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.

Sid Strong & Ducks In Flight

Gravesend Borough Market received its charter in 1268 and is in fact one of the oldest markets in the country. My mother said rather vaguely that it had been there since the year dot and Old Nan maintained it was definitely donkeys’ years ago that somebody had the good sense to set it up. I can’t say that I thought very much about the age of the place at the time of our many and regular visits there but later on when I came to realise that the construction of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul did not begin until 1455 I retrospectively began to see it in context. Not that I would ever suggest that the two markets could possibly be compared but it did make me stop and think about market charters which I hadn’t ever done previously.

We made a trip to the market most Saturdays and I always looked forward to it even if one or two of the aunts and my grandmother came with us. We would set off on the bus during the mid-morning and first of all embark upon a tour of the shops in New Road and a lot of time would be spent admiring what was in the butcher’s window and my mother might even make a purchase of half a dozen pork sausages. Aunt Mag was likely to dither a great deal and say she’d done all her Sunday dinner shopping already which remark might well result in Words between her and the sausage buyer because did she really believe that we were having sausages for our Sunday dinner? Could sausages, even the best pork ones, ever be described as a Sunday Roast? And later my mother would ruminate about the cheek of it especially since that saucy mare had finally made up her mind and gone in and bought a really lovely leg of lamb – having said she’d got all her Sunday shopping in! You wouldn’t credit it really would you? But then you never got the truth of any matter out of Mag and she was well-known for saying one thing and meaning another.

The frostiness might even last through the cups of tea and biscuits from the café that used to be near the old Woolworths building but by the time we got to the market family relationships were usually back on an even keel again. The stall I was most interested in was the second hand books one in the covered area just through and immediately beyond the bold, curving pediment upon which the date of the charter is given – 1268. That’s when Henry III granted the Manor of Parrock the right to hold a Saturday market and an annual fair. For years I believed this to be the original structure and was annoyed to find that it was erected in 1898 and replaced an earlier building because I wondered what the earlier building had been like. The rest of the family were disinterested in books so I was usually left at this point to browse alone after my grandmother loudly warned that I’d go blind with all that damn fool reading. I was usually allowed twenty minutes whilst the fabrics and bric a brac were examined and debated by the aunts and food items such as live eels possibly purchased by Old Nan and then placed to thresh around in the bottom of her mock leather bucket bag or sometimes, more alarmingly, in the bottom of a string bag.

We barely gave the east end of the market more than a cursory glance, and the Grade II Listed figure of Queen Victoria was largely ignored because invariably we had little interest in proceeding into Queen Street on a Saturday. Always the Saturday visits terminated in Market Square where immediately to our right we would find Strong’s Fancy Goods Ltd where the inimitable Sidney Strong the totally matchless market trader sold a wide range of china and glassware from the back of his lorry, aided by Young Gerald. Old Nan said that Young Gerald was his son and she knew that for sure because she’d been told by a cousin of Tubby Isaacs of Petticoat Lane fame. That was most probably not true because she was not someone who set a great deal of store by truth and anyhow Sid himself maintained that Gerald was his younger brother. A few years later when I had become a fully-fledged teenager and ran away from home I came across Strong’s Fancy Goods in Petticoat Lane myself and entered into conversation with Sid who tried to persuade me to return home. When I elected not to take his advice he took me with him on his weekly trip to buy china from manufacturers in Stoke-on-Trent. Later he drove me back to York Road and firmly deposited me on my home doorstep telling me I had a duty to my poor mother. At some stage the question about his relationship with Young Gerald was raised, in all likelihood by me and I was told unequivocally that Gerald was his youngest brother and he was sick to death of being asked that question.

Back in 1950 there was no real way of knowing the family relationships of market traders you had a passing Saturday acquaintance with for sure although for some reason we were all fascinated where the Strongs were concerned. However, all extraneous debate ceased once Strongy began to sell, launching with a great deal of energy into his familiar patter. Then the usual group of onlookers would gather at once, a large number of them not there to buy but simply as an admiring audience gathered shoulder to shoulder in anticipation whatever the weather.

There was no doubt that Strongy could hold the attention of a crowd, from the pre-schoolers in push chairs to the elderly leaning on their bamboo canes. Old Nan, generally more prone to criticism of salesmen rather than praise, admitted he was an Artiste and he should be on the bleeding stage and that was a fact. She’d certainly seen far worse at Collins Music Hall years ago and had to pay for the pleasure what’s more. Meanwhile Strongy, seemingly oblivious to his entertainment value expertly tossed an entire dinner set into the air and caught it again without as much as a resultant crack in a side plate and beamed around at the spectators delighting in the intakes of breath and spontaneous bursts of applause. It was at this point with an appreciative crowd in the palm of his hand that his patter would become his spiel, and pulling himself to his not inconsiderable full height it would rapidly morph into a kind of patois between himself and Gerald that he knew with satisfaction we would not understand a word of.

Although china was the main feature of his regular stock base in fact a wide range of other household goods reliably surfaced from the depths of the truck and at one time or another almost everyone you spoke to had made an important purchase from the Strongs. My grandmother was adamant that she had been a regular customer at their Sunday pitch in Petticoat Lane for years and particular buys in the past had been what she indelicately described as really lovely china Piss-pots, each one a work of art. Certainly each one of the many Constant daughters had been presented with one of these then essential items on the occasion of their weddings from Mag in the twenties right up to August 1939 when my mother was the last to walk down the aisle. Nobody expected Freda, the baby of the family to ever find a husband because of her multiple personality problems and tendency to petty crime so somehow or other she was never counted as part of the marriage stakes. Lovely pieces of work those chamber pots had been though and Old Nan frequently reminded us that you just didn’t see Piss-pots like that these days with all the new-fangled Bakelite and plastic. You didn’t seem to get the same kind of decoration around the sides now did you? The one she gave Nell and Bern at the very advent of World War Two had been dusky pink and had been adorned with little golden cherubs flying alongside white doves. My mother was never amused when this story was repeated and when the giver was out of earshot said that if the truth be known she had been ashamed to receive such a gift but at the time had no option but to join in the laughter and put up with all the smutty jokes that went hand in hand with weddings. Her honest opinion was thank the Lord for plastic and long may it last.

