William H. Critch II

I was not always “Bill Critch”. After birth I quickly became Bunny, Billy, Billy Brown Bear, then ‘Critch’, Master Critch, Critchey, Private Critch, Aviation Cadet Critch, Captain Critch, Pop, Benjamin Pink, Mr. Bill and finally, Bill.

Baby Billy’s Recollections

I see bright sunshine.
I hear a phonograph playing “Me and My Shadow”, and I am throwing my toys down a long flight of stairs.
I am riding a ‘kiddy car’, on broad but not busy streets. It is hot.
I'm in a car with other people somewhere in the mountains on a hot, narrow, dusty road. I am playing with a silver ashtray. I throw it out the car window. We stop at a place that is green and someone's climbing on a stone that's larger than I am.
A soft-spoken and gentle woman tells me not to go in the swampy lake. There are insects flying around my head.
The second floor of a sparsely furnished, wood-frame apartment. From high on the back steps I see gray freight trains close by.

The California Fog Begins to Clear.

I am holding a streamlined, black toy train. It smells of lubricating oil and the On/Off switch is very large especially now that I have taken it apart and the body is removed. I hand the clockwork innards to a big man who puts it down and begins to read the ‘funnies’ section of the Sunday newspaper. My favorite strip is Buck Rogers. Black Barney, Doctor Huer, Buck and his young protégés, Buddy and Alura excite me with their adventures fighting the Martian cat people and the Mongol hordes, the evil Killer Kane and his ‘squeeze’, Ardala Valmar. In the minds of the authors Philip Nowlan and the illustrator, Army Air Corps Lt. Dick Calkins they represent the foreign aggressors who will soon throw the world into war.

We are in a very busy outdoors place with many people. The people I am used to seeing every day do not say the usual softly spoken words to me. They are concerned with the other big people. I cannot understand what's happening. It's not frightening but it's not the usual routine of being washed, dressed and fed. A large, noisy moving machine is very close and my mother is talking loudly. My father is talking loudly and quickly. My sister is on the ground, but she gets up.

We are in a small space with the steamer trunks - large trunks that I shall remember for the rest of my life. I see suitcases, I feel secure. The smell around me is a ‘new’ smell like the paint on the black; toy train but there is no train. But I can and see Dutchie, the girl doll I have undressed. I hold Teddy out of a round window smell my teddy bear and I hold him tight or he will fall down into the water.

The Voyage to Australia, 1934

While the voyage to Australia was great fun for a four-year-old, my sister Mary tells me it was embarrassing for my mother. She was all too aware that we were not allowed to leave the ship until we arrived in Sydney. My father, an accountant with a serious drinking problem, had surrendered the family passport in return for free repatriation to Australia. We were ‘charity’ cases of the Great Depression with our passage paid by the U.S. government to ease the drain on the economy that was paying foreigners unemployment benefits. But for me, it was my first adventure. En route to Pearl Harbor, ‘white hat’ US Navy sailors took me on their backs in the swimming pool and the bar tenders gave me root beers. Hawaii and Pearl Harbor were just names. I knew nothing of the rest of the world and the coming war. The boat was a happy place for me. People were friendly, let me talk or sit with them on the deck chairs.

My sister’s Memoirs describe our landing in Sydney:

“While we waited for port clearance, we anchored for several hours out in the stream near Fort Denison, known as Pinchgut, a bare knob of rock with a miniature stone fort. The sky was clear blue, the water sparkled, and on this Saturday afternoon the harbor was dotted with sailboats and ferries. While deep enough for ocean-going liners, the harbor is narrow and the shoreline is indented with scores of sheltered coves, all edged in lush parks and gardens and houses with red-tiled roofs.
Leaning on the rail, we watched the tugboats with their thick hawsers nuzzling the Mariposa toward the pier. The ship made a slow turn to port, helped by four tugboats. Soon we were going down the starboard gangplank and the pleasure trip was over
After Customs clearance the agent returned Father’s passport, shook hands, and said, “Welcome home.” Father then turned to mother and said: “Addie, we’re home.” Mother said nothing. He was not at all concerned that he had only £3 (about $15) to feed and house the family.…
Father called a cab; we loaded it with our three large steamer trunks, and asked the driver to suggest a suburb where we might find an apartment. Near the docks we drove through streets of terrace houses welded into one mass from corner to corner; houses with strings of gray washing hanging on the lacy iron balconies. Then up busy William Street with Darlinghurst on the right and infamous Kings Cross on the left. After a discussion with the driver, this area was deemed too expensive. At his suggestion, we drove on for another ten minutes to Bondi Beach and its acres of cookie-cutter brick houses with red tiled roofs and meager front yards, enclosed by low wire fences. Neither a garage nor a tree in sight...

