A Life

Judy kept a blog. I didn't know.

Like so many others, I was not born in Canada. I was born in the picturesque, thousand-year-old town of Salisbury, in the southern English county of Wiltshire. It has a magnificent Gothic cathedral whose spire is -- was – falling down. Perhaps they have fixed it now. And is not far from Stonehenge. It used to be called New Sarum, so I’m told, and was built next to Old Sarum, which had been inhabited since the days of the builders of Stonehenge. It is old, if anything is.

But I have never really been there. I was not raised by my mother but was taken in at the ripe old age of ten days by foster parents, living in Sevenoaks in Kent. It was wartime and such things were not uncommon. Sevenoaks is in what was known as ‘bomb alley’, the route of the rocket bombs launched in Holland, with the anti-aircraft guns pounding away at all hours to try to knock them out of the skies before they fell on London. Apparently, it was all right if they fell on us.

Needless to say, I was a nervous child. I chewed the ends of my pigtails and sucked my handkerchief when no one was looking. Until I left England, at the age of eight, we lived on rationing. They say it was severe and I suppose that an allotment of one ounce of sugar per person per week counts as ‘severe’. It was the only system I had ever known and if I was deprived of the necessities of life, I was blissfully unaware of it, having, it seemed to me, everything I needed, a family, a brother, a dad who carried me on his shoulders and wonderful Christmases. How is that deprivation? No-one thought to explain to me either what a ration was or the need of it; it was a way of life and the only one I had ever known. I did at least know that everyone was required to have them; there were no special cases that I knew of. If I was deprived, so was everyone else and it was not noticeable. The grown-ups never spoke of such things within earshot of children and I am inclined now to think that there is merit in such a system.

Some time after the war, perhaps in 1948, we moved to Wythenshawe, a suburb of the great Industrial Revolution city of Manchester, with its ship canal that had been the aorta of Britain for the export of woollen goods from the ‘dark, Satanic mills’. What did I know of all that? To me, Manchester meant Manchester United football team, having a red and white muffler, filling in the football pools for Pop, since we two children had as much chance of being right as anyone, being within driving distance of the Blackpool Illuminations, walks along country lanes every Sunday after church, being forbidden to play in the rhododendron bushes because of the black, oily streaks that resulted from touching the dark leaves, Father Christmas at Lewis’s Department Store – and at several other big stores as well, of course, which was how I determined that, lovable as he was, Father Christmas was a fake -- and a field for playing Cowboys and Indians behind the ‘semi-detached’ house.

We lived with the sight of bombed buildings. I thought nothing of them; they were simply there, the way of things, as ‘normal’ as sharing one can of Spam between five people and thinking ourselves well off for a lump of coal for the fireplace instead of the usual peat. There were trips to the zoo, with its wonderful elephants. There were rides for the children in a wooden seat high on the elephant’s back. One of the best-cherished childhood delights was feeding Bassett’s Licorice Allsorts, one at a time, to the huge beasts, holding the treat carefully between childish fingers while the two-ton giant took it with exceeding delicacy by the prehensile ‘lips’ of the end of its trunk, its touch warm, soft and gentle. I have loved the great behemoths to this day. I actually remember nothing else about the zoo, but it is enough.