Sunday's Child

Every child used to be aware of the day on which they were born at one time and the implications it was likely to have on their life. Monday’s child was fair of face and Molly from number 31 had been born on a Monday. It was one of the reasons she was confident of becoming a Hollywood film star because she knew that she would grow up to have the looks for it. She said she would have been tempted to go into hairdressing if it hadn’t been for the auspicious day of her birth.

Joan Bennett, was not so fortunate being welcomed into the world on a Tuesday by her grandmother who announced at once her delight because Tuesday’s child was full of grace. None of us understood all that well what Grace entailed but it was definitely important to her grandmother who had used it as a given name for Joan’s mother back in 1909 and she’d been born on a Wednesday. Years later Joan’s recently married teenage sister whose husband was Irish and found Joan difficult to like was heard once to say she was graceless.

We were glad not to have to grow up as Mrs Ribbins’ latest baby, Sonia-Kim a Wednesday’s Child and already full of woe judging by the amount of noise she could make which her mother said was just the Colic and something she would grow out of. Aunt Mag thanked the Lord that none of her four ever had the Colic.

My brother was considered a fortunate newborn because Thursday’s child had far to go and Old Nan said he would do well in life just like her Edgar did when he managed to give up the drink. It was odd that she should have made this comment at all as she never managed to give up the drink herself. After a more than shaky start involving problems with the local law enforcement authority Bernard did indeed go far and accomplished much more in his life than any of us would ever have thought possible.

Friday’s child was loving and giving and that description wholly suited the only Friday’s child I knew, my cousin Little Violet who was unfortunate enough to have to live with our Grandmother but bore the difficulty admirably well even at Christmas when the crayons and colouring in book that had been promised her were not at the bottom of her bed on the morning of the 25th. She no longer believed in Father Christmas anyway she said and fully understood that the problem was because Old Nan had been too preoccupied with gin from The Jolly Farmers the day before to even think about heading down to Woolworths. Anyhow Little Violet told us that she wasn’t that fussed about colouring in books and crayons because they were not always all they were cracked up to be and never worth the money. Next year, she decided, she was going to buy her own Christmas present. In the meantime she continued to be kind to everyone else and looked fearful and guilty when Uncle George seemed outraged when it became clear she was the only child in the family without a gift that year. He told the awkward collective of Constant sisters that he thought their mother was a disgrace. To make up for being overlooked he gave Little Violet two half crown pieces and Uncle Harold not to be surpassed in generosity did likewise. She was of course quite delighted with the sudden improvement in her fortunes and later said it had been the best Christmas ever.

The oldest of my nearly grown-up male cousins, Young Harold who I disliked and distrusted was fond of telling us that he would always have to work bloody hard because of being born on a Saturday and we all knew that Saturday’s child works hard for a living. He had just got his first job down at Vickers and had recently bought a smart pair of tight black jeans and boots with heels and managed to attract his very first girlfriend so he felt superior and wanted to be treated as if he was twenty rather than sixteen.

By the time I was two years old I knew perfectly well that I was a very special child indeed having been born on a Sunday. We were all completely aware that The child that is born on the Sabbath day is happy and wise and bonny and gay. Even my grandmother was grudgingly appreciative of the fact that there was a lot to be said for being as fortunate as I was concerning the day of my birth though she insisted it had more to do with basic good luck than anything else. This was rather spoiled later, when at the impressionable age of fourteen, I was told that because my time of birth was midday it meant I was of a very shallow disposition as all the planets were above the horizon. I was for ever destined to have only superficial ideas and a slight understanding of life and all my relationships with people would be at a surface level. I had no idea whatsoever what this would mean for my future but I immediately began to feel rather more shallow than was healthy. I knew my mother was still proud of my Sunday status even though she used to look at me sometimes and shake her head saying nobody would ever think I was a Sunday’s child. She didn’t really mean it and I felt it would not be fair to explain to her how shallow I was.

I sometimes wonder if today's child is aware of the possible significance of being born on a certain day of the week.

The Lives of Children

There would be no exaggeration in saying that in the middle of the twentieth century the health matters that most troubled our community differed vastly from those causing anxiety today. Children in particular were more at risk back then and unlike today parents more eager to take advantage of any government schemes such as mass vaccination that would protect them. There was no need for medical personnel to explain that vaccination was a miracle of modern medicine and that it would save more lives worldwide than any other medical product or procedure. Uneducated though we were there existed a tacit understanding that this was so and in those days there was no knowledge of afflictions such as Autism and those stumbling across it would have been unlikely to recognize it as something that was undesirable or that could have been avoided. They would have found any assertion that it might be connected with their child’s recent vaccination very hard to believe. There was an acceptance that in the midst of any group of children there were those who were different, slower than the norm, with visual or hearing defects, or suffering from an inability to control their impulses. The latter were seen as wayward, described as badly behaved and might be beaten more than was customary and if their parents failed to sufficiently quell their behaviour with violence at home, regular canings could be doled out at school that often had the desired effect.

