Parenting.....at the Seaside!

Parenting…..at the Seaside!


I took up my new job as Additional Public Health Inspector to Clacton Urban District Council in May 1956, and we moved to 39 The Chase, Holland-on-Sea on the 18th of that month. I remember the exact date, as it was my 35th birthday. We had been married ten years and, after a disabling operation that was to affect her for the rest of her life, Heather had survived a severe and life-threatening illness. We had two sons, Peter who would be three in July, and Andrew, just five months old. 39 The Chase was a modern three bed-roomed Council house situated in a residential road just two or three hundred yards from the cliffs and the sea front. Holland-on-Sea (originally the village of Little Holland) is a quiet suburb of Clacton-on-Sea.

It was a pleasant enough house in an attractive location but, from the start, Heather and I thought of it only as a temporary home. We had decided that we would remain for some years in Clacton (though I don’t think that either of us imagined we would spend the rest of our lives here!) and we wanted to buy our own home. We thought that we could just about afford a mortgage on the kind of home we wanted.

We had some quite firm ideas about this future home. Heather insisted that it must be a bungalow. With remarkable foresight she realized that the time would come when we would find stairs difficult. We also needed three bedrooms – we expected to have occasional guests, and we hadn’t at that time ruled out the possibility of a third child, perhaps a sister for Pete and Andy. We would like to have a garden and to be within walking distance of the sea front and of an Infants’ and Junior School. And, of course, we needed to be able to afford it!

88 Dudley Road met all those criteria. Dudley Road wasn’t, and isn’t, ‘posh’. I once heard it described by a Council official as ‘working class residential.’ That suited us. We had no pretensions to gentility! The neighbours on both sides seemed friendly people, not unlike us. St. Osyth Road Infants School was within easy walking distance and Alton Park Junior School not a great deal further. Dudley Road was also situated about half-way between Clacton’s two secondary schools, Clacton County High School and what was then Pathfields Secondary Modern School, though we weren’t then thinking so far ahead. The town centre and sea front were further away – but not very far, and we did have a car. There was quite a large garden at the rear of the bungalow and a small one at the front.

We moved in, in October 1956. An oddity about Dudley Road at the time, and for some time after we moved there, was the street lighting by old-fashioned gas lamps. Every evening at dusk the lamplighter would cycle down the road with his pole, with which he opened the glass window of each street lamp and lit the gas inside! Eventually, of course, the ‘new-fangled electric street lighting’ was provided and this relic of an earlier age disappeared forever. I wish I had taken a photograph of that lamp lighter in action!
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Our bungalow itself was basic. It had been built in 1953, three years earlier. At the back was quite a large living-kitchen with walk-in pantry. There was a rather small bay-windowed sitting room at the front, three bedrooms, a bathroom with bath, washbasin and toilet with a rather old-fashioned high level flushing cistern, and a quite wide hallway (ideal for parking a pram!). The floors were Marley-tiled and uncarpeted and space heating was from open solid fuel fires in sitting room and living kitchen. The kitchen fire had a back-boiler that was the source of the bungalow’s hot water supply. There was a driveway, just big enough to accommodate a small car but not big enough to provide space for a garage.

It was habitable but by no means luxurious. It was many years before cavity wall infilling, roof space insulation, double-glazing and gas fired central heating made it a really comfortable dwelling. Much later Heather and I had an extension (a small utility room) built on the back and a porch provided at the front. As time passed, we installed a new bathroom suite and the essentials of late twentieth century and twenty-first century living – telephone, fridge, freezer, washing machine, tv, video, computer and so on.

Heather and I were never wealthy but, for some twenty years before Heather’s life ended, she and I always had enough money in a savings account and enough cash in our joint current account, to deal with any emergency that might arise. This was not true of our early days in Clacton. Looking back over the years it shocks me to realize how very hard up we were when we first moved to Dudley Road.

I had a loan from the Council for the purchase of the car that I needed for my duties. This had to be repaid by a deduction from my salary every month. There were the mortgage repayments (tiny by present-day standards but crippling then!). There were the rates, the water rates, the electricity bills (we had no gas at that time), and the bills for fuel delivery. There wasn’t much left to feed and clothe a family that included two rapidly growing young children. There was nothing for ‘treats’, for holidays, for domestic emergencies, or for ‘savings for a rainy day’.