The fact that Sidney Strong made regular appearances in Petticoat Lane on Sundays was at one time something of a surprise to us because we definitely saw him as belonging to Gravesend and of course our loyalty was first and foremost to our local market but as Aunt Martha pointed out, he had to make a living the same as the rest of us didn’t he? And some market men were able to make a very good living by anyone’s standards if former stall holder Alan Sugar is anything to go by. Perhaps Strongy never quite reached Sugar’s dizzy heights but over the years it was obvious that all things considered he certainly wasn’t on his uppers. In 1956 when he was seen at Meopham Green in The Cricketers my car conscious cousin Harold couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to have bought himself a brand-new Ford Fairlane and such a vehicle he pointed out would have set him back a bob or two and no mistake.

Certainly Strong’s Fancy Goods basic stock became more diverse as time went on and aptly accommodated the household needs of the local clientele. There were dinner sets and canteens of cutlery for the newly- weds together with bedlinen and towels, followed by pushchairs and baby baths a year later in time for the first infant and by the mid 1950s glamorous items like electric blankets or even tea making machines to be ostentatiously purchased by young marrieds like my cousin Margaret who was said to have more money than good sense.

Listening to Strongy launch into his sales patter was mesmerizing because it wasn’t just a matter of raising an arm and saying that you would have one of them there electric blankets for two pounds ten shillings before they all went, or even determinedly waving the required sum at the seller. Strongy was absolutely not going to let his beloved blankets go that easily and he always elected not to take your money immediately because strangely he preferred to slash the price to two pounds, then astonishingly to one pound ten shillings. He was just giving them away at thirty bob and that was a fact. But then again - No he’d rather be robbed than take thirty bob from you and they would have to go at a guinea a piece! By this stage anticipation was high and instead of selling two blankets he’d be selling ten then twenty and be quickly down to the very last one. And who would take the last one off his hands? Then invariably if someone elected to do so he would find another last one in the back of the truck for the disconsolate and disappointed few fearful of remaining blanket-less.

And within this odd post war mixture of hyped selling and East End humour Sid Strong briskly and proficiently sold a wide variety of household essentials to the families of Gravesend and Northfleet at prices to suit every pocket. There was no doubt whatsoever that he was an Artiste if ever there was one and even my mother agreed with that. Old Nan said he put her in mind of Gus Elen years ago at the old Hackney Empire. He’d been known as the Coster Comedian and famous for ditties such as Wait Until The Work Comes Around that made you fall off your seat laughing. Gus Elen was always far superior to Harry Champion for instance in her opinion – but Old Strongy of Gravesend Market was one out of the bag though he never went in for singing of course. And it was for all these reasons together with items such as alarm clocks and toasters that the Saturday visits to the Market Square were a regular outing for so many members of the Constant family as of course they were to hundreds of other families in the district.

One particular Saturday trip had been organised by the collective of aunts to celebrate a significant birthday for their mother and a fish and chip tea was going to be part of the treat possibly even at The Reliance Fish Rooms but before that could happen a trip to Strong’s Fancy Goods was critical. My grandmother had expressed a great desire to own a group of china ducks to fly above the mantelpiece of the house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford and she had been reliably informed that Strongy had a batch of them, suitable in every way. My mother said as far as she was concerned she wouldn’t give china ducks house room and they were definitely not worth the money you had to fork out for them but if that’s what Mum wanted that’s what Mum would get because there was no arguing with her once she got the bit between her teeth.

We waited patiently through the Finest Porcelain tea sets, sherry glasses packaged in neat half dozens, turquoise or navy if you fancied it candlewick bedspreads, easily mistaken for genuine tiger skin rugs, baby-bath-and-potty sets in pink or blue, shopping trolleys on wheels and walkie-talkie dolls with blonde brushable hair and at long last just when Old Nan’s feet were killing her and her legs threatened to hold her no longer the ducks in flight that were easily attached to any wall, appeared. And as with everything else when Strongy first demanded thirty bob apiece we knew without doubt that within five minutes that sum would be reduced to twelve and sixpence much to everyone’s pleasure and approval.

Later on as she sat upright and straight as ever over her halibut and chips my grandmother rather uncharacteristically said it was most definitely a blinder of a birthday celebration. She was glad she’d worn her coat with the fake fur collar because as birthdays go she hadn’t had a better one since the time her Edgar, God rest his soul, took her to Brighton and they were thrown out of The Grand though for the life of her she couldn’t remember how or why that happened.

It was all of fifteen years later when one of my cousins drew my attention to the fact that Strong’s Fancy Goods Ltd had been very much in the news and in fact the talents of the incomparable Sid had at long last been recognised with him winning a silver cup and voted the best market auctioneer in Europe. Photos of Sid in Amsterdam holding his cup and looking very dapper in a silk mohair suit of the type later seen on the Kray Twins during their trial at The Old Bailey, had been in all the papers and what’s more he had appeared on television to say a few words. My mother told me he’d said more than a few of course because he definitely had the gift of the gab but he’d always been a good sort and no wonder he’d done well. And did I remember the time he brought me back when I ran away, driving miles out of his way? And what about them lovely ducks we’d bought from him years ago for Old Nan that she still had flying over the fireplace. Not a mark on them and good as new because they were real quality. My brother, sitting at the kitchen table and idly turning the pages of a magazine called Wildlife murmured that if you looked at them properly you would see that they were not actually ducks of course – they were Canada Geese but we ignored him.

