Memory Lane

70years ago I was having a jolly good time as an evacuee in deepest Sussex, billeted with an aunt and two female cousins. We hardly knew there was a war on. We had walks across the downs, with stick insects common in the beechwoods and ponds full of large newts, dewponds for animal droving and fields full of cowslips. I did not realise until I was older how much our older relatives had protected us children from the worst. Everything seemed a big game.

I went on loan to Chichester High School until we went back to London, catching a green Southdown double-decker bus. Sometimes I was the only passenger, and the bus was the only quiet spot to do my homework. One evening, at a stop in Chichester, I saw a van with a fridge inside, advertising ‘the first ice creams since the end of the war’.

I had an Uncle Bert whom I idolised, a local lorry driver, bachelor, excellent darts player, drunk whenever possible and a rogue. He used to take me in the cab of his chaindriven log lorry and get me to run over fields to pick up rabbits and pheasants he shot with a .22 he kept hidden behind his seat. He also took part in shooting competitions and always seemed to win a prize, usually food for my aunt to feed us, or beer which he drank on the spot. He also helped deliver mixed concrete for the wartime US ‘flying fortresses’ and he introduced me to the glamorous GIS, who always seemed to have gum and cigarette cards from packs of Camels. Everyone should have an Uncle Bert.

It all had to end one day, as good things do, and back my mother and I went to our house in Clapton, east London. We travelled courtesy of Uncle Bert’s wood lorry, me in the cab and my mother in a dilapidated armchair looking back at the road, with a couple of bottles of stout and an old tin mug to drink from. We looked like travelling gypsies and the motor gave off clouds of steam every time it came to a hill. I transferred to Hackney Downs Grammar School, which had something called a ‘static water tank’ where I looked for newts in vain.