on the vehicles, and at night time our Control was taken over by the Fire Service. After every run we had to phone in from the hospital. Our first radios were fitted in 1971. Prior to the takeover we only covered Holland County and the shoulder flash on our uniforms read “HOLLAND”. When we went to hospitals in the Midlands to transfer patients, they thought we were from across the North Sea! Now under new bosses we could be sent anywhere in the county, and we were expected to know every village. That caused many problems and I had my share of ups and downs with them because we had to do some map reading before we set off to make sure we were going in the right direction. Then you were on the carpet for taking so long! At least we now had comfortable vehicles with heaters so it was a comparable luxury to ride in them.
In 1977 I bought a Wolseley 1500 from Cyril Johnson’s son, Neil. I fell in love with it when Cyril first got it, and asked him to give me first refusal if he sold it. He used in his job as a council rent collector for eight years, so it had been out in all weathers, but then he let Neil have it and within two years he had run it into the ground. Cyril rang me to tell me that he was scrapping the car for £20, so I went round and had a look at it and bought it from him for £30. However, as I drove it to a spare garage which I had permission to use at the ambulance station, I was having second thoughts as the front end was so low that the sump scraped on the ground at times. One of the mechanics got it in the council repair shop on a Saturdayand sorted out the torsion bars. With the car sitting level once more, one of my mates, Geoff Barnes, did the necessary welding and plating to get it through its MOT. That summer we had a boat on the Thames and Rob was running a Vauxhall 101 estate, which he named Russ Teep. He drove us down to London in it with all our luggage, and it got us back safe and sound but it was really on its last legs. He sold it shortly afterwards for £25, keeping his fingers crossed that it would get the chap home!
In 1978 I sold the Consul for £100 so that wasn’t bad. I then started running the Wolseley after doing the bodywork up, and it now looked quite smart. Dennis booked a bungalow at Liskeard in Cornwall for us for a week and we accompanied him. He then took a flat and stayed for a second week. During our touring,”Noddy” as I called her, took us many miles, and I remember thinking at Land’s End, is this the car that I paid only £30 for? It did not seem possible as it ran so well.
In the summer of 1976, Miss Gray came to stay with Auntie for a holiday, and while there she asked Miss Gray if she would consider selling us our house. Auntie Gertie had already bought her house some years previously from Miss Gray, and happily she agreed to our sale too. It was valued at £2000 as it needed so much work doing to it. We were happy to pay that, but then Miss Gray went to live in Canada and the solicitors spent many months searching for the deeds. The original ones had been lost in Stockport, so new ones had to be drawn up from records at Lincoln. That took the best part of a year, then there was a long postal strike in Canada, and it was finally the spring of 1978 before we got everything signed up. I put down £400 deposit and took out a mortgage for the rest plus £700 for new windows at the front, and paid it off in nine years, so by 1987 the house was ours.
My dad was taken ill in 1979 with another heart attack. He had had a bed in the front room for some years as he could not manage the stairs, but he gradually went downhill and had to go into hospital. His kidneys had stopped working and he could not pass water and died on the second night there. As I came away that night I said, ”See you tomorrow”, to which he replied, “I don’t think so - Dot had this trouble and she did not last two days”. He gripped my hand so hard and we both know it was true. The hospital rang an hour later to say he had gone, and he was still on the ward when I went to collect his belongings, but I did not go in to see him. I have seen so many dead people over the years and preferred to think of him as he was. It was 13 years since his first heart attack but he had gradually deteriorated during that time. We now had to keep an eye on Nellie, as she had heart problems too. I wired an electric bell to our house in case she needed us, but we had a row with Mr Gould at number 46 because he didn’t like the bell wire lying in his gutter. She had no phone so I had no choice. She now had the bed in the front room, and along with Gertie, we kept an eye on her during the day. Fay also cooked all her dinners for her in her last year.
In August 1983, she had a heart attack and went into Pilgrim Hospital for a week, and she seemed fine, but in September she had another. Back into hospital she went, but on her second day, we had just visited her and she was talking about coming home when a final attack finished her off. As Peter was in Somalia, Alan, June and myself ended up with about £160 each after I cleared the house. Not much to show for a life’s work, but if my mother had lived it would have been very different. I think Nellie held him back in so many ways. After all, he was running the bus company in Stamford, but was having to put a lot of hours in after the war started, as many of the drivers were called up. She chafed at him so much that he took the job near Leicester as ambulance driver for the county. He would have ended up with a pension like me if he had stayed, but she nagged him so much because again, he often worked long hours on call outs. Because of this, he moved again and again, and as they say, ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’.
