Where I Was Born

A Memory of Sole Street.

My Beginning, at Sole Street near Cobham Kent. (9th March 1946 - 2nd January 1951)

I was born on Saturday March 9th 1946 at 3.29pm at Temperley, The Street, Sole Street, Kent. I was delivered at home by the local midwife and our doctor and family friend, Maxwell Landau with my Nanna, mother's mother, in attendance.

There were many telegrams of congratulation including those from my father's parents, his younger brother Tony, Auntie Bell his mother's sister and husband Uncle Harry, mother's sister Rita and husband Rene, half-sisters Joy, Betty, Peggy, Norma and half-brother Bill, their respective husbands and wives and several friends and work colleagues.

My first real memories are of my mother taking me out in my pram the following year in the snows of March 1947. Our small hamlet of Sole Street was completely cut off by the snow drifts that were in excess of five feet deep in places. To this day I can remember my mother struggling to push my big pram along the lanes and due to the depth of the compacted snow filling them to almost hedge top height, being able to see over into the fields which resembled a Christmas card scene.

My memories of our first home, a medium sized, pebble dashed bungalow are as follows. The kitchen was a long room with a separate pantry at the back, there was a door to the back garden and another door that gave entry to the central hall. Off the hall were the bathroom and four other rooms, my bedroom and a dining room at the back, with the sitting room and main bedroom to the front. The loggia was a glass and timber two-roomed extension built across the front of the house and this was where my Nanna lived during the time she was with us. This was always a very cold place in the winter and probably didn't do the old girl's arthritis and bronchitis much good.

The front garden was quite small, below road level and was set behind a tall privet hedge. Flowerbeds containing the wonderful lupines and wallflowers were at each side of the central path and a rose arbour screened the house. The back garden had a big lawn to the left of which was a sunken area, with lots of ferns and shade loving plants with apple trees behind. A large plum tree was at the back of the lawn, which was flanked by a vegetable garden that was bordered by a big old wooden shed at the bottom of the garden where Dad tried to grow mushrooms commercially. This had lots of paraffin heaters and lamps with red glasses hung from the rafters over the deep beds of compost, a venture that was I remember an expensive failure. The whole of the garden was flanked by high damson hedges.

I can remember a time sitting on the floor in the kitchen playing with my toy rabbit Binnie, while my mother washed up at the sink, which was below the window on the side wall facing our neighbours Mr Guest. My attention was drawn to something that I thought was a leaf that kept appearing at the pantry door. I drew my mother's attention to it and she said it was nothing. A little later a large mouse came into the kitchen from behind the pantry door and this time my Mum saw it and dealt with it by trapping it in a dish cloth and putting it outside.

Piggyback rides on Mums back down to Baldock's shop, she often dressed in one of her macks. The strong rubbery smell of her macks and the mackintosh sheets of various colours that were in a cupboard in the hall, said to be blackout curtains from the war, but there were very many more than was required to cover the small number of windows that the house had! I was encouraged to use these, her macks and cape to make camps in the house by Mum. Often at night she would come into my bedroom, with one of her macks or the cape and wrap me in it. I found this very comforting and many is the morning, that I have woken in the warm rubbery smell and soft feel of one of her rubberised garments.

The dogs Nibby, a Sealyham (rather a fashion statement at the time) and two other long haired terrier types Peter and Jack, were always gambolling around my push chair. All these dogs were elderly and died off, long before I really understood the finality of death.

Nanna holding me in a shawl and walking me around the garden, I remember being fascinated by and pointing to daffodils, but then not liking the smell of them much. Later I can remember the heady scent of the many lupines that grew straight and tall in the front garden, they would have won at any flower show.

From a very early age I can remember the strong smell of the massed wallflowers and the subtle fragrance of apple blossom, (both which I love to this day) from the big trees in our back garden. Nanna singing, 'Twinkle, twinkle little star', 'Lulla Bye Bye' (the Paul Robeson song), 'I'll be loving you Always' and 'Babe of Mine' to me (from the film 'Dumbo'). Some of the favourite songs of the time were 'Martyr witch of the wild wood', 'One day when we were young, that glorious love-time in May, Remember, remember when we were young that day' (the Anglicised and 'popular song' version of a duet from an opera), 'When lilacs bloom again' and 'Springtime springtime springtime I will love you ever' (from Noel Coward's 'Bitter Sweet'). My mother's favourite was the German tenor Richard Tauber (who died in 1949) and I can remember his lovely rich and unmistakable voice often coming from the old radiogram in the hall.

