Kitty Butland’s little boy

At first …

In the summer of 1955 I was getting ready to move up to Grammar School. My mother called me into the kitchen and told me to sit down. “There is something you must know. Your father drowned himself in the river. I want you to know this before you go to school in case someone else tells you”.

I was delighted. When my best friend Bash Lear came round that afternoon “I’ll show you where my father drowned himself” and took him to a local stream. It was quite the wrong place, but was as good as any other and conveniently near the house.

No one had ever said anything about my father. My mother had taken me to his grave each year to lay some flowers. She would tell me to go off and get some water while she waited. The grave had been kept tidy by the town grave digger, Bertha, for which my mother was very grateful. The date on the grave was January 1944. I was 6 months old when he died.

It never occurred to me that this must have been a very sad journey for her or wonder what she did while I went for the water. It was just something we did each year. I still remember the scent of roses in the gardens of the houses we passed. We went past the maternity hospital where I had not been born as it used to be the Work House. Instead I was born in Crediton as my Aunt Doll was a District Nurse and lived near there. And it was better than being born in the Work House. Later on I found a letter from my father to my mother saying he hoped to be able to get up on a milk lorry to see her. Totnes then had both a milk factory and a bacon factory. Lorries would go from the milk factory each day to farms all over South Devon to pick up huge churns of milk. If you got to know a driver he would take you with him.

I had never missed my father any more than I missed the sister that my mother had wanted. She had spoken of my imaginary sister more than my absent father. No one ever referred to him, except once my favourite Aunt Doll said “Your father was a lovely man”. She could not have said anything better. He was youngest of 11 children and had looked after his own mother until she died when he was then able to get married. When I was in my mid-teens I can remember wanting to feel pity for a tragic fatherless life. However, as I couldn’t think what it would be like having a father, this didn’t take as much as 5 minutes, and I got on my bike to go for a ride. We were never any good at feeling sorry for ourselves.

40 years later I went into the local museum which contained copies of the Totnes Times from the First Edition in 1860. I looked out reports for January 1944. The main headline story was “Local man drowns himself in river”. My father had been seen in the River Dart. A passer by tried unsuccessfully to save him. Over the next few weeks the inquest and funeral were reported in pitiless detail. He had been unable to serve in the Forces during the War because of ill health. My mother said it had something to do with his flat feet. He had just received notification by post that he had been assigned a job in Plymouth Dockyard. When he went to the Labour Exchange he asked if he could be given a job nearer home to be near his family. The Official was outraged, told him he was a disgrace to his country and to his family and that he should think himself lucky he was offered an easy job in Devon. He left the Labour Exchange and went straight down to the river. The Coroner’s verdict was that he had taken his own life “while the balance of his mind was disturbed”.

My mother said that she considered taking me into the kitchen, turning the gas oven on, and ending it all for both of us. She said that she had been given hope by the saying of Jesus “In my Father’s house are many mansions”. Maybe one for my father as well. For the rest of her life she looked forward to seeing him again. It would be a happy reunion.

My mother had to manage on a few pounds each week. This was not easy. The family wanted to help but my mother was stubbornly proud. She would manage. We wasted nothing. We lived in a little house with gas lighting, an outside toilet, tin baths on the wall, and a mangle. The rent was 2/-6 a week. It was paid once a month without fail. Two shillings and six pence. The figures are not comparable, but that converts to 12½p in decimal currency. Soon enough Aunt Ann came to live with us bringing in her Old Age Pension. “Sufficient is enough” was the underlying theme of my childhood.

Also appearing:

I was never short of Aunties. My father contributed 10. My mother was the second of 5 children so she supplied another 4, all born in Ilford, Essex, and very supportive of each other. In the background there also lurked a number of Great Aunts, but they were all very old and did not contribute much to my upbringing. My mother had gone down to Totnes in her 20’s in order to look after her grandmother. Her own mother had run away from Totnes to London after her father leathered her for going to a dance when she had been forbidden.

Most Aunties could reliably be expected to contribute 2/- at Christmas and for my birthday in July, so I was positively affluent twice a year.

