TASHY DID - A LIFE
1955
This year saw two fairly traumatic events. In February I went into hospital to have my tonsils out. I use the word hospital but it wasn’t. It was a private
nursing home, basically in a large house somewhere in Harrow-on-the-Hill. There was one room for children and most seemed to be having a tonsillectomy too. I say
most, which is a bit of an exaggeration, as there were only 3 others and all from the same family. Father took me in by taxi on the Wednesday, helped me undress
into my pyjamas and then said goodbye and left me. I’m fairly certain I had never been away from home before, apart from that other hospital trip when I was
eighteen months and too young to recall anything.
Nobody told me what might happen, maybe they didn’t know. I had a book so I lay in bed reading while the other 3 played around. They had had their operations
and were due out the next day. At about 9.00pm the lights went out and these other three settled down but first, using a potty in the corner, they all had a wee.
I can vividly remember my thoughts at that moment. Should I do this or was it their own private potty? In any case communal urination had not been an experience
I had been privileged to have and it was all very embarrassing. In the end I decided to follow their example and felt very relieved when no one said anything and
very relieved anyway.
Our own doctor was the anaesthetist and I learnt later that he and I had a jolly good fight about whether he was going to be allowed to do his job.
Eventually, it would seem, he won and I woke up later that Thursday afternoon sans tonsils and adenoids. Father came to see me that night and all was good.
In those days, ice cream was seen as the cure for the general soreness and I didn’t find that much of a hardship. There were now no other patients in the room
and I was not that unhappy, just a bit sleepy.
After a quiet day on Friday, mother came to see me and I saw her in the mirror coming up the stairs, burst into tears and cried the whole time she was there.
I have no idea why. The next day I was collected and taken home and told to stay in bed for a week to recover.
I may have mentioned that my maternal grandparents had a live-in maid for many years and after she left they had a woman who came in and did their cleaning etc.
Once we had moved back to London, she also came in to help my mother once or twice a week. Also, at this time, my grandmother was unwell and this lady was spending a lot of time helping them out, even accompanying my grandfather when he took his wife to hospital for frequent appointments. I didn’t know at the time but my grandmother had breast cancer and wasn’t expected to live much longer.
I mentioned this lady because she features in this next story. Some people, I now believe, are highly tuned in to any changes that happen around them.
I am one of these. Lying in my bed recovering from the op, I suddenly felt myself drifting away. Most people would then close their eyes and give in to the natural
sleep overtaking them. I didn’t. I leapt from my bed and ran to the top of stairs screaming that I was dying. Our home help was cleaning in the hall and simply
looked up and said, “Richard, go back to bed”. I sort of did but mother soon appeared and was far more sympathetic, which is what I felt I needed and probably
completely the wrong thing to do. This was my first panic attack and, over the next 55 or so years, they have always been close at hand. Nowadays I can control
things but there have been times when this irrational fear of dying has overwhelmed my world and my life. You will hear more.
I returned to school later and was then kept in one afternoon for something I didn’t do. We all left the classroom and when we came back our chairs had been
turned upside down. The teacher asked who did it and someone mentioned my name along with another guy. I said I hadn’t done it but very little else, being too
shy and probably turning bright red. We were both kept behind for an hour after school. I think it was this episode that really made me question some people’s
intelligence. I had left the classroom with the teacher and the chairs were upright; I had spent the next half hour in the hall with her and then returned with
her. How could she possibly think I had done it? I still question that intelligence even today and more later.
In May of that year my grandfather and grandmother sold their house in Chatsworth Road and went to live with my cousin and her parents in Eastcote. I
understand that when it was obvious my grandmother’s illness was terminal, both my father and my uncle wrote, inviting the grandparents to live with them.
In our case I have no idea how it would have worked. We were a family of four with a three bedroomed house, one bedroom of which was no bigger than a box room.
My sister and I, at this stage, shared the second biggest bedroom and while we had two rooms downstairs, I am not sure anyone could have really lived in one of
those. My cousin’s house, however, although roughly the same size, was far more suitable because she was an only child. My grandparents therefore had a bedroom
upstairs and their own living room downstairs, leaving my cousin’s family two upstairs rooms and a downstairs one. In the long run, this turned out to be a rather
fractious arrangement.
