John was born in April 1929 and went first the Foundling Hospital in Redhill and the next year, moved with the rest of the children to the new school at Berkhamsted. He joined the army on leaving school and then went into bookmaking. He lived in Surrey with his wife and family.
Early Life
‘And he was 14 and when she was– and she was 15 and… and that was when it was done… And of course then things weren’t as they should be and, you know, they sent my mother away to Salisbury to be looked after in a… unmarried mothers’ home…. my grandfather said that that had to happen because her mother, my my mother’s mother, had died in 1926. There was no-one at home to look after her as well because they had a small-holding where they were living and they needed all hands to the pump sort of thing and no-one was there to help look after my mum and me. So she was sent away to Salisbury and to the Diocese of Salisbury. And then she met someone there who suggested to get in touch with the school. And then from then on that’s how I became from there to the school. And this is the letter that I got which says… thanking the school for taking me in… She went back to… a place in… run by …not nuns, but… monks or something like that, in Salisbury, and there she was– worked there, in the washroom or whatever like that, washing, and she contracted TB and she died. 18 years old.’
Into the World
‘I mean we didn’t have a civilian ah uniform– civilian clothes when we left the school so the only clothes we had when we left school was in our school uniform, and all the other boys came in their civilian clothes and we had no civilian clothes so we went from school uniform straight into Army uniform. So we went out of one uniform into another. We was– we were used to it, that was our way, and I remember the first night there, a lot of sobbing going on in the dormitory, or in the… the Army hut, where boys were missing their mums and they were homesick. But our boys weren’t homesick because we… we were used to being disciplined or whatever, and we had nothing to cry about so we lis– we listened to the other boys sobbing as they went to sleep, missing their home. Well we had nothing to cry about.’
School Life
‘The thing– the abiding memory is that one day, our our dormitory was upstairs, a big dormitory with over 30 children in and there was two lines on the outside and lines in the middle and I remember standing there and looking out the window and seeing a train go by. And I stood there and I thought “Now I’m all alone. It’s me against the world.” And that’s the first time I ever thought, you know, that I was somewhere different, like, that, you know, that I was in a school, I wasn’t with my foster parents. That there was just….that I was on my own..[long silence]’
