There are places I'll remember....

In My Life.....

Snelling's Haulage Yard, Copthorne, Spring 1959

There are places I'll remember

All my life, though some have changed

Some forever, not for better

Some have gone, and some remain

All these places had their moments

With lovers and friends, I still can recall 

Some are dead, and some are living 

In my life, I've loved them all

Edgington, 1951 - what wheels!

But of all these friends and lovers

There is no one compares with you

And these memories lose their meaning

When I think of love as something new

A Ladies' Man, 1951

Though I know I'll never lose affection

For people and things that went before

I know I'll often stop and think about them

In my life, I'll love you more

Tiddles, 30 Farlington Avenue, Autumn 1954

Though I know I'll never lose affection

For people and things that went before

I know I'll often stop and think about them

In my life I'll love you more

Bros, Farlington Ave, Portsmouth, 1954

In my life I'll love you more

John Lennon and Paul McCartney

One of the things I had on my list to do, before we were told to lock ourselves up and throw away the key, was to go through the archives of photos and letters etc that hold sensory signposts into the 'good' 'old' days.  So now I have time to review some of the pictures in my mother's albums which take me back to another world and recall places and people I love.....

It was a world of black and white, evidently.  I took none of these pictures, and cannot verify their veracity.....  I once claimed to my mother-in-law that mine was the first generation to grow up with a comprehensive photographic record.  This didn't go down well with Dorothy, but because I held on to the concept of cheap cameras etc I still thought I was right.

Now I look back at the pictures of my grandparents and their parents, and of Dorothy and Bernard, I realise my arrogance.

But, more concerning, perhaps, is to contemplate what my children's generation are going to think when it comes to fifty+ years from now.  They will have to interrogate millions of selfies and Facebook posts and billions of pixels to piece together a taste of their youth.

So....  Every silver nitrate lining has a cloud?

Anyway......

My first few steps were taken in a flat in the High Street of Old Portsmouth.  I remember looking out from the flat roof, where mum hung out the washing, seeing warships steaming in and out of the harbour.  Among these were three Russian Destroyers.  Subsequently mum took me and my big brother down for a look around - I remember a sailor chatting mum up and her laughter.  Possibly at the same time that Commander Buster Crab was losing his head in the murky waters beneath the hull.

We lived on the second or third floor, so mum had to park my deluxe perambulator in the stairwell and clamber up the wooden hill with me on her hip.  That summer we went to see her mum, at Edgington, her house at Cripps Corner, on the B2089 near Robertsbridge in East Sussex.  We must have gone there a few times before Grannie died in 1954, and I remember the house and garden well, with particularly vivid images of her two spaniels, her Bakelite telephone on the hall table where she also kept a set of Halma pawns which we played with in the evenings.

Just up the lane, opposite an orchard, lived her friend, Carew, whose house had a wheeled pump for water outside the backdoor. In the field at the back she kept a donkey, a Gypsy Caravan, and an old railway carriage in which resided Aunt Pil, of whom I remember her green eyeshade....

Edgington, 1951

From Portsmouth High Street  we moved up to 30 Farlington Avenue, Drayton, where we had a house, a garage and a garden.

30 Farlington Avenue, 1954

Mum must have taken this picture of Simon getting some kind of telling off.  A few minutes later, I guess, dad took this picture, Simon still chastened....

30 Farlington Avenue, 1954

I remember the place with much affection.  Not really the inside of the house, but the green corrugated iron roof of the coal store, and the recreation ground out the back (which is still there).  I went to my first school across that ground, and in spring and summer we would walk up it to Portsdown Hill and Fort Purbrook and Farlington Redoubt. I remember the poppies and the cornflowers, and Small Blue butterflies.  I loved the grass and the air, and a sense of freedom that faded as we returned home.

I remember starting school, first with Miss Williams, and then Solent Road infants, where as a result of a minor misdemeanour (itself the result of the coercion by a Nelson Munt type) a teacher made me sit inside the classroom and chalk out the numbers from 1 to 100 on a small board while the rest of the school ran round and round screaming in delight.  I remember the dining room, where a  foot once tripped me and sent me crashing to the floor with my peas and mash, the floor and skirting dusty with splinters. I remember walking Shirley, from the year above, to her home, mother concerned by my lateness.

