Recollections of a Rural Childhood

The earliest clear memory I retain is of lying in my pram and pulling down and chewing the poisonous foliage of a macrocarpa tree under which the pram was parked. Hardly less vivid are other early memories of lying looking up at the sky and watching the minute, moving ripples which occur in the liquid film that covers our eyes. In bright sunshine these can often take on interesting prismatic qualities. Such occupations apart, there are not many things to do in a pram.

While macrocarpa trees occupied one side of my family’s modest but pleasant garden in Kent, a much more typical local sight would have been the row of seven apple trees that marked the opposite boundary. Kent was once Britain’s leading fruit-growing county. Each apple tree was of a different variety and would ripen at a different time. Our largest apple tree, a green Bramley, grew closest to my parents’ house. By the time my mother and father finally left their home in the ancient town of Faversham the more inaccessible apples from this tree would not only grow to a considerable size but would cling obstinately to their stems even in the face of the high winds that generally blew there in autumn and early winter. Poised six or seven metres up in the air, they presented a seasonal hazard to my scholarly father on his daily trips to replenish the supplies of coal and coke on which our house depended for its grossly inadequate heating. He was once hit squarely on the head by an apple weighing over half a kilo.

Whether many colder houses than ours existed in England I cannot say but certainly, like most other houses of the time, it was extremely poorly insulated. Where we lived, close to the southern shore of the Thames Estuary, no physical barrier obstructed the passage of bitter east winds that blew in from Scandinavia and Russia in winter, often carrying heavy falls of snow.

My father’s sister named the two unheated attic rooms where my sister and I slept the “North Col” and “South Face” after prominent features of Mount Everest which had yet to be climbed when we were children. While thick frost on the outside of our bedroom windows was commonplace, they could sometimes feature frost patterns of great beauty on the inside too. In winter my hands were an habitual mottled shade of salmon and deep blue.

The house had been built originally for my mother’s favourite brother Reg, from materials supplied cheaply by my maternal grandfather Aquila, who was a timber merchant. Two of my mother’s three elder brothers, Gerald and Horace, and also her first love, a Royal Flying Corps pilot, were all killed in the First World War, while Reg was severely wounded at Pozieres and lost a lung. All were volunteers and typical of the countrymen of pride and spirit of their day. Reg was a talented amateur artist who sent drawings home from the trenches, while Horace was a fierce horse-breaker and boxer. My mother’s family hailed originally from Cornwall, whence my maternal great-grandfather came to Kent to build one of Britain’s first railways.

When my portrait was painted some years ago by the English artist John Wonnacott the preliminary pencil drawings he made revealed to me for the first time how much the structure of my head resembled that of my late father. It was not until colour and expression were added that the genealogical influence of the Cornish Davys really became apparent in the darkness of my colouring.

Portraits were something I attempted myself from a very early age. When my mother died I inherited a cache of my earliest efforts, which she had kept for her amusement. Nearly all were of male figures in profile, with many sharing a most unusual feature: a long proboscis which resembled a type of television antenna that came into use in Britain decades later consisting of a long horizontal rod punctuated by short uprights.

I do not think my mother ever really knew what these probosces represented and it took me some hours, on renewed acquaintance, to work their significance out for myself. What they were, in fact, was a reinvention of Cubist principles by a two- or three-year-old. In brief, they were simply moustaches viewed from head-on but attached to faces which were in profile. Amazingly all were attached at just the right height. What they represented was the admiration felt by a very small boy for a favourite soldierly uncle.

The East Kent town of Faversham where my maternal grandfather plied his trade lies at the end of a muddy creek which debouches into the main flow of the Thames Estuary. When I was a small boy, the area beside the water was still the poorest as well as the oldest area of the town. Medieval buildings mingled with factories and yards such as that which contained my grandfather’s timber business.

One of my grandfather’s staunchest workmen was a man called Axey, an unremarkable-seeming name in a timber yard. It was not until much later in life that I discovered that the man in question was the youngest of a huge family of boys. Because his elder brothers used up all the names of the biblical apostles, Axey’s devout parents christened him plain “Acts of the Apostles”—in fact Acts of the Apostles Epps. It is hardly surprising he preferred the shorter version of his name.

Faversham lies less than 100 kilometres from London but, during my childhood, remained genuinely rural. Most of the local farmers grew hops and a variety of fruits and almost all recruited casual labour from outside our area to help with seasonal picking. In pre-mechanised days, hop-picking was largely the province of poor families from the East End of London who could not afford other forms of holiday. Once a year they gathered for the seasonal picking in primitive compounds specially constructed by local farmers. These consisted of windowless huts and latrines which were ventilated, like horse boxes, solely by stable doors.

