"Dreams - Really Do Come True" - A Book By Gordon Beard

Birthday

My birthplace - Hopkins Farm, High Easter, Essex

My earliest memory is probably sitting on the home made rug in the living room of Hopkins farm house, nibbling a pink candy mouse and a ha’penny worth of jelly babies. It is March 17, 1926 and it is my third birthday.

I remember that home made rug so clearly. It was made by my parents, John and Bertha, using old worn clothing cut into strips, then pegged into the fabric of an empty sugar sack. The strips were all brightlycoloured to cheer up the room on cold winter evenings.

It worked too – I remember a great sense of warmth and well being sitting there and a sense of being loved. I had two older brothers but my parents had waited seven years for me, following the loss of a daughter soon after birth and a number of miscarriages. My mother never forgot that lost daughter. She often told of her grief at not being allowed to even hold the child in her arms before it died.

The highlight of my birthday came with the arrival of my eldest brother Alfred, who had just started his first job after leaving school at 14. Alfred had brought home a parcel for me – a wooden-edged drawing slate complete with slate marker. It was the perfect gift because I couldn’t wait to join my next elder brother, Reginald, at school. But there was more to come – what Alfred called ‘the surprise!’

Everyone trooped outside in eager anticipation. What could it be? Well, whatever it was, it seemed that Uncle Joe had something to do with it. Uncle Joseph Lodge was the family’s entrepreneur. He singlehandedly started a bus service from High Easter to Chelmsford with two taxis. They could be forced to carry up to 20 passengers between them – although they had to be given a push from behind by a few of the male passengers to get up some of the hills!

Uncle Joe had also branched out into selling the very latest gadget - a Cat’s whisker radio receiver. The receiver was a product of the now famous Marconi company which operated from Chelmsford, and Alfred, now the rich brother as he worked many hours overtime on the local poultry farm, had bought one from him at the princely sum of £2.50 - almost three weeks salary. Of course it had to be cash up front in those days as Hire Purchase was not available for the working class until the end of the 1930’s.

There was much excitement as the family watched Uncle Joe begin to install the aerial. He climbed to the top of the tall elm tree at the far end of the Horse Pond and fixed a double length of copper wire, kept two feet apart by a wooden spar. The wire reached to the bedroom window of the farm house and fed down the wall to the downstairs window sill where a safety switch was installed in case of thunder storms. We waited in excitement as Joe twiddled and turned the cat’s whisker to receive the first radio signal. Finally, the sound came and we all took turns with one side of the ear phones whilst a parent held the other side to an ear. “KKKKatie, wonderful Katie, You’re the only Girl that I adore, And when the MMMMoon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be waiting at the KKKKitchen door…” Most children still had to wait to hear the latest pop record on a wind up gramophone, but not us. We were among the very elite.

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