Driving slowly, we saw a “To Let” sign on a decrepit apartment building next to the Royal Hotel opposite the beach boardwalk known as Campbell Parade, the fish and chip belt of Bondi Beach. The narrow, dead-end lane separating the apartments from the hotel was littered with orange peel, lolly wrappers and old newspapers. We waited in the cab while Father went inside. He soon returned and paid off the driver, who said, “Good luck, mate.” Typical of Father, he had talked the manager into waiving a deposit for the first week’s rent!”

Growing Up in Bondi

For me however, it was a fun place - vacant lots, kids to play with and a ‘sleep-out’ of my own on the front balcony. It was here on the back stairs that I found a cardboard carton of toys including a small train set and a Russian Cossack doll we named “von Skirtz”. I was never told where they came from but as it was Christmas I believed it to be a gift from Jesus. It was in Bondi Beach that I formed an attachment to our bread knife that accompanied mother and I wherever we moved. It was the family’s general-purpose tool used for cutting string, paper, vegetables, meat and in the near future as a potential weapon. We ‘shifted’ (moved) frequently in 1939 but it was within a small radius and I kept the same friends. They had toys - new to me but associated with my heroes: Buck Rogers Disintegrators and Rocket Pistols.

We moved to North Bondi near Ben Buckler, close to the cliffs. I stood on the bluff and watched the waves and the surf fisherman hundreds of feet below - Ocker Aussies - Iron Men. Down the road on Bondi Beach I discovered Peter’s Ice Cream and Minties – the white, sweet, chewy lolly wrapped in a red, white and green paper. The tram terminus nearby was my first sight of the ‘toast rack’ trams that would provide our usual means of transportation for many years. Trams filled with smokers and steamy, sweaty bodies, conductors on the running boards saying, “Fez Pleeze” loom large in my memory. Those men earned their wages clinging in the cold and rain to the swaying tram on the 12-inch footboard. Frequently newspaper boys would cling to and work the other side of the tram’s footboard pressing close when another tram passed at their back. “Getcher latest Telly, Laaay-up.” When they had canvassed the entire tram and it was clear, they would ‘dismount’ by stretching their arm to full extent still grasping the door railing. They would then let go landing on one foot and pivoting 180 degrees to lean forward facing the rear so that their bodies were angled to absorb the forward motion of the departing tram. In later years, I too was a newsboy, but never on trams.

And Bronte

I was six years old when we moved to the suburb of Bronte Beach. It was the last time we lived together as a family. Our rental house across from what is now Bronte Park was still standing at the corner of Alfred and Hewlett Streets when I visited Bronte in 1970. The park was the ‘gully’ inhabited by the fierce “Gully Gang” whom we never saw. There were some ‘big kids’, but if we saw them in the gully, we’d run off. We did discover some depressions in the brush-covered areas. These I suspect, were ‘pozzies’ for the local blokes and their compliant sheilas. Sexual consciousness was now raising its delightful head, and my neighbor girl, Betty Dietcham, attempted to give me an introduction. It was lost on me but she was a great ‘mate’. We walked the fences behind our houses, made mixtures of anything to be found in the kitchen, played ‘hidings’ under the street light till our parents called us, went to the flicks on Bondi Road and pretended we were the actors. We dug a hole in the back yard to make a ‘fort’ or ‘cubby-hole’. An old canvas awning pole was our cannon and the pit was lined with cast off clothing. We scrounged corrugated iron for the roof and supported it with scrap lumber from the gully. After all, we had to defend our house - this was World War 2 and the Japanese had captured Singapore. Mary’s bedroom windows were taped to preclude any bomb driven, flying glass.

