Homes For The Worthy Poor

My mother was born in 1908 and could well remember the flurry of building projects that followed the Great War and known as the Homes for Heroes. Ten years later at local Council meetings these developments were referred to as Homes for the Worthy Poor, but never in the presence of those they were intended to house of course.

When I was very small it did not occur to me that there was anything undesirable about our house at 28 York Road, nestled as it was in the lower third of the South side of the street. It was simply home and to me when I was two, three and four years of age, invariably welcoming. Similar homes had been built since the eighteenth century, tight rows of neatly constructed two-up-two-down cottages beginning their stretch almost from the central point of tidy English towns, extending to their outskirts and very nearly encroaching into what was by the middle of the twentieth century, to be called The Suburbs. Unlike other European countries, England’s towns largely lacked centrally built tall blocks of flats that unwillingly gave way to terraces and ultimately more widely spaced homes. The latter, whether Council or privately constructed had to await their advent for some considerable time. Strangely, this did not appear to be the case in Scotland, however, where lofty blocks rose menacingly from the very centre of both Edinburgh and Glasgow and very possibly other places also. Stubbornly, however, English cities, even those as swarming and jam packed as Liverpool and Manchester opted for back-to-back structures and crowded courts rather than buildings that were too alarmingly vertical. So the English remained blissfully unaware of congested centrally placed apartments such as those gracing the back streets of Berlin, Paris and Prague until they had enough disposable cash with which to travel which was, of course, going to be quite a long time into the future.

By the time I was six years old though, I was beginning to compare our house in Northfleet unfavourably with that of my Aunt Mag in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford. Close to the Three Jolly Farmers pub and the 480 bus stop to and from Gravesend, it was part of an estate built in the early years of the twentieth century to hastily house local factory workers. This was at a time when Industrial Crayford erupted from its previous state as a rather sleepy village. The change came with extraordinary rapidity, so much so that decades later unmistakable signs of a previously more rustic life pervaded the very air of the place. These were facts that did not concern me in the slightest at the time. My immense admiration for the house in Iron Mill Lane was simply because it was semi-detached, rather than part of a terrace, it had its own little entrance hall, rather than forcing entry directly into the Front Room, and wonder of wonders, it had a bathroom complete with indoor lavatory! It also had an almond tree in the little front garden which in the Spring burst into creamy blossom and made passers-by pause and comment upon its magnificence.

The house was not only conveniently placed for the frequent visits to the Jolly Farmers that my grandmother and aunts seemed attached to, it was also handy for my Uncle Harold’s job at Vickers where the work itself was of such importance to the War that he was exempted from service and where he was progressing rapidly towards becoming a Foreman. As Aunt Mag was fond of pointing out, Vickers would be hard pressed to do without him. My oldest cousin, Young Harold explained to me that this was something to do with Vickers making munitions which you needed if you were going to fight a war. My own father had been Called Up because his job was only at Bevan’s Cement Works and the war could do without cement very well. I didn’t really understand what munitions were or all that much about cement but I listened politely. My mother said more than once and usually only to me, that Big Harold was nothing more than a coward and when he thought he might be Called Up he had cried all night and very next morning ran whining to his foreman at Vickers and begged to be transferred to Essential Work. As she repeated this dubious claim about a number of those not required to enlist, there was no way of knowing if it was true but I came to suspect that it wasn’t. Nellie Hendy had a relentlessly unforgiving attitude towards those males who to all intents and purposes were healthy, yet failed to go to War. Why couldn’t Essential work be carried out by women she would like to know or if that was impossible then by the maimed that had emerged from the previous war? However, although she posed these questions to me on bus rides to and from Crayford she never broached them as conversation topics to the adults in the family.

By the time my brother was born and I reached my seventh birthday the war had become simply a memory to me and even my father, who had loved his years of service, had reluctantly returned to take his place once more within the ranks of Bevans’ workers. I listened with interest to Sunday afternoon conversations between my parents concerning Housing Lists and how to move up them, and perhaps moving to Erith or Crayford or Dartford where smart new houses were being built. To aid this proposed move the Council officials in each area had listed us together with the fact that we were living in grossly overcrowded circumstances with, variously, Aunts Mag or Maud or Martha. Council Officers visited the homes of these aunts and inspected the sofas upon which my parents were supposedly sleeping and the topping and tailing my cousins and I were purportedly doing. Each one decided that our need was indeed worthy. A new home was not going to appear overnight, however.

My father was keen to stay reasonably close to Northfleet in order to cycle to his shifts at Bevans. My mother, however, seemed quite drawn to the innovative Tin Houses, with corrugated iron roofs that were planned for Erith because she did not want to have to live in the pockets of That Crayford Lot if she could avoid it. It would be true to say that she had an oddly symbiotic relationship with her sisters. I simply wanted a house with a bathroom and if I had actually been in a position to make a choice, I would have chosen a prefab identical to those in Orchard Road close by the Northfleet cemetery and the Old Rec where the first tenants had been happily living since March 1946. Sadly my mother did not fancy a prefab at all because not only did they look cold and uninviting, more importantly they had been built with the help of German prisoners of war and you never knew what that might entail in the long run because you couldn’t be too careful.

Two girls from my class at school lived in the Orchard Road prefabs, Jean Taylor and Wendy Selves. They were such good friends that they went everywhere together and even finished each other’s sentences which was fascinating. They did not look alike because Jean was tall and fair whilst Wendy was small and dark but they tried to be as similar as possible by copying each other. Each had hair I greatly envied, twisted in rags at night so as to form long ringlets in the morning. I had actually seen inside Wendy’s prefab on the heady occasion when she invited me to her seventh birthday party at which her mother had served fish paste sandwiches and Lyons fruit pies cut into quarters. I had looked inside the bathroom and taken note of the pale green tiles and reassured myself of the indoor toilet. I told Wendy that I greatly admired their prefab and ventured to enquire if the fact that it had been partly built by prisoners of war concerned her mother at all. Wendy said she didn’t know what I was talking about and no prisoners of any kind had been anywhere near their prefab at any time whatsoever and I was mad if I thought so. This seemed just a tiny bit odd as this was a year in which POWs featured rather more than previously in the life of the local population. As a community we were being gently encouraged to see the Germans as human beings rather than as hideous monsters. A service for them had been recently held at Chalk Church during which hymns were sung in both German and English. The sermon was preached in German and the local Vicar obligingly translated it into English. In return, to show goodwill POWs did their best to fight a fire in a local fifteenth century cottage and managed to save a great many antiques and ensure that the damage was restricted to the upper storey only. All this did nothing to improve my mother’s attitude toward them and when an unexploded bomb was found in Albion Terrace, Gravesend and had to be defused she promptly laid the blame solely upon the attendees at the Chalk Church service, even suggesting they had absconded from their camp in the small hours and deliberately placed it. This sounded unlikely even to me but I didn’t say so.

