David Waddington Memoirs

by David Waddington

  On Fridays in the school holidays we used to get the bus to Burnley to do the shopping. Sometimes my sister Zoe and I stayed on in Burnley and went to see Aunt Dot who lived on Manchester Road. Once we used our pocket money to buy a budgerigar. The shop keeper popped it into a paper bag and when we presented bag and bird to my mother and asked her to carry it home on the bus in her shopping basket she was most indignant but complied.

  I was born in 1929. I cannot put a date to many early memories, but I do remember sitting on a wall to watch King George V and Queen Mary go past on their way to open the Mersey Tunnel. That, I find, took place on 18 July 1934. I then have a very clear memory of the Silver Jubilee in 1935. We were all in bed with measles and every few minutes, or so it seemed, God Save the King was played, and every few minutes we leapt out of bed and stood to attention. Before the abdication in 1936 I remember being taught some rude rhymes about Mrs Simpson and, on the day of the coronation in 1937, I planted a tree to mark the occasion.

  When five I went to Sunnybank School in Manchester Road. We were taken there each morning by my father and usually we were late. Martyn Noble, who started at Sunnybank at the same time, used to help me do up my shoe laces but otherwise I was well ahead of the other children, having been taught by my sisters to read, write and do some arithmetic.

  One day on arriving at school I took off my mackintosh in the cloakroom and was horrified to find that before leaving home I had failed to put on my jacket. The Headmistress, Miss Farrer, was disgusted to see me displaying my braces and rang up my mother to tell her I was improperly dressed. Rhona, our maid, came to the rescue and sped to Burnley on her Francis Barnett motorbike carrying the missing jacket.

  I was never allowed to forget this event, any more than I was ever allowed to forget the time when we were out for the day in the car and I lost my purse with all my pocket money in it. My father stopped the car to allow it to be searched, but of the purse there was no trace. Bitter tears were shed. And then a mile or two down the road I took off my school cap and, lo and behold, my purse was sitting on my head where I had very sensibly placed it for safekeeping.

  At Sunnybank there were brass studs on the bannisters to stop us sliding down them and Miss Farrer had a bad-tempered Scottish terrier which took a big piece out of Cynthia Forsyth’s face. In time the scar disappeared and all that was left was a pretty dimple but it was a very bloody business.

  My father’s office was above Barclays Bank in Burnley, and if he wanted to see the manager, Mr Shutt, he walked down the stairs and straight in by the inside door. Once I was with him and he stormed in saying that he wanted to borrow quite a big sum of money and that he had not the slightest intention of providing any security. Mr Shutt replied: ‘Calm yourself, Mr Charles. Of course I don’t need security.’ Banking seems to have changed a bit since those days, and not in the interests of the customer. My father could be peppery, as he was on this memorable occasion, but he was very kind to me and rarely complained about my behaviour, even when sorely tried. He seldom gave me any advice, but he did tell me that there were only three things to avoid in life – calling the fire brigade, playing cards with men on trains and questioning the decisions of magistrates; and I would have saved myself much trouble had I accepted his advice on the first two counts. When I was old enough to know better I was accosted by an Irishman on the train from Manchester to Llandudno. He invited me to find the lady, which I did with great ease, until the moment came when I agreed to back my judgement with a five-pound note. And after marrying I had a minor fire at home which the local fire brigade attacked with enormous ferocity, doing great damage to the fabric of the building. The reason for my father’s advice regarding magistrates was that he had on one occasion appeared before a particularly crowded bench and after a long retirement the chairman returned to say they were equally divided. ‘But how’, said my father, ‘can you be equally divided when there are nine of you?’ ‘Very well Mr Waddington,’ said the chairman, ‘in that case we find against you.’

