Down Among the Weeds

by Harry Beaves

  Harry Carter and I got on superbly well and everyone knew us as Old Harry and Young Harry. Harry came originally from Imber, the village in the middle of Salisbury Plain that was evacuated and taken over by the Army as a training area in 1943. He was close to sixty-five years old and his ruddy, weather-beaten face told that he had worked on the land since he left school at fourteen. Harry always wore nailed boots, heavy flannel trousers, and a threadbare jacket over a collarless shirt and a ‘weskit’. His outfit was topped off with a greasy old cap pulled down over one eye. If it was exceptionally hot he might occasionally remove his jacket, but his cap never came off. On the rare occasions when I saw him indoors without it, I couldn’t stop staring at the top of his forehead and his receding hairline which, protected from the elements by his cap, were a deathly white in comparison with his ruddy face. Then there was his central eating – no, Harry always called it ‘central eating’ as he had just one front tooth at the top. Harry was a gentle, slow-moving country man, always completely unflappable. I would see him bent over the baler making running repairs, then there would be a ‘ping’ and, like a Heath Robinson cartoon, springs, bolts and washers would fly through the air and be lost in the stubble. He would just look up at the blue Wiltshire sky and rub his chin with his favourite saying: ‘Ah, these things be sent to try us.’ And that would be it.

  From the age of twelve I worked on four successive harvests. I would leave home each day on my bike at 7am to cycle the three miles to the farm and then ride the bale sledge until midday when we stopped for lunch. Lunch was doorstep sandwiches and a bottle of squash, leaning on straw bales as Old Harry happily pointed out the birds and wildlife in the hedgerows and stubble. We would work on until five and then I would cycle the three miles back home where I would have a bath and collapse exhausted. The bale sledge was very hard and heavy work as well as being dirty and noisy. A spotted handkerchief over my nose and a pair of old motorcycle goggles that I had found in the back of the barn gave little protection against the dust thrown up by the baler and the foul diesel exhaust from the tractor.

  Apart from being good fun and an adventure, I thought it was well worthwhile financially, as my efforts were rewarded with the princely sum of 3s 6d (about 17.5p) an hour. After every harvest I was very fit and strong with a healthy tan, though my hands were so hard and rough that you could almost strike Swan Vestas on the palms. In mid-September a Harvest Supper was always held in the Village Hall for the farm staff and their families. It was provided by the Ivory family as the traditional way of celebrating ‘harvest home’ and saying ‘thank you’ to them all. The farm was one big family and I was a welcome member. I just loved it.

  Laurence and I also helped on the farm at other times of the year, particularly in the autumn when we would beat for the shoot. Again, just to be a part of it was a terrific fun and very grown-up. For a young teenager the beaters’ lunch, usually in a barn, was always a treat. In addition to our day’s pay the beaters would take something home from the shoot; in my case it was often a pair of hares. I would hang them cautiously over the handlebars of my bike and wobble off home through the darkness, as proud as punch that I had something for the table.

  One Saturday morning in October I pedalled through the rain to the farm and Laurence and I spent from 9am to midday picking milk thistles out of a field of kale before I rode back home through the steady downpour. For that I received 1s 9d (less than 10p) an hour, ruined a pair of shoes and spent two days in bed with a cold!

  My enjoyment of the school is largely retrospective. We certainly played hard and I excelled at rugby, captaining Wiltshire under-fourteens, and at athletics, holding the school record for one hundred yards, but I was not particularly academic and always found the work difficult. Schools in the Sixties seemed strong on public humiliation and the twice-yearly school examination results were published on the notice boards for all to see. I well remember one year coming ninety-fourth out of ninety-six in a geography exam, though for most of the other subjects I managed to stay in the top twenty. Somehow I remained in the ‘A’ stream which took GCE Ordinary Level at the age of fifteen rather than sixteen, as in the rest of the school. Achieving ‘O’ levels at this age allowed some of us to spend three years in the Sixth Form, if necessary. The third year could be used to take scholarship exams for Oxbridge or to re-take ‘A’ levels and improve the grades.

