Remembering a very different childhood

By Peter Hopper - 26/07/2007

It was just a few hundred metres to where I wanted to be, but it was dark because the street lights had been taken away. On foggy evenings, the different noise of footsteps on the pavement was scary, so I hurried on as fast as my little legs would carry me. My age was in single figures, and Britain was at war.

Bombs had already fallen on this small town of (at that time) just under 13,000 souls, the supposedly “safe” seaside resort of Skegness, on the Lincolnshire coast. To a boy small for his age, evacuated to live with strangers from the age of three, everything was scary.

At the end of the road I turn left, only a short distance now to the building they called The Citadel. Waiting there are members of the largest army in the world - the Salvation Army - and the welcome sight of the men and women in uniforms different from those of the armed forces. The ladies join in the singing, tapping out the music on tambourines....

This weekly event for children, which attracted me like a magnet, had an unforgettably comforting name, Band of Love. I sometimes attended evening concerts at the citadel with my foster mother. No such luxuries as ice cream or coke during the interval - just a delicious saucer of peas and a cup of tea.

When I look back to those years of austerity, I consider how lucky I was to be a child at a time of distraction from parental authority; to have all the freedom I wanted except during school time and on Sundays. The lax attitude to roaming the fields on the edge of town, fighting imaginary foes with home-made bows and arrows, did not extend to The Lord’s Day, when attendance was virtually compulsory. The requirement was to dress in best clothes, attend Sunday School and, at the very least, join adult worshippers at morning church services. It was not always as boring as it sounds.

I was the youngest of 300 children evacuated from Grimsby to Skegness on 1st September 1939, too young to be able to look back on that arrival, but it is an event my thoughts have turned to constantly throughout my life, as a help, not a hindrance, during my three score years and ten. I stayed with evacuation foster parents for 17 years, my mother having died when I was a baby.

Life as a child then was very different from today. In the austere post-war years, for instance, I  rejoice in the fact that I was one of a small, unique band of children called “barrow boys”, though perhaps a more appropriate title would have been “luggage boys”, at a time when the solace for thousands of working families was the luxury of a week beside the sea.

Very few people owned cars, so Midlands holidaymakers en route to Skegness travelled by train or by coach, alighting at the railway station and coach terminus and looking out for a taxi to take them to their hotel or boarding house. Our vehicle was, well, just a barrow. Usually a large box or trolley attached to a pair of discarded pram wheels and two large handles attached at one end. The barrow acted as a mobile receptacle for suitcases and was made for me by my foster father.

No doubt that at first sight, I and my fellow barrow boys appeared to be scruffy urchins out to make a quick profit on unwary holidaymakers, but our customers were well satisfied, because our hire at very small cost allowed them to stretch their legs and walk the short distance to their accommodation, with the added bonus of not having to carry heavy suitcases.

The first question I was asked by would-be customers was always: "How much do you charge?" To which I replied, with as much humility as I could muster: “I do not charge, sir, I will take what you give me.” The theory, which worked most of the time, was that my hirer was flush with money at the start of his holiday, and therefore would give more generously than if I had charged a set amount. I would expect to be given a shilling, a florin (10p) at most. I was always careful to book them for the return journey the following weekend,  hoping, of course, that they hadn’t spent all their money by then!

There were occasional exceptions to the theory, such as the family that asked me to take them to Butlin’s Holiday Camp, a distance of three and half miles and a round trip of seven miles. My reward was sixpence. Needless to say, I did not book them for the return trip!

Our enemy was the taxi driver. We had to be quick to get out of their way to avoid a clip around the ear, no doubt permissible, even desirable, to control cheeky, though enterprising, kids in those days.

Only recently, I learned from a book by Skegness author Winston Kime that, in 1950, the Skegness Taxi Proprietors’ Association sent a letter  to Skegness Urban District Council asking them to request the police to “put a stop” to the barrow boys touting for luggage on Saturday mornings as they were a pest and were seriously affecting the taxi drivers’ living. I was delighted to see that, after consulting with the police, the council replied that as no complaints for obstruction by barrow boys had been received no action could be taken. From my point of view, a good result for healthy competition. But I wonder if the outcome would have been different in today’s social climate?

I would be completely exhausted by mid afternoon, and for a break I sat in my barrow to eat a well-earned ice-cream. My takings late Saturday were around £2, a little more on a really good day, most of which was put aside for a holiday with the Boys’ Brigade in October, the holiday month for people who cater for holiday-makers.

Another seaside business enterprise was a bit more sneaky. Sensible beach clothes were rare, and the dress code of the male head of the household was invariably grey flannel trousers, white shirt and something to protect his head - often a knotted handkerchief would do. He settled back to sunbathe, his back against the foot of the sand dunes. Up would go his legs, leaving his pockets at just the right angle for coins to roll out and bury themselves in the sand.

When the breeze stiffened towards the end of the afternoon and it was time for the family to return to the coach park or their lodgings, my beachcomber instincts came into play. No metal detectors were available - or necessary - to recover any coins lost!

Mine is a story about childhood as a consequence of war and its aftermath in post-war years of unsettled peace, when an impoverished nation required food rationing for an extended period after the conflict.

 

Looking back, it was certainly a very different childhood to that experienced by today’s children, or during any other period of British history.