Down Among the Weeds

by Harry Beaves

  His new O/C interviewed him and was delighted to hear about his infantry battle experience. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘You’re just the chap we’ve been looking for. We’re just about to begin a series of water-borne invasions (what we now term ‘amphibious landings’) and I reckon you’re the man to run the beach head dump as Brigade Ordnance Warrant Officer (BOWO).’

  As a BOWO with 26th Indian Division he was not far behind the first troops up the beach on each occasion, so was still very much in the thick of it. Ironically this was the sort of operation that I would subsequently train for during my service. Ramree, Akyab and Rangoon were three names that I remember him mentioning, but I believe he said he took part in six landings. He and I both had problems with the old military maxim ‘never volunteer’ and he was well and truly out of the frying pan of the infantry and back into the fire.

  When he returned home he was gaunt and racked with malaria, his six foot two inch frame weighing less than eleven stones, so it was hardly surprising that as children we were never allowed to leave a scrap of food on our plates!

  Father never seemed particularly happy as a policeman. I believe ‘a good job with a house and a pension’ were major considerations and I often thought he would have preferred it if he had continued working with cars as he was a very practical and resourceful person. Our family never called in a tradesman as Dad could fix anything. In the post-war years money was so tight that he more or less had to. Our first car was a 1937 Ford Eight, registration number AWV886, with a concertina luggage rack, which folded down from the back, instead of a boot. It was his pride and joy and he rebuilt much of it by hand. My mother’s cylinder Hoover was a very basic machine that sucked air in one end, caught the dust in a bag inside and blew the air out of the other end. Take the hose from the ‘suck’ end, insert it in the ‘blow’ end and attach a mate’s spray gun with masking tape and, hey presto, dad was ready to re-spray the car!

  A Beaves family day out 1957 in my father’s 1937 Ford 8 that he spray painted with my mother’s vacuum cleaner!

  He could also turn his hand to plumbing, kept my mother in vegetables from the garden all year round and built a hen house for our post-war chickens. His father had taught him to cut hair, so he became barber to the neighbours. I vividly remember one occasion when he was cutting my cousin David’s hair. David, aged about three, would not keep still and my father nicked his ear with the scissors resulting in howls of tears and what, at that age, I thought was buckets of blood. The going price for a haircut in those days was about half a crown, but my father charged 6d, which sounds about right! In 1953 he bought our first television so that we could watch the Coronation. Made by Ferguson, it had a twelve-inch black-and-white screen mounted in a huge, square, polished wooden box. We must have had it for at least ten years and each time it went wrong my father would set about it with his soldering iron. The valves glowed, but he would take the precaution of waiting until ‘things cooled down a bit’. I shudder to think of the dangers involved.

  After two World Wars my father’s generation had to work hard for everything. He believed that any spare time should be used productively in activities that either improved life for the family or put money on the table. The only concession was to activities which improved the children’s education. To do well at school, get a good job and make our way successfully in life was what he hoped for us. When I showed sporting promise, mother bought the sports kit, but father winced at the cost and gave me no encouragement as I would ‘never earn a living kicking a bag of wind’ when I left school.

  He was forceful and authoritarian, often withering in his criticism and only saw things in black and white. As we grew up, to our amusement we realised he could also be spectacularly wrong. In my teens the local pop group in Salisbury were Dave Dee and the Bostons. In daily life Dave Dee was really Police Constable David Harman, whom my father knew well. In 1961 the group was getting more and more exposure and they had the chance to turn professional. I well remember my father’s scorn. ‘How could young Harman be so daft as to give up a good job with a house and a pension (always critical factors) to be a blooming pop singer?’ In the event the group changed their name to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and had a string of hit records. Strangely, I never heard my father express surprise.

  For my father the family meant everything. He was a perfectionist who only wanted the best for us and was actually extremely proud of all we achieved. It is just a pity that his was a generation that found it difficult to communicate their true feelings. For my part I was never able to break down the emotional barrier between us. Mike and the Mechanics come close to expressing the sadness I feel over this in their song ‘The Living Years’.

