The Life of Laurie

By Laurie, himself

I was born in 1931 in Lewisham. One of the lasting disappointments of my life is that no plaque has ever been erected on the house where this important event occurred. As a result I have always felt unappreciated. After all being born is no mean achievement, and was I thought, more newsworthy than the resignation of Winston Churchill from the government that happened in the same year and captured headlines that should by right have belonged to me.

DAD. A proud father.

My father was a truly great man. His mother had died before he was two and he had immediately been placed in an orphanage by his father. Neither his father nor any other relative visited him during the fourteen years he was at the orphanage. He didn’t really have any serious hang ups but there was just a trace of bitterness that his father never bothered to visit him.

He left school at fourteen and served an apprenticeship as a baker. When he went to work on a very wet day he would put his shoes in the baker’s oven to dry.
He fought in Gallipoli but would never speak about his wartime experiences.
After many years he became a foreman baker and eventually was promoted to become the Manager of John Gardener’s bakery in Long Lane, Bermondsey. The bakery was unfortunately located next to a skin-processing factory and the smell was appalling. But the bread and cakes were consistently of good quality and sold well and the directors invited my father to take the job of Manager on a three months trial. At the end of three months he was called into the directors’ office and told that the job was permanently his under one condition. He must wear a hat when he came to work. How the world has changed.

During the war he was responsible for several hundred wartime canteens run by Lyons. Not bad for an orphan boy who left school at fourteen. Possibly because he was an orphan his family meant everything to him and was always at the centre of his life. My mother was not an educated woman. At thirteen she left school to work in a grocer’s shop. She had to lift heavy bags of sugar or tea from the top shelves, which probably contributed to her severe arthritis, which caused her so much pain during the last twenty years of her life. The girls who worked in the shop were not allowed to sit down during their twelve-hour day. When the supervisor was out of the shop, one girl would keep cave while the rest sat down. If a customer came into the shop and didn’t buy anything, the supervisor had to be called. My mother was a wonderful housewife and mother. I was extremely privileged in both my parents.

MUM. A lovely mother with a new baby.

We moved to a big house with a wild uncultivated garden, a child’s paradise but you know what adults are. My father cut down the long grass and planted flowerbeds, which mustn’t be trampled on under pain of death. However it was a huge garden and there was still room for my brother, three years younger than myself, my father and I to play cricket, which helped to give me a lifetime’s love of sport.
Life changed dramatically in 1939 with the outbreak of war. My brother and I were sent to St Teresa’s Convent boarding school at Tenby in Pembrokeshire, South Wales which was run by nuns.

RIDING HIGH. My brother and I go racing.

When I woke up at the school on my first morning I wouldn’t open my eyes for fear that I would see the blue curtains at the window near my bed and I would know I was definitely not at home. I could no longer make believe it was all a dreadful dream as soon as I saw those horrible curtains.
At the age of ten I was sent to St Joseph’s College in Market Drayton, Shropshire, another boarding school run by Christian Brothers. There has been so much criticism of brothers and nuns in the press in recent years that I must say that I was very happy. There was plenty of sport and both the brothers and the nuns were strict but fair. The brothers beat us occasionally when we deserved it, but we usually managed to get our own back by fouling them when they played football with us. They gave a lazy boy an excellent education.
When I was ten years old I decided on my future profession. I already had a great love of the sea and with the naval war very much in the news I decided that I wanted to be an Admiral of the Fleet. I wrote to the Admiralty in my childish handwriting asking them to explain how I should go about this, and amazingly I received a reply explaining the need for years of training and asking me to apply for schooling in a naval college when I was fifteen. I kept the letter for many years as an example of the human face of the Admiralty in 1941 in the middle of a war for survival!!!
Many years later a friend of mine wrote to the Queen asking if she would come with her corgis on a doggie walk he was organising to raise funds for the youth club. He received a reply regretting that Her Majesty had a previous engagement and therefore would be unable to attend. Officialdom had retained its sense of humour over the intervening years.

GETTING KNOTTED. Learning to be a sailor.

When I was fifteen I began my naval career by joining H.M.S. Worcester a training ship for Cadets hoping to enter the Merchant Navy. It was an eye opener. Under the religious supervision of the nuns and brothers I hardly knew a swear word and sexual matters were scarcely mentioned by either teachers or believe it or not the students. On the Worcester such matters monopolised ninety per cent of the conversation.
Starting out on a naval career was a mistake. To be an efficient naval officer a person must be good at Maths quick of movement and practical. I was none of these things. Something of a dreamer really.
After two years I passed my final exams on the Worcester - just-- - and entered the Merchant Navy with Clan Line, the largest company in the British Merchant Navy, the wrong course if I was to realise my childhood ambition of becoming Admiral of the Fleet.
I survived for two years, visiting South Africa, Mauritius, India, Ceylon as it was then called, and Pakistan.

After I left the Navy I was called up to do my National Service. The rule in those far off days was that if you were in the Merchant Navy you did not have to do National Service but the moment you came out you were called up. I joined the R.A.F. on a three year commission and was put on a RADAR course. I was good at the theory and at one stage could name the precise function of 160 valves in a RADAR set called 7K but as usual my practical ability let me down.

HOLY COMMUNION PARTY. I’ll grab a piece before the kids get at it.

When I was nearing the end of my time in the R.A.F. a sergeant came into the billet and asked if there were any Roman Catholics present. Three of us reluctantly admitted the truth suspecting he wanted us to clean out the Church but in fact we were sent on a Moral Leadership course in Liverpool. It was a brilliant course run by a group of young priests and as a result I decided that on leaving the R.A.F. I would become a Catholic Priest. In the pursuit of this vocation I was more successful than in my ambition to become an Admiral and after eight years training I was ordained. Over the next thirty-five years I served in the parishes of Plumstead, Deal, Camberwell, Cheam, Tooting, Aylesham, a small mining village in Kent, Tonbridge, and finally back to Deal.

MEG. My Red Setter was anxious to improve herself.

After I became too old to play games - I played my last game of Rugby at thirty-seven - I acquired two Red Setters, Meg and Jill to make me take exercise, and later after they went to the great Kennel in the Sky my third Setter Emma who is still with me. I preferred to play Cricket or Rugby but the sight of a Red Setter running across a green field in the sunshine is as beautiful a sight as you could wish to see. At one time Meg had aspirations to become a concert pianist
I retired in 1966 but still continued my pastoral work which gave me great pleasure. I took two services at Chatham every week, carried out the occasional wedding or funeral and looked after the parish when the parish priest was away.

In 1999 I was diagnosed as having Colon cancer but the malignant growth was successfully removed. While in hospital under the influence of the drugs I hallucinated and insulted almost everyone in the ward. I told the Ward Sister she had a drunken husband and I firmly believed that the I.R.A. was coming to kill me. I sat up in the bed with a plastic bottle in my hand for use as a club ready to fight them off. The hallucinations were far worse than the reality of the operation.
After six months of chemotherapy I was right as rain for four years. Then after several seizures it was discovered that I had a brain tumour and a couple of spots on my lungs. The tumour was removed and at the moment the spots on my lung seem to be dormant. No chemotherapy for the present, thank God,
All my life I have been telling people how wonderful heaven is. Today the gardens in the Hospice are lovely and it’s a gloriously sunny day. Such a heavenly world! I’m in no hurry to leave it. A heaven in the hand is worth two in the bush??? A heaven you know is better than one you don’t know???

THE END … not quite

© Laurie Hobbs 2003