Lifelong Learning
by Eve Williamson
Introduction
This site is intended to introduce a very different kind of travel from the many thousands of miles around our beautiful and very special planet cycled by Barry and Margaret, and so thoroughly and entertainingly recorded by them. While my journey has included physical travel to other countries, some on holiday but mostly to work, it obviously in no way qualified me to contribute to MagBazTravels. I did, however, convert one extended series of visits to Russia into an unpublished novel, the first part of which can be accessed in MagBazWords. Further chapters are available for anyone interested.
I have learned and am still learning from the creativity and expertise of other people, past and present, who have contributed so much to the enrichment of my life. In what could be very dark times ahead if we fail to tackle climate change, I want to share what has been most interesting and pleasurable for me to discover, both within formal education and outside it, and has resulted in the large collection of books and recordings which now fill my house, many of which remain currently available. It still amazes me how much can be accessed on line, or (for those with the time and energy to search for them) in second-hand book, album and charity shops.
I was born in 1931 in the midst of the so-called Great Depression. It occurs to me that there could be more to come, including one triggered by COVID, which may lead to more lockdowns and worldwide economic collapse. If so, I remain optimistic enough to hope for a much fairer distribution of wealth and better protection of our fast diminishing planetary resources. However, this is not a political website; others are covering that aspect far better than I. I am writing about how I have coped with the traumas and opportunities of my own time, shortly to come to its inevitable end. For me, it has been a very rich era of wonderful opportunity and incredible learning, well worth sharing with anyone who may be interested. Its particular strength has been the technological progress made to improve access to learning resources in ways never dreamed of, even by my own parents, born in the final decade of the 19th Century. They managed to survive two World Wars, unlike other members of their family and friends, but the period since their deaths in 1986 and 1990 has witnessed unprecedented digital computerised advance into universal access to information and ideas and the opportunity, if we have the courage to pursue it, to create an environment which cares for and protects rather than punishes and destroys the plants, animals and humans fortunate enough to be alive in these troubled and dangerous times. To quote a familiar phrase, the greater the crisis, the greater the opportunity. Lifelong learning is an essential route to prevent disaster. Hence my small contribution which I hope you find useful as well as entertaining.
Pre-School Years
Amongst my early memories, and one for which I am eternally grateful, was my sister, Joan, five years older than I, teaching me to read. Prior to that I was dependent on my parents, my father’s secretary and our home help, Vera (who cycled or walked nearly every day to our house from her home in a nearby village), to read to me, play the piano, turn on the radio, and sing to me for my introduction to what I describe as “learning”. My brother, David, had other ideas. He wanted a playmate and member of The Crimscote Gang, which he had formed to take on any of the village children who ventured into our garden, and to man the fort he had built out of wooden planks and boxes at the top of our sloping lawn. The slope was important because it allowed him to trundle downhill in a wooden car he had also built, steering it by a rope attached to old pram wheels. At the bottom of the lawn was a large laurel bush where we would conceal ourselves at bedtime, hiding from the live-in secretary/governess employed by my father. My father’s office was based at home, but his job as a Livestock Officer for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries demanded that he travel widely visiting farms throughout Warwickshire. The presence of that office in our home also provided important learning opportunities, including the one I am using now, touch typing. More later concerning the role of our location in a small hamlet called Crimscote, near the village of Alderminster, 7 miles from Stratford-on-Avon.
Prior to learning to read for myself, I was treated to the usual diet of books for children at that time. Special memories for me include A. A. Milne’s poetry, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six,, as well as his famous stories, Winnie-the-Pooh, and The House at Pooh Corner. There must have been nursery rhymes, too, although I only recall a few popular ones like Jack and Jill, Sing a Song of Sixpence, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Rock-a-bye Baby, Ring around the Rosie, and Humpty Dumpty. The origin of many of these rhymes has been well researched, and a significant number are now regarded as unsuitable for children because of their implied references to the high rate of infant mortality, the Great Plague of 1665, animal cruelty and racism. Even less suitable were the Victorian verses taught to me by my father’s mother, Mabel (known to the family as Maymay) during her occasional visits to our home.
“Tell me mother what is that that looks like strawberry jam?
Hush, hush, my dear, ‘tis only Pa run over by a tram.”
or worse:
“Don’t care was made to care, don’t care was hung,
Don’t care was put in a pot and boiled ‘till he was done.”