I remember shopping with mum, at the butchers on Havant Road, with her ration book, and sawdust on the floor.  I remember the Rectory at the top of the hill, where I went to a birthday party and saw conjuring tricks.  Many years later I was to work with  Liz, in Rome, and even later to buy paintings from her brother, John Booth, who was Art Master at Eton....

One evening, at bath time, there was a strange chortling noise outside in the street.  Mum became excited and we were allowed to look  through the bathroom window. Dad had brought home Aggie - his first car: a splendid Armstrong Siddeley, running boards, green leather seats, walnut dashboard, and a tendency for the radiator to boil when going up hill.  It was probably a 1932 HP Saloon model, but I'm afraid her big end went long ago.....

Dad hooked the car up to a camping trailer and we rumbled down to Dorset for a summer holiday, on a site near Corfe Castle.  It wasn't unlike the kind of rough camp that wagon trains made in the movies, which could explain my life-long love of westerns.... Dad as John Wayne; me as Chill Wills perhaps?

Camping at Corfe, 1955
By the way, note the snake belt - very fashionable!

The bathroom was rudimentary.... But the experience was a stirling introduction to a simple life outdoors, and the Isle of Purbeck is still one of my favourite places....

Bathtime at Corfe, 1955

Dad had been to Worth Matravers as part of his RAF service - Radar it was.  So he took us back.  Without the camping gear, we stayed in Gulliver's Cottage, hard by the duck pond (and a short walk to the Square and Compass - and a long walk back)....

Worth Matravers, with Jamie Gough, 1957

The village was to be our holiday destination for several years and is deeply etched on my heart. We made friends there, and as a teenager I went back with Roy and Joe, and then, much later, with Amanda and our own girls.

After Gulliver's, we rented Sunnyside, at the head of the path down to Winspit. Here Tim joined us later in the fifties....

Sunnyside, Worth Matravers, 1959
Wot larks!

We would spend days at Studland, where the Commandoes were still practising with their landing craft while we were playing, swimming - and shivering....

Studland Bay, with the Reid children, 1955

Studland Bay, 1959

And at Kimmeridge, fishing for crabs with limpets for bait.... I should have capitalised on the smell of rotting rock, but wasn't into oil at the time....

Kimmeridge, 1958

As an Easter treat, in 1958, we went to Gloucestershire, and stayed in Woodbine Cottage, in the hamlet of Edge. 

Woodbine Cottage, Edge, 1958

I loved this place too, surrounded by green countryside, lanes with high banks, and hedged fields.  It sticks in my mind, especially perhaps, because the chimney caught fire, and dad tried to starve it with a board as scorching embers fell back before the heavy suited firemen arrived.  

From there we visited the Severn Wildfowl Trust, now the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, at Slimbridge, which Peter Scott had founded in 1946, at his home.

Nene (Hawaiian) Geese, Slimbridge, 1958

I have returned many times  to Slimbridge; I  think I owe my interest in birds to Peter Scott....

In the meantime, we had moved from Portsmouth to Northchurch, in Hertfordshire, where dad grew up.  His father was headmaster of the Village School and choirmaster and organist at the Parish Church.  We lived in Crowstone, a house with gardens back and front, and Mrs Ayers next door with chickens.  The house belonged, somehow, to my grandmother, and was a great place for kids.

Crowstone, Northchurch, 1958
Note long trouser and no chain guard

Simon and I used to ride our bikes down the lane opposite to the Grand Union Canal at Dudswell.  The Phillips family with 24 children, lived at a the farm there, and for some reason we had an antipathy to this tribe.  Perhaps they called at us as we rode by, perhaps they didn't have 24 bikes....?  Anyway, one time we decided to raid their yard, and rode in, daring them to react.  Simon, and I believe another friend, made good their getaway, but in my haste I trapped my right trouser cuff in the chain of my bike and became immobilised and terrified in the gateway.  I nearly wet myself as members of the extended Phillips family approached.  I remained petrified as they tended gently to me, helping me to release the oiled trouser from the cog, and encouraging me peacefully on my way.

Ten or more years later I stacked shelves in Sainsbury's in Berkhamsted, where Donald, one of the sons, was a butcher.  We got on famously.....