In June of this year, we had our first full family holiday, my sister included, and went down to stay at the bungalow owned by my mother’s aunt, in
Winchelsea. We hired a car and my father’s luck with cars continued. We had only been there a day when, after driving to the beach, we returned to the car,
switched it on and a loud, continuous shrieking sound came from the engine. We all searched around but couldn’t see anything so had no choice but to drive
home making this noise. A little later the RAC came out and mended things saying it was something to do with the heater.
This was the holiday, children, where your aunt spent much of her time washing the pebbles on Winchelsea beach, a thankless task considering how many
there are. She would sit on the beach with a full bucket of water, plonk some pebbles in, clean them and then lay them out to dry. Archimedes principle being
operative in these conditions, her full bucket would start to empty and she would cry out the immortal words, “me wonky more wart, wart”. For those older than
two, this translates as could you refill my bucket please.
I note from photos of that year that, even when playing in the garden, I would be wearing my school uniform, At the time, this didn’t seem strange but,
in a few years time, you will see that my sister and I also wore school uniform on holiday. On reflection, I think we may have been less well-off than
things looked. I recently calculated that, at today’s prices, my parents paid out over £250,000 on my education over 13 years. That could account for some
of it and why we never replaced that car until 1966, when father took part of his pension. It wasn’t that he had a lowly job, by his retirement he was an
Assistant Accountant General in the Ministry of Labour which might have been castled into the Department of Employment and Productivity by then, I’m not
sure. Possibly, in 1955, he was still working his way up although in 1959 his name did appear in Whittaker’s almanac showing top civil servants; how top
I don’t know. And one further statement, they don’t make tricycles like that any more.
By September it was obvious my grandmother was seriously ill. Mother would be away most days and we would be left with the home help on many occasions.
On Monday October 10, grandmother died and was cremated on Friday 14 at Golders Green Crematorium. No children attended the funeral. Mother was obviously
distraught as, although she knew it was coming, she had always been very close to her mother. Then, in one of those quirks of fate, on Monday 16 October,
father took up his new position in Leeds. Mother was left mourning and with the job of selling the house and then moving away again from what was left of
her family. Father would come back every other weekend but for the next nine months we were, essentially, a single parent family.
As the year drew to a close my sister celebrated the fact by contracting chicken pox and, although Christmas had just gone, she made a present of it to
me. The next few years were particularly stressful although, as children I don’t think we really knew it. Let’s just say life was not normal and mother and
father’s relationship changed too.
My mother and father first went out, as I told you last time, on 23 September 1943. Two years later, father proposed but they had a problem. His first
wife would not divorce him. In those days divorce was more of a stigma than nowadays and also more difficult to achieve. In the end they had to spend the
night in a hotel, despite the fact that they were already living together, and then produce a receipt to show they had stayed there. All a little bit sordid
if you ask me.
During the time they lived together at father’s flat in Du Cann Court, Balham (pictured now), there is an interesting story of which two of you will have
experienced the end result. My mother was a worrier. Boy, was she a worrier. Father used to claim that not only could she make a mountain out of a mole hill
but she would go out first to find the mole hill. She always liked to check everything, at least twice, before leaving the house. One day, father’s sister,
the youngest one, came round to go out with them and she told mother to hurry up. She did, but when they got back, the flat was filled with smoke as mother
had left a tea towel boiling on the hob. Remember no washing machines, so you often boiled particularly dirty items. From that moment on, mother never left a
house without returning to the kitchen and looking at the cooker and saying “straight, straight, straight, straight, off”. The “off” referring to the oven
switch and the four “straights” to the hobs. However, it was only a few years ago when telling this story, that I realised, for all those years, she was wrong.
There should have been another straight for the grill. Lucky she never burnt the house down.
The divorce from father’s first wife was finally made absolute on 15 September 1947 and father and mother were duly married 5 days later, which happened
to be my maternal grandfather’s 62nd birthday. It was a registry office wedding, no church would marry a divorcee in those days, and this picture shows
bride and groom with her parents. My father’s parents were still living up in Harrogate and his father was too ill to travel. Note the rather neat pair of
gloves that father is carrying and my apologies to all animal lovers but in those days a real fur stole was considered perfectly fine for formal occasions.
