by Alf Townsend
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to Nicolette, my long-suffering wife of nearly five decades. For many years she had pushed me to write my experiences in the Second World War and, for many years, I chose to continue to live in the comparative comfort of being a well-known, taxi-trade journalist. Finally, I actually wrote three books in the space of four years that were eventually published by Sutton. Blitz Boy, about the Second World War, was my first book, followed by Bad Lads, my experiences of RAF National Service in the 1950s. My third book entitled Cabbie, was a ‘warts-and-all’ account of my forty-plus years as a London cabby. Strange to relate, but my last book was published first and my first one published last!
My lovely wife Nicolette and my children Nicholas and Joanne, their partners, and all of my seven gorgeous grandchildren, have been my inspiration over the past sad and dreadful years since we lost our wonderful eldest daughter, Jenny. She bravely battled breast cancer for nearly seven years before finally succumbing to this horrid disease over Christmas 1999, at the age of just forty-one.
Thy Eternal Summer Shall Never Fade
Our Deepest Love Forever Darling
CONTENTS
Title
Dedication
Introduction
1 Before the War
2 Mum Says it’s a Trip to the Seaside
3 Penryn Purgatory
4 Newquay for the Duration
5 Another Move to Pentire
6 Our Final Move
7 Return to War-Torn London
8 Victory in Europe
9 Newquay: Sixty-Odd Years On
About the Author
Copyright
Wartime Memories
A poem written by my eldest sister Joan, c. 1940
I remember the year 1939 – when war broke out, I was only nine
The memories that come flooding back, when the skies were full of enemy attacks
The bombs would fall and we would run, to the shelters that weren’t much fun
But they kept us safe with God’s helping hand – although many fell, never to stand
Mum and Dad wanted to keep us safe, so they sent us kids off to a better place
I shall never forget the day we went, so many years ago
And now that I am older, I realise it’s the only way they know
But things turned out for the best, we stopped all that running and had a rest
So on our journey we all went many miles away; our eyes were full of tears as Mum and Dad had to stay
The lonely times that lay ahead, I used to think when I went to bed
I did my best to fend for us all and prayed each night that Mum would call
And then at last that day did come when we saw our dear, old faithful Mum
The teacher said there is someone outside, so go and dry the tears from your eyes
I didn’t know what to expect as I went towards the door
There was Mum and Nan and baby brother Ken who was one of us four
I know my prayers were answered by the look on Mum’s face
She had to be beside us in this lonely, lonely place
At last my heart was happy just like a bird in song, as Mum said Dad was coming and it shouldn’t be very long
Oh happy, happy days there would be when at last we became a real family
My eldest sister, Mrs Joan Westmore, returned to Cornwall in her retirement.
INTRODUCTION
I’ve had this story firmly locked in my brain for over sixty-five years and I thought now was the appropriate time to put it down on paper. Whether my story is published is not really important. What is important is that I can finally purge the demons in my brain that have haunted me for all these years and start to chronicle the events for my children and their children. I believe future generations should know what really happened to many of the inner-city kids during the Second World War, who were unknowingly sent to some Godforsaken hell-holes and had the crap beaten out of them.
Certainly there have been many books and television dramas about evacuees over the years. Quite entertaining for sure, but they all seemed to involve Enid Blyton-type nice, middle-class kids having a spiffing good time in the country on some idyllic farm, with Mummy and Daddy coming down in the car nearly every weekend to visit them. A car, indeed, the most we ever had was a handmade cart with ball-bearing wheels! I remember in the early days of writing this book, the posh old auntie of my daughter’s husband showing interest in my story and asking to read my typescript. My daughter had married into the country set who, at one time, lived in the local manor house. They were very nice people, but certainly not like us Londoners. The posh auntie kindly penned a letter to me saying how much she had enjoyed my book. ‘But,’ she remarked, ‘you have got it all wrong about the hardships endured by evacuees.’ This was because the evacuees she had housed during the war had a wonderful time and didn’t want to go home. That explains what being an evacuee meant in a nutshell – it was a total lottery. Some kids had a great time, while others suffered hell. Yet, that idyllic scenario, penned by some individual from a completely different environment, certainly wasn’t like that in my case, or in the case of many other working-class kids. We suffered months and even years of loneliness, hardship, humiliation and in some extreme cases, hatred, physical and mental abuse from the very people who were supposed to be caring for us.
This mass exodus of kids from our major cities in 1940 was unique and the government’s hasty organisation programmes left a lot to be desired. It was tantamount to a social revolution and certainly a culture shock for the parochial farmers and middle-class country folk who, whether they liked it or not, were coming into contact with young, frightened, scruffy, somewhat lice-ridden and poverty-stricken kids from the very poorest areas of Britain’s cities for the very first time. A large proportion of the people who took in ‘Vacs’, a derogatory term for evacuees, used by all the local children and many of the adults, did so purely for the cash – I believe it was 8s 3d per week per child, that’s just forty-odd pence in new money. It sounds a pittance in today’s society but, if you reckoned our boys were fighting on the front line and risking their lives and only earning about £2 per week, it gives you some idea of its spending power. We didn’t starve, but by golly we had to earn our corn and in many instances the young lads became almost full-time and unpaid farm labourers. Many of the Cornish farmers certainly showed a very healthy profit on their 8s 3d a week from me and my mates!
