- Details
- Parent Category: Ringmer Past
The village of Ringmer was just three fields away from home, but when I first started school it might just as well have been savage Indian territory as far as I was concerned. I was christened in the church and I suppose I must have been taken to see the doctor occasionally during my first five years, but otherwise my mother had few reasons to go there. But daily walks to and from school over the next six years were to make it very familiar to me.
Even in the 1940s it was a sprawling place that had grown up beside the main road and stretched in a long, thin ribbon from Paygate to the Broyle. Nevertheless it was a close-knit village community of long-standing residents, quite unlike the miniature town it has become today, and it provided a variety of shops and services for a wide rural area where few people had cars.
Perhaps it is worth recalling those businesses. At Paygate itself was the yard of Hobden's, the agricultural contractors, who did the threshing for all the local farms. Their steam traction engines were a familiar sight on the roads around Ringmer, competing for our interest with the County Council's steam lorry, an antique well past its sell-by date that used to hiss and rattle at a surprisingly spanking pace along the lanes.
If you walked from Paygate into the village on a shopping expedition you would first arrive at the little sweet shop opposite the point where Church Lane met the main road. I can't remember the names of the couple who kept it, but even when the shadow of Hitler threatened the destruction of civilisation as we knew it you could still get a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie here, of a generous size and in its own cardboard box. Whether you could also get sweets depended, of course, on your coupon state. Sweet coupons came in strips of eight valid for four weeks. It was a complex system for a child to work out, but most of us mastered it as soon as we could read. Sweet coupons were the only ones allowed to be removed from the ration book, and each strip consisted of four coupons marked E and four marked D. The ration might vary a little from month to month, but my memory is that E coupons were usually worth four ounces and D coupons one ounce. The first day of each four-week ration period was always a Sunday, when you often had to fight your way through the crowd besieging the shop. Wise parents kept a close guard over sweet coupons, which could easily become playground currency, with tiny spivs flogging them in much the same way as their elders discreetly traded clothing coupons.
A few yards further on was the Ringmer Motor Works. This, like the Ringmer Building Works at the Broyle, was an enterprise set up by John Christie of Glyndebourne as an admirable attempt to bring new economic prosperity and much-needed employment to the village in the 1930s. The Motor Works was a vital feature of our family life. We didn't own a car but we did have a cumbersome radio designed specially for households with no electricity supply. It required a big high-tension battery with a long life and an acid-filled accumulator that needed frequent re-charging. My father and I shared the task of cycling to the Motor Works each week to take in the exhausted accumulator and collect the charged one, carrying them in a specially made box slung on the handlebars. If they weren't over-busy the mechanics would do quick running repairs on the bike too.
The Post Office was a few doors further along. I think it also housed the local telephone exchange, which must have been an attractively simple affair since the Park Farm phone number was Ringmer 28. The only heavy breathing likely to be heard on the phone in those days came from the operator listening in, so nobody would dream of making a confidential call.
Directly opposite, in one of a small group of weather-boarded cottages that encroached on the village green, a barber offered a part-time and rather amateur service. His efforts did much to compensate for our lack of school uniform because you could always identify a Ringmer schoolboy by the stark quality of his pudding-basin haircut.
Next came the Anchor Inn, a puzzling name in view of Ringmer's lack of seafaring connections. It was one of the few buildings in Ringmer that came close to being picturesque, and its position right next to the village hall ensured that even the dullest community events could have a happy ending. In the early 1940s it was the obvious choice as the unofficial headquarters of the Ringmer platoon of the Home Guard, of which my father was an enthusiastic member.
If you continued walking down the village street you came to Hooper's the butchers and Geering's the bakers, occupying two purpose-built shops directly opposite the cricket pitch. Their delivery vans covered a wide area so we were long-distance customers of both, and I very quickly became a regular after-school caller at the baker's shop, discovering that one of their penny buns (bought on credit until my mother checked her bill) would fortify me comfortably before the walk home.
A short row of small villas separated these two shops from the newsagent and tobacconist situated opposite the village pump. The war years were a lean time for this sort of business. Cigarette supplies were spasmodic and unpredictable because priority went to the armed services, so the bulk of the stock remained under the counter, to be dealt out in miserly fashion to regular customers only. Similarly it was rarely possible to buy a magazine on impulse. The newspapers had first call on paper supplies, and once the wretchedly thin daily paper was read it was carefully stored away for a variety of uses ranging from toilet paper to meat and fish wrapping. (Woe betide you if you turned up at the butcher's without your piece of newspaper). Magazines and comics had to be ordered, and they were recycled many times by means of neighbourly swapping, usually ending up months later as highly prized bundles at jumble sales.
It was just a few steps further to Moore's Stores, the grocery shop. (If my memory is correct Mr. Moore also ran a sideline in bicycle sales in a separate wooden shed). And Ringmer's commercial enterprises did not end there; if you walked a hundred yards further towards the school you would see on the left the squat and definitely unpicturesque Brewer's Arms, and just beyond it the little wooden hut that housed the shoe repairer's shop.
Finally the blacksmith plied his trade in an untidy clutter of sheds opposite the school gates, providing a clanging accompaniment to our lessons. With the number of farm horses diminishing rapidly and recreational riding confined to the rich, he should have been an anachronism, but his business had been given a boost by the wartime scarcity of farm machinery and spare parts, so he spent most of his time manufacturing widgets for geriatric binders and hay mowers. Even so, I would occasionally come out of school to find a couple of the Park Farm horses in for shoeing, which meant a majestic ride home on the broad back of a Clydesdale.
The school's most important neighbour was a large house shielded by an impenetrable privet hedge and called Elm Court, a hotel when I last saw it, but occupied by the army in my day. Just inside its main gate were a couple of houses, one of them the residence and unofficial surgery of the district nurse. Nurse Hall touched our lives at many points. In addition to her official visits to the school she was constantly in demand to staunch the flow of blood which was an integral part of our daily routine. Since she had brought most of us into the world and knew us all by name we took it for granted that she would be happy to provide free after-care, and she did so with good-humoured tolerance and a large supply of sticking plaster. A dedicated and widely respected lady, she was for most villagers the first resort in medical matters in preference to the slightly forbidding Dr Rice, who lived, conducted his surgery and dispensed his medicines in a large detached house on the other side of Elm Court.
When I first started school my mother would accompany me, pushing my baby brother in his pram. The need for a road surface meant going the long way round via Ham Lane, which linked the village with the Uckfield Road. We would take the left turn before the church, pass Geary's disreputable scrapyard (another village business, but one not discussed in polite circles) and walk along the lane which skirted the vast village green, passing a scatter of cottages before emerging directly opposite the school.
Later, when I was judged safe to be let out alone, I would take the short cut across the fields from our house, climbing the stile at the back of the new churchyard and entering the village at the top of the main street. The path through the old and new churchyards was a right of way but I was always nervous of the sexton and gravedigger, a stern and unfriendly man who would stop whatever he was doing as soon as I appeared and watch me until I was out of sight. His intimidating behaviour may have had something to do with an occasion when I innocently rifled a new grave in order to conciliate my teacher, Miss Taylor, with a tasteful bouquet. It was a well-meaning way to acquire a criminal record.
That incident reminds me that we children were seldom free from the scrutiny of grown-ups. On all but the wettest days my walk through the village would be observed by a succession of old codgers sitting on the benches that bordered the green, plus other adults working in their gardens, conversing outside their front doors or just standing and staring into the middle distance. They were like a series of security cameras, and twice as effective because the first sign of anti-social behaviour would be quelled by a fierce bellow.
At weekends and during the school holidays the village played no part in my life, and I wish I could remember more clearly what I got up to during those hours of idleness. The farm was strictly out of bounds, but I know I roamed around the fields with the children next door, playing endless games of soldiers, building dens, damming streams and generally interfering with the processes of nature. I would like to be able to claim that I gained a profound knowledge of wildlife and the countryside, but to this day I can hardly tell one flower from another or identify more than two or three common birds. This ignorance confirms something I have long suspected - that the 'country child' versed in natural lore is a creature derived from fiction or from over-romanticised autobiography. I was not alone in my ignorance. Miss Liversedge was keen on taking her class for nature walks and must have suspected us of a subtle conspiracy when we eagerly besieged her with requests to identify primroses and cowslips. To me the fields and woods were just a convenient playground, and when we later moved to the town I didn't miss the countryside one little bit.
With that sort of blasé attitude it is hardly surprising that urban expeditions remain far more vividly in my mind. My mother took a weekly Saturday bus trip to Lewes to visit my grandmother and do any shopping that was not covered by our deliveries from Ringmer. That meant a visit to the Co-op, which occupied a mock Tudor building in West Street almost opposite the dark and rumbling hell-hole known as 'the needle factory', where the doors were always open to reveal fearsome machinery and shadowy figures singing along to 'Music While You Work'.
At the risk of digressing I feel I ought to say more about the Co-op. At that time it still carried out its original function of providing necessities at a discount for the poor, and you could not shop there unless you joined the Society by taking out shares at a nominal price. All co-operative societies were affiliated to the CWS - the Co-operative Wholesale Society - which used its huge bulk-buying power to supply the retail shops with goods at favourable prices. Unlike modern discount supermarkets, however, the shops did not pass on the reductions directly to customers. Members bought their goods at normal prices but were entitled to a cash dividend on the total cost of their purchases. The dividend, or 'divi' as it was usually known, was fixed each year, and news of the figure, which varied between five and ten per cent, was eagerly awaited. If I remember rightly it was paid out in half-yearly instalments, providing a welcome windfall.