  My mother was born Kathleen Nora Williams in 1912, the daughter of Albert Henry Williams and Hephzibah Fanny Wilkes. Granfer Williams was born in the village of Shrewton, tucked under the edge of Salisbury Plain, where six generations of the Williams family before him had worked on the land, raising their families and never moving more than a mile or two from where they were born. Albert Williams was a blacksmith and after he completed his apprenticeship in Shrewton he moved to Devizes where he set up his blacksmith’s shop in Vines Terrace, close to Wadworth’s Brewery, and earned a large part of his living shoeing the brewer’s dray horses.

  My maternal great grandfather’s family at the wedding of Edith Williams 18th September 1902 in Shrewton. Standing. 2 left Albert Henry Williams (my Grandfather) 3 left Hephzibah Fanny Wilkes (my Grandmother), 3 right (straw hat) Herbert John Williams. Seated 2 left Elizabeth Williams (my G-Grandmother), 3 left Julia Ellen Williams, William Hibberd (groom), Edith Fanny Williams (bride, my Grandfather’s sister), 3 right Henry Williams (my G-Grandfather), 2 right Alice Hibberd (sister of the groom, married Herbert Williams).

  My grandmother, the beautifully named Hephzibah Wilkes, also came from a Shrewton family. Unlike the Williams, the Wilkes family seem much more adventurous with several generations emigrating to Australia. The first was Edward Reeves, the brother of my great-grandmother, Mary Ann Reeves, who must have left in about 1865 to settle in New South Wales.

  Hephzibah’s brother, Edward Reeves Wilkes, who, as I mentioned in my introduction, wrote a fascinating diary of his voyage to Australia, joined his uncle in 1883 and eventually settled in Eumundi, Queensland. Hephzibah’s sister Ruth Wilkes was a schoolteacher who married Tom Stevens of Shrewton. The pair became Plymouth Brethren and also settled in Queensland, not far from Edward Wilkes, at Doonan.

  Hephzibah died tragically of cancer at the age of forty-five leaving Albert to bring up five young children, Charlie, Harry, Stella, Nora (my mother) and Philip. As a temporary measure Albert sent them to stay with Hephzibah’s sister, Florence, and her husband Alfred Ashton who farmed at Bratton, below Westbury White Horse. Florence had four children of her own and my mother spoke of happy times with her cousins, in particular, picnicking on the White Horse’s grass eye. The children all thought it was lucky to sit on the eye as one of the brothers had once found a florin there – a worthy find. Stella Ashton, Florence’s youngest daughter, wrote a charming little book called Maisie and Me in which she describes her life growing up on the farm at Bratton in the 1920s and includes mention of the ‘cousins from Devizes’ staying with them. Not many years later, at the age of forty-nine, Florence, like Hephzibah, died of cancer.

  Albert Williams subsequently married Fanny Elizabeth Kirk, a widow with two sons Fred and Stanley, and together they had two more children, Jean and John. Fanny Kirk’s two elder sons, Stephen and Arthur, had previously gone to Canada, through Dr Barnado’s organisation, so the solution to overcrowding in Albert’s new household was to encourage my mother’s two elder brothers, Charlie and Harry, to go to Australia where they would be received by Hephzibah’s sister Ruth and her husband Tom Stevens. Ruth and Tom Stevens ran a mission school living a strict life as Plymouth Brethren and I believe Charlie and Harry were very unhappy with their frugal existence. Eventually they left (one
story says ‘ran away’) and settled close to Gympie where they raised their families.

  In contrast to my father my mother was very outgoing, warm and loving. She and her siblings were born at the family home, 1 Vines Terrace, which was in the area of Devizes between New Park Street and the back of the Palace Cinema. All but one of them attended Devizes Grammar School and after she matriculated she worked for a dry-cleaning company in the town. Mother was a home-maker, a very happy person, full of little stories and silly rhymes and although she died when I was only fourteen, even now I often find myself saying ‘my mum would have said…’

  My parents married in Devizes in 1939 where my father was serving with the Wiltshire Constabulary and my elder sister, Stella, was born in Trowbridge in 1942, shortly before he left for the War. After the War, far from fit after his service in Burma, he had two village beats: Shalbourne, about which I remember nothing, and Hindon, sixteen miles west of Salisbury, of which I have hazy memories. At Hindon my father drove one of the first police patrol cars in Wiltshire.

