From a Distance

I've peered at the photo below for hours.  It was probably taken on Eastbourne beach in 1920 when ten year old mum was recovering from Spanish 'flu.  The pandemic killed between 20 to 50 million people worldwide and nearly killed her. She remembered feeling ill to the point of death. She's wearing soft, casual clothes and gym shoes; - beachwear that her own mother would never have been able to use.  Behind her, daintily picking their way across a boardwalk, is a group of women whose coats are fairly free-flowing - not too much evidence of corsetry, buttons and rigid belts here.  Perhaps they're going to use one of the old bathing machines behind them?  By this time, these contraptions had mostly fallen out of use and those remaining became changing huts. Fast forward to 1934. My mother had trained as a PE teacher and joined the staff at her college as soon as she'd graduated.  The students' summer camp was based in Middleton-on-Sea and my...

I wonder if you have any memories of the Coronation?  That day in 1953 dawned as a chilly, showery one without the merest hint of flaming June.  My siblings were away at boarding school. I was nine and we'd been given the day off for  the Queen's Coronation .  Everyone from our school, the Gateway, had been issued with a mug and a book called Elizabeth our Queen by Richard Dimbleby.  Somewhere in the mix, I also had an issue of the Young Elizabethan magazine and had been given a miniature coronation coach. Like thousands of families in the country, we'd bought our first television set in readiness for this much-anticipated event.  The new TV with its tiny 12"/30 cm recessed screen was pushed into the corner of the sitting room.   Our mum was an inveterate organiser and she had hired a television for the local sports club and had invited lots of people from the village who didn’t have televisions to watch the ceremony. Alas, the hired TV never...

When war was declared in September 1939, my parents and my older sisters Ann and Sally, then aged two and nine months, were living at Beachcroft, our grandfather’s house in Southdean Drive fifty yards from the sea. The whole area rapidly became a vast armed camp with military manoeuvres accompanied by the screeching and clattering of tanks. There was no chance of those toddlers playing by the sea. Beaches were fenced off with barbed wire, sown with mines and protected by high iron scaffolding.   Our mum watched one of the unexploded mines bob about on the waves just yards from the house before it was safely detonated at low tide.   There were coastal batteries and gun emplacements in front of the house with relentless overhead activity from the RAF bases of Tangmere and Ford; the latter was shortly to be dive bombed by Stukas.  When the military took over in the village, our family did a reverse evacuation in August 1940. Mum hired a lorry, packed it with h...

I've been reflecting on my earliest school days.  From 1948 – 1954 I took the 50a bus from home in Middleton-on-Sea to a little private school called the Gateway in Felpham.   We passed another school on the way.  It had sturdy flint walls and a chain link fence running across the front of the playground.  At four years old, I imagined that the children there were so wild that they needed to be kept in a cage.   Only much later did I realise it was simply a fence to keep them safe from the road and to stop footballs from flying out. As an older child, still deep in that sheltered ignorance, I had absurd visions of these caged children running riot in some kind of dark, Dickensian establishment. However, recently I’ve joined a lovely group called Flashback Bognor Regis and I asked if anyone remembered the little school.   The floodgates opened and a wonderful set of warm and happy memories poured in from group members some of whom had parents and ev...