I’m sure to have written in the past on several aspects of what will follow. I apologise for it. But putting it all together will, hopefully, give a rough idea of what my country-bred childhood was like during the late 1920s to early 1930s. Here goes with memories - if a bit haphazardly chosen.
The pleasures of my youth at Sawyer’s Lands in Silchester were miriad and at a time when one did not expect others to give much of their time for us. We were free to come and go more or less as we pleased. Self-sufficiency was quite normal and one’s initiative, was encouraged. But if we misbehaved Nigel and I were punished by beatings with the back of a clothes brush - Nigel rather more than me as I was my father’s favourite. However, I deserved a beating after using scissors to trim the bristles on my father’s hairbrush.
At some 14 years old I was at one time looking after myself during school holidays because my father had died and my mother was too busy in London working for us to survive. Then all I had learned about feeding myself, shooting for the pot, and local friendships fell into place.
Aeroplanes in those formative years of flight where very important for my brother Nigel, and me. There was the King’s Cup for handicapped (mostly) biplanes that sometimes flew so low over our house that we could see the pilots clearly. The Schneider Trophy was a speed competition for seaplanes (with floats) over the Solent that we went to view, and Alan Cobham’s Flying Circus, that based itself in a rented farmer’s field, and at which we had our first taste of really flying in an aeroplane. It was magic.
Then there was a ‘flip’ over London from Croydon Airfield (London’s greenfield airport) in a Klemm Bat, which, when I was 7 years old was one of the many instances that gave me a taste for flying. We were always making models to scale and to fly. One of the latter, a Frog, a monoplane powered by elastic bands, was one of the most sophisticated to fly.
Kingsford Smith, the great Australian aviator, was to visit and land in our field, but didn’t, due to more “corporate” pleasures. But I did meet him later at Croydon.
For the house (before refrigeration) we gathered mushrooms (mainly for breakfast and eaten with tomatoes), blackberries blueberries and fruit of all kinds for bottling in Kilner jars to feed us in winter time.
With a chicken farm we ate chickens and eggs a lot, with roast chicken being our choice when asked what we wanted to eat on our birthdays. Our dog Ben would help my father select birds and hold them down with his paw until my father could pick them up.
We would snare rabbits and acquire game to hang in our larder to eat when high enough. Stilton cheese was also eaten over-rype by today’s standards.
My rather grand grandmother, of little known origins, once volunteered to clean, skin and cut up a rabbit and rolled up her sleeves to do so. This indicated that she might have been a butcher’s daughter in Ireland. She might also have been a hairdresser.
My father, an athlete who had played cricket for Berkshire but badly wounded in the First World War, was a bit of a health freak, so crates of oranges featured prominently in the larder. An aluminium pressure cooker that looked like a large Mill’s bomb was used for boiling cabbage overnight. The resultant liquid smelled horrible but my father thought it was very healthy to drink.
For him, lavatory routine was very important for us children. We had to “try hard” even if we had not eaten anything for days due to illness.
Good manners were also very important to him. We would open doors for grownups allowing ladies to go through first. I think we rather overdid it. But it was much appreciated. We had to write “thank you” notes for any gift or visit. I still do.
My father took great interest in nature and taught us about bird, animal and insect recognition. Our garden was special to him so we were virtually self supporting with fruit and vegetables. When my father had grown some giant gooseberries and was going to show them at the local fete, gypsies broke into our garden at night and stole the lot. Of course we contacted the local policeman who was unable to help, but for every time we called on his services he would say “it’s not good enough” so his nickname to us was always “not good enough”.
I was the proud owner of a garden gun that fired .2 2 bore cartridges. One day when my parents were out, two partridges walked in our kitchen garden. Miraculously I shot them both with one cartridge. When my parents came home they were shocked instead of full of praise because shooting game then was out of season. This was not a thing to do in country society. I think we had to bury the partridges as to shoot them at that time of year really was “not good enough”.
We had a lovely tennis court that was free of weeds. After we had weeded it, a monetary prize would be given to the child who found any weed that might have been missed.
As for other entertainments my father played the saxophone and drums in the local jazz band, so we gave dances on our sprung dance floor. Both of my parents played bridge with local families. I was taken along, and to keep me happy was sometimes given marron glacé when I would much rather have had a simple Mars bar.
In summer, at our tennis parties, we provided home made lemonade to drink. We were relatively poor as when the local brass band came to play Christmas carols in our drive we had no money to give them, which made my mother cry. We may have given them chickens or eggs.
We, as children, had access to most houses as all were welcome and few doors locked. My sister June once had to deliver two chickens from our farm for a dinner party at the Firth’s (friends and neighbours). Being used to free access she delivered them to the front door of their house. The butler, Sherrard, told her to deliver them to the servants’ entrance. She never forgot it.
Harry Firth enjoyed a good glass. Unexpectedly one day he chose to visit his cellar and found there Sherrard drinking his favourite port out of a tea cup. He sacked Sherrard on the spot, not for drinking his favourite port, but for drinking it out of a tea cup.
If lemonade was the drink for tennis, my own preference was to consume the dregs from wine bottles left out for the wine merchant to collect and recycle. These tipples must have given me a good start to a later life as weekly wine correspondent for our local newspaper and authorship of several books on the subject.