  In early 1953 our family moved to Devizes where my father became an instructor at the police driving school and I began a period filled with many of my happiest childhood memories.

  I was the middle of three children. My sister Stella was six years older and my sister Heather was eight years younger. In Devizes we lived on an estate of police houses at Park Field where I enjoyed an energetic childhood. It was a fantastic place to grow up with the thirty-six police houses winding round a huge playing field and backing on to an area of woodland. We played outside from breakfast to bed time – all the games that boys enjoyed, climbing trees, playing cowboys, making obstacle courses for our bikes and making hides underground roofed with tin, like the soldiers we sometimes saw on Roundway Down. It was non-stop mischief, but we were the ‘Police Kids’ so we rarely crossed the indistinct line between mischief and trouble as the response from our fathers was daunting.

  Harry William Beaves born 27th Oct 1947. Every family has a picture like this to show to girlfriends when we are teenagers.

  One of the ‘big kids’, probably aged twelve, made a guitar in his school woodwork class (well, it was shaped like a guitar and had strings, but was made of solid wood) and we found an empty garage in which to practise our skiffle group with me, aged about nine, tunelessly plucking an old tea-chest double bass. We modelled ourselves on Lonnie Donnegan, as I recall!

  For all this, most of our time was spent with sport. When Wimbledon was on we beat a tennis ball cluelessly to each other, when the Tests were on it was cricket from dawn to dusk, but most of all we played football. In those days it was unusual to find real goal posts on a children’s playing field, but we were very lucky. Our housing estate was next to the immaculate sports fields of the Wiltshire Constabulary whose groundsmen also had the task of caring for our playing fields. One of them, Henry Gummer, had been a policeman himself and my father used to say that at six feet seven Henry had been the tallest man in the force. For us, Henry was a kindly giant who from somewhere found a single set of goal posts (no net) and put it up on our playing field. This was just too good to be true.

  School friends from Devizes used to come up and play our team at Park Field in wonderfully haphazard matches. We had one set of posts at the top of the field, coats on the ground at the other, no white lines and no referee. In those days proper soccer kit was in short supply and I remember my first boots were a child’s size thirteen, heavy leather, up over the ankle and with leather studs, ‘Stanley Matthews’ style. My mother found a pair of green-and-white striped woollen football socks and a pair of shin pads for me at a jumble sale. The socks were a reasonable fit, but I was told I would ‘grow into’ the shin pads. The pads were made of leather with split cane protection and actually came half way up my knees so that I had to wear my socks on the same line. My mother tailored an old pair of my father’s shorts to fit (!) me. I was as proud as a peacock in my football kit and played my heart out. It was just so much fun and although for several seasons a five-nil defeat was a reasonable result for the Park Field boys, those happy days sowed the seeds of a passion for sport which has stayed with me to this day.

  * * *

  My school photo Southbroom Junior School, Devizes 1953.

  In 1958 we moved to the police station at Stapleford, between Salisbury and Warminster in the picturesque Wylye Valley. One of the first things for my father to do was to put up a TV aerial, but, being my father, he had to make his own, rather than spend his money. He visited Mr Grant, the village builder, and bought a square off-cut of elm from a coffin (Mr Grant was also the local undertaker) and some steel reinforcing rod. He cut the rods to the appropriate lengths, fixed them on the board in a letter ‘X’, connected a length of co-axial cable and hung the whole thing in the loft with strong string. He then slowly rotated the aerial, while mother watched our huge old TV set in the sitting room and shouted when the picture was strongest. I relayed her messages from the top of the stairs to my father in the loft and he finally secured the structure in the best position. For the six years that we lived in that house his homemade aerial – cost, probably less than five shillings – never let us down!