The Co-op was certainly a godsend for isolated households because if you couldn't get to the shop you could list future requirements in a special book and hand it to the van driver for delivery the following week. If you preferred to visit the shop in person you sat on a stool at one of the polished wooden counters and were attended to by a man in a white coat. The unique feature of the shop was the complex system of overhead wires terminating at a corner cubicle, where the lady cashier sat in state. When a transaction was completed the counter assistant would unscrew a container from the wire, place in it the money paid with a note of the customer's share number, replace the container and send it hissing on its way to the cashier. If change was required it came shooting back the same way. It certainly made shopping fun for children, a fact that strikes me every time I go into a supermarket and see bored youngsters being dragged listlessly round miles of monotonous shelves.
While my mother would usually make a few impulse buys the main purpose of our visits was to order for the following week. For that we went to a special section where obliging men would take the order book and later assemble the goods in a cardboard box and mark it for delivery. Ordering in person had advantages in wartime, because you could make on-the-spot changes to compensate for unpredictable shortages or to snap up any rarity that happened to be in.
The counter assistants certainly earned their money in those days when sugar, rice, tea, currants and similar goods arrived at the shop in hundredweight sacks and had to be laboriously weighed out and wrapped in paper cones. Biscuits, of course, were never pre-wrapped but lifted straight from the tin and weighed into paper bags. Bacon was always sliced to order. It meant that each customer sitting on her stool was the centre of busy and dexterous activity, punctuated by the continuous hiss and click of the overhead railway.
Evidence of thriving commerce was music to the ears of the shoppers, with their personal stake in the business. It was always a solemn moment when 'divi time' came round and we climbed to the office at the back of the shop and presented evidence of membership to a clerk, who would consult his ledger and formally count out our share of the profits. It goes without saying that while this admirable system was open to anyone it would have been social death for a middle-class housewife to be seen shopping at the Co-op, in preference to the Home and Colonial or Roberts, the posh grocer at the top of School Hill.
Our shopping was essentially functional and there was no time or money for fripperies, so the ports of call did not vary much. Wyborn's, close to the County Hall, was our chemist. The Scotch Wool Shop, directly opposite, provided supplies for my mother's never-ending knitting, while the Mac Fisheries next door was always good for a pound of sprats. In the Cliffe, at the bottom end of the town, we might call in at Tickner's the 'baby shop' before the inevitable visit to Woolworth's. This small, dimly-lit and inconvenient branch of the giant American concern still proclaimed itself as 'The 3d and 6d Store' on its trademark red and white fascia, and a shilling would indeed buy you quite a lot if you were prepared to negotiate the dark and narrow aisles between counters staffed by watchful but uncommunicative girls. I remember once being sent there to buy a light bulb. As usual the girl tested it casually in a socket fixed to the counter, but on this occasion she fused all the lights in the shop and a few seconds later slumped to the floor in a dead faint, unnoticed in the pitch darkness. I don't think the manager actually locked the doors and searched each customer but it was some time before order was restored, and I quietly made my escape, racked with guilt and without the light bulb.
There was never any danger of this sort of fiasco when we visited the Town Hall, where stern WVS ladies (almost certainly patrons of the Home and Colonial) kept firm control over the queue of mothers waiting to collect their free orange juice and large tins of National Dried Milk - the government's contribution to the diet of wartime babies. Since adequate quantities of fresh milk were one of my father's perks I am not sure why we carried the big grey and blue tins home unless it was to avoid feeding my brother with unpasteurised stuff more or less straight from the cow. I can only say that it never did me any harm.
Since my mother was a great reader any visit to Lewes was bound to take in Richardson's library, the sort of institution that disappeared completely when Boots gave up lending books. It stood in the High Street next to Barbican House and did brisk business at a time when the public libraries had a rigorous policy of not spending public money on popular fiction. If you wanted a detective story, a Western or a romantic novel you went to Richardson's and paid 2d to borrow it for a week.
One thing my mother seldom bought in Lewes was clothing. That came from the 'Williams' Catalogue' which had an honoured place in our home. I was delighted to see recently that the old-established mail-order firm of CE Williams is still in business, though no doubt its catalogues are rather different from those of the 1940s, with their line drawings of impossibly tall adults and plump, angelic children.
Each Christmas we had an afternoon out in Brighton, a town sadly deprived of much of its character by the wartime closure of the piers and the beach. The missing lights, the peeling white paint and the barbed wire along the promenade created a dismal atmosphere and made the war seem much nearer. For a time Brighton had funny buses too. With petrol in short supply the Corporation decided on a short-lived experiment, converting its vehicles to methane propulsion, with the result that the buses had to tow trailers with ballooning fabric containers of gas. However, wartime austerity did not prevent the big shops in Western Road putting on a show of seasonal cheer, and at Wade's department store you could still get a present from Father Christmas. Santa's Grotto was ingenious but, on the first occasion, distinctly unsettling for me. With a group of other children I was ushered into a small darkened room fitted with a ship's wheel. A woman in the dress uniform of a Ruritanian admiral seized this and uttered a nautical monologue while an engine chugged away and simultaneously the 'windows' lit up to reveal a moving panorama of landscapes, including, I recall, the Pyramids, the North Pole and the African jungle. Having arrived at some exotic destination we followed the admiral out of the ship and discovered Santa sitting in a cave ready to hand us each a present with a few gruff ho-ho's. By this time I was terrified, convinced that I was whole continents away from my mother and demanding to be allowed back on board immediately for the return voyage. But there was no return trip. When I was led round the corner to find that it was still mid-afternoon at Wade's and that my mother was sitting there showing no signs of panic at the abduction of her child my confusion was complete.
I had to make a less welcome visit to Brighton at the age of eight when Dr Rice decreed that that my tonsils should go. Having your tonsils out was a common operation for children in those days, although I am not sure what the benefits were supposed to be. The removal of adenoids, equally popular at that time, is something else that seems to have gone out of fashion. Anyway, both operations were on tap at the Brighton Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, a grim red brick building in Queen's Road. Harold Owen, the brother of the poet Wilfred Owen, describes in his autobiography the experience of sitting in the kitchen of his home while the doctor sawed out his tonsils on the spot. Medical techniques had fortunately advanced a bit by 1943, but going under the knife was still a serious business involving foul-tasting preparatory capsules, nauseating general anaesthetic and several days with a sore throat in a ward run by a dragon of a Sister who had no sympathy with homesickness. I didn't have much to show for the ordeal either, unlike some of the other patients with problems that required immense and grotesque head bandages.
Thanks to my father I was able to see something of London during the war. He used to spend part of his annual holiday on visits to his sisters, one of whom had married a postman and now lived in New Malden. (It was their son Clifford who had spent a short time at the farm as an evacuee.) On a couple of occasions he took me with him, and I can remember the shock as the train rumbled over Battersea bridge and I saw for the first time the vast river Thames, although what impressed me even more was the forest of barrage balloons that hung over the city and seemed to darken the sky. I took my first tram ride too, grinding down the Vauxhall Bridge Road to Vauxhall station, where we caught the train to New Malden. It was not an exciting place. In fact life in this featureless expanse of identical suburban roads and houses was deadly dull, and my father took every opportunity to escape. So it was that I found myself one night at the Kingston Empire, enjoying one of those variety entertainments that have now passed into show business history. The famous ventriloquist Arthur Prince with his sailor doll was top of the bill, advanced in years at that time but still looking pretty good to me. On another occasion we paid a visit to my father's other sister, who lived with her family in a block of Peabody Buildings in Pimlico. These model tenements, erected by a nineteenth-century philanthropist, were built round a courtyard that echoed with the cries of children, and with their concrete stairs and open walkways they were not unlike modern council flats. No sooner were we inside than my aunt called in my two young cousins from their game in the yard and ordered them to 'look after' me. They were none too pleased at the prospect, but cheered up when she handed over some money for the pictures. A vague memory of cartoons and battle scenes tells me that we must have gone to the news theatre on Victoria station, and it may well have been my first visit to a cinema. I didn't enjoy it much, fearing that my cousins would slip away in the darkness and abandon me. It was Santa's Grotto again without the present.
Anyway, we got home safely for a prolonged tea that took us up to opening time. There was no nonsense about baby-sitters. The whole family plus the odd neighbour trooped along to one of those big, boozy, brass-and-mahogany pubs, where we children were handed lemonade and crisps on the doorstep and instructed not to go away. So we sat in the evening sunshine on a handy ledge outside the open doors, listening to the hubbub and screams of laughter within, and requesting passers-by to 'give us a fag, mister'. At least my streetwise cousins did. Bumpkin-like I sat and marvelled at their metropolitan sophistication, doing my best to join in their sing-along to the jangling piano inside. I was distinctly relieved when, at blackout time, my father and I said goodbye to the maudlin mob and caught the train back to the respectability of New Malden.
The next day we returned home, with my father in a subdued mood. It may have been a hangover, but as the train pulled out of Victoria it is far more likely that he was thinking of the long year that lay between him and his next visit to London. I don't think my mother ever accompanied him on these visits. London was not her world. No doubt she understood that however contentedly he accepted the farming life he needed once a year to tread the familiar pavements and briefly recapture the raucous world of the Pimlico streets where he had been brought up. Incidentally, I never saw my cousins again. Perhaps they still sit in a Westminster pub, tut-tutting at the wild ways of the younger generation and boring everyone with memories of the days when you could leave a child in perfect safety on a busy pavement outside the saloon bar.
