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This is my story, from 1924 when I was born, (an identical twin) up to the age of thirty. It covers growing up in a guest house at the seaside among a large extended family who were all in seasonal businesses. Then joining the A.T.S. before I was seventeen for five years until the year after the war was over. On being demobbed I met up again with the boy next door, we married within six months and had three children in five years. In 1952 I took them to West Africa, (still the Gold Coast) where my husband was working on the new Kumasi hospital. After that, Kuwait, and in at the start of the building up of the city. An overland journey home across the desert from Kuwait, in a Morris Minor, with two of the children, although six months pregnant with our fourth baby. That took us 18 days. Lots of fun, with purpose and achievement.
Excerpts Childhood - During the summer months, there would be up to about fifteen visitors in our four bedroomed house. Can you imagine it? A spare mattress would be put on the floor for my sister and me in the second little downstairs room where our parents had their bed. Some of our neighbours lived in much more crowded conditions and every so often, the health inspector would come round. If Mum knew he was coming she would whip the mattress out of sight, but she was caught out sometimes and given a warning as we got older, about us sharing a room with them, but she didn’t take any notice, everyone had to make the most of the summer months at the seaside.
- We would often call on my Father’s friend, Freddie Rye, who had a lion in a cage on his land, where he kept it in the winter between taking it up to the amusement park as a side show in the summer. He would get a celebrity to go into the cage and one year he got Harold Davidson, the ex rector of Stifikey, known as the prostitute’s padre, who was attacked and killed by the lion in front of the paying audience
- The most intriguing show of all, to us, was the Midget show. These were not people who had not grown, they were a race of their own, seemingly extinct now as I have never heard of them since. They were no more than about three feet tall, the ladies smaller, fully proportioned, with high pitched little voices and clear very white complexions and quite pleasing faces. The men were dressed in custom made suits and the ladies in long dresses, with tiny shoes, slim, neat and smart.
Wartime - On September 3rd 1939, we sat in stunned silence by the radio. We were at war with Germany that afternoon everyone disappeared from the beach. The holidaymakers went back to their lodgings, packed their bags and headed for the station, by midnight they had all gone
ATS, York - The raid went on non stop for nearly two hours, with planes swooping down on us, dropping their loads and screaming away. The next day there was no sign of Dorothy. The men from our office dug among the rubble for ten days before her body was found.
- At the station the red caps were out in force and two of them stopped us straight away and demanded to see our passes. We had to admit we hadn’t any and gave them such a sob story that they let us get on the Leeds train -
- by this time it was getting late and we had had nothing but chocolate to eat all day and now there was no time to go anywhere to get a bite to eat. We dare not attempt to go into the canteen on the station because of the red caps, but they caught us anyway, just as we approached the platform they made a beeline for us. Again, we gave them our sob story but they wouldn’t accept it and said they were ‘charging’ us. There was only one thing to do, the three of us burst into tears and they couldn’t cope with that and let us get on the train back to York -
Africa - the three African houseboys were waiting for us The new German doctor, Charles Hoffman, had come, in his mind, to ‘change Africa’. He was out on the streets at night among the pavement dwellers He would walk into our house, whether we were there or not, slump down in a chair and go fast asleep, the cold beer that the boy had fetched him left and forgotten on the side table.
There was a fly, which, if it got onto your skin would lay its eggs under the skin and these would hatch into grubs. Edith had been kneeling in the garden and the flies had got on to her thighs we would squeeze up to seventy grubs out of her legs every morning.
Overland journey - We were now making our way across the desert to the oil pumping station H3, where King Hussein of Jordan previously met his cousin, King Feisal of Iraq, for political talks
Turkey - We stopped on the mountainside to make some tea. Looking across the ravine to the mountains on the other side, we saw, in the distance, a woman come out of the mountainside and disappear into the valley to the left. Then two little children appeared, they spotted us in the distance and slowly made their way - people were living in a cave in the side of the mountain.
Istanbul - it was dark and pouring with rain, the traffic was relentless. The overhead road signs were double Dutch to us. When we tried to get off the town centre roundabout the police blew their whistles and sent us back - we were two hours getting out of Istanbul... |
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A Brief Glimpse of my Life By Ros Davis |