Ten Highlights of My Childhood

Family photo, c 1958. On the left are Auntie Pam and cousin Patricia. My Dad is at the back. My Mum and brother Andrew are on the right. The photographer was my Uncle Den. I am in the middle hating being photographed!

I have been considering writing an autobiography for Bea to read when she gets older; after all, I am seventy-one and she is two, so I don’t know how long I will be around to tell her about my life! I would recommend anyone of my age to consider doing something like this. How many interesting memories get lost? Your descendants will be fascinated to see what you did and what inspired you; look at the interest in programmes like Who Do You Think You Are?.

I started writing a book but it is quite daunting; there are so many things you could include. I was getting bogged down. So I had the idea of writing blogs about my life which she could read later: easier than a whole book both to write and to read, and possibly more interesting to other people too. In this first one, I have chosen ten highlights from my childhood that were important to me and which say something about my life as a child. They are in chronological order, not ranked in importance. In a future blog, I will do the same thing about my adult life. Maybe you’d like to try this too?

1. The Wonderful World of the 157

The 157 Bus to Morden Station (photo: http://red-rf.com/images/157_RT4291_110573_CrystalPalace_JPr.JPG)

Recently, I took Bea to the Manchester Museum of Transport. They had a large collection of historic buses, a few of which you could board. That brought back memories of travelling on those old buses; you could leap onto the back platform if they slowed down for lights or just got stuck in traffic, This would not be safety conscious enough for today; probably there were some nasty accidents before they introduced the modern bus with its shutting doors.

I loved buses as a small child and I am glad to see that Bea seems to like them as well. My parents claimed that I was so keen on bus routes when I was about four or five that adults would ask me for information about them. That is most certainly a big exaggeration, but it is true that I did get very excited about the large red London buses and their numbers. Today I would probably be diagnosed as being ‘on the spectrum’ or something like that. Nevertheless, I didn’t end up as a train spotter.

It wasn’t so much the bus itself that fascinated me; it was the fact that they sported different numbers and went off in various directions. I was enthralled with the routes rather than the vehicles themselves, although their size and noise did make them interesting. My family lived in a South London suburb called Morden, to which all my grandparents had moved in 1930 when a new council estate called St Helier had been built. This followed the building in 1926 of the underground station, the furthest south in the London system (Morden is about ten miles from the centre of London). Because Morden station stood at the southern end of the Northern Line, it was served by a number of bus routes that allowed commuters to pass from bus to train. The station had a large area outside for buses to stop and sometimes park. The 93, 118, 154, 157, and 164 (A and B) are the ones I remember, but there were several more. I loved it when we visited the station.

I was given my own bus conductor’s ticket punching set. In those days, the London buses had conductors as well as drivers, which is regarded as a luxury now. The driver did not need to collect fares but simply waited for the conductor’s bell to set off, which meant that fares could be taken whilst the bus was in motion (in the same way as is still normal on trains). When I was a child, the tickets were small but solid pieces of card marked with the particular fare cost, each different value given its own colour. This wasn’t as cost effective as the roll of paper which succeeded them, but they were much more fun. Everything bus-wise was more fun in the 1950s!

Being a bus driver was a dream job for me as a four year old. I did finally get to drive a double decker red London bus when looking for a job as a young adult, just in the compound. They said I would have to work as a conductor for several months before graduating to driving, but by then I was aware of the hassles that conductors suffered from hooligans and drunks. So I didn’t take it up.

Around ten years old, I also became interested in the London underground railways. You could get a twopenny child’s ticket to South Wimbledon (the next station from Morden as you went up towards central London), and then travel round the entire system before returning to South Wimbledon, as long as you didn’t get out anywhere. As an adult, it is difficult to comprehend how anyone would want to travel round in the darkness in crowded trains, but I was keen to check off as many stations as possible. I was proud when, as a teenager, my parents asked me to escort the children of some friends across London by tube from Liverpool Street to Paddington. I, of all people, certainly knew where to go!

I still dream about the line from Morden up to central London and even today I can reel off all the intermediate stops. The Northern Line is the deepest of all the London tube lines. You disappear at Morden into the tunnel and leave the daylight behind all the way into central London and beyond. No wonder it gets into my dreams!

2. On Board the Demodocus

The Demodocus (photo: https://www.tynebuiltships.co.uk/D-Ships/demodocus1955.html, copyright Chris Howell)

My sixth birthday was spoilt by feeling unwell, thanks to vaccinations against tropical diseases. This was because we were due to leave for Singapore that same month, January 1959. My childhood is divided into two halves, Before Singapore and After Singapore. I can date things according to whether we lived in South London or Singapore. My early memories of Before Singapore include some which are pleasant, but many not, as I was a sensitive and withdrawn young child with ‘issues’. Singapore changed me into being rather more outgoing and confident.

My father grabbed the opportunity of a posting abroad. As he was a meteorologist (weather forecaster) in the civil service, there were invitations to go on a three year ‘tour’ in a place where the R.A.F. was stationed and, in the 1950s, there were many more than today, as the fading of the British Empire took place over a long period. My mother was not so sure, as the trip meant leaving grandparents and friends in a time when the chances of a long distance visit – either for us to go home or a relative or friend to come to us – were much more limited than they would be now. But she lost the argument and admitted later that she was glad we went; my parents had a good social life on the R.A.F. stations, and while in the equatorial heat in Singapore, they had a Chinese servant to help with the housework, a teenager called Ah Heng. We certainly became familiar with Chinese music!

