MY STORY Chapter 10 Back on Terra Firma

A few months after we returned to the UK after a long sea trip Alan left the Merchant Navy for good. He found a shore job as an Engineer Surveyor for an Insurance Company. We eventually moved to London after about 6 month’s training in different parts of the country. I accompanied him while training. Some of the lodgings we stayed in were fine and others quite strange and we would have to move on quickly. We had little money so were not staying in the most salubrious of lodgings. One place in Scotland, our host’s Father was a serious alcoholic who stayed up all night eating oranges. The next morning there would be orange peel strewn everywhere. When I look back now I wonder how I ever survived some of these experiences.

We are both Northerners, Alan from the North East and me from the North West, but we eventually settled in London as this was the area that Alan’s company placed him. He worked from home, going out doing his inspections in the morning and his office work at home in the afternoon. Friendship wise we were starting from scratch so we needed to get to know some people.

I had always been in Brownies, Girl Guides and Rangers so was pleased to find there was a Boy Scout group meeting at the corner of the avenue where we lived. I went along to see them and they welcomed me with open arms as they were in need of an Akela for the Cub Pack. We were renting a bed sitting room in a large house in a predominantly Jewish area. It turned out that this was a Jewish Scout group and although it was closed to non-Jewish children they were happy for me to join them as long as I adhered to Jewish practice with the boys where necessary. Very quickly Alan was drawn in to help also and we made some deep and lasting friendships with other Scout leaders. However this Cub Pack was different to anything I had experienced before. Many of the parents were very wealthy and the boys would arrive at Cubs in chauffeur driven cars. When trying to get the boys to learn certain tasks they would ask why, as normally their Nannies did it for them. The parents however were always more than grateful when we took the boys camping and taught them some self-sufficiency. All in all it was a good experience and only came to an end when we moved away from the area some 5 years later.

During these 5 years living in London, alongside our social life I needed to work and found my niche in the Almoner’s Department of a local general hospital. Almoners who originated from wealthy people giving to the poor, became State run departments of Social Work. It always amazes me that this was the field I gravitated to because hospitals and illness frighten me. I think I was trying to allay my fears in the midst of a very interesting and rewarding job.

This was where my love of gardening began. My first garden was two window boxes on the window ledge.

So here we were attempting to get on with normal life after our exotic beginnings on board ship. However, the storm clouds are gathering though I am not aware of it. Probably as a result of my dysfunctional family life as a child I set out to try and create the perfect life. I think also I was wanting to prove to my Mother-in-Law that I was not too young to marry her son and could manage not only as good as anyone else, but better.

Also during this time my Mother suffered her first serious mental breakdown. She had undergone major surgery and while she was in hospital my Father, who had never been left to fend for himself, had a nervous breakdown and was found wandering in another city having lost his memory. Consequently my Mother returned home from hospital and instead of convalescing was immediately back into caring for my Father. It was too much for her and after a complete nervous breakdown she ended up spending a whole year in a psychiatric hospital. My Grandmother who was a widow and was helping care for my 11 year old brother, fell and broke her leg so Alan and I dropped everything and drove North to see how we could help. Alan’s company were very understanding but the hospital where I worked insisted that I would lose my job if I ever took time off again in this way.

After a week the best solution we came up with was to bring Stephen,my young brother to live with us until my Grandmother and Father were fit to look after him. In our bed sitting room we had 2 x 3 foot beds pushed together and we slept 3 to the bed with Alan in the middle. We lived like this for about 6 months. My friends from the Scout group kindly arranged for my brother to attend the Jewish school. They were very good to him and gave him lots of clothes as we had brought him down almost in what he stood up in. I remember him coming home on the first day and saying, “Barb, what’s a Gentile?” As you can imagine I was like a Mother to Stephen during this time and we became very close. He emigrated to Australia in his early twenties and I never saw him again. We eventually took Stephen back home and almost immediately another of my brothers who was a junior Chef on a large sea going liner decided to jump ship somewhere in the Mediterranean and he turned up on our doorstep when he got to London looking for help and financial support. Fortunately we had made friends with a neighbour in the bed sitting room next door and as she was going away for a while she allowed my brother to use her place while he was in our care. The sad part of this was that not long after she returned she decided to end her life in that same room one night while we were sleeping.

This brother Kenneth developed Muscular Dystrophy and he too emigrated to Australia before becoming wheelchair bound and apart from seeing him briefly when my Father died, I never saw him again. My other brother Geoffrey stayed in the UK and he too developed Muscular Dystrophy and became incapacitated.

As you can see my year of having nothing to do but amuse myself on the ship and visit the many ports, quickly turned around to something very different. The pressures and stress were building up and my way of dealing with it was to just try harder to make everything perfect. We will see the outcome of this in the next chapter.

My First Garden

The garden of our bed sitting room

As a child I longed for a red velvet dress

Stephen posing in his new clothes

The cubs at camp standing to attention for 2 minutes silence

A trip to the village store

The Akela

Gilwell International Scout Camp