Children of David Harry and Hilda May Pankhurst

I still have quite a vivid recollection of the first day they arrived, because I took the boys, my cousins, across the Lines, in front of our house, to see the War Memorial, which was the far side of the Lines, which overlooked Chatham, and the River Medway. As we were walking back to our house, we were suddenly overwhelmed with a great cloudburst, rain, 'cause I remember my cousin David saying to me, "Your clouds down this way come very low," and—before we knew where we were, we were caught in a drenching rain; we had to run all the way back home, and—it was a real cloudburst, we couldn't see anything but cloud, you know, just see through, make our way direct, home—but it was like running in a cloud. I hadn't experienced that before, it just seemed to be extraordinary, that it should happen that day.

But my cousin David was a year older than me. He became enrolled at the grammar school, he got a transfer to the same grammar school, and I used to go to school with him—while they were living with us. After three months, they managed to get a house in Windmill Road, which was only about five to ten minutes' walk from where we lived, and it was on my route to school, I passed their house on my route to school. So I often went to school with my cousin David, and came home with him, but—as he was a year older than me, his school timetable was slightly different from mine, so we didn't always coincide. But he was quite a good sportsman, about the same ability as my self, in educational standards, although he—I think being educated in Scotland, the Scottish education was slightly more advanced than the English equivalent, at that time—so he was doing fairly well at school. He later left school, he didn't go on to university. He went to work in the local chemist's, as a dispenser, or assistant dispenser, of drugs, at Boots' Chemist, in the High Street. He was a great sportsman, too, and liked playing football; and he played for his team in a midweek league—most of the shop assistants, of course, couldn't play football on Saturdays, 'cause it was a full day of working them—but they usually had Wednesday early closing—so that they used to play their football on a Wednesday afternoon. He played for one of these midweek teams, and often he would ask me to make up the team number, if they were short of players. I had Wednesday afternoon free, at school, and if I hadn't got a rugby game on that afternoon, I would go and play football with his team. Sometimes it meant playing under very atrocious conditions—I remember one particular football match when it rained the whole time, the pitch was absolutely a sea of mud. We hadn't any changing places, it was a recreation park, down at Luton, which meant that all our clothes were just piled in a corner, and just with our macks on top of them. So we were very wet, it wasn't always the best of games to play! But that was all we had, in those days . . . Other games were better, would have changing facilities—we had to take what we could.

. . . my cousin David, later, became a policeman, in the Metropolitan Police service; and he married a Swiss cook, on one of his beats—I think he passed his wife's house, where she was a cook. I don't know how they became acquainted, but he used to find it very convenient to be able to stop and pass the time of day there, and have a chat with her. She would provide him with some goodies somewhere where he could sit and have a rest, and a bun, while he was on his round. Anyway, they married and had two or three children. We met up with them again, after the War, when—we were living in Muswell Hill, at the time, we'd moved to Muswell Hill. I think we'd still exchange Christmas cards, or we started exchanging Christmas cards after the war (I don't know what happened during the war) but anyway, we found that we weren't living so very far away, and—I think one Christmas we all went to their house, to have the Christmas day together, or it may have been Christmas evening, I can't remember now. It must have been the Christmas probably before Lucy was born [so probably Christmas 1947], we just had the two children, because—I seem to remember it was early on in our stay in London. And we had quite an interesting Christmas time with them.