1952: I am nineteen.
I am a trainee quantity surveyor on holiday with my parents in Mevagissey, and I have just met the prettiest and most attractive girl that I will ever encounter.
I had experienced eleven years of boarding school, starting before my seventh birthday. I attended three schools; Forest School in Walthamstow, Carn Brea, first at Cranleigh, and then at Bromley, and then Bradfield in Berkshire. The teaching throughout was variable; it was wartime, and many capable teachers had joined the forces, but I eventually mastered most of the subjects I studied. I won a small grant – a mini scholarship – to my secondary school, and thereafter prospered at latin, maths and chemistry.
Father would have liked me to have gone on to university – I attended an interview at Cambridge where I was told that they were not prepared to consider me until I had done my two years of National Service. I was not keen on the idea in any case, and as I wanted to enter the family building business, I was lucky enough to secure an apprenticeship in the surveying office of a moderate sized building contractor in Stratford, East London, A.E. Symes Ltd. For this I obtained a deferred call up to my National Service.
A few weeks after leaving school, I was employed on a building site in Poplar, where I was treated with great kindness, if with some reservation; it was after all, a social upheaval for me and I was an object of curiosity for my new companions in the class conscious attitudes of the times. I found myself with blistered hands assisting the bricklayers, carpenters and plumbers; I was sent out to fetch rolls of felt, fixings and sky hooks, the latter a favourite leg pull in the industry.
The site was part of the 1951 Festival of Britain; the general foreman was Bill MacMonnies, a former bricklayer from Liverpool, a true gentleman, who kept tropical fish and seemed to find these more rewarding than his wife. They had no family of their own, and when I last heard of him, he had found work in the Virgin Islands where he was said to have gone with a female companion.
One of his men was a ganger, in charge of the labourers. He was an interesting character; he had enlisted in the army during the First World War aged fifteen or sixteen, and been sent to fight in France, where he admitted to killing the enemy without compunction; it was after all, what he had signed on for.
He was particularly proud of his summary execution of a tramp around 1930. On this occasion he had accompanied his sister, her husband and their two small daughters on a picnic on a river bank in Kent. After their lunch, the children wandered off, returning in tears because one of the girls had been attacked by a strange man. He and his brother in law set out to look for this person, and came upon a tramp whom they suspected might be the offender. They interrogated the man, who strenuously denied responsibility, and as they did not believe him, they threw him into the nearby river. When he swam ashore, he and his brother in law questioned him again. Again he denied responsibility, so they threw him in again. This continued until he admitted the offence, after which they threw him back and made sure he didn’t come out. To him this represented justice; he had spent his war service executing Germans who had done no wrong in his eyes, and he was now able to execute a man who was manifestly guilty, and to do so with the minimum of trouble and expense.
In the early summer of 1951, I was moved into Symes’ offices and started to learn to be a quantity surveyor; at the same time I attended part time day and evening classes, and even won a prize for being the second best building student in the London Region. In the summer of 1952 I was sent up to Warrington, where my employers were building a factory extension and enlarging the existing electricity generating plant for Thames Board Mills, a Unilever subsidiary.
I lodged in Stockton Heath, on the banks of the Mersey Ship Canal, at that time a busy waterway. My landlady was Mrs Ward, a dour and humourless Lancashire divorcee. I asked my fellow lodger who the man was who came every Thursday evening to watch television with Mrs Ward. Tom Dunbar replied that he was surprised that I didn’t know that he was Mrs Ward’s erstwhile husband.
At the beginning of August I left Warrington, and returned to the London office. I had not really enjoyed my spell in Lancashire, and asked not to go back, a request which was accepted. I then went on holiday with my parents and brothers to Mevagissey, where I met the girl who I immediately decided was the love of my life.
Unfortunately the life then became more complicated, as my new friend came from Cheshire, a formidable distance from where I lived, in London. At the start, I managed to obtain an invitation to the Warrington office Christmas party, and was able to call to see my friend in Knutsford, en route. Luckily the visit was a success, and emboldened by this, I forced myself to ask the chief surveyor, Harry Jones, for Saturday morning off; we normally worked until twelve on Saturdays. Harry Jones looked over the top of his glasses: “You can have it this time, but don’t let it become a habit, Fuller.” “No sir, of course not sir, thank you very much sir.” Well, not for another three weeks, anyway. Luckily I was able to borrow the family’s second car – an Austin A40 estate, or adapted van, and in the following spring I asked if I could return to Warrington, only a dozen miles from Knutsford, for another few weeks of training. Again I was lucky, and – apart from my friend’s occasional wish to terminate matters, all went well.
So life blossomed; every three weeks or so I drove North; no mean feat in the days before motorways, with a car with a top speed of little over 60 mph, poor roads and heavy goods traffic travelling in convoy at official maximum speeds of 20 mph.
In the spring of 1954, my friend’s parents invited me to go on holiday with them to Mevagissey again, and this time disaster struck. We all went, of course; the weather was cold and dull, and it was intended that my friend should come back to London afterwards and spend a week sightseeing. Alas, she decided that she had had enough. I was forced to return home on my own and it spelled the end of what I felt had been the time of my life. Although I made a number of attempts to revive matters, they all ended in failure. I became such a dreary individual that my exasperated parents eventually suggested that I should join my cousin, whose building career was parallel to my own, and do my National Service, albeit a year earlier than originally intended. In the event, this was what happened, and I duly had my medical (“Drop your trousers, cough, fair enough.”).
Before I started, I was invited to the wedding of a local friend, where I met a girl, (“The only trouble is, she is very similar to the other one,” said mother) whom I invited out two or three times. The last time we went out, I took her home to Welwyn Garden City where she lived. I was introduced to her parents who questioned me on my background and training. I explained that I was a trainee surveyor but expected to finish my apprenticeship and start my National Service in two weeks time. “What branch of the Services will you be joining?” asked the father. I explained that I was due to enlist in the Royal Engineers at Malvern. “Isn’t that where Jim is going?” he asked his daughter, to which she shrugged a non committal response. As this was the first mention I had had of Jim, I was mildly curious, but no more than that, and in fact I soon forgot about him – and her.