CHILDHOOD REMINISCENCES AROUND MY BROTHER COLIN
Created | Updated Aug 11, 2014
CHILDHOOD REMINISCENCES AROUND MY BROTHER COLIN
ONE
Now that I am an ‘old man’ fit for reminiscing about days long past I thought that perhaps I should put down some childhood memories of Colin, since he may never had the time and luxury to do too much reminiscing himself: though perhaps the first thing to say is that I suppose I was twelve years old when Colin effectively left home to go into the RAF.
“THE END OF THE BEGINNING”
When we first went to visit Vanessa at Halton, and I turned off the main road up that slope into the old RAF estate, I had a flash-back of us all going there in order to drop Colin off at the start of his new life. And, though we are constantly told that children are ‘growing up’ quicker these days, it does not really seem to be in the sense of realising that you have to stand on your own two feet.
Colin very quickly found that there was plenty to do in work and play in the RAF: not least, I believe, because of the change that came one afternoon when he was doing athletics at Cheney School, as he told me, but not our Mum, when he got home that day.
He had been sitting down on the ground having a break after some activity when someone had deliberately trodden on him with athletic spikes. I think that to some extent both of us had been brought up not ‘to say boo to a goose’: but this event spurred Colin into action. He leapt up and ‘beat up’ the culprit.
I suppose he had just begun to become aware of a certain explosive physical core strength that seems to be part of our inheritance.
In my own case it happened perhaps around the same age in different circumstances at the Oxford Boys High School, when one day the form ‘big wig’, “Biffo” Jones, told me to let him take my place as we were waiting in the corridor to go into a lesson. I refused to budge and he started punching me. But I just covered up with my arms, and after not too many blows he realised that he was making himself look ridiculous: and perhaps also, on feeling the solidity of those Smart-arms as well, he decided that it was not really worth pushing me too far.
A couple of days ago I was reminded of that power, when my car was in the garage in Bligny, and I was with the mechanic, who was trying to undo the plug on the oil reservoir. Struggling and not succeeding, he said something like “Wow! These English are strong!”. So I offered to have a go: and succeeded. “Not such and old man yet!” I thought to myself.
Actually some of my memories of my ‘big brother’ are connected with this kind of event.
“THE LAST RESORT”
Perhaps the earliest one was the new and revelatory feeling when I actually managed to make Colin cry. I have not much idea when it was, but I must have been very young. In the back bedroom that we shared in Crotch Crescent there was an arm chair in our room with a solid-wooden frame including arms. I must have been sitting and playing on the floor and I suppose Colin was doing something that irritated or annoyed me. I suddenly had the idea that I could push his head against one of those really hard and solid arms that was just close by. I was taken totally by surprise when my action brought my ‘big brother’ to tears. Holding his head he ran downstairs crying out to Mum about what I had done. This I may well have been the first moment in my life that I realised that I could actually make things happen instead of just observing or experiencing them.
Years later Colin was at the centre of another incident along my learning curve, when he was playing with some of his local playmates in our back garden. Dad had picked up from somewhere on his travels a heavy marble roller that he may have been intending to use by fitting an electric motor, as he had recently motorised a lawnmower. Colin and the ‘big boys’ started to play with this roller, and eventually tried to lift it at least one end of it off the ground. When they had failed, and moved on to other games, I had a go and discovered a capacity for power-lifting not unlike that which our Dad had used in a drama in our street that I heard about later.
Apparently one of the Andrews children or their relatives just down the street had had an accident when their front garden wall fell on them. We knew of Mr. Andrews as quite a powerful, tall, lean but well-shouldered man, and he tried in some desperation to lift up the remnants of the wall with no success. Dad offered to ‘have a go’ and, perhaps being shorter and quite stocky, succeeded.
But these memories may well stick out because I don’t think we were really brought up to be particularly physical except in a last resort, especially perhaps by the time that I was born in 1945 it seemed obvious that there had been more than enough fighting, destructiveness and explosiveness. This time world war would be followed by sound and solid construction
But I am left wondering whether Mum was ever really convinced about any of Dad’s ‘big ideas’ either in terms of politics or his inventions and projects, after all the daily reality of her, and in many ways our lives, was that most of the time she was left ‘holding the fort’, trying to manage the family affairs and, in her eyes, paying for our house by her constant industry.
