1937 to 1943

My turn to join Naylor I and Naylor II at St Pirans-on-the-Hill at Maidenhead came in the summer term of 1937, when I was a few months short of eight years old.  I remember very little of my first year or two at St Pirans, just flashes of memory of odd events.  For instance, as soon as I had gone there for the first time, my parents went to France on holiday and I was very homesick.  My mother had given me a few dinky toys to keep me happy but they did not comfort me much.  We lived so close that when we went out on our Sunday walks in a long crocodile dressed in our blue coats and caps, I could almost see Little Mount.  It was just over the crest of the hill if we went along the Marlow road.  The thought of how close it was also made me feel homesick.  As I lay in bed, just before going to sleep, I would listen to the traffic going along the Marlow road, wondering if one of them was my father because I knew he always came that way on his journey home from work.

The headmaster was Commander Tippett, known as Com T, a big bluff ex-Navy man with a dominant presence.  His wife, Ma T, was short and dumpy, and not as kindly as Com T.  She always wore a fox fur tippet.  The masters I remember are the older ones who did not join up when the war came; I have no recollection of those who left in 1939.  The school was quite small, I think about 60 or so.  I was number 18, Michael was 17 and Dennis 19, but as odd numbers were on one side of the changing room and even numbers on the other, I did not get dressed or washed near them.  Michael was a school prefect and I became a sort of prefect’s mascot, at least until he went to Oundle in 1938.

My father organised a different sort of summer holiday from our usual beach holidays for us in 1937.  We stayed on a farm on Exmoor.  I am not sure exactly where on Exmoor or what sort of farm it was.  The farmer was called Downs and was very friendly to us boys and I think we just joined in the life of the farm, with the new experience of having real animals wandering around the house and farmyard.  We also joined in the country sports.  We went otter hunting and it was most exciting, with the hounds barking and the huntsmen splashing in the river.  We did not see an otter but thoroughly enjoyed the sport.  We had not learned that it was cruel; nobody saw it that way then.  We also went cubbing and I was in at the kill near the top of Dunkery Beacon and was blooded.  We must have done some touring around as I remember going to Dunster and Porlock, and we must have gone to look for the Doones as they were already a favourite of mine.

The following summer we all went to France for a holiday.  My father had just bought a second-hand Buick, a massive black thing which was his pride and joy, and we went in that.  My memories of events that far back begin to become clearer from age eight onwards.  So I can remember some funny details of that holiday.  The whole of the journey was an excitement; it was my first time abroad, my first time on a ferry, and hearing people speak a foreign language.  We stayed the first night at the Hotel de la Poste at Montargis and the next day went on to the Hotel de Charlannes at La Bourboule, where we spent about two weeks.  La Bourboule is in the Massif Centrale.  The hotel was set high up on a hill above La Bourboule and the valley of Mont Dore, approached by a ‘funiculaire’, a mountain railway with two counterweighted cable cars coming up from Mont Dore.  It was a luxurious place and we were very spoilt.  The staff made a great fuss over me on my birthday and I had a wonderful creamy chocolate cake.  There were also many other firsts in the French food, but what I remember best were the peaches, out of this world.  We went for walks in the woods along way-marked trails and in the evening listened to the incessant roar of the sauterelles (cicadas).  And if I remember right we went up the Puy de Saucy, the mountain, on a telerifique or cable car.

That summer, back home, my father bought a swimming pool which we put up in the garden; a canvas one about 12 or 15 feet across and three feet deep.  I learned to swim again there and lost my fear of water.  (There was a fine heated indoor swimming pool at St Pirans which I then could begin to enjoy; I had not liked it in my first few terms.)  We would go off, the three of us, on long bicycle rides, to Marlow or Bourne End and beyond, with never a worry about the traffic.  It must have been about then also that I learned to ride a horse.  Michael and Dennis had been riding for some time but it was not till about then that I was allowed to start.  I kept falling off.  I did not really like riding that much but had to do it to keep up my self-esteem.

At St Pirans I must have been reasonably happy as I have little recollection of events there, either good or bad.  I was not athletic; too chubby.  I was ragged for that but didn’t mind terribly.  So I was not much good at games though I was more willing to try than the school was to let me try.

