Go to Agnes’ page (his mother), or to Charles’ page (his father)

Ian writes:

Me: baby Ian Charles Hill b 02 12 1928 in Birmingham Maternity Hospital, Loveday Street, in the town centre; d not yet. I’m probably one of the few real Brummies, born within the sound of Big Brum (that’s what I always called it), the clock bell in the tower of the Council House.

Evacuation

My memory tells me that it was 3 September 1939: first day of war, first day at Grammar School. Did my mother walk me down and tell me what was happening? I don’t remember: she may have been busy with my little sister doing the same thing. Lined up in the playground, we never went inside. Marched off in a crocodile, new boys and girls, no established schoolmates, we walked to a railway station. Ended up in Hinckley, Leicestershire; taken in by a local family and showed to a small bedroom. Went to the local school: first day, frogmarched between two big boys, they stole the fountain pen I had been given for starting school. It was some time before I caught the name of the family I was with: Knott. In the evenings, a young man (their son, I presume) and his father cocked their heads to listen to aircraft passing overhead: “Going to Birmingham,” they said to each other, “I ’spect they’ll get it in Birmingham tonight,” “Ah.”

One Sunday afternoon my parents turned up to visit me, 40 miles northeast of home; they had spent the morning visiting my sister, who had been evacuated to a farm in Pershore, 40 miles southwest, on their tandem bicycle,160 miles round trip. A little later I was out for a walk at the edge of a field, with the class I was in, the teacher leading in front. From behind, my mother appeared, half running: “I’m taking you home,” she said. I had lasted a month; Marguerite came home two weeks later. We spent our nights by going to bed and being woken up by bombs and anti-aircraft guns. Once the house was full of shattered window-glass, and we went outside, in the dark early morning, waiting by a bus-stop, hoping. The first vehicle to arrive was an open lorry, and by this and other means somehow the family arrived at the house of one of mother’s friends, oddly enough in Leicester, while our house was repaired fit enough to live in. Father had gone back to work and firewatch. I would a million times rather face the bombs with my Mom and Dad than be safe in Paradise… or Leicester.

Ian married Wilhelmina Burrows in the sixties.

During the sixties, Ian and Wilma adopted two children – Geoff and Anna.

Ian emailed:
Ian has sent over a couple of lovely photos – four generations and the oldest and youngest! Ian’s son Geoff, his daughter Asha, and her son Archer.

When your own son is a grandpa it tilts the world a little.
Ian, Geoff, Asha and Archer, October 2014

The oldest and the youngest.

HOME, WORK, And Other Stories

Some useless information about Raybould descendant Ian Charles HILL

My parents Agnes née Raybould and Charles Hill married in 1921 and lived, probably rented, at

38 Colonial Road, Birmingham.

They moved at some time to

107 Cartland Road, Bournville, Birmingham

The Beginning:  I was born in 1928, in Birmingham’s Maternity Hospital in Loveday Street, Birmingham.  Their gifts to me were to become my father’s body and my mother’s brain.

The World of Work:  They were probably still both working at Cadbury’s, Bournville, but in her sister Gladys’s memorial papers it says that Cadbury’s wouldn’t employ married women; in that case I don’t know what she did.  In those days my mother would anyway have given up any paid job on my birth and worked even harder and longer, for nothing, as a full-time mother. My birth made her very ill and ruined her chances of having a second-born.

How My Parents Met:  Cadbury’s again. My mother was friends with Nelly, my father’s sister, and they all met up on a ramble.

A Colourful Yarn:  On that countryside walk mother looked over a field and commented on the mass of beautiful red poppies; “What poppies?” my future father said.  He himself hadn’t realised at the time, but it turned out that he was red-green deficient colour-blind.  She was worried about their baby when it was due – would I be colour-blind, too?  They had to wait till I was old enough to answer their tricky questions with coloured toys and the like.  Don’t worry – No.  Oh!  You wouldn’t have worried?  Ah, well.  At least I’m pleased.

