I was born on the 17th<\/sup> August 1929 at The Chauntry, Bourne End<\/a>, Buckinghamshire.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I was the third boy in a row; a disappointment to my parents as they had been hoping I would be a girl.\u00a0 My elde<\/span>st brother Michael had been born in June 1924 and was therefore just over five years old, and my other brother Dennis had been born in December 1926 and was thus nearly three years older than me.\u00a0 My mother had had a miscarriage between Dennis and me, which probably explains the gap in age.\u00a0 As usual in those days I was born at home.\u00a0 My mother had a nurse, Nurse Lane, a friend of her family, to stay for about four months to look after me.\u00a0 She had also attended the birth of each of my two brothers.\u00a0 (Nurse Lane is in the Chauntry Visitors Book for May 1928; perhaps this was the time of the miscarriage?).\u00a0 The family doctor at that time was Dr. Bailey and he was also in attendance.<\/span><\/p>\n When Nurse Lane left, my mother employed a 17 year old called Ruth to cope with Michael and Dennis while I was left to a series of contract nurses from the Morland Agency.\u00a0 This was not a success and Ruth took over looking after me as well.\u00a0 Ruth lived with her mother and sister nearby in Woburn in a little flint cottage by the church.\u00a0 Her father was in the Indian army.<\/span><\/p>\n My parents had been married for almost seven years when I was born.\u00a0 My father was 34 years old and my mother 29.\u00a0 My father<\/span>\u2019s connections were round the Marlow area, although he had been born at The Priory, The Green, Norwood (part of Southall).\u00a0 His mother would, I surmise, have moved when Naylors Paints moved from Southall to Slough at the end of 1919, just the time when my father would have come out of the Royal Flying Corps at the end of the First World War.\u00a0 His mother lived in Marlow as did his elder sister Marjorie.<\/span>[1]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/sup><\/a> He worked in Slough at Nobel Chemical Finishes, a firm that had bought out Naylor<\/span>\u2019s Paints, the long-established family firm, after a disastrous collapse of the firm in the twenties.\u00a0 At the time I was born, Nobel Chemical Finishes was suffering as a result of the Depression and I suppose my father<\/span>\u2019s salary, like that of all those around him had been cut.\u00a0 He once told me he was earning \u00a3800 per year just before the war. Things were to get worse before they improved, so I came at a period when his financial situation was precarious.<\/span><\/p>\n My mother was the daughter of a wealthy cotton spinner from Lancashire, Peter Crook.\u00a0 Her mother was Sarah (nee Blackburn).\u00a0 At the time of my mother<\/span>\u2019s birth they lived in Birkdale in Lancashire, with another house, Borwick Lodge, near Hawkshead in the Lake District.\u00a0 She was their fourth child.\u00a0 The eldest was Dorothy who, at the time of my birth was married to Dr. Hugh Wills, a GP in Marlow.\u00a0 The next child was Kathleen (Kay), who was married to Brian Dickson, who lived in Pickneys Green, near Maidenhead.\u00a0 The third child was another Peter who was married to Dody and lived in Frodsham in Cheshire, which was where my parents were married<\/span>[2]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/sup><\/a>.\u00a0 I have never been able to discover how it was that three girls from a Lancashire cotton spinner came to marry three men from Marlow or thereabouts.\u00a0 All three girls went to Wycombe Abbey School<\/a>, but further than that I have not been able to find a connection.\u00a0 Both my Crook grandparents were dead by the time I was born and their children had come into their father<\/span>\u2019s wealth, which would explain how my parents were able to maintain a standard of living above what one would expect from his level of salary.\u00a0 At one point I remember my father telling me that the Crooks did not consider him a fit person to marry their daughter, but marry her he did.<\/span><\/p>\n When they were first married they lived in a flat above Wootton<\/a><\/span>\u2019<\/a>s<\/a> Boathouse, by Marlow Bridge.\u00a0 They moved after a couple of months to <\/span>\u2018The Old Nest<\/span>\u2019 in Cookham.\u00a0 After three or four months there they moved to <\/span>\u2018The Wapentake<\/span>\u2019 in Beaconsfield and after another few months moved to <\/span>\u2018Taormina<\/span>\u2019 back in Cookham.\u00a0 After a less than a year there, they bought <\/span>\u2018The Chauntry<\/span>\u2019 in Bourne End in early 1924, three months before Michael was born.\u00a0 The Chauntry was a considerable house with five bedrooms (one of which became the nursery) and two bathrooms and three large reception rooms and an extensive kitchen and servants<\/span>\u2019 area.