Such moral turpitude was anathema to the Hood family and would lead not just Gerry but the entire family into collective shame. Hard working, honest folk, didn’t do such things, though it must be admitted that his own father had a chequered past which included a conviction in the magistrate’s court for poaching. Having grown up in the country in times of profound austerity Gerry’s father Bill had learned how to catch rabbits for the family’s table. As a child Bill’s father - who had come to the area having been invalided out of the Royal Field Artillery during World War I - learned that the countryside around him was not only the best but the only source of live protein. Rationing and poverty were the order of the day so Bill and his father would lay snares and net the warrens of the thriving local rabbit population, though they weren’t too discriminating to reject the chance of hare or the occasional pheasant on the family table. These skills were passed on to Gerry by his father and tough he disliked the notion of killing anything he understood how this had provided much needed sustenance to this previous generation of his family which, in addition to his grandparents consisted of four girls and two boys.
Gerry loved to hear his father’s reminiscences of his early life in wartime Toleby, the hilltop village of his birth. Stories of scavenging live ammunition from the local Army garrison which had commandeered the nearby hall and from which many of his stories emanated. Bullets, thus appropriated would be set off by throwing bricks onto them and then converted into cigarette lighters modelled on the one his grandfather had brought back from the trenches of Flanders where he had fought. Indeed Bill’s first academy had been the local blacksmith’s where in return for his muscular power to operate the smithy’s bellows he had learned welding and metalworking skills in preference to attending the village school. Though his truancy earned him many beatings with a cane he was an avowed student of life’s university and would recount the many onerous jobs required of him as a child. Emptying the family cess-pit, with the aid of a borrowed horse and cart, was a tale that brought a dark look to Gerry’s father’s eyes as he recalled not just the filth but the very real danger to a ten year-old boy that marshalling a cart horse and a cart full of human ordure necessitated.
The Hood’s knew about horses - Gerry’s great-grandfather on his father’s mother’s side had the curious job of ‘travelling’ what was prosaically referred to as an ‘entire’ stallion. He would set off from his village home early of a Monday morning and return only on the Friday when the stallion had served all of the local mares requiring this vital service. The same stallion once imprisoned Gerry’s great-grandfather in his stall, delivering a kick to the then old man that left him anything but entire. Horses were dangerous creatures and, when as a young man Gerry eventually took to horse riding with his father, he learned what a very capable and knowledgeable man he truly was in terms of equestrianism as they galloped across open fields together. Bill would assume a dreamy air as he told Gerry - Glenn shared his father’s passion for automobile mechanics - of the summer days when he, and his best mate Sam, would catch a couple of ponies on Toleby hilltop and ride them downhill and away from their expectant teachers who awaited their presence in the claustrophobic local school.
Anywhere was more interesting to Bill than a place where he would, simply by displaying his boredom, be guaranteed being hit with a stick, several times a day. This might be because his daily routine, whereby he was required to fill several large pails of water from the water pump - a cast iron affair which disgorged its contents from the mouth of a carved lion’s head and which, with his frozen child’s hands, was virtually impossible to turn and hold the freezing cold handle in the open position - carry them (one in each hand) the thirty metres or so back to the cottage where he would pour them one-by-one into the enormous copper on top of the stove where his mother would use them for the family’s daily chores of washing, or cooking. His father, who lay prone upstairs, coughing up the residue of German mustard gas attacks, was therefore unable to carry out any task more demanding than drinking himself insensible at the local public house. Both the pub and the pump had great significance in his own personal history. He had met his first wife at the pub, she being the eldest daughter of the then publican who was unimpressed with granddad Sid’s offer to clean his smoking chimney which he immediately accomplished by firing both barrels of his shotgun up the chimney engulfing the entire clientele in soot. Nevertheless they were married and she bore him two children before her death, by typhoid poisoning, from the very water source that so afflicted Bill’s attempts to be punctual for school. Running water was to remain a modern miracle to Gerry’s father that was to have no peer in a lifetime that would ultimately see a man land on the moon.
Sid, whose younger brother Cecil was tragically blown to pieces by fragments of a German artillery shell on the battlefield of the Somme in 1916, was something of an enigma. The son of a shoe-maker - then referred to as a cobbler - he was very much the ‘black sheep’ of a family that consisted of three boys (he being the eldest) and four girls. Great mystery surrounded his disappearance in the latter years of the nineteenth-century to London, where it is believed he lived with an errant cousin doing who-knows-what during this period. He joined the Army, as a professional soldier, in 1910, thereby averting any action in the recent Balkan conflict. History, and his military records confirm that he became a Driver with the Royal Field Artillery, his job being to tend and marshall a team of six horses who would pull a field-gun and tender as part of a highly mobile artillery unit. He fought, and was decorated for his bravery, in the battles of the Marne and Aisne, but was invalided out of the Army, with no apparently visible signs of trauma, the same year his brother died from what was recorded as ‘a piece of shrapnel through the lungs’. The bronze ‘Death-Penny’ his parents received in payment for the life of their favourite son bore mute testimony to a wasted life that promised much, and somehow separated the two brothers in terms of distinction. Dark looks and despicable mutterings would pursue Sid, who held the same battle honours and decorations as his deceased brother, throughout the rest of his life, whilst Cecil was forever lamented as the honourable corpse, now decomposing in a military cemetery in France. Death trumped survival and in a time of blind patriotism Sid’s existence was marred forever by his invisible suffering, the fact of which filled an old sweetie tin on his bedside cabinet which young Bill bore personal witness to as he emptied its slimy contents down the toilet every day.
