Made In Hull By Maurice Fairfield Part Five - The War 1 (3/3)

(1/3), (2/3), (3/3). Part One - Arundel Street Days Part Two - Our Terrace Part Three - The Calm before, (The Storm) Part Four - Schooldays Part Five - The War 1 Part Six - The War 2

This was the case with my younger sister and myself. We were sent later on to the home of my grandparents and aunts and uncles, who lived in a village called Polesworth in Staffordshire, not far from Birmingham. For the first time I learned that not all working people were as hard up as the bedraggled natives of working Hull.

It was a busy manufacturing and coal-mining area and my mother's family had benefited from steady well-paid work largely untouched by the depression of the thirties. Their houses were bigger and better furnished and they seemed tougher and more confident; opinionated and direct, a bit harsh and contemptuous of strangers.

We were not happy there although our relations did their best to make us so. My most lasting memory was going for a walk with my Uncle Ted and his spaniel one Sunday morning. The landscape was a mixture of rural and industrial with coal mines nearby as well as clear slow-running rivers different entirely from the brown muddy waters of the Hull and the Humber.

Our walk led us near a railway busy with heavy steam locomotives effortlessly hauling long, clanking goods trains. On a green bank sat a young man with a notebook and a pencil jotting things down as they as they rattled and rumbled by. Uncle Ted nodded to him as we passed. I was brooding. Uncle Ted, I said at last. What if he's a spy? What if he's writing down the stuff in the trains and where it's going?

Ted laughed. I shouldn't think so lad, he said. Nevertheless, his walk slowed after a while. D'you think us 'as done right thing by us's country? he asked thoughtfully. My initial suspicion seemed a bit unlikely now. Then he turned and we walked back to where the young man was happily scribbling in his book. What you writing down there, lad?" he asked a note of challenge in his voice. Engine numbers, he said. My uncle looked at him sternly. It's me hobby, he said, outraged. He held the book out to show neat columns of numbers.

Uncle Ted grunted, baffled, and we went on our way back to the house in Polesworth where I had a model aeroplane to work on in the shed. Uncle Ted, still unsatisfied, called into the Police Station where, to our surprise, we were taken seriously by the sergeant (after a conversation with a young constable who couldn't understand what we were on about at first).

Nowadays there would probably be a police car with flashing lights and sirens. As it was, the two police left the station locked up and headed off on their bikes. We never heard how they got on but it made a good talking point at Sunday dinner and it was generally agreed that we had done the right thing.

Since then I have noticed two occasions on which British tourists in Europe have been flung, protesting into gaol after being picked as spies when collecting the numbers of aircraft at European airports. Once in Rumania and once only a few years ago in Athens. Harmless eccentrics are not looked on as tolerantly in many other countries it seems. These incidents many, many years later made me feel a little relieved - I had occasionally wondered what happened on that peaceful Sunday morning all those years ago. Perhaps he really was a spy…

Original Photographs published with the kind permission of The Hull City Archive and The Polesworth Society www.polesworthparish.co.uk . Copyright 2006 © Maurice Fairfield

Continued on www.thisisUll.com Part Six - The War Part 2

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