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John
Robert Derbyshire and Esther Alice Knowles married on September 26, 1942,
after a brief acquaintance. My father, 43 years old, was a materials
inspector for the Air Ministry, on temporary assignment to Sankey's, a
manufacturer in Wolverhampton, England. My mother, then aged 30, was
a nurse at the factory. They honeymooned at Llandudno in north
Wales. It was the first and last marriage for both of them.
In April 1943 they moved to Northampton, where the Air Ministry had opened an office in Wood Street.1 When first in Northampton my parents had lodgings with a Mrs Higgins in the Billing Road, then with a Mrs Frisby at 89 Colwyn Road, finally at 18 Perry Street in a house belonging to, or in some way associated with, one of the families of White & Joyce, a firm of stonemasons prominent in the town.2
My sister Judith was born September 4, 1943, I myself on June 3, 1945, both at Oakwood Nursing Home behind St Matthew's church. Dad had also brought a son with him to the marriage: Roy Noel, born in Christchurch, New Zealand, January 6, 1930. However, Noel lived mainly with Dad's family in Shropshire.
I have a few very early, very dim memories associated with the Perry Street lodgings: Dad lifting floorboards with a small bone-handled knife (one of whose siblings
it was part of a set given to my parents as a wedding present
dwells today in my kitchen drawer) to reveal some frantic pink mice; a fire at St Michael's church opposite; a flood of water down the stairs, caused by me, I think; going with Mum to buy her needlework supplies at a little corner shop; my sister and myself playing with a ginger cat in the garden. The cat was ours, but we
terrorized it till it ran away (so I was told).Title to the Perry Street house belonged to a young man who was killed in the war. When the will was settled, Mum and Dad had to move out. They were in serious peril of becoming homeless. At the last minute in May 1948 Northampton Borough Council made a property available at 62 Friars Avenue on Delapre estate, a new development on the south side of the town. Dad went to the Council offices to get the keys the Saturday before they were to leave Perry Street, and they moved to Friars Avenue the following Monday, May 24th 1948, ten days short of my third birthday. Rent was nineteen shillings a week $2.60 at that time. They lived at 62 Friars Avenue as tenants of the Council until 1982, when I bought it for them under Margaret Thatcher's program of selling off Council houses. Dad lived there until he died (November 16th 1984), Mum until she could no longer keep the house in order (June 1990). It was sold in February 1991.
My earliest connected set of memories are of moving into 62 Friars Avenue. The Council had painted these properties in utilitarian colors: the woodwork khaki, the plastered walls a vile shade of green. My mother expressed immediate strong disapproval of this dιcor. There was a cast-iron radiator in the dining-room, painted gold (at least, that is how I remember it). Two shiny galvanised-metal buckets came with the property: one with a plain lid, for general rubbish, and one with a complicated sliding hinge, for food slops, which the Council collected and then distributed to farmers as pig swill. There was also a Council-provided set of garden implements: spade, fork, hoe, rake, edger, trowel and hand fork.3
Somewhat later though it cannot have been very much later I remember playing on the sloping front path of the house with Peter Starmer, who lived next door. The other side of the street was still under construction, and we used to go over and beg pieces of waste wood from the carpenters.
Dad was the second child of Robert F. Derbyshire and Elizabeth Daniels, of Oakengates, now a district of the town of Telford in Shropshire. Mum was the eleventh child of John Henry Knowles and Esther Perry of Hednesford, a coal-mining village near Cannock, Staffordshire. Dad was called "Bob" and Mum was called "Tess" by everybody I knew, including each other. Their given names live on in my brother Noel's older son, Robert, and my sister Judith's daughter, Tessa.Oakengates and Hednesford both belong to that area of England where southern Staffordshire,4 northern Worcestershire, western Warwickshire and Eastern Shropshire combine to form "the Black Country". This region was the site of the first industrial revolution, the smoke and grime of which gave it its name.5 The first iron bridge ever built was, and still is, at Ironbridge, a few miles from Oakengates. Until the 1970s the area was dense with coal mines, iron foundries, glass works and so on. And yet, outside Birmingham city boundaries, the Black Country was much more rural than urban. There are many coal mining villages, but no coal mining cities, nor even towns (well, not many). There was actually a colliery near Hednesford called The Fair Lady that was considered a beauty spot, down in a dell invisible from the road.