So we set off from England, my mother, father, baby brother Andrew, and I, leaving the dog Kim behind with grandparents. I guess he was pretty miffed about that; at least, the grandparents who looked after him said that he spent a lot of time sitting near the front door. He died before the three years were up. As far as he was concerned, we never returned, sadly.

I’m not sure how my father arranged it, but he had opted for a month long boat trip as opposed to a journey by air. Perhaps he had to take leave and pay for any extra this would have cost the civil service. He was very keen to see as much of the world as possible. Anyway, he announced that we were to sail from Liverpool and, to add to the excitement, that the journey from Euston Station to Liverpool would be on a train pulled by the famous Royal Scot, one of the prominent steam engines of the day. I can just about remember him proudly showing us the esteemed engine before we boarded the carriage.

The ship we sailed in was called the Demodocus, a compact mixed cargo and passenger ship of the Blue Funnel Line. They named their ships after characters in Greek myth. The ship made several stops; our first was in Rotterdam, where we disembarked and looked around. These were my first steps on foreign soil. Then we had to find our sea legs while crossing the infamous Bay of Biscay, off the French west coast; predictably, we were all seasick. Fortunately, we got used to it. I never made peace with the fog horn, however, which was tested each day at noon. In a small ship, the noise reverberated around the passenger areas and frightened me even though I knew it was coming. I used to go to the cabin and place a pillow over my ears!

The Demodocus stopped at ports where we could get off and look around, and others where we were not permitted to, perhaps because the stop was shorter or the opportunities for touring more limited. The latter included Port Said in Egypt and Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, between which we had the exciting experience of sailing through the Suez Canal. This was only three years after the Suez crisis, so the place did have a certain atmosphere. We finally got to leave the ship again in Aden, at that time a British colony but now part of the troubled country of Yemen. In the ports of disembarking, we toured around, although I can’t remember any of the detail.

Yet I will never forget the port of Penang in Malaya, not far short of our final destination in Singapore. The ship was moored at a distance from the docks, and so we needed a launch to reach the shore. The launch should have been placed next to the ship on the opposite side to any tidal current to prevent it bobbing up and down, but it seems that this had been overlooked. As we walked down the gangplank, it was clear that stepping across to the launch would be hazardous. A woman called Toni, a fellow passenger on the ship and a nurse from Liverpool, was holding my two year old brother in her arms. She was a bold character and decided to leap across, but at that precise moment the launch moved away from the ship, so that she and my brother fell into the sea. How they survived between the bucking launch and the ship is anybody’s guess, but she was a strong swimmer and held on to Andrew until both were fished out. We all went back onto the ship for a little post-shock counselling and tea, and travelled to the port only when the launch had been re-positioned safely.

Among the passengers, my parents made long-term friends with Toni and with Jack and Anne, a married couple who were in the rubber planting business and en route to settling in Malaya. A month at sea made for a strong sense of community. It also induced in me a liking for ships and the ocean, which the seasickness and foghorn could not subdue. My eyes were opened to the world, and it was pretty clear, based on my own memories and what my parents said about it, that my time on the Demodocus was a life-changing experience for me.

3. R.I.P. Violet Irene Maunder: Nan

'Vim' c 1905 - her maiden name was Mance so she was always a V.I.M.

Three years later, we returned from Singapore in the same way as we had arrived: by boat. We did not sail westward to Suez but continued our eastward route which included a railway journey across Australia, where we stayed for a couple of weeks to visit some friends of my parents in Melbourne and my aunt Connie in Sydney, along with her husband Jeff and my cousin Linda, at that time about two years old. We then sailed across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal and into the Atlantic, arriving in England in May 1962. I got just about every childhood disease going on the journey, so it wasn’t as fantastic as perhaps it should have been. And there was another reason why 1962 proved to be a difficult year.

All my grandparents were dear to me, but there was no doubt as to who was my favourite: Nan, Dad’s mother. She was everybody’s favourite, a woman who made people feel better by her presence, an unselfish and generous soul. My other grandmother had not liked her at first because of my Mum’s obvious adulation of her future mother-in-law, but after a couple of friendly visits, even she had been converted. My Mum first encountered Nan as a young guide, as Nan’s great passion was her spare time pursuit, one should probably say vocation, as a guide leader.

Singapore opened all our horizons and we returned with a new family member, baby sister Jacqueline. But to leave our grandparents for three years must have been a tough decision for my parents to have made. There were only letters: no visits or even phone calls. So it was anticipated that my grandparents would go crazy with excitement when we returned, especially our adoring Nan. Yet when we arrived by train, we could see no Nan standing at the station with craning neck. And when we got to their house, it was Grandad who rushed out to greet us. Inside the house, Nan was quiet and reticent. What was going on?

My parents knew, as they had received prior warning by letter that Nan had been diagnosed with lung cancer, but even they were shocked at how ill she was when we returned from Singapore. The pain prevented her from being the active grandmother we had left behind three years earlier (her appropriate initials were V.I.M., an acronym which became her nickname). She did her best in the remaining time, but she only had a few months to live. In many ways, I lost her at the age of six, even though she died when I was nine.

