In 1930, the year I was born, Chigwell Row was still a somewhat rural village in South West Essex. Although situated a mere 12 miles or so from the centre of London there had been little change since Victorian times. Practically all of the 17th & 18th century wooden cottages and the later 19th century Victorian brick built houses in the village had outside toilets and were without bathrooms, although most had mains water laid on.

In ‘The Square’ at Lambourne End there were four wooden terraced houses with just one outside toilet between them! It was probably like this until well after the end of the war in 1945. (In the 17th and 18th centuries these cottages had to draw their water from wells!) Almost all had gas for lighting but there wasn’t any electricity, so appliances we now take for granted, like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machine etc. could not be used; anyway they would have, most probably, been too expensive for most people or were just not available. One cottage did have electric lighting though, Angel Cottage, just over the border in Lambourne Parish.

A postman by the name of Wally Faux lived there with his wife and three children. Wally was very practical and had installed a generator in a shed outside to supply his house with electric lighting. Before retiring for the night he would nip outside and turn off the petrol, the generator would then keep running on the fuel left in the carburettor to enable him to get back and in to bed before the lights went out; ingenious!

We did not have a telephone, not many houses did; but there was a public call box near the cross roads. When making a call you actually spoke to a person, an operator, who connected you to the number you asked for….eventually! To post a letter cost a 1½ d stamp or just over ½ p in new money! It went up to 2½ d (about 1 new ‘p’.) in 1941. Postage on post cards was 1d. Unsealed envelopes were also cheaper. Popular newspapers were, I think, 1d or 1½ d. Broadcasting was only eight years old in 1930 and television was still the stuff of dreams! In about 1936 we did have a new EKCO* ‘Wireless’, as radios were called then; nowadays you seldom hear a radio called a ‘Wireless’. Ours was a Bakelite art deco design in Brown and Cream; that ran off a rechargeable accumulator and a long lasting grid bias dry battery that heated the valves!

Sundays were always special and definitely a day of rest for nearly everyone. The vast majority of shops were closed, with only a few that sold ice cream, sweets or teas opening for a limited time. It was still the custom to wear our ‘best’ clothes on a Sunday and maybe go to morning service at ‘All Saints’ church and in the afternoon many of the children would go to Sunday school. Sunday lunch was always a ‘roast’ with, perhaps, relatives or visitors arriving later for tea in the afternoon.

Many of the folk in the village spoke with an Essex accent; an accent that is rarely heard nowadays, if at all, with the possible exception of one or two of the much older generation. In fact I can’t think of anyone who still does since Martha Lucas, Lil and Cyril Groves have died; Martha lived in a small wooden house (it’s no longer there!) next to the Two Brewers public house. The school children also spoke with an accent, apparently, but I didn’t realise that I had one until I was told I had an Essex accent when I started work. This is the genuine Essex country accent, not the awful ‘Estuary’ English that is often wrongly attributed to all of Essex!

The few Police cars and ambulances announced their presence by ringing an electric bell mounted on to the front of their vehicles. Firemen wore big brass helmets when driving to an emergency and rang the large bell by hand that was mounted high up on the fire engine.

Many local farms were still using working horses for jobs around the farm in the 1930’s, a time when horse drawn carts and carriages were gradually being replaced by motorised vehicles! I remember our milk being delivered by a horse drawn milk float; horses were still being used up to the early 1950’s by the United Dairies. Nowadays electric milk floats are used in those places where the milk is still being delivered in bottles!

There were still trams (that ran on rails) going through Ilford Broadway in the early 1930’s. Sometime later they were replaced by Trolley Busses that had two long arms on the top that were attached to wires that were suspended above them, supplying the power. The arms were always coming off at the junctions and had to be replaced by the conductor using a long hooked pole that was carried under the trolley bus for just that purpose. They ran between Barkingside and Ilford via Horns Road and across the A12 at the Green Gate to Ilford.

Our nearest train station was Grange Hill about a mile or so away; it was on the recently opened LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) line that ran to Liverpool Street station. The steam trains ran in a loop via Ilford and Woodford, travelling in both directions to Liverpool Street station. This line became part of the Underground Central Line in 1948 with the ‘underground’ trains running from Hainault to Newbury Park station above ground then underground to Gants Hill before emerging above ground again at Leytonstone. After Leyton it was below ground again into central London and beyond. The line from Newbury Park to Ilford was discontinued for passengers and was only used occasionally for freight. Central line trains ran a shuttle service over ground between the Hainault and Woodford stations. Before 1948, Steam trains ran from Liverpool St to Ongar via Woodford, but after the change to the London Underground Central line, the trains terminated at Epping.

The village did have a couple of bus services that operated earlier in the 20th century, so by the 1930’s getting to places like Ilford and Woolwich was possible. With one change of bus, Romford and London were easily reachable. I can just remember seeing busses with open stairs at the back! Those early busses had to use a very low gear to get up the hill to the Bald Hind when coming from Barkingside. On one frosty winter evening there was ice on that hill and the bus we were travelling on got stuck half way up, wheels spinning on the ice, we were not going anywhere, so Mum and me had to walk the next couple of miles or so to get home. We were well used to walking everywhere but we could have done without that in the dark at the end of a shopping trip to Ilford!

The first busses locally were independently run and very competitive with each other, but on 1st July 1933 they were all amalgamated to become London Transport. Of course being just 3 years old I don’t remember those independently run busses at all. The one bus that ran all week was the No. 25A bus. It ran from the yard behind the Maypole Public House in Chigwell Row to York Road in Ilford via Grange Hill, Bald Hind, Barkingside and Gants Hill. On Sundays and Bank holidays some continued all the way to London’s Victoria! Later it became the Number 26 bus. The service was discontinued sometime in the 1950’s when it was replaced by the No 150 bus. This ran a slightly different route from Chigwell Row to Ilford; going through the newly built Hainault housing estate before travelling on to Ilford via Barkingside and Gants Hill. The 101 bus only ran on Sundays and Bank holidays, travelling between Lambourne End and the Woolwich Free Ferry via Woodford Bridge, Wanstead and East Ham.

At holiday times and weekends in the summer, large numbers of people used to visit Chigwell Row and Lambourne End on these busses. They would, no doubt have come to visit the recently opened Hainault Forest that had been opened to the public in 1906 and to have tea at one of the many tea rooms that had opened up that were taking full advantage of the trade that came with all those visitors! Or maybe they just came to visit one of the three Public Houses in Chigwell Row, the ‘Maypole’ Inn, the ‘Retreat; and ‘The Two Brewers’ or more likely the popular ‘Beehive’ Public House at Lambourne End. Most of these Pubs catered for families by serving teas or meals of some sort. The Two brewers and the Retreat used to brew their own beer in earlier times and perhaps the others did as well.

The ‘Beehive’ public house was very popular because it was right on the edge of the Hainault forest. With the 101 busses from Woolwich and East London terminating at Lambourne End, Londoners could now easily get a taste of the countryside and the forest early in the 20th century. On a warm summer’s evening in the mid 1930’s I saw a large number of people queuing at the Chigwell Row cross roads waiting for a bus. A bus inspector was there to keep order and was assuring the queue that busses would soon be along to take them back to their destinations.

It wasn’t unusual to see competing ‘runners’ or ‘walkers’ going through the village particularly at holiday times. Ilford athletics club organised these from a long wooden building in the grounds of Carpenters Hall near the ‘Retreat’ pub. This ceased with the outbreak of war in 1939 and probably didn’t resume again after the war had ended.

Like most places within commuting distance of London, Chigwell Row has seen a great many changes since the end of the Second World War in 1945; housing estates have been built on the open fields in the village and on the estates of ten of the thirteen or so 18th and 19th century mercantile houses. With the exception of Clare Hall (irreparably damaged by a flying bomb in 1944), they had all survived the War but alas, not the developers after the war, when most of these large houses were demolished to make way for housing estates. The majority of these ‘merchants’ houses were on the north side of Manor Road, (now Lambourne Road) and mostly to the West of the crossroads in the village.

The only Public House that is left in the village now, is the Two Brewers, The Retreat went to housing at the end of the 20th century and The Maypole has been closed (2015) for over two years now, in spite of several attempts to reopen it. It will, no doubt, be pulled down in the near future to make way for housing of some sort. The wooden public house called, ‘The Beehive’ at Lambourne End was rebuilt in 1929, and eventually its name was changed to ‘The Camelot’; after further enlargement it became a ‘Miller and Carter’ public house.

I am not too sure but I have a vague memory of kerb stones being put in place in Chigwell Row village, probably around 1935/6? But it did have some street lighting though, with a few gas lamp standards scattered throughout the village. The cross roads at the ‘Maypole’ were single carriage roads without traffic lights; with so few motor vehicles traffic lights were unnecessary in the 1930’s. It wasn’t until well after the War had ended that electric street lighting replaced the old gaslight standards, and we had traffic lights at the crossroads with Romford Road becoming a dual carriageway.

The only open areas in Chigwell Row for people to enjoy nowadays are Hainault Forest and the 50 acre Recreation ground with its tennis courts and other sports facilities. About half of this area is still ancient woodland, a 25 acre remnant that was once part of Hainault Forest; it is a delightful walk in early spring when the Hornbeam trees are coming into leaf.

Chigwell Row’s southern border now adjoins the Greater London Borough of Redbridge with about half of the 800 acre Hainault Forest in Redbridge and a much smaller area in the Greater London Borough of Havering. The rest is in the Epping Forest area. Up until the creation of Greater London on 1st April 1965, both of these Greater London Boroughs had been in the County of Essex!

There cannot be many villages in Essex or any other county for that matter that have not seen a great many changes in the last 80 years; especially those that are within commuting distance of London or other large cities. The changes that have occurred in Chigwell Row since my childhood in the 1930’s are staggering, but there again I expect my parents and grand parents in Sussex would have said much the same in their day, but the changes would have no doubt, been at a much slower pace.

With such a large increase in the population and housing, Chigwell Row can hardly be called a village anymore. Sadly, the days when nearly everyone in the ‘village’ knew practically everyone else in the village have long since gone never to return! People are much more mobile now than they were in the early part of the 20th century.

Having been brought up in West Sussex, my Dad in Monks Gate, Nuthurst and my Mum in Horsham; it begs the question how did my parents come to live in Chigwell Row in Essex and to leave such a lovely area in West Sussex? Well it happened like this: Dad was apparently apprenticed to a horse racing stable in Sussex; being small I think he may have had hopes of being a jockey. But at the age of 24 or thereabouts he left the stables; I don’t know why, he never spoke about it, but I always had the suspicion that he didn’t like it there, or perhaps he’d just put on too much weight to be a jockey, I just don’t know. He was courting my Mum at the time and was now out of work; that was until he saw a job advertised for a groom and chauffer that had a house that went with the job. He applied for it and got the job - with the Savill family (the Estate Agents branch of the Savill family) in Chigwell Row.

* Made at Southend-on-Sea by E. K Cole Ltd. ‘EKCO’, from Eric Kirkham Cole Limited.

 Mum and Dad's wedding day

A hastily arranged marriage took place in August 1929, at Mitcham, I believe, (Dads older sister, Minnie lived there.) before moving into No1 Montfort Cottages, Grove Lane, Chigwell Row, Essex. 10 months later on the Summer Solstice, June 21st 1930, a Saturday, I was born an Essex man or rather an Essex baby boy! My mother always said it was the longest day of her life! Following the Wall Street crash a severe worldwide economic depression had started the year before I was born. (It was just a coincidence I had nothing to do with it!) The Great Depression, as it became known, lasted for a decade until the start of the Second World War in 1939.

The house my parents moved into was a three bedroom semi-detached late Victorian (c.1895) yellow brick built cottage with a slate roof in Grove Lane, Chigwell Row. The semi-detached Montfort cottages would have been built originally to house staff employed by the owners of Montfort House; a large early 19th century house off Manor Road a short distance away. Their extensive gardens were just a field away directly behind our house.

Having a brick built cottage with three bedrooms was quite a luxury when in the earlier wooden terraced cottages throughout the village, two bedrooms were usual. Electricity was unheard of but we did have some coal gas lighting in the three rooms downstairs. (Natural gas was not available in those days.) We had to take a candle in an enamel ‘candle-stick holder’ when we went upstairs to bed. The gas mantles that were used to provide our downstairs lighting at home were purchased from the Gaslight and Coke Company; that was the first shop on the right as you entered Barkingside High Street near the Fairlop roundabout. When the mantles were new they could be handled and easily put in place but, after the first lighting and the stiffening had burnt off, they were extremely fragile. It could be tricky when using a match or a taper to light the gas as just one touch and the fragile mantel more or less disintegrated and was unusable! Two chains hanging down from the fitting operated a lever which turned the gas either on or off, depending on which one of the chains you pulled. It was in about 1953 when we had electricity installed.

A large stone step led up to our front door. I really liked that step and used play on it when I was small, later it was ideal for sharpening my penknife! All boys carried a penknife in their pockets along with bits of string, marbles, elastic bands, fluff and other miscellaneous and unidentifiable objects! I don’t think it had ever occurred to any of us boys that a penknife could be used as an offensive weapon! (I think films and television have a lot to answer for!) Older boys in the Scouts even had sheath knives with a five inch blade! I still have my fathers Boy Scouts sheath knife with a deer antler handle complete with its leather holder from when he was a Boy Scout in about 1913 - 1918.

Like all cottages of that period the front door opened directly into the parlour, or the front room, as we called it; a room that we only used occasionally when we had relatives staying or at holiday times like Easter and Christmas. Our front door wasn’t used and was sealed up to keep the draughts out! It needed to be as older houses tend to be incredibly draughty.

In the front room was an upright piano that Dad had probably obtained from ‘Woodlands’ (later called Woodview!) In 2017 it was pulled down to make way for further housing. It had been the home of Phillip Savill until his death in 1922; he is buried in All Saints church yard.

Several pieces of furniture we had at home were items that had been discarded and were no longer required by the ‘Big House’. They were always very good quality as you would expect coming from a large and grand Victorian house. I tried and tried to play that piano without much success; I envied those who could play any tune on a piano by ear. I never had any lessons either, but I believe my younger sister did. I am not very musical but I used to play a portable ‘wind up’ record player we had. It played 78rpm records of which we had quite a few. I played and played those records and can remember many of the songs to this day, although I would have only been about seven or eight years old at the time.

A cast iron open fire was the only means of heating the front room; because of its only occasional use, it always took a long time for the room to warm up. A second room, next to the front room, was the Kitchen (nowadays it would be called the Living room!) where we cooked, ate, bathed and generally lived with its coal fired Range, or Kitchener as we called it, that burned almost continuously. It was allowed to go out about once a week or so, to allow the clinker that would build up to be removed, and any cleaning could be done.

Using the coal that was delivered and the wood we had collected meant that our chimneys ‘sooted up’ and had to be swept on a regular basis. A Chimney Sweep would be called and he would push his brush up the chimney from the Kitchener or a fireplace indoors. I was always posted outside to wait and watch for it to appear out of the chimney pot. When it did I would call out and then the Sweep would pull it back down taking the soot with it! Mum hated having this done as you can imagine it made quite a mess with soot everywhere indoors. The cloth the Sweep put up covering the fireplace was only partially successful in stopping the dusty soot escaping. The soot that was collected would be used on the garden or on the allotment but only after it had been well weathered over the winter to remove its acidity. Chimney fires were a serious hazard if you didn’t have your chimneys swept regularly! It was not unusual to hear of a chimney fire occurring somewhere or other in the locality; this was, apparently, always disastrous for the house and its furnishings if it did happen. It would make a dreadful mess with soot everywhere. We always had our chimney swept regularly so we never ever had to endure that trauma.

Mum always changed our curtains twice a year; it was normal and routine for homes in those days. The summer curtains were light and colourful but the winter curtains were heavier and often lined to provide some insulation to keep out the cold that came from those draughty wooden windows. With double glazed windows and much improved heating and insulation in modern houses it isn’t necessary to change your curtains twice a year and is rarely done nowadays.

The stairs that were off the kitchen divided the two main rooms. The cupboard that was under the stairs we used as a larder. A small porch off the kitchen led to the scullery and the back garden. Built in to the house was a narrow shed where dad stored the potatoes off the allotment, his garden tools, our bicycles and a long galvanised tin bath that hung on the wall. On Friday nights the bath would be taken down and used for our weekly baths. A brick built flush lavatory was tacked on to the outside of the house at the far end. We had to go outside to use it; no fun in the winter when it was cold or wet! We did have ‘proper’ toilet paper though, called Izal. It wasn’t very good, a bit like thin tracing paper and smelled of disinfectant. Each piece had a couple of lines of a nursery rhyme printed along the edge. For nights we had to use chamber pots - ‘Po’s’ or “Jerry’s” we called them.

The toilet had a rather ramshackle corrugated shed built around it where we kept the wood and coal along with a large hand operated mangle that Mum used for removing excess water from the washing on Mondays. Monday was always wash-day! It always seemed rather odd to me having a mangle in a shed where the coal was kept with all that coal dust around! When we had the coal delivered by Pearsons, the Lambourne End coal merchants, mother always counted the sacks as they went past the window! Pearsons coal depot was at Grange hill Station by the Western embankment.

As well as being suspicious, Mother was also superstitious! She would not have May blossom or an open umbrella in the house at any price, and she always made a point of kissing my Dad goodbye when he went to work whatever mood they might be in. She couldn’t bear to think that she hadn’t kissed him goodbye if anything untoward should ever happen to him at work.

We had to go through the coal shed to get to the lavatory that was tacked on to the outside of the house; the shed did offer some protection from the frost in winter but even so the lavatory’s lead pipes would occasionally freeze up causing them to split, especially if we forgot to light the small paraffin heater we kept in there for those very cold frosty winter nights. F. Harman & Sons the local builder’s and funeral directors plumber, Jack Harvey, had to come with his blow lamp and solder to ‘wipe’ the split pipe to repair it.

In the early days we had a cesspit near the front of the house that had to be emptied periodically. I remember the iron cover being removed and watching a tanker type lorry putting a flexible tube down into the cesspit and sucking the contents out! I made sure that I watched from a safe distance when this smelly operation was being performed! The sewage from the 17th century Millers Farmhouse at the bottom of the Lane ran down the fields in a deep smelly ditch probably from an overflowing cesspit!

In our scullery there was a shallow sink below a small window that looked out onto the backyard, it had a single brass cold water tap, with lead plumbing of course! In another corner of the scullery there was a brick built copper heated by a coal fire underneath with its own flue. A round, plain wooden lid sat on top. As well as being used for washing the laundry, the copper was used to heat up the water for our baths. On Friday nights the long galvanised ‘tin’ bath that we kept in the shed was brought indoors and placed in front of the Kitchener’s fire for warmth. It was partly filled with hot water from the copper before we all took it in turns to bath in the same water; it was topped up with more hot water as and when it was needed. Dad, mum, me, and later my sister; all washed in the bath.

Another Friday night ritual for me was ‘Senna Pods’, the pods were soaked in water to be drunk as a laxative. It was only given to me for some reason that I couldn’t understand; I say given, but actually I objected most strongly and had to be ‘persuaded’ to drink it because I have never smelled or tasted anything so foul or so disgusting in my life! I think it must have been a left over habit from my Parents child-hood, although my younger sister Pamela was never made to endure that laxative! I began to think that my sister was Dad’s favourite, especially after being made to give up my teddy bear to my baby sister. Years later this suspicion was further reinforced when my sister Pam used Dad’s can of petrol that he kept for his moped, on a garden fire that was dying down. A huge flash of flame frightened Pam and she dropped the can on the burning embers. Fortunately the petrol left in the can didn’t catch fire. When Dad came home I was the one that got into trouble; just because I had not retrieved his petrol can from the fire! I was more than a bit miffed over that I can tell you! Retrieving a can of petrol from a burning fire wasn’t, I didn’t think, a very wise thing to attempt!

In the kitchen was the black and shiny steel ‘Kitchener’ that we used for cooking and heating. It had a built in oven to the left of a barred fire which had two doors on it. A round plate could be lifted off the top above the fire for refuelling and a kettle or pot could be sat in the hole directly above the fire. A flue with a damper was embossed with the words, ‘The Clanick, Shoreditch E’. My mother regularly blacked the Kitchener with ‘Zebra’ Black lead and I think the shiny parts she brightened with a piece of emery cloth. The flat irons she used for ironing’ the clothes, were heated by standing them on the Kitchener. Checking that the iron was at the ‘correct’ temperature for ironing was with a wetted finger dabbed on to the sole plate! I don’t think it would have been too reliable if we had clothes made from man-made fibre at that time, that’s for sure! I’d guess Kitcheners were the forerunner of today’s much larger and modern Aga’s.

Sometime later, probably about 1938 I think, we had a gas stove with an oven and what a blessing that must have been for my mother. With its heat much more controllable it would have made cooking for her so much easier; it also enabled water to be heated up more reliably and certainly quicker. Later on we had a small ‘Ascot’ water heater that heated water only when you needed it. Safety Matches were used to light the gas stove and our gas lighting. Matches must surely have been one of the greatest inventions of all time. It certainly beats tinder boxes. (Or rubbing two Boy Scouts together!)

Cooking on the Kitchener must have been a work of art as you didn’t have very much control over the heat, but we ate a lot of suet puddings, all cooked on that Kitchener. The suet we used was bought from the butchers; a hard fat that had to have the skin removed from it and then be diced up finely and maybe put through a hand operated ‘mincer’. Steak and kidney pudding was a favourite; a basin was lined with the suet pastry and then filled with the meat, onions, carrots etc. and then topped with more suet pastry and covered with a cloth tied around the top of the basin with string. A ‘handle’ fashioned with the string across the top allowed it to be safely lifted in and out of the boiling water when it was cooked! It was cooked standing in a pot of simmering water for a very long time. Apple, Apple and Blackberry or Plum puddings were similarly made. Other puddings such as Golden Syrup (my favourite!), Jam Roly Poly, Spotted Dick, and others were all made using suet pastry and rolled in a cloth and tied at each end like a large sausage, before boiling or steaming.

Mother also used to make jam or syrup sponge puddings cooked in a basin. All served with ‘Birds’ custard of course. Bread pudding and bread and butter puddings were other favourites; both made from leftover stale bread. Nothing was ever wasted in our house! If we asked Mother what was for dinner or tea, she would always say; “Bread and pullet”But I never knew what that actually meant; and I doubt whether she did either. It appears to be attributed to several Counties especially East Anglia although my Parents came from Sussex. Its meaning is unclear but it seems that it may have meant that you tied greased bread to a piece of string before swallowing it and then ‘pulling it’ back again for reuse! Ugh!

There was always a basin of beef dripping kept in the larder under the stairs to use on our toast. The bread was toasted on an expandable toasting fork in front of the Kitchener’s fire and the dripping with its savoury jelly was then spread on to it. It was very tasty! During the War when we had rationing*, Beef dripping would have eked out the fat ration. It would have probably been used for frying some things like Bubble and Squeak – absolute heaven! (Fried left-over cooked potatoes and vegetables.) Also in the larder there was always a bottle of ‘Camp’ coffee; a syrupy mixture of coffee, chicory and sugar. A teaspoonful was put in a cup and hot milk or water with tinned, sweetened condensed milk added – but not to my young taste! (I liked sweetened condensed milk though, and liked to dip my finger in an opened tin!) Everyone seemed to use ‘Camp’ coffee then, as the instant freeze dried coffee wasn’t available until well after the end of the War.

Another product we always seem to have, was Salmon and Shrimp Paste, it was spread onto bread or in sandwiches; it had a pleasant but fairly strong fishy flavour. I’d guess it was cheap to buy and economical to use; it is still commonly available today. Libby’s Evaporated milk (Milk with about 60% of the water removed; it was only available tinned), was a milk product we used instead of cream. It was the consistency of single cream and came in tins. It had a distinctive taste of its own, different to fresh milk, not unpleasant; but it made tea…undrinkable! Without a refrigerator we couldn’t keep fresh cream for very long.. Milk was not pasteurised and only available as full cream milk – straight from the cow! In the early days I believe Dad got our milk from the farm that was behind ‘Woodlands’ - Phillip Savill’s large Mid Victorian house. It wasn’t unusual for these large houses to have their own adjacent farm, supplying the house with milk, butter and meat etc. Sometimes in the winter, the milk tasted pretty foul; it was apparently because the cows had been fed on mangolds (mangel wurzles) – a type of root vegetable.

Early in the war I can just remember our milk being delivered by A & E. Winter of Limes Farm in Chigwell. (Shortly after the war the farm house was pulled down and the Limes Farm housing estate was built on the site of the house and its farmland.) Later on our milk was delivered by the United Dairies horse drawn milk float, it came in ½ pint, 1 pint or quart (2 pints) sized returnable glass bottles; it also gave us a ready made local delivery service - Les the milk-man! He would deliver messages or small items etc. between the customers that were on his milk round!

