A Simple Standard Lamp

Some years ago we bought and transported home a standard lamp from Holland that had magic in its makeup, inasmuch as near to its bulb was a small stem that by touching it with one's fingers it would change the volume of light from degrees of dull to brightness.

As with all electrical goods, planned obsolescence or not, it came to the end of its life. We had to find a replacement.

This replacement had to be simple, unobtrusive, and to spread light around generally and in particular upwards and downwards.

To find one should have been simple. But somehow standard lamps are generally "feature" items, with fancy mouldings, tassels, voluptuous shaped shades and all the rest. So to find a simple and practical design turned out to be extremely difficult. 

That was, until, when browsing around a Scandinavian shop when looking for A4 picture frames, I spied on a shelf just the kind of lamp that I had been looking for - but was unavailable at the time. The                price? £7.

I persevered. And on another occasion I spoke to a supervisor, who found the last one in the shop. I thought it was a mistake when a smallish cardboard box was handed over in exchange for £7. "Is that really it?" I queried. "You have to make it up yourself." came the reply. 

For that price one doesn't expect precision engineering. So to make it up would require patience and imagination. 

The pictorial instructions were cursory. And the manufacturer had difficulty in describing how a springy bit of material in a paper tube could be converted into a circular lampshade.

Much later and with the help of four hands, two clamps and superglue, the shade took shape. Bits that parted from the construction too easily were superglued in place. Finally plugged in, the lamp was in one piece and just what was wanted.

Then when I was turning the Dutch one into small pieces for the dustmen to cart away, I found that its shade was not only well made, but fitted over the Scandinavian one as if they were meant to be together. Again, with the invaluable superglue, the old shade was used to partially cover the smaller new one and the result was not unlike lights of the 1960s that had louvers to direct their beams of light.

It is unique, charming and, well, all for £7. 

As this will be the last blog of the year 2022, we would like to wish all our loyal readers a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year. 

Smoke, Fog, Lung, and Work or Peasouper

 The war had ended. There was no further a need for pilots, so I was grounded and became an RAF Photographic Intelligence Officer.

Having missed the years I should have been at school because of the war, I used the "grounded" time to acquire enough qualifications to become a medical student at St Thomas's Hospital.

Having joined the RAF when I was old enough in 1942, I had to await my turn to be demobilised after the war had ended (first in first out).

Just before that date I was found to have contracted TB in the lung. There was no cure at that time. I must have acquired the affliction in 1947 when the winter was exceptionally cold and both fuel and food were rationed (even for those in services).

So, after being invalided out of the RAF, I started to become a medical student. But after more spitting of blood, it had to be the conclusion of my medical ambitions.

Then came the start of what turned out to be a seven-year process of being screened every week or so, and having a thick needle shoved between my ribs to allow air to enter an induced gap between my ribs and lung. This was thought to "rest" the lung, and was as unpleasant to put up with as it sounds.

Being invalided out of the RAF entitled me to a Council flat. This consisted of two minuscule rooms above the railway lines outside Victoria Station.

It was still the age of steam trains, coal burning, smoke and dense fogs. Below my window, steam engine drivers kept their engines boilers in readiness by the continuous burning coal. This meant more smoke. From my abode, the general noise of railways was punctuated by the occasional shock-inducing blast from the release of excess steam. 

Inside my studio room I kept warm by burning coal in a small grate, thus adding to the atmosphere that could become thick fog. One of these "peasoupers" as they were called, was so thick that the only way of navigation outside was to walk with one foot on the pavement and the other in the road.

I needed to move to cleaner air, and did so by buying a bombed-out house in the Fulham Road and restoring it (less the top floor, because of the cost) to become a comfortable place in which to live and work.

In the meantime I went to the Central School of Art to paint with Bernard Meninsky and then to the Old Vic School of theatre design. 

Now working as a scene painter at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and then designing and constructing sets for repertory theater and touring shows, and creating sets for television (black and white then - actually various greys). I still managed to paint landscape that sold well from several of the best London galleries.

It seems extraordinary that breathing in the dirty air of that period, and coping with the building work and food rationing, not to mention the almost weekly high dose of screening radiation involved with the chest pneumothorax, that far from killing me I seemed to have thrived on it. 

(A119 (A1)

Foxes

 Foxes seem to have been part of my life.

As a child they were the enemy and I was somewhat afraid of them.

We had a chicken farm (all free range then) where the chicken houses, where the birds laid their eggs, were old army huts on iron wheels. These were moved around a large field. 

At night, if foxes gained entry to a shed they would slaughter all the chickens there, just, it seems, for the pleasure of it.

Gamekeepers may have trapped or killed foxes, but mostly they were the target of The Hunt.

The various hunts in that part of Hampshire/Berkshire met in front of some large mansion or other with men and women on horseback, surrounded by a pack of excited hounds. The men wore pink (red) coats, and the ladies, often riding sidesaddle, wore black.

After draughts of sloe gin or brandy, handed up to them on their horses, the horsemen and women would move off (blow away) under the control of the master, to find, and kill a fox. The sounds of the master's hunting horn would indicate to hounds and people what was happening and what to do, like "blowing away" (start) or the long note calling the hounds ("blowing out").

It was then that we youngsters with bicycles, who knew the country well, would position ourselves where the foxes might run. There we would see them in daytime and witness the hunt in full cry after them, as their quarry raced across open land from copse to copse to escape death.

When close to a fox in the open one felt a sense of danger, magnified by the noise of the hunting horn, the shouting and the baying and barking of the hounds.

So I saw foxes as dangerous creatures and, for the sake of the farm, the more killed by the hounds the better.

Those were country foxes. Now I see town foxes.

My first town fox was spied from an underground train, above ground, basking in the sunshine beside the track. It made a fine sight with its sleek shape and chestnut colouring.

Now they are commonplace around the London streets where I live.

They do damage in town, trashing gardens in a comprehensive manner and, in a neighbour's case, leaving a cat's head behind.

Two doors away, after hearing much squealing we saved a cat from being mauled to death by a fox. The owner of the house where this occurred contacted the cat's owner, who, because of the animal's serious injuries, suggested that it be put down. But it was taken to the vet, patched up, and has turned out to be a charming cat, but a wild one, which would much rather be wild like the foxes than cooped up, like it is, as a house cat.

When I get up at night I look into the still, lamp-lit night outside and sometimes foxes running (fox trotting, I suppose) along the road and pavement. But recently I have seen in the early hours, a fox curled up, apparently asleep, right in the centre of the road outside the house. From that position it is able to see up to two streets.

Is it just a warm place on which to curl up and pass the time of night? Or is it guarding a corner of its territory?

Like dogs, let sleeping foxes lie. So I would not think of disturbing it. Indeed, I have to admit I'm still a little afraid of them. 

An Apple Store

 I have recorded previously in my An Autobiography in Words and Pictures about how, as an airman posted to RAF Hornchurch in late 1944, I volunteered to be a roof slater of bombed-out housing while waiting for a posting abroad for pilot training.

When at last, I was waiting no longer and on my way, the first move was by train to Liverpool to board the New Mauritania liner bound for Canada.

We were allotted hammock space, and I was given the job of being in charge of the refrigerated apple store.

This had the advantage of, having left a strictly raisioned nation, I now had access to as many apples as I wanted. They were American apples of a deep red colour, all perfectly shaped, and scented the one-bulb-lit cold store in which I would spend my refrigerated days.

That was an advantage. A disadvantage was my location should we be attacked by Nazi submarines.

In eight days we docked in Moncton, New Brunswick, and were offloaded into barracks. 

There, my only recollection was of a hill where gravity worked the other way around. One peddled a bicycle down the hill and free-wheeled up it.

We (our Flight of about 100) were soon on a train to the USA, specifically to the RAF, 3 B.F.T.S airfield near to Miami, Oklahoma.

From being transported from war-torn England, where strict rationing was in force, we were bombarded with kindness at railway stops where locals came aboard to ply us with candy, tobacco and much else. This bountiful generosity seemed quite unreal to us ordinary airmen. It was as if we were heroes.

(A 113)

Prignac

 I was just coming to the end of casting my eye over bottles of red wine in a supermarket, when I saw the name Prignac on a front label. Though a bit above our usual price range I bought it. And this is the reason why.

In the early 1960s I travelled to the Bordeaux region to drink and learn about their wines. 

I settled in the unfashionable region of Bas Médoc, selecting a rather primitive auberge as my base. I was offered a sort of shed to sleep in and when asking for its sanitary arrangements, was directed to the surrounding trees and bushes. This was good advice as the lavatory in an outhouse of the establishment was quite disgusting. 

