My Childhood

My mother gave birth to me in the Lying In Hospital in Bethnal Green, East London. It was a Sunday Morning around 6am and the Bow bells of Stepney would have rung out if they had not been damaged by the German bombing, I was officially born a Cockney. It was June 1950.

My Parents, Iris and Peter had known of each other at the Latimer school in Edmonton where they both had attended with scholarships, my mother being the daughter of a carpenter Walter Flemming, who had a relationship with Ethel Ore, and together had complicated family of 7 children from various relationships of which Iris was the second youngest, born in 1921. Her parents didn’t marry as Ethel wanted to keep her widow’s pension from the husband she lost in the First World War.

They lived in a gas lit three bedroom house in Edmonton north London relative poverty, but never went hungry and Iris in her story wrote “There was a copper in the scullery where you could heat water by lighting a fire under it. This way the scullery got warm too. My mother would put water into the copper then light the fire and a long time after the water would be hot enough for a bath. My mother would have to ladle the water out of the copper into the bath with a saucepan, and if it was too hot she would add cold water from the tap. When my sister and I had finished my big brothers would have their turns, and last of all, my mother

and father. When the bath was full of water it was very heavy and the grown-ups had to carry it outside and tip the water down the drain.”

The only toilet was outside in the back yard. The bath lived on a hook in the back yard.

Iris was a bright child and at 11 gained a full scholarship to the prestigious Latimer school including a clothing allowance, and was sent to the school tailor to be fitted, which often meant she dressed more smartly than fee paying children. Iris would have liked to go and further her education but her parents needed her to work and help support the family so at sixteen she left and found work in the education office.

My father was the son of an accountant William John Baynes who married Olive Carr. William had a job as an unqualified accountant at a gunpowder factory in Waltham Abbey that his father also worked at, which meant he was a protected worker during the First World War and remained at home. After the war he left the Royal Small Arms Factory to work for a firm called Levy and Franks, who ran a chain of pubs or hotels. The family became relatively prosperous during this time and bought a house in Southend on Sea as Olive liked the idea of living near the sea. Dad remembers moving into this newly built house on a rainy day when the furniture had to be carried down the muddy lane as it was impossible to drive the furniture lorry to the door. In Southend Dad started school, his parents joined the tennis club, and it seemed a happy interlude. But in 1930 or 31 in common with many others in the depression William lost his job. The house had to be let out and the family moved in with relatives.

My father Peter, the second of three boys was born in 1920. He grew up in Southend then later in Edmonton and also went to Latimer School on a scholarship – Latimer was unusual for it’s time as it taught girls and boys together but Peter didn’t meet Iris until later at the when he was working as a clerk at the education department of London County Council (LCC) and she came in to offer help.

During the Second World War my father’s youngest brother Mike and his mother left London to the safety of the countryside. Granddad, father and Ray (his elder brother) remained to continue their work. Dad was in the Edmonton Education Office, and Ray in the Tottenham Education office. They would sleep on the sitting room floor in allotted spaces when air raids were expected. Dad can remember his ‘girlfriend’ Iris sleeping over in this arrangement. He says it was a very chaste affair. Dad was asked how his father had reacted to the fact that both his brothers Peter and Ray registered as conscientious objectors. He says that his father came to his Tribunal to offer a character reference. But a neighbour sent them a note saying that the boys were ‘squirmy cowards’ (Dad’s words!).

My parents lived in the East End of London during the war as they were conscientious objectors, working with the Pacifist Service Unit in Stepney, which was based in an old vicarage. My mother working for the fire service and my father doing social work, helping people de-lice their homes, running a boys club and helping people move from their homes after bombing. They live through the blitz and were friends with other objectors, some who refused to participate in the war effort in any way and were gaoled. Objectors had to go to a tribunal to prove their beliefs were genuine – an improvement from the First World War when several objectors were shot. The devastation caused by that war led 135,000 people in 1934 to sign the Peace Pledge never to support war. As the Second World War continued and the atrocities of the holocaust were revealed some objectors changed their minds. My parents were reported one night for failing to

close a curtain during the blackout. Mum was summoned to appear in court for this offence. In fact she was unable to attend and sent a letter, (of which we have a copy.) There was a fine of seventeen shillings and sixpence. They got married in 1943 and had a Unitarian minister conduct the service – he was an American named Jeff Campbell who came to Britain to study but then found it difficult to return due to the war.