So we were all vaccinated against Smallpox when we were under two years of age and apparently many children had an unpleasant reaction to the inoculation with high temperatures and were perhaps sick and fretful for several days. Some of them might well have gone on to develop conditions associated with the vaccine but unlike today the attendant gossip about such matters did not particularly proliferate around the neighbourhood. There were no radio Talk Back Programmes on which to air concerns, no television and nobody knew what Support Groups might be. What most pre-occupied our parents was that we should not fall victim to the truly terrible illness that had killed and maimed so many of their own generation. The vaccine did not come accompanied by doubts and uncertainties.

Old Aunt Maudie was profusely pock-marked and in her eighties and her opinion was that Smallpox was a malady that struck with guile and without pity and should never be under-estimated. She was not anyone’s real aunt and her neighbours had quite forgotten whose aunt she had originally been except that his name was Humphrey. He had not been a proper nephew but the son of one of her cousins from Southend who had died in the Flu epidemic just after the Great War. She said The Smallpox when it settled upon her family in the latter part of the nineteenth century seemed to be just a cold in the head and nothing more than that. Victoria was still Queen it being just before she also adopted the title Empress of India, the very same summer in which the Chapel organized an outing by train to Ramsgate. They had lived In Chatham at the time on account of her father’s work in the ropery at the dockyard. Both she and her older sister Gracie had been chosen to go on the outing because of their good behaviour and oh how they had enjoyed themselves. What tales they had to tell when they returned. Gracie had even won a prize at Hoop La - a set of wooden alphabet blocks which she intended to give to their youngest brother who was about to reach his fourth birthday. It was to be a surprise and she hid the box under the bed she shared with Gracie in the attic. None of them were accustomed to birthday presents.

Then they both began to feel unwell and as the days passed her mother had never known such girls for crying and complaining just for the sake of runny eyes and noses. It was surely giving her The Pip and so they tried as hard as they could not to make The Pip any worse. Then she and Gracie began to vomit and to feel much worse. It had taken more than a week for the tell-tale blisters to make their entrance and my goodness didn’t they cause a deal of dread and trouble. At first they seemed perhaps harmless, just little pink clusters but she and Gracie knew it must be bad from the extent of the fear and fright on their mother’s face. They wondered how long it would be before they recovered. Maudie remembered it was more than two weeks before the scabs fell off and it was then she first became aware that at some stage during that time her sister had died and had even been buried for there was no longer any sign of her. Nobody in the bed beside her, no longer a sister to squabble with or to share secrets with. She remembered the alphabet bricks and checked that they were still hidden which they were.

She, Maudie, had been lucky really and most especially when you considered the fact that despite her poor mother’s best efforts The Smallpox had not been content to take just Gracie and within weeks the three little brothers aged six and five and very nearly four were similarly seized, two of them passing in one night. The youngest never did reach his milestone birthday and so never knew about the wooden blocks won by his sister which was a pity really. And now all these years later Old Maudie couldn’t for the life of her remember what happened to them. She said she thought her poor mother had never really recovered from that time of The Smallpox and the loss of four of her five children. And in recent years Dr Crawford had told her that it was a good thing her mother had once been a milkmaid but what he meant by that was not clear except it was something to do with all the children dying.

My father when regaled with the story upon his return from the six to two shift said that several boys admitted to the Chatham Orphanage he grew up in were there because Smallpox had killed so many in their families. And because he thought it was interesting he added that what was more the disease had been active in Egypt thousands of years ago and those that dug up mummies had found evidence of it. My mother said she found that very hard to believe and qualified this remark by explaining that she meant the bit about Egypt, not the orphanage. He replied that the scourge of Smallpox would probably be with us for all time, vaccinations or not. But he turned out to be wrong about that. It’s hard now to know what Old Maudie would have thought about the fact that Smallpox was destined to become eradicated from the face of the earth within two decades.

In the 1940s and 1950s a range of childhood illnesses that are becoming less familiar to us such as Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Scarlet Fever, were run of the mill and every child was expected to encounter them at some stage, suffer the effects that would hopefully be temporary and emerge all the stronger for the experience. There were after all, far more critical onslaughts on the child body. There was Polio for example that nobody wanted to contemplate although oddly enough it largely ignored the working classes and concentrated on those more affluent, the toffs from the smart houses on the London Road, and even those from more moderate homes in Springhead Road. Why this should be was not clear and when a vaccine appeared it was received with relief and delight because everyone in communities like ours had at least heard of children whose lives had been devastated by the disease even though the death rate seemed to be lower than other more feared illnesses. In the late 1940s Polio had spread throughout North Kent. Swimming pools, cinemas and schools closed and the fear of its direct visitation became visceral. There were tales that the more badly afflicted became unable to breathe and lived their lives inside something called an iron lung whilst others recovered with only a limp to show for it. For some children months were spent in hospital. I was rushed to the local doctor one morning by my alarmed mother simply because overnight I had developed a stiff and painful neck. And in the waiting room other parents, pulled their children just a little further away from me and left the chairs on either side of us empty. Dr Outred examined me carefully, taking twice as long as was customary for him and with tight lips and narrowed eyes so that I became slightly alarmed myself turning over in my mind everything I had heard about those unfortunates who fell into the clutches of Poliomyelitis. But I was to be reprieved and in our immediate area only Joyce Martin of Dover Road fell victim to it, was hospitalized for seven months and left with a pronounced limp.