It was that kind of place where the patronne and her daughter augmented their income doing other matters, so food might be delayed before being cooked and served. But the copious amounts of red wine consumed there by guests and locals was delicious ordinary Prignac. The wine came from the local co-op where it was made in an atmosphere so thick with fruit flies one could hardly breathe within its concrete construction without ingesting some of them.

Before leaving, I ordered my first cask (une demie barrique) of their 1966 to be delivered to me in London, fut perdu (non returnable barrel), fob (free on board). 

When it arrived I paid carriage and duty (another tale), and bottled 150 bottles (gathered from outside bars and clubs at 4 am in the mornings).

I was later to order the same quantity of their '67 and '68 red.

Not knowing how to work the system, I was later to import a hogshead (353 bottles) of wonderful Rioja from Bilbainas, in Spain.

Those were the days when most fine wines came to England in cask and was bottled by the wine merchant. Now, barrels are used mainly for ageing good wine. With lesser quality, wine is either bottled at the château or co-operative, or imported in bulk and bottled in quantity where there is a market for it.

So from those very hands-on days of negotiating, and then bottling from barrel to bottle, the Château Tour Prignac, year of vintage, branded cork of fine quality, and price, still has much of the character and charm of the Prignac that I loved in the 1960s. 

From the first sip of that newly discovered bottle, it was like meeting an old friend once more - but a much smarter friend who had come up in the world considerably. 

Bee up the shorts

When I was designing for the theater and landscape painting in 1950, I was beginning to think that a wartime gap in my education needed to be fixed. A Grand Tour around Europe was what was wanted. I would feast on paintings and the theater, let alone the food and wine from foreign parts.

Painting scenery at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and designing and painting sets for repertory theatre was artistically and creatively rewarding but poorly paid. 

But when I worked on background scenery for an ice show (I still had my RAF flying boots to keep my feet warm on the ice), I had enough money to buy an old, flat-back, Ford, builder's van on which to construct a sort of mobile living space.

I made my vehicle to fit my body shape, with a most comfortable, deep, rubber seat, canted up in the front for me to lean back and, in so doing, raising my knees. On the flat part of the truck was enough space for a blow-up bed, cooking kit, stores, water, paints and other stuff.

As it would be hot in Europe, on the roof above the front seat I installed two large air scoops - the kind seen on old-fashioned steam ships. These would scoop and duct down fresh air and, should it rain, they could be turned to face the rear. And as an anti-mosquito measure, combined with a net, they could stoppered off with two large diameter corks. 

Then I added a horn that would waken the dead. My personalised Grand Tour vehicle made an unusual sight with its added streamlined bodywork, made of moulded ply and canvas. I gave it new Michelin tyres, brush-painted it British racing green, and set off. 

It was when travelling along a main road somewhere near Genoa in Italy, and amid a throng of workmen returning home on bicycles, that a bee was scooped in and down through the vent above my head, directly entering my shorts. 

I glanced at the consternation in my more view mirrors but was otherwise more concerned about that bee. 

Back in England, my live-in car was eventually sold to a Scottish Laird and may have been used to round up deer or other animals. Armed with a mosquito net and corks he may well have got the better of the midges in the course of travels around his estate.

As for that Genoese bee....? I can't recall. 

Gardeners' World

 In 1984 I was living in the country north of Andover in Hampshire. A car accident had ended my life as a sculptor of large lumps of elm trees and I had started to write on wine.

A not-too-distant neighbour, called John Cherrington, and I became friends. He was a famous farmer who had a weekly column in the Financial Times. Through his recommending me as a writer, the Editor of the FT published my pieces on any subject not covered by his regular journalists.

Also, through John Cherrington's auspices, I was introduced to the producer of Gardeners' World programme for BBC2, who liked the garden and my ideas so much that a date was fixed for a programme to be made on it.

Other than the overall design of its wedge-shaped Leylandii hedges in serpentine form, and a focal point of an old and broken stone fields roller on end, there were, I seem to remember some nine designs of weathervanes around the garden, mostly made from copper sheet and tube. One, the most common, least elegant, but most successful, had a plain vane at one end and a four-bladed propeller at the other. This told not only the direction of the incoming wind but by the speed of propeller rotation, its force.

Another took a tube shape with a vane at one end and an inserted kitchen funnel at the other. This supposedly would scoop in the wind to a sub-sonic whistle, which would tell the birds in the district that this was a nice garden to visit. Unfortunately, a spider liked to take up residence in the funnel and block it with its web. If the cleared weathervane ever worked in attracting wildlife, I will never know. But it might have done. 

Another piece of interest to me and possibly others, was an experiment with wood preservation. At the end of a small wooden stable block was an exterior wall made of vertical planks. As these faced the wind and weather I thought I might treat each one with a wood-preserving substance, leaving an untreated control panel every so often. I recall that I used oil from a fish and chip shop, creosote, paraffine, bought wood-preservers, petrol, linseed oil, engine oil, caustic soda, urine, paint stripper, roofing solution, drain cleaner  and other substances. After four years the outright winner was used sump oil from a diesel tractor. And when powdered burnt sienna powder was added, the result was excellent, warm-coloured wood-preservation.

The television crew arrived in three great wagons and parked them in a field next door. Their operators numbered some 13 men. Cables were dragged around the garden and my sculpture of a large elmwood horse placed on trestles in the middle of the lawn.

It was raining when we started to made the programme, only noticeable in the end result by water running down the side of the horse.

The presenter of the programme, Geoff Hamilton, would isolate himself from everyone to practice his lines. When we came to discuss the wood-preserved woodwork he might suddenly utter a vile oath, this, he explained to me was when he was not pleased with his words so that those in the wagons would be unable to use them in the programme. So he would carry on without swearing until word perfect.

At the end of filming, the entire programme had been completed in the wagons and ready to be broadcasted the next day.

A few days later I received a letter via the BBC from a fellow wartime pilot. He and others had visited my last address in London, to be told by the landlady that "I had gone". From this they presumed that I was dead (as I had been invalided out of the RAF with TB). Now, here I was, after some 40 years, alive on television. So I joined these fellow pilots, with whom I had trained in the USA, for their annual get-together.

It is somewhat ironic that now I am still very much alive and they, sadly, may all be dead. 

Binder and Pub

In wartime 1942 I had returned from the USA to become an airman in the RAF, and then, because of congestion, told to return to temporary civilian life to await pilot training.

The first job that I took was as a labourer on a farm where rotation of crops was the order of the day, and horsepower (literally) drew wagons and worked machinery.

Harvest time was physical backbreaking but much enjoyed by everyone involved.

We grew wheat, as one of our crops, for making rationed bread. For this, a binder, drawn by two cart horses, would bend the grain stalks toward oscillating blades where it was cut and then gathered into sheave tied by twine, which were then tossed out on to stubble. 

The binder would start by working around the periphery of the field and then toward the middle. in doing so, rabbits were corralled toward the ever-diminishing uncut centre. Then out would come the village families, armed with sticks, to dispatch this valuable food source as the frightened animals scampered, now with difficulty over the stubble, to safety - or death. Rabbit pies augmented our meagre rations and were very much enjoyed. 

The sheaves, now lying on the stubble left by the binder, had then to be gathered up by us labourers into stooks. The process was called "shocking up".

As no one wore gloves and, as thistles abounded, our hands and fingers became pierced with painful spines. 

The stooks, of some six sheaves each, were left in the field so that the grain at the top of them could dry. This might take days to weeks depending on the weather. In this time the wheat became a feast for wild birds. 

When  the straw and grain were dry enough, the sheaves were collected by horse and cart, with us tossing them up with pitchforks to whoever was stalking it. The cut straw ends formed the outside wall of the load. Then off they would go to the rickyard at the farm where, on staddle stones (mushroom-shaped, short stone pillars to make them rat-proof), a rick was formed. This was then thatched, awaiting the arrival of the mighty steam traction engine and threshing machine.

The resulting grain from the threshing was directed from the threshing machine into sacks (only the strongest of us could handle them - not me) and taken to the barn for storage and sale. Dust was tick in the air and the noise deafening. But the smell of the traction engine, wonderful (as was that from steam railway engines of the time).

The grainless straw was formed into another rick in the yard and used for bedding and fodder.

Nowadays this process is conducted by a combined harvester in the field, with the grain carted away to the barn, and dried, if necessary, by heat and fan.

After our day's work we repaired to The Bell Inn where weak beer was consumed and needles used to extract thistle bits from our flesh.

I now realise how lucky I was to have had some experiences on a wartime farm and been able to paint and write about the laborious and enjoyable harvesting days.

