The Road Less Travelled
A Personal Journey
By
John Porter
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SMASHWORDS EDITION
Published by
John Porter at Smashwords
The Road Less Travelled
Copyright © 2012 John Porter
This book is a work of non-fiction and any resemblance to persons,
living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely intentional, if at times a little hazy. The characters and events are as the author remembers them, although he would be the first to accept that his memory may be fallible in places, and he apologises for any misrepresentations which might have occurred.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Table of Contents
Thanks, credits and dedication
Foreword
Part One: The Growing
England, house by house
Chapter five: Hadlow College, Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks
Part Two: The Seeking
Here and there, bit by bit
Chapter six: Australia the first time around
Chapter eight: Sojourn in the UK: Living with Dad
Living with the Howling Fathers
Part Three: The settling
Australia, job by job
Chapter ten: Itchy Palm, Hunters Hill and Mosman
Chapter twelve: Karate and Davidsons
Chapter thirteen: Karate and Plantlovers
Chapter fourteen: Self defence and Perfect Plants
Chapter fifteen: Gloucester Garden Centre
That made all the difference!
Thanks to…
…my brothers Brian and David for their pictures, memories, corrections and proofreading, to Alan Wardrope for encouraging me to start the book, to countless others for providing me with material for fifty years, and above all to Tammy for listening to me droning on about the writing for months.
Most of the illustrations are my own, or are family photographs. Thank you to those who lent me photographs for the book, and to Richard Barnicott for kindly going and taking photos for me around Faversham. In the few cases that I have included other people’s pictures I have made every reasonable effort to contact the original owner of the image, and apologise for any copyright infringements that may have occurred. Full credit will be given in future printings if this has happened.
This autobiography is dedicated to my parents for all sorts of reasons, which may become apparent as you read on…
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
***
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
***
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
***
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I remember studying this poem when I was in senior school, and liking it greatly. For the most part, it is a metaphor for the way in which my life has changed direction from time to time. In retrospect I have seldom taken the main road.
More by dint of chance and circumstance than by conscious decision-making, I have frequently gone down the little used pathway, never being able to see around the next corner, never being sure of the destination.
Much of my life has been unplanned. I have enjoyed most of it, learning much along the way, but there are many parts that I would change if I could. I am grateful for the opportunity to have spent my years as I have, to have met the people I’ve met, to have seen the things I’ve seen and to have done the things I’ve done.
As I remember the times I have walked through over the past half century, there are many instances where my actions have been questionable, and my account of those episodes may raise a few eyebrows. Having changed dramatically in several respects in my early forties, I have tried to mend my ways, and cannot feel ashamed for what has gone before. I am a different person now, so I make no excuses or justifications for my past actions, and the person I once was.
The old me is at times amusing, annoying, reprehensible, commendable, and sometimes dull, but I’ve set this down ‘warts and all’ with a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ attitude.
When I mentioned this writing to a friend a few days ago he quoted from something he’d once read which said, “Most men begin their memoires too late. They usually die before they get out of their childhood”. Rather than wait for the Grim Reaper, or even a qualification for a walking frame and rocking chair in the setting sun on a front veranda, I have opted to begin my story now, at the age of fifty, and I pray that God will grant me enough time to at least my half century in print.
I have tried to recapture my life’s journey in sharp relief and full colour, involving some of the characters, experiences and places, disasters, and perhaps a few achievements and triumphs along the way. The canvas my life has presented me with involves each side of the planet, commencing in my native England, then Australia, a sojourn back in the UK, and finally Australia again, where this is being written. The paints my years have given me to daub onto the canvas are sometimes very bright, sometimes misty and grey, but mostly they blend in together well.
I have anchored the first part of the book to those places where I lived before leaving England. Those were my ‘growing years’.
The middle part of the book trickles through a three-year spell in the Antipodes, a journey back to Europe, and a subsequent three years in and around my home-town of Faversham on the North Kent coast. This period was a time of seeking for me – always wondering in an abstract way, and also at times very logically and consciously, just where I wanted to be for the rest of my days.
Ultimately I decided on Australia as my permanent home, and the final part of the story details my two and a bit decades back in the ‘Great Southern Land’; a period of finally settling down. This latter part I have written with a chronology based on the places in which I have worked, as I have never been unemployed since my return.
This layout seemed to provide a good base line from which to describe the imprints left upon my mind by the passing of time, along with memories of the people who sometimes knowingly, but mostly not, have provided me what wisdom I may have gained, the oft elusive keys to life, survival, and sometimes behavioural models to be avoided at all costs.
I would ask the reader to forgive the brevity of some descriptive segments, and the verbosity of others, as I have tried to strike a balance between dull repetition and hopefully entertaining narrative. Chronology is sometimes very precise, but at other times for the sake of a cohesive tale I have linked episodes that occurred some months apart. Similarly there are omissions, for if everything I have experienced were put into print you would be holding a very cumbersome and laborious tome indeed!
I hope you'll enjoy travelling along my roads with me at least half as much as I enjoyed the journey.
“Memories are things of the past”
Part one: The Growing
England, house by house
Chapter one: Scooks
On July 3rd, 1959, in the main hospital of Canterbury, Kent, at somewhere around ten in the morning a squawking, wrinkled, red creature was delivered from the womb of a woman who had never really intended to have another child after her first two boys, over a decade earlier.