Eventually, to my mother’s delight, we were offered a house with a corrugated roof, close to the bus route, at Erith and in great excitement we went by motor bike and side-car to visit the site one afternoon at the end of my father’s Six-to-Two shift. Erith lies on the banks of the Thames, like Gravesend and Northfleet except closer to London and the history of the town is similarly tied to the river. There was once a royal dockyard there and there was still an impressively long pier in early 1948 where we sat that afternoon eating sandwiches and drinking cold tea from lemonade bottles. My father, who at the time seemed particularly driven to giving mini-lectures of an improving and educational nature, told me that the name Erith was Saxon in origin and that Henry VIII founded a naval dockyard there and that furthermore one of his most famous warships was built there and he only wished he could recall the name of it but for the life of him he couldn’t. What he could remember though was that the famous local Callenders Cable Factory provided a great deal of employment in the town and of course everybody knew that it was Callenders who had laid an underwater pipeline in the Channel and it was this very pipeline that had supplied the fuel used by Allied vehicles during the D Day Landings in June 1944. I nodded in what I hoped was an enthusiastic manner but thought this was an excruciatingly boring bit of information.

My mother bringing a lighter note to the exchange observed that Great Aunt Martha, now living in Northfleet, remembered Erith well when it was something of a Resort and had gone there on day trips as a very small child either on a pleasure steamer or a train. Her father had on one such occasion won her a wax doll with long curly hair at a kiosk which, tragically, she had lost on the way home but had never forgotten. This was much more interesting and my heart bled for the child that Great Aunt Martha, known to me as Little Nanny, had once been.

Like comparable riverside towns, despite its romantic heritage, Erith was ultimately destined to become an industrial centre mainly due to the conveniently placed docks and its proximity to both central London and the English Channel. It was during the late Victorian period that two entrepreneurs in particular, Charles Beadle and William Anderson ensured that the place abandoned all aspirations to remain a Resort and became instead the foremost industrial area of the South East, engineering emerging as its most prominent industry.

The houses we had come to see turned out to be something of a disappointment to my parents. On the outskirts of the town, the rows of imposingly large homes, each with a red-brown undulating roof looked acceptable enough to me although startlingly different from York Road. I asked if every house had a bathroom and a hallway and when I was ignored I asked again. I had to ask three times before my mother looked distractedly in my direction briefly and simply nodded saying that they were bound to have and no mistake. My father said they were further from Bevans than he had hoped but he had heard there were good jobs going at Vickers. My mother said when it rained the din on those roofs would be awful and she wondered if her nerves would be able to stand it. She would ask the Doctor for his advice next time she went and then hesitantly added that she couldn’t help noticing that the rows of little houses closer to the town centre looked a much better bet. I was surprised by this revelation because the terraces that looked so very similar to York Road did not seem big enough to house a bathroom and a hallway which was disconcerting. I also wondered why the Doctor had to be asked and decided that maybe he had to write us a letter before we would be able to procure the tenancy of one of these new houses with the wavy roofs.

A week or so later I heard her in conversation with one of my aunts and it appeared that the Doctor had strongly advised that we should go nowhere near the Tin Houses at Erith. The reasons were various. For one thing the din on the roofs when it rained was bound to be something awful and for another they were built far too close to the river and it stood to reason that the damp rising off the water on a winter morning played Merry Hell with the chest. What was more, Little Jean was known as delicate to the Doctor and the wind around the Tin Houses in winter was bound to cause pneumonia. Quite apart from all that they were a long way from Bevans and everybody knew that Bevans paid better than either Vickers or Callenders. Besides, there were bound to be lovely new estates going up any time now much closer to Northfleet. You only had to look at Kings Farm to see that because that entire estate went up in no time at all.

So we did not end up living at Erith in a Tin House and although I mourned the loss of the entrance hall and the bathroom I was glad not to have to change schools and leave the groups of children I knew, even those who were greatly hated and definitely my enemies. During the years that followed there was frequent animated discussion concerning housing and parental conversation was littered with talk of moving to Painters Ash, Istead Rise or Valley Drive but we never did. Long after I had permanently left the area my mother even cautiously considered applying for a tenancy in one of the new high rise flats that were a mere stone’s throw from her garden gate and were climbing rapidly skyward. She thought she might like to live on the very top floor and awake to an astonishing vista each morning but within a very short space of time, predictably perhaps, she changed her mind.

The much vaunted move from number twenty-eight did not in fact become a reality until the latter part of the nineteen-sixties when residents were advised that the South side of our street was to be demolished to make way for a complex of modern units to house young families. Within a very short space of time my mother moved with her cat, Simon, to Wallis Park, situated on the site of Huggens College in Northfleet. She realised almost immediately that she was going to hate living there and nothing could convince her otherwise despite the smart entrance hall and brand new bathroom . She even complained about the dreadful din on the roof whenever it rained. A further move to Painters Ash, where the entrance hall and bathroom were decidedly smaller and more cramped, proved much more successful. She was even sure that the rainfall was infinitely less invasive there. And when I visited one afternoon I could not help but notice that in the patch of garden immediately adjacent to her front door was an almond tree that when in blossom apparently caused passers-by to pause and make admiring comment.

The St Botolph's School Blazer

I was in my last year at St Botolph’s when the newish and decidedly tyrannical headmaster decided that what the school needed to lift it above those lesser academic establishments in the district was a uniform and a school anthem. Mr Cooke was a man with an ambitious agenda for making sweeping improvements to the school. This included compelling we students, and with an undoubted all-embracing flow-on effect in mind for the adults in our lives, to focus upon what he called the Rich Tapestry of our Kentish heritage. Henceforth there would be maypole dancing and one lucky girl would be crowned Queen of the May and wear a white dress. Furthermore the ancient tradition of a Boy Bishop was to be revived. The fortunate candidate would be suitably robed and would circle the cottages and businesses around The Hill giving all and sundry his blessing. We listened politely. Our joint academic performance was to be immediately lifted, by force if necessary and the headmaster himself would personally teach Mathematics to those approaching the dreaded Eleven Plus exam. His style of teaching as previously documented included a great deal of shouting, kicking desk tops onto fingers and becoming alarmingly puce in the face. As a group we were terrified of him, even the previously most disruptive and disorderly boys and it was to be fifty years before I came to realise that this dread and dislike extended also into the staff. Our much loved class teacher, Mr Will Clarke in email correspondence eons on revealed just how profoundly the new headmaster had affected his life, with general bullying and demands involving compulsory after school sports teams, and the organization of social evenings for parents. This was a man who successfully instilled fear and loathing into the hearts and minds of all who were unfortunate enough to cross his path.

