The New Blogger Isn't Easy .......

Try as I might I am finding the new version of Blogger almost impossible to navigate - this might be because I am a slow learner of course which at my age isn't all that surprising.  But how the hell do you add a paragraph break?

It should be simpler than it is.....

Daphne & The Winklepickers

I’ve been thinking about winklepickers for weeks now and wondering when it was I first developed that longing for them that became all consuming. If I had only known that yearning would decades into the future lead to the painful problem I now have with my left foot would I have opted for more sensible footwear? I think not to be honest. Looking back I blame Daphne Davis though of course she was quite unaware of her culpability. I first noticed those shoes of hers on the London-bound platform of Gravesend station in the mid 1950s. She wore them whilst waiting for the 9.05 train. I was of course late that morning because my train had traditionally always been the 8.10. They were the most extreme and shiny black winklepickers that I had yet witnessed on a foot – rather than in a magazine! Well she definitely didn’t come by them in Gravesend. Worn with her black duffel coat and armed with her copy of Bonjour Tristesse she looked sensational. To be totally honest I had for some years admired Daphne Davis rather more than she deserved and that all began when we both entered a speech competition at Wombwell Hall which she won with Abou Ben Adhem by Leigh Hunt. Elizabeth Johnstone came second and I’ve now quite forgotten her piece just as I’ve forgotten most other things about her except that she had dancing lessons in Northfleet High Street and was described as Fine Boned & Delicate by her mother to mine in the queue at Ripleys one morning. I came third and my poem was The Song of the Little Hunter by Rudyard Kipling. Well it’s better than not being placed at all I suppose but oh how I hated that piece and re-reading it just a few minutes ago I’m still not overly keen. I’m not sure if we made the choices ourselves or if they were suggested by Miss K Smith but I cannot honestly believe she whose saintliness at the time was great would suggest that particularly ghastly piece for me. I would have done much, much better with Leigh Hunt – better than Daphne I’m not afraid to state but I won’t labour that point further. Suffice to say she won and I didn’t and from what I remember she didn’t even have any ambition to go on the stage whilst I of course did. In fact at that point in time I was at the very zenith of stage-struckness. It was all most frustrating especially when I considered that the only theatre I had ever set foot in was The Chatham Empire to see the annual pantomime some years previously. I think it was Mother Goose. Anyway none of that matters very much because the point of all this is not the outcome of the Wombwell Hall speech competition and whether or not Miss K Smith made an error of judgement in the choices, but the winklepicker shoes. Despite the quite natural animosity I still held for Daphne I felt compelled to compliment her on them. Well, after all, I very much wanted to know where she’d bought them. She seemed slightly alarmed rather than hostile and said she had found them in a shop in Kings Road, Chelsea near where she now worked because now she had a simply fantastic job and she wasn’t required to start until ten am each day. She waxed lyrical about her new boss who was young and good looking and told her that he admired her style. It was quite difficult to bring her attention back to shoe shops but when I managed to she said it had sold theatrical footwear and her cousin had told her about it. It was a bit like that famous dance shop in Covent Garden. Her cousin had been considering buying some but she was after all saving up to get married and thought they were too expensive. Daphne was lucky because she waited for the sale. Later I thought she must be referring to Anello & Davide founded as a theatrical footwear company in the 1920s and whose storefront in Drury Lane I stopped by regularly. I only found the place when I was doing one of my usual walk-pasts of London theatres and it was directly opposite the Theatre Royal. When you don’t have the opportunity to visit theatres all that frequently and they are after all going to be your future workplaces, you can at least walk past them. How on earth did Daphne Davis though, come by a cousin who frequented glamorous shoe shops? And was it possible that Anello & Davide had a branch in Chelsea which wasn’t a place I went to very often, mostly because there was no convenient tube stop. Second to my obsession with theatres that I did not venture into on a regular basis was my obsession with the London underground network which I did. Daphne wanted to talk more about her new job but I asked how her sister was and she seemed to think it was an odd question. It wasn’t that odd as far as I was concerned and if Daphne had not won the speech competition I wouldn’t even be giving the sister whose name I’ve forgotten, a thought. The fact was that the sister and I had shared a boyfriend a year or so previously. His name was Donald and I cannot say that I was all that taken with him apart from the fact that he was quite posh in that he’d been to some minor public school in Sussex. He was to be honest just a bit dim but he had a sensationally good looking brother called John who I was hoping to attract at some stage. During our Sunday afternoon dates over a 1950s style cappuccino in the then very popular coffee bar in Harmer Street Donald rather unwisely confessed the details of his double life with Daphne’s sister. It was she he took to The Majestic on Saturday afternoons, never in the evening because he had to be home by ten. The other Davis Girl was the reason why he was never able to meet with me on Saturdays! To say I felt affronted is an understatement and even after all these years I still feel just a tinsy bit injured considering the facts of the situation. I mean – how could he? Daphne’s success via Leigh Hunt meant that I quite naturally harboured a fair amount of resentment towards the entire Davis family – well you’re bound to aren’t you? However it is with some horror I now recall insisting that docile Donald make a choice between us and what’s more choose me. As he was extremely biddable he did so, even tolerating me standing over him whilst he told the poor girl that he was not going to turn up for their next date at The Majestic because he much preferred me. I felt I needed to be by his side just in case he told her some story about me being the daughter of his father’s bank manager whom he was compelled to entertain because of a loan to pay off family gambling debts. That’s what I would have done myself had I been Donald, but of course I wasn’t. She looked startled, quite confused and annoyingly quite a lot like her sister. She’d probably also be a speech competition winner given half a chance. Nevertheless I often wondered what she actually made of it all though of course under the circumstances I was doing her a favour – who would want a boyfriend like Donald? But to get back to Daphne that particular day as we waited together for the 9.05. When my mind drifted back to her she was talking about her black duffel coat yet another Kings Road, Chelsea purchase she told me. I said she looked terrific and asked if the book came from the Kings Road too but she said no, she’d bought it in Foyles in Charing Cross Road. I wanted to ask if she’d actually read it but thought that might be impolite so I didn’t.

Appreciating the Medway Cottage Homes

Although there is no record of the actual level of interest in education my paternal grandparents might have had, in the long run it mattered little because my father was fortunate enough to have been received into the Chatham Workhouse at a tender age along with his baby sister. This wasn’t nearly as bad as it might sound and in fact it was not by any means his first experience of the place. Strictly speaking the term Workhouse had for several years been replaced by Poor Law Institution and although those entering had previously been known as Paupers they were now referred to by the more up to date and cutting edge term Poor Persons. None of this of course was of much interest to my four year old father.