Although supposedly and probably tough, many of the East End families who came to our area were unsettled by the unlit darkness of the countryside at night and also by the pervasive silence, punctuated solely by the cries of owls and foxes. Many were driven to loud singing to keep their spirits up, especially on walks back at night from obscure local inns. To the delight of local children, many were also terrified of bullocks and heifers, which they regarded collectively as bulls. Few even of the most hardened East Enders would enter or try to cross fields containing such dangerous beasts.

Country children of my day often kept ferrets for rabbiting and owls or jackdaws as pets. When my parents were first married they rented a house at the seaside town of Whitstable which lies some dozen or so kilometres nearer the mouth of the Thames Estuary than Faversham. My father and many boys who were his pupils at Faversham Grammar School commuted daily, together with a tame jackdaw belonging to one of the boys. According to my father, this faithful bird made the journey independently each day, flying alongside or in pursuit of the small steam train and waiting patiently for its master during lesson times in a tree in the school playground.

Rural children of the time were generally well versed in country lore and regarded themselves as comfortably superior to town-dwellers, who could seldom climb difficult trees, ride horses or kill rats. This balance of power persisted until the 1950s, when growing mechanisation denuded the English countryside of farm workers, many of whom were compelled to move to towns or cities to find alternative work. The days of the perceived superiority of rural children finally ended when it became realised that their urban counterparts could visit cinemas easily, afford to buy motorbikes and attend important football matches. Sadly, keeping ferrets or jackdaws paled into insignificance beside such lofty pursuits. The death knell for many rural communities was ultimately sounded when Dr Beeching, a government minister, closed great numbers of small, uneconomic country railway stations.

Only relatively wealthy people owned cars in those days. Indeed it took the outbreak of the Second World War before my sister and I experienced a lengthy journey by car. If England were invaded our home, which lay in a 300-metre strip between the major road and rail links joining London and the Kentish coast, would have been in a direct path of any German military advance on Britain’s capital. The pair of us therefore became another two to swell the ranks of displaced schoolchildren known collectively as evacuees. An aunt collected my mother and us in her tiny Austin Severn and somehow spirited us, with an overnight stop at the lovely cathedral city of Wells in Somerset, to a remote location on the coast of North Devon.

A journey by road of 300 kilometres or more was looked on, probably rightly, as a major undertaking in those days. We must have arrived at Wells after night fell because I remember continuing to see white road markings and feeling that I was still moving long after being put to bed. My sister was eight at the time, which was close to my fifth birthday.

Our sojourn with a kindly couple in the little village of Mortehoe marked our first lengthy separation from our mother. I expect I felt acutely homesick but have no recollection of being so. What I do remember clearly are the rolling, dark green hills of Exmoor and my extreme pleasure in chasing a ball made from transparent plastic—possibly a birthday present—down their slopes. This curious toy contained water, a white plastic swan and a bright red ball. I also recollect picking blackberries by the handful in country lanes that formed thoroughfares for small herds of dairy cattle, the odour of whose sweet-smelling dung has been linked in my mind ever since with the flavour of blackberries.

Mortehoe provided an introduction for me to a world of fascinating rock-pools, rolling surf and an horizon line punctuated with the distant hulls of shipping.

The bodies of two merchant seamen whose vessel was probably torpedoed were washed ashore while I was there and an angler for conger eels was tugged off a slippery rock and drowned. These incidents provided my first evidence that death really occurred.

The couple with whom we stayed were frequent foragers along the shoreline, where they collected an edible seaweed. The subsequent serving of seaweed cooked with bacon and eggs and of Devonshire cream with mashed swedes and other vegetables certainly extended the range of my limited culinary experience. One consequence of a wartime childhood and of seven subsequent years at an English boarding school is that I am still grateful for any edible and wholesome food. I remained a small and skinny boy for much of my childhood and now realise what a privilege this was.