In time my mother’s family would come down to Totnes for a week at a time each Summer. These visits were welcome. That was when we ate well. My father’s family would visit less regularly. The Uncles were of no consequence apart from my mother’s oldest brother, Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill was extraordinary. We lived very strictly. Uncle Bill went out to the pub each night and bought a News of the World on Sundays. I never knew they were allowed to print the stories you could read there. They were interesting, though.

We went on a proper holiday for the first time in 1959 when I was 15. Until then we had always gone to Ilford to stay at relatives when I would sleep on a sofa. We would travel from Totnes to London by Royal Blue coach. London was exciting. There was a lot of rebuilding still going on after The War. You could see cranes swinging large balls against the side of tall buildings to demolish them. Even better holidays entailed staying at my Aunt Doll’s house in Cheriton Bishop, about 12 miles out of Exeter. Aunt Doll was my father’s next oldest sister. She had 5 children of her own, 4 older than me and Marion who didn’t count. Another small one in the house wouldn’t make much difference. There was a blacksmith’s forge in the lane by her house where you could see huge horses being shod. I can still remember clearly the sound and smell of the fire and metal, with the heat increased by enormous bellows, but also the blue periwinkles growing wild by the door. Marion did have something going for her – a copy of an Enid Blyton book with a picture of a parrot on the cover. I must have been about 9 and read it and loved it. But in 1959 I organised a proper holiday. Charlie Stevens at Chapel let me have a booklet including an advertisement for a week in a caravan at Perranporth in N. Cornwall. I wrote to the address given and asked about renting 2 caravans in May – one for my mother and Auntie Vi and one for me and 2 friends. I was delighted when they said it would be OK, and sent a Postal Order. They might not have wanted us. The line from Truro to Perranporth was single track and this was exciting in its own right. Sunday was Whit Sunday, and we went to the Methodist Chapel in Perranporth where the Minister delivered a very unsatisfactory sermon based on the wonder that when Peter preached to visitors in Jerusalem of all nations, they “heard every one in his own language”. He suggested that Peter had preached in Koine Greek – a kind of Lingua Franca of the 1st Century. He obviously didn’t believe a word of the story as told and could not recognise a metaphor if it looked him in the face. The holiday was a big success, though. We went by train to Falmouth, went on a cruise in the bay and I was sick. No matter. I was just 15 years old and had organised a holiday.

Aunt Ann

Aunt Ann was one of my father’s older sisters. She lived in Totnes and came to live with us soon after my father died. She had a son, my Cousin Stan, who was grown up and had been serving in the RAF. Just before I was born he was reported “missing, believed killed”. My mother had previously decided that if I was a boy I would be called David John, but after Aunt Ann’s news, she said “we will call him Stan”, and so it was that I was christened “Stanley David” in memory of my cousin. He then turned up unharmed.

Aunt Ann was one of the uncomplicated people who taught me all that needed to be known about the importance of simple kindness. She would take me to Nursery School which was in a prefabricated building in the Park, about half a mile from home. In the winter of 1947 the country was covered in snow and ice for months. Aunt Ann told me to hold her hand when we went down the steep hill behind our house “to stop me from slipping”. I did, and felt proud. It was easy to trick Aunt Ann, though. When I had a boiled egg for breakfast I would turn the empty egg shell over, put it back in the egg cup, and give it to Aunt Ann. She would tap it with a spoon, then discover that it was empty and say “What a sell!”. The trick worked every time to my immense delight. Even then it didn’t take much to please me.

My earliest memory of Aunt Ann (I think genuine) is of her carrying me in her arms and singing in a broad Devon accent (with John pronounced Jan and fool as vool):

Auntie Vi

Auntie Vi was my mother’s youngest sister. She was unmarried. If only Alan Bennett had more imagination he would have written about Auntie Vi. Maybe Dickens knew something about her when he described Mr F’s Aunt in Little Dorritt. Strange and unpredictable. She arrived at our house out of the blue, but there may well have been other forces at work, kept from the ears of chidren. Auntie Vi arrived from Ilford at about the time that Aunt Ann went into an Old People’s home in Totnes. She may have been involved in an unsatisfactory relationship with a married man to Uncle Bill’s stern disapproval, but no one spoke about it. She lived a very solitary life and spoke critically of other people most forcibly. When my intended wife Judy first met her she was disconcerted, unable to know how to react, but later they became the best of friends. As Auntie Vi said “I have always admired cripples like you”. You made allowances for Auntie Vi.