If you needed to keep the milk for more than a day or two especially in the summer, you had to boil it in a milk saucepan to prolong its life; it ensured that it didn’t go ‘off’ for several days! The milk saucepan was in fact two saucepans, one sat half in and on top of the other. Water was boiled in the bottom one to heat the milk in the top, it meant that the milk didn’t burn or boil over. When the milk cooled a skin would form on the top of the cream that I liked to put on my breakfast cereal. We never had refrigerators of course.

What a nightmare this way of living would have been for modern day nutritionists! And yet amazingly there was hardly any obese children in school (There was one, who always had a runny nose; she was always falling asleep in class!), without cars they presumably burnt it all off by running about and walking to school. At home, we ate plenty of vegetables as well, off Dads allotment. I was always made to eat my ‘greens’! Ugh! Small children do not like greens! I always had to finish my main course as well, before I could have any pudding! (I am not too sure that this was a particularly good idea as it probably encouraged over eating!) Eating meals was always sitting around the table together as a family and we were never allowed to leave the table until everyone else had finished eating. Walking about eating was a definite no-no. We had a high chair that converted into a rocking chair. The two front legs were curved forward and the back legs were curved backwards, each leg had a metal wheel. By releasing the locked legs the chair lowered into a rocking chair. It was quite ingenious, but very heavy and probably Victorian. I would have used it but I can only remember my sister in it; it was just used as a high chair, never as a rocking chair. I don’t know how my parents came to have such a chair, but it was most likely another item that had been discarded by ‘Woodlands’ the house where dad often worked.

Fruit, including soft fruit, was plentiful but only when it was in season and was mostly sourced locally. At Christmas the mincemeat and the Christmas puddings were all made at home. (Suet was used in them, of course.) Small silver thrup’ny joeys - 3d pieces - were put into the puddings for luck! If anyone got one (I think it was always arranged that I got one!) in their pudding on Christmas Day, you had to make a wish. Afterwards we were expected to give them back to Mum for reuse in a year’s time as they were no longer being minted. (They were last issued in 1922. I have inherited several of them some dating from Queen Victoria’s reign.) We always had a large chicken on Christmas Day. I don’t think having a turkey at Christmas was very popular among the working classes until much later. In those days, having chicken to eat was a luxury that we only had at Christmas or perhaps Easter; they were generally unavailable or most likely too expensive for us to regularly buy them at other times of the year. Nowadays of course, chicken is one of the cheapest of meats that you can buy and good value for money.

Jams were made as the various fruits came into season and a lot of fruit was bottled in Kilner preserving jars for future use. Runner beans were preserved in stoneware jars. A layer of prepared beans then a layer of salt and so on alternating until the jar was filled with a final layer of salt. I can’t say it was very successful; the beans were always very soft and more often than not, rather salty when eaten!

The cooking salt we used came in a block that had to be carved up into small pieces and broken down with a rolling pin before it could be used; that was usually my job! In those days there just wasn’t any other method of keeping food; there were no freezers or refrigerators in the average domestic home. Although we didn’t have electricity there were gas operated refrigerators available, but we didn’t have one. When I started to crawl I used to go backwards; or so I was told. Not having ‘eyes in the back of my head’ was a big disadvantage! Dad said he got me to crawl forwards by placing a piece of chocolate a few feet in front of me. I promptly crawled forwards and never crawled backwards again!

Upstairs there were three bedrooms with a double bedroom either side of the small square landing at the top of the stairs and a small bedroom leading off the central double bedroom. This central room was always my parents. It was in this room that both my sister and I were born, assisted by the local midwife Nurse Guys. She cycled everywhere from her house in Vicarage Lane; she was the midwife for all the mothers in the area when they were giving birth. No hospitalization for pregnant mums about to give birth in those days! I had the small bedroom that led off from my parent’s bedroom until I was about eight or nine years old. It was when my sister outgrew her cot and needed a proper bed that I was moved into the front bedroom. Mother was scrupulously clean and always examined the bed linen for signs of bed bugs – small spots of blood I believe; but I don’t recall her ever finding any! I guess that might have been a problem for some households in those days. She was also a fresh-air fiend; the bedroom windows would be opened wide on most days, even in winter. She always got up very early at about 6 am, and would bring me up a cup of tea to wake me up for school. There would always be grouts left in the cup so I used to throw them out of the open bedroom window into the field outside, until one day I ended up with just the handle in my hand; the cup had gone as well as the grouts! I was in big trouble especially as my parents refused to believe my story, but it was perfectly true, the cup had separated from the handle and ended up in the field outside!

The Kitchener was the only source of heating that was used in the house. Although each bedroom had its own cast iron fire place, I can’t remember them ever being lit so the bedrooms were always very cold in the winter; on frosty nights the windows would freeze up on the inside, with beautiful leaf and fern patterns on them by the morning. Hot water bottles were an absolute necessity during the cold winter nights. They were either the usual rubber sort with a woollen jacket, or the hard ‘stone’ water bottles, triangular in profile; in the morning the water would still be slightly warm so it was used to wash with! That’s recycling at its best!

After I was toilet trained a potty was kept under the sink in the scullery for me to use. Later on it was taken away and I was expected to go ‘out the back’, but I didn’t, I still went under the sink – potty or no potty! Well I guess I would rather than having to brave the elements to go to the toilet outside, especially at the tender age of about two or three. I don’t really remember the incident but I vaguely remember getting my legs slapped very hard one day and being sent to bed! Just going “Out the back” was an expression we always used in our house when needing to use the ‘flush’ toilet that was brick built on the outside at the end of the house.

* The first items to be rationed for each person per week were:-
Bacon (or ham) 4 oz’s,
Sugar 12oz’s (At the end of summer extra sugar was available for Jam making.)
Butter 4 oz’s (although this amount varied from time to time according to supply.)
Meat was rationed at 1/10d worth a week on 11th March 1940 (about 1 lb in weight.) This was later reduced to 1/2d and had to include canned beef.
Tea 2 oz’s.
Margarine, cooking fats and cheese 2 oz’s were added in July.
Cheese was reduced to 1 oz the following May. (Cooking fats were reduced to 1oz in 1945!)
In the following March, Jams, Honey and Lemon curd and the like were rationed. It varied between 8oz’s and 2lb per month.
Sweets or chocolate was 4oz’s per week.

Woolwich Free Ferry

I liked it when relatives came to stay with us, mostly before the start of the Second World War in 1939. Both Dad’s sisters used to visit us fairly regularly. Minnie, dad’s older sister with her husband George came from Mitcham to visit once or twice a year, and sometimes came with their daughter, also a Minnie, but for some reason was always called ‘Nibby’; she would come with her boyfriend Cecil. Dad’s younger sister, my Auntie Amy and Uncle Dave, came more often as they only lived at Woolwich; a short journey to the Woolwich ferry to cross the Thames and then the 101 bus to Chigwell Row. Uncle Dave worked at the Woolwich Arsenal until he was called up at the beginning of the war in 1940 to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corp. When they stayed with us I would climb into their bed in the mornings when Auntie Amy would tell me a traditional fairy story such as Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks and the three bears. She was very good at story telling.

Without the distraction of a television, the adults often played card games, especially Cribbage; or they would play Darts. Our Dart board was in a shallow box with two doors that when opened up wide were black on the inside, on which we chalked the scores. It was a permanent fixture mounted at the top of the ‘Kitchen’ door.

I can remember Uncle Dave and Dad experimenting with photography in about 1936-7. They produced contact prints by exposing the light sensitive paper to our gaslight in a frame that sandwiched a negative and the paper together; then processing them behind a thick cloth stretched across the alcove on the left of the chimney breast in the kitchen. I can’t remember how successful it was as they wouldn’t let me ‘help’! The wet prints would be pegged out on a makeshift line to dry. Perhaps my photographic ambitions were started back then!

Dad’s older sister Minnie came with her husband George to visit us from Mitcham, travelling on the London Underground and then on the LNER steam train from Liverpool Street Station. They were always welcome as far as I was concerned as Uncle George always brought with him a good selection of comics from ‘ Marshalls’ the Newspaper and Magazine Wholesale Company where he worked. As a bonus I always got comics a week or two before they were available in the shops!

We sometimes visited Uncle Dave and Auntie Amy at their home in Woolwich, usually just for the day. We would catch the 101 bus that took us to the Woolwich ferry. We would then board one of the ‘steam’ driven Free Ferries and cross the Thames. I loved Dad taking me down into the engine room with its lovely smell of oil and steam and watching the polished brass, copper and shiny steel machinery churning away; backwards and forwards.

On one of our visits to Woolwich, I had my hair cut for the very first time at the age of about 3; it was long, blond and curly. The barber’s shop, recommended by Uncle Dave, was, I believe, in Shooters Hill, where I remember the barber placing a plank of wood across the arms of the barbers chair for me to sit on. (I was just too small for the chair; the barber would have found it difficult to reach down to me!) I believe my Mum may have had a few tears, but as far as I know, none of my curly locks were kept.

Very few people had a television set before the war, as it was the very early days of television broadcasting, but Uncle Dave had one; I think it was a Marconi television. Early in 1939 I remember we all watched a live Eric Boon boxing match on a very small 9” screen; it was in black and white, of course. Their house and all their belongings including the television were badly damaged or destroyed by a bomb during the blitz in 1940. The fight was Eric Boon’s (nicknamed the Fen Tiger) defence of his British Lightweight title fight against Arthur Danaher on the 23rd February 1939; it was the first live television broadcast of a boxing match. Boon won on a technical knock-out in round 14.

The BBC Television Service started its regular broadcasts from Alexander Palace on 2nd November 1936. It was discontinued on 1st September 1939, 2 days before War was declared, and did not resume broadcasting again until the 7th June 1946.

Auntie Amy and Uncle Dave with mum’s younger sister, Auntie Alice would often spend Christmas with us; it was always a fun time with party games in the front room. Without any television to watch or distract us, we had to make our own entertainment in the 1930’s. Christmas presents (from Father Christmas of course!) would be opened in great anticipation; Dad always received a decorative tin of tea from Savill’s his employer. (Tea was an expensive and valuable commodity in much earlier times!)

I received a wooden Fort one year with lead soldiers who always seem to eventually lose their heads! Match sticks were used to try to hold the heads back in place but it wasn’t very successful. I found out that lead tastes quite sweet if you lick it; but I don’t think it was realised in those days that lead was quite so poisonous! Goodness knows how much lead I may have ingested.

One Christmas I received a cut-out book of the Cunard Ocean Liner RMS Queen Mary for me to cut out and assemble. The ship had been launched a few years earlier in 1934. Ironically, just before the war started in 1939, I had a German made Shuco clockwork model red sports car for Christmas. It was a wonderful piece of engineering; it had 3 forward gears, neutral and a reverse gear, with a clutch on the outside of the body. If I still had it complete with its box it would be worth about £300 now according to a recent Antiques Road show programme. My parents had paid 5/- (25 new pence!) for it; that was an awful lot of money for them in 1938, being about one eighth of Dads weekly income.

Like most children I had a favourite teddy bear, but after my sister was born on 21st April 1937, I had to give my teddy to my baby sister. My Parents considered I was too old at seven or eight to have a teddy bear so I was made to give him up, with much protesting, to my baby sister. I was very upset at the time. Too old at seven, good heavens; you are not too old at seventy to have a teddy bear! I don’t think I was ever quite the same after that!

Although my sister was born on April 21st 1937 at home like I had been nearly seven years earlier, I can’t remember her actual birth. But it would have almost certainly been during the Easter holidays when I spent two or three weeks staying with my Auntie Amy and Uncle Dave in Woolwich; I was two months short of my seventh birthday, and it was my first time on my own away from home so I had a few tears on the first night! In the days that followed she took me to the Tower of London and the Imperial War Museum and many other places of interest in London. She also showed me the Fire station not far from where she lived at Woolwich and we looked at the two lovely bright red and polished brass fire engines that were there. It was then, at the age of almost seven, that I decided that is what I wanted to be – a fire fighter. I never was but my maternal Grand Father had been in the Horsham fire brigade, and my father joined the fire service soon after the outbreak of the war in 1939. So I suppose you could say it was in the family!

Like many men Auntie Amy’s husband Dave smoked; ‘Piccadilly’ brand cigarettes were his preferred choice – but not where he worked, of course, at the Woolwich Arsenal! Uncle Dave was slightly built but he had very strong arms and his hands were always stained yellow from the explosives he handled and probably from the smoking of his cigarettes as well! He suffered with emphysema in retirement and old age which made him very short of breath.

Grove Lane where Peter Comber lived

Although it is only about 200 yards long, Grove Lane only had houses on the left hand side towards the bottom end of the lane in the 1930’s. A brick built Victorian detached house was the first, followed by Grove Cottages, a row of 9 wooden terraced 18th century ‘2 up and 2 down’ cottages (Note; There are now ten terraced cottages, an extra one was sympathetically added on the R/H end several years ago!) An entrance to the fields behind the houses separated the Grove cottages from the semi-detached Montfort Cottages. We lived in the first of these two cottages. A single brick cottage followed with several old wooden farm buildings right at the end with the early 18th century wooden Millers Farm House right across the bottom of the Lane. I can just remember seeing cattle in those farm buildings, probably in 1934/5. They were not used after that for over 30 years before eventually succumbing to a new development. The lane was a fairly close knit community; as once moving into one of the cottages it was seldom that anyone moved again. They stayed where they were for the rest of their lives.

Nobby Tridgett was quite a character. He moved into No 1 after his elderly relatives, a Mr and Mrs Tridgett who lived there had both died by the late 1930’s. Nobby had a high built up boot for his short right leg which gave him a strange gait so he went everywhere by horse and cart using ‘Billy’ his feisty grey pony with either his two wheeled or his four wheeled cart. He liked his drink did Nobby. One day when he was leaving the Retreat pub he offered to give two large ladies a lift, as they got to the slope by Scotts cottages the weight was too much and the cart up-ended and they all fell out of the back. Mrs Green in Scotts Cottages gave them all a cup of tea to get over their shock. On Sundays Nobby would go to the Maypole pub and get drunk. After closing time he would rely on Billy his pony to get him back home in Grove Lane! Nobby kept his horse and carts in the field behind our house. The trouble was that once ‘Billy’ got going it was difficult to stop him. He would go sailing passed the top of the Lane and way up the road before Nobby could bring him to a halt. Nobby would eventually get him back and into Grove Lane where they would career down the Lane at break-neck speed, swinging round into the field between our house and the wooden cottages and then charge around the field several times like a Roman chariot, before eventually stopping. It was quite amusing watching him; but how Nobby managed to stay on the cart without ever falling off or the cart turning over I’ll never know. It was our Sunday afternoons entertainment! (Or perhaps he did fall off sometimes!)

I broke a window in No 2 Grove cottages bedroom window on one occasion; a spinster Lily Vale lived there. I had made myself a parachute and on the end was a cardboard canister into which I had put a large stone. The parachute was launched by swinging it around my head and letting go. On this occasion the box spilt open and the stone carried on and headed straight for that upstairs window in No.2, Oh dear! I was in trouble.

The Haddons lived at No 5 in the cottages and were particular friends of ours; we were the only two families in the Lane with young children. Mr Haddon was the only man in the Lane to own a motor car; I think it was a Morris car that had a dickey seat at the rear. A Dickey seat was an uncovered seat that opened up from the rear of the vehicle (Where the car boot would normally be on a modern car!).

At No 6 lived the Sheldons, a couple without children; they just had a dog called Bimbo. One day Mr Sheldon went missing, no one knew where he was or where he may have gone. His wife had no idea where he was and was very worried. After much searching I believe it was Mr Haddon who found him, hanging from a tree in the copse behind the houses; he had committed suicide, what a terrible shock. As you can imagine there was a lot of speculation and gossip as to how he may have become so depressed that he would want to take his own life.

Lily Vale’s brother, Bill, lived at No 8 with his wife. Bill was a Road sweeper by trade, they didn’t have any children of their own, but just before one Christmas in 1937, Bill took me to Ilford on the bus and bought me a Christmas present. A nice surprise!

In the fields that belonged to Frog Hall on the right hand side of the Lane opposite Grove Cottages, there were quite a few old horses that had been retired from the United Dairies milk float duties. (I believe the Ex-Chairman of the United Dairies was living at Frog Hall at the time.) In the hot weather the horses would all gather under the shade of a large Oak tree in the centre of the field, just quietly dozing and constantly flicking off the tormenting flies with a swish of their tails or a shake of their heads and manes.

Two unmarried well educated and very religious sisters were living in Millers farmhouse when I was young; Millicent and Irene Mawer. (They had a nephew who was the Chairman of the London Development Agency in its early days.) Millicent was the eldest and stayed at home while Irene worked at the British and Foreign Bible Society. I used to get foreign stamps from her. Collecting British, Colonial and Foreign stamps, was a hobby widely pursued by many of us boys!

Millicent cooked a lot and baked her own bread; she would often ask me to cycle into the village and collect yeast for her from Sharpes the bakers. I rather liked the taste of it so I would pinch a tiny bit on the way back home. It came in a greyish lump with the consistency of soft cheese; live yeast I suppose. I usually got 3d (just over 1p) or a piece of homemade cake for collecting it, so I didn’t mind going on that errand.

Throughout the war Millicent held prayer meetings once a week in the farmhouse to pray for the war, but not everyone in the ‘Lane’ went to them. Millicent and her sister Irene were Church of England, but evangelical, so there was a certain amount of conflict with our local vicar I recall, but I never really understood it. I just couldn’t see what the problem was; after all we were all Church of England. They were known to us, affectionately, as the Happy Clappy Brigade. This was further reinforced when Mum, me and some of the other residents from the ‘Lane’ went with the two Miss Mawer’s a couple of times to somewhere in East London I think it was, where we all took part in a lively service held in a hall and listened to a lively and engaging sermon by a Mr Medley!

Millicent used to set me challenges by giving me verses and psalms from the Bible to find and learn off by heart.. I can only think she thought it would be a good way of getting me used to regularly reading the bible. In later life it hasn’t worked too well I am afraid to say! I still have the leather bound bible the two sisters gave me as a wedding present in 1955! Sometime afterwards in the 1960’s, the two sisters retired and moved from Chigwell Row to be nearer to their niece in the Wirral in Cheshire. Millicent the elder sister died not long after they moved, but Irene continued living in the Wirral for several years.

Oaklands Terrace Cottages early 1930’s

SHOPS AND OTHER SERVICES

Chigwell Row was fairly well off for shops when I was young. You could buy almost anything except for clothing and new furniture. The shops didn’t open on Sundays, as it was against the law and Thursdays was early closing with the shops only open in the morning. This was normal throughout the country although the early closing day varied from area to area; but it was always midweek - usually a Wednesday or a Thursday.

And at the far end of the shop was the Post Office counter that was run by the manager’s daughter, Hilda. My mother’s weekly grocery bill from there always came to about 14 shillings a week or 70p in new money! The groceries were delivered on Friday nights by Pardey and Johnson’s van. The driver, Bill somebody or other, I can’t remember his full name, ran off with the manager’s wife; as you can imagine it was the talk of the village. But it must have been acutely embarrassing, for the manager Mr Wilding.

There were two doctor’s surgeries in Chigwell Row. Our family doctor, Dr Ellis, came once a week from his practise at ‘White House’ in Abridge. His surgery was held in the front room (parlour) of the end house of Oaklands Terrace cottages next to Pardy & Johnson’s General Store. The front door opened directly into the front room so you had to wait outside until it was your turn; not so good if it was wet or cold! Inside, the room was very Victorian - complete with an aspidistra and a fringe around the mantle shelf! Later he transferred to one of the Victorian brick built terraced houses on the right hand side in Gravel Lane, where you waited in a very narrow passage for your turn to see him; at least you would be waiting in the dry if it was raining. Dr Ellis was a great one for visiting the sick, often visiting on Sundays and Bank holidays! Any medicines required were made up by the Doctor himself at his Abridge surgery.

The other Doctor who had a one day a week surgery in Chigwell Row was Dr Pratt from Chigwell. His surgery was held in Socketts Hall. (Socketts Hall has since been replaced by a much larger property.) Dad always used him as his doctor because of his employment with Savill’s, as Doctor Pratt was married to one of Phillip Savill’s daughters, a sister to Dad’s employer, Miss ‘Winnie’ Savill. Whenever Dad was prescribed medicine, it always seemed to contain quinine; I can only presume the good Doctor reasoned if it tasted awful you would think it had to be doing you good! Good psychology that! It became a standing joke in our family.

There were two shops, one in each of the two blocks of four ‘Oakland’s Terrace’ cottages, one was the newsagents and tobacconist shop - Dellow’s. Mr Dellow delivered the papers himself throughout the village on his bicycle, although I never saw him actually riding it, he would always seem to be pushing it with the newspapers in a bag slung over his cycle cross-bar. In the winter he always had a drip on the end of his nose; it seemed to be there throughout the winter! I used to wonder if it would develop into an icicle in frosty weather! He always reminded me of Mr Punch with his ‘hooked’ nose! In his shop he sold things like cycle parts, batteries, sweets and fireworks for November 5th. Dad always bought our batteries and our fireworks from Dellow’s shop. November the fifth was an exciting time as we always had some fireworks! The War put a temporary stop to that annual event!

We had the Daily and Sunday Express newspapers delivered by Mr Dellow. Every day I would look forward to Dad reading to me the adventures of Rupert Bear from the paper; that was until I was about seven years old and able to read it for myself. Mickey Mouse Weekly was a colourful comic I had delivered for many years; with Mickey and Minnie, Goofy, Donald Duck with his mischievous nephews and all the other Disney characters and stories like Pinocchio and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs etc as a series of cartoons.

In the other block of Oakland’s Terrace cottages adjacent to Dellow’s shop, was ‘Fuller’s’ tea rooms. Later on it sold second hand furniture and antiques of a sort. Between these two shops was a wide path that led to stables, where the horses had been kept for the Hackney carriage business run by the Green family. Eventually, motorised transport replaced the horses. ‘Stump’, the village tramp was quite a character; he used to sleep with the pigs in the pigsties further along the village close to the garage with its single petrol pump,. He walked awkwardly with the aid of a stick; he was a soldier in the Great War and got his injuries serving in France. (His real name was Smith!) Eddie Green used to cut his hair with horse clippers and put racing bets on for him. Some of the children used to poke fun at him and he would shout and wave his stick at them. The present ‘Lambourne News’ shop was just a sweet shop when I was young; it was at one time called ‘The Doves Nest’, but I only remember calling it ‘Reads’ - run by two sisters, the Miss Read’s and their bachelor brother. It was a lovely shop; early in my life you could buy sweets for as little as a farthing, but mostly it was a ha’penny or a penny. A quarter (4 oz.) of good quality sweets, like acid drops or pear drops, was 3d or 4d. (Less than 2 new pence!) Shortly after the two sisters retired to live in Grove Lane, the shop’s new owners took over the Newsagents business from Dellow’s shop which had closed after Mr Dellow’s death.

There were three tea gardens and several smaller tea rooms throughout the village and several at Lambourne End that sold cold drinks and teas, all catering for the large number of visitors that came from East London on the busses at weekends and holiday times. Sunnymede tea gardens served their teas from a First World War railway carriage at the side and to the rear of the petrol garage. I wonder how they got the Railway carriage to there? (At the end of the First World War, ex Army railway stock was sold off cheaply to ease the housing shortage!) Opposite the Two brewers Pub was Bliss’s tea Gardens and a kiosk that sold ice cream, with an invitation to ‘Come across for the finest ice cream you have ever come across’. Without electricity, blocks of ice were delivered to make and keep the ice cream cold. Walls ice cream was sold from a tricycle with a large ‘keep cold’ box with two large wheels, one on either side; with a single wheel at the rear. ‘Stop me and Buy one’ was the slogan on the ‘keep cold’ box.

Opposite were two semi-detached shops built in 1903. The right hand one was the bakers; where everything was baked on site. (And still is!) Hot-Cross buns were delivered by the owner Tommy Sharpe in time for breakfast on Good Friday morning cost ½ or 1d each! I did a few deliveries in 1944/5 for him, using a bicycle with a small wheel and a large basket at the front, just like the one Granville used in ‘Open All Hours’. When I returned Tommy Sharpe would pay me and give me a hot freshly baked doughnut rolled in castor sugar from the bakery behind the shop. Absolute heaven! He wanted me to do his deliveries on a regular basis but I had started work by then as an apprentice at Henry Hughes and Sons Ltd and could not help him.

I believe Mum bought Petit Beurre and Arrowroot biscuits from the Bakers, probably because they were better value for money - you got more of them to the pound! They came in fairly large square tins and were sold loose. When the baker got to the end of the tin the broken biscuits left in the bottom were usually sold off a bit cheaper. If we did have cream or chocolate digestive biscuits and tinned salmon, which I particularly liked, (and still do!) it was only on special occasions such as birthdays and maybe at Christmas. Many working class people joined a Christmas club where you saved money regularly to help with the expense at Christmas time. You had to borrow from the club during the year but you paid interest on the loan which all went into the club so at Christmas you always got a little bit more out than you had paid in.

