1. York, Rochford and RAF Felixstowe
I was born in York, in 1941. My mother came from Sherborne in Dorset. She was the daughter of Frederick William Vincent Hodges, a civil servant and naval marine who died young from a wound he received in the Great War. My mother, Joan Elizabeth Hodges, was the eldest of four sisters and a brother. There was a mystery surrounding the birth of my grandfather. He was born in a workhouse, his mother Mary Toop being a chambermaid at Lord Digby’s home, Sherborne Castle. The family myth is that one of the lord’s sons had seduced Mary and then disowned her and her illegitimate child.
The baby was later raised by the castle’s gardener and his wife, the Hodges, and my grandfather took his surname from these adoptive parents. As he grew up he was given a good education and a position in the civil service, courtesy of an ‘unknown’ benefactor.
My father George Edward Kilworth, born in 1918, was also the eldest of his siblings. A farm labourer’s son, he was one of five children raised in a tied cottage in Canewdon, Essex. There have been Kilworths in Canewdon since the mid 1700s, when the first of them came over from Ireland to farm the land. Some of them spell their name Killworth and some Kilworth, but since my grandfather was the only one of his eight siblings who spelled his name with one ‘L’ my guess is that they all come from the same Irish root. They originated from in and around the Kilworth Mountains in County Cork.
My paternal nan was a Salwood from Swindon and beyond that I am ignorant. Her faded birth certificate, issued much later, states that Fanny Kate Salwood was born ‘Around 1897’. Grandad was born in 1881, so he was about sixteen years older than Fanny.
My father was an airman when he met my mum in London at the beginning of the Second World War. His RAF ‘Certificate of Service’ describes him as an ‘Electrician’ but I never saw him wire a plug or even change a light bulb in my whole childhood. He was five feet six inches tall, with hazel eyes and brown hair. My mother Joan, on the other hand, was five feet two inches, with brown eyes and dark hair. With parents of this stature and colouring, I stood very little chance of reaching my desired goal of being a six-foot-tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed Adonis who might one day win a freestyle swimming race at the Olympics.
When mum became pregnant she was evacuated to York to have the child, probably to leave the hospital beds in London available for victims of the Blitz. I was later quite pleased about that, because it meant I could have played cricket for Yorkshire at a time when you could do so only if you were born in the county. I never did of course. My ability at cricket has always only ever been average.
The Second World War had four years to run after I was born. My early memories are few and hazy. I know there were bombs and Doodlebugs, and V1s and 2s. I remember seeing fighter planes in the sky spitting fire at each other and I recall being woken in my bed at nights and given a candle to carry to the air raid shelter. In those shelters there were faces that showed pale and white in the light of my candle flame. People rarely spoke above a whisper, almost as if they were afraid they would not hear the bomb that killed them. We huddled together wrapped in blankets. Someone usually had an arm around me as we listened to the drone of the aircraft passing overhead. The German bombers often flew over Essex on their way to London without bothering us, but there were times when they wanted to jettison their payload early or late and dropped it in the estuary of the Thames, close to us.
My pal in my paternal grandparents’ backyard was Black Mick, a dog I grew up with until the age of twelve.
Food during the war, and after, included plenty of stuff not seen on the shelves very much now, if at all: powdered egg, Camp coffee made out of chicory, lemonade powder, crab paste made from crab essence, dandelion and burdock fizzy drink. Some things are now banned from our healthy dining table: bread spread thickly with dripping-fat from the frying pan, for instance, and thick sugar sandwiches. Shame. We were actually quite poor in those days, but I think my grandkids are now sick of hearing me say that we were sent to school with water sandwiches wrapped in newspaper.
The yard was full of clucking chickens. My grandparents’ terraced cottage had no water or electricity (a situation which did not change until the late ’50s). Downstairs had gas lighting, and the wireless was powered by an accumulator battery. In the two bedrooms candles were used. Men slept in one room, women in the other. Sometimes five or six in each. I liked the company of brothers because candles were always blown out when the adults went downstairs and darkness filled the room. We huddled together, terrified, after listening to The Man In Black on the wireless: ghost stories read by Valentine Dyall. Water could only be had at a big-handled pump which stood in the middle of the row of ten cottages. The outside toilet was tagged on to the house, but was always freezing in the winter. We used torn strips of the daily tabloids for toilet paper. Invariably a hare hung on the back of the door. Those dead hares would stare at me with knowing, glinting eyes while I performed.
Sunday evenings saw us all using the tin bath. Three inches of kettle water bathed three dirty kids. My youngest brother, Derek, always got the dirtiest water. I never heard of my grandfather taking a bath, but perhaps he did when I was not present.