His mother Kate displayed an enduring level of neglect that totally eclipsed the worst excesses of Old Nan Constant, her mothering being liberally peppered with police charges, prison sentences and accusations of prostitution. Her husband Charles had abandoned her because the two youngest of their eight children having been conceived whilst he was away at sea were unlikely to be his. The rest of his family, all living in the Medway area were supportive of this stance. By the time Kate came before the Stipendiary Magistrate at Chatham Police Court in November 1913 her mistreatment of the two children remaining in her care was described as the worst case of neglect the NSPCC had seen in a very long time. So shocking were the details they were widely reported in local newspapers and the children swiftly removed to the safety of what all the locals still called The Workhouse. Their mother was sentenced to six months hard labour. This turned out to be a very good outcome for Bernard Joseph who ended up in the long term care of the Medway Cottage Homes and was not to see his mother again for more than thirty years. Unfortunately all contact with his baby sister, Elizabeth Mary was also severed and it is not known what became of her although she may well have been adopted. Although when she learned of his history my mother was appalled by the fact that he had ended up in institutional care my father always considered it had been a stabilising influence in his life and very quickly came to believe that from an educational viewpoint Nellie and her sisters had been dealt a much worse hand overall.

The Cottage Homes in Pattens Lane, Chatham had been purpose built in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a small self-contained village in which seriously disadvantaged children lived in groups of ten to twenty each with a house mother, boys separately from girls. They had their own school on site together with a chapel, sports facilities and training workshops for metalwork and carpentry. All pupils learned to swim, there was opportunity to learn to play musical instruments and from time to time there were outings to Broadstairs and Southend funded by local church groups. It is unlikely that any of these opportunities would have ever been forthcoming under the chaotic maternal care of Kate Hendy.

Warm clothing and sturdy boots were provided along with an adequate supply of food which was generally plain except at Christmas. As they grew older obliging and hungry lads like Bernard Joseph Hendy volunteered as scullery assistants which meant that from time to time an extra bread and jam or pudding ration might be purloined. Any kitchen related duties would invariably afford the young worker such perks as sole charge of stale bread discarded from the Friday bread pudding making. This task came with instructions to break it into suitably sized pieces to be managed by the four, five and six year olds who were to distribute it to the evening gathering of squabbling pigeons. Not all of the bread reached the birds of course and the untidy assembly grew more raucous and clamorous by the minute as it disappeared into the mouths of the youngest boys. Bernard Joseph enjoyed the shiver of munificence as walked among them ensuring that each child had a portion of stale bread for dissemination. This was his quasi-family, these small children pseudo-siblings. He enjoyed his role as a virtual big brother and he quite liked his house mother.

Discipline at the Cottage Homes was definitely firm but if you kept your head down, as all sensible lads resolved to do, its worst excesses could be avoided. It was not wise to allow yourself to become a bed wetter or to draw undue attention with smart remarks that made other boys laugh because then you surely would find life could be unpleasant. It was also a good idea to pay attention to school work and offer to tidy classrooms. A helpful attitude meant you were invariably one of those allowed first choice of reading books and might even result in your name coming to the top of the list for visits to museums or to the Pantomime. Quite apart from that good behaviour earned you much coveted proper swimming lessons and meant that the small but regular fortnightly pocket money allowance was never reduced by fines that so plagued the miscreants. Life was by no means unpleasant for a boy who kept his wits about him and had learned to get by without a surfeit of parental love and affection in his life.

In fact the austere and disciplined learning environment with its over-abundance of books by Charles Dickens and classroom walls covered with maps of the world suited my father admirably. He never tired of examining those fortunate areas of the known world operating within the confines of the Great British Empire and he vowed that in the mysterious future he would travel widely. Over the years within the relative comfort of these predictable environs he learned rapidly and with ease, was always top in Mental Arithmetic, rarely made spelling mistakes and usually had his socks pulled up to his knees and his boots polished to perfection. For just over a decade he did not rub shoulders much with outside children, those described as Ordinary with mothers and fathers and real siblings neither did he appear to have any memory whatsoever of any of his birth family. For him they were good years.

He had got on as a Cottage Homes boy very well overall but nonetheless something happened to rupture this equanimity when he was thirteen or fourteen years old because it was then he damaged his unblemished record of excellent behaviour and ran away vowing never to return. Unfortunately he chose not to share the details of this most exciting story with me and if he did so with my mother she chose likewise. He set off apparently after lights out with a bread roll wrapped in a handkerchief and two shillings of laboriously saved pocket money. This was revealed to me by my brother after a great deal of genealogical research in more recent years and may or may not have been completely accurate. His aim had been to reach London and find a job, preferably as a motor cycle mechanic which was something he knew little about but was exceedingly keen to learn. How he made his way to the outer reaches of North London to a modest mock Tudor estate is not known but somehow or other he did. An over excited ten year old boy called Stephen Woodman, the only child and son of a ledger clerk, hid him in the garden shed at 29 Methuan Road, Edgware just beyond the neat rows of climbing beans for almost a week. He supplied him with food stolen from his unknowingly generous mother’s pantry and desperately wanted to join him on the next part of the adventure, promising to steal him a map of the area with perhaps clear indication of the way to Wales. It was whilst searching through his father’s possessions in near darkness late at night for such a map that he was discovered and unable to control his excitement any longer blurted out to his startled parents that there was a runaway boy in the shed.

And so it was that my father was returned to Chatham quite quickly to the disappointment of both boys. Young Stephen, greatly impressed by Bernard Joseph’s resolution and mettle stayed in touch with him for years afterwards, sending regular letters to the Cottage Homes and was eventually to be known to me and my brother as Uncle Steve. It wasn’t until after the death of my father that he revealed the story of how their relationship began.

When Bernard Joseph reached the obligatory age for leaving the care of the Homes a job was found for him at the cement works in Northfleet together with a relative to lodge with, traced apparently without undue problem. The first two weeks of his Board was to be financed by one of the funds established for the purpose. His older brother Walter Francis Hendy now married and living at 119 Waterdales was deemed a suitable landlord and my father moved in without delay sharing a room with several teenage nephews. It was then that he began to save for a motorbike and reclaim his heritage by embracing Catholicism.
The details of his progress through life over the next thirteen or fourteen years are unknown but on a Saturday evening in early 1939 he was taken by a group of motor cycle enthusiasts to The Jolly Farmers in Crayford where he met my mother and two of her sisters. By that time he was the proud owner of an Ariel Red Hunter cycle that boasted only one previous very careful owner. He was also a regular Sunday Mass attendee at St John the Evangelist Church in Gravesend. He was undeniably anxious at the age of twenty nine to settle down and create a family of his own. Nellie Constant, unmarried, demure and associated with the Right Church seemed ideal and in any case it was about time he was getting on with it.

