1995 How Impulsive Can You Be?.................................

The scene: the living room of the house in Shubenacadie.
The time: about nine a.m., early April I think.
I was sitting in my recliner, holding a mug of tea, Glennys came down the passage from her bedroom. Out of the blue I asked, "Fancy moving to England?" Just like that.
Quick as a flash came back the answer, "OK."

So began, perhaps, the strangest year of my life. One factor had perhaps prompted me. Glennys' aunt Ann had died shortly before. As luck would have it I was in casual touch auntie Ann's son (Glennys' nephew) Paul.
Rocky and Ann's bungalow in Bourton-on-the-Water stood empty. No memory now of how the seed germinated but our oft-thought-about but never-seriously-acted-upon urge to "go home" seems to have stirred again. Paul must have offered and some part of us must have heard the call too loud.

The urge to "un-emmigrate" had been with us perhaps from 'soon' after we'd arrived in Montreal. Perhaps the urge to "go home" dwells forever in the breast of the immigrant. The spark would flash to flame and grow bright for a while then inertia and common sense would push it back down again, but it never quite burnt out.

But in 1995 with our sons gone, me retired and the mortgage paid - what was to keep us from wandering?

No doubt friends and relatives were aghast and thought us mad. Mad in a way we were. Our sons and grandchildren were going to be left behind. A brand new car, a house full of stuff from nearly thirty years of Canadian living, the house itself, friends, interests. From where did we gather enough nerve (or enough stupidity)?

Regardless of all common sense to the contrary we bagan a mad whirl of "give, sell or toss."

The house? That should have been the difficult part but, oddly it sold and we got close to our asking price. The car? A brand new, green Toyota Tercel went easily enough. "Everything else?" We gave to friends, sold in yard sales, passed on the Martin, took to the dump - it must have been never ending.

The chaotic business of shedding our "stuff" is now a dim and confused memory. Somewhere I began to feel a wonderful freedom. There may be a streak of minimalist in me but the freedom was oddly refreshing.

What did we keep? My railway! A sizeable selection of our books (a lot of railways and aviation books included of course). Photo albums and that modest pile of irreplacable stuff that is "your past". It all went into a cruelly small heap of cardboard boxes, to follow by sea.

No doubt there were last visits to friends who wished us well and thought us deranged. A sweet and strange farewell gathering at the Enfield archery club. Martin did the final honours, driving us all to supper and thence I think to the airport. Strange how time dims and muddles the memories. Emotions must have run very high and very low that day.

I remember the 'climb-out' fom Halifax airport in a 767. The setting sun. Improbable though it might seem I was able to pick out the gleam of that sun on the Shubenacadie river. The river and the place had figured much in our lives. Now, we were going home and .... we were leaving home too.

What thoughts must have gone through our heads that evening in June(?) of 1995. What had we done!!! What lay ahead? The mix of joy and sadness must have been awful.

What lay ahead indeed? ........ Turned out every bit as crazy as what we'd just done.

1980's Amazingly, I remember little of the 80s. ......................................

They opened with us newly moved into the Shubenacadie house and it closed with us still there. Me at Air Canada ... enduring.
Although built with electric heat we heated the house with wood (until the chimney fire) so there was much sawing and splitting and stacking and burning of wood. Septic systems came and went - there's a good story in itself! Much snow was shovelled. Much blood lost to blackflies, mosquitoes and deerflies. More 'grass' to mow than made sense. A garage was built.
We became avid bird watchers and very good at it. Over a hundred species recorded on the property. Hordes of evening grosbeaks, nesting pileated woodpeckers, herons hunting our frogs on the banks of Lake Nigel.
Mitchell was essentially gone to Truro by the time we moved in. Martin, when did he leave, pre or post 89?
I started an ambitious model railway in the basement and Glennys made seemingly tons of stained glass.

Anyway, it seemed, appropriate to mention the 80's at this point. Detailed tales will have to be clawed from dark recesses as we proceed.

