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Looking back on my early years (see Shifting Classes, Chapters Three: First Footsteps and Four: A Child’s War) made me reflect on the part food played in our lives, both producing it and consuming it. Any parent will be familiar with the ways in which the most lovable of children learn to use food as a means to assert their fledgling identity and fight back against adult authority. I had once gone so far as to vomit a greasy school dinner over my teacher. I didn’t dare to be sick on my mother’s shoes, but to her despair, I simply refused outright to eat the horrid fat bacon my father had grown up on and delighted in, any kind of meat with fat on it, and most vegetables. My father, mindful of a BBC campaign on behalf of surplus vegetables, would wheedle me:

“Look, I’m eating nice Charlie Carrot and Percy Pea.” 

“Daddy, you can have my Charlie Carrots and Percy Peas too.”

I kept this up for years, yielding only to treacle sandwiches and spam fritters.

When I presented a first version of A Child’s War to the Ainsty Villages History Group in Yorkshire’s Appleton Roebuck, the village where I first went to school, I was asked about the experience of rationing in those wartime days. My audience seemed taken aback by my response, that my mother once told me “we were too poor to afford all of the rations we were entitled to buy, like decent cuts of meat, or new clothing.”  On our very low farm labourer’s weekly wage, these would always have been unaffordable luxuries. Farm workers were allowed an extra ration of cheese, a distant Ministry of Food perhaps presuming that bread and cheese was all they needed or were accustomed to. Mum’s response is borne out in Juliet Gardiner’s excellent account of ‘The Kitchen Front’ in Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 (Headline Book Publishing, 2004). Each member of a family, including children over six, later five, had a ration book. Most basic foodstuffs were restricted, including butter, sugar, bacon, meat, cheese, tea, soap, and clothing, while bread, milk, fish, game, fruit and vegetables were not.

The idea behind rationing was to ensure a fair distribution of goods in short supply, but in practice there were many inequities between classes. A survey found that ‘the poorer people themselves do not regard their food position as materially altered’. Meanwhile, it was reported that in London, chauffeur-driven cars were ‘bringing in the rich people from the West End to take the people’s food’. Wealthy diarists like Henry Chips Channon, and Harold Nicolson told of drinking magnums of champagne at the Dorchester Hotel. In any case, expensive restaurants remained open, apparently not much affected by rationing, and out of reach of the majority of wartime pockets. The authorities responded to public resentment of middle and upper class privilege by creating more down market ‘British Restaurants’, but it seems that less than two per cent of housewives ever ate in these. 

One advantage for the rural poor was the ability to obtain food related to their place of work or from their gardens: vegetables, particularly potatoes; eggs from hens; milk from the farm (though all children had good rations of milk). Dad’s garden would be a fruitful source of food throughout my childhood once I grew out of my resistance to his produce. And at harvest time there might be the odd unlucky rabbit. In my village, harvest-time could see an abundance of tea and sandwiches for the weary workers, though there were complaints too of ‘Yorkshire puddings so heavy they were used to prop farm gates open’ (Living History In The Ainsty: ed Marjorie J. Harrison, York Press, 2010).

Another fact that seemed to surprise my twenty-first century audience in Appleton Roebuck was that rationing did not end with the war, persisting for meat, eggs, fats, cheese, bacon, sugar and tea, sweets too. At some point even potatoes were rationed, but Dad’s garden could at least provide these. Our ration book for 1953-54 is pictured above, and was one of the last to exist, as rationing was ended on the 3^rd of July that year. But celebrations were muted, not least because many foods either were still scarce, or were in effect rationed by rising prices. I know that during both wartime and the postwar decade the food my family ate was determined by income rather than availability: for us, ‘austerity’ was a permanent way of life.

What of the bacon and eggs of my title? At a particularly poverty-stricken time of our life in the immediate postwar years, with themselves and three hungry children to feed, Mum and Dad acquired two pigs, a duck, and a gaggle of hens.  All these amiable creatures became our childish pets, and we were distressed and outraged when it became clear they would end up on our breakfast and dinner tables. In my case, I refused for years to accept the strips of bacon regularly cut from disembodied lumps of pork hanging from hooks in our kitchen ceiling. I was saved from imminent starvation when a peripatetic fish van appeared weekly, and Mum acquainted me with the delights of bloaters and soused herrings (see Chapter 6: Country Life: Happiness and Miseries).