  Pa suffered great provocation at the hands of my sisters Ann and Mary who used to get the most appalling school reports. My mother was so afraid of the effect that they might have on Pa were he to see them at breakfast-time, that she used to intercept the post and secrete the inflammatory literature until before dinner when he had settled down in his armchair with a large drink in his hand. Once, and only once, did Ma’s plan come unstuck and a report did fall in to Pa’s hands at breakfast. There was a major explosion after which Ann and Mary summoned Zoe and myself to a council of war in the dog kennel. They said we all had to run away to teach Pa a lesson. Happily, however, the scheme never got off the ground because of a shortage of rations for the journey.

  Once Ma and Pa were summoned to Cheltenham and arraigned before the Headmistress, the terrible Miss Popham, who told them of Ann and Mary’s manifold sins and wickednesses. ‘But,’ said my mother, ‘they are very happy here.’ ‘Happy?!’ said Miss Popham. ‘That’s the whole trouble.’

  My mother used to spend a lot of time railing against the weather – ‘Call this flaming June? It ought to be ashamed of itself’, ‘You would have thought it had more sense’, etc. It always seemed to me a somewhat exaggerated reaction as almost permanent rain seemed our lot in east Lancashire. Indeed we were told that it was because of the rain that the cotton industry had gone there in the first place and given us all a living.

  As a child I spent a lot of time praying that there would not be another war. My parents spoke about the horrors of the Great War and their fears that another one would soon be on us. ‘Is it the crack of doom?’ my sister Mary asked when income tax went up in the 1938 budget; and in spite of the merry times, doom did not seem far away. I remember the eerie silence when all the traffic in Manchester Road stopped for the two-minute silence on each Armistice Day. It was as if the world was standing still. Then trenches were dug in Scott Park where the school went for its midday walk, and gas mask practices were held in the school yard. This was in the summer of 1938 and, although a month or two later Chamberlain came back from Germany saying there would be peace in our time, my parents did not believe a word of it.

  In August 1939 we had our last family holiday together, staying at the Monreith Arms, Port William, in Wigtownshire. I travelled in my godfather Nunky’s new Rolls-Royce which was towing a trailer carrying the family bicycles. On the car wireless, the first I had ever seen, there were repeated renderings of ‘Roll out the barrel’ and ‘He was a handsome territorial’. At nearby Burrow Head an anti-aircraft unit was in training and on most days a target was towed overhead. We did not often see a hit. It was while we were in Scotland that the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed and we all knew then that war was certain. On Friday 1 September, the day on which Poland was invaded, I went on the bus to Burnley with my mother and she bought black-out material from a little draper’s shop against the side of the very distinguished Market Hall, which was not destroyed by Hitler but by developers in the 1960s. On Sunday 3 September my father and I went down to the Mill in Padiham and we switched on the wireless on the board room table to hear Chamberlain say that there had been no reply to our ultimatum and we were at war.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Away at School

  Two weeks later I arrived at Cressbrook, a preparatory school in Kirkby Lonsdale. I was terribly homesick and wished I could die. The pain seemed never to leave me. It was there in the classroom, at play and, most of all, at night. I had a model aeroplane which was shot down by a boy armed with a spear. The event coincided with a visit from Nunky who in due course sent me a new plane, but it did not help the sickness. Things got a bit better as the weeks went by, but it was years before going back to school at the beginning of term did not reduce me to tears. In spite of all this I still remember sunny times and I made some very good friends. It is surprising that a few of us did not finish up in the mortuary for we spent our play time capering around on the school roof, throwing spears and lumps of lead at each othe
r and swinging from the branches of trees. One particularly sensational exploit involved our leaping off the terrace, hoping that the homemade parachutes strapped to our backs would ease our landing. They did not.

  Every Sunday we had to learn the collect for the day and many have stuck in my mind ever since, particularly ‘Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruits of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded.’ This was learned on ‘Stir-up Sunday’ and after church we all went into the kitchen and stirred the Christmas Pudding. Most of our thoughts centred on food. They were hungry times and one boy with great strength of mind built a splendid stamp collection by swapping his tea-time buns for my Mozambique triangulars. If we were feeling ill we were sent up to the sick room and always received the same treatment – starvation. It was amazing how soon we got better.