Coincidence meant that the place, time, and date of her death is indelibly printed on my brain. In 1956, my brother Andrew had been born at 6.45 p.m. on Wednesday, October 31st in St Helier Hospital. In 1962, Nan died at 6.45 p.m. on Wednesday, October 31st in St Helier Hospital. These were two moments in my childhood which changed things forever. The birth of my brother on Hallowe'en 1956 meant that I was no longer an only child. This was quire challenging for me as a three year old, and it took me a couple of years to accept my little brother and begin to appreciate him as a friend and companion. But Hallowe'en 1962 took away my favourite grandparent prematurely. Nan was only 62. She was born in the same month as Elizabeth the Queen Mother, August 1900, but her life ended up being forty years shorter.

Why would I include her death in a list of highlights of childhood? I have missed out the couple of operations that I had, and the moments of panic that characterised my sensitive early years.  These did not seem worthy of being ‘highlights’. Yet, however painful, Nan’s death and funeral were a highlight because of the sheer outpouring of love that I witnessed from her family and friends. The very positive estimate that everyone had of her life was wholly genuine, well beyond lip-service respect for the dead. The reaction anticipated Princess Diana on a small, local scale, although I would not personally compare them, as Nan was a far, far greater person in my life, a woman who got on with caring for others without ceremony or celebrity, one of life’s unknown saints. Her all too early death gave her immortality in the family. What would it have been like if she had been alive to see me struggle through my teens and into my twenties? What advice might she have given me? Would she have accepted long hair, rock music, and my dropping out of university first time around?

Nan died at a globally significant time. While she was dying during October 1962, the Cuban Missile crisis brought the world to the precipice of nuclear war. There was a radical change about to occur in the Catholic Church as they sat down to meet that month at the Second Vatican Council, something that meant nothing to me at the time and for many years afterwards, but much later came to mean a lot. And Nan would not have heard of the Beatles; in that October, their first single ‘Love Me Do’ reached number 17 in the charts. Nan died and the world changed.

Such is my love and regard for Nan and her memory that we named Bea after her, giving her the middle name of Violet. Natalie also had a beloved Violet in her family, a great grandmother. So Bea bears the names of these two women of our families’ past. Violet of course has enjoyed a recent resurgence as a female name!

4. Pick of the Pops

DJ Alan Freeman (photo: https://www.mixcloud.com/terry-obrien2/pick-of-the-pops-1963-01-20-alan-freeman/)

The first passion that I had After Singapore was not football, but pop music. Charts and tables have always interested me, so I could admit to being an absolute geek, but actually I am not that unusual. I know several other people who are the same. My sister-in-law once got mad with my brother spending a good deal of Sunday morning just looking at the football league tables, not watching football itself but just enjoying analysing the order of the teams. I suffer from this poor use of time too but, for me, before football league tables came the top twenty. The DJs make a great deal of whether record A has risen or fallen in the charts, and by how much. It’s another numbers game, and it can be fun. Admittedly, it hasn’t interested me as an adult, but it did as a nine, ten, and eleven year old.

Those were very interesting years in the pop music world. While Elvis and Cliff had already made their name and were ever-present in the charts, the Beatles were new to the charts in 1962 and became famous in 1963. When I first heard them, the blended voices of John and Paul sounded to me like the Everly Brothers, and my first impression was that the Beatles were a pair of brothers.

The top ten for Christmas week 1962 included artists and songs quite familiar to me as I look back: 1. Return to Sender, Elvis Presley; 2. Bachelor Boy, Cliff Richard; 3. Lovesick Blues, Frank Ifield; 4. Sun Arise, Rolf Harris; 5. Bobby’s Girl, Susan Maughan; 6. Dance with the Guitar Man, Duane Eddy; 7. Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree, Brenda Lee; 8. Swiss Maid, Del Shannon; 9. Telstar, Tornados; 10. Devil Woman, Marty Robbins. Talking of devils, Elvis’ Devil in Disguise, a hit in 1963, was the first single that I bought. That is odd as I was never an Elvis fan; I just liked that record. Around the same time, my parents bought me a Rolf Harris single, Sun Arise. Rolf was something of a hero in the 1960s, which is clearly not the case now (perhaps he was the devil in disguise that Elvis sang about). Overall, I admit that my musical taste as a child left something to be desired.

I became addicted to Pick of the Pops, a radio show hosted by Alan Freeman on a Sunday afternoon. This was the moment when you found out the new weekly chart. I was devastated when, at my first scout camp in 1963, the patrol leader sent me out to collect wood just when Pick of the Pops was trilling out on the transistor that hung by the tents. Alan Freeman, who died in 2006, was exactly the same age as my parents, that is, he turned thirty-six in 1963. It is not surprising, then, that my parents liked many of the pop tunes too. By the end of 1963, I tried to break away from records that my parents also liked and bought the counter-cultural rock classic Louie, Louie by the Kingsmen. Mum turned her nose up, and wondered what I was doing. We only had the one record player in the family. She didn’t know that this musical rebelliousness would lead in my mid-teens to even greater horrors like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull.

Pick of the Pops and its TV successor from 1964, Top of the Pops, are probably best left to the nine, ten, and eleven year olds, the age I was when I listened avidly. One day I simply stopped tuning in. I can’t remember exactly when or why. You just move on, I suppose. There are top ten hits that are perennials and still delight people today, but for every great hit, there are nineteen more that are best left forgotten, despite BBC 4’s current penchant for repeating old episodes of Top of the Pops.

