My childhood
Growing up in post war England, the space race, the sixties.

Postwar England.
     We lived in Bodkin Cottages, a single structure by the side of the Maidstone West goods yard.  The structure was owned by British Railways who had divided it into three two-storey homes.  Bodkin Cottages were made of Kentish Ragstone and a plaque over the door said that they had been built in 1858.  I think the building was much older but the railway had converted it to cattages at that date.  They were demolished in 1968 to make way for a parking lot.  While I was young boy it was discovered that a tunnel connected them to the Archbishop's Palace on the other side of the River Medway, and that they had been originally constructed as stables for the palace.  Numbers 12 and 16 on each end were a large spacious houses, but number 14 in the middle was tiny.  In the late fifties and throughout most of the sixties, my family lived in number 12 and my uncle Ern and Aunty Kath lived in number 16, and almost every day Malcolm and I played with our cousins Roger and Lorraine.  In number 14 lived the Lacy's, and we sometimes played with their only daughter Miriam, who was also our age.

Miriam (left) and Lorraine (right) at the coast.

    Initially we had no televisions, although large crude sets came later and on Saturday evenings the families would get together to eat sweets, drink tea and beer, and watch.   The families would also get together for firework's day (November 5th), and the man who pulled the short straw had his vegetable garden destroyed to make way for a large bonfire.  We had no cars, and could hardly afford the cinema.  The five children would play outside a lot, by the river bank, in Maidstone market just across the street, in the buidler's construction yard along Barker Road where sweet little Jeniifer lived for a short while.  She sometimes also played with us.  I was always good at school, yet I learned much more playing with these friends.  Some of the lessons I learned linger with me still.  I came of age with these people.  The pictures show Miriam and Lorraine at the coast, when they were about nine or ten years old.

    At the age of 11 I went to the tech.  For the first few years, my best friend was an American whose father was a pilot at East Malling airbase.  Tom Richter brought me lots of American newspapers and magazines, plastic construction kits of rockets, and I became interested in the U.S., learning its history and its political system, and I was devastated when Kenedy was assasinated.  In 1963 Tom's family left for the U.S. and Tom sent me postcards from everyplace he visited, including his final destination in Jacksonville, Florida.  The card is dated 29th August, 1963.  Coincidentally, my eldest son, who is now 23, lives in Jacksonville, just a few miles from the airbase.

The Tech.
    At Maidstone Technical High School for boys I learned about English and Mathematics, History and Geography, Physics and Chemistry, Metalwork and Woodwork.  I earned two "Awards of Merit" (the Tech's equivalent of Nobel Prizes), one in Chemistry and one in Woodwork.  I enjoyed school very much. 

The school was a very dynamic place, with fund-raising activities like the annual fete, and sports days, and plays and Christmas reviews.  And there were many clubs and societies, like the Astronomical Society.  For a few years we operated a school radio service – Radio Oakwood (this was the age of Radio Caroline, a radio station based on a ship anchored off territorial waters) but we were closed down when the French master claimed he could hear us half a mile away.  Shortly after I left the school became Oakwood Grammar School and is almost unchanged today, although girls can now attend the school and there is no Woodwork.

Holidays and Day’s Out

    Holidays and day’s out were important, and numerous because Dad could get cheap rail tickets. The picture above was taken in the mid-sixties while on holiday in Wales.  I would have been about 16 years.  I have no idea who owned the car.  The Elvis Presley style hair was popular at the time, although the Chemistry teacher constantly threatened to make us wear hairnets; he had a point because it did catch fire in a bunsen burner at one time.  This was the holiday when I nearly picked-up my first girl friend.  Nearly, but I was  not quite ready.

The Space Race.
    Dad being on the railway, meant that we traveled frequently, to the north and south Kent coasts,  to London and to Wales or the West Country (Cornwall or Devon) for our annual holiday.  It also meant that Dad brought home plenty of magazines and newspapers, because he was good friends with a newsagent that used the railway.  Every day he would come home with the pockets of his heavy coat full of folded-up pages of newspapers, pages that had articles on the space race.  I collected a large number of scrapbooks that I still have.  He also brought home the occasional Parade magazine, and pretended not to notice when I took it to my room to look at the pinups.  By the time I went to college, I had quite a collection.  At this point I had fallen in love with Haley Mills.

    Pages from my scrapbooks of space flight.  I call them my Space Albums (later "Contemporary History of Spaceflight").  I have eleven volumes of newspaper cuttings.  I tried to get one published once, but was summarily turned-down.  Top left, Yuri Gargarin, first man  in space.  Top, middle, Alan Shepard, first American in space in his Mercury spacecraft.  Top right, Gemini 4, the first two-man gemini mission.  Bottom left, Apollo 11, first moon landing mission.  Bottom right, the Viking spacecraft on Mars.

    I was fanatically interested in astronomy and space as a child, building rockets out of cigar tubes with weed-killer and sugar as fuel, taking turns with my friends Robin Hunnicutt and Raymond Cropper being President, Secretary and Treasurer of the school Astronomical Society, and making rocket and spacecraft models out of cardboard and balsa wood.  The balsawood model of the Ranger spacecraft came to an inglorious end when my mother flattened it against a wall when trying to clean behind a wardrobe.  She did not see it hanging by cotton threads from the ceiling.  She was very upset, and never quite got over it.

Homemade models.  Cardboard models of the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft (left) and a balsawood model of the Ranger lunar spacecraft.

My First Girlfriend

There’s something about the first. My first girlfriend was late, during my first year at university, a lively, happy, fun loving woman called Sue Hewitt. She showered me with kisses at a party in Eliot College, squeezed in an armchair for one, while we kept our feet off the ground for fear of crocodiles. She left me because she thought she made me sad, she did not know I was grappling with depression. Neither did I. After a couple of short-lived relationships, Hazel came along and instinctively understood.

For other images from my time at UKC, click here.

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