Mother had made me an elephant, (Dumbo) a deer (Bambie) and a rabbit (Binnie) from chamois leather. This must have been quite costly both in time and materials, which were on ration then. I loved Binnie, who was my confidante for many years of my childhood. Bambie was all right, but I preferred the Walt Disney cartoon, which to this day can make me cry as can the cartoon film Dumbo. For some inexplicable reason I hated poor Dumbo and his trunk and ears soon got torn off. (I remember Mum carefully sewing them back on many, many times, to the extent that the soft chamois leather became very holed from the sewing)

Perhaps this is an early manifestation of my unreasoned dislike for things that are considered a little out of the ordinary to my strange eyes. My treatment of Dumbo, which I still have along with the others and now treasure greatly, as they hold so many memories of happy and carefree childhood days, makes me feel very sad now. As my abuse of poor Dumbo must have hurt Mum a lot, as she had obviously put so much love and care into making it for me.

Thinking back to these times has been quite a revelation, for I have realised with quite a shock that I had never actually seen the film, my first viewing of it being in early 2009 sixty-one years on, though my memories of Dumbo are a very vivid recollection from my very early days. It is not possible that at the age of one or two I saw the film and we did not have a television until the early fifties and I would not have understood it if I had! I must assume that my memory is from what mother and Nanna told me and from the books, mainly picture, of both Dumbo and Bambi that I must have had at the time.

These books must have been compiled from the Disney cartoon drawings for I have vivid memories of the wheeled and barred container, which features in the film that the disgraced mother elephant was contained in and the sign upon it Mad Elephant. I also remember very strongly the mother and Dumbo's trunks reaching for each other and the mother cradling her baby in her trunk and rocking him gently while she sang Babe of Mine to him. The whole film depicts ridicule, victimisation and humiliation and this to this day still, like some scenes in the film epic Ben Hur brings the tears to my eyes.

Mr Guest, our next door neighbour who was then in his nineties calling me his Golden Boy. I was blond at birth and had golden curls, until I was about two. On reflection he is probably my earliest link back through the years, as he had been born in the mid eighteen-hundreds. He used to talk to me a lot and told of times when people walked or rode horses and travelled in stage coaches to get about. After his death from yellow jaundice aged ninety-five in 1949, a couple of school teachers the Cools, moved in. They were not liked by Mum for some reason; they probably tried to be friendly!

There was water under the house. This could be seen through cracks in the floorboards especially on moonlit nights, when the moonbeams passed through the ventilator grille in the wall below my bedroom window.

One day the old wooden cased radiogram that we had, catching fire and Mum tipping a jug of water into it, after ripping the flex from the wall socket, amid huge cracklings and great amounts of steam.

At the time I was fed a lot of rabbit (something that I no longer care for) and fish. The fish man was a regular on Fridays and I remember Huss being a favourite, again though I do like some fish still, Dog fish is not one of my favourites now.

Dog walking in the woods at the bottom of Manor Road, Mum almost always dressed in one of her many macks and taking Edna's big Collie dog, Buster, with us.

My first experience of a wasp sting (one that I did not enjoy at all!) occurred in the bomb crater in the woods at the bottom of Manor Road, at the age of about two and a half.

In what was probably the spring of 1949, I was in the woods at the bottom of Manor Road picking Primroses with Mum and Nanna. I became separated from them and all of a sudden bumped into an old dishevelled woman, dressed in a long skirt with a shawl about her shoulders carrying a trug full of primroses. I was terrified and fled from her, soon bumping into my mother and being very comforted by her and the smell and feel of her mackintosh. I was convinced that the old woman was a Witch, which she may well have been, but it is far more likely that she was a Gipsy. My unreasoned fear of witches stayed with me through my early childhood.

