In 1925 we were on the move again. I believe my father had the choice of going to a place called Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire or to Attleborough, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, and he chose the latter. Except for the private school at Calne, the Nuneaton area is where I spent the entire period of my schooldays.
At Attleborough, the house next to the Baptist Church was not yet vacant for us to move into and for a short time we lived at Nuneaton itself, in Edward Street. I was taken to a church school at Chilvers Coton, a suburb of Nuneaton within walking distance of where we were living, to begin my education. My age was such that I was taken to the main school, but on the first day it was apparent that my previous education at the private school at Calne had been so deficient that I was not up to the required standard. I well remember the lady teacher, a Miss Cooper I think, calling the headmaster to look at my attempts at writing. He looked over the top of his glasses, thinking for a moment or two, then promptly took me by the hand to the infant school, a short distance away. I was seated at a desk by the side of a dirty, poorly clad little girl. When I was transferred to the main school at a later date I found the other children very rough and uncouth, being mostly from poor miners' families.
About five minutes before school was due to begin in the morning, the deputy headmaster, I think he was the headmaster's brother, stood outside the gate ringing a handbell. The music teacher was a Welshman, so of course we had to sing Welsh songs like 'Land of my Fathers'. On one occasion I was required to stand up and sing a note. The volume with which I did so must have created an impression because the teacher muttered something like, 'Golly, he can sing all right.'
We had regular visits at the school from a nurse and had to queue up for her to look through our hair for any sign of nits. When she got to me, a teacher who was watching murmured with a smile, 'He's all right.' One day I was sent by my parents to a barber, not far from the school, for a haircut. When I got back home my father was furious because the barber had cut my hair so short that I looked like a convict. It seemed to be quite a common practice to cut boys' hair very short in that locality.
Quite near to the school was a road junction underneath a railway arch known as Coton Arches and I well remember the appearance of the first automatic traffic signals which my father referred to as an 'automatic policeman'. the railway over the arches is the Nuneaton to Coventry branch. We eventually moved to the house at Attleborough and I was transferred to a Council school in that area called Park Avenue Council School.
The house at Attleborough, number 6 The Green, was a square structure, apparently solid built, but it was damp. A damp course was subsequently fitted, though this did not entirely remedy the defect. Before we moved in, there was no bathroom; a wash house was situated across the yard and the toilet was outside. We never did have an inside toilet all the time we were there. My mother could not tolerate the wash house being across the other side of the back yard, and so we had a wash house-cum-bathroom built on the back of the house containing a bath covered with a hinged wooden worktop and a copper for boiling the clothes on washday and for heating the water for the bath.
My wife and I have visited that area and seen the house where we, my father, mother, sister and I, lived. It is, I believe, a listed building, something to do with George Eliot [possibly the school were George Eliot attended from the age of five in 1824/5 until 1836]. the front of the house, on the ground floor, had been apparently made into a shop [now the offices of Key Estate Agents]. Nuneaton and Chivers Coton were featured in some of the stories by George Eliot, the novelist, (1819-1880). In Newdegate Square, Nuneaton, there is a George Eliot exhibition (her real name was Mary Ann Evans).
Soon after we moved to that house, and I was about ten years old, I had terrible nightmares. They started soon after I had been put to bed and gone to sleep and before my parents had retired. On hearing my screams my father would carry me downstairs, my eyes being wide open although all I could see were the objects of my terror. He would sit me on his knee in front of the fire, pointing it out to me, until the nightmare had passed.
Another memory of that house was hearing the heavy footsteps of the miners in the early morning and in the late evening as I lay in bed, and then looking out of the window to see the colliery bus parked outside the Fox public house over on the other side of The Green waiting to pick up the miners to take them to work at the Haunchwood colliery, or it may have been the Griff colliery. At about 7.30 am crowds of women workers would be crossing The Green on their way to work at what I think was a clothing factory situated just opposite our house. The part of Attleborough called The Square was just a few yards from The Green.
I will never forget an occasion when I was sitting down with my father and mother at a meal when I said something or used a word which my father did not like and he put me out into the hall. I was very angry and kicked the door and this made three bad marks to the paintwork. When I saw what I had done I was really frightened at the thought of what might happen to me. Whether or not my father gave me a good hiding I do not remember, but I can still see in my imagination the three marks in the door paintwork, even the angle of the marks above each other. When I said I intended to do something, or go somewhere, my mother would frown at me and sternly say, 'Man proposes, God disposes.' I believe it was this attitude which sowed in me the seeds of pessimism.
One evening there was a terrific thunderstorm. The lightning was vivid and the thunder deafening. Suddenly there was a very loud bang as if our house had been struck. My mother made us kneel down on the kitchen floor while she said a prayer, she was obviously very frightened. The day following the storm, I learned that the Attleborough parish church spire had been struck by lightning and I saw that it had been visibly shortened.
