One of my earliest of memories is the journey which I made with one of my aunts who was deaf, dumb, blind and bedridden caused by childhood meningitis. It was a journey made during World War II, from our home in Wallington, Surrey, now within the administrative area of the London Borough of Sutton in Greater London, then near to what had been London's premier airport, Croydon, an area which according to the Eden camp Museum in Yorkshire, more flying bombs landed than elsewhere in the UK.
We travelled by ambulance to the home of a married aunt, who lived in army officer's quarters at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. My care mother, Aunty Harriet, born with the name Margaret and the eldest of the family of seven sisters and four brothers, Lena, travelled with her separately by train, and later we were joined by my birth mother. I was about four years of age and I have only a few visual memories.
I remember being shown the larder at the house which amazed the aunts who I was growing up with because it was well stocked and they were used to ration books and to shops where little was available and on show, The second memory was of an evening walk in sunshine along country lanes and of walking in a field full of corn that was growing higher than myself. The most important memory is of being taken by "Aunty" Mabel by bus to nearby town for a haircut and then buying a small packet of different coloured plasticine strips from a shop in a building the centre piece of a market place. It was a small town in the days where there were few cars or other motorised vehicles. I can remember it being very quiet with few people being on the street. I remember that bus trips were made to Richmond and I also believe Northallerton, having visited both towns earlier to day, as well as Catterick Village and the major military complex of barracks and training facilities that is known throughout Britain and the world as Catterick Camp but renamed Catterick Garrison. It is sixty five years since my stay in the area. It was my first journey of any kind and the first time I can recall travelling or being with someone other than the family.
I used to have a good chronological memory of what I thought and felt as a child which I carried with me hoping one day I would find the words to express which I believed was a unique experience. Later I learnt that the experiences were far from unique although few have been able to successfully communicate themselves although some professionals concerned with young children and some parents who have tuned in have been able to join up their own glimpses and residues of their experience with those of their own children or the children of others that they have been able to communicate with.
I have not visited before during the past thirty five years when a visit could have been made to Catterick and back in a day from my home in the North East, or stopped off on what is by now countless journeys by road south, mainly to see my birth mother and care mothers on the once a month visits between 1992 and 2003 and then to see my birth mother at her residential home between 2003 and the summer of 2004. I would pass by what I now know is one of the barracks which is located alongside the A1M-A1 roadway with a turning off marked Catterick. I did make a few visits to Richmond but could not identify any part which resembled the shop where the plasticine was bought and had thought of going to Catterick one day to see if I confused places as I remember that the visit for the haircut involved what I considered at the time and subsequently to have been a long bus journey. Until the past five years and commencing the 101 project the motivation was not there and since then I doubted if a visit would add anything to my memory or to the significance of what was my first and only recollection of having done anything alone with the person I was subsequently to learn was my birth mother. Even after that visit she remained distant and hostile towards me. Not in any physically aggressive way and even when she was upset with my behaviour I would be aware that she was upset by something that I had or had not done and where Aunty Harriet would be on my side. It has to be remembered that when the sisters talked they talked in Gibraltar Ian Spanish rather than Gibraltar Ian or English, Gibraltar Ian being primarily Gibraltar Ian Spanish with a mixed of English words and sentences included, but omitted if they wished to converse among themselves without English only speaking individuals present understanding what was being said. Of course when you live with closely with someone speaking another language you can pick up the emotional content of what is being communicated, and then its sense as some words and their meaning become familiar, and then as the year pass you assumed you knew what was being said although I did not communicate to anyone that this was so, until doing so by accident. An uncle and an aunt were visiting England on a prolonged stay for the wedding of one of their children and had been told to say if asked that I was the child of Lena the eldest of the sisters. I cannot remember the circumstances in which I was travelling in a car with the uncle and aunt and I believe at least one other relative but not my birth or care mothers or other aunts and during the journey the uncle and his wife spoke in Gibraltar Ian and at one point posed a question or said something which without thinking I commented or answered accurately thus revealing that I knew more what they had been told I knew. I explained that I could not speak Gibraltar Ian but sometimes seemed to know what was being said although I could not usually express it. I was a teenager at the time and could not communicate well in general, especially with adults who were strangers.