The green wooden lorry made for me by Mr. Leak, the station master of Sole Street station for my 2nd birthday. He also made me a large red painted sit in wooden railway locomotive, but being unable to either pedal or steer it, I very quickly lost interest, though it was a very nicely made thing.

Playing with the Belfors or Belpers families children who ran The Railway Inn, which was at the head of the approach road to the station forecourt. They had a complicated double swing, a slide and sand pit in their big garden.

Nanna eating plums from the tree in our back garden giving me one and me coming up in a rash, choking and nearly passing out. I have never been able to eat raw plums since.

Nanna, Mum and I waiting at the farmyard at Rookery Corner (which was our nearest bus stop) on the Cobham Road opposite the big house called Owlets whose garden was a mass of snowdrops in the spring. Looking up to watch the rooks wheeling around the tree tops and Nanna getting bird mess right in the eye.

The tree washing machine that Mum called 'The Sinka Sinka Chain Engine', a very apt description of the noise it made. This was a large tank/chassis, mounted on spoked iron wheels, with a big triple plunger pump at one end driven with the aid of a long open link chain, by a bright red horizontal open crankshaft, twin flywheel engine that was probably an Amanco. I remember being enthralled by this piece of equipment as it whirred, clanked and spat away to itself, as the farm workers used it for high volume tree washing in the local orchards. This machine was usually towed about with the aid of a Standard Fordson tractor. (The whole thing would have given today's health and safety inspector's apoplexy!)

I have treasured and lasting, memories to this day of happy late spring hours, spent with Mum and Nanna sitting on the lush grass under the huge stately Napoleon, Rivers and Gauche cherry trees full of the sound of buzzing bees and all clothed in massed white blossom and in the local apple orchards walking under the trees that were covered in delicate sweet smelling blossom. Listening to the liquid trills of the Skylarks high in the sky above us, the plaintive 'Peewit' call of the Green Plovers and the strange croak of the Corncrakes in the golden fields of corn. Fields were generally much smaller than they are today and the thick boundary hedges were alive with birds, butterflies, many other insects and countless wild flowers. There were many more hedge row trees and the stately old Elms gave an unmistakable dark green and very typical silhouette of Southern England's landscape to the distant horizon.

Nanna leaving us in 1949 and going to live with her son Billy Birchley and his family at 57 St Albans Close. Valley Drive in Gravesend. I was devastated by this, as I was very attached to my Nanna and loved her very much. This move I think was instigated partly by my father, as he like I am nowadays, was not too keen on other people in his house on a permanent basis.

Getting Julie the pedigree St Bernard bitch from breeders at a house near Dowde Church in Gt. Buckland. This was soon after Nibby the Sealyham had died; I think Mum was the bigger dog lover of my parents, for I am sure that Nibby, Peter and Jack were around before my father came on the scene.

For my third birthday, my major present was a pedal powered Jeep finished in creamy yellow with red wheels. I loved this car and got a huge amount of use and enjoyment from it. It went to Watling Bank with us and became a favourite of my best friend Tony's too!

The light blue painted latticed iron footbridge over the railway line (the Victoria Line from London to Folkestone and Dover) at Luddesdown in the fields near The Cock Inn. Many hours were spent here waiting for the bright, Malachite Green painted Merchant Navy class Bullied steam locomotive (known derogatively as 'Spam Cans') hauled, Golden Arrow train to hurtle down the deep cutting on its way from Victoria station in London to the Channel steamer docks at Folkestone.

Long walks were made at the weekends across the fields behind our house, over to Gt. Buckland with Dad and Julie. Often my treat was either a bag of Smiths crisps or a Mars bar from Baldock's shop where old Nellie Smith worked. I often went off with my Mum and Nanna for a shorter walk into the fields behind the Smiths orchard, the dog often disappearing into the tall corn much to my delight. Lots of flax with its pretty massed light blue flowers, being grown by the farmers then.

The Baldock's ran a small general shop and operated a transport business that had several Albion and Leyland flat bed lorries. Their son David was the same age as myself and in later life we were to meet again, as he had an interest in old cars like me and did a bit of dealing. Subsequently he was to own a garage in Goudhurst that was dedicated to pre war vehicles, but I understand that this venture failed in the late nineteen eighties.