Urged on by her sisters who all agreed marriage would be good for her and she was lucky to be asked at the great age of thirty-one my mother did not hesitate for long although she did have doubts. The main obstacle as far as she was concerned was that he wasn’t a patch on her Fred but Mag said she was bound to think that but she shouldn’t let it stand in the way of good sense. Her Fred would have wanted her to find somebody else after all these years and it could even be that he was looking down and had directed Bern her way. Nellie didn’t entirely agree with this considering it a fanciful notion but she didn’t argue too much either because when all was said and done he did seem a nice enough chap and nobody could accuse him of being a drinker for instance. A single pint once a week or perhaps two if really pushed was quite enough for him, nothing like Mag’s Harold or Maud’s George who both drank like fish. He didn’t use bad language either and if you only heard the language used by some that she didn’t care to name it would make your hair curl, it really would. So to be fair she could do a lot worse.

So her brother Edgar booked an available space with the priest at St Mary of the Crays for Monday 7th August at 11am, he and two Constant sisters agreeing to be witnesses. The fourth witness was a cousin from the Hendy side called Arthur May. My mother wore a cream satin dress and carried a spray of orange blossom and everybody said she looked a picture. Four of her sisters were bridesmaids in pale blue satin, Rose, Phyllis, Violet and Freda. She hadn’t really wanted to have Freda if the truth be known but Old Nan was adamant and Mag said don’t upset the apple cart, it never pays. Mag’s little Margaret was the flower girl and Maud’s Desmond was the page boy, both in cream with blue sashes and looking as if butter wouldn’t melt. To be fair little Margaret was always a well behaved child but Maud spoilt her kids rotten and Desmond could be a real tartar at times and if he was hers he would get what he deserved and that was a fact. That day, however, he was as good as gold. She had to admit it, she’d definitely enjoyed the ceremony and the fuss involved in the taking of photos and the wedding breakfast in the hall had been a real treat, everybody said so. It had been a most agreeable day though not the happiest in her life because that had been the day she and Poor Fred got engaged but nevertheless a good day. Everything had gone well all things considered and it was only the future that really concerned her.

At some stage in those early days of marriage she took courage and discussed with her new husband topics that perhaps she should have raised earlier. The most significant by far were her grave reservations regarding some aspects of Catholicism and she took pains to emphasise that she thought the teaching nuns to be particularly cruel and that she would be reluctant to release any future children into their care. A Roman Catholic wedding was one thing and was over and done with before you could say Jack Robinson and as Mag quite rightly pointed out, upsetting the apple cart would be foolish. On the other hand year after year in a religious school was quite a different matter. If that could be avoided by setting the cat among the pigeons then that was the way it had to be, apple cart or no apple cart.

How much heed my father actually paid to the revelations is completely lost but what is evident is that a great many altercations took place over the following years with regard to the Holy Catholic Church and exactly how my brother and I should be taking part in it. There would have undoubtedly been a great many more disagreements had the Second World War not intervened and deftly removed him from our lives for a number of years.

Our baptisms were problematical and the precise details of my own are a total mystery. The only aspect recalled by those present and now still living such as my cousin Margaret is that there was a last minute complete change of name announced by Nellie in unusually firm tones that brooked no argument, startling whoever was officiating and greatly embarrassing my father. My brother inexplicably was baptised at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Rosherville in an obvious act of complete defiance and again there was a name change, though this time less significant. As far as the schools we were to attend were concerned there of course eventuated even more disharmony. I was deftly enrolled in St Botolph’s before my father was demobbed from the army. Naturally enough he was later to retaliate and my brother was registered into St Joseph’s in Springhead Road when he was still only four years old. My mother, enraged and aghast was heard to complain to the aunts that he had done so Behind Her Back whilst she was gossiping with Grace Bennett one Friday afternoon. The only good thing about it was that it was on our doorstep and she was able to view what was going on in the playground from the garden gate. The moment one of those nuns laid a finger on her son she would be over there like greased lightning to clean them rotten.

Regular Church attendance heralded even more problems and once he returned to us my father bought me a Missal for Roman Catholic children and took me to Sunday Mass himself each week which I did not altogether enjoy. My mother sent me to the Methodist Chapel Sunday School in the afternoons which I quite liked because there were stories and orange juice and ginger biscuits and sometimes transfers to adorn hands and arms with. It would be fair to say I grew up under a surfeit of differing beliefs and learned always to be wary when discussing them. Those childhood Sundays of memory were never completely agreeable days. Even now Sunday is my least liked day of the week, the day where unpleasant pieces of the past live. Some of us have most liked days on the other hand, days that are far easier to pick from recall and examine. For my father they were probably those when he walked as a kind of older brother among his pseudo siblings supervising the casting of stale bread to gatherings of pigeons. They were good days and when in future years his new in-laws spoke in whispers about his mother, pitying him and saying he must have been a Poor Little Soul he could only wonder at their ignorance.

Working on Wokeness ......

Whilst idly watching Laurence Fox debate his recent fall from grace on a Utube clip I found myself unexpectedly gaining an insight into those horrendous aspects of societal justice that so plagued European history – the ritual Burning of Witches, and Heaven help us the worst excesses of the Holy Inquisition.

Liberating your locale of a pesky harpy might almost seem acceptable I suppose if her home cures for aches and pains failed to work and her cat developed a habit of digging up your beans and carrots. On the other hand if only the woke of yesteryear had stopped at Ducking because immolation seems extreme by anyone’s standards. I’m not saying anyone is promoting the burning of Mr Fox but he does seem to have got himself into some strife with his comments. He apparently accused someone who called him a White Privileged Male of making a racist comment. Honestly, at this rate he’ll be loitering alongside JK Rowling in no time at all. In the interim he seems to be losing work options by the week and I loved him as Sergeant Hathaway in the Lewis series. It’s just not totally fair on his fan base.

How we once dealt with witches is one thing but the Inquisition itself perhaps stood on a different level. The aim was a virtuous one, to ensure correct and decent thinking throughout society – to combat heresy in fact. In the twenty-first century we are infinitely more civilized and we have a better overall insight. In order for an Inquisition of any kind to succeed there has to be a group of people who believe that they are in the Right, and who want everyone else to toe the line or else! There has to be a dogma that must not under any circumstances be challenged and in any case it’s for the ultimate good isn’t it? If only they had gone about it in a more gentle fashion back then the lives of those like Italian philosopher and former Catholic priest Giordano Bruno might have been spared. According to reports of the time he was burned at the stake for stubbornly adhering to unorthodox beliefs– he maintained that the Earth was round, that the universe was infinite and that other solar systems existed! Ex priest Thomas Hitton, seized at Gravesend no less and subsequently charged with heresy and burned might well have escaped also if only he’d played his cards right. Even sleepy Gravesend and its environs didn’t dodge what was happening – it was rife.

You could say that Galileo had more sense than most accused and indeed he got off lightly when you think about it. His astonishingly distasteful suggestion that the Earth together with other planets actually circled the sun definitely ruffled feathers. An unacceptable idea to say the least and it put him on a trajectory towards conflict with the Judges of the Inquisition. He was lucky to escape with his life and spent his remaining years under house arrest. Not so Thomas More, an English lawyer and social philosopher who simply couldn’t curb his tongue on matters of the moment and met a most unpleasant end.

