Adam Hart-Davis : Articles

Articles

Radio Times articles, from 2003-2005

Escape-proof???
Sounds Familiar
The Hounding of the Royals
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells?
The Mystery of the Stones
Going Loco
Troy
Pedal Power
Dentures
Obesity
Genius Sperm
Ultimation
Sandals, Slaughter and Sex
Greased Lightning
Flying Saucers
Aztecs
Venus
The Stuarts
The Ascent of Man
Test-tube Tantrums
RT Mastermind
Medical Marvels
Engineering Triumphs
Eccentricity
Surreal Estate
Offshore Wind Farms
Nothing to Loos
Groovy
A Bridge Too Far
Flogging a Dead Horse
Worst Jobs
Asteroid Alert
Eureka Years
Crash
Inspired
The Man Who Missed Dinosaurs
The Sagger-maker's Bottom-knocker
The Master
Naming Nature
Albert Einstein
Environmental Scariness
Geronimo!
Ancient Plastic Surgery
The Ancients
Gold in Them Thar Banks and Braes
Animal Magnetism
Egyptians
Technophilia
HIGNFY
Panem et Circenses
Tambora
That Spotty Old Sun
Telling Stories
Beethoven's Hair
A Blind Eye
Comets
Medrocks

At home and school in 1952

At the beginning of 1952 I was eight years old, and just starting my second year at prep school – St Andrews, Pangbourne. I remember clearly the headmaster interrupting a Latin lesson in the classroom at the end of the corridor above the gym; he stuck his head round the door and said that the King had died. Later, in my diary, I wrote ‘George VI died February 6 1952’. I probably spelled February wrong.

Home was Bromsden Farm, four miles out of Henley-on-Thames, where I had been born, and lived until 1963. It was an old square red-brick farmhouse, and mine was the little bedroom over the front door, surrounded in mid-summer by sweet-smelling honeysuckle. The house belonged to Peter Fleming, who lent it to my dad during the war so that my mum and we children could be away from the bombing in London, and it was a wonderful place to grow up, surrounded by woods. There was no one of my age within two miles; so if I wanted to go and play with friends, I had to learn to ride a bike, and also to maintain it and to mend its punctures.

I guess this was an austere time for the nation, with some rationing still in place after the war, but I was not aware of being deprived. My mum was a great gardener, and we always had enough vegetables. The cows came twice a day to be milked in the cowshed, only twenty yards from the back door, and I used to go up with a jug to collect a few pints of milk as it came off the crinkly aluminium cooler – no homogenization in those days.

We had a brand new electric cooker; this was a great step forward. My mum was a terrific cook; one day she roasted a chicken when a friend had come to play. As we were chewing away on the bones, Vicky said ‘Isn’t it lucky you haven’t got a dog? Else we should have to give it the bones.’ Mum used to make jam from whichever of the fruit trees performed well that year – often plum jam, sometimes quince jelly. This jam-making was a great event; the fruit was boiled with sugar, the jam jars had to be sterilized, and the pulp was strained into them through what looked like an old blanket, hung precariously on bamboo poles slung between two tables. We never bought jam – and maybe there was none in the shops. We never bought vegetables, either, since we grew our own – and in those days no one dreamed of flying exotic vegetables and fruit around the world; so we ate cabbages in the winter, peas in the early summer, beans and tomatoes later on. There was no chance of having tomatoes in winter; I never saw avocados or mangoes, oranges appeared around Christmas, and even bananas were a rare treat.

Best of all was Christmas. The electric oven was never big enough for the turkey; so early in the morning mum lit a fire in the great iron range, and got a good blaze going to drive out all the various bits of damp, and probably the creepy-crawlies that had camped inside. All morning the delicious smell of roasting turkey would seep through the house, and after going to church, eating a huge lunch, and listening to the Queen’s speech, we sat around the tree where I, as the youngest, handed round the presents. The tree was lit with a couple of dozen real candles, which must have represented a desperate fire hazard, but was lovely to see.

I don’t think we had a fridge in 1952. There was a cool larder, and eggs were stored in water-glass; I once drank some by mistake, and the taste was foul.

We had no central heating. The water was heated in the dining room by a boiler, which was much loved for bum-roasting by my elder sister, though it was too high for me at that stage. Two of the rooms downstairs had open fires, which burned mainly logs; I spent my time in the nursery, where I had my books and toys; Meccano was a great favourite, and a couple of years later I won the school Holiday Hobbies Competition by making a Meccano clock that almost worked. It ran for a minute or so, but then needed a push to prevent it from stopping; I think my rods were slightly bent. I also had a box of Minibrix inherited from my brother, and one of my favourite books was Lancelot Hogben’s Man must measure, which may possibly have sparked my interest in maths and science.