She was always good fun, and joined The Crimscote Gang as Old Bill, a Punch magazine cartoon character from the First World War who got everything wrong, much to the annoyance of my brother who wanted a disciplined squad. It’s just as well that I soon moved on to more literary fare with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy. Less familiar to today’s children, at least as a book rather than an animated film, may be Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, a critique of the dreadful conditions under which child chimney sweeps worked at the time and written in support of his friend, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (first published in 1859). It is hard to forget Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid or Captain Hook and the crocodile. I was too young for my sister’s favourite book, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, but we both enjoyed and spent many hours looking through the beautifully illustrated Flower Fairies collection of verses, first published in the 1920’s by Cicely Mary Barker (still in print and widely available as a collection and as separate small books easy for a child to handle).
I was saddened by a recent viewing of the biographical drama film Goodbye Christopher Robin, which showed how the widespread publicity associated with his books and drawings appearing in print and all the marketing hype surrounding them almost destroyed Milne’s marriage and ended the magical times he and his son had experienced together with Pooh, Piglet, Eyeore, Owl, Roo, Tigger and Rabbit during their adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood. Christopher Robin as an adult never allowed himself to benefit from money earned from the sale of his father’s books. I’m sure Beatrix Potter’s charming tales and drawings were also among my favourite pre-reading, but somehow I don’t remember them, despite my more recent viewing of the excellent and moving film of her life, Miss Potter, and the signifiant contribution she made to ensure the setting-up of the Lake District as a National Park.
Once I could read I moved on to explore more widely the large collection of books in our home. Of special interest were those collected by my mother’s father, Charles Marsh. He died of prostate cancer just before I was born, but he loved books and art and frequented new and second hand bookshops near where he lived in Kingston-on Thames, Surbiton, Earls Colne and Cambridge. I still have some of these, many purchased in the latter years of the 19th Century, which include poetry by Keats and Shelley, novels by Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, and The Collected Works of Shakespeare as separate books. For some reason I selected Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, which I carried around with me and tried to read all by myself. I unearthed my treasured but somewhat battered copy when I was sorting through old books recently and found I had coloured in some of the illustrations. I still miss a beautifully illustrated edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories, a birthday present from my grandfather to my mother, which I sold when I was short of cash, and Richard Jefferies’ Bevis, the Story of a Boy, which I gave to my niece, and which my father read to my sister and I, who shared the Nursery, before we went to sleep.
My father spent much of his life outdoors - on his father’s farm growing up, in the army during the First World War, and throughout his long career with the Ministry of Agriculture. He loved the natural world and always encouraged us to explore the surrounding countryside, taking us farther afield by car whenever he could, and teaching us to identify different wild birds and recognise their songs. In those days there was far less light pollution and he often took us outside to look at the night sky, showing us the nearby planets, the Milky Way and the familiar groups of bright stars he called the W, the Plough, and Orion. One night was very special. My mother woke us from sleep to come and look out of the office window. The whole sky was filled with flashing and undulating green light. My father told us it was the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights, and they were very rarely seen so far south. I have seen them only once since, and that was many years later in northern Sweden, part of a very different learning experience.
When you are little most of the important learning is about skills rather than information and ideas. We were fortunate to have a large flower and kitchen garden, a back yard with a laundry, store rooms for garden tools and bicycles, and a separate garage where my father kept the Morris car he used for work and to take us for drives in his spare time. Warwickshire and its neighbour, Gloucestershire, are beautiful counties and, as well as visiting the limestone villages and sloping hills of the Cotswolds, we had frequent trips to Stratford-on-Avon, where my mother, an excellent punter thanks to growing up by the Thames and spending time in Cambridge, took us up and down the river, occasionally near to the edge of a rather scary weir, just a short distance further on from the recently re-built Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. She also took me to a dance class based in the remains of the adjoining Old Theatre, which had burnt down.
Any time music was playing on the radio or on the piano, I started to dance when I was little, and my mother, recognising a natural talent, took me to join the class when I was 5. The highlight for me was our annual performance on the stage of the new theatre. I was a pearl in a white satin dress decorated with artificial pearls by my mother’s mother, Edith (called Giffy by the family), and our class was allowed to use, as scenery for their under-sea performance, the wreck of a wooden ship specially built for Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I also learnt quite early on that it was important to be able to swim. There was one secretary/governess we hated (my brother put holly in her bed and filled her gumboots with water.). She took me for a regular daily walk to the Rectory where I would meet a friend of my own age, Rachel. As well as opening several five-barred gates, the walk included crossing the river on a rickety wooden bridge with a number of missing slats. I must have been quite small because one day I slipped through a gap. The governess grabbed the half-belt on my coat and pulled me back, but the river was full and the drop quite far, so it was high time I learnt to swim. We used to go to a water mill in Taunton, another regular walk, to swim. The mill pond was created by a large wooden gate, over which the water flowed when it was full. There was an area attached to the gate where the pond was shallow enough to allow us to stand, and I was warned never to venture beyond it. I also had a rubber tyre to help me learn how to swim. My mother looked round one day to see my empty tyre floating in deeper water. She dived down quickly and rescued me, thank goodness.