Baldock's Stores, the local shop in Sole Street, had a very meagre selection of sweets and biscuits, most of which were sold loose from big glass display jars and after weighing out, were handed over in small brown paper bags. There were very few pre packed things then, some of these were Smiths plain crisps in blue, red and white greaseproof paper bags, with a small amount of salt inside in a twist of blue paper, Mars bars and small bars of Cadburys plain and milk chocolate. (3d, 5d and 6d in old money, today 1.25p, 2p and 2.5p respectively) They also sold cigarettes Players, Woodbines, Craven A 3s 6d for a packet of twenty (17.5p) and some newspapers. Generally 1 or 1d (.4 or .6p) all sweets and cigarettes were then on ration still and one of the first things to come off rationing was outer clothing and mackintoshes. (Which then cost between 30s, (1.50p) and five pounds depending on the quality? In 1986 a similar garment cost 150.)

Our coinage then was very different to what it is today. The smallest coin was the Farthing, one thousand to the pound and I can remember purchasing single biscuits and sweets for a farthing, (a quarter of a penny) the Halfpenny (ha'penny), Penny (240 to the pound) Threepennyy-bit (thruppenny), a nine sided bronze coin, Sixpence, Shilling (twenty to the pound), Two shilling (a florin) and Half Crown (two shillings and six pence) were all silver coins and notes were Ten shilling, One pound, Five pound, Ten pound, Twenty pound and Fifty pound denomination, though the larger twenty and fifty pound notes were rarely seen, as fifty pounds then was a huge sum, representing an executives monthly wage!

Ganders the grocers and general stores in Cobham was a wonderful big shop, full of the most exotic smells. Eric the son was the same age as me, his father George had taken over the business from his parents who lived in a small bungalow at the back of the shop. Our groceries were always delivered on Wednesdays, with the aid of an old 193's long front Morris Commercial van.

The shop was quite large and held a wide variety of provisions. There were many large hams and sides of bacon hanging from big hooks in the ceiling of the cured meats section, also there were a great number of large Hessian sacks standing open on the floor that contained dried mixed fruit, apple rings, prunes and many split dried peas, beans and lentils. The cheese and butter counter was always piled high with huge round cylinders of various mature cheeses wrapped in muslin and the butter was in big salt encrusted wood chip boxes.

They also sold kitchen goods, ironmongery, paint, paraffin and creosote. Lamp wicks and chimneys, Primus stoves, Aladdin heaters and Valour stoves, various oil and petrol lamps, including the American made Miller petrol vapour lamps and Aladdin paraffin wick and mantle lamps. After our move to the Tollgate, we remained a customer of Ganders and they still delivered our groceries every week for many years. But with a new van the pretty, old one having been replaced with a new forward control Morris Commercial. The vehicle with the turned down radiator grille, making it I think one of the saddest looking vehicles ever produced!

Mr. Mungeam was the local Taxi, Wedding and Funeral car driver. This was a 1936 Austin Sixteen with division, he was a very softly spoken man in his sixties, who had seen terrible action in the First World War having been gassed and was always very nice to me.

Many hours were spent at the forge (converted into a house in the late fifties and where a school friend Richard Walker from my days at St. Andrews School subsequently lived) near the war memorial in the village street at Cobham, watching the big Shire and Suffolk Punch farm horses being shod.

Every visit to Cobham (quite a walk from Sole Street) had to have its ritual pump of the handle on the village pump that was on the other side to the church on the way to Rookery Corner. I never got any water from it! But developed a lasting fascination for pumps and water generally.

The Airedale Terrier dog in Sole Street, that unusually (for from a very early age I have always had a deep affinity with animals, especially Dogs and Cats) I did not get on with. It was a bad tempered creature and to this day, I have never liked the terrier breed.

One day walking past the pond, at Sole Street House and asking Dad if I could walk on the pond weed that completely covered its surface and not understanding his reply that it would not take my weight.

