1929-1937

I was born on the 17^th August 1929 at The Chauntry, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. 

I was the third boy in a row; a disappointment to my parents as they had been hoping I would be a girl.  My eldest brother Michael had been born in June 1924 and was therefore just over five years old, and my other brother Dennis had been born in December 1926 and was thus nearly three years older than me.  My mother had had a miscarriage between Dennis and me, which probably explains the gap in age.  As usual in those days I was born at home.  My mother had a nurse, Nurse Lane, a friend of her family, to stay for about four months to look after me.  She had also attended the birth of each of my two brothers.  (Nurse Lane is in the Chauntry Visitors Book for May 1928; perhaps this was the time of the miscarriage?).  The family doctor at that time was Dr. Bailey and he was also in attendance.

When Nurse Lane left, my mother employed a 17 year old called Ruth to cope with Michael and Dennis while I was left to a series of contract nurses from the Morland Agency.  This was not a success and Ruth took over looking after me as well.  Ruth lived with her mother and sister nearby in Woburn in a little flint cottage by the church.  Her father was in the Indian army.

My parents had been married for almost seven years when I was born.  My father was 34 years old and my mother 29.  My father’s connections were round the Marlow area, although he had been born at The Priory, The Green, Norwood (part of Southall).  His mother would, I surmise, have moved when Naylors Paints moved from Southall to Slough at the end of 1919, just the time when my father would have come out of the Royal Flying Corps at the end of the First World War.  His mother lived in Marlow as did his elder sister Marjorie.^[1] He worked in Slough at Nobel Chemical Finishes, a firm that had bought out Naylor’s Paints, the long-established family firm, after a disastrous collapse of the firm in the twenties.  At the time I was born, Nobel Chemical Finishes was suffering as a result of the Depression and I suppose my father’s salary, like that of all those around him had been cut.  He once told me he was earning £800 per year just before the war. Things were to get worse before they improved, so I came at a period when his financial situation was precarious.

My mother was the daughter of a wealthy cotton spinner from Lancashire, Peter Crook.  Her mother was Sarah (nee Blackburn).  At the time of my mother’s birth they lived in Birkdale in Lancashire, with another house, Borwick Lodge, near Hawkshead in the Lake District.  She was their fourth child.  The eldest was Dorothy who, at the time of my birth was married to Dr. Hugh Wills, a GP in Marlow.  The next child was Kathleen (Kay), who was married to Brian Dickson, who lived in Pickneys Green, near Maidenhead.  The third child was another Peter who was married to Dody and lived in Frodsham in Cheshire, which was where my parents were married^[2].  I have never been able to discover how it was that three girls from a Lancashire cotton spinner came to marry three men from Marlow or thereabouts.  All three girls went to Wycombe Abbey School, but further than that I have not been able to find a connection.  Both my Crook grandparents were dead by the time I was born and their children had come into their father’s wealth, which would explain how my parents were able to maintain a standard of living above what one would expect from his level of salary.  At one point I remember my father telling me that the Crooks did not consider him a fit person to marry their daughter, but marry her he did.

When they were first married they lived in a flat above Wootton’s Boathouse, by Marlow Bridge.  They moved after a couple of months to ‘The Old Nest’ in Cookham.  After three or four months there they moved to ‘The Wapentake’ in Beaconsfield and after another few months moved to ‘Taormina’ back in Cookham.  After a less than a year there, they bought ‘The Chauntry’ in Bourne End in early 1924, three months before Michael was born.  The Chauntry was a considerable house with five bedrooms (one of which became the nursery) and two bathrooms and three large reception rooms and an extensive kitchen and servants’ area.  The garden was at least an acre in size with a tennis court, a substantial vegetable garden looked after by Tranter, who ruled the roost in the garden and forbid us boys from his vegetable garden, and extensive lawns. The vegetable garden was elaborately laid out with low box hedges in regular squares.  One had to go through it to get to the garage, which was miles away at the bottom of the garden by the railway line.  The house was within walking distance of the GWR station at Bourne End, very convenient for London, Paddington.  It was also virtually on the River Thames, separated only by the Bourne End to Marlow single track railway line (where we used to put pennies on the track so the ‘Marlow Donkey’ would squash them), and the various boat houses of the Bourne End Sailing Club.  Altogether it must have seemed a very suitable residence for an up and coming paint manufacturer with a growing family, because at that time the paint business appeared to be doing well.  Sometime in the recent past the garden has been sub-divided and now contains four houses, as well as the Chauntry, one on the tennis court and three in the vegetable garden.