There was also a fireplace in the drawing room, which was used only rarely, and by grown-ups, but the telephone was there, with its plaited cord. The number was Rotherfield Greys 205, and to call someone else you had to pick up the receiver, wait for the operator, and ask for the number; there was no dial. When dad was home he disappeared in to the library and either worked at his desk or slumped into a filthy old armchair by the glass-fronted solid-fuel fire. As I recall, this fire ate anthracite, but the boiler used coke. They were both black and messy.

I remember watching television with great excitement, not in 1952 but once the following year. We did not have a telly in my house until 1969, but in 1953 we went to a rich friend’s house and watched some of the coronation of Princess Elizabeth. Their telly was a huge wooden box with a tiny screen you could almost cover with one hand. The pictures were black and white, and blurred, but I could vaguely see coaches and horses. A few years later, on that same television set, I saw Jim Laker taking nineteen Australian wickets in that magical test match at Lord’s.

At home we had a radio, and then we acquired a radiogram – another huge wooden box with a radio in the top and a gramophone below. It would play eight records one after another. These were the stiff black 78s, and we had songs by Richard Tauber, Mario Lanza, and I think Guy Mitchell – Drink to me only with thine eyes, Oh mein papa, Girls were made to love and kiss, and This ol’ house. We had a cat called Tauber, because it meowed so much. Our American cousins were much more advanced, and at Christmas one year they sent us a brand new sort of record, a long-player: 33 revolutions per minute. ‘LP microgroove’ it said on the sleeve, and we thought it amazing that a record could play for half an hour instead of just three or four minutes.

They sent us records year after year, mainly of the musicals – Oklahoma, Kiss me Kate, The King and I, South Pacific, and eventually The Pajama Game and West Side Story. I played those records so many times that I can still remember the words to most of the songs, and I love singing them, but unfortunately other people do not seem to enjoy the experience, and I am politely invited to stop.

I had not enjoyed being sent off to boarding school at the age of eight, and I remember being miserable in my first few weeks, and hating everything and probably everybody, and then barely recognising my mum when I saw her again. School became bearable as I made friends, and learned that after lights out, when it was against the rules, it was a good idea to talk quietly; being beaten was no fun. Bath time came twice a week, I think; there were about six baths in one big room and we wallowed in shifts, to be supervised by one of the masters. Everyone had to go to the lavatory after breakfast every morning, and one favourite trick was to scrunch the end of the hard shiny bog-roll into a ball, put it in the loo, and then flush, hoping that the swoosh of water would catch the ball and pull the whole roll down the drain. I don’t think it ever worked.

One day, running down a corridor (against the rules), I tripped, and putting out my hands to save myself, landed on the little finger of my left hand, which bent painfully back. I had a ‘greenstick fracture’, they said, which apparently meant I had bent the bone. My hand and wrist were in plaster for a week or three, which was quite fun, and everyone signed their names on it, until I carelessly peed on it, and the plaster smelled quite disgusting until they took it off.

I think it was in 1952 that we first went to France on holiday. All five of us crammed into our little green Morris FYK 660, drove down to the coast, and caught the ferry to Dieppe. We stayed in the Auberge des Vieux Puits, and I was mystified and delighted by the curious language and the strange signs everywhere. I faintly remember the beach being covered with huge lumps of concrete - this was not long after D-day – but otherwise I cannot recall much of my first trip abroad.

An eight-year-old of today, transported back to 1952 in a time machine, would find it a dull and empty place. No television. No mobile phones. No personal stereos or CD players; not even simple tape recorders. The home computer was a generation in the future; even the pocket electronic calculator would not appear for 15 years. We had to do our difficult sums with the dreaded log tables, and I was delighted when a few years later my dad bought me a slide rule; this was not only a great help in science lessons but a real status symbol. I didn’t feel deprived, because I had not known anything else; this was how life was for everyone in middle-class England. But don’t be fooled into thinking that those were good old days; anyone going back from here would find 1952 a pretty Spartan place.

Written for
The Times, June 2002

Page last updated: Friday, 02 November 2007 11:06

Radio Times articles, from 2003-2005

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At home and school in 1952