>> This is James Newberry.
I'm here with Alan Davis on Wednesday,
May 20th, 2015,
at Social Sciences Building at Kennesaw State University.
And Mr. Davis, do you agree to this interview?
>> I do.
>> Thank you very much.
So let's just get started at the beginning.
When and where were you born?
>> I was born on the 27th of March 1932 in
East London in the Borough of
East Ham in the community called Manor Park.
>> And what was your full given name?
>> Alan Ivor Davis.
>> So tell me, what were your parents' names?
>> My father was Frederick John Thomas Davis,
and my mother was Florence Ivy Coultart,
C-O-U-L-T-A-R-T, and I've often
thought it sounds as though she
was a French extraction or something.
But she was very East London as far as I know,
but Coultart is a strange name.
Sometimes I used to
pronounce it Coulte to make it sound a
little bit more sophisticated because
Coultart is a bit crude. But that was her name.
>> So can you tell me a little bit
about the Davis family,
maybe a little background on your father's family?
>> Unfortunately, James,
I was never one that was very interested in family.
In fact, my mother and I had some disputes
because I would never visit
relatives when I was growing up.
And I think this annoyed her quite a bit.
But she gave up because I was
a hard-headed little bugger.
My father's father, to the best of my recollection,
worked as a bricklayer at a big brewery in East London.
It might have been Whit breads
and I think they still exist.
So he was a bricklayer for a brewery company.
On my mother's side,
it gets even a little less pleasant because
her father was a man who had very bad
eyesight and never really held a permanent type of a job,
and he became a heavy drinker.
He had no money, but what little he had
he spent in the local pubs.
So that was on my mother's side.
>> And how did his life come to an end?
>> He killed himself.
Two years after I was born, 1934,
he gassed himself in the oven
in their little house in East London.
Going back to my father's side,
his mother developed some mental problems later in life.
She had I think five children.
Again, life in East London back in those days,
'10s, '20s, and '30s was
tough and it often worked very hard on the women.
And she went into a depression or schizophrenia.
I don't know the exact description of her illness,
but she wound up being committed to a mental hospital.
But lived until, as I recall,
the age of 72 and
spent about 25 years in this mental hospital.
>> So in your household,
there were two other siblings?
>> There were. I had an older sister
Vera who was six years older and a younger brother,
six years younger, Roy.
>> So what did your parents do for a living,
specifically, your father to start with?
>> My father started off at
that brewery working as
a bricklayer apprentice or something like that,
but at a young age of 17,
he decided he didn't want to
spend his life doing that and
took the training to become a London taxi driver.
And in London, you had to
be very knowledgeable because it was
regulated by the metropolitan police and
they were quite strict and it took him
about three years because he worked on weekends,
on push bike cycling around the streets of London,
studying maps, I guess.
And it took him
nearly three years to acquire the knowledge
and go before the police board and get his taxi license.
And he never owned his own cab.
He always drove for a small company.
I think they owned 17 or 20 cabs, something like that.
And so that's what they used to call mushing.
He mushed for the rest of his life
except for his four years in the army.
>> And your mother?
>> My mother, of course,
had very little education.
The one job I do know before she got married,
she worked for a cigar making company in East London
and they imported Cuban tobacco and she rolled cigars.
That's the only job that I know she had.
She probably had one or two others,
but I'm afraid I don't have any knowledge.
>> So in your book that you wrote your memoir,
you said you compared
London's East End to Rio De Janiro's Taveras.
Do you recall doing that?
>> I do.
>> Why?
>> I became very conscious
of the discrepancy of British life.
I've been in the upper and lower classes.
And of course, I was somebody who resented it.
And so I was trying to make the point.
Probably it wasn't quite an appropriate comparison.
I've never been in Rio De Janiro's Taveras.
But I imagine that they're rather grim.
And I thought some of East London is rather grim.
It still is, I believe, to this day.
>> So describe that area to me.
What was it like? What are
your impressions as a young person living there?
>> In the real deep east end near the docks,
which is what later
became the object of the German bombers,
there were little row houses all together in a small,
no front yard, no backyard.
You walked in off the sidewalk,
went straight into the house,
and they were small, very basic abodes.
>> What activity was going on in the street?
>> I'm sure there were a lot of
snotty nose kids playing on the street.
There were very few or maybe no parks
in that part of London.
And so the kids had nowhere to play.
They had no backyards, they had no front yards.