A Bird Called Kairo

It didn’t occur to me to question where the bird came from, not back then at the turn of the 1970s. I was the very opposite of curious yet I knew it was improbable that it had been found in the average pet shop. It would have even been unlikely to happen upon one in that extraordinary Pet Department that once nestled in the far corner of the fourth floor of Harrods where I once bought a hamster that inexplicably perished on the way home. They of course gave us our money back. You could get all manner of odd creatures at Harrods. It was rumoured that in 1933 Noel Coward bought an alligator there to surprise a friend for Christmas and as recently as 1967 it had been possible to purchase a lion cub. But there were no Kestrels as far as I recall and possibly that was because they simply weren’t popular. I could certainly understand that.

The bird I now refer to had been given the name Cairo for some reason now long forgotten and Cairo with a K rather than a C – Kairo. Now I begin to think about it the most likely reason for Bernard’s possession of it was that he filched it from the nest among Alice the Falconer’s window boxes. He certainly would not have bothered seeking the permission of those with Authority even had he had been required to because his obsession to possess one became overwhelming. At times I wondered why this was because it was he who told me that the bird had for hundreds of years occupied a lowly status in falconry and in the middle ages was spoken of derisively as the Knave. In the late 1960s the Barry Hines novel about Billy Caspar in his cheerless Northern town finding and training such a bird inspired him further and he read and re-read the book, becoming even more glued to Ken Loach’s film a year or so later. He began to refer to the Kestrel in a strangely soft voice by its old country name of Windhover - therefore Kairo’s appearance in his life was not altogether unexpected.

I was with him when he first met Alice in her 20th floor council flat somewhere in South London and I was only there because his wife-at-the-time, Janice, refused to go with him despite the fact he had been voluble to me and my partner-at-the-time, Vidar, about Janice being his Best Friend and that he simply would not be able to cope with life without her. Janice said that kind of talk was always a bad sign. Someone, she pointed out sensibly, had to stay home in the flat above the Painting & Decorating Store in Camden Passage and look after the baby. She was absolutely not prepared to subject the child to yet another jaunt into the further reaches of suburbia in search of strange and anomalous species. Vidar had expressed a similar lack of interest so that’s how it came that just the two of us climbed twenty flights of stairs because the lift was not functioning on an unusually chilly late May evening.

Alice was a small bird-like woman herself, in her sixties with tightly permed hair and a husband in a wheelchair on account of his back. She was waiting for the Council to rehouse her or, alternatively, ensure that the lift could be relied upon because the top floor was not what anyone would call convenient for wheelchair living though it did of course have a splendid view. She told us that it was the third year in a row that the birds had raised a family in her window boxes and she’d never heard of Kestrels. When Bernard spoke of falcons and hawks and birds of prey she looked alarmed and wondered if the cat was safe with them though they’d never shown much interest in it to be completely honest. That year there were five chicks for them to care for and she had felt concerned for them and even offered them budgie seed which they did not care for so she was trying them on bread soaked in warm milk but they’d turned out to be fussy eaters. Bernard looked horrified at the described diet and spoke of the importance of trying to maintain their natural diet of voles or mice or bats or shrews and failing these culinary favourites, perhaps worms and insects. Alice looked equally aghast and blinked rapidly whilst the husband in the wheelchair turned up the volume on the television and said feeding wild birds was a damn fool idea if ever he’d heard one and if they wanted bread and milk they’d make bloody sure they knew what time the milkman drove past.

The objects of the discourse meanwhile, hunched in their home among the petunias and geraniums interspersed with the mint for the Sunday roast, looked guarded, wary and later Bernard said it was more than likely because they were expecting yet another onslaught of indigestible budgie seed. I could not help noticing that he looked a little cautious himself as he bent to examine them and there was just the slightest suggestion of a tremor in his hands. He was talking about falcons being smaller birds than hawks and that they killed their prey quite differently and how to tell the female from the male. The male, he whispered, was the one with the blueish greyish head and the female was the bigger one, the one that was a bit browner. The male had bright yellow legs and feet – could I see that? I couldn’t but I agreed that I could. When I whispered back that I had never seen one before he reminded me that Little Nanny of Hamerton Road had surely had a stuffed one under a glass dome in her parlour and did I not remember that? In any case he said, they were widespread throughout the country except perhaps on Shetland where there were no voles. Were there voles in South London I wondered but he seemed to think that didn’t matter particularly because voles were not absolutely vital – they would easily take sparrows if needs be. There was a lot of goodness in a sparrow from a kestrel’s point of view.

Somehow it happened that a day or two later we went back to Alice’s flat with a reporter and photographer from the local newspaper and had our photos taken alongside Alice and the birds that the following week appeared under the headline Alice of Crompton Court – Falconer Extraordinaire! She definitely thought that the publicity might help with the problem of the non-functioning lift and perhaps it did because I don’t remember having to face the twenty flights after that though I know we visited Alice on frequent occasions during that early Summer.

It was a few years after his acquaintance with a complete family of falcons that my brother made an odd request of me that I was reluctant to agree to. Would I be prepared to stay at his new home in Chatham, Kent to take care of a pet bird and his small son whilst he and his wife spent a few days in Scotland in search of eagles? I had a small son of my own at this stage and thought it might be fun for the children to spend time together and a pet bird was not going to be too much trouble. I think I might have envisaged something diminutive in a cage. I was definitely not expecting Kairo and was dismayed to find that the bird lived in the spare room adjacent to the kitchen, on a perch arrangement to which it was tethered. Even more alarming was the fact that I was expected to perform care rituals such as Loosening the Jesses and offering portions of food that absolutely must be as fresh as possible and have a measure of roughage attached.

For my convenience a dead mouse had already been dissected into Kestrel sized pieces and was in the fridge beside the left over chicken. Before I even made the query I was sternly advised that the chicken was not also destined for the bird because Kestrels are not keen on cooked food – the chicken was for me and the children. If I could also manage to fly the bird I should not be surprised if it managed to catch something it particularly fancied. It was apparently inordinately fond of bats. In the interim when Kairo finished the mouse in the fridge I could cut up a wild rabbit, it was suggested because they were suicidal thereabouts and easy to run down at night in the headlights of the mini-van - and if I did so, to definitely not discard the fur. I said nothing though my heart was heavy.