  In 1939 and for the first few months of 1940 the War did not impinge on our lives to any great extent, except that we were required to knit balaclava helmets for the Finns after Russia’s attack on that unfortunate country. I doubt whether my misshapen effort brought much delight to its Finnish recipient.

  In the summer of 1940 we sat in the headmaster’s study listening to news of the evacuation from Dunkirk and the following winter we lay in bed hearing German bombers flying overhead on their way to the shipyards in Barrow. Back home for the Christmas holidays the passage running along the back of the house had been turned into an air raid shelter, and the valley between Blackburn and Burnley was embellished with barrage balloons, each of which was given a nickname leading to questions such as ‘Why isn’t Dickie up, today?’ An Ack-Ack battery was stationed at Simonstone and we had a few noisy nights during the Manchester blitz when the sky was red with the fires of Manchester and Salford, and shrapnel, presumably from anti-aircraft shells, fell on the barn roof. Pa had joined the Home Guard and was enjoying himself enormously, walking up and down outside the house wearing his tin hat and imagining he was back in the trenches.

  Once a week Pa had to perform guard duty at the barracks in Burnley. Before leaving home my mother stuffed him full of raw carrots in the belief that it would help him see in the dark. The blackout meant that cars had virtually no lights, drivers being required, at that stage of the War, to cover almost all their headlights with cardboard.

  When Hitler invaded Russia, Sykie, Cressbrook’s deputy head, told us to rejoice. Hitler would suffer the same fate as Napoleon and lose the War. I suppose he also told us that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was good news, but all I can remember about the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942 was the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the east coast of Malaya and the fall of Singapore. They were disasters of enormous proportions and, although none of us doubted ultimate victory, we could not see it happening for many years.

  Before I went away to school my sister Zoe and I used to quarrel a lot. But separation made the heart grow fonder and after I had gone away to Cressbrook the holidays found us inseparable. Once Zoe was so pleased I was coming home for the holidays she jumped into the air while running along the upstairs landing, hit the ceiling and knocked herself out.

  My father bought a bicycle and together we cycled from Cressbrook to Sedbergh to see what was going to be my next school. I did not much like what I saw. I should have gone to Sedbergh in September 1943 but I fell off my bicycle and broke my leg so I did not arrive until January 1944. This turned out to be a considerable misfortune because seniority based on length of time at the school counted for a great deal and the chances of getting in to a senior position after only three years in the place were slight. I was faced with another more immediate problem. I was very well aware that my parents were hard up. They had sent all my sisters to Cheltenham Ladies’ College and my youngest sister Zoe was still there. So I had insisted on taking the scholarship to Sedbergh. The papers, however, turned out to be beyond my comprehension. (One of the questions I remember was ‘What is surrealism?’) I did so badly in the scholarship papers that when I arrived at Sedbergh I found I had been placed in the third form doing work which to me was infantile. Eventually I plucked up courage and told the form master, who was old, crusty and frightening, what I thought; and he was so amazed and amused at my temerity that he sent me round to the Headmaster. He was equally amused and promptly transferred me to lower fourth classical where I blossomed and was then swiftly transferred to the fifth form. It was very important to me because I had worked out exactly where I had to get to in order to take Higher School Certificate at seventeen and leave school before I was eighteen.

  Sedbergh went in for cold baths and running up hills and had a discouraging motto ‘dura virum nutrix’ (A Hard Nurse of Men). Winder House faced Winder the hill which, towering above the town, was attacked almost daily by hundreds of boys. A friend told me the other day that he had been back to Sedbergh recently and at first could not grasp why the place looked so different. Eventually he realised that it was because Winder was covered in heather. In our day any heather was removed by boys’ bottoms as they slid down from the summit school-ward bound.