So they played on the street, on the sidewalk.
Of course, in those days,
James, there was relatively little traffic.
It was a foot traffic and people on bikes.
>> So your parents moved quite a few times?
>> Yes, in my book,
because my mother did once give me a list of
the 17 different homes they had before
they bought their final home.
And she said that they moved so much always in
the attempt to improve
their living conditions at the least cost.
That's how she covered the times they
moved because I naturally assumed
they were always moving to beat the rent collector.
But it apparently wasn't true.
>> And by 1939,
they were in Forest Gate?
>> Yes.
>> Can you describe the house there, the street?
>> Again, it was a row house and I
think the street was almost a mile long, I believe,
and there's one house after another joined together,
but they were a bit bigger than
those earlier houses I was describing.
We had a small front yard and a bit bigger backyard.
And in fact, it had four bedrooms.
And at one time,
it had been a street with a little bit
of better class of client
or individual living there because the house where we
moved had been the home of a school teacher.
And he fled London with the coming of the war.
My parents moved in 1939,
of course, the year the war was declared.
And that the teacher
moved because of the war and he went to the West Country.
As I recall, I think he went to Devon,
a very nice English county.
>> So you liked soccer, correct?
>> I did.
>> And was that recreation for you?
>> Yes. And East London kids
were normally very poor and soccer,
all you needed was a football and some space to play it,
you dropped four coats to make the goal posts,
and you played,
and we used to play for hours.
>> And where did you go to school at that time,
when you were still quite young?
>> I started off in the,
I forget the proper term for the school,
it would be where you started at Age 5, I believe.
And it was called Fourth Avenue Road School,
and it must have been on a street Fourth Avenue because
they came up with
the imaginative name of Fourth Avenue School.
[LAUGHTER]
I think I stayed there until the age,
let's say, seven or eight.
And then I transferred to a junior school called
Salisbury Road School where I stayed until I was 11.
But we should get into that perhaps a little bit later
on because that's a big thing in my life.
What's your next question?
>> So tell me what was the Boys' Brigade?
>> It was trying to be like the Boy Scouts,
but the Boy Scouts in
East London was considered a bit of a CC group.
And I didn't want to join that.
But by the Boys' Brigade,
they had little pillbox hats and
a white shoulder belt and boys belt.
So it looked a bit like the military officers who
wore brown leather belts with
a holster but we didn't have any guns.
But I joined it at some cost to
my parents because they had to buy
the hat and the belt, etc.
Can this get an X rating?
Because the reason why I left much to
my mother's annoyance was because
the man who ran this thing in a church hall.
We met one night a week and did gymnastics.
And then one evening,
you want the dirty details?
He asked two smallest boys of
which I was one to stay behind the other boys.
Do I have to go any further?
>> Well, so it was an issue of molestation?
>> Molestation, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
We want to get all the details.
He didn't touch us.
He just looked at us.
He stood us on a bench.
So I still remember this very well.
And he observed but he didn't
touch to the very best of my recollection,
but that was my first exposure
to aberrant human sexuality.
>> So at that point,
you had been very eager to
join and then you suddenly
chose to get out and your mother was annoyed?
>> Well, because she had spent the money.
I never told my mother what happened.
I was so dumb and shy. I never told her.
And of course, she couldn't understand
and I pestered her to buy the uniform.
And of course, I wanted the uniform
because there were so many military troops
in London in those days,
I wanted to look like a soldier.
And I thought I did. And I thought
all the nine year old girls were in love with me.
>> So what kind of a kid were you?
>> [LAUGHTER] A little bastard.
>> How would you say you got along with
other kids your age?
>> Okay because I was in this played soccer and
I liked having mates in those days they called in London,
friends they're called mates in East London.
So I had my share of mates.
>> And I know your siblings were quite a part in age.
So were you close to them, not close to them?
>> Not close to them. I had very
little to do and to the best of my recollection.
>> I know you were still young in 1938, 1939,
but do you have any awareness of
events on the continent in Germany specifically?
>> Well, as I mentioned in my book, I'm glad I read it.
I was conscious in '38,
'39 of a concern
in my parents' voice when they talked about,
I didn't really understand much,
but I knew I detected
an apprehension fear in my parents' voices.
And I attribute that to
the uncanny ability of children to pick
up their parents' emotions without
necessarily understanding
what the hell they're talking about.
>> So what about when the war began in September 1939?