  * * *

  Around this time life began to change dramatically. It was during the farewells after a Christmas visit to my father’s sister, Beryl, in Andover that my aunt wished my mother ‘good luck’ for her forthcoming operation. This was the first inclination we children had that anything was amiss and the following day my mother told Stella and me that she was going to have an operation in a week or so. It would be a while before she was better, but that it was nothing to worry about. She had cancer. The operation in Odstock Hospital, Salisbury revealed that the cancer was in an advanced state and she was sent for radium treatment at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Fulham. Over the next few months she had several periods of treatment in London, followed by periods at home to recover, but it was not long before my father was told that she could not be cured. Stella and I were not told the full extent of her illness, so it was a confusing and very upsetting time for us. My mother was very ill and we were watching her physical deterioration, but I had no idea that she was dying or what it all meant and just could not imagine life without her. Strangely, there were many happy memories over that time. My mother knew she didn’t have long and I think that she and my father resolved to see as many old friends and acquaintances as possible. We seemed to be out and about all the time that her strength allowed it and there was a steady stream of friends and relatives who came to the house to visit us. She died on 14th March 1963 in Odstock Hospital and was buried at St Mary’s, Shrewton close to her parents and grandparents on what I will always remember as the saddest day of my life.

  Bishop Wordsworths, School U13 Colts 1960/61. Rear. Mr Walter Watson, Stuart White, Robin Pike, Tim Sanger, John Morris, Ian White, Stephen Harris, Paul Desborough, Alan Sillitoe. Middle Row. Peter Ford, Jim Blake, John Barrett, Chris Jordan, Harry Beaves. Sitting. Peter Foot, Paul Tuck.

  One of the last things my mother said to us was ‘Try and keep the family together.’ As we grew up my father devoted his every minute to this task and worked himself to near exhaustion in the process. His immediate priority was for Stella to qualify as a teacher, for me to pass my GCE ‘O’ Level examinations, and for Heather to progress happily through primary school. He would wake us for breakfast, I would catch the bus for school before eight o’clock and he would deliver Heather to a neighbour who would see her on to her bus. Then he would go off for his normal day’s work as a policeman. In the evening he would come home, cook the dinner and do the ironing and household chores before eventually going to bed.

  Things became even more difficult when, just six weeks after our mother’s death, Heather was involved in a horrific accident which she was very fortunate to survive. Although she was only five years old, the neighbour would put her on the bus and give her to the bus conductor who would watch over her and see her safely across the road to the school, which was just opposite the bus stop at Steeple Langford. All of the conductors got to know her because she was such a happy little girl. The bus was due at 08.56, but very often it arrived a little after, so it was not unusual for Heather to be a few minutes late for school. Steeple Langford School is an imposing Victorian stone-built building with a flight of about eight steps leading up to the heavy old front door. The green painted door was solid oak with huge iron hinges and a heavy oval handle. A few days before the accident the bus had been late. It was cold, the door had been shut and the nine o’clock morning assembly had begun. The door handle was too heavy for Heather and she could not make anyone inside hear, so it was some time before one of the staff finally came out and found her in floods of tears, but she told no one about this. On the day of the accident the bus was late a
gain and, worried that the door would be closed, she rushed out from behind the bus before the conductor could stop her and was hit by an articulated lorry.

  She was rushed to Odstock Hospital with lacerations to her head and a broken femur. My father was called from work and took me to see her later that evening. Unwelcome memories returned, as her children’s ward was in the same corridor as the ward in which my mother had only recently died. The sight of Heather swathed from head to foot in bandages was extremely upsetting for us both. Her right leg was suspended in traction, in a Thomas Splint, but the main concern, initially, was the injuries to her head. She was confused, very distressed and sobbing inconsolably for our mother who had died so recently. The situation was heart-rending, but fortunately, small children heal rapidly. She was soon out of danger and, as always, she became the nurses’ favourite with her bright little personality. She was in traction for ten weeks which included her sixth birthday, and my father and I settled back into the hospital-visiting routine trying to banish the images of my mother’s last days in the nearby ward.

