THREE

MEN MUST WORK AND WOMEN MUST WEEP


 What is certain is that the fall of the first Labour Government to have a working majority in Parliament had a big impact nationally and no doubt locally, as the Conservative Party formed the new government and the Labour movement became torn between the Ballot Box and the ‘Wildcat Strike’ associated with the ‘Shop-stewards’ movement.


But among the nationalisation goals of the Attlee Years had been the creation of a “national” and joined up Transport Industry and with the creation of the “British Road Services” Dad ended up no longer doing the long-distance run up to Barrow-in-Furness and back, that in those days had taken him away from home for most of the working week. And it seems that Dad made the fairly common move from trade union representative, shop-steward to foreman, with the result that for the next few years I seem to have spent quite a lot of time either with my Dad, or at least in my Dad’s space.


And I guess this meant that Colin was to some extent relieved of his ‘nibblo’ duties and was soon making new ‘mates’ in Secondary School and going off to play football, cricket etc. I remember him recounting how one day they had been in the University Parks and Colin Cowdrey, just then one of England’s test match heroes, had given him some personal coaching.


These were years when I might watch Dad take the car-engine totally to pieces, with no workshop manual, and arrange all the pieces around the floor of the garage to clean before assembling. And when Dad was not in the garage I was often ‘fiddling’ around there myself learning the knack of knocking nails in wood, carving wood to make boats and canoes, then I graduated to learning how to saw straight lines in sheets of hardboard and such that were going to make caravans.


I went down to help Dad on our Old Marston Allotments to dig, sow, weed etc: and it was me who went to help Dad to ‘man the stand’ at the Ideal Home Exhibition in Earls Court in early 1955, when the “TV Inventors’ Club”, that had featured Dad’s dining bench/sofa in one edition, decided to feature it ‘live’. Dad designed and built a ‘new improved’ version that, as I could demonstrate, was ‘Child’s Play’ to operate. Eventually another one of Dad’s inventions, wall-mounted plate-racks, was being marketed in Boiteau’s, the local hardware store in the range of shops at the bottom of Headley Way, and the two of us had a little cottage-industry going in the garage, with ‘my job’ the rounding of the heads of the supporting ‘spokes’.

Of course Colin and I still shared the back-bedroom, which had ice on the inside in winter because it was pretty well north-facing almost at the top of the hill, where the wind was cutting. But June in the ‘box room’ on the corner probably had it worse, with two outside walls, no wall-mounted electric fire and no airing cupboard in the corner, where I suppose some warmth may have emerged on the days when the immersion heater was turned on.


Somewhere ‘along the line’ the double bed that we shared, giving rise, when we had the novelty of new torches, to illicit after-dark torch-light sessions under the blankets, was transformed into two bunk beds by the simple device of standing the ends on their sides and cutting the iron-and- spring base in two. Dad fitted two stretches of angle-iron to make two single bed-frames, drilling holes to fix the springs in the requisite tension. So night times I clambered up on top when it was my bedtime, and I was probably fast asleep when Colin came to bed, unless I was busily making up stories in my head.


There was not much else to remember about the room, except for one colour picture not even a foot long that was fixed above the electric heater in the middle of the wall, and featured a street or building somewhere in the lands of the British Raj, which was more than just India but stretched from the Malaysian peninsular to the “Persian Gulf”. It seems to have been a ‘silent witness’ to the fact that our grandfather was born in India, though ‘Smart-family’ history never really came into our lives very much, so I really can only guess why our great-grandfather went out to teach in the British Army in ‘the Raj’: and just why, in spite of the collapse of the Labour Government, and a return in many ways to ‘the bad old days’ in Britain, parental discussion of taking advantage of the Ten Pound Poms scheme in the early 1950s came to nothing. It probably seemed too much of a ‘leap in the dark” from where we were at the time, conscious perhaps of the fact that were not really a solid and powerful unit of the kind that would be suited to that kind of pioneering challenge, little knowing that we were heading for disaster like the Titanic. 



GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

One of the results of the Welfare State was that with the wider ‘Social Security’ even prudent family finances did not need to worry so much about that ‘rainy day’ and it became increasingly common for people to take advantage of their annual paid holidays in order to just ‘get away from it all’ with the double-bonus of not only leisure time but some spending money for treats making it easier to “put all your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile”.


Perhaps this change in family circumstances was helps in part to explain the appeal behind two popular Fifties films that we saw on our annual holidays: (a) I think that “A Day to Remember” was the title of the film of ‘the Titanic story’ made for people of those times. We saw it when holidaying at Rhyl in North Wales and I suppose lots of other people to this day cannot hear the hymn “Nearer my God to thee” without getting a lump in the throat after those scenes of people singing and playing as the Titanic went down. Many years later I had a Salvation Army colleague whose grandfather had been in that band on board the Titanic. I suppose it was a good reminder in the Fifties of those who had ‘made the ultimate sacrifice’ for the sake of others, and that we are all in the same boat together, but also that there are times when Life is just not fair and “the best” struggle to do the best they can for the greater good. But there was also for the popular audience a ‘lesson of History’ in the mistake that was made in placing too much trust in the marvellous claims of this new Civilization of Science and Technology. Post-war Great Britain and the ‘Brave New World’ was supposed to be ‘new and unsinkable’ too, but it was in ‘dangerous waters’ it too could crash and sink without trace.