Frames and Framers

 Talking about picture frames past and present, Margreet asked me why I haven't written about frames, especially when I was well known and selling in the 1950s? In a way, she suggested, it would be of period interest. So here goes.

I suppose that those early frames surrounding portraits of queens, kings, noblemen, sailors, heroes and villains were carved beautifully out of wood and finished with gesso and gold leaf. They are generally works of art in themselves if we care to look at them closely. Later, with less noble sitters, there was less carving and more gesso used. Then came moulded gesso and gold leaf or gold paint. Machines have now mainly taken over the framer's art. But gesso is still much used - especially by the framers of international art. What is gesso?

Well, the girlfriend of a neighbour works for a famous framer in London. She tells me that gesso is not necessarily made of just chalk and glue, as I had supposed, but of many different powders and glue binders. And these vary, depending mainly on restoration work and the re-framing of "collector's art".

We have a large mirror in our bedroom that is surrounded by a gilded gesso moulding. This plaster stuff falls away from the wooden backing frame at the slightest touch. The gesso therefore, was of poor quality.

A 1933 painting in its original frame hangs on our wall with gesso moulding that is so strong that a hammer blow would hardly disturb it. So gesso quality is of great importance when dealing with frames that are not of the "manufactured" quality.

In the 1950s I believe there were far fewer framers around. And those that were, were very professional. Not only that but there was generally a close relationship between the artist and his/her framer. That closeness was, and is, good for framing.

I used Ernest Wheatley, who had a premises close to Carnaby Street in London. Two key men worked there. One was an Italian gilder, called Dino de Biasi, and the other, Len. Len was a genius. He could paint a frame by dragging various colours over it,  and could cut a cardboard mount with a scalpel and by eye. He had amazing skills. I never used Robert Siell (if that was how his name was spelled). He would put a painting on an easel, stand back like an artist, and apply various mouldings before painting the appropriate one. I have a painting of a nude lady in one of his frames. His own design of a moulding for this is a simple spoon-shape, painted a dark grey, with the forward edge a ripple of gold leaf. It is a frame made by a master.

Dino de Biasi left Wheatley to set up on his own, and I used him for a part gilded frame of some width around one of my first landscapes painted after the war. But the large area of gold detracted from the leafy green subject, so I had to rub a thin mixture of wax and oil colour over it to soften its power. The change was surprisingly successful. Dino left for Wales. I hope he did well there.

When someone buys a painting from me, I would rather that they have it framed by their own framer, but for the mounts on A4 small works I like to paint a mount around the subject to get the effect that I think is appropriate. And I don't pay much for the frames as I expect the new owners to have different ideas from  mine. 

My present framers are Llexia, run by a charming Japanese lady, called Matsue, and her husband Patrick. 

I wrote earlier of the close relationships between artists and framers. Now came an even more surprising relationship between Patrick and myself.

I had taken into his shop one of my larger paintings to be framed for a one-man show at the Mayor Gallery, in Cork Street, London. It was one for the exhibition entitled "Aircraft Shadows". So we started to talk of aeroplanes, and he to learn that at one time in the war, when I was training to become a pilot, I was stationed at RAF Davidstow Moor in Cornwall with Coastal Command to gain operational experience. I was simply another pair of eyes and sitting in the co-pilot's seat of Warwick aeroplanes on the lookout for the highly armed German Condor aircraft. We had a lifeboat slung beneath the fuselage to drop toward baled-out aircrew. It transpired that Patrick's father was also at Davidstow as a pilot, flying the same aircraft. In the often rather casual way we treated flying then (there was no Health and Safety regulation), my name might or might not be in his logbook. So we looked up dates and they coincided. But instead of my name he had recorded "passenger".

So had we been shot down over the Bay of Biscay, drowned, and our bodies recovered, perhaps my gravestone would have simply stated "A Passenger".

Recalling a child's life in the late 1920s to the early 1930s

People made their own entertainment, and there was plenty - often centred on the village hall. Here there were evenings for plays, whist drives, jazz music (my father played the drums and saxophone) and dances, sometimes in fancy dress. Though small, we actually had a sprung dance floor in our house. On a grander scale was the 9 to 90 ball (I must have been 9 years old or over), where I remember a lady in a simple red dress held up from behind the neck, that when she bent over revealed her comely breasts. At that age I thought that it was rather disgusting. And there was the occasional ball at my grandfather's 18th century Strathfield Saye vicarage where, being gauche and young, I untied the bows on the dress of a girl I fancied. That was not the thing to do.

Foreign governesses, to educate and look after us children, came and went. One in particular hailed from Switzerland and became a family friend. I was staying with her family in Vevey when the war was eminent, so was put on a much overcrowded train and returned to England. 

We took part in plenty of other activities, too. We gave tennis parties, our grass court being so good that we children were often given a prize should we find a weed on it. 

Home-made lemonade was the thirst-quencher, dispensed from the shade of a wooden shelter that could be rotated as desired for sun or shade. There was the Schneider Trophy along the Solent to watch, where seaplanes of several nations raced. The British aircraft were powered by the newly-developed Rolls Royce Merlin engine, later to power many of our fighters and bombers in the upcoming war. The King's Cup air race sometimes took a course above our house. The mixture of private biplanes and racing monoplanes flew quite low in a handicap race around markers. They made a wonderful and colourful sight. There was car racing at Brooklands where we watched from the Home Banking to see such as Napier Railton and ERA cars race around. But for me it was aeroplanes and flight that fired my imagination. Alan Cobham would bring his Flying Circus to some farmer's field and take passengers up in an Avro Tutor biplane. I went for a flip at 7/6 had a loop-the-loop included.

But that was nothing compared with a flight from Croydon Aerodrome (then a large grass field as London's airport). It was 1931. Kingsford Smith had just flown in there from Australia in an Avro 10 Trimotor aircraft with the Christmas mail. It took a record breaking 17 days, crewed by an all-Australian crew - except that my uncle Wyndham Hewitt was his flight engineer and very much English.

Anyhow, Kingsford Smith's plane had a broken tail skid, so we were taken up (my brother Nigel and I) in a German Klemm Bat monoplane. We sat in the forward open cockpit on a bench, and had to hang on like mad in the wind and the exhaust of its in-line, air-cooled engine. I think it must have been a sales aeroplane with advertising words on its side and, unusually, had a prop boss fared into the streamlining of the fuselage. The type was very modern for its time and was used for training Luftwaffe pilots. It was made in many configurations, and a quantity were sold to Czechoslovakia and the USA.

The excitement and potential danger of flying stayed with me until I obtained my wings in the USA at the end of the war. 

The Silchester house was built next to a Roman road. Because of this it was quite usual for us to find Roman coins in the kitchen garden soil. The coins were of little interest to us as they were found so often, so they were thrown in a hamper. 

After my father died of radium poisoning (Madame Curie's triumph), we sold the main house and lived, mainly for weekends, and me alone in some school holidays, in the re-designed, and then thatched, ex-army sheds situated around the pear-shaped back drive. Much later, after I had joined the RAF and was working as a prop swinger, waiting for a place as a trainee pilot, I heard that the thatched house had burnt to the ground. No one knew quite how it had happened. Perhaps a tramp had broken in and set fire to it, perhaps an electric bed-warmer had been left on by mistake? Anyhow, all the Roman coins had melted away, and only an iron cooking pot and a lump of gold, found below where I had placed my watch in a drawer, were recovered. 

Although now much older and able to become an RAF airman, that was the end of my connections with my youthful existence at Silchester. Its time capsule had now been left behind - some of which I have now remembered in haphazard form and recalled here in print. 

Recalling a child's life in the late 1920s to the early 1930s (part 3 of 4)

With no refrigeration at that time, food that might deteriorate was kept in the larder - a small room on the north side of the house. Game was popular for us, but usually kept until it was almost crawling with maggots. A pheasant was always hung up by its two tail feathers until the rotting bird fell to the floor. Then it was ready to roast and be eaten. And very smelly it was - both before and after.

On certain days the muffin man would come to the village with his wares in a tray on his head. He rang a bell and shouted that he had muffins and crumpets for sale. We would bike into the village for them. But most of our food was delivered to the back door by van - baker, butcher, fishmonger and merchant. When dealing with the wine merchant, all used bottles were left out for him to re-cycle. And it was the dregs in those wine bottles I consumed that must have been the origins of my taste for and later writings on wine.

