Memories Of An Early Childhood In Clutton (1931–1942)
by Lena Church (2009)
Further along the road was Mrs Treasure. She wore a man's cap and stood with her arms folded and a sour look on her face. She frightened me a bit. She was grandmother to the Selway boys. It was Mrs Treasure who told my mother about the policeman having to rescue me from the Old School wall.
In the house next to Mrs Treasure were Mr and Mrs Mayfield and their two daughters Joan and Marie. They were older than me and seemed to be so grown up and glamorous. Marie painted her nails and that impressed me. She was my very first Sunday School teacher. Mr Mayfield was originally from the U.S.A. although he had been in the British Army and retired as a Regimental Sergeant Major. Mrs Mayfield was very Welsh and if anything amazed her she always said, "Oh Dieu, Dieu". She and my mother were friends. Joan and Marie had a cousin John who came to stay in the long summer holidays, in later years he was knighted for Services to Industry; I remember him as the horrid little boy who put a tortoise in my tent in Gastons. Ugh, it gave me the creeps.
Joan played with Sylv sometimes and would spend evenings at our house knitting, or playing cards. We played cards a lot - but never on Sundays. We weren't allowed to knit on Sundays either; it was mind-bogglingly dull. There were jigsaw puzzles - that was
allowed.
The Kerley family came to live in the cottage which we had vacated, before they were allocated a council house at Tynings. Then Mrs Bates moved in.. She was as round as she was high and like the others, always wore a wrap-around apron. Mrs Bates had a son Teddy, whom she called 'Sunshine' and so did everybody else, but not in front of his mother.
Mrs Bates also had a lodger whose name was Mr Dabonet. He was a very swarthy man and everybody called him 'Darkie', but not to his face. Darkie Dabonet, we were told, watered his spring cabbage plants with the contents of the chamber pot. Well, that was cheaper than buying sulphate of ammonia.
The end cottage was Mr Jack Partington's shop. Here he sorted and sold his newspapers, cutting the string around the bundles with a big vicious looking knife. He then used the same knife to loosen the sticky sweets in the jars when they would not shake free.
Mr Partington never swore: the worst expletive he used was 'flopping'. Everything was flopping this and flopping that, so needless to say he was called Flopping Jack or Flopper. He hailed from Bolton and never lost his Lancashire accent; and he could clog dance. A 'turn' by flopper was always expected at a village concert.
Miss Hill was the Post Mistress, and I just remember the Post Office being in the building on the Bristol Road, now called the Old Bakery. Miss Hill met and married Mr Bob Martin when he was working on a gang that came through laying telephone cables. He was a Scot. The Post Office was moved to Cooks Hill in the new building which Mrs Martin had built.
She never addressed you by your name, but always referred to you in the third person. So over the counter she would ask, "What can I get for her?" or "What does she want?" Mr Martin was short and stocky and his walk was a strut with his arms swinging. He liked to go to the Warwick Arms and when he was passing by we would say in loud voices, "Does anybody feed their dog Bob Martins powders?" That was considered very daring, but he never took any notice. Perhaps he was deaf.
Next to the Rectory was "Mycott" where Miss Collinson lived here with her companion Miss Bligh. They both wore long black clothes and had never moved out of the Edwardian period. Miss Collinson was the photographer whose pictures now adorn pub walls around and about. My dad did the occasional bit of tidying up in their garden.
Two other old ladies of the same ilk were the Misses Whitley. They were sisters Miriam and Mabel and lived in Yew Tree House in Cooks Hill.
Concerts and socials were held in the Old School, opposite Stowey Road. Church Sunday school was held here as well. Professional Concert Parties came to the village from time to time and they would hire the Miner's Welfare Hall, For a week they would perform real dramas like Uncle Tom's Cabin and Murder in the Red Barn. A different play each night. Then on Saturday afternoon there would be a variety matinee for the children. I remember them doing
Uncle Tom's Cabin and using local lads as young black boys and blacking them up with burnt cork.
I must have been in the upper half of Mrs Seymour's class when war broke out. I don't remember war being declared, just that suddenly we were overwhelmed by all these children from London. It was a bit of a shock for everybody. They couldn't understand us and we couldn't understand them.
They brought teachers with them and helpers for the infants, and tried to continue as their own school whilst squeezed into our building. One of these helpers was called Brenda and she wore her hair in a thick under-curled fringe which the Americans would call a 'bang'. Oh! How I longed to wear my hair like that.
