My Life Story

Chapter 2

This is a continuation on from chapter 1 in the series...

My Schooling in the U.K.

We were lodging with friends of my elder sister (by nine years), Honor, in an already crowded flat (apartment) at 'Clevedon Mansions', just over the Twickenham side of the River Thames at Richmond Bridge, and on the corner of Cambridge Road, the road that the Ice-Drome was in, a skating arena that was very popular then and still. Honor worked for the government in Whitehall, so the flat was fairly conveniently located to the Richmond UndergrounD station.

Honor was a product of mother's previous marriage, to a dashing young naval officer who had served in World War 1. Jock (Campbell) 's health failed a few years later, and I believe it was due to delayed shock at his commanding landing craft who took soldiers ashore on the beaches of Galipoli during the Dardanelles campaign where the ANZACs distinguished themselves so greatly.

Jock would have been perhaps sixteen or seventeen at the time, and one would imagine that the horror of seeing the troops he was landing being shot up would have had an horrific effect on him. Apart from the personal danger of himself and his very small crew, and their having to repeat the routine time and time again with the same results.

It was also a hop, skip and a jump by two double-decker red London buses to Wimbledon, where overlooking Wimbledon Common was Kings College School.

I was enrolled in its Junior School, next door. I remember three things from there.

One was unusual, the Senior School were presenting a dramatic production of Dorothy Sayers' just published play, called 'The Man Born to be King'. This was a departure from her detective stories about aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey - alias de 'Ath Bredon.

We juniors were allowed to stay after assembly one day and watch spellbound as these seniors did their stuff in a dress rehearsal.

The second was my discovery of what Camembert cheese was, from the stinking breath of a grossly overweight small boy in my class, whose desk was at the back of the classroom. I have never liked it as a result!

The last was a doggerel rhyme we made up a year or so later when our classroom was on the ground floor at the back of the school instead of the upper floor at the front. We had a Latin master, who like the others wore an academic gown, and often a mortar-board. His name was Gerald C. de la Condamine. He had a habit of perching himself on an empty front desk - funny how nobody ever fills up the front ones! Anyway, one day the inevitable happened. The desk collapsed, and poor Mr. de la Condamine was on the floor with bits of timber under and on top of him. I think he must have been okay, because I don't think we would have been nasty enough to joke about it if he had broken something. The rhyme went:

'Condibus sitibus on the deskorum.
Deskibus breakibus,
Condie on the floorum.'

By the way, if you have never learned any Latin, that is unlikely to make much sense to you.

This school nowadays also has a web site.

Most of my schooling in the UK from the age of about 11 was accomplished either while living with friends, or in boarding school, because of dad's military postings. He had the dubious honour of commanding the last prisoner of war camp in England to close, one that was high security, and which had a large garrison of soldiers to ensure the security. Prior to that, his command was a 'working' camp where the prisoners were hired out to work in the fields of local farms (mainly in the planting and harvesting of sugar beet) because the farmers and farm hands were still away in the army doing the last bits of 'mopping up'. That was during the very cold winter of 1947, where everything got isolated because of enormous snowdrifts.

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That was near a World War II constructed R.A.F. airfield, close by a little village called Seething in Norfolk. Sheep now grazed what was previously the grassed areas between the the runways and associated road works. Mother and father lived in a pair of Nissen Huts which mother very capably furnished and turned into a home.

During the Seething period, I boarded with friends in North Cheam, an outer southern London suburb, while still attending Kings College Junior School at Wimbledon.

Father's final posting was just outside Bury St. Edmunds, in the East Anglian county of Suffolk. Fornham Park was a large country house with extensive grounds, and he and mother had their quarters in a portion of the house, the rest of which was occupied with all of the offices associated with a military unit, rather like a colonial era Government House.

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It was rumored that Rudolph Hess, one of Adolf Hitler's aides-de-camp, was detained at what was eventually father's camp at Fornham, after his capture in Scotland, and the Allies not entering into the negotiated peace he appeared to have parachuted in to arrange. Hess's whereabouts were never actually divulged, so this is all pure speculation. Father would have known if he were an inmate there, but would never have divulged it.

