Week 2.09

Tendring Topics….on Line

'Three score years and ten'

I find it difficult to believe that 1939, a year filled with events that will affect the lives of people world-wide for generations to come, is now seventy years - a lifetime - in the past. It was nearer in time (and I think in public attitudes) to the Victorian age of Gladstone and Disraeli, and of Britain's colonial wars, than to the present day! It was a year that dramatically changed the course of my life!

Myself, aged 17. I think though, that I look about 14! No wonder Heather and I were never conscious of the difference in our ages.

I can’t remember exactly when I volunteered to join the Territorial Army but it was certainly during the first two or three months of the year. Everything had seemed so clear-cut in those days. Fascism and Nazism were unmitigated evils and it was everybody’s responsibility to defeat them. Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, addressed a public meeting in Ipswich Public Hall. I sat near the back. He was a charismatic speaker but his words sent a chill down my spine. I remember being particularly dismayed by the fact that when he took his place on the platform, twenty or thirty black-shirted members of the audience leapt to their feet and gave the outstretched-arm Fascist salute which he, also black-shirted of course, returned.

Four of us members of the clerical staff of Ipswich Corporation’s Public Health Department volunteered for the Territorial Army at the same time. Still under eighteen years of age, I had to attend the recruiting office armed with my father’s written permission to enlist. We found ourselves in the 67th Medium Regiment R.A., equipped with ancient iron-tyred 6in howitzers. We were issued with our inelegant ‘battle dress’ uniforms, attended two ‘drill nights’ a week and, in August went away for a fortnight’s training at Roedean, Brighton, camping immediately in front of the famous girls’ school.

The German army invaded Poland. Barely had we returned to our desks in Ipswich’s Health department when, on 2nd September we received notice that ‘His Majesty the King had been graciously pleased to embody the Territorial Army’. We were back into uniform, this time as full-time soldiers. Two-thirds of the members of our regiment lived in Ipswich. We were billeted in our own homes, our parents receiving a welcome billeting allowance. Billets were found for the remainder whose homes were in small towns and villages in southern Suffolk. There we stayed, continuing our training, until we were moved to Gloucestershire in the following spring.

This was the so-called ‘phoney war’ period in which there was some action at sea and the RAF dropped propaganda leaflets over towns in Germany but, on land, nothing much else happened. Plenty happened to me though!

On 3rd September, the day on which Britain declared war on Germany, I met the girl whom, nearly seven years later, I was destined to marry and who was to share my life for the following sixty years.
Heather as I first knew her. I carried a copy of this photo in my pocket (and looked at it at least once every day) until, in 1943 when I was a POW in Germany, she sent me a new photo of herself aged 19. My original photo was a little dogeared by that time!

Heather Gilbert, as she then was, was not yet sixteen. Her home was in Ilford. She had been evacuated to Ipswich with the Wanstead County High School and billeted next door to a close friend of mine. We spent a companionable evening together, discovered that we had similar backgrounds, similar tastes and a similar outlook on life. She had a most engaging smile and was, I thought, very beautiful. She retained that smile and remained beautiful until the day she died. Wanstead County High School must have been evacuated to Ipswich by mistake. Within a fortnight they had been moved, first to Maldon in Essex and later to the west country.

That fortnight had however been long enough for Heather and I to form an attachment that continued, largely by correspondence, throughout the war. It culminated in our wedding on 27th April, 1946, just four days after my discharge from the Army.

The other personal event for which I remember 1939 was a sad one. My father, then aged only 57, died suddenly and unexpectedly of coronary thrombosis on 27th November, after having been treated by his doctor for several weeks for ‘acute indigestion’! I had loved, respected and admired my father and I felt his loss acutely. I deeply regret that he was never able to welcome me safely home from the war, to get to know the girl I married, and to have the joy of seeing his two grandsons, of both of whom, I am sure, he would have been immensely proud.

It is only now, that I have been a widower myself for nearly three years, that I appreciate how deeply my mother must have missed and mourned him during those long war years and after.

The Wrong Sort of Spending?

Can we spend our way out of the current financial crisis, using borrowed money to do so? It seems unlikely to me, especially in view of the fact that the present crisis was created by rash and irresponsible lending and borrowing, first in the USA and then in Britain. But then my knowledge of economics is limited to knowing how to stay out of debt myself. High finance holds mysteries that I have never attempted to penetrate.

The government and its financial experts obviously think that increased borrowing and spending is the answer. They have increased the national debt and have thus been able to reduce VAT and to juggle with income tax and the allowances for us pensioners to give us all more spending power. They are urging the banks, whose fingers were so recently badly burnt by unwise lending, to start lending money again. The purpose of all this is to encourage us to go out and spend, spend, spend until the wheels of commerce once again begin to turn.