These evacuees were from Dagenham and Barking, with east end accents. There was one little boy called Roy Connley who was billeted in Cooks Hill. Everyday as we returned to school after dinner the local quarries would blast at exactly 2 minutes after one o'clock Every day without fail Roy Connley would say -Haak. Haak, the gans are Roy had two older sisters, one called Constance and the other one' s name I don't remember. They had little song and dance routines which they taught to us, and Esme and I thought it was wonderful. We would copy what they did, and copy what they sang, and we sang the words just as they sounded. So a little Datch boy" (or Datch gel) followed by the movement of fist under chin, elbow on raised knee and the words "As we lean on the hoa see whoa", which my Sister eventually translated into " the old sea wall"
At home on dark winter evening, Esme would sometimes come to play, and we would perform some of the songs and dances we had learned. It would be ten minutes behind the curtain dressing up, and then a two minute performance. Ah, Show Biz. Our audience was my mum and sister if she wasn't out at Girl Guides.
Another little girl whose name was Doreen Wisdom - she was about 6 – always threatened everyone with what her two brothers would do to them "Moi Ronnie and Moi Reggie" they were called Perhaps her real name was Kray.
At home we would get up if there was an air raid on Bristol. Dad would light the fire and make tea. Giving up sugar in my tea was my contribution towards the war effort.
Once, dad took me outside to see the orange glow in the sky, and to tell me in a very dramatic voice; "That's Bristol burning!" I was rather frightened.
On another occasion during the evening, when there was just mum and me there, a raid started and suddenly a screaming bomb could be heard Mother grabbed me, pushed me under the stairs and managed to get most of herself inside too. In the ruins of bombed buildings in Bristol, the stairs nearly always survived, so it was as good a place as any to take shelter as a last resort.
Bombs fell in several fields west of the main road, and we would go looking for bits of shrapnel the next day. The nearest they came to us was Great West, two field beyond the Methodist Chapel. Then two huge land mines left enormous craters in a field beside the road. just north of the Warwick Arms. And so we dug an air raid shelter behind the chicken house where the garden sloped slightly. We dug in and down and round the corner. Esme helped. It was our dad's idea, designed on a dugout from the first world war trenches. It finished up about four feet high, with planks across the top and lots of earth piled on top of that Just once, when things got a bit scary, the ARP wardens took cover there, and just once we kids had a magic lantern show down there. It could well have caved in and buried us all.
Mother kept a few hens so we had eggs. Father got extra cheese ration as he was a miner, but I don't remember being hungry. It was a novelty to shake cream in a kilner jar to produce a bit of butter. and marzipan could be made with soya flour and almond essence. Housewives became very resourceful and magazines were full of ideas for stretching the rations. But as a child this was all over my head.
Clothes rationing must have been a nightmare. Shoes were 7 coupons per pair. My mother acquired a pair of brown, toe-capped ATS shoes coupon free - which I had to wear and I hated them. I can remember showing off and paddying, about wearing these
shoes, but wear them I had to.
At school, I was now in Mr Hoyal's class and what a miserable time that was. I hated him, and he terrified me. My sister had passed her scholarship and he expected me to be just as bright, I think I was the proverbial short plank. Around the top of the classroom walls was a frieze of cards that had all the significant dates in history on them. 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered American is the one that sticks in my mind.
Then came 'problems'! Oh how they defeated me. I had no idea how to make seven toffees go around four boys. I would probably have given them one each and eaten the other three. It was all those written words that confused and frightened me.
When I look back at those wartime days in Old Hoyal's class, it is a wonder we weren't all total idiots. He was never there to teach us. As the war progressed, he was appointed as a welfare officer and given the rank of Captain. We were then expected to address him by that title. He swanked about in his khaki uniform - he even had a car. He was a big man and we kids gave him the nickname of “gutty”, but he knew what we called him. One day he stood in the classroom doorway and thumping himself on the chest shouted “I'm not gutty”. I can't think what brought that about . He would set us some work do to then disappear for hours on end, leaving a classroom full often and eleven year olds unsupervised.
Well, most of the time it was chaos, and every now and then a very irate Mrs Seymour would cross the intervening hall and give us a telling off and make us settle down… for about five minutes What a nightmare that must have been for her.