The bedroom was always very cold in the winter. By the candlelight I would secretly watch my grandad take off ancient dirty trousers that smelled of horse dung and then remove his false leg. I used to grimace at the white crinkled stump which appeared out of the socket. Kids are fascinated by gruesome sights. He lost this limb in the Great War, but every time I asked him how it happened he told me a different story. This is all in my semi-autobiographical novel Witchwater Country but I think the scenario which is closest to the truth is that he was hit by shrapnel. This wound probably saved his life, because he would have been sent home. His brother Victor Charles Kilworth (my great uncle) of the 9th Battalion, Essex Regiment was killed in action near La Boiselle at the Battle of the Somme on 3 July 1916, aged nineteen years. So far as I am aware, Victor was the only one of the six brothers to lose his life in the war, though I never remember meeting any of my great uncles.
My grandad also had two sisters, Rosa and Daisy. Years later I would hear from the vicar of Canewdon Church that Rosa and Daisy were ‘quite mad, you know’ and that many of the Kilworths suffered from mental illnesses of some kind.
‘You don’t stand a chance of staying sane,’ he said to me, pleasantly.
There was in the alleyway a hutch containing a ferret named Pugerchov, who belonged to Uncle Peter, who used him for poaching on nights when the sound of a 12-bore shotgun would bring the gamekeepers running. It was me who named the creature, after seeing a film about a Russian revolutionary. The only other tame animal in the house was Ginger the tom, who could leap on the sashcord window, his weight forcing it to slide down in order for him to escape. However, in the coal cupboard under the stairs lived wild mice, who would make a dash for the coal-fired range where nan did her cooking, often only to be trapped there by the tom and tragically slaughtered.
Once the Second World War was over, Uncle Charlie became the town’s postman and had a red bike to prove it.
Uncle Peter (the youngest by far) was already the local burglar, poacher and street-fighter, though occasionally he worked the land, using a heavy horse to pull the plough. I learned much later in life from a very reliable source that Peter had a twin who was given away at birth because my nan could not afford to keep them both. The whereabouts of that twin remains a total mystery, since anyone who would know about the affair is dead. Who he was ‘given’ to and what happened to him after that went to the grave with my dad, aunts and uncles.
My aunt May took me to the cinema to see my first film when I reached eight years. The film was King Kong and though it scared the pants off me, it also amazed me. I believed every scene, every word, and thought the world a wonderful place to have giant apes in it. By that age I knew Father Christmas was a lie, and that there were no such thing as fairies, but it took a little while for King Kong to catch up.
~
Aunt May was a seamstress at the shirt factory and aunt Amy got married and settled neatly into housewifery. Grandad was by then a lengthsman, chimney sweep and sexton. He owned a horse called Custard and everyone outside the family called my grandad ‘Rhubub’. Custard pulled a rickety old wagon which Grandad used for his business.
Mostly it was the lengthsman work that kept him busy, cutting the verge grass alongside the roads between villages. I have a mind’s-eye picture of him still, wielding that heavy scythe of his like the two-handed sword of an Anglo-Saxon warrior. The great blade would flash in the sun as he swept it back and forth and the smell of the cut grass and dry ditch weed seeds began to fill the air of a hot summer’s day. He would work for two or three hours on end, stumping along a verge and swishing the scythe, while I walked Custard forward to keep pace. Then he would stop, take out his pipe, and smoke a bowl full of tobacco, before going back to shaving the county’s face with his giant razor.
In later life I tried handling that same tool, but the one-legged countryman of Irish descent, with his broad shoulders and heavy bones, must have been a great deal stronger at seventy than I was at forty. I was exhausted within a few minutes. His heavy scythe was awkward to hold by the two small handles that protruded from the main shaft and while I could pick it up, it started to weigh a ton after a very short use.
He was a crusty old man, Rhubub, and rarely said much more than ‘Mornin’’. I would ride with him and Black Mick on the wagon, through Rochford, Stambridge, Hockley, Canewdon and Ashingdon, but we rarely talked. Sometimes though, he would quietly hand me Custard’s reins and would then take out and play a rusty old penny whistle – Irish tunes from somewhere deep in his bones – and Black Mick would howl along with the music.