Eggs are a different kettle of fish. They only became problematic a few years later, now ensconced on a farm in another Yorkshire village, Roecliffe, near Boroughbridge. With two children now at grammar school, and another on the way there, money was very scarce. Dad was able to supplement our income by many hours of overtime, laboured at until late at night. Mum’s contribution was to wash the large quantity of eggs produced daily by our employer’s barnful of hens, an early case of factory farming. We children had to do our bit in this nightly routine, the eggs to be clean and sparkling for the next early morning collection by the Egg Marketing Board. We soon sickened of the dreary task, the cold outhouse in which we worked, the stench of many inevitably half-formed and broken eggs, the impossibility of ever again (it seemed) being able to contemplate eating the things. The great British Breakfast remains a bit of a turn off for me.

The whole experience inspired my sister Sally to write a poem, set out below:

 Washing Eggs
  
 1
  
 Translucent shells, and sometimes the jellied shape
 Of shells without the sharp tap of hardness.
 I can feel one break in my hands, the sudden give
 Of fragile oval strength. Not enough grit
 You said, your hands in the water, washing more eggs.
 You rinsed, I wiped; in the chill sulphurous air
 You carried on, and passed me your taste for escape.
  
 2
  
 Sculleries like graveyards; cascades 
 Of deadly cold tapwater run through 
 A gutted fowl, till the pink turns clear blue.
 Once, a shower of golden eggs, unlaid. 
 I thought of Zeus; you said 
 That all these things are lovely in their way.
 It wasn’t true; neither is this. Your clay
 Moulds into deeper clay; I think of Keats
 Whose name was writ in water, yet still beats 
 In countless hearts, but no more in his own. 
 Quicksilver names ground into stone;
 Dark damp flags, and we’re the scullery maids.
  
 By Sally Minogue, published in Arvon International Poetry Competition 1987 Anthology, selected by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney 

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My previous post, A Tale of Two Fathers, looked at the unlikely interactions in postwar Britain of two families at opposite ends of the social scale. I continue that theme here with a different bit of the aristocracy, illustrated by the photograph of my migrant Irish grandfather, Tom Minogue and other farm workers, mingling with children and nannies of the Mowbray and Stourton family. A fine piece of rural nostalgia, concealing some brutal social realities.

The story goes that in about 1908 Grandad was in a field directing the operations of an Irish harvesting gang when the 24^th Lord Mowbray (and Premier Baron of England) rode by on horseback and cried to his Agent: “I want that man to work for me!”. So he did, on the Allerton Park estate in Yorkshire, as gardener then farm labourer for the next 28 years, living in the small estate cottage where he and my Granny brought up their 11 children. When the notoriously irascible William Stourton inherited as 25^th Baron Mowbray in 1936, he soon peremptorily sacked this loyal family servant and many other staff, including my mother Josephine, who for the previous six years had been a kitchen maid in the estate Castle.

Perhaps it was nostalgia for the place where they first met that persuaded my parents to return to Allerton Park to work for this very same man in the early 1950s, with Dad as the effective manager of the main estate Home Farm. This was the first house we lived in (me now aged 12, my sisters 9 and 3) to have electricity, mains water, and an inside lavatory and bathroom. This seeming idyll was blown apart when Lord Mowbray abruptly sacked Dad, accusing him of involvement in the secret theft and sale of cattle. Mum and Dad and their three children were given only two weeks to find a new job and tied cottage. Since no one locally believed this charge for a minute, Dad quickly found a sympathetic local farmer to give him a job and a house. It later transpired that others were behind the nefarious practice, and Lord Mowbray sent his son Charles to offer Dad’s job back. He proudly refused the offer.

These are grim stories of mistreatment of loyal workers by an uncaring and uncompassionate upper class employers who behaved this way because they could, without any redress.  Dad and his father before him were victims in part of the ‘tied cottage’ system, which gave farm workers no protection against such evictions. I do not forget that, unforgivably, the post-1945 Labour Government did nothing to prevent such abuses in this pernicious system.

