Pop's Chronicles 1
I was the eldest of four children.
Not the best looking, not the most intelligent, not the most imaginative.
But by far the most frightened of the dark.
Being a catholic, and hearing how Jesus could take us to Heaven while we slept. made me frightened more than anything. That’s nuns for you.
One night when I was seven, as mum was tucking me in (she must have had fried egg for her supper), I asked her when I was ten if I could have a garden shed for my spade and watering can. She laughed and said, 'of course Jay. if you live long enough'.
I was worried about everything. But that made me laugh.
Mum was cool, and I was at my happiest when I was settling down for the night.
Nigel was in the next bed, already asleep. He talked in his sleep occasionally. I remember he said, “Cows in the mob.” one night.
Dandy was bed ridden and died when I was eight. He was headmaster at Barton Boy’s School in Newport, until he retired probably due to ill health.
He was a nice, but quite forbidding person I thought. I liked him though. I liked his pens in his top pocket, and I used to rearrange them so he would use his fountain pen, and not the Biro. But that never seemed to work. (When we moved back to the Island in 66, my new friend Pete Mathews’ dad, said to me, “So you’re Ernest Morris’s grandson. He was my headmaster before the war, and he was the bast teacher I ever had. He never used sarcasm to children, because he knew they could never answer back.” So that was a relief.)
At that time my dad was working in Bournemouth. I wrote him a letter asking for ten shillings to buy some fireworks, but I saw a nice pen and stationery set in Smith’s and got it for mum’s birthday, which was also on the fifth of November.
What a little creep.
Just remembered, on my eighth birthday, mum got me a Davy Crockett suit. Leather fringed jacket and trousers, and a racoon hat. I’d never seen it on telly (we didn’t have one), but all the kids were talking about it and singing the Davy Crockett song on the bus on the way home.
I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen. Wore it once into town and realised with a tiny bit of embarrassment, that Mum had made it, as a kid in a proper outfit (a bit more of a grey affair) and a fluffier racoon tail passed me. So me and my specially made outfit stayed at home at weekends.
It was near a part of an overgrown tennis court that had seen better days. We had a deep, dark and jungly beech tree area which had a floor of nutshells and mossy creepers which we tried to climb. Sometimes we lit a bonfire, and once I set fire to a rose hedge. Lala was a bit annoyed, but she was never get cross for long.
I went to visit Dad in Bournemouth. I think that was when DuDu was being born. 1956. Shar and Nigel kept badgering Mum for a sister, so they could sing, “Sukie Put The Kettle On”. Being a fertile catholic woman, Mum obliged. So the new baby was christened Susan (according to instructions), but Nigel couldn’t say Sukie, so Dukie, then DuDu, was the name that stuck all her life.
Bless her.