Somehow though it has to be the right sort of spending. At the same time as consumers are urged to spend, public services are told that they must economise and cut back. Furthermore the government (and our MP) are still worried to death about the number of people, particularly it seems in Essex, who are drawing sickness and disability allowances. They want the sick and disabled back into work, never mind the fact that every day there are fewer jobs for them, or anyone else, to do.

Can it possibly be true that spending on improving refuse and recycling services, making our parks and gardens more attractive and at least maintaining existing standards of education and health and welfare care, is less conducive to the national good than, for instance, members of the public getting new tv sets or bigger and better cars? Do local and other public bodies, as distinct from private individuals, indulge in ‘the wrong sort of spending’?

I was delighted to note that our Prime Minister warned us in his New Year message, of the evils that can arise from reliance on ‘unbridled market forces’. It’s a point that I have tried to make over and over again in Tendring Topics ….on Line. It was something of a surprise to hear it from Mr Brown though. Wasn’t it he and his predecessor who, during their terms of office, have done much of the unbridling.

Easter is coming!

Easter Day this year falls on the twelfth of April, over three months away. When I wrote in this blog a few weeks ago that no sooner would the Santa Clauses, the tinsel and the reindeer have vanished from the supermarket scene than they would be replaced by hot cross buns, Easter eggs and fluffy chicks, I quite thought that I was being guilty of mild exaggeration.

It seems that, on the contrary, I was guilty of understatement! At Morrison’s this morning (3rd January and three days before ‘12th night’ when Christmas is officially over and the Christmas decorations come down) I found that hot-cross buns and Easter eggs are already available for sale in some of Clacton’s supermarkets!

How soon after Easter, I wonder, can we expect to see Halloween masks on display and preparations being made for Christmas 2009?

Clacton’s Future

Last summer, before the credit crunch really began to make itself felt, it seemed to me that Clacton was experiencing a rebirth. We had the new town centre, greeted with derision at first by local residents. Visitors liked it though and I think that we natives are learning to love it. New businesses were coming into the town. Shops that had been empty for years began to be occupied again. There were to be two splendid new hotels

Is that all about to change – or already changing? The design of one of those planned hotels has been modified for economic reasons. Woolworth’s, one of the largest and longest established retail outlets in our town centre, today stands empty. Is it to be the first of many similar closures?

We must all hope not. On the plus side, the fall of the value of the pound against the Euro should encourage holidaying Brits to stay in Britain – and where better than the Essex coast, with its sandy beaches and low rainfall? Perhaps it will encourage holidaying mainland Europeans to visit us. I know that my visiting friends from eastern Germany were delighted with Clacton when I introduced them to Clacton’s town centre and vast expanses of tide-washed golden sand early last summer. Fortunately it was a warm, sunny and windless Sunday morning and the tide was right out!

Will the much-maligned and accident-prone water feature in the town centre be put into operation this year. I was among those unimpressed by it, largely I suppose because it was rarely working! However in the autumn I had the opportunity of seeing a similar feature at the front of the Town Hall in Sheffield.

It was attractive and impressive. If a water feature in a northern industrial town on a chilly and overcast day in late October can look attractive, surely in warm and sunny summer weather a similar town centre feature in a reborn seaside town on the Essex Sunshine Coast should be able to manage it!

Sheffield's water feature. The Town Hall is in the background. Taken on an overcast day in late October.

It’s the ‘warm and sunny summer weather’ that is problematic; and we can’t do anything about that! Surely fate can’t be cruel enough to deny us a proper summer again this year.

My Grandchildren’s New Year

Their granddad may be a has-been (or even ‘a never-wosser!) but my grandchildren are certainly doing their bit for the Hall name as we move into the New Year. Elder grandson Chris, who has been teaching English in Taiwan for the past two years and who is now a fluent Mandarin speaker, has just been designated ‘Teacher of the Year’ by the ‘Joy’ organisation that owns and runs the school at which he teaches and number of other similar schools in Taiwan.

Before a crowded audience in Taipei, capital city of Taiwan, Chris receives his award as the Joy Organisation's 'Teacher of the Year!

Chris' cousin, my granddaughter Jo, who has been working as a Social Worker with Sheffield Corporation, has this week taken up a much-sought-after post as Social Worker to the Renal Unit of a large Sheffield Hospital. Meanwhile Chris’s brother, my younger grandson Nick, who is employed by the European Travel Commission in Brussels, returned in December from a mission in Tokio where he had been furthering the Commission’s task of encouraging and facilitating travel to Britain and mainland Europe. He will shortly be travelling to New York, and then on to Toronto, engaged in a similar task.

All three of my grandchildren are graduates and Jo is an MA as well as BSc. Can you wonder that I am proud of them?












Above - Nick on the phone in his Brussels apartment, and Jo and I during my trip to Sheffield in October 2008