The next period of which I have clear memories was the summer holidays of 1939.  We all went off to another farm, this time in the Lake District.  It was just off Ullswater, on the east side somewhere near Howtown or Martindale.  Dennis and I tried to find it after the war but failed. I have never been able to remember the farmer’s name.  The place was more primitive than the farm we stayed at on Exmoor, with the loo at the bottom of the garden.  There was a stream running through the fields just below the farm and I had a steam-powered boat that I used to sail up and down the stream.  We toured the Lake District extensively in our big Buick and did the tourist things, like the sheep dog trials at Patterdale, and watched the fell running.  On my birthday we went into Penrith and I was allowed to choose a watch.  It was an Ingersol pocket watch that cost 2/6, my first watch. On other days we bought lots of Kendal mint cake and Grasmere gingerbread.  We also did some proper walking and I am sure I climbed Helvellyn.  The last day I was suffering from food poisoning and spent half the night in the loo at the bottom of the garden and was sick in the car all the way home the next day!

The threat of war loomed over that holiday somehow and we had not been home long, indeed I think we may have cut short our holiday because of the prospects, when we were at war.  I have a vivid recollection of coming out of the swimming pool in the garden and going through the French windows into the sitting room still drying myself and standing in front of our huge Murphy radiogram and listening to Chamberlain announcing that we were at war with Germany.  That was September 3^rd 1939.  It did not affect our lives in any way for some time.  I went back to school as usual.  We were issued with gas masks like the rest of the British population.  This was a bit traumatic for me as all the school, except me, were issued them one day.  But there wasn’t one for me.  It was only in the evening that Com T produced one for me and I had a special fitting to myself, and he told me I had the right shaped head for the gas mask to fit snugly.  Maidenhead was pretty much on the direct route for bombing raids on London from Germany but in 1939 I don’t think that that concerned anybody at St Pirans.  It was only in mid-1940 that the ghastly reality became apparent.  Many schools evacuated from danger areas to safer locations, but not St Pirans.  Instead the whole cellar area was converted into one large air raid shelter and before too long the shelter was turned into a dormitory for the whole school with bunk beds two layers high and several layers across.  And so, later on in 1940, we would lie there at night in our bunk beds, listening to the German planes coming over and the crump of anti-aircraft guns.  There were occasions when things got too close for comfort and planes were shot down near us, but on the whole I don’t ever remember being scared of the bombing.  For a time, perhaps eighteen months, we went to the cellars every night as a matter of routine, without waiting for the air raid alarm to sound.

At Little Mount too things were changing.  Because it was such a big house my father was worried that it might be selected as a place to house refugee children from London.  So the Gummers came to live with us.  Tom Gummer was one of my father’s childhood friends from his days in Ealing and at school (his son David always used to enjoy telling me the story that our two fathers would go shooting pheasants on Ealing Common!  That would have been before the First World War).  His wife, Dinah (nee Hays, from the ticket agency family), was about the same age as Mr. Gummer.  They had one child, David, who must have been about 5 years old when they came to live.  We boys all loathed him at first, but learned to tolerate him!  In the end he and I became great friends.  The next big change was that ICI loaned my father to the Government (Ministry of Munitions?) to help in the war effort.  He became production manager at a large ordnance factory in Bridgend that made naval shells.  I do not know the exact date this happened, early 1940 probably, but it did mean we had to leave Little Mount.  My father managed to rent Little Mount for the duration of the war and we moved to a much smaller place at the bottom of Cookham Dean, Dean Cottage, where I think we spent most of 1940 because in September we certainly watched the blitz over London from the garden, with searchlights weaving in the sky looking for enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft guns flashing.  Dean Cottage was set on the side of a hill with a reasonable sized garden running down to the road at the bottom.

So throughout most of 1940 I suppose my father was down in Bridgend working at the ordnance factory, while my mother was still in Cookham Dean.  He was living on a farm at Southerndown, about five or six miles from Bridgend.  The farmer was called Morgan.  We all spent Christmas 1940 with him on the farm.  At Christmas dinner I was asked which piece of the turkey I would like and said the drum stick.  It was so big I could hardly finish it.  I suppose we all went there by train since petrol rationing had been introduced, and anyway the Buick drank petrol and it had been laid up in Currell’s Garage in Marlow for the duration.  My father got a small car in which to go to work and I suppose my mother kept her little Morris 8, registration number CPP 727.  She would have got a small ration of petrol for it.

