The Princess Flying Boat

Saunders-Roe Princess Pic: John Howard Worsley

Continued from Woodside.

Some time after my ninth birthday my mother finally walked out on my stepfather. According to her story it was more like she ran not walked, with pots and pans hurled as she fled down the stairs. But then she was suing for divorce on grounds of cruelty, and had to offer instances (embroidered if necessary) to impress the court, and avoid being countersued for adultery. In retrospect I cannot help seeing my “Uncle Kenneth” as hapless victim rather than perpetrator in this sad case.

I witnessed none of this, being at boarding school and therefore out of touch with day-to-day events at home. This is why I am reliant on the public record for the chronology. I’ve found a list of songs from the UK hit parade between 1951 and 1954. It will be invaluable to synchronise their dates with my memories, so I can untangle them: Answer Me, The Happy Wanderer, Oh Mein Papa, and several songs from films:Wonderful Copenhagen from Hans Christian Andersen, the song from Moulin Rouge (1952), the song from Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, “I’ll be loving you eternally . . .”, and more. I didn’t get to see any of those films but my mother told me about them. To me they were happy songs and I took their tunes and words back to boarding-school with me, to hum and sing whilst I mopped the floors under the eagle eye of Mrs Nora Brummell-Hicks.

My mother had moved to the top flat of Granny’s house, and this was the best time we’d ever had together. We became friends. She apologized for the marriage to Kenneth. That is where she bought the typewriter which so fascinated me (a Lettera 22), and planned to train as a shorthand secretary. After the darkness of the previous years I enjoyed having my mother to myself during the school holidays. We did little projects together, for example I would dictate at a certain speed and she would type. We did prize competitions and sent them to Woman’s Own. One was to submit colour-schemes for a room. Mine was absurd but that was the fun of it. I would try and make her laugh, inventing new lyrics to the popular songs, drawing cartoons. Some of these were to amuse my grandfather too.

Sometimes my baby sister, now three, would come and stay, and I would look after her while my mother went out. She was restless. She had set the divorce in motion but I caught her in the larder munching spoonfuls of ground coffee and she confessed an addiction to this odd vice.

She decided we would still go to Woodside for a summer holiday, even though that was the favourite haunt of Kenneth, my stepfather on whom she had walked out. She was careful of course to ensure he hadn’t booked the same week. I don’t think it could have been before 1952. I got friendly with a boy there who was constantly singing “Two on a Tandem” but that song is not giving a definitive date. It is more music-hall, Billy Cotton Band Show than a pop song of the day.

I promised to tell you why nudism—or Woodside at any rate—is a key part of my story. I leave out those parts which aren’t crucial to the narrative. For example, my mother was also a Spiritualist at this time, seeking messages from her first husband (who I still believed to be my father). But that didn’t provide any turning points. Naturism did: for at Woodside she met Blackett.

Blackett was one of his names and out of the five he’d been given (Septimus Leslie Carr Blackett Charlton*) I think it’s the one which suits him best. He was a no-nonsense man, an engineer born and bred in Tyneside, as his flat Geordie accent, spoken with the mouth almost closed, so clearly betrayed. He might have ended up on the shipyards but he strove to better himself and escape the human tide of working-class men streaming into those clanging yards. He studied hard and passed enough exams to commence in the engine rooms of Merchant Navy ships, which took him to places as exotic as Yokohama and Buenos Aires. But when a man’s no longer young, and the promotions aren’t offered, he seeks dry land, so he joined the aircraft manufacturer Saunders-Roe, a few miles from Woodside. The company was the main employer in East Cowes and its big project was the Princess Flying Boat, so stylish inside and out, which everyone still hoped would fly commercially from Southampton to New York with 107 passengers in great luxury.

Blackett had a big house in East Cowes, rented from the company. As well as his day job, with his wife he took lodgers: transient employees and students on secondment. He’d had three children, but one had died of meningitis. Then a lodger called Satterthwaite fell in love with his wife: took her and the two surviving kids to Australia†. He never saw them again.

He’d heard about Woodside and got in the habit of bicycling through deserted country lanes to go as a day-visitor on Saturdays and Sundays. That’s how a romance developed with my mother. I didn’t notice the wooing, but when I found out, it became plain that he would have to woo me too.

* Please see the comments below by Nigel Charlton.
† Nigel corrected my memory: it was New Zealand, not Australia.