Many of my parents’ records that stayed with me for life were classical, as I always loved classical music even as a child. In my sixth form, a couple of friends and I discovered that the music teacher would run a classical appreciation class as an option if anyone requested it. We did request it and enjoyed Wednesday afternoons as a result. I was much younger when my parents played their records: Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, Handel’s Messiah, Carmen Jones, an English language version of Bizet’s Carmen set in the African American community, and Grieg’s Peer Gynt are the ones I remember the most. There were also plenty of piano pieces, my mother being a very good player. All these are ingrained in me. I have to come to appreciate that many of the most famous classics are popular for very good reason, even if they can sometimes feel like a cliché. And our family record player also had its fair share of Rodgers and Hammerstein: South Pacific, Carousel, The King and I. I feel nostalgic when hearing those too.

5. Over to Dad for the Weather

Don Maunder on TV at a weatherman reunion in 1979 ((https://showreel.thetvroom.com/talent-profiles/9111/walker-peter/).

My Dad and I didn’t get on all that well when I was very young. He was an outdoor type who had been an adventurous boy scout as a child, and now in adulthood had grown into a keen and highly competent scoutmaster. Like many men of his generation who grew up during the Second World War, he did not show much emotion. He resorted to some hard slaps when he felt that his authority had been challenged. I, on the other hand, was a sensitive child who preferred books to outdoor activities, and sought the warmth of comforting adult females; I spent the first few years of life hiding behind my mother’s skirts. We did not have nurseries then, which exacerbated the shock that I felt when going to school for the first time aged five and had to be dragged screaming. So my general self-perception was that my father did not like me very much. The Singapore adventure began to change things for the better, and I consciously set out to try and be the son that I think he wanted me to be: more robust, better at sports, and generally more outgoing. So my Dad became a role model for me in my immediate pre-teen years, rather than being my nemesis.

I was proud to see him leading scouts. He had a loud voice for a short and slightly built man, and could command the attention of the entire scout district when they assembled on parades. He was a good runner, and won parent races at school or scouts sports events. And, not long after we arrived back from Singapore, he did something more remarkable: he began to feature regularly on BBC radio, and then the TV. This happened, of course, because he was a weather forecaster in the civil service, from where the BBC took its weather presenters. Just as he welcomed the openings for travel that the job afforded him, so he was ambitious in seeking the media opportunities. He joined the ranks of the TV and radio weather men. On his first appearance, the family sat round the box with bated breath. We were very nervous for him.

If I am honest, it was obvious even to his biased son that my father came across as stiff and apprehensive compared to his TV weather men colleagues. It wasn’t really his forte; he did a lot better on radio when you could just hear the voice rather than read the body language. Unlike other slow starters, he didn’t seem to get much better with time. And so, while he lasted several years on the radio, he only had a couple on the TV. His own conclusion, according to my mother’s recollections, was that the colleague who took his place had family contacts within the television system: my Dad was therefore the victim of nepotism. But I suspect, although that might have been part of the answer, the more obvious reason was that he did not appear to be a natural TV type. He did not belong to the emerging brigade of television presenters who, by sheer force of personality, had overcome the old class and accent prejudices on the BBC. Like, for example, his colleague and friend, Bert Foord, who was a regular on the box during the 1960s and came from Carlisle with an accent that matched. Bert was more of an extravert than Dad. The families got friendly, and we went on holiday with the Foords one year. Bert and his wife had just the one daughter but he was very good with boys, as my brother and I found out when presented with a set of racing cars that he bought us along with a cardboard track for racing them on with dice. Sadly, the friendship between the adults did not last all that long.

Despite its short-lived nature, the fact that my Dad had been on TV was still the stuff of pride and the odd bit of boasting as the years went by. The world of television seemed very remote from ordinary people then, very much more than it does now in our age of reality TV. And to see one’s father on the gogglebox was certainly a thrill even if accompanied by some quite severe butterflies in the stomach!

Some years later, in 1979, Dad appeared on TV once again in a reunion of weather forecasters on a BBC entertainment show. Once again, he showed that he was not the extravert that many of them were, despite their being civil servants and not trained media presenters. They had to sing ‘The Sun has got his hat on’ but it was difficult to see Dad behind the umbrellas that they sported. He admitted that he found the whole thing so embarrassing that he hid deliberately!

In my adult life, I have appeared on TV briefly a few times because of my interest in the Virgin Mary. For a couple of years, several requests came in as TV production companies sought out someone to field the subject and found out about me. One of the programmes, aired just before Christmas 2002, attracted a few million viewers. Then the opportunities seemed to dry up. Like father, like son!

6. A Monday Evening in East London

I am in there somewhere! (Photo: https://shop.memorylane.co.uk/mirror/0300to0399-00392/leyton-orient-v-southampton-league-match-21634975.html)

My parents seemed comfortable with me swanning around the underground system in London. By twelve years old, I was making several unaccompanied forays into London not only to simply stay on the trains but also to see the sights, and on a couple of occasions, I took my five year old sister with me. Probably that wouldn’t happen now; we have become all too aware of the dangers. Nevertheless, nothing unpleasant ever happened to me, not even a close call.

On a cold wintry Saturday afternoon in early 1966, I made my way to Leyton in East London on the tube system. I had begun to attend football matches when Southampton played in London. Well before having any knowledge of football, I had developed a fascination for Southampton, the place of my birth, probably because the family were all Londoners and it gave me something distinctive, an identity of my own. Maybe also because it’s an interesting port hosting the grandest ships. My parents had lived in Southampton for a couple of years when I was born. Civil service meteorologists mostly worked in London at that time, but they could be sent to a different city for a period in the same way as they could get a posting abroad. In Southampton, my parents lived in a caravan to save money. Most people, even those with regular jobs, were not very well-off in the early 1950s, and so my first dwelling was that caravan, along with Mum, Dad, and our cairn terrier Kim, a feisty little character, rather too aggressive for his size.