Following a late evening ambulance trip to the Children’s Hospital in Camperdown for suspected diphtheria, my sexual awakening occurred. The wards were crowded with iron cots filled with boys and girls. The nurses wore either stiff veils with the point in the center of their back, or small starched caps on the front of their head. I looked down the ward and saw a large, high-ceilinged room full of beds with white covers. Mine was covered with a transparent tent and when Mum came to visit, they lifted the side. Mum looked inside and held my hand, which was unusual for we were not a visibly affectionate family. The warmth was there, but it was not expressed in a tactile way. Even when I was older, I cannot recall many kisses or touches. The same was true of my father, but I recall times when he put his arm on my shoulder. I suspect we were never a touchy-feely, ‘lovey-dovey’ kind of family.

It was at the Children’s Hospital that my sexual awakening finally occurred. Excited by an urgent need to micturate, I persuaded the girl in the bed adjoining mine to allow me to join her and conduct an exploration of her lower parts. Penetration seemed appropriate, but like all boys of my age, the ejaculation was not semen. I persuaded her that she had wet the bed and to call for the nurse to change the sheets. The nurse scolded her while I covered myself with the blanket and pretended I was fast asleep. What a bomb-out at age seven!

My father however, gave me a real bomb. It was an unloaded Mills bomb, a hand grenade, which he had liberated as a souvenir from his employer, The Ministry of Munitions. From the pathway at the side of the house he pulled the pin and threw it across the road to the park across the street. I don’t know how I knew, but then as now I realize that he had done this before many times. I kept the bomb until the day following my own similar demonstration at school. The Army representatives were quite nice. All they wanted to know was where it came from. By this time, Dad had departed to the Army repatriation Hospital.

Surf’s Up!

Bronte is on the Tasman Sea and has big waves. Not a great surfing beach and somewhat dangerous because of the undertow. There was a Surf Lifesaving club who stood watch on weekends. I learned to swim in a bogey hole. The Bronte Bogey Hole is protected from the ocean by a ring of rocks and at high tide is open to the surf. You learned to swim and loved it, or had a lifetime fear of the water. I love the surf. Either my sister or I, were given a rubber ‘Surf-O-Plane’, a small inflatable raft about a body wide and a yard long. Surfing on the raft was terrifyingly exciting, but as safe as you wanted to be. You could skim the baby waves, get outside the first line of breakers, or float between the lines. Great for the lungs, too. We had no tire pump to inflate the raft, so if you deflated it to walk home, the next time you and your mate would blow it up again. Body surfing could be tackled in stages. The first thing I learned was that if a wave ‘dumps’ you turning you over and over, swim for the bottom. The turbulence was less and other than collecting a lot of sand in your ‘cozzie’ you were pretty safe. The next thing I learned was to dive through a breaking wave; basic survival in the ocean for a six year old.

And survival it was. Even at this tender age we knew that to surf was to be alive and to be able at some distant time, to enter a man’s world. We quickly learned the lingo: “How’re the shoots?” (Never ‘waves’). Responses would be short and to the uninitiated, cryptic. “Great,” “Ar - Bluebottles”, “Bit sharky.” Waves were judged with the same precision as Eskimos judge the quality of snow. “Too much water”, “Dumper! (everybody off.) or for good shoots" Everybody on!” I was never a great surfer even in my teens, but was always ready to “Give it a go!”

By climbing down the cliffs, one of my mates and I learned how to avoid paying the tuppence admission fee and sneak into the ‘big’ pool at the end of the beach. This was ‘big kid’ stuff. Now, in my 60s, looking up at the route we took down the cliffs gives me a very nervous feeling in my anal sphincter. The pool is still there and it is still open to the ocean. Quite refreshing - particularly when the surf is up. The green water crashes against the bath’s gray cement and quickly rises vertically to spill a small part into the pool. If the tide was high I was frightened that sharks would be waiting for me when I swam. The baths were made of cement that was very rough on the body, but the surrounding sunbathing decks were full of splinters.

Sunday mornings at the baths were a ritual; it was men’s country. No one considered why women were excluded—Australia in their minds was a man’s world. How wrong we were. The backbone of Australia was the Aussie Mum

My mother once noticed a boy limping up the Alfred Street hill. Ever the compassionate nurse, she removed a long splinter and gave him what she could ill afford, the bus fare up the hill. I’m sure that it came for the small housekeeping money she had saved. I now suspect that my dad drank much of his salary although unlike other countries, children could NOT enter the Public Bar. On the rare times he took me out, I would sometimes stand outside the pub and wait for him to finish drinking. But Dad was never mean – just a quiet drunk. I suspect, his experiences in France during the First War would now have qualified him for some kind of treatment or counseling for post traumatic stress disorder.