1968 My Third Driving Test, passed.

Montreal this time. Good old Montreal. As with all things in Quebec, there's a French Canadian way of doing things and taking a driving test was no different. Well, it was very different! I had a car of my own but it was the afore-decribed, semi-derelect Mini. It seemed like courting disaster to expect a Pepsi driving examiner to look kindly on an Englishman driving him around in such a vehicle. So, knowing you could rent a car at the Test Bureau to take the test in, I went by bus to Cremazie (sp?) and walked in.

First a simple vision test, then a written test. Having apparently not failed these I went and sat to wait my turn. The examiner appeared and called my name. Out we went to my hired car. A huge American- type vehicle, seemingly the size of a house after my poor little Mini. In we climbed, him with a clipboard and doubtful English, me with possibly worse French. The test seemed to be all about travelling a few city blocks and doing as asked.

I remember: 1. Failing to signal on at least on occasion. 2. Running a stop sign and 3. Attempting a one-way street in the wrong direction. By the time we were headed back I assumed I'd failed... well... how could I pass in this fashion?

A fresh instruction: "Pull hup halongside dat car and back hinto de space beeind."
I pulled hup as directed alongside de car hindicated and stuck the beast into reverse (this was my first automatic transmission) and the engine stalled.
In the silence I looked at him and he looked at me. "Try she hagain!"
I restarted the engine and stuck she hin reverse - the engine stalled again.
He said, "Merde! Deeze cars, hall de same, dis one same yez ter day. Take hus back to the hoffice."

And still I passed. Amazing.

..... as above, things are different in La Belle Province du Quebec. Glennys got her first license in Montreal a few years later. A birthday present. The lessons were taken in a VW Beetle in downtown Montreal, no place for the faint of heart. When her test time came her whole class attended at the Testing Bureau. As luck would have it she was chosen as the class representive .... she passed so the whole class was deemed to have passed..

1996 My Fourth Driving Test

This was in England. Again. Glennys and I were near the end of our strange, impetuous year in England. We'd soon be no longer allowed to drive as Canadian visitors. We were obliged to take driving tests to obtain British driving licences.

An awful fiasco it turned out to be.

The logic behind it defies belief. We'd arrived, supposedly completed strangers, unaware of rules and regulations. We were on the wrong side of the road and in unfamiliar vehicles - like any other toursits from North America. And yet we were allowed to career about Britains roads, a danger to the entire population for a whole year. We hit nothing and nobody and generally behaved like good citizens, slowly evolving, slowly learning, slowly improving. Then, just when we might be expected to have got as good as we were likely to get ........ we are required to take a test.

I failed. Driving with my usual verve and dash, confident that I driven just about everything, just about everywhere, oft under apalling conditions I just drove where and when directed. How could I fail? Yet fail I did.

She failed too. Essentially, she claims, because the examiner (same man) wanted her to do a three point turn on a busy road. "Why can't we turn somewhere quieter, safer?" she protested. He insisted, she refused saying it was an unnecessary risk.

Driving tests always puzzle me. Always concerned with the elaborate vehicle manouevering trivia with no regard to the new driver's abilities with high-speed highway driving or driving in darkness or in fog or on ice. So we came home, unlicensed (more reasons than just the driving of course.)

A delicous footnote: At the garage that sold us our little Ford (and bought it back when we returned to Canada) the owner told us that our examiner had been testing a motor cyclist soon after our tests. When he stepped out to indicate to his testee that he had to make the traditional emergency stop ........... the guy ran him down and put him in hospital. There is a justice after all hee hee hee hee!!!!! Still delighted about that. No more driving tests for me ........................ I sincerely hope!

1963 My second driving test. Passed.

This was in Peterborough which laid (sp?) claim then, to being one of the few English towns without traffic lights, which may have helped. This time I'd been adequately prepped it seemed and, using the school's Wolsey Hornet (an up-market Mini), I passed. It was a hot, sunny day I remember and that, coupled with my extreme nervousness, saw me emerge from the car t the end of the test quite sweat-soaked. Funny what you remember. Each lesson had seen me collected from, and returned to, R.A.F. Cottesmore by the instructor, I thoroughly enjoyed those lessons. There was more novelty then in car driving/owning than there is now. SO now I was loose on England's roads with my Tahiti-blue Morris Mini Minor.

