Some corner of a foreign field, Part 1

The heady days of August

It’s been a bit of an “Oh, What A Lovely War!” kind of year, having visited Austria and immersed in Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, the Habsburgs and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire my brother and I planned a trip to Flanders Fields.

For a very formative period of our lives for both of us, our maternal grandfather, Arthur, lived with us in a big rambling Victorian house on a half an acre in Frome in Somerset. Pop, as he was referred to by us kids, was a handsome and erudite man and was ever present, from breakfast through to the end of the day as he worked at his upholstery business from his workshop in the garage. That was until his slightly shrewish wife, Annie, known as Nanna, decided that some bizarre slight had occurred and, with very little notice, they upped and moved out of our home and into a pensioner’s flat a half mile away. He started off walking the short way back to his work shop each day, but over time he spent more time in the armchair watching TV and visibly and rapidly aged.

For the period they did live at home with us, they were part of our rambunctious lives, generally arranged around large communal meals, evening dinners and Sunday lunches. They had their own living room, bathroom and bedroom, and lived privately while yet being part of the larger family. Pop had his bottles of brown ale in his sideboard and as we lived next to a pub, they often went next door for a social drink. He helped out in the garden and Annie, helped my Mum out in the kitchen, baking, cooking and cleaning. The arrangement worked well, which was probably why it seemed such a tragedy that at the age when they would probably most need my Mum and Dad’s help, they decided to go it alone. In the Royal Oak next door, they drank in the Public Bar whereas my Mum and Dad preferred the Lounge. His sister, Ivy, the first lesbian I knowingly met was the landlady for a few years. Accompanied at all times by her slightly mustachioed, cigar smoking ‘friend’ Florrie. They kept a pair of corgis and regardless of the fact they happily shared a bed, my grandmother would hear nothing but that they were just close friends. They moved on to other pubs and later introduced us to Mark and Jason, “cousins” who also shared the same bed and the flair for interior decorating, flower displays and running very successful pubs with food, at a time when pubs and food were never said in the same breath with any expectation of much beyond a Ploughman’s Lunch or Ham Baps. Mark and Jason stayed as paying guests, one of several youngish men who passed through for 2-3 months at a time, eating with us en famille, breaking bread and usually providing interesting dinner discussion, a rural Somerset salon for our growing intellects and interests. Every now and then, my grandfather would try and chip in with some anecdote, and as it was the most formative experience of his life, he would often share a moment from life in the trenches during the first world war. As much as my brother and I were always happy to hear these tales of mud and misery, he was cut short by his wife Annie and the dismissive “They don’t want to hear about all that Arthur!”. She had perhaps heard them too often, but over time we discovered that she really didn’t want to be reminded of those days.

Arthur left London after his 16th birthday and went to Dorset, worked for a couple of months as a farm laborer and joined the local Dorset Regiment reserve on the 26th May 1913. His plan came to nothing as he was discovered, finally, to be too young to serve even though the war was coming, and they kicked him out in June 1914. Back in London, he and other male members of the family were rushing to the Hackney swimming baths to sign on to the London territorial regiments. Two months after being rejected for being too young at 17, Arthur lied about his age and joined up again.

Recruitment officers were paid two shillings and sixpence for each new army recruit, and needed all the soldiers they could find. Not many people at the start of the 20th Century had a birth certificate, so it was easy to lie about how old you were. The minimum height requirement was 5ft 3in with a minimum chest size of 34in and Arthur easily met all these. His brother George, named after their father George, famous in Hackney for being the MC of the local boxing competitions, joined the 1st/13th London Regiment, in July of 1914. His Battalion, Princess Louise’s Kensington Rifles went immediately to France in August, where George, newly promoted to Corporal, was killed the following May.

Arthur’s Battalion, the Hackney Rifles, were newly created as part of Kitchener’s Army, so they had to be taught how to soldier. They were sent to protect the infrastructure from spies and agent provocateurs, guarding ports and railways in Ipswich, then onto their tent encampment in Bromeswell Heath in Suffolk in May 1916 and then to Longbridge Deverell in Wiltshire in July 1916. Arthur with his prior 9 months service probably new the drill better, and he got promoted to Corporal and then Sergeant before being shipped off to France in February 1917 by which time the underage boy is an experienced man.

Meanwhile, Annie’s elder brother Dennis joined the London Regiment too in 1915 but after 7 months of service in the 2/10, Arthur’s unit, he was invalided out with TB, he died in 1919 in a military hospital, the current Chelsea ‘Pensioners’ Hospital. Arthur was also invalided out in 1919. Annie’s father was known in the Hackney boxing world as well and had boxed, so whether the two families knew each other is uncertain. What is certain is that Annie and Arthur met and eloped when she got pregnant. They lost the child but returned to London as “Mr and Mrs Harris”. As a testament to the practice of early obstetrics for the poor, Annie’s son died in the womb, but the x-ray showed that due to childhood rickets she would struggle to deliver the corpse if they induced birth, so they physically broke the dead baby up in the birth canal and pulled out the pieces that would pass through her shrunken pelvis. Arthur joined the family trade as a French polisher, and they lived in Whitechapel. Remarkably, after what they had gone through, they had my mother in 1925 by an early version of Caesarion section, a vertical cut that left a vivid scar.

Arthur took a gamble and using money he earned during the Great Strike driving a strike-breaking ‘scab’ truck he bought his own furniture business in Dagenham, opposite where the new car plant being built by Henry Ford, would soon be surrounded by houses to shelter the new workforce. The plant didn’t actually start production until 1931 and the workers didn’t get the new houses until the production volumes finally came up after the depression, by which time Arthur, his wife and 6-year-old daughter were bankrupt, and he moved back to London to work for others polishing furniture in the French fashion. As the war broke out in 1939 they were living in the top half of a rented house on Bromley High Street in Bromley by Bow, Poplar. They got evacuated out to Wiltshire in 1940 during the blitz and if you look around that part of Poplar its proximity to the London docks meant it was completely flattened and none of the buildings Annie and Arthur would remember remain today.

Arthur and Annie liked Bradford on Avon and stayed until the 60’s, living on a house on the steep Coppice Hill. He had a workshop and what were common skills in the East End of London, furniture making, polishing and upholstery, were practically rare in sleepy Wiltshire, he made a reasonable living. He decided that he wanted to help out in the new war but understood at the age of 40 that going back to the infantry was not realistic. So he joined the Royal Air Force and, stationed nearby at Melksham Air Force base, Airman Harris gave 4 years of further service to the King. Whether on her own or through his service, my mother, now aged 19, met a young pilot from Cheshire called Ronald, stationed at Melksham. They married in 1944 in October. Ronald took off from Norway on a foggy cold early March morning and never returned. Two months later her daughter, my sister, was born and name Ronny in his honour.

So Arthur and Annie welcomed the new member of the family to their home. Years passed and Melksham played a further role in their lives when Josephine met another RAF chap, this time a Flight Sergeant Engineer with a baby face and a rugby player’s physique. They married, had two boys and in winter of 1963, together with Arthur and Annie, moved to the big old Victorian house in Frome, 12 miles away.

At dinner Arthur would tell stories of his time in the mud of Flanders but Annie still didnt want to hear them.