We also bought from the local village shop, where salt was sold by the block, flour, sugar and such by weight in blue paper bags, and fine bacon, which was sliced from the side of a smoked and boned pig by a circular, hand-turned blade. Its rib bones were much prized for flavouring soup. Butter was prised from a  large lump by wooden paddles and patted into shape before being wrapped in greaseproof paper. It was used for most cooking instead of oil. Olive oil was only obtainable from the chemist.

Although not encouraged to mix with the village children all joined in as players or spectators when our cricket team played at home. We children loved it, as there were plenty of wild strawberries to be gathered from around the boundary, and a stream nearby where we could catch minnows.

The local carpenter would take me fishing for chub on the river Kennet.

The village garage was an essential in those times when machines tended to go wrong or engines not to start. It was owned and run by "Uncle Sid". The floor was thick with oil and grease as engines leaked a lot at that time. It smelled of oil and battery acid.

On our bicycle route to swim in the mill pool at Aldermaston, we would pass the garage, then where our bread was made in an oven fired by faggots, and then stop to pick blueberries in a wood. At the mill was a sign that said: "Please pay before you bathe or else you will be...." That part of the sign had been broken off, so we never knew what punishment might befall us if we did not pay.

Should we ever bicycle by night, we had an acetylene/carbide lamp to rather warn others then light our way. Carbide was placed in the bottom of these lights and water allowed to drip on to it, creating acetylene gas, which was lit by a match.

For family transport and delivering eggs to market, we owned an open bullnose Morris car with a Dicky seat, which was great fun in dry weather and in the summertime - when it worked. On a nearby hill we had to get out and help push it.  

The town of Reading was about 10 miles distant - a long way for a child. I loved it when we  went there, mainly because it had a gun shop where I could spend my pocket money on lead pellets for my air gun and .22 cartridges for my garden gun. We went to Reading once just to see King George V's funeral on a newfangled television set. 

And at another time I stopped on the pavement to look at an African man on the other side of the street. He was the first one I had ever seen.

Bicycles were our main mode of transport, and when the hunt met nearby we knew pretty well where the fox would run to and be there on our bikes before the hounds and horses arrived.

The meets were a fine sight with the ladies sometimes astride on their horses or sometimes riding sidesaddle.  The men and master in pink (really red), the barking of the hounds and noise of horses and their hooves the greeting of fellow villagers, neighbours, and strangers, the handing up of sloe gin to the riders, made for great fun. But having a chicken farm meant that foxes were our enemies, so the more dealt with by the hunt the better. And you did not shoot the hunt's foxes. Nor should you shoot partridges out of season, as I once did with my garden gun when very young - bad form.

There was a hunting ritual called "blooding". This was an initiation into the world of the hunt. Ordinarily for those on horse, somehow we children, too, were blooded. It involved having a fox bloody skin rubbed over one's face, and to keep the blood on the skin unwashed for a period of time. I don't know quite how we youngsters qualified - possibly because we may have known the Master of the hunt.

Recalling a child's life in the late 1920s to the early 1930s (part 2 of 4)

Our house was provided with light from a lovely, ticking gas-making machine. Petrol was poured into it and a weight that pushed the gas through copper pipes into the house was powered by winding a lump of concrete to the top of a tree (trees were obviously useful). To ignite the gas, a mantle had to be fitted to wall-hung sconces. These mantles were of soft material, like a small bag, attached to a ceramic ring. Fitted to the gas supply and before turning on the gas, the mantle had to be lit. After its flame had subsided the gas could then be turned on and the now very delicate mantle, lit. The light given off was soft and very pleasant. 

There was never any shortage of water as my father was an expert water diviner. He had selected two sites for wells from which the water was pumped up to a tank in our roof by a Swift car engine that had been bolted into a slab of concrete. But as the engine often failed to work, we all took turns to pump the water up by a hand pump in the kitchen.

The cooking, hot water and irons were catered for by a night-and-day, coal-fired, black-leaded kitchen range, on which was often a pressure cooker filled with water and cabbage.  The resultant liquor was thought to be health-giving by my father. The smell was unpleasant.

The kitchen was a focal point for us children, especially in winter. Connie, our maid (charming, but smelling of carbolic soap) made wonderful cakes there and allowed us to lick out the mixing bowls. The range also provided us with barely-enough hot water for our baths and hot water bottles that we took to our freezing bedrooms by candle light to warm our beds. There was no central heating in those days.

Connie, who lived in a room near the back door, had a boyfriend who was the local steam roller driver. He would leave his bicycle in bushes and climb into her bedroom through a very small window - when just around the corner of the house was a much larger window, which would have been far easier.

I once visited Connie's parents house in Tadley (where the gypsies came from) and when the door was opened, there in front of me, was a vast black pig hanging from a hook on the wall. I suppose that it was about to be cut up. I was impressed.

A man whose job it was to be in charge of a section of road, was called a length man. He mended pot-holes, trimmed hedged and cleared drainage ditches. I'm sure he also needed the services of Connie's steam roller boyfriend. Anyhow, our local length man was a friend of mine and I would sit on the verge of his road, sometimes to share his cold tea, bread, cheese and raw onion - I imagine much to my parents' displeasure.

To get into and out of our village, it was usual to cross over streams by a ford. Whether length men were in charge of keeping these in order I do not know.

Beside an adequate supply of eggs and chickens from the farm, we were almost self-supporting in fruit and vegetables. My father was an agriculturalist and very proud of his kitchen garden, from which we had many vegetables and much fruit - a lot of it being preserved as jam or in glass jars for the winter. At one time, when he was very pleased with a fine crop of giant gooseberries, we woke one morning to find that the whole lot had vanished. The gypsies had penetrated the hedge that separated us from the road and stolen the lot - every one, and at night. I'm sure we called the local policeman, whose name to us was "not good enough".

I was not meant to play with the village boys, and at one time when I went with them to catch newts, and thus gone missing, "not good enough" was called to find me.

When I went to the local pub to collect beer in a jug for Mr. Beer, I would pass by where the newts lived and left them and the village boys well alone.

Going to church on Sundays was a must. We walked there along a Roman track, crossing a pre-Roman fosse, and where a toad lived in his hole. Near to it was where long-tailed tits tended to build their lovely nests of moss and lichen. Then we passed through where there had been an entrance to Calleva Atrebatum, the Roman town. In our designated pew in church we had to listen to long boring sermons and in an atmosphere that smelled strongly of death-watch beetle spray. It was a great relief to retreat afterwards to enjoy Sunday lunch, cooked by Connie as we were supposed to have communed with God. 

Recalling a child's life in the late 1920s to the early 1930s (part 1 of 4)

 This piece is really a glimpse into my early life, a child's life in the English countryside during the late 1920s to the early 1930s.

It all started as Margreet and I were enjoying a glass in our garden "shed" when she asked me more about when I was recovered crawling toward a neighbour's house in my nappies to see the local parson's daughter, a friend. "You must write about it", she suggested. But how could I write a whole piece on such a small incident? So I might as well include it with other small recollections of that time. That is what I have done. I apologise for any repetition as I have written in the past on many of the episodes that I will mention.

I was born in our house at Silchester in 1925. At that time the village could not be reached unless a stream had been forded. My father (badly wounded by the Turks during the '1914 - 1918' war in Mesopotamia) had started a chicken farm in a large field next to our house.

Around our pear-shaped back drive were two ex-army sheds, joined together to form a banana shape. In one end the food for the chickens was kept (mostly dried sweetcorn and ground-up oyster shell) and in the other, the Baverstocks who worked on the farm and did odd jobs. Their daughter remembers me going to see them to ask for "half a naaner" (banana).

One of our jobs was to scrape eggs. Being free range (as all chickens were then) sometimes droppings would adhere to some. These had to be scraped off before the eggs could be loaded on or trailer to be driven to Woking market. One of those scraping knives is still in use in our garden shed. It must be around 100 years old. When there was an order for a chicken from the farm, our spaniel Ben, would under my father's direction, hold down the bird with his paw until my father could pick it up.

We were "gentry" but poor. This came to light I remember when the local brass band came to our drive to play carols at Christmas and we had no money at all to give them. Perhaps we offered eggs or chickens. But I recall that it reduced my mother (a Londoner brought up in court circles) to tears. I don't think she was ever very happy as a farmer's wife. Yet being gentry our financial circumstances were understood. And I am sure that friends and relations helped out with school fees and other expenses. 

This lack of money and the generous attitude to our small income with my father's war disability pension, manifested itself when my parents played bridge with friends. Always someone at the table would cover their losses. It was not a disgrace to be poor.

The Firths lived across a field from us. It was one of the venues for playing bridge. I was often taken along, and boring it was for a small boy. To keep me happy I was given marons glacées to eat, but I would have much preferred a "pennerth" (pennyworth of chocolate drops, a bag of lemonade crystals or a sherbet fountain. 