We used country recipes for country matters. To kill aphids etc, it was with nicotene spray made from cigarette butts soaked in water. Tomatoes were nourished with cow dung dissolved in water. Iodine was applied for all cuts and hurt like mad. Butter was applied for all burns (which I do to this day with success). Dock leaves were rubbed on to nettle stings. Butterflies were killed for the collection in a jar of laurel leaves. When collecting bird’s eggs, we were always sure to leave some in the nest. We would blow them for our collections, the method being, a hole was made in the shell and a hollow tube with a curved end used through which air was blown into the egg to empty it.
Connie, the maid, who was a wonderful cakemaker, and who allowed us children to lick out the bowls, always referred to my father as “The Captain”. Her lover drove the local steamroller, and would leave his bicycle in a hedge at the bottom of the drive. He would crawl into her downstairs bedroom through a very small window by the back door, when a large window beckoned around the corner nearby at the front of the house.
The roads were cared for by a lengthman. Our local one was a friend of mine and sometimes I would share his bread, cheese, raw onion, and cold tea - much to my parents’ displeasure.
We would collect beer from (really, a Mr Beer) in a jug at a penny a pint from the “Crown” village pub. We would collect bread from our baker (nearly every village had its local baker). Ours baked his bread in an oven in which tied faggots had been burned. Other people’s bread somehow always tasted better than ours. The muffin man would come to our village and ring his bell, balancing on his head a tray of muffins and crumpets.
The local carpenter would take me fishing for chubb at a tributary of the Avon river.
There were two local water mills at Aldermaston and Burfield where we would cycle for a swim in summer time. At one there was a notice that said: “Please pay before you bathe or else you will be…..” the rest of the notice board had been broken off, so we never knew how we would have been punished had we not paid. At Burfield Mill there was a tank of eels - which were presumably for sale.
With the Reverend John Barker taking over from my grandfather as the Duke of Wellington’s private vicar at Stratfield Saye, the lovely Georgian vicarage he lived in became our second home with its occasional balls, a river to swim in (5 shillings reward for our first swim across), trees for shooting pigeons and, for me, being made a Brownie as my aunt was their “Chief” or something. Next to where the Brownies met was a small museum of local artifacts - the kind that country gentlemen liked to have. Another at Silchester, run by Colonel Karslake, who was also Mayor of Paddington, held items that were related to the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester).
Being so close to the Roman town we would often find Roman coins. They were just thrown into a hamper, which was eventually destroyed in a fire.
Although most of the town’s Roman wall had disintegrated, parts had been restored by archeologists. It was massive, and clearly kept its inhabitants, travellers and merchants safe from tribal attacks.
The town’s amphitheatre had not yet been excavated and was the farmer’s duck pond.
At the end of our field was a totally overgrown fortification outside the Roman wall that must have been pre-Roman. We called it the fosse. It was completely wild - and might have been unknown.
Our local doctor, Dr Daley, who made his medicines in a shed in his garden, ministered to us and never charged as my grandfather had got him out of some scrape or other when they were both at Cambridge. For me, I learned a little about a girl’s anatomy as my cousin Cherry and I liked to play doctors.
As my father was so keen on sport and had played cricket for his County, he needed to listen to the Test Match in Australia. With the combination of an areal from the house to a nearby tree, and a huge dry battery combined with a wet one, charged by the Firth’s electricity-generating fly wheeled machine with floor batteries, we were able to reach Australia through a PYE wireless containing glowing valves in the shape of bulbs. It was sometimes my job to lug these batteries across the field that divided our properties.
Our cars were generally hand-me-downs from the Smithers family, our rich relations. Our favourite being a bull nosed Morris that we occasionally had to push up hills.
A field beyond the Crown pub was the village cricket field. Watching a match there meant harvesting and eating wild strawberries on its perimeter and catching minnows in a stream nearby.
We almost lived on our bicycles cycling everywhere. Light for cycling at night was provided by carbide lamps. To work these, water dripped on carbide to create acetylene gas which was lit by a match.
Within cycle reach were two farms where cheese was made. The one at Sherfield made a glowingly yellow cheddar type cheese, and the other a camembert lookalike coated in straw.
Heating for the winter was by open fires, and beds warmed by hot water bottles. Light for upstairs was provided by candles or torches.
Lighting for the house downstairs was by gas, made in a lovely,
clicking green machine into which we poured petrol. Power to push the resulting gas through to the house in copper tubes was by a large weight (concrete) hanging from a tall tree.
The gas mantles on brackets in the house each had to be lit by a match.
Water was pumped from a well in the garden to a tank beneath the roof of the house by a Swift car engine or, when we were unable to start it (often) by taking turns at a hand pump in the kitchen. This was next to the blackened range that was used for heating water for the baths (meager) and cooking for the house.
Climbing trees was for me a great pleasure, as was making tree houses. These climbing skills were especially useful when I was at prep school where the strict and tough regime had been established to make us boys fit to run the Empire. Our headmaster was sadistic, making any excuse to beat us. Certainly my bottom was often decorated with parallel welts of red and blue. An escape from this regime was provided for me in the form of a crow’s nest atop a tall pine tree. There I could climb to isolation and to enjoy the view of the Needles off the Isle of Wight and large ships coming and going on the Solent.
If the school was to make us able to run the Empire, it certainly failed in my case.
The war came. My childhood was over.