There have been times in the past when it simply wasn’t wise to raise your head above the parapet and at least at the time of the Inquisition there wasn’t Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook to worry about. You could say that the tools of repression are much more dangerously available now, the downfall of transgressors from Truth almost automatic. Every time you hit your computer keyboard you dice with how they who know better than you might react. And Laurence Fox has been foolhardy at the very least – I mean, he was live on TV – what an idiot!

At least he doesn’t have an actual Inquisition to deal with though. Apparently that ended after Napoleon conquered Spain and ordered it to be abolished though Ferdinand VII tried to reinstate it and was ultimately prevented from doing so by the French. Today avoiding transgression is much simpler and all we need to do is familiarize ourselves with the Right Way to Think. We need to keep our Wokeness up to date – I’m going to work hard on mine and I expect you all to do likewise!

A BIRD IN THE HAND

It would definitely be true to say that education was not high on the daily priority list for my grandparents on either side of the family. The lack of interest from certain corners of the Constants I have often somewhat flippantly documented and that frivolous attitude is in itself more than likely due to a fascination with the notion that anyone could care so little for that particular convention. However, as my brother was invariably at pains to point out, at the stage when our maternal grandmother should have been preparing her young daughters for regular school attendance the Act itself was still seen as a novel idea by a great many of the working class. Nevertheless, by the time the attention of the populace was fully occupied with the Home Front intricacies of the Great War it would be fair to say that the older Constants were at least nominally enrolled in the closest Roman Catholic School and at times when not needed for field work actually attended.

My mother in later years related a number of nightmare experiences she had during her school days largely involving the merciless brutality of various teaching nuns. It’s difficult to know how much exaggeration was involved but even if the tales were merely half true they indicate a level of cruelty that would be quite unacceptable today. According to her accounts she was caned for being absent from Sunday Mass, caned again for wearing grubby pinafores on Monday mornings and yet again for not reliably eating fish on Fridays. At seven and eight years of age she was not responsible for the family wash and definitely not put in charge of food shopping so she quite rightly felt that at times the punishments were uncalled for. She was particularly outraged by being addressed as Helen when her name was Nellie, her mother being unaware that this was a diminutive rather than a given name in the proper sense. When she tried to explain she was told she was being impertinent so she seethed with indignation instead. It’s more than likely of course that the ongoing persecutions had more to do with the fact that the entire Constant family was a thorn in the side of both School and Church rather than the particular wrongdoing of one of its small members. Whatever the reason the catalogue of misdemeanours was endless and the penalties over a number of years were severe. Quite the worst of which in her opinion was that of the occasion of the dying baby thrush.

She had a habit of regularly telling us that we must never ever hold a baby bird in our hands no matter how tempting that might be should we come across one that had fallen from the nest. The heat of our hands would undoubtedly kill it we were advised and that would lead not only to a great many tears but perhaps punishment as well and nobody wanted that. Eventually she related the anecdote concerning the particular baby thrush stumbled upon on her way to school one Monday morning in her grubby pinafore already worrying because she was late. And she was late because she had been the one called upon to help her mother with the newest baby born just a few days previously. How she foolishly stopped to examine the bird, wondering if there might be any way of returning it to its rightful place, how she unwisely picked it up and decided to take it with her, carefully sheltering it from wind and rain and running in triumph towards the ultimate good sense and perception of Sister Joseph. What a good, kind, pupil that greatly feared pedagogue would then see standing before her.

But by the time she arrived the week’s spelling list was starting – Piece, Niece, Achieve ….. i before e except after c and the woman’s startled short, sharp scream as she dropped the forlorn little bundle of feathers on the desk in front of her rang in my mother’s ears for many a long year. The sad little bird had already died, its demise coming about she was told on account of the hot and clumsy hands of a cruel eight year old. Slaughtered by the most disobedient and unruly student in the school, one who was known to regularly miss Sunday Mass and who ate meat rather than fish regardless of the day of the week. Now standing there in a pinafore that had not been washed for days she found herself responsible for the death of one of God’s creatures, slain in an untimely manner by the heat of her own callous hands. She was given three strokes of the cane on each of those iniquitous hands for their wickedness. When she tearfully related the story to her mother later that day she was advised she should have known better and that the punishment must have been deserved because the Blessed Sisters surely knew best. The baby thrush, however, proved hard to forget.

Unhappily not one of the Constant children of Maxim Road Crayford was able to take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by the new-fangled Education Act because their attendance was generally an ad hoc affair and their mother’s disinterest, tinged with fear, only compounded the problem. Nellie though always maintained that she was glad she learned to read, she enjoyed reading and did her very best to be present on Wednesday and Friday afternoons when there was a Silent Reading period. Perhaps even more surprisingly she revealed on more than one occasion a love of poetry, demonstrating that she still recalled verse after verse of The Forsaken Merman and Home Thoughts From Abroad though she was unsure as to the authorship of either. This predilection for the written word did little to protect her however from the school’s worst excesses of minor tortures and torments and she claimed that on Monday mornings when Father Carrol’s housekeeper needed help from the older girls in order to complete her duties she was invariably the one nominated to empty his chamber pot. Never finding it unused overnight she had to lift it carefully and negotiate the steep stairs to the floor below setting it down again in the kitchen with anxiety before opening the heavy door to the backyard where the evil looking contents could be finally emptied into the outside privy. Heaven forbid should there be any spills on the journey. Even Old Nan was to some extent affronted that one of her brood was so regularly selected to be responsible for the Reverend Father’s Piss Pot and said the housekeeper was a lazy trollop. She was never slighted enough though to open a debate with the woman because after all somebody had to get the job done because it would never do for the Reverend Father to find it unemptied the following night would it? Nellie should take a leaf out of Mag’s book and that was a fact!

Mag was always described as crafty, managing to dodge not only the most unpleasant duties such as those concerning the parish priest but also a lot of the other troubles at school that so often beset Nellie. It does seem that there were times when my mother went out of her way to court disaster and that there was a part of her that half enjoyed the attention gained by becoming the family whipping boy. At the same time, however, a growing abhorrence was inculcated within her for the Roman Catholic Church which eventually led to a firm determination to keep away from it as far as possible in the future. Wisely she did not share this stance widely within the family, taking part in the rites and occasions necessitated by births, deaths and marriages over the years without undue comment except on occasion to Mag. None of them had emerged as having more than the basic interest in religion that was necessary to still feel they had a stake in it, a right to identify themselves as part of it. All new babies were baptised in the first few months of life without incident and each went on to attend the nearest Roman Catholic school where luckily the new breed of teaching nuns proved to be less bitter and spiteful than their predecessors. By the 1930s it was not deemed quite as necessary for whole families to attend Sunday Mass on a regular basis. Good Catholic mothers after all were needed at home to prepare the roast lamb or beef, the various vegetables, the stewed fruit and custard and so for them once a month seemed to suffice to hold on to their rightful place in Catholicism as long as they went regularly to Confession. Children were just a little less likely to be cross examined about what they ate on Fridays and luckily the starched white pinafores of the Edwardian era had completely vanished.