When the war ended my father worked for the LCC driving school meals vans, but was awarded a grant (in line with returning servicemen) to study to teach adults. This was a two year course at Regent St Polytechnic.

Following this course he undertook supply teaching in the West End, and during the evenings studied at LSE for a degree in Political Philosophy and Economics.

By the time I arrived my parents already had two daughters Sally and Freda and when I was two months old the family moved to a small village, Bengeo, just north of a town call Hertford, which is 30 miles north of London. Peter had taken a job teaching at the Hertford adult teaching college Scott House. There were many people who had missed out on further education due to the war and Scott House provided a series of practical and academic courses both during the day and evening, father taught English. In Bengeo we had a flat in a large old Victorian vicarage that sat back from the road behind the local cricket pitch. Nearby was a small Saxon church but the vicarage had been built to accompany the Victorian Holy Trinity Church in the village. The flat was in the upper part of the vicarage and was on two levels, but first you had to climb a flight of stairs to get to the kitchen and living room. Another flight of stairs took you to two more bedrooms then up three more stairs and along a corridor past attic spaces led to two more bedrooms. At the back of the house there was a large garden that once held a tennis court and a kitchen garden with greenhouses, beyond that a wooded warren* that led down to Hartham common where the rivers Beane and Rib weave their way through the plain on the edge of Hertford. When we movedthere we didn’t have a car and my father would cycle to work through the warren, across the common to the college on the other side.

Groceries were delivered by horse and cart once a week when a mobile shop would arrive, otherwise there were some supplies in the village, (a ten minute walk for us) which had a Post Office, a sweet shop and a store that sold bread and vegetables, there was also the Holy Trinity church and adjoining that the infant school, both Victorian.

*Warren. A piece of ground in which there are many burrows in which rabbits breed.

Here is a letter my mother wrote in November1951
It’s about 11.30am. Jeffrey is asleep and Freda at the moment is quiet “writing

letters” with me so I am trying to get a reply to you while I can.
With three children I find I never catch up on all there is to be done, but with experience one learns to work a little faster, to skip the non-essentials and to lower one’s standards of house-keeping without worrying too much about what the nieghbours think. I find the mental & emotional strain of coping with children far more trying that the physical effort. I don’t seem to be a “born” mother and I find their endless chatter and constant desire to do what I’m doing a great trial. We don’t plan to go beyond three, but since we have two friends with un-planned additions to their families we are trying to keep an open mind about figures. Financially it would make life almost impossible. As it is we have a lodger and Peter takes 3 evening classes a week to try and balance the budget. This flat is very pleasant but very expensive and it is all we can do to keep adequately clothes & fed at the moment.

We have a large kitchen where we have most family meals, a large sitting room, which takes our dining table, two bookshelves, desk and a three-piece-suite quite comfortably. The other sitting room is even larger, and this is the one we let to a school teacher who shares the kitchen & bathroom with us and feeds herself. We get on remarkably well although we have almost nothing in common. We keep strictly to superficial topics - especially as she is very TRUE BLUE - only because Daddy is and she doesn’t consider it necessary to make her own judgements on politics and religion!

There are four largish attic rooms. Three we use as bedrooms the fourth is a playroom. There are lots of cupboards and its lovely to have lots of space even if it does mean more cleaning. The dirt isn’t at all smutty & sticky as it was in Stepney, so my slapdash housework isn’t so easily discerned.
Freda is gossiping all the time so if this is getting a bit incoherent you’ll know why.
We have also a garage, cellar & large garden in which Peter spends a lot of time. As this is his first year as a gardener we have made several mistakes, but we hope to do better next year. I quite enjoy digging and weeding, but with F & J to help me, I don’t often get much done.
Our present financial crisis is largely due to the fact that we are buying a washing machine. I cashed a small insurance to pay the deposit, but by the time the machine was available the P. Tax had been doubled and the insurance wasn’t adequate. The machine is a great boon. It does all the work with no effort on my part and much quicker than I can do it so I feel the effort to get it was well worthwhile.