Here we see a group of four soldiers from Fornham Park waiting to escort and repatriate prisoners from 186 Base Camp. Courtesy www.islandfarm.fsnet.co.uk web site, where there is a very large amount of information about POW camps in the UK.

Interestingly, visiting the U.K. briefly during 1990, I discovered that Fornham Park appeared to be deserted, either still, or again, with no sign of habitation in the house, and the grounds apparently being vacant too. Many wartime military conversions of stately homes resulted in an enormous cost to return them to a usable condition, so perhaps Fornham had never seen civilian use since about 1948 when no.186 Base Camp closed. As a child I remember during school holidays (while staying there) being sneaked into the soldiers' movie theatre, run by the Army Kinema Corporation, and the film being shown was 'Of Mice and Men', hardly appropriate, but I don't remember any detail of the film. This would undoubtedly have been another Nissen Hut, and thinking back they had two projectors in a make-shift 'bio-box' like a real cinema, and were thus able to do reel changeovers on the run.

Links of interest...
http://www.control towers.co.uk/S/Seething.htm
http://www.455th.ukpc.net/tomfeise/8thusaaf/bases.htm
http://freespace.virgin.net/frank.haslam/sites/assocs/rafstndrome.htm
http://www.islandfarm.fsnet.co.uk/LIST%20OF%20UK%20POW%20CAMPS2.htm
http://www.islandfarm.fsnet.co.uk/Repatriation.htm
http://www.covert-surveillance.net/hess.html
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/rudolph.htm

While at Fornham Park my parents looked for somewhere to retire, and found a delightful two-story thatched cottage with a nursery garden and extensive outbuildings on a back road, part of the village of Beyton, some five miles out of Bury St. Edmunds, heading towards Ipswich.

I then became a boarder at the recently moved-to-the-country Norwich High School for Boys, known colloquially as 'St. Giles' because it had previously been located at St. Giles Gate in the city of Norwich. The relocation was to another country estate, much like Fornham Park, ten miles out of Norwich, just outside the village of Loddon. Langley School, as it was renamed in the late 1940s, was located at Langley Park, has a web presence here. Apparently father had tried to get me placed at his old school at Framlingham ('Fram') not far out of Ipswich, but they didn't have any places available so close to the end of the war, even for the son of an old scholar.

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It was from there that my parents' military aspirations for me germinated. I joined the school's Army cadet unit, was completely inconspicuous in any real ability apart from always winning the fastest time in dismantling and reassembling a Bren automatic gun. I went to three summer camps, one near Colchester, one at Catterick in Yorkshire, and I think the third was at the Norwich garrison of the Royal Norfolk Regiment to whom we were attached. That was all paid for by the army, with us receiving travel warrants and adult subsistence allowances while travelling.

I remember marching across the northern city of Shefield between the two principal railway stations en route to Catterick.

My parents also encouraged me to take an interest in the sea, and for five consecutive summers I attended a fortnight "camp" on board an old timber hulk. This was the Training Ship 'Foudroyant', run by the Society for Nautical Research, and she lay moored on the Gosport side of Portsmouth harbour, a couple of hundred yards away from the Royal Navy's submarine training establishment, H.M.S. Dolphin. This was across the harbour from where H.M.S. Victory sits in her dry dock.

For the first few years of these camps, up river slightly from the Victory was located another and slightly larger ship-of-the-line, the retired wooden wall H.M.S. Implacable which as we see in this picture was eventually towed out into Spithead and blown up towards the end of my association with Portsmouth. It was at this time that my parents decided I should go to sea like my paternal grandfather who was never mentioned in our household because of a family feud, and never discovered by me until 1990 - forty years later.

Here are some useful links...

http://www.hms-trincomalee.co.uk/historic/training/training.htm
http://www.theheritagetrail.co.uk/maritime/HMS%20trincomalee.htm
http://www.hms-trincomalee.co.uk/intro/main.htm
http://www.christopherlong.co.uk/pri.hmsimp.html
http://axelnelson.com/skepp/victory.html
http://www.hms-victory.com

Please take this link to go to the next part of my story.

To Be Continued....