The main village pond (common place in most villages then) was near the turning into Gold Street. This was quite a feature of the hamlet then and was always well tended and full of water. There was another smaller pond, on the corner of Manor Road, opposite the Baldock’s transport yard. I have memories from those early years of steamrollers and road locomotives with a threshing machine, the driver's caravan and a water bowser on tow, stopping at these ponds to refill their boilers and water tanks.

There were generally very few vehicles of any sort on the roads in our area and only a few of the locals had a car or a motorcycle. Mostly people walked or rode bicycles to get about and Sole Street had no bus service. Our nearest bus stop was either in Meopham at Hook Green or Cobham at Rookery Corner, two and a half and one mile distant. My mother and Nanna walked miles in my early years, at first with me in my pram, then a push chair. I was quick to learn to walk and talk and I was soon making the mile and a half walk to Cobham village with them.

I do not remember going further afield by public transport much while we lived in Sole Street, though there were occasional trips to Gravesend by bus and Meopham by train and once a trip to Rochester and the castle in the summer of 1949, all the rail services were steam locomotive hauled then. The signals were all manual and the lights were all gas powered on the platforms and in the waiting rooms and paraffin on the signals. (These were still in use when I was going to Maritime College in London from Meopham Station in early 1965 and I can still recall that slightly sweet, warm and pleasant smell given off by the paraffin lanterns.)

Meopham Station was quite an important freight interchange then and had extensive sidings where several firms had their business premises including a large coal merchants. Off nearby Norwood Lane, which flanked the railway line there was a large nursery and market garden. They grew tomatoes, strawberries, chrysanthemums and carnations commercially under acres of large glass houses, which were sent by rail to Covent Garden Market on a regular basis. The company closed in the late fifties and the extensive site after remaining derelict for a few years, became a very large private housing estate.

Sole Street was not such an important station as Meopham, but it did have a siding on the Manor Road side of the line and there was a small factory that for years made specialist paint treatments and the Blacks had their coal depot there.

Longfield the next station up the line from Meopham towards London was also an important interchange station that had large areas of sidings and platforms. A half-mile further up the line was Pinden Halt and junction where the branch line that went to Gravesend via Longfield Halt, Betsom Halt, Southfleet Station then over the A2 trunk road at Springhead to Northfleet Pier Road station and to the line terminus at the rail/steamer interchange at Gravesend West Station at the head of the old Victorian pier on the River Thames, joined the main line.

I do remember regular car rides in Dad’s Morris Series E and later the Hillman Minx when he was home at weekends, but these were generally pleasure trips and not shopping expeditions. Mother and Nanna occasionally called on the services of Mr. Mungeam and his Austin taxi to go to Cobham and sometimes Gravesend during the hard winter months.

Dad coming home one Friday evening from West Houghton. The various mines, factories and depots that were in his charge were at Carlisle, Peter Lee, West Houghton, Bolton, Uttoxeter, Tewksbury, Melton Mowbray, Rochester and at Mountfield near Robertsbridge. Me coming in from the shed beside the house, with an old sack. "Don't bring that dirty ole sack in 'ere" from Dad, Mum going off at Dad for dropping his aitches and me in tears from the harsh words.

The garage where Dad kept his Morris Series E saloon car and later the Hillman, was in the Blacks coal yard, which was a pleasant wooded glade with various old wooden sheds in it off Manor Road that was a very sparsely populated and rutted unadopted track at the time. Going there one day and finding a rabbit (Blackie, who had been put there for me to find by Mum and Dad) and taking it home to a ready built hutch.

One evening, having gone to bed, hearing a van driving up the track beside the house. A big flash of flame, as Billy Wright's old Fordson van caught fire under the bonnet. He lived in the next house up the road and was later to take over Wrights Coachworks the family business in Strood.

Julie lived in the 'sack' shed and I remember one morning going to let her out, to find that she was in an awful state and covered in mess. Looking back now I do not think that poor Julie was a very healthy dog. I have vague memories of her being violently sick on several occasions and I am sure one morning during a walk, she suffered a seizure.