The sort of excursions I have described were obviously exceptional occasions. Most of my time out of school was spent at home, and there were long winter months when it was too cold, too wet or too dark to play outside - months when dusk descended soon after tea. Imagine a power cut that lasts from 4pm to 8am. You have some form of non-electric lighting providing illumination over a radius of three or four feet. You have a battery radio and a coal fire, and that's it. Now imagine this situation occurring every night for four months and you have some idea of what winter evenings were like at Park Farm Cottages.
But were we downhearted? Well yes, I think we probably were a little. The problem with having no electricity is that you cannot make the instant transition from twilight to cosiness. The picture of a room with curtains drawn and oil lamps casting a soft glow is an attractive one, but there are quite long periods, evening and morning, when there is enough natural light to do most things apart from reading, and when an oil lamp seems to make the surroundings darker. Life in this grey half-light can be depressing, especially at seven o'clock in the morning. It is easy to forget that winter life was like this for millions of people at that time. The electricity service was roughly at the stage where gas is today - readily available in towns but very patchy in the countryside. The National Grid had come into operation only a few years before in 1935, and in the 1940s a combination of wartime priorities, fairly primitive technology and sheer expense meant that the electricity supply in rural areas was confined to those who could afford a large outlay. Ryngmer Park had electricity and so did the farm, but when we left the cottage in 1948 there was still no sign of it being connected up.
My parents had long since become accustomed to tending the temperamental oil lamps, of which we had a variety ranging from the large globed models for use in the living room to the miniature ones we carried up to bed. A lot of time was spent in keeping them filled, trimming their wicks and cleaning their fragile glasses, which sooted up immediately if you turned the lamp up a fraction too high. Of course we also had torches for popping upstairs, fetching coal or going to the lavatory. But the war brought irritating shortages. Everybody knows about food rationing, but I think it would be true to say that any country dweller in the early 1940s would gladly have traded a month's butter ration for two or three lamp glasses or half a dozen torch batteries. (My mother would probably have swapped a lot of clothing coupons for a regular supply of babies' bottle teats; I remember at least one expensive bus ride undertaken solely on the strength of a rumour that a chemist in an obscure Brighton street had a supply of them.) With paraffin occasionally subject to unofficial rationing it is easy to see that you didn't need to be under enemy attack for life to become stressful.
Fortunately we had books, and we had our trusty radio provided that the accumulator didn't fail. My father and mother were both happy with a novel, and I was a fairly precocious reader myself, so with the lamps suitably positioned we would spend quiet evenings punctuated by radio programmes like 'Music Hall', that long-forgotten Saturday night showcase for stars like Suzette Tarri, Layton and Johnston, 'Hutch', Nat Mills and Bobbie and the great Elsie and Doris Walters. And since my father had to be up at 5.30 we would all be in bed by nine o'clock at the latest.
- Details
- Parent Category: Ringmer Past
I can't claim that the outbreak of war bothered me that much, although I was vaguely aware that the grown-ups were fussing a bit. At four years old I had no idea what 'peacetime' meant, so I accepted war as the normal state of things. Just occasionally there would be eye-opening glimpses of another world - it seemed incredible, for example, that the derelict machine on the platform at Lewes station had once dispensed chocolate on demand - but generally I was unaware of the restrictions that preoccupied my parents. It was peace that came as the real shock. For a long time I thought bananas and signposts on the roads were brilliant innovations by Mr. Attlee, and the gradual restoration of peacetime amenities came as a series of surprises.
Nevertheless, in the early months of hostilities I suffered mild frustrations. For a start it was more than six years before I was able to enjoy the twin attractions of the downs and the seaside. Our house had a tempting view of the hills that rise beside the Lewes to Ringmer road, but they were firmly out of bounds. In 1940 it was taken for granted that a German invasion was inevitable, so the downs became an important line of defence and a military training ground. When I finally started to explore them after the war I discovered gun emplacements everywhere, and overgrown slit trenches were a hazard for years afterwards.
Concrete 'pillboxes' mysteriously appeared in the fields, sited in an apparently haphazard way but no doubt forming a tactical pattern. I remember one on the Newhaven road just beyond Kingston that was prominently labelled 'CAFE', and another that purported to be a public convenience. They may have been examples of army humour. I hope so, because if they were an attempt to mislead spies someone had seriously underestimated German military intelligence. Naturally the coast was an even more sensitive area, and on rare family outings to the seaside it was a severe disappointment to be barred from the beaches, which were disfigured by ugly steel tank defences. There was a rumour that the beaches had been laid with mines as well, but that story could have been a way of making sure that nobody ignored the red warning notices.
I was far too young, of course, to share the horrifying prospect of being caught up in a German invasion. Photographs and newsreels of Dunkirk had shown long, straggling lines of panic-stricken French families fleeing the battle zone with whatever household possessions they could pile on to carts and prams. My parents, responsible for a five-year-old child and a baby, must have wondered whether we were destined to share the same grim experience, but if they had worries they did not pass them on to me. I recall a snatch of conversation with my mother at about this time;
"Who's going to win the war, Mum?
"We are,"
"How do you know?"
"Because we always do,"
In 1940 this confidence defied all logic, but I am sure she meant it and was not just putting a brave face on things for my benefit. It was all part of a dogged determination to maintain normal life.
When I started school in September 1940 with my dinner bag and gas mask bumping at my side, my mother and I walked beneath interwoven vapour trails and the sudden snarl of fighters as the Battle of Britain was fought out over our heads. At night we were disturbed by the intermittent drooping growl of German bombers on their way to and from London. Searchlights probed the sky, occasionally trapping a plane and forcing it into ponderous evasive action as the anti-aircraft guns cracked into furious life. Often aircraft would drop random bombs nearby, either through incompetence or to lighten their load as they set out to return across the channel, and more than once we were ringed with fires from incendiaries. None of this appeared to upset my parents, watching events calmly from the back door, so it certainly didn't frighten me. In fact I suspect that we children regarded the war as something arranged for our entertainment as we passed round anonymous bits of fused metal that were always confidently identified as key components of a Messerschmidt.
You never knew in those days what you were going to come across in the countryside. For a short time any field that could possibly provide a landing ground for a German paratroop glider was strewn with a Heath Robinson arrangement of poles and wires. One day I went out to find the cows moodily kicking sheets of paper around. They turned out to be smudgy German leaflets threatening us with unspeakable consequences if we did not lay down our pitchforks and surrender when the Panzers arrived. On another occasion the fields ware scattered with strips of metallic foil, dropped from enemy bombers in an attempt to confuse the radar defences. Since it only happened once the experiment was presumably not a success. Anyway we picked up the foil and saved the strips to make Christmas paper chains.
My grandmother had an Anderson air-raid shelter in the garden of her house in Lewes. It was basically a hole in the ground covered by curved sheets of corrugated iron, and was so uninviting that nobody ever set foot in it. (Perhaps the real deterrent was the fact that it was supposed to be shared with her neighbour, with whom she was at daggers drawn.) Our family was issued with the Morrison variety, designed for interior use. It was a cumbersome steel contraption about the size of a double bed and with a top that could serve as a table. Ours had to serve as a table because we had to move the table out to get the shelter in. My brother Richard and I would sleep beneath it at night after eating our meals at it during the day, and it became so useful that we were quite sorry to see it go. These shelters were named after Herbert Morrison, the Minister who had implemented their production, and it was a pretty impressive achievement to manufacture them in huge numbers when steel was precious. They would certainly have been effective in the event of anything but a direct hit.
In spite of the panoply of war unfolding around us, the precautions at school were perfunctory to say the least. We were supposed to carry our gas masks at all times and practise putting them on quickly, so once a week the classroom would resound to a grotesque roar as we donned them and chanted our tables and other less mentionable things. Occasionally we practised scrambling under our stout, iron-bound desks just in case Ringmer should be selected by the Luftwaffe for blanket bombing. On the one occasion when this precaution might have come in handy we had no time to put it into effect - we just sat there in a state of bewilderment as machine-gun bullets ripped into the tiles above us. Miraculously no-one was hurt. The imperturbable Mr. Self came in to soothe us, explaining that it was unlikely that Hitler had it in for us personally and that it was probably just an unfortunate accident. It is likely that the German pilot had spotted the trucks and soldiers at Elm Court, the big house next door. In retrospect it seems an unwise decision to have stationed an army unit next to a school, but we thoroughly enjoyed the military comings and goings, and at the end of school each day the unfortunate sentry at the gate would be surrounded by a chattering and inquisitive crowd. At a later point in the war Elm Court housed a Canadian unit whose army-issue cigarettes called 'Sweet Caporals' were responsible for a novel craze. Each white packet had on the back the silhouette of a German tank or aircraft. If the authorities hoped that the soldiers would carefully preserve these and study them in their leisure moments they must have been disappointed because the empty packets were strewn all over the village. For us they replaced cigarette cards as valued collectors' items, leading to a thriving trade in swaps. We got quite ruthless about this, rushing up to soldiers in the street and demanding that they produce their Caporals. Occasionally we were ordered to " --- off", but most of them took it in good part, often stowing away loose cigarettes in their pockets and carefully tearing off the back of a packet for our benefit.