Mum and Dad were surprised when they discovered that another baby was on the way, and anecdotal evidence indicates that my impending arrival was not altogether welcome. They were concerned that when I became of an age to ‘leave the nest’, they would be on the verge of retirement, and unable to provide me with a kick-start into the world.
As a result they saved for my education, took out insurance policies for me which could be cashed in if I should happen to make it to the age of sixteen and twenty-one years of age, and generally tried to plan how they were going to handle my upbringing.
It was probably a waste of their time to worry too much, since the way through life takes unexpected turns, and in retrospect I seemed destined to make that rule one to live by. Certainly the insurances were a waste of time. I remember when in my mid-teens they cashed-in one policy for me which paid out twenty-four pounds, after sixteen years of paying into the fund at sixpence a week or the like. It was small wonder that our insurance man was happy to come round each fortnight and collect the payments for all that time. Later in life, like all of us, I encountered many rorts and fiddles, some complex and some transparent, but I believe that was the earliest one I experienced first hand.
My family, none of whom I knew at the time, being barely able to open my eyes, let alone speak, or recognise the difference between a pussycat and a tin of beans, were an unusual and apparently endless amalgam of aunts, uncles and cousins. Most of them seemed to be on Dad's side, and many had a degree or three of eccentricity built into their characters.
Mum had experienced some problems with her stepmother whilst she was growing up, and we had much less contact with her side of the family. On Dad's side I remember his sister Rose, with whom I developed a strong and close relationship as I wound my way through adolescence.
Living away in the big city of London were large and loud Aunty Joan, and her diminutive, deaf husband, Uncle Johnny the street sweeper, who never smoked, but who collected so many cigarette coupons from the gutters he cleaned through daily, that their whole house was furnished and equipped with items purchased from tobacco ‘gift’ catalogues. That was back in the days when every pack of ciggys had a coupon in it, and a person only needed to redeem a thousand coupons to obtain a fine red plastic toaster, or a pair of carpet slippers.
Aunty Floss was another unusual lady. She was convinced that the Porter clan was descended from a Chinaman, although no one else could trace any oriental bloodlines. When I was four years old she sent me a pair of men’s shoes for my birthday. I didn’t hear from her again until I was fifteen, when she sent me a painting-by-numbers for seven to nine year olds, and a postal order for twenty-five pence.
My younger childhood was liberally speckled with fleeting but fairly frequent encounters with relatives, each with their own varying degrees of oddity, and now all mingling together in the melting pot of my memory; a glorious and colourful cornucopia of eccentricity. They were the startling spices that occasionally sparkled up the otherwise commonplace daily casserole of my social intercourse.
Perhaps the family’s eccentricities influenced my outlook on life, or maybe it’s an inherited trait, but my fifty years so far seem to have been liberally splattered with casual acquaintances telling me that I am ‘unusual’. It’s not me – it’s all the others.
I also found that I had two brothers, Brian, the eldest of us, who was born in 1943, and David, who was three and a half years younger than Brian. There was a gap of twelve years before I entered the scene, so growing up I felt almost as though I had three fathers until my early teen years, when one by one my siblings shed their paternal disguises and we began to develop the fraternal bonds which I enjoy with them today. I discovered too that we had a black dog called Bob, and a cat called Lulu.
So on that day late in the 1950’s (in the last century), I was taken home, probably in the rain (it rains a lot in Kent), to a farmhouse called Scooks, situated beside a country road which wound its way down from the orchards on top of a long, low hill between the village of Eastling and the town of Faversham, to the valley below, with its ploughed fields, copses, and of course, apple trees.
I remember being much taken with a tree-house that had been constructed in the branches of a big old tree at the entrance to the driveway, and I suppose that structure could be described as my earliest memory.
The architects and builders of the tree house were my brother Brian and cousin Andrew. My other brother David was, like myself, still too young for such an imposing venture. The last remnants of the structure were still there over a decade later, when I had occasion to visit Scooks – decayed for sure, but still in evidence nevertheless – a testimony to the construction skills of my sibling and cousin. Remnants could still be seen in 1985 according to my brother Brian who visited Scooks at that time.
A gentleman named Captain Swann, who I don’t recall ever meeting, had two stone cannons at the end of his driveway opposite, which pointed at our house. I have no idea whether he was a sea captain, or an army captain, but I suspect the latter. Either way his stone guns gave me great concern, since I imagined that they were real, and loaded. My parents tried to allay my fears, though as I recall the issue, I was never fully convinced.
Living in the English countryside involved (albeit as bystanders), the rural pursuit of the local hunt, with the local gentry mounted, and with their hounds, chasing after a usually invisible fox. It was a colourful interlude when one happened to pass such a scene whilst driving along a country lane beside pastures and woodlands.
However I remember one year a hunt charging over our garden, and largely wrecking flowerbeds and vegetable plots alike as it went through the property with a cacophony of bugles, baying beagles and the clatter clatter clatter of horses’ hooves over the stones in the driveway. Most impressive for the three-year-old me.
