CHAPTER 1
It seems to be traditional to ask someone recalling their long life if they can bring to mind their earliest memory. Mine goes back to when I was probably about two years old, sitting in my high chair in the kitchen, wedged behind the table in a corner. That's it, folks! I don't think I was screaming, or refusing my rice pudding, or in any way having a tantrum. I'm just there, and I have no recollection of anyone else. It may be deeply meaningful, but I doubt it.
My next memory is when I was just three. I am standing in front of my father, who is squatting on the floor and dressing me in my Chilprufe vest and knickers. He says I have a baby sister. This is quite surprising. She and Mummy are in the bedroom and I have to be quiet. My sister was called Rosemary, a name we somehow reduced to Rosebud until she became too old for that.
I started school at Chasely School, Ruislip, when I was four-and-a-half—the normal school age in England at that time. The first day—or at least part of it—is burnt into my memory. I was put at a small table in what I now remember as a bay window, and given a book to write in. It had numbers in it, and I had to copy them out. That was fine, no problems. But I was extremely daunted by the other children, whom I found very threatening, though in honesty I cannot recall that anyone ever did anything unpleasant to me. I was a very shy child, a fact that will surprise my many friends today.
In 1934 my brother Philip arrived on the scene. I was sent off to stay with my grandmother Rothwell while this event was happening; my cousin Pat, a few months older than I was, lived with Grandma, and in due course she and I came back to my home in north London. Grandma lived in Lancashire, and I have always had a real affection for that part of the world.
Home, for me, now contained a small baby and—horrors!—a nurse, as well as my parents and Rosemary. I took a strong dislike to the nurse, who seemed to come between me and my mother. At the far end of the garden, as yet uncleared of weeds, was a large patch of sorrel, and I gathered the seeds and made a cup of tea—well, I put some in my toy teapot and poured warm water on it—and offered it to Nurse, who really annoyed me by saying 'no thank you, dear'. I think I had hoped it would make her sick—or at least go away. I wonder if there are many five-year-old murderers about. And could this be a link with the crime stories I started writing half a century later?
Pat and I stood at the foot of my mother's bed. Somewhere, no doubt, the baby snuffled, but I don't remember it. We wondered why Mummy was in bed. Pat, always more outgoing than I in those days, said: 'What's the reason for the cause of the poorliness, Auntie Lily?'—a saying that has gone down in the annals of my family ever since, though Pat doesn't remember it, and was much amused when I told her about it a few years ago.
Pat's early history is worth recording. Her mother, Lottie, was my mother's sister, and she and her husband Norman went to live in Canada with their small sons, Norman and Brian, in the latter half of the 1920s.
Pat was born in Alberta in August 1928, seven months before I arrived in Lancashire. Her home was in a small town, Red Deer, and in the winter after her birth they were snowed in. At this difficult moment Lottie became ill with pneumonia, and they were unable to get her to hospital. She died when Pat was a few months old.
Grandma and Grandpa Rothwell undertook to raise the children, easing a situation that would have been very difficult for Norman, still trying to establish himself. The three little ones were brought home by ship in the care of a nurse. 'Babes of bulldog breed' was the newspaper headline announcing their safe arrival.
In due course, Norman remarried; he and Marjorie had three more children: and Norman junior, Brian and Pat grew up in the heart of the Rothwell family—a busy household, with two young uncles, Tom and James, also living at home.
By the time Philip arrived I had had my tonsils removed, a horrendous operation more in keeping with 19th century medicine than 20th. I developed pyelitis, a condition that has left me vulnerable for the rest of my life to 'waterworks' problems. Worse than that, it left me with a phobia involving mild suffocation and the fear of soft things over my head, as a result of extremely poor management of the pre-op situation, combined with a fear of being thought naughty which meant that I never told anyone, including my parents, how awful it had been. It is ironic that my father, then and for the rest of his working life, was employed at the Ministry of Health!
By the time I was about six, of course, I began to pile up experiences, and the memories are too many to relate (though perhaps I should confess that Tudor Harper kissed me behind the classroom door. He was an older man, almost seven, and I told my mother when I got home. 'Oh, did he!' she said rather meaningfully—and probably smothering a laugh—and I had my first lesson in What One Should Not Tell One's Mother). But my big crush was on my teacher, Miss Norman. When she left I tore upstairs as soon as I got home, shut myself in the toilet and cried very hard. School was never quite the same again.
