An Irrational Fear of Spontaneous Human Combustion

I developed an irrational fear of Spontaneous Human Combustion shortly after my paternal grandfather Alfred was found smouldering in a corner of the billiards room of the Hackney and District Working Men’s Club in Bethnal Green Road, Hackney. On answering his muffled cries for help it was soon realised he had drunkenly set fire to his own moustache while attempting to light a pipe. Despite ruling out SHC I have harboured the fear of going up in flames ever since. I was six years old at the time.
I was born 17th June, 1928 at the Salvation Army Mother’s Hospital in Lower Clapton Road, Hackney North, the only child of John and Grace Morris, and Baptised David John Tottenham Hotspur 25th September, 1928 in the Parish Church of St Mark’s Dalston. My father, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Jesus of Nazareth, was coincidently a jobbing carpenter. A Jack of all trades, he was always known as Jack (or Jesus) throughout his working life. As well as being a fanatical Spurs supporter he was also a keen amateur kite maker. On a Sunday morning he could be seen racing across Hackney Downs trailing a box or diamond searching for that elusive updraft.
When I was eleven‐years old we all declared war on Germany. My first thoughts were to ask granddad Alfred if he had any leftover bombs or grenades from the First World War that I could use to blow up the enemy. He smiled, shook his head and fell asleep. I wondered if he was dreaming. Granddad dreamt bad dreams, waking in the night to the clatter of machinegun fire, artillery bombardment and the cries of young men calling for their mothers. My second thoughts were of the real possibility that in the event of armed conflict I could well be going up in flames sooner than I imagined!

In the afternoon of 7th September, 1940 the Luftwaffe commenced the bombing of London. My father was flying kites on the Downs at the time and for some unexplained reason the early warning radar system mistakenly identified his kite as a Heinkel He111 German Bomber. Fire from anti‐ aircraft guns manned by the Home Guard in Hyde Park blew the craft out of the sky. Thankfully my father was unharmed, but for one brief moment in time held a 28lb shell on the end of a piece of string.

 I Spy With My Little Eye

 

A year after the Heinkel He111 incident we all mysteriously moved lock, stock, barrel and mother’s  piano to Berkshire where we rented a farm cottage in the village of Lambourn. When I asked why we had moved from London to live in the middle of a field, my mother explained that my father was engaged on a secret military project which needed his skills as a carpenter and kite maker.

I convinced myself he was designing a huge wooden rocket ship fitted with death rays that would destroy Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, then travel at the speed of light to the planet Mongo where we would help Flash Gordon defeat the tyrant Emperor Ming the Merciless and his armies of robots.
Our cottage was the middle of three terraced cottages in a road called Blind Lane. On one side lived old Mrs. Twill and her black cat, Marbles and on the other a German spy named Harry Smith ‐ obviously an alias. I think old Mrs. Twill was a witch. In her kitchen was a large cauldron in which she brewed a potion my father called moonshine. Drinking this brew caused people to act in a very peculiar way. It was as if they were under the influence of a powerful magical spell. (My father said they were definitely under the influence).

One day in the village store I overheard my mother talking to Mrs. Quickly about 72‐year old Dan Stockings, who after drinking moonshine one evening had broken his right leg when attempting to leap over a five‐bar gate. Having temporarily lost the use of his nervous system he felt no pain at all, and had been laughing and joking in the ambulance on the way to hospital and was apparently still laughing and joking when the surgeon told him that due to the open fracture and splintering of the bones there was a possibility he may have to have the lower part of his leg amputated!
I could never understand why Harry the spy had not been arrested and thrown into some foul dungeon. He was a very suspicious character and could be seen almost every day cycling around the countryside getting to know the lay of the land. On his back he carried a large sack which I suspected was a powerful long‐range radio transmitter and receiver used to communicate with the German High Command. I feared he had been ordered to sabotage my father’s wooden rocket ship and steal the plans for the secret death rays. My mother told me he was the village postman, but I always had my doubts.