1956 My first driving test - Failed!

Taken late in the year, in a hurry before I joined the RAF. Place: Clapham Junction. Car: Austin A35 (the saloon version of the van in the Wallace & Gromit film, "Curse of the Were Rabbit"). Took test after some professional lessons - obviously not enough lessons!

1959 Lost my virginity

February. 183 Queens Road, Norwich, Norfolk, England. No sign of it since!

1963 - 1983 Can One Have Too Many Minis?

I/we owned perhaps six in all. You know Minis? Not the new, chic, expensive machine re-engineered by the Germans but the very English piece of outrageousness designed by Alec Issigonis (spelling?).

It pioneered so much; front mounted, transverse mounted engine, front wheel drive, rubber shocks, SMALLLLness and numerous other smaller innovations. It was also to suffer from many inadequacies too but best not dwell on those.

There were Austin Minis, Morris Minis, Mini Coopers and Mini Cooper Ss, and Riley Elves and Wolsey Hornets and Mini Mokes ... but they were all Minis.

The mini skirt helped make them more famous or was it the other way around? Mini's won so many rallies, especially the Monte Carlo Rally that there were moves to have it banned from competition. Rally drivers who drove Minis became household names in England. Yes indeed, the Mini was a force to be reckoned with in its day.

For me the love affair started in Singapore. Probably 1963 when Flt. Lt. Bachelor arrived at Seletar Yacht Club with one. Love at first sight for me (the car not the Flt.Lt!)

When we returned to England car fever seemd to have hit the country. We'd been away for two and a half years and in that time England had seemingly become a car oriented country. RAF bases always had a parade ground, now these had become car parks. Where once an airman had had a bike or travelled by train and bus or by hitchhiking he now had a car and I suppose the rest of society was headed in the same direction.

Driving lessons followed (another story) and the test was passed. I went to a car salesroom in nearby Oakham (Rutland county's county town) and ordered a Mini.

Soon enough we were car owners. A Morris Mini in Tahiti blue. How proud I was, the care I lavished on that little car! I installed seat belts, the newest thing back then. I washed our Mini and waxed it and cleaned it. Its registration was AFP599B - some things you never forget.

We owned that Mini for four years, right up to our emmigrating. Broke my heart to sell it. It was likely in better condition than when we bought it.



Canada! Yes the Mini had crossed the Atlantic. New, they were $1,400 - you pay more tax than that on a car today. It was natural I'd get another Mini. But did I have to buy such a derelict specimen? Well, money was tight and I thought I could fix anything. But, buying a car for $25 should suggest something about its condition, shouldn't it?

I went to the address I'd been given. A Mini ... eek! It was a Mini Traveller which meant it was a make-believe station wagon with wood strips on the sides (real oak) and doors that opened at the back. But, she was in a bad way. The seller and I got it started and then discovered the brakes were seized on. While I drove, he bounced energetically up and down in the back until the brakes freed. Cutting the story short I got the little beast home and parked it behind the apartment block. With no license I set about getting our "new" transport roadworthy. (The acquiring of a Quebec driver's license is yet another magic tale).

I renewed the whole brake system and, as time went on, I did much much-needed bodywork and installed another engine that I'd rebuilt in our next apartment. Even the woodwork got scraped down and varnished. Oh! The work just went on and on. We even drove it down into the States. She was my second Mini (the third I bought for the above mentioned engine, the body I cut up in the garage under the apartment)

In time we bought a VW 1600 Variant and the Mini was sold .................. for $110. A profit?

There followed a lull in Mini-ownership. The VW came and went, a new Datsun 510 followed, we moved to Nova Scotia, Mitch wrote the Datsun off (almost ) in 1974, a brief ownership of an old Ford Mustang followed that. Then in a mad moment I bought a brand new Mini!!! This was dark blue and a delightful change of style and pace.

We'd not had that long before I spun it one sad morning during freezing rain in Enfield and was hit by another car. After I'd climbed out, she was struck again by a third vehicle. I was OK but the insurance company called her a write off. (In fact a fibreglass front end was fitted after we'd parted company and "my" Mini was seen again 'on the road').

The insurance money bought another one! White this time. It seemed to decay at an alarming rate (more salt on the roads? Worse British steel?).