I would have been more than willing to give the creature a chance because it wasn’t as if I was entirely against wildlife per se but it seemed to display an immediate resentment of me and scowled in so threatening a manner that I knew without question that our relationship was not going to be easy. Patrick, then aged about three was cautiously asking his older cousin where the actual pet bird was. Not, he qualified, the angry looking one tied up on the ledge but the pet bird we were going to look after. The one, he added hopefully, that would be in a cage and Merlin, completely accustomed to all that the avian world could possibly produce within the confines of a small terrace house in Chatham, obligingly explained the situation. He clarified knowledgeably for one who had not yet reached school attendance age that falcons never lived in cages and the only ones he was familiar with lived on ledges to which they were attached just as Kairo was at that very moment.

And so Bernard and Janice left I felt in a somewhat hurried manner in search of eagles. With the children at a safe distance in the doorway of the spare room I scrutinized the bird and tried to recall the detailed instructions as to how the falconer’s glove was to be used. I knew without doubt that things would ultimately go wrong. It was though a day or two before the situation completely deteriorated and during that time we three had proffered regular bits of raw mouse with the aid of kitchen tongs and congratulated ourselves when the offerings were rapidly consumed by the bird. The acceptance of the food might have been what gave me a false sense of security, a boost in confidence. I too might become a falconer and in any case why would I be afraid of a mere bird? Alice of Crompton Court after all had seemed quite at ease with her regular window box guests.

The problems began when somehow or other the bird got loose and although I tried diligently I could not persuade it to return to the ledge where it had originally been tethered. I’ve forgotten the details of how the calamity occurred but occur it did and no amount of tasty mouse morsels were going to lure it back to where our Chatham acquaintance began and I was led a merry dance throughout the small house, from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom and back again. Followed by the excited pre-schoolers I pursued it relentlessly attempting to bribe it with promises of raw bat just as soon as I could locate one. I consulted the various books on wild birds that proliferated the bookshelves because this of course was long, long before the advent of Google but nothing would persuade it to behave with anything like decorum.

In despair and during a hot chocolate break I gently enquired of my small nephew what his father might do at this stage should he find himself quite unable to catch a reprobate bird of prey. After a long pause he indicated he had no idea because to his knowledge such a thing had never happened and Kairo was a model of good behaviour with his father. He added helpfully that he had once seen his grandmother throw a teacloth over her budgie when it misbehaved so it would think it was night and go to sleep. It would indeed be wonderful if Kairo could be persuaded to sleep. With determination we began to throw tea-cloths but this activity was viewed with antagonism and the bird simply became more hyperactive. A few moments later when he perched precariously on the frame of a montage of family weddings sending them crashing onto the stairs he vengefully seemed to regard this as entirely our fault and withdrew once more to the kitchen where storage jars marked Rice and Vermicelli were also heard to clatter from their rightful place. So we abandoned the teacloth idea though Merlin assured me it had worked with Cheeky the Budgie.

I’m now unsure when it was I rang the local police station in despair – was it after two days of the Loose Kestrel or simply one? The constable on Desk Duty was quite matter-of-fact and called Dave. Kestrel-on-the-loose was it? Contrary creatures Kestrels could be. As it happened he was a bird man himself and even fancied himself as a bit-of-a-falconer so when he finished his shift he would be happy to pop round and see if he could help. Pop round he did, all burly reassuring six feet four inches of him. And once he donned the falconer’s glove, Kairo seemed to suddenly tire of the game that had so tormented me and swooped down from his temporary perch on the topmost bookshelf atop of British Birds of Prey and settled upon it. Dave worked wonders with the mysterious jesses, speaking softly to the creature and advising me that I would be wise to keep a better eye on him but if I had any more trouble I should not hesitate to call him again.

Of course there is no need to elaborate on how delighted I was with the return of the eagle hunters the following evening. I didn’t tell them the full story about Dave of course but mentioned that Kairo was probably homesick for the top floor flats at Crompton Court if in fact that had been his birthplace. For some reason he had not seemed completely happy or enjoy life the way a Kestrel should in the spare bedroom. Bernard was talking about eagles and absently stroking a wing feather I had not noticed on the kitchen floor but of course I wasn’t listening - I could not wait to return to London!

Years later when my brother had long since moved on to his second-wife-Irene and my small nephew had long grown to manhood and probably forgotten all about the time in Chatham when three of us engaged in an extraordinary Kestrel hunt, I happened to read a wildlife article about the sudden and odd change of breeding habit that had seen Kairo and his antecedents of several years develop a proclivity for high rise Council flats living. The writer thought it possible that Alice’s first pair had simply mistaken her window box at Crompton Court for a more convenient and customary clifftop. And possibly that is what happened.

When Your Face Doesn't Fit

I had never heard of Ringing Permits until I was well into my teens. I didn’t know that there were enthusiasts who spent a great deal of time putting tags or rings on birds for a variety of reasons and even when the reasons were explained to me at a later stage I couldn’t really work up much enthusiasm for the idea. On the other hand my ornithologicaly obsessed brother demonstrated a great deal of enthusiasm. For some time, and for the life of me I cannot now remember when the Ringing Permit preoccupation began, he was most anxious to become a member of the British Trust for Ornithology and be granted the required permission to put plastic identification tags onto the legs of birds. His uninformed and largely disinterested family couldn’t for the life of them see the attraction although as hobbies go it was relatively harmless and kept him nicely away from diversions that might well prove more damaging and possibly even shameful for the rest of us. Unhappily the activities that were to harm his reputation were already sitting in the future mapped out for him so perhaps no matter what hobbies were allowed there was no real chance of changing that.