When we returned from Singapore, I began to be interested in football. It was not something that either of my parents liked, and so I was nine before the whole league and cup system attracted my attention. At first, I decided that I supported Fulham, because a school friend did so and they were the nearest first division team. But one day I opened the sports page and there it was: Southampton, known as the Saints, the team representing my birthplace city, had just played in the F.A. Cup Semi-Final. While they had lost narrowly to the eventual winners Manchester United, a football fanaticism was born. I would forever thereafter be a Southampton supporter. They were a second division club and had never played in the first division, the top league. The first time I saw them was at Crystal Palace, just down the 157 bus route from Morden, and they won 2-0. Surrounded by home supporters, my sense of self-preservation dampened down any outward expression of pleasure at the victory.

But that Saturday in the winter of early 1966 was not so enjoyable. Having travelled all the way into central London and then out to Leyton, I encountered a sign outside the station telling me that the Leyton Orient – Southampton game had been called off because of bad weather. No warnings on the radio or in the press; I just had to turn round and go home again without seeing a game. And yet this turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The game was postponed until after the main part of the season had been completed. Southampton had done well that year and when the schedule came to an end, they were on the verge of promotion to the first division for the first time in their history. Rivals had all completed their fixtures, and the Saints needed only one win from the two remaining games which had been postponed, or even just a draw in one as long as they avoided a 6-0 defeat in the other. The first of these two postponed games was at Leyton Orient. And so I trekked along the tube system to Leyton for the second time. It amazes me now that my parents allowed me to go to the game alone on a Monday evening in term-time (9th May), arriving home quite late, at just thirteen years old!

It was an away game, but the ground was packed with Southampton fans because of its significance. I was surrounded by them. In those days, many people from Southampton spoke in what sounded like a west country drawl (they don’t now so much; the city has become London-ised). And what an experience it was! The game ended 1-1, the draw that the Saints needed. The crowd went wild and I was there in the midst of it.

Looking back, I wonder why we weren’t more disappointed. Leyton Orient were the bottom club in the second division, and had already been relegated to the third. A win against them would have meant that promotion was secured. So a 1-1 draw was not that great, and left things close to completion but not quite there. Yet no-one on the Saints side believed we would lose 6-0 in the final game, even though it was against Manchester City, the division champions (although not the free-scoring team of today). At the end of the Leyton Orient game, everyone including the players behaved as though promotion were already assured. They were right. In the event, the final game a week later ended 0-0 (I didn’t go to Manchester) and into the first division we went.

It was a sea change in Southampton’s fortunes, Before 1966, they had never been in the first division; in the 58 years since, they have spent 46 years there, what you could call a regular top division club. They have been promoted back to the top division, now known as the Premier League, three times since, including this year (2024) at Wembley against Leeds. But, however exciting these promotions have been, nothing could beat that first time.

Southampton’s promotion was more thrilling for me than England’s famous World Cup victory a few weeks later, not that I wasn’t pleased about it. As my Dad had whisked my brother and myself off to scout camp in late July, I had to listen to England versus West Germany huddled round a radio in the woods of the Lake District. Supporting England is very like supporting Southampton: in my lifetime, just one major trophy for each and a few near misses. Let’s both hope England and Southampton make it two in the very near future!

7. Ginger’s Model Army

Minitanks (photo: https://wargamingmiscellanybackup.wordpress.com/2013/04/07/expanding-my-collection-of-roco-minitanks/)

I’m sure we can all remember moments in our childhood when our parents told us that we were going to spend a day doing something we would rather not. And – I’m not sure exactly when, aged thirteen, I would guess – this happened to me on a weekend in the summer. Dad had remained in touch with a former colleague, a Welshman known simply as ‘Ginger’ who had moved back to South Wales. He wanted to visit Ginger for the day and take the family along. Ginger was single and had no children; therefore, the prospect of a long drive (and I don’t think the whole of the M4 was complete then) held little promise. It would just be a day arguing with my siblings while the grown-ups talked about work.

Things got rather better when we arrived, as Ginger was keen to show my brother and me his model army: soldiers and tanks. There were plenty of military miniature sets around at the time, and we had already got a few bits and pieces in our toy cupboard. You could get sets for most of the major wars of the modern period: World Wars I and II, the American Civil War, and the Napoleonic Wars, for example. Ginger’s main army was a World War II set, with British, American and German sections, although he had pieces from other periods too. He had painted them in scrupulous detail. The effect was fantastic.

And then Ginger played his master stroke, which put him high on the boyhood hero list. He informed the two of us that he wanted to move on from the pieces he had been working on, in order to collect and paint figures in a larger size. Therefore, he wanted to give us this miniature set to take home with us that very day. It was a monster army. I would struggle to estimate how many tanks and soldiers there were: my rough guess is forty or fifty tanks in the ‘Minitanks’ series and several hundred individual soldiers, all packed into cigarette packets. We could scarcely squeeze them into the car boot of the Austin Cambridge A55. And we could scarcely stop grinning from ear to ear.

My school friend Rob was already a war gamer at that time, as his adult brother-in-law was something of an expert at it and handed down ideas and pieces to him. I think I had played a couple of times with him. Now I was able to show him what firepower I had mustered, and we had some war games which included Ginger’s model army. Rob was a bit gobsmacked that someone as green behind the ears at the hobby as I was now had an army worthy of a seasoned gamer. I enjoyed the moment.