One other place that sits firmly in my memory is 10, St Ann's Road, Holland Park, London,  where mum's sister, Eve, lived with her husband Wilfred, and eventually several of my cousins.  

10, St Ann's Road, Holland Park, 1958

It's gentrified now, and the row of houses are smart and clean, but I have an abiding memory of the basement which used to flood after heavy rains.  I remember the dirty brown waters gurgling around the floor as we lifted rugs and furniture to avoid the worst.

Apart from that, it was the home of Tansy, my aunt's little dog, with whom we would play in the back garden while the grown-ups talked.

Another place that is engraved on my memory  is Copthorne, in Sussex.  Dad's parents, our Grannie and Grandad, had retired there, to Dunster, a red brick house with a detached garage for Grandad's maroon Standard 8 with a wind up windscreen.

Road testing a Dennis, Snelling's Haulage, Copthorne, 1959
(Or was it a Commer?)

Grannie was a Snelling, and almost everyone around was a relative. We took the train there (to Three Bridges or Horsham); later we steamed there in Aggie, stopping occasionally for me to be sick, while dad sang Green and Yellow Ones....

The Snelling family, Uncles Arthur and Harold, ran a haulage firm, supplying provisions to local farmers, who included several great aunts and uncles, and picking up milk in great sloshing churns.  Simon and I ran shotgun with the drivers on occasions, and in the meantime made dens out of sacks of pig and calf breeder nuts (sampling the produce when peckish).  It was heaven for boys in boiler suits and we would speed about in our imaginations in the lorries that didn't go....

At the end of the fifties, I suppose I began to feel different.  I had my own snake belt, Elvis was in all our minds, and, in 1960, Uncle Robert, mum's older brother, got married to Adrienne.  Somehow things were changing, and somehow they would never be the same again.....

At the beginning of mum's albums, she placed a cutting, probably with her first born in mind.

Hope springs eternal.....

By 1960 we had moved to Number 2 Boxwell Road, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. I believe this move was also funded by Grannie Gibbs, but can't be sure.  Dad was a teacher, and mum was a housewife, so otherwise how could we afford a large house in a desirable town?

By curious coincidence, this was the house where dad had gone to school in ages past.  Mr and Mrs Popple had held their academy in the schoolroom at the back, which now became our playroom.  

But so, while Harold Macmillan struggled with the fallout of the 1957 'flu' epidemic (in which some 30,000 Britons died - when the population was 51,495,702) and as we struggled back from the Court cinema at night holding hands because we simply could not see each other in the smog, we grew and grew, and life unfolded.

Here are my brothers and me, in the garden of 2 Boxwell Road (with the Carter's house behind us) in Autumn 1960, looking back, looking inward, and looking forward.  I believe we may have been photographed by a Chemistry teacher, who later ended his own life with poison, but at this time held a Rolleiflex twin lens camera and caused my big bro to laugh....

2 Boxwell Road, Berkhamsted, Herts, Autumn 1960
(Note the snake belt)

Where had the fifties gone?  How can time slip so fluidly through our fingers?  The black and white, the innocence of childhood, the period of selfless and selfish love, was ebbing away, and fast. Tim, my 'little' bro, remembers this photo shoot and remembers envying my snake belt.  

But time will, eventually, heal all.....

Off I go...  Next stop, oblivion!

There are places I'll remember

All my life, though some have changed

Some forever, not for better

Some have gone, and some remain

All these places had their moments

With lovers and friends, I still can recall 

Some are dead, and some are living 

In my life, I've loved them all

John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Portsmouth and Southsea

Man Overboard

Old Portsmouth and Spice Island from the Spinnaker Tower, St Thomas's Cathedral and the High Street left of centre, above the Isle of Wight Ferry.

In 1513 King Henry VIII had a hit with the song Pastime with Good Company. It had a catchy tune, and was performed widely. Evidence of its popularity lay for centuries in the hulk of the Mary Rose, and now is on display in the eerie new exhibition centre in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

Pastime with good company

I love and shall until I die

grudge who lust but none deny

so God be pleased thus live will I

Remnants of the band on the Mary Rose

Thus, perhaps, will live I, with good company, and no denial, but the Mary Rose was a war ship, and the story of Portsmouth is inextricably linked to the navy, and warfare.

