My foster parents

The cheeky young boy at the front is me at the age of 5 taken at the back of the bungalow in Winnersh that was my home for over 20 years.

Join me in drinking a toast to the two elderly ladies behind, for they were my foster parents. I called them my aunties but we were unrelated. They were sisters, Eliza and Bertha Mockford, who had lived and worked together as teachers and lecturers. Before retirement they were based in a teacher training college in Brighton, keen disciples of the Montessori method, state-of-the art education at the time. They lived in a flat. Above them lived the Bothwell family — my parents, my elder sister, me and a baby brother. When aged 2 I became ill with pneumonia and the doctor recommended a spell of fresh air in the country. It so happened that the Mockfords had just bought this bungalow in the countryside near Reading, so as a gesture of goodwill they offered to take me with them for a few months while I recovered.

So there I went. I never returned, not to Brighton nor to any of the other places where my parents lived subsequently. But I was never officially adopted, or officially fostered.

The photo was taken by my father during one of my parents’ rare day visits.

So my ‘aunties’ took it upon themselves to spend most of their love, money and time during their retirement years upon bringing me up.  I am hugely indebted to them for all they did. The elder of the sisters, in the centre, died when I was a teenager; the younger lived on until after my marriage and until shortly after the birth of our firstborn in 1952. I think she was so very pleased to have been around for both events.

I suppose it was something of a lonely childhood but I learned to enjoy my own company. There were many train journeys to the seaside, trips to France, visits to biscuit factories, glass blowing foundries, museums, castles and so on, most of them organised (I guess) to entertain me and to widen my general education. There was much fun and laughter, too, the three of us playing cards and other games in front of the coal fire.

Nurturing this wayward child must have stretched the patience of these ageing but wise spinsters, but they did so with great affection and with a firm but gentle discipline.

Early memories of Winnersh

Now a sizeable conurbation, then it was just a few country lanes, but served by Winnersh Halt on the Southern Railway. If you wanted to get on an approaching train you stepped onto the edge of the platform and waved a large red flag housed in wooden box. The train then ground to a screeching halt amid a suffocating cloud of black smoke from the steam engine. I suppose this primitive procedure accounts for the name.

Jack the milkman came each day pushing a handcart, and ladling delicious creamy milk from a large churn into out jugs. He was very lame and in pain all the time. One day his body was found on the railway line nearby. I used to chat with him and I thought of him as a friend.

When the gas globes that originally lit the bungalow failed I enjoyed replacing them, but when electricity came it was sheer magic to light a room by pressing a remote switch on a wall.

Once when a decorator came to repaint the outside, I sprinkled some grass mowings into the open paint pot. He was very cross. So were my aunties. I was sent to my room in disgrace but I got bored with that so I climbed out of the window.

The routine trek to Bearwood village church for Sunday Communion was a bit of a chore, and the nightly requirement to kneel by my bed to say a prayer had a surreal feeling about it — “God bless Mummy and Daddy, Sheila, Robin and June”. These were the parents and siblings whom I rarely met. It was never suggested by my aunties that I should include them in my prayers.  

The lady living opposite refused to speak to her neighbour. If she saw her approaching she would cross the road to avoid meeting on the same pavement. Why? Because she was Church and the other was Chapel!

The Mockfords were vegetarian so I was allowed treble the normal ration of meat. No doubt this served to feed my hyperactivity! But I also got to like vegetarian dishes.

Declaration of war

Darkness descended on Sunday 3 September 1939 when Neville Chamberlain announced on the wireless that we were at war — literally as well as metaphorically, as within a week I’d constructed frames of blackout material to fit all the windows. Not a chink of light escaped from anywhere at nighttime.

During the hot summer of 1940 it was exciting to watch the Spitfires and Hurricanes roaring overhead and sometimes to see bombs falling from a plane bearing a swastika. Later on in the war the pulsating drone of wave after wave of enemy planes on their way to London quickened the heartbeat night after night as we took refuge in the corridor.