But when I was growing up she was “normal”. She worked at the Bacon Factory in Totnes where she had a single friend, Gert. Gert would give her a home perm every so often. Aunte Vi had no other interests. She stubbornly refused to go to Chapel with my mother, having been reprimanded for speaking familiarly to Mr. Friggins, the Bacon factory manager, soon after she arrived in Totnes. Mr Friggins was a Cornishman and a pillar of the Methodist cause in Totnes. On Sundays while we were at Chapel she would prepare Sunday dinner.

Sunday dinners were a celebration in themselves. We always had a roast joint – a luxury in an otherwise austere succession of frugal meals during the week. The meal was substantial and usually included roast potatoes and baked suet pudding. On Sunday afternoons we had a tea – typically a tin of fruit and custard. For the rest of the week the Sunday joint was minced and served up in various guises. You could buy a wild rabbit for a few shillings as well, and we often had rabbit pie. On Saturdays we had “bones”. You could buy a griskin, the back bone of a pig, from the local Bacon Factory shop. Griskins were probably intended for dogs. My mother put one in a roasting tin and cooked it in the oven. We picked off the most excellent meat. It was so enjoyable that I had no idea it was anything other than a delicacy. I was invited to Mike Ramsden’s house for (mid-day) dinner once and said when I went home “They are rich, they have afters every day”. This still seems to me to have been an acute observation, but caused much amusement.

So Monday to Friday Auntie Vi went to the Factory each morning and took sandwiches for lunch. In the Winter she would sit in the kitchen with her feet in the gas oven to try to warm up before going to work. On Fridays she would bring her wages home in a brown envelope and would sit with my mother at the kitchen table when they would dole out their shillings and pence. The household finances were strictly kept in order by a system of coins in jam jars. There were separate jam jars in the kitchen cabinet for all the occasional expenses – one each for the rent, the gas, the electricity, the water, the coal, the rates. On Mondays my mother would go to work with the back door unlocked and leave the Insurance money on the table for the Pru man to collect. Once a month the Miss Marks came round for the Rechabite money. The Rechabites were a Temperance organisation encouraging thrift and ran a poor man’s insurance scheme – 6d a week. 6d a week accumulates to £23.00 once you are 15 and they pay for your funeral if you don’t make it. Mike Cole thought I ought to spend it on drink, but that would be a betrayal. It went into the Post Office savings bank. All bills were paid as soon as they arrived. Debt was a monster waiting to devour you if you gave it half a chance. At the end of the Friday night operation my mother would say with pride as well as relief “We don’t owe anyone anything”. This was a huge achievement. Later on, after I had left home, I noticed a jam jar with threepenny bits in it. “What’s that for?” “It’s for the old men who come round.” They would come to the back door asking for “something for a cup of tea”. My mother would make them a cup of tea and give them a threepenny bit. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that was unwise. Even if it was, it was heroic as well. As Auntie Vi said “If the poor don’t help the poor then no-one else will”. Well, yes. Auntie Vi also derived much consolation from the thought that “There’s always some one worse off than yourself”. It stops you taking your own problems too seriously.

Chapel

Totnes Methodist Church was where I grew up. I went to school willingly enough and played out with friends, but Chapel was where I formed all the important attitudes to life and other people. I must have attended the Women’s meeting each week long before Nursery School as my mother recalled me going about the house singing “Count your blessings” although I have no memory of going to the meetings.