Strangely, years later I discovered that I remembered the exact layout of the downstairs rooms at Scooks, even though I must have been very young when we lived there – maybe three years old or so. I went back when I was in my twenties as I had a friend whose family lived there then, and the rooms were just as I remembered them over two decades earlier.
Sometime around 1962 we had a holiday in France. I would have been three or less at the time, and I don’t know if we’d already moved to Ewell farm or not. Either way we stayed with a family in Hazebrouck, called the Gleenverks (or maybe Cleenverks). David remembers more than I do, and he has told me that their son Gerard, who was about three or four years older than him, was the only one who spoke a bit of English.
"Monsieur" wore a typical French beret, and smoked cigars, which he bought in nearby Belgium because they were cheaper there. I remember the smell of the cigars quite clearly, as I do the aroma of the small Tom Thumb cigars a colleague of Dad’s called Sid Butler used to smoke some years later. It amazes me how evocative and emotive the memories of smells can be, especially when experienced all over again decades afterwards.
“Madame” was quite large, with grey curly hair. Their loo was an earth closet in the shed, and they had a "pissoir" at the end of the garden, which I was very taken with, and kept visiting it to try and squeeze out another drop.
My brother David also remembers Mum taking me out into the street when the milkman came with his horse and cart, to get a jug of fresh milk from the large churn he carried, and that fits in with my memory of seeing a big horse.
One of Mum’s sayings ever afterwards was that the French ‘only use bread to get butter to their mouths’, so I think they must have enjoyed their dairy products.
My time at Scooks was short, and before I was very old we departed that home, with its tree-house and the good Captain Swann’s threatening cannons. Our new residence was another farmhouse, this time a massive old building at Ewell Farm just outside Faversham, a building with creaking floors, huge steeply-tiled roofs, several centuries of history, and dampness.
Chapter two: Ewell farmhouse
After we moved to Faversham I remember sleeping in a blue wooden cot with pictures of rabbits all over it. I was probably three or four years old.
Dad was an ardent gardener, especially when food was being produced, and my cot was in a room that overlooked his vegetable garden at Ewell farmhouse. Most of all I remember his crops of Brussels sprouts, which seemed as big as trees, and were full of enormous sprouts, which at that time I knew tasted horrible, but that I now love.
The back garden was probably around half an acre and had a partly ruined wall enclosing most of it, covered here and there in ivy with thousands of tiny black ivy berries, which I was frequently told were poisonous. The house itself was very old, and shaped like a disfigured Elizabethan ‘E’.
We lived in the part of the long upright bit of the ‘E’. My brother David tells me that it was originally a full E-shape, but that the east wing had burnt down years before, leaving an inverted ‘F’.
Ewell Farmhouse, Faversham, Kent
My first room, which was in the stubby middle arm of the original E, was situated above the large porch of the main doorway, which we never used. It was almost directly over a cellar room two floors below that served as a photographic darkroom and was always very mysterious and scary with its dim red light and troughs of strange liquids, where Dad and Brian produced works of art.
The eastern end of the main body of the house was closed up and full of what always seemed very peculiar and dusty items. I have a vague memory that for a short time a lady came and lived in that part of the building – I think she was a teacher maybe, but we hardly saw her, as she had her own door. Dad sometimes had props under construction for a local drama group in there too – I remember a full sized wooden model piano and a very realistic fire in a full-sized wooden fireplace.
Granny, wondering when I would be tall enough to feed the electricity meter
Granny and Grandad’s part of Ewell farmhouse was in the west wing. To get to the door they used in the west wing, you had to go round the back near the sheds where chickens were kept. I think we once had a few rabbits there too, but they vanished about Christmastime, and I never put two and two together. Granny and Grandad did have a front door, but it was only used for very special occasions, and I never saw it opened.
I remember being lifted up to put old 12-sided thrupenny pieces into Granny’s electric meter – there was always a little stack of three or four of them on top of the meter. When Mum would sit for an hour or two and talk to Granny, I would be given a knitting needle with which I would dig out all the dozens of tiny coloured beads in the cracks between the big oak timbers of Granny’s living room table.
I arranged them in groups according to colour and size, and when I’d finished Granny would give me her button tin to ‘sort out’. It was a good old fashioned square biscuit tin and had hundreds of buttons in it, which I would again organise neatly, like-with-like, until it was time for us to go. Granny was kind enough never to put them all back into the tin whilst I was still there, and I never thought about the fact that I had to do them all over again the next time we visited. Likewise I believe it was likely that she put the tiny beads into the cracks in the table again ready for my next call.
David’s room was almost opposite mine, and Brian had the room on the left at the top of what then seemed like a very wide staircase. The sweeping stairs wound down through two right-angles, with a little landing in between, where a goldfish lived in a bowl on a wide windowsill overlooking the vegetable garden below.
After Brian got married I remember moving into his room, and I especially remember the beautiful heady scent of the large lilac tree, which grew against the wall on the other side of the little yard where the outside toilet was. I could open the small window overlooking the yard and smell the lilac blossoms, and just about see my sandpit in the grassy area outside the wall at the front of the house.
When I caught the measles and had to stay in bed Mum rigged up a string from my room, out into the hall, down the banisters, then along through the doorhandles and into the kitchen. The idea was that if I wanted anything I would pull the string and a bell would ring in the kitchen so she could respond. I remember pulling the string several times but the bell would never ring – perhaps it was supposed to be set up like that after all!