Not long after, we went on holiday to join some of my mother’s family, who lived in a small fishing village, Cadgwith, not far from the Lizard, on the south coast of Cornwall. We had two wonderful holidays there, fishing for mackerel in the family’s engine assisted rowing boat, The Puffin, and watching Philip, my Aunt Elma’s younger brother, sailing round the bay in his yacht. Swimming in the sea, sunbathing on the rocks, exploring rock pools full of small creatures left by the tide, and building sand castles, are precious parts of childhood, never to be forgotten. Our second holiday there was in 1938, war was imminent and it would be a long time before we could visit Cornwall again.
Another adventure was learning to ride. We borrowed a white pony, Snowball, from a friend of my father’s. Our landlord owned the farm surrounding our house, so there was no problem finding a field in which Snowball could graze. My father had grown up with horses on my grandfather’s farm, which had to be sold when the Government withdrew all the farm subsidies during the depression. Hence his job with the Ministry. He deeply regretted losing what would have been his inheritance, and was always very careful with money so that the family would never suffer such a dreadful misfortune again. Snowball was his way of helping us to share the joy he had known as a boy. I was too little to do much more than sit on the saddle and be led around, Joan was too frightened to ride very far, but David trotted, cantered and galloped off around the adjoining fields to his heart’s content.
My brother and sister went to school, and I sometimes wondered why I didn’t go as well. My mother was educated at home, and it did not seem strange to her that I should be, too. She explained to me that I was too young to travel by bicycle to the bus stop on the main road to Stratford, which was 7 miles away. David attended the King Edward VI Grammar School, a black and white timber and plaster Tudor building, where an old oak desk, carved on the lid by its most famous pupil with the letters WS, was greatly prized. Joan attended a private school for girls, The Croft, which she hated because the staff and some of the other pupils were mean to her. My first heartbreak was when my brother was sent off to boarding school at the age of 12. The school was Sidcot, a co-educational Quaker school far away in Winscombe, Somerset, which my father and his brother, Tom, killed in April, 1918, during the last German push at the end of the war, had also attended. I was devastated by the temporary loss of my brother. David and I were always great friends, and I had begun to read his books rather than my sister’s. The Modern Boy magazine was far more interesting than the Girls’ Crystal which was my sister’s choice, and I found the adventures of Tarzan, Superman and Biggles really exciting. Without my brother to entertain and amuse me, what would I do all day except read and go back and forth endlessly on the swing in our garden?
I also experienced death for the first time. Our beautiful golden retriever, Numa, caught distemper, and we found her lifeless body on the kitchen floor one morning, surrounded by all the fluids which had spilled out from her body. When I was very little, she had let me ride on her back, and she was the most loving companion and guardian of our safety on numerous walks. My father soon replaced Numa with a springer spaniel, Judy, but somehow our relationship was never the same. My sister was the cat lover, and Sally, a beautiful tortoiseshell, lived long enough to accompany us to our next home.
My friend Rachel, the Vicar’s daughter, sometimes asked me why my family never went to Church. I found out that we were Quakers, and that my mother and father attended a small meeting house in Ettington on Sunday morning. When I was old enough to sit quietly for an hour and not fidget, they began to take me with them. As it turned out, I loved going to Meeting, which took place in a small thatched building surrounded by trees. There was no music or singing and no preacher - just a group of friendly people sitting down quietly for an hour in silent contemplation, waiting until someone felt sufficiently inspired to say something. There were no rules about who was allowed to speak. It could have been me, although I was far too shy to volunteer. You spoke if the Spirit moved you to say whatever was on your mind. There was a general consensus that anger, jealousy and hatred were not expressed except with regret and sorrow that they had been heard or spoken outside of Meeting. The overall theme was loving kindness, and how to do some good in the world if at all possible. I loved the atmosphere, and, judging by what I heard on the|BBC News, was surprised to find a group of relative strangers who seemed to care for one another. When I was bored by the long silences, I watched a family of red squirrels in the trees outside chasing each other up and down the branches and searching for food.