Surprisingly, despite my early childhood traumas and the beatings from my so-called ‘foster parents’, I grew up to be quite a bright kid. I continued my schooling after returning to London when the war ended. I managed to pass the old eleven-plus exam and went on to a decent grammar school. Unfortunately, my aspirations to improve on my early enjoyment of writing at a higher level were thwarted, as in austere post-war Britain my input was badly needed in the minimal family budget. I wasn’t unique – far from it, many of my classmates were far more talented than I. But that was the norm for poor families in the late 1940s – especially those like me who had a work-shy father who was at his happiest visiting all the local pubs up the Caledonian Road. To be fair to him, he wasn’t exactly work-shy. In those days in the painting and decorating game, the guv’nors held a ‘week in hand’ when you started a new job. That meant you worked the first two weeks for one week’s pay and the other week was held back for when you gave a week’s notice to leave. So, if my old Dad was refused a sub (a loan), on his first week’s wages, he used to ask for his cards. I think the term he used was: ‘I told the guv’nor to lick ’em and stick ’em’. So in effect he often had a new job nearly every week and in many instances, no job at all! My old Dad’s proudest moment – and his most profitable – was when I was featured on
the sports page of a national evening newspaper and talked of as ‘Leyton Orient’s big strong, seventeen-year-old centre-forward who could well play for England one day.’ My old Dad took a huge bundle of the papers round to all his local pubs and had free beers on the strength of the story for the whole evening and many more after that!
Upon leaving school, I drifted from one menial job to another until doing my National Service in the RAF. After the RAF, my blossoming career as a professional footballer never really took off, simply because I’d had enough of being told what to do and when to do it. Consequently, I always wanted to go out with the lads for a drink and a giggle instead of training. I married the love of my life, Nicolette, in the late 1950s and after becoming the father of our first daughter and our son, I decided in the early 1960s to do ‘The Knowledge’ and become a London cabbie, a profession I have thoroughly enjoyed for over forty years. The sheer pleasure of writing has always stayed with me and for the past forty years I have been lucky enough to indulge my passion as a hobby. I have edited a trade magazine for many years and written literally hundreds of articles for most of the taxi-trade publications. The majority of cabbies in London all know me by my nickname of ‘Alf the Pipe’ and unfortunately for them, my ugly mug has been staring out at them from the trade papers every fortnight for the past forty-odd years!
This book has been written following the success of my first two published books Cabbie and my second book Bad Lads: RAF National Service Remembered, which hit the bookshelves in 2006. Two-and-a-half million young lads like me did National Service and around one million went into the RAF. So my publishers are sweating on a large percentage of that million going out and buying my book!
As far as I am concerned, getting one book published, or, indeed, two or more, is not simply about fame and fortune. I view it as a long-term legacy that my children, their children and their children’s children, will enjoy many years after I have kicked the bucket. When a man is blessed with a lovely wife and wonderful children and gorgeous grandchildren, he doesn’t need anything else – certainly not money!
A.E. Townsend
Hampstead, 2008
ONE
BEFORE THE WAR
London in the late 1930s wasn’t anything like the London we all know today. For a start, it wasn’t as cosmopolitan and it had no large ethnic areas. In fact, apart from in the up-market diplomatic circles in Belgravia or the dock areas in the East End, it would have been quite difficult to spot a black person on the streets of our great city. If that rare event happened, all of us kids would run behind the unfortunate person chanting out a rhyme that probably originated way back in the time of the Black Death in 1664. We chanted in unison in the belief that it would bring us good health and keep away the deadly germs. It went thus: ‘Touch collar, never swallor, never catch the measles.’
Unlike today, when vast areas of former working-class boroughs have been ‘gentrified’ by professional people like lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers and architects, simply because of their close proximity to places like the West End, the City or even Canary Wharf, pre-war London was so completely different. It was almost as if an invisible line had been drawn across the capital segregating the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’. The ‘haves’ all had their spacious houses and apartments in places like Mayfair, Belgravia, Kensington, Chelsea, St Johns Wood and Hampstead. While us working-class lot lived our lives, often in abject poverty, in most of the other boroughs. The whole of South London had always been traditionally working-class, as had the East End. Not so today – in Islington, North London, the borough of my birth, house prices are now way beyond the reach of any of the local youngsters wanting to set up home. Back in the ‘good old days’ when generations of families all lived together in the same street, one of the old aunts or in-laws would always offer a room or two to the newlyweds. Unfortunately, over the next few decades, most of the working-class boroughs would be occupied by professional ‘outsiders’, the only people who could possibly afford the escalating house prices. I’m not knocking the process, just stating a fact. And the fact is that many of these outsiders literally just use their houses to sleep in. They don’t patronise the local shops and they certainly don’t use the local markets. But, you frequently see the little green Harrods vans making their deliveries.