When the Firths wanted two chickens from our farm for a dinner party, my sister June delivered them - to the front door. Sherrard, the butler, opened the door and asked her, very politely, to deliver them to the servants' entrance at the back of the house. My sister never forgot her embarrassment, especially as no one locked their houses and we were used to simply walk in to see whoever we wanted. 

A social faux-pas that I remember my mother telling we about was when the Duchess of Wellington came to call. When she arrived, my mother was eating bread and dripping. And dripping was one of the  perquisites of the staff.

Harry Firth seldom entered his well-stocked cellar. One day he decided to look at it and found the butler, Sherrard, drinking his favourite port out of a teacup. Sherrard was sacked on the spot, not for drinking the port but for drinking it out of a teacup.

We had other connections with the Firths. Our wireless (a PYE) needed power from a large dry battery and a wet, car battery. As there was no electricity in the village it was my job to take our wet battery across the field to have it charged at the Firth's electricity-generated plant. This extension to the back of their house contained a large flywheel as part of its power generator. On the floor were masses of car batteries linked up to supply the house with light. Our battery was added to the others. My father, being a cricketer (he played for Berkshire) among other sporting skills, wanted to hear the Test Match score from Australia. This needed an aerial strung from the wireless set to the top of a tree. 

The Firths must have moved, I think to Calcott. We stayed there and I recall their men's lavatory being just like stalls in a public lavatory. And after our stay I tipped the butler six pence.

Mary Firth's sister, Hetty Heber Percy, who came to stay at the Firths, became a great friend of my mother's. She lived in London near to the Albert Hall. Much later, when her chauffeur had gone to war, she let us use his flat in the basement, which became a fairly safe refuge for friends and family on leave or needing rest and recuperation. A bomb actually fell nearby and blew off the right breast of one of the sculptures connected to the Albert Memorial. (It was cleverly repaired after the war, but was not quite the same as the original.)

Other rich friends lived at The Vyne, a Tudor house owned by Charlie Chute (he was probably a sir or a lord). There was a chapel in the house, and a resident priest who gave me fishing hooks when I went fishing in their lake. Outside the front door were (and probably still are) two large stone eagles on plinths. They were covered in lichen. I called them "the mossy eagles", and that was then their name.

My grandmother, a formidable lady with a title and rather unknown origins, would come to stay with us. We obviously had to be nice to her as she probably contributed to our finances. She was grand enough that when walking in London's Soho district with my mother, they were confronted by some louts blocking the pavement. She pushed through them, saying "aside, scrum". And they obediently did stand aside.

One day at Silchester, when I had shot or snared a rabbit and not yet dealt with it, she rolled up her old-fashioned sleeves, paunched, skinned and cut it up for the pot. We were astounded. It might have confirmed that she had been an Irish farmer's daughter before she met my later to be knighted grandfather. 

Refugees

 With refugees much in our minds at present, I realise that I have, in my long life, been both the receiver and provider of aid in adversity.

With Russia now intent on overrunning and subjugating the Ukraine, the fear of invasion from hostile forces was as much in the minds of the British people concerning the Nazis in 1940. Hitler's henchmen were then on the rampage, just as Putin's army is today.

In 1940, with my elder brother and sister in occupations that could contribute to the war effort, and my mother working for WVS (Women's Voluntary Service) in London. I, at 15 years old would, she hoped, be one member of the family to survive the probable invasion if I was in a safer country.

An American family from Connecticut in America's East Coast, contacted WVS to ask for an English refugee boy. I was consulted at school, agreed to go, and prepared to leave for a safer land.

With a small suitcase of belongings, I took a train in London to board The Duchess of Richmond liner in Liverpool, thence to sail across the U-boat-infested Atlantic Ocean to disembark in Montreal, Canada.

It was the start of a lonely life in foreign parts, lasting until I was old enough to return to England in 1942 to join the Royal Air Force. 

As a refugee, people in America did their generous best to keep me happy, and certainly safe from Nazi bombs.

Compared with whole families uprooted and with their homes destroyed in the Ukraine, my life as a refugee was one of minor consequence.

That, briefly, was my life as a refugee.

Fast forward through my life in the wartime RAF (written about in my blogs and painted in pictures), TB, the war's end, recuperation (no cure then), medical student (TB again), and on to when I rebuilt a bombed-out house in Fulham, London, to become a landscape painter. 

For painting these landcapes of river and lake scenes, I bought a small pram dinghy and designed and had built a body of a flat-back VW truck in which to house the boat and myself when painting in the countryside. The results were popular.

Fast forward again to 1955 when the Russians invaded Hungary. Refugees, a little like I had been in the war, were pouring into Austria for safety.

With Anne de Goguel, who was well-connected in well-heeled society, we decided to aid these Hungarian refugees.

So, consulting all who might help, we filled my VW "boathouse" van with warm clothes and blankets (mostly new) and set off across Europe, crossing customs borders, and aiming for Vienna.

There we contacted the Red Cross and were told to take our cargo to their warehouse. 

We had not come all that way to do that. So we bought a newspaper to learn that many of those fleeing the Russians were crossing the border at a town called Eisenstadt.

Off we continued, to find a farmyard at the border with many Hungarian refugees trying to keep warm in straw.

Backing the VW into the farmyard we distributed the clothes and blankets directly to those really needing them (there's a moral there). On our way home we took a couple of refugees from the border to Vienna.

So I happen to have experienced both of life as a refugee and, in turn, helped others in much the same situation.

The movement of people throughout the world for economic or oppressed reasons will, sadly, continue for ever. There will always be those who help or are helped - sometimes both. 

\

Skylark

 It was in the spring of 1944 that I was posted for operational training to the highest airfield in England, RAF Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall.

I was only an AC2 trainee pilot, waiting for a vacancy to become a fully-fledged pilot in a friendly country where the weather was more conducive to novice flying.

Here, for experience of operations at Davidstow, my only job was to take the second pilot's seat in Warwick aircraft to watch out for the four-engined and powerfully armed German Condor aircraft, based in Brittany and operating over the Bay of Biscay.

Even with our plentiful collection of 303 Browning machine guns, we were no match for the bristling canons on the far swifter German aeroplane.

So my extra pair of sharp eyes being directed skyward were of vital importance when the others aboard the Warwick were looking seaward to locate bailed-out or crash-landed aircrew for whom we were prepared to drop, via parachutes, a specially-made lifeboat slung beneath the fuselage.

The sorties were often long ones, one, as I recall, lasting 9 hours. 

We were each given a box of food and drink guaranteed as fried egg on our return to Davidstow. 

The noise on board from our two Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp, radial engines was enormous. So conversation was impossible without use of the intercom. 

Back on land at Davidstow there were several useless plans to keep me busy, if not happy. But life on the station was generally pretty miserable with poor rationed food and infrequent leave.

As having the lowest rank in the RAF (AC2), I mostly had to keep my sleeping space in a multi-bed Nissen hut clean and tidy, trousers pressed, boots shiny, brass burnished and blankets in perfect "bisquit" form. So leave, if only a day's worth, was a delightful break from the land-based monotony. 

My favourite outing was to take a bike ride to Boscastle, a delightful, small and almost miniature unused inlet harbour on Cornwall's north coast.

On the way there or back I would stop, make for a field of grass, lie on my back and gaze into the blue sky to listen to the song, and watch the hovering flight of a skylark. 

A Busy Winter in the Garden

 My normal winter jobs in the garden are simple. In early December I prune the vines and turn the pruning into kindlings for a friend who has a real fire in a fireplace.

When it's cold and no longer pleasant enough to use our summerhouse (the shed), we move the potted lemon tree into it for the winter.

Then comes the distribution of compost from our bin and on to soil in pots, bags, or the small strip of garden soil at the edge of one side of the garden (where we grow alternatively new potatoes or beans).

I then prune our two examples of that wonderful rose called Typhoon, and take a few cuttings of it that I hope will "take", then to give away.

With light pruning of the pear and apple trees in pots, and a trim of the mistletoe on the apple tree, I close up shop and only go out in the cold weather to feed the wild birds. Jobs done.

This year has been different.

Rotten wood above the shed door needed clearing out and replacing. This was done mostly by our Lebanese handyman/plumber with my help.

Then I repainted the roof of the shed with another coat of silver, reflective paint and varnished bits of woodwork around the edge that might be subject to further wet rot. 

In attending to the rot over the door we inadvertently just altered the shape of the door frame, which widened the gap at one side of the door to allow wet and wind to penetrate. So I had to buy some timber to put that to rights.