When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed,
When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,
Count your many blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord has done

Do not be sniffy. It helped a lot,

I do remember attending morning service, sitting next to her and being quiet. She had shown me how to draw a picture of a cat without taking the pencil off the paper. This fully occupied me during the sermon. This was before the introduction of a morning Sunday School when the children would file out after an encouraging Children’s Address. We then had a meeting of our own. I remember clearly the first week when John Allin started to read Pilgrim’s Progress to us. He proceeded to read the rest of the story each week in turn. It was exciting. We heard of the “slough of despond” – no concessions to younger children – and the episode when Christian approached the House Beautiful guarded by 2 lions chained up in the entrance drive. As long as Christian kept his nerve and could walk in the middle of the path, the lions’ chains were just short enough to allow him to walk through. He had to keep in a straight line. And he did! Thinking back, the most remarkable thing about this reading of the story was that it was told without pictures. which you would expect to find in a book. Just words. A vivid description of the strangest of encounters – Vanity Fair with all its superficial attractions, the adversary Apollyon blocking the way and throwing darts “as thick as hail”, Giant Despair and Doubting Castle. All the heroes were simple, honest and poor. Worldly Wiseman was a deceiver and not to be trusted. The Muck Raker (John Bunyan invented the term) kept his eyes to the ground and so could not see the glories of the heavens. When I read the story for myself, 50 years later and more, it felt too contrived and was nothing like as exciting as it was on Sunday mornings when I was 6 or 7. However it pleased me to find that Pilgrim’s Progress was well spoken of by both George Bernard Shaw and the Marxist historian Christopher Hill. They read it as the triumph of working people over the pretences of the Professions. Well, maybe.

Sunday afternoons entailed Sunday School for an hour, and then we would go out for a walk in the country round Totnes. I looked forward to being allowed to attend evening service when I was old enough. Probably about 11 or 12.

Sundays were very strictly kept. It was the Lord’s Day. It was different. There were all kinds of things you were not allowed to do, but this never felt like an imposition. Judy was brought up in a similar environment. We shared all kinds of inhibitions that we did not need to negotiate. We never worked on Sundays. I had to contend with an ethical problem later whether it was OK to do RE revision on Sundays. On balance it was not. I do remember Christmas 1949 when I was 6 years old. Even though it was Sunday I was allowed to play with my new toys. These included a clockwork train and a torch shaped like the Disney character Pluto. You pushed his tail in to turn the light on. The following week we were back to normal.

There was plenty of activity during the week as well. Hardly an evening went by without me going to the Manse to tear up old sheets for bandages for Nigeria, Life Boys which I enjoyed and later Boys’ Brigade to which I only went out of duty, choir practice and Youth Club. On Mondays I went to the Gospel Hall for Childrens’ meetings where we sang choruses and were entertained by a visiting speaker – often with an instrument like a ukeklele or a 1 man band. Bash Lear’s family went to the Gospel Hall and we encouraged each other at being naughty. We sang the wrong words to the choruses and added our own actions.

And we sang. We sang each day at school. We sang with the BBC Schools’ broadcast “Singing Together”. We sang in Sunday services. We sang at Sunday School. Singing was always a pleasure and a joy. Even in Infants’ school we sang. Each year in the Infants’ school there was the same Nativity Service on the radio 3 years running when someone sang unaccompanied

Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber;
Holy angels guard Thy bed;
Heav’nly blessings without number
Gently falling on thy head.

It was the only time I ever heard it and looked forward to hearing it each year, remembering the words and tune without even trying. Magic.

It was at Chapel that I learned the principles of Republicanism. We heard the stories of the Kings of Israel and Judah. Almost all of them, with few exceptions, “did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord”. They were opposed by the Prophets who upheld the rights of the poor and disadvantaged. The stories were told in the magnificent rhythms of the King James version of the Bible which posed no fear for us for all its antiquity. It gave it an added lustre.