We might think that a leading family in the Catholic part of the English aristocracy should have behaved better to its predominantly Catholic servants and workers. Well, some of the family did; but only on the female side of the equation. First, my mother retained for many years a long connection with Miss Mary Stourton, sister of the appalling William. I recall shyly being introduced to her in her Otley home so that Mum could show off my grammar school uniform. She also left £1000 in her will to my Auntie Pat, a friend and companion since childhood on the estate. Moreover, another Mary, niece of the appalling William, and then by marriage the Countess of Gainsborough, always maintained personal contact with my Aunt Peggy, throughout Aunt Peggy’s long life as a Carmelite nun. I see these manifestations of feminine friendship and support as essentially part of a long tradition in the Catholic aristocracy that they should hold some responsibility for the welfare and well-being of the Catholic people who worked for them.

What a pity that this spirit of charity and social responsibility was not to be found among the men in the family. Not that this carelessness did the men much good. The 25^th Baron’s public reputation was destroyed by a court case in which he was found to have behaved with cruelty to his wife, who was rescued by a lorry driver when she fled from her husband to the Great North Road in the middle of the night. Relations with his son Charles were also badly affected by a messy disagreement over the estate finances and inheritance provisions. Charles, made some kind of political career in the House of Lords, and was by all accounts popular with his peers. His son Edward, 27^th Baron, seems to have led a rather sad and inconsequential life until his recent death after a fall, having abandoned Allerton Castle to one of those curious wealthy Americans who seem to yearn for the aristocracy they had long ago rejected. At least he was always friendly to my Auntie Agnes, as a regular patron in the pub she and her husband ran for a time in Knaresborough marketplace.

At one point, when just 14, I had occasion to act as an assistant bag handler to Charles Stourton during the shoots then organised by Lord Mowbray, essentially ways to bolster the increasingly hard-pressed finance of the estate. I was extremely impressed by the fact that he was able to shoot at all, given the piratical black patch he wore over an eye lost during the war, and later he would be Captain of the House of Lords shooting team. He was rather brusque with me, as I had not been brought up to all this gun and cartridge handling. For my part, I could scarcely conceal my distaste at having to collect together a series of dead and disarranged birds. Many years later, as 26^th Baron Mowbray, he would walk the same corridors of power in the Foreign Office as I had. He had never been reconciled to his father, who bypassed Charles and left the Allerton estate to Charles’ own son Edward. We were destined not to meet again as adults, but I doubt he would have recognised me, either socially, or as a former bagman.

If I examine these people and their lives, and look at my own family and its story, I see that both have had their due share of difficulty and hardships. But I’m pretty certain that my family instinctively knew more about how to lead a happy and fulfilled life than their erstwhile social superiors did. I’m glad that I was born on the right side of this social divide.

A detailed account of the social ups and downs of life on an aristocratic estate can be found in Chapters 1 and 2 of Shifting Classes (in the 1900s to the 1930s), and Chapters 7 and 8 (the early 1950s).

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Chapter 5 of my memoir Shifting Classes takes the family story forward to the end of the war in 1945. I quote Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon’, who reportedly looked around a grand champagne celebration of victory by London’s upper crust and said: “After all, this is what we have been fighting for”. This was rather rich coming from an American expatriate who had married into the wealthy Guinness family, and was notorious before the war for pro-Nazi sentiments and support for appeasement of Hitler. He and his connections provide a telling portrait of the ways in which the British social and political elite felt themselves entitled to the privileges they had done little to deserve, and continued to enjoy those privileges despite the stunning post-war Labour victory.  Class war no more brought them defeat than the real war had done.

The story of these two fathers and their sons illuminates the nature of social and political relationships after 1945. On the one hand we have Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, establishment grandee and his son Paul Channon, later Lord Kelvedon; on the other hand, my own father, a Yorkshire farm labourer, and his son. Astonishingly, given the enormous social gulf between them, the career trajectories of these two sons would bring them together in the mid-1960s, working in the same place (the Foreign Office), and meeting in the same Downing Street office to discuss government policy towards Southern Rhodesia.

Paul Channon had progressed from Eton to Oxford, then (leaving without a degree) into Parliament as an elected MP. At the age of 23, he was the youngest member of the House of Commons. He owed this precocious achievement entirely to the almost feudal grip his wealthy, well-connected family had on the constituency of Southend West (prior to that Southend-on-Sea). As four members of the Guinness family represented the constituency between 1918 and 1997, it became known as Guinness-on-Sea. His grandmother, who had retired from the seat, complimented the Southend electors for ‘backing a colt when you know the stable he was trained in’.

