Tea love and war, p.23
Tea, Love and War, page 23
The war proceeded with all its awfulness and home front shortages. Things were not going well in Europe, the Battle of the Bulge was happening as the Germans made a last-ditch stand to push the Allies back. Early 1945 saw the V-1 and V-2 flying bombs and the ‘doodlebugs’. It was a terrible time for Londoners and those living in Kent and Surrey. It must have been almost worse than the Blitz for those in the south-east as the bombs came over day and night and there seemed to be no defence against their power. It was said that all you heard of these extraordinary rockets, launched far away on the European coast, was a buzzing whine; if it cut out overhead you were likely to be unlucky and had to throw yourself under any form of protection as the bomb dived down. The V-2s were much bigger and more silent, left huge craters and did terrible damage.
At last in the early spring the Allies broke through and attacked the rocket launching sites, and the flying bomb menace was over. Then came news of the advance of the Allies on Berlin. Suddenly the war in Europe was over.
The end of the war should stand out and be etched on my memory as a great event, but strangely, but perhaps not surprisingly, I don’t remember any great joy. It had cost us so much as a family.
We had no one to come back.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
My mother was not someone to let an occasion for a party pass by, so at her insistence we agreed to celebrate the end of hostilities and asked all our friends in the Avenue to come round and join us. I can’t remember much about it but there is a photograph of a group of us toasting the end of the war in Europe. It didn’t make much difference to our lifestyle. Rationing and shortages were to be with us for several more years.
The war in the Far East continued but of course there were no more blackout curtains, the car was put back on the road and a degree of normality resumed. My father was able to finish his job in Nottingham and moved his office to Leicester in the Ministry of Health medical examination centre at 53 London Road. That was a great relief but he still had to make regular visits to Northampton, Burton-upon-Trent, Bedford and Peterborough to carry out medical examinations at the centres there. Sometimes my mother would go with my father and on one occasion he fitted in a visit to Wisbech Grammar School where his father had been headmaster.
Grandfather’s old retainers, called the Collishaws, had a smallholding near Wisbech and my father and mother would bring back eggs and strawberries – unbelievable luxuries. At the time we were still rationed to one egg per week. Little things like that stand out in one’s memory. Another was getting food parcels from Arthur’s aunts in Australia: that was always a wonderful event with things like dried fruit, raisins and sultanas, food that we hadn’t seen in years. The parcels were like gold and seemed to transform mealtimes for weeks – it seems difficult to believe it now.
One cloud arose on the horizon, namely that the owners of our rented house at 23 Morland Avenue wanted it back. Fortunately, some relatives of theirs owned a rented house in Shirley Road which was only a very short distance away. We had hoped to take over the tenancy but the relatives decided that they wanted to sell, and to my father’s dismay there was no alternative but for him to raise the money to buy the house outright. In common with many of his generation he had never owned a house in his life, he had always rented and he had never had any capital. However, by now his parents’ estate was being sorted out so there was some help there. Amidst his protestations of doom, gloom and potential bankruptcy, which we all took with a large pinch of salt, my father agreed to buy the house and everything was put in motion. Then at the end of July the General Election took place and we were all dumbfounded to find that Churchill was out and the Labour Party and Attlee in. My father’s doom and gloom intensified!
In early August my mother took to her bed with a temperature and generally in a poor state. In the midst of all this the news came of the atom bombs being dropped on Japan followed by the Japanese surrender. There was natural and great rejoicing in the country at the end of the war, but my memories of this time seem very blank: thinking back I suppose it was partly the sadness that we had gone through and partly worry over my mother’s illness.
Then my mother’s condition worsened and coincided with the start of one of her depressive illnesses. Life became very tense and difficult all round. She was put on phenobarbiturates and was not quite normal as a result: she seemed even more depressed than usual and was rather difficult. I was naturally (but selfishly) concerned with the effect this might have on Christopher and David, although the latter was too young to notice.
Mother was very much up and down in health terms and at the end of September we had a nurse in to help look after her. On 5th October two of my father’s medical colleagues, one being the superintendent of Leicester’s mental hospital, consulted together and as a result it was decided that mother should be moved to St Andrews in Northampton the very next day. It was an awful situation, mother had not been told of the decision but she must have sensed something since that evening she seemed strangely much better and she begged me not to let ‘them’ send her away. Of course she knew that she was suffering mentally but I felt an utter traitor knowing she was to be taken away the next morning.
When morning came, after a sleepless night for me, mother was drugged with morphine and taken by ambulance to St Andrews.
I felt very much to blame, fearing that it was my failure to cope with the children that had precipitated her condition – of course, with the benefit of hindsight this was not true, but at the time I felt dreadfully responsible.
Then, the very next morning, the telephone rang and we were told that mother had died during the night.
It was quite terrible. We were all stunned and my horrified father was completely devastated. I was totally overwhelmed, but Christopher and David were in the middle of breakfast with David in particular demanding attention. So, once again in our misery we collected ourselves together and tried to pick up the pieces again. My father went off to St Andrews and I took Christopher down the road to play with a friend. On the way back a neighbour called out of the window, ‘How’s your mother?’ I was so bemused, I couldn’t think whether to say ‘She’s dead’ or ‘She has died’ but I got it out somehow.