The summer fruit from the orchard and the various bushes was bottled for the winter months. I used to watch my nan steam and seal the jars of blackcurrants, greengages and gooseberries, a mysterious operation that fascinated me. Her larder walls were lined with shelves out of an apothecary’s shop. My nan was a woman of many talents and I did think some of them were closer to the magic than the mundane. She stirred the clothes in her scullery copper with a short thick staff that had grown as white as a wizard’s beard over the years. I have a photograph of her that I treasure and it makes my eyes water when I look at the dress she is wearing in that picture: shapeless, ragged at the hem. My dear old nan hardly knew the best things in life. It was just a long term of drudgery and toil, with very few rewards.
I think it was mostly my nan who tended the allotment. Although they were poor, my grandparents did not go short of plain food. The various harvests from the allotment ensured there were always vegetables in the larder and if there was no money for meat, Peter would go out and shoot something: rabbits, hares, pigeons, pheasants, partridges.
I would often go with him. There is little to equal strolling over forbidden fields in high summer, looking to find some game for the pot, occasionally catching a glimpse of a hot fox looking for shade or sending up a black explosion of rooks from the treetops. Again, on a winter’s frosty morning, when all the world is silver, the clods of earth in the furrows as hard as Christina Rossetti’s iron. I would kick at the long ditch grass to fill the air with sprays of ice-stars and use my home-knitted pullover as a bag to collect old crab apples. Such memories are infinitely precious. The countryside runs in my blood and where the choice has been mine I have lived rurally rather than in towns or cities.
When I was ten Peter let me fire the 12-bore and it knocked me flying backwards off my feet. I had a bruise the size of a penny bun on my shoulder for days afterwards, but I was proud of myself for some strange reason. When the gamekeepers were about and we couldn’t risk using the shotgun, we would take nets and Pugerchov the ferret, and do our illicit poaching silently under the moon and stars.
Years later, when I bought a house down an unmade road in Ashingdon, I offered to help with the garden of an elderly woman called Mary Sweetlove. (She called herself an anarchist, though I never knew her to carry out anarchy of any sort except against the stinging nettles which surrounded her porch.) Mary brought me a cup of tea as I was clipping the hedgerow around her Gothic-looking dwelling, and she said, ‘Your grandfather used to do that for me.’
Those words gave me a wonderful sense of continuity, a feeling that we are all walking along a generation track, an ancient way, and that when I am gone, one of my grandkids might just step neatly into my footprints for a few moments.
The very elderly Mary, I discovered, had once been a publisher. The house whose hedge I had cut had been the office from which she had published many of the works of Tolstoy. She showed me first editions of books she and her husband had published from their small, now very leaky dwelling in our small Essex village. Her dark-gabled home, with its twin towers like witches’ hats, was falling apart at that time and would have taken a fortune to repair. Mary Sweetlove the anarchist, with whom I had many wonderful conversations over endless cups of tea, died in the early part of the new millennium. I’m sure she’s now with her beloved birds, foxes and badgers that used to mill around her garden, safe from harm.
~
At the end of the war dad left the RAF to return to his old job as a greyhound trainer at a greyhound farm in Essex. Either the money was bad, or dad couldn’t stand his bosses, because he rejoined the RAF after a year in civvy street. In 1947 he was posted to Felixstowe, where they had seaplanes such as the Sunderland Flying Boats. I don’t know what he did there, but he was always in general administration, so I guess it was counting things and writing the figures in books somewhere.
We lived in married quarters – dad was a corporal by that time – and I went to Langer Road Primary School to begin what was to become a very nomadic education. The headmistress at Langer Road was a gruesome woman with a tongue like a rasp file. We had assembly every morning in a hall that smelled of dinner-time cabbage and there we used infant lungs to bawl out hymns. I still know the words of many of the ‘Ancient and Modern’ hymns. My favourite was ‘Eternal Father, Strong to save’ with the refrain ‘for those in peril on the sea’. It meant something in Felixstowe. We had the cold grey North Sea on our doorstep and one day it would come for us in the dead of night and overwhelm and envelop many of us. I get misty-eyed even now when I hear that hymn: it has a very emotional tune and deeply moving words.
We seemed to learn everything by rote in those days, especially our ‘times tables’. Day in, day out, we chanted those tables, until they were so lodged in my brain they’ll be with me into senility and beyond. Some nursing-home carer will ask a delivery man, ‘What’s seven times eight?’ and I – who by that time will not even know my own name – will interrupt with, ‘Fifty-six,’ without even pausing to dribble.
Classrooms in the ’50s had coal fires, whose warmth failed even to reach the front row of desks. They heated the backs of teachers until they steamed, leaving the pupils to freeze. Those same teachers were already inflamed by our uselessness and ignorance. They threw chalk, blackboard dusters and other handy missiles at us in the vain hope that such barrages would instil knowledge into our heads. If we lifted our desk lids as shields, the teacher would spring forward and whack our fingers with a ruler. I was never caned at Langer Road, as I was at my several senior schools, but I still collected a few scars there.