School

I enjoyed school. They taught us to read and write, of course, and to do sums which pleased me. At first I went to the pre-school Nursery in Totnes park. They gave me a peg with a picture of a yacht on it, and every day after dinner we lay down on rush mats to sleep. It was at Totnes Nursery that I met Mike Ramsden who was in the same class as me throughout my time at school up to leaving at 18. Mike Ramsden was my hero. He was good at everything. He came top of the class at Grammar school, He was in the 1st teams in football, rugby and cricket, and was the Victor Ludorum in the annual Grammar School athletics competition. His mother had been Labour Mayor of Totnes, and was in all the town’s voluntary associations. She and his father sang in Gilbert and Sullivan performances and she welcomed me into her house. When I was 11 she took me each week to Dartington where we learnt and practiced the Rude Mechanicals’ entertainment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mike Ramsden was Puck. I was Peasblossom. The performance took place in the open air at Dartington Hall on Midsummer Day (of course). When at Grammar School we were told to get one of the daily papers and analyse the contents, Mike Ramsden and I chose the Daily Worker, the organ of the Communist Party. We had to calculate the proportion of advertising to news, sport, and editorial content. I was unimaginably disappointed. The Editorial content included an abusive article about the W German Chancellor Konrad Adenaur, as unsatisfactory a lap dog of the imperialist Americans as you could imagine, but the most disillusioning section of the paper contained the racing tips. Gambling was completely contrary to the principles of Socialism. It is based on the principle of the redistribution of wealth where some lucky people win a fortune at the expense of everyone else. And it occupied a significant part of the news in the Daily Worker. The Communists obviously were not serious about Socialism.

I remember learning to read. At The Grove School there was a large oil cloth with the letters of the alphabet where the letter ‘S’ was a curly snake. In the final year we read “The Song of Hiawatha” in War Economy school books with large letters and pictures. It might be considered inappropriate for 8 year old children now, but I can still remember the rhythmic spell.:

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
At the doorway of his wigwam,
In the pleasant Summer morning,

Thus departed Hiawatha,
Hiawatha the Beloved,
In the glory of the sunset,.
In the purple mists of evening,
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,
To the Islands of the Blessed,
To the Kingdom of Ponemah,
To the Land of the Hereafter!

Could not be better.

At Junior school we learned to do joined up handwriting, something that caused me great difficulty. There was an annual handwriting competition and try as I would, I couldn’t write neatly at all. The letters all came out different sizes. The girls seemed to be able to manage this effortlessly. Aged about 8 or 9 I asked my mother “How do they know whether you are a boy or a girl?” “They have their ways”. If I had been a girl I would have long hair, wear a dress, and be able to write nicely.

Perhaps I was dim. I remember going to my Cousin Stan’s house in Lewisham when I was 7 or 8. One of the wonders of the house was that they had a separate bathroom with a bath in it which you could fill from the taps without bringing pans of hot water from the kitchen. While there I got Linda, about 2 years younger than me, to pull her knickers down. This was a great disappointment. She had nothing there. I was still confused a couple of years later when at school we had “hygiene” lessons on the radio. These included an episode when they described how babies are made leaving some of the technical details to our imagination. It is possible that I missed some of that. Immediately after school I went with John Hanson to his house and we tried it. It would never work. Perhaps he knew more than me. If he did he never said anything. I had to wait until my cousin Bruce came down from Ilford to tell me all about the plumbing. I got a Grade A in Hygiene in my school report at the end of the year. They never suspected.

In the final year of Junior School we all sat the 11+ examination which determined whether you went to Grammar School or Secondary Modern. I cheated. One of the questions required you to write the word which describes the part of the river which contains fresh and salt water and which leads to the sea. I couldn’t think what it was. I saw that Tim Howell had written “estuary” and copied it. This troubled me much later on when I thought the authorities ought to be told that I had no right to be at Grammar School. Old George Beer was unimpressed, as well. “He’s no business going to Grammar School. He’ll get beyond his station”. Oh I do hope so.

It was at Grammar school that someone told me that I would qualify for free school meals, My mother’s reaction was typical, if foolish: “We might be poor but we won’t look poor”. I must have been a big disappointment to her looking so untidy all the time.