 (b) “The Admirable Crichton”, which we saw when holidaying in Norfolk in the midst of a deluge that eventually turned almost into a ‘great flood’, reminded everyone just how difficult it was to just invent a ‘Brave New World’ within an England that had journeyed along its historical path by means of the “inevitability of gradualness”, not by ‘being smart’ and totally ‘reinventing the wheel’.  The play on which the film was actually based belonged to an earlier epoch when , in fact at the time of the Titanic disaster, the political power of the Lords was being given a final ‘coup de grace’ and with it the inevitable erosion of aristocratic and other forms of hereditary wealth though an ever- increasing burden of Death Duties. But that had left Great Britain in 1945 more or less awash with empty mansions and country houses, many of which, had been requisitioned for ‘national service’ and like many other things that came under national ownership after the war (e.g. the railways) were so deeply in need of repair and restoration that they were in many ways more of a national liability than as asset.


One way to avoid Death Duties, often based on an unrealistic estimate of actual ‘market value’ because there was an excess of supply and hardly anyone wanted to buy such places, was to leave the property to “The National Trust”, which would maintain them in perpetuity as part of the national heritage, in something of the same spirit as Chinese Communism kept all the great palaces of the Imperial regimes. The splendour and majesty of these places was really not a testament to the people who merely owned and lived in them, but to the brilliant craftsmen and artisans who actually made them, and their beautiful grounds and gardens. And perhaps some ‘historically literate’ people remembered that Blenheim Palace had been a gift from the people in gratitude for the magnificent victory of John Churchill that had saved Europe from tyranny and with that the liberties of the English people. Through a very long political career before 1939 Winston Churchill had dealt with generations of ‘new men’ from new families with a feeling that the world was going to need a new Churchill to do the work all over again.


In short though people like Harold Nicholson and his wife Vita Sackville West had anticipated during the war that they, their kind and their world would be wiped out after the war, they discovered that people would flock in droves to visit Vita’s beautiful gardens at Sissinghurst, and ,like many other families, both at week-ends and when on holiday, the Smarts visited such properties, and perhaps  reflected whether it was worse to have been part of a world in which you worked to create and maintain things of enduring beauty and value than to be living in a world of dull little boxes, functionality and austerity with built it obsolescence because nothing was ‘built to last’ in this age of government by ‘new men’, who believed that they were ‘the experts’ and ‘professionals’ and knew best, impartially and impersonally. 


Perhaps it was about this time that Dad’s sister moved with her family from the East End of London to a ‘tied’ cottage on the Harcourt estate near Oxford because she became part of the domestic staff in the Harcourt Mansion.     


But, in terms of things ‘lasting’, the irony of that Norfolk trip was that, though statistically it was the driest place in Great Britain, it rained so much during our two weeks that we may well have made more than one trip to the cinema, and eventually we had to evacuate the campsite before our caravan too got flooded.


Actually that may have been our last campsite because subsequent holidays tended to be of the ‘rolling stone’ variety, eventually equipped with the 1939 Rover that Dad found-burned out in a barn in Old Marston and totally restored, in part thanks to all the pieces that we managed to retrieve from a breakers yard somewhere out Abingdon way: and also with the advantage of the revolutionary new folding caravan that Dad designed and built. But by then, as the first lot of photos that I took of a family trip all the way up the west side of Britain up to Edinburgh and back down the east side show, Colin was not with us.


TAKING THE ROUGH WITH THE SMOOTH

By this time our caravanning tours were itinerant mostly just stopping overnight, very much in contrast with our earliest ones that had been almost on a ‘fixed site’ basis. Dad had built a caravan that we somehow coaxed all the way to Hayling Island, where, in addition to providing for our own holidays, it was let to other occupants. But that proved a sad lesson on the way that people can treat other people’s property, with the wear and tear ‘costs’ not really worth the limited ‘benefit’ of the rent .


Nevertheless our “Bluebird” gave us a taste of seaside holidays in a very British seaside resort: and an enduring memory was the inflated lorry inner tube that Dad had brought that we could sit on out on the sea, even the most of us who could not swim:  and the family dog, Prince, joined us ‘doggy’paddling’ his way to general amusement. Another memory was getting sunburn and having my skin peel off in sheets. But we did the normal Fifties things with buckets and spades, including in more rocky locations in other places hunting for crabs that we managed to keep briefly in our buckets taken back to ‘camp’ filled with sea-water. 