The only problem that seemed to emerge was, our mother said, as plain as the nose on your face and it was clearly down to his face not fitting. She said this once she learned that if you wanted to be welcomed into the particular fraternity that so attracted him it paid to be just a bit posh if you could manage it. No-one in their right mind would have described any member of our family as remotely posh so you could say a distinct disadvantage existed from the very start and it was never going to be easy. On the other hand what we lacked in poshness we perhaps made up for in determination.

The ringing scheme in Britain had started in 1909 and was really a combination of schemes, one instigated by a certain Harry Forbes Witherby and the other by Arthur Landsborough Thomson. A third scheme launched by Country Life Magazine also began around this time but WW1 intervened and by the 1930s all these systems had morphed onto one – the British Trust for Ornithology known by those familiar with it as simply the BTO.

In its earliest years it seems that the BTO pioneers simply set out to find answers to some of the most basic questions of the time. Where did those birds arriving in summer actually spend the winter? Where did the winter visitors spend the summer? Where did they breed? Back in the earliest days of these studies, even the migration routes were only realised from observations of groups preparing for journeys in Spring and Autumn and at one time there was even a suggestion that swallows spent their winters at the bottom of ponds. Old Nan for one firmly believed that. From her point of view it seemed a likely alternative to the far-fetched idea that they would embark upon a journey of thousands of miles. Apparently the first recovery of a ringed swallow came in December 1912 as far away as South Africa. This caused astonishment to Harry Witherby reporting in British Birds, Volume 6 who noted that it seemed to him quite extraordinary that a bird that bred in the far west of Europe should have somehow reached the South-East of Africa. Information gathering regarding swallows and where they spent their winters henceforth became a trendy pastime that attracted the middle classes and those emulating them.

Bernard was certainly captivated by these awe inspiring avian journeys and became ever more determined to join the ranks of those considered trustworthy and responsible enough to document them for the purposes of posterity via the possession of a Ringing Permit. But achieving that goal took much longer than he could have possibly anticipated on account of his face not fitting. He thought it might be to do with the fact that the efficient funding of the organisation relied upon donations from prominent citizens in various areas and as he grew older he was fearful that those in and around the Thames Estuary might well be too familiar with his unhappy history as a Gravesend butcher’s assistant and the rapid termination of that employment. Securing an early record for what was then termed Robbery With Violence did little to enhance anyone’s reputation and was an abomination as far as many of the Good and the Great of Gravesend were concerned. It was a definite problem that at that particular time a cluster of them were avid bird enthusiasts.

Old Nan did not endear herself to any of us back then by pointing out that being somewhat Light Fingered in general did not help matters when it came to creating a good impression with Toffs. As she was undoubtedly Light Fingered herself this observation was never likely to be received well and my mother steadfastly insisted that it was more to do with his face not fitting than anything else and what’s more you could never really tell in advance how your face was likely to be received. Luckily as time went on things changed and bird ringing became less the province of the middle classes and eventually presented in many guises from individuals in urban areas to large groups over a wide geographic area. It was no longer quite as necessary to make absolutely certain that you had a spotless reputation. Ages eventually ranged from under ten to over eighty and of course in due course the much coveted Permit was granted despite the fact that the earlier transgressions did not simply disappear and the reported habit of light fingered-ness definitely remained.

Bernard saturated himself in more and more stories of awe inspiring migrations and even as recently as 2015 told me in some excitement that a Sand Martin ringed at a Hampshire colony was re-captured by the very same ringer the next winter in Morroco! These remarkable recoveries graphically illustrated impressive and regular journeys that for the truly addicted are hard to overlook although for the uninitiated sometimes the detail is difficult to truly appreciate. I still struggle to understand why it was so unpredictable that an Arctic Tern should fly into a Japanese whaler off Antarctic pack ice thus finding notoriety as the only BTO ringed bird to be found at a Southern latitude higher than the Northern latitude at which it was ringed. Why should it not do so if it so chose?

I learned these facts bit by bit over time whether I wanted to or not because every conversation with my brother over at least two decades was peppered with them. I was told that as the ringing scheme itself grew in size and in age then so did the recorded ages of the focus of its very existence. Apparently very few wild birds reach anything like their potential age simply because too many factors work against them. They deal with not only accidents and predators but weather, disease, starvation and old fashioned bad luck. This came as no surprise to Aunt Mag and Old Nan also privy to this particular monologue. It was their opinion that birds were a bit like the rest of us because we could all do with a bit more good luck. That aside, some of the longevities seemed quite staggering. A Manx Shearwater had apparently recorded an age of 51 years, a Razorbill 42 years, an Oystercatcher 40 years and a Pink-footed Goose 39 years. These records seemed even more remarkable when the vast distances covered in their lifetimes were considered. The Manx Shearwater from Wales would have spent all of 51 winters off the coast of Argentina thus covering 1.5 million kilometres just travelling to and fro.

Although Bernard quickly realised that the ringing process was carried out by those with skill who had the utmost consideration for the welfare of their feathered friends he quickly became a vocal opponent of the most frequently used method, the mist net. These were erected between poles and designed to catch birds in flight. It was apparent that they could only be removed safely by the most experienced ringers. The problem seemed to be that from time to time the procedure resulted in the death of many birds and he was thus far more attracted to the idea of ringing chicks in the nest and justified this standpoint by saying that at least the precise age and origins was then known.

In spite of the fact that his views did not always win him friends he served an elongated apprenticeship under the close supervision of others and eventually learned the essential abilities that involved the safe and efficient catching and handling of birds, the identification, ageing, measuring and record keeping. The only setback seemed to be that on each occasion that his permit needed to be renewed there was invariably rather more delay in the process than he felt was usual or necessary. Our mother shook her head knowingly on every occasion this happened, bent over the current piece of knitting she was involved in and said she had told him over and over again it was on account of his particular face and that was a fact no matter how reliably he turned up at 5 am on the North Kent Marshes.

