Tag: childhood

Just my imagination running away … to Australia : 1972 : Eric Hall, Strode’s School

 A schoolboy babysitting two infant-school-age girls at night? Quick, call the police! Notify child protection services! … But wait! This was the 1970’s. That boy was fourteen-year-old me. Back then, few would have jumped to the (mistaken) conclusion that anything untoward was happening. How naïve we seemed to be!

My mother had few close friends and I fail to recall how she had come to know Cathy Bingham, who had recently moved into a new-build house at the far end of Byron Avenue, less than a kilometre away within our suburban housing development. Seeking a means to supplement my meagre pocket money, my mother had suggested to Cathy I could babysit her two young daughters if she and her husband wished to go out for an evening. I could only help out on Friday or Saturday as my school set two homework subjects each weekday and required my efforts to be submitted the following weekday. The resultant babysitting arrangement worked well and I was grateful for Cathy’s generous compensation which funded my purchase of more reggae and soul records.

Cathy was a genuinely lovely person who had moved to Camberley from Peru where her husband had apparently been posted by his employer. Prior to the birth of her daughters, she had had a job driving new cars from their Detroit production line down the Pan-American Highway for delivery to dealerships in Lima. I considered this a ‘dream job’ since my father had already stimulated my interest in American cars and I longed for the day I would be able to drive long distances myself.

One babysitting evening, once the girls had been put to bed upstairs, I spent the remainder of my time sat on the sofa in front of the television. I watched a recent British movie named ‘Walkabout’ about a father who suddenly abandons his two children in the middle of the Australian outback. The scenery was spectacular and the story fascinating of the children’s chance meeting with an Aboriginal boy who demonstrates his traditions to them and saves their lives. It made a huge impression as my first television experience of Australia beyond the formulaic ‘Skippy’ series.

I had already leafed through many large-format photo books of faraway lands, including Australia, whilst sat at a desk in the first-floor reference section of the local public library. I had been impressed by the mud-brick high-rise buildings in Yemen, the desert libraries of Timbuktu and the Ayers Rock sandstone monolith. Along the same Dewey Decimal shelf, I had recently discovered the first ‘Lonely Planet’ guide as a Roneo-ed set of booklets hand stapled together. All these readings had stimulated my desire to travel abroad, since most of our family holidays to date had been taken within Britain.

Australia was also on my mind after a recent chance meeting with a young Australian girl who was working in the bookshop on Station Road in Egham. I had made an earlier visit to the shop in 1970 to order a book (that changed my life) documenting American black music, ‘The Sound of The City’, which I had seen mentioned in its author Charlie Gillett’s weekly column in ‘Record Mirror’ magazine. My second visit was to exchange several ‘book tokens’ that had been awarded me as ‘School Prizes’. On that occasion, shop assistant Jan Somerville spent considerable time helping me choose paperbacks that might interest me, including ‘Exodus’, ‘Dune’ and ‘Topaz’. Her advice was particularly useful as I had no idea what to buy, my parents having almost no adult books at home.

I was instantly smitten with Jan as she was the first interesting girl around my age (well, she must have been two years older) I had met and, to my lusty adolescent eyes, she resembled heartthrob Susan Dey from ‘The Partridge Family’. She explained that her family had temporarily moved to Britain and she had found a job for a year in Egham’s large, well-stocked independent bookshop. After that, during my school lunch-hour, I would pop into the shop and chat with her regularly. When she finally returned to Australia with her parents, she gave me a slip of paper with her address in Clontarf, New South Wales. I was sad to lose my first ‘schoolboy crush’ but we wrote to each other for a while and she sent me a small toy koala which I have kept since. I had hoped to visit her one day … but life intervened.

