CAM        The joys of being a Campbell?                                                  Dec 2009

My mother was once asked "Aren't you proud to bear that famous name, Campbell".  Her reply was "It was the biggest mistake of my life".  Although I am the child of her and my father, I have to agree with what she said.  Your will see why if you read on.

Much of what I have recorded below is from my memory of what my mother told me.  However I do have two personal memories of my father to make me believe all that mother told me.  And I never found that my mother exaggerated facts, rather the reverse if anything.  "Honour thy father and thy mother" the Good Book tells us.  But I do not believe everything I read.  My mother was an excellent parent, and I say that without having any sentimental feeling in that matter.  But my father was a  lout.  And that statement too if not clouded by any sentiment.  Regretfully I have some of my father's genes in me, and I can recognise one of the less desirable traits in my character.

I was born in the 19th December 1925 at Victor Road Teddington.  The town is now in London but when I was born it was well outside the capital.  I sometime wonder whether I am strictly a Cockney as Teddington may have been within the sound of Bow Bells.  I say that as Big Ben was heard at Windsor in the late 1800s.  But I am certainly not a Cockney in my speech or calling.  I now live in Nottingham, but that's another story.

My mother married my father at the barracks in Newport Isle of Wight in 1924.  The old man was in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.  He had served in India and according to my mother, his best man told her later that Satan (my mother's name for Colin senior) was that he got one stripe, but lost it by being caught in the read light district of an India city.  (As the Medical Officer once related to my group when I served in India from 1945 to 1948 "You fellows put your penises where I wouldn't put my walking stick).

I have two early memories of my father.  He was always very dictatorial and on this occasion he was ordering me around.
"Do this"
"All right"
"Do that"
"All right"
"Stop saying 'all right'
"All right"
I recovered consciousness on the floor below a window.  I was probably about five or six at that time.

The other memory was of the thrashing he gave our little dog after it dug up a bit of the front garden.  I was terrified.

When I was a baby (probably about one year I would guess), my mother was out shopping and left me with the old man.  My mother's mother was in the house at the time.  Mother told me that I had a lusty pair of lungs and used them from time to time.  The old man hit me to make me shut up.  My Gran interceded and got a clout for her trouble.  Gran fled the house across the road to where her eldest son lived.  He was only a small chap but was nobody's coward.  He came across he road to sort out the lout that hit his Old Lady.  Satan grabbed me and used me as shield.  A standoff of about ten minutes ensued on the doorstep.  It was bitterly cold weather and I ended up in St John's cottage hospital Twickenham with double pneumonia.

My mother had an NSPCC Inspector call at the house when my father was at work.  He was a tram conductor and later moved to the trolley buses.  The Inspector asked if he could interview my mother and father together.  My mother replied "He's such a practiced liar that you will only have my word against his".

According to my mother, Satan was a "dreadful sulk".  "He would sulk for weeks without my mother knowing what had upset him.

My mother met one one of my old man's ex-drivers.  He told mother that he had put in a formal request to be transferred to another conductor.  He just couldn't stand my old man's sulking.  A funny story nothing to do with my father conduct.  He used to go the work in his LPTB uniform from the house at 21 Cross Deep Gardens Twickenham.  On day he got a round robin asking him to travel to and from work in mufti as his uniform lowered the tone of the road.  You can see how snooty some of the neighbours were in about 1930

The old man walked out on the family just after my younger brother was born, but returned a while later.  Soon after my mother applied to Brentford Magistrates Court for a Judicial Separation.  Both my parents were summoned to the Court and were interviewed by a Court Official prior to the actual Hearing.  My father said something to the Official and my protested "Oh Colin, that just isn't true".  The old man went to hit my mother before realising where he was.  But the Official had seen enough that he told the Magistrate that "This is man has a violent and uncontrollable temper."  My mother got he Separation.

The old man walked out and disappeared again.  But my mother could not keep up the mortgage and prevailed on one of her brothers who had a house at 10 Lisbon Avenue Twickenham.  My mother, brother and I lived at that house for quite a while.

Later in the 1930s my mother and father got back together again.  I do not know any details of that reconciliation.  I do remember that we lived in a Council House at 157 Kingston Lane, Teddington.  At the back of us was a pig farm.  Mum regularly bought fly-papers, I remember.  One one occasion a Council worker visited and he hung his jacket on the fence outside the house.  My mother said to him:
"It looks like rain, bring it in the hall".
"Thank you madam but I'd rather leave it outside"
"Oh, I see.  But there are no bugs in this house"
"Well, if that's true it's the only one on the estate"

Our house was some short distance away from the rest of the estate and had a nice back garden.  My mother tried growing caraway seeds one summer.  They germinated but failed to fruit.  I remember that the foliage looked similar the carrots.

Where the pig farm was, is now a block of flats.  Anyone reading this story who lives local to that house, will, I am sure, be interested.

We moved from Kingston Lane to 43 Clonmel Road Teddington, not to far from Fulwell Depot.  Quite close to work for my father.  It seems that he still had his violent streak in him.  One day in the morning I was in bed and heard a rumpus downstairs.  I ventured down when things were quiet again.  The old man had a piece of sticking plaster on his forehead.  Much later my mother told me that she had talked to a neighbour about my father's behaviour, and that he had thrown his dinner on the plate at her on several occasions.  The neighbour told her that what she should do was to pick up the plate and clout Satan with it.  My mother had done just that.

Later that day my mother gathered a few clothes and took my brother and I to my Uncle Bill's house at 10 Lisbon Avenue Twickenham.  He took us in again.  This was about 1937 or 1938.  I continued at Teddington Council School (now know as Stanley Road School).  My brother passed the 11+ but I failed it.  He went to Thames Valley Grammar School in Fifth Cross Road (known then as a Secondary School) and I stayed on at the Council School.  Somewhere along the line we lived at 83 Victor Road.  My mother told me that the woman next door was a tart and that Satan spent a great deal of his timer in number 85.  The woman's husband was one of those inoffensive characters who would not say "boo" to a goose.

I will add some more when I'm in the mood.

TO BE CONTINUED