Long before the wreck of the Mary Rose was discovered, I surfaced from the waves of childbirth somewhere by the Southsea Canoe Lake (even though the Italian authorities would later insist I was born in Southsea Castle!) my nautical, naval and warfare connections pretty tenuous at that stage....

Somewhere here there should be a blue plaque......

My father, at the time, taught at Portsmouth Grammar School, 

and we lived just down the High Street, on the top storey of Number 16.

No 16, circa 1985

Portsmouth had for hundreds of years been a densely populated city, with courts and alleys in the area around the naval dockyards (Portsea) packed with tenements lacking running water or sanitation.  

The Dockyards: HMS Warrior in the foreground, Victory and the Mary Rose Exhibition Centre above

The writer Walter Besant, who was born here in 1836, recalled the scenes along the Hard:  The Royal Frederick had been paid off that morning and a thousand Jack Tars were all together chucking away the money in a few days which it had taken three years to earn..... There was a tradition that being ashore meant drink as long as the money lasted.  It sometimes lasted a week, or even a fortnight, and was sometimes got through in a day or two.  There were harpies and pirates in every house which was open to Jack.....

“scarey night!”

Reviewed 12 April 2014

booked into this hotel because i remembered it fondly from when i used to live in portsmouth, it used to be a very nice place to eat. my god how things have changed.

my husband was quite appalled at the exterior of the hotel. things did not improve on the inside. we had booked 2 rooms for 2 nights, which we very quickly changed. the carpets were threadbare, the walls were filthy, the wallpaper was peeling off, the ceiling was falling down in places and that was just on the stairs

At the beginning of the twentieth century Southampton Row was 627 feet long and seven and a half feet wide; King's Bench Alley was 586 feet long with an average width of three to four feet. Portsmouth is the only city in the UK on an island, and is also the lowest above sea level  - global warming will turn Portsmouth into first a Venice and then a memory - but in the meantime, when in 1918 there were 23,000 men working in the dockyards, reformers and inspectors were busy with improvements.  In 1927, at Number 9, Blossom Alley, a family of ten lived in three rooms, the largest of which measured 13ft 6ins x 10ft x 6ft 8 inches.  Of course that was luxury compared to conditions on the ships: at the time of the battle of Trafalgar about 800 men lived on HMS Victory.....

And HMS Warrior (1860) was not much better,

Though Officers and Gentlemen lived in a slightly different world:

And if you were Admiral Nelson, you had the very best:

Even if he did have to sleep with a canon at the foot of his bed!

Portsmouth is still an important working dockyard, and there is a constant traffic of warships, supply vessels, and, in the background, ferries.

And local artists still cater for the flow of sailors, with their questions of identity.....

Across the island, past the War Memorial, past the D Day museum, past Henry VIII's Southsea Castle, at Eastney, there are the Barracks of the Royal Marines (which for years I believed was a project one of my forebears had a hand in, though I can no longer find the evidence.....)

Where a museum now inhabits the Officers' Mess.

War, whether Napoleonic, Crimean, World, Cold, or Falklands, has been part of the business of Portsmouth, since whenever.  As a child I remember my mother producing her ration book in the butcher's; we played in air raid shelters and bomb sites.  Much of the High Street had been smashed, families crushed and burnt in the rubble, the nave of the Royal Garrison Church still stands roofless since a fire bombing raid in 1941. The Cathedral, dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury, was only completed in 1991, as plans to extend it, following the creation of the diocese in 1927, were halted during World War II.  

As a child I remember sitting on my mother's lap during incomprehensible sermons, the temporary brick wall behind me of more interest than the liturgy. But then, with David Stancliffe as Dean, the west front, with its towers and rose window, was consecrated in the presence of the Queen Mother in November 1991.