During my father's twelve years at Attleborough a new church was built on an adjoining site and the old chapel which had been there for many years relegated to the function of a Sunday School building and a place for social activities, church fund raising concerts and teas or 'bun fights' as I used to call them. My sister and I organised concerts in our back yard with the other local children in order to raise money for the building fund. The 'curtain' consisted of an old piece of sacking slung across the yard on a piece of rope. One of the songs we sang was one my father and mother used to sing as a duet at a church concert. At our age of nine or ten we could not, of course, remember the proper words, and the line that followed, 'I will give you the keys of heaven,' got changed into, 'to open the gates at half past seven.'
My mother and father were intensely involved in fund raising for the new building of the new church. Our kitchen became a hive of activity, and Mother must have made tons and tons of marmalade, mincemeat and jars of potted meat, for sale to the local congregation and friends. Dad busied himself with making coconut ice, fudge and other sweetmeats. They acquired a machine for cutting up the Seville oranges for making marmalade, and this was worked by a handle manually operated from side to side and I can still remember the clump clump noise it made. Brawn was another thing Mother used to make for selling to raise money for the building fund. I was sent out every Saturday morning on my bicycle in all weathers with a small attaché case containing bars of assorted makes of chocolate, bought wholesale by my parents, and various people became regular customers. In those days a bar of chocolate could be bought for two pennies of the old currency. I can well remember going out on winter Saturday mornings when the fog was so thick one could barely see a couple of feet in front, and when the frost made the tree branches white.
Every year the Sunday School Anniversary took place which was quite an event, and which was preceded on the Saturday by what was called the Sunday School Treat when all the nonconformists Sunday Schools of the district of Attleborough marched through the streets, each behind their own banner, preceded by a brass band. If I remember correctly, the established churches held their Sunday School Treat on a different day. The procession finished up in a field where games were organised and the band entertained. The band was my chief interest in this event and I was always close by, listening and watching. This probably helped to cultivate my interest in music. The organ at church was a two manual reed organ, and sometimes a young man deputised for the regular lady organist when she was away. Quite often, after playing for the evening service he used to cross The Green to the Fox public house and play the piano to entertain the customers over there. My father was quite indignant about this! The new Baptist Church building had, among other facilities, a room where a weekly meeting called Christian Endeavour was held and I played for the hymns on a small harmonium, or was it on a piano, I really don't remember.
I always looked forward to going to the pictures and went fairly regularly every Saturday to a cinema in Nuneaton. The earliest films I saw were silent films. The music was supplied by a pianist who sat at a piano just below the screen and was suitably varied in volume and tempo to match the scenes being shown. The cinema was called 'Picture House' and situated in the centre of Nuneaton. Anywhere where there were tracks upon which vehicles would run fascinated me, and I used to go up to the stone quarries situated on high ground above the town, known as Tuttle Hill, on a Saturday afternoon after work had ceased and wander about the many narrow gauge tracks used in the movement of the tip-up wagons conveying stone about the works.
The pupils at the Park Avenue Council School were of a somewhat better class than those at the church school at Chilvers Coton. The teacher of the top classes was a Scotsman, name of L E R Ingram, a mathematician I believe, who was considered to be very severe and who terrified us boys. We used to sing a ditty to the tune of the Armistice Day Hymn 'Men who have died for England' which went, 'Boys who have cried for Ingram, silent and still they sit, scattered or all the classroom, under a waving sock.' However, he was an excellent teacher and taught me most of what I know, and I consider that my education at this school was of a quite good standard. What I was no good at was in the painting class (called 'art' nowadays). The teacher, if I remember correctly, was a Mr Lenton. I could never draw and paint a vase, for instance, as it would always look all one sided! One thing I remember about that classroom, which was at the front of the school, was looking through the window and noticing the change of the colours of the avenue trees during autumn and spring. When passing the hall I sometimes noticed, on certain days, rows of girls exercising by swinging Indian clubs, the sight of which I found quite attractive. On Friday afternoon, at nearly going home time, the Headmaster, Mr B W Yardley, assembled all classes in the hall for prayer and hymns, and then we were all marched, two by two, out of the school to the accompaniment of the piano.
Although the school leaving age at that time was fourteen years, I was, for reasons that I cannot remember, fifteen years old before I left school. I believe that the effects of the environment in which we lived were somewhat detrimental to my personality and general outlook. This probably caused me to be unwilling to apply for further education at the Nuneaton King Edward VII Grammar School, and my school education was at an end. Also, the prospect of having to take part in school sports put me off altogether. I was never any good at cricket, football or any other game, since I was a young child. I well remember trying to bowl the ball for cricket at school and the ball, instead of going to the cricket bat, went on the roof of a shed; I never had to try again. Most of my formative years were during the period of the British Empire, and I think I was influenced by this more than I realised. We heard quite a lot about it during my school days and could not help being impressed by seeing the red areas on the map of the world which denoted British rule and which made us proud to be British.
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