Derek’s death was devastating. He was after all a young boy, full of life, and although my father had also died young at forty-two, his death was a relatively gradual one. These sudden unexpected tragedies are almost impossible to take in at first. I kept going to Derek’s bedroom, looking at the bed, hoping for the impossible. Surely, my mind kept saying, there’s been a mistake? Perhaps it isn’t Derek in the mortuary? He wasn’t a driver, so someone else must have been at the wheel. Who could that have been? Another member of the band? A friend? Who?
It turned out that Derek had hitched a lift and the man at the wheel had been drunk. He lost control of the car and struck a telegraph pole at high speed. The main impact was on the passenger side of the vehicle. The driver suffered a broken leg, while my baby brother died instantly. Even at this distance in time, nearly fifty years later, I still have difficulty in believing a life could be taken away so suddenly, without any warning from any source. I feel the tears and anger welling up inside me, not necessarily directed towards the driver, who though a deadly dangerous fool did not intend to kill anyone, but at the happenstance that snatched Derek from us. Why did my brother leave his gig at that one particular moment? Why was it that specific car that stopped to give him a lift? Why was he in the exact position in the vehicle to ensure his death?
Fate should be tangible, a living being that one can scream and shout at, someone to blame for stealing our so very precious lives from us. Fate should have to account for its crimes against us. Fate kills our loved ones and sometimes does it horribly swiftly and mercilessly.
Just days before his death Derek had written a poem which he proudly showed me. It tells of a car crash in which everything reduces to ‘burning rubber, burning wire, all consumed in a ball of fire.’
~
Annette became pregnant again at the end of the winter of 1965 and we looked forward to another child, a playmate for Rick. September was almost over. We were in the station library gathering reading material when I got a tap on the shoulder. Annette wanted me for something.
‘Just a minute,’ I murmured. ‘I still haven’t found the novel I want.’
‘My bottom’s falling off,’ she said firmly.
‘Oh no!’ I knew what that meant all right, but this was not good. She was only twenty-seven weeks gone. Fortunately the Medical Officer was next door to the library. We rushed round and shortly afterwards Annette was on her way to Wegberg Hospital. A beautiful four-pound baby girl was born and had to go into an incubator. The baby remained on the critical list for several weeks, needing blood transfusions. Why was she so early? Annette is rhesus negative, while I’m rhesus positive, which causes problems with the antibodies in the blood of a second child. In the mid-1960s there was no anti-D injection to deal with this condition and the result was babies like ours which had problematic births.
I have to say that at no time did either of us ever believe our baby girl was going to die. I have no idea now why that was, but we never talked of losing her even though she went through several crises during those first few weeks. The talk was only of when we were going to get her out of that glass case and into the real world. Eventually of course, this happened, for the little mite was a fierce fighter, with a strong will and determination that remained with her from that day onward.
Annette and I had long ago discussed the possible names of our children and had decided that if we ever had a girl we would call her Chantelle. Annette’s French pen-friend was called Chantal and we decided to fancify it a bit with the ‘elle’ rather than the ‘al’ ending. Shortly after the child was born Annette got a visit from the padre who said, ‘It’s probably advisable to christen your baby in case something happens to her.’ I’ve already said we had absolute confidence in the idea that Chantelle was going to survive, but Annette was in a groggy state, naturally, after giving birth. So she told the padre, yes please, but in her confusion had lost the spelling and pronunciation of ‘Chantelle’, so instead she told him to name the baby Yvette Anne.
So she became for a short while Yvette Anne Kilworth.
Then I visited the hospital, heard her story, and said, ‘Oh, no – I’ve already sent the telegrams telling everyone her name’s Chantelle!’ In the meantime Annette had also sent telegrams from her hospital bed informing all and sundry that the baby’s name was Yvette.
For a while we had a very confused set of relatives back in England.
Eventually the baby was re-christened (and very definitely registered) as Chantelle Anne Yvette Kilworth. And a right royal name it looks too. As when Richard was born, I had to drive to Düsseldorf within ten days to register the child at the British Consulate, otherwise both our kids would have been German and liable for military service. Since neither of them likes goosestepping very much it was a good thing I was on time. (That’s a cheap joke, but hey . . .)