But I enjoyed school. Totnes Grammar School was single sex with about 250 boys. We had a limited range of options, but that was OK. We learned French and Latin. The Christmas before we sat O Levels I decided that I would do as well as I could to be allowed to go into the 6th Form and then to University. My Uncle Bill thought I ought to go straight out to work as soon as I was 14 to earn a wage to support my mother. I could never thank her enough that she ignored his advice. At Christmas time I read John Wesley’s sermon “On Redeeming the Time”, as you do, in which he outlines a Method (hence the Methodists) in which you make maximum use of what you have. You must waste nothing, including time. You must order every day to occupy each minute with purposeful activity. I could do this. I had a morning paper round and an afternoon grocery round when I laboured up steep Devon hills on a heavy iron bike like Granville’s. I therefore drew up a schedule which included memorising French and Latin vocabulary and irregular verbs, passages of Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare, and strategic dates in 19th Century European History. Once back from my paper round breakfast did not take long, and I could spend a good half hour memorising all sorts before school. Similarly in the evenings there was always a good 90 minutes between getting back from the grocery round and evening activities. Saturdays were an added bonus when I could spend hours at a time with Maths problems. Sundays were free of all work. No-one else knew about this commitment, and I surprised all the teachers at school with my examination results.

In the 6th Form I continued this strict regime in order to be able to take 4 A Levels. The school library contained a number of books which were a hang over from the time when the Grammar School was fee paying. These included a copy of the Dialogue “Laches” by Plato with the Greek text, grammar notes, and a translation in English at the back. I read the translation and was bowled over. The character Socrates as represented was gloriously subversive. He asked Important People, who ought to know, to tell him what “bravery” meant. Easy. They were generals and politicians. Unfortunately they all failed, since any definition they came up with had serious problems with it. Socrates concluded “The only thing that I know is that I don’t know”. I immediately started to buy books about Philosophy from second hand book shops and knew that this was what I wanted to study at University. I started to teach myself Greek from the single Greek Grammar in the school library. We acquired a new Head Teacher. One of his first decisions was that no-one should sit for 4 A Levels “3 excellent A Levels always beat 4 decent ones hands down”. I was outraged so decided to subvert him and asked the Latin teacher if I could try for O Level Greek in a year. “Of course”. He bought the necessary text books, and I set about learning Greek vocabulary and verbs with a will. The set books included extracts from Iphegenia in Aulis by Euripides and part of Xenophon’s Anabasis. Mr Jones marked my exercises in translating from English to Greek and occasionally ran a lesson for 3 of us reading the 1st Chapter of the Book of Acts. I continued to work methodically on the 3 A Level subjects that were left – Latin, English and RE. I wasn’t particularly good at Latin but excelled in RE and English. And I passed O Level Greek.

The new head teacher did however take a lesson for the 6th Form each Wednesday in which he outlined the principles of Capitalism and Marxism. We learned about Hegelian philosophy which formed the intellectual basis for Marx. I soaked it up. We were encouraged to think for ourselves.

By this time I had started to read, untutored, about Socialism. I came across the plays by GB Shaw and their prefaces and also the writings of G.G. Chesterton, HG Wells, and Hilaire Belloc. All this was extra-curricular and did me no harm. I discovered the Cooperative movement. The world shone.

I applied unsuccessfully to read Philosophy and Psychology at University College London. There I took an intelligence test and had a scary interview with someone who seemed to think that we were a bunch of electrical-chemical reactions. He didn’t want me. Then at Manchester University Professors Emmet and Prior called me up. That was a happy interview. I could freely admit to ignorance but that didn’t seem to matter. At the end of the interview Professor Emmett suggested that I should apply for accommodation to St Anselm Hall which admitted a number of Philosophy students. I walked the 2 miles to the Hall, knocked on the office door, and asked whether I would be allowed to stay there. “You can’t just come here without an interview”. I left my details and was then called for interview in early September. I decided to save on the train fare so set off cycling from Totnes to Manchester sleeping rough. This was after reading “The Path to Rome” by Hilaire Belloc where he describes his own journey from his native village in France to Rome by foot, sleeping wherever he could. I was always very pleased to have tried sleeping out in the open once. With no shelter. When it was getting cold at night. Once. I never admitted to being poor at the interview, or the unconventional way of travelling. They ought to have been impressed, but you never know. The secretary who had been so supercilious about me turning up and expecting to be allowed to live at St Anselm Hall was a model for all the privileged people I could hate with a perfect hatred without reserve. I turned up to pay the first term’s rent with cash, taken out of my Post Office savings account. “This will not do. Can’t you pay by cheque?” Well, no. I had only ever been in a bank once in my life with my Aunt Doll Barrett and Uncle Jack. Banks were an alien environment.”Well, you will have to get a bank account”. I was not alone. Judy’s first bank account was opened when we got married and she was 24 years old.