The greatest fear of all was reserved for Diphtheria, the sore throat that killed and was passed effortlessly from child to child. In 1942 three and a half thousand British children died from the condition compared with a mere four deaths in the past twenty years which fact should do just a little to indicate the positive aspects of vaccination. In 1946 Grace Bennett’s Joan developed a sore throat with attitude, and became so ill that her mother feared she had somehow stumbled across the infection and took a torch to peer into her throat, imagining she could clearly see a grey membrane. Old Mrs Bassant next door to us, whose adopted daughter Ina had been a victim years previously, and luckily survived, was called upon to give her opinion which she did and it was to call the doctor even though it was seven in the evening and a Sunday. This advice was coloured by the fact that in 1923 young Ina had all but perished and had been taken hurriedly to the Gravesend Sanatorium in Whitehill Lane where there were beds for those with infectious diseases. She had been lucky in more ways than one because only a few years before she would have had to be taken to Strood where it cost eight shillings a day but the medical care was not as good as it should have been. Gravesend that year had a total of sixty beds of which sixteen were allotted for Diphtheria, twenty for Scarlet Fever and twenty four for Smallpox and the cost of care was three guineas a week. When Ina was there first class care was given by a Matron and two proper nurses with the help of a couple of trainees. It was well worth the exorbitant fee for those who could afford it. They had been stretched to afford it but their Ina was well worth the financial sacrifice. The Matron had said that left another day she might well have had to have a tracheotomy which was where a hole is cut into the throat in order to ensure the patient can breathe. It just didn’t bear thinking about and Grace Bennett should get the doctor to her Joan as fast as possible.

When he finally arrived that evening, charging five shillings and sixpence and slightly ill-tempered because he had been intending to spend the entire evening sorting his boyhood stamp collection into the order he had long imagined would increase its worth, he said it was not in fact Diptheria at all. Their Joan was suffering from a common or garden Quinsy. Apparently a Quinsy was a tonsillar abscess and although in some cases it could be serious in this case it was, in his opinion, not as it was now with his help, to be adequately treated. Joan’s mother was left wondering if she would have been better advised to leave consulting him for his advice until the following morning when the cost would have halved because this was in the time before the National Health Initiative. Most people thought better safe than sorry and even today Diphtheria kills up to ten per cent of sufferers but because of widespread vaccination programmes is now rare in the developed world.

When the National Health Service was finally introduced and news spread throughout the working class streets of Northfleet that consulting a doctor with a sick child would no longer cost half a crown there was disbelief from some. My mother said she had never begrudged the money in the first place, which was not completely true. My grandmother wondered if the free visit would actually result in the kind of care that was worth having in the first place. But within a short space of time the community was reassured and free health care together with the development of vaccination programmes had the intended result.

Over time there were to be fewer funeral processions where the youngest child mourners dressed in white, and less mournful burials involving little white coffins. Mr Horlock and his sons were to be asked less frequently about the possibility of a white plumed horses-drawn hearse even though Old Aunt Maudie said it had always been a sight to behold and that the streets of Chatham had been wet with tears the day her little brothers were buried. My grandmother, who would have been the first to note that as time went on white plumed horses became an option reserved for The Toffs, said that back then all hearses were pulled by horses anyway and white plumes were commonplace. She recalled that when their little Arthur was taken, her Edgar had Polly the little Shetland pony decked out with the finest equine headdress he could find and she was made to pull a goat cart with the little white casket on it all the way to Dartford cemetery. People had stopped in the streets and men removed their hats and the women all cried. I didn’t ask what childhood malady had snuffed out the life of Little Arthur but I wondered. A long time later my brother, having done a great deal of family history research, told me that more than likely the infant had been smothered accidentally in the bed of his parents who in those days drank far more than was good for them or their children. So many aspects of the lives of children have changed for the better.

Tales of Consumption .....

Even as late as the early nineteen fifties one of the most common causes of death in our corner of North Kent was Tuberculosis known as Consumption and it penetrated local families with a quiet persistence determinedly stealing away youthful health and vigour. When I speak of our little corner I mostly mean Gravesend and Northfleet followed by Dartford, Crayford and Erith. Most of my mother’s family, all my aunts and my numerous cousins lived in and around Iron Mill Lane, Crayford though some were being pressed to consider moving to new estates just a little further afield. Wherever their main base was, however, Consumption was never far away.