  In July Stella completed her teacher training and was fortunate to get a post at the primary school in Shrewton, five miles from Stapleford. Life became a little easier as she relieved my father of many of the burdens of running the home, sadly at great cost to her own personal life. We were a family and we had a home, but it lacked the warmth and softness provided by a mother. We three children were everything to my father and he was unshakably determined, dogmatic and forceful in his efforts to provide for us. I’ve heard it said that men build houses, women make homes. My father saw his task as running a house and had no thought for homeliness, so our lives were pared to practical necessities. Ornaments and pictures, the things that make the house a home, were put away in order to reduce the need for dusting and the like. Sadly, Stella was too mild-mannered to question this and make the house function in a more relaxed and comfortable manner.

  The family portrait taken when my mother knew her illness was terminal in 1962.

  In 1964 we moved into a house that my father bought in Canadian Avenue, Salisbury. Meanwhile, at school, I was being pressed to make career choices. It was a huge world with so many openings and I knew more what I didn’t want to do – work behind a desk or in an office – than what I wanted to do. Four generations of my father’s family had served in the Wiltshire Constabulary, right back to 1861 when my great-great-grandfather, James Tibble, was a policeman in Cricklade, but the police force didn’t interest me. I was still sports mad and really wanted to go to St Luke’s College, Exeter and teach PE. I told my father my thoughts and he scathingly dismissed them as ‘Stupid’. His simplistic view was that working in PE would mean by the time I was fifty I would be stiff in the limb and out of a job.

  I had not really been ready to take my ‘O’ levels at fifteen and, although I had passed, my grades were too low to provide an easy passage through Sixth Form. Add to this the problems of galloping hormones and it was hardly surprising that I was struggling with my ‘A’ levels. I found the work hard and uninspiring and the teachers were not optimistic in their predictions for my results. This cast more cold water on my ambitions to teach.

  The Army seemed an active alternative to teaching PE, although I knew very little about what it actually entailed. More importantly, I knew it was a choice that would meet with the approval of my father. The irony is that my subsequent life in the Army was far more physically demanding than it would have been as a PE teacher and much of my military career was spent teaching or ‘training’, as the Army prefers to call it.

  I passed the Civil Service Entrance Examination which qualified me academically for Sandhurst, but the interview and selection process was much more comprehensive and ran over several days. Full of nerves and having little real idea what to expect, I arrived at the Regular Commissions Board (RCB) at Westbury. Over the next few days we were faced with various interviews, discussion groups, lecturettes, practical leadership tasks and fitness tests, none of which I was properly prepared for. The letter informing me of my failure was very disappointing, but in truth, not a great surprise. There was still a glimmer of hope, however, as my failure was considered to be mainly because of my lack of maturity and I was offered the opportunity to enlist as a Private Soldier on an ‘O Type’ engagement and try again. In an ‘O Type’ engagement, candidates signed on for three years’ service as a Private soldier in the Army during which time, if they were considered suitable, they would be put forward again for RCB. If they passed they would go on to officer training; if they failed they could leave the Army and would not be held to their three years’ service, provided their disciplinary record was satisfactory.

  I jumped at the chance and visited the Army Careers Information Office in Castle Street, Salisbury to find out more. My father was delighted and, as he was always very proud of his family’s war service, my decision very much met with his approval.

  I returned to the Recruiting Office, filled in the forms and a few days later took the oath, enlisting as a Gunner in the Royal Regiment of Artillery. The Recruiting Officer was a retired Gunner officer himself and on completion he reached in his pocket. ‘Congratulations, young man.’ He said. ‘You are now a serving soldier and here’s the Queen’s shilling.’ With that he handed me a coin. Sadly, not knowing the significance, at the time, I just put it in my pocket with the rest of my small change!

  Living in Salisbury I could no longer work on the farm, so at weekends and school holidays I worked for a company in Quidhampton, a couple of miles from home, where they made sheds and fencing. It was great fun and very ‘grown-up’ and also, coincidentally, almost next door to the house where my girlfriend of the time lived. At lunch time on my last day, my workmates and I went to the White Horse Inn for a little farewell. I rode home on my bicycle afterwards with a fixed grin on my face and a belly full of Gibbs Mew’s best ale. Our house was halfway up a steep hill and as I stood on the pedals, head down and driving furiously against the gradient, I cycled straight into the back of a parked car. The car was undamaged, but my much loved and cherished bike was wrecked, so I threw it in the back of my father’s garage, where it remained for many years. I now realise that this was to be the first of several incidents in my life involving bicycles and alcohol!