My brother and I played with the army many times, and Rob and I used them in complicated 'map manoeuvres'. When we moved to Germany – I was sixteen and my brother twelve – I left Rob behind and new friends and interests meant that the tanks and soldiers didn’t get as much airing. They are now in my sister’s attic. The next generation didn’t want to take up war gaming. There are still war gamers around today, but fantasy games have probably overtaken re-enactments of real wars in popularity. Maybe that is a good thing; should we entertain ourselves by playing out the horrors of the past? Or perhaps we exorcise the demons of the past by turning it into a game?

Rob and I also re-enacted a few Napoleonic battles. This led me into trouble when I went for an interview at Cambridge University for a Maths degree aged seventeen. I was a bit of a no-hoper, looking back, but the fact that we lived in Germany meant that I dodged the difficult entrance exam and my parents were keen for me to give it a go. So Cambridge gave me an interview. When asked about my hobbies, I mentioned the re-enactments. The venerable academics on the interview panel asked me whether we had replayed the Battle of Waterloo, and for some reason, I cannot now tell you why, the word ‘Yes’ came out when the actual answer was ‘No’. They followed it up with an in-depth question about Waterloo which I couldn’t answer. So I didn’t make Cambridge, which was no bad thing. And the model soldiers stayed in their boxes after that. But that feeling I experienced in South Wales and on the way home of something greater than Christmas, when a wonderful free gift comes completely out of the blue: that will stay with me.

8. Back in the U.S.S.R.

The Kremlin by night (photo: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/time-to-go-after-the-kremlins-wallets/)

At secondary school, we had a French teacher who was a communist; he had the somewhat ironic surname of King! The pupils discovered that, if a French lesson got boring, you could easily get him to digress by raising a political issue. He then switched into soapbox mode, and boys in the class liked to provoke him by disagreeing with him. In 1968, Mr King decided that it would be a good strategy to promote his political cause by inviting students to accompany him to the very heart of established communism, to Russia, the central nation in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.).

Overseas school trips were organised every summer. My parents had told me that they could only afford to send me on one during my time at secondary school, and so I would need to choose the trip that specially attracted me. Going to Russia did promise to be quite an exotic experience. I had done a project on the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-3) for a school open evening, with wall charts etc. The idea came from my interest in war gaming, but the research had caused me to be much more appreciative of the human cost and less interested in the strategy. It would make a lot of sense to follow this up with a visit to the very country in which the battle had taken place.

We left by boat from docks in the River Thames and sailed to Leningrad (the communist name for the city; it has now reverted to its original name of St Petersburg), stopping off in Copenhagen and Helsinki. I’m guessing there were about 30 boys mostly my age, awaiting the start of fifth year (year 11 in today’s money). I can’t imagine that trips such as these would be so ill-disciplined in today’s health and safety conscious world. We were fifteen year olds with open access to the ship’s bar, and learnt quickly that hangovers and seasickness made a bad combination. I remember from the first night’s drunkenness some boys throwing deck chairs over the stern. I’m not sure where Mr King or any of his assistants were in all of this.

Perhaps there was method in the madness; as the days passed and the steam got let off, we settled down. I recall the tours around Copenhagen and Helsinki, in particular the Little Mermaid in the one and the Sibelius Memorial in the other. It was an educational experience, all right. And so we arrived in Leningrad with its grand palaces and stories of the Russian Revolution of 1917 enshrined in two monuments: the ship which fired the first shots, the Aurora, and the Winter Palace which was seized by the Bolsheviks.

If Mr King thought that a visit to Russia would convince fifteen year olds of the attractiveness of communism, then he was surely mistaken. At that age, you are entranced by bright lights, music, and evening activities. The Russian cities under communism closed down at 9 o’clock. There were no adverts to give light to the city when it got dark. It lacked any obvious signs of night life. Russia in 1968 was dominated by older women, because so many men had died in the Second World War and under Stalin’s persecutions. One of these ladies working in the Moscow hotel where we stayed took a shine to me; fortunately, this did not develop into a Russian version of The Graduate! We could sell biros and jeans for relatively large sums because these items were not available in Russia. None of this made communism remotely alluring, although the visit as a whole was very interesting and we learnt a lot. And later, on the way home, the stark difference between East Berlin, with its twenty-four year old bomb sites full of rubble, and West Berlin, with its bars and tree-lined streets, reinforced the impression that we were better off in the West by far. And then there was the Berlin Wall, with its martyrs who had been killed while trying to escape from East to West.

While in Moscow, we visited those parts of the Kremlin that were open to tourists, and saw Lenin’s body lying in state in the mausoleum on Red Square. I believe that he is still there despite the demise of communism in 1991. But a lot of the trip is now lost to memory, except that I know I thoroughly enjoyed it. Eastern Europe was a place of mystery during the Cold War. As a memento, I bought my Mum a wooden bear ornament which, after her death, I inherited and still have on display.