I also remember the feeling of a series of ghostly presences right at the top of the stairs, and around the hallway on the right. Strangely enough someone who lived in the house some twenty or more years later also mentioned the same thing to me. She said that she had a litter of Labrador puppies in the room there, and at one time they all yelped and ran and hid under her bed about thirty seconds before the door to the room slammed shut. There was no wind she said. She also mentioned that on several occasions items on a hallstand outside her door suddenly fell to the floor for no apparent reason.
As a very young child maybe I was too imaginative, but I believe I picked up a real ‘ghostly feeling’ in that area, although it wasn’t at all frightening. I had a small, green, stuffed-toy elephant (which is still in my possession now), that I clearly remember sitting on the top stair while I went into my room. It had disappeared by the time I came out again. The toy only came to light months later underneath a large wardrobe or cupboard that was in the hall there. Maybe someone kicked it there, or just maybe…..???
I also remember Mum and Dad had a room to the right at the top of the stairs, opposite the room my cot was in. Sometimes in the mornings when I was a bit older I would go across and get into bed with them and snuggle down for a while.
In the early 1960’s sometime, Uncle Charlie and Aunty Blanche came over from Australia for a year – and I think the year prior to a visit from Cousin Colin and his wife Barbara.
Barbara was most amazing to Mum because she preferred chicken skin to any other part of the bird, which I don’t find strange at all now. She also liked to gnaw the ends of the bones – something I do myself. At the time that was lightly frowned upon – it just wasn’t the done thing. Ah…the English! Hardcore and hidebound with tradition! I remember Barbara being quite a beauty, and very, very suntanned. Colin and Barbara were only in the UK for a few months, but Charlie and Blanche rented a flat in London and more or less didn’t leave that city for a year.
Part of the ‘London experience’ for Charlie and Blanche was to seek out the city’s hidden spots, and little known corners. But at the other end of the scale they were also keen to visit and revisit the major attractions, and I remember us all going with them to see the wax figures in Madame Tussauds waxwork museum. The chamber of horrors was of course what impressed me most. I was far more interested in tortures, beheadings and the like, than I was in learning the history of the crowned heads of Europe, or viewing the dummies of silver screen and sports field stars.
I was also subjected to a session of abject misery in the London Planetarium, where I wondered how sitting in a large dark room and staring up at the projection of the night sky was in any way necessary, since we could do that on any evening when there were no clouds, without having to pay an admission fee, I’m sure I was barely aware of the explanatory comments that were given as the solar system moved around in super-fast time above our heads.
I certainly remember the excitement I felt at visiting the Tower of London, and especially the White Tower, which housed a collection of important pieces of armour. I was amazed at the size of Henry the Eighth’s broadsword, which was over two metres long. It gave me the impression that the man himself must have been enormously strong even to lift it, let alone fight with it, and I was probably not wrong in my assumptions.
In the Science Museum I remember the whole family being astounded at an exhibit where, by walking along a little pathway of low railings, the visitor was guided as though through a cattle race to a free standing glass door, operated by an infrared beam and sensor on the little path. The door opened automatically and the visitor passed through. Simple enough, but there was a queue of eight or nine other people waiting to have a go on the exhibit, and walk through the self-opening door. Some went back round to go through a second time. Now that those things are everywhere, we take them totally for granted, and it’s very difficult to imagine how novel the devices were back then.
Dad and I took Frank Radnik, an old friend of Dad’s from the Art Club to the Tutankhamen exhibition. Frank had a thick Hungarian or Polish accent that I couldn’t understand, and was obsessed with chess. He made me play him at least a dozen times as we stood in a long, snaking queue outside the exhibition in the unseasonably hot sun, and waited for our turn to go in. We knew the queues were going to be immense, and had even taken food, thermos flasks, and little folding campstools with us for the day. I hadn’t expected so much chess, and possibly wouldn’t have gone if I’d known! Much as I love backgammon, I’ve always disliked chess. It’s because there’s basically no luck in it. I feel a good game should always have an exciting element of chance somewhere in it, or it’s not really a game. A game with no luck should really be called a ‘sport.’
I was delighted at the exhibition however, kindling as it did in me an ongoing love of Egyptology, palaeontology and archaeology in general, and an avid craving as I would wait for the next edition of National Geographic magazine to come in the mail each month.
We once stayed overnight with Charlie and Blanche in their rented London flat, somewhere around the Earls Court area, sleeping on the floor for a couple of nights on camp beds. We had to be really quiet because they weren’t allowed to have visitors.
We also went to a couple of shows with them during that period including the original stage version of ‘The Sound Of Music’ with Julie Andrews. I found the shows very dull at the time, and the visits to London quite boring. The car journey gave me a headache and sometimes made me sick, but that may have been the constant cigarette and pipe fumes from Mum and Dad’s smoking. And it always seemed to rain, so the windows were constantly up.
I remember watching the Lord Mayor's Show pass by one year when we had an invitation (through Fisher Farms) to some ritzy place with a view right over the path of the parade, but at my age that bored me to tears too. Mum felt very out of place amongst all the “toffs”, but I think Dad quite enjoyed himself, although nobody could have mistaken him for a toff.