June has told me that the steps that made it possible for my paternal grandparents, with my grandfather terminally ill, to move to Oxford and down into Marsh Lane, when I was just a toddler, caused a great deal of trouble between our parents because in some way or another Dad had to use our money or use the house as security.
This was, of course, the age when Britain was going to become a country where people would be looked after ‘From the cradle to the grave’. But in 1949 the Cambridge historian C.R. Fay, updating his classic text book on British History in 1949, wrote about the Welfare State idea: “Just how long the young and fit will be prepared to pay for the old and unfit remains to be seen. I suspect it will be only as long as they can do it indirectly by taking the wealth away from the erstwhile rich.” And, in fact, this was, in effect, the issue that brought down the Attlee Government and the dream of a Brave New World-One Nation Britain that had seemed possible to ‘believers’ within the immediate post-war Oxford Labour Party. During the Fifties many of the features of ‘Old Britain’ came back, and with them some old practical common sense wisdoms of the Hare and the Tortoise variety.
“COULD HAVE DONE BETTER”
Actually if our Mum ever did have any confidence in the possibilities of a new and different post-war world, I strongly suspect that it would have had more to do with Dr. and Mrs. Rankle than with our Dad.
During the last years of the war Dr. Karl Rankle and his wife were ‘billeted’ on our family: billeting seeming to have had been connected with (a)having menfolk, like our father, who were in ‘reserved occupations’, and (b) owning your own house.
The Rankles were well-educated refugees and in fact I mostly came to connect him in the Fifties with his regularly appearance on the radio as the conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: and, at one point, when June was 16- 17, we drove up to London, and, some of us sat in the car, while June went to sing for him in some theatre or hall, where he was rehearsing, the idea being that he could assess whether her voice was good enough for her to make a career as an opera singer. ‘Dr. Rankle’, as we called him, was encouraging, but warned that June would have to accept starting from the bottom as just one of the Chorus and she would need to be living in London.
Obviously, being born in 1944, I do not know too much about ‘the Rankle years’ in Crotch Crescent, but I suspect that having such people within the Smart household had an impact. War often throws people together in ways that would never happen in times of peace, and I can imagine that as refugees in Britain away from the horrors of Europe they tried to be positive and to spread positivity about the future. With Dad absent from home on long-distance lorry missions and then on Home Guard duty contact with the Rankles was probably more of a constant factor in Mum’s life than Dad. Here was ‘the classless society’ that abolished considerations of ‘Them and Us’ brought down to domestic level: and the Rankles may well be at least in part responsible for the fact that the Smart household spoke BBC English with almost German precision and for the fact that we had a piano at home that June learned to play, while she also had singing lessons. Colin too had a violin and violin lessons may well have owed something to the Rankle experience and a musical tradition in which real talent was already a well-established ‘ladder of opportunity’.
When the time came I was auditioned (unsuccessfully) for the Magdelan College Choir School, and at grammar school not only did I briefly learn the violin, but, when it became known that ‘Smart is a singer’, the Headmaster, Mr.F.C. Lay, contacted his old college, Jesus, and put me forward as a boy soprano for the College Chapel choir. I think that by this time June had sung one of the leads in a university production of something by Verdi and it may well have been from this that Colin got asked to come along and sing alto. So Colin and I spent an Autumn term going to the Chapel and dressing up in ‘ruffs’ and red ‘surpluses’ until the Christmas high-point, after which Colin pointed out that our ‘Xmas box’ from the College made it just not worthwhile and we ‘chucked it in’.
For by this time Britain and the world were very much back in a “them and us’ reality based on unresolved conflicts from the past: and deep-seated and popular notions like those our parents had lived through during their crucial childhood years between 4 and 7, when all the talk was about German “war guilt” and “reparations” that would involve “making the Germans pay till the pips squeaked”. Planning for peace during ‘the Rankle years’ had been very different and I suspect that our parents hopes and dreams at all levels were bound up with the possibilities of this ‘new world’ that, in fact, did not materialize ‘according to plan’, things coming to a head with the Korean War.