A brown, second hand Mini was acquired, (I think the original colour was gold under the brown?). This exotic vehicle was for Martin' s use I think? But this was a constant source of mechanical grief. While extracting its left-hand half shaft with Martin I managed a torn knee cartilidge which put me in hospital. Its right hand door was transferred by Martin to the white one.

Eventually I sold it to Martin for $1. Legend has it that he lost his virginity therein during a trip to Prince Edward Island.

The Mini saga pretty well ends there. Truth be told I'm not sure what happened the white Mini. It seemed to rust as you watched it. Maybe it just rotted quietly away? As a family we moved on to a sucession of Toyota 'Tercels' and my passion for Minis evaporated, the world had moved on while the British Motor Corporation had stood still.

A little footnote: the Lady Vivian had owned a Mini in her younger days. Yellow in colour, she loved it.

Here they are, she and her yellow Mini in the late 1970s she thinks:

1968

Emmigrating in all directions, or so it seemed.

We weren't fleeing religious persecution or the like. We didn't need to emmigrate really. I had a good job at Blackburn Aircraft in Yorkshire, we had a comfortable home (a "Blackburn" allocated council house), a car, Mitchell happy in school etc etc.
The RAF had perhaps left us with wanderlust. We had no real roots. There were rumours of Blackburn's Buccaneer aircraft production ending. So, somehow or other I started "making enquiries."

At one point we were set to emmigrate in three different directions:
South Africa, I had a job 'for the asking' with Atlas Aircraft in SA. They were desperate for people with Buccaneer aircraft experience, which meant me; an aircraft inspector thereon. The South African Air Force had had two batches of Buccaneers from Blackburns and quite a few of our people had been to South Africa on support work on the aircraft. But stories were coming back with these people: English speakers were very much second class citizens to the Afrikaans- speaking Boers who 'ran the country'. I wasn't too keen to raise my two boys in the aparheid regime of the Republic. So, despite it having the world's best weather we didn't go.
Australia, Very much THE place to which English folk emmigrated in those days (whites only then, that's sort of aparheidish isn't it?). But Aussie is very much the unknown and very the-other-side-of-the-world. The word had it that newly-arriveds were housed in camps outside Sydney where you stayed while seeking work and proper accomodation. In Australia I had no job waiting so we sat and wondered about this one. Then along came ...............
Canada. Canada came in the shape of Canadair. An ad' appeard in the newspaper and I took a day off and went for an interview in nearby Hull. Well, the Canadair people did a number on me. Maps of Montreal showed mostly parks - my air fare was paid - we got a 'forgiveable' $300 loan - the money seemed good - the job building aeroplanes appealed................ the rest as they say is history.

Sold the car, stayed with mother-in-law in Blackpool while the wheels got into motion, had our medical in Leeds and somehow ... that was it.

"The Day" is described elswhere.

1976? Aquiring a Little Sister ......................................................

This little tale has all the trappings of a movie script. In fact, it did form the basis of my started but largely unwritten novel.

I was in St. Catherine's House in London during one of my long-weekend flying visits from Halifax, doing family tree research. I chanced to get into coversation with a chap from the Salvation Army.

"What," I asked, "were the chances of locating my father?"

This was the father I'd never met, knew very, very little about, who'd been damned by my mother, was he alive or dead?

The man asked for, and got, the few details I had. A promise from him that he'd see what he could find out and that was it. I sort of forgot about it.

Some time later, weeks maybe, I was back in Nova Scotia and letter arrived . The Salvation Army had located my father's second wife. Sad to say my father was dead but this second wife had said she write to me.

Write she did, with some explanation of my father's later years and the stunning news that I had a sister.

My father had remarried near the end of the war to a Eileen Josephine Moore (I nicknamed her EJ Mum)

They'd had a daughter in 1944 and named her Antonette Frances. To an only and oft lonely child the discovery of a sister is a rather delightful surprise, especially when she's been undiscovered for about 32 years.

She was living, EJ Mum told me, in Toronto, less than two hours by air. I wrote back to my new step-mother, I wrote to me new sister. I flew to Toronto and met Toni. A petite woman, definitely pretty, rather like Anne Murray (if you know the Canadian singer). We share my father's cleft chin.