We survived. The car loan was paid off and I began to earn a little extra money from my spare time freelance writing, a sum that increased year by year. Buying a small portable typewriter was an investment, worrying at the time but one that paid off handsomely. We weren’t too proud to accept hand-me-down clothing for the boys, and for a year or two, we told ourselves that living by the seaside, we didn’t need a holiday.

It was only for a year or two though. Since our honeymoon in 1946 (and that had had to be cut short so that I could attend a training scheme course!) Heather and I had taken only one holiday together. It had been in the summer of 1954. Baby Pete had been just a year old and we had spent a week in a hired caravan on a site by the sea in Aldeburgh. Now that we felt we were settled, we were determined, for the children’s sake as much as our own, to have a break of at least a week every year.

In the spring of 1960 a small second-hand touring caravan was advertised for sale in the local newspaper at £50. I bought it and had a towing bracket fitted to the rear of my Ford Popular car. We stored the van in the corner of the field of a friendly farmer in Little Clacton and used it, at first for family days out, and then for occasional weekends away. The very first of these was at a camping site beside the River Orwell at Nacton just outside Ipswich, an area that I remembered well from my youth.

We soon found that the caravan was too small for the four of us. We supplemented it with a small ridge tent. Heather and Andy (then four years old) slept in the van, while Pete and I slept in the tent. We also realized that it was much colder at night than we had imagined it would be. We needed thicker and warmer sleeping bags! We enjoyed our stay at that site beside the river and returned there for several weekends during the two or three years that we had the van, and later when we had changed to tented camping. One summer, during the school holidays, we stayed there for a week. I drove to the office in Clacton each day while Heather and the two boys stayed in the camp.

We used that van for three summer holidays, the first one camping on the south coast near Brighton. On our way home we stopped overnight at a campsite owned by West Ham Corporation at Debden Green, near Loughton – a site that we were to return to on several later occasions. The next year we were away for a fortnight, spending a week in the New Forest and the second week at a municipal site on the outskirts of Brighton. The third holiday was at a Caravan Club Site on the edge of the Forest of Dean, from which we explored the lovely Wye Valley and visited Tredegar in one of the South Wales mining valleys.

We decided that we could travel further and faster with a tent. We bought a large second-hand ‘two-bedroom’ frame tent. Putting the frame together was a bit of a problem but Pete was becoming old enough to be a real help. It served us well for some time but finally came to grief when its frame was irreparably damaged one stormy night while we were camping on Arenig Fawr, a particularly bleak and inhospitable Welsh mountain! We replaced it with two tents – a not-so-large frame tent for Heather and myself and for family meals, and a smaller tent for Pete and Andy to sleep (and sometimes quarrel!) in. These tents remained in use until the boys grew up and left home – and family holidays were over.

We began taking camping holidays because that was all that we could afford. We continued to take them because we always thoroughly enjoyed them. The major operation that had ‘cured’ Heather’s TB had left her with eight ribs missing on one side and with only one lung fully operational. She was far from being a hearty, outdoor girl – but she loved camping. She enjoyed open air cooking (on a calor gas cooker or on a small gaz burner when we left the camp site for a picnic day out) and did more than her share of the camping chores. We replaced our saloon car with an estate and we arranged it so that, on long journeys, she could lie on an airbed in the

Thus, we camped in mid and south Wales, in the Yorkshire Dales, on the Scottish borders and in the Highlands. We once pitched our tents on the cliffs of John o’ Groats. Obviously, the following year we had to camp as near as we possibly could to Lands End. This gave us a taste for Cornwall and for three summers in succession we camped in the Lands End peninsula, near the little town of Mousehole (pronounced Mouzzel)

It was 1970 before we ventured abroad, crossing the Channel by Hovercraft from Ramsgate to Calais. We drove through France to Switzerland, camping high in the mountains of Valais at Champex sur Lac, only a few miles from the Great St. Bernard Pass. On subsequent years we camped twice in the Aosta Valley in the Italian Alps, once in Austria’s Vorarlberg Province and once beside a lake in Austria’s Tyrol.