We had air raid practice sometimes. Taking cover "as to sit on the flagstones in the girls" cloakroom. Oh, those Stones were cold. The windows were covered with criss-crossed strips of brown tape to avoid splintering, and there we would sit fidgeting and giggling, and getting very cold bums.
There gas mask practice too. This was a hoot because of the farting noises that came with each exhalation and some of the boys could make louder farts than others
Mr Hoyal devised a series of whistle signals for air raids. Something like, one blast for take cover, two for incendiary raid and three blasts for gas attack. Needless to say we never got it right, and he came storming into the cloakroom on one occasion, saw us all sitting there and roared. "Well, you are all dead. Gassed" then slammed the door on us
and stomped away.
Out of school we joined in the war effort, although at nine and ten years old we had no idea of the seriousness of the situation. Waste collected and stored in the scout hut at Bendalls Bridge. It seemed mostly to be cardboard cartons simply strewn about the place and the smell was appalling.
The resident mice must have had a whale of a time. We were also encouraged to join in National Savings Schemes. There were special war effort weeks - Wings for Victory week. Battleship Week, when everyone made an effort to contribute money towards winning the war. I remember a "mile of pennies" starting opposite our house and eventually reached about
halfway to the Warwick Arms.
Meanwhile back in school things went on much as before. Mr Hoyal threw chalk at pupils when he got really cross and I remember him as a bully of a man. Once he caned my hand.
When he was there, on cold days he would stand with his back to the window and his arms out stretched, swaying gently from side to side the big radiator. After a certain length of time this mesmerised me, and he became a black silhouette. In painting lessons, Mr Hoyal had one expression which made us snigger, He always said "don’t paint the sky sugar bag blue." The funny bit was the way he said it, I don't know where he came from and he was a bit 'plum in mouth', but it always sounded like "don't paint the skay shigger baig blew." Lloyd Francis, one of the boys would mimic this perfectly to make us all laugh. Lloyd who never stopped talking earned the nickname of Rabbit. He was always a bit of a comedian.
Lloyd's grandfather was the local barber. He lived and ran his business from the end house at the top of the slope in Maynard Terrace [Number 9].
He was Bill Francis, and I remember him as a short well built jolly man. He always seemed to be smiling.
The hairdressers for we girls was on the top road, two doors from our house. Mr Fred Dando owned all the houses in the row and he set up a ladies hairdressing business for his wife in Grafton House. Some days she would be there swanning around and doing the odd shampoo, but others were employed as hairdressers. There was a man and a young woman called Sadie Lyons who came on her bike from Bishop Sutton. She must not have been much more than in her middle teens but seemed very grown up to us. A slip of the scissors one day left Esme with a plaster on her ear.
It was while in our final year at Clutton school that we learned to swim. Mrs Beatrice Perry took her two daughter to the baths every Saturday morning and a few of us were invited to join in. It later became known at Clutton Swimming Club, We caught the 11.20am train from the station - it was always twenty minutes late - and rode to Brislington. Then it was the long climb up Talbot Hill to the Jubilee baths. It was always a race against time to catch the 2 0'clock train home. On cold winter days, the woman in the pay desk would boil a kettle and make hot oxo drinks. Ugghhh. I believe you had to produce your own oxo cube. That was not for me.
Mrs Perry taught us all to do breast stroke and back stroke and basic life saving. Esme, was my partner for this, - who else? - and in turn we would lie on the ochre coloured honeycomb tiles in the changing room, and practice the life-saving of the day.
In the baths we would do widths of 'rescue' and ' 'tired swimmer', and eventually were brought to elementary certificate standard. Everybody passed - except me. I went to pot on the day and could not get the brick from the bottom. Ah well. Draw a line under that. I expect I cried!
However, I never forgot how to swim and some years ago when I was in my forties, I did 24 lengths at Clifton College in a sponsored 'Swim with David Wilkie'.
In the spring of 1942 all of the children in the upper part of Mr Hoyal's class sat the scholarship. The invigilator on exam day was Mr Frank Hillier and he had squeaky boots as he walked up and down between the rows of desks. We had no experience of an examination atmosphere and none of us expected to pass. However, one girl named Jean Young did. The rest of us were all off to the White Elephant at Timsbury
There was a new world to look forward to and we were going to be the new Timsbury Hooligans. Our very first day there was 3rd July 1942. I went straight into the "A" stream, and two years later was offered a thirteen plus scholarship to Midsomer Norton County Secondary School. I couldn't have been as thick as all that after all, so I like to think I was just a late developer.