Eventually, Chantelle got shortened to Shaney.
Chantelle is not actually a name they give to girl babies in France. Annette and I contrived it. Yet now there are a plethora of Chantelles, most of them coming out of Essex, though one or two of our friends’ children have also used the name for their offspring. It’s my firm belief that Southend-on-sea mothers-to-be heard the name of our daughter while collecting their children from school, liked the sound of it, and used it for their next girl child. Somewhere around the turn of the century one of these Essex Chantelles appeared on a reality television show. The name then naturally spread and flourished throughout the United Kingdom. The last I heard it had reached the USA. The name we invented was hijacked. ‘Chantelle’ has become a best seller by word of mouth, but sadly the two collaborating authors remain anonymous.
So, now we had what I regarded as the perfect family. A wife, a husband, a boy and a girl. Very symmetrical. Others might think that a dozen kids and two run-ragged parents make the perfect family, but for me one on each corner, two of each sex, is my ideal balancing act. My pride in my family has never diminished.
I have written earlier that Bill Bailey was captain of an American PBY Catalina flying boat, an aircraft that could land on the ground or on water. The tips of the Catalina’s wings could convert the floats to wheels. This elegant-looking aircraft was used in anti-submarine warfare, search-and-rescue, freight, convoy escorts and patrol bombing. An aircraft with beautiful lines, very versatile, the Catalina was the most successful flying boat of its era. The PBY stood for Patrol Bomber Y, the letter Y simply being a manufacturer’s code. It had a crew of eight men: the pilot (Bill), co-pilot, bow gunner, flight mechanic, radioman, navigator and two mid-aircraft gunners. To my knowledge Bill never crashed, nor was he shot down. He began his flying career in Canada, after joining the RAF as a common airman (just like his son-in-law) and then going for a commission (unlike his son-in-law) and eventually learning to fly. His patrol area, after leaving Canada, was the wide blue Indian Ocean. There he learned to navigate by the stars, a skill of which he was inordinately proud. He passed some of this knowledge on to Annette and her younger brother Colin and both can still name the major constellations.
It was in Canada that he did his flight training and I remember him telling me a story about that period. He was ordered by the instructor, who sat immediately behind him, to dive on a farmhouse they could see on the Canadian prairie below and only pull out of the dive when the instructor said so. Bill immediately went into the dive and went hurtling down towards the farmhouse. The roof of the house got closer and closer until Bill could almost see down the chimney pot. Finally, ignoring the instructor’s last order, he pulled out of the dive without being told to. However, when he next glanced behind he could see the instructor frantically trying to reconnect his communications cord which had become unplugged, sweat pouring from the man’s brow. Had Bill been a man who automatically obeyed orders they would have crashed and killed themselves and probably any occupants of the farmhouse. In a similar incident on patrol in the Indian Ocean Bill had been ordered to bomb a submarine, but he was not certain of his ta
rget and, ignoring the order from an admiral, went down for a closer look first. He discovered the ‘submarine’ was an innocent whale.
Like many men who had been through Second World War he was normally very reserved about his exploits. These were the only two stories I ever got out of him. However, he did tell me about his training period, on which he was given leave from Goose Bay. Going back to the UK was out of the question for the period of the leave, so he hitchhiked across Canada to Vancouver and back, paying for his trip by playing cards with lumberjacks and others. Bill was a brilliant bridge player. I never knew anyone as good. How the hell he found lumberjacks who played bridge rather than poker mystifies me, but he was not a man to lie about his history. Later in life he and Betty taught bridge in the local college in Southend-on-Sea and were probably responsible for most of the bridge players in the Thames estuary. They were legends at the game, which Annette and I studiously avoided playing except with our closest friends the Chidlows. There are no points to be had when your in-laws are experts at a game that needs the mental skill of a mathematician and you are useless at maths. Bill Bailey was not a patient man with his children, expecting them to be as brilliant as he was, and being taught by him was a horrible experience. I’m sure he was all right with unrelated students, but with his family he was severe.