In early 1941 they rented a tiny cottage about five miles from Bridgend, at Ogmore-on-Sea not far from Southerndown, called Wen Voe, near the end of a gravel road running down to the beach with lots of similar holiday cottages along the road.  I never actually went there as, by March, before the winter term ended, my parents had moved to a bigger bungalow, Sea Walls, which was the last house before the beach, with a minute garden but a big balcony running the width of the cottage looking over the sea.  It had a garage.  My father picked me up from Bridgend station when I came down for the first time on my own by train, and drove me to a house and said would I go and ask the lady of the house for the garage key; I had never been there before and did not know which house was which, so great was my surprise when the lady who opened the door was my mother!  We stayed at Sea Walls until late 1943.

The journeys by train to and from Maidenhead and Bridgend were adventurous to say the least.  The trains were almost always packed full and I often had to stand most of the way in the corridor; although that had the advantage that it at least kept me away from most of the cigarette smoke since everybody seemed to smoke in those days (including both my father, usually a pipe, and my mother).  I was only 12 when I first started doing the train journeys; totally unused to having to look after myself and very shy into the bargain!  I must have done the trip ten times each way, before I went to Radley, and I gradually learnt how to cope.  The normal journey time would have been about four hours.  The one great thing about St Pirans was that Mrs Tippett must have thought the journey was much further than it actually was because she always allowed me to leave school a day early.

During 1940, at St Pirans, things were changing too.  The younger masters went off to fight and Com T was promoted from Commander to Captain (to be known on Ma T’s instructions as Cap T!) and went off to work in the Admiralty every day; he was reputed to have been responsible for planning the defences of Singapore and all the guns were facing the wrong way!.  He handed over the day to day running of the school to Ma T, though she left most of it to Messrs Cushing and Higgins, the senior masters.^[1]  Food rationing was introduced in January with sugar, butter and bacon being rationed (an adult weekly ration was 8 oz sugar, 2 oz butter, and 4 oz bacon). In March meat, fat and tea were also rationed (1 lb meat per week, 6 oz fat and 2 oz tea).  I am not sure when clothes and sweets rationing was introduced.  I remember my contribution to the war effort was to give up sugar in my tea, and I never had it in tea again!

While the rest of the country was immersed in the disaster that was occurring in France in May 1940 and the evacuation from Dunkirk, I was in hospital in Windsor, having my tonsils out.  I have a clear memory of waiting outside the hospital with Tomlin, (our gardener cum part-time chauffeur) who must have driven my mother over with me, and of him teaching me how to play marbles in the gutter!  The operation did not go well and my throat took a long while to heal and I lived on scrambled eggs.  I read lots of  Doctor Dolittle, getting through several of his books, while I convalesced.  My first Doctor Dolittle had been given me on my last birthday by Auntie Marjorie, ‘Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office’.  I still have it.

Apart from my tonsils and the bombing my main memory of 1940 was the winter, one of the hardest in living memory.  There was deep snow and we were all allowed to use the Tippett’s garden (’Private Side‘), which had a very steep slope leading from the school to the lawn below and it became a wonderful tobogganing slide and a place for snowball fights.  I think the central heating was lowered as I remember being perpetually cold, particularly my hands and feet and holding them on the radiators to get warm and being told this would give me chilblains.  I didn’t mind so long as I got warm, and I didn’t get chilblains.

Once my parents were living in South Wales, from early 1941, I began to write letters once a week under a master’s supervision, so I had to write something however dull.  Most of these letters have survived and they are incredibly dull!  My first letter of January 26^th 1941 says I have joined four Societies, Rug-making, Shooting^[2], Drawing and Dramatics.  I began making ‘a rug of three big penguins and a baby’ which still survives in near perfect condition.  There were seven new boys that term and one new girl, who she was I have no idea.  The next letter says I have done the little penguin and started on a big penguin.   I relate that Mrs Tippett reads to the school three times a week ‘which is very nice of her and the book she is reading is rather good’, but I don’t say what it was.  The only one of them I remember was ‘Moonfleet’, although she read to us regularly for over two years.  My interest in aircraft identification was well advanced by this point in the war and I was subscribing to a Spotters magazine and in a series of letters I grumble that Smiths keep on sending the wrong editions.  Then in a series of other letters I seem to be sending my parents pictures of aircraft and expecting them to identify them and telling them off when they are wrong and explaining the fine details of how to tell one aircraft from another.  And I was also sending them crossword puzzles I had made up and expected them to send me the solutions.  I was also sending the crossword puzzles to Michael.