It became relatively easy for Nellie to manage a reasonable silence over most matters pertaining to Faith even when her adored fiancé Poor Fred succumbed to TB and his family turned out to be Anglican; so peace and harmony could be maintained all round. That was a blessing because it was most unwise to deviate too widely from the opinions of the Constant family. In fact a year or two later when she was slowly recovering from Fred’s death she even told them she’d had no knowledge of where his family worshipped and it was something never broached for discussion. That was of course quite untrue but because her anguish and despair had been palpable they asked no further questions and instead they said she had suffered a Breakdown and diligently continued to feed her the pills the doctor prescribed.

It was a number of years before she met Bernard Joseph Hendy and he asked her to marry him, rather too early in their relationship as far as she was concerned and she wasn’t expecting it. She had no real intention of taking it seriously anyway because nobody would be able to replace Poor Fred. At thirty one years of age she was an Old Maid, firmly on the Shelf and resigned to remain so, living with her sister Mag and looking after the children while Mag worked shifts down at Vickers. Vickers-Armstrong was an organisation that even in the 1930s distinguished itself with its forward thinking attitude towards the employment of married women. They were of course on a pay scale considerably lower than the men but this was a time when women were quite accepting of discrimination. Feminism was well into the future except for a few of the fashionable and middle class, female liberation had yet to emerge and men had families to support. Mag was more than delighted to become a working woman and her Harold was more than proud of her.

It never became completely clear to Nellie’s future children why it was their mother had agreed to the ill-fated marriage proposal that resulted in their birth but perhaps she was urged to do so by her family. It was as clear as daylight that Mag would soon need that back bedroom for her growing family. It wasn’t really Right that little Margaret still slept in the same room as the two boys and they were of course now quite old enough to keep an eye on her and each other. These arguments if presented, which they probably were not, would have sounded quite specious. The Constants as they grew up had slept where and how they could, huddled together under tarpaulins in the corner of fields during the Spring and Summer so having a roof of any kind overhead was seen as a bonus, separating boys from girls an extravagance. The idea of any of them needing constant adult supervision once they could walk and talk would have caused merriment.

Whatever the dialogue was, somehow or other at the beginning of that summer in 1939 the church had been booked and with trepidation my mother knew that the time had arrived for a frank exchange of views regarding religion. Her future husband had revealed himself to be a Good Catholic and he had clearly been lulled into a false sense of security by the outward signs of similar commitment within the Iron Mill Lane homes he had visited. On Old Nan’s kitchen wall the Bleeding Heart of Jesus was flamboyantly displayed and elsewhere among the sisters little statuettes of the Virgin clothed in blue, some holding the infant Jesus in their arms sat on sideboards. The plethora of small children called Patricia or Michael or Veronica served to seal his overall approval. For a young Catholic man considering matrimony this seemed to be a family sufficiently devout for his future fellowship and association but of course he had made an error of judgement.

Never on the Never-Never

I grew up with the firm knowledge that acquiring too many things on Tick was undesirable at best particularly when the items were those that might appear on a regular weekly shopping list. So generally we paid up front for our sugar, flour, bread and potatoes or else as my mother declared – we went without! To be fair we did not go without all that often because we were also a family that prided itself on good management and those things we did go without were, I was told, those we didn’t need in the first place. Mostly this revolved around her opinion and not mine or my brother’s because we were rarely consulted and whilst my father was still alive neither was he.

On the other hand many of our neighbours and certainly members of our own extended family were believed to be always up to their eyeballs in debt and it was made very clear to me that this was not a good way to run your life and very nearly tantamount to digging yourself into an early grave. However even at an early age I fully understood that it was unlikely that you could become up to your eyeballs because of an overdeveloped leaning towards grocery items. It seemed clear that it was portable radios and Raleigh 3-speed bicycles that might prove to be your undoing and we most definitely did not go in for such extravagances desirable though they might be. For one thing our 1935 Art Deco style bakelite wireless still worked perfectly well even though it was rather too awkward in size and shape to carry around with you and although I had been promised a bicycle if I worked hard and passed the 11-plus exam, when I failed the idea was not further mentioned.

My mother was proud of the fact that unlike many of our neighbours we never had to hide from the Tally Man but it was some time before I understood why he was so unpopular since his outward appearance was essentially smart and he seemed to be polite and smile a lot. He also had an appealing range of goods inside his blue van so the often prevailing attitude to him seemed curious. It was obvious even to an eight year old that his position hovering always between approval and animosity must have made his job unnecessarily stressful. It can’t have been easy to be a York Road regular destined to knock on doors that were so often not opened although I was aware that this also happened from time to time to the rent collector from Porter, Putt & Fletcher. Because we were Good Managers we never found ourselves in that position either and I was frequently reminded that we weren’t like some scrambling to hide away on the stairs of a Monday morning on account of the rent man. These persistent warnings with regard to what could happen if you slipped from the straight and narrow fiscally had the desired effect and even now I am nervous even contemplating the use of my credit card.

From early in the twentieth century many working class families, together with those aspiring to the lower middle class, were attracted by the hire purchase schemes offered for seamless acquisition of high priced household goods that would normally be beyond their reach. However over time many of the lenders were said to abuse their positions. They were alleged to charge excessive rates, set harsh terms for repayment that frequently enabled them to reclaim goods without notice and add undue levels of interest on payments. This was finally addressed by the Hire Purchase Act of 1938, proposed by Ellen Wilkinson who was later to become Minister of Education in Clement Atlee’s government. Among other things the Act restricted lenders from entering a purchaser’s property without notice and it required them to clearly state the terms of all agreements. Ellen had been born into a poor but ambitious family, her father was a cotton worker who finally bettered himself by becoming an insurance agent. She had embraced socialism at an early age and eventually, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 joined the British Communist Party. She was to remain a fervent lifelong supporter of better opportunities for working class girls and was largely responsible for the drive to increase the school leaving age from 14 to 15.

It became perfectly acceptable for us to start buying items of clothing from Littlewoods Mail Order Catalogue by 1947 which presumably was because my aunt became an Agent. The original company began in 1923 and provided venues for sports betting called Littlewoods Pools in partnership with John Moores who withdrew from the venture early on following a significant business loss in the first season. Notwithstanding these start-up hiccups football enthusiasts like Uncle Harold became devotees immediately and generally remained so for life. And furthermore the developing business off-shoots of the game made women like my mother feel that on Tick catalogue shopping was almost respectable.