One afternoon I remember Charlie, Blanche, Mum, Dad and I going for a walk somewhere in the poorer East End, and Charlie showing off a bit by rolling large old fashioned pennies along the road and pavement – he seemed to want it to look like he was never short of a bob or two (and I think by our standards he must have been pretty well off).
Everyone was highly amused when two or three ‘street urchins’ came running up to him with the pennies saying, “hey mister – did you drop this?” I still remember the disbelief on their faces when Charlie told them that they could keep the pennies. I’ve since been told that rolling pennies was a regular habit of Charlie's, and that he did it pretty much anywhere. David reports having seen him do it in Piccadilly Circus at one stage, just to see people’s reactions.
Some years later when England was going through a number of shortages – sugar, toilet rolls, and food generally as I recall – Charlie sent over big hampers from Australia every couple of months for a year or so. At first Mum and Dad were delighted, but I seem to remember Dad writing to him after a while and asking him to stop. I think it was getting a little embarrassing.
Charlie and Blanche must have come to visit the farm during the winter, because I remember we had great fun building a six-foot tall snowman, with a fat torso, coal for eyeballs and twigs for arms. We also built a huge (to me) mound of hard-packed snow with a spiral slide all the way down from the top, though I don’t remember how difficult it must have been to get to the top in the first place.
They must have also visited in the summer because I remember bright sunny days, when I was given two wooden Australian boomerangs with Aboriginal dots on one, and a painting of a kangaroo on the other. It was David who taught me to throw them, but sadly he never seemed to teach me how to make them come back. I used to play with them in the field on the Canterbury side of the farm where Graveney football team had their ground. The fence was nasty to climb over, and there were stinging nettles too, so it was quite a relief when I eventually lost both of the boomerangs.
The bonus about going up there was that there were often large dinner-plate sized field mushrooms growing near the fence around the field, and I liked to eat them raw. They were usually pretty full of little maggots, but I never seemed to mind them. Apparently these wild mushrooms were sometimes harvested and sent to market along with the fruit on Fisher Farms lorries to earn Dad an extra few bob. And just on the subject of food I remember enjoying making ‘earrings’ out of the cherries in the orchard on the way to the mushroom area, by hooking a pair of fruit on their strigs over each of my ears.
Fisher Farms grew plums, pears, cherries, apples and hops, the latter being dried in a traditional oast house near the farm entrance. It was only really the cherries that interested me – I think the other fruits were too commonplace at the time, and I preferred an occasional Mars bar as a treat. In any case the automatic bird-scarers used to worry me a lot, because someone had once told me that they fired lots of lead out of their mouths. Of course that wasn’t true, but I didn’t know that at the time. No doubt it was told to me to keep me away from them.
At other times I remember my childhood pursuits included making bows and arrows from the sapwood in the hearts of apple trees in the orchard opposite the farmhouse, and building ‘camps’ in cavities I hollowed out in the piles of cardboard boxes that were piled up in the sheds ready for fruit to be packed into during the picking season.
A strange Irish couple called Harry and Mary used to be employed to make the boxes. I thought they were married, but I’ve since discovered that they were siblings. I seem to remember that she was short and fat and he was short and thin, and that they lived in a caravan parked somewhere on the farm. I remember them as always being pleasant to me, and I strongly remember their Irish accents.
I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to, but I used to creep up to the oast house near the top entrance to the farm. It was only used for storage, and there must have been some arrangement with Mattison Meats, because all the stuff that was past its sell-by date was dumped up there and incinerated in a brazier.
Several times I remember trying to cook sausages that I found lying around the place on the still glowing embers of the brazier. They were always either almost raw or else burnt to a frazzle, and totally covered in ash and bits of melted plastic bag. It amazes me that I was able to eat them and not get horribly ill. That would have been the first sign of the cast-iron digestion that I retain to this day.
I remember frequently climbing the wobbling stacks of empty pallets – sometimes twenty pallets high or more – again I think Mum would have had a fit if she’d known, and thankfully I never fell.
I remember too, the muddy green-slimy puddles in the tractor-tyre ruts. They were always filled with crocodiles. I had to be very careful when I walked nearby in case one of the crocodiles grabbed me and pulled me in. Likewise I would never dream of going into the long old low sheds with the tarred walls, which had new cold-storage units built inside them, because it was obvious to me that many ghosts dwelled between the cold-stores and the outside walls.
I met old George Fisher, the farm owner, a few times when I was five or six. Apparently he had lost a spade somewhere, and he obviously thought it was a grand joke to ask me where it was, and when I was going to give it back.
I thought I was in terrible trouble, since I knew nothing whatsoever about his spade. But every time we met I remember him asking in a gruff voice “So where’s my spade then?” It amused him I suppose, but pretty much put the wind up me. I wished I could grow up sooner so I could stand up for myself and put him in his place, but for the time being I just hid behind Dad’s legs.
Practicing to be taller…I already had the clothes prepared
Mum used to let me have a dog biscuit when she fed the dog. That would have been old Bob, a black part-Labrador, part something else, who died when I was quite young. I liked the dog biscuits. They were fawn in colour and shaped like a bone. I enjoyed nibbling away at them from each end, then eventually trying to wedge the middle bit upright in my mouth. I’ve no idea why I did that – it usually hurt – but I kept trying at it anyway.