We were told about the proposed anthem on a Thursday morning at an unusual assembly. It was explained to us that our Old School would in years to come be known to us as our alma mater and the anthem we were about to learn was a patronal song. This of course meant nothing whatsoever to us. Mr Cooke added that the famous Charterhouse School sang `Jerusalem’, Dover Grammar School sang `Thou Whose Almighty Word’, The Liverpool BlueCoat School sang `Praise to the Lord, the Almighty’ and Magdalen College School sang `The Lilies of the Field’. We children of St Botolph’s, Northfleet Hill who knew nothing of the worthy establishments that tripped from his tongue were to sing `Front to the Northern Breeze’, recently composed by himself with the help of Mrs Frost the pianist. There followed a twenty minute rehearsal of a mournful hymn-like refrain which began with `…At St Botolph’s School on the hill we stand with our front to the northern breeze….’ and about which I recall nothing further. We were told that we should run through what we had just sung, in our heads over the next few days and be mindful that by Monday next our singing had to be flawless.

The following day at yet another unusual assembly, this time held at the end of the day rather than the beginning, we were told about the School Blazer which Helen Gunner the vicar’s daughter modelled for us looking both important and embarrassed as she did so. This garment, the colour described as maroon and later called wine-red by my mother, was undoubtedly smart, double breasted with gold buttons. It could be ordered directly from the school for a mere twenty two shillings and sixpence apiece. We ten and eleven year olds in particular, definitely needed to emphasise to our parents, that a St Botolph’s School Blazer was an absolute necessity. A notice was handed to each of us which we must ensure was passed on with immediacy as soon as we got home. An order form was attached which should be filled in by an adult as speedily as possible. Significant penalties might be incurred by those children who simply abandoned this important notice in a pocket.

Later that evening, relaxed after a Friday tea of fish and chips my father commented that a School Blazer was not an altogether bad idea and it would certainly define the wearer as a pupil of a school that Cared. That fellow Cooke was no sluggard and was trying to do Right by his pupils no matter how much girls like me objected to his bad temper. Possibly he was going to be exactly what we needed to ensure that we gave the Eleven Plus examination our very best shot. My mother was doubtful and pointed out that it was over a guinea and I wasn’t going to be able to wear it at my next school whether I passed the Eleven Plus or whether I didn’t. She discussed it a day or two later with Grace Bennett in order to ascertain if a blazer was to be purchased for her Joan but apparently no decision had yet been made. Molly Freeman said that there was no chance whatsoever of either her or her brother George becoming the proud owners of blazers. Jennifer Berryman’s grandmother had definitely agreed to the new item of clothing and was going to take her to the photographer in the High Street to have her photographed wearing it. Pearl Banfield’s parents were in favour which pacified Pearl who had been getting more and more anxious over the weekend as to what might happen to those of us whose parents did not respond in the affirmative. A few days later I was to find it had been decided that I would also become a proud blazer-owner which I have to admit was something of a relief. Within three weeks it transpired that more than two thirds of St Botolph’s Eleven Plus Year 1951 were blazer-clad and mostly completely paid for. Photographs were taken for the Gravesend & Dartford Reporter of us singing `Front to the Northern Breeze’ and Mr Cooke was quoted as confidently expecting a very satisfactory exam result.

The idea of blazer owning had certainly added a dimension of excitement to the school day for a large part of the term and protected the wearers from the extremes of the headmaster’s frenzies of temper. Most of his fury was now more specifically directed towards those who remained blazerless, particularly the boys who were kicked and slapped with cheerful regularity. After a while the maroon jackets, once so carefully hanger-hung in parental wardrobes were more carelessly slung on hooks in hallways or at the bottom of stairs. My mother even stopped telling me to take mine off the moment I got home from school. This was just as well because by the end of the term its right hand pocket had become the home of my pet mouse, Timothy Gunner.

Some progressive parents back then allowed their children to own pet mice and even bought little packets of mixed seed to supplement table scraps and provided birthday presents of mouse homes in the form of new-fangled metal cages from the pet shop in Gravesend. Predictably mine were not among them. Generally speaking my mother was not overly fond of animals and found it difficult to extend much affection to the family dog. She could just about tolerate cats and had no time at all for the tortoise my father once gave me, breathing an audible sigh of relief when it perished during its first ever period of hibernation. A pet mouse was out of the question and I knew better than to even pose the question.

So I would never have become a mouse owner in the first place if Helen Gunner the vicar’s daughter, whose parents were of the progressive variety, had not had to give up her beloved pet when her family made their final arrangements to move on to a new parish in far-off Bermuda. I inherited Timothy Gunner with great delight and solemnly promised Helen that his name would never be changed because now he was used to it. Sadly his cage, home-made by the vicar himself was going with them. Housing Timothy Gunner became a dilemma and that was how he came to live in the right hand pocket of the maroon school blazer. This arrangement worked extremely well for several weeks and Timothy Gunner behaved beautifully during school hours, sleeping peacefully and not drawing undue attention to himself except at playtime when other girls lined up to admire him and offer him bits of broken biscuit. When I got home he would happily explore the bedroom floor and as long as I left the blazer close by could be relied upon to return to it. Later in the evening he and the jacket would be hung on a bottom-of-the-stairs hook. I have no idea what he did during the night but he was always safely nestled in the pocket in the morning.

