Old 'Daisy'
Next door to our house in Whetstone lived two elderly spinster sisters, and boys being boys, I'm sorry to say that I made their lives a misery at times by annoying them by all means possible. 'Knock down ginger' as it was called was a favourite pastime up and down the street with local boys. The idea was to give the doors knocker a good old clout and then run like the bats out of hell round the corner or dive under a nearby bush out of sight where you had a good old laugh at the neighbours angrily looking up and down the road to see who was about.
In their back garden the old dears had a lovely ornamental bird bath on the lawn, and with an old 'Daisy' air-gun I had acquired, a favourite game of mine was to sit at my upstairs bedroom window to get a good clear view at the sparrows and starlings which came to drink and bathe. I considered these were fair game as there were so many of them; all other birds were exempt from this dubious torture. For if I was lucky enough to score a hit (which was not many times out of ten!) it would mostly only wing them and then I had to make a mad rush downstairs and out into the garden and then, after a hasty look to make sure nobody was watching, have to get a quick run and scramble over the fence to retrieve the unfortunate birds. Then came the rotten part I had to put the poor old birds out of their misery by knocking them on the head! Strangely enough this nefarious pursuit put me in good stead later on when I was out poaching which is another story.
All birds and beast of the fields and hedgerows were my high delight and although I made a nice collection of birds-eggs, which I learned to 'blow' myself, I never took more than one from each nest and then not unless there were at least three eggs in it.
The most hair raising of these expeditions was when on a stroll across Totteridge-Fields as we called them. They stretched from the High Road opposite the 'Black Bull' pub right down to the 'Dollis Brook', which was the boundary with the golf course on the side, and then by various footpaths you could walk right through to the bottom of Barnet Hill. I had previously watched a pair of Carrion Crow's nest building at the very top of what seemed to me a hundred foot high Oak tree, and I was determined to get my first Crow's egg.
I well remember the day I decided to attempt the climb, a nice spring day but quite a stiff breeze. Alone a usual on these forays, I set off fairly easy from the lower branches, which I could just reach from the ground. But as I proceeded upwards a casual glance down and curious bunch of heifers that had gathered to watch my antics looked as if were seeing them across the other side of a five-acre field. I had to have a breather and gather up my now trembling limbs for the final assault to the swaying top branches, which held the nest! But I was determined to get that egg and anyway was long past the point of no return. I don't know to this day how I at last managed to reach up an arm with the branches swaying in the wind, but I did and with the egg safely in my cap started the perilous descent. I knew I must not look down again and this did not help matters regarding feeling for foot-holds, however I hung on for grim death with both arms and feet and after what seemed a life-time got back down to earth. The crow's egg needless to say was the pride of my collection!
The old air-gun gave me many hours of pleasure and with a school mate Jack Cooper whose father was pig-man at the A.I. Dairies opposite the Bull, we used to go round the pig-sty's of an evening after dark and with a torch ping at the rats scurrying about the rafters and round the walls, and we had many a good night's fun from that. I had about a half-mile walk home from his place in the dark and if too late got a clip round the ear-hole from father for worrying my parents as to my where a bouts at that late hour and sent to bed with no supper. But it didn't stop us from an occasional evenings sport which we thought did no harm and in fact helped old George DeRivas who had the farm at that time, keep the rats down a bit.
School began to pall and on many a warm summers day I would be off 'playing truant' out in the country-side eyes and ears tuned to the sights and sounds around me.
I remember times when I lazed out in a meadow watching a Kestrel hovering, swoop for a kill and then fly to a nearby tree-stump to feed a newly fledged young-un. Also finding below a hole in a tree, the 'casts' of an Owl and taking this home to dissect to find out what the bird had caught perhaps the previous night.
Happy carefree days that, had I but known, were to end in a few short years.
I left school at 14 and my first job was an office boy at an Estate Agent in Golders Green, and my wages 25p (five shillings in old real money!)
Shortly after this we moved house again to Abbots Road New Barnet and I soon got fed up with the longer journey and I found myself a job nearer home at a Photographers with a wood yard attached where they made the picture frames. This paid a little more and no tram fares to fork out. I was put to odd jobs in the yard and as I had been quite good and liked wood work at school, I soon progressed to using the mitreing machine and assembling frames.
Various changes in jobs (they were easier to come by in those days) followed, from piece machinist at Standard Telephones New Southgate, to assistant/apprentice at a new factory opening up at Finchley to make optical lenses on government contract When I started there was just one other man, an ex-merchant navy marines engineer with a sheaf of blue-prints and my job was to assist him in putting up brackets for wall and floor machinery, electric motors, belt-pulleys etc, something new and interesting.
Later as lathes and a machine shop were installed I progressed to apprentice fitter and turned earning better money.
This was 1938/9 and little did I realise at the time that the eventual products ie; lenses, prisms etc, were to be weapons of war. I was very soon to find out in no uncertain terms!
The clouds were gathering over Europe and in September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. A