External events had begun to impinge on our private world. King George V had died in January, 1936, and his popular son, Prince Edward, was due to inherit the throne. Edward, who had never been very well behaved, had fallen in love with an American divorcée, Mrs Simpson, and it was unacceptable, if they married, that she should become Queen. The BBC and newspapers were full of the story and the political arguments surrounding it. More important and much more sinister was the rise of Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts, a Fascist group who were protesting in the streets and supporting Edward, who was friendly with the Nazi leader in Germany, Adolf Hitler. There were serious undercurrents to all of this, and my parents, who rarely mentioned their experiences during what was then called the Great War or The War to End All Wars, were looking increasingly worried and concerned. Edward finally abdicated in December, 1936, and his brother, Albert, to be known as King George V1, replaced him as heir to the throne.
Soon afterwards my parents finally found a secretary/governess who would live with us for a very long time, and came to be regarded by all of us as a member of the family. She, too, was a Quaker, was born in York and attended the Mount School for Girls there. Although her name was Irene, we called her Elizabeth, naming her after the already popular Elizabeth, Duchess of York, who would shortly become Queen. Everyone was talking about the impending Coronation, and I still remember a roundabout at the top of the main street in Stratford being completely covered with coloured lights representing a crown. For the first time I had a governess who was interested in helping me to learn as distinct from just listening to me read, correcting what I wrote, and telling me what to do. Elizabeth was prepared to join in my fantasy games, discuss what we heard on the News, and have conversations with me as if I was a real person, not just a child. We soon became good pals and would spend time together exploring the house and garden, picking fruit and vegetables, helping my mother, who did all the cooking for the family, prepare meals, and going for longer walks than any of my previous governesses had ever bothered to take me. On day we discovered a large bull alone in a field, munching grass and not showing much interest in or presence. My father had told us just how dangerous bulls could be when he was trying to punch a hole in their ears to insert a licence tag, so we gave this particular bull a wide berth. When we told my father about it on his return home, he was very relieved that we had neither approached the bull nor run away from it. This bull belonged to our landlord, the farmer who lived in a big red brick house just up the road from us. The bull’s name was Napoleon and he was notorious for his bad temper and tendency to chase anyone venturing into what he regarded as his territory.
Living in the country, we were surrounded by farm animals. We were training Judy, our new puppy, not to chase them or bark at them, and it was very important that we control her on our walks. There was so much to learn, not just for me but for Elizabeth, who had always lived in a city and had now taken a job which was all about agriculture. We were learning so much together: how to cook, how to plant flowers and vegetables, how to make jam, bottle fruit, wash clothes in the copper boiler in the laundry, and turn the big wooden mangle to wring out the water before we hung them up to dry. It was all fun with Elizabeth to help me. There was one job we did not tackle. We spotted a wasp’s nest in the eaves of the house, above the kitchen door. My mother told us to wait until my father came home. He knew exactly what to do. He waited until it was almost dark and all the wasps were in their nest, and then he fetched our longest ladder from the shed. He climbed up with a smoke puffer in his hand in case his presence alarmed the wasps and they started to swarm around him. All remained quiet, so he puffed more smoke into the nest and quickly plugged the entrance hole with a large cork leaving the wasps to die inside. These days I call pest control, who use chemicals rather than smoke, but the procedure is much the same. In those days you usually had to do whatever needed doing yourself, or you asked a neighbour for help. We were fortunate to have a man on a bicycle fitted with a stone grinder who arrived occasionally to sharpen scissors, knives and garden tools. One day someone else knocked on our door unexpectedly. He wanted to demonstrate a new tool and persuaded my mother to buy a Hoover, her first electrical home cleaning appliance.
Thus far I had never been to the cinema, where my parents sometimes went in the evening. I often asked them to take me, but they said I was too young. The films they liked included Rose Marie, with Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy and Sanders of the River with Paul Robeson. My mother bought sheet music for some of the songs from Woolworth’s for sixpence each, and Vera played and sang them for me on the piano. I found out years later that Robeson had only taken the role of the Nigerian tribal leader because it portrayed a black person as someone of dignity and courage. He subsequently realised that the film had been edited to promote the role of British colonial rule in a favourable light and to present black people as ignorant and needing our help. Robeson was furious, and disowned his role in the film, attacking it as a complete misrepresentation of the reality. Finally my father relented and took me to see a popular child star, Shirley Temple, in Captain January. The cinema was busy and we had to queue. By the time we got in the film had started, there were no more seats left, and we had to sit on the steps leading to the stalls. I was bitterly disappointed by my first taste of what was to become a favourite learning experience for the rest of my life.
There was one more important skill I had to learn before we left Crimscote. I was given a fairy cycle for my seventh birthday on 24th December 1938, and my brother taught me to ride it by holding the saddle and running alongside me on the road at the bottom of our drive. Freedom at last. I could be independent and venture out by myself for the first time.