There is one other aspect of my memory of this time which is important to mention before trying to write of my experience yesterday when I visited Catterick village and the area of Catterick Garrison I have no visual image or memory of being at Military base. It may have been quite late in the war as my aunt's husband was not there and there is one source which I will approach to learn if they have recollections or information which will fix the period more accurately than I can. The lack of any memory of a military encampment was reinforced because of the experience of Catterick yesterday.
I had not set off until after lunch. I had wanted to write having gone to bed and sleep well before midnight, sitting in fresh air watching the grass grow at Riverside Chester Le Street had good effect and then risen early around six am, something which I repeated again last night and this morning. Last evening I watched some television briefly catching part of a programme which listed the top ten places where it was still possible to buy properties comparatively inexpensively and have a good quality of life. One of the eh places was Chester Le Street and short film of only a few seconds showed the cricket ground as well as the town centre which I had visited only the previous week.
I had made no preparations for the my mini trip and need to be slow and methodical if I am not to set off and then need to return because I have forgotten something important, including in one instance in my former home, closing the front door! It is usually when I am away that I remember I have forgotten something which I need or would have liked to have with me such the connection cable for internet, or the instructions about using my mobile phone to connect to the internet, although in the instance of this visit I had not intended it to be an occasion hen I would need to have internet communication, but I would need to do so on other planned mini trips over the coming two months. I needed to do some ironing having forgotten to take out and hang up several shirts that I washed and dried the previous evening. I needed to carefully water the plants. I made myself lunch and watched the end of Bargain Hunt before switch over to watch a film, The Bold and the Brave with Mickey Rooney, Wendell Corey and Don Taylor as three World War II Gris conquering Italy. Mikey Rooney plays his natural self a cocky street wise private who chases the local ladies who make a living for themselves and their families from the invaders. It is revealed that Mickey has large family of relative which he is expected to support and this includes a wife. He is a brilliant gambler and it one luck game wins several thousand dollars which will provide for his family if he is in a position to get the money to them.
I think Wendell Corey plays his Buddy but it could have been Don Taylor, a man who is also worldly and who finds it difficult to kill when faced with his first experience of man to man combat. This is significant because the two men are led by the preacher, so named because he dos not drink, go with women and is always talking about right and wrong good and evil. His father was a drunk and he has no knowledge of his mother being raised by an uncle on a farm who appears to have lectured him throughout his childhood on the evils of drink and women. I joined the film as Wendell had paid an attractive young Italian girl from Naples (which she had left because she could no longer stand the shame of knowing that her family knew how she was supporting them), to pick up and entertain the Preacher . When he resists all her obvious moves and goes off to find some cold butter milk and then visit a church she is impressed and when he falls in love with her she begins to remember the young girl she had been with dreams of a white dress, a good husband and children.. Then the inevitable happens in that she is recognised by soldiers of previous acquaintance and he rejects her without listening to her story. He also condemns the gambling winnings and instructs Mikey to get rid of the money and then tackles an assignment with ruthless killer ferocity. He is also hard when another GI is injured, putting orders above human and Christian considerations. Having forgotten the name of the film I bought a newspaper during the trip, in part to check on the film title but also because it featured the first young woman killed in combat in Afghanistan. The brief note on the film rightly draws attention that this is film about characters than big battles and about who gets to survive and who does not. The importance of the money to Mickey gets him killed while Preacher is shown to be something of a hypocrite in terms of his theoretical Christian, fight the devil beliefs, although his behaviour is put into the context of his childhood. It is Wendell who finds it difficult to kill and who shows compassion and understanding, ensuring that the bulk of the cash is sent back home to the widow rather than make use of himself and helping the wounded Preacher back to the main force after the mission is completed.
Then in error than intention I forgot the location of Catterick and instead of heading for A1M I went to Sunderland along the coast and took the A19 to Middlesbrough before realising that if I continued I would join the A1M bypassing Catterick. I therefore head across country which involved single track country lanes and attractive North Yorkshire villages to Northallerton which is traffic congested Market when at first I was not clear from the road signs which was the direction to take to reach Catterick and therefore involved two trips through the centre of town is slowing moving traffic passed the old Town Hall building with shops/offices at ground floor and which could have been the building from where the plasticine was bought although it is some distance away from the Catterick complex.