I do not think I had any knowledge of schooling at this stage and recall experiencing difficulties with reading when my formal education belatedly began. This would have been sometime early in 1940 after my sister and I were returned to my parents in Kent. However, the summer of that same year saw the beginning of daylight raids on London by massed formations of aircraft. The German bombers that flew up the Thames Estuary were clearly visible to us from almost any elevated location. Indeed, I dream to this day of skies full of aircraft and see again the soft smudges made in the air by bursting anti-aircraft shells. It was to avoid the latter that the Germans flew offshore and it was to circumvent them, in turn, that tall concrete constructions were built as gun platforms, offshore, in the deeper waters of the Thames Estuary. These structures were known as Churchill towers. Some subsequently became pirate radio stations thirty years after their original purpose had become redundant.

A further threat of invasion in the late summer of 1940 saw the juvenile Autys off on their travels once more, this time to the town of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. From there we witnessed London docks burning fiercely at night, seventy or so kilometres away. The whole sky had taken on an extremely ominous glow. “They’ve certainly copped a packet tonight,” I can remember someone remarking to my mother, who had accompanied us this time on our travels.

My father had stayed in Kent because the staff and pupils of his school were required to take over the hop-picking duties which the inhabitants of London’s beleaguered East End were temporarily unable to fulfil. I sense my father may even have enjoyed picking hops rather better than trying to teach English literature to rural dunderheads. He complained only that the act of picking hops stained his hands until he was introduced by an elderly countrywoman to the unlikely remedy of immersing his hands in “bean-water”—presumably water in which runner beans had been cooked. Faversham boasted two major breweries at the time and the continued production of beer was considered, perhaps rightly, a vital part of the allied war effort.

Being sent away twice delayed the start of my formal schooling, which finally got under way at a country preparatory school on the other side of Faversham. The journey between home and school was probably no more than two kilometres but this had to be accomplished by bicycle along a main road frequently traversed by massive convoys of military vehicles and personnel. One could easily wait half an hour for all the vehicles to pass.

It is probably because of these rather unusual circumstances that I cannot readily recall my sudden-seeming transition from being a rather slow to an extremely confident reader. Much of my time outside school was spent reading once I had acquired the necessary skill, or drawing complex subjects suggested by my mother. Children of the time could hardly help being acutely conscious of the war and boys prided themselves particularly on such skills as aircraft recognition—a very handy ability, in short, to distinguish rapidly between friendly and hostile aeroplanes.

This was certainly an attribute worth learning and the only serious error I remember making was when I waved enthusiastically at two squadrons of German fighter-bombers as they raced low over our garden. They were on their way to bomb and strafe the nearby cathedral city of Canterbury in rumoured retaliation for the accidental bombing by allied aircraft of Cologne cathedral.

This event took place in the latter days of the war when a Focke-Wulf 190 could be mistaken all too easily for the Royal Air Force’s new pride, the Typhoon. The day was specially memorable because the German aerial attack coincided with a first local screening of Gone with the Wind. An extremely long queue of would-be cinema-goers, which included my mother, must have presented a bizarre sight to the German pilots who flew into the city almost at roof-top height. Sensibly, the cinema-goers flung themselves promptly to the ground. What subsequently incensed my mother even more than the air-raid itself was the sight of a lone man, walking purposefully among the prone women, calmly helping himself to their handbags.

So far as my juvenile understanding of such matters went, my parents endured the privations and worries of war with considerable stoicism and never imparted any fear they may have felt to their children. But I am grateful to them, too, in another special way.

Both of my parents had a wide knowledge of natural history and implanted a deep love of the subject in my sister and me. From a precociously early age, I learned to identify any British nesting bird, butterfly or beast, while my sister preferred botanical specimens. Walks, picnics and bicycle rides in an increasingly deserted and undisturbed countryside thus often became times of unlikely discoveries. My father was adept especially at encouraging nightingales to break into song by skilfully imitating their warm-up notes.

Because of the war, large tracts of land became overgrown and the never-to-be-used pillboxes, tank traps and slit trenches which embellished our local woodlands soon became even more artfully concealed by nature itself. In the meantime, the defences against sea-borne invasion which were erected on local beaches gave rise in me to rather an odd misunderstanding. This was because my first conscious contact with scaffolding was to see it erected all around our shoreline, some thirty or so metres out to sea, with the object of obstructing landing craft. When the war ended, many so-called “war-surplus” materials were returned to civilian use and thus when I first saw scaffolding used on buildings I could not help thinking how clever tradesmen were to adapt a system used for beach defences for peacetime use in this way.

Even in war, children seem protected by a strange innocence. Six of the first ten years of my life were passed during wartime. Thus men and women in uniform, night-time blackouts, air-raids, sirens, exhortatory posters and food rationing all once seemed to me part of an entirely natural way of life.