As my farm labourer father unaccountably had no parliamentary seat to hand on to me, I had to make my own way to Whitehall and Westminster, via Cambridge (which I did leave with a degree) and the fiercely competitive Civil Service ‘fast stream’ examinations. Paul Channon was in the same room as me because from 1961-64 he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, a position his father had also held. I was in the room because from 1963-64 I was Assistant Private Secretary to Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, responsible for Rhodesian policy.

It’s important to emphasise the difference in these two trajectories which brought together a wealthy son of the aristocracy, and a son of one of the poorest sections of the working class. Mine was a story of post war careers open to the talents; Channon’s was a story of success and position owed overwhelmingly to birth and wealth. This is not to say he was a dunce; indeed, he had a quite respectable if challenging career, ending as a Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher. Through the Guinness Trust, an investment vehicle, he became even wealthier, recorded in 1990 to be worth £164 millions, some of that money flowing from rents from more than 3,000 working class homes in London. In 1996 my father, who had remained a lowly paid labourer all his life, left savings of £3000 to be divided among his three children (to our astonishment and near disbelief, given his small earnings and pension). These were indeed two different worlds, and it was a small miracle that they ever collided, however briefly. But as Dad might have said: ‘After all, this is what we were fighting for’.

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We call our first names ‘given names’, that is, as helpless babies this is the first indication that we don’t control our own lives. This can lead to trouble later on for any number of reasons. For example, I was named Martin after my own father, also called Martin. The story goes that I came four weeks before expected, and Mum and Dad had not as yet agreed on a name. Under pressure to register me formally in case the premature birth didn’t go too well, Mum called me after Dad because it was the only name she could think of. Later in life, when she called ‘Martin!’ both of us would answer, unless she seemed to be on the warpath, in which case neither of us would answer, sometimes grinning at each other as we made off stealthily.

Thanks to my cousin Tom (and a link to a Minogue family tree being put together in America) I now know that the rather exotic name Anastasia mentioned in my earlier blog appears to have entered the family by marriage in 1807. How this name reappears in 1893 is uncertain. It seems possible that the transmission over such a long period could have been oral, a preservation of family names through stories passed down the generations.

Genealogies also make clear how much names are passed down from generation to generation and are in some sense ‘traditional’. In Germany, recently, the authorities in Lower Saxony charged with summoning people in the oldest age group for Covid19 vaccinations, sent out letters to people they judged to be in this highest age group on the basis of their first names. Toddlers called Fritz or Adele were invited for vaccination, while octogenarians named Peter or Brigitte were ignored. It seems that many old-fashioned names have been revived recently. This at least explains why German friends of mine have just given to newly born boy twins the names Ludwig and Leopold, which conjures up the faded nineteenth century world of aristocracy and empire.

The name Martin, I’m glad to report, conjures up more acceptable visions. St Martin, a 4^th century Bishop of Tours, is regarded as the patron saint of beggars, because of the legend that he divided his cloak in two to clothe an old naked beggar. A painting similar to the one above was one of only two paintings my parents had in the house, and any beggars knocking at Mum’s door (as they often did in the late 1940s) never left empty-handed. I also like the association with St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, where there is a St Martin chapel, with a plaque to Vera Brittain, whose pacifist views Mum had always shared.

So our names matter to us, and become a fixed part of our family identity. This can still cause complications. For example, my brother-in-law Tom comes from a family (the Stanfords) which traditionally would name each eldest son Thomas. His grandfather and father were named Tom, so was he, so was his eldest son and so was that son’s eldest son. If one of them comes up on a telephone message, I have no idea at first which Tom is getting in touch (I have now set up my phone to register them as Tom 1, Tom 2, and Tom 3). Another example is my own youngest son, who was at birth registered as Michael: but we never ever called him that, always giving him the name Ben. My mother couldn’t cope with this and always addressed him as Michael. Eventually, after a great deal of bureaucratic nonsense, we managed to get him officially registered as ‘Ben Michael’, at which point his elder brother Nick always called him ‘Bendy Michael’.

Given all the problems we see arising with naming, let’s give the last word to Shakespeare’s Juliet:

           What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…

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Teeth have been a life-long source of misery, from my childhood onward. It was only recently borne in on me that, unlike my own children, I never got visits from the Tooth Fairy, almost certainly because my parents could not afford her. My mother had her own favourite methods of dealing with these things. She regularly brushed my teeth, and those of my sister Maureen, with soot from the chimney back of our kitchen fire, presumably a folk remedy dating from mediaeval times. When our teeth, unsurprisingly, objected, Mum would clamp a large piece of brown paper suffused with vinegar over our jaws, meant to reduce any need for further, impossibly expensive treatment.