Joseph Meets Mary Magdalene

I started at the Lambourn Church of England School in November of that year and made friends with a boy named Tom. He told me that the Headmaster, Mr. Clarke had recently gone mad and been admitted to an asylum where he had joined his wife, Mrs. Clarke the English teacher, who was already there. With the absence of Mr. and Mrs. Clarke there were only three teachers left to instruct the 289 pupils (mostly evacuees), and for the rest of that term classes were held in the assembly hall which could hold about 200 children with the rest over‐spilling into the adjoining corridors, where some of the older pupils read Biggles stories to the younger ones. My favourite Biggles story was Biggles, Secret Agent in which Algy and Ginger help Biggles rescue Professor Max Beklinder who is working on a secret poison gas for the British. I expect that if Biggles had known of Harry Smith he would have gassed him right away!

In December Mr. and Mrs. Clarke returned from the asylum under sedation. There were now five classes of about 60 pupils in each and I was with Mrs. Clarke who nominated me as milk monitor. I had to bring the milk crates in from outside and hand out the bottles and straws then collect the empties and stack the crates back in the yard. There were monitors for almost everything. There were ink monitors, paper monitors, dining hall monitors and playground monitors.
It was while I was monitoring milk that I met Wendy who was a playground monitor. She was the daughter of an American colonel stationed at an RAF air base on Berkshire Downs and a year older than me. One day she sat next to me in class and offered me a toffee and asked if I wanted to see what she had under her vest. I felt myself flush and asked myself what Biggles would have done in the circumstances. I decided he would probably have taken the toffee but declined the vest!
At Christmas I was asked to play Joseph and Wendy was cast as Mary in our school Nativity play. They had given us a toy doll to represent baby Jesus, and it was so lifelike that Wendy imagined we had made it together. She would hold and cuddle little Jesus and tell him what a good boy he was and change his swaddling cloth once a day. After one evening performance she asked me to marry her. I told her that winning the war was my main priority so I ran off and joined the Cubs.

Bad News From The Home Front

The last time I had seen granddad Alfred was at Paddington Station where all the family had gathered to see us off on our great adventure. His moustache had just started to grow again and he looked a little like Adolf Hitler. At Christmas we had received a card from him in which he enclosed a press cutting from the Hackney Gazette reporting his win in a local billiards tournament for which he had won a cup and a new briar pipe.
On the 1st of January, 1942 a telegram arrived from Aunt Ivy telling us that granddad had passed away. This made me very sad and I hid in a cupboard for the rest of the day. I remember the stories he used to tell about the Great War. One particular Christmas Day British and German troops had left their trenches to play a game of football in No Man’s Land, and granddad had been sent off by the German referee for a dangerous tackle on the German goalkeeper. The next day he shot the referee dead. After all, we were at war, he would say.
 For Christmas I had been given a medieval fort my father had made from a discarded orange box. It had turrets on each corner, a swing down drawbridge and little lead soldiers to defend the walls. But the best present of all (the best present of all time) came from Santa Clause ‐ a crystal set radio receiver! (I knew the present was actually from my parents as I had seen them wrapping it, but I said thank you to Santa because I didn’t want them to know I didn’t believe in him any more).
This miracle of science could detect radio signals by means of a ‘cat’s whisker’ and the broadcasts could then be heard through the attached headphones. There was only one BBC radio station and that was the Home Service. When I was tucked up in bed at night with the bedclothes pulled over my head so nobody could hear I would listen to ITMA (It’s That Man Again) with the comedian Tommy Handley. He made me laugh. I also listened to the news programmes which never had any good news about the war.
One evening I was tuning the cat’s whisker when I detected another wavelength broadcasting in English. Some words were spoken in German but what I could understand was that somebody named Albrecht was calling from Berlin asking if certain map coordinates were ready for transmission. This was answered by a familiar voice confirming they were to be given to Helga. The signal then faded and Big‐hearted Arthur Askey came on singing Busy bee, busy bee. I was sure the second voice I heard was the voice of Harry Smith (who I suspected of being a spy) talking to the German High Command in Berlin. This confirmed my worst fears; Harry Smith was a spy, but who was Helga? Ever since the day my mother had told me that my father was working on a secret military project (that I believed was a huge wooden rocket ship), I had been trying to find out more. Every time I asked him what he was doing he would just smile and say he couldn’t tell me anything as he had signed the Official Secrets Act and that even the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill didn’t know what he was doing. I thought there must be millions of people that Winston Churchill didn’t know that he didn’t know what they were doing. He certainly didn’t know what Harry Smith was doing!
At breakfast the following morning I again asked my father if the rocket ship was nearly finished. He told me they were just waiting for a shipload of death rays that were somewhere in the North Atlantic. (So there really were death rays!) My father had never ever mentioned death rays before and I wondered if I would be asked to sign the Official Secrets Act. I decided not to tell my parents that I suspected the postman was a spy as that would be my little secret until I caught him red‐handed. Later in the morning I head them laughing together in the kitchen. When I walked in they stopped laughing and started talking about old Mrs. Twill’s herbal wart cure.