The journey was fantastic for a teenager. After the boat trip across the Baltic, we stayed in Leningrad and then flew to Moscow, my first air flight. After a further stay in Moscow, we travelled by train across what is now Belarus and then Poland before visiting Berlin, finally returning to the U.K. on trains via a channel crossing. The train journey from Moscow to Berlin was remarkable for my friend Rob and I, as the party didn’t quite divide down into the fours required for each compartment. Rob and I were left on our own and had to share with total strangers. Among these, I will never forget the Russian sea captain (no, I am not making this up, although perhaps he was!) who kept a large and smelly piece of fish in his belongings, from which he would take portions to eat at mealtimes. He offered us vodka in an enamel mug and demanded that we swigged it down in one; we duly obliged. Consequently, we were swaying in one direction as the train swayed in the other. Later, there was a German woman who gave us the chance to practice our language skills, as we were both O level candidates in German.

The Russians believed that friendliness to western tourists would enhance their reputation as well as bringing in much needed cash, and so they were friendly and helpful. We had more difficulty getting back into Dover – with a two hour delay – than we ever did crossing the borders of the Soviet Union. One incident impressed me. One of our number had very unadvisedly purchased a sheaf knife while in Finland, and it was predictably confiscated by the Russian customs officials as we entered Leningrad. When we left the Soviet Union at Brest-Litovsk, nearly 800 miles from Leningrad, it was there parcelled up with his name on for collection! The charge of communist inefficiency often made in western countries had been refuted on this occasion. But – as far as I know – it was not enough to persuade us boys to embrace the communist cause, despite our enjoyment in discovering more about the country which was the first to adopt it.

9. Setting Foot in Rheindahlen

Rheindahlen postcard (https://pcsbranch.org.uk/history-of-postal-courier-service/memories-of-jhq-rheindahlen/)

In early 1969, my father dropped a bombshell. Seven years after returning from Singapore, we were going abroad again, this time nearer to home in Germany. We would leave at the end of the school year, in July, after I had finished my O levels. I was not amused; as I got older, I had finally come to enjoy school, I had a good circle of friends, I was involved in sports, and I felt comfortable living where we were.

My bad mood abated a few days later when, on enquiring further about the Germany posting, I discovered that I would be entering the sixth form in a mixed school, boys and girls together. From eleven years old, I had been in an all-boys school. As I wholly lacked in initiative, this meant that I had not had a proper girlfriend. I did get chatted up one day while walking the dog, but had no idea where to take the budding relationship and it crumbled after a couple of weeks. So the idea of a mixed gender school was extremely attractive. I didn’t have any further misgivings and looked forward to July.

Thursday 10th July 1969, just ten days before humans first set foot on the Moon, and my parents’ twenty-first wedding anniversary: this was the day that we first set foot in the Joint Headquarters (Army and R.A.F.) at Rheindahlen, near the town of Mönchengladbach and not far from the border with the Netherlands. It was the beginning of a very magical period of my life: like landing on the Moon, getting a completely new perspective on the Earth, and being able to jump several feet in the air!

It is difficult to describe how excited I felt when we arrived. We stopped briefly in the garrison before driving on to the hotel where we would spend the first couple of weeks. I saw a schoolboy of my age walking through the small shopping precinct, carrying a briefcase. This turned out to be Gordon, the son of the N.A.A.F.I. manager (the N.A.A.F.I. is the organisation that provides shops for the armed services). He became a good friend and I discovered that he was a pretty decent drummer too.

Rheindahlen was such a wonderful, if too brief, experience, that if I were offered one moment to return to and re-live my life, knowing what I know now, it would be that first sight of the garrison. So many opportunities were opening up, and like pretty well everyone I guess, sixteen was far too young to make the best use of them. I will never forget the optimistic feeling that I felt in the first few months of living in Germany. The family spent a couple of weeks at a hotel in Rickelrath, a village near the garrison, then a few months in another nearby village, Beeck, and then into accommodation in Rheindahlen itself. The whole settlement is abandoned now, but it still sticks in the hearts and minds of servicemen and their children so much so that there are on-line groups who keep the memories alive, and provide video footage of the camp as it is today, overgrown and crumbling. I last visited in 2010, when Rheindahlen was declining and awaiting the final withdrawal of the troops in 2013.

The move presented me with a magical time in my life. The world is opening up at around the age of sixteen, and those years in Germany added something to the normal experience one might have at that age. I had written in a school exercise book at about the age of eight, ‘The best age is seventeen.’ I got that one right! I became friends with many girls at my new school and dated some of them. To give you a flavour of female names in the 1960s, the girls that I remember best at primary school were Janet, Maureen, Pamela, and Rowena. My first feeble attempt at having a girlfriend before we went to Germany was with a Gillian. And my girlfriends in Rheindahlen were two Wendys and a Sue.

Yet it was not just about the romantic relationships. Rheindahlen was big enough to constitute a small town with amenities, but small and compact enough for you to get to know most people. The camp provided regular social events such as disco nights or small-scale rock concerts for the youth. I had already starting drinking beer in England, but then I discovered German beer which is something else altogether, and it was a revelation as in those days there was not the choice and variety one has now in the English supermarkets.

As a schoolboy, the camp and several smaller bases nearby provided regular holiday jobs. My first was at Wegberg Hospital where I worked in the laundry and started the day in the hospital sluice room, wearing wellington boots and ankle deep in… well, you can imagine what. But that didn’t get me down; I needed the extra money! Among the things I needed it for were records. My friends in London had been football mad and Rob liked wargaming, but the Rheindahlen crowd were blues and rock music mad, and it soon took me over. I began listening to Cream, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Taste, and the rest. I still listen to them now.

