I suppose I was always a daddy’s girl (like most girls). I inherited many of his qualities and strengths, as we all do, but my earliest memories of him had no connection with war, only of peace, love, security and stability. I remember him showing my sister and me how to draw giant mushrooms and toadstools with little doors and windows in them in true Lewis Carroll style. Other art and craft projects with him filled my time at primary school, not war stories. My elder sister had been great at art and did it at O-level before she left school to go to work. I wanted to follow in her footsteps and be as good at art as she and my dad were, but because I was top of the top class, the grammar school I went to forced me into an academic stream that did sciences and maths at the expense of arts subjects. My dad tried to commiserate with unhappy me by saying that I could always do the arts and crafts as a hobby like he now did while working as a development engineer for De Havilland. It was then that he explained how he had been a commercial art student at Chiswick Polytechnic in the 1930s before the war, but that his Uncle Bert Hittinger, who had been managing Director of National Benzole and chairman of Queens Park Rangers Football Club, had told my dad’s parents that he “needed to have the corners knocked off him” by working at National Benzole in a “real job”. So dad had been taken away from art college to learn the joys of “real work”.
I started to feel really sorry for dad, that he had been prevented from pursuing his true passion as a career, especially when he added that it was no fun being ribbed by the workers for being the managing director’s nephew. What struck me was that dad never seemed to resent Uncle Bert for doing this to him. He was a dutiful nephew who would visit Uncle Bert whenever he had reason to go to London. When I was still at primary school, my dad took mum, me and my younger brother to visit Uncle Bert (by then in his eighties) at his apartment in Albion Gate Mansions, Marble Arch. He paid a live-in housekeeper called Pip to care for him as by then dad’s Auntie “Bell” (Diana) had died many years before in her care home in Torquay. Uncle Bert was a very warm and friendly old man who proudly showed us his photos and memorabilia on the walls, hopeful that my brother would become a QPR Football supporter. I never saw the old man again as he died a few years later.
By that time, although both his parents were long dead, I began to ask dad questions about his family and his early life in London. He said he had been a keen rower and swimmer and had been a member of the Penguins club in Twickenham near his family home. He had also been a member of the local choir with his maternal cousin Barbara Groom who had been a gifted music student at the Royal College of Music. Dad and Barbara had been very close. I was encouraged to write to “Auntie Barbara” who now lived in South Africa where she had the prestigious job of first Viola in the Durban Philharmonic Orchestra. She always replied to me with interesting letters full of photos and postcards of the Zulu people who lived all around her in Durban. It was this that sparked my interest in my dad’s travel around the world with his job as De Havilland’s propellor expert. He would get out his slide projector on a weekend when he had time to get it all down from the loft, and we would watch slide shows of his trips to Libya, Canada, Nigeria and South Africa. I would ask him questions about what we saw in the pictures. The local Africans in long white robes seemed to be having great fun pushing a bus with no engine along the dusty red streets of Kano. Why would they do that? I wanted to know but dad said they were very poor and couldn’t afford to put a working engine in it when the old one broke down. The photos of South Africa had modern buildings and busy streets with cars but this made him explain to me how disgusted he had been at the Apartheid system and how a colleague had reprimanded him in Johannesburg for stepping off the pavement onto the road to allow a pregnant black woman to remain on the pavement. That was my dad, a true gentleman. I suppose my own desire to travel was kindled by these “magic lantern” evenings and the carvings, beadwork and craft curiosities he brought back with him.
As I grew older dad’s firm was taken over by Hawker Syddeley Dynamics and he moved from Stevenage to Hatfield in his daily commute down the AI. He was working on the vertical take-off planes the Hawker Harrier, and the SRN4 Hovercraft. His trips to France became frequent as he was now their chief development engineer and as such had to meet with his French counterparts in ‘Lot” department as they began the anglo-french Concorde project and Hawker Syddeley became British Aerospace. He encouraged me to study hard at sciences at school because he said there was no reason why girls should not do science or be good at it. He even took me into his workplace for the day once, so I was able to see what his work was like. It seemed cold masculine and dull with large bits of metal machinery in wind tunnels. It didn’t really appeal to me to want to go back there. I enjoyed and did well in chemistry and biology at school but had little confidence in my own ability in maths and therefore physics because I found them hard to understand. This was due to poor teaching of these subjects at my school. My heart was more in history, geography, languages, art and needlework which I loved and was much better at. These were shared interests with dad. He would show me and my brother how to draw and paint, create model landscapes for my brother’s model railway set with cardboard and paper mache tunnels to paint realistically to look like grass. He even showed us how to design nets to cut out and make our own cardboard model village buildings. Then there were the balsa wood model aircraft with tissue paper wings doped to shrink-fit them tightly in place and the Britfix plastic kits of planes and boats.
He would show us how to make secret messages using lemon juice or the more spectacular potassium permanganate which had to be lit at one end with a cigarette to burn out the message trail. All these substances would now be banned for safe use with children. I remember dad telling me that he had to sign the poisons register before the chemist would let him have the potassium permanganate and so he wouldn’t let me use it without him supervising.
Saturday mornings were spent along the Bedford River Embankment while mum was at the hairdressers. Dad would take us to the Cecil Higgins museum and art gallery, or walk with us up the castle mound to fly the propellor driven balsa wood planes we had made. Other times we would walk by the river side feeding the swans and watching the rowers training for the local regatta. Then there were the Sunday evenings watching David Attenborough or Armand and Michaela Dennis diving on coral reefs. That’s when dad would share his near-death experience of getting stuck while snorkelling in caves around the Cornish coasts.
Then dad fell ill and it was very serious. He was having blurred vision and was off work for weeks while they did tests. No one seemed to know what the problem was. Could it be due to delayed effects of the concussion from his wartime air crash? When he eventually returned to work he was still being investigated by specialist neurologists at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. The diagnosis came back as disseminated sclerosis, a form of multiple sclerosis. None of us really knew what that would mean for us, but everyone seemed to be behaving as if it were a death sentence. The family went through a crisis and I felt very insecure. All the fun activities with dad had ended by now but he still was able to go to work and struggle on as British Aerospace began to make weapons and missiles and technology outpaced dad’s own technical expertise. I was now at an age where I was more politically aware and I would ask him more about his role in the war because I began to see the effects of it on his health. He told me why he volunteered for the RAF. He always made it clear that he hated what the Nazis stood for and the terrible things they did to the Jews and the resistance in occupied France and the Netherlands, where his paternal grandmother had originally come from. I was proud to think my dad would volunteer to risk his life to protect our country from invasion and to stand up for people in another country who were being tortured and murdered by an evil government. I asked him what happened when he got shot at and he said it was because the rear gunner froze and was too scared to fire when they were under attack by German planes. He often impressed me by speaking German phrases which he said he had been taught to memorise in case he had been shot down over German occupied France. Another time he told me how he had worked with Polish pilots whom he greatly admired and that he had been flying with them to protect convoys in the North Atlantic. I wanted to ask him more questions about his war service but he would say “War is a terrible thing Jane. I hope for you children’s sake we never have another one”.
I have already written a tribute to dad as a war hero in another article on this website but I wrote this time about his life as a post war survivor because I want to share these unique memories I have of him with younger members of my family who never had these experiences with their grandad who was already ill and afflicted before they were born. Now I hope to explore his war records in more depth to find out what I can about his war service that may be more accessible with the passage of time.
sapodilla press 