Next door was another general store of sorts that sold dry goods and sweets in open boxes on the counter. The cash register was against the back wall so when the owner, Mrs Palmer, turned to use that cash register, she was often relieved of a little of her stock! One day I got caught redhanded; it was so embarrassing; needless to say I did not try anything like that again! The shop is now the Post Office and sells groceries and stationary etc.

In 1954 two additional shops were built next to these two shops, one was a butchers (the butchers in Gravel Lane had closed earlier) and the other a greengrocers. When the Butchers had to close it reopened as a Chinese takeaway; and when Eve the owner of the green grocery shop retired, she couldn’t sell it on as a greengrocery business, so it became an Indian takeaway. A sign of the times we live in. Rather sad really!

Memorial seat at Roe's Well

Jack Sheppard and his old mother ran a greengrocers shop of sorts, with veg. and fruit sold from the scullery at the back of their house; an early Victorian detached brick house next door to Palmers shop. (It was where Raymond Way is now!) He was quite a character, if he didn’t like the look of you, he wouldn’t serve you! When I was in there at one time, a lady, who I didn’t recognise, asked for tomatoes, but Jack said; “Haven’t got any.” in his usual brusque manner, but he had got tomatoes; at the time I thought it very strange, it defied logic turning down a sale; there was no doubt about it he was an odd fellow!

Behind his house he kept a lot of chickens, ducks and turkeys, keeping them in with a spring loaded rickety gate that had a bell hanging on it. It bounced up and down when you opened the gate; loudly heralding your arrival. I never like going in there as his cockerel would go for you if it heard or saw you. Wings out and head down it would even go for Jack; he would kick out and shout at it to no avail, it wasn’t easily deterred! (It wasn’t there after Christmas!) Any excess vegetables Dad had from his allotment he sold to Jack. Dad’s first allotment was on the site adjacent to the forest where the Sunnymede houses are now.

Further along was a row of four of the oldest wooden houses in Chigwell Row. Sam Pead lived in one with his daughter Ethel. Sam always had an old pipe stuck in his mouth; with his white hair and beard and a small dog in tow, he was quite a character. Ethel never married and worked as a cleaner at the church.When the houses were built at ‘Sunnymede’ on the allotments alongside the forest, they were moved to a new site below the Retreat public house. Houses were again built on the allotment site becoming Sylvan Way and the allotments moved to a site in Gravel Lane.

We even had our own boot and shoe mender, Mr Dave Williams, who did the repairs at his home at No 2 Dove Cottages, off Gravel Lane. When I dropped our shoes off to be repaired he would always be the one to answer the door, his wife was very timid and used to hover in the background! He always delivered the repaired shoes or boots back to you on foot in a white sack slung over his shoulder. Dad used to do some of our repairs using Phillips stick-a-soles but they didn’t seem to last very long before they came unstuck! ‘Blakeys’, small half moon shaped studs, were hammered into the toes and heels of the shoes but they didn’t seem to last very long either! Woolworth’s shop in Barkingside used to sell all the DIY shoe repair materials. Their large shops were advertised as the ‘thrup-penny and sixpenny’ stores in the 1930’s and affectionately called ‘Woolies’. Most of their merchandise was either 3d or 6d! They sold a wide range of products; toys, clothing, sweets, small tools etc. etc. All the Woolworth’s stores closed many years ago.

F. Harman & Sons were the Builders Merchants and Undertakers; down by the side of and behind Reads Sweet shop. They were cabinet makers as well, even making the coffins they used in their undertaking business in the early days. They did much of the building work and repairs, including the decorating, throughout the village. For some obscure reason they also sold Paraffin! The two sons, Phil and George ran the business after Frank their father and founder of the business died. George had an artificial leg. Dad said he had lost his leg in a motor cycle accident. They always walked to the job where they were working, pulling a shallow cart with two large wheels and a ‘T’ shaped handle. All the tools and building materials they needed were carried on the cart. They never progressed to motorised transport.

Oaklands Farm, next to the Builders Merchants, became a Girl Guides camping ground in 1935. An outdoor swimming pool complete with changing rooms and diving boards etc, was built for the Guides to use. The local people could use the pool when the Guides were not in residence. It was opened for us to use during the war and for quite a few years after. I can’t remember exactly how much it was, but I think it would have only been about thrup-pence or sixpence. (About 1p or 2½ p) In 2016 it closed as a Girl Guides camping ground.

Not surprisingly we also had a barber in the village – Mr Rix. He operated from a very small caravan in his garden at the side of his house, a semi-detached Victorian wooden cottage opposite the garage. Without electricity he used hand clippers and wasn’t all that careful; having your haircut was a painful experience. I think it cost just, 1/6 (7½ pence).

Site of Mr Spain's forge. Picture 2018

The Village blacksmith was next to the Garage with its single petrol pump. Albert Spain was the blacksmith; I used to be fascinated watching him shoe the horses. He would pump the bellows to heat the iron until it was red hot in the coke fire and then hammer the shoes to fit in a shower of sparks on his anvil before eventually nailing it to the horse’s hoof. The horses seemed so patient as he removed the old shoes and put the hot new one on the hoof in a cloud of smoke and smell of burning hoof. Dad used to collect the hoof clippings and the droppings from the horses for his allotment. Albert Spain was a Chapel man and is buried there. He had a house built right opposite his forge and moved into it in about 1936/7. His ‘forge’ building and house are still there; after Mr Spain’s death the ‘forge’ was taken away and the building used to manufacture Garden ornaments and statuary for many years. Now it’s a business that sells and repairs garden machinery.

A well established hackney carriage business was carried on from Scotts Cottages by Eddie Green. (A rather large Eddie was addicted to ‘Cowboy’s and Indian’s’ films on his B&W television!) I remember that he had an Austin 12, it was quite a large car actually, later he had a Buick. His father, ‘Brock’ Green used a horse and trap, but I don’t remember him. He used to meet the trains in his horse and trap at the recently opened Grange Hill station early in the 20th century. This was well before they had motor cars.

One Sunday morning Eddie was outside the church waiting for his ‘fare’ to leave church, before driving her home. While he was waiting and standing by the gate, many people that he knew would be leaving church after Morning Service (and he knew nearly everyone!) He would greet each one with; “G’mornin’ Mrs So & So…. “Cold ‘ole morning!” To hear him repeat this simple observation to each person he knew, was quite amusing.

There always seemed to be various tradesmen calling. There was a Mr Bush who sold fruit and vegetables from the back of a horse and cart. (Or it may have been a lorry!) Not that we bought much as Dad had his allotment, so we were almost self sufficient in potatoes and veg. Mr and Mrs Hadyn from Woodford Bridge, and later their daughter in law, had a small van selling hardware and I think dry goods and groceries. Their son used to go to the Isle of Man and take part in the annual motor cycle races that were held there. There was, of course Mr Brighty from Abridge, who exchanged our accumulator every week for a fully charged one for 7d a week, to use in our wireless. On one occasion, when I was very young, I can just remember a gypsy calling on us selling clothes pegs that they had made. Another time when they called, I remember they were trying to sell us ‘lucky’ sprigs of heather. But Mum would have none of it.

The newly built ‘State’ cinema at Barkingside was our nearest picture house, where a couple of the first films I ever saw starred Shirley Temple, although I can’t remember too much about them, but I do remember her tight curly hair and her singing the song, ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’, It was a popular song at the time, it came from the 1934 Hollywood film, ‘Bright Eyes’. In about 1937 I saw a Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs I was taken there by Mrs Haddon with her daughter Margery; they were our neighbours from Grove cottages.

On another occasion, my friend Noel’s father took us both to the ‘State’ cinema to see the 1930’s American war film, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ we saw that in about 1936, I’d guess. I would have been quite young as the story eludes me; I have no memory of it only the trench warfare and the fighting come to mind. I think I was just too young to fully understand the story line. The film was based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same name. It was a human story about the horrors of the First World War.

The pond in the field behind our house

The fields behind our house were my playground; everyday after school I would go into the fields on my own or with a school friend; at first it was Roy Ashbridge from Chase Farm, then Noel King and later it was Derek Bateson. Roy lived in a wooden cottage at Chase farm from where we would cross a field to visit his Gran in Bennetts Cottages in Gravel Lane. She always gave us each a slice of bread and jam when we visited! The Horse Chestnut tree that was in her front garden is still there and the tall Elm trees that were along the road opposite hosted a rookery; but the trees have long gone having succumbed to Dutch elm disease in the 1960’s. Noel King and his three sisters lived in Chapel Lane; the next Lane to Grove Lane where I lived.

A bit later on Roy had a ‘Diana’ air gun and wanted Noel and me to attack him with clods of earth and other missiles while he was perched up in a Willow tree by a nearby pond. He said he would defend himself by taking pot shots at us with his air gun! Needless to say we declined to play this game. What if one of us got a pellet in the eye? Perhaps subconsciously we were remembering that Roy’s Dad had a glass eye. That eye never moved which gave him a slightly strange appearance when he looked at you. How he came to lose his eye I have no idea (his eye before he got the glass one! As far as I know he never lost his glass eye.) Roy always was a bit of a maverick and a dare devil. He was absolutely fearless especially when climbing trees!

During the school holidays Noel and I would sometimes meet up with George Chichester the son of Francis Chichester* (of nautical fame) from his first marriage. I felt sorry for George, because he was asthmatic and didn’t seem to have much of a family life either, and he appeared somewhat lonely and largely ignored by his father and stepmother. Francis Chichester did not have much time for us children either, for although we bumped into him from time to time, I cannot remember him ever speaking directly to us! The family lived throughout the war in ‘Pages’, a small Georgian detached house in Chapel Lane. Years later I read in the Sunday Express newspaper that George Chichester had died in Australia working as a waiter. Later Sir Francis Chichester had another son, Giles, by his second wife; Giles became a Member of the European Parliament.

Noel lived in one of the two 17th century cottages opposite ‘Pages’ with his parents and three sisters. His mother was a genteel lady, a complete opposite to her husband who I remember as being rather coarse. He told Noel and me a little rhyme that I still remember to this day, perhaps because it was rather ‘risqué’ for 7 or 8 year olds. It went like this;‘I chased a bug around a tree; I’ll have his blood he knows I will’ (say it quickly!)

Mostly we would just roam around the fields or play around the numerous ponds, building damns or dens, or fishing for sticklebacks, and in the spring, bird nesting. We would be gone for hours but our parents never seemed to worry too much about us, where we were or what we were up to. Children were quite safe on their own in those days.

A favourite den making material was the fast growing Elder stems, they were very straight and easy to break off and manipulate. Boys, especially country boys seem to have an instinct to want to build a shelter or den of some sort; no doubt needed as protection from the elements in Stone Age times! The ‘spring fed’ ponds would have watered Chase Farms cattle before 1940, that is, until the farm was turned over to agriculture; ordered to by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries soon after the war started, but the ponds remained. Every pond always had a single pair of Moorhens nesting on it and sometimes, if there was a suitable tree near the pond, a pair of Mallard ducks would nest there too. Mallard nest in shallow holes in trees close to water. We quickly learned to respect the water after one or two slips in and wet feet! Nowadays parents are paranoid about ponds but there were no fatalities among us boys that I knew of. I remember one incident during the winter when I was on my own and checking the ice on the pond that was closest to our house. It wasn’t much of a pond as it had silted up somewhat over the years, but I decided to test the ice by jumping on to it and wentthrough, filling both wellingtons with ice cold water. The problem as far as I was concerned was how to explain the wet socks and wellingtons to my mother! When I plucked up courage to return home, my luck was in and my mother was out; so I wrung out my socks as best as I could and put them on the top door of the Kitchener’s fire grate to dry, a big mistake as I succeeded in burning the sole out of one sock and severely burning the other. I continued to wear them like that for the rest of the week, and it was a very uncomfortable. It was when they had to be changed my mother discovered the large holes. As a way of explanation I lamely said I did it warming my feet in front of the Kitchener! Much to my astonishment, she swallowed this excuse. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to her that I would have burnt my feet as well!

Because we had the Kitchener and sometimes an open fire in the front room that needed wood, Mum, Dad and me would go ‘wooding’ in the autumn, mostly down those fields behind our house or sometimes in the forest behind the recreation ground. We would take hessian sacks to collect any faggots, sticks or fallen branches etc. that we could find; in fact any wood that would burn was collected or dragged home and sawn up to put in our coal shed ready for use in the winter. Another annual late summer and autumn ritual was picking blackberries and collecting fallen crab apples when we could find them. A lot of people picked blackberries in those days so you had to be quick to get the best crop. Knowing where to pick blackberries in places that were less frequented by others was an advantage. ‘High Woods’ was a scrubby area several fields away but it had a lot of blackberries, Dad carried a walking stick so that he could pull down those branches that were out of reach as they usually had the largest and juiciest berries! As we didn’t have a fridge or freezer the blackberries had to be eaten or cooked or bottled in Kilner jars or even made into jam within a few days of picking. Mother made all her jams from various fruits when they were in season including crab apple jelly. Wine making from elder berries and other fruits was made by Dad; he always said his parsnip wine tasted like whisky but I was never allowed to try it! Not that I would have known what whisky tasted like. I remember seeing yeast spread on to a piece of toast floating on top of the liquid (Boiled fruit with sugar added.) and a damp cloth draped over it while it was fermenting.

During the summer holidays on a very hot, sunny day, I was down the fields on my own with a small magnifying glass. All boys love magnifying glasses, useful for burning holes in paper (or on other boy’s hands!) or looking at creepy crawlies among other things. On this particular hot and sunny day I found a very rotten and very dry tree trunk still with its root plate lying on its side. I had barely started burn a hole on it when the breeze got up and small sparks from my burn were blowing everywhere, starting more smouldering patches producing yet more sparks and so on ad infinitum. They were multiplying so rapidly it became impossible for me to get the upper hand when trying to extinguish them. I decided it would be prudent to leave the scene as quick as possible. When I looked a few days later there was very little left, just ash, the trunk had almost completely burned away. I imagine the farmer, Mr Tipping from Chase Farm, would have wondered how it had happened; but I have no doubt it actually did him a favour! When I was with Roy one day he had climbed up a tree to reach a carrion crow’s nest when Mr Tipping appeared. He asked us what we were up to, when we told him he told Roy to destroy the eggs and wreck the nest. Crow’s (and Rabbits) can cause a lot of damage to the farmer’s crops.

Nearly all of the fields I played in were quite small surrounded by hedges the largest field by far was about 14 acres, Oliver Rackham, an academic who studied the English countryside, said the layout of those fields was almost certainly Bronze Age. If they were Bronze Age, the layout of the fields was changed completely in the middle of the 20th century! (Bronze Age relics have been found in the fields near Home Farm.) Several years later, some of the fields were taken over to build a reservoir and water treatment works for the Essex and Suffolk Water Company, the rest have been merged, with hedges removed to make larger fields. All the ponds were filled in many years ago. When I was young, there were plenty of old English Elm trees around, lovely, tall majestic trees. Grove Lane had six or seven down on the left hand side that hosted a colony of Jackdaws. There were a couple of smaller elm pollards on the right, one of which always had starlings nesting every year in a hole near the top of the bole. I could just reach the sky blue eggs in the nest at the bottom of the hole. Two sides of the small field behind our house had several old and very tall Elms. I used to find it exhilarating when we had high winds; the roar of those winds through the tops of those tall trees was incredibly loud and scary as the tops would sway frantically back and forth causing the odd dead branch to fall, thus providing us with firewood that we would collect. The field behind Miller’s farm was long and divided in half by a row of six very tall old English Elms that supported a colony of Tree sparrows; that are now quite rare.

We never collected Robin’s eggs as it was considered unlucky; we believed you would ‘break a limb’ if you did! A Robin had built a nest on the side of one of the Elms at the back of our house. It contained 5 eggs, one of which was a bit larger and longer than the rest. I showed it to my dad as I thought it might be a Cuckoo’s but he didn’t think it was, so I put it back in the nest. Two or three weeks later, much to my annoyance, my suspicions had been correct, there was this enormous cuckoo sitting in the tiny nest stretching it in all directions. Having a cuckoo’s egg would have been one up on my mates, but realistically, proving it was a cuckoo’s egg would have been difficult. It looked very like a robin’s egg but it was somewhat longer than the rest of the clutch. Cuckoo’s always arrive from Africa about the 18th April. It was always a pleasure to hear their distinctive ‘Cuckoo’ call for the first time in April. Sadly you seldom hear them calling nowadays.

Swifts could always be seen wheeling around very high in the sky as they caught insects. Swallows were less graceful but flew a bit higher than the aptly named House Martins that would gracefully swoop around the houses catching insects; the gabled side of our house was a Mecca for them on which to build their nests. I liked to watch them carefully building up their nests with mud, flying back and forth with their beak’s full. As soon as their nests were more or less completed the House Sparrows would try to evict the poor House Martins from their nests, and more often than not succeeding in taking over the nests for them-selves. Dad used to knock down those he could reach with the clothes prop; he said they made too much mess on the path. The swallows nested on ledges in the barns around Millars Farm near our house. I don’t know where the poor things went when the barns were knocked down. In the autumn, the Swallows and House Martins would gather in large numbers on telephone wires in preparation for their long migration to Africa for the winter. Sadly none of these migratory birds have been seen flying in this area for many years now.

Sometimes I would cycle to Scotts Cottages in the village to see Norman Faux and the slightly younger John Green and together we would all go birds nesting and explore Hainault Forest and ‘Jackie’s’ fields with its pond. In those fields there were always horses. Ingleby Gardens, All Saints Close and part of Woolhampton Way are on those ‘fields’ now. Norman was very good at climbing trees and there were plenty of old gnarled trees to climb. An area just north of Hainault lake had a copse of young, very tall and thin Silver Birch trees; Norman would shin up these to the top and then sway back and forth until the tree bent over, gently lowering him to the ground, amazing. Something I never attempted! Nearly all of those trees have now gone as Silver Birch trees only have a short life span of about 60 years! The much slower growing Hornbeams and the Oak trees that grew among the Birch trees, are still only about 10 inches in diameter although they must be approaching 100 years old!

Dad and I listened to a beautiful bird song one fine evening; it was a Nightingale singing from a bush at the bottom of the first house garden. It was close to the Montfort House derelict rose garden that was badly overgrown, probably making it an eminently suitable habitat for a nesting Nightingale; but I never found a nest!

I collected Moorhen’s eggs when I could reach them; which wasn’t all that often; they always built their nests in inaccessible places like the ends of branches etc. that hung well out over the water. Dad would have the eggs for breakfast; he always had a cooked breakfast every day. Armed with a long cane on to which I had tied a dessert spoon, I was trying to collect the eggs from a Moorhen’s nest just out of reach on the pond near our house. I was not having much success when Miss Millicent Mawer from Millers Farm saw me and gave me a good ‘ticking off’; she was a member of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. She persuaded me to join and have been a member now for over 70 years.

Bats, Pippistrelle’s, were a common sight around the houses, appearing at dusk, flitting to and fro on into the night; I asked Dad where they went during daylight hours and he showed them to me hanging in a row from the roof of one of Millers Farm’s barns during the day. I could easily hear their high pitched squeaking’ as they flew backwards and forwards, but I could only hear them until I was about twenty. (That is when human hearing starts to deteriorate in the higher frequencies.) Where the poor things went when the barn was pulled down and their roost was gone, I’ve no idea.

Crickets could be heard ‘chirping’ on hot dry summer evenings in the field behind our house but you could never pinpoint exactly where they were, their ‘chirping’ seemed to come from all directions. If you did think you had located one, it would just stop chirping when you got near to it. Very annoying, I never did find any. (They are a dull dark brownish colour – like the earth!)

Occasionally I would cycle to Lambourne End to visit Terry Dilley in Lambourne Square, and we would explore that part of the forest. Terry lived in a Victorian block of six terraced houses with very long front gardens. (At that time gardens were often in front of the house so that the landlord could see if they were being well kept!) A terrace of four very old wooden cottages in the ‘square’ only had one outside toilet between them; I found that out when I started school! The cottages have long gone.

Terry, Norman, Noel and I all started school after the Easter holidays in 1935.‘Scrumping’ (raiding orchards!) was something all country boys did given half a chance. All of the large houses and the farms around had an orchard or at least a kitchen garden with fruit trees. They were all very tempting for young boys. By crossing the field in front of our house where the United Dairies retired horses were kept, you came to chestnut fencing that enclosed the Chase Farm orchard. Getting into the orchard was easy as you only had to remove a loose Chestnut fencing paling that I had discovered and you could squeeze through. (The paling was always put back in place when I left!) Most of the time the apples that were ‘scrumped’ weren’t all that ripe, but as they say, ‘stolen fruit always tastes the ‘sweetest’.

Another time with my friend Noel King from Chapel Lane, we discovered a door in the wall around the Montfort House kitchen garden during one of our explorations. We found it off the neglected rose garden accessible from the field behind my house. Curiosity is a human failing; so we just had to go through that door and investigate. We crept in and immediately saw a large lean-to greenhouse against the south facing adjacent wall. It was a Grape house and low and behold there were a lot of luscious black grapes hanging there like, well, bunch’s of grapes. It was just too tempting; we had barely started helping ourselves when we spotted Mr Ailey who had also spotted us from the other end of the garden. Mr Ailey (pronounced Ay–Lee!) worked at Montfort House and only had to walk across the field behind the houses to get to work from Grove Cottages where he lived. We rapidly retraced our steps as he shouted after us as we ran hell for leather down into the fields, not bothering to stop until we were sure we were not being pursued. Stuffing ripe grapes down your shirt front when you are running for your life is not a good idea. It can get a bit messy! Mr Ailey lived with his elderly mother at No.4 in the cottages, a few doors away from us. As he was returning to work after lunch a day or two later, he saw me and told me off, he said he knew it was me so I could see there wasn’t much point in trying to deny it. Luckily he didn’t tell my Dad; or at least I don’t think he did. If he did, Dad never mentioned it, but I am pretty sure he would have!

At that time most men smoked, either a pipe or cigarettes, so it was natural that us kids would at some time want to give it a try. (My Dad smoked a pipe for much of his life, but gave it up eventually.) Smoking was considered glamorous, heavily promoted by the manufacturers’ advertisements and everyone seemed to smoke in the films that were shown in the cinemas. Noel and I used to make our own by collecting dried Cow Parsley stems to make into a sort of cigarette. A suitably sized piece of hollow stem would be stuffed with dried pieces and then ‘smoked’. It tasted very smoky and acrid, it was pretty foul actually. We always referred to them as ‘Cowmans’.

On one occasion we bought a packet of 5 ‘Woodbine’ cigarettes; they cost 3d (1 new pence) almost all of my weeks pocket money! Apparently, although smaller than most brands, they are quite strong. After smoking 2 or 3 of them I felt very ill and sick and went home to bed for the rest of the day. I don’t recall what happened to Noel and whether he was ill; I don’t think I ever tried smoking ‘cigarettes’ again after that trauma! I missed going to a birthday party because of that escapade. When I started work in 1944 my work colleagues tried very hard to get me to smoke, especially at Christmas time, but they didn’t succeed. I held out and have never taken up smoking and neither did Noel. Perhaps it was because of those early experiments with our ‘Cowmans’ fags that put us off for life. Thank goodness! All those that smoked were contributing in no small way to the ‘smog’ we used to get in the winter; a mixture of fog and smoke from all the coal fires etc.

The garden behind Millers Farm was fairly large at ¼ of an acre I would guess. It had fruit trees in it, particularly around the edge. We didn’t scrump anything from there because of an open sewer that ran from the house, a very smelly ditch running along one side of the garden down into the fields. It was also bordered by a thick hawthorn hedge, and anyway it was a bit too close to home. One day when I was with Roy Ashbridge from Chase Lane, Miss Millicent Mawer, one of the two sisters living in the farmhouse, invited Roy and me to help ourselves to some very ripe plums. Which we did enthusiastically, and I can now confirm that gorging oneself on ripe plums can be an extremely quick acting laxative! Never would I have made the 50 yards or so dash to get home, so it had to be behind a nearby fallen tree trunk. This is when I learned that large Dock leaves can have other uses besides relieving nettle stings! When I was quite young I went with my dad down into the fields where we watched a steam driven traction engine working. A long leather belt from the engine was driving a threshing machine. There seemed to be several farm hands working, loading the wheat into the threshing machine etc. After threshing, the straw came out ready baled and the corn was collected in sacks. I found it quite enthralling as I had never seen a traction engine working like that before. Steam driven road rollers were still being used for road laying and repairs and on a few occasions I remember seeing steam driven Lorries! This must have all been right at the end of the era for steam driven vehicles; diesel and petrol engines had practically replaced steam by the end of the Second World War.

Another piece of early mechanical agricultural machinery I saw was a horse drawn grass cutter. It was cutting the grass for hay in the field behind our house. A farm worker was sitting on it (or he may have been walking behind) controlling the horse pulling the cutter. It was pretty lethal as two serrated blades moved backwards and forwards close to the ground, looking rather like modern day hedge cutting blades. Any small unfortunate creature that was in its path would be cut to pieces. I was fascinated and watched it working for some time. This must also have been one of the last times that one of these horse drawn cutting machines was used locally.