Farm workers were in a reserved occupation and not liable for call-up, but when the Home Guard was formed my father was quick to volunteer along with his colleagues. Thanks to the immortal sitcom Dad's Army (the heading of this chapter is taken from its signature tune) the Home Guard has acquired a reputation for bumbling inefficiency, but there was nothing funny about it at the time. In the more northern areas of England it may have been taken less than seriously, but for some months it seemed highly likely that the Home Guard in our part of the country would be involved in a bloody fight to contain the first hours of an invasion. It should be remembered that these men had to be prepared to leave their families to an unknown fate, in the sure knowledge that they themselves would either be killed or taken prisoner.
Even when the immediate danger was past it required exceptional dedication to work a long day and then put on uniform for duty as an unpaid soldier. Not that my father didn't enjoy it - in fact I suspect that the day he was promoted to full corporal was one of the happiest in his life - but there is little doubt that the combined physical stress of hard farm work and strenuous Home Guard exercises aggravated the heart condition that was to lead to his early death after the war. Incidentally the Ringmer platoon was fortunate in its commander, Captain Taylor, a fine man who was later to reappear in my life as a classics teacher at the grammar school.
I don't want to give the impression that we children never contributed to the war effort. In fact we were a public-spirited lot, well aware of the need to Keep Mum about military secrets and to watch out for spies. According to the posters the latter could be easily recognised by their black trilby hats, turned-up coat collars and contemptuous sneers, but although Ringmer had its quota of dubious characters none of them possessed this particular combination of attributes. It was disappointing because in the comics that we passed round, groups of resourceful children quite often captured spies and were rewarded with public votes of thanks and special medals. Never mind. At least we could Avoid Waste, a theme with which we were constantly bombarded, not only by the posters, but by no less an authority than Auntie Ivy.
Auntie Ivy produced the weekly children's column in the Sussex Express and County Herald, a cunning wheeze to promote youthful reader loyalty. By sending in your name, address and date of birth you could become one of the Elkins, who were dedicated to courtesy, public service, good citizenship and insistence that their parents buy the newspaper every week. I have no doubt that the column was hacked out by the current junior reporter, but although no-one had actually set eyes on Auntie Ivy we firmly believed that she was a kindly grey-haired lady with twinkling eyes. Did she not always remember our birthdays and print our names in the paper in the appropriate week? Anyway, she thought avoiding waste was a good idea so we avoided waste.
With or without the exhortations of Auntie Ivy we were often called upon to serve the nation in more specific ways, although on looking back I feel a certain cynicism about it all. I distinctly remember sacrificing my afternoon bun from the baker's in order to swell the funds in Ringmer's 'Buy A Spitfire' campaign. According to the bulletin board erected on the village green we succeeded, but did we actually Buy A Spitfire? I never saw it. We spent whole afternoons toiling in the school garden, urged on by Mr. Self, who assured us that we were Digging For Victory. But we didn't have hot dinners at the time, so where did all those vegetables actually go?
Then there were the Drives. The great Rosehip Drive had us scouring the hedgerows for berries which, we were told, could be used to make a life-enhancing drink for deprived children. Hundredweights of the things were stacked up in the playground, but was anything useful ever done with them? Even more dubious was the Nettle Drive. Covered in painful red rashes we would lay out rows of nettles to dry and bring them into school by the sackful, but what on earth were they used for? Could it just have been an exercise to boost our morale? [Actually, I recently heard a fascinating radio programme in which it was asserted that the Germans made underpants from nettles during the war. It doesn't bear thinking about really, but it's just possible that British intelligence picked up some insane snippet of disinformation from the office of Dr Goebbels and decided to try an experiment....] Particularly memorable was the Book Drive, because whoever dreamed it up had hit on a surefire way of kindling our enthusiasm. We had to bring discarded books and magazines to school for the purpose, they said, of providing reading matter for the troops. In return we got a cardboard lapel badge denoting a military rank. One book made you a private, ten promoted you to lance-corporal, while with 250 you could become the Ringmer School equivalent of Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Given our fascination with all things military it was a brilliant idea. With the knowledge that we all had a Field Marshal's baton in our knapsacks we descended like locusts on our families and relations. Call me embittered if you like - I never reached commissioned rank - but I firmly maintain that things were not as they seemed. Did my mother's spare copy of an Ethel M. Dell novel really comfort some Desert Rat in his North African foxhole? It is far more likely that the whole lot went for pulping.
My evidence for a severe paper shortage at the time is the fact that for a month or so we did our sums on slates. Some far-sighted educational official must have forbidden the destruction of these Victorian relics on the grounds that they might come in useful one day. Well, the day came. It was an amusing novelty for us children but hell for the teachers, who spent their days trying to subdue the cacophony of shrieking slate pencils.
At the height of the blitz a London primary school was evacuated to the village complete with its teachers. In addition to finding accommodation for them it was necessary to continue their education, so the village hall was put at their disposal. But there must have been some intense negotiations about teaching conditions because an exchange scheme was eventually hammered out, with the result that once or twice a week we would leave our familiar surroundings and march to the village hall for sketchy lessons with minimal equipment while the evacuees enjoyed the luxury of a proper classroom.
We certainly didn't resent this makeshift operation, with all its opportunities for anarchy, but we were a little nervous at first of these aliens from London. On my solitary walk home I was particularly vulnerable, and I would usually have to pass groups of strange, pallid boys sitting idly on walls and regarding passers-by with narrowed eyes. But in fact they seemed a rather listless lot, understandably bewildered at finding themselves so far from the pavements and traffic of home. In any case I had an escort before long in the form of a London cousin, who had come to live with us as our personal evacuee, and he spoke the language of the enemy. Once the novelty of country life had worn off he was glad enough to return home. So, I imagine, were the other evacuees, who soon departed, leaving us to settle back into our familiar routines.
I hope that refugee school settled back too. The children were no doubt resilient enough, but the evacuation must have been an ordeal for their teachers. It is a reminder that the service rendered by teachers in wartime has never been adequately recognised. Mainly women, together with men who were unfit or too old for war service, they coped with situations that were well beyond the call of duty. Those of us whose primary school years coincided with the war should, by all the odds, have emerged as a scrappily-educated generation with serious psychological problems. The fact that it did not happen is entirely due to our teachers' success in maintaining a disciplined normality and shielding us from the disruptive effects of the war.
As the war progressed the atmosphere lightened perceptibly. By the time I had reached Standard 3 the threat of invasion had evaporated, and when I stood outside the house with my parents on summer evenings it was to watch the hundreds of allied bombers streaming over our heads towards Germany. At around dawn I would half wake to hear the steady drone as they returned. We were not concerned then with the morality of bombing; all we knew was that the allies were hitting back, and we cheered the aircraft as they proceeded with their nightly task of laying waste whole German cities. It is something that one cannot even begin to explain to a younger generation.
One sign that the war was turning in our favour was the arrival on the farm of Italian prisoners of war, drafted in to help with the harvest. We had seen pictures of them being rounded up in their thousands, so we turned out to study them curiously. Expecting to see the gaunt remnant of a humiliated army, we were astonished to find a cheerful and healthy-looking bunch jumping down from the lorries, whistling at the landgirls and generally behaving like Eastenders down for the hop picking. I don't think the grown-ups entirely approved at first - it seemed wrong that soldiers should be quite so happy at being relieved of their military responsibilities - but they soon became accepted as a welcome addition to the labour force.
The prisoners wore drab denim overalls with large coloured patches sewn in on the back and the knees to make them instantly identifiable if they tried to escape. Not much chance of that. None of them was sufficiently devoted to the memory of Mussolini to want to get out the vaulting horse, and the ceremony of counting at the beginning and end of the day was a bit of a joke, much enjoyed by contented Italians and British soldiers who knew they were on to a cushy number. So the prisoners revelled in the August sunshine, working to a noticeably Latin tempo as they stacked up the sheaves into stooks. I soon became used to their company and they seemed to like having us bambinos around, although they exploited us shamelessly, cadging tea, sending us off for water or even dispatching us to the village shop to buy traditional British delicacies like individual fruit pies and Camp coffee.
Since they were not paid it may seem surprising they had money, but my father quickly discovered the reason when he was invited to buy a variety of objects that the prisoners had made from odd materials in their spare time. The guards turned a blind eye to these enterprises, and as a result I acquired a fine wooden model of a lorry, very welcome at a time when toys were difficult to come by. Later on, after the invasion of Europe, we had German prisoners on the farm, and although they were friendly enough there was never the same warm-hearted rapport. How could there be? The Italians knew that for their families the war was over, but the Germans were helplessly inactive while their country was being relentlessly bombed and threatened by invading armies. Nevertheless I did strike up a brief friendship with one young man who knew a little English, and we would chat amiably as he worked. Perhaps a very elderly German pensioner still has distant memories of an eight-year-old lad who spoke in a thick Sussex accent and brought him cold tea.
During 1943 the traffic of war had died down a little in our part of Sussex, but the spring of 1944 brought it back with a vengeance. It started with the commandeering of local mansions and the installation of small batches of military personnel. Then the identity cards, issued at the beginning of the war and largely unused since, had to be searched out and carried at all times. The bus taking us into Lewes for our weekly visit to my grandmother would stop at the top of Malling Hill while every passenger's card was checked.