Prince’s swimming prowess was one of the features of our trip up to the Festival of Britain in 1951 when we drove up to London and visited various sites along the South Bank, though it seems to me looking back that some of them must have been based not actually in the new ‘futuristic’ South Bank Centre, but in Battersea Park, which I believe still has a bit of its Funfair left, and it may have been here that there was Battersea Dog Show in which owners could enter their pets for different competitions and categories. We entered Prince for the swimming competition that involved getting your dog to jump into the pool and swim across to you. Prince came second in his race and we went home with a silver rosette. My other personal highlight was getting the chance to ride a pony and I suppose Colin also got some kind of ‘treat’.

But in terms of personal events, one of the biggest dramas for Colin during his childhood, as I recall, must have been when he stabbed himself right through the foot with a spear-shaped piece of iron railing.


Our schooling was in the St. Clements quarter of Oxford, which seems to have been where the Labour Party centres were located, and perhaps in general terms there was more rounded activity there than out in the housing estates of New Marston, which like so many of those thirties suburban housing estates was very little more than just a place to house people, almost like a dormitory suburb. But it did mean commuting about a mile from home to school and back, and the various landmarks along that route became very familiar because after school we tended to walk home and keep our bus fare.


Not very far along the Marston Road there was a church set back quite a way from the road with a fairly overgrown piece of churchyard fenced off by some cast iron railings that were beginning to fall into disrepair: and apparently Colin and some mates went through a gap in the fence and found one of the dislodged heavy iron ‘spears’ that they were playing around with when Colin managed to stab it right through his own foot. I suppose we only heard of all this when he came home from hospital and fortunately he had done nothing to affect his footballing, and other sporting, life.


Eventually I moved from St. Clement’s Infant School to the Primary School, where Colin was already attending and, in fact, he stayed till he went on to secondary school. But in many ways probably Colin’s experience shaped my life because the 11+ selection process resulted in his being sent to a secondary modern school, and perhaps by this time parents generally were beginning to be aware that this process was not so ‘scientific’ and impartial as it was supposed to be. It was becoming quite evident that some schools did much better than others because they taught their pupils in a way that gave them a better chance of ‘passing’.


But ‘the system’ did take into account some ‘imperfection’ in the way it worked with the provision for some re-assessment and re-allocation at 13+ for ‘late developers’. Colin was re-evaluated and sent to Cheney Technical School, which probably shaped his life for such schools were really ‘purpose built’ to teach children the all-round basics that they would need to go on into really demanding apprenticeships like Colin’s in the RAF. And the house that Colin built would probably never have been built without that education.


But after Colin’s experience our parents took me away from St. Clement’s School; and sent me to East Oxford School, which I must say has left me with much more vivid memories than St. Clements. Changing school, however, may have had something to do with Colin feeling driven to ‘stand up for himself’ in that incident at Cheney School. This really is quite classic behaviour when someone new has to be fitted into an existing ‘pecking order’: and this may have been behind my incident with “Biffo” Jones because in a way I had only just ‘arrived’. 


Getting in to grammar school was only the first challenge and I floundered so badly once I was there that in my second Christmas Term report it was suggested that I might have been allocated to the wrong kind of school and should be moved. But in the next term I now applied myself to the regular schedule of tests that I now realised were being taken so seriously: and I came top of the class two months in a row. Looking back at this now I can see that this may have amounted to some kind of challenge to the class ‘pecking order’, which unsettled ‘Biffo’ Jones and his mates at the top of the pyramid. Anyway I was not bothered about being top and having made my point, I just settled back to stay at a prudent seventh position for the rest of my time in that class, i.e up to O Levels.


I suppose it was partly in the hope of encouraging children from ‘Oxford Town’ to aspire to join ‘Oxford Gown’ that Colin and I found ourselves in a scheme in which boys like us were invited to tea by undergraduates. I recall a couple of teas once in undergraduates ‘in digs’ near St. Clement’s School and once in one of the colleges that was down passed the Ashmolean Museum . There we could look out through large bay windows to well-tended lawns and a small lake complete with white swan. And I tend to associate these experiences with the quite particular Oxford intake of delayed undergraduates like Tony Benn, who had gone into the forces during the war, which meant that they were both more mature and had seen more of the world than previous generations of students. I discovered recently that his elder brother, who was ‘in line’ for the family peerage, had died in action in the RAF on or around the day that I was born. I wonder if that date 22/4/1944 resonated with him in 1965 when he wrote me a standard letter as my local MP in Bristol West congratulating me on ‘coming of age’ and finally getting the right to vote. 


Colin also, I seem to remember, belonged to the Cubs and it may have been with them that he went away once to a camp just outside of Oxford. In my mind’s eye I see Colin in Cub’s uniform, complete with cap and those little green flags that floated at the top of the grey socks. “Bob a Job” week was still quite a regular feature that seemed to be part of the ongoing wartime spirit, but that did not last too long into the Fifties, when TV home-entertainment started to change people’s attitude to interrupting knocks on the door.