Haystacks were the traditional way of storing fodder for feeding farm animals during the Winter. Grass and clover would be cut in July at just the right time for maximum nutrition and left on the field to dry. It would be turned over a few times before being raked into rows (haymaking!) to be collected and carted off to be made into a hay stack. Many hands were employed in haymaking to take full advantage of any dry weather. (From whence we get the proverb; ‘making hay while the sun shines!’) Stack building was a skilled process done to ensure the hay was always kept dry: the stack was thatched to keep out the rain. If the hay got wet it would go mouldy, thus making it toxic. Haystacks can overheat if damp, fires were not uncommon.

Haymaking was a big event in the farming calendar. To take advantage of a dry spell of weather all available hands would be employed turning the cut hay to hasten the drying process. Even Dad, employed as a chauffer and groom, had to help with the hay making; he even had his own pitchfork! (I still have it!) With the drive for greater production during the war, tractors and other more modern and efficient machinery using diesel engines were being used more and more, but not for haymaking until much later.

Apart from the work that went on from time to time, the fields were incredibly quiet and peaceful. In the summer, when the sun always seemed to shine, you could hear the buzz of the insects and the bees feeding on the many wild flowers that grew in the uncultivated meadows and along the hedgerows. You could listen to the many songs of the birds in those hedgerows or watch the sky larks spiralling upwards singing their twittering distinctive call. I never envisaged that in a few decades it would all come to an end with many of these birds becoming locally or even nationally rare and the wild flower meadows disappearing.

With Chigwell Row being a rural Essex country village in the 1930’s, it is perhaps not all that surprising that animals played a large part in my earliest memories; especially those of the Bovine, Equine and Porcine families. (Cattle, Horses and Pigs!) In those days there were still several small working farms in and around the village: Chase Farm at the bottom of Chase Lane was the biggest of these and farmed most of the fields behind our house.

Cattle and horses in particular used to petrify me. They were so big! Another of my earliest experiences with cows occurred when I used to play with Roy, farmhand Dick Ashbridge’s son. He lived in the Farm Manager’s wooden cottage adjacent to Chase Farm. Getting to his cottage was a short walk across a couple of fields, but if you went along the roads it was considerably further. You had to walk up Grove Lane to the top road, along to Chase Lane and down it to reach Chase Farm and Roy’s cottage. So the fields won every time even though I was only about six or seven years old! Roy was absolutely fearless; he would walk between the cow’s legs and in the cow sheds totally unfazed by the animals; I was petrified of them; to me they were huge with multiple legs and nasty looking horns, just great big lumbering red beasts. (Cows didn’t have their horns removed in those days!)

One day while in the farmyard, several farm hands including Roy’s Dad were trying to get a Bull to mate with a cow. The cow’s halter was being held by one of the hands. While the bull was led out by a long pole that was hooked into the copper ring through the bull’s nose. Apparently if the bull turned nasty it could be deflected by the pole. There wasn’t much chance of that happening though; the bull showed a marked reluctance to do anything. He needed an awful lot of coaxing, pushing and shoving before he would even mount the cow. Perhaps that was the umpteenth cow he was being persuaded to serve that day and was exhausted! One of the farm hands had a broom which he used to guide the bulls pistle (penis) to the target! I can remember this clearly but I doubt whether I really knew quite what was going on at the time. That experience did nothing at all to allay my fears of these beasts!

Dick Ashbridge, Roy’s dad, was a kindly man who always had time for us boys; he was the senior farm hand at Chase Farm. He sort of came with the farm and served several different owners of the farm throughout his working life. Perhaps he was listed in ‘the fixtures and fittings’ that went with the farm!

Before the 1939 war, Chase Farm was a dairy farm, with a dairy herd and steers for beef as were many of the farms around Chigwell Row were in those days. Cattle grazed in the various fields behind our house and it was not unusual for them to escape. On at least three different occasions our Lane was full of them, wandering about eating the grass on the verges and the plants in the gardens, so in no way would I venture out among them. On another occasion they had escaped into the field behind our house and a couple of cows had their large heads over our fence eating our new loganberry stems that would bear fruit in the autumn. Dad was furious and had a job to stop them; they were very persistent regardless of the prickles. No amount of shooing deterred them; Dad had to resort to physical means - a broom to stop them. They certainly had a taste for new Loganberry stems!

I never had much affection for horses either. It probably stems from hearing my Dad talking about how someone had been bitten on the shoulder by a horse. Perhaps the earliest experience I had concerning a horse was seeing one put down. There were often horses in the small field behind our house. On this occasion two or three men were around a horse, one holding it by a halter. I couldn’t see what they were doing but the horse appeared to stagger then fall on to its knees before gradually falling over on to its side. It attempted to raise its head but fell back its ears twitching. I must have been quite young because Dad told me the horse had been put down and took me back indoors so I never saw what they did with it. It didn’t shock me at all at the time although I might possibly feel a bit different now! At some period, perhaps early in the war, a couple of pigsties were constructed in the corner of that field and pigs were put in. They made a right mess of the field as pigs always do, turning the ground over looking for worms etc. Fortunately I don’t remember them being there for very long.

There were two riding horses in the stables at Clare Hall where dad worked and a wonderful Harness room full of shiny brass and leather harnesses etc, which hung along two walls, all pleasantly smelling of leather and saddle soap. A bench was all along one side. I was at the Clare Hall stables one day when Dad and Goff Watkins tried very hard to get me up onto one of these ‘enormous’ horses; no way was I going to get on that horse and I never did. I just wasn’t that adventurous. Goff Watkins was a local man and lived in one of the Billingsbourne Cottages by the school in the village. He was retired and had spent a lifetime with horses and always smelt of them; he was always dressed the same - tweed jacket, breeches and highly polished brown leather gaiters on his somewhat bowed legs; he looked quite a character. I never ever saw him dressed any different.

Our meat came from ‘Freebody’s, the butchers in Gravel Lane (The shop is now a Pet Food Supply’s shop). In about 1935, I remember seeing a freshly killed pig hanging upside down being lowered into boiling water before having its bristles scrapped off. Butchers were allowed to slaughter animals in those days. I wasn’t shocked, I would guess this animal cruelty thing has come about because most people are now city dwellers and have become totally detached from country ways. You don’t see complete animal carcasses being cut up in supermarkets or in butcher’s shops nowadays. During the war Jack Freebody’s assistant, Bill Barrett, got 6 months in jail for illegally handling ½ cwt of black market butter. Various rationed foodstuffs that had been obtained illegally on the black market were available from time to time, usually at somewhat inflated prices. If you got caught selling or even buying these ‘black market’ goods you were in serious trouble!

Further down Gravel Lane was Slemmings the horse slaughterers, the horses were shot before being hung up and skinned and then cut down the spine into two; the two halves of steaming carcasses were in full view from the road. The building is still there, but it is now a garage. Not surprisingly riders could not get their horses to go anywhere near the place let alone go past it! Local people used to buy horse meat for their dogs from there.

I remember going to Romford in about 1935 when it still had a cattle market. As the cattle were being led into the ring to be auctioned, a man was tapping the cattle on the nose with his stick. I was very worried at the time seeing animals being treated like that; but it was probably not as bad as it had looked to me at the tender age of five or six! Although I have never liked cattle very much, I didn’t like to see them ill-treated. Mr Hilliard the live stock manager at Romford market was living at Crosby House in Chigwell Row at the time.

With so many animals on farms in and around the village it was inevitable that we would be plagued by a myriad of flying insects. As well as the house flies indoors, there were the Blue bottles or Blow flies to contend with. Then there were the biting insects, gnats and mosquitoes; they were a nuisance especially at night; their high pitched whine was a warning to cover up smartly to avoid being bitten by them. Sometimes I would wait until they settled on me and then try to swot them, but I wasn’t always lucky in catching them. If you did get a bite, the resulting weal and swelling irritated and itched for a week. Attracted by the carbon dioxide in your breath, it is the females that bite and try to feed on your blood. Female Blue bottles or Blow flies would lay their eggs on any ‘dead’ meat they could find, so our meat had to be covered at all times with a meat ‘safe’, a large domed fine mesh metal cover sold for just that purpose. (We didn’t have a ‘fridge’ to put the meat in!) My mother said the meat was ‘blown’ if the blow flies did manage to get to the meat and lay their clusters of creamy white eggs.

Rabbits were a different proposition; they were everywhere and a pest, eating the plants in gardens and the Farmers and Allotment Holders crops. When Dad had his allotment next to the forest, they were a real pest. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that the fatal disease Myxamatosis decimated the rabbit population. But during the war they were a good source of protein! They were not ‘Cuddly Bunnies’ to us, just good eating. Several people we knew used to snare them, or shoot them or use small dogs to catch them. Holding them up by the back legs and hitting them at the back of the head was the usual method of dispatching them. Mr Boyden my Headmaster at Chigwell was an avid rabbit catcher, using his dog ‘Tess’ and snares. He showed us boys at school how to make a snare and how to set it up, but I have never tried it. It is a bit cruel as the rabbit can choke to death if the snare isn’t visited regularly. It is probably illegal now!

When we were given a rabbit, which was quite often, it had to be skinned and gutted before being cut up ready for cooking. Dad didn’t fancy that job so Mr Haddon from the cottages used to come down and do it for him. I like wild rabbit stew or rabbit baked in the oven with onions and vegetables, but not if the rabbit had been shot, you would have to be careful of the shot gun pellets! We had pigeon for dinner one day and I remember we had the same problem – lead shot! A lot of small toys for boys were made of lead; lead that is poisonous but with a rather sweet taste!

We kept chickens as well as rabbits during the war. Dad thought he would have a go at killing one of our rabbits. He caught hold of it and held it up by the back legs but it squealed so much he bottled out and put it back in the hutch. (Rabbits were dispatched by hitting them at the back of the head.} Send for Mr Haddon! The chickens we kept provided us with eggs until they became too old to lay any more then they too would be dispatched and eaten; but only after being cooked for a long time because, being old, they were invariably a bit on the tough side. Plucking the feathers off them was always a bit of a chore that I tried to get out of if I could. If ever we were short of eggs I would have to cycle to Brownings Farm House in Gravel Lane and buy them from the Farmer Padfield’s house keeper at the backdoor of the Farm House. My sister, Pam, made a pet of one of our chickens; she was always carrying it about with her; even the chicken seemed to enjoy the attention.

In the Spring and Summer when our eggs were plentiful, Mum tried preserving them in a bucket containing ‘isinglass’ solution; a kind of gelatine apparently made from fish! The eggs were preserved but shells would go soft and rubbery, but I don’t think mum bothered with it much after one or two attempts. Miss Scott, the lady living in No. 9 Grove Cottages, the end cottage nearest to our house, always kept quite a few chickens, including a cockerel. (He had a very good life up until Christmas, keeping 8 or 9 hens happy!) They roamed around the field at the back of the houses. If any of the hens got broody they would often lay at the edge of the field and sit on the eggs. The neighbours used to help search for those ‘missing’ hens. One day there was a hullabaloo in the field, and there was my sister being pursued by Miss Scott’s Rhode Island Red cockerel, she was yelling and running for her life, trying to reach our back gate before she was caught. I think she just about made it! I thought it was quite funny at the time - but she didn’t!

Miss Scott was renowned for making excellent rag dolls out of scrap materials for all the locally born babies. I would have had one but I can’t remember what happened to it. (I probably had to give it to my sister!) My sister had one but lost hers in Sainsbury’s Grocery shop in Barkingside High Street.

Keeping chickens was a bit of a risk; if they were not locked up securely at night you stood a good chance of them being taken by a fox! There was one incident in Vicarage Lane, when someone had lost 14 chickens one night to a fox. The fox would always kill all the chickens in the coop but only take one away and bury it. He might come back again and take another and so on, but invariably most of them would be just left - dead. That’s the way of foxes, they always do that! They are ruthless predators!

* Francis Chichester, aged 64, set sail from Plymouth on 27th August 1966 to circumnavigate the World. His vessel, ‘Gipsy Moth IV’ was named after his De Havilland Gipsy Moth, the aircraft that he had used to do his pioneering navigational research. His single handed around the world 24,500 mile journey took a total of 274 days. He was the first person to sail single handed around the world. In July 1967 Francis Chichester was knighted for his, ‘individual achievement and sustained endeavor in the navigation and seamanship of small craft’. Sir Francis Chichester died aged 71 on 26th August 1972.

White Hall

EARLY DAYS BEFORE THE WAR

Dad worked for Miss ‘Winnie’ Savill from 1929 until about 1940 as a chauffer and Groom. Miss Savill used to ride and kept a couple of horses that Dad was responsible for. He also drove her upmarket Lanchester car; it was most likely a Lanchester 10, I think it was black and dark green! I know that Dad liked to boast that it had a fluid flywheel! It meant you could put it into any gear but it wouldn’t actually change gear until you had depressed the clutch.

The Lanchester Car Company was an early pioneer in the automotive industry and was responsible for many innovative ideas. In 1931 it became part of the Daimler Co. Occasionally I got to ride in the car; it was a great treat as not many young boys ever got to ride in any car let alone a Lanchester! It was generally only wealthy people who could afford to own a car. It was probably before I started school or during the school holidays that if Dad needed petrol for the Lanchester car he would collect me for the ride into the village where there was a single petrol pump at the Sunnymede Garage.

In the mid 1930’s petrol was priced at 1/6 a gallon (7 ½ p in today’s money; unbelievable!) The owner was a Mr Willis who walked with the aid of two sticks. After serving Dad with petrol, he would give me a small packet of Roundtrees fruit pastilles from a ‘Shed’ behind the pump where he sold sweets and cigarettes. He was injured in the First World War, but because he hadn’t actually lost a limb or suffered some other loss he didn’t get a pension, so he paraded outside of Parliament and generally made himself a nuisance to the authorities: eventually they relented and he was given a substantial pension for his injuries.

Before World War II a pond stood beside the Maypole Inn in Chigwell Row which would later be filled in to become a car park. White Hall stood on grounds to the right of the pond. When the building got demolished the site got redeveloped and became Whitehall Close.

Dad also had to mow the lawns at Clare Hall, Woodlands and The Bowls and, I think, Forest House, as many of these large houses were unoccupied at that time. It became part of a chauffer’s job to mow lawns using a motor mower because of their presumed knowledge of petrol engines. Unfortunately for Dad it wasn’t a ride on mowing machine, it was a walk behind job! When he was mowing the extensive lawns at the Woodlands, Dad would sometimes take me along with him. He told me how I used to run behind him going up and down, up and down until I was tired and exhausted, when he would put his coat down under one of the large Lime trees on the edge of the lawn and I would lay down on it and fall asleep. I can’t say that I remembered it as I would have only been three or four year’s old; it was before I had started school.

It has occurred to me in later life that my Dad showed me a lot of interesting things up to the outbreak of war. I can remember him showing me the Northern Lights, but they weren’t all that spectacular from where we lived. We could see the greenish glow to the North from the fields just below our house. I’d guess it would have been in 1936 when it was one of the ‘Solar maximum’ years. I have not noticed them since, but there again I haven’t really looked for them. Northern Lights occur when solar particles enter the Earths atmosphere and emit burning gas that produces the different coloured light. The scientific name is Aurora Borealis; named after the Roman goddess of the Dawn. They are at their most visible on an 11 year cycle, called the solar maximum.

Whilst on the subject of the sky, we both watched a spectacular meteor shower or shooting stars, as we called them, occurring when debris from a passing meteor enters the earth’s atmosphere and burns up. Several would streak across the sky at short intervals throughout the evening in the remarkably clear sky. Most likely it would have been the Geminid’s shower that occurs annually in the middle of December. I was never allowed to stay up late and always put to bed at a reasonable hour so it had to be sometime in the middle of winter. Dad pointed them out to me as we watched it happening on a beautiful cloud free night sky. The Genimid meteor shower is one of the showiest and peaks around mid December. It is caused by the debris shed by the asteroid ‘3200 Phaethon’ entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up.

The sky was especially clear during the war years when everywhere was blacked out; there was no light pollution whatsoever. On a clear night you could literally see hundreds of thousands of stars, Dad used to point out the milky-way and various constellations such as The Great Bear, the Plough and the Pole star etc. But I don’t think I could remember them now as I haven’t been able to see them all that clearly for many a year; the atmospheric and light pollution that has occurred since the war has put an end to that!

Another time in late 1936, (actually it was the 30th November) when I was six years old and I walked with Dad to Vicarage Lane in the evening and we looked South across to London and saw the Crystal Palace burning. I don’t know how dad knew it was on fire but he may have been attracted by the red glow in the sky that was clearly visible from our house in Grove Lane; or maybe he could have heard it announced on our wireless.The Crystal Palace was erected in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, the building was 1,851 feet long (564 metres.) and was the largest expanse of glass in the World, at the time. Exhibitors gathered from around the World to fill the 990,000 square feet (92,000 m2) of exhibition space displaying examples of their latest technology. After the exhibition it was enlarged and rebuilt on Penge Common, near Sydenham Hill in 1834. On 30th November 1936 it caught fire and was burned to the ground. The area is known as Crystal Palace!

On another occasion we both watched an Autogyro fly across our church in an easterly direction. Autogyros were not very common as they tended to be a bit unstable. Autogyros were similar to helicopters but the top blades were not driven, they rotated freely with the forward motion of the aircraft, this is what made them rather unstable.

Everything seemed to happen to me when I was six or seven years old. I had a two wheeled Fairy Cycle on which I had learned to ride. Dad used to run behind me holding the saddle until I realized he wasn’t holding the saddle anymore and I was actually riding a bike. One day I came of it and chipped a top front tooth; and I still have that chipped tooth to prove it! (But not the chip!) On another occasion I nearly lost an eye!

Living near farms meant we were always inundated with house flies indoors during the summer. They could always be seen flying around the gas light fittings and leaving their trademark black ‘dots’ all over the glass. When they settled anywhere we tried to catch them by scooping them up from behind - they actually take off backwards - and throwing them into a bowl of soapy water. On this particular day I was catching them in the scullery and in doing so I knocked the frying pan off the high saucepan shelf. It fell on me, handle first and cut my eyebrow rather badly. I was lucky, an inch lower and it would have gone in to my eye! Another time when I was six years old, I slipped on leaves and fell on the garden path and split my left shinbone, it was put in plaster for six weeks.

In the lane a ditch ran along one side for a good part of its length. One day I spotted a wasp’s nest in the bank behind and watched for a while as the wasps were casually flying in and out. Rather stupidly I decided to give it a prod with the cricket bat that I was holding; my word that enlivened them. They didn’t like that one little bit; they poured out of the nest like dozens of mini helicopters and chased me back down the Lane as I was running for dear life. I didn’t realise how fast they could fly, but I do now! I think I got off rather lightly with just a couple of stings. Very early in the war we had a visit from an elderly man. He had cycled all the way from Chadwell Heath; I think he was an uncle of Dad’s. I have not had any contact with that side of the family since then, but there used to be a Hairdressers shop at the end of Whalebone Lane, Chadwell Heath, called ‘Comber’s’ that was owned by a distant relative of Dad’s.

I went with my mother to Grange Court at Chigwell one day for tea with, I think, the nanny there. How this came about I have no idea, but it may have been when my mother worked occasionally as a housemaid at Clare Hall, that she got to know the Grange Court nanny. We walked down Vicarage Lane and into Meadow Way to the gates of Grange Court. It was very grand walking up the long drive with its immaculate lawns on either side to this large three story imposing building with its wide steps going up to the front entrance. (This front drive and garden has long since been built on and the only entrance now is at the rear of the house from Chigwell High Road!) My Dad said an MP by the name of Kemsley and his family lived there; I guess the family must have been on vacation when we went to tea! There was a large Mulberry tree in the grounds at the back of the house with delicious black fruit – like very large and very juicy blackberries! I have not tasted mulberries since then. Grange Court, was probably built in the late 17th or early 18th century; it was remodeled in 1774 Now it is part of Chigwell School.

I don’t know when it was exactly, but my mother took me to the London Zoo, probably when I was about six years old. Seeing wild animals in the flesh for the first time rather than looking at them as pictures in books was quite an experience. I was not very old so it would have been well before the start of the war in 1939. I remember a large monkey or a gorilla that spat water at visitors through the bars of his or her cage if they got too close. It may have been a gorilla named Meng. It would not have been ‘Guy’ the famous gorilla; he didn’t arrive at the zoo until November 5th 1947. The gorillas were caged in the ‘Gorilla Round House’, a Grade 1 listed building. They now have a much larger and a more natural environment to romp in. Feeding time at the ‘Penguin Pool’, also a Grade 1 listed building, was a source of amusement as they were swimming so fast and gracefully through the water to catch the fish thrown to them. The pool was not considered very penguin friendly either and isn’t used for housing penguins now.

The chimpanzees’ tea party was a daily occurrence and attracted a large audience who roared with laughter at their antics. But for some reason, I felt rather underwhelmed; perhaps my interest in Natural history had started by then, it seemed so unnatural to treat wild creatures like that, although the chimps seem to thoroughly enjoy it. They apparently only used young chimpanzees as they are much more playful. Using adult chimpanzees would have been quite unsuitable for this jolly. The ‘tea party’ was eventually discontinued in 1972. I did get a ride on an Indian elephant though; I had to climb up steps to sit on one of the two bench seats; one on either side of the waiting elephant, each seating about four children facing outwards. The ride was a bit lumpy as the elephant was led along by a keeper walking along side the elephant. Camels were also used in a similar way for children’s rides. Both rides were stopped in 1960 after there had been a problem with an elephant misbehaving. It was unusual for Indian Elephants to misbehave, so they were always used for rides and also for working in Asia; the African Elephants, (with the larger ears) are, apparently, unpredictable and not used for riding or working!

I also misbehaved, all be it accidentally. We had stopped to have a cup of tea at a tea bar, it had tables and chairs and a roof but it was open on three sides. I decided I would be helpful and collect up some of the empty plates left on the tables; as I tried to put the small pile I had collected on to an empty table they slipped and fell on to the concrete floor with devastating consequences. With broken crockery all over the concrete floor, my mother was not amused; luckily she wasn’t charged for them, thank goodness. I had got into enough trouble as it was. You could say, I suppose, that I’d had a smashing time at the Zoo! My first visit to a Zoo was hardly a success and evoked mixed reactions in me as a child. This is probably why I have not been all that enamoured with Zoo’s ever since that first visit. How we had got to the zoo I don’t remember except that I recall Mum complaining that it was a long walk through Regents Park before we arrived there.

Malcolm Campbell was breaking land and water speed records between the wars. In 1939, just before the war started, I remember him breaking the water speed record on Coniston water; it was shown on the cinema newsreels and was in the daily newspaper we had. Malcolm Campbell broke the water speed record on 19th August 1939 in his Power Boat ‘Blue Bird K4’ on Coniston Water, Cumbria; averaging a speed of 141.740 mph.

Snow in the winter was always exciting for us, especially when we were at school. This particular winter, in 1937 or 38 I think it was, I saw a lot of people skating on Hainault Lake. My friend Noel was on the ice trying to skate; where he had got his skates from I have no idea. It isn’t very often the Lake is so frozen that you can skate on it. Skating on the lake wouldn’t be allowed nowadays that’s for sure. (Elf and Safety again!)

Another time when we had a significant fall of snow I was given a half-a-crown - 2/6 (12 ½ pence in new money) to walk into the village to buy a bar of chocolate as a special treat and to bring back the change. I tucked the money into my glove for safe keeping. On the way out I met Noel’s sister, Phyllis, and we had a friendly snowball fight. Imagine my horror when I discovered the money was missing out of my glove, no doubt buried in the snow somewhere. Trying to find it in several inches of snow was impossible. There was nothing for it but to return home and confess. My parents were furious with me and I was sent to bed without any tea - or chocolate! 2/6 was about one sixteenth of Dads wages; it would be worth a several pounds today! No wonder he was annoyed.

In June 1939 I remember hearing some terrible news on the wireless and reading about it in the newspaper. The Royal Navy had suffered its worst ever submarine disaster when HMS Thetis sank during her maiden voyage just 40 miles from where she had been built in Birkenhead. Ninety-nine men tragically lost their lives through this unfortunate accident. Conditions on board were extremely cramped, with the submarine carrying 103 men, 69 were sailors, the rest were employees from the Cammell Laird ship yard; it was twice the number she was designed to carry. Frantic efforts to refloat the vessel were unsuccessful, and after 13 hours the oxygen supply was almost exhausted. Only four men managed to escape through the hatch, and another four perished using the same route. The pride of the Royal Navy was no more.

Grandma Comber with her Grand children in 1933. Peter is on the Left Bill (William) is trying to pacify his daughter Margaret, on Grandma’s knee. (Martin had not been born in 1933!) Joan is on Grandma’s other knee. Joan’s brother Ted (Edward) is on the Right. Behind Grandma is Minnie (Nibby). Grandma’s well can be seen on the right.

