“God help the country from this load of drips and wets.” he would moan, “They are chucking away the Empire, giving in to the Unions, scrapping and reducing the Navy and we are having to live like supplicants, and to be spoon fed by the Americans. The country seems to have lost its pride, and everywhere socialism and liberalism is rampant. It was our lot and our generation that built through Industry, Trade and conquest the wealth of our Empire. Your miserable generation are going the right way of losing it.”
He spoke these words at a time when Britain had freshly emerged triumphant in war, winning in turn the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, caused the destruction of Germany with 2,000 bomber raids that wiped out whole cities in firestorms, had helped with the Americans launch the biggest Combined Operation Landings in History in Normandy, and had then swept across France and North Germany to finally crush Hitler. Everywhere the idols of the day were commandos, sailors and airmen who had risked their lives doing the most hazardous and dare devil feats. Most of the bravest were small quite unassuming men in ordinary life. Men one would not normally give a second glance to, and were generally very reticent about their exploits, but Tomlinson shrugged them all off.
“ Yes they were brave, and tough in the heat of battle and under adversity. But that is not what I am talking about. I am thinking of the soft soul of the country which is not involved in heroics, but in the day to day decisions of life. That is what is soft and that is going to be your problem, not mine”.
I wonder just what he would think of Britain at the end of the 20th Century, with the breakdown of family life, the highest divorce rate in the world, our capital now a cosmopolitan city with a quarter of its population ejected by foreigners, who because of a lack of will are eating up our limited countryside with a new city the size of Leeds being built every ten years. I wonder how he would view the Godless materialistic society, where money only is King, the appalling taste and constant lowering of standards each year in all spheres of life, from dress to manners, to television and the triumph of the computor culture at the expense of reading, literacy and a respect for learning. The huge drug industry, pornography single parent families and an illiterate underclass that lives from one generation to the next devoid of employment with no will nor inclination to work in honest labour.
That winter of 1946 was one of the coldest on record. It started snowing shortly before Christmas but the real cold weather did not arrive until January . Staying at Gwen’s house “Treetops” at Pinner was like living in a deep freeze in comparison to the centrally heated houses of today. The house which had been well and solidly built with lovely solid oak doors and liberal oak panelling in the 1930’s, was designed with a sitting room in the form of a gallery. At one end was a raised stage and the ceiling was vaulted up to the apex of the roof like a church. At the far end of the long room was an open fire, the only form of heating, which was fuelled largely with old wooden cobbles reclaimed from streets that were now being steadildy macadamised. John Simpson who was a most frugal Australian from Queensland, had bought a vast stock of these and would have a roaring fire in the evenings, but the shape of the room meant it would never warm up and so whilst one sat in front of the fire with ones front warm, the cold air rushed past to go up the chimney making one shiver and freeze. In the bedrooms there were small gas fires, and one would hurriedly undress in front of one, then turn it off and dive into bed, and be immobile for five minutes until that patch got warm and one could gingerly move ones leg a few inches to warm another patch. In the mornings the windows were opaque with the most beautiful fernlike shapes of ice that had crystallised over them. Paul and Jeremy their sons were like me keen on tobogganing in the snow, but the only suitable place were the slopes of Pinner Hill Golf Club where we were banned in case we damaged the greens. To get around this we would go with our toboggan at night and in the moonlight we would pile on top of one another and go careering down the slopes that we could hardly see, speed over the flat green and then take off away and crash over the edge ending up finally in the rough which was a mass of brambles. It was good exciting fun though and we all enjoyed it greatly.
Back at Bradfield the snow lay deep over all the games pitches and so our only form of exercise was cross country running. There was a continual crisis from a lack of coal which was rationed and had to be used sparingly. Later in January to make matters worse I was sent to the sanatorium bedridden with measles, which however had one advantage in that it was the warmest place in the school. The snow lay crisp and deep for 7 weeks, and I was amazed at the contrast with Japan, where though the falls were much deeper, the snow rarely lasted more than a few days, when the warm sun would melt it. Here the thaw did not arrive until the beginning of March, and then it came so suddenly that there were floods everywhere. The flood meadows by the River Pang were all deep underwater and with a friend we made a raft out of two aircraft auxilliary fuel tanks that we strapped together. With this we floated off over the floods and would land on islands full of mice and moles which had escaped to higher ground. At Pangbourne the River Thames was in full flood, and “The Swan” was closed with the water swirling through the bars and the car park was about three foot under the river with dangerous rushing torrents covering it as the water then poured over the flooded weir.
Father and Mother had arrived in April 1947 from Ceylon and had rented a sumptuous house in London at Harrington Gardens by Gloucester Road. Tea had boomed during the War and Hugoland Estate was now coining money as it came into full production and more land was being opened up for new tea clearings. Everywhere two years now after the war was over, and following the coldest winter ever, there was now a sense of excitement that post war reconstruction was at long last getting under way. There was still clothes and petrol rationing, but there was with the new buds and blossom a sense of hope that things can only each month get better and better. One big boost to everyones morale was the explosion on the London stage at Drury Lane and the Coliseum of two American block busting Musicals: Oklahoma and Annie Get Your Gun. The sheer vitality, brashness, colour and vivacity had everyone humming and whistling and singing the tunes in a way that today would be completely incomprehensible to the modern generation. As the summer progressed and reconstruction started to patch up and rebuild the bombed cities, one felt optimism everywhere in the air, and you felt glad to be alive and be part of the vitality that was happening all around.
In the spring of 1947 Helen was finally demobilized. She had brought back from Trincomalee her sailing boat and had it taken to Norfolk where she based it at Hickling Broad. The summer of 1947 was glorious with hardly a cloud in the sky and we spent a month sailing and camping on islands and up creeks and cuts. After all the hard studying and the grind that I had undergone, it was wonderful to relax fishing for perch and eels, and learning the arts of sailing under the sunny skies.
Later Helen took me to Chipping Camden where she had been evacuated with Tudor Hall school during the War. The school had now moved once again to Banbury, but