The threatening financial burden of healthcare was, of course, lifted from the shoulders of poor working class families like mine by the post-war health reforms of the new Labour Government. This turned out to be a mixed blessing for me, for it meant that a dentist could now be let loose on me and my ever recalcitrant teeth. There was only one dentist in the nearby small town of Boroughbridge, and he appeared to have inherited the agricultural practices predominant in the locality. I bled for days after this first appalling intervention and didn’t even have anything to offer the tooth fairy by way of appeasement. Wild horses would not drag me to a dentist thereafter, which naturally ensured that I would always have need of one. So the Tooth Fairy and I have kept a love-hate relationship going for most of my life. Good NHS dentists have got fewer, but so have my teeth. Clearly, the chimney soot treatment hasn’t worked.

The past, it is said, is another country; they do things differently there. Well, Sarah tells me that in the 1930s and 40s it was thought that the best present a would-be bridegroom could give to his bride, was the present of a completely new set of teeth to show off at the wedding. In the more recent setting of Thatcherite Britain, the novel Shuggie Bain (by Douglas Stuart) shows us young working class girls with bad teeth, who have them all removed at once and replaced by a set of pearly gnashers with which to outface the world. Perhaps the soot treatment had not worked for them either.

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It seems appropriate to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by reference to these members of the Irish side of my family. Thomas (Tom) was my grandfather, born in 1878; Patrick was his brother, born in 1885. Anastasia was their younger sister, born in 1893. The two young men, Patrick possibly no older than 15, migrated from their home in Outrath, Kilkenny, around the turn of the century, as described in Chapter One (Hard Times) of my memoir. Anastasia is a bit of a puzzle, appearing in a list of eight children replete with conventional Irish names. Originally, I thought she might have been named after the famous Russian Romanov princess of the same name, but the princess was born in 1901, her Minogue namesake in 1893. If anyone out there can offer an explanation, I’ll be delighted.

The story of Tom Minogue’s settling down to work, marriage, and children (one of these my father Martin Bernard) on the estate of the Catholic aristocratic Mowbray and Stourton family is told in Chapter Two (...and Hard Masters). Buttoday I want to tell a much later story about how my Dad (and Mum) went to visit Ireland for the first time ever in 1971.

We (me, my then wife Lizzie, Dad, and Mum Josephine) travelled more in hope than expectation, since Grandad seemed to have left scant information about his old family haunts, or indeed his family. This was also the first time my parents had been in an aeroplane, a baptism of fire so far as Mum was concerned. When we were told we could remove our seat belts, I turned to look back at them. Mum still had her eyes closed and was clearly in a state of permanent prayer. Dad caught my eye and said, “Have we taken off yet?”

After a night in Dublin to recover, we headed off in a hire car for Kilkenny.  Arriving, we tried ringing various Minogues in the telephone book (you see how ill prepared we were).  Given that Grandad and Patrick had scarcely ever returned there over the intervening six decades, the polite but baffled responses were unsurprising. We decided to sink our sorrows in a local pub. It soon became clear that our very English group was being regarded with a sort of guarded curiosity. A couple of men came over quite deliberately to chat, and I remember feeling a little anxious, reflecting that the English were not likely to be popular just then, given what had been going on in Belfast. I need not have worried. Dad told them why we were there, about his Irish origins, and his usual cheery and open demeanour seemed to allay any suspicions. He was soon the life and soul of the evening. At closing time, we were almost caught flat-footed when everyone rose and struck up ‘The Soldier’s Song’. Happily, Dad knew the rousing words, schooled at his father’s knee, and our new friends wished us well in our search.

Touring the West of Ireland, we found ourselves in Bantry. The highlight here was a race meeting, in a large farmer’s field outside the town. Things seemed both in spirit and practice probably much as my Grandad would have found them in 1900. You paid a couple of pounds to get in, though a large number of people were unwilling to countenance this charge and stood outside along the hedge, jostling for position to view the races for free. Inside was a long oval track marked by oil drums roped together. Inside the oval everything else took place; horses trotted about and were weighed out and in for each race. About six bookies had set up shop. Each employed runners to convey odds and carry back bets for the many people lining the hedges outside. I often wonder if they ever took any winnings back.