Ickenham High School, when I was eight, mercifully only lasted a year. I went to school on the underground train—which was above ground by the time it got to us—from Eastcote to Ickenham in the variable care of the 'big girls', who were all of twelve years old and ignored us kids completely. To use the train I had to have a season ticket, and I suppose it is quite surprising that in that whole year I never lost it. I developed a fear, not of trains, but of the gap between the train and the platform. If one is determined to spend one's life in various forms of fear there are always plenty of opportunities. I think this one arose from the story that a woman had fallen under the train a short while before, and both her legs had been cut off. Whether this was true or not I have no idea, but the 'big girls' made a meaty story out of it, and had us, or me at least, properly scared.
I was also terrified of the headmistress, who had a way of taking misbehaving children into her study and 'slippering' them. I don't know whose slipper she used. I only know that I lived with the knowledge that I was going to do something wrong, however hard I tried not to, and the slipper would be mine! The day we were playing netball and my friend gave me a lolly—which if course was absolutely forbidden (as nearly everything except breathing and eating was)—and I was caught! almost brought my life to a shuddering end. Fortunately, nothing and happened—but I knew it would, one day.
I have wondered why I was so timid in those days. With a good home and loving parents I should have had more confidence in myself. I don't recall ever being 'put down' at home. Mum and Dad were encouraging, expecting me to do my best, but not reacting negatively if I failed at something. Although my fearfulness slowly waned over the years I was still very sensitive even in my early teens, and very aware of that terrible thing, being laughed at. I'm thankful that marriage and a family gave me greater confidence. Fear is all right in its place, but not when it inhibits growth.
I remember the old king, George V, dying in 1936. A solemn voice on the wireless said, 'The King's life is drawing peacefully to its close,' which to me, at 7, was very poignant. We all wore black armbands, which would seem quite odd these days—except on the footy field. Then there was a new king, and the deep respect in which the royal family had been held began to erode. The new king, Edward VIII, had been much loved as a young prince, but it soon looked as if the grown-ups were not too happy about what was happening. It's amazing to think, in these days when the Internet has made it impossible to keep anything under wraps, that the British press—unlike the American—made little mention of Edward's 'goings-on'. He was a bit of a womaniser, with a penchant for married women, whose husbands apparently managed to cope with the royal blessings being bestowed on their wives.
Edward was never crowned. Mrs Wallis Simpson, American divorcée, got him first; and though she may well have seen herself as being the first American queen of Great Britain, there was no way she would get past the politicians of that era, who were unitedly against her. Edward abdicated—thank goodness!—and he and Mrs S, now a duchess since he had been given the title of Duke of Windsor, left for France and were never again of any importance in British history.
Schoolkids, of whom I was one, sang about this great turmoil:
Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson's pinched our king! If she does not give him back We will give her the sack!
Decades later, in Australia, I discovered that on the other side of the planet the children sang the same ditty!
I say 'thank goodness!' in particular because the Windsors were quite smitten by Hitler and his activities in Germany. Many people, including me, believe that he would have been prepared to accept a role under Germany as a puppet king. That, of course, would have been disastrous. We would have become part of a German empire, and that was unthinkable. Fortunately, his brother who became (rather against his will) George VI, and Elizabeth who in our time was the much admired Queen Mother, were inspirational during the Second World War, and together with Winston Churchill dragged us through the horrors to eventual, if weary, victory.
Meanwhile, on the home front, Philip was proving to have health problems which at the age of 4 gave him pneumonia. He was asthmatic; pneumonia in those days was very frequently a killer, and I imagine that my parents were deeply afraid of what was going to be the outcome. This is in the pre-antibiotic days, and there was very little that could be done, except to wait for 'the crisis', a moment when the body finally decided whether the fever would break or the patient would die. Very often they did the latter. Thankfully, on this occasion the fever broke and Philip slowly began to mend. But he had to learn to walk again.
My memory tells me that Rosemary and I were also very ill that winter, but I don't know what it was—perhaps bronchitis, which I was very liable to suffer until I was in my 20s. At any rate, I suspect Mum had a dreadful winter; and when we were on the way to health again she said in despair to the doctor, 'What am I going to do with these children?' He said something which none of us could possibly have known would change the pattern of our lives for ever. 'Take them to live in the country for six months and run wild.' What a doctor!