It was certainly another fact that Bernard had always been drawn to the Northfleet and Gravesend marshland and throughout his ringing period had diligently progressed through the study of a variety of Estuary migrants together with tits and finches on bitter cold winter mornings. During the breeding season of warblers he was reliably on site at least thirty minutes before those whose faces had always fitted. His conscientious attentiveness eventually paid off and when he suggested that he was more than anxious to make the leap to owl chicks in nest boxes and hawks of every persuasion after some discussion he was allowed to do so. He began to think that perhaps in time he would even have the good fortune to tag a Golden Eagle.

I was definitely aware of his ambition regarding the Golden Eagle. I knew that from the time he first became aware of its existence he had nursed a desire to become more acquainted with it. I fully understood that it was the Golden Eagle that drew him so frequently to the North of Scotland and that eventually became the prime reason for him making his home there in the last ten years of his life. His wife on the other hand, uprooted from the comfort of the Kentish village surrounded by friends and family, took longer to come to terms with it and called it an Obsession. It was clear that pleasing everyone was impossible.

School Reports From Way Back When!

Having rediscovered my school reports from Wombwell Hall a few days ago, I have been glued to them! That’s clearly what a global Lockdown is likely to do and admittedly this sudden surge of interest has been magnified by the plethora of wounded comments emerging from my laptop and revolving around Miss Hoffman who sounds like the headmistress from hell. Fortunately for me, this legendary Principal arrived after my time and presumably directly followed the rather less brutal Miss Fuller. Although I was greatly in awe of Miss D Fuller and now wonder if she might have been Dorothy or Dierdre or even Demelza - and was certainly filled with dread when sent to her for something like a uniform breach, I cannot recall any direct sadism at her hands. My mother cautiously admired her but regularly commented in a low voice on what she termed her Mannishness! During that transition period when the old order changed there was an overhaul of the school uniform because in my day it revolved around green gored skirts and cream blouses. A couple of years after I left it seems to have become blue.

Analysing the end of term comments on the now yellowed and slightly musty pages issued by the Kent Education Committee in the early part of the 1950s, I see clearly I was never going to be a runaway success academically. Considering that I would always have placed English as my most favourite subject I have no memory whatsoever of Miss MMH who appeared to be Form 1G’s first English teacher. Well that is almost true because I do know that it was she who put to me the horrifying question in the very first week or two of that very first term. It came out of the blue, asked in front of the entire class and I was both startled and embarrassed. Was anything worrying me she wanted to know – did I have any pre-occupying concerns?

I think I had been staring out of the window, across the wide park towards the field where another junior class was attempting to master the rudiments of hockey. Whatever was happening in Miss MMH’s English class at that time was clearly of little interest to me but had she asked me the question in a less public manner I might now recall more about her. It’s unlikely that I would have revealed any of the numerous anxieties in my thirteen year old life because at that age the last thing you want is counselling from your English teacher but a little more sensitivity might well have prompted a place in memory for her at the very least. The trouble is I suppose that schools did not really do Sensitivity in a big way back then.

Now had it been Miss SMH who queried my state of mind I would have understood both the question and the inattention much better. Miss S M Hart taught us Arithmetic, a subject I both feared and detested. She notes that I found her subject Difficult, later that I was a Slow Worker, later still that I should try to learn the Basic Principles. I had no idea what she was talking about. She was a broad, angular woman with iron grey hair in tight sausage curls at the nape of her neck, sometimes held in place with a hairnet and she wore a great deal of Prussian Blue; suits with military style jackets. She did a lot of staring into the middle distance herself when she spoke of matters other than mathematics and of aircraft in particular which appeared to be one of her favourite subjects. It was years later that someone told me she had in fact been one of those extraordinarily courageous women who delivered Spitfires and Hurricanes around the country during WW2. I so wish I had known that at the time, that she had once had once led such an adventurous life. I might even have concentrated harder in her classes because anything is possible.

Another subject I found extraordinarily difficult was French, taught by Miss SMS – the infamous Miss S. Smith who was also predetermined to eventually hold me up to ridicule when I revealed to the woman we all thought was her cousin – Miss K Smith, that my great ambition was to become a famous actress. Strangely I did not hold the rather wonderful Miss KS responsible in any way for this interlude of horror. Her putative cousin, Miss S also taught hockey and appears to have thought I was a promising player which only shows that she too was not concentrating as hard as she might have been.

A woman I grew to detest was Miss DKS, she of the tiny and neat handwriting and lilac knitwear. Miss D Springate taught Geography and I might well have done better at identifying the rivers of the world had we got on better. I might even have later understood that Costa Rica might well have been a desirable holiday spot but it was not in Spain. I can’t remember now when we first came head to head but we did so regularly and I have memories of being quite openly rude to her. She must have been delighted when I was absent for more than a month with Chicken Pox during the Summer term of 1955 and she therefore did not have to make cautiously negative remarks alongside the lowest grade she dared to give me. Fortunately the more pleasing Miss W Wood noted that the only reason I had not been placed in an exam position for shorthand and typing that term was merely because of the absence – but I had worked hard and not been unduly hindered by my illness. Directly below these heartening remarks Miss PHR, whoever she was, notes that my work in her Accounts class was erratic which I still feel was unfair of her under the circumstances. Had the woman not noticed I had been missing for weeks? A few months later she observed that I had little interest in the subject. I imagine it became obvious to me that Accounts was simply a form of Arithmetic in disguise.

I remember Miss MJE quite well, Miss Eatch our form teacher for several terms and our History teacher. She was tearful with big breasts and often wore blouses that should have been a size bigger. Perhaps she simply bought them in haste, unwilling to draw attention to her breast measurement by trying them on, and then reluctant to return them. We were cruel and reduced her to tears on more than one occasion which she did not deserve. None of us could have been all that interested in her subject and I see that I once came third in the term examination but was still only given a B grade. Perhaps she had not quite forgiven me for leading a small rebellion of some kind against her.