I remember four events before the age of about 5:

Eating the Garden:  Barely toddling, a freshly-dug bit of garden surrounded by (to me) huge rocks, looked delicious, so I stretched my tiny arm out and sampled it; Ugh ! Is it hindsight that made me think it was chocolate ?

Motor racing:  A snowy day, with the red rounded bonnet on my pedal car; on a later day I let it race downhill and turned a sharp corner, where my mother, looking back from our front gate, was convinced I had rolled over into the road… I hadn’t.

Jogging:  Coming back one evening from somewhere, nearing home, over my father’s shoulder, half asleep, rocked by his gentle walking movement, while he and mother chatted.

The Tale of the Dog:  We had a terrier; he let me turn him out of his kennel while I crawled in.  The back garden had a gate to the field at the back.  One day the dog was poorly – it had cut its paws on some broken glass near the gate; it had to be put down.  Mother leaned against the hall wall and cried when she answered the phone telling her about it.

At about the age of 5 we were for a very short time

Over a shop in Stratford Road, Birmingham.

Fire!  I remember seeing through the upstairs window a car driving along the road, with the bright sun shining on a rounded part of the roof: I was convinced it was on fire. Then we moved to a brand-new house at

360 Sarehole Road, Hall Green, Birmingham

Making a stink:  I remember going with my father to the half-constructed house, where the ground-floor joists were laid over a cavity with bare earth left under it, about 2 feet deep, before the floorboards were laid; my father had a pot of creosote, with which he painted all the floor joists.

The Neighbourhood:  After we moved in, further up the road houses were still being built; I remember being told how dangerous the lime-slaking pit was if I fell in.  At the back of the house was a field all the neighbours enjoyed, including a big party to celebrate King George V’s Silver Jubilee.  A pretty stream ran through it, overhung with trees, with shallows where I could paddle and see tiny sticklebacks, and a gloomy place where a drain discharged into the river, with dangerous black quicksand.

I used to walk about a mile to my first school in Stratford Road.  One of my teachers had been my mother’s teacher.

Marguerite: Here there arrived my adopted sister Marguerite, about 1935-6. Around 1937 my father got a new job on the other side of the city, when we moved to

84 Yardley Green Road, Little Bromwich, Birmingham 9

Building History 1: Father bought the house, built 1908 in the Garden City style, from my mother’s aunt Annie, who had just remarried for the third time (at her end she had been widowed three times and never had children) and moved to her new husband’s house nearby.  We had no internal WC, water in the kitchen only and an Ascot boiling water heater, and no bathroom till I had them put in in 1947.  Everything was gas until my father got an electrician to modernise before we moved in.

A Death in the Family:  Marguerite died of diphtheria aged 8 in late 1942.

National Service:  I was called up in 1949 and lived in

Guillemont barracks near Farnborough, then in Ripon, then in Egypt at Fayid and Fanara, then

Back home in Birmingham, 1951

Priority One, Find a Job:  I first worked in the drawing office of the Company Architect at Dunlop Rubber Company in Erdington, then commuted to a private firm of architects Hellberg & Harris in Coventry.

A Coincidence:  Grandpa Raybould was listed once as a Rubber Worker.

Leaving home:  On the last day in December 1959 for the Big City and Great Things, to a temporary lodging in London, before a flat in

4 Homer Street, Marylebone, London

What the Streets of London Were Paved With:  Wilma, in the office of architect Ernö Goldfinger in Piccadilly.  Met and married in 6 months, and never regretted a minute.

We had just both resigned from Mr Golfinger and lived in

36 Mill Lane, Greenfield, Bedfordshire

Building History 2:  A thatched cottage, two knocked into one, with an internal tiny bathroom off the kitchen which drained soapy water into a stinky open ditch behind, and a truly modern chemical closet (really just a bucket) in a shed in the garden. In the house, we painfully learned to duck our heads while crossing a room from one side to the other.