Morland Avenue was only a short cul-de-sac and everyone was very shocked to hear of this latest tragedy in our family. My mother was so well liked and such a lovely character. I loved her dearly and to lose her at the very time when I most relied on her support to cope with the deaths of Arthur and Stuart was very hard to bear.
The funeral was terrible, crude and rushed through at the crematorium. We should have had a church service but were so traumatized that we did not think through the arrangements, which probably demonstrates the momentary failure of my father’s usual iron control. From that moment onwards and for the next twenty years he was always to wear a black tie by way of mourning.
And yet, on life had to go again. My father in his single-minded way would not be seen to be yielding to grief. He went to work as normal the next day and in addition announced that he saw no alternative to his going through with the purchase of 7 Shirley Road the following week. We had to sell a lot of furniture and good things to move, as we had inherited my grandparents’ possessions from Highfield Street and had too much to fit into the new house.
The great move took place on 1st January 1946: widower father, widowed daughter and two fatherless children beginning their new life together, a life which was to last for the next twenty-two years.
BOOK TWO
2nd Lieutenant S.V. Poyser R.E.
CHAPTER ONE
I never had a father.
That is not to say that my father’s blood does not run in my veins, nor that I have not sought in life to atone for his loss of my upbringing and mine of his paternal love and support.
Arthur Farndell Martin Mitchell was killed in action, as the expression goes, in June 1944. I, David Vernon Martin Mitchell, was en ventre ma mere at the time, ventre being womb and the Gallic precision of the reference emanating from my subsequent life as a lawyer. The prefix Martin was derived from my paternal grandfather Dr Charles Martin Mitchell who is said to have once hyphenated his name. I am not clear whether there was a serious intention that subsequent generations would reassume that pretension, but in deference to that possibility my daughters were given Martin as their third name. They report that they did not find the device helpful to their early life in school playgrounds. My brother Christopher followed suit, but since he too fathered only daughters the expectation of a plethora of double-barrelled descendants has gone.
It will already be apparent that Christopher is my older brother. To most of the world he is Chris, but despite his encouragement I have never been able to bring myself to use that shortening of his name. My usage has caused some of our mutual friends to revert to his full name, to my brother’s silent disapproval. He had just passed his second birthday when father was killed and likes to believe that some recollection remains. In his sixtieth year he asked mother what father was really like, and she wrote:
Arthur was not a noisy extrovert like my brother Stuart, but he was very sociable and got on well with all sorts. He belonged to Kings Norton rugby club and enjoyed his tennis and golf well before we became friends. Arthur enjoyed reading, but more the classics, and doing crosswords though he used to read Whitakers Almanac. He was a patient sort of chap, liked his car and enjoyed messing around with it. He got on well with all his mates and enjoyed a beer with them often at the Clarendon pub. Stuart once said in a letter that ‘old Arthur is a damn good bloke and has a heart of gold, I’ve never known him bad tempered and he’s a much better character than your big brother …’ To close I would say he was honest and strong, clean minded and straightforward and that was his wish for you to both have in your minds as you read his final letter following your growing up to the age of 16.
The final letter to which she refers was kept locked in the big safe that lived in the garage at Shirley Road where we were brought up by our mother and grandfather. After the death of my father and of my mother’s mother my grandfather entered into an arrangement whereby my mother would act as his housekeeper and he would provide for us all.
This worked well: we lived in tolerable comfort, if frugally, at number 7 Shirley Road in a good suburb of Leicester; my grandfather went about his work as Medical Officer for Health and my mother cycled to the General Hospital where she worked as a physiotherapist, for which her training at Bedford Physical Training College had qualified her.
My mother was required by my grandfather to keep a detailed account of her financial expenditure; only a proportion of her total spending would be reimbursed and it was necessary for her to work to keep us boys in the modest manner to which we were accustomed. The detached and stuccoed house had large gardens to the front and rear and there were no trees of significance that were not climbed, nor warlike games that were not played, within those grounds. My brother was allowed to occupy the master bedroom with a bay window overlooking the front garden and the road beyond. This became the gathering point for our friends and for our boys’ version of the Famous Five, which in our more extreme youth often split into two factions each of which would make blood-curdling threats against the other before mother called us all in for our tea.
In later years the room housed our record collection, and the required Dansette record player, together with the equipment for such of my brother’s enthusiasms as were in vogue. A full set of weight- lifting barbells was one of the final acquisitions to accompany our later teenage years.
My bedroom opened off my brother’s, two steps down gaining access to a narrow room with metal-framed windows at either end and a sloping ceiling under which my simple bed was placed. Insulation was non-existent, the room was directly over the garage and the only source of winter heat was a two-bar electric fire. We left the door open at night, and devised a system of signals for when mother or grandfather approached with the risk of our lights-out dialogue being interrupted. Christopher delighted in telling ghost stories in the hope that I would be frightened, and was not above creeping into my room and uttering moans from under a sheet to add to the atmosphere. Since it was customary for me to read Swallows and Amazons or the like by torchlight beneath the covers, which partly accounts for my extreme short sight, it was rare that I was intimidated. In later years I was often required to remain imprisoned in my room whilst my brother was entertaining a girlfriend, my only escape route being out of the rear window on to the flat roof beyond and descent via the edge of the glass roof over the backyard. With hindsight it is perhaps surprising that I survived.