Felixstowe took care of my early formative years. I played cowboys and Indians on the ‘plains’ between the married quarters and the seashore. There was a boy called Colin Colenso, and his sister, and the three of us used to light fires in the old Languard Point fort and roast potatoes. In the summer months the Territorial Army used that area behind the beach for camping their soldiers and we would earn money cleaning boots and belt buckles. The tents had duckboard floors. When the summer was over and the army had gone, we would run our fingers through the grass where the tents had stood for coins that had dropped through the duckboards. We became surprisingly rich.
When we weren’t playing games on the dunes, my middle brother Ray and I (Derek was born at Felixstowe and was still a baby) would go fishing off the dockside pontoon where the ferry to and from Harwich used to moor up. Using just a line, wine cork and hook we caught smelt, dozens of them, and took them home for tea. Felixstowe docks is now a massive commercial enterprise, the third largest container port in Europe so I’m told, but in the ’40s and ’50s it was a small open square surrounded by granaries and warehouses, big enough for one or two medium sized ships, but nothing like the monster it is now.
Around the docks were yards full of giant buoys of the sort used by ocean-going liners for mooring. They were as big as small houses, some hollow metal balls, others square blocks of wood wrapped in iron bands. There were mountains of them and on a certain night in 1953 they became lethal battering rams that smashed into houses, and crushed prefabs and caravans. Whether they were actually responsible for any of the deaths of my schoolfriends I do not know, since I never went back after that murderous night to find out why so many of them failed to survive.
~
When I was about six years of age I had whooping cough and heard my mother and father debating about calling the doctor. It was 1947. Years later I realised that the National Health Service had not then come into being. So my parents would have had to pay for any medical help. In those days families like ours were paid weekly. The money often ran out. There was barely enough for food. Indeed, there was certainly none left for holidays. In my whole childhood I do not remember my parents taking us away for a single holiday which did not involve staying with relations. Us kids were sent to grandparents for the summer, or took a train to my mother’s younger brother, Douglas, in Ilkeston. Also in the late ’40s and early ’50s we still had food rationing. I used to cadge sweet rations from elderly neighbours who liked my curls.
My mother had four siblings. Like my father, she was the eldest of the family. Next came Aunt Barbara, who lived in Catford, South London and whose only daughter was Christine, my favourite cousin. Then Aunt Daphne, who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, whose daughter Molly was born with a hole in her heart and died at the age of ten and also Harvey, who had diabetes and died in his late thirties. There was a much younger half-sister, Aunt Margaret, but before her in age came my Uncle Doug, whom I adored as a kid. Though my mum’s family had been mostly born and raised in Dorset, they had all gravitated towards the capital, probably to find work.
Doug was a lorry driver working for the British Coal Board at the opencast mines in Derbyshire. I used to ride passenger in his lorry during the holidays and search for fossils among the coal he carried. I found several fern and tree impressions, which I treasured and took back to show my class at school. Uncle Doug was the spitting image of the actor Nigel Patrick and any film in which the actor starred, such as the Pickwick Papers or Raintree County, had me riveted. I found it fascinating to see my uncle up there on the screen, even though I knew it wasn’t he. The likeness, the gestures, the speech were all Uncle Doug. He and Aunt Jessie were good, kind, honest folk and I was extremely fond of them. Doug had moved to Ilkeston at the age of seventeen, yet until the day he died at the age of eighty the Ilkeston men called him ‘the Londoner’. He was held in great affection by them though, especially at the working men’s club, where he was elected chairman several times during his life.
~
Christmases at that age were magical. I can remember looking out of the window and seeing a lone star fading in the early morning sky. My favourite Christmas present – the one that thrilled me with its colours and textures – was a chemistry set. I was never good at school chemistry, but this was different. You could make all sorts of wonderful concoctions with a home chemistry set. Stink bombs, salt petre fuses for bombs, copper crystals. You could do litmus tests, change the state of liquids and gases, play with a Bunsen burner without getting told off, make explosive mixtures, kill wasps by creating a vacuum in test tube, make electricity and magnets. Wow. I loved that gift.
