There’s a little phrase that is a mantra of family travel experiences. Whether by car, train, plane or on foot, there is always a little voice from the back asking this question. Unknowingly the voice is questioning something far, far greater than simply the whereabouts of the end of that particular journey. Life is all about getting there one way or the other and we continually strive to find out where ‘there’ is, what we have to do to get ‘there’, what we are going to find ‘there’, and how we will know when we’ve got ‘there’.
At every turn, at every life changing decision – and goodness knows every decision we ever make changes our lives in one way or another – we pause, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deep in thought, and wonder if this is a real turning point in our lives, if this decision is the one that will bring us to the final plateau, the final destination, the place we have been travelling towards all these years. So we ask ourselves “Are we there?” Or more to the point “Are we nearly there?” Or has the journey of our life just turned full circle and we are actually practically back where we started.
The truth of the matter is that most of us don’t have a clue what is the object of our life, what is our final destination – apart from the proverbial hole in the ground – and how on earth we will know when we have reached ‘there’. And when we do think we have reached ‘there’, will there be a sign telling us that we are really ‘there’, or will it be some rather vague indication that we are in fact, nearly there, nearly being such an imprecise adjective as to have no really useful meaning.
And then there is the matter of that little word ‘we’. Does it mean ‘me’, or more grammatically correct ‘I’? Does the use of ‘we’ imply an unconscious knowledge that everyone else is also making this journey along with us and everyone can be expected to arrive there together? Or is ‘we’ a reference to just me and a special someone else, someone for whom the journey has also been long, meandering and seemingly pointless?
Let us therefore insert a note of optimism into this wandering wondering. There comes a time in everyone’s life when it becomes possible to believe that the journey does have a conclusion, that the ‘we’ is indeed the coming together of two lonely people, the time when two soulmates find each other in the amorphous crowd that is humanity. Let us wander no more, let us wonder at the beauty of that meeting and enjoy a little story that ends with two such lucky people.
Every good story has a good beginning and in my mind my story begins on the occasion of another, perhaps even more auspicious meeting, when my mother met my father. And yet it should probably begin even before that, back in 1905 on 28thMay, when Pop arrived in this world in Finchley, a North London suburb, and began his own peregrinations that led to him finding my Mum some thirty-nine years later. Pop was the youngest of four children born into a respectable middle-class artisan household whose income was derived from the family engineering business, the stereotypically named “Acme Engineering Works”. Together with his older brother he attended a private day school where he learnt to play the noble game of rugby, “a hooligans’ game played by gentleman”[1]as opposed to football, “a gentleman’s game played by hooligans”! Pop took to rugby much better than he took to his books, eventually leaving school to take up an indentured apprenticeship in the family business, and continuing to play Rugby as an Old Gower[2]until several years after I came on the scene.
Sadly there are many things that one simply doesn’t discuss with one’s dad including asking him why he took so long to get married. The only clues I have now are several albums of old photographs that show Pop enjoying himself with chaps I know to be his rugby team mates, often on beaches or sailing boats, and nearly always accompanied by a selection of pretty young ladies, and I can only conclude that he was spoiled for choice and simply couldn’t make up his mind who he wanted to settle down with for the rest of his life. I know also that he had a somewhat checkered career. His father was a Mason and wanted son Harold to become one also, something that didn’t quite fit with Pop’s egalitarian views on life. Had he agreed he might have stayed in the family business and who knows, he could have been the managing director by the time I was born. However, he chose the alternative, he thumbed his nose at the idea of a privileged life and, apart from a brief interlude when he worked on the buses during the General Strike in 1926, made a life from engineering sales. This was undoubtedly a good thing as far as I’m concerned as he wasn’t considered to be important enough to completely avoid the draft as WWll progressed and eventually found himself in the RNVR training to be a gunnery officer. And that’s sort of how he came to propose to my Mum, although it was a tortuous route he took before that happy affair.
The navy was an obvious choice for Pop, he loved sailing and he enjoyed seeing the world, two passions that I gladly inherited. He soon found himself sent to America to stand by a frigate that was being built in a shipyard in New Jersey[3], which satisfied both his desire to travel and his propensity to socialise. In my early teenage years I received a letter from Sharon, a young New Jersey girl, telling me that her mother knew my father and wouldn’t it be nice if we became pen-friends. Sharon was the daughter of one of Dad’s fellow officers who found himself an American wife, a side-benefit of several weeks ashore in the United States where war could nearly be forgotten. Unfortunately the pen-friendship never really got off the ground and we lost contact almost immediately, another missed turn by me perhaps.