All this explains why, on the occasion that English Language homework required me to write an essay about a landscape I had never visited, I naturally chose Australia. My teacher, Eric Hall, was a young man (relative to the majority of ancients that taught us) who wore tweed suits and was eager to show off what he probably believed was his sardonic wit. However, I read his attitude as sarcasm, a quality I found less than endearing after having arrived at the school wholly ignorant of his subject. Many of my classmates had previously attended private ‘prep’ schools and already knew what a noun, adjective, verb and tense were. I had never heard these terms because my state junior school had been keen to develop our creative skills rather than grammatic pedantry. I faced a steep learning curve at Strode’s School.

When I started my third year, I had been disappointed to be told that Mister Hall would be our ‘form master’, with whom we were required to register our attendance twice a day. My already poor rapport with him deteriorated considerably when, without prior consultation, my father impulsively booked a package holiday at an Egham travel agency for me and him to visit Florida during school term to witness the launch of an Apollo space mission. As a result, my mother was angry that her husband had not discussed this indulgence beforehand and had apparently demonstrated no desire to be accompanied by her and my two siblings. Mister Hall was outraged to be informed of my impending absence as a fait accompli and insisted that my trip be cancelled, which my father refused. Subsequently, my relationship with not only Mister Hall but most of the school administration was soured. I was never to be awarded a further School Prize.

At the end of our English Language period, Mister Hall walked around our desks, handing back each of our essay books … except for mine. After returning to his seated position at the front of our classroom, he said:

“You can all go now. Except for Goddard, who I want to see afterwards.”

Now what I had I done wrong? He opened my workbook to the page of my latest essay and pointed at it disparagingly.

“Your essay about Australia was very descriptive and incredibly detailed. Have you ever visited Australia?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well, I just do not understand how you could have written about somewhere you have never experienced with so much detail about its landscape and features,” he commented sourly.

I had no idea what he was trying to imply. I had worked very hard to produce a good essay and now he was trying to say obliquely that my work was too good? How was I expected to explain that?

“I’m interested in Australia,” I said. “I have seen films and read books about it, which is the reason I chose to write my essay about it.”

“Well, I am afraid I do not believe that you wrote this essay,” said Mister Hall angrily. “I have come to the conclusion that you must have copied it from some book. That is the reason that I have had to give you a fail mark for this piece of work and, naturally, this will be reflected in your end-of-term report.”

I was horrified. How could Mister Hall be so cruel? I understood he had never liked me, but I had never contemplated he could be so nasty to a student who had worked as hard as they could in order to be successful in his subject. From then on, despite my regular ranking as one of the top five students within my year of sixty pupils, Mister Hall’s comments in my termly school reports were consistently negative. His and a few other teachers’ similar attitudes to me during my seven years at Strode’s coloured my entire secondary school experience. For the first time, I learnt what it meant to be despised by an adult in a position of authority. It was an incomprehensible change from my previous positive experiences at Cordwalles Primary School, where my incredible teachers had been generous to a fault with their mentoring of me and my classmates.

I had no choice but to soldier on at school under the tutelage of Mister Hall. I took the GCE ‘O level’ exam in English Language the following year and achieved an ‘A’ grade. Three years later, I passed the ‘Use of English’ exam required of entrants to Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Before those subsequent academic successes, my life was changed irrevocably later in 1972 when my father deserted our family to run off with a newly married teenage bride who lived a few doors away on our street. The brief trip to Florida was the final occasion I spent time with my father until the day he died. Not only did he unknowingly negatively impact my school life for the remaining four years, but he knowingly impacted my family’s lives forever. The evening that I had chanced to watch the father in ‘Walkabout’ maroon his children in the outback was paralleled only months later in my own life when my father walked away from his three children, condemning them to an unexpectedly different future.

Despite these personal setbacks, Cathy Bingham’s experience of driving through the American continent in the 1960’s continued to inspire my ambitions. In 1984, I hatched a plan to hitchhike from the United States down the Pan-American Highway to Nicaragua to visit my friend Tony Jenkins who was there providing news reports to ‘The Guardian’ and ‘BBC World Service’. I visited the London embassies of all the countries I would pass through and obtained the necessary visas. However, this plan was stymied by a six-month wait for the BBC to inform me whether my second-round interviews for separate producer jobs at ‘Radio One’ and ‘Radio Two’ had been successful. In the end, I was rejected for both. Angry that my travel plans had been thwarted by the excessive wait, I enquired why to BBC Personnel, only to be informed by its employee that in future I would need to prove to interviewers that “you are one of us”.

