biography>Chapter 4
Chapter Four 1944
Waiting for Call Up
I left school with School
Certificate with Matriculation exemption but no idea what I wanted to
do next. My family had no tradition of higher education so the idea of
continuing into the sixth form was not even considered. My main interests
were drawing and maps and my father found the "ideal" opportunity
for me. He was secretary of the Chelmsford Police Sports Club and through
that he met an Engineer from the Essex Rivers Catchment Board and told
him of my interests and my need of a job. After an interview with the
Chief Engineer and a tracing test I was offered a job as a Tracer/Chainman.
This meant that I traced maps and plans onto translucent paper so that
they could be reproduced as blueprints. The Chainman bit meant assisting
the surveyors by holding one end of a measuring chain or survey pole.
I soon found that this often also entailed standing in a very cold river
with the water only inches from the top of your thighboots or floundering
knee deep in the blue-black mud of the Dengie saltings. The mud has a
unique smell that defies description.
I was posted to Mid-Essex Division where the Divisional Engineer was John
Garland who had arranged for my interview. The Divisional office was a
ground floor flat in Shrublands Close , the only one not occupied by a
family. There were three rooms each about twelve feet square, kitchen,
bathroom and a small room used as a store for survey equipment. I was
in the front room with two surveyors and an assistant surveyor.
The middle room housed John Garland and the Divisional Engineer of Western
Division as well as a secretary. The third room was the domain of Plum
Warner, Divisional Clerk, and his two assistants.
The secretary was Marie, known to everyone as "Floosie", who
had bleached blonde hair and a boyfriend in the Royal Marine Commandos
Diving Section. She often brought into the office trophies he had given
her such as a German army dagger. John Garland liked to persuade her to
switch on the lights with her toe. She didn't need much encouragement
to show off her long legs! When the war ended she married an American
airman and went off to,the U.S.A. Several years later I saw the Marine
running a small beach cafe at Frinton.
My desk and drawing board were in the front window where I could relieve
the boredom of tracing by observing the inhabitants of the Close. Mrs.Button,
a pinafored , rosy cheeked lady, put on a daily display of window cleaning,
brass letter box polishing and the application of Cardinal Red polish
to the front step and tiles. The Parsons family , a little further down
the road, had two small girls. The older of the two, who was about four
years old, would climb out of the front windowand walk along the 3inch
sloping sill. It was only about four feet from the ground but there were
dense rose bushes under it. She never did fall down. Such excitement .
Still it broke the monotony of tracing maps with a recalcitrant bow pen.
The best relief was going out on a survey. Most of my survey trips were
in the Dengie Peninsular, the mostly flat marshlands between Maldon and
Burnham. The main landscape feature was the sky which , because of the
low straight horizons, seemed far bigger than inland. From the seawall
beyond Tillingham we often saw flocks of hundreds of geese feeding on
the saltings. Near Bradwell there were often cormorants sitting on the
broken piling of old disused jettys and in the last months of the war
there were Tempest fighters landing at Bradwell airfield. The modern planes
contrasted with the deserted St.Peter's Chapel on the seawall, over a
thousand years old and partly built from bricks from the Roman fort, now
only an outline.
The River Crouch was another part of the Mid-Essex Division and it was
used by a fleet of motor torpedo boats for exercises. They used a lot
of smoke floats which were mostly made of balsa wood which floated onto
the mudflats and sea walls. we collected some of the unburnt pieces and
used them for model making. I made a large fleet of small warships from
Royal Navy balsa wood and dressmaking pins stolen from my mother. The
war had stolen my Dinky Toy fleet but provided a replacement.
Towards the source of the Crouch several tributary ditches flowed from
around Laindon, where there were a lot of sometimes ramshackle bungalows
built from scrap wood and the occasional tin advertisement sign. With
a surveyor I was wading up a ditch behind a small group of shanties when
the surveyor shouted, "Get out!". We scrambled up the bank as
a small tidal wave came down the ditch. He had heard a toilet flush!
The weather varied from very hot, with no trees to give shade, to an aching
frost fed by the wind which swept in from the North Sea. One local farmer
called it "The non- stop express from Siberia." We were always
miles from any buildings and lunch was usually a flask of hot soup with
sandwiches brought from home or cheese rolls from a "hole in the
wall" cafe near the Catchment Board offices. Our transport was either
the Engineers own car, an Austin Eight, or a Blue Ford ten hundredweight
van, known as " The Flying Pig". Although I was only sixteen
or seventeen I was allowed to drive the van on the farm tracks and the
wet mud was as good as a skid pan for learning to control a skid. At first
I had trouble starting off without stalling,but one day I was sitting
with my foot on the clutch waiting for a farm horse to pass by when my
foot tired and the van very slowly and gently moved forward. I had no
more trouble starting off! During the lunch breaks we used to practise
changing the wheels or cleaning the carburettor. Cars were much simpler
then. I also had lessons in surveying, especially using an engineer's
level. We also practised pacing a measured hundred yards accurately. Different
people have different stride lengths and at that time I stepped 117 paces
to one hundred yards. Once you knew that it saved a lot of time with a
tape or chain.
The task was usually to measure the seawalls that needed repair, then
back at the office draw levels and cross sections to estimate the amount
of soil to be dug from the ditch and piled onto the wall. Later we set
pegs on the wall to mark the new levels. the actual work was done by work
gangs, mostly local men too old for military service. The clay was dug
from the ditch behind the wall, barrowed up planks and dumped on the top
where it was rammed solidly into shape. Sometimes the labour was supplied
by Italian prisoners of war. There were often about eighty of them mostly
working quite hard, with a plump sergeant who did no work at all but shouted
a lot. One day he walked across a plank over the ditch full of water.
Somehow the plank slipped and he fell in. The cheer must have been heard
in Naples.
Transport was scarce and in early 1946 the Board purchased three or four
ex-army 250cc motorcycles. I was by now going out alone to inspect ditches
and seawalls and it was quite exhilarating riding the bike on the almost
deserted roads of Dengie. Not so exhilarating was trying to stay on in
snow and ice with frozen hands. I used all of them in sucession and each
one ran quite well for a while but they had been hard used and all eventually
all were scrapped.
A weekly event in 1946 was playing cards at a neighbour's house. Mrs.Mott
also invited three girls of about my age and I think she fancied herself
as a matchmaker. The eldest was Joan, a year older than me and a very
popular girl, and there were twins, Pearl and Ruby. We played a game called
Newmarket and drank tea. My father was very suspicious of this den of
iniquity! Pearl and Ruby soon dropped out and each week I would walk Joan
home to Jeffrey Road, about half a mile. Walking arm in arm with a pretty
girl in the dark and being rewarded with a chaste kiss was an exciting
experience for me. I was smitten but Joan had a boy friend in the merchant
navy and eventually married him. I carried her photograph with me into
the Army.