Jeffrey is walking now and is full of adventure and mischief. I think he will be very much like Sally in temperament, tho’ perhaps rather more cheerful. Fortunately he doesn’t talk yet and we are deliberately making no effort to teach him. Two constant gossipers is quite enough. He already enjoys playing with the girls and I think perhaps they are all already beginning to get some benefit out of family life. Freda is much slower than either S or J, but is much more cooperative than they. We tend to take advantage of her agreeableness and I fear Sally will soon learn to “put upon” her. Her fall* made her less confident in herself than formally but I think she is catching up again now. She is still very variable in her use of pot, which is rather trying but no doubt she’ll manage it properly sooner or later.

Sally is full of “Tee says ’t’ for tap” etc., and “adds” and “takes” and “equals”. Bengeo School was founded in about 1860 and still goes strong, largely with the old methods as far as I can see. It has a reputation for a high percentage of passes to the Grammar schools, and for cramming and no games. But I think provided we see that Sally has plenty of chance to let of stream and paint on large canvasses (of newspaper) at home it probably won’t do her any harm. She went to a nursery for a year when we got here. The matron, who knew Peter, took pity on us and had Sally although we weren’t really eligible to use the nursery. It was very well equipped and Sally was very happy there so that she was disappointed with school and having to sit still for so long. But she seems happy enough now and is content to stay to dinner too, which is a help.

I must stop as Peter is coming in to lunch today.

*The fall Iris mentions in her letter -

My Sisters Sally and Freda shared a room with a window over an apex roof and one morning they were jumping on a bed next to the window and Freda fell out and rolled down the roof then fell around 10 feet into the garden. Sally ran up the long corridor to my parent’s bedroom yelling, “Mum Dad, Freda has jumped out the window”. Dad went down to the garden to find her crying but intact. I guess she must have been about three, Sally who is two years older remembers being shocked that dad ran outside without his shoes to rescue her.

Bengeo Junior School was opened in 1869 and divided with a Girls entrance and a Boys entrance. I started at the school at the age of five where my two elder sisters were also being educated, in the girl’s section, and I would see them at playtime and talk to them through the railings as the playground was segregated. As it was a church school we would start the day with an assembly where the children were required to stand and hear a sermon and sing a hymn or two and I remember one child would regularly faint and fall to the floor which all seemed a bit daunting, the headmaster was over six feet tall and to me scary. I also remember having to read a poem on parents evening to a backing track played from a tape recorder that broke half way through my performance and I was commended for persevering. At seven we transferred to the junior school, which was modern and had a playing field. My memories of this time are a little hazy but I was a keen football player and had a friend called Christopher who was the son of the Borstal school headmaster and I would go to their house and watch TV, as we didn’t have one. Champion the Wonder Horse, Davey Crocket, The Lone Ranger I remember along with Dixon of Dock Green.

(BBC 1 started in 48 although there had been some limited broadcasts since the 30s in 1953 the broadcast of the Queen’s coronation was an instigator for many to buy a television set which back then came in wooded cabinets. ITV started broadcasting in 1955 in the London area – BBC2 1964 – Colour 67 BBC2 69 BBC1)

At home there was just the radio, which had 3 BBC channels - The Light Program, The Home Service and BBC Third program. A regular listening was on a Saturday morning when there was a program called Two Way Family Favourites where families in the UK would send messages to family overseas, there was also a program called Children’s favourites which would play “I’m a pink tooth brush” by Max Bygraves and other songs like “Would you like to swing on a star?” – it was very limited.

I would sometimes meet Christopher and play in the warren where there was a bank you could slide down. Den making was another activity but occasionally you would come across tramps “men of the road” – tramps and I imagine there were quite a few men who never readjusted to society after the years of war. Dads old bicycle was stolen from where he had left it by the back gate. So more often we would play in each other’s gardens, which in our case were large, and we had a tyre swing suspended from a tree, we also had a playing field in front of the house at the bottom of which someone reared pigs.

Bonfire night was a big event back then and often held in our back garden where a large fire would be built probably over a period of a month to be adorned by a guy we would make from old clothes and straw, Mum would make Parkin* and we would have sausages and other foods around the fire. A baked potato in anopen fire is a thing of wonder.