\u00a0 The garden was at least an acre in size with a tennis court, a substantial vegetable garden looked after by Tranter, who ruled the roost in the garden and forbid us boys from his vegetable garden, and extensive lawns. The vegetable garden was elaborately laid out with low box hedges in regular squares.\u00a0 One had to go through it to get to the garage, which was miles away at the bottom of the garden by the railway line.\u00a0 The house was within walking distance of the GWR station at Bourne End, very convenient for London, Paddington.\u00a0 It was also virtually on the River Thames, separated only by the Bourne End to Marlow single track railway line (where we used to put pennies on the track so the <\/span>\u2018Marlow Donkey<\/span>\u2019 would squash them), and the various boat houses of the Bourne End Sailing Club.\u00a0 Altogether it must have seemed a very suitable residence for an up and coming paint manufacturer with a growing family, because at that time the paint business appeared to be doing well.\u00a0 Sometime in the recent past the garden has been sub-divided and now contains four houses, as well as the Chauntry, one on the tennis court and three in the vegetable garden.<\/span><\/p>\n The household was run with almost military precision by a large staff.\u00a0 As Ruth remembers it, the cook Gladys ruled in the kitchen and we were not allowed in there.\u00a0 There was a house parlour maid called Bridget, who did all the cleaning inside.\u00a0 We children took our meals upstairs in the nursery, a large airy room where we kept all our toys, and where I suppose Ruth supervised us.\u00a0 One of Ruth<\/span>\u2019s jobs, she remembers, was to keep us out of the way during the afternoons, while my mother rested.\u00a0 So for two or three hours every afternoon we all went for long walks, whatever the weather.\u00a0 I suppose this is why Dennis and I have ever since had the urge to go for long walks whenever possible.\u00a0 I can just remember some of those walks and the places I remember are quite a long distance from the house.\u00a0 I can also remember standing at the top of the stairs, just outside the nursery, and screaming my head off because it was raining and we were all being made to put on our mackintoshes and I did not want to go out.\u00a0 Another memory at the top of the stairs is being violently sick in a thunderstorm.<\/span><\/p>\n The yearly household routine was also tightly controlled.\u00a0 We had to be out of the way for two weeks every spring while the house was being spring-cleaned.\u00a0 Generally we went to stay with Uncle Edward, my mother<\/span>\u2019s uncle.\u00a0 Ruth says he was a bachelor and lived in an enormous house in Colwyn Bay.\u00a0 She would take us all up there by train and I think be joined by my mother and father for part of the time.\u00a0 Some years we went to stay with Peter and Dody Crook at Frodsham with their children Betty and Tim.\u00a0 From those visits to Frodsham I remember going for a ride on their gardener<\/span>\u2019s motor cycle; and also falling out of a downstairs window down a steep bank covered in gorse, and the endless job of pulling out the thorns.\u00a0 I can also remember one spring (1936?) when we stayed at a hotel in Swanage.\u00a0 My mother had had an operation on her nose and was convalescing.\u00a0 There was a miniature golf course there and we spent hours playing.<\/span><\/p>\n The summer holidays were a similar ritual, or were, once I was a little bigger.\u00a0 We would rent a house by the sea, probably for the month of August; this would have been in the four summers of 1933 to 1936.\u00a0 In 1933 and 1934 we rented <\/span>\u2018Woodrising<\/span>\u2019 at Sandbanks; in 1935 and 1936 we went to Ferring.\u00a0 Ruth took me to see the house at Ferring (just west of Worthing) in 1985.\u00a0 It is a fairly substantial house right on the edge of the sands on top of the sea wall.\u00a0 Ruth describes the family summer exodus rather like the Indian Government moving to Simla in the hot weather days of the Raj.\u00a0 Everybody came, from the cook and the house parlour maid to Ruth and us children and the dogs, or Susan our Sealyham anyway (I am not sure if Simon her son had come on the scene by then).\u00a0 The establishment was set up for the summer.\u00a0 My mother ruled the roost and my father would come down at weekends.\u00a0 I don<\/span>\u2019t remember much about these summers except masses of ants along the paths, although I have many photographs to show what it was like.\u00a0 Apparently I nearly drowned on the last day of one of the summer holidays; everybody else had left the beach for the last time and they suddenly noticed I was not with them.\u00a0 They found me nearly dead in a pool.\u00a0 I know it was several years before I wanted to swim again, although I have no memory of the near drowning.<\/span><\/p>\n I suppose I started at Kindergarten when I was less than five because Dennis was there too to begin with, and he must have gone to St Pirans when he was seven and he was almost three years older than me. It was a very small school in Bourne End, called the Abbey school with a Mrs Stallen as headmistress.