Public Service:  I worked for nine months in the office of Luton Borough Architect, then changed to the County Architect’s Department in Bedford.  We bought a site and designed together a single-storey house where we moved to

32 Wood End Lane, Pertenhall, Bedfordshire, MK44 2AS

Building History 3:  The contract, of course, was late.  I learned, well into the contract, that it was the builder’s first, and he had only ever helped build a cowshed before.  When we really had to move in there were no floor finishes, no curtains, no internal doors, undecorated, and still damp from constructing the place.  Christmas 1962 – the beginning of the coldest winter for years – six weeks continously below freezing.

Bringing Up Babies:  We brought up our family of Geoffrey and Anna in the country there.

Saying Goodbye:  Wilma died in 1988, of brain cancer, in the same month that I formally retired from 27 years with the same employer, having spent most of the previous year looking after her deteriorating condition – hospitals, surgery, and radiation treatment, the NHS in London, Luton, Cambridge and Bedford battling their best.  The children married and left home.  I sold our little Heaven On Earth and retired alone to a first-floor flat in 1993 at

19 Fenner’s Lawn, Cambridge CB1 2EH

Sports Report:  It looked out onto the cricket field. I never had any interest in the sport, but I enjoyed the space and the public milling about.

A Second Coming:  Remarried, to Liz Leigh in 1995, a widow, and then 1996 both moved to her house at

40 Highsett, Cambridge CB2 1NZ

Building History 4:  A modern terrace house in a 1964 estate.  You can judge how modern it it has a flat roof.  We did some decorations and adaptations; near to the town centre, buses and trains; visits here and there; holidays abroad, country walks, new places and friends.

Liz died in 2012, of advanced Alzheimer’s.

Still Here:  At the time of writing, yes.  Lonely?   Well, I do my best to meet people, do things, volunteer with a coffee morning for dementia patients; go to lectures – I have given about 200 to the local University of the Third Age, but not now. Have I got a Lady Friend?  I wish: but there will be nobody like my Wilma.

Sent Away and Brought Back

I was 10 when World War 2 broke out.  I was supposed to start at a new school, my younger sister Marguerite at another.  I walked to mine that morning and joined a queue. 

Instead of being crocodiled into the school we were marched off to a railway station I didn’t know, and put on a train.  We arrived at a small town I’d never heard of [Hinckley], about 40 miles from home, and taken to their Grammar School.  A kindly lady led me to her small house and lent me a bed in their spare room.  

She had a grown-up son; I wondered why he wasn’t in the Army.  Every evening he and his father crooked their necks when we heard the noise of aeroplanes overhead, and they commented, “Aye, they’re going towards Birmingham, that’s for sure.”

I was bullied at the new school – frog-marched backwards between two big boys with their arms through mine.  They stole – or it somehow disappeared – the new fountain pen Granny [Emily] Raybould had given me for passing to the Grammar School, the first in her family.

Marguerite was evacuated with her school 40 miles in the opposite direction [Pershore], and lived at a farm.  My parents had no car – just a tandem.  The next Sunday-but-one they cycled to visit us both on the same day – some 160 miles.

Two weeks later my mother [Agnes Emily née Raybould] came and took me back home, and two weeks after that mother took me to collect Marguerite and we brought her back.

When the air-raids started I was 11.  Our Anderson shelter in the garden was flooded, and several nights after school and work I helped my father rebuild it in our front room.  German bombers were doing their best to annihilate the factories all over Birmingham, dodging searchlights, barrage balloons, anti-aircraft guns, and at least once they dropped a bright light drifting down on a parachute.  Anybody could see everything: my Dad and I went outside to see – the planes seem to have gone.   Houses were bombed, incendiaries rained, the houses on either side caught fire, and one morning there was a giant hole in our road filling with water from the broken mains;  one house I saw had broken windows and a bed on the roof.  Once we had to leave home for a fortnight while it was being repaired fit to live in.  Much of the glass to replace our broken windows they could only get frosted.

I said then, and I say now: I was happier to be with my family, whatever the bombing and the aftermath was like.

Ian Hill