Fireworks would be bought and administered by parents, telling us to keep back and I remember Eric Green, a colleague of my fathers setting off a Catherine wheel by mistake in his duffle coat pocket and I managed to get a burn under my chin by holding a firework wrongly.

For a while we were sent to Sunday school, I think mainly so our parents could have a bit of time to themselves and I even became a choir boy as you would get money for singing at weddings – I didn’t last long as I found the whole experience pretty creepy. One Sunday the church spire got struck by lightning, which I saw was the hand of god indicating she wasn’t too pleased with the place – I stopped attending

In the flat there were attic spaces and I remember creating a museum inside one of them – someone had given me an African shield, which was my prize possession but I can’t remember what other items I had. The attic was off a long corridor that was covered in linoleum and one of our games was to run along it then jump on a pillow and slide ending up going down three steps bump bump bump. Simple pleasures.

Winters were cold and the old vicarage didn’t have central heating so sometimes you would wake to find ice on the insides of the window. Duvets were yet to reach Britain and we had eiderdowns and blankets to keep us warm, along with hot water bottles, where there would be about a half hour when you got into bed until you warmed up. On getting up I remember shivering while getting dressed in front of a two bar electric fire.

Meals were generally the meat and two veg variety with things like dripping on white bread for tea, our mum had never been taught to cook so the food was often bland, with the treat being pudding, which we would have as part of most evening meals. I would ask what is for pudding and the regular reply was “wait and see with custard. The skin on the custard was considered a treat and as there were six of us we would be allotted the treat one day each with my father having it twice in a week. Food rationing ended in Britain July 1954 but for a long time afterwards there was not a great variety of food. We grew quite a bit in the garden and the summer and autumn were the harvesting times, things like strawberries were only available for 2 or 3 weeks in June. One of my favourite puddings that mum made was gooseberries with flapjack another rhubarb and custard, out of season dried bananas in custard was often on the menu.

*Parkin is a gingerbread cake traditionally made with oatmeal and black treacle, which originated in northern England.

At some point we got a second hand car that had running boards, dad had learnt to drive in the war but I think without any proper instruction. The car struggled to go up hills and I remember one occasion dad reversing it up a hill. I used to play in the car when it was on the driveway and onetime released the handbrake and it started to roll backwards, with me trying to stop it by pushing, however the car got stopped by a tree at the bottom of the slope.

Nobody we knew lived very close by so we didn’t see relatives or even Dad’s work colleagues very often, but I remember going to the Greens house which was always exciting as Eric used to keep a pet jackdaw and Pete, his wife, painted and became a lifetime friend of my mother, the Greens had two children and would organise games for us when we went over.

Another of Dad’s work colleagues was Harmon Sumray the art teacher who was prone to wearing berets, smoking cigars, and was generally a large character all though quite a small man.

An African family came to stay with us who had the surname Quart so creatively called their first child Pint, the second was called Snowball; I remember them getting very scared when we showed them the pigs at the bottom of the playing field.

We had a lodger Cecily from New Zealand who played the cello and in one of the other flats were an Italian couple that seemed to have loud arguments onsummer nights. In the apartment downstairs lived Miss Butler, the county children’s librarian who would give us books surplus to the libraries need.

As a family we often went to Southwold for our holidays as good friends our parents had known from their school days had settled there and we would rent a cottage at Blackshore, which is on the river Blyth next to the Harbour Inn. In the early sixties there was still a small fishing community working from the Harbour and a ferry across the river by rowing boat. I have very fond memories of holidays there and along with the neighbouring village Walberswick it has become my spiritual home. The cottage was half a mile from the town and a regular morning walk would take us up to town through fields of cattle then across the golf course to the bakery where we buy bread fresh from the oven. At night one would fall asleep with the beam of Southwold lighthouse visible from the bedroom window. The sailing club was next to the pub and I would sometimes crew on dinghies and take part in weekend races – there were a bunch of local kids and holidaymakers who would hang out together and sometimes go off camping. It was during those holidays I learned there was a wider world and met kids from London who became friends and later quite influential on my outlook.

Holidays in Southwold were great fun, playing with the Horwood family, crab fishing in the river and time on the beach. My father is wearing the towelling robe we used to get changed to and from our swimming costumes while on the beach. The family are standing in front of the second car we owned, which was a little more reliable than the first.

Back in Bengeo.