We were never in any doubt that the invasion of France was imminent, but no-one was quite prepared for the influx of an international army. The generals' problem was obvious. A massive force of men, equipment and vehicles had to be transported across the Channel in successive waves. They could not all be lined up at the docks, and in any case some attempt had to be made to conceal the size of the build-up. As a result, the countryside behind the Channel ports became one giant marshalling area. Engines would be heard in the night as units moved to their allotted places under cover of darkness, and we would wake to find our quiet lanes suddenly lined with tanks and lorries, parked close against the hedgerows and covered with branches. Staff cars sped along the roads. I found it enthralling. A troop of bren gun carriers had taken up residence in the machinery shed at the farm, where their crews would sit around smoking and chatting, making the most of the brief interval of inactivity. Like soldiers everywhere they took each day as it came, and to my young eyes they did not have the steely look of heroic resolve that they ought to have if the films were anything to go by, but I shared their lumpy rice pudding and felt part of the action.
There were other encounters too. My grandmother's house in Lewes was directly opposite Southover Manor School, where the wealthy young ladies had been replaced by Canadian troops. Bored and under tight restrictions, some of them got into the habit of popping across the road to relax in front of the fire and drink tea. One sergeant in particular was a regular visitor, and my grandmother exchanged letters with him long after the war was over. Human contact of this kind gave a special significance to the coming event that was on everybody's mind.
May turned to June, and one afternoon I returned from school and ran off as usual to visit my friends in the barn. It was deserted, apart from an unserviceable bren gun carrier parked round the side. I worried about this, but I don't think its absence affected the outcome of the war. On the following day I stood outside Mac Fisheries in Lewes High Street and heard over a radio General Eisenhower's official announcement of the invasion. In the afternoon, outside my grandmother's house, we watched and waved as an interminable procession of tanks thundered along Southover High Street and away down the Newhaven road. On the side of one of them a member of the crew had scrawled a radio catchphrase; "We go - we come back!" My grandmother had memories of young men going off to fight in France. "Let's hope they do," she said. And we went in for tea.
There was to be a sting in the tail. Just when we thought it was all over and nobody took the blackout seriously any more we had to adjust to a new kind of nerve-jangling attack from the air. The V1 rocket was a very nasty weapon indeed. Not much bigger than a large bomb, these missiles burbled their way across the channel at a high speed and low altitude, their spluttering engines sounding like an unreliable lawnmower. They worked on a simple principle; with just enough fuel to get them from their base in Belgium to London they fell from the sky when their engines stopped. Officially we were not on their route, but their lack of an efficient guidance system ensured that they quite often wandered our way. Although the rockets were quickly given the cosy name 'doodlebugs', this random targeting and the eerie feeling that the machines had a malignant life of their own generated a psychological effect quite out of proportion to their destructive capability. They could be heard and seen from a distance, and the strain of listening for the engine to stop could reduce whole crowds to hypnotised immobility. I once stood and watched a Spitfire explode a V1 in the air with machine gun fire, but the depressing fact was that defence against the rockets was unsystematic and chancy. They were fast enough to make pursuit difficult and presented a small target, and no pilot could afford to shoot at very close range and risk the results of a mid-air explosion.
Hitler's final fling certainly took the edge off the euphoria that followed the success of the invading armies, but victory in Europe was only a matter of time. When VE Day came in the spring of 1945 a children's 'treat' was organised on the Priory recreation ground in Lewes, with rather watery ice cream as the highlight, but what really marked the end of hostilities for us was the final parade through the streets of the town by the local Home Guard platoons. Corporal Garner marched proudly in their ranks, while I did my best to embarrass him by scampering along beside the parade trying to catch his eye.- Details
- Parent Category: Ringmer Past
It would be silly to claim that I can remember anything useful about the first five years of my life. I clocked up a higher-than-average pram mileage, learned to walk and talk in the usual way, registered without much enthusiasm the arrival of a baby brother named Richard and generally settled into an uneventful routine. So the news that there was something called 'school' caught me unawares. It couldn't happen today, when children are eased gently into the business of education, throwing plasticine at each other in a playgroup and then learning the basic survival skills by part-time attendance at school. But I had to do it the hard way.
I have probably got it wrong, but my memory tells me that one day I was a free spirit roaming the fields and the next was screaming my head off in the iron grip of Miss Besgrove while my mother disappeared through the door. I was even more disturbed at the end of the afternoon to learn that education was not a one-day event. Considering that the Battle of Britain was going on at the time I suppose my problems did not rank highly in the total scheme of things, but they seemed serious enough to me.
I was dragged to a desk, given a piece of paper and a crayon and left to contemplate my surroundings. There was a lot to take in. Ringmer Council School was easily the biggest building I had ever been required to find my way around, although by adult standards it was a modest enough affair. It stood at the crossroads formed by the main village street, Harrison's Lane and Bishops Lane, and in 1940 it had changed little since it was built. A compact brick and flint structure, it was set back from the road behind the front playground. To one side was the teacher's house, occupied at this time by the headmaster, Mr. Self. To the rear was a smaller infants' playground, the school vegetable garden and a playing field. Like many Victorian schools it was short of classrooms, having been designed for an age when children left at twelve years old, and this had led to a certain amount of sub-division inside. Standards 3 and 4, however, still had to share the large room at the front.
In these days of universal secondary education it is easy to forget that for most Ringmer children at that time the village school was the only one they ever knew. Four years after I arrived the new Butler Education Act made it possible for some to take the competitive 'scholarship' exam for Lewes County Grammar School at the age of eleven, but the majority would continue at Ringmer until they left at fourteen, having spent their last three years in Standard 6, a single multi-age class conducted by Mr. Self. I do not know when secondary education for all was introduced in East Sussex, but until it happened a lot of late-developing talent must have been lost as village children languished in Standard 6's all over the county.
Having been for nearly five years an only child living in rural isolation I did not take kindly to classroom discipline. I failed to see why I should have to compete for attention, sit still at a desk or put up my hand before speaking. But Miss Besgrove had ways of making you learn these niceties quite quickly, and not by appealing to your better nature either. Still, given the sort of class she was landed with I dare say she was entitled to take a few short cuts.
She was a dumpy, grey-haired lady facing a menacing bunch of grubby, five-year-old scruffs - and that was just the girls. I need to be cautious about naming names here. Some of the boys may have fallen victim to occupational hazards – a gangland massacre, say, or a single shot from a Mafia hitman - but most of my former classmates may well be still alive. After all, if you lived to celebrate your eighth birthday at Ringmer School you were shockproof enough to survive into ripe old age. But I'll mention one boy I'll call Ron, just to convey something of the ethos of the infant class.
Ron was lank-haired and darkly grimed, and wore the same motley clothes every day of his school life. When he arrived his movements went largely unnoticed inside his voluminous jersey and shorts; when I last saw him vast expanses of arm and leg protruded from them. Ron smelt, and we had no hesitation in explaining why nobody wanted to sit beside him. He was normally a silent child, but we quickly discovered that if we taunted him enough at playtime he could be roused to impotent fury, his fists flailing wildly and his eyes blinded with tears. In this state he would scream obscenities, whereupon the girls would rush off in simulated shock to report him. At the beginning of the next lesson Miss Besgrove would summon him to the front of the class and order him to apologise. Weeping with humiliation he would mumble something incoherent while we smirked back at him. It's a bit late now to say sorry, Ron....
Like many children in the school Ron lived at the Broyle, an isolated settlement on the fringe of the village. For some reason I never actually saw it (perhaps I valued my life too much) but I imagine it was the sort of council estate that local authorities in those days tucked away out of sight to avoid offending the eyes and ears of respectable citizens. When the Broyle was mentioned our teachers would react in much the same way as a resident of Hampstead forced to discuss Tower Hamlets - a mixture of proper compassion and sheer thankfulness at not having to live there. Terrible tales were told of fights on the journey between the Broyle and school, and when I was old enough to take myself to school it was always a great relief to me that the howling mob would turn right outside the gates while my route lay to the left, in the company of rather nicer children from the tranquil centre of the village.
More often than not I would walk with a group that included a dark and dainty girl called Eileen, who lived in a picturesque cottage next to the Brewer's Arms, opposite Dr Rice's house. As time went by we got into the habit of walking alone, and at the age of seven we agreed to marry as soon as the war was over. Lacking an engagement ring I plighted my troth with some treasured sweets from a food parcel sent by our American relatives. But it never came to anything, for reasons which I shall explain later. Where are you now, Eileen?
The only girls who came close to displacing Eileen in my affections were the Beresford twins, who stayed for a term before their parents woke up to the terrible mistake they had made. The twins were polite, well-spoken and in all ways alien to the prevailing ethos of the school. They spent their days in a state of disbelief at what they saw around them but led a charmed life, protected by a daunting middle-class confidence that could make insults die in the mouth.
Their precocious experience of adult life fascinated us, and I would seek them out in the playground for serious discussions. One day we had a spirited argument about television. With the authority gained from a brief paragraph on the subject in Radio Fun I put forward the view that television consisted of the news in moving pictures. I had a hazy idea that through television, the bald radio accounts of military activities could be replaced by pictures of actual tank battles and dogfights in the air. The Beresfords begged to differ. They had actually seen television and were in a position to say that it offered nothing more than “plays and things and ladies singing and boring people talking”. I suppose we were both on the right lines, but the Beresfords have proved to be more accurate. For a few exciting days I sat next to Christine Beresford in class while Eileen sulked and walked home alone, but it couldn't last. The twins disappeared as mysteriously as they had come, and with them went the pleasures of intellectual conversation.