  On 9th September 1965 my father drove me to Salisbury Station. He was undoubtedly full of pride, but true to character, he revealed nothing and just gave me a manly handshake, slapped me on the shoulder and wished me ‘All the best’. As the train pulled out my excitement was tinged with a little apprehension. I was leaving home, but what would the future hold for me in the Army?

  Chapter 2

  The Gunner

  ‘Gobowen. Gobowen. This is Gobowen.’ The dull Midland tones of the voice on the tannoy announced our arrival at the railway station that served Park Hall Camp. After five hours and three changes I had finally reached my destination. I saw a man in a military uniform, with gleaming boots and stripes on the sleeve of his highly-pressed shirt, standing beneath a sign which said ‘Oswestry home of 17 Training Regiment Royal Artillery’. Under his arm he held a clipboard. Another six lost souls shambled awkwardly along the platform towards him. He checked us on his list; we boarded a minibus and drove off in silence.

  Park Hall Camp in Oswestry consisted of hundreds of low wooden buildings from about the time of the Second World War. Each Troop of soldiers was housed in a ‘spider’ of four huts. Every hut contained a barrack room sleeping thirty men and was linked by a corridor to a central ablutions block. We discovered that the man with the stripes who had met us was a Bombardier and he led us to one of the spiders. A sign outside identified it as ‘C’ TROOP, 24 (IRISH) BATTERY RA. He led us into a barrack room where a dozen young men, pasty faced and freshly shorn of their Beatle haircuts, sat on their beds, making small circles on their Army boots with Kiwi Polish. They jumped nervously to their feet as the Bombardier came in.

  ‘Right you lot, these are the new boys, make them
welcome and show them the ropes.’

  We were each allocated a bed space and then signed an AF1033 for blankets, wool – four, pillows – two, sheets – two, pillow cases – two, mattress foam (clean) – one, KFS and mug. The latter I recognised as similar to the knife, fork and spoon that we had at home. A new life had begun with a new language to go with it. It was 1630 (formerly known as 4.30 in the afternoon). With no time for any military work that day the Bombardier led us all across to the cookhouse for what the Army called ‘The Tea Meal’. Our new colleagues, because they owned a uniform and had served almost a whole day in the Army, were made to march, clutching their KFS and Mug in the left hand, behind the back. We, in our civilian clothes, were told to ‘walk smartly’.

  We were woken at 6.30 the following morning by the duty NCO beating a steel locker with his cane and bawling at the top of his voice. At eight o’clock Bdr Farrar (we had now learnt his name and the written abbreviation for his rank) led us down to Regimental Headquarters and we went through the sequence that begins every recruit’s life: Docs Office, Pay Office, barber, then off to the Quartermaster for a suit fitting. Everything was completely new and very different from civilian life. I staggered back to the barrack room, dropped my new kit on the highly polished brown Army linoleum and, blinking like a mouse in a bag of flour, I wondered quite what I had let myself in for.

  In fact I took to Army life like a duck to water. I was out of school, it was all high energy and no studying – deep joy! Like all recruits we were chased and shouted at from dawn to dusk and I seemed to be permanently tired. For lads straight from home it was very challenging, but through it all was the immense humour and comradeship that typifies Army life. In those twelve weeks of basic training, away from home and freed from the burden of academic study, I grew up. We were worked very hard, but we played with equal vigour and frequently crossed the fine line between mischief and trouble, but never to any serious degree and, for all this, the Queen paid us the princely sum of £4 17s 6d a week. Every Friday night we would float our teeth in the Boar’s Head in Oswestry and stand round the Wurlitzer howling the words to the Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’, a chorus written for recruits the world over. On Saturday we would grace the Garrison Dance in the camp theatre which would then leave us with just about enough change for tea and wads in the YMCA during the week.