Our home in Clacton-on-Sea meant, of course, that even when we weren’t away on holiday we were still ‘at the seaside’. Pete and Andy really appreciated spending their childhood within half a mile or so of the beach. Both quickly learned to swim and during the school holidays (when we weren’t away camping!) they would often go down to the sea front or, on their bicycles, explore the unspoilt countryside to be found just beyond the confines of the town. Heather and I, perhaps with my mother (Gran) who often stayed with us, would sometimes drive with them to neighbouring Frinton, Walton or Brightlingsea, or perhaps Harwich, where Heather’s father’s family had its origins.

Life wasn’t, of course, all holiday – though our family holidays were something to which we looked forward throughout the year.

For much of the time that Pete and Andy were growing up, I was a public health inspector. It was not a job that I enjoyed or was very good at. What I did enjoy was not actually doing the job – but talking about it! Fortunately it was not a task that my other colleagues relished. So, whenever we received a request from a school, a further educational institution, a Women’s Institute or similar voluntary organisation for a speaker about public health, food hygiene, refuse collection and disposal, or the work of the Health Department generally, I would step into the breach. I built up a collection of colour slides that I would use with a projector to illustrate my talk.

The experience I gained certainly helped me get the job that I really did enjoy – that of Public Relations Officer, at the time of Local Government reorganisation in 1973/’74. In that job I gave a great many talks to a great many organisations about the work of the Council generally. I always asked for ‘Any questions?’ at the end of these talks. On one such occasion a lady in the audience asked, ‘Are you the same Mr Hall who gave us a talk about food hygiene, ten or so years ago – or was that a younger, thinner man?’

At the end of the ‘60s, when Pete and Andy were in the their mid-teens, I was appointed Clacton’s Housing Manager. It was a post in which I was much happier and, I think, much more successful. They I am sure, noted this. I have little doubt that that was why, after making false starts; they both opted for a career in housing management. In 1973, with reorganisation imminent, I didn’t get the job of Director of Housing to the new Tendring District Council, for which I had hoped. I did however get the job of Public Relations Officer which, though much less financially rewarding, I preferred in every other respect.

Meanwhile Pete and Andy’s school days were in progress. At the age of five both boys began at what was then St. Osyth Road Infants School (now a community education institution), and at seven went on to Alton Park Junior School. Those were the days of ‘selective education’. At eleven-plus, Junior School pupils took an examination that decided whether they would go to Pathfields Secondary Modern School (now Colbayns High School) or to Clacton County High School (then a grammar school). Both schools are, of course, now comprehensives.

In view of Pete’s subsequent academic progress it might have been thought that, in his case, success in the eleven-plus exam that would have been a foregone conclusion. This wasn’t so. At the Infants School he had had difficulty in grasping the simplest principles of arithmetic (twelve years later he was to secure an ‘A’ grade pass in his ‘A’ level Maths exam!) and seemed to imagine that when asked, for instance, to add three matches to four, he was supposed to guess the answer – and he always guessed wrongly! A couple of years later Mr Cordwell, the Head Teacher of Alton Park Junior School asked me to call to see him about Pete’s progress. He told me that Pete was intelligent and was clearly destined for an academic career, but that he was painfully slow with all his work. Unless he could somehow speed up, there was a risk that he wouldn’t pass the first hurdle, getting selected for the County High School.

By the time the eleven-plus came round Pete’s performance at school had improved considerably and he was, in fact, selected for the High School. Even there, his progress at first was far from spectacular. Every year though, saw an improvement until; at the end of the fourth year, he was one of the specially promising pupils who were chosen for the ‘Express Class’ – taking GCE ‘O’ level and ‘A’ level exams a year earlier than was usually expected.

In the Express Class he continued to excel, obtaining six ‘O’ level GCE passes at Grade 1, one at Grade 2, and two at Grade 3, and going on to obtain five Grade ‘A’ passes at ‘A’ level plus a first class pass in Cambridge University’s ‘Use of English’ examination – a prerequisite of admission to the University. Jointly with another 6th former, he was awarded a prize for ‘Best “A” Level Examination Result’.