The sound of the wind humming in the many telephone wires. We were on the telephone at Sole Street, Cobham 364, but it was an all operator service, the telephone receiver having a big chromed button that when pressed called the exchange and I remember Mum often having quite long conversations with the various operators, before they made her connection.

Drives with Dad, around the local area to Luddesdown, Great Buckland and Harvel. I remember the time we found the major part of a Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle, dumped in the woods at Harvel. I can distinctly remember the reversed control levers, the twin fillers on the petrol tank, which was black with chrome flashes and the twin stacked fish tailed exhaust system, all that was missing was the big 1000 cc Matchless or JAP, V Twin engine.

At this time, there were several families living in old railway carriages and buses in the Harvel Woods. Today they would be scathingly called new age travellers, but then they had no alternative, as they were unable to afford the rents on brick built property, which at the time was very scarce in the area. One of the buses was a six wheeled Thorneycroft of 1930's vintage. It had a wonderful outside curving and sweeping staircase, at the back to the upper deck and would be worth a fortune now.

Dad was very friendly with Ken Briggs a colleague from work (much resented by Mum) who lived in Harvel. He had a daughter Carolyn, (Lyn) who was the same age as me. I was later to meet up with her at St Andrews School and in her teens, she got into bad company and a lot of trouble. Ken died quite young, around forty, of a heart attack in the early sixties and it hit my father rather badly and he took quite a time to get over it, for I think they (like my friend George Anderson and I, who also died too young) were very good mates.

I remember a trip to Rochester (1950) in Dad's new Hillman Minx his first company car, to watch speed boat racing from the Castle Pier. We were all standing on the pier head watching the boats flash past. It was a rather damp day and both Mum and I were dressed in our macks. There was a sudden flash and a crack and Dad reeled back, having it was said been struck on the head by lightning. It was certainly quite a spectacle for a small lad and curtailed the days activities very effectively; my father had quite a large burn mark on his head later.

There were many Empire Class and later Sunderland flying boats at that time moored on the river, off the Short Brothers factory and drawn up on the big apron beside the factory buildings (that became CAV and Blaw Knox factories) along the Esplanade. One of these aircraft was the composite piggy back of a modified Empire Class with the much smaller four engined Mayo on its back. This strange craft had been developed with long distance mail delivery in mind.

A Sunderland flying boat remained on a mooring in the river for a long time and was still there 'mothballed' when I started at St Andrew's School in 1957. In my first years at St Andrew's School when at Cunningham House we used what had been Short Brothers sports ground as our playing fields on the Esplanade below Backfields, though by then their large swimming pool complex and clubhouse that I remember was all built from corrugated iron sheets, was derelict.

I remember the Smiths, who lived in a bungalow in the cherry orchards behind our house showing me their Primus stoves with 'silent burners' which fascinated me. These were their favoured form of cooking during the summer months, when they let their Rayburn solid fuel cooker go out, as it made their little bungalow too hot.

The lady in Camer Lodge, showing me her many oil lamps, at this time her only form of lighting. This was probably around 1948/9 and she was a tenant of the titled Darnley family who were the major landowners in the area, owned Camer Park and its big model farm Nursted Court, farmed huge acreages of land in and around Cobham, Luddesdown, Harvel and resided in Cobham Hall.

It was quite a ritual in the spring to go through Cobham village and out on the road to Shorn that passed the daffodil fields of Cobham Hall, where the massed blooms were quite a sight. The Darnley family had dabbled in the growing of daffodils commercially before the war.

Another ritual during the late summer, was to go through Cobham village and opposite the entrance to Cobham Hall on the Shorne road near the cross roads on the A2 London Dover trunk road, enter Cobham Woods, where we would walk down the long tarmac surfaced track passed the old trial Gypsum mine that my father had been involved with on behalf of the Darnley estate, to the large pond (that my mother had painted in her twenties and entitled 'Nocturne') and climb up onto the open heathy area where lush blackberry bushes grew in profusion. A day's blackberry picking there would see us returning home loaded with fruit.

This was near the estate manager's house that was at the time occupied by the Booth family. Tony, the son of Lord Darnleys' agent, was a friend of my father's and later after Lord Darnleys' death, he taught history briefly at St Andrew's School.