Do you remember that specifically?
>> Well, I do remember
hearing the radio broadcast because the very next day,
my father who could
rent his cab he had to pay the owner of the cab,
but he could rent it himself.
He took us away into the country right away because
the government announced and warned of
imminent German bombers coming.
And so he took us up to Norfolk about 150 miles into
the countryside from East London
and we stayed there for about six weeks.
But of course, the bombing didn't start.
The government had warned,
but it didn't happen right away.
And somehow, I don't know quite how this worked,
but we wound up living with the village clergyman,
because what we didn't know he had
a German maid who had fled back to Germany when the war
started and so they were looking
for a replacement maid and
so my mother jumped into this because they
had the room to take her and two kids,
my brother and myself.
My sister who was nearly 14 years of age and would be
going out to work very soon she
went back to London with my father.
So we stayed with this clergyman
4-6 weeks I don't know exactly now,
but my mother was made their master-slave.
And of course, my mother is a bit
feisty and she didn't like that.
And since no bombing was happening
my father rented the cab again and came and took us back.
So I do remember the beginning of the war.
But as I say, the bombing didn't start,
so we didn't notice any great change.
>> But you were in the north with your mother and
brother and your father and sister were back in London.
So this was the first separation?
>> Yes. I considered
it an evacuation although I was there with
my brother and my mother in this house,
but I call that my first evacuation.
>> So after the war started,
these blackout orders came.
And what is this, explain that.
>> Well, the government required
you to put up any material that would
block light being emitted from
windows German bombers but
though the war started on 3 September '39,
the bombing didn't start until June of 1940.
So it was approximately nine months after the war
started that the bomb started.
And Hitler mounted raids virtually every night.
The only time that they didn't happen was when
the continent was fogged
in and they couldn't take off safely,
I guess so we got rest bites,
but the bombing went on again,
took nine months for it to start,
and then it lasted about nine months before Hitler quit.
I did hear once that he was hoping
this heavy bombing would cause the British people to
sue their government for
surrender but of course, that didn't happen.
>> Do you remember the will of
individuals of your parents, of other adults?
How did they feel during that period?
What was their response
when they had to do these constant blackouts,
prepare for the air raids, things like that?
>> How did they feel? They complied
because they could have been thrown in jail if they
hadn't but that was no big deal.
How they felt. I'm sure life was made more difficult.
Rationing started,
which would have made daily life quite tough,
just getting food on the table,
etc but it never
got to the point where we were going
to starve, I don't think.
Later on, of course,
we got a lot of food from America because I remember very
clearly the boxes of dried egg that came
from the United States have a little square boxes,
Khaki color with the government contract number
printed down the side and
the American Eagle printed on the other side.
I still remember. We had a lot of dried egg.
My mother cooked it in many ways,
and also dried milk that came from America.
And Canada, Canada was very generous
and helpful to the United Kingdom
in the Second World War.
Canada and the United States
fed that a lot of the working-class people of England.
>> We often hear during that time of
radio broadcast specifically,
Churchill's speeches on the radio.
Is that something that stands out in your mind at all?
>> No, I cannot say I have a recollection of that,
but he did, I guess,
talk quite a bit because he was
a very eloquent speaker
and he was the right man in the job at the time.
>> So for those air raids that you were present
for when you were not evacuated by yourself,
or with your sibling during those air raids,
where would the family go for protection?
>> I'm going to answer that in
some detail because the government issued
free a shelter that had to be put in the back garden,
so you have to have a back garden to use
this gadget but it was,
because I read it this morning.
It was about eight feet long by
four feet wide and a curved corrugated steel.
So you dug this pit.
You put these forms in and
bolted them along the top, and of course,
had a section that filled in
the back and the front had a little door and
some surrounding material to form a door and it
was dug into the ground about 4.5 feet deep.
So some of it was in the ground and some of it was
protruding above the ground level
and then you threw the dirt that you dug out of
the pit over the top to
make it a little bit more bomb-proof.
And it said in James,
I remember this because I read it this morning.
>> You wrote it.
>> But it said it would not save you from a direct hit,
but it would save you from a bomb that
fell not so far away.
>> So maybe from debris.
>> Debris etc.
>> Trapnol, other materials.
>> Exactly.
>> So during those bombings,
what was the noise like?
>> Well, I must have been.
I don't have any recollection of that.
And it was only after I came back from
my second evacuation that
I really experienced the shelter.