My mother said she had wept copiously when Greta Garbo died in a film called Camille in 1938, shedding far more tears than had fallen for her own younger sister who had perished in 1937. This was mainly because Greta Garbo was resigned to her fate whereas Phyllis was convinced she was going to recover – it was merely a matter of time. This particular aunt, gone long before I had a chance to get to know her had been the family extravert, always happy, always sharing a joke and yet she succumbed so easily to the illness becoming pale and thin and no matter how positive her attitude was, dying within a year.

By the time I was a preschooler and more aunts had perished my mother had developed an exaggerated fear of Consumption despite the fact that there was by then an assurance that medical treatments were rapidly improving and very soon a cure might be possible. This fear was handed on to me to whom she elaborated upon the various states of the sufferers among our immediate neighbours. These information updates ensured that I hurried past their homes not daring to breathe until I had safely passed the places where the not-yet-deceased but dangerously disease-ridden victims lived. When Mrs Morris, two doors along from us whose bouts of coughing could be heard from dawn to dusk, decided to donate the remaining bones of each Sunday dinner to our decidedly underfed pet dog I was horrified. I risked being savaged by him on a regular basis by wrestling them from his jaws once she had safely disappeared back through her scullery door so great was my fear that he would contract the disease. And if he happened to win the occasional struggle for the next ten days I found it hard to sleep at night and by day hovered around him ever vigilant that he might start coughing in a dry and tubercular manner. Fortunately he escaped the clutches of the disease but the weekly combat changed our hitherto friendly relationship and he found it impossible to forgive me which he demonstrated by treating me to menacing looks coupled with an occasional snarl and refusing ever again to join me for walks around St Botolph’s Churchyard.

Although it became clear that Consumption did not affect canines it continued to spread with ease from person to person. Sometimes the newly afflicted were sent to special hospitals called Sanitoriums where they remained for months at a time, enjoying gentle walks in the fresh air and good, wholesome food. One of my uncles even sent his two daughters to Switzerland, the place where Heidi and Peter spent their time tending goats but then he was said to be Flash and Made of Money. Many sufferers were thus destined to recover but there was a strange reluctance among a sizeable proportion of the working classes to actually avail themselves of such an opportunity.

Patsy Pitt, who lived in Springhead Road and was therefore almost but not quite middle class decided she would take the offered Cure. This was not simply because of being almost middle class but also because she had at the age of thirty found herself a Young Man called Alfred to whom she quickly became engaged only weeks before finding out that her sudden weight loss was not simply Love, but the first sign of the illness. Concerned to ensure she would be fit for her planned summer wedding she agreed to three months on the South Downs without argument as long as her beloved would agree to visit every Sunday without fail, which he did. She was later devastated to find herself jilted shortly after finding herself cured and sank into a deep depression.

My mother said she did not have much sympathy since Alfred had kept his word about the visits and had waited until she was pronounced Fit and Well before casting her aside for an usherette who worked at The Majestic. In her opinion Patsy Pitt should simply Get on With It as she herself had been forced to do when her Poor Fred had perished in similar circumstances back in 1930. Whenever Poor Fred was mentioned, which was never ever in the presence of my father, she paused a moment, eyes glistening and might then perhaps be forced to brush a tear from her cheek because no matter how hard she tried she had never been quite able to stop loving him.

A More Simple Time In Which To Live

Years ago it would be true to say that older family members were always totally prepared to throw themselves into all that was customary and went hand in hand with a relative’s passing. This wasn’t simply in our family, but also in those around us. Rather ungraciously I have in the past been wont to say that with us it was entirely because the end of life also went hand in hand with a great deal of alcohol but maybe that is not entirely correct. My grandmother and aunts on hearing of the latest death immediately busied themselves with the covering of mirrors and ensured that all photographs were laid face down. This was because they were in every respect superstitious and wanted to be on the Safe Side. My grandmother was so keen for us to be safe that when we walked at night she was apt to insist that we walk in the middle of the road so as not to disturb the spirits of the wayside even when that wayside consisted merely of the meagre little front gardens of Iron Mill Lane. They had some very odd ideas. Aunt Mag once told me that the stubs of funeral candles could be beneficial when laid on burns and at least one of the aunts warned us all to take care when walking in graveyards and not stumble close to new graves for to do so would ensure we would be dead within a year and so of course we walked very carefully indeed. Whether these beliefs had first and foremost come out of Ireland generations previously, or whether they were more recently acquired Kentish beliefs is hard to say. It’s possible that they were simply the false notions of their time and more widespread than immediately obvious. Along with these viewpoints they also held firm ideas about the cause of illness. Sitting in a draught would result in pneumonia especially if you had just washed your hair. Women should never wash their hair when menstruating for fear of something so disastrous it could not be openly discussed. Sitting on a cold step would certainly give you Piles.