That year four CCHS pupils gained places in Cambridge University – Pete was one of the three who went to Selwyn College with which Clacton County High School had a special association. Most students, going to Cambridge for their interviews with the college Admissions Tutors were either rejected, or accepted on condition that they obtained high pass grades in a number of subjects in their forthcoming ‘A’ level exams. Students from Clacton County High School’s Express Class already had their ‘A’ level examination results and were able to have an almost immediate decision.

Pete had inborn ability. There’s no doubt about that. And he worked hard and conscientiously to develop and make the most of that ability. It is though; absolutely impossible to over-estimate the help and support that he received from his mother during his years at the High School. We were both concerned and conscientious parents, but my contribution to our sons’ education was nothing compared with Heather’s. Her frailty and recurring ill health meant that she was always at home for them, always genuinely interested in everything they did, and always ready with support and encouragement.

She was patient, understanding, and always ready to help. My experience as a child (and I think Heather’s was the same) had been that my parents were unable to offer much help, because they didn’t really know much about the subjects we were learning. Where they might have helped, with arithmetic for instance, they didn’t do things ‘the same way’ as our teachers did.

Heather would delve into the boys’ textbooks to make sure that she did know as much as they did about their subjects. If something was done in a different way from that with which she was familiar, she learnt the new way. She had, like me, studied Maths up to ‘school leaving certificate standard’. When Pete progressed to ‘A’ level maths, she studied books on advanced mathematics so that she could discuss the subject intelligently with him.

Pete too, had a great deal of ill-health in his schooldays. He was very subject to attacks of bronchitis and what I now realize was asthma. He would continue with his schoolwork at home with Heather as his tutor. Heather was a born teacher. This was evident not only with our sons but with the Quaker children’s class that she taught for some years. It was a great pity that, as a wartime child, she didn’t have the same educational opportunities that her much younger sister later enjoyed.

At the Quaker Memorial Meeting after Heather’s death, Pete spoke very movingly of how, when he had been ill and in bed, his mother had often read poetry to him. When, in July 2006, he visited her as her life was coming to an end, he did the same for her.

Pete actually sat his ‘A’ level exams just before his seventeenth birthday. He thus had a ‘gap’ year before his admission to Selwyn College. Nowadays I suppose he would have spent it backpacking in Thailand, Venezuela or somewhere equally exotic. Then though, he found himself a job in the Clacton store of the Eastern Electricity Board. There he added to his bank account and gained useful experience of the world of work. He was told when he left that there would certainly be a job for him with Eastern Electricity, if he wanted one when he had graduated.

Peter studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge, concentrating on biochemistry. He obtained an ‘upper second’. His tutor urged him to stay on and read for a Ph.D but he felt that at Cambridge he was learning more and more about less and less – and was eager to get out into the ‘real world’. He at first secured a job at the Radio-Chemical Centre in Amersham. Heather and I were a little anxious about this at it involved handling radioactive chemicals. We were therefore not sorry when he decided that it was not a career for him. He had always (thanks to his Quaker upbringing?) had a strong social conscience and, while working at the radiochemical centre had done voluntary work at Centrepoint, the central London shelter for the homeless. Younger brother Andy was by this time a trainee-housing manager with a London Borough and was finding his career an interesting and satisfying one


Pete thought he’d like to do the same, even though it would mean a huge drop in salary. He obtained a trainee post with Enfield Borough Council, beginning a career that took him almost to the very top of the local government ladder and then on to the foundation of his own consultancy, HUBSolutions Ltd. That is not my story, but Pete’s, to tell. Needless to say, Heather and I followed his career occasionally
anxiously but always with great pride.

Pete, I think, resembled his Mum in both appearance and temperament. Younger son Andy was more like me in both. Andy’s progress at school was less spectacular but steadier than Pete’s. When Pete was at St. Osyth Road Infants’ School, Mrs Daldy was Head Teacher. She was, I thought, a wonderful teacher, kind but firm and loved by her pupils. She took a pride in passing her children on to Alton Park Junior School, just two or three hundred yards away, already able to read and write and do simple sums. By the time Andy started there she had retired and had been replaced by a Mrs Morris, of whom neither Heather nor I had a very high opinion.