My route took me to the Northern end of Catterick although I was coming from the South and close to the Racecourse and the village which in turn is close to the AIM and what I quickly realised was one of several separate heavily fortified barrack complexes. I recognised nothing about Catterick Village which is very pleasant indeed with several attractive Inns and a delightful Village green as well as few shops and other businesses in a area separate from the Green. There is no indication as with the Racecourse that one is part of what I suspect in one of the major military complex in Europe. It is according to Wikipedia.
I then headed for the main area of the Garrison complex and the extent of the area covered, the number of separate communities involved including the developing Garrison centre when I stopped at a major supermarket for the toilet was overwhelming and had a major emotional impact, not because of my childhood experience but from the combination of that War film and the newspaper article. I have no intention of going into further detail about the nature of the complex other than to emphasis that it is well fortified and that everyone and everything are under the closest scrutiny. However it was at the supermarket that I was made aware that this is an area full of young men and women and their families who have been or who will be going into combat on our behalf and on behalf of others. There was a sense, a contemporary sense of a nation at war, something which one does not get, even in London where there is lots of new concrete around key public buildings. At one level it brought my awareness of what is what like to be under threat during World War 2 not directly from soldiers in combat but from bombs dropped from sky with memories of the air raid shelter and going off to look at the craters where there once had been homes in our neighbourhood, the flying bomb and the trip to Brighton just after the war in Europe had ended and looked at the fortified Beach. These were the connecting links between past and present rather than my own memory of Catterick and the surrounding owns and villages. One discovering was how short is the route from the Garrison town centre to Richmond and where I turned away to return south rather than take the road which head up to Market Square. I had decided that I would return again once I had digested and adjusted to the impact of this first visit. What I need to emphasise that how ever strong the feelings aroused from watching television programmes about operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subsequent funerals of those killed or programmes about the care of those injured, the debates about equipment and the strength of the forces deployed nothing has had such an effect as a short drive through Catterick and a brief stop at the supermarket to bring the reality. Somehow my experience needs to be felt by the British people, not relayed in this way or rough TV and Newspapers, but the sense of their reality which I experienced.
Later I learn that the Garrison town centre was first created in 2000 and that under Defence plans published in 2005 1 billion pounds is being spent to upgrade an develop the Garrison which now embrace a large number of villages to a population of 25000 about double that at present and there are twice the barracks or unit HQ's that I estimated.
We travelled by ambulance to the home of a married aunt, who lived in army officer's quarters at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire. My care mother, Aunty Harriet, born with the name Margaret and the eldest of the family of seven sisters and four brothers, Lena, travelled with her separately by train, and later we were joined by my birth mother. I was about four years of age and I have only a few visual memories.
I remember being shown the larder at the house which amazed the aunts who I was growing up with because it was well stocked and they were used to ration books and to shops where little was available and on show, The second memory was of an evening walk in sunshine along country lanes and of walking in a field full of corn that was growing higher than myself. The most important memory is of being taken by "Aunty" Mabel by bus to nearby town for a haircut and then buying a small packet of different coloured plasticine strips from a shop in a building the centre piece of a market place. It was a small town in the days where there were few cars or other motorised vehicles. I can remember it being very quiet with few people being on the street. I remember that bus trips were made to Richmond and I also believe Northallerton, having visited both towns earlier to day, as well as Catterick Village and the major military complex of barracks and training facilities that is known throughout Britain and the world as Catterick Camp but renamed Catterick Garrison. It is sixty five years since my stay in the area. It was my first journey of any kind and the first time I can recall travelling or being with someone other than the family.
I used to have a good chronological memory of what I thought and felt as a child which I carried with me hoping one day I would find the words to express which I believed was a unique experience. Later I learnt that the experiences were far from unique although few have been able to successfully communicate themselves although some professionals concerned with young children and some parents who have tuned in have been able to join up their own glimpses and residues of their experience with those of their own children or the children of others that they have been able to communicate with.