Littlewoods dominated some households. It seemed to me that the complete silence that was required for my tetchy uncle to fill in his weekly Pools form always coincided with our regular visit and it took an interminable amount of time during which Aunt Mag hovered over any of us under the age of twelve hissing loudly with forefinger poised on lips that we should be quiet because Uncle’s Doing His Pools! And if we did not immediately pay heed she might add threateningly that he would not be best pleased if he couldn’t concentrate because there was a lot at stake. This made the outcome sound like something close to a matter of life as normal or being thrown out onto the streets. As for the form filler himself any intrusion into the total quiet that he demanded gave rise to a salvo of expletives of the kind only usually heard from our grandmother. His youngest daughter, Ann said I was lucky that my own father was not a football follower and that she hated the Pools as much as going to church and the library. Knowing that she did not seem to be overly engaged in either of those activities I was suitably impressed.

The regular broadcast that so engrossed men of similar ilk could be heard weekly on the BBC and the reading of the Results was heralded by an instantly recognizable march by Hubert Bath called Out of the Blue. The game results themselves were read by someone called James Alexander Gordon and eventually his voice became as soporific to me as he who read the iconic Shipping Forecast for years. I was totally disinterested in football and as this was long before we had a television set I had never seen a game. Football was simply something that preoccupied boys until they eventually reached the age of reason and a great many of their fathers who never seemed to grow out of the habit. In those days it would have been a very odd girl indeed who expressed an interest in such an activity. Nevertheless there was something almost reassuringly hypnotic about the rhythmic voices emanating from the radio and informing listeners of the most recent successes and failures of clubs throughout the country –and like it or not I became totally familiar with their names; Aston Villa, Arsenal, Blackpool, Birmingham City, Burnley, Colchester, Everton, Huddersfield, Sheffield United, Stoke City, Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers among them. And the latter would always cause a nod or a headshake from my passionately absorbed Uncle depending upon how well that team had performed simply because Wolverhampton was his place of birth and was according to him the finest place in Britain. He said this so often that even when I was seven I wondered why he had torn himself away from the place to live in Crayford and work at Dussex.

My younger brother was never interested in any aspect of the game even when some devious encouragers began to iron out its reputation calling it soccer and pretending it was more significant than it really was. The only attention he ever showed was brief and to Tottenham Hotspurs when he wondered why a cockerel appeared on the club’s badge. Nobody knew but a long time later he discovered that they got their name from Harry Hotspur a medieval English nobleman who appeared in Henry IV Part 1 and was noted for his riding spurs and interest in fighting cocks. Bernard’s interest was transitory to say the least though he managed to note that a Turkish side also had a cockerel on their club badge and were called the Roosters whilst Bradford City were known as the Bantams. This was merely a quiver of curiosity towards a flurry of feathers. Meanwhile Uncle Harold, not in the slightest bit concerned with any variety of cockerels fighting or otherwise, duly completed the Pools for years without a significant win and only gave up when BBC TV began broadcasting the results on Grandstand each week. I don’t remember him winning any amount that caused the slightest ripple of excitement in the family unless of course he chose not to share such an electrifying piece of news. Aunt Martha thought that was perfectly possible because Harold could be a devious piece of work if ever there was one and Mag had been heard to say that herself but Aunt Rose visiting from Petersfield thought he had far too big a mouth to keep it shut under such circumstances. My mother carried on knitting and wisely said nothing.

The Constant women were definitely more concerned with the mail order catalogue that Littlewoods first sent out to their then existing pools subscriber base in the early nineteen thirties than the game itself. The new venture had gone down well with many Pools Wives then effectively becoming retail agents, collecting money for goods ordered by friends and family. Because her oldest sister was to eventually proudly describe herself as a Littlewoods Agent, my mother adjusted to this particular category of on Tick buying quite effortlessly. She did, however, object to the undue pressure that reared up from time to time to make more purchases than she was altogether comfortable with. And she was largely only truly at ease with pale pink or blue underclothes and nightwear in plain old fashioned fabrics like winceyette or flannel. Regardless of this though Littlewoods grew as both a retail and betting organisation and, at its height, had over 25,000 employees.

As time went by and we became a one parent family money became tighter than ever. A tentative exploration was made of what the Rainbow Stores in Stone Street, Gravesend could offer on what was known as the Never-Never. My mother always behaved as if she was letting the side down when she embarked upon one of these purchases, outlining all the reasons for and against the idea for several weeks in advance and generally behaving as if she was in danger of being incarcerated within a Dickensian debtors’ prison. I remember her excitement when finally a much vaunted portable radio set appeared triumphantly on the front room sideboard along with the sherry trifle made in advance for Sunday’s tea. Although called a sherry trifle it had simply been exposed to sherry essence and the radio beside it, maroon rexine covered was, like its Art Deco predecessor rather on the ungainly side to be truly classed as portable. It was explained to me that it could be plugged into a power source of course but it also worked via batteries which in fact turned out to be a very expensive way of listening to Radio Luxembourg’s Top Twenty at 11pm each Sunday evening. But at least I could now listen in bed so at the age of fourteen I began to see that sometimes there might be a positive side to a reasonable degree of debt.

I was introduced to the mysterious and slightly exotic idea of Provident cheques when I was about to start work and after a lot of discussion as to whether it was a good idea we applied for one to equip me for my new life as a commuting shorthand typist. A twenty pound cheque was to be paid back each week to the Provident Man – one pound each time but on twenty one occasions. The final momentous payment was the Provident Man’s personal reward for providing the money in the first place – at least that’s how I saw it. At the time this was viewed as an excellent way of buying clothes and the shops accepting the cheques all had a discreet information notice in the window. I rather liked the fact that the word Cheque was used in the first place, implying in my immature adolescent mind that I might actually be mistaken for someone who operated a Bank Account. My cousins June and Pat had both acquired their glamourous working outfits via the good offices of the Provident Man although Aunt Maud said later that for her June it was a waste as she’d ended up working as a kennel maid at the Crayford Dog Track. June said she’d never been keen on the Burgundy New Look coat and matching high heeled shoes in the first place but her mother wouldn’t be told and apparently wanted her to look as smart as possible for her first job. Old Nan commented that although she said it herself, her third daughter Maud could be as silly as cats’ lights at times and it wasn’t any wonder at all that her June was much the same.

Being quite unaccustomed to buying new clothes I was desperately anxious to examine what the Gravesend fashion establishments had on offer and perhaps to talk loudly about Cheques as I did so and of course twenty pounds seemed like a fortune to me. We started in New Road and progressed slowly into the High Street. After several hours of vacillation I became the owner of a grey woollen Swagger style coat with a faux leopard skin collar together with an oatmeal tweed long sleeved dress, a black slim-line skirt, a red twinset and black Cuban heeled shoes with matching plastic that looked just-like-leather, shoulder bag. Quite a lot could be done with twenty pounds in May 1956. Being completely unfamiliar with the idea of owning so many new items of clothing all at once I felt distinctly light headed for several hours afterwards as I reverently examined them spread out across my bed. I was already more than a little anxious about the repayments and wondered what happened if you failed to make a payment. Did the Provident Man demand the dress back perhaps? And would he eventually return it if and when the debt was paid?