In February I got measles; there is a three week gap in my letters when I was in bed.  ‘I have only been in bed for about a fortnight which I don’t think is a very long time’.  Then for the first time is a passing mention of the war; ‘We have not had any raids here whatsoever, I am so glad it has been alright in Wales’.  Michael also got measles at the same time.  ‘It will be very nice to think that when the holidays come, that we will all have had measles’.

As early as this we were doing the Common Entrance exams (for entry to public school) and in my last letter of the term I list all the marks by subject.  I took twelve subjects and averaged 36%, making me 8^th out of 25 people taking the exam.

The first letter of the summer term, dated May 4^th 1941, shows that I went from Bridgend to Marlow by train, ‘I had a very good journey indeed and all the connections were very good indeed and I arrived at Granny’s at about 1 o’clock.  After lunch I went into Marlow with Auntie Daisy (Lionel’s wife) and she very kindly bought me an English Dictionary like I wanted.  I got into Maidenhead in Mrs Warren’s car.  The Quarry woods were looking lovely.  Granny very kindly gave me half a crown.  I arrived at school at about five fifteen and even then I was late.  I have joined the following societies: Natural history, and Gardening and Shooting.’  At the end of the letter: ‘My height is 59 ¼ ins and my weight is 105 lbs.  The dormitory I am in is Newton (all the dormitories were named after scientists).  This term there have been six new boys.  The Rugger field is being grown into hay again.’  The next letter says that I am in fact sleeping in the cellar; also that ‘last Sunday we had ‘ORANGES’ and we are having them again today.’  The next letter says ‘we are getting oranges every other day now which is very nice indeed considering the fruit shortage’.  At the beginning of June the school started a War Savings Group and the boys collected £11-15s.  I gave 3/6.  Cap T gave the school a talk on the sinking of the Bismark, the capital ship of the German Navy, as he read it out of the Times.  The Maidenhead War Weapons Week raised seven hundred and twelve thousand and forty eight pounds ‘which is very good indeed’.  Otherwise the letters are all about the cricket matches (I was not in any team), quizzes about aircraft for my poor parents to identify, lists of the types of aircraft I have seen (I must have been a sort of aeroplane twitcher) and requests for post cards of aeroplanes.  I finished my rug!  My parents came for an exeat at the end of June^[3] and were lent a car.  Then I went home for the summer holidays at the end of July.

Sea Walls was a wonderful spot for the summer holidays in the rather scruffy resort of Ogmore-on-Sea.  Our house was the last house before you got to the sea, down the end of a gravel road lined with summer bungalows.  As everywhere round the British coast at that time there were minefields surrounded by barbed wire.  The barbed wire would not have stopped the Germans for five minutes but it did stop the sheep from blowing themselves up and showed where the minefields were.  There were paths through the minefields that we locals knew.  One was just outside our back gate and led out at low tide onto a lovely sandy beach which sloped gently into the sea.  The beach stretched away westwards in a big bay formed by the little Ogmore river, across which one could wade at low tide to get to a big area of wild sand dunes and beyond that to Porthcawl.  To the east there were low cliffs or rough rocks along which one could walk for what seemed for ever.  They were ideal for fishing from when the tide was up.  Ogmore at this stage of the war was not a busy resort any more as it must have been before the war.  The beach was invariably deserted and we could swim to our heart’s content.  The previous occupants of Sea Walls had left some surfing boards and Dennis and I tried to teach ourselves to surf.  We did not do any sea fishing but would put lines out on the beach as the tide was coming up, baited and hooked to see what we could catch.  The only real excitement I can remember was catching a large skate, although there were other more grizzly reminders of the war washed up on the beach, like the corpse of a German airman and parachutes.

