Tiny stories from my dad's youth

My dad shared very few memories with me of his younger days so I could hardly write a biography. What he did share, however, was usually very funny, tragic or interesting...

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My dad was the fourth child of five. His older brother, George (first-born) was nearly nine years older than him - old enough to have fought in the second world war and have a uniform so he only looked up to him with admiration. His younger sister he also adored. However sisters number two and three gave him a lifetime's scar. The story goes that my dad was about four when he was trying to get into his sister's bedroom. They were not going to let their irritating little brother in so they slammed the door on his face - so hard, his nose was completely broken. This left him with a 'nose' that in effect was completely flat until you came to the nostrils. He had this 'deformity' until at the age of twenty one, when he had his nose reconstructed using a piece of bone from his elbow. It always looked a little wonky!

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My dad never had an easy relationship with singing! (The irony was that his son grew up to make a living through singing and playing music). His adverse reaction was simply a result of an unfortunate event in his middle childhood. When he was at school, the boys in his class were lined up and asked to sing. The teacher kept stopping the song because 'someone was singing horribly out of tune'. The boys were then asked to sing alone, one by one so that the perpetrator of disharmony could be discovered. It did, of course turn out to be my dad and he received a ruler over the knuckles for his incompetence but the public humiliation was clearly more damaging. When I was a child, highly aware of his inability to find a tune, he would sing loudly and laugh a lot - probably only took him four decades to comfortably own his 'shame'.

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Another school story my father told me ended up with him being frog-marched to the headteacher's office to be greeted by the headteacher, a boy and the boy's two parents. Apparently my dad had been bullying the boy. The parents and the headteacher, up until that point were unaware of who 'Charlie Potter' was exactly so when this tiny boy walked through the door and stood next to his victim that towered over him, there was considerable awkwardness in the room! I believe there was laughter and words to the effect of 'don't be ridiculous' but we know more about bullying now don't we!?

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My dad lived in Wimbledon as a child. He was not evacuated during the war and once described it as 'a really exciting time'. Being eight years old at the start meant he had little sense its terror and as far as he was concerned, there were overhead planes to look at, bombs to collect and crashed aircraft to forage (one particular one on Wimbledon Common kept him fascinated for some time). When his dad discovered his incendiary bomb collection under the stairs, he wasn't too pleased.

My dad's parents ran businesses. In a place called Pott's Corner, there was a cinema, a cafe, a fish and chips shop and a dance hall (I am a bit vague here). Before the war, the 'main' Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) frequented the dance hall. Just before and during the early war, the hall was used to build a prototype aeroplane. My dad had tales of how the engineers put him on the payroll for fishing out bolts and anything their relatively large hands could not retrieve. Very early on in the war, four bombs were dropped very close to Pott's Corner: three in a straight line and had the plane not veered off, the fourth would have landed directly on the dance hall. Speculation at the time was of course that this was something to do with Lord Haw Haw and his shifted loyalties.

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My dad was a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF from about 1950 - 1958. He spent one of those years stationed in RAF Coltishall which is only about ten miles from where I live. On one of his visits to Norwich, we went to visit the cemetery at the 'end of the runway' (he remembered flying over it to land). I was surprised to find he knew a couple of the people buried there. Then he explained. In the fifties the RAF was nothing like the professional organisation it became from about 1960 onwards. What became the 'cold war', was perceived as a real and immediate threat and having had little time to reflect since the last war, the mentality was: even if a plane isn't working properly, you still flew it. My dad witnessed several people die including a man burning to death after crashing in an orchard near Coltishall. He also escorted the body of a friend to hand over to his widow at the train station. He said he would never forget the look on her face. There was a general feeling of 'it could well be me next but we just have to get on with it'. Most men went down the mess and drank their trauma away but not my dad, he never really was a drinker.

And I think, that's all I have before my mum came along. Sad huh?