Dear Philippa

 

You asked me what it was like growing up in Hull in the 1950s. To give a bit of context, I was born in 1944, about a year before the Second World War ended, and I have few reliable memories, if any, of the mid-to-late 40s. The early fifties was a splendid time to be a small boy. Although there was another war going on, in Korea, and the possibility of yet another over Suez, I was barely aware of either dazzled as I was by the plentiful supply of military surplus materials; every little boy had a gas mask, an army water canteen, and lots of khaki webbing. The luckier ones had fragments of shrapnel liberated from the bomb sites that we were forbidden to approach but in which we foraged in a feral way hoping to discover not only bomb casings but also bodies of German airmen. Boys who grew up in areas untouched by bombing must have had a thin time of it. Also the girls, though I do remember my sister requisitioning our air-raid shelter as a wendy house.

 

An abiding memory was the constant presence of low-flying military aircraft, presumably operating out of the many RAF bases in East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. This was at its most exciting, that jump-up-and-down-and-do-a-little-wee-in-your-pants excitement that every small boy knows but never admits to, when we visited the coastal town of Withernsea where we could watch aircraft attacking, with live bombs, surplus naval vessels tethered off-shore. Whether they were training pilots and bomb-aimers, or disposing of unwanted ships I cannot say; perhaps both. We stayed there at a seaside boarding house run by the family who had taken my mother and brother in as evacuees “for the duration”. Well, not quite that - they were first evacuated to Lincolnshire, a strange land visible across the river Humber but seldom visited from Hull to this day. When my father discovered that my mother was pregnant with me and my sister he whipped us smartly back over the river, not you might think to secure for me the possibility of playing cricket for Yorkshire, but to avoid the dreadful fate of being born a Yellowbelly, a Lincolnshireman. North Humber bankers regard those on the Lincolnshire side with suspicion; low of brow and crafty of eye, they are, unreliable and with a yellow tinge to them caused by living their lives in the fen sucked fogs of Lincolnshire.

 

Living today as we did in the fifties we would be regarded now as deprived children, without benefit of social workers, below the poverty line: no fridge, no telly, no car, outside toilet. But nobody I knew had these things, but now no child I know has an air raid shelter to play in. Food was basic, cheap thanks to Commonwealth Preference, but rationed. No fat children, and obesity in my generation is uncommon still, compared with today where most children seem to range from chubby to Bunterish. I was a happy child.

 

We enjoyed freedom now almost unknown to today’s children, freedom to roam and explore and take risks up trees and on bomb sites. My sister, cousin and I would walk from Hull to Preston unaccompanied, about five miles, and back again clutching our packed lunches – dinner we would have called it – with stern intructions to stay together, instructions which, if disobeyed would have been followed by retribution swift and fearsome. Our parents now would be regarded as negligent, but they were not, they were wise.

 

In Spring 1956, to my outraged incomprehension, my sister and I were, along with others, obliged to go to school on two consecutive Saturday mornings: we were sitting “the scholarship”. This was to lead to great change. The following September we crossed the city to attend grammar schools, now much reviled, where we were confronted with French, Latin, and algebra, subjects hitherto unknown, and in my case corporal punishment. Childhood suddenly became a more serious affair.

 

Best wishes

 

Howard