Another winter job was to strengthen the piano, a bamboo framework that supports our summer crop of runner beans. On a recent blog I have related how I solved the problem when having bought long bamboos, the bus driver for my return journey refused me entry with any object over two metres in length (my bundle was six inched too long).

Now came the trickiest of my winter jobs.

The end of one of the slats of our hardwood garden bench had rotted away. I had tried several make-do methods in the past to correct this - and failed. Other solutions, contrived in ideas of the night, also proved ineffective. So I decided to tear off the rotten slat and replace it with new wood. Not selling hardwood at the wood merchant, I had to settle for the proscribed length of softwood. Then I found that the remaining hardwood slat was so firmly attached to the bench framework that it would be just as good and a lot easier if I simply replaced the rotten end of it. So, having drilled and countersunk screw holes, and coated the softwood twice with protective varnish, I assembled, and then admired my handiwork. Only a little wood filling was necessary and, because the colour of the new wood was too light, a bit of artwork came in handy to complete the job.

We live in an age and society where broken objects are often discarded to be replaced by the new. But I like to repair old and often loved objects, and allow them to continue to serve their purpose and become, in their way, unique.

I'm quite proud of my winter's work in the garden. But at my age it has taken a bit of time, and sometimes deserved a restful beer. 

"Waiting " in the SECOND WORLD WAR (part 2 of 2 parts)

 30/12/1944 - 07/01/1945.  I boarded the New Mauritania liner in Liverpool, bound for Canada. I was put in charge of the fruit store and the distribution of fruit barely seen in rationed England. The store was large and refrigerated. The smell was lovely but the cold unpleasant. Had we been torpedoed my chances of life would have been slim. But ocean liners are quick and it was felt fairly safe from U-boat attack. All was well. 

07/01/1945 - 20/01/1945.  We docked in Moncton, New Brunswick, in Canada, and boarded a train to the USA and Miami, Oklahoma, in America's mid west. On board the train, volunteers showered us with gifts of tobacco, chocolates and much else that seemed unbelievably generous and, to our rationed habits, quite eye-opening. We were now in a land of plenty, and almost treated like heroes.

23/02/1945 - 27/08/1945.  One hundred in our "flight" arrived at 3 BFTS (British Flying Training School) Miami, to learn to fly aeroplanes. I can only conclude it was the custom to make us feel less individualistic and more like canon-fodder, that the lavatory lacked partitions and was simply a long row of lavatory basins. Some of our number were so upset by this arrangement that they would only go there in the dead of night. But we all must have got used to it. Food in the canteen was bountiful and initially much appreciated.  But the American taste and menus seemed to pall after a while. The first type of aeroplane that we flew was a Cornell (PT19). This was a lovely aircraft and a joy to fly. One day some of us left our main airfield and flew from an auxiliary grass field not too far away. The day in question was cold, thawing on the ground and freezing in the air. We flew what was known as a circuits and bumps (taking offs and landings). I had done quite a few and had noticed that the controls were becoming a little stiff. So, after landing and taxiing to the shed where our instructor was sitting with his feet on a stove, I told him of this stickiness and asked his opinion. "Carry on or finish." he told me. The one thing uppermost in our minds was not to be short of flying hours and be left behind to join a later flight. So I decided to carry on. Unknown to me, and I think everyone else, was that this tightening of the controls was due to water splashing up from the ground and freezing to the underside of the wing when in the air, and thus altering its aerofoil section.  When I was turning in to land the controls froze solid. I had the choice of climbing, using top rudder and jumping out with my parachute, or flying the aeroplane into the ground. With a good chance of spinning and killing myself with my first choice, I chose the second. It was an instant choice. The resultant crash broke off both wings as well as the fuselage behind my neck. The broken propeller and engine, with me attached in the cockpit behind, skidded along the muddy turf and stopped. I saw what I thought was smoke rising from fire, but it was steam. Anyhow, having knocked two instruments out of the panel in front of me with my head, and somewhat dazed, I jumped out and ran to safety. On my way by ambulance back to the main airfield I asked the driver what had happened. He did not know. What I really wanted to know was had I perhaps been run down by a bus in London or something else. Anyhow, I recovered in hospital quickly. When the Commanding Officer visited my bedside, he asked me if I wanted to give up after such an accident. "No, sir", I replied, "I just want to get out of this bed and fly." I thought I'd overdone it. On leaving, he said to the Adjutant accompanying him: "That's just the kind of young man we want in the Air Force."

 On a short leave a friend and I set out to see some of America. So we set out to hitchhike first south to Dallas (then rather a small town), and west to Albuquerque, north to Denver (the Mile High City), and back east to Kansas City before south to Miami once more. A doctor who gave us a lift was curious as to why we kept turning our heads to right and left.  It was a habit we had acquired when constantly on the lookout in the air for other aircraft. We had not trouble in obtaining lifts, being in our RAF uniforms, but lady drivers declined to stop until we learned that when we saw it was a woman driver approaching, and when she had seen us, we dropped our arms and turned away from the road. Now they would usually stop. One man stopped, gave us his car key, told us of his far destination and went to sleep in the back seat. In eight days we travelled 2,425 miles (3903 km) at a cost of 21 dollars. 

From the charming Cornell training aeroplane I qualified as a pilot in the powerful advanced training aeroplane, the Harvard. This now enabled me to go straight on to fly Spitfires, Hurricanes or conversion to multi-engined bombers. But the European war had just finished and, although the war in the Pacific raged, there were enough skilled pilots available to take part in it. Out of the 100 aspiring pilots in my flight, only 50 completed the course to be awarded wings. Some had given up, some failed and some were killed. I was awarded my wings and a commission. 

28/08/1945 - 04/09/1945. Fort Hamilton. I see that I was posted there but cannot recall why.

04/09/1945 - 10/09/1945. I boarded the Queen Elizabeth in New York as a Pilot Officer on my way to Southampton and an England finally at peace.

11/09/1945 - 17/10/1945.  I was waiting again, now in Harrogate.

17/10/1945 - 13/11/1945. At Hereford, I took part in a course for newly appointed officers on how to conduct ourselves appropriately. We were lectured on subjects such as law (how to arrange a Court Martial), language (on joining up I heard for the first time the word "absofuckinglutely"), and other such as manners (not to raise aloft one's knife and fork when at the table - except when delivering food to the mouth, of course).

The rest of my time in the RAF consisted of waiting, then training as a Photographic Intelligence Officer at RAF  Medmenham, then interpreting German aerial photographs of oil installations north of the Caspian Sea at RAF Nuneham Park. Lack of food and heat at Nuneham in 1947 probably caused my TB (there was no cure at that time). Then came discharge to recuperate. The war was over. My war was over. Had I been born a year earlier I doubt if I would have survived it. Even all the waiting may have helped to save my life. But then I have always been lucky. 

"Waiting" in the SECOND WORLD WAR (in two parts. Part 1)

 Just as nowadays much of our time is wasted in "waiting" for such as deliveries, the post, appointments with doctors, dentists, opticians, telephone answering, and even jabs, so my days in the RAF as a wartime volunteer, and after, also involving waiting, but on a different, larger, and sometimes life-altering scale.

As I was complaining to myself recently about so much waste of time in life, I came to think and mentally record the same seemingly endless waiting around in the RAF both before and after gaining my wings in the USA.

So I have recovered a piece of dog-eared paper (now some 80 years old) on which I recorded the various stations with their now long-forgotten acronyms of purpose on my journey from joining up in 1942 wartime and being invalided out of the RAF with Tuberculosis (TB) in 1947.

If anything of note happened during this saga of billeting I will add a word or two on it for the sake of interest. So here goes.

1942. Having been a refugee in the USA, and now, at 17 years old, I crossed the Atlantic from New York to Liverpool in a convoy as I was at last old enough to join the RAF in England. I signed up right away in Oxford (why Oxford I have no idea).  Disappointed, I was told to await a vacancy for pilot training. So, thinking that one day in the future I might become a farmer like my father, and now fully aware of food shortages, I took a job as a farm labourer to learn and help with the national effort. It was a hard life, which I embraced, but one of worry, which rather put me off the whole idea. I then heard of a job vacancy at RAF Theale, some five miles away from my digs, where a prop-swinger was wanted. Within bicycling distance, I took the job of starting up the engines of Tiger Moth biplanes. With no meteorology available at that time, an instructor would fly up-wind to see if the oncoming weather was suitable for safe flying. As the second cockpit was unused, and I was known to also be in the RAF, I had some gratis instruction in how to fly. This was valuable later when I came to my first solo flight. Then came the welcome news that I could start my training. This period of waiting in civilian life had been frustrating but put to excellent use.

