On Christmas morning we were bursting with excitement when we were invited into the drawing room and handed a parcel each. I could tell straight away that mine wasn’t an aeroplane because it was a big flat box that rattled when I picked it up. I tried to smile and look pleased when I opened it to find a board game called Ludo. Freddie got a painting book and some paints and I think Dennis got some books. We were each given a money box shaped like a post box, with a slot to put the coins in and an opening in the bottom where you could take them out. It wasn’t exactly what we’d have chosen ourselves, but they were the first Christmas presents we’d ever received and that was a great feeling.
Later that day we had our first proper ‘family’ Christmas dinner as well: chicken and ham and dried fruit pudding and so much food that we were stuffed to the gills and couldn’t have eaten another bite.
Before we went to bed that night, I had another look at the Christmas tree and saw that, intriguingly, none of the parcels hanging on it had been opened. I kept my eye on that tree right through the festive period up to 5 January, when Mrs Connop and Ginger carefully took down all the decorations and packed them away in boxes to go back up to the attic. The next time I could sneak off without being spotted, I climbed the ladder up to the attic and found the box with those parcels in it. I had to know what was inside them. I peeled the paper off the first one and was bitterly disappointed to find it was just an empty cardboard box. I tried another and another until I had opened nearly all the parcels and the floor was strewn with wrapping paper, but they were all merely decorative, with nothing at all inside. It was a bitter disappointment to me.
I’d forgotten all about it by the time my crime was discovered. Some weeks later Mrs Connop had climbed up to the attic to look for something and come upon the bits of Christmas paper strewn about, whereupon she gathered the three of us in the drawing room and urged the culprit to confess. My blushing gave me away yet again, and I took my six of the best reluctantly. That time it definitely hadn’t been worth it.
In the New Year of 1942 I began to get friendly with the Connops’ lodger, a happy, friendly man whose name I can’t remember any more. He walked about the village in all weathers, summer and winter, wearing just an open-necked shirt, short trousers and heavy boots. He always stopped for a chat with any villagers he passed and had a big smile for everyone. At the age of seven, I thought he was an old man but looking back he was probably only in his forties or fifties. One day I admired a pencil that he was using, which was painted gold, and he said I could have it. A real gold pencil! I was over the moon about it and took it to school the next day to show off to all the other kids. It became one of my most prized possessions for a time.
After that, I started hanging around with the lodger when he was working on the farm, asking if I could help out. I liked being with him. He chatted to me as if I were an equal, explaining things about farming and animal behaviour and why you planted certain crops in a field at particular times, and I found it all fascinating.
One day the lodger wanted to saw some small tree trunks that were piled up by the saw bench at the back of the farmhouse, and he asked me if I would give him a hand. The saw bench was a criss-cross wooden contraption. You put a log into the cross-section and then two people were needed to operate the long saw with handles at either end. Although I was only seven, I’d done it before and I knew that I had to push while the lodger was pulling and vice versa.
We’d only just started cutting when all of a sudden the saw blade jumped out of the groove and the lodger yelled in pain and jumped backwards. Blood was gushing from his finger and he sat down hard on a log. I ran inside to get Ginger and I think the district nurse was called out later that evening to have a look at his wound. I felt terrible. It wasn’t my fault, but I knew that the cut had been a very bad one.
I don’t know if his injury had anything to do with it, but soon afterwards the lodger became very ill. Mrs Connop looked after him herself, bustling in and out of his room with clean bedding and bowls of soapy water and trays with soup and cups of tea. Whenever I peeked in the door he was lying back on his pillows looking gaunt and exhausted and completely different from the cheerful, chatty man he’d been before. He tried to say hello to me but it seemed like a huge effort and after a while I stopped talking to him when I passed and just glanced in timidly at his unmoving shape under the bedcovers.
And then one day Mrs Connop told us that he had passed away. She kept dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and I could tell that she had really cared about him. People in the village seemed very upset as well and lots of them stopped me to pass on their condolences. ‘He was a good man,’ they all said.
I felt very sad myself. It was the first time anyone I knew had actually died and while the nuns explained to me that he had gone to Heaven, which was a ‘much better place’, I found the whole idea that I would never see him again very hard to take on board. ‘Never’ was such a big word. For ages, I kept glancing into the barn, half-expecting to hear him whistling away in there, or I’d look into his room when I passed and get a shock to see the neatly made bed with no person inside.
And then a few months later, his room was dismantled and a wall removed so that the hallway became much larger than it had been before. No trace of the lodger remained, except for the gold-painted pencil he had given me. That was my first experience of death and for me it was very unsettling and strange.
The year continued, and mostly we were happy-go-lucky kids having an idyllic time. Freddie had joined Dennis and me at school and he was old enough to take part in more of our after-school games. We built a den together in the corner of the chicken shed, where we could hide our birds’ egg collection and any other valuables we didn’t want grown-ups to find, and where we could stay hidden from Mrs Connop when she was on the warpath. Once we took a baby owl from its nest and carried it to our den, but unfortunately it died as we didn’t know how to feed it. Ginger knew about our hiding place but she would never give the game away. She protected us when we got into scrapes, so long as she could do so without getting into trouble herself.
I continued to have a bit of trouble with bullying from some of the village boys. There was one in particular, called Dick, who was the ringleader. He lived in a pink house up at the top of the village along with his nan, to whom he wasn’t very nice. I heard him talking to her one day, using all sorts of bad language and berating her: ‘I told you to do so-and-so’ and then ‘Don’t argue with me.’ He obviously wasn’t a decent person. I don’t think I was the only person he bullied but I probably used to wind him up a bit. I stood up for myself and didn’t take things lying down if someone was mouthing off at me, so I was often in trouble for scrapping. Mrs Connop used to get very cross with me when she found out, but what could I do? I had to defend myself or I would have got hurt.
I also used to get into trouble for being late for school. If I was dawdling around, the others would set off without me and I’d have to make my own way there. One morning in the autumn of 1942, I was ambling along the lane on the outskirts of the village, hitting the heads of dandelions with a stick. I knew I had to get to school but I was in no particular hurry. Just then a local farmer drove by on his tractor, which was pulling a trailer. I knew he’d be driving up to Croft Castle so I decided to hitch a lift and I jumped onto the back of the trailer.
The farmer turned round and he was not best pleased. ‘Oy! You! Get off there!’
I was standing in the middle of the trailer, which was still moving, arms outstretched to keep my balance on the slippery surface.
‘Get off before I come back there and drag you off!’ he shouted.
I stepped carefully towards the front of the trailer, thinking I could jump off at the towbar, but suddenly my foot slipped. I fell as if in slow motion and hit the ground hard, and the wheels of the trailer trundled over me. The farmer braked abruptly and came running round.
‘You stupid idiot! What have you done?’
I lay there, winded, unable to move because I was trapped by the trailer wheels. Fortunately it was empty or it would have been much heavier, but still the farmer had to use all his strength to lift up one side of it so I could roll out, dazed and bleeding.
‘Blimey,