The Last V2 Rocket To Fall On West Ham

It takes time to get to know your Father. In my case, perhaps sadly like so many, I feel I have only begun to get to know him in the years after his death. When it was too late to speak to the man to whom I owe so much.

My father came from another world, so to speak. He was born in 1916, into a world that was so different from the world that I have come to know as mine.

His Father was a Merchant Seaman, and by all accounts a Victorian, who lived his life in ways that we can only dream of or read about today.

My Father was one of 12 children, and his mother, Beatrice, lived until she was 95. Quite an astonishing achievement for a woman that had lived through the times that she had to live.

It was said within the family that she had never quite understood why she had fallen with child whenever her husband, Shadrach Abraham Page, had returned home from a voyage. Straight out of Moby Dick

Such innocence seems extraordinary from the viewpoint of the present.

From the 60s through to the 80s there were numerous funerals as brothers and sisters in turn reached the end of their lives. As a child, growing up from 1960, I was always sheltered from such events, although I have strong memories of most of my uncles and aunts, until the time in about 1971 when my Mother and Father moved away from what had been a close family in London to begin a new life on the South Coast.

Perhaps it was necessary for my Mother to have escaped the close village atmosphere of East End London, where I can remember family events almost every weekend, when inevitably the Brothers would drink heavily, and probably play cards, whilst the women brought up their children and gained most comfort from their sisters and sisters-in-law.

It wasn't an easy life, to be married to one of the men this close clan. Those were difficult years through which to live, and many of the Brothers spent time away from home during the war years, and though my father was a Stevedore in the London Docks, which would have been a Reserved Occupation, he joined up in 1940 along with numerous of his dock labouring pals, and in my Father's case, after being married in 1938, he was away at war until he returned in 1948.

I am sure this was not a unique experience among the women of my Mother's generation. My Mother spent most of the Blitz in the East End of London, living with my father's Mother, close by the docks, which must have been a terrible experience to have lived through.

In my Mother's case, she escaped after the Blitz by taking war work on the outskirts of London, in an armaments factory until she trained to be a Capstan Lathe Turner.

She was then sent to work in a factory close to Blackpool in Lancashire, a world away from her life in the East End of London.

She was childless until my sister’s birth in 1955, and I was born in 1960.

The work of a dock labourer was a hard one, long hours and backbreaking work. Compounded by the early separation in their marriage, it can’t have been easy, and I don’t believe my Mother ever knew the contents of my Father’s wage packets, although the priority for any expenditure that she did make from housekeeping was for us children.

My Father’s life after the war was spent mainly with his pigeons, and I can’t help but feel that this was an escape from the memories that he must have carried around since the end of his war service.

Although I remember occasional trips as a family to local pubs, I only remember one occasion when we had a family holiday at the seaside, where we visited a resort in which my Mother’s sister had worked for years as a chambermaid.

Holidays were not something that my father was good at, and he would much more likely spend a week off work building a new pigeon loft for his beloved birds.

To be fair, perhaps the one social occasion in the year was the Pigeon Fanciers’ Ball, which my father only really attended so that he could receive the cups and prize money that he regularly received.

He was an excellent pigeon fancier, but this was a fairly solitary hobby.

I would spend time with my Father at the regular Friday meetings of the local pigeon club, were the birds would have their rubber rings attached to their legs, and the clocks would be struck and tested for their accuracy as timing instruments for race days.

I still have my father’s time-worn pigeon clock, a beautiful French clock. a Toulet,  in a small wooden box. Pigeon clocks are like ships’ chronometers, extremely accurate instruments into which the rubber race ring would be inserted inside a metal thimle, the timing of the birds arrival back at the Loft enabling the speed of the pigeon to be calculated in yards per minute, so that longer races could be run between clubs that were miles apart, and sometimes prize money from betting in the inexpensive pool might accumulate to significant sums.

I remember that one year my father had a pigeon that came third in what was the London Combine from Thurso in Scotland, third out of 30,000 birds to fly the 600 miles from the race point at the most northerly point on the British mainland.

He was offered a significant sum for that pigeon, which he refused, because the money meant nothing. Pigeon racing was the closest my father came to the companionship of other men, where they could talk about the things that their women would forbid to be spoken of in front of the children.

There were several stories that were suitable for women and children to hear, but so few that he would be forbidden from talking about his war experiences because everybody had heard everything that could be spoken of too many times.

No doubt there were many things that my father would have never wished to ever recall, from service that took him through the desert under Montgomery, El Alamein and the second front from North Africa to invade Italy, fighting up the leg of Italy. What in one song referred to the D-Day Dodgers. Only in the last verse did some mention get made of the comrades that were buried in places like Monte Cassino.

When he was demobilised in 1948, he was in Palestine, and no wonder he always talked about how he had done enough traveling never to want to have to  ever go abroad for a holiday.

Love kept them together, but it was the kind of love that dared not be spoken of, the acceptance that there was nothing else to contemplate beyond providing for the children, and putting up with the way in which the men drank too much whenever they got together.

Emotion lay buried deep beneath the surface, and I only lately discovered that one of my Fathers closest Brothers, a fellow pigeon fancier, had lost his first wife and his young daughter to the last V2 rocket to fall on West Ham.

He remarried, but never had any more children. Pigeons, once again, seemed to be the way in which life was made bearable. Hours spent alone waiting for the birds to find their way home, that and in Harry’s case, a wicked brew of rice wine, such as I have never tasted since.