\u00a0 It was within walking distance, up the road from the Chauntry to the main Marlow-Cookham road, over the level crossing and first left.\u00a0 I can remember going to and fro with Dennis, particularly him making me run, trying to get me to run faster and faster and almost dragging me home at high speed. (The hymn <\/span>\u2018with brother hand in hand with brother<\/span>\u2019 that we used to sing at St Pirans, always made me think of these school runs.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am amazed that, once Dennis had gone to St Pirans, I was allowed to walk to and fro on my own.\u00a0 I think Ruth must have left us at about this time, in 1935 or 1936 so she would not have accompanied me\u00a0 I still have the first book in which I learned to read, <\/span>\u2018Squirrel Nutkin<\/span>\u2018 but otherwise I have few memories about what I learnt other some Canadian geography!<\/span><\/p>\n Other memories of the Chauntry are relatively few.\u00a0 Lying in bed on long summer evenings, when it was still light, and listening to all the people coming and going in their cars is one.\u00a0 My bedroom looked out over the road leading down to the sailing club and most cars had to park just outside our house as there was little room to park over the railway line in the boatyards.\u00a0 Or just listening to the thud, thud of balls as my parents played tennis.\u00a0 Another memory, also lying in bed, was of one winter.\u00a0 Michael and I must both have had German measles and were in his room and we were warmed by a flickering paraffin stove, sending light patterns over the ceiling, and Michael drummed on the wall with his finger nails imitating a galloping horse.\u00a0 I thought that was terribly clever.\u00a0 Another memory was of one Christmas morning.\u00a0 I was lying wide awake in bed dying to see what was in my Christmas stocking.\u00a0 So I crept into my parent<\/span>\u2019s bedroom, which adjoined mine, to ask if it was time.\u00a0 I was sent away with a flea in my ear as it was only four o\u2019<\/span>clock!<\/span><\/p>\n Bourne End was not much more than a village in those days with few shops.\u00a0 At the top of our road, on the left where it joined the main road, was Mrs Wicks sweet shop where we would go in and buy our pennyworth of peppermints or liquorice.\u00a0 Just across the road was the Royalty Cinema where I saw my first film in 1936.\u00a0 I was taken by Michael and Dennis to see a western <\/span>\u2018Wagon Wheels<\/span>\u2019.\u00a0 I was very frightened and kept on screaming at the awful things that were going on.<\/span><\/p>\n One Christmas time, probably the year before I went to St Pirans, the school carol singers and bell ringers came to the Chauntry and we all gathered round the piano in the sitting room and had a lovely concert.\u00a0 The next year we had moved to Little Mount and, though I was not one of the carol singers, I was allowed home to join them.<\/span><\/p>\n Around the end of 1936 my father decided to move from the Chauntry.\u00a0 Things must have been going well at work since we moved to a very large house in Cookham Dean, called Little Mount.\u00a0 We actually moved some time in 1937.\u00a0 Almost the whole of Cookham Dean, which lies just above Marlow on top of the Quarry Woods, was and still is National Trust land, so could not be built on; a much grander area than Bourne End and a much grander house.\u00a0 I remember my father telling me that he had spent far too much on Little Mount, and the considerable enlargements which he made, because he was supervising an extension to the paint works in Slough and got carried away by the amounts which were being spent in Slough.\u00a0 Be that as it may, it was a lovely house and we proceeded to live on a grander scale. Downstairs one entered into a massive hall, with the dining room off to the right, and a vast sitting room to the left.\u00a0 Part of my father<\/span>\u2019s extension was to add a playroom off the sitting room, big enough to take a full-size ping pong table.\u00a0 The kitchen quarters were extensive; a large butler<\/span>\u2019s pantry, a big kitchen and a scullery, with a walk-in larder off that. There were five bedrooms on the first floor and two bathrooms, which was just right for the family with one spare room for visitors.\u00a0 On the second floor there five rooms for the staff.\u00a0 We had a live-in couple, the Nurdins, who lived up there.\u00a0 He was the butler and she I think was the cook, or we may have had a separate cook as well.\u00a0 The garden was looked after full-time by Fred Tomlin, who doubled up as chauffeur when needed.\u00a0 The garden must have been the best part of an acre, with a huge, partly walled kitchen garden and three greenhouses and a solid fuel boiler.