She was much more ‘up-to-date’ than Mrs Daldy, convinced that learning should be fun, concentrating on ‘strengthening tiny fingers’ with plasticine modelling and similar pursuits and convinced that children would effortlessly discover how to read and write, by some kind of osmosis. In fact Heather taught Andy to read and write and, for the last three months of the time that Andy should have been at St. Osyth Road Infants School she kept him at home to do so. During that period the Education Welfare Officer (in my childhood it would have been the dreaded ‘school board man’) called. Persuaded that Heather was giving Andy at least as good an education as he would have been receiving at the school, and assured that he would turn up regularly at Alton Park School in September, he departed and bothered us no more.

At Alton Park School Andy was always in the top half of the class but he was, I think nervy, and possibly lacking in self-confidence. I was a ‘pencil chewer’ myself at school, but Andy’s ‘chewing’ put mine in the shade. He would wreck pens and pencils and then he would chew away at his tie – reducing it to a wet and bedraggled rag! A teacher wrote ironically on his otherwise good school report – ‘He takes a consuming interest in his work!


Unlike either Pete or myself (though Heather told me that she was quite a good sprinter when she was at school) Andy had an aptitude for sport, for football and for some athletics. I was once asked to be one of the judges on the school’s sports day and had an opportunity to see him in action on the racetrack. He had a most extraordinary style; hurling himself down the track with arms and legs seeming to fly in all directions. He’d have never become an Olympic athlete but he did tend to come first or second at the primary school’s track events ..

While we had wondered how Pete would do in the 11-plus exam I don’t think that Heather and I ever doubted that Andy would follow his brother to Clacton County High School. And so he did. It couldn’t have been easy, following a brother who was, by the time Andy arrived at the school, beginning to be noted as both talented and hard working.

Andy was a much more flamboyant character, eager to demonstrate machismo and dare-devilry. There comes a stage in a boy’s life (I went through it myself so I know), usually in the early teens, when he tries to give his mates the impression that he is a freedom-loving young gentleman who just happens to lodge with his parents but is actually quite independent of them. He also tries to impress his mates with the idea that he can perform brilliantly in tests and exams without ever needing to do any tedious homework.

Andy was actually very conscientious with his homework, but he didn’t want anyone to know that. If there was an exciting play on tv he’d leave his work to watch its beginning. Then he’d return to his homework, dropping in again about halfway through the play, hoping that something quite exciting would happen during the five minutes or so that he would spare to watch it. Finally he’d look in for a few minutes at the very end. Next morning he would be able to hand in his completed homework, and discuss with his friends the merits of the play he had ‘watched’ the evening before.

Andy was very good at the subjects that I had been good at during my schooldays – English language and Literature, History, Geography, Religious Knowledge and so on. For his ‘O’ level subjects he had to take at least one science. Wisely he did as I would have done and chose Biology. He then had to make a choice between German and Chemistry. He was quite good at German but unwisely, I think, chose Chemistry. Heather and I thought at the time that that was because he thought of languages as being more ‘girlie’ subjects. He has since told me though, that it was for the ostensibly more sensible reason that he feared if he studied two languages at the same time he would get them confused. I doubt if he would have. I know that, at that age, I would have found Chemistry at ‘O’level alarmingly difficult. I think that that was probably one of the many ways in which Andy resembled me!

In the event, Andy’s ‘O’ level exam results were very good indeed – but I think that they could have been even better had he chosen his subjects differently.

One extra-curricular subject at which he was, and still is very good, was photography. We gave him the best equipment that we could afford and he used it very skilfully. On holiday in Austria (he must have been about fifteen) he took a photo of his mum in the Tyrol that I have enlarged and now have framed in the sitting room. He more recently took a ‘candid camera’ picture of Heather and myself in profile that is also framed and in the sitting room and that I have also used to illustrate ‘The Final Years’ in this autobiography.
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Men often have a ‘mid-life crisis’ in their fifties when they see old age creeping up on them. Do boys have a not-dissimilar ‘mid-teens’ crisis when they begin to appreciate the proximity of adult-hood? I think that I probably had one. I remember that the year before I took my ‘Matric’ exam I did appallingly at school – even at subjects like English and History at which I had been accustomed to excel.