My grandmother avoided the marshland so loved by my teenage cousins Harold and Leslie with their rabbiting rifles. The Crayford Marshes directly flanked the early estate housing where she lived and lay beyond The Jolly Farmers and The London Road, and it promised all manner of exciting activities but our grandmother asserted that it was the Ruin of the lungs and hers in particular. The Hearts of Oak roll ups she determinedly smoked, she assured us helped to counteract the deadly vapours that rose up from the damp terrain and gave you Marsh Fever. She was strangely unconcerned about the layers of cement dust that coated the roofs of Stone Village, a few miles further down the river and passed regularly on the 480 bus route to Gravesend. There was something slightly exotic about the riverside village of Stone that had grown so rapidly during the middle of the nineteenth century, sprouting row after row of Victorian terraced housing to accommodate the local cement factory workers. When I was six or seven years old I was convinced that the grey-white covering on rooftops and bushes was a kind of everlasting snow, unbending to the heat of summer and I had envied my cousin Little Doris, whose mother had died at her birth simply because she and her father Poor Arthur Steele had briefly lived there. My Grandmother would gaze fondly from the windows of the bus and comment that she had a lot of time for Stone, and that years ago she had spent many a happy hour with her Edgar at The Brown Bear that lay just beyond the Almshouses and that she had pitied the women forced to live in Them Places, crowded in together and never once allowed an evening out at The Bear even though it was right there on their doorstep. Even at the time I marveled at the fact that she and my father viewed the area quite differently, he telling me more about the local castle that was made completely of flint and built as long ago as the reign of King Stephen, whenever that might have been. Neither of them seemed unduly concerned about the effects of the cement snow upon the health of those living in the area.

In comparison, Northfleet and its surrounding environs seemed then a surprisingly healthy place in which to live considering the amount of industry that polluted Thameside settlements at that time. If you avoided renting those houses closest to the various cement works, you were unlikely to be overly bothered by the contamination they caused though conversely neither would you be so close to your probable place of employment. All this meant you simply had an important choice to make about your workplace and any repercussions would be nobody’s fault but your own. In many ways it was a more simple time in which to live and the widely held belief systems were equally simplistic and if not everyone actually believed in them wholeheartedly, they at least paid lip service to them.

I still wonder about the advisability of sitting too long on those cold stone steps!

A Death In The Family

There has never been any doubt whatsoever that when it comes to death, the Irish do it better than most. My grandmother, although not particularly attached to the country of her predecessors, having minimal allegiance to the Riordens and not especially bound to the Catholic Church, would generally come into her own on the occasion of a death in the family. She had an uplifting attitude to the conventions of a community. I clearly recall her determinedly putting out teacups on All Souls’ Day for the two aunts recently taken by tuberculosis, each one leaving a newborn girl. One of my older cousins said it was in the hope of the dead returning but in his opinion that was a load of baloney and it would be difficult if they did. This was because the one who still had a husband had just left him and both aunts had been sharing bedroom space in the ever more crowded house at the bottom of Iron Mill Lane. But he said all this softly and with hesitation fearing the clip around the ear it would earn him should he be overheard.

Despite their at times half hearted attitude to the One True Church my mother’s family was too intimidated by the thought of everlasting fire to completely ignore the rituals expected of them. Wakes were essential and held a day or two before a funeral Mass, usually at night. The women cried a lot into their white handkerchiefs newly ironed for the occasion and the men talked about how wonderful the deceased had been and then everyone got drunk and ignored the children who fell asleep under the nearest table. These affairs, looking back on them, were considerably more elaborate when the newly deceased were male. As we were a family overburdened with women the more emotionally charged gatherings were few. After the Mass there would be a gathering at The Jolly Farmers where everyone got drunk once again. Occasionally there might even be a Memorial Mass a month or so later.

My father, always a more devout believer than my mother might well have been seduced into the family in the first place by all the apparent devotion to the religion he had been raised within. Sadly, in the case of his own death few of the possible traditions were observed. Nobody would have thought to put out a teacup for him at the next All Souls’Day and the Wake, if indeed there was one, would have been a subdued affair. This might have been simply because my mother was theoretically making all the necessary decisions and she had always harboured a certain amount of hostility towards the Church and in recent years a great deal towards her husband. Decades later my brother’s demise occasioned a similar disregard, for similar reasons. No matter how elaborate the memorial event held some months later might have been, the stylish venue, the champagne and smoked salmon canapes could never erase the indifference to what basic Catholicism demanded and what he would have expected had he been able to voice an opinion. The imperiling of his immortal soul by dispensing with such traditions was glaringly obvious to all family members, lapsed though they might be if not to his cheerfully atheistic wife and her relatives, creating little pools of discomfort here and there. My cousin Margaret courageously observed that she had now outlived two Bernards and added that neither death had elicited the Send Off she would have expected. Then she fell into silence when her daughter, my Second Cousin Jane-Marie, who once upon a time was simply called Jayne, pierced her confidence with the kind of gaze intended to do exactly that. But a moment or two later her mother added in a voice both daring and tremulous that our grandmother would never have allowed such a thing to happen and Jayne, stuck to her mother like glue for reasons best known to herself, looked confused because she had little direct knowledge of her notorious great-grandmother. Unfortunately having little knowledge does not always elicit the most sensible reactions to situations of course, particularly where family is concerned and the deaths of family members, particularly when they are unexpected, throw up unexpected emotions. These are the times when even the most progressive among us are found to embrace the comfort of traditions.