In general the boys were friendly enough, but the girls were a bossy lot and few of them inspired affection. Their natural leader was Dorothy, who ruled by virtue of size alone. Overweight and under-talented, Dorothy had few interests outside her own appearance and could be provoked to dangerous fury if her hair was even slightly displaced. Messing up Dorothy's hair was easily the most daunting challenge a boy could undertake to prove his courage, and every newcomer to the school was required to attempt it as a kind of initiation test. It always ended in tears - and not from Dorothy. Once a fortnight she would be absent from school, and on the following morning the teacher would wearily go through a long-established routine.
"Where were you yesterday, Dorothy?"
“My mum took me to have my hair purled, Miss."
We were never sure what 'purling' was (could she have meant 'permed'?), but the dialogue was repeated so often that it became a tradition for us all to join in the chorus.
I have no doubt that I was totally at home after a week in this new, rumbustious world, but that first year remains a blur in my mind and I wish I could remember more about it. I wish even more that the fly-on-the-wall documentary had been invented, because a video of Miss Besgrove in action could have replaced a whole year of teacher training. It is enough to say that by the time she handed us over to Miss Taylor twelve months later we had become a well-behaved class, proficient in simple reading, ready for joined-up writing and capable of getting to the lavatory in time. Or rather to the 'offices', which was our particular euphemism for the twin malodorous brick sheds in the back playground. They were unmarked and indistinguishable from the outside, so it was inevitable that on my first day I should have selected the wrong one. I was hauled out, given a clout round the ear by Dorothy and never made the same mistake again. You don't get efficient social education like that these days.
If Miss Besgrove wielded an iron fist in a velvet glove I suppose you could say that Miss Taylor didn't bother with the glove. She was the archetypal schoolmistress of the time – tall, angular, hair in a bun and comprehensively tweeded. Nothing deflected her from the job in hand, and she was certainly not going to make any concessions to a silly war, so she was just the sort of teacher we needed in the miserable days of 1941.
Under her supervision we consolidated our grasp of the basics. After the morning hymn and prayer ("hands together and eyes closed") we would go through the enjoyable ceremony of chanting our tables, progressively adding to our repertoire until even the tricky closing stages of the twelve times table were grafted into our minds. (I am sorry that this doesn't happen nowadays because it is not only valuable but entertaining too.) Handwriting was perfected with the help of the traditional copybook, printed with lines rather like music manuscript that ensured that we achieved the precise height and depth of each letter. I believe that even at the age of seven we were into long multiplication and division, enjoying the way in which those complex sums worked themselves out and formed neat patterns on the page. Everything was done with formal precision, not easy when we had to write with a scratchy pen in one hand and a piece of blotting paper in the other.
Miss Taylor was a great one for rituals. At morning break, as we sucked up our third of a pint of milk, a sombre queue of children who had been officially pronounced 'undernourished' would form at her desk to receive a tablespoonful of treacly malt from a large jar. No doubt this was part of her duties, although she made her humanitarian task seem like a ceremonious kind of punishment that you received for not eating up your greens. (When I later came to read Oliver Twist the image of Miss Taylor and the malt came immediately to mind.) After we had eaten our midday sandwiches she would call "heads down", the signal for us to put our arms on our desks and rest our heads on them. We were supposed to take a nap, and since it was a tiring day many of us did so in the manner of vagrants in a public library. It is a tribute to Miss Taylor's disciplinary powers that although she left the room at this point - possibly for a cup of tea or even a quick smoke - none of us would have dared to move or speak. A few minutes before the end of afternoon school, when every trace of our activities had been cleared away, she would say "Let's see who's ready to go home." In a flash we would fold our arms, brace our backs into total rigidity and desperately try to catch her eye. "Right, John", and some creep who had managed to assume the most deformed posture would be allowed to leave the room first.
It all sounds a bit silly now, and when I go into a primary school today I can see that the children sitting informally at tables are happily relaxed. But they still appreciate rituals, and there is a lot to be said for punctuating the day with fixed points of formality, however artificial they may be. If they do nothing else they give children the reassuring experience, increasingly rare today, of an adult totally in command. When we entered Miss Taylor's classroom we could face the day with serene confidence that nothing untoward would occur. Even the famous occasion when the school was machine-gunned from the air did not throw her; she sat unmoved as bullets shattered the roof. “Get under your desks, and there's no need for chatter” was her response to the might of the Luftwaffe.
Only once did I see her less than totally composed. It was the end of the day, and we were ready for the usual farewell ceremony. But instead she hesitated, cleared her throat and muttered "I've brought a few sweets for you." And she walked slowly up and down the aisles with a paper bag while we each took a peardrop. "Thank you, Miss," we whispered, transfixed by the sight of a whole month's sweet ration. "Yes....well....off you go then," she said, scrabbling in her desk and sheltering behind the lid as we tiptoed out.
Mention of the dreaded malt reminds me that our health was rather more strictly monitored than it is today. As a farm boy I was lucky enough to be brought up with no lack of milk and fresh vegetables. In other homes, I suspect, the diet was pretty rudimentary. I knew at least one boy whose midday meal consisted of nothing but dry bread. So there were regular medical checks for rickets, anemia and other disabilities, and the unfortunate teachers had to cope with the necessary remedial measures. The 'nit-nurse' was a frequent caller, combing ruthlessly through our hair in search of worse things than head lice.
But the dentist was the one we feared. He would set up his stall in some broom cupboard or other and we would be called out one by one for inspection. Dental philosophy today sets some store by preserving childhood teeth for as long as possible. Not then. The clattering of the probe and mirror was accompanied by an explicit commentary that seldom boded well for the future. “Out” was the recurring cry to the nurse standing by with her charts.
In due course we would be driven six at a time in Mr. Self's car to the schools dental surgery, which at that time was located just behind the barbican of Lewes castle in a gracious house that gave no indication of the horrors that lay behind its intricately-carved front door. The surgical procedure was simple. The six of us were lined up and injected with anaesthetic in quick succession. It was called cocaine, although I can't say I ever found it particularly addictive. Then we were sent to sit in the waiting room, becoming more numb and incoherent by the minute as we stared at posters telling us that 'Careless Talk Costs Lives', which we interpreted as a sterner version of the message we received every day from Miss Taylor. Incapable of even careful talk we watched another six from a different school go in for the same treatment. Meanwhile yet another six would be stumbling in through the front door, ready to take our places as we returned to the dentist's chair for tug-and-crunch time. You had to give the dentists credit for the kind of cost-effective efficiency that would be warmly applauded by National Health Service administrators today.
The medical attention we received may not have been user-friendly but at least it was there. In the days before the National Health Service it took a serious illness or a bad accident to force working-class parents to consult a doctor, so routine checks for most children would have been non-existent without the schools medical service.
In much the same way our intellectual health was looked after by the county library. Each month a number of large, flat boxes would be unloaded at the school - our new supply of reading matter. The books were not only used for silent reading sessions in class but could be taken home and regularly exchanged. I have good reason to be grateful for that provision.
******************
The more I think about Ringmer school the more I realise how good it was. The tone of any small school is likely to be set by the head teacher, so we were lucky to have Mr. Self. He was a jovial, outgoing man who took his responsibilities seriously and never seemed discouraged by the unpromising material he had to mould. Obviously I knew nothing at all about the day-to-day problems he contended with, but I imagine that the combined demands of the education authority and the war took their toll. Nevertheless, he was always relaxed, and in spite of his full-time teaching commitment with the senior pupils he would make a point of visiting other classes to chat with us about the work we were doing.
The one occasion when I was summoned for an interview with Mr. Self effectively put an end to my dalliance with Eileen. In a fit of generosity I had made her a gift of my last sixpence. Her mother must have interpreted this in the worst possible way because Mr. Self took some trouble to explain that the conventions did not permit cash payments of this kind. It was all done in a reasonable, man-to-man style, and I took his point. I also took my sixpence with some relief, because I was already regretting my reckless gesture. Eileen tended to avoid me after that, and perhaps it was just as well. So many of those wartime romances ended in disillusion and recrimination.
Regrettably I can remember almost nothing about Miss Liversedge and Miss Bettinson, in charge of Standards 3 and 4 respectively, except that they were comparatively young - in their thirties probably. In fact I don't recall those two years at all, and I can only assume that they passed in relative tranquillity. Which is more than I can say for Standard 5, which hit us with the shock of an explosion. The lady who lobbed the grenade was Mrs. Bentley, a human dynamo who would cycle in from Lewes whatever the weather and launch herself into the day with brimming enthusiasm. She was almost certainly the first married woman to teach at Ringmer School, the result of the wartime relaxation of the rigorous rule that women teachers in primary schools should be single. Needless to say, she was still 'Miss' to us.
It is no exaggeration to say that my whole future life - education, career, wife, family - was decided by Mrs. Bentley. Although I was unaware of it at the time, a small group of us must have been marked out as possible 'scholarship' candidates, so she had the difficult task of grooming us for stardom while at the same time motivating the rest of the class. Small, wiry and bespectacled, she fizzled round the room, coaxing, commanding and clarifying. She improved our word power by setting us crosswords from the daily paper, starting an addiction which I have never been able to shake off. It was Mrs. Bentley who first explained the parts of speech and showed us how to construct a sentence. Mysteries like decimals and the division of vulgar fractions gave up their secrets magically at her touch. She would involve us in lively discussions on topics of the moment, paying grave attention to our ill-informed responses and tactfully encouraging us to articulate our ideas. She was a magnificent teacher, and even at the age of ten I sensed that she was taking us into a different league.