This site is intended to introduce a very different kind of travel from the many thousands of miles around our beautiful and very special planet cycled by Barry and Margaret, and so thoroughly and entertainingly recorded by them. While my journey has included physical travel to other countries, some on holiday but mostly to work, it obviously in no way qualified me to contribute to MagBazTravels. I did, however, convert one extended series of visits to Russia into an unpublished novel, the first part of which can be accessed in MagBazWords. Further chapters are available for anyone interested.
I have learned and am still learning from the creativity and expertise of other people, past and present, who have contributed so much to the enrichment of my life. In what could be very dark times ahead if we fail to tackle climate change, I want to share what has been most interesting and pleasurable for me to discover, both within formal education and outside it, and has resulted in the large collection of books and recordings which now fill my house, many of which remain currently available. It still amazes me how much can be accessed on line, or (for those with the time and energy to search for them) in second-hand book, album and charity shops.
I was born in 1931 in the midst of the so-called Great Depression. It occurs to me that there could be more to come, including one triggered by COVID, which may lead to more lockdowns and worldwide economic collapse. If so, I remain optimistic enough to hope for a much fairer distribution of wealth and better protection of our fast diminishing planetary resources. However, this is not a political website; others are covering that aspect far better than I. I am writing about how I have coped with the traumas and opportunities of my own time, shortly to come to its inevitable end. For me, it has been a very rich era of wonderful opportunity and incredible learning, well worth sharing with anyone who may be interested. Its particular strength has been the technological progress made to improve access to learning resources in ways never dreamed of, even by my own parents, born in the final decade of the 19th Century. They managed to survive two World Wars, unlike other members of their family and friends, but the period since their deaths in 1986 and 1990 has witnessed unprecedented digital computerised advance into universal access to information and ideas and the opportunity, if we have the courage to pursue it, to create an environment which cares for and protects rather than punishes and destroys the plants, animals and humans fortunate enough to be alive in these troubled and dangerous times. To quote a familiar phrase, the greater the crisis, the greater the opportunity. Lifelong learning is an essential route to prevent disaster. Hence my small contribution which I hope you find useful as well as entertaining.
Pre-School Years
Amongst my early memories, and one for which I am eternally grateful, was my sister, Joan, five years older than I, teaching me to read. Prior to that I was dependent on my parents, my father’s secretary and our home help, Vera (who cycled or walked nearly every day to our house from her home in a nearby village), to read to me, play the piano, turn on the radio, and sing to me for my introduction to what I describe as “learning”. My brother, David, had other ideas. He wanted a playmate and member of The Crimscote Gang, which he had formed to take on any of the village children who ventured into our garden, and to man the fort he had built out of wooden planks and boxes at the top of our sloping lawn. The slope was important because it allowed him to trundle downhill in a wooden car he had also built, steering it by a rope attached to old pram wheels. At the bottom of the lawn was a large laurel bush where we would conceal ourselves at bedtime, hiding from the live-in secretary/governess employed by my father. My father’s office was based at home, but his job as a Livestock Officer for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries demanded that he travel widely visiting farms throughout Warwickshire. The presence of that office in our home also provided important learning opportunities, including the one I am using now, touch typing. More later concerning the role of our location in a small hamlet called Crimscote, near the village of Alderminster, 7 miles from Stratford-on-Avon.
Prior to learning to read for myself, I was treated to the usual diet of books for children at that time. Special memories for me include A. A. Milne’s poetry, When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six,, as well as his famous stories, Winnie-the-Pooh, and The House at Pooh Corner. There must have been nursery rhymes, too, although I only recall a few popular ones like Jack and Jill, Sing a Song of Sixpence, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Rock-a-bye Baby, Ring around the Rosie, and Humpty Dumpty. The origin of many of these rhymes has been well researched, and a significant number are now regarded as unsuitable for children because of their implied references to the high rate of infant mortality, the Great Plague of 1665, animal cruelty and racism. Even less suitable were the Victorian verses taught to me by my father’s mother, Mabel (known to the family as Maymay) during her occasional visits to our home.
“Tell me mother what is that that looks like strawberry jam?
Hush, hush, my dear, ‘tis only Pa run over by a tram.”
or worse:
“Don’t care was made to care, don’t care was hung,
Don’t care was put in a pot and boiled ‘till he was done.”