All that stopped one memorable afternoon in the old, cold, narrow stony kitchen at Ewell Farmhouse when I bit into a dog biscuit only to find a white maggot wriggling in a tunnel inside it. I went off them after that. Even to this day I rarely eat dog biscuits because of the memory of that maggot. I think it was because it was so much bigger than the maggots in the mushrooms from the orchard.
The other rooms in the house that I remember included the large living room between the kitchen and the hallway, which was more or less where we lived. The front door was in the corner of the living room, but I don’t remember it ever being used. There was also a lounge room opposite the stairs to the cellar which housed a fine collection of jigsaw puzzles, which I greatly enjoyed starting but which never seemed to get finished. There were always a few pieces missing apart from anything else. I was amazed that anyone could be so clever to think of making jigsaw puzzles a round shape, like two of the ones we had, but they never got finished either. The lounge was a cold, damp room, which was rarely used, except for leaving unfinished jigsaws in.
I was never one for fast cars, but I loved to play with my earth-moving machinery in my sandpit, making roads with my Matchbox toy diggers and trucks so that my tractor and trailer could get about and move sand around. The sandpit had originally been a small fishpond, which had been filled in so that I wouldn’t drown.
Near the sandpit was the driveway to the house, each side lined with small rocks about the size of pumpkins, which like the walls of the house, were all painted white. At the end of the drive, inside the hedge, was the well with a proper traditional well roof over it, and a bucket on a rope to pull up with a handle. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the well cover and bucket were false and not used. Water was pumped up to a cistern in the roof using an electric pump.
On the lawn area on the other side of the lilac tree was a shed where Dad raised turkeys a couple of times – they fascinated me, but didn’t come out, so they were always hard to get a look at. I remember being amazed that they had to stand on a floor with gaps between timber boards, so their feet didn’t touch the ground. I wondered at the time how they would ever be able to live in the wild.
I remember much of the summer as a little boy was spent without clothes on, playing in the garden – an al-fresco trend that was to be repeated in later years. I suppose it saved Mum doing quite so much laundry.
I was a keen nudist from an early age…
In retrospect I often wonder what we used to do in the evenings – I don’t remember a television in those days, although I’m told that we did have one. I’ve since discovered that Mum and Dad's first TV was purchased to watch the Coronation on June 2nd 1953, whilst they were still at Scooks. Mum and Dad and my brothers used to play cards and board games a lot, but I’m sure that on the occasions when I joined in I was more trouble than I was worth at that age! The first TV I actually remember was at the new bungalow. But it may just be that I went to bed before all the adults settled down for the night.
I vaguely remember Brian’s wedding reception at the East Kent Packers factory in Whitstable Road, Faversham, where he used to work. My recollection is of a lot of noise, and I was pleased to be taken home. I wasn’t very used to people, and there were certainly none my own age present.
I remember a boy called Tony at Ewell farm, possibly a son of one of the staff. He was a bit older than me, and very mischievous. I was probably fortunate not to be badly led astray.
I was also quite friendly with a lady called Queenie who worked on the farm. She was always very good to me, handing me occasional little chocolate treats and the like. Her hair seemed to be permanently adorned with hair-curlers. I was quite upset some years later when I heard that she’d died.
My time at Ewell farmhouse was a carefree period for me, and if I considered it at all, no doubt I thought things would just go along in the same way forever, but just before I entered infants' school, we left the big old farmhouse. Although we only moved to the entrance of the farm driveway, in a way I also moved to the entrance of my school days, and the long period of growing pains that would inevitably follow.
Eventually time came for Dad to consider leaving the farm or retiring. Maybe he had just had enough, which I find hard to believe. Or perhaps he’d fallen out with George Fisher, or staff, or most likely, he or Mum wanted to live in something that differed from the damp and creaking old farmhouse. My brother David has told me that he isn’t sure why we were given the bungalow either, but for whatever reason we duly moved into it.
Dad designed the bungalow himself, and so a brand new dwelling was built near the entrance to the farm. I remember that nine months later the farm was sold and we had to move again, which I think was a bitter pill for Mum and Dad to swallow. I had great fun while the diggers were digging the foundations, since they left mountains of soil with rocks that were ideal for making yet more ‘camps’ from which to fire the arrows from my bow.
I thought it was at that time Grandad came along with a little galvanised wheelbarrow and asked an excavator driver for a barrow load of topsoil. However an old photograph of him standing leaning on a shovel and looking a bit askance at a pile of dirt with one wheelbarrow handle protruding from it, shows that that incident occurred while the foundations for a new cold store were being dug, and that the excavator of my memory was actually an old blue tractor with a hydraulic front bucket.
The bungalow was of pale brown brick with a dark, tiled roof, and had a six-foot high wrought-iron gate with a curved top, which opened into a small paved courtyard, on one side of which was a concrete coal bunker. David would sometimes play football there with me – it was a good place for that because of all the concrete walls around to bounce the ball off, and the comparative lack of windows in the area. Not that I didn’t break my fair share of windows over the years. I used to get a bit frustrated because David was much better than me with the football (being quite a bit older), but he would try and teach me kicking skills, and let me have the ball a fair few times.