Thus when, at Colin’s funeral someone came up to me recognising that I would have to be his brother, and, having ascertained that this was in fact the case just shook his head and said “He could have done so much better”, before turning away I muttered something like “Idiot” to myself. To my mind all three Smart children did indeed have talents and abilities that might have taken them and their careers in different directions had our family circumstances been different. Had they been truly impossible so that there seemed to be no alternative to ‘jumping out of the frying pan into the fire’ we might all have jumped and just ‘risked it’. Had they been truly solid and actively supportive the risk element would have appeared less significant. As it was our parents themselves were as good as all alone in the world, for I have no memories of friends or family being part of our lives, only the division of endless Labour between our parents, which led naturally to each one of us also having to feel that our lives too were essentially individual and we bore a heavy responsibility not to ‘mess up’ as our parents had done: so more than a degree of prudence and forethought was the order of the day.
It certainly did not seem prudent to send June all alone to live in London in the world of the arts and entertainment at the age of 16-17. And there was prudence behind Colin’s decision to go into the RAF rather than to accept a football apprenticeship at Wolves, then one of the top teams in Britain, and in fact Europe. That afternoon at Cheney School, when Colin decided to fight back, seemed to be a real turning point in the way that he was going to run his life. Now that he had found that his maturing physicality could be expressed he quickly established himself as someone with sporting capability. He became the school goalkeeper and, quite quickly, the Oxford City Schools keeper. Perhaps that is almost and ultimate physicality of the last resort because playing in goal can mean just having to stay active and alert ready to literally suddenly leap into action. But soon he was no longer tall enough to ‘make it’ in goal. By this time, too, however, he was playing violin in the Oxford City Schools Orchestra, and perhaps one of the common themes in both activities is that you act as one of a group.
Coincidentally just last week-end I met the father-in-law of one of my Swiss nephews who had also been an RAF engineer until about 1968, who had also been a keen sportsman, playing for minor professional football teams on the side, and also playing basketball, making the combined services team in one of these sports. He had been working for a few years on the TSR2 before it got scrapped and then found the RAF was down-sizing and wanted to off-load a large proportion of its engineering staff. And at that time he was offered the chance to play Basketball professionally in Switzerland, where his RAF engineering training was recognised as a real asset and he rattled off various things that he has done since. It just reminded me of just how much Colin’s decision to go into the RAF just took him into a radically different kind of world to the one he had grown up in, instead of one small family with struggling parents he became part of a large “universal provider’ organization, where he could learn to be a “team player” with skills that then served him well when he was creating his own “Team Smart”.
ONE
Now that I am an ‘old man’ fit for reminiscing about days long past I thought that perhaps I should put down some childhood memories of Colin, since he may never had the time and luxury to do too much reminiscing himself: though perhaps the first thing to say is that I suppose I was twelve years old when Colin effectively left home to go into the RAF.
“THE END OF THE BEGINNING”
When we first went to visit Vanessa at Halton, and I turned off the main road up that slope into the old RAF estate, I had a flash-back of us all going there in order to drop Colin off at the start of his new life. And, though we are constantly told that children are ‘growing up’ quicker these days, it does not really seem to be in the sense of realising that you have to stand on your own two feet.
Colin very quickly found that there was plenty to do in work and play in the RAF: not least, I believe, because of the change that came one afternoon when he was doing athletics at Cheney School, as he told me, but not our Mum, when he got home that day.
He had been sitting down on the ground having a break after some activity when someone had deliberately trodden on him with athletic spikes. I think that to some extent both of us had been brought up not ‘to say boo to a goose’: but this event spurred Colin into action. He leapt up and ‘beat up’ the culprit.
I suppose he had just begun to become aware of a certain explosive physical core strength that seems to be part of our inheritance.
In my own case it happened perhaps around the same age in different circumstances at the Oxford Boys High School, when one day the form ‘big wig’, “Biffo” Jones, told me to let him take my place as we were waiting in the corridor to go into a lesson. I refused to budge and he started punching me. But I just covered up with my arms, and after not too many blows he realised that he was making himself look ridiculous: and perhaps also, on feeling the solidity of those Smart-arms as well, he decided that it was not really worth pushing me too far.
A couple of days ago I was reminded of that power, when my car was in the garage in Bligny, and I was with the mechanic, who was trying to undo the plug on the oil reservoir. Struggling and not succeeding, he said something like “Wow! These English are strong!”. So I offered to have a go: and succeeded. “Not such and old man yet!” I thought to myself.
Actually some of my memories of my ‘big brother’ are connected with this kind of event.