In the summer a travelling fair would park itself on Hartham common and the sounds would drift up the hill to Bengeo where I would lay awake and wonder.

Originally there was swimming in the river on Hartham common that had an area that was tiered for access, then they built an outdoor pool and I remember swimming a mile in the pool when I was 10.

Back then there was an exam called the 11 plus that children took in the last year of junior school and would decide whether you would go to Grammar School or Secondary Modern School, the first being for kids with an academic talent and

the second was for the rest. I seem to remember I passed on the second attempt. Then we moved to Leicestershire.

In 1960 my father got a job with Leicestershire council as head of adult studies, coordinating evening classes and youth clubs throughout the county. We moved at Easter so I had a term in junior school before the summer holidays. Integrating into new school at that age meant I had to fight a few kids who thought southerners were softies but my reasonable football skills allowed me some respect.

My parents had bought a new house that was being built on a large estate in a town called Oadby, which is 4 miles from the centre of Leicester. The house was not ready when we arrived that Easter so we took digs in a house where the woman who ran the place wanted us to be out between 10am and 4pm which was OK during school time but became a bore during the summer holidays as Leicester had 2 museums which we went to too often and that put me off going to museums for some years. In the lodgings I had to share a room with another tenant, a soldier on leave from the army and at another time a welder who was recovering from damaging his sight after too much welding on a gasometer – It was a very strange summer, I turned 11 in June and towards the end of the holidays we went to a roller skate park and I skated for several hours then afterwards complained of a stomach ache. My parents put it down to too much skating but after a couple of days took me to a doctor who said I had appendicitis and I was rushed to hospital to have my appendices removed. I was put in the children’s ward and at the time I was knitting a Spurs scarf, the girl in the bed next to me asked if she could have a go at my knitting while I was having my operation, I agreed but her technique was very different from mine and the scarf changed width. It was the last time I lent my knitting to anyone.

I think we moved into the new house in Oadby before the end of the summer, but the estate was still being built and for many months the access roads were muddy and there were houses still being built. The nearest shop was about a mile away and I made some pocket money going to the village for snacks the builders wanted. One great improvement was central heating and in 1963 we got a television

Having had my operation it delayed my start to the school term in September, and excused me from sports for some time. The school had the grand name of Oadby Beauchamp Grammar School and was an amalgamation of a grammar school and a secondary modern school. September 1961 was it’s inaugural moment as a comprehensive school in a new building on the other side of town to where we lived. The grammar school teachers resented having to teach the secondary modern kids and the secondary modern teachers resented the attitude of the grammar school kids. I was put in a middle class where we got the worst of both attitudes. The head had come from the grammar school and had a ball and socket joint in his knee so would sometimes fall in corridors. Assemblies were large, long and tedious (as were a lot of the lessons), the school had its teething problems. One year we had six maths teachers as no one could stand the job. Having started late and not being able to take part in games I hooked up with another lad who had recently arrived and had a medical excuse not to do games. This was Christopher Bruce Longhurst whose father was a tea planter in India and his mother had returned to Leicester with their two sons for secondary school education while his father remained in India. I don’t remember that much of the school days apart from feeling bored and somewhat left out – I had missed out on football due to the operation and never recovered in time to join the school team and so games lessons were often cross country runs, where you would try and hide in a wood to avoid completing the full course and by the time we were thirteen or so we had taken up smoking and our main interest were girls whom

were beginning to develop in ways us boys didn’t understand but were keen to explore.

The Avengers was a big hit in our household

I was 14 in 1964 and Mods and Rockers were the fashion, the girls sporting Mary Quant Style haircuts and shortening their school skirts until they were told off by teachers, we also would try and refashion our uniforms and ties along with growing our hair, all of which was resisted by the school. What we did have is fantastic music and fashion evolving Motown, Stax, The Beatles, The Stones, The Small Faces, The Who, Carnaby Street, Biba and although we were too young to afford the real thing we mimic the fashions and could listen to music on Radio Luxemburg then later the pirate radio stations broadcasting from the North Sea. It was in many ways a great time to be a teenager. I remember going to my first pop concert with my elder sister Sally and her boyfriend to see Del Shannon and Roy Orbison at the De Montfort Halls

Bruce would often come to our house as his mum would be out being a district nurse, my mum would ask him if he would like to stay for supper and he would decline but still be sitting there when supper arrived on the table – this would infuriate my mum and annoy the rest of the family. I would visit Bruce’s house and they had some strange books with photographs of the atrocities of the Second World War, his mum taught me how to do the Telegraph crossword. Mr Longhurst when he came was a strange colonial character with a pencil moustache who thought it was funny to show his sons (Bruce had an elder brother Alex) and me a three cup bra, he didn’t visit very often and Mrs Longhurst started a relationship with the man who owned a local garage, which was quite confusing for her sons.