The horses were all ridden by jockeys who could not have been more than 14 years old, mostly quite skinny and light. The racegoers were tremendously friendly and informative. One informed us that the horse that had just won the first race would be racing again later but under a different name.  “Don’t spend your money,” he advised, “she’ll be held back”. Sure enough, when the twice-named horse ran again, the jockey visibly stood up and with all his strength held the horse on a tight rein as the others ran past. Ascot it was not, but everybody seemed to be having a good time, punters, trainers and jockeys all trying to outsmart each other. I now understood better why my Irish Grandad always at race meetings parked himself firmly alongside the bookmaker, making sure that he would not run off with the winnings.

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I owe this title to George Ewart Evans, taken from his classic descriptions of village life and farm work over the first half of the twentieth century, based on interviews and oral accounts from older inhabitants of East Suffolk. He believes that change has occurred over this period to such a great degree that it might be described as a revolution, so that life in these places will never again be the same. In seeking to understand this disappeared society, he suggests we need to help the ‘backward traveller’ “not so much to know the past as to feel it. For history is not merely the acquisition of knowledge about the past, it is more than anything else the imaginative reconstruction of it’. (Ask The Fellows Who Cut The Hay p.13 Faber and Faber 1956)

I am wholly persuaded to this view myself. A problem with such classic accounts, and there are others based in oral history, is a tendency to create a picture of the past that is essentially unproblematic. We can still enjoy such accounts, especially where they focus on communal practices such as harvesting, or the charm of old tools like flails and scythes, or give us sepia-tinted photographs of splendid Suffolk Punch horses. These accounts are full of interest for the twenty-first century reader, and I have just come across an excellent recent story of one rural labourer’s life and work (see the photograph above). Mont Abbott describes his life and work in Oxfordshire from about 1915 to 1985. His account carries real conviction because it conveys one, very recognisable voice, rather than several grouped into a generalised narrative. Lifting The Latch: A Life on the Land (Day Books 2003) is both a fascinating and moving account.

An earlier account by George Bourne (Change in the Village 1912, Penguin Books 1984) has its fair share of nostalgia, but also recognises the harsher aspects of life and work for rural farm labourers and their families. “A majority perhaps of the labouring folk endure … chronic poverty, in which at some point or other every day, the provision for bare physical needs falls a little short” (p.59). He notes too that this largely poor and exploited group of rural workers seems just to accept an unhappy fate: “The truth which economists begin to recognise, that where there are wealthy and idle classes there must as an inevitable result be classes who are impoverished and overworked, has not found its way into the villager’s head” (p.63).

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My own oral resources for this part of my memoir are my own parents. They left written accounts of their lives which have little room for nostalgia, but tell us a great deal about the courage, resolve and determination required to cope with the always challenging conditions of hard work, inadequate housing, and very low income. In telling their stories, I have had to do a great deal of backward travelling myself, while trying to observe George Ewart Evans’ dictum of ‘imaginative reconstruction’.

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Had she still been around, my mother Josephine (Josie) would have celebrated International Women’s Day enthusiastically. From an urban mining family in the North East, but married to a Yorkshire farm labourer, she constantly rebelled against the constrictions she met with in rural estate and village life. This often meant being precipitately kicked out of the tied cottages that came with my Dad’s job, regularly remonstrating with surly farmers about the appalling conditions she was obliged to live in: no running water, no bathroom or inside lavatory, no electricity, no hope of improvements or repairs. Her running battles meant that we made a peripatetic progress around Yorkshire, and I went to three primary schools in five years.

Mum’s readiness to defy authority, regardless of the consequences, is best illustrated during the second world war, when our local village life was more than a little disrupted by a variety of incomers, including land girls, conscientious objectors, and prisoners of war. The latter two groups were treated with unremitting hostility by most village people, but not by my firmly socialist and internationally minded parents. Conscientious objectors were welcomed into our house, as was their penchant for radical political talk, and continued these friendships after the war was over.

But the real clash with authority came because of the friendliness shown to prisoners of war. Mum and Dad made firm friends with some of the Italian PoWs, especially a downed pilot, Rosario Pistritto, in civilian life an artist. This was made known to Dad’s employer, Sir Benjamin Dawson, by a local woman widely known as ‘the Ministry of Information’ because of her readiness to tell these kinds of tales. The whole estate staff were lined up in front of Sir Benjamin and the local British camp commander, and told that such fraternisation was unpatriotic and would henceforth be punished.  Dad was more circumspect after this, not wanting to lose his job and home; but my mother didn’t waver, secretly smuggling packets of woodbines to Rosario and his fellow prisoners, while encouraging me and my sister Maureen to continue our own form of fraternisation with these cheerful and lively companions.