The ownership of my first ever pet mouse had been surprisingly stress-free and I even began to wonder why anyone thought mice needed cages. Was it not even quite cruel to confine a white mouse to a cage? At some stage I might write a letter of enquiry to the RSPCA. So all was well until the fateful Saturday morning when I skipped happily down to Molly’s house to exchange gossip about film stars, and returned to find the maroon blazer missing from its hook. Casually enquiring as to its whereabouts I was struck mute when told by my father that it had been taken to the dry cleaner in the High Street. My mother, it appeared, had decided it was becoming very dirty and smelly – smelly enough to be in need of dry cleaning. But we were not a family that ever used the services of a dry cleaner and the news made my throat suddenly very dry indeed. When I regained my voice I pointed out that I hadn’t noticed the smell – what kind of smell was it? It was like ammonia I was told, and later my mother herself said she would have very much liked to know what on earth I had been doing with it to get it into such a state. And to think it had cost over a guinea too not to mention that the dry cleaning would be half a crown. When it returned I was never, ever to let it get into that kind of condition again.

In panic I headed for the library and asked the mystified librarian where the section on dry cleaning was but of course there wasn’t one. Where then might I find information on what was entailed during a common or garden dry cleaning process? She looked annoyed and said it wasn’t a topic that involved many enquiries. An elderly borrower lingering in the General Science Section said he believed various chemicals were used but was unclear as to what they might be. Ammonia might be one of them. No he did not know if they might be dangerous to mice. I was crying almost hysterically as I retraced my steps down Dover Road so much so that old Mrs Eves waiting at the bus stop asked me what on earth the problem was and looked puzzled when I said my mother had taken my school blazer to the dry cleaner’s. That was nothing to get so het up about she sagely advised.

I waited anxiously for the return of the blazer some days later, now in a paper package and hung on a metal hanger, smelling of lemons and lavender and nicely pressed. In horrified anticipation of a mangled mouse corpse I inspected the right hand pocket as nonchalantly as possible. It was empty. It was as if Timothy Gunner had never existed in the first place. Henceforth on each school morning I donned the maroon blazer I began to cry and could provide no convincing explanation as to why this was.

A Box At The Empire

Once my father came back from the war, from time to time, providing he and my mother were on speaking terms, he would propose a special treat, either just for him and myself and occasionally my young brother, like going to the Museums to look at Dinosaurs and Mummies or one that involved the whole family like the Pantomime at Chatham Empire. I must emphasise that these treats were few and far between, not only because they involved unplanned expenditure but also because as time went on he and my mother had a hard time communicating. I did not quite understand the reasons for this then but later came to realise that he was an adulterer and had more than one Fancy Woman. This behaviour caused my mother great distress and decades later she was to say that in many ways she blamed herself and that she had never been good at forgiveness. The only thing I was aware of at the time was that she seemed to spend a great deal of time crying.

The visits to various museums and art galleries were not an unmitigated success as far as I was concerned and my younger brother was definitely more taken with dinosaurs than I was. Neither of us found paintings terribly thrilling and our Grandmother was heard to say that in her opinion it was the war that had ruined him. Aunt Rose who was married to a Welshman who did a fair bit of gallery visiting himself said it was because at times The War turned perfectly ordinary men from normal to highbrow. In her opinion they returned to Civvy Street with ideas above their station and this was evidenced by the development of an admiration for foreign ideas. I was wont to agree with her there because my father seemed to have a preoccupation with something called spaghetti which he insisted was delicious, and I privately thought looked like worms in blood. To be fair the only spaghetti I had actually seen was the tinned variety courtesy of Heinz displayed on the outside wall of Penney, Son & Parkers’ shop adjacent to the Roman Catholic Church on The Hill. When I pointed out the similarity with worms my father told me that I was extremely foolish if I thought that Heinz canned spaghetti was anything like the real thing. I made no further response but decided that I would be most unlikely to ever sample the real thing and in fact would actively avoid it at all costs.

It was to be a long time before I was given the opportunity to try it when a boyfriend took me to an Italian restaurant in Bloomsbury on the occasion of his own birthday. I was sharply reminded of the worms at the first few surprisingly tasty mouthfuls. Unexpectedly I came to the realization that all things Italian were not necessarily as unpalatable as they had previously appeared to be. Some time later in discussion with a cousin whose father was also said to have been ruined by the war, far from enthusiastically agreeing she said that she didn’t think she could ever get used to foreign muck and would prefer a Wimpy hamburger with chips any day of the week.

But when I was still a child these discussions were not frequent because we rarely went in for what is now termed Eating Out and on those exceptional occasions when we did, it was generally in cafes serving Egg & Chips and Fish & Chips . Not especially inspiring.

It was some weeks before Christmas when I was told that our entire family would be going to the Theatre – the Proper Theatre, the Theatre Royal, Chatham. We were going to see a Pantomime, Jack & The Beanstalk. I was nine years old and beginning to become very taken with The Theatre and greatly influenced by the children’s books of Pamela Brown and Noel Streatfield.

We set off for Chatham a few days later, traveling by train from Gravesend and arriving at The Empire Box Office just after lunch. It was then that we found all tickets for the stalls and circle had been sold. In fact the only seats left in the house were four in a Box at the huge sum of four pounds. My mother said that had he thought ahead my father would have booked and that nobody could afford four pounds. Despite this my father, who had been paid only the day before, paid up and that is how we came to be seated like very important people in a box overlooking the stage. It was my first experience of traditional Pantomime other than what I had read in books and I was immediately very much taken with the Principal Boy and the Pantomime Dame and the tradition of heckling from the audience. All in all I was both thrilled and delighted with the day, more so than my young brother, and very keen to return. However, it was to be a long time before I would find myself in the building for a second time, when I would go with a songwriter called Bill Crompton to see a performance of his great friend and ally, Morgan Thunderclap Jones, pianist, who had thoughtfully provided us with complimentary seats in the front stalls.

My mother, definitely keener on visits to the cinema, was not nearly as taken as I was with the theatre trip and maintained that you could waste a fair amount of hard earned money if you spent it inadvisedly in theatres. However, this particular treat still remains with me as one of the most magical events of my childhood – the day when we saw Jack & The Beanstalk from the luxury of a Box overlooking the stage, exactly like a family in a book! What could be better?

Of Cleaning & Cats

Despite the fact that we never had very much that absolutely needed to be kept clean a lot of cleaning of one kind or another seemed to go on at our house. The kind of cleaning that doesn’t happen much these days. I remember a dark red polish with a picture of a funny looking man on the screw top, who called himself Cardinal and not having much of a clue about the hierarchy of the Church at the time I believed him to be the person who made the polish. I thought it was rather avant-garde of him to have his picture on every tin.