William H. Critch II

I was not always “Bill Critch”. After birth I quickly became Bunny, Billy, Billy Brown Bear, then ‘Critch’, Master Critch, Critchey, Private Critch, Aviation Cadet Critch, Captain Critch, Pop, Benjamin Pink, Mr. Bill and finally, Bill.

Baby Billy’s Recollections

I see bright sunshine.
I hear a phonograph playing “Me and My Shadow”, and I am throwing my toys down a long flight of stairs.
I am riding a ‘kiddy car’, on broad but not busy streets. It is hot.
I'm in a car with other people somewhere in the mountains on a hot, narrow, dusty road. I am playing with a silver ashtray. I throw it out the car window. We stop at a place that is green and someone's climbing on a stone that's larger than I am.
A soft-spoken and gentle woman tells me not to go in the swampy lake. There are insects flying around my head.
The second floor of a sparsely furnished, wood-frame apartment. From high on the back steps I see gray freight trains close by.

The California Fog Begins to Clear.

I am holding a streamlined, black toy train. It smells of lubricating oil and the On/Off switch is very large especially now that I have taken it apart and the body is removed. I hand the clockwork innards to a big man who puts it down and begins to read the ‘funnies’ section of the Sunday newspaper. My favorite strip is Buck Rogers. Black Barney, Doctor Huer, Buck and his young protégés, Buddy and Alura excite me with their adventures fighting the Martian cat people and the Mongol hordes, the evil Killer Kane and his ‘squeeze’, Ardala Valmar. In the minds of the authors Philip Nowlan and the illustrator, Army Air Corps Lt. Dick Calkins they represent the foreign aggressors who will soon throw the world into war.

We are in a very busy outdoors place with many people. The people I am used to seeing every day do not say the usual softly spoken words to me. They are concerned with the other big people. I cannot understand what's happening. It's not frightening but it's not the usual routine of being washed, dressed and fed. A large, noisy moving machine is very close and my mother is talking loudly. My father is talking loudly and quickly. My sister is on the ground, but she gets up.

We are in a small space with the steamer trunks - large trunks that I shall remember for the rest of my life. I see suitcases, I feel secure. The smell around me is a ‘new’ smell like the paint on the black; toy train but there is no train. But I can and see Dutchie, the girl doll I have undressed. I hold Teddy out of a round window smell my teddy bear and I hold him tight or he will fall down into the water.

The Voyage to Australia, 1934

While the voyage to Australia was great fun for a four-year-old, my sister Mary tells me it was embarrassing for my mother. She was all too aware that we were not allowed to leave the ship until we arrived in Sydney. My father, an accountant with a serious drinking problem, had surrendered the family passport in return for free repatriation to Australia. We were ‘charity’ cases of the Great Depression with our passage paid by the U.S. government to ease the drain on the economy that was paying foreigners unemployment benefits. But for me, it was my first adventure. En route to Pearl Harbor, ‘white hat’ US Navy sailors took me on their backs in the swimming pool and the bar tenders gave me root beers. Hawaii and Pearl Harbor were just names. I knew nothing of the rest of the world and the coming war. The boat was a happy place for me. People were friendly, let me talk or sit with them on the deck chairs.

My sister’s Memoirs describe our landing in Sydney:

“While we waited for port clearance, we anchored for several hours out in the stream near Fort Denison, known as Pinchgut, a bare knob of rock with a miniature stone fort. The sky was clear blue, the water sparkled, and on this Saturday afternoon the harbor was dotted with sailboats and ferries. While deep enough for ocean-going liners, the harbor is narrow and the shoreline is indented with scores of sheltered coves, all edged in lush parks and gardens and houses with red-tiled roofs.
Leaning on the rail, we watched the tugboats with their thick hawsers nuzzling the Mariposa toward the pier. The ship made a slow turn to port, helped by four tugboats. Soon we were going down the starboard gangplank and the pleasure trip was over
After Customs clearance the agent returned Father’s passport, shook hands, and said, “Welcome home.” Father then turned to mother and said: “Addie, we’re home.” Mother said nothing. He was not at all concerned that he had only £3 (about $15) to feed and house the family.…
Father called a cab; we loaded it with our three large steamer trunks, and asked the driver to suggest a suburb where we might find an apartment. Near the docks we drove through streets of terrace houses welded into one mass from corner to corner; houses with strings of gray washing hanging on the lacy iron balconies. Then up busy William Street with Darlinghurst on the right and infamous Kings Cross on the left. After a discussion with the driver, this area was deemed too expensive. At his suggestion, we drove on for another ten minutes to Bondi Beach and its acres of cookie-cutter brick houses with red tiled roofs and meager front yards, enclosed by low wire fences. Neither a garage nor a tree in sight...