Evidently, I never was.

[8mm film of Eric Hall by classmate & dear friend Martin Nichols]

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/05/just-my-imagination-running-away-to.html]

Life is a battlefield : 1966 : Barossa Common & Sandhurst Royal Military Academy

 My childhood playground was a warzone. While my classmates were likely splashing around in inflatable pools in the safety of their back gardens, I would be on my bike following tanks on manoeuvres, riding alongside battalions marching across the countryside, and waving at camouflaged soldiers hiding in trenches with guns. Occasionally they waved back! Nights were regularly punctured by the sound of machine-gun fire and exploding shells, while my bedroom curtain would be illuminated by phosphorous flares. Outside our house, tanks would roll along the street between daytime traffic. Nobody took any notice. This was all perfectly normal.

I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, his bed under the window, mine opposite against a wall. On my bedside table were: a hyacinth bulb in a square cardboard box that I had to water daily up to the line printed on a little transparent side window; a tray of watercress seeds on blotting paper for a school project; and a little transistor radio with a white earpiece to listen to ‘Radio Luxembourg’ at night. Taped to the wall alongside the bed was a world map I had sent for from ‘The Daily Express’, on which every day I plotted the position of Francis Chichester’s boat ‘Gipsy Moth IV’ on its record-breaking solo round-the-world voyage. Under my bed was a line of Easter egg boxes which I rationed so that I could eke out my daily chocolate intake until the approach to Christmas.

Hidden against the wall behind the Easter eggs was a line of anonymous brown boxes in which I stored ammunition I had collected whilst biking through the warzone. More than a thousand identical brass-coloured bullet casings stacked in neat rows and, in an odds-and-ends box, a hoard of variously shaped larger artillery shells. Nobody knew about my hobby and they never would because my mum had little inclination to clean beneath our beds. I had no understanding then, but now I realise that most of the cartridges were blanks and had a tell-tale indentation showing they had been fired, though some bullets and shells remained unmarked and were probably still live.

Our house was 180 metres from the corner of Old Green Lane where two tarmacked, fenced tennis courts were hidden from the road by thick foliage. Their gates were never locked, enabling me and my mates from our street to bike there and mess around with racquets and tennis balls ‘borrowed’ from our parents. Only once did army officers dressed in whites arrive unexpectedly and admonish us for using military facilities. That was the most trouble we encountered the many times our mothers saw us off after breakfast during school holidays and weekends, not expecting us to return until ‘tea’ at the end of the afternoon. Anything could have happened to us … but it didn’t.

Although the front entrance to Sandhurst Royal Military Academy was manned, the back entrances were open, allowing non-Army residents to wander through the grounds. Every winter, my mother and I almost froze to death standing on the shore of one of the Academy’s two lakes while my father insisted on showing off his ice-skating prowess, learned as part of my parents’ earlier, unfulfilled plan to emigrate to Canada. My mother would occasionally swim in the indoor heated swimming pool where, if challenged, she would claim to be an officer’s wife, with me in tow expected to play the part of the officer’s son. Security was non-existent prior to the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign in 1973.

Adjacent to Sandhurst was ‘The Common’, 4192 acres of wooded common land shared by Camberley locals for recreation and the British Army for war games. The land was criss-crossed by perfectly straight paths and wide unmade roads dating from Roman times, though the ‘Caesar’s Camp’ archaeological site within was eventually determined to be an earlier Iron Age hill fort. One part of this vast landscape was where my father struggled to teach my mother to drive, me sandwiched between them, terrified on the front seat of our American Rambler station wagon. It was the blind leading the blind as my father had never taken a driving lesson. Conscripted to the Suez, he was ordered to drive trucks across the Egyptian desert, which he did as fast and aggressively as possible for two years. Demobbed with a British driving licence, his style of driving refused to change. How my mother subsequently passed her driving test I never understood.