I never became a famous chemist of course, which would have made a nice round ending to the story. You know the sort of thing, Albert is given a tin whistle for his birthday and eventually grows up to become an international flugel horn player. No indeed. Nor did I become any kind of chemist whatsoever, not even a gifted teacher of the science like my friends Chris and Fe Evans. I became a writer. Just as Arabic newspapers would come to thrill me with their strange writing patterns, so did those test tubes with their coloured powders and crystals stir the latent apothecary and alchemist in me. Not that I wanted to cure or poison people, or turn base metals into gold. I just loved the idea of doing those things with magical ingredients. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Gold Bug. Words in Arabic, tubes of coloured chemicals, these were full of mystery and awakened strange imaginings. Imaginings that became tales of the fantastic kind, which I later burned on to blank white paper.
Also I have come to realise that the writer must have been in me from a very early age. It was not so much the chemistry that excited me, but the names of things. Words. Labels with saltpetre and ferrous sulfate printed on them. But the one gift that really brought home this revelation was the ubiquitous water colour paint box. I don’t think a Christmas passed without a paint box in my stocking. But it was not the colours themselves, or the thought of using them that excited me. It was the names of the paints: burnt sienna, yellow ochre, crimson lake, cobalt blue, burnt umber. These names hovered on the edge of my imagination, like keys ready to open doors to strange and wonderful story-worlds.
~
Early in the morning on 1 February 1953 my brothers and I were abruptly woken. My parents were dashing down then up the stairs with perishable things like photo albums. When I stood on the landing and looked down the stairwell I could see about a foot of water swilling around the hallway. Bleary-eyed and confused I went back into the bedroom and looked out of the window to see a wall of water combing the fields behind the house with white surf. A moment later a tidal wave struck the side of the house, breaking one or two panes of glass, and thundered round the corners of the building. Soon seawater was gushing in below and my parents stopped their evacuation of the lower part of the house and gathered us all in the main bedroom.
‘It’s a flood,’ said dad. ‘The sea wall’s collapsed. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. These houses are very solid.’
However, kids can see concern in adults who might be the greatest actors in the world. My brothers and I knew we were in trouble. We could hear the wind screaming around the eaves, see the water swirling halfway up the walls of the house, and were aware of distant cries of those in the houses a little lower than ours. Hell had opened its sluice gates and not fire but water was surging through the gaps. Then a short time later there was a loud bang on the side of the house and the whole place juddered. Looking out we saw one of those massive ocean liner buoys swirl past after hitting our brickwork. It went on to strike another house in the next row and we could see bits of brick fly up on impact.
‘We’ll be fine,’ said mum. ‘We’ll be fine.’
Staring out of the window again I could see a meteorologist’s mast on the top of which was an anemometer. There were rungs going up the mast, each about a foot apart. I watched the water level climbing those rungs one by one. We were probably going to drown. I was scared but not terrified. I thought we might die, but I also thought we might be rescued. It was a strange, ambivalent feeling, looking out at the ocean that had swallowed my garden. There were animals floating by now, cats and dogs, being swept along with the force of the tide. Thankfully I saw no people, though there were plenty who died that night, some of them horribly. I learned later that water rose six metres above mean sea level. In Britain, Holland and Belgium 2,400 people lost their lives. Ours were saved by my dad, who tied us to the chimney stack with strips of blanket until the water began to subside. My mother stayed in the attic, but the water never did reach that high.
My brother Ray had the flu. He was quite sick and since it was very cold – it was February, remember, and though the wind speed had dropped a little it was still extremely fierce – my parents took us back down into the house as soon as they thought it was safe. I’m not sure how much time we spent on the roof, but I don’t think it was a long period. As soon as it was light we were rescued by the army in rowing boats – by that time the tide had gone out and the water had dropped to about two metres in depth – taken to the Sergeants’ Mess, which was a tall building, and thence to the docks where we were packed into a launch. There were other families of course, with dark grey RAF blankets draped over them, and we huddled together with bleak expressions. The launch, which must have done many trips, and probably there were more boats ferrying people across the haven, took us to Harwich. We then boarded coaches and were taken to USAF Waterbeach in Suffolk.
Thirty-eight people lost their lives in Felixstowe, and a great many homes were rendered uninhabitable. Fifty-eight died on Canvey Island and thirty-seven at Jaywick, a small village in nearby Essex. Many, many more were drowned in Holland, and several in Belgium. Ships and trawlers went down in the channel and the North Sea with loss of life. Scottish forests were flattened by the wind. The flood was the result of a combination of a hurricane, a spring tide and an ocean tidal surge. The disaster began building during the day of 31 January, starting on the Scottish east coast, and working its way down to the south. There were no warnings broadcast on national radio. To this day I have not received a satisfactory answer as to why that should have been. Local radios in the ’50s did not broadcast at night, so by the time we were hit, about 1 a.m. on 1 February, local stations had closed down. In those days too there were very few home telephones. No one I knew owned a telephone.