Holidays
For a year or so after coming to Caldecott, my mother was too ill for me to go home for the holidays. When I began to do so, I did not want to return to Hatch, and was very homesick after my return. It was not entirely homesickness; I was very timid when it came to physical activities, and was also nervous about the prospect of returning to the obstacle course, Sunday football, etc.
Everything changes, of course, and by the time I was fourteen or fifteen and was one of the bigger boys I positively looked forward to returning to Caldecott at the start of a new term.
Until my mother was well enough to have me home during the holidays, I spent two or three holidays with Simon Rodway and his mother at her home at Ewhurst Green, near Oxted. One of these was a Christmas holiday, and I was very impressed by Simon’s brother Anthony taking the part of Father Christmas, wearing not a red cloak and a false beard but evening dress and a top hat.
As a boy, I spent a lot of time making models with plasticine. One of Mrs Rodway’s neighbours was a potter, and allowed me to make some clay models, which she then fired and glazed for me. I took home to my parents an elephant and a crocodile, which they kept for many years, but which were eventually lost.
I have never forgotten a piece of advice that Simon’s mother gave me towards the end of a holiday, when I was not looking forward to my return to Caldecott. I said that I wished it were already the end of next term, and she replied “Don’t wish your life away”. The context now is likely to be rather different; I am more likely to be looking forward with anticipation to something in the future than dreading the immediate future, but those words are a useful reminder to make the most of the intervening time.
The journey home from Caldecott was quite exciting. The first leg of the journey was a trip to London by coach. We became familiar with the route, and came to recognise Crittall’s Corner as a landmark that indicated that we were nearing London. The more sporty boys would cheer as we passed the Oval shortly before reaching Victoria coach station; especially Barry Callaghan, who came from Surrey.
I would be collected from Victoria by a Cornwall County Council social worker [were they called social workers then?], and taken by taxi to Paddington, where we would take the train to Plymouth, to be met by my parents for the short railway journey to Saltash. After a while, other Caldecott children would accompany me; Tony Cox lived in Torquay and when I was fourteen my brother Randall and my sister Elizabeth also came to Caldecott. I remember Tony injuring his finger when it got caught in the door of a London taxi.
When I was thirteen my parents moved from Saltash to Plymouth, and I was no longer Cornwall’s responsibility. Plymouth apparently having decided that we were old enough to do so, from then on we travelled unaccompanied on the train, being escorted across London by a Universal Aunt. Towards the end of the 1950s we were joined on the journey by a younger boy named Stephen Phelan, who lived in Plymouth. I remember asking him on one occasion whether there was any of our food left, to which he replied “Only some second-hand biscuits”. When I said that I thought we had eaten all the biscuits, he said “Yes, that’s why they’re second-hand”.