It would appear, in this bigger picture, that my grandfather celebrated his birthday by actually holding a cigarette in the photograph, something probably
also not acceptable these days. The other guests were, from left to right in the foreground, my mother’s brother’s wife, my mother’s mother, mother, father,
his sister and mother’s father. In the background are, again left to right as you look, mother’s sister, her brother and her father’s sister. As a fashion
statement from nearly seventy years ago it is quite interesting. You must also remember that this is just two years after the war ended so, I would guess,
most of these clothes had seen service before.
Within six months of their marriage, my father was transferred to work in Geneva and mother went with him. It was supposed to be for a year but mother didn’t
enjoy it, she had to return home twice because her mother was ill and so in late 1948, they came back to England. This photo, in Geneva, would seem to show
that mother was now wearing the gloves, and probably the trousers. Mother also experienced a miscarriage out in Geneva, which must
have been pretty traumatic away from her family and in a country where she didn’t understand the language. This can be proved from the time father heard her
order a coffee for breakfast and she asked for “cafe au lac”, which, as they were at the time sitting overlooking Lake Geneva (lac is French for lake while
lait is French for milk for the uneducated among you) would have been mighty interesting.
I am sure this experience, the miscarriage not the lake, coupled with the fact that father already had a daughter from his first marriage, even if he had
never seen her since he moved out, was why I became so precious to mother. I was the something that she had given father that no one else had.
Almost as soon as they returned, father was transferred again, this time to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and it was there that our original story begins and, from 1949,
you have been able to read it.
However it would seem almost certain that I was conceived in Switzerland.
I returned to school later and was then kept in one afternoon for something I didn’t do. We all left the classroom and when we came back our chairs had been
turned upside down. The teacher asked who did it and someone mentioned my name along with another guy. I said I hadn’t done it but very little else, being too
shy and probably turning bright red. We were both kept behind for an hour after school. I think it was this episode that really made me question some people’s
intelligence. I had left the classroom with the teacher and the chairs were upright; I had spent the next half hour in the hall with her and then returned with
her. How could she possibly think I had done it? I still question that intelligence even today and more later.
In May of that year my grandfather and grandmother sold their house in Chatsworth Road and went to live with my cousin and her parents in Eastcote. I
understand that when it was obvious my grandmother’s illness was terminal, both my father and my uncle wrote, inviting the grandparents to live with them.
In our case I have no idea how it would have worked. We were a family of four with a three bedroomed house, one bedroom of which was no bigger than a box room.
My sister and I, at this stage, shared the second biggest bedroom and while we had two rooms downstairs, I am not sure anyone could have really lived in one of
those. My cousin’s house, however, although roughly the same size, was far more suitable because she was an only child. My grandparents therefore had a bedroom
upstairs and their own living room downstairs, leaving my cousin’s family two upstairs rooms and a downstairs one. In the long run, this turned out to be a rather
fractious arrangement.
In June of this year, we had our first full family holiday, my sister included, and went down to stay at the bungalow owned by my mother’s aunt, in
Winchelsea. We hired a car and my father’s luck with cars continued. We had only been there a day when, after driving to the beach, we returned to the car,
switched it on and a loud, continuous shrieking sound came from the engine. We all searched around but couldn’t see anything so had no choice but to drive
home making this noise. A little later the RAC came out and mended things saying it was something to do with the heater.
This was the holiday, children, where your aunt spent much of her time washing the pebbles on Winchelsea beach, a thankless task considering how many
there are. She would sit on the beach with a full bucket of water, plonk some pebbles in, clean them and then lay them out to dry. Archimedes principle being
operative in these conditions, her full bucket would start to empty and she would cry out the immortal words, “me wonky more wart, wart”. For those older than
two, this translates as could you refill my bucket please.
I note from photos of that year that, even when playing in the garden, I would be wearing my school uniform, At the time, this didn’t seem strange but,
in a few years time, you will see that my sister and I also wore school uniform on holiday. On reflection, I think we may have been less well-off than
things looked. I recently calculated that, at today’s prices, my parents paid out over £250,000 on my education over 13 years. That could account for some
of it and why we never replaced that car until 1966, when father took part of his pension. It wasn’t that he had a lowly job, by his retirement he was an
Assistant Accountant General in the Ministry of Labour which might have been castled into the Department of Employment and Productivity by then, I’m not
sure. Possibly, in 1955, he was still working his way up although in 1959 his name did appear in Whittaker’s almanac showing top civil servants; how top
I don’t know. And one further statement, they don’t make tricycles like that any more.
