A Knight’s Tale – Page 16

A Knight’s Tale (5: That Heady, Optimistic, Summer)

VE Day was just two months before my third birthday. In fact I have no memory of the original event, but I do have photographic evidence that Chris and I were there.

This photograph depicts a street party celebrating Victory in Europe at the end of that sphere of World War Two. For anyone below the age of about 75 to imagine the jubilation of that heady, optimistic, summer is virtually impossible.

Chris and I are in the centre of the front row. My chubby little brother, then not yet two, looks, as would any other toddler, as if he had no idea what was going on or why he was there. I, on the other hand, seem to be harbouring particularly pleasant thoughts that I am not sure I ought to have had. A little girl proudly holds my hand. She smiles broadly. I try to suppress my glee.

Mum, as she always did, would have made our outfits from scratch. She continued to do this until she could afford not to. Our first Wimbledon College blazer badges were embroidered by her own hand.

It wasn’t until secondary school that most boys in those days gravitated to long trousers. (I proudly wore my first pair up to the common and ripped them whilst climbing a fence. That must have been a pecuniary disaster.) Shorts worn with long grey socks were the norm. The hose were held up by elasticated garters. One or two of those in the picture have slipped a bit. The older members of the group could probably share their parents immense relief that they were able to celebrate the end of six long years of war. That the people were able to dress up at all, albeit in a sometimes strangely fitting assortment of clothes, is a tribute to their fortitude. Garments continued to be rationed until well into the 1950s. As can be clearly seen here, designer clothes and trainers were a thing of the far distant future. But look at the shine on the boots and shoes.

This party took place in Carshalton, then in Surrey but now part of Greater London, in the street of Mum’s cousin Ivy Wilson, whose two children, Audrey, third from left in the back row, and Roy, second from left of the middle row, were present. These two are the link with the first Holly in our extended family who will feature later in the story.

A Knight’s Tale (4: Shrapnel? And Air Raid Precautions)

My brother Chris was born in the October of that year, and, with Dad still in the Army, Mum decided to move herself and her two boys from Leicester to be near her husband’s family in Wimbledon. She then set about finding somewhere to live. 29a Stanton Road, Raynes Park, SW20, was the address of the rented accommodation she found. Posher now, West Wimbledon has, according to Estate Agents, replaced the location. The suburb had no Waitrose in 1944. It was to be our family home for the rest of my childhood.

In this 3-bedroomed first floor maisonette my parents brought up 5 children. I believe my earliest memory is of my mother carrying the two-year-old me into what was to be my small bedroom backing onto the railway lines between Wimbledon and Raynes Park. She removed something from the mantelpiece. Later, she said it had been a piece of shrapnel. Since our street was not actually bombed by the Luftwaffe, I’m not sure how it got there.

The sound of trains running alongside was a regular refrain, punctuated by periodic cries of nocturnal track maintenance workers and the clank of their equipment.

Here are front

and rear views of the building taken in 2012. We never kept a cat, so the flap on our back door was a later addition,

as is demonstrated by this image I produced with my paternal Grandfather’s old Box Brownie in 1957. The face in the window is that of our downstairs neighbour, Fred Downes.

Ours was the upstairs frontage to the large sitting room which would become my teenage bedroom after everyone else had gone to bed.

We often stayed at my paternal grandparents’ home at 18 South Park Road, Wimbledon, SW19. The large, well designed, Victorian house, in common with the rest of the dwellings in that long road parallel with Wimbledon Broadway, has made way for hideous blocks of flats built from the 60s onwards. The grand original properties had a life-span less than mine.

It was there that we would sleep on bunk beds in the cellar when there was fear of an air raid. This was the location of my next memory. The image is of a ceiling such as I would recognise many years later in Lindum House in Newark, when my mother told me that that was an exact copy of the South Park Road House. The Lindum House cellar still bore the huge supporting beams that were fitted in case of such an attack. I can therefore safely assume that the Wimbledon house bore the same.

