LINES ABOUT MY ADOPTED FATHER

a few more lines from my book, this time picking up on George Spencver my father. I'd very much welcome any observations from other family members.


................To the casual outsider George must have had a slight limp as he was still recovering from a bullet wound gained in India. He had grown up in Waterloo north of Liverpool where his father Frank (Prof – professor) Spencer was an inspector on the corporation trams, bandmaster of the tramway brass band and in his spare moments leader of the Stylists dance band. His wife Daisy was a relatively small lady but of fiery temper and after having a bible thrown at him one day George decided that generally speaking life at home and as bell boy in Lewis’s Department store was not for him so he enlisted as a boy soldier at the tender age of 14. With his father’s pedigree a bandsman life was inevitable and it wouldn’t be long before he would be shipped off to India with the Kings Regiment, Liverpool. One of the duties the band undertook before leaving was playing at the opening of the Mersey Tunnel with the King in attendance.

As a bandsman George was a non combatant, they acted as stretcher bearers in times of conflict. Unarmed and attacked by tribesman in the Khyber Pass region, now part of Pakistan, he shinned up a tree for cover but was shot in the leg. I suppose had it been peace time he may have been dismissed from the service but as war in Europe had broken out he found a role teaching maths and ending up in Fort William, his last posting. Along the way whilst at home in Liverpool recuperating he no doubt played with his father Prof’s Stylist dance band and one evening at a dance spotted my mother Marion who had been evacuated from Eastbourne to Liverpool. A strange decision you may think but at the start of the war Liverpool was far from the range of German bombers and Eastbourne was much more on the front line and with invasion expected much of the civilian population was removed.

Marion went to Liverpool with her sister Sylvia and was allocated a job in a ball bearing factory, much as men were drafted into the army or mines. After she met my father she also met the formidable Daisy from whom George had previously fled, Daisy obviously hadn’t mellowed and even at the risk of imprisonment for leaving a job of national importance she returned to Eastbourne in 1944 only to find that the coast was now being pounded by the dreaded doodle bugs (German unmanned rockets), many falling short of London which was the intended target, 60 miles to the north.

Marion had been to school with the girl who married comedian and conjuror Tommy Cooper, supposedly they were mixed up in racketeering in the war. We inherited a small tea set, this was given to Marion by some young soldier friends of Thelma, they had ‘liberated’ it from a house in Rye where they had been billeted, the home having been evacuated in view of the expected invasion.

The early days of the war must have been exciting and happy times for the girls of mum’s age but just 5 years later as widows, with doodle bugs and V2s behind them it must all have been wearing a bit thin.

We know that granddad and granny Spencer had been out in America, Daisy told how they had hid in flour barrels from the Red Indians, there obviously was some truth in the story, confirmed when I did the family history and found siblings born in Colorado. Likewise granddad supposedly had Spanish blood, again confirmed when I found the name Sabeno as a second Christian name for both granddad and great granddad alike, although nothing more is known. Granddad known as Prof used to play bowls; crown green unlike the lawn type in Eastbourne, there was a green near their house in Thorndale Rd, Waterloo, a smart upper working class neighbourhood of Liverpool. The house still stands and looks in good order, when we visited in the 50s my cousin Charles, a Teddy boy, played billiards with his cronies in the front room. I remember the old Liverpool market being burnt down to the ground to clear it. The old overhead railway no longer ran but the structure remained in place, Prof would dearly liked to have shown me their trams but a trip to Fleetwood had to suffice. He once bought me a tiny ‘Matchbox’ model tram from Wilson’s sweet shop. The ships on the Mersey stretched out into the far distance; we watched them from the shore line near Waterloo where the sand stretched out forever until it merged with the grey sea and still greyer sky. The vessels were a link in the chain of commerce which had had it’s heyday in the time of the slave trade. For Merseyside bad times were coming only to be lightened by a new primeval beat of pop music and diversions from hardship from a line of comedians.

I think George liked to gamble, we never had much money that’s for sure but after he died Marion never spoke ill of him but then again never erected a memorial headstone at his grave, and she bought two plots side by side. Certainly we were out on a limb down at Langney and relatives seldom visited us, it was all one way traffic. I think Thelma worked in the Saxone shoe shop on Terminus Rd, perhaps Marion had also done so pre war. Olive in the 1960-70s worked at Oswald Fields Ladies gown shop just past the station near Bradford’s coal office. The buses stopped either side of the road outside the station until traffic got so bad they moved them a few yards down into Terminus Road. Post war with the surface pitted and roughly applied tarmac, Terminus Road had little by way of road markings or street furniture, it seemed an immense spacious highway occupied by the occasional cyclist. It was a sort of landing trip into town for the gorgeous green and cream Southdown buses which still served all the surrounding country villages several times a day and Eastbourne Corporation whose vehicles painted Blue, Custard and topped off with white roofs were the epitome of municipal style and charm. Even the adverts were painted in yellow by hand and designed to use the blue body colour as background.

Sylvia also found her husband Claude Pessell in Liverpool. The impact of these V1 flying bombs, one of Hitler’s secret weapons which he had long threatened to unleash, was quite severe as they gave little warning. Marion went to the doctors for her ‘ nerves’, Dr MacLeanan recommended taking up smoking, a justification she clung to for many years until a bad cold finally put her off the habit and she stopped without further ado. Dr Mac as he was known went on to treat our little family for many years although they fell out over some childhood ailment I’d had and we had the less satisfactory Dr Saville. She met Dr Mac in retirement and they sat in Gildrege Park quietly reminiscing and regretting the incident. In those days a bottle of bright pink medicine sorted out most ailments real or imagined, it’s taste was pretty dire so you wouldn’t want to feign illness. My health has thankfully been good and I had the worst whilst still very young, this consisted of a bout of whooping cough (App VII), then a killer, I also had tonsillitis.