The scholarship examination, the culmination of all this frenzy, came virtually unannounced. I have only a hazy memory of the written papers, which were presumably done in school, but I recall very clearly travelling to Lewes shortly afterwards with Mr. Self and my friend Michael Ellis. We were the two survivors into the second round, which consisted of a brief and halting interview with the deputy head of the grammar school. After that the excitement died down until one afternoon towards the end of the spring term, when Mr. Self came in to announce to the class that Michael and I had been accepted. Since nobody had explained to us what a grammar school actually was, much of the euphoria passed over our heads, but when Mrs. Bentley hugged us impulsively it became clear that she was pleased with us, so that was all right. But for me it was a near thing. The eleven-plus examination had been introduced in 1944, so if I had been two years older I would have been destined for Standard 6 and who knows what afterwards? If I had been just one year older I doubt whether the school would have been able to organise itself in time to take on the unfamiliar task of preparing us for grammar school transfer. So it was sheer good luck and the dedication of Mrs. Bentley that changed the course of my life.
If my parents were anxious about the financial and other problems ahead they did not show it. They did the traditional thing and bought me a new bicycle, an event that made far more impression on me than the examination result. And since nobody else was nervous neither was I. It was 1946, the war was over, summer was coming, the holidays were in sight, I had a new bike. It was quite enough to be going on with.- Details
- Parent Category: Ringmer Past
If you travel north-east out of Lewes by way of Malling Down you will arrive at a point on the edge of the town where the road forks. To your right the road to Ringmer climbs gently on to the downs; to your left the road to Uckfield takes a lower route. If you decided to ignore both roads and walked along a line bisecting the angle which they make, you would, after a mile or so, almost certainly find yourself trespassing in the grounds of a large house called Ryngmer Park. If you then had the effrontery to walk through its gardens and out the other side you would pass a rather up market house that was once numbers 5 and 6 Park Farm Cottages. It was in no. 6 that I struggled into the world with the help of the district nurse on May 20th, 1935.
I didn't know it then, but I was lucky with my parents. My father, John Garner, was a farm worker and a rather unlikely one, having been born and brought up in the maze of mean Westminster streets between the Abbey and Victoria station. Nowadays the district has been gentrified a little, but in the early years of the 20th century it was a tough neighbourhood, and from the stories he used to tell it was obvious that his upbringing had been rough and ready to say the least. For reasons that have never been clear to me, he came to Sussex in his early twenties and got work in the Lancing area, delivering milk for a local farm while lodging with one of my mother's aunts. Presumably he first met my mother on one of her visits, and they eventually married.
My mother's roots, on the other hand, were firmly in Sussex. Named Violet Elizabeth Rose Page, she was born in Uckfield, where her father was a clerk in the office of a coal company and a talented amateur artist. He had also, I believe, served in the navy when younger. Like thousands of other British children she was made fatherless by the Somme offensive in 1916, after her father joined up with the Royal West Kent Regiment. Obviously a bright girl, she had to abandon her education at the minimum age in order to earn a living, and before her marriage she was the cashier at the butcher's shop that used to stand next to the White Hart at the corner of High Street and Station Street in Lewes.
With their non-agricultural backgrounds they were not the sort of couple you would expect to find living in a tied cottage on a Sussex farm in the 1930s. My father could hardly have been less like a son of the soil or the traditional forelock-tugging yokel. He was never happier than when deflating pomposity, and his streetwise sharpness and quirky sense of humour must often have puzzled the stolid men he worked with. My mother took a quietly intelligent interest in matters well beyond the isolated world of the farm. They both valued education, so my two younger brothers and I grew up in a supportive atmosphere where knowledge was valued and ambition not discouraged. As it turned out, two of us became university graduates and the third could almost certainly have done so but chose otherwise. You cannot attribute that entirely to formal education.
Park Farm, where I was to spend the first thirteen years of my life, was one of a group of three run by a gentleman farmer named Monnington (the others were Upper and Middle Stoneham). It stood just over the wall of Ryngmer Park, a mansion invariably known as 'the big house'. (The nearby village was Ringmer, and I never discovered whether the odd spelling was genuine or just an affectation.) In 1935 Ryngmer Park was occupied by a reclusive man called Mr. Glass, reputed to be a millionaire. When encountered on one of his solitary walks he would engage in grave conversation regardless of the age or status of the person he was addressing, so we children quite often found ourselves out of our depth in his company. I am not sure whether he owned the surrounding farmland, but he did his best to act the part of squire in a shyly courteous way, counting among his duties the distribution of expensive gourmet hampers to the farm workers at Christmas. The pillars of Mr. Glass's domestic staff were Mr. and Mrs. Williamson, butler and cook, whose son I got to know sufficiently well to be invited to at least one birthday party held on the Ryngmer Park lawns during the war. Thanks to Mrs. Williamson's professional skills it featured the forgotten luxury of homemade ice cream, and the occasion is firmly fixed in my mind as an early taste of the high life.
After Mr. Glass's death the house passed to a rather aristocratic family named Crawley, and the hampers ceased to arrive. Mr. Glass's mildly eccentric regime was replaced by a conventional pony-and-tweeds household with which we peasants had little contact. For a while I was consumed with unrequited love for Henrietta, the younger of the two Crawley daughters, my passion taking the form of hanging about in the vicinity of the house on the offchance that I would hear a scream and find her being attacked by a savage labrador or vainly trying to halt a bolting horse. Neither happened (which was just as well, since I would have been useless in either case) although I once retrieved a tennis ball from a high gutter for her - at some personal risk, I may say. She thanked me politely but didn't invite me to tea.
The farm's permanent labour force consisted of five men, who all occupied tied cottages around the farm. These were not palatial. Ours had a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms and a small attic. There was no electricity, so my mother cooked on a kitchen range and an oil stove, and when it came to the weekly wash she would light a fire beneath the big copper in the washhouse that we shared with the neighbours. In the same small block of outbuildings there was a flush lavatory - an advance on the traditional earth privy, but involving a cesspit that had to be regularly emptied. Baths were taken in front of the fire by the light of oil lamps.
There is a popular myth that country people used to be sturdily self-sufficient, but in our case nothing could have been further from the truth. Life depended on supplies from outside. We relied on the coal lorry, the butcher's van, the baker's van, the grocer's van, and during the winter there were always times when they failed to negotiate the hilly lane. That often meant forcing a pram through deep snow to the main road, where the necessities had been left at Mrs. Gumbrill's cottage. Paraffin for the cooking stove and lamps had to be fetched from Ringmer regardless of the weather.
It was to be thirteen years before I lived in a house with electric light, and fifteen before I discovered the benefits of a bathroom, inside lavatory and gas cooker. On balance I think the experience has been beneficial - after all, it bred the kind of hardiness that most boys at that time only got from an expensive public school education. Even now I tend to think of warmth and comfort as a welcome bonus rather than something to be enjoyed as a matter of course.
Surrounded as it was by tranquil, undulating countryside and commanding a fine view of the Downs I dare say the house looked idyllic to the casual passer-by, and with all its shortcomings it was probably superior to the general run of farm accommodation at the time. Textbooks of social history deal graphically with city slums between the wars, but most of them ignore the primitive and exhausting living conditions endured by very many country-dwellers, who had the additional burden of isolation.
My birth brought with it the need to wheel a pram, and for my mother that meant a walk of two miles to the nearest shop at Ringmer or one mile to the bus stop on the Uckfield road if she wanted to get to Lewes. For most of the time she was confined to the house, producing three cooked meals a day and coping with a routine in which every operation took several times as long as it would today. No wonder the sort of advertising that invokes nostalgia for the countryside tends to drive me to quiet fury, I wish those who produce it would try the experience of getting up early when the frost is hard, the water pipes have frozen and the kitchen range has to be raked out, re-laid and lit before just one room starts to get warm.
The farm was a mixed enterprise with the emphasis on dairying but with quite a large acreage given over to cereals, and it was run on conservative lines. That meant a full team of shire horses, lovingly managed by the carter, Dick Gumbrill, who always wore the Derby tweed suit and leather leggings peculiar to his trade. The milking herd was made up of dairy shorthorns, even at that time falling out of favour elsewhere with the arrival of the more productive Friesians, and milking was done by hand well into the late 1940s. The feeding, milking and mucking out of the cows provided work for a team of four cowmen of whom my father was one. His working hours were long. Rising at 5.30am every day he would be on duty half an hour later preparing for a two-hour milking session, after which he would return briefly for breakfast. With the exception of an hour at midday he than worked through until the second milking was completed at 6pm. This was a seven-day-a-week routine and he got one free Sunday every four weeks. 'Dad's Sunday Off' was a big event in our house.
I doubt whether he ever earned much more than £6 a week in return for those long hours of work that were physically very demanding. At least four hours of his day were spent crouching on a low milking stool with his arms extended, a position guaranteed to induce backache in addition to the stress on the hand and arm muscles. It must have been a considerable relief when the frothy bucket was full and had to be carried across the yard to the dairy for cooling, which was done by pouring the milk into a tank and allowing it to trickle over a sort of radiator full of cold water before it reached the churn. I was not encouraged to hang around the farm, but occasionally I would have to take a message to my father during milking, and would enter the cowshed to find him sitting with his head pressed into a cow's flank amid an unusual hush broken only by the snuffling of the animals and the swish of milk squirting into the buckets. Delivering the message was like talking loudly in church.