So I got to know my father a little through meeting her, even if it was by proxy. I later met EJ Mum and learned some more.

Toni? Still in Toronto. We are close but distant, the seperate years somehow forming an emotional gap between us. Occasional phone calls and cards keep us in touch. I missed meeting my father completely and missed having a sister for all those years.

Writing this tells me I need to phone her and maybe talk a while. She is my sister!

1955?

The first time I flew.......................

The whole process of getting that flight and a few that followed beggars belief now.

I lived in south London then and attended Henry Thornton Grammar School which had its own Air Training Corps squadron. The cadets met on Friday evenings after school and we learned marching and studied (with limited seccess) air navigation and meteorology and like mysterious stuff. The whole thing was a government plot to provide the Royal Air Force with half trained new recruits I suspect. The uniform was, I remember, a devilish torture. Made of the old serge material which had the feel of a coarse woollen blanket. The collar was a throw-back to a World War 1 style. It fastened at the throat with two hooks and eyes which lined up perfectly with our newly appeared adams apples. But, enough of the suffering!

One of the perks of being in the ATC was the chance to fly. This happened, I think, on Sundays. I would appear at Balham railway station in my awful uniform and join the rest of the cadets. We' go by green, electric train to Kenley. Off the train at Kenley we'd form up into a squad and march all the way up the hill to R.A.F. Kenley.

Kenley had been a major Battle of Britain fighter airfield in the second world war (only ten years past then!).
In 1955 it was much reduced. Well, we'd march onto the base and seemingly spend the rest of the time there marching up and down waiting for our time to fly.

The aircraft? Avro 'Ansons'. Essentially a left-over from before the war although the ones we flew in were built during or perhaps soon after (?) the war. Two engines, Armstrong Siddley 'Cheetahs' each driving two bladed propellors. Archaic I suppose to today's eyes they were old even then. Seven passengers and with a tailwheel undercarriage they were nonetheless the most exciting things we'd ever seen close-up.

At long last my turn came and we dashed across to where our 'plane waited. An awkward scramble in through the door on the left hand side behind the wing. Get ourselves sat down and be shown how to fasten the strange all-webbing Sutton harness. A least twice I flew 'up-front' in the right seat beside the pilot. I don't recall where I sat on that first trip. I can't remember the flight now, it was just one of maybe half a dozen.

They were all the same, wonderful.... just wonderful. There's nothing like it. We'd been brought up on stories of the war with its lumbering heavy bombers, Lancasters and Halifaxes and the nimble fighters like the Spitfire and Hurricane. Now I was part of that band of heroes, or so I must have thought.

The bumpy taxi across the grass and turn into wind and no doubt wait the OK from the 'tower'. I can imagine it now. The throttles being opened, the seeminly deafening noise. Brakes off and slowly at first, the acceleration and finally, the sudden smoothness of flight and the ground dropping away. It must have been wonderful. Up into the blue, up where Spits and Messerschmitts had fought over England.

Tiny cars and tiny cows and tiny everything and able to see forever.

The fear, the awe, the excitement. I WAS FLYING. It only happens once for the first time. Forgotten now in a way, in the blur of so many flights since. But that first brief 15 minutes of soaring above the earth must have made my heart sing.

All too soon we'd turn and seemingly find Kenley by strange magic. A slow, wing-wobbling descent and the wheels would hit and we'd taxi in to swap with the next lucky seven.

The 'Anson' was a dear old lady. When the landing gear went down two green- painted, wooden balls would emerge from two tubes to tell the pilot the wheels were locked down and safe. The engine oil pressure gauges showed through cut-outs in the cowlings, requiring the pilot to peer out of his windows, left and right, to read them. You clambered over the main spar on your way to the cockpit.

More marching and then a long march downhill to the train, but that didn't matter ... I'd flown, escaped earth's surly bonds ... I'd flown!

1968

In family terms '68 was probably the most significant year to date. We emmigrated!

I'll deal with the "whys" etc another time.

People usually open something like this with: "The day dawned....." well, I can't remember the dawn of April 4th 1968 at all. It was, by odd coincidence, my ninth wedding anniversary.