\u00a0 My memory is of producing vastly more tomatoes than we could possibly eat.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Tomlin<\/span>\u2019s wife came in as the daily.\u00a0 She was a massive woman and we all loved her.\u00a0 Everywhere she went was an effort and she was always breathing heavily.\u00a0 One week in the Mickey Mouse magazine there was a cartoon of someone scaling a cliff and looking into a puffin<\/span>\u2019s nest and Mickey calling down <\/span>\u2018what you puffin<\/span>\u2019 about<\/span>\u2019 and ever after she was called Mrs Puffin.\u00a0 Then there was Mrs East who lived next door with her lorry driver husband Harry in Little Mount cottages.\u00a0 I am not sure how there was enough work for all of them or whether I am confusing who overlapped with who.\u00a0 Every morning certainly there was a large tea party in the cook<\/span>\u2019s sitting room, off the kitchen.\u00a0 We boys were not allowed in.\u00a0 It was all one big happy family in my memory.<\/span><\/p>\n I am sure that this period of my life was when my character was formed.\u00a0 Being the youngest of three boys meant that I was always being led, I was never the leader.\u00a0 Perhaps if my natural characteristic had been more aggressive I would not have been content to let my brothers, especially Michael, take the lead all the time. But I was not so inclined.\u00a0 And so through life I have not been a natural leader; sometimes it has been necessary to take the lead but I have usually preferred to let someone else, someone who appeared to feel it necessary to take charge of a situation, to take charge, even if I felt inwardly that I could do it better.\u00a0 My father also had a strong personality and during these formative years I was very much in awe of him.\u00a0 Except during holidays I did not see that much of him, all my needs being catered for by Ruth and the other servants, which reinforced the distance between us.\u00a0 My mother I loved dearly, but even with her the relationship was not as close as it became it later years during the war, when we had no servants and had to work together to keep the household running.\u00a0 So I became the introvert that I have always been ever since.\u00a0 Sometimes I have wished that I had a greater urge to lead but for the most part I have been happy enough with the way things worked out for me.<\/span><\/p>\n [1]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0My father<\/span>\u2019s father William Ernest had died at the age of 59 in 1916 and my father<\/span>\u2019s mother Nina was very much the matriarch of the Naylor family.\u00a0 She had been born in 1860, the twelfth of the sixteen children of Arthur Ouvry Medley and the only one to marry.\u00a0 She lived at Mansfield, Lock Road (so-called as it started at Marlow Lock on the River Thames), Marlow, a fair-sized house in a big garden.\u00a0 It has since been demolished and several houses built in the garden.\u00a0 At that time there were only houses on one side of\u00a0 Lock road; the other side was open fields across to the GWR Station.\u00a0 Marjorie Alice Constance, my father<\/span>\u2019s sister, was born in 1891 and lived at this time on the top floor of Old Bridge House, next to the church and right on the river.\u00a0 Below her, on the first and second floor lived Douglas and Greta Warren and their daughters Diana and Joan who were much of an age with Michael and Dennis.\u00a0 My father<\/span>\u2019s elder brother Lionel, who was born in 1887, was eight years older than my father, and lived in London.\u00a0 He had married Daisy (nee Jones), in 1918 and had three children, Joy born in 1919, John born in 1920, and Rodney born in 1923.\u00a0 My father had had another brother, John, who had died aged nine of peritonitis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n [2]<\/span><\/sup><\/span><\/sup><\/a>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0Hugh and Dorothy Wills had two children, Joyce, about Michael<\/span>\u2019s age who used to come on summer holidays with us, and Ian, who must have been about my age but who had some kind of health problem and disappeared from the scene at an early age.\u00a0 Brian and Kay Dickson had two children, David, again about Michael<\/span>\u2019s age and Zena who was a couple of years younger.\u00a0 Peter and Dody Crook also had two children, Betty, who was again about Michael<\/span>\u2019s age, and Tim, a couple of years younger.\u00a0 Peter died in the mid-thirties and Dody married again to (I don<\/span>\u2019t remember his first name) Smith and they had a daughter Susan.\u00a0 He was killed during the war.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 1929-1937 I was born on the 17th August 1929 at The Chauntry, Bourne End, Buckinghamshire.\u00a0 I was the third boy in a row; a disappointment to my parents as they had been hoping I would be a girl.\u00a0 My eldest … Continue reading <\/p>\n
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