HOLIDAYS

Having left Sussex for Essex I guess my parents must have been a little homesick, so every year for our annual break we always went back to the Horsham area to do the rounds of all the relatives – Aunts, Uncles, nieces and nephews and my Grandma; Dads Mother. For some reason that I never really understood at the time, we did not visit Mum’s mother or her father who both lived in Horsham. We would always manage to spend a day at the seaside, usually Brighton or Worthing. It was a mixed blessing for me as I have very fair skin so I invariably got sun burnt. I don’t know if sun screen was available but it was never used on me if it was. Calamine lotion was applied but it had little effect; sleeping was so painful, it was agony.

To get to Horsham we would walk from our cottage in Grove Lane, Chigwell Row and catch the 25A bus to Grange Hill Station, (or it may have been to Ilford Station; I don’t remember) and board the LNER steam train for Liverpool Street Station. The bus fare to Ilford was 4d at first, with a green ticket, later it was a 5d (2 new pence! orange ticket. Tickets were reduced in size during the War. Buses had Conductors who issued the appropriate value ticket and punched a hole in it adjacent to the number of your destination. (It was a bit hit or miss whether the hole was punched in the right place!) Tickets were coloured according to their value and were carried in a hand held rack with spring clips. The machine that punched the holes was hung around the Conductors neck and went with a ‘clitch- ding’ when the ticket was punched.

On arrival at Liverpool Street Station we would catch another bus to Victoria Station where we caught the Southern Railway’s electric train to Horsham. And yet another bus ride (or a bit of a long walk) to my Aunty Ruth’s (Mums sister.) house at 9 Oakleigh Rd, Roffey in Horsham, where we always stayed. It took the best part of a day to do the 50 miles or so! And to think we did that every year. I just can’t imagine anyone contemplating such a journey nowadays! But then it was our only means of getting there. It is not much more than a couple of hours by car. Aunty Ruth and her husband, ‘Son’, I only ever knew him as uncle ‘Son’, (I believe his real name was Albert) had two children, Ken who was slightly older than I was and his younger sister, Margery. After the war had ended, they moved from Oakleigh Rd into a new Council house where Uncle kept a Golden Pheasant, a very attractive bird with its bright red and golden yellow plumage. It was kept in a large cage near their back door. I’ve no idea where he got it from or why he wanted it but it was a good talking point and very attractive bird to look at. Behind the houses were allotments; Uncle’s allotment was directly behind his house – making it virtually an extension of his garden. In later life he had difficulty managing it though, with his failing eyesight.

With Auntie Ruth’s house at Roffey in Horsham as a base, we would take the bus to visit most of the relatives in turn. We visited Dad’s older brother in Southwater - Uncle Ed, (Edwin) and his wife Auntie Flo (Florence) and their two children Ted and Joan, Ted was slightly older than me, and Joan was a bit younger. They lived in a brick built cottage opposite the Southwater brick works. (Southwater bricks were always in demand because they were very hard. A type of engineering brick, I suppose.)

Uncle Ed was a blacksmith in Horsham, he seemed a very large man to me but I don’t think he was very tall; in fact neither of my parent’s families were very tall. Uncle Ed was a jovial man with huge arms and hands, I am thankful that I never had to shake hands with him; at least I am sure I would remember it! Actually he was a very gentle and jolly man. We visited his blacksmiths shop once or twice on the edge of Horsham town. Uncle Ed was killed when a van door opened and knocked him off his bicycle in about 1940. He had a metal plate in his head from injuries, I presume, he had received in the 1914-18 Great War. (I still have a Dutch hoe with a detachable blade that Dad said Uncle Ed had made!)

Dad’s eldest brother, Bill (William) was head gardener at a house in Bexhill, where we visited him on one or two occasions. He also had two children, Margaret and Martin. Eventually he ended up as Head Groundsman at Wicksteed Park in Kettering, Northamptonshire, where they had moved into a bungalow in the Park grounds.

On the way to Monks Gate we always stopped off at one of Mum’s Auntie’s in the Brighton Road, I think her name was Rose Bargent, I believe she may have been my mum’s mother’s sister, but I am not too sure. Her son, who I called Uncle Dick, was disabled and used to be always sitting on the floor. I never ever saw him standing – always sitting on the floor. He did tailoring for a living. I now realise he must have been sexually frustrated for he was always trying to get the women to sit next to him on the floor so that he could cuddle them, (and probably grope them!) I found it all rather odd and more than a bit embarrassing at times for my tender years.

Once or twice during our annual visits to Horsham we bumped into an elderly quite well dressed man who was rather bent and walked with the aid of a stick. He had a back problem caused, apparently, when he worked at a brick works, or so my father said. He was my Grandfather, mother’s father who lived, I believe, in St Leonard’s Road, Horsham. Why my mother never bothered to visit him while we were in Horsham I don’t know. Mother never even wanted to contact her own mother either. From the little information I gleaned, it seems that her mother walked out of the family around the end of the First World War. My mum, being the eldest of five children, took it rather badly. (She was about 13 years old at the time.)

My mother, Hilda May; (she was always called ‘little May’; (big May’ was Dads older brother William’s wife, and she wasn’t very big!) was followed by Winnie, Ruth, Alice and George, the only boy. At the age of 14 Mum was packed off into service at ‘The Grange’, a large house in Welford, Northamptonshire. Did she resent being sent away? Was this the reason she never ever wanted to see her father?

Right from when I was quite young I can remember Mum being hard of hearing. It got progressively worse as she got older; by the time she had reached old age she was almost completely deaf. It always made communicating with her very difficult. A group photograph used to hang over our stairs at home of the Horsham Fire Brigade, with Mum’s dad a member of the crew; what happened to it I don’t know. I would dearly have loved to have had it. Perhaps Grandad had been a fireman during the Great War, I don’t know. Another coincidence occurred one day when I was staying at Auntie Ruth’s. (I used to stay on for a couple of weeks in the summer holidays and go about with my cousin Ken.)

Peter's maternal Grandparents

An elderly lady living in the bungalow directly opposite came over one day and had a long conversation with me, but I can’t remember now what it was all about. Afterwards Auntie Ruth said; “You know who that was, don’t you? “ Of course, I didn’t know, I had only noticed her from the other side of the road on one or two occasions. I had not the faintest idea who she was. “Well” she said “That was your Grandmother; my and your mum’s mother”

My Grandmother? Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. I was flabbergasted. It struck me as very strange, even bizarre that all the years we stayed at Auntie Ruth’s, mum’s mother, my Grandma, was actually living in the bungalow directly opposite and mum never attempted to make contact with her – ever, for the rest of her life! But she had kept the photograph of her mother!

I never met Mum’s sister, Winnie, her husband was no good; she had to meet him at his place of work and collect his wages on pay-day, otherwise he would spend it all in the pub. Mother never kept in touch with her, I would have thought she could have done with a bit of support from her older sister. I once met Aunt Winnie’s eldest daughter, my cousin, also called Winnie who was also staying at Auntie Ruth’s. Years later I heard that Cousin Winnie had married and she and her husband were running a pub. How ironic! Aunty Winnie, Mum’s sister, had several children, but I only met cousin Winnie, never any of the others.. Alice, mums younger unmarried sister, worked as a cook at a large house in Chelsea until the outbreak of war in 1939.

Women that were single or didn’t have children were required to do war work, such as working in factories or working on the land – The Women’s Land Army – replacing the men who had been called up. There were a couple of Land Girls and a ‘conchie’ working at Chase farm near where we lived in Chigwell Row. He eventually married one of the Land Girls. (Conscientious objectors were men who refused to actively serve in the forces and use guns, they were commonly called conchies!)

Alice stayed with us for a while when she worked in the canteen of Henry Hughes & Son Ltd’s, Unit Works factory, in New North Road, Hainault. (Now, Barclays Bank is on the site.) I seem to remember she used to go up to town dancing with Canadian soldiers. Alice, who was also hard of hearing in later life, married late in life to an Irishman Jack McCartney in March 1947; the snow was still on the ground as 1947 had been a very long hard winter. He liked his drink did Jack.

At Lower Beeding there was Mum’s younger brother George Young and his wife, Eddie. George was another member of the family who had a hearing problem. I can just remember him getting married and the reception being held in a very crowded front room of a house. I got very upset there and cried, as I desperately wanted one of the silver ornaments that were on top of the wedding cake - but I never got one; I must have only been about 3 or 4 years old at the time. Uncle George worked for Lord and Lady Loader at Leonardslee Gardens until he was called up and drafted into the Army Catering Corp. They had two girls, Maureen and Yvonne. After the war when he was demobbed they moved to Broadbridge Heath not too far from Horsham. That is all I know about the maternal side of the family. My mother never talked about her early years. I wish I had asked her more about her early life, but I don’t think she would have been very forthcoming on those earlier years. It would have probably provoked too many unhappy memories for her.

As I got a bit older, I used to stay on for an extra couple of weeks at auntie Ruth’s and go out and about with my slightly older cousin Ken, he on his bike and me on Auntie Ruth’s bike! We cycled all over West Sussex. Some days we would go coarse fishing and catch mainly Bream in ‘Hammer’ ponds. On one occasion Ken had his Pike tackle with him. He baited the three barbed hook with an unfortunate Bream and threw it out into the water as far as he could some twenty yards or so. We watched fascinated as the float, a short fat pike float, was slowly going round in large circles as the poor unfortunate bream was trying to swim away. After a short time I noticed the float had disappeared, there was no sign of it, just the vast expanse of water. Ken waited for a short while before deciding he had better pull it in to see exactly what had happened to his float. As he drew it in closer we could see he had hooked quite a big fish; and when he got near to landing it, it came off the hook flapping wildly about, luckily in shallow water, so Ken waded in and ‘hoofed’ it on to dry land. It was a 2 ¼ lb Rainbow Trout. Wow, imagine our excitement; we had never caught such a large fish before. Breakfast was more than a bit special the following morning!

A WW2 land mine that parachuted down and was defused by the bomb disposal squad

THE DAY WAR WAS DECLARED

The media love the phrase, ‘Where were you when….’, for example, John F Kennedy was assassinated or the day the Falklands war started? To be quite honest I do not remember where I actually was when most of these World events happened, although, of course, I do remember them but it is just that I don’t remember where I was at the time! Probably at work most of the time, come to think of it. The one event that I do remember quite clearly though, was the broadcast by Neville Chamberlain declaring war on Germany on September 3rd 1939. It was near the end of the school summer holidays and I was staying at my Auntie Ruth’s, (Mums sister) and Uncle Son’s (Albert Pannel) and their two children at 9 Oakleigh Road, Roffey, Horsham, Sussex with my Mum, Dad, and my 2 year old sister; I was 9 years old. (How did we all manage with only three bedrooms?) We always stayed there at about this time, it was a yearly ritual, in fact it was the only annual holiday we ever had when I was growing up. Sussex was my parent’s birth place, so all their brothers, sisters and other relatives lived in that area.

We were all sat around the kitchen table waiting to hear a broadcast by the Prime Minster, Neville Chamberlain. The wireless was one of those with a rounded top and a very small tuning window with a couple of knobs below it for tuning and adjusting the volume. Somehow we must have known that an important Ministerial broadcast by the Prime Minister was to take place at 11.15 am.I can remember the Prime Minister’s words to this day;

”I have to tell you now ……… this country is at war with Germany.” He went on to state the reasons for this action. “This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note saying that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared, at once, to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany”.

After the announcement, no one knew quite what to do, but I knew it must be pretty serious! After all, Mum, Dad, Auntie and Uncle were children during the First World War just 20 or so years earlier so they would have memories of what war was like. Although I knew it was grave news I had no idea what it all meant, but that was soon to change. Not long after the broadcast the air raid warning sirens sounded and it got people worried. Many went to their shelters if they had one, but eventually they came out into the street and were standing around in small groups looking around and chatting, not knowing quite what to do. Later the authorities said it was a false alarm; but I thought at the time it had been done deliberately- just to reinforce the Prime Ministers declaration of war, but I don’t know for sure! In the first few weeks people were saying that it would be all over by Christmas! I remember thinking to myself, ‘How do they know that?’ But of course it wasn’t. Perhaps they were subconsciously remembering that is what people had apparently been saying at the start of the First World War some 25 years earlier. “It’ll be all over by Christmas” And they were very wrong then!

Cinemas and places of entertainment were closed until further notice but this didn’t last too long. I think it was felt that entertainment helped to keep up the population’s morale. By 1940 Britain had a coalition government led by Sir Winston Churchill.

Sirens had been erected throughout Britain a year or two before the war was actually declared; our local one was at Chigwell, next to the Police box on the corner of Vicarage Lane at the junction with Chigwell High Road. I believe the sirens were operated manually by a policeman in the Police box. Police boxes haven’t been in existence for many years now. Modern mobile telephone technology has made police boxes redundant!

Dad decided to return to Chigwell Row and left Mum, me and my 2½ year old sister at 9 Oakleigh Road. We returned to Chigwell Row a few days later when it became apparent that nothing was about to happen. In fact nothing much happened for some time, nearly a year in fact!

Within a year or two the war was to radically change people’s lives; by how and where they lived, what they ate, where they all worked and how they slept. City and town children were evacuated to strange new homes in the country for their protection. Men up to the age of 40 were called up to serve in the armed forces and single women were required to work in factories or on the land. In fact there wasn’t a single home that wasn’t affected in some way by the war; for many people it was to turn their lives upside down, changing their way of life forever.

Soon after the war had started Miss ‘Winnie’ Savill, Dads employer, suggested Dad join something to help with the war effort. So he did, he joined the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) much to Miss ‘Winnie’ Savill’s dismay.“I didn’t expect you to take on a full time job and leave my employment!” she wailed. Shortly after he had joined, the AFS was amalgamated with the Regular Fire Brigade, to form the National Fire Service, the NFS. The fire service was on call for 24 hours a day, so all the firemen worked 8 hour shifts. All the fire brigades for miles around were called in to help fight the dreadful fires that raged in and around the London docks during the blitz. They had to draw their water from the Thames. I don’t know if Dad went up there, as it would have depended if he had been on duty at the time. At night the intense red sky over London from those burning fires was very visible from our house. He served as a fireman throughout the duration of war and was based at Grange Farm Chigwell where a specially built Fire Station had been put up facing the Chigwell High Road. The station didn’t continue operating for long after the war had ended and was closed.

After the war Dad wanted to stay on as a fire fighter but at 42 years old, he was considered too old! You had to be under 40 years old to be a fireman, something to do with fitness I suppose. Having left Miss ‘Winnie’ Savill’s employment more than 5 years earlier, he could not go back, as by then Miss Savill had got someone else to do her chauffeuring. He managed to get a job with Thorn Electrical at Stapleford Aerodrome as a security guard. When they moved their operations from one of the large buildings at the Aerodrome, Dad was again out of work. Mr Whichello who lived opposite in his new house in Grove Lane, offered him a job as a Painter and Decorator working for his firm, A. E. Whichello and Son, builders in Ilford. Dad stayed in that job until he retired in about 1968. He died of a cardiac arrest in early 1983 shortly before his eightieth birthday. My mother had died in 1976; she had cancer and just wasted away, suffering dreadfully towards the end of her life.

Just before war was declared, we were all issued with a gas mask and houses with families had been issued with Anderson shelters. Eventually each person was issued with a Ration Book and an Identity card, my card number was CCFG 33-3. (Dad’s was CCFG 33-1, mum’s -2 and my sister’s - 4.) Identity cards did not have a photograph of the owner on them. Ration books were printed on special paper that had short red hairs in the paper in an effort to prevent forgery. They had pages of dated coupons for the various rationed foods etc. The retailer had to cross through the appropriate coupon for which rationed item you had bought. You had to register with a particular shop to get your weekly rations. Even before rationing you didn’t shop around much for bargains, there just wasn’t any; everything was more or less the same price wherever you shopped. There weren’t any ready meals or other convenience foods in those days either and very few restaurants. Most Public Houses generally didn’t serve food either.

A chain of restaurants was set up by the Ministry of Food in 1941 on a non-profit making basis, called British Restaurants; they were run by the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) and volunteers or local government in places where there was a kitchen available, such as Schools, Church Halls and Scouts huts etc. I remember there was one in a wooden building at Goodmayes. A main meal cost just 9d (about 4 new pence.) They had all closed by the time rationing had ended in 1954. Food rationing started on 8th January 1940 and continued for nearly fifteen years before it finally ended in 1954; it had meant that for over fourteen years of my early life I had only known food rationing! I was now 24 years old!

In fact, the weekly amounts of most rationed foods like milk and eggs etc. fluctuated according to the season and their availability. White bread was no longer available; we had to put up with just one sort of ‘white’ loaf that was rather grey in colour; the National Loaf. Soap was rationed at just 4 oz’s a month. In 1945 it was reduced by 1/8th by restricting the number of coupons available to eight weeks instead of seven. Distribution of eggs and milk was controlled, Dried milk and dried egg powder (=12 eggs.) were available in tins later in the war(1 tin per family per month.) They were sent over to the UK from the United States.

Clothes rationing was introduced on June 1st 1941 when the clothing designs were strictly limited. Each item of clothing was given a set number of points so you had a choice of what you bought up to the maximum number of points that you were allocated. Once you had used them up, you had to wait until the next allocation was available!

Furniture was limited to twenty designs under the Utility scheme and was only available to those with the greatest need such as newly weds and those who had lost everything in the bombing. Coal was even rationed to only 4 cwt per month for each household.

Surprisingly, queuing at shops was started during the war! People would line up waiting patiently until it was their turn to be served. Anything that wasn’t on ration was rarely obtainable; occasionally a shop would have a delivery of imported goods such as bananas (Bananas were only available for young children with a Green ration book!) or oranges that were not on ration. As soon as word got around, a queue would quickly form; people would often join a queue not knowing at first what they were even queuing for! Whatever it was they didn’t want to miss out on a possible little luxury!

By today’s standards, rationing gave us a very meagre diet, but we survived on it so it was sufficient; but not much chance of getting over weight though! Many recipes for using leftover food were published along with various ‘Waste Not Want Not’ posters urging house-wives to re-use everything and waste nothing. This wasn’t too much of a problem in our house as mother was very frugal, always using up everything. She used to buy ‘Hudson’s’ household soap and keep it for weeks to let it harden to make it last longer! I wonder if it really did last longer.

Our weekly menu was nearly always the same; roast on Sunday’s, cold meat on Monday’s with a meat pie or a Sheppard’s pie, made from any meat that was left over, on Tuesday. On Friday’s it was often fish. Rabbits that were caught were ‘free’, so Rabbit stew was a popular addition to our diet. Nothing was ever wasted; stale bread was used to make bread pudding or bread and butter pudding or simply eaten as ‘bread ‘n’ milk’ or ‘bread ‘n’ oxo’. This routine would not have changed much even after rationing had ended.

Up to the outbreak of War in 1939 I suppose we would we would have been classed as a rather poor family with Dad earning only £2 a week, but we didn’t really think of ourselves as poor (It reminds me of a story I heard on TV some time ago when a reporter asked a young Mother how long she had been poor. She thought for a moment then replied; “Well, just now; when you told me!” ). A third of Dad’s income went on food and household consumables. Our rent was quite low and was collected once a week by a Mr Ives. When Dad died in 1983 his rent at No1 Montfort Cottage was less than £1 at just 90 pence a week! Mum did some house work at Clare Hall on the few occasions when she was needed, which helped.. Dad’s allotment provided most of our vegetables and we seldom had to buy potatoes. It all changed for the better after he had joined the Fire Service when his salary almost doubled.

An awful lot of posters were issued during the war, such as; ‘Dig for Victory’ where you were urged to grow your own vegetables and other edible crops on every piece of available ground, even parks were turned over to growing food crops. We were even urged to plant potato peelings, providing they still had their ‘eyes’ you would get potatoes. There was the ‘The Squander Bug’ poster that urged us to save unusable food scraps for collection to be made into pig’s swill and many others. Paper and metal including pots and pans were collected and even iron railings were removed for their metal for use in the war effort. Posters urging us to ‘Make do and Mend’ and ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ were everywhere throughout the war. ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’ was another poster that I remember. There was a never ending succession of posters issued in the war with catchy slogans urging us to help with the war effort in one way or another.

By the time the war had started everyone had already been issued with a gas mask. They were fitted with adjustable straps that went over your head securing a rubber mask over your face with a clear viewing window. A green round filter was attached at the bottom below your chin. I remember that they had a peculiar rubbery sort of smell. They came in a cardboard box with a string attached allowing it to be carried on your shoulder-at all times! Later you could buy rexine (plasticised cloth) cases shaped to fit the gas mask. Young children had a different design, coloured red and blue it had a rubber ‘snout’ that blew ‘raspberries’ when breathing out. It was referred to as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ gas mask made especially for very young children up to five years old I think. Babies were placed in to a special gas mask that enclosed the baby and filtered air had to be pumped into it by an adult. The threat of a gas attack was very real early on in the war and was considered a distinct possibility but fortunately it never happened, thank God!

Later on in the war we all got very complacent and didn’t always carry our gas masks with us. One day we were all in Horsham town during our annual holiday and without our gas masks when Dad smelt ‘Tear’ gas, so we all hurried away in the opposite direction; we didn’t want to suffer the unpleasant effects of the gas. It was not unusual for the authorities to ‘test’ the population with ‘Tear’ gas as a stark reminder to always carry your gas mask, it was a lesson learnt! Dad being in the Fire Service had regular ‘testing’s’ of the various gases that were likely to be used by the Germans so he knew straight away what gas it was. The gas mask he had was a service gas mask like that used by the Armed Forces, ARP wardens and the Police etc; an entirely different design to the civilian ones. Officially the War started on 3rd September 1939, but the government had been preparing at least two years before. I remember noticing the services tin helmets and our gas masks etc. were all date stamped 1937!

Our Anderson Shelter was delivered by lorry; men unloaded these large shiny curved galvanised corrugated steel sheets, complete with the necessary instructions, and nuts and bolts etc. and carried them to the field behind our house to be assembled by us. There was even a spanner supplied. Four bunk beds were also delivered; these were rectangular wooden frames with thin metal strips woven between them. Dad got permission to erect the shelter in the field behind our house; this entailed him in having to dig a hole about 7ft by 5ft and 4 ft deep, as about 2/3rds of the shelter had to be below ground. (Our back garden was so small it would have almost filled it!) The first rain we had promptly filled the hole with water, so Dad put in a drain that ran down to a ditch and rendered the inside of the shelter with a cement mix, this solved the problem. The soil dug out had to be thrown on to the top of the shelter after it had been erected to provide extra protection; it also provided us with an ideal place on which to grow marrows.

Anderson shelters were very effective and protected you from blast and ground shock, in fact from everything but for a direct hit by a bomb. They were named after the Lord Privy Seal Sir John Anderson and designed to accommodate up to 6 people.

Inside they were just 6 feet 6 inches long x 6 ft high x 4 ft 6 inches wide and were buried 4ftin the ground. You entered through a 2 ft square hole at one end of the shelter (Believe me, it was very cramped!) Those families with incomes below £250 a year had their shelters supplied free. Ours was supplied free!

Two or three years later in the war we were issued with a Morrison indoor shelter; a reinforced cage like box, but I can’t remember us ever using it. It sat on the floor in our Front room. Morrison shelters were named after Herbert Morrison; the Home Security. They could accommodate a maximum of three people and measured just 6 ft 6 inches long x 4 ft wide x 2ft 6 inches high with welded steel wire mesh sides, they were very claustrophobic. They were designed to withstand falling debris if you were bombed,thus keeping you safe until you could be rescued. Just the thought of being entombed inthat confined space for a long period in the dark is enough to make your flesh creep!

When the Second World War started in 1939 the street lighting was turned off for the duration of the war and all the Place names and road signs were removed throughout the country to confuse the enemy should they invade. It wasn’t only the enemy that could be confused; it would even confuse us at times! Those vehicles that were allowed on the road had to have there headlights covered with a slatted metal cover that deflected the much reduced light downwards. Driving at night must have been difficult without road signs and street lighting,…… Dad eventually made frames to fit and black out our windows as it is very difficult to totally black out the house lights; no light was permitted to show anywhere, especially from our houses.

In no time at all ‘Pill’ boxes were being constructed and anti-tank trenches were being dug all over the place. ‘Pill’ boxes were hexagonal, very thick, re- enforced concrete structures half buried in the ground with a flat reinforced concrete roof; there were elongated slits on five sides for guns. The sixth side was an access opening with a heavily reinforced protective wall in front. There was one in Manor Road (now Lambourne Road.) built in the corner of a field opposite Vicarage Lane. Coming home from school one day I saw a sign writer or an artist painting chestnut fencing on it as a continuation of the field fencing and very convincing camouflage it was too. Nearly all the pill boxes were knocked down after the war. I believe that the few that were ‘missed’ are now listed!