The household was run with almost military precision by a large staff.  As Ruth remembers it, the cook Gladys ruled in the kitchen and we were not allowed in there.  There was a house parlour maid called Bridget, who did all the cleaning inside.  We children took our meals upstairs in the nursery, a large airy room where we kept all our toys, and where I suppose Ruth supervised us.  One of Ruth’s jobs, she remembers, was to keep us out of the way during the afternoons, while my mother rested.  So for two or three hours every afternoon we all went for long walks, whatever the weather.  I suppose this is why Dennis and I have ever since had the urge to go for long walks whenever possible.  I can just remember some of those walks and the places I remember are quite a long distance from the house.  I can also remember standing at the top of the stairs, just outside the nursery, and screaming my head off because it was raining and we were all being made to put on our mackintoshes and I did not want to go out.  Another memory at the top of the stairs is being violently sick in a thunderstorm.

The yearly household routine was also tightly controlled.  We had to be out of the way for two weeks every spring while the house was being spring-cleaned.  Generally we went to stay with Uncle Edward, my mother’s uncle.  Ruth says he was a bachelor and lived in an enormous house in Colwyn Bay.  She would take us all up there by train and I think be joined by my mother and father for part of the time.  Some years we went to stay with Peter and Dody Crook at Frodsham with their children Betty and Tim.  From those visits to Frodsham I remember going for a ride on their gardener’s motor cycle; and also falling out of a downstairs window down a steep bank covered in gorse, and the endless job of pulling out the thorns.  I can also remember one spring (1936?) when we stayed at a hotel in Swanage.  My mother had had an operation on her nose and was convalescing.  There was a miniature golf course there and we spent hours playing.

The summer holidays were a similar ritual, or were, once I was a little bigger.  We would rent a house by the sea, probably for the month of August; this would have been in the four summers of 1933 to 1936.  In 1933 and 1934 we rented ‘Woodrising’ at Sandbanks; in 1935 and 1936 we went to Ferring.  Ruth took me to see the house at Ferring (just west of Worthing) in 1985.  It is a fairly substantial house right on the edge of the sands on top of the sea wall.  Ruth describes the family summer exodus rather like the Indian Government moving to Simla in the hot weather days of the Raj.  Everybody came, from the cook and the house parlour maid to Ruth and us children and the dogs, or Susan our Sealyham anyway (I am not sure if Simon her son had come on the scene by then).  The establishment was set up for the summer.  My mother ruled the roost and my father would come down at weekends.  I don’t remember much about these summers except masses of ants along the paths, although I have many photographs to show what it was like.  Apparently I nearly drowned on the last day of one of the summer holidays; everybody else had left the beach for the last time and they suddenly noticed I was not with them.  They found me nearly dead in a pool.  I know it was several years before I wanted to swim again, although I have no memory of the near drowning.

I suppose I started at Kindergarten when I was less than five because Dennis was there too to begin with, and he must have gone to St Pirans when he was seven and he was almost three years older than me. It was a very small school in Bourne End, called the Abbey school with a Mrs Stallen as headmistress.  It was within walking distance, up the road from the Chauntry to the main Marlow-Cookham road, over the level crossing and first left.  I can remember going to and fro with Dennis, particularly him making me run, trying to get me to run faster and faster and almost dragging me home at high speed. (The hymn ‘with brother hand in hand with brother’ that we used to sing at St Pirans, always made me think of these school runs.)    I am amazed that, once Dennis had gone to St Pirans, I was allowed to walk to and fro on my own.  I think Ruth must have left us at about this time, in 1935 or 1936 so she would not have accompanied me  I still have the first book in which I learned to read, ‘Squirrel Nutkin‘ but otherwise I have few memories about what I learnt other some Canadian geography!