At the back of the bungalow was a small, grassed area with some flowerbeds around it, then cherry orchards. On the lawn we had a homemade rabbit hutch with two guinea pigs called Blackie and Ginger.
We also had a Jack Russell called Timmy who was pretty much the terror of the household – very nasty and snappy. If he was in front of the open fire no-one would dare to move him in case he bit them.
One day I remember Timmy found the guinea pig run and must have attacked it with quite some ferocity, because I also remember that one of the guinea pigs was found dead, still clinging upside down to the wire, and the other one was hiding in the box. I don’t think anyone was greatly upset when Timmy eventually ran under a truck in the drive outside the bungalow and was killed. We never had another dog after that.
Our old cat Lulu was still with us – in fact she didn’t get put to sleep until I was sixteen or seventeen years old and she was eighteen, suffering mammary tumours. That upset me greatly, especially since I’d never really considered death before. It was after we moved to Abbey Fields, and Dad and I drove her to the vet's at the bottom of Stone Street, left her in the surgery, and that was the last I saw of her.
Avoiding frostbite at the age of four in Kent
Winters were cold when I was young; there was always plenty of snow, and Mum and Dad often took me for long walks over the farm. I think they greatly enjoyed the scenery. Dad was especially keen on photography, and took many photos. I was always wrapped up very snugly, and it wasn’t until I was sixteen that I had my first attack of frostbite.
The first Christmases I remember were at that bungalow, with a real Christmas tree near the fire in the living room, and presents around the base of it There was a seemingly interminable wait for Santa Claus to come, until at last I was allowed to open my stocking at four o’clock in the morning.
I must have often been a real pain in the neck – I always hated going to bed. Sometimes I would manage to convince myself that there was something wrong with my kidneys (although I wasn’t quite sure where they were located), and would plead desperately with Mum and Dad to call a doctor at 11 o’clock at night. I think I even convinced myself in the end that I really was ill. Anything to be allowed to stay up a little later. I also knew that if I played on the floor behind a chair very quietly, sometimes I might get forgotten for a little while and squeeze another half hour that way.
The living room at the bungalow had a polished parquet floor and there were glass French windows opening out onto the back lawn. I remember learning that it’s difficult to stop yourself on a parquet floor when you’re running along in wet Wellington boots. Somehow I slid straight through the French windows, with broken glass shattering all around and over me, yet I didn’t receive a scratch.
Not so fortunate one day when I was romping around on the floor with Dad. He always had a sharp 2H pencil in his tweedy jacket top pocket, and I had the tip stab my right thumb. The black spot where it broke off is still there today, like a subcutaneous tattoo, almost fifty years later.
I started going to school when we lived in the new bungalow, which meant travelling to town on the bus. The first day was very frightening for me, which I don’t suppose is unusual at all. Mum left me with the teachers, while she went to do some shopping and catch the bus home. I was petrified. I remember crapping myself during lunch when we were all sitting down to eat, and the horror of it sliding down the leg of my shorts and onto my foot.
One of the teachers cleaned me up and got me a change of clothes, then started to walk me home, where somewhere along the way we met Mum who took me the rest of the way. I think Mum used to walk the four kilometres from the farm to town and vice versa quite often, since she never learnt to drive. School dinners were awful, but they taught me one thing – you cannot hide Brussels sprouts in a glass of milk.
I remember school always smelled of digestive biscuits and stale milk, and was filled with teachers who all seemed to have the most peculiar names. There was Mrs Osicoya (who married a black African, which was much frowned upon at the time), Miss Whirlo, Mrs Shackleton, and Miss Baird - all names that sounded very made-up to me.
Soon after I started my school days I did the traditional thing and ran away from home, maybe because I’d had an argument with Mum or something, but I don’t recall. I got as far as the telegraph pole about twenty metres up the driveway from the new bungalow and started to become very concerned. I had a piece of cheese in my pocket, so I must have been very determined to go through with my plan to leave home.
I continued to the very end of the farm driveway where the school bus stopped to pick me up at the Whitstable Road, before my courage deserted me. I remember sitting down at the side of the drive and eating my cheese while I waited for a bus - any bus - to come and get me. Eventually after what seemed like hours but which was probably about four or five minutes, it was Mum who came and found me and led me home. I have little doubt that she’d been keeping an eye on me from the kitchen window the whole time.
At school they tried to teach me fractions using wooden blocks of different lengths, but I hadn’t got a clue. David had more success with me years later after we moved to Abbey Fields. He managed to teach me what fractions were for at least, even if I still didn’t really see how they all joined together. I clearly remember his pronunciation of “quarter” was “kortah”, and I wasn’t sure for years if quarters and kortahs were the same things.
School had lots of sheds and storage areas with open doors, but all behind wire fences. They were full of interesting looking toys – balls, bats, hoops, gym horses, mats and so on, but you couldn’t get to them. Oddly I don’t ever really remember using them either, but I am sure we must have done sometimes.
Slow to make friends, I usually sat by myself, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, simply because I’d not had any social contact up until then.
I think my eyes were pretty poor even at that age, because I remember not really being able to see what was going on at the front of the class properly. I didn’t wear glasses until I was eight years old, and had quite a bit of catching up to do by then – especially in maths. English was always ok, after all we spoke it all the time, and I could ‘wing-it’.