In the reminiscences of my parents' generation, their childhoods were spent among fields and trees, among blacksmiths and poachers and fox-hunting gents, in country lanes bordered with hedgerows. My mother loved to talk about going to the Blewitts' farm: "We most liked to go there when they were slaughtering a pig. What a sight that was! The kids would come running from miles around!" 6 My father's childhood playground was the country east of Shrewsbury, some of the loveliest in England, dominated by the Wrekin (a mountain, or what passes for one in England), speckled with lovely and evocative ruins the ancient Roman city of Virconium (named after the Wrekin "Wrekin" is a very old word, probably pre-Celtic) is nearby, and Lilleshall Abbey. My father had a childhood friend named Ernie Padmore whose daughter married a farmer at Uckington, not far from Oakengates. We visited them when I was small, and I can remember watching from my bedroom window the air traffic warning light flashing on top of the Wrekin.
1. Office, Wood Street, and the Air Ministry itself have all ceased to exist. However, a neighboring office was occupied by an optometrist, Mr Howe. When it was discovered, circa 1958, that I needed glasses, I was sent to Mr Howe, by that time a middle-aged bachelor. He had a large red birth-mark down one side of his face. For ever after I cannot go for an eye exam without it summoning up Mr Howe's dark, atmospheric little office, all lined with wooden racks and cabinets of lenses, frames and other optometric paraphernalia. Mr Howe eventually had the birthmark removed and got married.
2. My father's driver's license for April 12th 1944 shows "89 Colwyn
Road". For April 18th 1945 it shows "18 Perry Street".
3. The food crisis of the war years, when Britain was in real danger of starvation, was still on everybody's mind. Along with residential rights to the house, my parents got an "allotment"
a small plot in some land set aside for this purpose, behind the new houses being built on the other side of the street. There you were supposed to grow food, thereby taking some of the strain off the farmers. I can remember my father working his allotment; but I can't imagine he did so with much enthusiasm, and he certainly didn't do it for long. He did grow vegetables in the garden of 62 Friars Avenue, though: potatoes, cabbages, sprouts, peas, string beans, scallions, radishes, carrots, onions, lettuce, cauliflower, rhubarb.
4. Throughout these pages I have used the old English county names. Local administration in England was
reorganized by the Heath government in 1974, at the high tide of bureaucratic managerialism in
Britain. The new administrative boundaries left most of the place-names associated with my family history in something called "West
Midlands." I have ignored this gibberish, as most English people have.
5. Like "Yankee", the term "Black Country" has a denotation that gets narrower the closer you get to the subject. Inhabitants of Birmingham, Alabama regard anyone from north of the Potomac as a Yankee; in the North itself, "Yankee" is restricted to natives of the six New England states; yet plenty of New Englanders
the Canucks of
northern Maine, for example
do not consider themselves Yankees. Similarly, the good people of Birmingham, England will not thank you for including their city in the Black Country, which
according to them
starts further west, somewhere round about Dudley. This whole region descends from the realm of Saxon Mercia, on the edge of the Danelaw. The place-names are mainly Old English; though "Cannock" is the Celtic word for "hill"
same as "Knock" in Ireland.
6. This is how my mother told it. According to Aunt Muriel, however, the pig slaughtering took place not at the Blewitts' farm but at the home of the Courses (?) family in View Street, where Grandma and Grandad Knowles lived. Most streets had a pig, which was jointly owned by the residents and fattened up in a sty at one of the homes. (In English towns and villages up to the Great War it was common for a house to have an adjoining pigsty. After returning to England in 1978 I had the vague idea to buy myself a house and viewed some properties around Northampton. One, in the village of Great Billing, came with a pigsty included.) The slaughtering was carried out ceremoniously, in a party atmosphere, and the butchered
carcass shared out among the pig's owners.