A Knight’s Tale (3: A Relationship With My Dad)

Throughout the night we were beset by a thunderstorm, and I was beset by a barometric pressure headache.

I wasn’t up to much this morning, but Jackie persuaded me to go for a drive this afternoon. Most of the areas to the east that we normally visit were far too crowded either to park or to photograph with ease.

The exception was the village of Pilley where

ponies spilled across the road outside the Community Shop. The pair occupying the centre of the tarmac completely ignored passing traffic. Tails used as whisks, stamping of hooves, and amazing tolerance were the main defences against the gathering fly population.

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Later, I redrafted the third episode of my life story.

There was no National Health Service when my mother brought me home to her parents seven weeks after my birth. It did not come into being until I was six years old. The necessary treatment was free because Dad was in the Army.

We came home to rationing, described thus by Wikipedia: ‘To deal with sometimes extreme shortages, the Ministry of Food instituted a system of rationing. To buy most rationed items, each person had to register at chosen shops and was provided with a ration book containing coupons. The shopkeeper was provided with enough food for registered customers. Purchasers had to take ration books with them when shopping, so the relevant coupon or coupons could be cancelled.’

Excepting only vegetables and bread, every consumer item we now take for granted, from food to furniture; from suits to sweets; from butter to Brylcreem; was in such short supply that if you had insufficient specific stamps there could be no purchase.

This is a pictorial image from http://bookcoverimgs.com/food-ration-books-ww2/ displaying one adult’s weekly food allowance per week. There was some variation in quantity according to supply, but this was probably the correct allocation when I was a baby and couldn’t eat any of it anyway.

In the early summer of 1943, my Dad may have been on official leave from the army, in which he spent the war years and a couple more. It is he in whose arms I seem to be struggling in this photograph. Mum, who was there at the time, assures me that I knew Dad well and was fond of him, so I must just have been distracted as the picture was being taken by my maternal grandfather. It is not every child of those years who had the opportunity to form a relationship with his father. I will always be grateful for that, and for the efforts my parents went to to nurture it.

Grandpa Hunter not only held the camera, but he developed the film and printed the shot in a complicated darkroom process.

This of course was long before four year olds like Malachi, his great-great-grandson, who had his own WordPress blog, could take a colour photo with a mobile phone, download it, and post it around the world on the very same day.

This evening we dined on succulent Hunter’s Chicken; boiled potatoes; firm cauliflower, and tender runner beans, with which Jackie finished the Sauvignon Blanc, and I finished the Syrah.

A Knight’s Tale (2: I May Not Have Existed)

I was seven weeks premature, and weighed 5 pounds, 6 ounces. Those weeks were spent in hospital with my mother, who I believe suffered from eclampsia, yet who was told by nurses not to worry and that she should bring me back when I was twenty-one because I would grow to be over 6 foot, dark, and handsome. The first two points are objectively true; the third is subjective. This was perhaps the first time I was lucky to survive.

Like all infants, I was totally oblivious of the world around me. I was aware only of food, excreta, and sleep. Even when I discovered my fingers I didn’t know they were mine.

Rather later, I came to understand that I had been born slap bang in the middle of one of the most important events of world history. Not only was WW2 a terrible conflagration inflicting enormous hardship on my young parents, but it changed the shape of the world and the interrelations of its peoples forever. Had this not happened, my parents, and those of many wartime babies, would never have met.

Firstly it is worth noting that had my father not survived, for example, Dunkirk in 1940, I would not have existed. This was the period, from 27th May to 4th June, when it seemed that almost everything that floated left the south coast of England to sail or stagger across to France to gather up our retreating soldiers under fire from the beach.

This flotilla of 700 little ships consisting of merchant marine and fishing boats, pleasure craft and lifeboats, assisted in the rescue of 338,000 British and French troops cornered by the German army. Some simply ferried waiting soldiers, some of whom stood shoulder deep in water for hours awaiting their turn, to the larger ships waiting off shore.

Others carried their passengers all the way to Ramsgate.