Driving slowly, we saw a “To Let” sign on a decrepit apartment building next to the Royal Hotel opposite the beach boardwalk known as Campbell Parade, the fish and chip belt of Bondi Beach. The narrow, dead-end lane separating the apartments from the hotel was littered with orange peel, lolly wrappers and old newspapers. We waited in the cab while Father went inside. He soon returned and paid off the driver, who said, “Good luck, mate.” Typical of Father, he had talked the manager into waiving a deposit for the first week’s rent!”

Growing Up in Bondi

For me however, it was a fun place - vacant lots, kids to play with and a ‘sleep-out’ of my own on the front balcony. It was here on the back stairs that I found a cardboard carton of toys including a small train set and a Russian Cossack doll we named “von Skirtz”. I was never told where they came from but as it was Christmas I believed it to be a gift from Jesus. It was in Bondi Beach that I formed an attachment to our bread knife that accompanied mother and I wherever we moved. It was the family’s general-purpose tool used for cutting string, paper, vegetables, meat and in the near future as a potential weapon. We ‘shifted’ (moved) frequently in 1939 but it was within a small radius and I kept the same friends. They had toys - new to me but associated with my heroes: Buck Rogers Disintegrators and Rocket Pistols.

We moved to North Bondi near Ben Buckler, close to the cliffs. I stood on the bluff and watched the waves and the surf fisherman hundreds of feet below - Ocker Aussies - Iron Men. Down the road on Bondi Beach I discovered Peter’s Ice Cream and Minties – the white, sweet, chewy lolly wrapped in a red, white and green paper. The tram terminus nearby was my first sight of the ‘toast rack’ trams that would provide our usual means of transportation for many years. Trams filled with smokers and steamy, sweaty bodies, conductors on the running boards saying, “Fez Pleeze” loom large in my memory. Those men earned their wages clinging in the cold and rain to the swaying tram on the 12-inch footboard. Frequently newspaper boys would cling to and work the other side of the tram’s footboard pressing close when another tram passed at their back. “Getcher latest Telly, Laaay-up.” When they had canvassed the entire tram and it was clear, they would ‘dismount’ by stretching their arm to full extent still grasping the door railing. They would then let go landing on one foot and pivoting 180 degrees to lean forward facing the rear so that their bodies were angled to absorb the forward motion of the departing tram. In later years, I too was a newsboy, but never on trams.

And Bronte

I was six years old when we moved to the suburb of Bronte Beach. It was the last time we lived together as a family. Our rental house across from what is now Bronte Park was still standing at the corner of Alfred and Hewlett Streets when I visited Bronte in 1970. The park was the ‘gully’ inhabited by the fierce “Gully Gang” whom we never saw. There were some ‘big kids’, but if we saw them in the gully, we’d run off. We did discover some depressions in the brush-covered areas. These I suspect, were ‘pozzies’ for the local blokes and their compliant sheilas. Sexual consciousness was now raising its delightful head, and my neighbor girl, Betty Dietcham, attempted to give me an introduction. It was lost on me but she was a great ‘mate’. We walked the fences behind our houses, made mixtures of anything to be found in the kitchen, played ‘hidings’ under the street light till our parents called us, went to the flicks on Bondi Road and pretended we were the actors. We dug a hole in the back yard to make a ‘fort’ or ‘cubby-hole’. An old canvas awning pole was our cannon and the pit was lined with cast off clothing. We scrounged corrugated iron for the roof and supported it with scrap lumber from the gully. After all, we had to defend our house - this was World War 2 and the Japanese had captured Singapore. Mary’s bedroom windows were taped to preclude any bomb driven, flying glass.