  Life in the sleepy village was a complete contrast to Devizes. I left Southbroom Junior School, Devizes, with several hundred children, to attend the little village school at Steeple Langford. I had far fewer friends and Stapleford had no football pitch of any description – disaster!

  Steeple Langford was about three miles up the valley, a 2d ride on the Wilts and Dorset bus. The school had only two classes and there were fifty-two children on the school roll, noticeably less during the harvest, but it was the making of me. With such a disparity in ages the opportunities for competitive games were limited which was disappointing. On four afternoons we did handicraft and one afternoon we did English country dancing. I enjoyed the craft, but for boys of our age there was nothing less ‘cool’ than country dancing. As the tallest boy I always had to dance with the biggest girl, not a pleasant experience, but there were ways of striking back. Just about every dance included a ‘swing your partners’ section. My mates and I would dance ever closer to the table on which the shiny new ‘Dansette’ record player sat, then ‘swing’ with such ferocity that the thumping of our feet on the wooden floor would inevitably cause the needle to jump a couple of grooves on the record so that the dancing would be reduced to chaos.

  Five of us in my year at Steeple Langford School were taking the Eleven Plus Examination for entry to grammar school. Three of those were not strong candidates; the fourth was Susan Jarvis, daughter of the head teacher. In a single class of eight-to eleven-year-olds we tended to work more in ability groups rather than by age, so Mrs Jarvis was able to focus on Susan and me and stretch us academically. To the surprise and delight of my parents, I passed the examination, something that I doubt if I would have achieved at Devizes where my mind was constantly distracted by fun and games.

  In September 1959, dressed proudly in my new school blazer, navy blue and blue school cap and grey shorts, I began my first term at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury. ‘Bishops’, as it is known, was typical of the many Grammar Schools that existed in the country at that time, with very high academic standards, close links with the church, in this case Salisbury Cathedral, and a very strong sporting tradition. There are many well-known ‘old boys’, but the most famous person connected with the school was William Golding, the Nobel Prize-winning author, best known for his book Lord of the Flies, who taught us English. School legend has it that characters in the book were drawn from his observations of Bishops boys during his many years with us and that the draft for the book was written in a Bishops exercise book during chapel services. Critics of my prose may regard me as one of ‘Scruff’ Golding’s failures!

  My best friend in my early years at school was Laurence Padfield whose father managed an 800-acre farm at Yarnbury, about a mile west of Steeple Langford. The farm buildings were in a beautiful setting d
own by the River Wylye and the farmland stretched north across the A303 to include the historic earthworks of Yarnbury Castle. The farm was owned by Colonel Basil Ivory who lived in the ‘big house’, now known as Ballington Manor. The Padfields lived in the lovely mill house with the River Wylye actually running under it through the old mill race.

  Laurence and I shared two passions, Meccano and our bicycles. We both had huge Meccano sets and would spend hours building cars and lorries with gear boxes, steering mechanisms and suspension powered by Meccano electric motors. I was never strong on maths and science and owe much of my understanding of car mechanics from things I learnt experimenting with my Meccano set.

  But our bikes were our pride and joy and we raced them around the farm over all terrain, years before mountain bikes were dreamt of, though Laurence was usually fastest as I had already ridden three miles from our home in Stapleford to get to his house! After about two years of saving I was finally able to buy a much sharper bike with derailleur gears from a friend at school and spent many happy hours stripping it and tuning it.

  My new bike cost the princely sum of £11 and I was able to save for this luxury machine largely because Mr Padfield allowed Laurence and me to work on the farm. In the sixties the 800 acres of Yarnbury Grange Farm needed about seven regular employees to work it and at harvest time everyone lent a hand. Aged twelve, I worked with a wonderful old chap called Harry Carter who drove a tractor towing a baler, behind which was a sledge that I rode on. My job was to take the straw bales as they emerged from the baler and stack them on the sledge. When I had sixteen bales I would lift a lever and the neat stack would be left behind ready to be picked up by fork lift.