Once Shaney was born, we had to move. The flat above the farm had only two rooms and now we were four. I found another hiring in Luttelforst in a huge, monstrous-looking house that was straight out of Gormenghast: a Gothic German mansion with witch-hat towers. Inside it was a maze of dusty and gloomy passageways. It was set in the grounds of a private park, complete with lake and swans. Some German baron or other lived in it at one time, but in 1965 the woman who owned it had to let out rooms to pay for the upkeep.
We had the whole top floor, an attic divided up into six rooms with sloping ceilings and sharp corners. The elderly landlady always dressed in black and had a mynah bird in the hallway that mimicked her daily greeting so accurately it was spooky. Her name was Frau Raut, but being terrible plebs we dropped a vowel from the surname. She looked like a formidable maiden aunt straight out of one of P.G. Wodehouse’s novels, but in fact after a while she thawed a bit. Not much, but a bit. The myna never did. It remained forever the frosty-voiced Frau Raut, startling us when we crept in at midnight after a party at someone’s house with a strident ‘Guten Tag!’ from its perch in a dark corner of the entrance hallway. It reminded me of the refrain from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, quoth the myna, ‘Guten Tag!’
We had learned a good bit of German since living there and that was lucky because Frau Raut, unlike our beloved Kathe, did not speak any other language.
While in Germany I wrote a lot of ‘nature’ poems, mostly about ice and snow, mountains and trees. They were good training. I stuck to traditional rhyming sequences and metres for the most part, feeling my way into less formal poetry later on. I’m a great believer in learning the craft from the beginning before tacking in a personal direction.
So, we had three years exploring Germany, including the Black Forest, the Eifel Mountains, Munich, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Cologne. We made several camping trips to Italy and Belgium and actually did our weekly shop in Venlo, Holland. Pay was better in Germany, with overseas allowances, but we were still not well off. Annette took a job in a flower shop and became a florist’s assistant for a year or two. She learned all the names of the plants in both Latin and German.
Chid and I joined the local Rover Scouts and went on several camping expeditions with others who enjoyed the outdoor life as much as we did. (I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown my love of scouting and even now yearn to be 12 years old again and singing songs round the campfire.) One winter we camped in sub-zero temperatures in the Eifel Mountains. When we tried to cook breakfast after an ice-bound night during which I slept not at all, the eggs were frozen solid in their shells and the bacon shattered in the pan. Chid suggested we use the eggs as missiles to stun a deer and thus earn a venison breakfast, but I had by that time cut my hand badly on a piece of bacon and wanted to go home.
The summer before returning to England I put in for ‘Expedition Training’ which the RAF provided for anyone who wanted adventure. One could go climbing mountains, potholing, jumping out of planes, gliding, rock climbing, many activities. In Germany, the RAF owned six sailing yachts which were based at Kiel near the border of Denmark. (At the time the Royal Navy had brought out bumper stickers proclaiming ‘Fly Navy’: the RAF responded with ‘Sail RAF’.) I found myself on a three-man yacht in the Baltic, ready to earn my Deck Hand Certificate. The course lasted a week. For seven grey stormy days ploughing through the waves I spliced ropes, tied knots, reefed sails and hung over the gunwhales emptying the contents of my stomach into the Baltic. I have never been a good sailor and the Baltic is not the kindest of seas to wimps with weak stomachs.
Towards the end of our time in Germany I took promotion exams and luckily leapt from Senior Aircraftsman to corporal. That meant two stripes on each arm and a small pay rise. Our first three years of marriage were over and we were going home to England with a complete family. I was twenty-four years of age and Annette just twenty-one. Rick was a chubby two year old and Shaney was still in towelling nappies.
Our new posting in 1965 was St Mawgan, in Cornwall, just outside Newquay.
12. RAF St Mawgan
After home leave in Southend, we drove to our new home in the West Country. We still did not have enough points to qualify for married quarters. Annette was determined that we should stay together as a family, so we hired a beach caravan at Mawgan Porth. To help pay the rent for the caravan, which was quite small inside, Annette took a job cleaning the other vans after holidaymakers had gone home.
