A Life Remembered - Your Tributes

I was 5 and Clive 4 when we shared a bedroom together in officers quarters close to Catterick Army camp in North Yorkshire 1944. I was evacuated to his parent’s home  with aunty  Rosalina  who in the language of the day, was blind, deaf, dumb, and  bedridden  from  adolescent meningitis, in a  wartime  ambulance with voluntary drivers. 

I retain only a  few  memories of our time together, with the most vivid running through a cornfield which was higher  than him on our way to church with his mother and two of the other  three aunties who travelled separately by train.

I saw Clive again immediately after the war when his father was stationed at Aldershot. His  father took both of us for a meal in a hotel, my first experience of having a meal in a restaurant. We  had brown Windsor soup and chicken Vol-au-Vent which both of us did not like as we had  never experienced before, meriting a reprimand about other people starving and wasting  good  money.

I went to stay with Clive and his mother when they first went to live in Folkstone and his father was again away serving in Hong Kong. I had left school and was working in the Finance

Department of a County Council. Clive was studying to become a draftsman. 

I was an enthusiast of traditional jazz and blues at the time and Clive had acquired the first Elvis Presley long play  which  was  played  all  day and  night   until his  mother  said  stop. 

The  two had returned from Germany where his father  had  been part of the  British Army of  Occupation. Clive had attended at least ten different schools, and his mother was greatly affected  by the devastation and poverty of the German civilian population and their plight.

Given his experience as a war time  baby and then then his nomadic life as a school boy in a foreign  land, it is remarkable what he then achieved in his working life. I remember  that he put off retiring from the manufacturing company he had come to wholly own in order to ensure the  future of  the  workforce.

Over the past year we communicated more than previously sharing  news of how our respective lives were affected by physical health challenges and concern that our children and their children  were facing just as much danger, challengers and uncertainty about their future than our parents  had faced, and when as children we had not understood and therefore appreciated.

The eldest of our seventeen first cousins, Albert, who had worked for the Dock Police in the family homeland of Gibraltar, was the first to die in a Japanese Prisoner of War in Borneo, buried in a British maintained war grave, the telegram arriving as the war in Europe ended. Now  there are only a handful of us left, the eldest approaching 100  years.