I worked Christmas Day in Wegberg Hospital and was greeted with food and drink on every ward where I collected the dirty laundry. It was nice coming home a bit tipsy and finding that my Mum was tiddly too, resulting in a fun Christmas Day with lots of laughter. It was the first time that we shared that experience, so I treasure the moment. It summed up the good feeling and relaxed lifestyle of Rheindahlen.

One of my life’s mistakes was to leave Rheindahlen after only two years to go to university to study Maths. It is true that I was able to return during holidays, as my parents and siblings lived there for a total of four years until 1973, but it was never the same. I wasn’t ready to leave and that first visit to university was depressing, leading me to drop out eventually. All I can say positively about it is that my experience at university led me to be an empathetic ear when dealing with struggling students later as a lecturer!

English towns and cities became dreary places when my friends and I compared them to Rheindahlen. There was the camp itself, but also travelling out into the German towns and cities, Mönchengladbach and the Düsseldorf Altstadt in particular. Germany was clean, organised, and hooligan free in contrast to England in those days. I would say that one country suffered a certain amount of complacency after victory in 1945, while the other had had to pull itself out of the chaos that Nazism left behind and rebuild. We went to Germany (West Germany as it was then) only twenty-four years after the war had ended, so it was still recent history. The growth of the German economy can be measured by the fact that there were twelve Deutschmarks to the pound when we arrived, but within a few years it was only three.

I felt very jealous recently when my brother-in-law and nephews stayed in Düsseldorf for a few days during the European football championships. They visited the Auberge, a wonderful old pub in the Altstadt that played heavy rock music in the 1970s and still does. It was a must-visit in my late teens, and I have returned several times since, including taking Natalie in 2016 during our first year of marriage. I am due another visit. Like many ageing rock fans, I have my own Auberge T-shirt and probably need a new one. I always love going back to Germany.

10. All about that Bass

The Klira Bass Guitar

Speaking at my father’s funeral in 1998, I recalled a time in my teenage years that was important in my memory of him. When I earned a little extra money in Germany in the school holidays, I announced that I wanted to spend some of it on a bass guitar and amplifier. Everyone in Rheindahlen seemed to be playing guitars or drums and dreaming of being the next supergroup. Nigel, who became my best friend not long after I arrived there, told me that he played lead and Gordon played drums, so they needed someone on bass guitar.

Dad was opposed to the idea of my taking up the bass, although he accepted that it was not really his decision to make. My music teacher at school in South London had called me a ‘bad egg’ because I gave up first the violin and then the trombone. Was I really going to make a go of it this time? Mum and Dad had supported me in playing these classical instruments at school, but neither had any liking for the rock music that emerged in the 1960s; to them it was just noisy and chaotic. Yet, despite these misgivings, Dad became my willing chauffeur as I carried the guitar and amp around to practice with Nigel and Gordon, and he offered the scout hut as a venue for it, as of course he had already taken up a role as the scoutmaster in Rheindahlen. So I remembered his loyalty in supporting me in something for which he didn’t really share a passion.

Both bass and amp were, of course, second hand. I think I got the amp from some individual on the camp who was selling one, but I’m a bit hazy on that. Buying the bass, on the other hand, I will never forget. It was purchased from a music shop in Düsseldorf that had a second hand section. It was a little known make, a Klira, and it cost 120 Deutschmarks, which was not much above £10. However, to put it into perspective, low paid people still earned only around £10 a week at the time, so it was still a reasonable sum, but fortunately within the reach of a schoolboy who worked in the holidays. I am uncertain as to exactly when I bought the bass, but I think it was early 1970 when I had just turned seventeen.

No purchase I have ever made has given me so much pleasure. I still have the bass, although it is a while now since I played it. I did, however, play it from time to time over many years. First of all, Nigel, Gordon, and I had several jamming sessions in the Rheindahlen scout hut. We talked excitedly about a future career with the consequent fame and fortune, but it was never going to happen; we were neither good enough musically nor committed enough as a group. However, Gordon did become a regular amateur drummer throughout his life, and other friends of ours in Rheindahlen, Ian aka I.K. and Paul played at major concert venues; Paul also made a record with a group called Automatic Fine Tuning. I wouldn’t rise to these heights, but there were many moments when I got to play the bass along with others. Most notably, I joined a band that performed in the local pub for the royal wedding in 1981. Later on, I was in a band that played occasionally in the Leeds Bus Drivers’ Social Club, as the other members were bus drivers.

Not long after buying the bass, I got hold of a cheap, second hand six-stringed acoustic guitar and I have owned two or three of those, plus an electric lead. It is easier to find opportunities to play the standard acoustic guitar rather than an electric bass. I have played fairly regularly in church contexts.

But that was all in a future adult life when I walked into that music shop in Düsseldorf and splashed out the princely sum of 120 Deutschmarks. Who could know where it would lead? I certainly went into it with a great deal more excitement, anticipation, and passion than I had for the violin or trombone. My first lesson was to learn the riff for the Cream song, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’. After that, I was pretty well self-taught, with all the rough edges that come with that.

In your youth, sometimes you need to think that you are going to become the greatest thing ever just to be bothered to put some effort into an activity that has attracted you. You could sit down and think, ‘Be sensible; you will not be anything other than a very mediocre amateur. Yet it will still give you hours of pleasure and a few friends will appreciate your efforts.’ But you don’t, rather you get excited about your own skill and potential as you begin to master something that you have never done before. Nevertheless, if it takes a little self-delusion to get you to spend the many spare hours of your time necessary in order to learn to do something worthwhile, then so be it!