13th August

This is another true story from my dad’s side of the family. This time I have related some of the exploits of his brother John, five years older than Dad and, if anything, more daring. The featured photo is from 1909 and depicts the Nascent Pleasure Beach in Great Yarmouth, which would have been very familiar to my Uncle John.

The audio version is available on Anchor: https://anchor.fm/dashboard/episode/e1mf977

You can find the tales of my dad’s life in the following two links:

Remembrance

An Absolute Riot

13^th August

“Born on 13^th August and unlucky all my life” was always the claim of my dad’s brother John. Sadly, I never knew him, but he was apparently not only a very likeable and kind man but also famous in the family circle for various pranks and associated mishaps. A 1907 baby, he was the sixth of my grandparents’ nine children and was named after his mother’s brother. John was a live wire as a boy, small and bearing a strong resemblance to the French side of my grandmother’s family and inheriting a linguistic gift which enabled him to learn and speak good French and Italian in later life. Drawing on this, he worked as a tour guide in Europe for a time.

My dad, born in April 1912, was just as daring as John, whose idea it had been to climb up the drainpipe on the side of the house one day when they were youngsters. John set off on the ascent with Dad on his back. Halfway up, the drainpipe came away from the side of the house, and the pair of them landed on the path below. As Dad said, he was the unlucky one because he not only hit the ground directly but also had John on top of him. However, they both lived to tell the tale, though their mother’s views are unrecorded!

Mealtimes were evidently action-packed with John or George leading the mayhem. John was adept at trying to goad both his parents – many a time, his mother would be in the kitchen hearing him taunt, “Go on, say it again, Father. You haven’t got the nerve, have you?” while his father, seemingly oblivious to it all, continued reading his newspaper in silence. I don’t know what John was saying on this one famous occasion, but it was probably being repeated in an annoying manner, and his mother walked into the dining room threatening to tip the pan of potatoes on his head if he said it again. These she had just strained and was preparing to dish up. He did say it again, and without a second thought, his mother carried out her threat, so the potatoes landed on John’s head! He then claimed he was scalded – probably scarred for life. She was immediately sorry, and the rest of the family declared John right out of favour as they had to go without potatoes at that meal! As a footnote, he wasn’t scarred for life, to the best of my knowledge.

Living in Great Yarmouth, the sea played a big part in their family life as my grandfather ran a herring curing business, inherited from his Scottish father who had travelled south and settled there on the Norfolk coast. In the early part of the 20^th century, there was a plentiful supply of herring in the North Sea. The art of curing was to smoke the herring over oak wood, the process transforming them into kippers or the famous Yarmouth bloaters, invented by two local families. It seems that herrings in all forms were very popular on the Continent, and they were exported to various European companies with which my grandfather had good business links. Thinking of his sons’ future in the family business, my grandfather decided it would be good for them to learn to speak French and sent three of them – Dad, John and George – to a boarding school in Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast. Although all three learned the language in due course, John excelled at it, becoming fluent very quickly. He was undaunted by the strict discipline that existed at the school and, I understand, more than once was given Saturday afternoon detention (following lessons in the morning), during which he had to learn a number of verses of French poetry and then recite them to one of the masters.

As they were in class on Saturday mornings, there was the compensation of having Thursday afternoons off. The boys spent this free time on the beach, playing sport or just going into the town and spending their pocket money. John was a very good swimmer – when at home he would swim for miles accompanied by the family’s dogs although they would get tired and swim back, leaving him on his own in the sea. The form master at the French school was entrusted with his pupils’ pocket money for safekeeping, handing it out to the boys on Thursday mornings on request. One Thursday John, realising that he had forgotten to ask for his money, went in search of his teacher, only to learn that he was fishing in a small boat, about a mile out. This was no barrier for John. He swam out to the boat and, no doubt shocking his teacher, who would have thought he was well away from civilisation and especially his students, asked for his money. Amazingly, the schoolmaster had the coins with him and handed them over without query. John thanked him and swam back to the Saint-Malo shore, then went off to spend his cash. And they say that teenagers of today are unpredictable!

On returning to England, after his couple of years at the French school, John went into the family business. All the boys had learned to make barrels, and John was no exception. He was a hard worker, up early every day and reporting for duty at 6:00 a.m. but was consistently frustrated by his younger brother Charles, who was slow with everything – the exact opposite of John. Charles would take hours to get ready and, as a result, would saunter down to do his stint of barrel-making anything from 9:00 a.m. onwards. The frustration for John was that when they all finished at 6:00 p.m. each day, Charles had made more barrels than John, and just to add insult to injury, they were well made and sturdy enough to fill with herring, which was their intended purpose.

Even in the pre-war days, there were food inspectors who would arrive at the fish-curing premises, asking to look round. On one occasion, John was detailed to give them a guided tour, which was not a wise decision. During the course of the walk around the fish house, the question of whether the herring were fresh was posed, and John replied that the only way he could tell one way or the other was if they got up and saluted him. You get the impression a minus mark was being given to the company at this point. Apparently, running sea water into the toilets was illegal as it corroded the pipes but, as it was so readily available on the coast, it was often used. When asked if their staff toilets contained sea water, John told the inspector that if he wanted to know, he could bend down and taste it! How the family business continued in its trade after that is a mystery, but I assume his father was called in to restore order and set the record straight, particularly as I understand that their plumbing system had only fresh water flowing through it.

As I’ve said, John was a keen swimmer and for reasons best known to himself came up with a wild idea that I have related in my recollections of Dad’s life. John suggested a sixpenny bet with two of his brothers (George and Dad) that they would all go for a swim on an appointed morning – Dad couldn’t remember whether it was 11^th December or 11^th January – and that both would be out of the sea and dressed on the beach while he was still swimming. Both took on this bet, but when the morning dawned, George decided it was madness, paid John his sixpence and went off to work. My dad, however, who could never resist a challenge, especially where sport was concerned, carried out his promise, only to have to pay John sixpence later as he did have just a quick dip and was dressed and off back home while John remained in the sea. Dad went to work after warming up and having breakfast, but John was so cold he couldn’t go to work at all and spent the day thawing out by the fire, with his mother reprimanding him for his foolishness and making him hot drinks. Bearing in mind that Great Yarmouth juts out quite a way into the North Sea and Dad recalled walking along the promenade on many winter days with icicles forming on his eyelashes, you will get an idea of the temperature of the water on that cold winter morning.

Sadly, I never knew my uncle John, as he died suddenly of a heart attack a few years before I was born. However, his legend lives on. Dad often regaled me with tales of his younger years and the many exploits involving his brother John, and I have recalled a few of these above. I can assure you that these are all true. Despite my tendency towards inventing bizarre situations for my creative writing projects, I couldn’t have made any of these up, and I hope they have made entertaining reading.

 “Bloaters on Yellow Paper”, an 1889 painting by Van Gogh

© Chasqui Penguin, 2022

Twitter: @chasquipenguin