06/09/1943 - 23/09/1943 at St John's Wood, London. This was where we were issued with uniforms and given a collection of inoculations before gathering at Lord's Cricket Ground beneath the corrugated roof of a single story stand where the Warner Stand now exists. One of our number blew up a condom and let it sail out over the hallowed ground to much laughter. We were given a patriotic lecture.

25/09/1943 - 06/01/1944. I was posted to RAF Paignton, Devon, where we were put through the unbelievably harsh training to become airmen and fit men. The non-commissioned officer who chastised us was known as "Chan". Some of our number swore to get even with him after the war. Life was miserable, my fountain pen was stolen and I had not the money from our meagre pay to buy another. On the bright side was the rough cider served in a thatched, woodland pub. Those unused to this drink might fall flat on their faces when leaving the pub. Fellow airmen who had been brought up close to home and mommy-coddled, had a dreadful time of this harsh training/bullying. Those few who had experienced tough boarding school life were far more able to deal with it. It was wonderfully enlightening to mix with people from every walk of life - something for which I have been eternally grateful.

07/01/1944 - 04/02/1944 at RAF Shellingford. This was just a few huts, a farmer's field, and Tiger Moth biplanes in which we learnt initial flying techniques up to the stage when we flew our first solo flights over the Berkshire countryside. It was a magical experience to have now flown an aeroplane alone. Local girls were much in demand by American soldiers stationed in the district. Silk stockings were the reward for sex, but condoms had been pierced by needles - leading to an increase in the local population.

18/02/1944 - 28/02/1944. Heaton Park, Manchester, was a holding distribution station. I can only recall a crowd of us airmen waiting on one railway station platform when three girls walked on to another platform opposite - to much whistling. Showing the airmen some hidden areas of flesh drew enormous shouts of approval. 

28/02/1944 - 14/03/1944. I was in Scarborough but for why I cannot recall, except that it must have included more waiting.

15/03/1944 - 16/05/1944.  RAF Davidstow Moor, in Cornwall was, I believe, the highest airfield in England, so quite often interesting aeroplanes would land there when other airfields were fogbound. After a Wellington squadron was based there, the station became an air/sea rescue unit of Coastal Command flying twin-engined Warwick aircraft. These failures as bomber aircraft had specially made lifeboats slung beneath the fuselage to be dropped beneath parachutes to save fellow airmen in the Bay of Biscay. I have written elsewhere of my experiences flying in the second pilot's seat, only as another pair of excellent eyes. My 20 hours in these Warwicks were my only operational flights in the war - one in particular being extremely dangerous when we managed to avoid the attentions of a powerfully armed, four-engined German Condor aircraft.

17/05/1944 - 07/06/1944. I was back at Heaton Park for more waiting.

07/06/1944 - 17/08/1944. Now I was on a Lancaster bomber airfield. RAF Skellingthorpe, just outside Lincoln. It was very much operational with its aircraft regularly missing from night time raids over Germany. It was not uncommon for those returning from bombing missions to have the vulnerable rear gunner dead and hosed out of their turrets. One day a returned Lancaster had to have a Merlin engine replaced after it had been destroyed in combat. So the new engine installed had to be tested in a flight up to Scotland and back. The rear gunner was, for some reason, unable to fly on this test flight, so I was asked to take his place. Now, at my fingertips I had four Browning machine guns fully armed up and ready. With a twist of the hands I could swing the turret from side to side and the guns up and down. It was possible, but improbable, that a German aircraft could cross the North Sea and beat us up. And I was ready. My only task, when asked by the navigator, was to take the drift (aeroplanes are subject to side winds, and this is drift). I would line up my guns with the landscape beneath and read off the drift on a scaled indicator at floor level on the right hand side of the turret. I would give him the information on the intercom. All was well. The new engine worked. No German aircraft appeared. Then, for the landing, those aboard, except the pilot, would gather around the main spar amidships that connected the wings. I had now flown in a Lancaster which, at the time was exciting enough, and, in recollection, a memorable stroke of wartime luck and experience.

17/08/1944 - 05/09/1944.  I was back at Heaton Park - waiting once again.

05/09/1944 - 21/11/1944. I was posted to RAF Hornchurch a fighter airfield on the outskirts of London - again to wait. So I volunteered to mend bombed roofs in the East End south of the river Thames in Plumstead. Given a mate, the simple equipment, and an hour or so training by a professional slater, I crossed the river on the Woolwich ferry to start mending broken roofs with rather poor quality Welsh slates. It was a filthy job as the terraced slums were Victorian, with their soot, dirt and bits of slate accumulated in the roof space over the years, seemed to penetrate my clothing. The new slates had to have two holes tapped out of them with the point of my slater's hammer and then nailed into position on the slats attached to the rafters (I hope I have the nomenclature right). I must have made three or four bombed houses rainproof. It was such a deprived district that a lovely girl in one of the houses I worked on, smiled only to expose a mouthful of rotten teeth. The inhabitants were not only extremely grateful for the work done but would generously offer us tea and buns from their meagre rations. One day when I was up on a roof I heard a loud a loud explosion, followed by a strange swooshing noise. Later, I learned that is was made by one of the first German V2 rocket bombs to strike London. The noise of it arriving through the air followed the sound of its explosion. 

21/11/1944 -30/12/1944.  Back to Heaton Park once more to wait. Now, at last, important advances were about to happen. 

Bamboos

The quest was simple. I needed some five foot bamboos to mend and strengthen the construction we call "the piano" over which we grow runner beans in the summer. I also wanted two four or five foot bamboos for a new idea of vines in pots, to be grown rather like larger Bonsais with an umbrella-like top of leaves and fruit. So I set out one morning to buy bamboos - all simple enough. Surprisingly, our local garden centre does not stock them. This meant I had to take a bus to a much larger garden centre about an hour's distance away. 

All was well and good when the bus, which normally goes straight on near the garden centre, turned, rather suddenly left. I lost my footing and fell on part of the bus, which was to give me a nasty bruise on the thigh, but no broken bones.

At the garden centre there were plenty of bamboos for sale in bundles of ten, but the shortest were seven feet tall - too long, I felt, for travelling back by bus. But I took a chance and bought a bundle.

At the bus stop for my return journey the driver, who came to a stop at my request, refused me entry. "Two metres is the maximum length allowed for the likes of that", he said. After a short discussion, he agreed to take me to the nearest main line railway station for me to continue my journey by rail. I boarded and managed to arrange my bundle of bamboos to just touch the plastic ceiling but not to damage it. 

Then I realised that the railway would deposit me in central London, and I would be far worse off. Perhaps if I shortened the bamboos all would be well. 

So, at a stop near shops, I disembarked with the idea of either borrowing a saw or buying a cheap one, cutting and shortening the bamboos, possibly on the pavement or in a bus shelter.

Two ladies in a Pound shop did not know what a saw was and directed me to a sweet counter. I returned to the pavement to further enquire if there might be a hardware merchant in the district. After a short walk I found a branch of Screw fix, in a small shop where pre-orders were dealt with by young men behind plastic screens. 

A most helpful assistant produced a small Junior Hacksaw from below the counter, and with a measure (seemingly in feet and inches) we measured roughly what two metres would be. With the bundle taking up rather a lot of room, I started to saw, with the counter as my workbench.

As the bundle swung around a bit and might have upset trade, the boss appeared, heard my tale and took me and the bamboos to a nearby office. Not only that, but he volunteered to cut the remaining bamboos for me. 

What lovely and understanding people they had been. A proffered reward was declined. 

Now, with a bundle of roughly two metre bamboos, I was on my way home - without dispute.

Francis Bacon (A piece to accompany my autobiographical 2021 paintings and covered comprehensively in my previIn 1958 In 1958 ous blogs of 29 November 2015 and 25 March 2017.)

In 1958 I decided to sell my house beside Chelsea Football Ground in London's Fulham Road, to travel and to draw on my way toward the Far East where wonderful Japanese woodcut prints had been produced in the 18th Century. 

But I somehow felt that I still wanted roots in England to confirm in my mind that I still belonged to the country were I was born.

So I advertised in local Hampshire and Berkshire newspapers for a barn to return to. 

"Artist wants to buy a barn for work and life, etc. "

Several farmers and landowners replied, offering me barns - but only to  dismantle and take them away.

One lady, a Mrs Rampling of Chieveley near Andover, offered me a tumbledown thatched cottage on the Berkshire Downs for a ridiculously low sum. I met her. We took to each other. I loved the site with its mouldering wreck, and bought it.

