Coming straight to point about war years

IT’S last Saturday, if that makes sense. I wrote about living with my family at our home in Plevna Rd in the London suburb of Hampton, Middlesex.

I mentioned that we were all “bombed out” in one of the first airraids on London near the beginning of World War II. We returned to Plevna Rd a few months later and lived for a further 15 years in the house next door to the one that the Germans had turned into a heap of broken bricks. We soon became very familiar with the bricks and the remains of the grotty house that had been our family’s home.

Please allow me to share a few more thoughts about what it was like to live in a London suburb at a time when England was recovering from about six years of war. Remember, those were the first six years of my life; being bombed out by Germans, or whoever, was “normal” for me and my twin brother. Our parents brilliantly did not transfer any of their inevitable own fears to us.

We soon got used to living in a small air-raid shelter that our Dad had built in the backyard. Putting on what we referred to as “our siren suits”, and running into our shelter, was “normal” even when it was raining, with a gale blowing. Our Mum shouted words of encouragement, balancing our dinners on her outstretched arms. We had an apple tree growing in the middle of a small backyard and providing ample roots to be tripped over on the darker nights...

I started school in September 1943 when I was a cheeky but nervous four years old, very grateful that I had a twin brother to keep me company. Our school, Hampton Infants’ School, was in a grotty building no different from every other grotty building in a fairly ordinary suburb! We all filled in the time spent outside our family airraid shelter by listening to a bossy young teacher reading boring stories in the school’s own air-raid shelter.

It seemed to rain on most days and we would spend much of each morning drying out before getting wet again on the walk home... We graduated into Percy Rd Primary School on the other side of the railway line. London’s Waterloo Railway Station was 25 minutes up the track and a great challenge for nervous little blokes with their Mum.

She, by a miracle of money skills, managed to pay for me and her to make the train journey from Hampton to Waterloo twice every week for countless years. The purpose was to get me to a grimly special place called the London Refraction Hospital. It was there that men in white coats breathed on me, spoke with posh accents and supervised my performance of various eye exercises. These were designed, unsuccessfully, to rid me of a persistent squint!

I was, to coin a phrase, boss-eyed. This merely meant that nobody knew who I was trying to look at. This worried me far less than it worried them but amused me when various doctors regularly tried to look me straight in the eye... The London Refraction Hospital is in an inner London area called The Elephant and Castle. It still persists in its attempts to persuade people to look at those with whom they are speaking.

Those of us who have lived all our lives with a squint quickly learn not to try to look people straight in the eye. If honesty does require us to do that then we become adept at having a hand scratching our cheek when we are talking to someone nearby.

I still get irritated if somebody suggests that I should come straight to the point, whatever that point might happen to be!