On Tuesday mornings unless it was raining the front step was spruced up with the help of Cardinal, followed by the flagstones in front of the kitchen stove. I was never allowed to help with these jobs although I was keen to do so, finding the smell of the gloopy red stuff almost intoxicating. I envied Jennifer Berryman whose grandmother always allowed her to polish their front step though it took her half the morning and even I could see that she used rather too much Cardinal and even then didn’t achieve much of a shine. I was told that Jennifer was only given the job to save her grandmother’s back because at her age to bend gave her gyp. It was a fact that the regular application of Cardinal to front steps was a matter of principle as far as most of the local housewives were concerned and those who avoided the task were thought to be slovenly.

Another time consuming and regular job for the woman whose work was never done was the black leading of the kitchen stove. I’m not sure that this was carried out on a weekly basis because it was a mission for which my mother covered her hair and clothes with her oldest scarf and overall and at times even wore rubber gloves before carefully removing the lid from the Zebo Blacking. I most definitely was not allowed to take part, and probably neither was Jennifer no matter how bad her grandmother’s back happened to be, but I could certainly watch the proceedings from a safe distance and bring fresh newspaper when asked. When I was little, long before I got what my cousin Margaret called highfaluting ideas about my own importance, I thought our stove was one of the best things about our house. That was way back when I didn’t long for an indoor lavatory, preferably situated inside an indoor bathroom. Back then I loved coming home to the warmth and security of the freshly black-leaded stove in winter when my mother might make toast on a long toasting fork for tea or bake potatoes in their jackets in the oven. The more modern gas stove in the scullery did not ever have quite the same appeal whatever might be cooked upon it or in it. In winter the kitchen stove was without doubt the most cost effective way to cook despite the heat being at times variable. Slow cooked vegetable stews enriched with the odd bit of bacon could simmer on the hob for hours and fill the house with a smell that promised a tasty supper and there was no anxiety that the gas might suddenly Go Out and have to be replenished with pennies in the meter. In those days at our end of the street we still had gas light because electricity had not quite reached us before the war interrupted the process of modernising. The lights going out never caused much drama as far as I was concerned as long as a fire still burned in the grate and in any event we seemed to always be able to find a candle. Later on when we boasted an electricity meter alongside the gas meter in the coal cupboard under the stairs, not only did it have to be fed with shillings rather than pennies, but when it suddenly went out it caused an instant shock. My friend Pearl said years later when sitting in the Banfield’s front room courting with her boyfriend, that she lived in fear of the embarrassment of the lights going out. It simply did not happen, she maintained, at his house and she wondered how she could be expected to live down the humiliation of the family scrabbling around and calling for a shilling.

At some stage in the early 1950s we joined the neighbourhood trend and rid ourselves of the old fashioned cast iron stove that needed to be pampered with Zebo on a regular basis. It was replaced with what was described as a Modern Tiled Surround which turned out to be an open fireplace edged with anaemic looking pale pink tiles. My mother was very keen to make this transition once the Bennetts of Buckingham Road installed one and Grace Bennett had extolled its many virtues over several cups of tea a day or two later, maintaining that it had been worth every penny. Her daughter Joan whispered to me that she couldn’t say she agreed at all because the one thing it wasn’t was cosy and for her part she greatly appreciated the cosiness of its predecessor. She added that it was impossible to make proper toast with a tiled surround. Her mother said she didn’t need to make toast on a fork anymore because they now owned an electric toaster and Joan said it didn’t taste the same. Later my mother pointed out that Joan Bennett was still being Spoilt Rotten. You could tell by the way she wouldn’t stop whining on and on about toast not to mention the way she demanded to have her weekly bath in the kitchen rather than the scullery just so she could watch their new TV set at the same time. Privately I agreed with Joan but I didn’t say so because I could see there was no stopping a tiled surround invading our kitchen.

I was right and within a week the change had been organised with Porter, Putt & Fletcher in Gravesend and our cast iron stove was wrenched from the place where it had sat for more than a hundred years and deposited at the end of the garden awaiting the scrap metal merchant. In no time at all we were sporting a tiled surround and were never again to make proper toast or jacket potatoes or simmer soups for hours in winter time.

A word or two should be mentioned regarding the regular cleaning job that seemed, and undoubtedly was, quite a reckless undertaking in those years after the war. The cleaning of upper floor windows was not for the faint hearted but despite the risk involved every house proud woman was able to balance precariously on the narrow window sills whilst vigorously applying pink viscous Windolene to panes of glass with scrunched up sheets of newspaper. Strangely I was never fearful that my mother was going to fall into the street below, because no-one ever did and quite apart from that I saw her as potently powerful where cleaning was concerned. The cleanliness of windows was just as significant as applying Cardinal to a front step, almost a duty to the community. Only your nearest and dearest were likely to observe how often Zebo had been used on the kitchen stove simply because only relatives, and close friends were invited to step inside houses but every passer-by could see the state of windows and door steps. For that reason when new curtains were made, the patterned side was invariably hung to face the street so all and sundry could witness that the front room at your place had been freshly adorned and no expense had been spared. At least, that was the idea. Meanwhile those who sat inside the room experienced the back side of the drapes. This probably didn’t matter nearly as much as it might have done as we very rarely sat in our front room, using it only at Christmas or when very special visitors came calling.

Our lavatory was cleaned every week with Lavvo which I was told ensured it was spotless. It was attacked briskly with an ancient lavatory brush and my mother was not at all averse to pushing her hand around the S bend as far as it would go because what she could not abide was a filthy lavvy. Her older sister Mag diminished considerably in her estimation when she let that lovely new lavvy in that lovely new bathroom get into the kind of state that would have shocked the drawers off a duchess. It was a crying shame, I was told, and all for the want of a bit of bleach. Every time we went to visit I could tell she was itching to take to my oblivious aunt’s offending S bend. When the move had been made into the newly allocated council house in Iron Mill Lane, for a while my cousins had been told they should start calling their new lavvy the bathroom because after all it was in the bathroom. Our grandmother who lived conveniently across the road with several of the younger aunts observed that nobody was going to tell her what to call the khazi and added that when she was a girl in Bethnal Green it had been called the privy. Little Violet said that at school everybody called it the toilet and to use it you had to put your hand up and ask to be excused. Apparently it had taken quite a degree of school attendance before she realised that rule only applied when you were in the classroom and so had spent a lot of time during breaks trying to find a staff member who could excuse her.