The most momentous on Tick, Never-Never decision was when we headed back to the Rainbow Stores in mid-1956 to seriously investigate the idea of finally becoming owners of a TV set. We were definitely the very last York Road residents to take the plunge towards the delights of the Telly and my brother said that at school he was looked at incredulously when he admitted our disadvantaged state. How could a respectable ten year old live without Crackerjack? Now, however, with my new status as a working woman earning the huge sum of five pounds per week it was clear that we would at last be able to justify the regular twenty five shillings repayment which seemed to go on for ever. We studied a great many models and I can no longer remember whether we finally decided upon the Decca, Pye or Bush version but I do know that ours featured a smart dark French polished cabinet on slim legs and an extraordinarily impressive fourteen inch screen. We ended up quite dizzy with elation that Saturday afternoon and had to revive ourselves with cups of tea from the stall in the market before heading home. Things were definitely looking up!

The set arrived on the following Tuesday and Bernard told me he had sat in school all day oblivious to everything around him, gazing through the classroom windows and imagining he could just decipher the words on vans navigating the area. Which one might be from the Rainbow Stores? He had never felt such sublime exhilaration. By the end of that week we were a trio that had feasted upon Gunsmoke, Hancock’s Half Hour, Opportunity Knocks, Sunday Night at the London Palladium and Armchair Theatre to mention just a few of the entertainment gems on offer. My mother quickly decided that she loved Dixon of Dock Green above anything else whilst Bernard rapidly became addicted to Zoo Quest and was then a lifelong fan of David Attenborough. Owning our very own black and white television set with its vast fourteen inch screen was a critical moment in his short life and meant that he would no longer endure regular spikes of envy and resentment when local mothers called their offspring in from their regular after school play on the street to watch Popeye or Worzel Gummidge. And in those early days he even rushed home from school to take in the adventures of Muffin the Mule and Andy Pandy though he was clearly a little too old to be truly interested. Furthermore having felt seriously side-lined in June 1953 at the time of the Coronation he felt that should Queen Elizabeth ever feel the urge to repeat the grand event he would be able to watch it from the moderate comfort of his own home rather than wait hopefully to be called inside that of a neighbour. Regardless of the many arguments Against as far as my brother was concerned there was undeniably a permanent place for the Never-Never in the life of a working class boy.

As for investing money in the Pools well that was a completely different matter. Old Nan always said that you didn’t have a dog’s chance of winning with Littlewoods because everybody knew it was rigged. For one thing you never met anyone who’d had a win did you? Not a proper win that would buy you a stand-alone house on Blackheath or even a semi-detached in Bexley. Even Mag’s Harold thought he might have been better off ditching Littlewoods and throwing his lot in with Vernons. When I asked nobody seemed to know if Vernons had a catalogue of course but it’s more than likely that they did.

Recalling Bluebirds

I was saddened when Vera Lynn finally shuffled off her mortal coil at the great age of 103! To be totally honest I hadn’t thought about her for years and if I had given her a passing thought I would more than likely have imagined that she died twenty years ago or more. That’s what happens when you live in the antipodes because like it or not you become quite divorced from the trivia of those procedures and practices that ensure you never forget the enormous contribution wartime entertainers made to raise the hopes of the nation. And it’s not simply ensuring that the memory is kept alive is it because if you’re anything like me you feel affronted to find that you simply don’t know what is being referred to when some clever dick visiting from London decides they’ll have a Vera at the local bar. On the other hand a Vera & Tonic doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it? - neither does a Vera & Lemon. A Vera & Lime is less troublesome if you use care when tossing it into the banter.

Whether or not I had given her much thought during the intervening years there was no doubt at all that Dame Vera had featured very large indeed in my early childhood. For one thing her wartime repertoire was not only regularly played on the wireless but the refrains were echoed in-between the programming schedules by my mother. This wasn’t as unfortunate as it sounds because back then not only did mothers sing on a daily basis as a matter of course but mine had a very good singing voice that she enjoyed showing off to the neighbours. Singing accompanied hanging out the washing, beating the rugs, doing the ironing and chopping vegetables for a healthy Ministry of Food suggested wartime stew. Consequently the popular catalogue of Vera Lynn melodies had by 1944 become part of me and I was lyric perfect in We’ll Meet Again, The White Cliffs of Dover, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow, and many more besides.

To some extent the hits of the 1940s supplanted and displaced my earlier favourites learned from my Grandmother – Two Lovely Black Eyes, Down at the Old Bull & Bush, Boiled Beef & Carrots and The Boy I Love is up in the Gallery. Old Nan herself maintained she never thought that much of Vera Lynn and when all was said and done she wasn’t a patch on Florrie Forde or Marie Lloyd. The Aunts firmly maintained, when she was safely out of earshot that was because Edgar Constant, their late father had harboured a very sweet spot for Vera, never missing her regular 15 minute broadcasts and saying she brought a tear to his eye. His penchant for the young songstress had been something of a bone of contention between them because my grandmother was never good at sharing attention.

My own overall favourite was The White Cliffs of Dover because when it came to the line about Jimmy going to sleep in his own little room again my mother always unseated poor Jimmy, replacing him with Jeannie. By the time of the Normandy Landings I had become convinced that the song had been written especially with me in mind. The only area of confusion lay with the Bluebirds and this was because I had never actually seen one in real life. When asked my mother just said it was a dear little bird, all blue in colour and shaped a bit like a Robin Redbreast and what’s more when you saw one it made you feel warm and happy. I began to form the opinion that the bluebird was generally perceived as a symbol of joy and an expectation of everlasting happiness. To see the flocks of them that were anticipated over Dover’s white cliffs would surely mean that nothing too awful was ever likely to happen again. It was to be years before I realized that although I was generally spot-on in my bluebird analysis I was unlikely to light upon one easily as they lived mostly in North America as did the song’s composer and lyricist – Walter Kent and Nat Burton. Perhaps the pair simply believed that their ubiquitous local bird was global or perhaps, more obscurely, it was an allusion to the American pilots as apparently the allied planes had their undersides painted sky-blue for some reason to do with camouflage.