“THE LAST RESORT”
Perhaps the earliest one was the new and revelatory feeling when I actually managed to make Colin cry. I have not much idea when it was, but I must have been very young. In the back bedroom that we shared in Crotch Crescent there was an arm chair in our room with a solid-wooden frame including arms. I must have been sitting and playing on the floor and I suppose Colin was doing something that irritated or annoyed me. I suddenly had the idea that I could push his head against one of those really hard and solid arms that was just close by. I was taken totally by surprise when my action brought my ‘big brother’ to tears. Holding his head he ran downstairs crying out to Mum about what I had done. This I may well have been the first moment in my life that I realised that I could actually make things happen instead of just observing or experiencing them.
Years later Colin was at the centre of another incident along my learning curve, when he was playing with some of his local playmates in our back garden. Dad had picked up from somewhere on his travels a heavy marble roller that he may have been intending to use by fitting an electric motor, as he had recently motorised a lawnmower. Colin and the ‘big boys’ started to play with this roller, and eventually tried to lift it at least one end of it off the ground. When they had failed, and moved on to other games, I had a go and discovered a capacity for power-lifting not unlike that which our Dad had used in a drama in our street that I heard about later.
Apparently one of the Andrews children or their relatives just down the street had had an accident when their front garden wall fell on them. We knew of Mr. Andrews as quite a powerful, tall, lean but well-shouldered man, and he tried in some desperation to lift up the remnants of the wall with no success. Dad offered to ‘have a go’ and, perhaps being shorter and quite stocky, succeeded.
But these memories may well stick out because I don’t think we were really brought up to be particularly physical except in a last resort, especially perhaps by the time that I was born in 1945 it seemed obvious that there had been more than enough fighting, destructiveness and explosiveness. This time world war would be followed by sound and solid construction
But I am left wondering whether Mum was ever really convinced about any of Dad’s ‘big ideas’ either in terms of politics or his inventions and projects, after all the daily reality of her, and in many ways our lives, was that most of the time she was left ‘holding the fort’, trying to manage the family affairs and, in her eyes, paying for our house by her constant industry.
June has told me that the steps that made it possible for my paternal grandparents, with my grandfather terminally ill, to move to Oxford and down into Marsh Lane, when I was just a toddler, caused a great deal of trouble between our parents because in some way or another Dad had to use our money or use the house as security.
This was, of course, the age when Britain was going to become a country where people would be looked after ‘From the cradle to the grave’. But in 1949 the Cambridge historian C.R. Fay, updating his classic text book on British History in 1949, wrote about the Welfare State idea: “Just how long the young and fit will be prepared to pay for the old and unfit remains to be seen. I suspect it will be only as long as they can do it indirectly by taking the wealth away from the erstwhile rich.” And, in fact, this was, in effect, the issue that brought down the Attlee Government and the dream of a Brave New World-One Nation Britain that had seemed possible to ‘believers’ within the immediate post-war Oxford Labour Party. During the Fifties many of the features of ‘Old Britain’ came back, and with them some old practical common sense wisdoms of the Hare and the Tortoise variety.
“COULD HAVE DONE BETTER”
Actually if our Mum ever did have any confidence in the possibilities of a new and different post-war world, I strongly suspect that it would have had more to do with Dr. and Mrs. Rankle than with our Dad.
During the last years of the war Dr. Karl Rankle and his wife were ‘billeted’ on our family: billeting seeming to have had been connected with (a)having menfolk, like our father, who were in ‘reserved occupations’, and (b) owning your own house.
The Rankles were well-educated refugees and in fact I mostly came to connect him in the Fifties with his regularly appearance on the radio as the conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: and, at one point, when June was 16- 17, we drove up to London, and, some of us sat in the car, while June went to sing for him in some theatre or hall, where he was rehearsing, the idea being that he could assess whether her voice was good enough for her to make a career as an opera singer. ‘Dr. Rankle’, as we called him, was encouraging, but warned that June would have to accept starting from the bottom as just one of the Chorus and she would need to be living in London.