As a family we still went to Southwold for our holidays from Oadby.

I got to the age of 16 when you take exams and only managed to pass one in English literature then stayed on another six months to do some retakes and passed a maths exam then left school. I remember going to the careers advisor who offered the possibility of apprenticeships in the shoe trade or in printing, both of which Leicester was known for. I ended up as a junior at the Rates Department on the strength of my maths qualification.

The Leicester Rates Department collected what is now known as Council Tax and was situated in a 1930’s building in town. The desks were set at an angle so that large leather bound ledgers could be worked on and we would enter payments received in our best handwriting. My job as the junior would involve changing the calendar each morning, filling the inkwells and making tea. At lunchtime when the telephonist had her break I would sit in at the Bakelite

telephone exchange and take incoming calls and with a wire put the calls through to the relevant person. I lasted at the rates department for a year, during which time I bought myself a tonic suit from Burtons, my first SLR camera and made friends with a piano player called Bob Noble.

Bob Noble had been a bit of a child prodigy at the piano and his mother had a gold suit made for him and he made appearances at the working men’s clubs I the area. He left the rates department around the same time as me to join a band that toured Germany with the hope of becoming the next Beatles, I took their publicity photos with my newly bought camera and went and got a job in the Leicester Permanent Building society as an arrears officer.

Band publicity shot - Bob is second from the right

The building society was in Oadby, which saved me travel time to work and meant I could spend more time with my photography. A work friend of my father gave me a projector so I set up a darkroom in the downstairs toilet at home and spent many an hour in there much to the annoyance of family members wanting the toilet (although there was another upstairs). My work as an arrears officer entailed choosing the right letter to send to people who had got behind with their payments and in my memory there were 13 levels of letter starting from “I would like to remind you that you missed the payment on the 15th” to “If you don’t pay anything by the end of the month we will send round the bailiffs & repossess your property”. I was there for 6 months when a colleague of my father was involved in running UNESCO youth camps and wanted their work photographed and I got offered the job for expenses. These meant photographing different activities the camps were doing in Manchester, Notting Hill and New Cross, which was very exciting for me as I had hardly ever been outside of Leicestershire. In New Cross I stayed with a member of the Foot family (Michael Foot was leader of the Labour Party and Paul Foot an investigative journalist) I did a photo study of New Cross, which at the time was still populated with gangland characters that would have huge funeral processions when one of them died. I remember smoking dope and listening to the Beatles Abbey Road with the young Mr. Foot. They had an exhibition of my photos in the community centre.

Having had a taste of freelance photography I thought it might become my profession, I was 18, but my parents wisely found me a job at the Photographic Department of Leicester University (through a connection with a neighbour). The photographic department consisted of five employees and we were tucked away with a small studio and darkroom behind the geography department. We wore white lab coats and would have to print up matching photographs in batches of 30 or so for use in exams, go out with geologists to photograph locations, photograph the graduation celebrations and be the visual aids assistance in lectures. I got day release to study for an Ordinary National Diploma in Photography then later the Higher National Diploma and remember travelling to Derby to do some of the course. I started living away from home in shared accommodation and met my first proper girlfriend Sue. I would be invited to Sue’s house for Sunday lunch along with her twin sister Jane, her elder sister Bridget, Bridget’s partner and her parents. Sunday lunches were very god as Sue’s father was a butcher although I always felt a little sorry for the man as he was surrounded by women and seemingly a little hen pecked- in their back garden they had quite a large aviary which he would retire to as soon as possible. Bridget had airs and was a bit snooty as was her husband. Jane had a boyfriend called Mel who shared a house with two friends in the Highfields district of Leicester and when a vacancy became available I was offered a place in the house.