I also recall Miss EN perhaps only because she was also our form teacher for two terms. Miss E Norman had a loud voice, a country accent and taught Science. She was astonished that we could not identify Romney Marsh Sheep and didn’t know what Animal Husbandry was. Her name I feel might have been Elaine or even Elspeth.

Though I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Wombwell Hall and was completely in love with the old house the adoration in no way extended to the educational opportunities being offered me and have little memory of many of the staff. A Miss SMM felt I definitely needed to concentrate more in Music, yet another Music Teacher, a Miss MB said I showed no interest in the subject. An Art teacher with attractive calligraphic initials – HMK, that still manage to jump from the page made comment that I needed to work more thoughtfully and vigorously and months later that I was still making no improvement whatsoever.

Safe to say I was not a good student. Perhaps I was just too consumed with the house itself, the sweeping cantilevered staircase, the lofty library ceiling, the tall windows with tantalizing views, the narrow back stairs that only the staff members were allowed to use. Caught once on this forbidden staircase by no less than Miss Fuller herself I even dared to query why it was we students were not allowed to use it and added that in the heyday of the building surely it would have been the wide staircase in the hall that was prohibited. I had so frequently visualized maids enveloped in linen overalls scurrying up and down with trays of morning tea for the gentry whilst girls dressed in velvet and satin used the much more magnificent flight at the front of the house. Although I did not verbalise this picture of late Victorian life the Headmistress looked at me sharply as if trying to judge if my remark necessitated a threat of a detention before saying that the narrow back staircase was in sad need of repair and until that work could be carried out the less people walking on it the better. She even half smiled. She was most definitely no Miss Hoffman!

Miss Sands of Wombwell Hall

Looking back on those largely halcyon days of memory at Wombwell Hall I no longer know whether the staff member I have locked into recall as Miss Sands the Religious Education Teacher might have actually been Mrs Sands. As this thought somewhat strangely occurred to me at 3 am and as I still have all my relevant School Reports I even spent some time searching through the various comments made during the time I was there but she always designated herself as simply MLS. And before you mention it, yes of course I realise this is quite neurotic behaviour. She may have been Margaret Louise or Mary Leonie or maybe something much more innovative. It’s hard to know after so many years but what I do know is that throughout my several years attending her classes and feeling that I benefited from her tutelage it was only in the final term that I shone in any way because it was then that I came top in the Spring Term Examination. It was the first and only time I had come top in anything at all, either before or since so little wonder that it is committed to memory. To be fair I think Miss Sands was as surprised as I was.

Until that significant result her comments on my Reports had hovered around remarks noting that with added application I had done better recently or even that I had worked with interest at a particular time but when I unexpectedly excelled she noted that I had not merely worked hard but done extremely well as my final examination result attested. The sudden success was bewildering as far as I was concerned and I later sensibly came to assume that it had something to do with the more academic students having little interest in matters pertaining to religion whereas I could always be relied upon to become quite engrossed in the idea of a Special Being and all the ideas both metaphysical and logical that accompanied His presence. I had not at that time yet considered that God might be a woman. I was too engrossed in wondering if any particular idea or ideal connected to spirituality was in fact a force for good or evil in the world. You could argue either way and that’s generally what I did if I couldn’t find a real person to argue with. I blame Roman Catholicism because there is something about growing up within the Faith, even via a group of rather lapsed believers such as The Constants and The Hendys that predisposes their young towards a general commitment and allegiance to the philosophy of One True God. And quite apart from that of course the Catholic Church has always been overly fond of sinners and basks in the glorious idea of Penitents. Little wonder that some bored teenagers such as myself toyed seriously with the idea of a life spent in a Nunnery.

At that time at Wombwell Hall the R.E. classes were taken in what I had long decided had once been the Dining Room of the old house. This idea of mine was not based in fact and I came to that conclusion largely because there were two doors to the room opposite each other and one led directly down to the kitchen area, past Miss Fuller’s office. The other door opened into the central hall where we had a Group Assemblies three times each week. I harboured pleasant daydreams where the Colyer-Ferguson family entertained friends to lunches that were obviously quite formal, and had candlelit suppers together in the room where Miss Sands later conducted her R.E. classes and servants bustled to and from the kitchen with platters of all things nutritious. And of course I wondered what led the family to abandon the rather lovely house though later found that the artisan housing of the latter part of the nineteenth century began to creep ever closer across once green fields and verdant orchards and definitely had a large part to play in the momentous decision they made in 1937.

Nearly twenty years later Miss M.L Sands trod firmly upon the boards of the Colyer-Ferguson dining room and instructed us on spiritual matters. She had an appearance that was almost as sandy as her name. Although she was not in any way overweight she always appeared bulky and seemed uncomfortable in her clothes. She wore plaid patterned skirts in various sandy shades and hand knitted cardigans with intricate patterns, one of which featured a swan on a beige background stretching from left to right across the shoulders as it paddled upon a lake. Miss Sands’ knitwear was never made of ten ply QuikKnit yarn but always of four ply which as every knitter knew took forever to complete. For this reason my own Forest Green school cardigans were always without fail constructed from QuikKnit purchased from a stall in the Saturday market because my mother was an inveterate and impatient knitter and greatly irritated by lack of progress. Once I learned to knit competently myself I was astonished at how unlikely it was for her to unpick even a line in order to retrieve a dropped stitch. Such irascibilities were definitely not a feature of the workmanship displayed by whoever created the collection of cardigans worn by Miss Sands in the early 1950s, however.

