A Slice in Time
Mon, August 17, 2020 Recently I was thinking back to 2008, just twelve years ago, a slice in time if you will, as I thought of the things I had done since that date. It seems not too long ago, and yet for someone sixteen years old today, that twelve years would be the entire memory of their life.
2008 came to mind for several reasons. It was the year the housing bubble burst and threw us into a recession. I was 72 years old and had a nice little part-time job, in an engineering design department of a company that built forklift trucks. It was a three-day a week job that paid well and I enjoyed, but being part-time I was one of the first to go when the recession hit. It was the last job I would have.
2008 was an election year, and America elected its first Black President, Barack Obama. This was something I thought I would never see in my lifetime and thought finally there was hope for Racial Equality. Sadly, here we are twelve years later, and we have a “Black Lives Matter” movement, and protests on the streets.
Four years ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, which I am managing quite well with a relatively low dose of medication, exercise, and a plant-based diet. I have not developed any more symptoms apart from a slight tremor in my right hand which I can control for the most part, and it does not stop me from doing anything I want to do.
Last year my wife and I moved from Summerville, near the coast of South Carolina, 200 miles inland to just outside Greenville, South Carolina. Summerville not far from Charleston was a beautiful place to live but was becoming over-crowded and traffic was horrendous. We are now in a rural area more suited for a quiet retirement.
After reflecting on the last twelve years I thought back to the time from 1940 when I was four years old, up until 1952 when I was sixteen. Another twelve-year slice in time, and still in quite vivid living memory for me, with so much happening in the World during that period.
1940 My father somewhere in the Sahara Desert during WWII.1940, WWII had started in September the previous year, and my father had left to go fight.
I remember little of him before he left, and it would be five years before he returned.
The USA had not yet joined in the war, that would happen the following year in 1941, after Pearl Harbor.
In 1940 we were living in the East-end of London where my father worked on the docks as a Stevedore, loading and unloading ships.
I remember the bombing during the Blitz when a bomb landed a couple of streets behind us. All the windows in the back of the house were blow out, and the blast blew open the bedroom door next to my bed, slamming the door against my bed.
I was uninjured, so too was my mother in the next bed and my sister who was a baby less that a year old. My older brother who was eleven years old at the time, slept in a back bedroom and was blown out of bed and cut by flying glass. We went down to a coal seller, under the house. I remember having to hold my baby sister, who was just screaming and would not stop, while my mother tore strips from a bedsheet to dress my brother’s cuts. Luckily, my brother was not seriously injured, but I clearly remember him covered in blood from head to toe.
Me age 4 with my father's brother David who I was named after. The tents in the background are an army camp.Soon after we moved to a rural area in the South of England where we waited out the rest of the war. I never understood the war at that age, I had known nothing else.
There was no actual fighting, but a lot of soldiers camped nearby, training and playing war games. A lot of military vehicles and even tanks on the road, which for a small boy was pretty awesome.
I particularly remember the American troops arriving in 1944 prior to the Normandy invasion. I was now eight years old.
What I remember most was these American soldiers were always laughing and goofing around.
They seemed like adults to me at the time but now I realize they were teenagers, just barely ten years older than me. Laughing and goofing around because that is what teenagers do.
Then one day in early June 1944 they were suddenly gone. They were there one day, camped on every available piece of spare land, then the next day they were gone. It was a surreal experience.
It was years later as an adult I would realize that many of these happy, laughing kids, had left to die on the beaches of Normandy in their thousands. It would have a profound affect on me that would stay with me for the rest of my life.
My father fought the entire North African Campaign against Field Marshal Rommel’s German Army. He came home briefly in 1944, before returning to France just days after the Normandy Invasion, and went right through Europe and into Germany, and did not come home again until the war was over in 1945.
My father spent the entire war as a member of a tank crew, and was completely uninjured, “Not even a scratch,” as he put it. When he first came home, he was my hero because of what he had done, and because my mother had talked continuously about him while he was gone.
My father turned out to be emotionally distant, and physically abusive to both my mother and me. But war will do that to a man, I was three and a half years old when he left and eight years old when he returned. We never had a chance to bond.
We moved back to the East End of London in 1946 and my father went back to his old job. The kids who had stayed out the war in London were tough and street wise. We evacuees who had spent the war in a rural area, were unsophisticated country bumkins. We even had a different accent and were bullied horribly.
My father who was an amateur boxer would have none of this and taught me the art of self-defense. The result was to be punched by a 36-year-old man, who was a hardened war veteran, hurt far more than any kid at school could hit me. I became unafraid of being hit and fought back. Eventually the bullying stopped.
The East End of London was a high crime area, with an extremely corrupt police force, especially right after WWII. In 1949 when I was thirteen years old, my mother talked my father into moving to Luton, an industrial town just 30 miles north of London.
Me with my first new bike at 13. A Hercules roadster that must have weighed 45 lbs.This move was the one thing that changed the whole course of my life. I got my first bike, and got into cycling as a means of escape from my dysfunctional home.
I passed an entrance exam to a Technical School which lead to an Engineering Apprenticeship at 16 years old.
I got my first lightweight bike at fourteen year old, joined the Luton Arrow Cycling Club at fifteen, but had to wait until I was sixteen to race.
By then I had hundreds, if not thousands of miles in my legs, was super fit and raring to go. I started to win races, and people were telling me I was good at something.
No wonder I lapped it up, even my own father was proud, as long as I won. If I did not, he would say, “You’re fucking useless.” I think more than anything I wanted him to come out and watch me race. But he never did.
Looking back, that first twelve years in memory, seems double the length of the last twelve. But when I consider all that happened in that first slice of time, it is not so much that it is longer, it is just a thicker slice.
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Reader Comments (8)
Very interesting thanks Dave. Glad to hear your Parkinson's isn't affecting you too badly. (It runs in our family.)
Thanks for sharing your slices, I enjoyed it very much.
Great memories, Dave.
Eloquent memories. I'm a generation younger (born on Capitol Hill during the first Eisenhower adminstration),, but I read a great deal of WW II history, particularly as it involved Britain, so your descriptions fit well and meaningfully into the general schema I've gotten from my reading.
Your age-13 Hercules looks very much like the metallic-gold-with-white-accents Raleigh Sports I horse-traded for, age 13, and which I "sportified" by for a steel drop bar. I made the tourist brake levers fit the new drop bar by hammering them until they had a reverse curve; then covering up the damage by some plastic brake sleeves. Oh, and I replaced the bar-mounted trigger shifter with a top-tube "hot rod" shifter with big black plastick knob ordered out of the Sears catalogue, and shipped by slow boat to the ex-Brit-Raj-colony where my father was stationed with the US Foreign Service.
Thanks for the memories, my first lightweight was also a Hercules 3 speed, which I rode from New Haven to Hartford and back on Interstate 91 before it was opened to traffic.
When I read this article, I was immediately reminded of https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/well/live/parkinsons-disease-toxic-chemicals.html
Wishing you health,
Anirudh
Wow! Great post Dave!!!
I've archived all the design threads on this blog in hopes of absorbing even 10% of your knowledge. But what really keeps me coming back is posts like these. Sure I remember getting underwear and socks for Xmas under a tree I made from sticks in the yard, but I've never lived through a bombing raid in a world war.
Thanks Dave