My letters from the winter term show that the books I was reading were surprisingly adult.  I was into Alexandre Dumas in a big way, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, The Count of Monte Cristo, and getting through them at some speed.  It must have been at this point that I started reading in bed.  I had a torch and read under the blankets in the cellar.  On the back of one letter is a request for some batteries!  On October 19^th I report that ‘we had a lovely feast of grapes which were grown on the private side greenhouse, I helped Cap T pick them.’  Its funny but I can recall perfectly helping Cap T do that picking.  It was a huge crop, grown actually in the conservatory attached to the school.

The war might be almost non-existent on the basis of my letters.  It is only the visits of old boys which brings the reality home.  One old boy has won the DFC, another is a Spitfire pilot who has shot down five German planes in nine months; another was on the ‘Norfolk’ at the sinking of the ‘Hood’ and the ‘Bismark’ and tells the school all about the chase and the sinkings; and yet another ‘naval man who has the DSO, and was at Taranto and when the Illustrious convoy got through in the Mediterranean is coming with a cinema to show us some slides’.  The next week I report that his name was Lieutenant Goring, he is in the Fleet Air Arm and his slides were very interesting indeed, about 20 to 25 of them.  Yet another’s mother ‘has presented the school with a picture of the King, The Queen and Mr Churchill, framed in a lovely frame with a nice crown on the top of it.’  On one occasion there was an ‘evacuation practice down to the cellars which took a minute and a half and another half minute to make sure everybody was down which is really quite quick on the whole.’  I suppose by this point in the war the bombing of London had slackened off sufficiently so that regular sleeping in the cellars was no longer necessary.  Mrs Tippett continued to read us books in the evenings.  This was a wonderful idea and I still think of these times as ones of great peace and I used them to make another semi-circular rug that is still around.

At the end of term there was a concert and a feast.  My description of the feast makes it clear how short of food we were.  ‘For the first course we had fried eggs, brussel sprouts, potato crisps and potato and gravy.  Then we had fruit salad and then if we wanted more there was bread and honey.  There was after that Crackers, which are very hard to get, inside them there were some very nice things.  After that there was the concert.  The first item on the programme was the senior song ‘The British Grenadiers’.  I was in that.  The second item was ‘A Moonlight Occurrence’ which was quite good.  Then there were some songs sung by the juniors.’^[4]

My letters home for the period Jan-July 1942 are missing.  I take up the tale from the start of the winter term 1942 since I have no idea what happened in between, other than that Michael left Oundle in the summer of 1942 and joined the R.A.F.  He started his R.A.F. career with a six month university short course, most of which he did at Pembroke College, Cambridge.  There were two new societies, Timber Cutting ‘in which we are cutting up trees for firewood’ and Leatherwork, ‘in which we make things out of leather‘. The timber cutting was a great idea for the school since it harnessed some of our excess energies for something useful and, judging by letters during the term, we did a great deal of timber cutting.  I remember it as great fun.  We also learned to split the logs we cut.  I entered into the leatherwork with great zeal and made such useful things as a ration book cover, writing pad cover, and an ostrich skin shopping bag which my mother used for years.  Leatherwork replaced rug making as an activity we could undertake while Mrs Tippett read us books.

The war comes in for occasional mention.  Each week Cap T gave a presentation on the progress of the war, and old boys would come with their stories of what they had done; ‘I expect you remember that some people went out to Africa in a submarine to talk to some French men, the captain of the Submarine was an old-boy‘.  On October 4^th is an excited comment in my letter: ‘I expect you saw in the papers about the biggest daylight raid on Friday we saw 15 fortress bombers going south and 6 going North East and also a lot of Bostons flying about and we all thought something was happening and so it was (over France).’  On November 15^th church bells were rung all over the country to celebrate the victory over the Germans at El Alamein and I ask if my parents heard them.