In Uniform

The Lambourn Cub Pack met on a Wednesday evening in the cricket pavilion on the school playing field. We began the evening with the ‘Grand Howl’ squatting before our Cub Mistress (Akela), who I was surprised to see was my teacher, Mrs. Clarke. On my first evening she nominated me as knot monitor. I was responsible for collecting all the bits of knotted string left over from knot tying practice. To earn our badges it was important to learn how to tie knots, which I thought would come in very handy when I captured Harry Smith. We also had to learn semaphore and practice first aid. (It was never a good idea to practice first aid immediately after knot lessons!). I learned that Cubs always do their best, do a good turn every day and be prepared. My friend Tom was already a Cub and had badges for tying knots and signalling semaphore. I wondered if I should tell him about the German spy.
On the first Wednesday of each month we would have a guest speaker who would give a talk on a subject of interest, sometimes accompanied by an illustrated slide show. The best talks were when the speaker managed to drop all the slides onto the floor and show them in the wrong order. This could be very funny. The speaker for January had been Major Hank Jansen, an American Army surgeon from Newbury District Hospital, the hospital where Dan Stockings had been taken. Using full‐sized human‐like dummies he showed how gaping chest wounds should be covered with a sterile field dressing or some other absorbent material until professional help arrived. If internal organs were protruding he stressed they should not be pushed back in but covered with a moist dressing, and never to use paper products as the blood and guts would turn them to pulp causing serious complications. He also showed us how to easily amputate arms and legs using just an ordinary rifle bayonet. During the course of the demonstration several cubs fainted and Akela was pronounced dead. She was later found to have been in a deep coma as a result of taking an overdose of nerve tonic.
At school the following week us cubs talked of nothing but the gory details of massive chest wounds, and debated that if a person had a hole in their chest would you be able to see what was behind them just by looking through the hole. Granddad Alfred had once told me of the time they were advancing towards enemy lines when a shell passed completely through the body of the soldier running beside him. All he could do was to keep on running and hope that if he was hit by a shell it wouldn’t hurt too much. Somebody had started a wild rumour that the next speaker would be Mr. Clegg, the local undertaker, who would be demonstrating how the ancient Egyptians removed dead people’s brains prior to embalming. (This rumour was actually started by Tom who was charging the boys 6d each admission fee).

 On the evening of the eagerly anticipated February talk the cricket pavilion was full to bursting, with some of the late arrivals clinging to cricket nets that hung from the walls. Mrs. Clarke (Akela) walked to the front of the troop and announced the speaker for this month was Mr. Harry Smith who was to give a talk on the subject of local Ornithology. A stunned silence followed as the village postman (and German spy) Harry Smith walked on. I think I knew how Dan Stockings must have felt when he leaped over that five‐bar gate! It was though I was under the influence of a powerful magical spell as I listened to a German spy who spied on birds. As my senses returned I started to watch the accompanying slide show and was startled to see that in the background of a picture of
a flock of starlings there were views of an aircraft hanger surrounded by a coiled, barbed wire fence with what looked like armed soldiers at the gates. This slide was quickly followed by an upside‐down picture of a pigeon. Good grief, I thought, was this the secret military base where my father was building his rocket ship! Could it be that Herr Smith had no interest in birds whatsoever but was using bird watching as a cover for spying? It was also apparent he had no knowledge of British birds at all as one of the slides showed a pair of emus which I was certain had never migrated to Berkshire.
The talk was interrupted on several occasions when some boys lost their grips on the cricket nets and had to be treated for minor injuries. When Harry Smith had finished speaking Mrs. Clarke applauded loudly then walked with him to the locker rooms. As I was helping to fold flat and stack the wooden chairs I saw a crowd of angry boys gathering around Tom demanding their money back. I hoped he hadn’t spent it all on boiled sweets and Smarties. It was dark outside when we left the pavilion, but by the light of Harry Smith’s cycle lamp I saw him handing Mrs. Clarke the box of photographic slides he had been using, which she quickly put into her bag.

To be continued...come back later...