Kitty Butland

It must be obvious that I had and retain enorous admiration for my mother. This saved me from the alienation from their parents that young people are supposed to feel when they are learning to grow up. There is a down-side to this. I have never grown up. There is more to Kitty Butland’s story than you might suppose.

When I was about 14 Wilfred Penny, the oldest preacher in the Totnes, Ashburton and Buckfastleigh Methodist Circuit, gave me a couple of dozen books including Volume 3 of Wesley’s sermons which contained “On Redeeming the Time”, a wind up gramophone, and a handful of 78 records. After playing the Ride of the Valkyries, the Prelude to Lohengrin and Mascagni’s Easter Hymn, I put on “Felix kept on walking”. My mother opened the door and said “I used to walk onto the stage to that”. For the first time she told the story of her youth. Immediately after leaving school, Kitty Grinyer, as was, became a Magician’s Assistant. She travelled in Europe and went on stage dressed in a cat costume to the tune of “Felix kept on walking”. She did not say much about the act she performed in, but mentioned being on-stage in Dublin where the natives were definitely not friendly. She also travelled to Hamburg in a very cold winter when someone said goodby to her with “gute nacht”. Since she was born in 1905 it must have been soon after the 1st World War. This was a surprise. She was always so respectable.

After her appearance as a music hall artiste she worked in the kitchen of a large house in London where she must have learnt to cook as well as she did. This had to be on a much more modest scale now, but meals were always most appetising. Each November she would make about 8 Christmas puddings for presents for the family. She would make the puddings, covered with greaseproof paper, in basins which were then stacked in the copper boiler which was used for the washing on Monday mornings. After boiling for hours they were set aside for 6 weeks or so to mature. On Saturday evenings while I was having a bath in the tin bath in the kitchen and listening to the football results on the radio, she would bake a cake for Sunday tea. It would smell wonderful.

On Monday mornings she would do the week’s washing in the boiler, The clothes were boiled then put through the mangle before being hung out on the washing line. I can remember coming home after my paper round and finding the sheets already frozen stiff on the line.

She never ever gave the least sign of feeling sorry for herself. She would go out to visit people who were having a difficult time and would pray with them. I guess that since they knew her own history this would give them some reassurance. She came home once dismayed that someone she had just visited “did not have any family”. She had presumably been abandoned when a child, and knew nothing of any relations at all. Here was her with dozens of relatives and this poor sould had none at all.

Kitty Butland was a Methodist Local Preacher. South Devon was full of tiny chapels where a dozen people would meet each Sunday, sing (of course) and be reassured. My mother was good at that. I still have a book containing her sermons. They are simple and only of value when you realised the background of the preacher. They typically rehearse the story of some Biblical character who was nearly overwhelmed by events but who held fast and came out chastened but shining. I would go out with her and at some time in the service would sing a solo quite unselfconsciously,

Growing up giving thanks for all the good things you enjoy and not thinking too much about the dreadful bits was good preparation for living with Judy later. “Giving Thanks” is a much undervalued habit. Something to do each morning as soon as you wake up. You then set off in an optimistic frame of mind before you start messing everything up. The tide has come in and gone out again. The beach is clean and everything is new.

Playing out

Totnes was a wonderful place to grow up. It was surrounded by countryside with muddy lanes and woods where children could wander at will. You could go down to the river Dart to swim and the local streams were full of sticklebacks and minnows. Salmon leapt in the River Dart. Each April the Marshes next to the river came alive with tadpoles. We never had a television set at home, so I spend most of my time not at school out of doors. In the Summer I went round to Mike Ramsden’s and a crowd of us children played “Kick the Can” in the field next to the railway line. We lit fires and cooked on them unsupervised and without incident. The seasons came round and we collected conkers around the base of the Horse Chestnut trees. We found a walnut tree in the field next to the Police Station in Autumn and barely edible sweet chestnuts in Winter. They were not particularly appetising but we ate them without being poisoned. If you knew where to look you could go out collecting field mushrooms early in the morning. In August and September the bushes were full of blackberries.