After several weeks of a peaceful existence on the other side of the Atlantic, HMS “Halsted” and her new crew set sail back to the war zone that was Europe, to eventually participate in the Normandy landings. Pop was never very clear about what happened to end his active participation in that awful war. Sub-Lieutenant H G Hewitt was Gunnery Officer on that stout little frigate when, on the 11thJune 1944, five days after D-Day, during a skirmish with German E-boats somewhere in the English Channel off Cherbourg, it was hit by a torpedo that literally blew off the bow and drove the number two gun turret hard up under the navigating bridge, killing 21 of the crew and injuring more than forty others. The totally disabled ship was towed back to Blighty, where it was declared to be a “constructive total loss”, and carrying within it’s depths a seriously injured Gunnery Officer. Lucky to be alive but with a hole in his skull the size of a walnut, Pop eventually recovered but never saw further action. Pensioned off from the armed forces, he learnt to live with a metal plate in his head, keeping headaches at bay with a never-ending supply of codeine. Sewing was a skill that every seaman needed to learn if he was going to keep his blues and whites in parade-worthy condition, so as part of his rehabilitation Pop started putting those skills into good use, making stuffed animals from coloured felt. I don’t know what eventually happened to the end results except that brightly coloured stuffed felt birds and animals seemed to be all over the place when I was a baby. And although he was a bit of a cuddly bear of a man, I always remember him as a dab hand with a needle and cotton, something Mum must have appreciated.
But let us return to his recuperation from that horrific event in June 1944. Eric, a great school friend of Pop’s, and a fellow Old Gower, invited Pop to stay with him and his family while he recovered from his injuries. They lived in Radlett, a village on the main railway line from St Pancras to Bedford and beyond, and the stage-set for my early years. Mum, by then a 28 year-old war widow, was already living in Radlett, and was also very much part of Eric’s social scene which seems to have centred around Porter’s Park Golf Club. Pop had also been an occasional part of that scene in the years before and during the war, and Mum remembers first meeting him at a party she went to with Eric and his wife Gweny, though the rudeness of another young female guest, perhaps seeing Mum as a competitor for Pop’s charms, was the more memorable event of the evening! When the war-wounded Pop returned to Radlett, he and Mum made more of their earlier casual acquaintance and just a year later, on Friday 13th July 1945, Mum and Pop were wed in a quiet civil ceremony in St.Albans, and nine months after that I entered the world in a small maternity home in the village.
For Pop this was his first foray into the world of marriage and parenthood. Mum, on the other hand had become a young bride just a year or so before the beginning of the war. She and Alistair although not exactly childhood sweethearts were both brought up in St.Albans, the next major stop on the railway line north of Radlett. I mention the railway line again for, as you will soon learn, it was such a significant part of my young life. St.Albans, once the ancient Roman city of Verulamium, was in those days a country market town, a center of all that is good about the English countryside. It was surrounded by farmland, green fields, woodland and small villages. A farmer’s market took place once or twice a week in front of the Town Hall on the High Street, the local shops included butchers, bakers, greengrocers, hardware stores and clothiers. Banks were housed in elegant premises suited to the caliber of the business carried out therein, and several public houses served to quench the thirst of farm labourer and gentry alike. Complete with a magnificent cathedral overlooking the valley below and a venerable boy’s high school housed in a building dating from Norman times, St.Albans epitomized the classic image of a small English city. Mum was brought up there in a society that encouraged young men and women to go horse-riding together, perhaps joining the Hunt occasionally, to play tennis on sunny summer afternoons and partake of afternoon tea together at St Michael’s Manor. In short, hers was a reasonably privileged upbringing, in some ways a world away from the light engineering industry and suburban way of life in which my father learnt his social skills. Hardly surprising then, that I grew up in a household with a noticeable political rift.
Alistair was a young stockbroker in The City, of London that is, when he started the courtship that led to Mum becoming Mrs Struthers. A career in acting was actually what Mum had in mind, attending the Central School of Speech and Drama alongside such worthies as Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft. Consequently both Mum and Alistair were regular users of the LNER railway service through to St Pancras, meeting each other each day on St Albans platform ready to board the ‘7.37’ together, before going their separate ways upon arrival at St Pancras, the one to the City to buy and sell stocks and shares and the other to learn how to ‘tread the boards’ at The Royal Albert Hall. Evidently, the idea of marrying such an eligible though slightly older man proved stronger than her career intentions, and after their marriage in All Souls Church in Langham Place in London, and a fortnight honeymooning in the South of France they moved into “The Cottage”, 2, Shenley Hill in Radlett, a gift from her parents. Mum was fast approaching her 99thbirthday as this was being written and her powers of recall were greatly diminished. She did however recount a moment when she feared her marriage to Alistair might have been very short-lived. He went for a walk along the beach one evening and being caught by the incoming tide was obliged to wait several hours before being able to rejoin his very frightened young bride in their hotel when the tide receded once more.