I have not visited before during the past thirty five years when a visit could have been made to Catterick and back in a day from my home in the North East, or stopped off on what is by now countless journeys by road south, mainly to see my birth mother and care mothers on the once a month visits between 1992 and 2003 and then to see my birth mother at her residential home between 2003 and the summer of 2004. I would pass by what I now know is one of the barracks which is located alongside the A1M-A1 roadway with a turning off marked Catterick. I did make a few visits to Richmond but could not identify any part which resembled the shop where the plasticine was bought and had thought of going to Catterick one day to see if I confused places as I remember that the visit for the haircut involved what I considered at the time and subsequently to have been a long bus journey. Until the past five years and commencing the 101 project the motivation was not there and since then I doubted if a visit would add anything to my memory or to the significance of what was my first and only recollection of having done anything alone with the person I was subsequently to learn was my birth mother. Even after that visit she remained distant and hostile towards me. Not in any physically aggressive way and even when she was upset with my behaviour I would be aware that she was upset by something that I had or had not done and where Aunty Harriet would be on my side. It has to be remembered that when the sisters talked they talked in Gibraltar Ian Spanish rather than Gibraltar Ian or English, Gibraltar Ian being primarily Gibraltar Ian Spanish with a mixed of English words and sentences included, but omitted if they wished to converse among themselves without English only speaking individuals present understanding what was being said. Of course when you live with closely with someone speaking another language you can pick up the emotional content of what is being communicated, and then its sense as some words and their meaning become familiar, and then as the year pass you assumed you knew what was being said although I did not communicate to anyone that this was so, until doing so by accident. An uncle and an aunt were visiting England on a prolonged stay for the wedding of one of their children and had been told to say if asked that I was the child of Lena the eldest of the sisters. I cannot remember the circumstances in which I was travelling in a car with the uncle and aunt and I believe at least one other relative but not my birth or care mothers or other aunts and during the journey the uncle and his wife spoke in Gibraltar Ian and at one point posed a question or said something which without thinking I commented or answered accurately thus revealing that I knew more what they had been told I knew. I explained that I could not speak Gibraltar Ian but sometimes seemed to know what was being said although I could not usually express it. I was a teenager at the time and could not communicate well in general, especially with adults who were strangers.
There is one other aspect of my memory of this time which is important to mention before trying to write of my experience yesterday when I visited Catterick village and the area of Catterick Garrison I have no visual image or memory of being at Military base. It may have been quite late in the war as my aunt's husband was not there and there is one source which I will approach to learn if they have recollections or information which will fix the period more accurately than I can. The lack of any memory of a military encampment was reinforced because of the experience of Catterick yesterday.
I had not set off until after lunch. I had wanted to write having gone to bed and sleep well before midnight, sitting in fresh air watching the grass grow at Riverside Chester Le Street had good effect and then risen early around six am, something which I repeated again last night and this morning. Last evening I watched some television briefly catching part of a programme which listed the top ten places where it was still possible to buy properties comparatively inexpensively and have a good quality of life. One of the eh places was Chester Le Street and short film of only a few seconds showed the cricket ground as well as the town centre which I had visited only the previous week.
I had made no preparations for the my mini trip and need to be slow and methodical if I am not to set off and then need to return because I have forgotten something important, including in one instance in my former home, closing the front door! It is usually when I am away that I remember I have forgotten something which I need or would have liked to have with me such the connection cable for internet, or the instructions about using my mobile phone to connect to the internet, although in the instance of this visit I had not intended it to be an occasion hen I would need to have internet communication, but I would need to do so on other planned mini trips over the coming two months. I needed to do some ironing having forgotten to take out and hang up several shirts that I washed and dried the previous evening. I needed to carefully water the plants. I made myself lunch and watched the end of Bargain Hunt before switch over to watch a film, The Bold and the Brave with Mickey Rooney, Wendell Corey and Don Taylor as three World War II Gris conquering Italy. Mikey Rooney plays his natural self a cocky street wise private who chases the local ladies who make a living for themselves and their families from the invaders. It is revealed that Mickey has large family of relative which he is expected to support and this includes a wife. He is a brilliant gambler and it one luck game wins several thousand dollars which will provide for his family if he is in a position to get the money to them.