Such freedom came with its dark side as well. Mike Ramsden had an inflatable car inner tube to swim with. I went round to the garage up the street and asked if they had any old inner tubes that they could give me. “No. If we can patch them up we will mend them, if not they are no good and we throw them away”.

I was about 9 or 10 years old. Beginning to be able to think for myself, but not yet very good at it. If I could find a tyre sufficiently damaged to be not worth repairing I could try to patch it up myself and then use that. Follow this logic closely. I therefore went immediately outside our house where there was a car parked in the street. I took with me some kindling wood and a cloth soaked in paraffin and lit a fire under the front tyre. This was not a good idea.

I do not remember the exact sequence of events, but my mother was very upset. Devon Social Services were called in. Aunt Ann couldn’t believe I would do anything as wicked as that, but everyone else did. Even Mr Dolbear, the local milk roundsman with whom I went in his van delivering milk into jugs that people left out, expressed his disappointment next morning. A man and a woman from Social Services came round. My mother said “they will send you away to a special school”. This was maybe a chink of light in the dark. I had read about special schools in Enid Blyton books, and they seemed positively happy places to attend. When the 2 Social Workers came into the garden to see my mother in the house I stood completely still, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. That seemed to work.

I am not sure what was said or what conclusion they came to, but there was no special school and I stayed at home as usual. In bother for some time. I was still not allowed to go to a bonfire party months later in November.

When Phil was about 8 years old I remember thinking “What would I do if he did anything like that?” It was unthinkable. Fortunately he did not have my imagination or power of reasoning, so the issue never arose.

When I was 12 years old my mother bought me a second hand bicycle. It was the best present I ever had. I could go anywhere and cycled all round Totnes. I cycled up to Dartmoor and down to the South coast. In the Summer I cycled regularly 5 miles to Paignton to watch matches at Paignton Cricket Club. They even had a semi-professional player. I gave my mother half my wages for my paper round and the grocery round each week, but this still left me plenty. I later found out that my mother bought National Savings stamps for me with the money I gave her. Typical. The local electrical shop advertised a record player on Hire Purchase for 2/-6 a week. When I asked my mother if I could get one she was horrified. “You’ll get ill and not be able to afford the weekly payments and they will send a man around to take it away. If you can’t afford it you can’t have it.” So I started saving. A year later I bought my own record player and could build my own collection. I had just started the 6th Form and decided that I wanted to do O Level music. The music teacher was compliant, undeterred by my seriously poor coordination. I could sing, though and played the violin. Why the violin? Because we couldn’t afford a piano. The syllabus that year included Bach’s 3rd Brandenburg concerto, Mozart’s 40th symphony and Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols. I loved them all. Wolcum Yole indeed. The teacher left during the year and I never saw this to completion.

In conclusion

With all that baggage it is amazing that I grew up so normal.

I had a very happy childhood, leaving school believing I could do anything. This didn’t even start to be true, but the illusion set me teaching myself German (a bit), playing the violin (a bit), carrying on with Greek, and believing that after a successful year of Logic at University Mathematical Logic would have no fears for me. At the end of that year the lecturer asked us “Before the examination, are there any questions you would like to ask me?” I had not understood a word of what he had said for the whole year and could not formulate a single question beyond “what ever have we been doing?” It was only a few years later that I began to start to understand what Mathematical logic was all about, and is maybe of limited value. Too late. They kept me on for a third year, though, which was a big relief.

The other big success with University was that I met Judith Whitely and eventually managed to intimate that I loved her, without actually saying so.

Worth going for that.

Judy and I were always most at ease with simple unpretentious people who were never going to make anyone else uncomfortable because they didn’t have a bank account. The people who worked with us at BUSS were almost all just like that. We both hated the self-righteousness that people assume to hide their inadequacies. To see people at their best, find a 10-year old and learn again to have fun.

But don’t set fire to cars.