My father was a lovely man who I adored. He never lost his temper and loved my mother very much.
When I was a small child my father at that time used to smoke cigarettes, but gave them up sometime during the early 1950's. Of course in those days nothing was said about smoking being bad for your health it was just something that people did.
I can remember that when he gave up smoking to compensate for the lack of a cigarette he started drinking cough linctus. In those days the base ingredient for cough linctus was alcohol so my father started to get addicted to drinking cough linctus. It took my mother quite some to break my father of this habit but she succeeded in the end and my father never smoked or drank cough linctus ever again.
I must have been only about 5 or 6 years old when I kept getting tonsillitis, my mother kept taking me to the doctors and eventually they decided to have my tonsils removed. When the doctor looked at my throat in readiness for booking me into the local hospital for the operation, he seemed to think my throat was too small, so it was decided that I would have my tonsils painted with a tarry substance that would stop the growth and cure the problem.
I can remember being sat on our wooden kitchen table with the light over my head and my father using a long thin paintbrush to paint my tonsils, he had such a steady hand that the doctor allowed my father to do this. I never suffered ever again with tonsil problems.
In our house at Bremilham Terrace we had a very large red bell just inside the front door, it was fitted just at the bottom of the stairs.
This bell was connected up to the local fire station because my father was a retained fireman, and this bell, when it rang, would notify my father a call out shout had been issued. You didn't in those days have mobile telephones and we were never posh enough to have a telephone fitted in the house.
As my father was a retained fireman this meant that during the Second World War he was not liable for call up for service in one of the armed services because a fireman came under the category known as a reserved occupation.
I can remember many times when we had just sat down to our Sunday meal, the bell would go off and my father would have to either run or get his bicycle out of the shed and cycle the mile plus to the fire station, to get there in time to go out on the fire tender. He held a rank of Leading Fireman.
I can remember on one occasion he had got his bike out and was just starting to cycle to the Fire Station when the Fire Engine came speeding past where we lived, they had picked my father up on the way and threw his bike onto the back of the engine.
I can remember being taken down to the Fire Station when I was on my summer time school holiday. Apart from actually attending fires, the firemen also had to make so many attendance's, at least once a week, when they did training and made sure the fire engine was in tip top condition.
I can remember seeing my father's name above the clothes hook that held his helmet, and fire suit as well as the large Wellingtons placed underneath. My father's helmet was White with him being a Leading Fireman.
I can also remember being allowed to sit in the driver's seat of the fire engine and ringing the bell, this was done to make sure it was in perfect working order.
At that time, although the fire engine was completely enclosed, the bell was a large brass bell that was hung on a bracket on top of the driver's cab, and you had a thick cable attached to the bell. This cable went right into the driver's cab, and allowed the fireman sitting next to the driver to pull on the cable to make the bell ring, the noise of the bell notified people that the fire engine was on a call.
I can also remember on one occasion when he was called out, we didn't see my father for nearly three days. They had been called out to a large Dutch barn on a farm, that was full of hay bales, that had caught fire and it took the firemen all that time to extinguish the fire and dampen it down enough to make it safe enough for them to leave.
Another time we were driving past an old thatch cottage and can remember my father saying that the week before they had been called out to this cottage because a chimney fire had caught the thatch alight, again he was away from home for over 48 hours.
My father never talked a great deal about his time fire fighting during the war although I can remember a couple of things he did say.
The first was when the bombing blitz was at its highest and Malmesbury' fire engines had been sent to help with a blitz raid on Bristol. My father was up a long turntable ladder trying to put a fire out from over the roof of the buildings when a bomb exploded underneath him. By the time he had managed to get down to ground level he found a lot of his friends and comrades had been killed by the blast.
The other time mentioned, I am not sure whether it was my mother told me and it was confirmed by my father or if my father had told me himself, but this concerned a spitfire that had crashed in a small wood on the outskirts of the town. The plane had caught fire on crashing and by the time the fire brigade had got to the scene it was nothing but a charred wreck. What stuck in my memory is being told that the fire must have been so intense that there were hardly any remains of the pilot left to bury, so they loaded the coffin with stones to bring the weight up, and that is what is buried, more stones than body.
I think my father must have experienced some awful sites during his war years, but as with most people of that period they are very reluctant to speak about them.
When my parents moved to Southend-on-Sea with his job, my father had to give up being a fireman, and by this time he had been in the service for over thirty years, he was given a lamp with a red fire engine on the base.
Around this time my mother had also acquired a egg-timer which you wound up and set for the amount of time you needed, when this timer went off it sounded just like our old fire bell and I can remember my mother saying that my father was very often halfway out the front door before he realised it was only the timer going off.
When we had first moved to Bremilham Terrace my father worked at a garage next door to Bremilham, but not long after that he got a job at a company called Ekco.
Unfortunately he died of a heart attack brought on by prostate cancer in June 1984. He was such a lovely man who never uttered a cross word to anyone.
I have since discovered that just before I was born in the summer of 1943 my father saved a young child from drowning. The Royal Humane Society for saving a life awarded him a certificate, I still have that certificate.