Armistice Day

We were determined today to attend the one hundred year commemoration of The Armistice today to be held appropriately outside the Auckland War Memorial Museum and indeed we did, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the ritual. The Mayor looked splendid in his official regalia and when he spoke he did so well and was pleasingly brief. A schoolgirl called Fabiana spoke passionately about the actions of hands in war, the consequences of those actions and I began to think of Dylan Thomas - `The hand that signed the paper felled a city’.
An elderly man, standing straight and tall, spoke eloquently in Maori, the words so powerful that I wished I understood and later wished I had paid attention to his name because I failed to find it when searching through the Order of Service. The Master of Ceremonies, whose name I did find, spoke about the fact that many New Zealand families lost more than one son in the conflict with a notable few losing three or even four and this made it sound like the breathless countdown to destruction that sometimes happens with road deaths on statutory holidays. Later as we trod through the rows of twenty thousand crosses I bent to look at a photograph someone had placed in a plastic bag and entwined around the cross. Four handsome young men with half smiles stared up at me, proud in their uniforms and off on an adventure, off to see the world. I had found one of those special families!
It began to rain, not the usual harsh semi-tropical rain we are accustomed to in Auckland but gently, persistently, Dylan-Thomas-like - `hands have no tears to flow’.
As children we never really understood what marking Armistice Day was all about because by the time we had any perception of it they had changed the name to Remembrance Day which then became Remembrance Sunday and finally Poppy Day. Despite all this the Crayford aunts firmly continued to refer to it as Armistice Day with their voices slightly lowered and even my grandmother would halt momentarily when it was mentioned and stare into the middle distance for a second or two and perhaps mention Poor Violet Eves who lost her young husband in 1917 and their son in 1944. This undoubtedly made her special.
The first Armistice Day I remember was almost certainly 1945 when I stood with my mother at the War Memorial on The Hill and thrilled to the sound of The Last Post whilst men bared their heads and a nearby tall green bus became silent and still in reverence. The day was crisply cold and my fingers were numb even in my newly knitted green mittens. This might have even been the advent and re-establishment of church bells after the war because all at once there was a burst and discord of bells, a cacophony I was not accustomed to and momentarily terrifying.
Today, although we had been promised bells, for some reason we did not hear them from where we stood and we commented on it as we walked back down Parnell Road, stopping off at Non Solo Pizza for coffee and Amoretto, the latter because it was a special Sunday and the rain was still falling - raining a century of tears.

BROADCASTING CARRIES ON

For years we had an old copy of the Radio Times at our house, issued on 4th September 1939, price two-pence which we pronounced `tuppence’. The cover featured an impressive photograph of Broadcasting House in Portland Place under which was the assurance that Broadcasting Carried On! A banner of text was superimposed across the building proclaiming that this particular edition contained the Revised Programmes for September 4th to 10th. Some dramatic changes in programming had clearly taken place due to the emerging conflict. The Home Service had been somewhat abruptly created and a great many of the BBC staff had been evacuated, not that my mother was really aware of that of course. She only rarely purchased the weekly magazine but on this occasion must have decided that we needed to be fully informed of what the future might hold for us and most especially for me, newly procreated and to be born the following year. The only print connection with the air waves that I was regularly aware of as I grew up was my older cousins’ copy of Radio Fun which they fought over then usually passed on to us, supposedly for me but my mother devoured it eagerly. It featured Big Hearted Arthur and Dicky Murdoch on the front cover and Vic Oliver within its pages. These people became almost real to me and as I am sure I have said previously, I knew that they lived inside the wireless in a strange parallel world.

The Wireless itself was still relatively new and innovative in 1939, the year my parents were married in Crayford. My mother was an early and enthusiastic listener on account of her brother Edgar actually building a Crystal Set in the 1920s which had elevated him to intellectual brilliance in the eyes of his numerous admiring sisters. Although the BBC had been launched as a private company as long ago as 1922 it had rapidly burgeoned in popularity and became a national corporation in 1926. By the first few months of 1938 more than six million receiving licenses had been issue and by the Autumn of that year, shortly after the Munich Crisis the British Broadcasting Corporation solemnly began preparations for what it saw as the inevitability of War. It was only natural that the company should see themselves as significant, even vital in the business of the struggles in Europe and those VIPs in government obviously felt similarly including Neville Chamberlain himself who was heard to say that the broadcasting of pure entertainment must surely cease once war began. This would have been devastating as far as my mother was concerned but oblivious to the feelings of minions like her, he had already decided that the airwaves should be a vehicle for government advice and instruction together with hourly news bulletins. In order that the corporation be most effective and to avoid the possibility of information dissemination being disrupted by bombing campaigns both National and Regional Programming were to be combined into a single channel called The Home Service which would broadcast throughout the country. Programming would still be produced in several different places to limit damage if one area was knocked out due to enemy activity. In fact Broadcasting House in Portland Place was to be hit twice but the BBC was never forced off air which they must have found gratifying at least in retrospect. Replacement provision had been made in Bristol from a disused funicular tunnel in Clifton gorge with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Adrian Boult in mind but when the Music Department moved to Bedford, Bristol became the BBC nerve centre in the West of England eventually sending programmes in more than thirty languages all over the world. None of the Constant sisters were in the slightest bit interested in the kind of music Sir Adrian Boult might concern himself with but they mourned the temporary loss of dance bands and they were certainly more than a little on edge about what might happen next if the war actually came to pass.