During the winter months a good deal of time was spent in cutting hay from a stack and carrying it to the cowshed. Nowadays this can be done in minutes by using a tractor with a front loader to lift down bales and whisk them away, but in those days it was a much more laborious operation. For a start there were no bales, and after a few months on the stack the loose hay became compressed into a solid mass, so it was necessary to climb a ladder and cut out a section by plunging a large two-handed knife down into the hay. (Today's health and safety experts would probably swoon at the sight of someone standing on a ladder and operating this lethal tool.) The heavy cubes of hay then had to be lifted off with a pitchfork and carried down the ladder. Keeping the cows supplied with concentrates was almost as tiring because the cake did not come ready-crushed and bagged but in the form of rock-hard slabs which had to be put through a giant mincer cranked by hand.
Mangolds were the other staple winter feed. These turnip-like vegetables (always pronounced 'mangles') were grown on the farm and stored in a straw-covered clamp in the field. Digging them out and loading them on to a cart was a thankless early-morning task in frosty weather, and so was the business of slicing them up. Fortunately the job of carrying feeding-stuffs to the cows was simplified by the farm's one labour-saving device, a sort of overhead railway system. Wooden troughs hung from a rail that ran the full length of the cow-shed and could be pushed by hand to carry the feed. Alternatively metal troughs could be brought in to take away the accumulated muck, an operation that had to be carried out twice a day with shovels and brooms.
Milking, feeding and mucking out the cows took up several hours a day, and in between these rituals there was plenty of other work. The dairy had to be washed down, the churns and buckets sterilised and the young stock attended to. For a brief period during the war pigs were kept - an alien species and not popular, particularly with my father whose hand was badly bitten by one. For a cowman any injury to the hands affected his ability to milk, so this was a serious incident. Whether or not the bite was the deciding factor, the pigs departed soon afterwards.
The monotonous daily routine eased a little when the cows were turned out in the spring, but the summer months brought the hay and corn harvests, which made extra demands on the labour force. Silage was not an option then, so the hay crop was vital and, because it depended on the weather, entirely unpredictable. Haymaking began with Dick Gumbrill circling a field with his horse-drawn mower, leaving swathes of grass in his wake. If the weather was kind and the hay dried he would then hitch up the tedder with its revolving spiked wheels that swept two or three swathes into a single piled row. When the time came to lift the hay, the farm's ancient International tractor was brought out and its paraffin-fuelled engine coaxed into reluctant life. This was one of the few occasions in the year when it came into its own because the horses would have kicked and trodden the neat hay rows whereas a tractor could straddle them. A waggon was hitched to the tractor and an 'elevator' (a device for clawing up the hay and dropping it into the waggon) was attached at the rear.
Driving the tractor was my father's job, and since it had a hand throttle that could be set to any speed I was sometimes allowed to steer it along the rows while the hay dropped from the top of the elevator into the waggon, where it was evenly distributed by a man whose task became increasingly precarious as the load rose - it was fatally easy to slip off the side of a waggon of hay as it rocked and lurched its way across the field. When the waggon was full an empty one was substituted and Dick Gumbrill and his horses hauled the load away to the Dutch barn at the farm. Here another team would be waiting. One man unloaded the hay on to an elevator driven by a petrol engine while two more formed the falling hay into an even stack. By the time the empty waggon had returned to the field a full one was likely to be waiting, so there was little time for rest.
For the men it was exhausting, since most of the haymaking was done in the evening after a normal day's work, but there was overtime pay, and in any case hay was a precious commodity, so there was a cheerful air about the whole business, with much coming and going by wives and children carrying food and flasks of cold tea. And with double summer time in operation those sunlit June evenings seemed to go on forever.
Two months later it would be time for a similar combined effort to get the cereal harvest in. The machine at the centre of operations was the binder, a device notorious for breaking down at frequent intervals. Considering its complexity this was not surprising. I shall not attempt to explain how it worked, but for the benefit of those who have never seen a binder in action I shall simply say that it was a device about ten feet wide with a wheel at each end. It had a long cutting blade with a conveyor belt behind it, and as the corn was cut it fell on to the belt and was carried into some bulky machinery from which a neatly-bound sheaf was ejected every few seconds.
The binder cut the corn in ever-decreasing circles, so eventually there would be a small island left in the middle of the field. At this point everyone would stand back as the dogs were sent in to flush out the rabbits which had retreated further and further into the uncut wheat. As they broke cover a brief frenzy of shots ensured that every family would get at least one dinner apiece.
With this burst of excitement over, the business of 'stooking' would begin. The sheaves were gathered and stacked upright in stooks of six or eight, to ensure that if it rained the sheaves would shed the water and dry again quickly. It was essential that the corn should be stored absolutely dry, so as soon as conditions were judged to be right the waggons would roll again as the sheaves were pitchforked up and carried to the barns.
It would be nice to be able to say that we celebrated the ancient 'harvest home' traditions, perhaps fetching out big jars of cider, roasting a pig, decorating the place with corn dollies and holding a barn dance, but it would not be true. The end of the harvest was a muted occasion. There was satisfaction in clearing the fields, but also a certain melancholy because the evenings were now getting shorter, autumn was beginning to assert itself and (for me) the summer holiday was drawing to an end. So the last full waggon made a subdued sunset journey with the men sitting on the shafts or perched on top of the load, whistling or chatting quietly while the horses plodded a route so familiar that they hardly needed to be led.
It is often said that the need to produce more food during the war hastened the process of farm mechanisation. Not in our part of the world. Shortage of petrol and the scarcity of new machinery helped to perpetuate methods that had scarcely changed since the Victorian age. The most vivid indication of this came a few weeks after the corn harvest when the thresher arrived. If you want to see threshing now you have to catch a special event at a farm museum, but these demonstrations never capture the feverish activity and sheer sweatiness of the real thing.
Heavy contractor's fees made it essential to complete the operation in one day, so soon after first light unknown men drafted in from Mr Monnington's other farms would cycle into the yard and watch for the approach of the steam tractor. Unless it had been working at a nearby farm the day before it would have to make a laborious 4 mph journey from Hobden's yard at Paygate in Ringmer. It could usually be heard a couple of miles away, but it seemed an eternity before the outfit finally chugged its way on to the farm and began the cumbersome manoeuvres needed to place the red threshing machine in front of the stack and the steam tractor at the right distance from it. Finally a leather belt would be slung between the tractor's big driving wheel and the thresher and the proceedings could begin.
Threshing was very labour-intensive. One man was stationed on the stack to throw down the sheaves. A second stood on the thresher to cut the string and feed the sheaves into the machinery. A third was responsible for hitching the sacks on to the grain outlet and carting them away when full. A fourth forked up the straw that issued from another opening and threw it into the elevator, where it was carried up to a fifth man who built the straw stack. At least one spare man would be needed so that the others could take an occasional break in turn, because apart from a brief pause at midday the machine would not stop. The puffing of the engine, its belching smoke, the deafening roar of the thresher, the clouds of dust and the hoarse shouting produced an unearthly atmosphere that was totally alien to the normal life of the farm.
When the din finally died and the begrimed engineer started to prepare for the journey back the men would gather to chat and drink their cold tea before slinging a tarpaulin over the straw stack, which would eventually be thatched. It was a significant moment - the end of the farming year. All was indeed safely gathered in, and now the days would get shorter, the lights would be on for the morning and evening milking, and the only signs of life outside the farm would be the lonely figures of Charlie Blackman laying a hedge or Dick Gumbrill surrounded by seagulls and manoeuvring the single-furrow plough behind his straining horses to start the process all over again.
On re-reading this I can see that what started as a factual account of farm work in the late 1930s has acquired a tinge of romance, but the truth is that there has never been anything romantic about commercial farming, The end product of all my father's labour was a batch of milk churns loaded on to a lorry each day. But in my father's time there was at least companionship in work - time for chat and badinage. Technology has put paid to all that. Nowadays silaging and haymaking is done by a single tractor-driver (probably the farmer himself) enclosed in his cab and with nothing but his radio and headphones to break the monotony. Operating a sophisticated milking parlour is a solitary job that requires unrelaxing concentration. The old rituals of the corn harvest and threshing have been replaced by the intimidating combine harvester. And for the farmer the prospect at the end of the day is a session with the account books or the computer. Farming has simply become a lonely business, and mechanisation has not removed the basic anxieties of an occupation where you can only control so much - where you still have to rely on the co-operation of nature. No wonder suicide is a major occupational hazard for farmers.
I can say with complete truth that as I grew up I never once felt attracted to the farming life. But it must be in the blood somewhere because my eldest daughter decided that she wanted nothing else, and she became a farm worker like her grandfather before her, eventually marrying into a dairy-farming family.- Details
- Parent Category: Ringmer Past
| Lawrence Garner | A Long walk to anywhere | Starting life as a son of the soil | Click here |
| Lawrence Garner | A Long walk to anywhere | Morning milk with Eileen | Click here |
| Lawrence Garner | A Long walk to anywhere | "Who do you think you were kidding, Mr Hitler?" | Click here |
| Lawrence Garner | A Long walk to anywhere | A few new horizons | Click here |