She was always good fun, and joined The Crimscote Gang as Old Bill, a Punch magazine cartoon character from the First World War who got everything wrong, much to the annoyance of my brother who wanted a disciplined squad. It’s just as well that I soon moved on to more literary fare with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy. Less familiar to today’s children, at least as a book rather than an animated film, may be Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, a critique of the dreadful conditions under which child chimney sweeps worked at the time and written in support of his friend, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (first published in 1859). It is hard to forget Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid or Captain Hook and the crocodile. I was too young for my sister’s favourite book, Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, but we both enjoyed and spent many hours looking through the beautifully illustrated Flower Fairies collection of verses, first published in the 1920’s by Cicely Mary Barker (still in print and widely available as a collection and as separate small books easy for a child to handle).
I was saddened by a recent viewing of the biographical drama film Goodbye Christopher Robin, which showed how the widespread publicity associated with his books and drawings appearing in print and all the marketing hype surrounding them almost destroyed Milne’s marriage and ended the magical times he and his son had experienced together with Pooh, Piglet, Eyeore, Owl, Roo, Tigger and Rabbit during their adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood. Christopher Robin as an adult never allowed himself to benefit from money earned from the sale of his father’s books. I’m sure Beatrix Potter’s charming tales and drawings were also among my favourite pre-reading, but somehow I don’t remember them, despite my more recent viewing of the excellent and moving film of her life, Miss Potter, and the signifiant contribution she made to ensure the setting-up of the Lake District as a National Park.
Once I could read I moved on to explore more widely the large collection of books in our home. Of special interest were those collected by my mother’s father, Charles Marsh. He died of prostate cancer just before I was born, but he loved books and art and frequented new and second hand bookshops near where he lived in Kingston-on Thames, Surbiton, Earls Colne and Cambridge. I still have some of these, many purchased in the latter years of the 19th Century, which include poetry by Keats and Shelley, novels by Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, and The Collected Works of Shakespeare as separate books. For some reason I selected Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, which I carried around with me and tried to read all by myself. I unearthed my treasured but somewhat battered copy when I was sorting through old books recently and found I had coloured in some of the illustrations. I still miss a beautifully illustrated edition of Kipling’s Just So Stories, a birthday present from my grandfather to my mother, which I sold when I was short of cash, and Richard Jefferies’ Bevis, the Story of a Boy, which I gave to my niece, and which my father read to my sister and I, who shared the Nursery, before we went to sleep.
My father spent much of his life outdoors - on his father’s farm growing up, in the army during the First World War, and throughout his long career with the Ministry of Agriculture. He loved the natural world and always encouraged us to explore the surrounding countryside, taking us farther afield by car whenever he could, and teaching us to identify different wild birds and recognise their songs. In those days there was far less light pollution and he often took us outside to look at the night sky, showing us the nearby planets, the Milky Way and the familiar groups of bright stars he called the W, the Plough, and Orion. One night was very special. My mother woke us from sleep to come and look out of the office window. The whole sky was filled with flashing and undulating green light. My father told us it was the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights, and they were very rarely seen so far south. I have seen them only once since, and that was many years later in northern Sweden, part of a very different learning experience.
When you are little most of the important learning is about skills rather than information and ideas. We were fortunate to have a large flower and kitchen garden, a back yard with a laundry, store rooms for garden tools and bicycles, and a separate garage where my father kept the Morris car he used for work and to take us for drives in his spare time. Warwickshire and its neighbour, Gloucestershire, are beautiful counties and, as well as visiting the limestone villages and sloping hills of the Cotswolds, we had frequent trips to Stratford-on-Avon, where my mother, an excellent punter thanks to growing up by the Thames and spending time in Cambridge, took us up and down the river, occasionally near to the edge of a rather scary weir, just a short distance further on from the recently re-built Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. She also took me to a dance class based in the remains of the adjoining Old Theatre, which had burnt down.
Any time music was playing on the radio or on the piano, I started to dance when I was little, and my mother, recognising a natural talent, took me to join the class when I was 5. The highlight for me was our annual performance on the stage of the new theatre. I was a pearl in a white satin dress decorated with artificial pearls by my mother’s mother, Edith (called Giffy by the family), and our class was allowed to use, as scenery for their under-sea performance, the wreck of a wooden ship specially built for Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
I also learnt quite early on that it was important to be able to swim. There was one secretary/governess we hated (my brother put holly in her bed and filled her gumboots with water.). She took me for a regular daily walk to the Rectory where I would meet a friend of my own age, Rachel. As well as opening several five-barred gates, the walk included crossing the river on a rickety wooden bridge with a number of missing slats. I must have been quite small because one day I slipped through a gap. The governess grabbed the half-belt on my coat and pulled me back, but the river was full and the drop quite far, so it was high time I learnt to swim. We used to go to a water mill in Taunton, another regular walk, to swim. The mill pond was created by a large wooden gate, over which the water flowed when it was full. There was an area attached to the gate where the pond was shallow enough to allow us to stand, and I was warned never to venture beyond it. I also had a rubber tyre to help me learn how to swim. My mother looked round one day to see my empty tyre floating in deeper water. She dived down quickly and rescued me, thank goodness.