I had built a Perspex greenhouse for Gertie, and she got so much pleasure from it that in 1980 she insisted in buying one for me, so one Saturday Paul went with me to a garden centre in Pinchbeck, and we brought one home on a roof rack on the Wolseley, with the glass on the back seat. It was really far too much weight for the old gal but we made it home okay. While I was putting a foundation in for it I dropped a brick on my ankle and ended up with it in plaster for three weeks. It did not deter me though, so with a plastic bag over my foot, I still built the greenhouse and had it set up in a week. My plaster got soggy with sweat and twice I had to have it rebuilt at Pilgrim Hospital, but I didn’t need to go through the casualty department as I was well in with the plaster technicians.
When Paul was 10, I bought him a ‘Stylaphone’ - a miniature electric keyboard played with a stylus. Within a few days he was playing ’Moon River’ on it, so I said that if you can play that you can play it on the organ, as up to that point he had shown no interest in the organ. So I showed him a few chords and in no time he was playing the organ. Dennis was a regular visitor and he took over the teaching, and within a month Paul was playing better than me. I got to a stage where I dare not play when he was around as I sounded so bad in comparison. When he was 16 he was playing regularly at The Five Bells at Butterwick, and I borrowed a van from Ray Johnson to transport the organ. Dennis got him the job as he only lived across the road. That prompted me to buy a Ford Cortina estate to carry the organ and by the time he was 17 he was playing at a number of pubs around the town. He had a regular gig at Alford, and another at Chapel St Leonards. He had a Honda AP 50 motorbike when he was 16, and even went to Northampton on it one weekend, worrying us to death, so I was pleased when he was 17 and passed his driving test for a car. He bought a second-hand Viva from Rob, who helped him with some customised paintwork on it, so around Boston it became known as the Status Quo Viva! By the time he was 18 he was playing keyboards in a group, and has progressed up the ladder ever since, playing in various bands and earning himself some extra money on the side.
Barbara left school at 15 and took a job at Fogarty’s, but was not happy working in a factory, so when she was 17, I persuaded her to have a go at nursing as they were training extra nurses ready for when they opened the Pilgrim Hospital. She took a two-year SEN course and passed okay, then transferred to Spalding after she was married, but she gave up nursing when she was expecting Samantha.
Rob went into the butchery trade when he left school. He never wanted to go to the grammar school anyway. He took a job at Keymarkets as bacon hand, then Geo Adams at Frampton, Dewhursts in the market place,Wrights family butchers, where Dave Ayre had once worked, and back to Keymarkets as butchery under manager, before becoming the butchery manager at Spar at the back of Oldrid’s. When the lease ended on that store, he left home in 1981 to take a flat and a job as relief butchery manager for Gateway’s Foodmarkets in Northampton, where he has lived ever since. After a business takeover, all of the fresh food counters within Gateway’s Foodmarkets were franchised out. Rob took a franchise at Irthlingborough and ran it for almost 2 years, but found it difficult to pay, so then took a job as Provisions manager at Hillard’s in Northampton, and then on to Walkers butchers in the Grosvenor Centre, Northampton. He left them after an argument over their wrongful sacking of a junior butcher, and found himself on the dole for nine months. He then took a job as a postman for Royal mail, and has been there ever since.
Cliff and Fay moved to Caistor in 1984, and we had some good holidays with them until they moved back to Stanford in 1992. We once took them with us on a boat for a week on the Norfolk Broads.
Our friends Peter and Margaret moved to Cromer in 1979, running a guesthouse which they eventually bought, and we had a few short holidays with them while they were there.
Auntie Gertie was taken ill in the spring of 1988, and Fay looked after her for a few weeks before she was taken into Pilgrim Hospital on 29 June, where she died only hours later from a brain haemorrhage, so that was a huge shock to us all. She had been my mainstay in life taking the place of my mother, and I always went to her for advice, so it was quite a blow when she died. She had worked hard all her life, looking after her own mother, my Gran, who lived until she was 94. She married John when she was 45 years old, and spent much of her time caring for and looking after our family until she died, aged 89. We all miss her still.