Other memories of the Chauntry are relatively few.  Lying in bed on long summer evenings, when it was still light, and listening to all the people coming and going in their cars is one.  My bedroom looked out over the road leading down to the sailing club and most cars had to park just outside our house as there was little room to park over the railway line in the boatyards.  Or just listening to the thud, thud of balls as my parents played tennis.  Another memory, also lying in bed, was of one winter.  Michael and I must both have had German measles and were in his room and we were warmed by a flickering paraffin stove, sending light patterns over the ceiling, and Michael drummed on the wall with his finger nails imitating a galloping horse.  I thought that was terribly clever.  Another memory was of one Christmas morning.  I was lying wide awake in bed dying to see what was in my Christmas stocking.  So I crept into my parent’s bedroom, which adjoined mine, to ask if it was time.  I was sent away with a flea in my ear as it was only four o’clock!

Bourne End was not much more than a village in those days with few shops.  At the top of our road, on the left where it joined the main road, was Mrs Wicks sweet shop where we would go in and buy our pennyworth of peppermints or liquorice.  Just across the road was the Royalty Cinema where I saw my first film in 1936.  I was taken by Michael and Dennis to see a western ‘Wagon Wheels’.  I was very frightened and kept on screaming at the awful things that were going on.

One Christmas time, probably the year before I went to St Pirans, the school carol singers and bell ringers came to the Chauntry and we all gathered round the piano in the sitting room and had a lovely concert.  The next year we had moved to Little Mount and, though I was not one of the carol singers, I was allowed home to join them.

Around the end of 1936 my father decided to move from the Chauntry.  Things must have been going well at work since we moved to a very large house in Cookham Dean, called Little Mount.  We actually moved some time in 1937.  Almost the whole of Cookham Dean, which lies just above Marlow on top of the Quarry Woods, was and still is National Trust land, so could not be built on; a much grander area than Bourne End and a much grander house.  I remember my father telling me that he had spent far too much on Little Mount, and the considerable enlargements which he made, because he was supervising an extension to the paint works in Slough and got carried away by the amounts which were being spent in Slough.  Be that as it may, it was a lovely house and we proceeded to live on a grander scale. Downstairs one entered into a massive hall, with the dining room off to the right, and a vast sitting room to the left.  Part of my father’s extension was to add a playroom off the sitting room, big enough to take a full-size ping pong table.  The kitchen quarters were extensive; a large butler’s pantry, a big kitchen and a scullery, with a walk-in larder off that. There were five bedrooms on the first floor and two bathrooms, which was just right for the family with one spare room for visitors.  On the second floor there five rooms for the staff.  We had a live-in couple, the Nurdins, who lived up there.  He was the butler and she I think was the cook, or we may have had a separate cook as well.  The garden was looked after full-time by Fred Tomlin, who doubled up as chauffeur when needed.  The garden must have been the best part of an acre, with a huge, partly walled kitchen garden and three greenhouses and a solid fuel boiler.  My memory is of producing vastly more tomatoes than we could possibly eat.    Tomlin’s wife came in as the daily.  She was a massive woman and we all loved her.  Everywhere she went was an effort and she was always breathing heavily.  One week in the Mickey Mouse magazine there was a cartoon of someone scaling a cliff and looking into a puffin’s nest and Mickey calling down ‘what you puffin’ about’ and ever after she was called Mrs Puffin.  Then there was Mrs East who lived next door with her lorry driver husband Harry in Little Mount cottages.  I am not sure how there was enough work for all of them or whether I am confusing who overlapped with who.  Every morning certainly there was a large tea party in the cook’s sitting room, off the kitchen.  We boys were not allowed in.  It was all one big happy family in my memory.

I am sure that this period of my life was when my character was formed.  Being the youngest of three boys meant that I was always being led, I was never the leader.  Perhaps if my natural characteristic had been more aggressive I would not have been content to let my brothers, especially Michael, take the lead all the time. But I was not so inclined.  And so through life I have not been a natural leader; sometimes it has been necessary to take the lead but I have usually preferred to let someone else, someone who appeared to feel it necessary to take charge of a situation, to take charge, even if I felt inwardly that I could do it better.  My father also had a strong personality and during these formative years I was very much in awe of him.  Except during holidays I did not see that much of him, all my needs being catered for by Ruth and the other servants, which reinforced the distance between us.  My mother I loved dearly, but even with her the relationship was not as close as it became it later years during the war, when we had no servants and had to work together to keep the household running.  So I became the introvert that I have always been ever since.  Sometimes I have wished that I had a greater urge to lead but for the most part I have been happy enough with the way things worked out for me.