I remember, or imagine I remember, tottering on the roof outside our flat, my mother hanging washing, while grey ships hooted their way in and out of the channels. I can see my mother laughing with a Russian sailor as he showed us round his cramped quarters. On 18 April 1956, the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, in company with the destroyers Sovershenny and Smotryaschy, had arrived at Portsmouth Naval Base and berthed on South Railway Jetty. This is the VIP berth immediately in front of the distinctive Semaphore Tower. Ordzhonikidze carried the Communist Party leader Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Nikolai Bulganin for talks in London with the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden.  The following day the public was allowed to board at least one of these ships, and, possibly at the very same time, war hero Commander Lionel 'Buster' Crabb, who had stayed the night at the Sally Port Hotel under the name of Smith, slipped into the waters of oblivion somewhere beneath us.

Family and friends (Molly and Freddie Howe) on the Camber
in the mid '50s

Fourteen months later a headless and handless body was found in Chichester Harbour, wearing the same wet suit that Crabb favoured.  The bodied was identified, and subsequently buried, as Crabb's.

Theories, at the time and since, have been broadcast, though official documents are not due to be released until 2057.  One of the most interesting accounts is that of novelist Tim Binding, contemporary and friend of my elder brother, in Man Overboard, which was published in 2005.  Subsequently Tim wrote that he had met Sydney Knowles, the man who was called to identify Crabb's body, who claimed that Crabb had been about to defect to Russia and so MI5 had rigged the events in Portsmouth Harbour and killed him.

Delightful Brutalism - a derelict building in Southsea

On February 7th this year, which would have been Charles Dickens's 202nd birthday, the first full scale statue of the author in Britain was unveiled in Guildhall Square, Portsmouth, not very far from his birthplace museum.  Dickens did not stay long, nor for that matter did Peter Sellers, another famous Portmuthian.  But if my experience is anything to go by, those first salty breaths, the toddling steps in earshot of the sea, the press of history combined with the holiday air that scuds across the shingle and round the shelters along the esplanade, all remain ingrained in the soul, engraved on the cortex, imprinted on the heart.  The bric-a-brac of first impressions must help shape the soul?

Me and Fiona Reid, Ladies Mile, 1952

We moved from the High Street to Drayton, up the hill on the mainland, and then away all together, but I still remember the trolley buses in the town centre, the butcher's St Bernard, and the tiger skin on our dentist's waiting room floor.  I can also recall my father being launched in a glider on the playing fields, a team of boys running with the rope, and the ultimate child's toy, a Link Trainer, somewhere within the darkness of the school. Years later, a teenager, I returned to stay with my godmother, and wandered into a nightclub in Eastney to hear Victor Brox.  The streets then were all in black and white, and somehow the grey sea seemed to be leaking into my mind.

Later still, in the 80s, Amanda and I returned to arrange our wedding with the Dean of Portsmouth, who had become a friend.  Around the same time I witnessed a diminutive coffin being nailed shut in the cathedral crypt.  It was the coffin of a sailor from the Mary Rose, chosen, I believe, to symbolise all those who died.  Also present was a descendant of that sailor.

I've been back on other occasions - taking one of my daughters to see the dockyard, passing through to the Isle of Wight, visiting the Mary Rose, but I have no contacts there now.  The war did its damage, but so much more has changed since then.  Shopping at Gunwharf Quays is the attraction now, with the bold landmark of the Spinnaker Tower,

the University populates the boarding houses with students, the Mighty Mouse is a rusty shadow of its former self.

The Pier is closed, awaiting a millionaire to restore it, or perhaps the arsonist's kiss.

There is something about the British seaside.  On a good day it can shimmer with the abandoned fun of escaping from the daily grind.  But it is not what it once was.  It is not really well.  Rust persists through the thick paint while weeds push up through the cracks in the pavements.  Henry VIII may have enjoyed sunbathing on top of Southsea Castle, strumming his lute and warbling one of his hits, but even the stones of that hefty building seem tired today.

Where did the time go?

On my recent visit I purchased a Captain's Boarding Pass to the Historic Dockyard, which entitles me to many benefits (though curiously would not get me in to the Royal Marines Museum) and would readmit me at any time for two years.  

However, though I feel that, in a strange way, Portsmouth and Southsea are a part of me, I guess that I am no longer part of them, and I am not sure I will ever go back now.  Truth is, despite the pastime, or the times passed, with good company, I am now more of a man overboard.  As Henry VIII sang:

youth must have some dalliance

of good or ill some pastance

Company methinks then best

all thoughts and fancies to digest

The door is firmly closed.....