With Gertie gone, we had to look after John. He was not much trouble, but used to pat his stomach and complain if his dinner was not ready by 12 o’clock, as that is what he had always been used to when Gertie was alive. He also did not like to be disturbed if he was watching cricket or football on television. He once came round and said that his television had gone wrong, so I went out and bought him a new one. After he had died, and I was clearing the house out, in dumping his old telly I chopped the plug off. About a week later I went to use the plug on something, and found that the fuse had blown in it. It was too late to save the telly- it was already at the dump! In the spring of 1994, John went to the doctor’s with a bladder problem and ended up in hospital for tests, where they found he had cancer of the bladder. They flushed him out and catheterised him but when he saw the stuff that was draining out of him he lost the will to live and stopped eating, even though the doctor told him he could live for years. After treatment we got him into Willoughby Grange next to the Windmill on Willoughby Road, but he starved himself to death, and died a week later, saying he no longer wanted to live. After the funeral, the family chose what they wanted from their belongings, then I had to clear the house and get it on the market. It went up for sale at £32,950, but I had to keep dropping the price until it eventually sold 15 months later for £29,500. So that was the end of an era, as I had so many memories of happy times spent in that house from being a small child.
We had already helped Barbara and Peter with the deposit on their house, as they had had to sell their house in Pinchbeck when the haulage business bit the dust, and they were living in a rented place whilst the new one was being built. We then helped them further and then gave Rob, Carol and Paul the same amount when we got settled up with the house.
After I got the house on the market I started work on the Wolseley and got it on the road for the spring of 1995. At least at that time I was still capable of crawling underneath and doing all the donkey work myself, but with the new parts, welding and shaping of parts by Geoff at Kirton, and a paint job, it cost me about £2000. Happily, already in retirement, I was still so fit that I got Dave’s help and we dug out and laid the foundations for most of Geoff’s outbuildings, then laid and level all the hard-core for his yard and drive. Through Paul, who worked for City Electrical Factors, I managed to get the heavy duty cable and laid it to all his buildings etc. I don’t think Geoff appreciated the work I did for him as he never offered me anything for petrol for the dozens of times I went to and fro, but anyway I enjoyed doing the work.
I tried my hardest to get Fay to move into a bungalow while we still had the cash, as we could have bought one at a time for £60,000, but she said if I wanted to move I could, but she was staying put so that was an end to that. If I get so that I can’t climb the stairs and have to have a bed downstairs I will be better in my box, because I still have memories of my dad’s bed in the front room.
I spent £7000 on a newish Vauxhall Cavalier but by that time Mother was getting so that she did not want to travel far. We had a week at Torquay but after that her bladder problem prevented her from wanting to go too far afield.
Rob and Simon bought a lovely house and I helped them to move. Then Barbara and Peter moved to their new place and I helped them to flit too. Even Carol and Dave now have a modern place and I helped them to move, and Paul and Cathy are buying their place, but we are still stuck in this place we moved into in 1950.
It is now January 2005, and I typed most of this out on a word processor after I retired. Then when I got my first computer in 1998, I transferred it and think I should now bring it up to date.
I have lost one of my best mates, Cliff. He was always one for a laugh when he was in his going gear, and in fact still kept his wit up until the end. After he married Dot they used to come over regularly, and he was always treating us and our kids, as we were rather hard up in those days. I went 12 years without a holiday and even on the Ambulance Service I had to work over a year before I got a week’s holiday. The young ‘uns today have it far too easy and just take everything for granted. Nobody knows what it’s like to be really hard up. They get so much help from social services these days. We didn’t get family allowance until Rob was born, but the most we ever got was 28 shillings for all the kids. That seemed a lot then but it’s nothing to what they get today. On the other hand, we were happy loving family and there are not many about that care for each other the way we did and still do.
Now I am knocking on for 77, and I feel I have deteriorated quite a bit over the last five years, what with bad circulation in my legs, a session of diabetes, arthritis, blood pressure and a bit of angina, I feel I have almost outlived my usefulness. Over the last 18 months I have had dizzy spells and blackouts but found out this was mainly due to being overtreated with tablets, and I have felt better over the past few months since I cut my tablets down. I used to spend so much time in the shed, but now can’t find any jobs to do so I get fed up of sitting about, and I spend time playing games on the PC. I have the car but there is nowhere to go as Mother never wants to go anywhere, and there is no pleasure in going out on my own. But, I feel I have led a fairly useful life, and what a lonely life it would be without family. It was hard at times bringing them up, but what a joy they have been as we got older. Without them life would not be worth living. I try to get out on my good old faithful bike (now 57 years old) when weather permits, as the exercise seems to help my circulation. I have been taking cod liver oil every day since I was 60 and I swear that has kept me going or I would have been an invalid like my dad was.
Another of my old mates, Bob Padley, died two years ago and then my cousin Reg died on 27 December, so I suppose I should be grateful that I am as well as I am. At least I’m still able to get out and about and enjoy life with the rest of my family.
Langley Robert Clay.