I wonder if that is what happened to Andy at about the same age? At sixteen he seemed to me to be increasingly nervy and ill assured. He took a major role in a school play but told Heather and I nothing about it, so that we couldn’t be in the audience. Did he feel that we were expecting more of him than he could deliver? It was shortly before his ‘O’ level exams. Was he working too hard and worrying too much? I’m a born worrier and I started to wonder if he might be heading for a nervous breakdown.

Finally, after he had taken his ‘O’ levels and we were discussing our summer holiday, he announced that he didn’t want to come away with us on holiday that year. He didn’t want to stay at school and take his ‘A’ levels. He was sixteen and he wanted to leave school and get a job. Heather and I did our best to dissuade him. At least to wait till after he had his ‘O’ level results. If he didn’t want to come on holiday for us, we could make other arrangements for him. Would he carry on studying for his ‘A’ levels if we could get him a place in a 6th Form College?

He was adamant. Pleas and appeals to reason failed. We certainly didn’t want to provoke the kind of row that would end with his slamming his way out of the house and swearing that he’d never come home again. He found himself a job as a trainee in the Civil Service and accommodation in a nearby hostel. We did all we could to help him. I recall that I went out with him to buy a new suit and a case in which to take his belongings to London. Pete was on holiday from University and went up to London with him to settle him in his new ‘home’.

It was a sad day at 88 Dudley Road. Heather blamed herself and said that she had failed him. I tried to cheer her up by reminding her that we had both left school and started work at 16. As she pointed out though, we hadn’t left home to do so. Matters weren’t helped by the fact that Heather had a gynaecological problem at about that time and had to go into hospital for a few days for a ‘d and c’.

We had a letter from Andy that cheered Heather up a little. He had started work and was OK. He was studying in his spare time for his ‘A’ levels, and was playing football at lunchtimes with some other lads from the hostel. We decided to take our holiday as we had planned. We drove to Austria and camped in the Tyrol. Pete had passed his driving test and we shared the driving. We missed Andy’s presence though.

The ‘O’ level results were published. Andy had done very well indeed. Heather was sure, as were several of his former schoolmates that he would now come back to Clacton – but he didn’t. On a visit home, he told us that there had been times when, on his own, he had been lonely and miserable; but he had never for one moment regretted his decision to leave school and find work.

We had mixed feelings when Andy let us know that he had given up his ‘A’ Level study and had left the Civil Service for Local Government. He felt that he needed vocational training. His good ‘O’ level results, and friendly help from his Civil Service seniors, had secured him a post as trainee housing officer with Newham Borough Council. He had found and moved into a small flat in Hackney and was now studying for the Institute of Housing’s Housing Management examination. Heather still felt that he should have gone to university but we were both pleased that he now seemed to have decided on his career. I, of course, was especially happy that he should have chosen one in which I had found satisfaction.

Andy studied hard for that examination and on his visits to Clacton I was able to help him a little with my own knowledge of Building Construction and, in particular, of hot and cold water supply and drainage. The exam was in two parts and Heather was particularly pleased that before sitting each part he took a week’s holiday and came back to Clacton for his final revision. He had his own old room for his study and emerged from it only for meals! He passed both parts of the Institute of Housing’s examination at his first attempt, and became a professionally qualified Housing Manager.

The story of Andy’s subsequent career, his marriage and the birth of his daughter, our first and only granddaughter, is his to tell. I feel – and Heather eventually felt the same – that Andy’s dogged pursuit of independence and his passing the by-no-means easy examinations of the Institute of Housing after intense spare-time study, were as praiseworthy as the exploits of his brother. Heather and I had every reason to be proud of the achievements of both of our sons, and to have no regrets about the way that we had brought them up, and the values with which we had tried to inspire them.

Neither is now a practising Quaker, but neither has either of them resigned his membership of the Religious Society of Friends. Both have a strong social conscience and uphold what I think of as Quaker values. I am sure that if Heather were able to see them now – and perhaps she is able to – she would be as proud of both of them as I am.