Childhood

left: the violin owned by my great grandfather that he used to teach his students. Handed down to me as I used to play violin as a child, however it has never been restored.

right: My great grandfather working as a waiter at a garden party event. I don’tthinkI’vegotonespecificmemoryfrommychildhood, when I lived in Weybridge, it was mostly taken up with the war time, everyday was different, if it was the summertime you just went out and played, it was surreal really.

Before that we lived in the pub atNorth Wraxall, my father owned the pub, he was a professional violinist and he used to play in the silent movies in Weybridge and in Alton, Hampshire, which is where I was born, and he was also a violinist at the cinema. I was too young to see him play before we moved to Bath for a short period of time and then we moved to the pub where my father took the licence on at North Wraxall.

That was where I was of an age where I could start to remember things, between the ages of 2 to 5. My memory there was that we used to make our own electricity, my father used to run a generator during the nighttime for the cars coming down the road, it was the only place around that there was electric light in the village. The engine used to start on petrol and then run on Paraffin and I remember one day going down to the tank on my own and opening the tap and flooding the place with Paraffin!

“

A“ nother time I was taken by a steam lorry, these two chaps would drive the steam lorry taking some stone from Bath, from the quarry there to Chippenham, they called into the pub for their lunch, and they said to my father “can we take Peter with us on the lorry?” which they did, on the steam lorry, and when I’d gone my mother had been looking for me and she said to my father “Where’s Peter?” “I don’t know, I don’t know where he is” he replied and he’d forgotten all about it, I think he’d had a couple of drinks.

It was absolutely pouring with rain, as black as night, and my mother is wondering around the village, asking people where I was!

That was my most memorable time, but the steamlorry, even now sticks in my mind, a great big Sentinel, Sentinel Steam Lorry.

Photos taken from outside the Shoe Inn, North Wraxall, owned by my great grandfather. Photos taken in the early to mid 1930’s.

Grandpa with his father, Arthur, mother, Mabel, and grandmother Margaret.