She lived next door in a small cottage surrounded by the kind of garden displayed colourfully on biscuit tins. There was no plumbing in the house that she shared with her First World War veteran husband who had been gassed in the fighting. Effluent went into a trench to grow the following year's runner beans. They were country people at their best, and would look after my new possession when I was away.

I returned a year later after making several thousand paintings, had an exhibition of them at the Reid Gallery in London's Cork Street, and set about designing my new studio and living quarters, using ideas and proportions gleaned from a circumnavigation of the globe. 

Although I might have been able to rebuild the wattle and daub structure and its remaining rodent-infested thatch, I agreed with Mrs Rampling that it would be best to burn it down to the ground and start to build from scratch.

When the wind was in the right direction I telephoned the local fire brigade, told them not to bother, and put a lighted match to the upwind corner of the thatch. In a couple of hours there where only two chimney stacks to demolish. I had already designed the new building, and could now start - but to construct only half of its gull-winged roof design for economic reasons.

The studio house that rose in place of the old structure was, to me, lovely.

I lived there in great contentment and at one with nature. Even a blue tit roosted in my bedroom, and a mother blackbird would virtually leave her first brood for me to look after while she was busy with new fledgelings.

But after a year's drawing abroad I had the greatest difficulty in being able to return to using paint - even with the paint that I had always ground for myself and the wax medium that I had been so used to using, I had vegetated.

In my struggles I turned to making collages out of coloured paper to be able to see my way out of this impasse. They are now popular with collectors. Anyhow, it was time to return to the metropolis, to galleries and a speedier way of life.  So I had to sell the house I loved.

In 1961, after the local estate agent said that he could never sell a house with only one bedroom, I set about advertising it. I chose two nationals. The Times and Telegraph. I was contacted by a Telegraph reader who wanted to see the house. His name was Francis Bacon. He saw the house. It was just what he wanted. There was no negotiation except that I tried to get one of his paintings as part of the deal. It was his London gallery financing him. They declined.

With no fixed address I took various digs and the offers of beds with friends as I looked for my next place as studio and abode. And, quite surprisingly, it was a great period for my art as I returned to painting again, mainly concentrating on the shapes in London dockland, especially around Limehouse where I sometimes worked as a matelot supernumerary on coasters.

Seeing a warehouse for sale at auction, and discovering it had its own river wall by cleaning a patch in a dirty window at the rear, I made the winning bid and got it. 

With no fixed address, a letter reached me via my bank in Regent Street from Francis. Would I come for the day or a weekend? Of course I would. What would be there in my old house with Francis Bacon in residence? 

I arrived to find virtually nothing had been changed from the house I had left. But I could now see why Francis had bought it. The bare walls were still the pinkish, unadorned plaster, slightly varying in texture and colour. The marble floor of the studio was still laid with the collection of Victorian washstand tops that I had been buying and saving for years, and the small room beside the studio was still partly surrounded by a low platform of cloth-covered soft rubber. There were no art materials to be seen in the studio and no pictures hanging on the walls. In fact, the only items missing to make up a Bacon painting were a grotesque central figure and chrome tubing that he once used  when making furniture and was depicted occasionally in his paintings. 

But the missing figure really was there in the room next to the studio, curled up in a corner of the soft rubber platform. It was the contorted body shape of George Dyer, combing his greasy black hair. 

Now, in the centre of the studio, with one of its walls mainly of glass overlooking the garden and Downs, was a small table on which were laid out for lunch of raw kippers covered in raw onion rings, and Champagne. With no pictures anywhere on the walls, this table constituted a small but powerful decoration.

George took very little part of our conversations, but Francis and I were both very aware of the success of chance of painting, and many subjects were covered. 

Sexually we were worlds apart, but he was very insistent that people believed that homosexuals lived in a twilight world, which he emphasised was quite untrue.

Of the two paintings that did feature in my visits to Chieveley, one was an image that I once saw in some publication or other of Bacon's painting of George, curled up in his corner, just as I had first seen him. (I later looked in the Bacon Catalogue Raisonné to find out more about it, but it was not included.) And the other was one given to Mrs Rampling next door. It was of thick impasto paint of Mont Ventoux - almost childlike in its bright colours, simplicity and directness. I do not know what happened to it, even if it had been painted by Francis.

Whereas there was no clutter, pictures or paint to be seen at Horsemoor Studio in Chieveley, other than a painting I had done on a bedroom door to represent a bookcase (which he praised), the contrast was extreme when compared with his Reece  Mews abode in London which was cluttered up with paint tubes, colour, pots, brushes, easels, pictures, scrap paper and much else that forms a messy studio. I was invited there once to meet James Baldwin, who had just arrived from America to launch a new book over here. I was most surprised to see fellow guests who appeared to be mostly young man from the city in city suits and very much "presenting" themselves. 

I had expected an artistic-looking crowd. A more arty crowd was at a pub party given by Francis near the Theater Royal in London, where a fellow guest remarked that Francis was unaware that George was gay - whatever that meant.

Francis wrote to me later (in 1966), thanking me for seeds and that he was selling the Chieveley house. (I thought he had given it to George before George killed himself. Perhaps it came back to him.) He wanted me to explain about the house's idiosyncratic bits so that he could inform the new owner. These were mainly to do with drains and the septic tank. But the house had other hidden features, such as a central, frost-proof core in which all drainpipes, tanks, water piping and cisterns were housed. No pipes were to be seen anywhere. And there was under floor heating, a pipe for air to enter the house beneath the floor to give draught air to the fireplace, and a fake chimney that took in outside air to be heated by the real chimney next to it and then deliver its warmed air to the only bedroom through an adjustable grille.

After this sale I met Francis several times in London, and he would always stop to talk with me.

I suppose that our relationship hinged on the facts that we naturally got on well together, I was not in awe of him, and  that I would not take advantage of our friendship.

As he always seemed to me to be so youthful in looks and mind, it was quite a shock when I learned that he had died.

He was a friend.

Ideas for Slow Cooking

 The trouble with writing recipes is to cover the variables satisfactory. 

All us family cooks have our favourite pans and know their limitations from years of use. We know the settings for our ovens, slow cookers and gas or electric adjustments. Owners of them know their drawbacks.

But we don't know what preservatives have been added to food to increase shelf life, the amount of water injected into meat, or the chemicals used for curing meat - such as for sausages, hams and bacon. And what is used to dye and smoke the meat and fish? Might these be bad for your health?

The times needed to soak dried beans, chick peas and lentils will depend on their age. It is difficult to tell by looking at them. So we have to interpret a lot to get matters right.

Thus, when I write that a dish takes such and such a time to cook, I may know when using my own kit, but with yours it may be different. 

One's own judgment of quantities and timings is what counts, and mine rely on "throwing in" this or that and timing rather roughly. Others have to, and are happy, to measure everything.

As I belong to the "throw in" brigade - I expect surprises and inconsistencies - and delight in them. 

The following two slow-cooking recipes come very much under this approach to cooking.

I think that lamb or mutton shoulder is tougher and certainly fattier than leg.  But a shoulder, or half of one, laid on a bed of thickly sliced potatoes and all covered with plenty of garlic and chopped rosemary (I use a hand-operated Mouli for that), pepper and salt and all moistened with a good glass of wine or beer containing some lemon zest, lemon juice chopped preserved lemon, will produce a splendid dish if given half an hour in a hot oven, followed by an hour or two at 130 degrees

The top part of the cooked joint may be what is now known as "pulled" (stringy), the lower part being more for slicing. The potatoes will melt in the mouth.

Oven settings will vary on the oven make, the height at which food is placed in it, and if others in the district are using the same power source at the same time. And then, of course, timing will depend on the meat, game, stews, fish or vegetables being cooked.  That's when a certain amount of guesswork comes in as well as the occasional glance at the proceedings. Extra liquid may be in order, in which case it is best to heat up the liquid before adding it.

Before serving, pop the plates in the oven for a short time to warm. But keep an eye on them as they can get too hot quite quickly. 

My slow cooker is rather tinny and ancient, but throw into it any sort of meat and surround this with almost any desired vegetable, then pouring over some stock, wine or beer, some pepper and salt and perhaps a herb or spice, and out will come a delicious meal in an hour's time, having set the heat (in my case) at the 1 and a half setting.

I might add that when I last cooked shin of beef in this way (one and a half hours) I used whole potatoes and Brussels sprouts as the vegetables. Should you try this (the sprouts are delicious), add more spuds and sprouts than wanted at the time. Then mash the leftover vegetables to form excellent bubble and squeak.

Cooking can then be so easy and fun.