To return to the final letter: it was customary for those away at war to write letters to be read by their loved ones in the event of death. My father was no exception and his letter to my mother, which I was shown in my early twenties, was poignant. My mother decreed that his letter to Christopher should be read by each of us since he knew that another child was on the way. It seems that I was to be called Alison had my chromosomes so dictated – and I remain grateful that I was born a boy.
Mother recalls that we were allowed to read the letter on our respective sixteenth birthdays. My recollection had always been that it was not until we were eighteen, but there would have been little logic in that anniversary since twenty-one was still the age of majority in those days, so she is probably right.
The letter, dated 29th May 1944, was written almost exactly a month before father’s death. It was headed:
Somewhere in Italy
and started with the words:
If you ever come to read this letter, it will mean that the worst has happened and that I shall not have returned home from the war. It is a sad thing for both of us …
I am sitting outside the Mess at a Base Camp in Italy, from where I am due to go into the line at any moment, to do my share of the fighting which has been forced upon so many peace-loving people like myself.
Having now reached grandparental status I can only begin to imagine how strange it must have been for any father of a two-year- old boy to seek to encapsulate a lifetime’s advice into a single letter which would not be read until many years later. We learn fatherhood by experience, an opportunity denied to those losing their lives in such conflicts, so to seek to anticipate what guidance will be valuable must be extraordinarily difficult.
In any event Christopher did not share his earlier knowledge of the contents with me but I am sure that we both, at our separate readings nearly three years apart, felt the raw sadness of the emotion of those distant words.
For me it was an individual rite of passage setting out infinite wisdom, from a face I had never seen, speaking with a voice I had never heard.
I recall that on occasions I was asked whether I missed my father. It is perhaps less painful to miss what one has never known, and I do not think I was qualified to answer the question until I had children of my own. It was only then that I knew the depth of the love my father would have had for me, and to appreciate its certain reciprocation.
I was a voracious reader as a boy, and much of the post-war literary diet involved prisoners of war. The Colditz story and other writings fed my favourite fantasy, which was that my father had been captured and would one day return home. The detail now blurs but I seem to recall that I invented some remote Stalag where news of the liberation had not yet been heard. In my early days at boarding school I would imagine the summons to the headmaster’s study – and the welcome that my resurrected parent would give me, hopefully coupled with some pride at my achievements in his absence. Whether or not this imaginary anticipation caused me to study harder, or behave better, I am uncertain.
I only remember one occasion when I cried publicly for my loss. I must have been about twelve since it was when I was a monitor at Christ’s Hospital Prep School, which lofty status I reached in the year before entering the upper school. The whole school, including the prep school, ate in the huge dining hall overlooked by the vast fifty- yard-long painting by Antonio Verrio, and we precocious prep school monitors had the good fortune to sit on a dais in one of the two bays framed by the stained glass windows overlooking the quadrangle. It must have been July because that morning I had received a letter from my mother in which she had for the first time set out to me the circumstances of my father’s death, which I now know was in that month of 1944. Her letter described how he had been advancing down a village street when he was machine-gunned by one of a group of partisans concealed nearby. I had a compulsion to share the news and read out the passage to a fellow monitor and friend, I recall his name was Sills. In the process of the reading I must have put the machine-gunning words into action which caused me to start a fit of laughter in which he joined. My laughs then degenerated into sobs, to his discomfort and my great embarrassment.
What I now know was missing from my childhood was the witnessing of ordinary marital intimacy. My mother was the only woman in a household of men: even our Cairn terrier was male. Christopher and I would dutifully kiss both our mother and, in earlier years, our grandfather, the latter being an abrasively scratchy experience in view of his moustache. Mother would embrace us, and kiss her father, but those latter often perfunctory peckings defined the limits of any outward display of love. It was a loving household, but to grow up without visual third-party experience of embracing, handholding and similar signs of affection led to my finding it awkward to make overt displays in such matters. Even now my mother will complain that I do not return her hugs with sufficient enthusiasm, failing to appreciate, understandably, that this was a small if significant consequence of my upbringing.
I should conclude this comment on my early life by saying that my grandfather Vernon Poyser was a philatelist of some importance. One of his interests was in postmarks, and in later days after the war he would extend this to the printing techniques that allowed sorting machines to position and identify the letters. Stamps were his principal hobby, and of an evening at Shirley Road a brown baize cloth would be spread over an extended gate-leg table in the drawing room and a child-sapping concentrated silence would envelop the evening. Woe betide us boys if we sought to disturb the process. As we grew older we were drawn into the activity ourselves and even now have our more modest collections tucked away for posterity. My collection of Great Britain sports its obligatory penny black, not of the highest quality, and contains references to such esoteric and long- forgotten details as the printer of each stamp. Canada was another of my chosen countries, whilst Christopher’s collection majored in Australia; each of us was proud of our particular choice and suitably disdainful of the other.