Their new home was most conveniently situated about a hundred yards from Radlett station. This enabled Alistair to continue his daily commute into The City, along with all the other bowler-hatted, umbrella-toting, besuited gentlemen, each carrying that day’s copy of The Times and maybe also the Financial Times in the case of the stockbrokers and bankers. Mrs Struthers quickly assumed the role of loving housewife and life was good. Radlett offered a facsimile of St Albans society as they both looked forward to all that young marrieds see on the horizon, prosperity, a family and happiness. Only their horizon didn’t take full account of the horror that Chancellor Hitler was bringing to life in Europe. As war became a reality, Alistair abandoned his stockbroking ways and joined up becoming an RAF navigator flying Wellington bombers on sorties deep inside Germany. Mum and he decamped from “The Cottage” to live in a far simpler dwelling near his squadron in deepest Lincolnshire, conceived Francesca (“Cescy”) who was born in 1941, and then but a few months later had their world shattered about them as Alistair’s plane was declared “missing, believed shot down” during a raid over Hamburg. “War widow” was not a title to be envied, and Mum and young Cescy mourned his loss for the rest of the war, eventually returning to their home in Radlett. I know from her photographs she was a very attractive widow and had several suitors, including my Uncle “Tiny”, Pop’s elder brother, a glamorous globe-trotting engineer in the oil industry. Pop may have been damaged by his war experiences but his skills as a Lothario obviously remained undiminished as he won over Mum from his more debonair brother.
It isn’t every man who will take on the responsibilities of helping to bring up another man’s child, but Pop was very much up to the task and quickly grew fond of Cescy as well as Mum, which meant I had a ready-made sister. “The Cottage”, Mr and Mrs Harold Hewitt style, was a wonderful home to be born into, close to the centre of Radlett which, at that time, was still a relatively small village. The house itself was an amalgam of three cottages which would originally have housed workers on the nearby Newberries Estate, one of three country houses whose owners shared the lands around the village in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Set in an acre of land, which included a wooded dell that was destined to become my much-loved playground for many years, it had a beautifully landscaped garden leading down from the terrace towards the adjacent railway line. There were flower beds everywhere, Mum being a very keen gardener, and large areas of lawn which Pop , slightly grudgingly I felt at times, kept well-trimmed with a variety of motor mowers the earliest of which I remembered was a Rotoscythe, the world’s first successful rotary mower, and a machine much admired by my small friends as we began to get interested in such things. The close proximity of the railway line was a fascination for little boys and occasionally a source of great amusement. As London bound trains departed the station, they passed under a bridge and started up a gentle slope towards Elstree, right in front of our garden. It was quite a struggle for some of the old steam locomotives as they hauled their load of six or eight carriages packed full of commuters and it involved a lot of soot and steam being blown from cylinders and smokestack as wheels spun frantically trying to get a grip on steel tracks made slippery with wet dewy leaves dropped by the many elm and sycamore trees in the wooded dell twixt garden and railway line. Every Monday Mum would get the washing done early to get it hung on the line for the best part of the day, the washing line being suspended down the garden between a large sycamore tree and a silver birch tree at the edge of the dell. Well, hot air rises, taking steam and soot with it, the prevailing winds were from the west and our house was to the east of the railway line, so it was only logical that the soot and laundry should meet, very funny for a little boy but not so for his Mum. The trains had also caused considerable distress to Alistair and his bride, apparently keeping them awake all night long during their first night at The Cottage upon their return from their honeymoon! The noise of slipping wheels, clanking pistons and connecting rods, and carriage couplings stretching to take the strain were certainly a part of my life as a young boy, but I remember most fondly the clouds of steam and soot that regularly bathed our rather smart garden! Convenience does have its price.
[1]Apocryphal – credited to Winston Churchill
[2]Traditionally in England, teams of players who are all alumni of the same school are known as “Old xxxs”. In Dad’s case he went to UCS school on Gower Street in North London and hence he and his team mates were known as “Old Gowers”.
[3]One of many warships and merchant ships built by US shipyards as part of the Lend Lease scheme to strengthen the Allies’ naval and merchant shipping capabilities during WWll. The Buckley Class frigates were designed as destroyer escorts.