We headed eastwards from Blackpool in a hired mini-van (or some-such). The driver plus mother-in-law Rena and Andrea, Glennys, Mitchell, Martin and myself (and as much luggage as regulations permitted) made up the load. Quite a lot of humanity and 'stuff', all hurtling towards Manchester airport.

I remember nothing of the road journey or the ticketing etc at the airport. Andrea disappeared (was she with us at all?) and the remaining five of us sat and waited and waited. Our aircraft had a fault and departure was delayed. Very delayed in fact and we all sat and cooked in the departure 'lounge' which was solar heated, on a very sunny day.

Eventually a replacement aircraft was flown up from London. I remember walking out to the aircraft across the tarmac. A B.O.A.C. Boeing 707 carried us aloft and westwards; not quite, but nearly, into the setting sun ... well it sounds right.

Must have been a wrench for us all.

We arrived something like seven hours later and five hours late at Montreal's Dorval airport. The people who should have met us had long gone home and we found our way, somehow, by taxi to some 'self catering' place on the slopes of Mount Royal.

The Hutton tribe had arrived in the New World.

Perhaps a short write-up for such a memorable event but it seemed to happen like that somehow: all in a rush.

1939-1944

My stories will be from memory. I'll open with the approximate year. How far back does our memory go? Some say to the womb. Can't manage that I'm afraid.

My first four years were spent in Sevenoaks, a town in Kent, in south-east England. World war two was in full swing for course. Over Kent, much of the Battle of Britain was fought. As that waned no doubt the hit-and-run raids continued, courtesy of the Luftwaffe. In 1944 things warmed up again in Kent as the V1 'Doodlebugs' and later, the V2s started arriving. Little of this really survives in my memory of course.

No doubt spent cartridges and assorted bits of Spitfires and Me109s etc rained down on the 'Garden of England'. None hit me I'm glad to say.

Real memories? Yes quite a few. Much of early memory is questionable because of subsequent input from relatives etc but I have some very real memories of those four earliest years.

We lived in a big house. Number 56 Granville Road. The powers that be decided that military personel should be 'billeted' in private homes where there was room. I vaguely remember the comings and goings of these strangers. But only one stays firmly in mind. She was a WAAF or a WRAC or aWREN? No idea but I managed to worm my way into her affections, maybe she liked cute little boys. But I do remember being in the bathroom while she took a bath and remember her large breasts ... which may explain much about me.

I created an onomatopoeia all my own duing this time. "Ging-gong". A ging-gong or goods train got the name from the noise the wagons made when their buffers struck those of another wagon during shunting. The word is mine and now that ging-gongs have gone into history I have my small place there with them! Ging-gongs, like those breasts explain a vital side of my later (and current) character.

I remember travelling on buses and not being able to see out, because the windows had been covered in an adhesive 'fabric' to protect passengers from flying glass should a bomb explode near the bus, there was a war going on remember.

In '44 (presumably) a 'Doodlebug' (V1 flying bomb) landed at the top of the road and blew out all our windows. A Sunday morning I think (the Germans were no respecters of the Sabbath!) and I was yelling from my cot that the curtains had fallen down. A cot at 4 years I hear you ask. Well it was thought safer than a bed I'm told. A leaf from the dinning room table was placed atop my cot as protection from falling houses.

I remember being chased by geese in St Botolphs Park. I've never quite trusted geese since.

Well, in '44 we moved to Farnborough .... a nice point to move on.

A brief intro.....................................

This is my fourth blog but the first "real me" attempt. Two I deleted and the other is a horse of a very different colour.

The name of the blog? "Prewarmodel" - simply, I was born before WW2. I'm now in my 68th year but don't let that put you off, I still have most of my marbles and all but one of my teeth.

I love to write. So, "write about that which you know best." So much has gone from the world in my lifetime - much that was good and much that wasn't. Also much has come and not all of it good. A world that has changed so much and yet, changed not at all.

What to write? Just stories of those years gone. Like everyone else I have a nearly endless supply.
Who's this for? Two sons and four grandchildren who might like to know. (and for me - for the joy of writing it)
Who else? Anyone who finds their way here and has the patience/curiosity to stay awhile.

Please write to my e-mail address chuckle88@yahoo.ca if the mood takes you.