The transition from Victorian terraced housing with inconveniently placed outside conveniences to ultra-modern council housing was challenging for some people and although Old Nan seemed, rather surprisingly, to take it in her stride, most of her daughters did not. At the houses of Aunts Mag, Maud and Martha, despite the bathroom now being adjacent to the bedrooms, for several years chamber pots remained under beds. Our chamber pot was known as a Po but my aunts usually referred to theirs as a Jerry and Uncle Harold called his a Gozunder. Old Nan, rather horrifyingly to me when I was small, referred to hers as a Piss Pot. Even when I was four years old that sounded rather vulgar to me because I was never allowed to use the word Piss.

It wasn’t just cleaning and toilet arrangements that made life more complicated back then. We seemed to live alongside a great many more pests than we do now. These days the sight of a marauding rodent causes a stir but then there was a tacit acceptance that vermin were just a part of life. I’m not suggesting that anyone thought they were amusing or added an entertaining dimension to life but on the other hand nobody complained too much. In summer time hundreds of flies invaded our kitchen and scullery and fly papers were hung from the ceiling and within days were spotted with black mini corpses. Spiders lurked in the corners of every room, especially so in the lavatory where they grew bigger and more menacing than elsewhere and earwigs that were supposed to stick to the backyard, often crept into the house where I was told they would crawl into my ears if I wasn’t careful and that was why they were called earwigs. I couldn’t really tell the difference between bees and wasps but I have a feeling that the airborne striped offender that stung me so painfully in the very centre of my right hand when I was three years old and busy purloining sugar from the kitchen cupboard, was in fact a wasp. I have been wary of wasps ever since and never made raids on the sugar again. Bees did not seem to come inside and only visited the gardens of those who grew flowers like Old Mrs Eves and Old Mrs Freeman and largely avoided those of us whose backyards were devoid of plant life.

We were plagued with mice at times and they could be heard scampering behind the walls late at night so my mother then laid traps baited with bits of dry bread. Old Nan said bugger feeding the bastards and placed mothballs in the kitchen corners instead because she said if there was one thing mice could not abide it was mothballs. In those days they were not considered dangerous items. The best deterrent as far as mice were concerned was most definitely acquiring a cat and so at various times we did so and then became free of mice almost overnight. When our irksome household mice were replaced by decidedly more irksome household rats one year, our cat Tom the Mouse Hunter became overnight a Rat Hunter Supreme and grew ever stronger and more intimidating on a diet of rodents. Tom was not a cat one could easily forge a loving relationship with being possessed of a decidedly unpleasant nature but he was infinitely preferable to Smudge next door who seemed terrified of the very pests he had been procured to purge.

In essence, like everyone else, we were not unduly alarmed by the wildlife around us and learned to cope with the various bugs, parasites and rodents intent upon sharing our cramped quarters. There were no enticing insect sprays on supermarket shelves to tempt us to wholesale slaughter because there were of course no supermarkets. None of us quite knew what to ask for at the hardware shop apart from mouse traps and fly papers and so the elimination progress was decidedly slow.

At our house we didn’t come across Flit Guns until crickets invaded the underside of the cast iron kitchen stove. Then the chirping was so intrusive that after three or four days my mother headed to Mrs Bodycombe’s Hardware Store in the High Street where she had been assured she would find the miracle of Flit. And it was indeed a miracle and thus the Crickets on our Hearth met a speedy death, as did almost anything else that could creep, crawl, or fly for the next week or so until the gun was exhausted. I often wonder what the long term consequences might have been. But of course back then we didn’t give a thought to consequences either to the environment or ourselves. You could say we were just not Green enough!

Wash Day Reminiscences

Monday was, without fail, always Wash Day even when it was raining, not just for us but for everyone around us as well. It wasn’t easy to opt out of Wash Day even if you wanted to, and not many would have wanted to. Even if the bedsheets were only changed on a fortnightly basis, and not many housewives would have admitted to such a housekeeping slip-up, it remained a fact that a family needed two changes of underclothing per person, per week. A regular wash day, therefore, was essential.
Along with the rest of England, Northfleet housewives were expected to wash on Monday and the neighbours might even enter into gossip if that didn’t happen. My mother would have definitely considered anyone avoiding the expectations of Monday to be slovenly which was a word she took to using a good deal. She might have described such a miscreant, as slummocky which had more of a ring to it and definitely conjured up the right picture in the mind’s eye. Either way, Wash Day was never missed in our house at least not as far as I can recall. And it started early both summer and winter before six with a fire lit under the scullery copper for the basic and necessary heating of water. Whites were churned vigorously in the copper, sheets, pillow cases and anything made from cotton. Little by little the modest terraced houses began to fill with the steam that would only begin to diminish by Thursday.

Each terraced dwelling had a copper in the scullery, every one brick-built with a small fireplace beneath and each came supplied with a wooden lid and a sturdy copper stick to aid the twenty minutes or so of churning. When I was small I was warned to keep well away from the copper when it was in use because it was considered a hazardous space. Dark stories were told of children who did not heed such warnings and reaped the terrible consequences. The only one I remember was the cautionary tale of the four year old boy who, when dismounting his tricycle, managed to lower his leg into the boiling water and thereafter walked with a limp. His name was Brian and I was told he had very nearly died of shock and so, for different reasons did his long suffering mother who had given him many a warning so when all was said and done, it wasn’t her fault poor soul; he should have listened.
While the whites were agitating, pans of water would be heated on top of the gas cooker for the dolly tub to be filled and the remainder of the wash to begin. Nightdresses, knickers, shirts and socks would now be rubbed against the washboard with the aid of Sunlight soap, bright yellow and looking fit for the job. My mother attired in a print overall, her hair covered in a bright checked scarf, sweat pouring down her face, would pause from time to time to sip from an enamel mug of tea. I would be sitting like a Good Girl on the scullery step and if the day was cold and the door to the backyard was closed, a great deal of the washday steam would have magically transformed itself into water that ran liberally over the walls but the scullery itself would be oddly, snugly, tropically balmy. So memorable was this Monday morning ambiance that on my first visit to Singapore decades later I was instantly, sharply reminded of York Road washdays past.

