I was too young to be aware of the horrors happening all over Europe – the bombing, the Holocaust, the terrible suffering. Ireland was a haven of tranquillity, having declared its neutrality under President de Valera.
My mother kept mentioning this fantasy figure called ‘Daddy’. I could not quite imagine who or what he was. This mysterious person had actually written to me from India, telling me to be a good boy and look after Mummy while he was away. This letter was read to me, as I was only three years old. I can imagine it not meaning too much to me.
Then, one day, a good-looking man in a grey pin-striped suit and a trilby hat arrived at the door, picked me up in his arms, and kissed me on the cheek. This was an invasion of privacy – and he was paying a rather undue amount of attention to my mother as well. I cried my eyes out.
Eventually, I must have warmed to this intruder; but, not so long after, there was another interloper, and I was no longer the focal point of everyone’s attention. My sister Ann was born. Of course, she had been delivered by an angel to my mother in hospital, a story I must have bought without further question. All I knew was that this new person was taking up a vast amount of my mother’s time and interest, and for the first time in my young life I felt the pangs of jealousy. My grandmother had to take me to one side and explain that Mummy certainly loved me the best but, because Ann was so small, she needed to be specially looked after.
But the ‘looking after’ wasn’t enough to save her young life. Within six or seven weeks of her birth, she died of meningitis.
While I remember my baby sister arriving, I have no clear memory of her death or that it affected me very much at the time. I suppose I was shielded from it, and my grandparents would have explained it all as ‘the will of God’. I have often wondered what sort of person Ann would have grown into and what effect she would have had on my life.
Obviously my mother and father were distraught at the loss. Soon afterwards they decided to take up their jobs in England again, and I found myself on the train to Limerick and Dublin and then the mail boat crossing from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead in North Wales, a journey I was to experience almost every year during my childhood as we went ‘home’ for the summer holidays.
My parents had rented a flat in Brighton before the war but now needed a new home. At first we became lodgers in the house of one of Dad’s work colleagues, who had two sons, both older than me. I didn’t take to them, and the feeling was entirely mutual. They continually mocked me when I spoke. I could not understand why, but of course I had a broad County Clare accent and they couldn’t make out a word I said, and neither could their parents.
Pretty soon we moved to a brand new council house, the building of which was virtually going on around us. Amongst the labourers were German prisoners of war, yet to be repatriated. I learned, much later, that they were treated badly by some of our new neighbours, but my Dad showed them respect. His view was that they were probably family men like him whose lives, like his, had been disrupted for five years through no fault of their own. Soon they disappeared back to their homeland, and I was disappearing off to school.
St John the Baptist Roman Catholic Primary School was a pretty dismal-looking place in a poor part of the town run by a combination of nuns and lay teachers. Most of the kids were from Irish or Italian Catholic families, but I was the only one nobody could understand, for a while at least. My earliest memory of school is of being asked to draw a line. I drew a funny little animal with four legs. For me a line, with my Irish accent, was a tiger without the stripes. The teacher thought I was mucking about. My parents told me that within a few months, the Irish accent had disappeared and I became like the other kids in my speech patterns, unlike my parents, who retained their Irish accents all their lives.
Once I could make myself understood I became accepted by my infant peers and I began to enjoy going to school. I worked out pretty soon too that I wasn’t the dullest in the class by a long way. Within a year, though, I was to be out of school for nearly three months. I had been complaining of stomach ache and a local doctor had diagnosed indigestion, told my mother not to let me eat apples, prescribed some milk of magnesia, and said I would be alright in a day or two. Over the next few days, I gave them great cause for worry. I developed spots, which my father immediately knew was measles, and the stomach pains were getting worse. Dad telephoned another doctor, Dr John O’Hara, who saved my life and whom I met again thirty years later when he was on the council of the Football Association. Dr John immediately diagnosed a septic appendix: I was in a fever with the measles, and now needed an urgent operation as well. My parents, having lost Ann a short time before, were now close to losing me. The appendix was taken out – probably in a hurry. The scar is still prominent all these years later. After the operation, I was removed to an isolation hospital, where I would remain for some weeks. When I eventually returned home, I must have looked a very poor specimen indeed. I could scarcely walk, having been bedridden for so long, and for weeks my mother had to take me to a clinic for physiotherapy to help me get the use of my legs again.
I didn’t like this place called England. First they mocked the way you speak, and then you got hit with not one, but two serious illnesses at once. I wanted to go back to Ireland, and said so in no uncertain terms. But, in time, I settled into the rhythm of my new life in Brighton. In those days, everyone who had been given a council house seemed to be inordinately proud of it. Gardens were tended with great enthusiasm – my father won several prizes for his garden; doors were regularly re-painted, and windows sparkled. We had a refrigerator, which was unusual for working-class people in the late Forties and early Fifties. Few of our neighbours had a car. If they did it was usually a pre-war model. My Dad cycled the four or five miles to the hospital where he worked, but after a time was able to afford a modest motorcycle combination. The bike was a 500 cc BSA with a Watsonian sidecar capable of seating my mother, with me behind her. It was a very fragile piece of equipment and seemed to be made largely of plywood, covered with a black lining. These ‘combinations’ were very popular in those days, being cheaper to run than cars. You rarely see one now. Sometimes, when the weather was good, I was allowed to sit on the pillion seat behind Dad. This was long before crash helmets were deemed compulsory, or indeed necessary. We often went up to London to see relatives by this mode of transport and once went all the way to Ireland, singing at the tops of our voices as we meandered through the country roads of Wales to the boat train at Fishguard. That sort of happiness should be bottled.
At school I was progressing from cowboys and indians to football and cricket. I also sang in the school choir – our rendition of ‘Panis Angelicus’ won us first prize in the Sussex schools’ competition. My best pal was Micky Weller and I was in love with a pretty girl called Janice Prossor. I usually showed my passion for her by chasing her round the playground. It was unrequited love, but I did manage to kiss her once. Sheer bliss. It gave me a wonderful tingling feeling of which I have never tired.
In class, I was doing well under the guidance of Miss Thornton and Mr Beech, but being a Catholic school we were consumed with religious instruction that took up around an hour of each day. I kept hearing about the Immaculate Conception many years before I knew what immaculate or conception meant, never mind the two of them together. It was a wonder we had time for the academic stuff.
I got into a few fights in the playground, won a couple, lost a couple. Steeled myself not to cry when I lost, but the emotions usually got the better of me when I won. In summer evenings I would gather in the local park with a few other boys and we would play cricket till dark.
Although we had little money, my parents loved to go to the local variety theatre, when the housekeeping budget allowed, to see some of the great comics of the day, and I went with them. They had heard Frankie Howerd, Jimmy Edwards, Max Bygraves and Max Miller on radio; and in those pre-television days, or at least before most people had TVs, this was the way to see your favourites. The Brighton Hippodrome was usually packed when a big name came to town, which happened regularly. The theatre was a ‘number one’; that is to say, the top-line acts would appear there. As well as those mentioned above, I remember seeing Tony Hancock, Vic Oliver, and even Laurel and Hardy live on stage. And of course we never