When we all lined up to be picked for teams I remember always being the last to be picked, with both teams saying “You take him” or “no no – you take him, we don’t want him”. None of that stopped me raking up about eight other kids who were prepared to come to my first ever birthday party at the new bungalow – I think I was six or seven years old. The names of several of the kids are easy to remember, but not very relevant now. I was desperately in love with Theresa Jones who had once given me some chocolate.
We played the usual ‘pin the tail on the donkey’, ‘blind man's buff’, ‘musical chairs’, ‘pass the parcel’ etc, but I remember feeling a bit left out because even though it was ‘my party’; all the others could play together and I mostly got kind of ignored. I didn’t really know how to play with kids my own age. Although it didn’t turn me off parties forever, it meant that I didn’t really warm to social events until I was in my twenties.
We also used to take one or two of my ‘friends’ out on excursions from time to time in the family car, normally to a ruined castle somewhere, such as the enormous tumbledown Norman structure at Bodiam, with its wide moat, plenty of places to climb, and an enthralling little bridge to get to it across the water.
On one such outing we took two girls, Janet Harvey and Jacqueline Page, along with Graham Beake, but I was too shy and bashful to talk to any of them, and the day was awful for me.
We had a holiday at one of the Butlins Holiday Camps when I was fairly young – our first and only venture into one of those places. The location was Bognor Regis on the south coast – a town made famous as the brunt of many jokes by a series of comedians, including Benny Hill, and the immortal Peter Sellers. It was the archetypical working-class family retreat, where two adults and three kids (or in our case just one kid) could be fed, watered, entertained and relaxed for a traditional fortnight’s summer holiday, all for less than the cost of a week's wages.
I don’t think Mum and Dad were very impressed, and I know I wasn’t. The food, served in a huge hall at very specific times, was mass-produced to the point of being totally insipid. The ‘entertainment’, although constant throughout each day, was humdrum, forced, and had less flavour than the food. The ‘chalets’, which were glorified garden sheds, had more in common with prison cells than holiday accommodation.
All in all it was an interesting experiment, and if our family had been semi-literate morons with an under-developed sense of humour, brought up on tripe and turnips, and with no notion of the freedom of owning our own car or tent, we might have benefited more from the experience. As it was, we endured, rather than enjoyed it, and once it was over we never spoke of it again.
There’s no doubt in my mind that such holiday camps filled a necessary niche for a great number of working-class British holiday makers, but I think the regimentation, lack of freedom, and the artificial nature of the entertainment and location filled my parents with inertia, and I believe the following year saw us tripping off to Ireland for an extra special camping adventure.
Scotney Castle, Kent
Trips to stately homes, areas of scenic beauty, and to relatives in Kent were also quite frequent. One of my own favourite trips was to Tunbridge Wells, where I was allowed to clamber unattended all over the Low Rocks, a sandstone outcrop in the middle of the common at the centre of town. From there we would often travel the extra few kilometres to the High Rocks, but they were far too tall for me to run around by myself, and so at that time were much less interesting for me. All the features looked the same and I quickly got bored there.
Sometimes we’d go down to the seaside town of Deal on the south coast of Kent, where an uncle and aunty of mine lived. On the way to Deal we passed a finger signpost, with pointers to the village of Ham and the town of Sandwich both on the same side, so of course a photo was taken of the young me leaning against the sign, eating a ham sandwich. In Deal we played ‘clock golf’ and ‘crazy golf’ in a basic early form of amusement park. I cherished those days and had great fun.
It was actually a cheese sandwich
My other golfing outlet was when Faversham Recreation Ground was taken up once a year by a travelling fair, and the athletics competition was held at the same time. Some entrepreneurs set up some short putting greens, and again I greatly enjoyed hitting the little white ball around the place. Mum didn’t enjoy my back swing one year, which broke one of her teeth and cut her lip open. I don’t remember playing the game in the years that followed that.
The fair had all the usual sideshows to do with tossing rings, airgun ranges, darts, plastic ducks, and fluffy teddy bears, and I loved them all. I remember tramping around in mud over the tops of my shoes, nostrils filled with the smell of sausages The sounds of screaming coming from the carousel, and laughing shouts all around me were the aural backdrop for the bright colours and flashing lights, as I ate a head-sized ball of delicious pink candyfloss. That’s the stuff kids' dreams are made of.
There was also a big carnival through the town at the time the fair was in residence, and local organizations had competitions to see who could come up with the best float.
My parents and I would try and find a place somewhere along the route of the procession, and I was usually hoisted up onto Dad's shoulders so that I could see over the crowd. There was an intensity of noise from the masses of people, and some firecrackers thrown into the throng from time to time by young boys. The reverberations of the different marching bands, with their crashing drums and screaming bugles vibrated through my stomach and were very exciting.
Collections were taken up for local charities by the parade participants, and long hollow tubes for throwing coins into - ‘Copper catchers’ - were waved underneath the windows of those lucky enough to have an upstairs room overlooking the carnival route.
During my few years at Ewell Farm I was in these ways socialised to a degree. The time was thus very formative for me, and I changed from a baby into a little boy. Nothing I had experienced so far, however, had prepared me for the culture shock of actually moving into the town of Faversham itself.