With luck on our side the arduous task of rinsing the soap from the piles of washing could begin by eight am when the Reckitt’s Blue Bag was added to the final rinsing water. It was a long time before I realized that the object of the Blue Bag was to make Whites appear as white as humanly possible before they were manhandled, piece by piece, into the terrifying jaws of the Mangle. Our Mangle, huge and made of wrought iron with wooden rollers, lived just outside the back door against the wall of the lavatory. In fact you had to pass it on every lavatory visit you made and it could be strangely comforting to bump into its solid hulk on moonless winter nights but on Wash Day it became a disturbing beast. It was a slightly complicated piece of technology in that the space between the rollers could be adjusted if you knew how. Nobody in our family had ever been initiated into the mysteries of fine-tuning its performance and I was constantly reminded of unfortunate children like Brian whose fate has already been detailed, wayward children whose fingers had been wrenched from their hands or flattened beyond recognition on account of foolish meddling with mangles. I lived in fear of joining their ranks and though I was a curious and often disobedient child, I curbed my enthusiasm for exploration of Mangles.

By noon, with a degree of sunshine and a modicum of luck the week’s wash would be tidily pegged to the line with pegs made by my grandmother from slim offcuts of willow that between washes I was allowed to play with as long as I put them all back in the peg basket when I had finished. As I grew a little older and was persuaded by my father to attempt to read difficult books like Little Women I learned that Meg had used a clothes peg nightly pinned to her nose in order to improve the shape. I found it strangely painful when I tried it myself and abandoned the idea when there was no perceptible change in shape on the third morning. Mostly I did not experiment much with the pegs and they were usually merely students in my School For Pegs or patients in my Hospital For Pegs. Later, as my brother grew older they at times became soldiers defending Kent from Roman invaders. We were not possessed of many toys.

Usually on Mondays, unless the day had been excellent for drying, we ate our tea of toast and dripping amidst still damp sheets and shirts hung from cords that criss-crossed the kitchen and forced us to duck and dive in order to avoid them. By morning with a degree of luck the Monday wash would be ready for ironing and by the time I was seven years old our family had become the very proud owners of an electric iron. As far as I can remember this enviable and convenient aid to modern housekeeping was proudly purchased from Frost’s in Northfleet High Street by my father to mark the birth of my baby brother in April 1947. It was definitely a step up from the flat irons of my earlier childhood. Nevertheless, rather inconveniently it had to be plugged into the light socket above the kitchen table which entailed mounting a chair and first removing the light bulb. This in turn meant that ironing could only take place in daylight hours and so it usually took place on Tuesday mornings. It was a hazardous process and sturdy shoes needed to be worn because somehow or other my mother had come to believe that shoes would protect her from death by electrocution. My cousin Margaret, ironing a school blouse was once thrown across the kitchen in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford simply because her feet were clad only in cotton socks. She could very well have been killed, at least that is what I was told and from that moment on, I also had a healthy respect for electric irons and to this day wonder if I should change my footwear before beginning the task.

Even though by Tuesday evening the week’s ironing was completed, the regular washday ritual was not totally concluded because the sheets and shirts still had to be aired and so they once again hung above us on the improvised indoor lines until they were safe to use. My mother believed that the consequences of wearing a damp liberty bodice would be dire and pneumonia would most likely result. Thankfully I have not inherited this particular conviction and my own children happily donned damp garments without noticeable health problems throughout their childhood.

In the 1940s, Wash Day and its aftermath was an exhaustive undertaking and considering this it was not entirely unreasonable that our clean clothes were rationed. Until I reached the age of not quite sixteen and was about to leave school I was never allocated more than two clean pairs of knickers and socks weekly and it simply did not occur to me to protest. One pink floral wynceyette nightdress was donned after each Saturday evening bath and not discarded until the following Saturday and when I grew older and attended Colyer Road Secondary School and Wombwell Hall, I was granted just one clean blouse weekly. This latter garment was decidedly grimy and slightly smelly by Thursday each week which was understandable as not much mid-week washing of necks and underarms took place. On the other hand back then most of us smelt the same, even those boasting brand new bathrooms on spanking new housing estates because old habits die hard as far as general cleanliness is concerned, at least that’s how it was then. And if this appears just a little distasteful from a modern viewpoint it helps to consider that a hundred years earlier the situation would have been even more dire and two or three hundred years ago simply doesn’t bear thinking about.
In 1952 at Colyer Road Secondary School during a history lesson that these days would more likely be called Social Studies, the enthusiastic young Supply Teacher urged us to speak with our grandparents about how life had changed over decades, ask our grandmothers what household tasks had been like when she was a young mother herself. I wasn’t all that keen so rather half- heartedly enquired of Old Nan what her own Wash Day had been like in those years before the first World War when she already had half a dozen small children. She said it had been not much trouble to her on account of The Bagwash. I never found out exactly what The Bagwash entailed and lacked the confidence to enquire how many clean underclothes she doled out weekly to her brood. I strongly suspected changes of clothing were few and far between.

There’s no doubt at all that the emergence of modern washing facilities in the form of modern bathrooms and automatic washing machines and dryers in every home has transformed the ease with which we can now monitor bodily odours and how many clean pairs of knickers we allow ourselves each week.

Reflecting Upon Down Syndrome Decades On

I had not given Brian Philpott a thought for years, not until a neighbour recently spoke of her young brother, a Down Syndrome sufferer. We discussed the need for inclusion and how over decades society’s attitude toward children with disabilities has inexorably changed for the better. Later I found myself thinking about Brian and wondering about our attitude toward him as he grew up in Shepherd Street.

Back then we knew nothing of chromosome abnormalities and had of course never heard of John Langden Down who apparently had first described the condition in 1862. Because of the features of the affected children he called them Mongoloid and in 1949, some ninety years later so did we. My mother said Brian was a Poor Little Bugger and wouldn’t live long because children like him never did and that all them Mongols were slow. It wasn’t until 1961, long after I had left the district and pushed all memory of him from my consciousness that scientists began to suggest that the term Mongolism had misleading connotations and had become an embarrassing term. It was dropped completely in 1965 and those with a connection to children with the condition had to learn overnight to describe them as having Down Syndrome. To be fair it probably wasn’t nearly as hard for those with an afflicted family member as it was for the rest of us. Most of us, with the exception of course of the medical profession and those training to be social workers, continued to describe children like Brian as Mongols. This meant that we were treated to hostile and superior looks or as time went on, the error of our terminology was pointed out to us.