  But in spite of the running and emphasis on sport, and in spite of the fact that I was once beaten for forgetting to bring a rugger ball back from the field and threatened with another beating for reading a history book by the side of the cricket pitch when I should have been watching the game, Sedbergh was certainly not ‘one of the more pointlessly sadistic public schools’ as it was described by The Observer in 1994. Headmaster John Bruce-Lockhart was quite forward-thinking and, recognising that there was excessive emphasis on prowess at games, particularly rugger where he himself and his sons had excelled, introduced school colours for music.

  I enjoyed music at school, playing the piano and then the violin and the viola in the school orchestra. I transferred to the viola because it meant promotion of a sort – from second violin to first viola. A friend, Brian Hurst, played the cello. One night the bridge on his instrument broke with an awful report. Brian suffered from the schoolboy equivalent of shell shock.

  Everybody had to join the JTC (Junior Training Corps) which was the old OTC (Officers’ Training Corps), renamed to bring it more in tune with the egalitarianism by then in vogue. I have a certificate to prove that I passed the examination for War Certificate A. I cannot think why because the examination was a nightmare. I was told to reassemble a Sten gun which lay in pieces at my feet. I thought the parts were a bit stiff or the barrel a bit thin but by standing on the butt I managed to apply sufficient extra pressure to force the breech block into place. I had achieved the almost impossible. The breech block was in the wrong way round.

  VE Day plus one was a very special family occasion. It was the day of my sister Nancy’s marriage to an RAMC captain whom she had met as a nursing sister in Normandy very shortly after D-day. She had crossed the English Channel in an American ship, docking at Mulberry Harbour, and had then had a dangerous journey by lorry to Bayeux. It must have been very exciting but also very terrifying for a 22-year-old trained at Victoria Hospital, Burnley, who had known precious little of the world before becoming a nursing sister in the QAs.

  In August 1945 my mother took Zoe and myself to London and we were there on VJ Day mingling in the enormous crowd outside Buckingham Palace. The Goring Hotel’s scrambled egg made from egg powder did not impress, but we relished seeing the King and Queen arrive at Parliament for the State Opening. Our London visit ended with a performance of ‘Perchance to Dream’ by Ivor Novello and not only did we sing ‘We’ll gather lilacs’ all the way home, we played it for months afterwards – Zoe on the squeeze-box, Ma on the piano and myself on the violin.

  Back to Sedbergh where in 1946 we had a day off to enjoy the end of the War. The headmaster announced that we could go anywhere we wanted provided we did not use motor car, train or bus. It did not seem much of a bargain. Sedbergh, after all, was the back of beyond; twelve miles from Kendal, the nearest place with a cine
ma.

  Plans were laid, and four of us walked to Sedbergh railway station, which was well outside the town, and boarded a waiting taxi. In Kendal we went into a pub and bought a pint of beer each and twenty cigarettes, and then proceeded to a picture house where we found four girls who were prepared to sit in the back row with us and let us have a few kisses. The taxi then whisked us back to where we had started, and from there we ran back to Winder House well pleased with ourselves. Unfortunately, one of our party decided to finish off his packet of Players in the boiler room. The packet and a few fag-ends were discovered by the man who did the stoking, and we were all for the high jump.

  I had decided that the next year was to be my last at Sedbergh and was determined to do my best to get up to Oxford to read law. So it worked out. I was accepted by my father’s old college, Hertford, and found my way there in October 1947.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Happy Times at Oxford

  I do not know why I was so confident I would get in to Oxford that year. Men who had fought in the War were still coming home and were entitled to priority, and my sister Zoe had had a real struggle the previous year before, eventually getting a place to read medicine at Queen’s University, Belfast. But I felt in my bones that everything would turn out all right, and so it did. So at the beginning of October 1947 I caught a train to Oxford and on arriving at Hertford was directed to a gloomy set of rooms in the shadow of the bridge across New College Lane. There I met my roommate, Peter Nicholls, who for a year had, I fear, a lot to put up with from me.

  Before long there was a knock on the door and I was recruited to play squash next day; another knock and I was joining OUCA (the Oxford University Conservative Association) and so it went on. It was the beginning of a time in my life when every day seemed to bring new excitements.