Three or four months later we were given a quarter on a disused air base called St Eval, up on the cliffs above the Atlantic Ocean. It was a nice little terraced house with coal fires and two bedrooms, perfectly adequate for our needs. If we did get cold we warmed ourselves up dancing to two new pop groups: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. An American singer had also just entered the charts, a strange gravelly-voiced hippy called Bob Dylan. I was not dead keen on the Beatles at that time (it took ‘Elenor Rigby’ and ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ to get my attention, before that I thought them pretty mediocre) but I loved the Stones. Bob Dylan was a revelation. Dylan and Joan Baez were singing ‘protest’ songs that I thought brilliant.
We were still not very well off at St Mawgan. In Germany we had received Overseas Allowance, lifting our standard of living a bit, but of course that was dropped once we got back to dear old Blighty. After paying all our bills for the week we had ten shillings left. That was five for the baby-sitter and five to spend at the pub. One round of drinks for four people. It was a good night out, though, and we were happy enough. At that time too the RAF had ceased paying us a weekly wage in cash and told us to open bank accounts. We chose the Midland Bank for reasons which have since left my head. Now we were a couple with a ‘chequebook’. That felt very middle class and grand.
As a corporal I had one or two more privileges around the RAF camp than before, but mostly I just went to work at the comcen and then home. The name of sergeant in charge of communications was Tony Sergeant. Sergeant Sergeant. Everyone, including the CO, called him Sergeant Squared. I recently contacted him. He now lives in Australia, but though he seemed very keen to meet me again, he confessed he had no memory of me or our service together. I was slightly peeved at that, since we were both in the amateur dramatics club. Obviously my performance as a stage actor was as unmemorable as my performance as corporal in charge of the comcen.
My mother visited us with her second husband, Ted. My new stepfather was a driver: buses, hearses, taxis, coaches. You name it, Ted drove it. He had been an acquaintance of my dad and had asked mum to marry him two years after George’s death. She was lonely. Ted was a kind and thoughtful man. He had a fine voice, in the style of Matt Monro, and earned good sid
e-money singing and playing in pubs and clubs around Southend. Shortly after their marriage Ted was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had his prostate removed, so their marriage moved from whatever it was to celibacy.
13. RAF Eastleigh and RAF Steamer Point
After a few months at St Mawgan I was sent on what was known as a ‘Detachment’, which was a short, unaccompanied posting lasting no longer than three months. It was to RAF Eastleigh, near Nairobi, Kenya. This was Annette’s and my first real separation since marriage. Kenya was now an independent country and trying to build its own air force. I was to assist in training the Kenyan Air Force in telecommunications.
Eastleigh was stunningly beautiful: the trees dripping with brightly-hued blossoms and the grasslands covered with flamboyant flowers. Magnificent birds, some of them no bigger than my thumb, others huge and bursting their seams with colourful plumage, decorated the bushes. The climate is warm and gentle, Nairobi being on a plateau 6,000 feet above sea level. The name means ‘Place of cool waters’ in the Maasai language. One could envy the residents of that city if it had not been for the thousands of shanty dwellings where the poor existed. There was a lawlessness about the place too, the shops guarded at nights by huge local men carrying pickaxe handles. One of these guys let me spend the night in his shop doorway when I missed the last bus back to Eastleigh in the early hours, standing over me, occasionally chatting, then allowing me sleep off the excesses of an evening on the town.
Once again in a foreign land my excitement with being there bubbled over the minute I was free to walk around and appreciate the gifts it had to offer. I visited Nairobi Game Park as soon as I got a weekend pass and happily photographed wild animals ranging from giraffes to lions to warthogs. Some friends and I took a Landrover and drove over the plains and out towards Mount Kenya. The landscape was vibrant and alive with wild things. Birdsong woke me in the mornings, birdsong filled glorious sunsets with their trilling. The people were friendly, the work unoppressive. I missed my family of course, and wished Annette could share this wonderful experience, but I was also aware how lucky I was to be in such an enthralling place.
On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer Page 13