But when we were children it was still perfectly acceptable for Brian to be referred to as a Mongol. He was supremely unaware of all this and a more cheerful and chirpy child would have been hard to find. He lived at number 60 Shepherd Street with his grandparents, Annie and Albert Philpott. He called Them Mum and Dad and for a long time I thought they were indeed his parents until I overheard Old Nan saying that his actual mother had Scarpered and who could blame her. This may or may or not have been true because Old Nan was well known for jumping to conclusions and as my mother was wont to point out, getting the wrong end of the stick.
What Brian may have lacked in intelligence he made up for in enthusiasm and was always more than anxious to join in any group game being played and happy to take on roles that the rest of us discarded on account of them being monotonous. Brian never tired of the tedious and the repetitive and was simply delighted to be accepted as part of the crowd, guarding camps, searching for lost balls and inexpertly keeping scores without argument and with a cheerful countenance. He loved being with each and every one of us and did not seem to attempt to analyse why it was that although he was willingly included in group games, singly it was harder for him to find a playmate, especially among the boys. The only one of us always agreeable to playing with Brian on a one to one basis was Kathleen Draper who lived a few doors away from him. He called her My Kath and loved her dearly, following a step or two behind her and obeying her every instruction. And Kathleen looked after him like a mother although she was only a year or so his senior, ensuring that from time to time he got Proper Turns in games and prepared to put up a fight on his behalf if anyone argued about it. Even in more complex games like What’s The Time Mr Wolf when nobody ever really wanted Brian to be the wolf, Kathleen would take his hand when he got muddled and tirelessly explain that it couldn’t always be Time to Eat you Up which was his favourite part of the ritual. And with her beside him, holding on to him tightly, he rose to the occasion and managed to remember.

I can’t remember Brian going to school with us so perhaps he went to a special class somewhere in the neighbourhood along with Elsie Coppins from Buckingham Road who was in a wheelchair because she couldn’t walk, or maybe he wasn’t required to attend at all. My mother said there was no point anyway because if you were like him you’d never learn to read and write because you simply wouldn’t have what it took. It stood to reason and it was his poor grandmother she felt sorry for. Nevertheless Kathleen was making firm attempts to teach Brian to read and he could already recognize B for Brian and K for Kath. She said she didn’t mind how long it took because it had to be done. Brian wanted to be a train driver and he would need to be able to read at the very least the names of the local stations. Even as a ten year old I understood why he loved her so devotedly.

St Botolph's School Remembered

I recall the staff at St Botolph’s School in the late nineteen forties with a certain amount of affection. I greatly admired Miss Honour who I saw as unbelievably glamorous when I was five especially after I overheard her comment that she thought I must be adopted because I was quite unlike my mother. I regarded Mrs Johnson a little more cautiously because she was not as easily fooled by the BBC accent I was trying to cultivate when I was six but on the other hand she gave me Enid Blyton stories to read. I was not quite as keen on Mrs Allen who threatened me with physical punishment when my father complained to her about my behaviour at home (despite the fact that she was heard to say I was as Good as Gold at school) but felt secure with Miss Biggs who helped me complete the doll’s bonnet I was trying to knit. Each of them were sound teachers and basically kind. All were eclipsed, however, by Mr Clarke in whose class we found ourselves for two wonderful years and whose teaching was at times inspiring and whose pupils without exception loved him dearly. The boys were particularly intrigued by his war record. He had been a fighter pilot during the war and was shot down and became a POW. This information did not emotionally move the girls nearly as much of course but Will Clarke was able to enthuse and motivate each one of us in a way that eludes most who decide to enter the teaching profession.

Friday afternoons were in particular an exciting time devoted to ideas and to books. Mr Clarke discussed with us all manner of interesting ideas such as the rights and wrongs of cannibalism and what human flesh might taste like. John Dyke wanted to know if he meant when it was raw or when it was cooked and Mr Clarke paused momentarily before assuring him that he meant when it was cooked. Even quiet and good Wendy Maxted who rarely said much raised her head at once and wanted to know exactly how it would have been cooked. A few of the more assertive and popular girls began to laugh but stopped when Mr Clarke treated that question seriously also and explained that he thought it might have been simmered in a cauldron with roots and vegetables and perhaps a few herbs. This cooking method and the resulting taste was then hotly debated until Mr Clarke said that he had heard that human flesh when cooked with care tasted a little bit like lamb. With that we were silenced although I found myself contemplating this interesting morsel of information on every future occasion when the Sunday roast happened to be lamb.

On one occasion he led us into a discussion as to whether or not children would ever be allowed to vote and if it was a good thing and if so which political paths we might pursue. He listened carefully to the reasons why our families were Labour or Conservative without passing comment. A substantial number of us surprisingly perhaps supported the Conservatives though one boy admitted to having a father who was decidedly Communist and believed in Communal Farms. The rest of us did not understand how that particular form of agriculture worked and Mr Clarke enthusiastically explained and the following Friday told us something of Russian History and how and why the 1918 revolution happened. Those of us who lost interest and became bored by these Friday afternoon debates were allowed to doodle or fall asleep without comment.

It was also a time when we were introduced to poetry – The Lady of Shallot, Daffodils, The Destruction of Sennacherib and were urged to read the Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome. And occasionally he would encourage us to write our own poetry if we felt so inclined. For these reasons though time passed I was never quite able to relinquish memory of Mr Clarke.

Six decades later Molly Freeman, then determinedly beginning to master the use of email, sent me an excited message because she had by an odd accident of fate involving an article about football in a local paper, rediscovered Will Clarke, by then in his nineties and living in The Midlands. We were ecstatic to make contact once again with the man who had deftly turned what might have been two completely ordinary primary school years into a time during which learning became distinctive and exceptional. And he, more than at ease with the intricacies of electronic messaging, communicated with each of us with enthusiasm and deliberated all aspects of those St Botolph’s days. We learned that his time at the school had not always been as uncomplicated as our own and that the loss of his teenage son in a road accident had all but paralysed him emotionally. We also began to understand that the demands placed upon him and the rest of the school staff by the most unpopular headmaster, Mr Cook,had made life anything but enjoyable and had caused him to examine frequently the reasons why he stayed.

This latter sentiment we certainly understood because if we found Will Clarke hard to forget, few of us who attended St Botolph’s School during those years have found it easy to forget the tyrannical Mr Cook. How this disturbing head teacher ever became involved in the business of educating the young is a mystery because he was truly a man as sadistic as Mr Clarke was compassionate and as terrifying as he was gentle, as poor an educator as he was inspirational . Now I find myself seriously wondering how and why he made the choice he did, what caused his alarming rages, and if he actually realized the degree of terror he instilled in us. And did he ever ask himself why it was that his pupils feared him as fervently as they loved Will Clarke?