Although Hitler terminated his mass bombing
after nine months, thereabouts,
he did let bombers come over every now and again,
more or less as nuisance, raids, propaganda raid.
I'm not quite sure what the military,
if there was a military objective, I don't know.
They're the things that I
remember because my mother used to have
to come around and get us up when the siren went.
We had to go into the shelter,
which was at the bottom of the garden,
30 yards down the garden.
But of course, it's cold in London, in Britain.
And the water level
in England is very high because it
rains all the time there, as you know.
So there was always water forming in this pit.
So you've stepped into the thing,
you stepped into water.
And of course, we had had my father built some bunk beds,
so we climbed onto the bunk beds.
But often you stepped in
and you're doing this in the middle of the winter,
with your pajamas on and maybe a coat
over you to go into the shelter.
So it was a decidedly unpleasant experience.
So I got that I wouldn't go into shelter.
Of course, another thing my mother was
driven nuts by me because
I would give her a hard time about going into shelter.
>> Were there any close calls?
>> The closest bombings that we had were
some phosphorous bombs that
were dropped on our street
and blew out our front windows.
Now, that happened, as I say,
after I came back from
my second big evacuation
when I stayed away for about a year,
they blew the windows in.
But we're getting a little bit ahead of the story here.
You need to ask me about my evacuation.
Why don't you sit here and let me sit there.
>> You can do both jobs.
Let's talk about that first.
>> You don't mind if I make jokes.
Good.
[LAUGHTER]
>> It's nice and refreshing, actually.
So let's talk about that first major evacuation.
And I'm going to try to pronounce it. Gloucestershire.
>> Very good. Exactly. Gloucestershire. Well, that,
of course, once the bombing started seriously,
and that was in June of 1940,
that's when the government said you
should evacuate your children and most families complied.
A few wealthier families went away as a family unit.
But for the government-sponsored evacuation,
only the kids went.
Parents could not go under that program.
So that's when my school was evacuated.
They evacuated you by the school
and by the class so that you stayed with people,
kids you knew, but parents weren't included.
And so I went to Gloucestershire,
a little village near the town of Cirencester,
and the town was called
[inaudible] which sounds very medieval to me.
And it was just a little village.
But I was not put within an individual family.
And families who volunteered to take children were paid
a small amount at 10 shillings and sixpence.
It was the old British currency.
You got 10 shillings to the first child and
eight shillings if you took a second child,
which was a small amount,
but it meant a bit more in those days.
And most kids got picked up by families.
Most of the families were really, I think,
interested in that money rather than taking the kids.
I'm sure there were a few good souls who did
it out of the goodness of their hearts,
but most were interested in it.
>> Well, let's talk about that first place you went.
You went with your class.
So you weren't necessarily traveling with your brother?
So he went somewhere else?
>> No. He was too young then.
>> So he stayed with your parents?
>> He stayed home.
>> So in this first location where
someone was being paid to house you,
can you describe that place?
>> Well, in the end,
we wound up going to an estate of
a wealthy man who turned out,
I found out much later in life,
had been in the oil industry
and worked for the company that became BP,
well known British company nowadays,
but he had been with it long
before it was even called BP.
So he was a valued government employee at that time.
And I didn't see him around the estate very much.
And I think he was always in London
working probably with the ministry
of supplier whichever handled
gasoline supplies to Britain in those days.
But there were six boys
and he didn't open up
his big home and he had a big home on that estate
because he was also working farm.
There were six boys,
and he at one time had pleasure horses.
The family had that but they got rid of the horses,
and so they got rid of the grooms who took care of them.
And we were put into a room above the stables.
We didn't sleep in the stables.
We were in a room above
the stables which he had decorated,
prepared a bit decently,
I think, and he provided the six beds.
And next to this room where the beds were,
there was a little kitchen area,
because it's where the grooms had lived at one time.
So we took over that.
But it was a working farm.
And I have many recollections
of the farm activity going on there.
>> How independent could you be as a child staying there?
Could you go into town? Do you wonder?
>> Well, yes, we did wander around the countryside.
Because the six boys,
the age range from about six years of age to 12.
So we broke up into two groups,
the older and younger groups.
And so I did wander
around with the younger ones, of course.
Yes, we could go into town much to the annoyance
of the local villages because we were
snotty nose London kids and they didn't particularly
relish their little village being
invaded by these heathen children.
>> How did you demonstrate your heathenness?