At that time we lived in Eastcote, near to Harrow in NW London, in a new estate of houses built after World War I. I dimly recall Dad saying that our house cost £1250. We had moved there in 1931. It was a good house: 4 bedrooms, lounge and dining rooms, bathroom and toilet, good-sized kitchen and scullery. In 2008, when I was with Rosemary, we went to find the house, and the young woman who lived there very kindly let us go inside and have a look at it after Rosemary had told her that she was born there. It was what in England is called semi-detached, and all the houses in quite a long street were exactly the same design; fortunately quite a good one. Next door to us was the dentist.
Life in the country must have been quite an amazing concept for my parents, brought up as they were in the smoke of Lancashire. By the next April we were settled for six months in a rather eccentric bungalow, surrounded by young forest and seemingly endless areas of heather, on the lower slopes of the South Downs at Storrington in Sussex. From the top of my favourite tree (I was a dedicated tree climber) I could see the Downs. We were on an unmade lane, sandy, with homes scattered about out of sight of each other. It was idyllic, and as a family we were never quite the same again.
I was 9, Rosemary 6 and Philip 4. As a cure it was not entirely successful: a few years later Philip once again escaped with his life from another bout of pneumonia, Rosemary had asthma but got over it with treatment, and I usually had annual attacks of severe bronchitis until antibiotics came in and I grew out of it. There were times when I dared not lie down in bed because I would choke, and Mum must have got heartily sick of looking after us. I don't know where the chest problems came from, whether they were 'in the genes' or what. I just know that I lost an awful lot of school time as a result.
But what joy Storrington was! How did Mum and Dad get it past the authorities? We had no schooling from April to October 1938, and we did no lessons at home! I heartily recommend it.
One of the spin-offs from this super holiday—during which, of course, Dad had to go up by train to London from Pulborough every working day, but didn't seem to mind it in the least—was that when it was coming to an end they apparently agreed that they never wanted to live in the suburbs again. We had all been spoilt, I'm afraid. So they began to look for somewhere within a half-hour or so of London by train. And in due course they settled on Dorking, as being conveniently close to necessities—shops, church, cinema, doctors and so on—but with countryside all around.
So we moved to Dorking at the end of 1938. Rosemary and Philip started school at Stanway, just up the road from us, and I went to Charlton House School, which was not as grand as it sounds, at the other end of the town. Many interesting things were to happen to us as a result of this move.
CHAPTER 2
My parents were Lancashire-born. As far back as I know, both sides of the family, Rothwells and Blakes, were Salford or Manchester people. Very few people outside the English Midlands have heard of Salford, which has long been swallowed up by its larger neighbour, Manchester, and is presumably now a part of Greater Manchester. But it was once a separate entity, and Salford people were proud of their heritage, grimy and smoky though it might be. And Salford is in fact a city in its own right, even if it is a bit obscured by the Manchester twin.
Southerners have always seen that area as something to be avoided at all costs. It is the 'industrial north', with cotton mills and pitheads and, always, the smoke and grime. But I used to love to go there as a child. It was so very different from the green and pleasant land which was Dorking. I felt there was something a bit romantic about the fact that under my feet were coal and salt mines, that land occasionally subsided into sink holes, that the sky was seldom anything but a pale grey, and that all the city buildings were apparently created out of black stone. I know better now, of course. The great clean-up that has overtaken all the British cities has revealed clean, pale stone, and the skies are now quite blue.
When I was a teenager I used to go with Pat and her youth club mates down to a particular place in Sedgely Park, where my Grandpa Blake lived, and 'hang out' (yes, we used to) at the milk bar. There was a place there with a parapet over a wide, flat area where there were the great wheels of the pitheads, slowly turning to indicate that there were men underground. This area extended into a kind of mist after a considerable distance, a mist which I failed to realise was smog. Many years later, driving through during a holiday sometime after we had emigrated, I found myself at that same parapet. The wheels had stopped turning, but they were still there—just no mining. And in the distance, where that mist had been, was a distant view of hills, presumably the Pennines. They had been there all the time, but I had never seen them until the clean air act came into force.