The Italian PoWs were repatriated in 1944, when Italy dropped out of the war. Soon after, we received from Rosario Pistritto, now in Messina, Sicily, a letter enclosing pencil portraits of my sister and mother (see above); the letter ‘in grateful remembrance of a friendship which will last eternalli’ and ‘con amore a chi Josie’, (with love to dear Josie). Whatever the constraints of war, Mum had defiantly done her bit for good international relations and humanity. For a fuller account, see Chapter Four: A Child’s War.

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My eldest son Nicholas (Nick) died when he was 35 years old. Today would have been his 47^th birthday. Our whole family miss him terribly, but today we celebrate the memories of who he was and what he achieved. The photographs trace his academic progress. When he came back from his first day at school and was asked how it was, he replied with a sigh that they had spent all day doing ‘the cat sat on the bloody mat!’.  He would go on to score straight As in all his school subjects, then a First in Chemistry at the University of East Anglia, and  a Ph.D there under the supervision of Professor John Sodeau. Nick went with John to the University of Cork in Ireland to help with the setting up of a new Centre for Research into Atmospheric Chemistry. They still list his contributions to four articles in the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Later Nick would leave academic life and work as a management consultant at Accenture in London.

But Nick carried all this success modestly and with an easy grace. A kindly and sensitive person, with a quick sense of humour, he made friends wherever he went, including during a year at the University of Texas at Austin. Taking an optional course there in swimming, he found himself in with the American  training squad for the Olympics. They took him under their wing and when he did his compulsory test times, they ran up and down the poolside shouting out his times, and urging him on: he just squeezed inside the set minimum.

Nick always encouraged me to write about my rake’s progress from a farm labourer’s cottage, and was inspired by it to paint the ‘upward path’ that is the basis for the cover design. It’s a particular sadness for me that he is not able to read this memoir and see the contribution he made to it. But I recall too, at my70^th birthday party, where he gave me this painting as a gift, how he and brother Ben vied with each other to tell the funniest stories about me. I think it was probably a dead heat.

So we all miss Nick very much, as a son, a brother, an uncle,  a cousin, a nephew, and a friend. Peace Nick; and thanks for the cover story.

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Now that my book is up and running, so to speak, I’d like to pay tribute to those who had a key role in producing it. I was initially doubtful about venturing into self-publishing, but am now a committed fan. One of the principal advantages of this route to publication is that as author and holder of the copyright, you retain control at every stage of production, and face none of the pressures to leave bits out or do major rewrites, as you might find with conventional publishers. Naturally, this leaves a considerable responsibility with you, the author, to get things right  and not be afraid to make cuts and changes where these seem to be indicated. I had great help with this from  those who read my drafts and gave invaluable critical responses (as well as huge encouragement). You can find them in the Acknowledgements. But I also owe a big thank you to those at my publisher, YouCaxton, specifically Bob Fowke, who produced excellent and clear guidance throughout the whole production process, and Ella, YouCaxton’s  specialist book designer, who was tremendously helpful and efficient. I could not be more pleased with a handsome and well produced book.

While on the subject of efficiency, I must mention the Post Office, an organisation that does not always, these days, attract admiration. But when I posted off several complimentary copies to family and friends from a rural Welsh post office in Knighton at 4pm on a Friday afternoon, the very next morning I  received news that copies had arrived in places as far flung as Knaresborough in North Yorkshire, West Harptree in rural Somerset, and a suburban part of Leicester. So I’m posting in praise of the posting service.

Many years ago, while working overseas, I had occasion to address 500 members of the Postal Service of the Philippines on  the British postal system (please don’t ask why). I began by declaring that the best thing about the British postal system was that if you posted a letter in any part of the United Kingdom one day, it would always arrive the next day. Stunned and loud applause from the serried ranks of Filipino postal staff, who have to cope with huge rural areas and several islands. Then a member of the audience asked for the microphone and declared ‘Well, when you post a letter in the Philippines, you have no idea when it will get there, but IT WILL ALWAYS ARRIVE!’ Even louder and very patriotic applause.

You will find the story of my own labours as a temporary British postman in Chapter Fourteen, Working Life 

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