Following a late evening ambulance trip to the Children’s Hospital in Camperdown for suspected diphtheria, my sexual awakening occurred. The wards were crowded with iron cots filled with boys and girls. The nurses wore either stiff veils with the point in the center of their back, or small starched caps on the front of their head. I looked down the ward and saw a large, high-ceilinged room full of beds with white covers. Mine was covered with a transparent tent and when Mum came to visit, they lifted the side. Mum looked inside and held my hand, which was unusual for we were not a visibly affectionate family. The warmth was there, but it was not expressed in a tactile way. Even when I was older, I cannot recall many kisses or touches. The same was true of my father, but I recall times when he put his arm on my shoulder. I suspect we were never a touchy-feely, ‘lovey-dovey’ kind of family.

It was at the Children’s Hospital that my sexual awakening finally occurred. Excited by an urgent need to micturate, I persuaded the girl in the bed adjoining mine to allow me to join her and conduct an exploration of her lower parts. Penetration seemed appropriate, but like all boys of my age, the ejaculation was not semen. I persuaded her that she had wet the bed and to call for the nurse to change the sheets. The nurse scolded her while I covered myself with the blanket and pretended I was fast asleep. What a bomb-out at age seven!

My father however, gave me a real bomb. It was an unloaded Mills bomb, a hand grenade, which he had liberated as a souvenir from his employer, The Ministry of Munitions. From the pathway at the side of the house he pulled the pin and threw it across the road to the park across the street. I don’t know how I knew, but then as now I realize that he had done this before many times. I kept the bomb until the day following my own similar demonstration at school. The Army representatives were quite nice. All they wanted to know was where it came from. By this time, Dad had departed to the Army repatriation Hospital.

Surf’s Up!

Bronte is on the Tasman Sea and has big waves. Not a great surfing beach and somewhat dangerous because of the undertow. There was a Surf Lifesaving club who stood watch on weekends. I learned to swim in a bogey hole. The Bronte Bogey Hole is protected from the ocean by a ring of rocks and at high tide is open to the surf. You learned to swim and loved it, or had a lifetime fear of the water. I love the surf. Either my sister or I, were given a rubber ‘Surf-O-Plane’, a small inflatable raft about a body wide and a yard long. Surfing on the raft was terrifyingly exciting, but as safe as you wanted to be. You could skim the baby waves, get outside the first line of breakers, or float between the lines. Great for the lungs, too. We had no tire pump to inflate the raft, so if you deflated it to walk home, the next time you and your mate would blow it up again. Body surfing could be tackled in stages. The first thing I learned was that if a wave ‘dumps’ you turning you over and over, swim for the bottom. The turbulence was less and other than collecting a lot of sand in your ‘cozzie’ you were pretty safe. The next thing I learned was to dive through a breaking wave; basic survival in the ocean for a six year old.

And survival it was. Even at this tender age we knew that to surf was to be alive and to be able at some distant time, to enter a man’s world. We quickly learned the lingo: “How’re the shoots?” (Never ‘waves’). Responses would be short and to the uninitiated, cryptic. “Great,” “Ar - Bluebottles”, “Bit sharky.” Waves were judged with the same precision as Eskimos judge the quality of snow. “Too much water”, “Dumper! (everybody off.) or for good shoots" Everybody on!” I was never a great surfer even in my teens, but was always ready to “Give it a go!”

By climbing down the cliffs, one of my mates and I learned how to avoid paying the tuppence admission fee and sneak into the ‘big’ pool at the end of the beach. This was ‘big kid’ stuff. Now, in my 60s, looking up at the route we took down the cliffs gives me a very nervous feeling in my anal sphincter. The pool is still there and it is still open to the ocean. Quite refreshing - particularly when the surf is up. The green water crashes against the bath’s gray cement and quickly rises vertically to spill a small part into the pool. If the tide was high I was frightened that sharks would be waiting for me when I swam. The baths were made of cement that was very rough on the body, but the surrounding sunbathing decks were full of splinters.

Sunday mornings at the baths were a ritual; it was men’s country. No one considered why women were excluded—Australia in their minds was a man’s world. How wrong we were. The backbone of Australia was the Aussie Mum

My mother once noticed a boy limping up the Alfred Street hill. Ever the compassionate nurse, she removed a long splinter and gave him what she could ill afford, the bus fare up the hill. I’m sure that it came for the small housekeeping money she had saved. I now suspect that my dad drank much of his salary although unlike other countries, children could NOT enter the Public Bar. On the rare times he took me out, I would sometimes stand outside the pub and wait for him to finish drinking. But Dad was never mean – just a quiet drunk. I suspect, his experiences in France during the First War would now have qualified him for some kind of treatment or counseling for post traumatic stress disorder.