I continued to read voraciously.  ‘Lorna Doone’ and ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles, and other Conan Doyle’s like ‘The White Company’ and ‘The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard’.  There is no mention in any letter of one phase of my reading; when I discovered the boys’ adventure stories of A.G.Henty.  He wrote many novels about the Napoleonic wars and about the great battles of Marlborough against the French.  I got through them one after another and thoroughly enjoyed them.  They are not the sort of thing that teenagers read nowadays; a kind of ‘Boys Own’ in novel form.  The Conan Doyle historical novels were in a similar vein, with Brigadier Gerard the hero.  And of course there was Biggles, another great favourite of mine and to boys of my generation.  I collected almost all the ‘Saint’ novels, sadly I don’t know what happened to them, and Bulldog Drummond too.  In early 1943 I was into the Dr Syn novels.  I had seen a film of one of the novels over Christmas about Dr Syn, with Alastair Sim I think, and wanted to collect all eight of them.

At the end of 1942 I was top of the school in the end of term exams and obviously very proud of myself, (I am on the ‘Honoris Causa’ board once again’), putting a little chit with all the results in my letter.  I was top or equal top in nine exams, second in two more and third in the last, with an average of 75.83%!  We used to have weekly form contests, what for I have no idea, and the form that had done best was given ’the clock’ for the week.  On the clock was a brass plate with the last four lines of  Kipling’s ‘If’ inscribed on it:

‘If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more- you’ll be a man my son!’

I think that probably reflects Cap T’s philosophy as much as anything, and what he tried to inculcate in all his boys at St Pirans.  It’s probably old-fashioned now but it was bred into me from an early age.

Going to chapel was another important feature of school life bred into me, though it never gets a mention in my letters, except once when I ask if, during an exeat, they want to come to chapel.  There was a service every Sunday and a hymn practice on Saturdays.  I learnt many of the hymns I know today at these practices.  For some reason I became the organ blower.  We had an old-fashioned organ that operated from a manual bellows, which squeaked.  Since the bellows had to be full when the organ started playing, one either had to blow it up during the silence at the end of a prayer, when the whole congregation could hear the squeaking, or start inflating when the organ started, and risk a sort of squealing noise as the pressure got strong enough.  I never did master the best way.  In common with past generations of organ blowers I carved my name behind the organ.  Michael said it was there when he had to take his turn thirty years later.  I can also still remember the first time I had to read the lesson and being coached on the importance of clarity and how what I read would influence the listeners.  My first lesson was Mark Chapter 10, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me’.

Cap T had a heart attack in early February and died suddenly but the school seems to have gone on running smoothly.  I took Common Entrance to get into Radley at the end of February.  I am amazed that I had to do twelve exams in just two days.  From my letters I sound uncharacteristically confident that I had passed.  By early March I knew I had got in to Radley.

My letters are relatively silent on my participation in school sports.  They report the results of lots of school matches but, until late 1942, I do not seem to have been much involved.  That is not how I remember it.  I was never any good at cricket, not having a good eye for a ball, though I remember hours of practice on a catching machine trying to harden my hands.  I ended up as the scorer for the first XI, so I would not have written about such an uninteresting position.  I liked it as it meant I went to all the away matches, and shared in the teams’ teas!  Watching cricket on a summer afternoon meant bringing chairs out from the classrooms and sitting under the chestnut trees along the drive in the shade and reading a book, glancing up from time to time to see what was happening.  Hockey was mainly a winter term sport.  I wanted to participate, as it was a sport that involved a lot of exercise.  I wanted to be a half or back.  Instead I was put in goal, a position I hated as one did nothing.  My final degradation was to have to act as substitute goal for a girl’s school when their goalie was injured and letting in a goal!  In one of my final letters I was apparently Captain of the Second XI and played back, so I suppose I got what I wanted.  On the other hand, I was in my element at rugger.  By the winter of 1942 I was in the first XV, playing in the scrum, and got my school cap in November.  I was in it again the next term and got my school colours in March.  I remember Mr Higgins, our coach, in a congratulatory speech, saying that Naylor was always there in the middle of things when he was most wanted.  I seem to have scored tries frequently.  We had an unbeaten team that term, what the school called a gold-letter team because when our names went up on the team board they were painted in gold not white.  It was only the eleventh team since 1921 to be gold.  The school got a half-holiday in our honour.

At the end of my final letter from St Pirans is a P.S. asking my mother to send me some money.  She would find a bottle in my bedroom with pennies in it and could use the pennies to buy a postal order!