Julia Hill who had until I excelled so surprisingly usually gained the highest R.E. mark had confidently been expected to do so once again. She was a great favourite with the sandy R.E. teacher and they were consequently rather appreciative of each other. Julia admired the Sea Island Cotton shirts worn under the four ply cardigans and the careful embroidery on the collars, featuring woodland flowers and from time to time the wearer’s initials – MLS, beautifully sewn and displaying the effortless assurance of a confident stitcher. Julia, never known to lack confidence said that had she not been playing Malvolio in the class drama production of The Merchant of Venice that term she would certainly not have allowed herself to be beaten by someone like me. I definitely did not like the way she said that but did not particularly wish to make a complete enemy of her so did not retaliate. Miss K Smith, she added, was a hard taskmaster where performance was concerned and when I feigned disinterest she looked at me knowingly and added that everyone was aware that I was wildly in love with Miss K.S and couldn’t understand why I had not bothered to audition for a part myself. With three rehearsals weekly there would then have been no time left for useless and boring R.E. exam swot. I ignored these remarks and continued to consider how unlikeable this particular classmate was.

Although I found the R.E. classes a great deal more interesting than mathematics or science or geography at times I thought some of the things Miss Sands said hard were to accept and she was most of the time disinclined to debate a point. On one occasion when she was talking about Simon Peter washing the feet of Jesus she hastily added that it had not been an act of humility or obeisance but simply because that’s what people did in those days in that part of the world. They lived in an arid climate where the heat was searing and whereas we might wash our hands and face, Jesus and his Disciples would rather use any available water to wash their hot and dusty feet. It was a sensible use of precious water in fact. People did not waste water back then the way we were inclined to in the Spring of 1956. I asked her if she was absolutely sure of that and she seemed quite annoyed and said of course she was sure. Jesus would have been one hundred per cent against such Acts of Humility and Obeisance – he simply was not that kind of human being and that was totally clear. It wasn’t altogether clear to me but I did not query this line of thought further.

Valerie Goldsack and her best friend Yvonne from Swanscombe told me they were amazed that the first time I came top in anything it happened to be R.E. because Miss Sands did not seem to like me all that much. I agreed that I had been quite startled myself but put it down to having a particular interest in religion which made them look at each other knowingly and exchange smiles before Valerie ventured that her father had said it was something of a Soft Subject, a bit like Anthropology had been for him at Gravesend Grammar. It wasn’t difficult, she said, to do well in R.E so I added that I was definitely considering devoting my life to God by becoming a nun which seemed to amuse them even more. Yvonne said that R.E. was the most boring class of the week in her opinion and she really disliked Thursday afternoons simply because of it except for the times when Miss Sands used Bad Language which could be hilarious. Valerie said that when she told her father about that shocking incident he checked out the details in their Home Encyclopedia because he had definitely not liked the sound of the expressions that had been used.

They were referring to the recent occasion when Miss Sands told us that the Ark of the Covenant and furniture of the Tabernacle were made of Shittim Wood. There had been sharp intakes of breath from girls like Valerie and Yvonne and perhaps also Julia and barely suppressed giggles from at least a third of the remainder. The rest of us looked at each other uncertainly and then watched with horror as Miss Sands began to write squeakily but firmly on the board in bold letters – Shittim Wood! After an interminable silence Julia asked in her Malvolio stage-projected voice if that particular wood had always had that name because she had never heard of it and then outbreaks of proper laughter erupted from various areas at the back of the room so she tossed her head and looked behind her, appreciatively and then sat up a little straighter. Julia Hill the Actress – Miss Hill the Entertainer! Miss Sands said in a voice that did not change in any way that it was the wood of the Shittah Tree now more commonly known as the Acacia. She carefully added the words Shittah and Acacia to the chalkboard. The various woods mentioned in the Bible were interesting, she told us. Some people she added, seemed to think that Dogwood had been used for the cross on which Our Lord was crucified for instance and that later the tree became ashamed so God ensured that it would henceforth grow small and twisted and never be used for such a purpose again. She added that according to the sacred tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church the True Cross had been fashioned from three different varieties of wood – Cedar, Pine and Cypress. These varieties she carefully added to the list on the board. Then she looked directly at Rimma Klotz because her family was Russian and therefore she must surely have insider knowledge with regard to the Orthodox Church. In point of fact Rimma’s family was Jewish and had fled from a village pogram early in the twentieth century. They were possessed of little of the knowledge Miss Sands attributed to them. But that was hardly her fault as she couldn’t be expected to know everything. I wondered how the mysterious Orthodox Church differed from the Church we were all reasonably familiar with but did not like to ask.

On R.E. afternoons I usually walked to the bus stop with Gloria Glover who was on the Shittim Wood occasion still highly amused by the incident that had brightened up the last class of the day. She said you could always rely on Religious Education to provide a few laughs and wasn’t Miss Sands a card? I nodded doubtfully and a few weeks later when I wanted to discuss with her the fact that I had come top in the exam Gloria just said well somebody had to come top and it might as well be me if I was really serious about becoming a nun. I should know, she said, that if Julia Hill had wanted to, she could easily have beaten me because she was what all the staff called An Outstanding Student and Gloria had actually heard Miss K.Smith mention her Outstandingness one afternoon after Hockey to Miss S.Smith. I wondered if that was true but even if it wasn’t I found the idea of Miss K.Smith saying such a thing strangely irritating.

Several months after I left Wombwell Hall I very nearly came face to face with Miss Sands the R.E. teacher in the Promenade Gardens, in Gravesend. She was accompanied by a woman who to all intents and purposes was simply an older version of herself, sandy and bulky and bent over, leaning heavily upon a stick. Perhaps it was her mother. She was in a heated altercation with a teenage boy from whom she appeared to have confiscated a catapult. He had attacked one of the swans, apparently, a fact that she had clearly found deeply distressing. I paused to see what might happen next, but far enough away from them not to be noticed. As the confrontation refused to descend into anything more excitingly violent, after a while I began to walk away – but not before I noticed that she was wearing her Four Ply cardigan with the paddling swan across the back. There was something strangely uplifting about that and for the briefest second or two I wanted to say Hello.

My thoughts turned back to Miss Sands, the swan and the Shittim Wood when I learned rather more recently that the final demise of Wombwell Hall had come in 1994 when ownership of the place rested with a nursing home. The place was totally demolished overnight that Easter to make way for a housing development.