She peered over. ‘That’s a maggot,’ she told me, matter-of-factly. ‘Flies lay their eggs up there in the bacon on any bits that aren’t covered by salt, and maggots are the result. Good source of protein if you fancy eating them!’ She laughed at the horror on my face. ‘Either that or just keep your bowl covered up next time.’
All three of us quickly put our arms round our soup bowls and leaned over to protect them, and for the rest of the summer we would always check our food carefully before taking a bite.
At weekends and during school holidays we went out to help Mr Connop and James on the farm, although I’m not sure how much help we were at our age. There weren’t any tractors in those days so horses had to pull the ploughs and it was one of our jobs to take the horses to the drinking troughs for water and help to feed them. One Saturday I worked in a field with Mr Connop for the whole day, hoeing the crops row by row, and at teatime he slapped me on the back and told me I was a really good worker. I liked his praise and decided I was going to try and earn it whenever I could. I looked up to him and wished he could be my real dad and not just my foster dad because I wanted to be like him when I grew up.
The next day, he asked the three of us to collect the thistles that had been cut in one of the orchards. I decided to try and build a ‘thistle-rick’, copying the way I’d seen the grown-ups building hayricks. I filled a wheelbarrow full of thistles and started pushing it along the rutted ground, but it was way too big and heavy for me.
Mrs Connop saw what I was trying to do and, trying to spare me, she called out that I should put the wheelbarrow away and come indoors to get ready for school the next morning.
I hated to fail at anything I set out to do, and I was yearning for Mr Connop to praise me again, so I was feeling a bit upset and frustrated as I turned to take the wheelbarrow back to the shed. The wheel hit a stone and got stuck and, instead of trying to move round it, in a fit of temper I shoved the wheelbarrow up against the stone trying to force it over. At that moment, my foot slipped and I lost my balance and fell, hitting my face hard on the edge of the metal wheelbarrow.
Mrs Connop came flying across the field to pick me up. My mouth was full of hot, salty liquid and when I spat it out, I was alarmed to see bright red blood all over the ground and down the front of my shirt.
‘Your teeth!’ Mrs Connop wailed. I looked down and, sure enough, there were my two front teeth on the ground. I felt with my tongue and there was just a big ragged gap where they used to be. Thankfully it was only my baby teeth I lost, but I had a year or so of being teased by all and sundry about the gap. I became so self-conscious about it that I used to cover my mouth with my hand when I smiled or laughed. ‘The toothless wonder,’ Dennis used to call me. Needless to say, I wasn’t allowed to use that wheelbarrow again.
The Sisters of Charity School was a boarding school as well as a day school and, as the name suggests, it was extremely religious. It had been a girls’-only school but by the time we got there, there were quite a few boys as well. I had to go to mass every morning, taking the communion wafer. We were taught by nuns, who used their best endeavours to turn us into holy creatures of the Lord and sometimes this involved rapping us on the knuckles with a ruler if we committed a sin such as using bad language or taking His name in vain. I was still a frequent, though inadvertent offender. Swear words just slipped out my mouth without me consciously putting them there.
Although Dad’s family were Catholic, we’d never been to church back in Newport. My only religious experience was of the boring sermons at the Sorrels’ church, but I was impressed by the elaborate ceremony of the Catholic church in Yarpole and thought there must be something in it all. I learned my lessons faithfully and after a few months I was dressed up in a white suit and had my confirmation by the priest, about which I was very proud.
On the way to and from school I had a bit of bother with some of the village kids bullying me. I don’t know if it was my gappy teeth, or the fact that I was a welfare boy, or maybe just because I could be a bit mouthy, but I’d often find a group of them surrounding me and calling me names or chasing me down the road, throwing stones.
‘Get off him,’ Dennis would shout, charging towards us and hitting out at my attackers. ‘Leave him alone, you little bastards.’ Given that he was a good six inches taller than them, they’d usually melt away at that point. ‘You OK?’ he’d ask me gruffly, and I’d grin: ‘Course I am!’
Dennis never hesitated to step in and protect me, despite the fact that he was the quieter, shyer one of the two of us. I was the tough one, ready to take on any challengers – and I frequently did.
I was glad when school broke up for the summer. The farm was a paradise for young boys and we spent hours on end out in the fields playing. We’d lie down in great mounds of freshly cut grass to make an imprint of our bodies, or we’d climb trees and collect eggs from birds’ nests (although we knew never to take more than one egg from each nest so the mother didn’t abandon it altogether). We’d make a hole at each end of an egg using a thorn from a thorn bush and blow out the white and the yolk to stop it going bad, then take it back to our bedroom. We didn’t have many eggs but we were very proud of our little collection.
Perhaps our favourite game was aeroplanes and gliders. Dennis would tie one end of a long piece of string round his waist then attach the other round mine with a slip knot. He was the plane and I was the glider being towed around by him. We spent many happy hours running around the fields with our arms outstretched, Dennis going one way and me gliding the other, until we fell over exhausted on a grassy bank to lie and watch planes going overhead. Every young boy in those days knew the different markings you got on aeroplanes, and we were always on the lookout for ones with the tell-tale black-edged cross symbol that would indicate a stray German bomber. We never saw one, though, out there in the heart of Herefordshire. The war hardly impinged on our lives at all, since we didn’t suffer any food shortages, being lucky enough to live on a farm. The most dangerous thing that happened to us that summer of 1941 was the day when Freddie nearly drowned.
It was a scorching hot day and the three of us had gone to play near the pond in one of the bottom fields, next to the orchard. There were tadpoles and frog-spawn in the water and we liked to collect it in glass jam jars. At the edge of the pond there was a big log, and Freddie decided to clamber out on it so he could get closer to the tadpoles, but just as he reached the furthest point, the log rolled over and tipped him into the deep water.
Immediately Dennis and I scrambled onto the log and lay full length along it, trying to catch his hand to pull him up again but it was difficult because he was struggling so much. He kept disappearing under the glassy green surface and we’d haul him back up coughing and spluttering. Neither of us could go in the water to help him because we couldn’t swim. No one had ever taught us. We clutched at Freddie’s hand, his clothes, panicking like mad as his fingers slithered yet again out of our grasp. ‘Hold him!’ I yelled at Dennis. ‘I’m trying!’ he yelled back. Finally we managed to get a firm grip and drag him back to shore, pulling him up through the weeds and mud.
There was a terrifying moment when he lay on the bank with his eyes closed, not moving. I shook him frantically, yelling ‘Freddie! Wake up!’ Dennis pushed down on his chest and pumped his hands up and down. And then Freddie coughed, and gasped for air, and when he started sobbing I knew he would be all right and I was flooded with relief.
‘Thank God! Thank God!’ I cried, shivering despite the heat. But then there was another worry. ‘Mrs Connop will kill us when she finds out.’
‘We can dry out his clothes before we go back,’ Dennis decided. ‘She doesn’t need to know.’
We persuaded Freddie to take all his clothes off and laid them out on the banks to dry. He stopped crying and started chortling with glee at being able to run around the field stark naked.
We stayed out at the pond all day so that by the time we went back to the house, Freddie’s clothes were dry, albeit caked in mud. We’d agreed we wouldn’t tell Mrs Connop what had happened but Dennis was a bit of a tell-tale and couldn’t seem to help himself.