Sid’s first wife’s demise brought assistance in the form of her best friend Winnie, who arrived in the family household to foster the two young daughters she had borne him. The intimacy of such an arrangement soon proved to great and they were married hastily before she produced first two more daughters and then, in quick succession, two sons. The oldest boy was named William, paradoxically after Sid’s own father who by all accounts was not enamoured of his own eldest son. Sid would, in his own twilight years, regale the infant Gerry with tales of his own, the favourite concerning a pair of shoes. William Walter Hood had come to Lindon as a young man and after marrying his shrewish wife Elizabeth opened a business as a shoe repairer and maker on the city’s Cannock Road. It was from here that early one morning he despatched his eldest son Sidney to the distant uphill Cannock Hall to deliver a very expensive pair of men’s brogue shoes he had been commissioned to make and deliver on Christmas day, presumably a present for the owner of the Hall, a man of some importance in local terms at least. The small boy walked out onto the icy street, some two miles distant from his destination and, as he would recall, found himself “up to my arse in snow!”. The long and slippery walk took over an hour in the conditions and, upon his arrival, he was required to wait at the kitchen door where he handed the precious shoes over to the head of the household’s servants, waiting patiently in the freezing courtyard. The lady of the house returned and with a grateful smile placed a large silver coin in the boys bare and shivering hand with a simple “Thank-you.” Sidney had never before seen such a coin which felt massive and weighty and bore the legend on the rear-side of the King’s head ‘Half-a-Crown’. Even with his rudimentary knowledge of money and maths, Sid knew this to be two-and-sixpence, the most money he had ever seen and quite possibly more than his own father earned in a week! He would recount how he skipped and ran down the slippery, icy hill until breathless with excitement and exertion he ran into the family sitting room where his father, in his suit and studded collar sat smoking his pipe impassively.
“Look what the lady gave me dad!” he exclaimed breathlessly, holding the shining coin in his outstretched hand. After pausing to examine and turn over the coin in his calloused palm, the old man placed it disdainfully back in the small boys palm and said:
“She has obviously made a mistake. She must have meant to give you a penny and took the wrong coin (of a similar size) out to hand you. Take it back” he commanded, returning his gaze to the clock on the mantle shelf.
Young Sidney knew better than to argue with his dictatorial father and without so much of a sigh of disappointment he went out again into the road and “up to his arse in snow” began the long and lonely trudge back to the hall. On arrival he stammering explained the nature of the mistake to the perplexed housekeeper who once again kept the small boy waiting in the freezing courtyard for what seemed an interminable time. On her return, with what Sid expected to be an admonition for some imagined dishonesty on his part, she once again placed the shiny half-crown back into his palm and said “No, there’s been no mistake. The lady of the house would like you to have it as a gesture of her thanks for coming all the way here in such dreadful conditions. Thank you once again.”
Sid’s heart leapt at this new stroke of luck and he could hardly contain his excitement as he skidded across the parlour floor to share his news with his father.
“She say’s it’s not a mistake dad! I can keep it!” he squeaked in his excitement, looking down with grateful amazement at his enormous fortune. Before he could close his fingers to clasp his treasured booty, the old man looked at him from behind the newspaper he was reading through his half-moon spectacles and without a word extended his hand and with a barely perceptible beckoning motion of the fingers of his left hand, summoned the boy to place the coin in his outstretched palm. Looking back towards the text he was engrossed in reading, he calmly placed the coin in his waistcoat pocket, and that was the end of the affair, for William Walter at least, though Sidney Earnest never forgot the experience, German gas attacks notwithstanding.
Gerry’s father had his own wartime memories and recalled trembling beneath the kitchen table with his parents as the German Luftwaffe bombers thundered overhead on their mission to bomb the nearby RAF bomber bases in 1944. Indeed they succeeded in destroying the church in the next but one village on the hilltop road with an enormous landmine dropped from several hundred feet, but Bill would speak with great excitement about the night a Heinkel bomber crash landed a mile away, immolating all on board. His enmity for the Germans never quite resolved.
Gerry’s mother Joan reserved her hatred for the Japanese, who had bayoneted her brother Alfie to death in the Burmese jungles. Any of the many war films, which enjoyed frequent repetition on the family’s television, which featured what she would variously refer to as ‘Japs’ or ‘Nips’ met with her derision. She also had some curiously innovative ways for enforcing racial stereotypes. It took Gerry many years of obsessive nail-clipping to understand how this worked. Her obsessive cleanliness extended itself into this realm as, when inspecting Gerry’s fingernails for any sign of dirt beneath them she would often say on its discovery “The Japs would cut your fingers off for this!”(or occasionally hands, depending upon her mood). Gerry found himself unconsciously anxious about a chance meeting with oriental people, though the likelihood of this in 1960’s Lindon remained extremely unlikely.
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