The pond in the recreation ground was extended by having an anti-tank trench dug from it on either side, parallel to the road, terminating in a Pill box at each end. One was on the corner of Chase Lane, and the other in the corner of the field adjacent to the recreation ground almost opposite the Chapel. Thank goodness they were never used in anger, although Army training manoeuvres sometimes used them. Bren Gun Carriers carrying troops were a fairly common site on our roads and in the fields around. A trench went from near the two Miss Read’s Sweet shop (now the Newsagents, Lambourne News) across the fields through to Collier Row. Inverted ‘V’ shaped ‘H’ section iron girders could be dropped into place into holes in the roads to further check the movement of enemy transport should they arrive. Some of the fields behind our house had trenches dug in them, terminating in a ‘Pill’ box. In fact there were an awful lot of defences like these all around our towns and cities.

Early on in the war on a Saturday morning an incident occurred that freaked me out. I was in the fields on my own looking at a recently dug tank trap trench in the fields below Chase Farm when a man appeared, a stranger, and he started chatting to me about these defences that were going on everywhere in the area. He suggested we take a look at one of the ‘Pill box’ gun emplacements situated at one end of the trench. You had to go down several concrete steps to get into them. As I followed him down backwards I was startled when he grabbed me by my private parts half scaring me to death. Although I didn’t know quite what was going to happen, I knew that what ever it was I didn’t want to be a part of it! I immediately shot back up to ground level a lot quicker than I went down I can tell you, and quickly looking at the pocket watch that I always carried, I stammered; “I am going to the pictures with my mother and I am late”.With that I took off running like a bat out of hell hardly stopping for breath until I arrived back to the safety of home. I didn’t dare tell my parents about it as I didn’t know how they would react. In fact, until now, I hadn’t told anyone about that incident of over 75 years ago.

At the tender age of ten I was completely innocent of such carry-on’s and didn’t know that there were men about who sexually molested young boys; but I had a fair idea after that experience! I saw this man several times afterwards, but there wasn’t any sign of recognition. He was a bus conductor on the 25A bus route and I remember thinking what a pathetic weak character he looked; perhaps if he had been a stronger person I might not have been allowed to escape so easily. Perish the thought!

I remember the one advantage that we had during the war was the lovely long light evenings, because we had Double British Summer Time – DBST. In the autumn of 1940 the clocks were not put back to Greenwich Mean Time – GMT - as was usual, but they were then advanced by one further hour in the following spring. So we then had Double British Summer Time and were two hours ahead of GMT! It was brought in to help the farmers especially during harvest time. In the winter, of course, when the clocks were put back one hour, we were still one hour ahead of GMT.

Sometimes we had Army manoeuvres in and around our Lane. They used Thunder Flashes, a sort of large firework banger, to simulate hand grenades, and smoke grenades containing phosphorus, but I am not sure how these were used. On one occasion I touched a wet patch on the ground in the Lane and my woollen glove started to spark and burn; it was the phosphorus. (Our phosphorus in the Lab at school was always kept in water!)

Shortly afterwards I had built a den in the small Elm pollard tree opposite our house, with a lot of Elder branches that had become bone dry. Noel King and I were in the den with a little fire going in a tin, we somehow knocked the tin over and the dried material caught fire. Dad was home and threw buckets of water on it to extinguish it. I was reluctant to tell him how it happened but he put two and two together and got five! He assumed it was that phosphorus; so I didn’t think he would be too happy if I disillusioned him!

In the recreation ground opposite ‘The Manse’ (The Pastor for the chapel lived at the Manse) was an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Post – a heavily reinforced brick built building – a depot for the ARP Wardens whose job it was to look after the local population during air raids and to enforce war time regulations, e.g. to ensure a complete ‘black-out’ or to warn of a gas attack etc. ‘Put that light out’ became a catch phase! No light was permitted to show anywhere, our windows had to have blackouts put up to stop any light showing! In various places, including close to the Wardens post, there were pale yellowish green panels about a foot or so square that apparently would change colour if gas was detected so giving as much advanced warning as possible in the event of a gas attack. Large rattles would then be used by the wardens to warn the public that there was a gas attack and that gas masks had to be worn. Wardens were volunteers from men who were in reserved occupations or were too old to be called up. Other men who were over call up age or ineligible to serve in the regular forces would be required to join the Local Defence Volunteers (LDV) soon to become the Home Guard. This was very controversial and caused much debate in high circles; at first they were not armed or given uniforms just armbands with LDV on them.By the time the Home Guard were properly kitted out they had already earned the nickname of ‘Dads Army’.

Near the corner of the recreation ground near to the cross roads a large underground communal shelter was built for the people of Gravel Lane and the surrounding area to use.In the early days of the war our Anderson shelter was only used occasionally, as although we had air raid warnings, they didn’t seem to affect us very much. It wasn’t until the summer of 1940 that things began to really hot up with daylight raids that Winston Churchill later referred to as the Battle of Britain. The German vice chancellor and Marshall of the Luftwaffe (Air force), Herman Goering, had assured Chancellor Adolf Hitler that the German Luftwaffe would soon knock out the Royal Air Force, thus clearing the way for the invasion of England. They did not succeed in winning air supremacy and suffered huge losses, particularly to their Bombers. Winston Churchill hailed this as a victory by our fighter pilots; he expressed it perfectly when he said. ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few’. The invasion of England, code named ‘Operation Sealion’, had to be postponed indefinitely! (The Germans always referred to the British Isles as ‘England’) Had the invasion occurred it was arranged that Church bells would be rung throughout the Country and Air Raid Wardens would ring hand bells. The Church bells had been silenced at the start of the war.

I came out of the shelter on a lovely summer’s day in July 1940, to watch the aerial dog fights that were going on more or less above me. The swirl of the vapour trails in the blue sky left by the fighting aircraft; with the occasional short bursts of machine gun fire was all very exciting for a ten year old. Dad came home and promptly made me go back into the shelter, much to my disappointment. During these daylight and night time raids, London was ringed with Barrage balloons tethered by cables, necessary to deter low flying enemy aircraft. (Low flying aircraft are difficult to shoot down!) Some balloons were attached to winches on purpose built vehicles so that they could be transported at a moment’s notice to where they could be used most effectively. Early on in war a lone enemy aircraft machine gunned Ilford High Road on one occasion. The East London Barrage Balloon depot was at Chigwell off Roding Lane where 3000 RAF personnel were stationed. It is now the Roding Valley Nature Reserve; the concrete bases etc. are still visible there. Lupin flowers grow where the living quarters used to be.

In September the Luftwaffe changed tactics and resorted to night raids on London and many other British cities in the hope that it would break the people’s morale thus putting pressure on the Government to surrender. Coventry in particular took a terrible battering one night. In 1940 France had soon surrendered when the German troops were nearing Paris.

In spite of exaggerated claims by both sides, losses were fairly even among the singleseat fighters.. The German Messerschmitt BF109’s that escorted the Bombers had a superior performance at higher altitudes. They were at a serious disadvantagethough; they could not stay long over England because of their lack of fuel, and those pilots that were shot down and survived were made prisoners of war. The Vickers Supermarine Spitfire Mk1’s were used to tackle these fighter escorts. The Hawker Hurricanes were mainly used to target the Dornier, Junkers and Hienkel Bombers witha great deal of success. The Hurricane was a very robust fighter aircraft and could take a lot of punishment!

At home we had a brown and cream Bakelite ‘Ekco’ wireless that was powered by an accumulator, as we did not have electricity in our house until about 1954. Once a week the accumulator was exchanged for a recharged one; delivered by Avis of Abridge for 7d (less than 3 p!) a week. (Did they have electricity at Abridge?) The wireless also used a long lasting grid bias 9v dry battery that only needed replacing occasionally. The wireless was an essential means of communication throughout the war; as well as avidly following the news, we liked to listen to Winston Churchill’s inspirational speeches.

On one or two occasions we listened to the propaganda from Germany by Lord Haw Haw on our wireless. It always caused us some amusement. Lord Haw Haw was a nick-name given to the Irish born American, William Joyce, by the Daily Express. I believe it was illegal to listen to those broadcasts. There was a rumour going around Chigwell Row at one time that Joyce had lived at Lambourne End! Whether he had or not I have no idea. William Joyce founded the British National Socialist League after falling out with Osward Mosely and his ‘black shirts’ fascist movement. He fled to Germany just oneweek before war was declared and immediately started his propaganda broadcasts from Berlin. He always started his broadcasts, ‘Germany calling’ but because of his nasalaccent it always sounded like ‘Jarmany calling’! After the war he was captured andcharged with treason and hanged on 3rd January 1946. Oswald Mosely with his ‘black shirt’ sympathisers and other German nationals were interned on the Isle of Man for the duration of the war.

The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) only had one programme at first during the war- the Home Service. Eventually there were two – the Forces Programme was added, later becoming the Light programme. There was also the very popular American Forces Network. The most popular weekly comedy was Tommy Handley’s ITMA (It’s that man again!) it was a comedy programme I didn’t like to miss!

News readers always gave their name at the start of a news broadcast so that listeners would get used to hearing them. ‘Here is the News, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it’, is one I remember. If the enemy took over the BBC it would then be obvious if a strange voice was broadcasting the news. The BBC controversially had war correspondents who reported from the various war zones. I remember some of their names to this day - Godfrey Talbot, Richard Dimbleby, Frank Gillard, Chester Wilmot and Wynford Vaughn Thomas are some that I recall.

The Forces programme was especially for our forces serving overseas. Dame Vera Lynn was very popular with her songs of home. Songs that I still remember, like, “We’ll meet again don’t where don’t know when”, and, “There’ll be Blue birds over the White Cliffs of Dover”; with many others that were popular at the time.

It made singer and song writer Vera Lynn famous: she became known as the ‘Forces Sweetheart’ with her own programme. The BBC decided her songs of home would be bad for morale so axed the show. In fact the reverse was true, the troops loved her songs. She toured with ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association.) and went to Egypt, India and Burma entertaining the troops who absolutely adored her. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1975 Birthday Honours list for her Charity Work. Just one of the many Honours she received.

Later in the war, the Morse code for the letter ‘V’ (V for victory.) was continually being broadcast between programmes using drums. It was to give support to the people in the occupied countries who would illegally listen to the BBC. It was based on the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – dot, dot, dot dash. The fledgling television transmissions were suspended for the duration of the war and didn’t resume again until 1954.

Vera Margaret Welch was born in East Ham London on 20th March 1917. She adopted her maternal grandmother's maiden name, Margaret Lynn, as her stage name when she was eleven years old before changing it to Vera Lynn.

Gordon E. Hughes in 1995 with Hainault Hall behind. The Hughes family moved into Hainault Hall at the end of the Great War. Henry Hughes & Son’s factory in New North Road, Hainault, started production in 1917. Top right: Wing Commander Gordon E. Hughes

THE BLITZ (BLITZKRIEG - GERMAN FOR LIGHTNING)

Having failed to knock out our Air Force during the day, Hitler decided on August 23rd 1940 to deliver a knockout blow by bombing London at night into submission and thereby demoralising the population. He was hoping the population would then put pressure on the government to surrender. Needless to say it didn’t work! The intensity of the blitz on London was awful; starting on 7th September 1940, London was bombed on 57 consecutive nights (apart from 2 days at Christmas) continuing until 21st May 1941. As well as the bombing of London, many other cities and ports were targeted, causing a lot of destruction throughout Britain. The raids always followed the same pattern; as darkness fell we would hear the distant wailing of the sirens in Kent and Essex; gradually getting nearer and louder until our own local siren based at Chigwell would go off; that was then the time to go into our Anderson shelter and spend the night there. When the London docks and the East End were heavily attacked, the sky over London was glowing red from the fires that raged there. London took a dreadful pounding night after night; my auntie Amy (Dad’s sister.) was bombed out at Woolwich during the Blitz; the front half of the house was completely demolished with some of the furniture still more or less in place, but badly damaged. Everything she possessed was ruined! It must have been heart breaking for her. I cannot remember how we came to be at Woolwich but Auntie Amy showed us her house or what remained of it, at No 7 Downend. I can still see that damage in my minds eye even now. Uncle Dave, her husband, was in the Royal Army Medical Corps; but I believe he got compassionate leave when that happened. Auntie was in the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) at the time, helping others who had been bombed out! She went to live with her mother at Monks Gate, near Horsham, Sussex for the rest of the war. In London, many people, especially those from the East End, would emerge from their shelters in the morning to find their homes destroyed and have nothing left but what they stood up in.

Night after night it was nearly always the same; as soon as our local siren sounded its warning we would go down into the Anderson shelter and spend the night there trying to get some sleep. This was our routine until May 1941 when the raids on London eased and other cities around Britain were blitzed. Some nights we didn’t have a raid when the weather probably played a hand in whether we had a raid or not. Believe it or not there was an unofficial truce in 1940 over the two day Christmas period when we didn’t have an air raid! The only light we had in the shelter was by a Hurricane lamp, I can still remember that ‘smell’ of burning paraffin from that lamp! Of course light was not allowed to show anywhere outside, everywhere was totally dark. The ARP (Air Raid Precautions) Wardens used to rigorously enforce that.

Mrs Haddon (Gladys) and her daughter Margery from the nearby Grove Cottages used to share the shelter with us and on occasions when there was room; Mrs Vale from the cottages would join us. As you can imagine it was very cramped! There was Mum, me, my 3 or 4 year old sister Pamela, Mrs Haddon, 7 or 8 year old Margery and Mrs Vale; all in an area 6ft x 4ft 6ins with just 4 bunk beds. We children occupied 2 or 3 of those bunk beds. Margery occupied one of the top bunks, I was in the lower bunk, I used to hold her hand when the raids were happening! The adults must have got what sleep they could by just sitting up! In the winter condensation was a big problem; it ran down the insides of the corrugated metal interior. Mr Haddon, Earnest, was in the RAF and he was stationed at the Barrage Balloon Depot at Chigwell, just a 20 minute cycle ride away, so he often came home; how lucky can you get! The Haddon’s were friends of the family. Although Margery is over two years younger than me, we were great pals and used to play together when we were young. Mrs Vale’s husband Bill was an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Warden, so he would have been on duty during those night raids.

It wasn’t long after dusk that the sirens would sound, the distant ones at first, until our local siren sounded its warning. Soon afterwards we would here the distant sound of anti-aircraft guns, gradually getting closer and louder, following the bombers as they came over one after the other at several minutes intervals. The noise was deafening, louder than a continuous stream of thunder storms following one after the other, shaking the ground! The flashes from the anti-aircraft guns and their exploding shells lit up the sky. No sooner had one enemy aircraft passed over than gunfire could be heard in the distance as the next one was approaching. German aircraft made a distinctive sound; they had a pulsating engine noise- Woom, Woom, Woom, Woom, you couldn’t mistake them, getting louder as they approached. (The twin engines on the enemy bombers were synchronised, which gave them this distinctive sound.) Sometimes we would hear our night fighters joining in the attack. How this was coordinated with the anti aircraft guns I’ve no idea. Searchlights with their almost parallel beams of light would sweep across the skies trying pick up the enemy aircraft; when one did, all the searchlights in the surrounding area would also home in on it showing it up as a shining silvery white aircraft. Then all hell would be let loose, but I never saw or knew of any that had actually been shot down, but some were. Manning searchlights could be dangerous as some German aircraft would attack them, firing directly at the source of the beam. Anti-aircraft guns were popularly known as Ack Ack guns, with permanent Gun sites around the area.

Mobile Ack Ack guns also moved around the area, and would sometimes park in our Lane and let off salvos of shells. Bang, bang, bang with about 8 shells, being fired off in quick succession followed by the noise of the shells cutting through the air – a noise like tearing newspaper! You would then hear the shells exploding around the aircraft. If the aircraft was in range tracer shells would join in the barrage, these showed up as a series of red dashes in the sky. All this used to put the wind up some of the pilots and they would unload their sticks of bombs (usually about 8 bombs.) before they got to the target in London and head back home to the continent. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened listening to each aircraft as it approached; no one spoke as we all held our breath, especially when the enemy aircraft sounded directly overhead, then breathing a sigh of relief when the noise of the aircraft started to recede having past over us without unloading their bombs. Sometimes the German aircraft would drop flares on parachutes; lighting up the countryside like daylight for miles around; one I remember, was over towards Chase Farm, it seemed to hang in the sky for quite a while before it expired. (The Wardens couldn’t get those put out!) As each aircraft approached the din from the Ack Ack guns would get so loud the noise seemed to get down inside of you and the ground would shake with each shell that was fired. The noise would diminish as Ack Ack guns further away took up the challenge as the aircraft continued on its way; it would all then be repeated as the next aircraft approached, all heading for London. This carried on for several hours, night after night. When the docks were targeted we could see the very red sky across London from the fires that raged there. It was always a welcome relief when dawn approached and the sirens sounded the ‘All Clear’, a long continuous note.

Many sticks of bombs fell, roughly in a straight line, on and around Chigwell Row. The first bombs of the war were dropped on farmland behind the Chigwell Row Recreation Ground woodland near to what is now Brocket Way on the Hainault Housing Estate. The houses that are there now were built after the war had ended in 1945. The bombs always made a whistling sound as they came down followed by a short silence then the noise of the explosion and the ground shaking like an earthquake! It was always a heart stopping moment if you heard them coming down and it happened much too frequently for my liking. They used to say that you never heard the whistling if a bomb actually dropped on you; I wonder how anyone knew that!

Some out-buildings were hit at Sheepcotes, a Georgian house at the eastern end of the village. A stick of bombs fell, one exploding near the wall surrounding ‘Pages’ a small Georgian house in Chapel Lane causing some damage and blowing slates of the house roof. A tarpaulin was stretched over the roof to keep the house water tight by Francis Chichester who was living there. The damage the rest did was limited to a few broken windows. They fell close to the road, luckily missing the large houses along towards Vicarage Lane. One fell beside our Lane, exploding deep underground and causing a ‘hump’ in the Lane. The hump was there for many years but it has finally settled back now and is no longer visible. An unexploded bomb went through the roof of the Saloon bar of the Retreat public house. The people living close by in Scotts cottages had to evacuate their houses in case it exploded but after a few days they began to drift back. The unexploded bomb had gone down 25 ft and had to be dug out and taken to Wanstead Flats and made safe. Fortunately Chigwell Row was still sparsely populated; otherwise there would have been a lot more damage to property and possibly loss of life.

When we returned to our house from our Anderson shelter in the morning after a heavy raid, it became a regular occurrence that we would not have any gas or water (Electricity supplies would have also been interrupted as well but as we didn’t have electricity that didn’t worry us.) So it was candles until the gas was restored. Water was brought out to us by the water board in Lorries with water tanks fitted. All available buckets – galvanised of course, no plastic in those days – kettles, saucepans and jugs were utilised as we were never too sure when we would get the next delivery or when the water supply would be restored.To flush the toilet we used rain water we had collected in our water tank that had come off the roof. In fact where clean fresh water wasn’t necessary we nearly always used the water from our water tank outside. The morning after a raid, all us boys went around collecting shrapnel; pieces of jagged steel that had fallen during the night from the exploding Ack Ack shells. Nose cones andthe shell bases were always intact and were much prized, especially the nose cones!

Spent .303 bullet cases were collected with the clips that held the bullets in a chain, some boys made belts with them but not many fell around where we were in Chigwell Row. They came from our night fighters or our aircraft involved in dog fights during daylight hours. If we did find a complete live .303 bullet we would remove the bullet and tip out the thin yellow cordite sticks from the case and light them – they burn quite bright like miniature sparklers!. Boys collect almost anything; I collected Military cap badges and tunic buttons etc as well as shrapnel. I had an old metal Hat box that was almost full of shrapnel. Falling shrapnel was one of the reasons the Air Raid Wardens, the Military and the Police and other officials always wore tin helmets. The various services had a large letter on the front of their helmets, e.g. Police had dark blue helmets with a white letter ‘P’ on the front: Air Raid Wardens had a ‘W’ on their grey helmets and the Fire Service an ‘F’ and so on. There wasn’t a single house, including our own, that did not have broken tiles or slates on their roofs, damaged by the falling shrapnel. If a bomb dropped that was fairly close to the house the windows would be blown in and the roof probably damaged as well.

A bit later in the war the enemy aircraft used to scatter 1000’s of 2cm wide strips of black paper with silver foil on one side especially to jam our radar, the length of the strip was determined by the frequency of the Radar that they were trying to jam, it was commonly called Chaff. In the morning the place would be littered with the stuff. It was independently developed by both sides to confuse Radar signal’s; it was officially called ‘Window’ by us and ‘Duppel’ by the Germans.

The nearest bomb we had was an incendiary bomb that came down early in the evening; it landed the other side of our fence, about a metre or so from our back door; it was burning extremely brightly, when Mrs Vale, a near neighbour, came running round rushing past it (a foolish thing to do!) and burst in through the back door. She was so scared she could hardly speak; she had a stammer anyway so as you can imagine it made it considerably worse! Before she could get out what it was she was trying to tell us (what we already knew!) the bomb exploded, as all the later incendiary bombs did. It blew a small square hole in the paling fence and broke a window in the small bedroom. I don’t know why we were not in the shelter at the time but as the war went on we tended to get a bit blasé about air raids at night as they were becoming much less frequent. The ARP wardens had stirrup pumps with a 30ft hose that had to be operated by 2 or 3 people, one to use the hose, and one to pump water from a bucket and one to top up the bucket! Red painted buckets with lids for holding sand or water for dealing with the early incendiary bombs were also available everywhere. The volunteers on ‘Fire watch’ duty patrolled the roofs of factories and other large establishments, ready to deal with any incendiary bombs that fell onto the roof, hoping to extinguish them before a fire got out of hand. The later bombs would explode after burning for a short time: this made dealing with them rather more hazardous! During the war ’Spotters’ on the Henry Hughes & Sons Ltd factory roof would look out for enemy aircraft or V1 Doodle bugs and sound an alarm if any were seen to be heading in the factory direction. Only then would all the employees rush to their nearest shelter!

Roaming around the fields after school one day I found an unexploded incendiary bomb in pristine condition. The magnesium body was bright and clean with red and black lettering. On top was an olive green fin. It had come down and hit the edge of a ploughed furrow so it had failed to go off. I was sorely tempted to pick it up, but with all the dire warnings we were constantly given at school, I left it where it was and told Dad. What a trophy that would have been to add to my collection of military memorabilia; the envy of all the boys! But if I had have brought it home I wouldn’t have been allowed to keep it, that’s for sure.

Early on in the blitz during a night raid a land mine came down less than 100 yards away from us and exploded. It was just a couple of narrow fields away from our house in Grove Lane. It came down by parachute so we didn’t hear it coming. They didn’t always explode on impact, but this one did causing a huge explosion; violently shaking the ground like an earthquake, not surprising when they apparently weighed a tonne. The huge crater it made eventually filled with water and became a pond that I used to put the carp that I had caught when fishing elsewhere into it. It was eventually filled in at the end of the war.

On 19th April 1941 a land mine dropped on to The Prince of Wales public house at the Bald Hind, this resulted in about 35 deaths. A darts match was going on at the time, the actual number killed was not known for sure. Everyone was shocked but I can’t, for some reason, remember it making too much of an impression on me at the time even though the father of Peter Mason, one of our school pupils, was a victim of the tragedy. The understanding of death apparently had very little meaning to me as an eleven year old in 1941!

Cycling past the site a short time later I noticed that the Telephone Exchange on the other side of the road was relatively undamaged – the pub had taken all of the blast. Another came down near Gravel Lane and didn’t explode; the residents in the houses near to it were evacuated. Those that didn’t explode on impact were often defused by a team of Royal Navy or Royal Engineers bomb disposal experts; they were very brave as they never knew when they were likely to explode! On one occasion we heard of a bomb disposal expert who had lost his life trying to defuse an unexploded bomb or a land mine. A British light aircraft, probably a Taylorcraft Auster, crashed in Millers Lane, killing the pilot and an Army Officer I believe. Several boys went to the site collecting souvenirs, one of the boys boasted he had picked up a flying boot with the leg still in it! Our Head-master at school gave us all a very stern lecture over that.

Later in the war I used to watch the USAF Mitchell bombers from their bases in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, flying out in formation over Lambourne End in the mornings to carry out daylight raids on the continent. They suffered appalling loses at first until long range North American Mustang fighters were employed to protect them on their missions.

As dusk fell it was the turn of the Avro Lancaster and the Short Stirling bombers to fly out and continue the continental raids during the night. I watched them flying out in a Southerly direction over Lambourne End flying quite low in formation. When those that had survived the bombing raids returned by the same route, they were always fragmented; usually arriving back singly or in twos or threes. We never knew how many of these aircraft didn’t return from a bombing raid but their losses were quite high! Aircraft crews that survived were rested after a stint of 30 missions! A neighbour’s son, George King, did at least one 30 mission stint flying in Handleypage Halifax bombers. He survived the war but was badly affected by the experience.