It’s a bit scary to think that after many hundreds of years of deep-rooted cockney history, this complete transformation of the way that Londoners live has been irrevocably changed in just over half a century! Even now, many thousands of the true cockneys are living on large council estates well outside of London, while their former council properties are being sold off to the highest bidders.
AND SO TO SCHOOL
One of my earliest recollections is being dragged screaming to the top of our street off Caledonian Road by my Mum, and taken into a little church-like school with a horde of other screaming four-year-olds. I often wonder if I possess an unusual, highly-sensitive, retentive, or photographic memory. I’m always questioning my good friends of my age group about their childhood, but they can’t remember anything about being evacuated or even their time in nursery school! I sometimes question if the clarity of my memory is a blessing or a curse!
Little Alfie with cousin Pat, 1937. (Author’s collection)
Little Alfie, c. 1936. (Author’s collection)
The smell of that school still lingers in my subconscious after more than sixty-seven years. A damp, musty smell that one always associates with old churches, coupled with the sweet, sickly odour of generations of sweaty little feet doing PE without shoes and socks. These were the days before any deodorants, or daily baths and showers. Once a week, down the old Cally Baths was the norm if you were lucky. If not, it was a ducking with strong carbolic soap in the old tin bath out in the back scullery. This sweet, sickly odour in the school must have permeated the parquet floors over a period of many, many years, because it hung heavy in the air. Our sweaty seat of learning and our old street, Ponder Street, just next to the railway bridge in Caledonian Road, has long since been demolished by the bulldozers after taking a right battering in the Blitz. It has been replaced by one of those many awful council estates typical of town-planning in the 1950s and ’60s. I still reckon those old Victorian terraced houses would have lasted much better than these estates!
I distinctly recall this wizened old lady with white hair approaching my Mum with a fixed smile on her face. ‘And who have we got here?’ she said in a thin, reedy voice. ‘This is little Alfie Townsend. Well, he ain’t all that little, ’cos he was the heaviest baby born in 1935 in Islington,’ Mum said proudly.
‘Is that so?’ said the wizened old lady with the white hair, with a look of total disinterest on her face. ‘So, why are you making that awful noise?’ she snapped, grabbing my hand in a vice-like grip. ‘If you stop crying little Alfie, we’ll put you in the band and you can play music with all the other children.’
She said this all with the same fixed smile on her face. But I was a rotten kid and I didn’t want to stay in her smelly old school, or play in her soppy band. So I just carried on yelling and screaming. The next thing I realised was that my Mum and all the other parents had suddenly disappeared and I had had a triangle thrust into my hands, with what looked like a meat skewer to bash it with. The old lady started clapping and we all had to bash our triangles and drums in time with her. The sound was a cacophony of noise, absolutely unbearable and without any semblance of a tune. Then, we were all ordered to sit on the sweaty, smelly floor while she read us a soppy story from a dog-eared book. I was still crying and wanting to go home, so, in a vain effort to shut me up, I was given the job of milk monitor. This entailed carrying in a crate of little bottles of milk and giving one to each of the kids – whether they wanted it or not! I can remember Mum picking me up a few hours later – I was still snivelling. And that’s just about the total recollection of my first day of school life.
Yet nursery school didn’t last too long for me or my classmat
es. Something terrible was about to happen. Something so terrible and frightening that we would all remember it to our dying days. Many of my classmates, their parents and their relatives, would perish as tons of high explosives fell on our great city and a generation of young men would fall in the bitter battles to come. Untold millions of innocent civilians would be butchered, simply because they were considered ‘undesirables’ and didn’t comply with the twisted Aryan beliefs of a madman and his bunch of murderous thugs.
This madman was controlling a massive and well-trained fighting force and leading his people into total darkness! The many heroic battles of the Second World War and the Blitz will forever be remembered. But unlike any other conflict in the past, most people will remember it as the war when civilised man turned into a vicious animal and slaughtered more than six million civilians, simply because they were Jewish. The German dictator, Adolf Hitler, had decreed in his twisted mind that it was the Jewish bankers who had caused Germany’s capitulation in the First World War. The German people were desperately searching for a strong man to save their bankrupt economy and they wanted someone to blame for the humiliation of the 1918 Armistice and the loss of so much of their land. Hitler became the man of the moment and conveniently fitted the bill. His rantings against the Jews, the gypsies and any other non-Aryan race were accepted by the gullible German people. This created an open door for the ‘Final Solution’ and the terrible holocaust that followed in the Nazi death camps. I find it inconceivable that despite innumerable reports from Jewish organisations about the Nazi death camps and gas chambers that the authorities in Britain never really believed it – or rather didn’t want to until it became unavoidable. Yet, strangely, these terrible facts seemed to be common knowledge among the ordinary London folk. My old Mum would sometimes threaten me if I was particularly naughty by saying: ‘I’ll get “Jerry” to put you up the chimney, Alfie.’ Surely that’s a clear indication of knowing about gas chambers?