Early on the morning of 1st September 1939 Poland was invaded and it was this defining act of aggression that finally pushed Britain into decision and the BBC found itself all at once on a most serious footing which meant that the much mooted merging of the channels took place at once and was announced to listeners on the midday news. My mother, standing at the shallow stone scullery sink in York Road felt a dull and ominous thud in her chest. It was a Friday and the fish for my moderately devout father’s midday dinner was already simmering in milk with a sprinkling of parsley, the potatoes bubbling alongside. Although she was always to be an indifferent cook she could manage boiled fish in what she described as Parsley Sauce though sadly never learned how to thicken the sauce.

When war was finally declared it startled those unfortunate broadcasters sitting in lonely soon to be abandoned studios playing tracks from LPs and every ten minutes informing a dwindling group of listeners, that their particular channel was now defunct. More than likely they like everyone else had confidently expected that the Start of War would herald an extraordinary bombing attack that would maim if not kill Britons in huge numbers. That did not of course happen. In fact nothing happened immediately and the housewives of Northfleet began to breathe easily again.

No official announcement was issued to the nation by Neville Chamberlain until the deadline for German troop withdrawal ran out on 3rd September. Hitler had perhaps wisely ignored those who expected a dramatic turnabout from him. In Northfleet my mother, her new pregnancy already suspected and undoubtedly half lamented, stayed close by the trusty wireless and wondered not for the first time about the prudence of the soon to be most unhappy marriage she had entered into. Bernard Joseph Hendy might well be a regular Mass attender, might never be heard to use bad language, might indeed not be a drinker BUT when all was said and done he was not her Fred. Fred her beloved fiancé was now five years in his grave, a victim of the greatly dreaded TB. It is fair to say my father had a number of pleasing attributes but in our house he was destined not to be loved.

She was not alone in her concentration on the Wireless that day because most of the neighbours and indeed all our relatives in Crayford were equally attentive and all were eventually rewarded with the iconic broadcast announcement that most of us have since become familiar with, after which the national anthem was played followed by a lot of information about how to conduct yourself during an air raid and reminders to be sure to carry your gas mask with you if you ventured outside. All this certainly promoted a feeling of unease in the community, particularly the focus upon gas masks. The protection device distributed to mothers for infants under three months was in the form of an alarming box operated via a foot pump. My mother had paid great attention to that issued to Totty Freeman from No 31 for her new baby Molly and was consumed with anxiety as to what might become of the vulnerable infant should the mother herself succumb to poison gas or indeed prove not to be particularly adept at pumping. She was to be more than relieved the following year when I reached the required age to be allocated the more acceptable diver’s helmet style mask that did not rely on maternal proficiency.

During these disquieting early days whilst mothers of the next generation anguished over what might lie ahead, the BBC came up trumps with regular tips on how to ensure the safety of the young and the only fault that could be found with the deluge of data was that the women delivering it were definitely of the Posh variety and most likely would not have any real worries themselves, at least not of the kind that preoccupied those living in the working class terraces of the south of England. Aunt Maud maintained you had to overlook the fact that they were undeniably more than middle class because there were times when you needed people like them, women who knew what was what. Anyhow they couldn’t help sounding posh if they belonged to the Women’s Institute because everybody knew you couldn’t join unless you were at least a little bit posh. Old Nan said that they were all looking up their own arses and you didn’t have to take their advice if you didn’t want to. My mother, on the other hand, always felt compelled to take the advice of those higher in status than herself and continued to feel doubtful. Interspersing the broadcasts were news bulletins and live music from Sandy MacPherson and his organ which everybody enjoyed even though he turned out to be a Canadian and not Scottish after all. Not that there was anything intrinsically bad about being Canadian of course.

So the British listening public continued to wait with bated breath for the onslaught of bombs from German aircraft and as the hours passed began to gradually relax when nothing untoward took place. By 6th September the BBC’s Variety Department took a deep breath themselves and broadcast the first live revue of the war – Songs From the Shows, from their new headquarters in Bristol. Within a week Children’s Hour had returned also and a week later Band Wagon was back complete with Arthur Askey at the helm. This was swiftly followed by ITMA which was hugely popular and had started months earlier. All the aunts were reassured, even delighted and Old Nan quickly decided that Chamberlain had got it wrong about the war in the first place although she was sure he’d done his best, adding generously that it couldn’t be easy doing his job.