After the United States had declared war on Japan and Germany; thousands of GI’s - Sailors, airmen and soldiers, were ferried over in convoys and by the end of the war 1.5 million would be stationed in southern England or would have passed through to fight in Europe. With so many GI’s, with their smart uniforms and lavish life styles attracting the girls, romances were inevitable. The GI’s were paid up to five times what men in the British Army earned, so they were able to lavish their English girlfriends with flowers, chocolate, nylon stockings, and other luxuries that were impossible to get hold by us ‘Brits’ during the War. Although seriously discouraged by the American authorities, 70,000 marriages took place, with the girls following in ships at the end of the war to join their husbands in the United States. Needless to say there was a lot of resentment felt over the GI’s taking ‘our girls’.

The United States entered World War II when their Pacific Naval fleet was attacked and badly damaged or destroyed by a surprise military strike on the U.S Naval base at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii on 7th December 1941; the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service destroyed 20 ships, including 9 Battleships, over 2400 personnel were killed and 1178 were wounded. The US had been criticized for not getting involved at the beginning of the Asian and European conflicts, but until this attack, they had very little reason to get involved. But they had been supplying us with food, including powdered egg and milk, armaments, warships and many other items throughout the conflict. It was called Lend-Lease. In return we gave them our technology, including the jet engine, the magnetron, plastic explosives, the feasibility of an Atom bomb etc. and much more.

In Chigwell Row the Bar family were living in a cottage next to the Blacksmiths; their daughter became a GI bride and joined her husband in the US. Sometime towards the end of the 20th century Peter Maxey, a local man, visited her in the US and she gave him a fragile copy of the booklet that was issued at the dedication of Hainault Forest in 1906. It was gratefully received by me when I was given it! (The Bar family and the other gypsy families had been forcibly removed from the common in 1905!)

When D day (the invasion and liberation of France) started on June 4th 1944, we saw an awful lot of activity by our own and US aircraft; each one had broad black and white stripes painted across and under each wing and around their fuselage. This was done to make them recognisable as friendly Allied aircraft to our troops on the ground thus avoiding the risk of them being accidentally shot down. Apparently it had been a problem in some earlier campaigns.

From where we lived in Grove Lane, we could hear the steam trains working at the Hainault train Depot. The depot had been almost finished ready for the Central Line expansion programme when it had to be halted at the outbreak of war, just before it was quite ready! The United States Army Transportation Corps took over the depot and were stationed there between 1943 and 1945, assembling war-time railway stock. It was the largest and most active railway car assembly plant in the UK with, finally, some 1,200 US army personnel working there. It came through the war almost unscathed but for a V1 doodle bug which destroyed the club house. There were about 20 injuries, but none were too serious; and, amazingly, no one was killed. At home in the mornings, I would often hear the locomotives start up and then there would be a rapid let off of steam. “Chuf… Chuf… Chuf … chu chu chu chu chu chuf. I have learned since this was a ‘no-no’ among skilled train drivers as it meant the wheels were slipping due to a rapid acceleration thereby wearing out the tyres (Rims) on the wheels. I guess the troops were rather impatient! After the war, work was resumed on the Central Line extension, and the Rolling Stock kept in store at Hainault was called back into service; then in December 1947 the Hainault depot was officially opened. As they say, the rest is history!

The raids became fewer and more intermittent as the war went on, probably after Hitler had became preoccupied with his eastern front when he attacked Russia, so we had some respite from those night raids. By 1944 a new menace from the skies occurred – V1’s (Vengeance weapon 1) they were popularly called ‘Buzz bombs’ or ‘doodle bugs’. They were un-manned pulse jet powered flying bombs, packed with 800kg of explosive, and very fast at 393mph. Typhoons and the latest marks of Spitfires were the only fighter aircraft that could catch them and if they did shoot them down they had to take swift evasive action to avoid the possibility of a massive explosion. With the risk of being blown up, some of the best pilots started tipping the V1's wing, but because of damage to their own wing tips, they developed the tactic of disrupting the airflow by placing their wing very close to the V1's wing, this would upset its gyro mechanism and they would crash into the Channel or in Kent; great skill was required by the pilots to do this. The V1’s engine noise was very distinctive, like that of a fast motorcycle of that period, so there wasn’t a problem in hearing them coming. One night I was in bed asleep when I was awakened by the sound of an approaching doodle bug; when it sounded overhead it suddenly plunged down with its engine on full power. It was probably my most frightening experience of the war! It was just so loud; when it hit the ground the noise stopped abruptly and a huge explosion followed, shaking the whole house. I was showered with bits of plaster from the ceiling above my bed; my heart was pounding, phew, that was very close!

As the crow flies it came down less than 300 yards from us exploding very close to the late 19th century Clare Hall; Miss ‘Winnie’ Savill’s residence off Manor Road where dad used to work. She and her brother Eustace and staff were in the house at the time, but amazingly no one was injured, but the house was completely shattered and was left barely standing. With the windows blown out, doors hanging off and the roof largely gone; it looked a sorry sight. It had come down close to an evergreen Holm oak (Quercus ilex)) in Clare Hall’s front garden, close to the Manor Road; the tree survived but for the first time in its life it didn’t have a single leaf left on it! The tree soon recovered but it didn’t survive the developers shortly after the war ended however! Miss Savill and her brother and staff all moved into the empty ‘Sheepcotes’ a Georgian house at the Eastern end of the village. Another V1 Doodle bug came down onto the bungalow in the grounds of Old Farm in Green lane, Chigwell, killing the two occupants Mr & Mrs Harvey who were sheltering under a table. They had previously lived in the Lodge at Clare Hall; Mr Harvey was, I think, the gardener when Dad worked there, so we knew them. Their young daughter* had survived because she had injured herself by falling on to an agricultural harrow and was in hospital at the time; what a terrible shock for her, losing both parents. Mrs Harvey’s sister in Vicarage Lane brought her up, afterwards.

Another time at school we were working on our allotments on the afternoon of July 11th 1944 when a V1 came over. (They didn’t fly very high, at 2,500 - 3,000ft) Our head master told us all to jump in the nearby ditch for safety. As it passed almost overhead its engine cut out, another heart stopping moment, but this one just carried on gliding; we all watched it as it headed in a north westerly direction, gliding over the houses in Meadow Way and out of sight before exploding. Shortly after the explosion we saw a cloud of dust and debris rise up into the air above the roofs of the houses. It had come down and exploded in front of the caretaker’s house at the Buckhurst Hill County High School for boys, injuring the caretaker and his wife. There was some damage to the school but it could have been much worse but for the house taking most of the blast. It was also fortunate that the pupils had broken up for the summer holidays just the day before; otherwise there would have probably been casualties among the pupils as well. Another V1 came down on the west embankment very close to Grange Hill station badly damaging it. Afterwards the station was rebuilt in the more modern style that you see there today. Previously it had been a similar design to the early Edwardian Chigwell Station.

V1 Doodle bugs did one of three things. When the engine cut out they would, either, plunge immediately to the ground and explode, or after the engine cut out, glide a long way before hitting the ground, or come down with the engine on full power. You never knew quite what they would do. They were very effective exploding immediately on impact without causing much of a crater, so a lot of damage was done by the blast.

After D Day as the allies advanced into France and the Low Countries they gradually over-ran the V1 launch sites that were scattered along the French and Belgium coasts; stopping the V1’s from being launched against England but V2’s (Vengeance weapon 2) were taking their place. These were 13 tonne rockets that were fired 60 miles into the air; as they came down they exceeded the speed of sound so you didn’t hear them coming. The first one hit London on the 13th June 1944. At first the authorities said they were gas main explosions!

One fell in Hainault Forest on the wide path that leads up to Cabin plain from the common; it made a very deep crater, you could have easily got a double-decker bus in the hole. I cycled from home to have a look at it. Not many people nowadays know that it is there but it is still visible today as a silted up pond with the wide path deviating around it. Close by, badly damaged Hornbeam pollard trees can be seen, still alive and struggling on.

Twenty-one, V1’s and thirteen, V2’s fell in the Chigwell area. In all 9,521 V1’s were aimed at England, of which, 4621 were destroyed. 2419 reached the London area.When the war was over, Von Braun, the V2 designer, went to the United States to assist with the United States Space Programme.

Like nearly all the boys I was mad about aircraft and could recognise all the aircraft I saw in the skies and of course there were plenty of opportunities during the war years. With a fighter airfield almost on our doorstep at Fairlop, it was all very exciting but try as I might, I could never get anywhere near to it. The RAF Regiment guards posted along the bordering roads would not let me or anyone else stop for a look! Very frustrating for all of us lads! Various squadrons were posted there from time to time including a Polish squadron. Hurricanes, Spitfires and Typhoons and many others flew from there. In the summer of 1944 the airfield became a Balloon Centre operated by the WAAF’s (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) as part of the balloon barrage around London to stop the V1 Doodle bugs. 3% (278) of the V1’s were downed by the steel cables that tethered the balloons; 19 by the Fairlop balloons. Barrage Balloons were a very common sight in the skies through-out the whole of the war, a deterrent to any low flying enemy aircraft. Ilford High Road had been strafed by a low flying enemy fighter aircraft on one occasion earlier in the war.

Model making, aircraft of course, was something most of us boys did as well as fretwork. Our rector at All Saints, the Rev. George Robert Milner, used to hold weekly wood working sessions for us in the attic of the old Victorian Vicarage; the new vicarage had yet to be built. I really liked these wood working and fretwork sessions. Off-cuts of wood we used came from the Hughes factory. Regrettably none of my ‘masterpieces’ have survived.

Everyone was urged to do their bit for the war effort even us boys in the village were roped in to collect salvage. ‘Salvage’ was the waste paper that the Villagers put out to be collected by us in our go-carts on Saturday mornings. We all had go-carts made with the help of our dads using old pram wheels. (Pram wheels were highly sought after!) With my friend Noel King we did a house to house collection from our lanes up to Crosby House; the home of the Hughes’s. Several houses were built on the site after Crosby House was pulled down towards the end of the 20th century; it was named Crosby Court.

Other boys collected elsewhere throughout the village. All the salvage paper collected was bagged up in the stables behind Crosby House with the help of the Hughes’s chauffer come handyman, Joe Wade. It was organised by Mrs Elsie Hughes, wife of Arthur Hughes, the Managing Director of Henry Hughes and Son Ltd, a nautical and aeronautical instrument manufacturer in New North Road, Barkingside. (It became Kelvin Hughes in 1950. and in August 2012 moved to a new factory in Enfield specialising in ships radar.) Arthur Hughes was short in stature but larger than life! Mrs Elsie Hughes was Swedish, but spoke impeccable English; she was a lovely lady, all the boys loved her.

We all had a stern lecture one day when he told us that ships would win the war not aircraft. Hmm! Mrs Hughes would hand out copies of ‘Flight’ and ‘The Aeroplane’ magazines from time to time to us boys; they were always enthusiastically received. After the salvage was bagged up, Mrs Hughes used to give us all a penny each and a thick slice of bread and honey from the bee hives that she kept in her garden. She showed us the hives, how they worked and how the honey combs were removed from the hives using smoke to subdue the bees. After skimming the top off the honey comb cells, the combs were whirled at speed in a hand operated purpose built ‘extractor’ to spin out the honey. She was a keen gardener and a lovely lady and enjoyed telling us all sorts of facts about all sorts of subjects. She told us that the row of buttons down each sailor’s sleeve, were called ‘snotties’, put there to stop the sailors from wiping their noses on their sleeves! Afterwards she would read to us a chapter from a book such as “The Secret Garden”.

The Rector of All Saints church, the Rev. George Robert Milner would usually turn up, no doubt to keep an eye on us all. One day, Terry Dilley from Lambourne End, (Terry always wore heavy hob-nailed boots) had an altercation with the Rector, but I don’t recall what it was all about. The Rector grabbed Terry and trapped Terry’s head between his knees to hold him and then proceeded to give him a good spanking. The sight of Terry jumping up and down on the Rectors feet, crying, and being spanked with his head jammed between the Rectors knees was quite a sight. I think the Rector must have had bruised feet; and Terry a very sore bottom! Noel and I also collected conkers for the war effort; I think we collected a couple of stone (2 x 14lbs) or more, one year. We were lucky because four Horse Chestnut trees arranged in a diamond pattern below the Montfort House extensive garden were only known to us and this gave us a head start. I can’t remember exactly how much we were paid; I think it was a shilling or two (5 or 10p in new money) when we took them to the collection point at Woodlands Farm house opposite the Petrol Garage at the other end of the village. Apparently they were used to make acetone.

Acorns and Rose hips were also collected. I am not sure what the acorns were used for but they may have been used as pig food. They are poisonous to other animals. The Rose hips were used for making Rosehip syrup for infants. Sometime later on it was realised that the high sugar content of Rosehip syrup was causing children’s teeth to decay!

The one thing all us boys were crazy about during the war was seeing and identifying aircraft; and there were plenty of opportunities; everyday they could be seen in the sky. But to see one flying so low that you could indentify the pilot was very unusual but very exciting. (There were not any restrictions on the height aircraft could fly during the war.) Edward Gordon Hughes or Gordon e Hughes as he preferred to be known; was the youngest son of Arthur and Elsie Hughes. He was attached to the RAF Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) throughout the duration of the war. When he had returned from a mission he would fly very low over the Hughes factory at Barkingside, (much to the annoyance of his father as the employees would leave their work and rush outside to see him!) and then fly very low over the family home, Crosby House, to let his mother know he was back safely from a photographic sortie! I would rush outside just in time to see him do his second pass in his unarmed azure blue Spitfire, later he flew an azure blue De-Havilland Mosquito; he was always so low you could easily recognise him in the cockpit! He was a hero to all us boys; we could never get enough of hearing about his exploits from his mother at Crosby House. She was very proud of him.

PRU aircraft operated singly at 21,000ft and were unarmed and without allunessential equipment, carrying only cameras for stereoscopic picture taking. (It is extremely cold at this altitude.) This made them very light in weight and very fast; enemy fighters couldn’t catch them! The first confirmation of the V2 rocket building at Peenemunde came in 1943 when photographs taken by Squadron Leader Gordon Hughes revealed vehicles carrying long cylindrical objects that could not be readily identified at first. Subsequent PRU sorties and the Polish Resistance confirmed these to be rockets (V2’s). Soon after, 600 aircraft of RAF Bomber command targeted thesite at night with follow up daylight raids by the United States Army Air force, ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers. It delayed the launch of the V2 Rockets by many months.

The Hughes family moved from Fenchurch St London into Hainault Hall, Chigwell Row, in 1917 when the Hughes factory opened at Hainault. In 1938 the family moved into the nearby Crosby House. They had two sons, Francis and Gordon and a daughter, Adele. Gordon, the youngest, was a trained pilot in the RAF Volunteer Reserve. When the war started he was called up and made a Pilot Officer in the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) at RAF Benson flying Spitfire’s and Mosquito’s armed only with cameras. He remained in this service throughout the War. He was the most decorated PRU pilot, of the war. He was awarded the; Distinguished Service Order (DSO), Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and bar, Air Efficiency Award (AEA).

When Gordon E. Hughes left the RAF he had risen to the rank of Wing Commander. He died on 10th June 2012 at the age of 94. The Daily Telegraph Newspaper gave him a half page obituary! My first memory of any of the Hughes family was in about 1937. Gordon Hughes had driven down our road, Grove Lane, in a small car, I think it was an Austin Seven, and on his way back, he had somehow managed to end up in the ditch; he always drove very fast! Several of the men from the cottages including my Dad went to help him lift the car back onto the road. I wanted to go with dad but he wouldn’t let me! Shame!

Chigwell Row School Infants Class 1935/6

Back row; Stella Hoare, Terry Dilley, Norman Faux, James Threader?, ??

Middle row; Winnie Smith, June Darken, Pansy Hartwell, ??, Rita Boxall.

Front row; Peter Comber, Noel King, Robert ‘Robin’ Everett.

STARTING SCHOOL

The ‘National’ Board school was built in 1885, replacing an earlier Congregational school. A Church of England infant school built earlier near the crossroads, opened in 1853 but it closed when the National Board school was opened in 1885, so it was used for parochial purposes – Sunday school, Public library and Village Hall. Chigwell Row Operatic & Amateur Dramatic Society (CROADS) used to perform their ‘Productions’ there before moving to the new Victory Hall at Chigwell. Known as All Saints Schoolroom it had to be demolished when found to be riddled with dry rot. The church authorities then found to their dismay that a new one couldn’t be built on the site because they had only been given the land for just that building! Two houses are on the site now.

Our lives are made up of a series of events that make major changes to our way of life. Starting school, accompanied by my mother on the first day, was the first to happen for me, although I can’t actually remember very much about the day I actually started at Chigwell Row School. On entering the school you immediately went into the cloakroom where there were a lot of coat hooks on several rows of racks where the pupils hung there outdoor clothing. The reception class was held at one end of a huge cathedral like room with another class being held at the far end. When I went back there 70 odd years later I couldn’t believe how small the room actually was, it was considerably smaller than I had remembered it when I went there in 1935 at the age of five!

The school was 50 years old when I started there after the Easter holidays in 1935; a couple of months before my fifth birthday. The class I joined had seven boys and six girls; I think we all started on the same day. Four of the boys became good friends and one was my best man in 1955. One of the girls had the delightful name of Pansy Hartwell. I rather liked Pansy as she was quiet and very bright; even at the age of five it seems that boys can be attracted to the opposite sex! I have never seen or heard anything of her since leaving that school. Boys stayed there until they were eight years old before moving on and the Girls stayed until they were fourteen when they left to start work!

I do remember in the first few days of starting we had a tray of sand and had to copy the alphabet letters from the blackboard or maybe it was from the large letters displayed around two sides of the classroom; copying them in the sand with our fingers before graduating to pencil and paper. We also had to learn our times tables up to 12 times! The alphabet also had to be learned off by heart, parrot fashion and the sounds the letters make (Phonetics!) from the wall as well. Interestingly, the letter Q was followed by a U; even now I hesitate when I get to Q. It just shows that those early days of schooling are very important and can make a lasting impression on you, remembering them for the rest of your life.

Right from the first day I went to school, I had free milk and that continued for all of the time I was at school; it was delivered every day by the milkman, in crates full of 1/3 pint bottles of milk, The bottles were sealed with cardboard tops with a central portion that was pushed in to open a hole for a straw to be inserted. At first ‘straws’ were actually straw, although later they were made of waxed paper that soon went flat, making them more or less useless for drinking through. Genuine ‘straws’ lasted much longer!

Boys and Girls toilets were situated outside at the far end of the playground; you got rather wet if it was raining. At the back of the school was a covered area, open along one side that we could play in if the weather was bad. Three or four wash basins with cold water taps were at one end. Mr Sykes the Caretaker, his wife and two boys lived in the house attached to the end of the school. (It has now been the school office for many years!) When the school was first built in 1885 it would have been living accommodation for the head teacher!

I wrote a letter to Father Christmas, probably Christmas 1936, and had a reply from him. (Sometime later I learned it was an uncle; Uncle Dave, who had written it. What a let down!) Miss Keckwick, my first teacher, must have been quietly amused, but she took it all seriously and read it to the whole class. I stayed in Miss Keckwick’s class for a couple of years before going up a class at the other end of that big room, where I had a Welsh teacher, Miss Lloyd, who was a bit strict. The Head mistress Mrs Johnson was a teacher we respected and feared in equal measure, but she only taught the top girls classes. Her daughter Issidy, who had frizzy hair, was in her class.

Whilst I was at that school several Royal events took place. Shortly after I had started school in 1935, it was the Silver Jubilee of George V and Queen Mary; eight months later on 20th January 1936 the King died, when all the children received a picture of the King edged in black. Edward his eldest son, succeeded him to the throne to become Edward the Eighth, but he abdicated on 10th December to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. This put the second son Albert on the throne; his coronation taking place in 1937 when he was crowned as King George VI with his wife Queen Elizabeth. I vaguely remember everyone talking about these extraordinary events with a lot of sympathy being expressed for Edward, although I was just too young to understand it all.

It was felt that he would have made a good King after his many visits to areas of high unemployment during the economic depression of the early 1930’s. It made Edward very popular with the working classes. In 1937 Edward and Wallis Simpson met Adolf Hitler and it was suspected that their sympathies lay in that direction. He was given the title of The Duke of Windsor and a job as Governor of the Bahamas for the duration of the war; perhaps this was done to keep him away from Europe! After the end of the war he was exiled and spent the rest of his life with his American wife, living in Paris.

At each of these Royal events all the school children received a commemorative gift; a fountain pen with a small picture of the couple in the top, and a mug with a picture of King and Queen on it, although I can’t remember now what item was given for which event. Regrettably only one of my commemorative items has survived, the ‘In Memoriam’ picture of King George V edged in black.

Armistice Day, commemorating the end of the First World War was remembered at school every year on 11th November at 11 o’clock. We all had to stand in silence for two minutes and listen for the gun salute that, I think, came from Woolwich. You would never be able to hear those guns today with all the traffic noise around! It must have been unbelievably quiet in those days; at least it was until the Second World War air raids started.

At this time the three serious potentially fatal childhood diseases were, Diphtheria, Scarlet Fever and Tuberculosis or Consumption as it was called in those days; it was a big concern among parents when I was young. Scarlet fever mostly affected children between 4 and 8 years old. In 1940 immunisation was available for Diphtheria and Parents were urged to have their children immunised. Dad didn’t believe in it so my sister and I were never immunised. We were lucky, we didn’t catch any of these; but we both had all the other usual childhood diseases like measles, mumps and chicken pox etc. I used to suffer from tonsillitis quite often until I eventually had my tonsils removed at the age of 16. It was actually on my 16th birthday on 21st June 1946 that I had both my tonsils and adenoids removed in a wartime hospital annex at Brentwood. Getting there was a bit of a long journey; we had to get the 25A bus to Ilford to catch the steam train to Brentwood Station, and then walk the mile or so to get to the hospital. It wouldn’t have been too much of a problem though, as we were quite used to walking everywhere; it just took a long time to get there.

The hospital was a collection of temporary single story buildings put up early in the war. I didn’t know my adenoids were going to be removed as well as my tonsils until the doctor told me afterwards that they had been removed. His actual phrase was that, “I also had some adenoids as well”. ‘Had’ being the operative word! (No pun intended.) I left hospital after a week and as expected, my ‘sore’ throat healed within a few weeks, but it was very painful swallowing for a while after it had been done.

Another event occurred when I was six; I split a shin bone by falling over when helping my parents in the garden; we were lifting the spring bulbs that had finished flowering. Our doctor, Dr Ellis, came from his Practise in Abridge, after examining my leg he ordered me to be taken to King George Hospital at Newbury Park. Mum had to get me to Grange Hill Station, most likely on the 25A bus, and then on a steam train for the four stations to Newbury Park followed by a short walk for Mum (I was almost certainly carried) to the hospital.(Note: A much larger King George Hospital was built in the grounds of the Barley Lane Psychiatric Hospital at Goodmayes, when the Newbury Park Hospital closed.

After being X-rayed the radiographer showed me the 6” split in my shin bone, clearly visible on the X-ray plate. I was then plastered from above the knee down to and including the foot with an iron hoop underneath to enable me to walk! For six weeks I had to endure this fixed ‘stiff’ leg, but I still managed to get around pretty well. Getting to school, a mile away, was by means of a pushchair, pushed every day by my friend Noel’s sister, Phyllis from the next lane, and she was only six months older than I was! Having the plaster removed was absolute agony; they pulled all the hairs off my leg removing the plaster!

All the children walked to school as there wasn’t any other means of getting there, I don’t think there was anyone who owned a car, unlike today. It was exactly one mile from my house to the school. Nowadays children living not more than 200 yards from the school get taken by car! No wonder childhood obesity is becoming a problem.

At the beginning of the summer holidays in 1938 I left Chigwell Row School and started in September at the Council School for Boys at Chigwell as an eight year old. By the time I had started at this school I had graduated to using pen and ink. A pen with a detachable nib and ink in an inkwell! As you can imagine it tended to be a messy business at times with blots appearing on books and inky hands. The use of disposable ballpoint pens or ‘Biros’, as they were called, were not commonly available until after I had left school. Using Biros must have revolutionised school writing; there would certainly have been much cleaner books.

Starting another school was perhaps another big event in my life, again I don’t actually remember the first day that I started there either; it was with several of my friends from Chigwell Row. One of our first teachers was a rather thin Mrs Priest, later it was a man, Mr Hall, and very strict he was too. I also think he was a bit of a sadist; he would use the cane on the slightest pretext. He was the only teacher I ever had that used the cane other than the Headmaster. I came very close to it on one occasion. During the lunch hour we could get through the perimeter fence and roam the fields beyond, this particular day I and a couple of others were late back in class; out came that cane just as Mr Boyden the Headmaster appeared, he told us not to let it happen again and to go and sit down. Saved by the head! It may have been just luck that he appeared at that moment or perhaps he had seen us arriving late and knew what might happen, I just don’t know. Mr Boyden had a saying that he had read on a tomb stone of a university lecturer; “He was a beast – a just beast.” He said he aspired to live up to that! After the war had started, he had to contend with many changes of staff, when the younger male teachers were called up to serve in the forces. They were largely replaced by older women teachers.