The Common seemed enormous to me, bordered by the scary Broadmoor Hospital to the west and Windsor Castle to the east, eleven miles from our house, a destination my mother said she had reached on foot as a child accompanying her father. The only human imposition evident on the landscape was a single line of electricity pylons that crossed it, whose cables sizzled as you passed underneath. This noise scared me after having seen my father thrown across our living room when he recklessly drilled a hole in the wall above our house’s electricity fuse board. Now, whenever I watch 1960’s/1970’s Hammer historical movies with horse drawn carriages speeding along straight unmade routes through thick wooded land, I recognise The Common that I came to know so well.

Having access to so much wilderness so nearby to explore was idyllic as a child. There was the ‘Star Post’ raised lookout junction where ten perfectly straight paths intersected. There were army assault courses with tyres on ropes, wooden climbing frames alongside ditches full of water if you fell off. There were small ruined buildings that we could run in and around, chasing each other. There were trenches we could hide in, hoping to frighten a passing dogwalker or biker. Some parts were densely wooded while others were covered with undergrowth, offering scope for all sorts of games. Most of all, there were long straight unmade roads where we could reach great speeds on our bikes without the worry of traffic … except for the odd tank.

Before adventuring onto The Common, we would habitually meet up with our bikes on Old Green Lane, a long, wide, tree-lined straight cul-de-sac of huge residences for senior Sandhurst staff. At the far end was a ditch perpendicular to the road marking the border with the Sandhurst estate, rather like a miniature moat. In the ditch were black stag beetles, some of which grew to the size of an adult hand. My mates liked to poke them with sticks. I was more wary of wildlife after having spotted a large snake in the tiny front garden of our house and then having hidden indoors, peeking from the front window with my mother as my father hacked it to death with a spade. On another occasion, my father having asked me to bring him a tool from a tall cardboard box on our garage floor, I reached inside and a huge spider crawled up my bare arm. I screamed … and still do.

One morning, at our Old Green Lane rendezvous, my mates’ poking angered a huge stag beetle sufficiently for it to climb out of the ditch. This scared me, I climbed on my bike and rode away at top speed down the road, followed by my mates on their bikes shouting “It’s flying. It’s on your back. It’s attacking you.” I was absolutely petrified, reached the other end of the road, pulled my shirt off to find … nothing. My mates laughed at their cruel jape. I was not amused. I never spoke to them again or joined them biking across The Common. I travelled alone after that, having learnt a valuable life lesson. As Bob Marley sang: “your best friend [could be] your worst enemy”.

Not long after, my parents announced that we would finally be moving into the new house two miles away they had spent several years constructing. I had very few possessions to pack, but what should I do with the secret hoard of ammunition under my bed? I knew my bike-riding, bullet-collecting days over The Common were to end now. Initially I considered the easiest solution was to throw them in the dustbin for the weekly rubbish collection, but then I realised that the crushing machinery inside the dustcart might prove catastrophic. I had no ambition to be notorious as Britain’s youngest mass murderer … if I survived the explosion that would have destroyed our house.

Instead, I made dozens of journeys across The Common during the weeks prior to our move, carrying a portion of my artillery hoard each time and throwing it back onto the common land from whence it had been harvested. Nobody would notice because the Army demonstrated no interest in clearing their wargame debris from the landscape. Environmental damage? What was that? 

Once we had moved house, I did not return to The Common for three decades. In the meantime, it appeared to have been named ‘Broadmoor to Bagshot Woods & Heaths’. Snappy! I was now taking morning runs alongside my brother-in-law. The deer were still there. The pathways were still in the same place. The electricity cables beneath the pylons still sizzled. The occasional camouflaged soldier with a gun could still be spotted hiding in a trench. And night-time gunfire and flares continued. Somewhere in the world there is always a war for which to prepare.

[Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2023/04/life-is-battlefield-1966-barossa-common.html]