By September it was obvious my grandmother was seriously ill. Mother would be away most days and we would be left with the home help on many occasions.
On Monday October 10, grandmother died and was cremated on Friday 14 at Golders Green Crematorium. No children attended the funeral. Mother was obviously
distraught as, although she knew it was coming, she had always been very close to her mother. Then, in one of those quirks of fate, on Monday 16 October,
father took up his new position in Leeds. Mother was left mourning and with the job of selling the house and then moving away again from what was left of
her family. Father would come back every other weekend but for the next nine months we were, essentially, a single parent family.
As the year drew to a close my sister celebrated the fact by contracting chicken pox and, although Christmas had just gone, she made a present of it to
me. The next few years were particularly stressful although, as children I don’t think we really knew it. Let’s just say life was not normal and mother and
father’s relationship changed too.
My mother and father first went out, as I told you last time, on 23 September 1943. Two years later, father proposed but they had a problem. His first
wife would not divorce him. In those days divorce was more of a stigma than nowadays and also more difficult to achieve. In the end they had to spend the
night in a hotel, despite the fact that they were already living together, and then produce a receipt to show they had stayed there. All a little bit sordid
if you ask me.
During the time they lived together at father’s flat in Du Cann Court, Balham (pictured now), there is an interesting story of which two of you will have
experienced the end result. My mother was a worrier. Boy, was she a worrier. Father used to claim that not only could she make a mountain out of a mole hill
but she would go out first to find the mole hill. She always liked to check everything, at least twice, before leaving the house. One day, father’s sister,
the youngest one, came round to go out with them and she told mother to hurry up. She did, but when they got back, the flat was filled with smoke as mother
had left a tea towel boiling on the hob. Remember no washing machines, so you often boiled particularly dirty items. From that moment on, mother never left a
house without returning to the kitchen and looking at the cooker and saying “straight, straight, straight, straight, off”. The “off” referring to the oven
switch and the four “straights” to the hobs. However, it was only a few years ago when telling this story, that I realised, for all those years, she was wrong.
There should have been another straight for the grill. Lucky she never burnt the house down.
The divorce from father’s first wife was finally made absolute on 15 September 1947 and father and mother were duly married 5 days later, which happened
to be my maternal grandfather’s 62nd birthday. It was a registry office wedding, no church would marry a divorcee in those days, and this picture shows
bride and groom with her parents. My father’s parents were still living up in Harrogate and his father was too ill to travel. Note the rather neat pair of
gloves that father is carrying and my apologies to all animal lovers but in those days a real fur stole was considered perfectly fine for formal occasions.
It would appear, in this bigger picture, that my grandfather celebrated his birthday by actually holding a cigarette in the photograph, something probably
also not acceptable these days. The other guests were, from left to right in the foreground, my mother’s brother’s wife, my mother’s mother, mother, father,
his sister and mother’s father. In the background are, again left to right as you look, mother’s sister, her brother and her father’s sister. As a fashion
statement from nearly seventy years ago it is quite interesting. You must also remember that this is just two years after the war ended so, I would guess,
most of these clothes had seen service before.
Within six months of their marriage, my father was transferred to work in Geneva and mother went with him. It was supposed to be for a year but mother didn’t
enjoy it, she had to return home twice because her mother was ill and so in late 1948, they came back to England. This photo, in Geneva, would seem to show
that mother was now wearing the gloves, and probably the trousers. Mother also experienced a miscarriage out in Geneva, which must
have been pretty traumatic away from her family and in a country where she didn’t understand the language. This can be proved from the time father heard her
order a coffee for breakfast and she asked for “cafe au lac”, which, as they were at the time sitting overlooking Lake Geneva (lac is French for lake while
lait is French for milk for the uneducated among you) would have been mighty interesting.
I am sure this experience, the miscarriage not the lake, coupled with the fact that father already had a daughter from his first marriage, even if he had
never seen her since he moved out, was why I became so precious to mother. I was the something that she had given father that no one else had.
Almost as soon as they returned, father was transferred again, this time to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and it was there that our original story begins and, from 1949,
you have been able to read it.
However it would seem almost certain that I was conceived in Switzerland.
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