Soon after I started at this school Dad brought home a pair of riding breeches, jodhpurs I presume. My parents thought they would keep me warm in the winter. I was made to put them on – just the once but in no way was I going to wear those to school, not at any price and I never did, I would have been a laughing stock that’s for sure.

Later we had a lovely teacher; she was older and very keen on Natural History which suited me with my interest in wildlife. I can’t recall who found it but a passage from Kings II in the Bible got us boys going. It read something like “Eat thy own dung and drink thy own piss etc”, I was dared to ask ‘Miss’ what it meant. (As if we didn’t know!) So I asked her. She said she would tell us later but she never did, but I just didn’t have the courage to ask her a second time. How she would have explained it I have no idea, and she probably didn’t either. I have always felt a bit mean asking her that. Boys will be boys!

A year after I started at Chigwell boy’s school, war was declared on 3rd September 1939, right at the end of the summer holidays! Not long afterwards, reinforced brick built shelters were erected near the top of the playground for the whole school to use if we had air raids in school time.

Before I had started cycling to school, the sirens had sounded their air raid alert early one afternoon but there wasn’t any activity at all, no aircraft or gunfire there was nothing; just an eerie silence, but the sirens did not sound the ‘all clear’ throughout all the afternoon. So the headmaster decided to take the boys who lived at Chigwell Row part of the way home in his Hillman Minx car rather than letting them walk all of the way home. In the first run he dropped three of us off at the end of Vicarage Lane to continue the rest of our journey home on foot as quickly as possible. His second run was to the cross roads at Chigwell Row with boys who lived at that end of the village. The three of us dawdled on the way and hadn’t got very far when he passed us on his second run. To say he was displeased was an understatement; he was furious with us the next day at school and read us the riot act. He had used his precious petrol ration and we had let him down. His use of a car was considered essential so he got petrol coupons; but not for running boys home! I remember him telling us he had purchased a hundred-weight of sugar just before it was rationed; quite how he stored it I have no idea.

We always took a packed lunch to school as school dinners were not available until much later, around 1942 I think it was; before, lunch was eaten in the classroom on the desks. The cloth that was supplied had to be put on the desk before we were allowed to start our lunch. That cloth smelt awful, I don’t think they were ever washed properly, if they were washed at all! In the winter we were allowed to bring in a large potato to bake in the school’s coke fired boiler. The boiler was housed in its own small room below and at the side of the school, it supplied the hot water to the cast iron radiators that heated the school’s class rooms. After carving our initials on the potatoes we would put them in the front of the boiler fire box at playtime. By lunchtime they would be baked, and sometimes over-baked! Mum used to send me with a small cube of ‘Stork’ margarine to put on my potato.

At the beginning of the war, we were bombarded at school with messages and posters warning us about the perils of picking up strange objects. It was feared personnel bombs would be scattered across Britain, and if disturbed would explode. We not only had that, but Army manoeuvres occasionally left live ammunition around. Gas mask drill was practised regularly as it was feared that gas might be used as it had been at the front in France during the First World War.

Not long after we were told that we would be evacuated to the country. Those who wanted to go had their names taken, including mine, but in the event Chigwell, somewhat surprisingly, wasn’t considered a sufficiently dangerous place from air raids for us to be evacuated. So I spent the whole of the war at home in Chigwell Row. Picking up strange objects was brought home vividly to us when a boy named Turner, (I can’t remember his Christian name!) who was living over the stables at Forest House, picked up an army Mills bomb and tried to open it in his fathers vice. It exploded and he ended up in hospital for several months. He had very little sight left, and wore incredibly thick glasses. He had lost several fingers and the rest of him was deeply scarred including his legs. I don’t know what happened to him because he wasn’t at school for very long after that. He may well have found it too difficult to cope with his severely damaged eyesight.

Early in the war there was also a succession of posters urging people to save and buy special Saving Certificates to help the war effort. The Headmaster told us to ask our rich friends to buy them. So my friend Noel and I decided to ask Miss Savill who lived at Clare Hall; plucking up courage we went to the front door and she actually answered it, so we told her why we had come. After we had spoken to her she rang the Headmaster to ask him what it was all about. The next day at school, he plainly wasn’t very happy with us and gave us a very stern lecture. He must have been more than a bit embarrassed when she rang! Well, I always felt it was his fault anyway, for urging us to ask our rich friends - but I wouldn’t dare tell him so. I don’t think he would have taken very kindly to that!

Another thing that occurred in the winter when it was freezing was a slide across the play-ground. Our headmaster, Mr Boyden lived in the school house and when it was below freezing at night he would throw a few buckets of water down across the playground at intervals so that it would freeze. He would do this several times during the evening so that when we came in the following day there was a ready made ice slide, diagonally across the playground, for us boys to use. It was lucky the playground sloped across the opposite corners. What now ‘elf and safety’!

When I first went to school at Chigwell I used to walk; a distance of almost 1½ miles along the roads. My friends who lived further into the village had to go a bit further to get to school, well over 2 miles in some cases. Sometimes, on fine days, Mum would come to meet me along Vicarage Lane. On one occasion I took a slight detour through the bushes that grew by the roadside and came face to face with a tramp, he looked quite frightening dressed in a dirty tatty bundle of clothes tied up with string around his waist and with his unwashed, uncut hair and whiskers. I quickly retraced my steps as he called out, “It’s alright” but one sight of him was enough for me! Mum asked me what was the matter and I told her, but not surprisingly, she didn’t make much comment.

In the fine weather, and if the ground was firm, I used to walk across the fields to school cutting a good half a mile off the road distance. It was much more pleasurable and fun as well, I could even do a spot of bird nesting on the way home! In the fields Norman and I went pea picking on one or two occasions; we were let off early from school especially, where we joined some of the local women pea picking. We had to pick a stone (14lbs) of peas in the bags supplied, and get paid a shilling or two, I don’t remember how much exactly. So Norman and I joined in and earned ourselves some useful pocket money. The pea plants had to be pulled up and all the pods picked off and bagged. Some unscrupulous pickers used to put stones in the bags to increase the weight. If this was suspected by the farmhand he would tip the lot out so they would then have to pick them all up. I think he had an idea that there might be stones in the bag by how full the bag looked.

One year, in a field near the school, there were enormous cabbages growing; I have never seen such large cabbages! What they did with them I have no idea; they would have not been suitable for selling to the public. The field had been heavily manured, so as a bonus a lot of field mushrooms popped up between the cabbages, which I gratefully picked. The problem was I didn’t have anything to put them in so I used my handkerchief; if only I had a basket or something similar I could have picked pounds!

Gradually all the boys from Chigwell Row got bicycles, this made getting to school a lot easier and certainly quicker. At first I used to go with my friend, Noel, in Chapel Lane. When I would call for him he would still be eating his breakfast, much to my annoyance, particularly as I had started to get a reputation for always being late for school!

When we all got bicycles, we would all meet up and cycle in line astern; we would hurtle down the hill in Vicarage Lane to the ‘Z’ bend and fly round the tight left hand blind bend and then a right hander and onwards. As the War was on there was hardly any traffic to speak of especially as you could only get petrol coupons if you were working in an essential service. There were not many cars anyway, which was just as well! One of the last to get a bike was Billy Smith. Billy had a twin sister Joyce and they lived at the Retreat Pub, his dad, who was also a twin, was the publican. Billy joined our convoy and blindly followed us until he got to that sharp left hand bend; but he couldn’t make it and carried straight on into the hedge on the opposite side of the road. Further on we realised we had lost him so we cycled back and there was Billie’s bike, still upright, stuck in the hedge but where was Billy? He had sailed over the top of the hedge into the field beyond which for him was unfortunate as the field was several feet lower than the road. Luckily he was only shaken and a bit bruised but otherwise unhurt. I don’t think his bike was quite so lucky! Another accident occurred when we were trying to hitch a ride on the back of a slow moving lorry. Something we all liked to do, if given half a chance. Noel King was ahead of the pack but he rode into the back of the vehicle and came of his bike in Vicarage Lane, knocking himself unconscious. The lorry stopped and the driver got out but I don’t recall the outcome of this escapade but Noel was OK.

Another incident with bikes occurred at the top of the hill above the brook in Vicarage Lane. There was a partly used Haystack in the field at the top, simply inviting us to climb it. Boy’s minds are programmed to quickly spot an opportunity like this when they see one! About seven or eight of us dropped our bikes by the side of the road and made a beeline for that stack. One after the other we climbed to the top of the stack before sliding down to the bottom; it was huge fun. Because it was partly used it was easy to climb! After a few go’s, someone decided to go down head first, and I followed, a big, big mistake; when I hit the bottom, my legs went back over my head bending my spine in a direction it didn’t want to go! It knocked me for six and I was completely winded. It took several minutes of gasping for breath before I could inflate my lungs properly, but my back was very painful. That was the end of my haystack fun! (I have had a problem with my back ever since!) Call it luck but shortly after that a small van from Limes Farm came hurtling down Vicarage Lane and screeched to halt. The driver leapt out and shouted at the boys before grabbing up all their bikes and bundling them into the back of his van. I retrieved my bike and fled, as I was just a spectator at the time! Ha Ha. The woman living in the house opposite had telephoned Limes Farm! What happened to their bikes I am not too sure, but I think the driver drove off with them and probably dropped them off much further down the road out of sight? The boys would then have had to leave the scene not knowing when or if they would be united with their bicycles ever again! The thought of having to tell their parents what had happened to their bikes would have appalled them; but I doubt whether they would have got much sympathy.

In 1941 at the age of eleven I was selected, with a few other boys, to sit an exam at the Buckhurst County High School for boys. To get there I had to cycle a distance of about two miles or so. I can’t actually remember much about sitting the exam, but I was expected to pass, but I didn’t, I failed, much to everyone’s surprise. If I had have passed I would have gone to the Buckhurst Hill County High school for Boys and continued my education for another five years. As it was, my education continued at Chigwell Council School for Boys for just another three years. Déjà vu.

The Oxford and Cambridge boat race was always a big event among the boys at school. Everyone showed their support by wearing a light or dark blue celluloid fancy badge. Most boys wore light blue, as Cambridge had been winning for several years previously. I always supported the underdogs, the dark blues – Oxford.

Coming home, one day, from school on the last day of term before Easter, I got ‘bombed’. I was cycling on my own and came out of Vicarage Lane and as I went under a Rook colony in the tall elms that used to be there, one scored a direct hit on the peak of my cap splattering my face with bird pooh. Ahrrrr. I bet that Rook bragged about his direct hit to all his mates! Wherever several tall trees, nearly always Elm, were growing together along the highways, there would invariably be a Rook colony in them, especially if it was close to human habitation.

Within a short while of returning to school after the summer holidays in September, it was the start of the ‘conker’ season. For a few mad weeks the playtimes were taken up with playing ‘conkers’. The object was to smash your opponent’s conker on its string with your conker. If you did this your conker became a ‘oncer’. If your opponent’s conker was already a victor its score was added to your conker and so on. It was all very competitive with its own language – ‘vinegar dip’, when the conkers were soaked in vinegar; ‘Lardies’, last years conkers and ‘Bakers’, conkers that had been dried in the oven; all these tricks were done to harden them. ‘Strings’ is when the two strings become entwined when you missed when playing. The first one to shout, ‘strings’, had an extra turn. It was one of the highlights of our school year! To think some schools have actually banned playing conkers; utter madness. ‘Elf’ and safety again! What is the country coming to?

A nurse used to visit the school and examine each child looking for nits. I don’t remember ever having nits but some children must have had them. She also looked for signs of malnourishment with some children being prescribed a daily dose of cod liver oil and malt. I tasted it once, it was foul. Parishes food was also prescribed, a vitamin and iron supplement I believe. It was much more palatable but I never had to have either of these, it always seemed to be the same children that had them prescribed.

A dentist would come every year and set up his dental surgery in the building that had been the workshop for carpentry. Wood working was suspended at the start of the war. (Eventually the building was used as the school canteen.) All the children had to have their teeth examined and any remedial treatment was carried out there and then. I had a tooth extracted once, and was ‘put out’ with gas; a mask was placed over my face and I was asked to count to ten. By the time I got to five that was it. I was gone! When I was woken up it was all over. I think I would know the sickly smell of that gas even now! I believe it was Nitrous oxide, or Laughing gas as it was commonly known!

School dinners were available from about 1942. They were cooked and served in the separate building that was once the workshop for the older boys to learn wood-work etc. The war had put a stop to all that so there was a ready made empty building that was available for conversion into the school canteen. The cook was a very large lady, Mrs Pearce, whose husband was in the National Fire Service at Chigwell along with my father, so I knew her. This proved to be very useful because any pudding that was left over was randomly distributed to the boys that she selected. I was always selected for those second helpings, much to the annoyance of some of the older boys; there was one who used to call me names; he was a bit of a bully anyway, but I didn’t mind. I always got that second helping!

Our Headmaster, Charles Lesley Boyden, had a serious hobby, Gardening. He used to show flowers, especially Dahlias and Agapanthus along with vegetables including giant onions, at the Chigwell Horticultural Show. His ambition was to beat the entries from the big houses in Chigwell who nearly all employed professional gardeners. I would have expected he probably did eventually.

We were all urged to grow our own vegetables, when the slogan was ‘Dig for Victory’ during the War years. The Head master made sure that from the age of 11 all the boys would each have an allotment on the Vicarage Lane Allotment Site. It was greeted with either joy or dismay depending on your enthusiasm. I think it was dismay for most!

I looked on it as a challenge as my Dad had always had an allotment. My friend Norman didn’t mind either and was probably looking forward to it. For the last 3 years of our schooling; we had allotments; each year the plots were a bit larger than the one we had the previous year. We were taught all the fundamentals of growing and crop rotation; it was a very thorough training. From double digging a third of the plot and adding manure, to liming a third for brassicas and leaving a third for growing root crops. We had to plan it out on paper and work out the planting distances etc. which gave us a valuable lesson in practical mathematics. We grew peas, beans, cabbages, carrots, beet, parsnips, turnips, onions and salad crops. 4 Tomatoes and 4 potatoes for each of us were grown in the beds in the school grounds. On the allotment one day I tried to pull up a carrot to eat but the top broke off and I said “Oh bugger” unbeknown to me the Head was standing watching me. But he just went “Tch Tch” and walked away. Phew!

It was all very competitive too; the individual plots were independently judged and prizes were awarded. In the first year, 11 to 12 year olds, I came second to my friend Norman, though neither of us won anything in the second year. Wire-worm was the cause; they ate the roots off nearly everything we grew ruining a lot of our crops. Cultivating fresh ground that had previously been rough grass was the problem. In the final year, for 13 to 14 year olds, our positions were reversed; I came out as overall champion with Norman taking second place. Our reward was Savings stamps. Stamps could also be purchased and stuck on a card until you had enough to get a Savings Certificate, thus helping to pay for the war effort. (Lend to Defend) In that last year we were encouraged to enter a collection of vegetables in the Chigwell Horticultural Societies Annual Show and I managed to win that as well. Because Dad had his allotment the produce I grew wasn’t always needed so I use to sell it to the neighbours. I remember selling ‘Webbs Wonderful’ lettuces for 3d each, (Just over 1p.) to our neighbours in the cottages. We were all doing our bit for the War effort by Digging for Victory!

For a couple of terms we were taught swimming at Leytonstone Swimming Baths. The class had to walk about a mile from the school to Chigwell Station, and catch the steam train to Leytonstone then walk the length of Leytonstone High Road to get to the baths. After swimming we did this in reverse for the return journey. And who took these classes? Why the Headmaster of course.

It is amazing to think that the Headmaster not only had two classes of his own, but he organised the allotment growing and the school football teams and generally ran the school, all without an office or a secretary or any other non - teaching staff for that matter. It would not be possible nowadays! He had two mannerisms which amused us boys immensely, if something went missing or was mislaid, he would always say, ”There it was – gone” The other was when he was deliberating on something or other, he would start with,“I feel myself……….” This caused much amusement among us boys. I don’t think he ever realised quite what he was saying. But we did!

The war was on for nearly all of the time I was at this school, so the head had to contend with frequent changes of teaching staff as well. At the beginning of the war two or three Masters were called up to serve in the forces. They were replaced by women teachers. How things have changed!

While I did quite well in most subjects, especially art, I was totally useless at sport. Sport was something I would never be any good at, much to my chagrin. (Strangely I like watching sport; snooker, darts, golf, football, rugby, athletics, F1 motor racing, in fact any competitive sport you care to name, but especially cricket!) Our headmaster was very keen on football so most of our Physical Training was with a football! We even had five a side teams that played one another. The older boys would adopt a professional team name and take it in turns to pick a pupil for their team. I was always one of the last to be chosen; now there’s a surprise! On the two or three occasions that I did get picked to play in the school team, it was always for the goal keeper’s position. That is where you always ended up in the team if you were useless at playing football – in goal! I only remember playing once, in goal of course, in an away match against Abridge on their school football pitch. It can be very lonely in goal, particularly as I only had to make one save, thank goodness; we won the match, 7- 0, I think it was. The team always did very well playing other schools in the area. In fact I can’t remember them ever losing a match. One annual event was the match against Chigwell Grammar School – a private school. It was never a contest, we always thrashed them; one year we won 19 – 2. (And I wasn’t even in goal!)

Sunday school was held in the ‘schoolroom’ near the cross roads at Chigwell Row, I always had to attend every Sunday afternoon and take my little sister. There were three or four classes based on age, I was in the top group and my sister aged about five, was in the first group. On one occasion, when the closing prayers were being said, my little sister standing with her eyes tightly closed and hands clasped together in prayer, suddenly opened her legs and wetted a large puddle on the floor. She didn’t flinch and carried on as if nothing had happened - her eyes closed and her hands still clasped together! I was horrified and embarrassed as any 12 year old would be. In fact I was quite disgusted at the time, but looking back on it now, it must have been quite funny! Like most boys I got fed up with going to Sunday school, so one Sunday I decided to play truant. That was the longest hour or so of my life, not knowing what to do with myself. I never got found out but I only bothered to try it the once.

When the schoolroom had to be pulled down in the 1960’s due to irreparable decay, it was discovered the land it had been built on did not actually belong to the church. The land had only been given for that particular building! It meant that the church could not erect another building on the site. Two houses are there now.

Later on at the age of 14 we older boys went to our local church, All Saints, on Sunday afternoons for Bible and confirmation classes, where the Rector, the Rev. George Robert Milner, was played up something awful particularly by one of the boys. After attending the confirmation classes for many weeks I was confirmed on April 18th 1945 by the Bishop of Barking, James Theodore Inskip. All the boys from the confirmation class and the Rector had to cycle all the way to St Johns Church, Loughton to be confirmed. Chigwell Lane was still a very narrow country lane then and the Debden estate had not been built. In 1930 or 31, I had been christened by Canon Thompson at All Saints Church, Chigwell Row.

At the end of the 1944 summer term, at the age of just 14, I left school for the last time and so another chapter in my life had ended and another about to begin – work and that was to last for over 52 years! The following year after I had left school the leaving age was raised to 15 when the ‘1944 Education Act’ came into force.

Before starting work I had to go to the Labour Exchange to register. This turned out to be a bit of a trauma in more ways than one. I cycled first to the Labour Exchange that was situated at the end of New North Road just a couple of hundred yards from the factory where I was going to work as an apprentice. There they told me they couldn’t register me and that I had to go to the Labour Exchange in Buckhurst Hill or Loughton, I don’t remember which. When I got to Buckhurst Hill (or Loughton) they said they could not register me and I had to go back to the New North Road labour exchange! I could see me going back and forth ad infinitum! I can’t remember how it was resolved back at the New North Road Labour Exchange but it was a hassle I could have certainly done without. It had given me an early introduction into the bureaucratic world of officialdom!

Another revelation for me was seeing my name on my birth certificate for the very first time. I had always been called Peter and always thought that my name was Peter Leonard Comber (PLC); so you can imagine my surprise when I saw that I had been christened Leonard Peter. (LPC) I suppose calling me Leonard would have caused some confusion with my Dad who was also a Leonard. It has always caused me some problems as socially, my family and friends know me as Peter, PLC, but on official documents I have to be Leonard, LPC. (PLC sounds a lot better!) Why I wasn’t christened Peter Leonard in the first place I’ll never know; only my parents could have answered that but I never asked. I expect they would not have had much of an answer anyway!

So it was that on 9th August 1944 at the age of 14, I started work as an apprentice in the Electronic Drawing Office of Henry Hughes & Son Ltd, in New North Road, Barkingside. (Hainault) - a local factory completed in 1917 making Marine and Aviation navigational instruments. The war was still on with V1 Doodle bugs (flying bombs) and V2 rockets still active. The D-day invasion of Europe by Allied troops, (code named ‘Overlord’) on June 6th was only just a couple of months old. It was the beginning of the end of the war!

Observers were posted on the roof of the Hughes factory. If a V1 Flying bomb was seen heading towards the factory a hooter would be sounded and everyone would be expected to rush into one of the many air-raid shelters around the factory site.

Getting to work was easy for me by bicycle, as it was just a couple of miles or so to the factory in New North Road just past Hainault Station. For the first couple of years or so, half of New North Road was still a narrow country lane with a small farm on either side; but it was quickly absorbed into the Hainault Housing Estate that was being built shortly after the war ended, primarily to house bombed out Londoners from the East End. Prefabs had been put up late in the war opposite the Fire station in New North Road; they were there for many years well after their expected life span before they were eventually taken down and replaced by permanent housing.

My starting wage at Henry Hughes & Son Ltd was just eighteen shillings and nine pence – 18/9, or 94p in today’s money, for working a 44 hour week; half day Saturday working was still part of the working week! I was made to save 6/3 (31p in decimal money.) and to give my mother 6/3 for my keep and I was allowed to keep 6/3 to spend as I wanted. All good sound advice, it is a pity it isn’t still practised as nowadays it is all too easy for people to get into debt. I was brought up that if you couldn’t afford to pay for it you didn’t buy it; as simple as that. Anyway there were no such things as Credit cards or any form of credit at that time, at least not for working class people! You could obtain loans against pawning jewellery etc at a Pawn-broker’s at Ilford but my parents would never consider using such a place. They didn’t have much jewellery of value anyway.

Nine months after I started work, the war with Germany came to an end on 8th May 1945, shortly after Adolf Hitler* and his wife Eva Braun had committed suicide on April 30th 1945. Admiral Doenitz** had succeeded Hitler when Germany surrendered.

At 3.0 pm on the 8th May, Winston Churchill officially announced the surrender of Germany - VE day; Victory in Europe. I can’t actually remember Winston Churchill’s announcement of Germany’s unconditional surrender, but the country went wild with joy when it was announced, especially in the towns and cities. The radio reported on the celebrations that were going on throughout the country and it was shown on all the cinema newsreels and the newspapers were full of photographs of the celebrating crowds. Nothing quite like that happened in Chigwell Row but all the children of the village aged 15 and under went to a VE celebration party held outdoors in front of the Retreat Public House. I just scraped in - by a month!

Food rationing was still in operation, in fact it lasted another nine years; it was 1954 before it finally came to an end! Sweet rationing was one of the first to end but there was such a demand that supplies quickly ran out so rationing had to be reintroduced for a little while longer!

The War in the Far East continued for another four months, before Japan surrendered a few weeks after atom bombs had been dropped on two Japanese Cities. The United States President, Harry S. Truman gave the order to use the atom bomb. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on the 6th August 1945 by the Boeing B29 Superfortress, ‘Enola Gay’. Three days later another atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The two cities were completely annihilated, it was total devastation, nothing was left standing. The total number of lives lost in both cities was over 200,000 with many thousands more severely burned or injured through radiation. If necessary Tokyo would have been the next city that would have been atom bombed had the Japanese not surrendered after that second atom bomb! The Japanese had threatened to kill all the prisoners of war that they held if allied or US troops ever set foot on Japanese soil. The atom bombs had achieved their purpose by bringing the war to a rapid conclusion; Japan surrendered on 2nd September 1945! The loss of life in those two cities was horrendous, but there is no doubt that it saved the lives of a great number of Allied and Japanese troops and shortened the war by many months or perhaps even a few years!

At last the World was at Peace and we all could finally breathe a sigh of relief. At least there was peace in the World for a short while!

* Born in Austria in 1889, Adolf Hitler rose to power in German politics as leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, better known as the Nazi Party. He was German Chancellor from 1933 to 1945, and was a dictator from 1934 to 1945. As leader of the Third Reich his invasion of Poland precipitated World War II. He orchestrated the Holocaust, which resulted in the death of six million Jews! Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide on April 30th 1945 in his bunker in Berlin as Russian troops had advanced to the outskirts of Berlin. Sometime after there was a rumour that Hitler had fled to South America which seems unlikely.

** Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz (1891-1980) Commander of the U-boat fleet and Supreme Naval Commander became Hitler's successor in the last few days of the Third Reich when Germany surrendered to the allies.

Many thanks to Peter Comber for sharing his story.