Not long after, we went on holiday to join some of my mother’s family, who lived in a small fishing village, Cadgwith, not far from the Lizard, on the south coast of Cornwall. We had two wonderful holidays there, fishing for mackerel in the family’s engine assisted rowing boat, The Puffin, and watching Philip, my Aunt Elma’s younger brother, sailing round the bay in his yacht. Swimming in the sea, sunbathing on the rocks, exploring rock pools full of small creatures left by the tide, and building sand castles, are precious parts of childhood, never to be forgotten. Our second holiday there was in 1938, war was imminent and it would be a long time before we could visit Cornwall again.
Another adventure was learning to ride. We borrowed a white pony, Snowball, from a friend of my father’s. Our landlord owned the farm surrounding our house, so there was no problem finding a field in which Snowball could graze. My father had grown up with horses on my grandfather’s farm, which had to be sold when the Government withdrew all the farm subsidies during the depression. Hence his job with the Ministry. He deeply regretted losing what would have been his inheritance, and was always very careful with money so that the family would never suffer such a dreadful misfortune again. Snowball was his way of helping us to share the joy he had known as a boy. I was too little to do much more than sit on the saddle and be led around, Joan was too frightened to ride very far, but David trotted, cantered and galloped off around the adjoining fields to his heart’s content.
My brother and sister went to school, and I sometimes wondered why I didn’t go as well. My mother was educated at home, and it did not seem strange to her that I should be, too. She explained to me that I was too young to travel by bicycle to the bus stop on the main road to Stratford, which was 7 miles away. David attended the King Edward VI Grammar School, a black and white timber and plaster Tudor building, where an old oak desk, carved on the lid by its most famous pupil with the letters WS, was greatly prized. Joan attended a private school for girls, The Croft, which she hated because the staff and some of the other pupils were mean to her. My first heartbreak was when my brother was sent off to boarding school at the age of 12. The school was Sidcot, a co-educational Quaker school far away in Winscombe, Somerset, which my father and his brother, Tom, killed in April, 1918, during the last German push at the end of the war, had also attended. I was devastated by the temporary loss of my brother. David and I were always great friends, and I had begun to read his books rather than my sister’s. The Modern Boy magazine was far more interesting than the Girls’ Crystal which was my sister’s choice, and I found the adventures of Tarzan, Superman and Biggles really exciting. Without my brother to entertain and amuse me, what would I do all day except read and go back and forth endlessly on the swing in our garden?
I also experienced death for the first time. Our beautiful golden retriever, Numa, caught distemper, and we found her lifeless body on the kitchen floor one morning, surrounded by all the fluids which had spilled out from her body. When I was very little, she had let me ride on her back, and she was the most loving companion and guardian of our safety on numerous walks. My father soon replaced Numa with a springer spaniel, Judy, but somehow our relationship was never the same. My sister was the cat lover, and Sally, a beautiful tortoiseshell, lived long enough to accompany us to our next home.
My friend Rachel, the Vicar’s daughter, sometimes asked me why my family never went to Church. I found out that we were Quakers, and that my mother and father attended a small meeting house in Ettington on Sunday morning. When I was old enough to sit quietly for an hour and not fidget, they began to take me with them. As it turned out, I loved going to Meeting, which took place in a small thatched building surrounded by trees. There was no music or singing and no preacher - just a group of friendly people sitting down quietly for an hour in silent contemplation, waiting until someone felt sufficiently inspired to say something. There were no rules about who was allowed to speak. It could have been me, although I was far too shy to volunteer. You spoke if the Spirit moved you to say whatever was on your mind. There was a general consensus that anger, jealousy and hatred were not expressed except with regret and sorrow that they had been heard or spoken outside of Meeting. The overall theme was loving kindness, and how to do some good in the world if at all possible. I loved the atmosphere, and, judging by what I heard on the|BBC News, was surprised to find a group of relative strangers who seemed to care for one another. When I was bored by the long silences, I watched a family of red squirrels in the trees outside chasing each other up and down the branches and searching for food.