So although the bluebird remained a bit of a mystery, the other bird that back then pre-occupied Dame Vera – the nightingale, certainly did not. Old Nan said that although she didn’t think she’d ever laid eyes on one, what with them saving their songs for after dark, you certainly heard them often enough and not just in Berkeley Square either which was a place she did not normally frequent. She’d heard them at Cliffe Woods, and again in Cobham Woods and once as large as life one night in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford she’d swear it. And then my mother would tell of the time she and my father heard one on Blackheath while waiting for a bus. Aunt Mag might then ask if she’d heard from her Bern recently and how was he but not much would be said further because the fact that Mag’s Harold had not been Called Up on account of what was said to be vital war work was a sensitive issue

News of my father was of little interest to me back then because I had only the very vaguest memory of him although I had to blow a kiss to his photograph every evening on my way to bed and I knew that he had bought me my teddy bear prior to leaving to join the Eighth Army. Now he was apparently fighting the enemy in some foreign place where the food was said to be shocking and I was doubtful that he would ever bother to return so I gave him little thought. There were other complications to emerge eventually to do with his time serving in places like Italy and North Africa that were to cause my mother considerable distress but I was always somehow too young for them to directly disturb my overall equilibrium. Nevertheless I was always aware that there often existed between my parents something akin to an armed truce.

When letters arrived from what were clearly faraway places my mother’s attention would stray from me and my narrow pre-school world and I knew that the man whose photograph hung next to the wireless had now taken her entire attention. His writing on the flimsy airmail forms was instantly recognizable and she would hold each one in both hands and a little gingerly when it arrived under the front door, staring down at it for a long time before carefully and slowly slicing the sides with the small ivory handled kitchen knife. Then it would be read and read again throughout the day and she would more than likely cry which made me tense and anxious. The airmail letter days were those when she would be likely to sing Yours a great deal and Mrs Bassant next door would ask to hear it again because she sang like an angel. Yours til the stars lose their glory, yours til the birds cease to sing, yours to the end of life’s story…… But then again when you are three or four years old you don’t pay too much attention to the words that accompany popular melodies.

It was to be many years before I understood that my father had been very much a second best choice as a husband and accepted because it was preferable to being left On The Shelf. Every time she sang Vera Lynn’s 1941 hit song in all likelihood she was dedicating each rendition to Poor Fred her fiancé who had died of TB in 1934. She kept the birthday cards he gave her in a shoe box at the bottom of her wardrobe, along with Very Important Papers such as my birth certificate, her marriage certificate and important letters. From time to time she took the cards out, removed them from their tissue paper and held them gently, tenderly as if afraid they might disintegrate. One day, much later after I had learned to read I took them out myself hardly daring to breathe as I read the message and studied his grown-up writing, so different from Bernard Joseph Hendy’s, less positive and defined…. To my sweetheart on her birthday. And when I was old enough to contemplate such matters I wondered what he had been like, this man who should by rights have been my father and for whom she had so often sung sad songs. And what would I be like if the dreaded TB had not claimed him? Would I be a lot better at maths perhaps? Would I still feel like me?

Once I asked my older cousin Margaret who was known to have a great fondness for my father, if she had known Poor Fred. But she said she didn’t remember him and thought she must have been still a baby when he died. All she knew was that the aunts feared my mother would never get over losing him. They had their doubts at one time about Uncle Bern though and our grandmother didn’t like many of his ideas and said they made him sound as Thick As Pig Shit. Though for all that at the great age of fourteen she thought it was better to marry somebody with daft ideas than not marry at all because nobody wanted to be an old maid. And as for Poor Fred, well there wasn’t much that could be done about getting TB.

Of course these were things destined to be discussed only rarely between my mother and her sisters because working class women had an enormous capacity for absorbing the good with the bad and life was simply the way it was whether you liked it or not. Better not to dwell on it unduly, simpler by far to just get on with it and Count Your Blessings, maybe even Wish Upon A Star if you became too disheartened with your lot – and naturally enough those melodies too definitely featured among family favourites.

Just getting on with it was sound advice for all who grew to adulthood in the first half of the twentieth century and followed assiduously by the man who eventually became my father undoubtedly borne out of his formative years growing up in a Chatham orphanage. His own mother being comfortably familiar with the local workhouse may well have simply deposited him there along with his baby sister, Mary when he was four years old. She was apparently about to receive a prison sentence and not for the first time. The older children had been distributed between various relatives but there was a general reluctance to care for Bernard and Mary as they were illegitimate and thus the Hendy family members felt no responsibility towards them. This situation which eventuated in late 1913 was to cause my brother, the family genealogist considerable distress when he came across the information a century later in 2013. Almost reduced to tears he said he now felt that he was not who he had always thought he was because the person he had always imagined was his paternal grandfather was not in fact - and subsequently try as he might, he could find no information whatsoever regarding the man who might well have taken his place.

Our mother had invariably sniffed disapprovingly when the matter of our father’s peremptory depositing into the care of the Medway Cottage Homes was raised. Such a thing would never have happened in the Constant family and as far as she was concerned his older sister, Connie should have taken care of the poor little mite. The fact that Connie was a mere teenager herself cut no ice with Nellie Hendy as she and her sisters had a long history of caring for numerous younger siblings for extended periods. She was strangely impervious to the fact that having a parent serving a prison sentence was possibly a very different situation to that of her own upbringing no matter how chaotic it was at times. She also, again perplexingly, chose to ignore the presence in the mix of the baby, Mary.

Surprisingly there was an upside to orphanage living even back then with local philanthropists and generous do-gooders more than anxious to fund treats such as trips to the theatre, riding lessons, sports equipment and books of an edifying nature. And to get the best out of life it was advisable to keep your head down, your boots shiny and speak as politely as humanly possible to your elders and betters. My father applied these same dictates to the British Army and thus got along very well indeed with a series of rapid promotions.

And while my mother sang her heart out in York Road, Northfleet, he got the most he could from a musical point of view out of Italy learning a number of arias from the works of Verdi. He sang them to her when he came home on leave, explaining the tragic stories behind each one. He said he would take her to a real performance after the war, perhaps at Covent Garden where they might even see the great Beniamino Gigli himself who he explained was a bit like Richard Tauber. When she discussed this idea with her sisters they turned out to be luke warm on the plan and Maud said you never knew where that kind of activity was going to end did you? In the end it didn’t happen.

What did happen was that at the conclusion of his last period of leave and in a gesture of goodwill towards his emotionally confused wife my father surprised her with a rendering of We’ll Meet Again whilst carrying me on his shoulders to the top of the garden. Later that evening he sang it again at The Prince Albert in Shepherd Street preceded by E Lucevan le Stella from Puccini’s opera Tosca at which my mother said you could have knocked her down with a feather. Old Mr and Mrs Bassant sitting in the Snug over their Saturday night halves of mild and bitter said you could have heard a pin drop and it went down very well indeed because there was no doubt at all that all manner of folks were drawn to all kinds of music and that was a fact.

Many long years later during a discussion about 1940s privations with her grandson gathering information for a school project my mother commented that back in those dark wartime days there was no underestimating the mettle of the likes of Vera Lynn. Black outs and ration books were all very well of course but you could never overlook those who could stand up in front of any number of people day in and day out to sing. A gift like that she said, brought a lot of joy into people’s lives and there was no doubt that’s exactly what you needed to keep you going in wartime bluebirds or no bluebirds.