Dad Grabbed

I never knew my grandparents. All grannies and grandads were gone
long before my first memory, so I grabbed my Dad - and he's been dead
for four years. But he wrote a memoir, rather unimaginatively called
"The Old Man's Story", so through that manuscript I can ask him about
his early years.

His family moved just a few roads into a street off the bottom end of
the Kings Road in London sometime in the first 10 years of last
century, his very first childhood recollections coming from this
upheaval. He remembers the mess of what must have been a new
development with building materials littering the road that was as yet
unmade. "The workmen wore, as far as I can remember, thick cord
trousers with a leather strap under the knee, waistcoat and muffler or
choker and a bowler hat."

Heaven knows how many times the postman came those 95 years ago in
London but there were two deliveries of milk a day. Milk was poured
into a washed can put out the night before and for the nearly 50 years
or so I knew my Dad he always shovelled one heaped teaspoonful of sugar
into his frequent cups of tea, and then a tiny bit more. He explained
the little bit extra as a product of watching the milkmen dole a
measure and a bit into the milk cans. The second delivery was known as
the 'pudding round' when housewives bought extra milk and eggs for the
meal they had, by the afternoon, planned for the evening.

"Another familiar sight was the lamp-lighter. He would come down the
street on his bike with along pole over his shoulder and stop at each
lamppost to switch on the light by the hook on the end of his pole.
Street lighting was by electricity but automatic switching was still a
a long way off."

In early adolescence he began taking in more of the detail of his
environment. "There was stark uniformity in the architecture of the
houses in which we lived; a long terrace of homes on both sides of the
street, all identical in design, size and appearance. The builder must
have been very fond of lions as each house was decorated with three
lions couchant on the roof, forming a line of these animals right down
the street."

It took Dad's family an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon to get to
Peckham from Fulham to visit his Mum's parents. His elder brother,
Herbert, who later became a brilliant engineer and a Royal Academician,
was clearly showing signs of later greatness. "We would take a No.11
bus to Victoria and thence by tram to Peckham. Herbert and I would sit
right at the front of the bus and he, being of an engineering turn of
mind even in his early years, would explain to me the intricacies of
the motor bus and the details of the mechanics of it; the gear changes,
and the various pedals which the driver used. Five decades later Dad
taught me to drive in a dreadful 1950s Austin Somerset and he still
knew how to double-de-clutch.

1914 was a big year for him. A war started and surgeons cut out one of
his kidneys in St George's Hospital, that fine building on Hyde Park
corner that is now a swanky hotel with big torches burning outside. In
1914 the best doctors in the land did not know a lot about kidneys and
cutting bad ones out of living bodies was still a very new procedure.
With a little glibness he said, "This involved surgery which left me
weak and considerably limited my physical activities. Nowadays such
surgery is common, but in those early days it was looked upon as being
very serious." He lived in good health to his mid-90s on one
kidney.

So there was a war. The doctor he got to know best during his five
months in a hospital overlooking one of London's busiest corners was a
Dr. Hibbert. Dad saw him every day and they became close. When H.M.S.
Formidable was torpedoed in the English Channel in September 1914,
Surgeon-Lieutenant Hibbert died, bringing home the gravity of what was
happening in Europe to a sick 12-year-old.

"Another memory that still lingers is the arousal of public feeling
after the air raids by Zeppelins and aeroplanes on London causing much
damage and civilian loss of life. The foreign names over the shops and
their German owners trading among the people became the source of great
indignation and bitterness especially among some of the working
classes." He remembers crowds gathering at night and shouting and
roaring with rage until just one person threw a stone through a window
and then all fury was let loose. "It was mob violence against which the
few police available could do nothing and they wisely kept out of the
way."

In July 1916 and because all his friends were leaving school, his
parents found him work in a retail chain selling men's clothing. He
began his business career with Hope Brothers and he stayed with them
till they collapsed after the Second World War.

He started work in the Kensington High Street branch. He wore a dark
suit, starched collar, dark grey overcoat and bowler hat. He was 14
years old.