The Wireless went from strength to strength during those early war years, and by 1943 the Variety Centre had abandoned Bristol and was back in London but holding onto an audience with only one channel would have been far from simple. There was a compelling necessity for Popular broadcasting and at the time this meant music and comedy. ITMA remained undoubtedly the most popular wartime show. It starred Tommy Handley and Jack Train who posed as a range of characters including a German spy called Funf who in particular caused my grandmother great merriment Each generated their own catchphrase such as `I don’t mind if I do’, ‘This is Funf speaking’ and of course the iconic `Shall I do you now Sir?’. The people of York Road were regularly convulsed with laughter at the antics of The Minister of Aggravation and those in The Office of Twerps. Old Nan became eventually more addicted to the first new hit show of the war, Garrison Theatre, which featured the kind of revues that had entertained the troops of WW1. The slightly boisterous and disorderly audience definitely appealed to her.

The Bassants next door quickly became fans of Any Questions, which later became known as The Brains Trust and was described as a general knowledge programme, serious in intention but light in character. Five experts discussed questions from members of the forces concerning such unlikely topics as philosophy, science and art. It became a huge success, attracting a regular audience of millions. The BBC Repertory Company produced half a dozen plays each week and these promised to appeal to The Average Listener although my mother had her doubts about this assertion saying that in her experience plays could not always be relied upon and that films were better all round, even though you had to go out and catch a bus and on Saturday nights even queue up.

Children were definitely well catered for as time went on. MPs like Megan Lloyd George gave educational talks about how Parliament functioned and there were also talks on World Affairs. Infinitely more popular though was serialized drama which included The Water Babies, Ivanhoe, Little Women and Nicholas Nickleby. In October 1939, Princess Elizabeth made her first broadcast on Children’s Hour with a special message to Evacuated Children which later included messages from parents to those children who had been evacuated to North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This was of course most exciting not just to those directly involved but also those listening Ordinary people, not all of them posh, people with ordinary accents heard on the wireless! My aunts, however, maintained that those who had their children sent Overseas were not ordinary at all and could only be described as Nobs. Not everybody agreed with them.

By the end of 1940, when the Blitz was well under way and The Battle of Britain had come and gone, the population had adjusted reasonably well to the various onslaughts. London had become the seat of Governments In Exile for Norway, Belgium Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Greece and acted also as the headquarters of General de Gaulle. The services of the BBC were used to address people in all these countries with Holland having a regular slot called Radio Orange with Queen Wilhelmina giving the first broadcast. In January 1941 during the broadcasting slot allotted to the Belgiums, it was suggested that the letter V for Victory should be used to symbolize resistance in Europe and within a few weeks the idea was gaining traction in occupied countries. By the middle of the year the letter V in morse code became the signature tune of the programme and adopted the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The French, always thought to have a high opinion of themselves, became particularly adept at setting anti-Nazi words to traditional folk songs and in occupied France the tunes were whistled enthusiastically. It would be true to say that families like ours were remarkably insular and never over fond of foreigners of any description, not just the more actively despised Germans.

Meanwhile the Germans were busily broadcasting an English language News Programme with the aid of Lord Haw Haw, actually of course, William Joyce. He most definitely became a wartime radio star and millions tuned in to hear him, resulting in every British child of listening age becoming completely familiar with him and how he should be Strung Up, or Hung, Drawn & Quartered. I am not clear if we entirely understood why he was so universally reviled but to make an enquiry of this nature would have only resulted in further diatribes concerning the fate that must surely await him so generally we did not probe too deeply. However, over time even the youngest of us became comfortably acquainted with the names of those regular broadcasters of the years 1940 and 1945. This was unsurprising since these people were regular visitors into our homes day and night so that they were almost akin to family friends, in much the same way as that list of social media Friends infiltrate the outer reaches of our lives today. Not Real Friends in the sense by which we normally understand the word but nevertheless shadow people we almost consider we know well. By 1945 the list included Alvar Liddell, Freddy Grisewood, Wilfred Pickles, Elsie and Doris Waters, and Joyce Grenfell amongst others. My mother would have wanted to include Vera Lynn who with her regular fifteen minute singing spot kept the nation’s spirits up. And being a definite fan of vigorous piano playing for a time she would have very much wanted to add Charlie Kunz to the catalogue. By 1944, however, he had been abruptly tossed aside when a neighbour convinced her that Kunz was a close confidante of Goebbels, a definite German spy and thus sending messages to the enemy via the keyboard. This was on account of him having a German sounding name although later it appeared that he was more American than German but having lived in England for years definitely considered himself part of the British community. When he died in 1958 he was buried in Streatham Vale cemetery in London but Nellie Constant remained suspicious.

The part played by wartime broadcasting during the first half of the 1940s cannot be overvalued and radio fans like myself find it cheering that the technology, now more than a hundred years old, is still going strong, still invaluable during times of tension and trauma. Broadcasting has indeed carried on!