Obviously, being born in 1944, I do not know too much about ‘the Rankle years’ in Crotch Crescent, but I suspect that having such people within the Smart household had an impact. War often throws people together in ways that would never happen in times of peace, and I can imagine that as refugees in Britain away from the horrors of Europe they tried to be positive and to spread positivity about the future. With Dad absent from home on long-distance lorry missions and then on Home Guard duty contact with the Rankles was probably more of a constant factor in Mum’s life than Dad. Here was ‘the classless society’ that abolished considerations of ‘Them and Us’ brought down to domestic level: and the Rankles may well be at least in part responsible for the fact that the Smart household spoke BBC English with almost German precision and for the fact that we had a piano at home that June learned to play, while she also had singing lessons. Colin too had a violin and violin lessons may well have owed something to the Rankle experience and a musical tradition in which real talent was already a well-established ‘ladder of opportunity’.
When the time came I was auditioned (unsuccessfully) for the Magdelan College Choir School, and at grammar school not only did I briefly learn the violin, but, when it became known that ‘Smart is a singer’, the Headmaster, Mr.F.C. Lay, contacted his old college, Jesus, and put me forward as a boy soprano for the College Chapel choir. I think that by this time June had sung one of the leads in a university production of something by Verdi and it may well have been from this that Colin got asked to come along and sing alto. So Colin and I spent an Autumn term going to the Chapel and dressing up in ‘ruffs’ and red ‘surpluses’ until the Christmas high-point, after which Colin pointed out that our ‘Xmas box’ from the College made it just not worthwhile and we ‘chucked it in’.
For by this time Britain and the world were very much back in a “them and us’ reality based on unresolved conflicts from the past: and deep-seated and popular notions like those our parents had lived through during their crucial childhood years between 4 and 7, when all the talk was about German “war guilt” and “reparations” that would involve “making the Germans pay till the pips squeaked”. Planning for peace during ‘the Rankle years’ had been very different and I suspect that our parents hopes and dreams at all levels were bound up with the possibilities of this ‘new world’ that, in fact, did not materialize ‘according to plan’, things coming to a head with the Korean War.
Thus when, at Colin’s funeral someone came up to me recognising that I would have to be his brother, and, having ascertained that this was in fact the case just shook his head and said “He could have done so much better”, before turning away I muttered something like “Idiot” to myself. To my mind all three Smart children did indeed have talents and abilities that might have taken them and their careers in different directions had our family circumstances been different. Had they been truly impossible so that there seemed to be no alternative to ‘jumping out of the frying pan into the fire’ we might all have jumped and just ‘risked it’. Had they been truly solid and actively supportive the risk element would have appeared less significant. As it was our parents themselves were as good as all alone in the world, for I have no memories of friends or family being part of our lives, only the division of endless Labour between our parents, which led naturally to each one of us also having to feel that our lives too were essentially individual and we bore a heavy responsibility not to ‘mess up’ as our parents had done: so more than a degree of prudence and forethought was the order of the day.
It certainly did not seem prudent to send June all alone to live in London in the world of the arts and entertainment at the age of 16-17. And there was prudence behind Colin’s decision to go into the RAF rather than to accept a football apprenticeship at Wolves, then one of the top teams in Britain, and in fact Europe. That afternoon at Cheney School, when Colin decided to fight back, seemed to be a real turning point in the way that he was going to run his life. Now that he had found that his maturing physicality could be expressed he quickly established himself as someone with sporting capability. He became the school goalkeeper and, quite quickly, the Oxford City Schools keeper. Perhaps that is almost and ultimate physicality of the last resort because playing in goal can mean just having to stay active and alert ready to literally suddenly leap into action. But soon he was no longer tall enough to ‘make it’ in goal. By this time, too, however, he was playing violin in the Oxford City Schools Orchestra, and perhaps one of the common themes in both activities is that you act as one of a group.
Coincidentally just last week-end I met the father-in-law of one of my Swiss nephews who had also been an RAF engineer until about 1968, who had also been a keen sportsman, playing for minor professional football teams on the side, and also playing basketball, making the combined services team in one of these sports. He had been working for a few years on the TSR2 before it got scrapped and then found the RAF was down-sizing and wanted to off-load a large proportion of its engineering staff. And at that time he was offered the chance to play Basketball professionally in Switzerland, where his RAF engineering training was recognised as a real asset and he rattled off various things that he has done since. It just reminded me of just how much Colin’s decision to go into the RAF just took him into a radically different kind of world to the one he had grown up in, instead of one small family with struggling parents he became part of a large “universal provider’ organization, where he could learn to be a “team player” with skills that then served him well when he was creating his own “Team Smart”.
