Reflections

Childhood

While I continue to look forward every day, there is now a lot to look back on, some of which I will inflict on you. To those few people who have read my Tunnel book, have no fear. I will not regurgitate all the vicissitudes and few glories of my Victorian-style early life. Andy and Nicky would stop me by saying “cardboard box.” That refers to the wonderful Monty Python sketch called “The Four Yorkshire Men.” They outdid each other with tales of past deprivations. For example: “We lived in the ditch beside the road.” “Oh, you had running water, luxury!” But perhaps I can be allowed just a brief sketch of my early days.

My earliest memories are from the mid 1940s, shortly after the war ended. My Dad (Oliver John Coode Cotton) was a single-handed family doctor (and amateur engineer and glider enthusiast). We were fortunate to have been well away from hostilities, living in rural Herefordshire in England on the Welsh borders.

There was a Royal Air Force station on “Madley Aerodrome” in the next village, so there were sometimes planes in the sky. I remember one pilot parachuting into the next field. Dad rehearsed the local farmers in the intricacies of repelling potential attackers, on our tennis lawn, exactly like the marvelous TV show “Dad’s Army.” Our attic was filled with empty bottles to make “Molotov cocktails” to repel any invaders. 

I remember a big fete on the aerodrome to celebrate the end of the war. There were running races for the kids and bowling for a pig. It was a large pig, and I worried about taking it home, but we didn’t win. One of the large horses in a race got out of control and stepped rather firmly on my sister’s bicycle.

I have vivid memories (enhanced by early photos) of the great snow of 1947. A basin of bird food put out on the croquet lawn disappeared under snow in November and reappeared eventually in the spring. Our driveway was cleared of snow by locally housed Italian prisoners of war, and Dad made his house calls on a borrowed tractor.

Although there was official food rationing, we did not go hungry. Dad grew lots of vegetables and fruit, and his farmer patients often paid him in chickens, eggs and ham (sliced I remember from big chunks suspended from the beamed ceilings of their farmhouses). Seeing asparagus on any menu nowadays makes me rather queasy. Dad grew it in super-abundance. We had no fridge, so were obliged to eat it at every meal during the growing season.

There was a period of plenty after the National Health Service started in 1948 when Dad was getting a salary as well as all the farm produce, before the farmers knew better.