A Life of Pride. Alan G Pride
lawn-mowing.
We crossed the Channel on the steamer, M.S. Dinard, all vomiting like mad in the rough seas, and headed to Paris. It was hard to be understood, but we learned fast and the French were very polite. They couldn’t tell us how to get to the “Eiffel Tower” though! Then one of them twigged: “Ah, the Toor Iffell!” and pointed us in the right direction. Up we went.
Notre Dame, the Arc De Triomphe, coffee in big bowls, crook-smelling French cheeses; beautiful meals and tree-lined boulevards – Broken Hill couldn’t have been further away.
We hopped on the wrong train to Brussels but caught the right one eventually, and there was our first-ever view of snow, as we crossed the French Alps. And ice on the ground when we arrived, and blazing fluorescent lights – how modern! The ice was even thicker when we reached Holland; the very canals were frozen. I rushed excitedly to break the ice with my foot: yes, it was real!
A lot of Rotterdam was still open space, where bombs had fallen during the war. Our cash was nearly exhausted and Allan and I both had diarrhoea, but we enjoyed the lack of food rationing. We returned to London in mid-December. Allan and Beryl sailed for Australia a few days later on the Strathmore (P&O, 23,000 tons) and I went back to dating Pat. Luckily, my family sent me £10 for Christmas – I’d gone through £27 on the trip and was nearly broke – so I took Pat to Brighton for the weekend, by bus and train.
I’d now gone without a motorcycle for FOUR MONTHS! This couldn’t last. In early January, 1952, I bought a 350 cc 1947 A.J.S. for £100. I put down £33 and signed up to pay off the remaining £66, at £1 per week. Pat hopped straight on the back that afternoon and we raced off. Guess what? I wasn’t used to riding on icy roads! Within 5 minutes, we had a spill. Pat never let me forget that my first reaction was to run to the A.J.S, pick it up and call, “It’s OK! The bike’s not damaged!!” as she lay on the freezing road.
Nevertheless, she was game for a 7-hour ride the next day and we had 200 k’s of sunny weather and lovely scenery, with no accidents. She was just as silly and reckless as I was and would hang on behind me screaming, “Faster! Faster!”
I fitted panniers to the bike and later painted kangaroos on them, copied from an Australian ha’penny. During my time in England I rode around much of the country, from Land’s End in Cornwall in the west, to Fullerstone and Margate in the east. I went north as far as Glasgow and Edinburgh and as far north-west as medieval Shrewsbury. The distances were piddling after my travels in Australia, and the roads were usually a lot smoother.
Chapter 18
Family in Cornwall
In February I visited Mum’s Cornish relatives at Sennen Cove, down near Land’s End, for the first time. Mum had never been to England and I took lots of photos for her: the stone house, ‘Tresgillian’, which her grandfather had built and in which her cousin William James Chappell still lived; the 1400-year-old church nearby, the ancient village, and the family. Her other cousin, John ‘Chippy’ Chappell – so called because he’d been a ship’s carpenter – and his wife, Janey, were really excited to see me and made me feel welcome. Their home, Rossitter House, was only 40 metres from the 'First and Last Hotel ' and less than a kilometre from the southern tip of Land's End. Of course, I had to climb down to the actual end of Lands' End, taking care not to be swept away by the huge tide.
Janey cooked pasties while I was there, and I was pleased to write to Mum that they were much the same as the recipe I’d grown up with.
Chippy had sailed around the world 34 times over the course of his working life! His part of the family had lost contact with ours sometime after Mums' father, James Barnes, emigrated from Cornwall in 1885.(James was the brother of Chippy's mother, Emily.) They reconnected when Chippy went for a haircut in Port Adelaide in the '30's or early '40's and somehow came upon them or their address. He then visited them in Adelaide, but did not have time to get up to Broken Hill, much to his regret.
I thought I’d like to go to sea and he said he’d help me get a job. His old captain was now a P&O superintendent and could put in a word for me. He forbade me to go to the North Atlantic in winter – too dangerous, he said.
I spent five days in Cornwall, walking and catching buses to sightsee and visit relatives, of which there were many along the coast. Our forebears had been tin miners, labourers, seamstresses and shell-fishermen, many of them illiterate and poor, hence the emigration of some to Australia, and others to New Zealand in the 1800s, in the hope of improving their lot.
Altogether, the Cornish relatives didn’t want me to leave, but I had to go back to work. From beautiful, sunny Cornwall to sleet and snow in the big smoke. (While having a pasty for lunch in a St Ives café, I’d heard of the death of King George VI, and I later stood in the freezing London sleet to see his body brought from Sandringham to the Houses of Parliament – a simple but impressive procession.)
Still a tourist, I took the opportunity to stand under Big Ben before going back through the snow to my flat.
Chapter 19
Steam Trains and Motorbike Adventures
The talks with Chippy had made me keen to go to sea, and because of my love of steam power it had to be soon, because diesel was quickly replacing steam on the seas. I'd swaggered off to Leadenhall Street with my Broken Hill qualifications, only to find that top companies like the Cunard Line were unimpressed. So to get some steam experience, I signed on as a fireman with the British Railways. I started as a trainee in heavy snow in mid-February, with a month to go before being fully qualified. It was hard shift-work, with three possible shifts: 6 a.m to 2 p.m, 2 p.m to 10 p.m, or 10 p.m to 6 a.m. I chose to start with a morning and night shift, because finishing at 2 p.m on a Saturday would give me 'till 10 p.m Monday night off. On March long weekend, I used the time to ride the A.J.S (with Pat pillion) on a big tour of south-eastern England, from Folkestone down the coast to Eastbourne, inland to Battle and Cranbrook, back to Folkestone and up to Dover, Margate and Canterbury; then back to London before work at 10 that (Monday) night. We’d done 630 k’s for £3/1; really satisfying for me, perhaps not so exciting for Pat.
The weather then turned bitterly cold, with blizzards, gales and metre-deep snow. March ‘came in like a lamb, out like a lion’, said the English, an awful shock for Reg and I.
Still, I liked being on the trains. Hard and dirty work, but it was steam. We used to cook eggs and bacon on the engine on one of our uphill runs, very welcome in the freezing winter.
As the weather warmed up in April, I painted ‘Australia’ and the kangaroos on my bike panniers and rode hundreds of k’s sightseeing. April 20 was especially beautiful, with the country lanes around Aylesbury a sea of wild bluebells, and the spring green really stunning to a red-desert Aussie. Pat loved going out into the country with me and we would wander along, picking bluebells.