I think Wendell Corey plays his Buddy but it could have been Don Taylor, a man who is also worldly and who finds it difficult to kill when faced with his first experience of man to man combat. This is significant because the two men are led by the preacher, so named because he dos not drink, go with women and is always talking about right and wrong good and evil. His father was a drunk and he has no knowledge of his mother being raised by an uncle on a farm who appears to have lectured him throughout his childhood on the evils of drink and women. I joined the film as Wendell had paid an attractive young Italian girl from Naples (which she had left because she could no longer stand the shame of knowing that her family knew how she was supporting them), to pick up and entertain the Preacher . When he resists all her obvious moves and goes off to find some cold butter milk and then visit a church she is impressed and when he falls in love with her she begins to remember the young girl she had been with dreams of a white dress, a good husband and children.. Then the inevitable happens in that she is recognised by soldiers of previous acquaintance and he rejects her without listening to her story. He also condemns the gambling winnings and instructs Mikey to get rid of the money and then tackles an assignment with ruthless killer ferocity. He is also hard when another GI is injured, putting orders above human and Christian considerations. Having forgotten the name of the film I bought a newspaper during the trip, in part to check on the film title but also because it featured the first young woman killed in combat in Afghanistan. The brief note on the film rightly draws attention that this is film about characters than big battles and about who gets to survive and who does not. The importance of the money to Mickey gets him killed while Preacher is shown to be something of a hypocrite in terms of his theoretical Christian, fight the devil beliefs, although his behaviour is put into the context of his childhood. It is Wendell who finds it difficult to kill and who shows compassion and understanding, ensuring that the bulk of the cash is sent back home to the widow rather than make use of himself and helping the wounded Preacher back to the main force after the mission is completed.
Then in error than intention I forgot the location of Catterick and instead of heading for A1M I went to Sunderland along the coast and took the A19 to Middlesbrough before realising that if I continued I would join the A1M bypassing Catterick. I therefore head across country which involved single track country lanes and attractive North Yorkshire villages to Northallerton which is traffic congested Market when at first I was not clear from the road signs which was the direction to take to reach Catterick and therefore involved two trips through the centre of town is slowing moving traffic passed the old Town Hall building with shops/offices at ground floor and which could have been the building from where the plasticine was bought although it is some distance away from the Catterick complex.
My route took me to the Northern end of Catterick although I was coming from the South and close to the Racecourse and the village which in turn is close to the AIM and what I quickly realised was one of several separate heavily fortified barrack complexes. I recognised nothing about Catterick Village which is very pleasant indeed with several attractive Inns and a delightful Village green as well as few shops and other businesses in a area separate from the Green. There is no indication as with the Racecourse that one is part of what I suspect in one of the major military complex in Europe. It is according to Wikipedia.
I then headed for the main area of the Garrison complex and the extent of the area covered, the number of separate communities involved including the developing Garrison centre when I stopped at a major supermarket for the toilet was overwhelming and had a major emotional impact, not because of my childhood experience but from the combination of that War film and the newspaper article. I have no intention of going into further detail about the nature of the complex other than to emphasis that it is well fortified and that everyone and everything are under the closest scrutiny. However it was at the supermarket that I was made aware that this is an area full of young men and women and their families who have been or who will be going into combat on our behalf and on behalf of others. There was a sense, a contemporary sense of a nation at war, something which one does not get, even in London where there is lots of new concrete around key public buildings. At one level it brought my awareness of what is what like to be under threat during World War 2 not directly from soldiers in combat but from bombs dropped from sky with memories of the air raid shelter and going off to look at the craters where there once had been homes in our neighbourhood, the flying bomb and the trip to Brighton just after the war in Europe had ended and looked at the fortified Beach. These were the connecting links between past and present rather than my own memory of Catterick and the surrounding owns and villages. One discovering was how short is the route from the Garrison town centre to Richmond and where I turned away to return south rather than take the road which head up to Market Square. I had decided that I would return again once I had digested and adjusted to the impact of this first visit. What I need to emphasise that how ever strong the feelings aroused from watching television programmes about operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subsequent funerals of those killed or programmes about the care of those injured, the debates about equipment and the strength of the forces deployed nothing has had such an effect as a short drive through Catterick and a brief stop at the supermarket to bring the reality. Somehow my experience needs to be felt by the British people, not relayed in this way or rough TV and Newspapers, but the sense of their reality which I experienced.
Later I learn that the Garrison town centre was first created in 2000 and that under Defence plans published in 2005 1 billion pounds is being spent to upgrade an develop the Garrison which now embrace a large number of villages to a population of 25000 about double that at present and there are twice the barracks or unit HQ's that I estimated.
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