External events had begun to impinge on our private world. King George V had died in January, 1936, and his popular son, Prince Edward, was due to inherit the throne. Edward, who had never been very well behaved, had fallen in love with an American divorcée, Mrs Simpson, and it was unacceptable, if they married, that she should become Queen. The BBC and newspapers were full of the story and the political arguments surrounding it. More important and much more sinister was the rise of Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts, a Fascist group who were protesting in the streets and supporting Edward, who was friendly with the Nazi leader in Germany, Adolf Hitler. There were serious undercurrents to all of this, and my parents, who rarely mentioned their experiences during what was then called the Great War or The War to End All Wars, were looking increasingly worried and concerned. Edward finally abdicated in December, 1936, and his brother, Albert, to be known as King George V1, replaced him as heir to the throne.
Soon afterwards my parents finally found a secretary/governess who would live with us for a very long time, and came to be regarded by all of us as a member of the family. She, too, was a Quaker, was born in York and attended the Mount School for Girls there. Although her name was Irene, we called her Elizabeth, naming her after the already popular Elizabeth, Duchess of York, who would shortly become Queen. Everyone was talking about the impending Coronation, and I still remember a roundabout at the top of the main street in Stratford being completely covered with coloured lights representing a crown. For the first time I had a governess who was interested in helping me to learn as distinct from just listening to me read, correcting what I wrote, and telling me what to do. Elizabeth was prepared to join in my fantasy games, discuss what we heard on the News, and have conversations with me as if I was a real person, not just a child. We soon became good pals and would spend time together exploring the house and garden, picking fruit and vegetables, helping my mother, who did all the cooking for the family, prepare meals, and going for longer walks than any of my previous governesses had ever bothered to take me. On day we discovered a large bull alone in a field, munching grass and not showing much interest in or presence. My father had told us just how dangerous bulls could be when he was trying to punch a hole in their ears to insert a licence tag, so we gave this particular bull a wide berth. When we told my father about it on his return home, he was very relieved that we had neither approached the bull nor run away from it. This bull belonged to our landlord, the farmer who lived in a big red brick house just up the road from us. The bull’s name was Napoleon and he was notorious for his bad temper and tendency to chase anyone venturing into what he regarded as his territory.
Living in the country, we were surrounded by farm animals. We were training Judy, our new puppy, not to chase them or bark at them, and it was very important that we control her on our walks. There was so much to learn, not just for me but for Elizabeth, who had always lived in a city and had now taken a job which was all about agriculture. We were learning so much together: how to cook, how to plant flowers and vegetables, how to make jam, bottle fruit, wash clothes in the copper boiler in the laundry, and turn the big wooden mangle to wring out the water before we hung them up to dry. It was all fun with Elizabeth to help me. There was one job we did not tackle. We spotted a wasp’s nest in the eaves of the house, above the kitchen door. My mother told us to wait until my father came home. He knew exactly what to do. He waited until it was almost dark and all the wasps were in their nest, and then he fetched our longest ladder from the shed. He climbed up with a smoke puffer in his hand in case his presence alarmed the wasps and they started to swarm around him. All remained quiet, so he puffed more smoke into the nest and quickly plugged the entrance hole with a large cork leaving the wasps to die inside. These days I call pest control, who use chemicals rather than smoke, but the procedure is much the same. In those days you usually had to do whatever needed doing yourself, or you asked a neighbour for help. We were fortunate to have a man on a bicycle fitted with a stone grinder who arrived occasionally to sharpen scissors, knives and garden tools. One day someone else knocked on our door unexpectedly. He wanted to demonstrate a new tool and persuaded my mother to buy a Hoover, her first electrical home cleaning appliance.
Thus far I had never been to the cinema, where my parents sometimes went in the evening. I often asked them to take me, but they said I was too young. The films they liked included Rose Marie, with Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy and Sanders of the River with Paul Robeson. My mother bought sheet music for some of the songs from Woolworth’s for sixpence each, and Vera played and sang them for me on the piano. I found out years later that Robeson had only taken the role of the Nigerian tribal leader because it portrayed a black person as someone of dignity and courage. He subsequently realised that the film had been edited to promote the role of British colonial rule in a favourable light and to present black people as ignorant and needing our help. Robeson was furious, and disowned his role in the film, attacking it as a complete misrepresentation of the reality. Finally my father relented and took me to see a popular child star, Shirley Temple, in Captain January. The cinema was busy and we had to queue. By the time we got in the film had started, there were no more seats left, and we had to sit on the steps leading to the stalls. I was bitterly disappointed by my first taste of what was to become a favourite learning experience for the rest of my life.
There was one more important skill I had to learn before we left Crimscote. I was given a fairy cycle for my seventh birthday on 24th December 1938, and my brother taught me to ride it by holding the saddle and running alongside me on the road at the bottom of our drive. Freedom at last. I could be independent and venture out by myself for the first time.