Many of these vessels had not been in the open sea before and often leaked especially alarmingly for a non-swimmer like Dad. His job in the evacuation process, until his turn came to clamber onto an ancient fishing boat and pray all the way across the Channel, was to repeatedly drive out to and beyond the front line to load his truck with exhausted comrades.

The only story my father ever told about this experience or anything else from the war was that each time he drove back to the invading front from the packed beach, the German voices grew ever nearer, until he drove his vehicle into a ditch and legged it to join a queue for the leaky vessel that took him back to Blighty. He was 22 years old.

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It is perhaps apt that I should feature the second instalment of my life story today, because this was the first occasion post-Covid 19 that Elizabeth has been able to bring our mother to our home for a visit.

Mum was able to see much of the garden colour, and was intrigued by the idea of a water feature operating from solar panels. She knew she had been to a garden like this before, but wasn’t sure it was ours. She congratulated Jackie on her creation.

One bonus of having a small group together is that we can enjoy different conversations and silent moments without pressure to focus on one person.

We even briefly included Danni and Ella in a FaceTime conversation with Mum. I wondered how many people approaching their 99th birthday could enjoy the experience of communicating with their 2 year old great granddaughter in this manner.

Jean was shyly appreciative of the complimentary messages of goodwill sent by so many people from around the world via this blog.

She was also delighted by the posy Jackie prepared for her to take home.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s flavoursome sausage casserole; boiled new potatoes; sautéed mushrooms, leeks, and peppers with crisp broccoli. The Culinary Queen drank more of the Sauvignon Blanc and I drank more of the Syrah.

A Knight’s Tale (1 : “A Sneaky Weekend”)

On another blisteringly hot day, before the sun was fully up, I produced

a dozen current garden views from above.

Later, Jackie occupied herself planting and watering, while I carried out some dead heading. These activities were continued at intervals throughout the day.

Some years ago, now, encouraged by a number of my readers, I began work on an autobiography reflecting the era of my life so far. Eventually I came to a seemingly unsurpassable crossroads.

I have now decided to publish extracts from my draft, in occasional instalments, making use of some material previously posted and further thoughts and details, of which this is the first:

During the early 1940s members of my father, Douglas Michael Knight’s, generation were doing what those of his father had done before, namely fighting to save the life of our country, and, indeed, the whole world, from the might of Germany and its allies.

My maternal grandfather, an engineer in the prison service, was attached to Leicester Prison. As such he and his family including my mother, Jean, née Hunter, were allocated prison quarters.

Dad was billeted for a while next door. The teenaged neighbour must have aroused his interest, because, on 7th July, 1942, I was born in Leicester General Hospital. The above photographs were taken around this time.

Wherever he was stationed, Mum tells me, Dad took every opportunity when in England to get home to Mum and me and, later, Chris. If he had no official leave, this involved nipping off for what she calls “a sneaky weekend”. Apparently he found all kinds of means to do this, often involving the railway services. On one occasion when he couldn’t find any sort of train he walked all through the night from ‘somewhere in Yorkshire’ to Leicester for the pleasure. Dad himself has told me about marathon nocturnal walks to Leicester.

Mum’s part in the subterfuge was to keep a lookout for redcaps, as were termed the military police, one of whom was her elder brother Ben. I guess discovery could have been awkward.

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Later this afternoon, having read more of David Copperfield, I scanned the next four of Charles Keeping’s illustrations.

‘What was my amazement to find, of all people on earth, my aunt there, and Mr Dick!’

‘I observed Agnes turn pale, as she looked attentively at my aunt’

‘Mr Micawber had prepared, in a wash-hand-stand jug, a ‘Brew’ of the agreeable beverage for which he was famous’

‘I replied, ‘I, Miss Mills!’ I have done it!’ – and hid my face from the light, in the sofa cushion’

This evening we dined on Jackie’s luscious liver and bacon; boiled new potatoes; tender broccoli and cabbage, with which she drank more of the Sauvignon Blanc, and I drank Valle Central Syrah Reserva Privada 2019