[LAUGHTER]
>> Well, we made a lot of noise and generally
disrespected the quiet of
the village by making a lot of noise.
[LAUGHTER]
>> Did you get along with each other?
>> Yeah. I'm sure we did.
I don't ever recall any big fights.
But as I say, we separated
into the older and the younger,
which is, I guess, perfectly normal for children.
>> And did you attend local schools?
>> Well, that's a good question because,
of course, they didn't have.
The local school couldn't handle this influx.
And I don't know how many children descended on
[inaudible] but I would guess it
was 150, perhaps even 200.
So suddenly you got this influx of kids,
and the local school couldn't handle it.
So what they did,
they made the school in the community hall,
which was itself, not that big,
but we all each grade or form
as it's called in England, had a table.
But you had then kids from
six years of age up to 14 in this one room.
So you can imagine,
it was not conducive to the pursuit of higher education.
>> Did you feel at all as if you were on
a vacation from school or a vacation in general?
>> Did I thought I was on a vacation?
No, I can't say I ever
recall I think I was on on vacation.
Because I didn't like being away.
I missed my family
because my mother was a good mother.
She was an easygoing mother,
so I thought she was good.
>> So talk about that separation.
This is the first major one
where you're away from both your parents.
And how do you think that impacted you then?
How do you think it impacted
you over a long period of time?
>> Well, I had mental emotional problems later in life,
and I suspect the doctor once
said it could have been had its foundations in that time.
But I don't know that to be a fact.
It's a good theory, though.
>> So it wasn't something you were conscious of then?
>> No. I was conscious of the fact
that because they put a woman in charge of us,
had come from East London herself,
and she was put in charge.
She lived in a room in
that farmhouse building and she was there.
I guess she cooked meals,
but she was an evil woman.
She used to disappear to the local pub a
lot and I'm sure
she didn't do a very good job in meal preparation.
So that was the first one.
But she was eventually exposed and fired.
And then we got a very nice Mrs. Price.
I still remember her name.
And she took much better care of us.
As I said, I have an image of this woman in
a floral apron with a teapot welded into her hand,
because we lived on tea.
And she moved around
with this teapot all the time, but she was a good woman.
And as I say in my book,
not all the heroes of World War II had uniforms.
Some of them wore aprons. I like that.
>> So tell me about returning to
your family after that first evacuation.
>> Well, I stayed away 12-14 months.
I do not remember the exact time,
but yes, when the bombing stopped,
we all went back.
So I went back to my old school,
a very inadequate school, of course.
And I was very pleased to go back to my mother's cooking.
Although food was not readily available,
but my mother did a good job.
>> So how many times overall did you have to evacuate?
>> Well, then there was another time.
So the war went,
the bombing stopped although Hitler kept
up occasional raids because it was on one of
those occasional raids when our street got hit with
those phosphorus bombs and
our front windows were blown out.
But then it was June of '44
when Hitler launched his V1 and V2s.
Well, V1s came in June,
V2s came in September.
The V1 was a pilotless drone plane,
packed explosive in the nose,
but it flew pretty low.
It was very noisy. It had
a strange engine that emitted a weird sound,
but I saw several go
over at night and they had this orange flame.
It was a jet-type engine.
I'm not a mechanic,
so I can't tell you too much more.
But once the engine stopped, the thing came down.
That was the V1.
The [inaudible] that's the German.
Then in September, '44,
he came up with his V2, the rocket.
And that was scary.
If he had had the rocket at the beginning of the war,
the whole war could have gone a different way,
because it traveled at 943 miles an hour.
And it went up and down,
and you didn't know it was coming.
It traveled so fast.
We only knew it was there when it exploded.
As I say, had he had that early in the war,
I really believe the war
could have taken a different course.
>> So on the subsequent evacuations,
did you go to different [OVERLAPPING]
>> Yes. See,
when he fired these new weapons in summer of '44.
And remember, France,
the Normandy Landings occurred on 6th of June, 1944.
They evacuated the London school kids again because he
concentrated on London pretty much this next time.
And so once again,
the kids were rounded up and
this time we went to Torque in Devonshire,
in the West Coast of England,
actually quite an elegant town.
In this time my brother was older,
so he and I went together.
And we wound up being billeted
with an old couple who were eking out
a meager living running a small holding.
Small holding would be the proper word, I believe.
A few pigs, a few chickens.
No cattle there.
But it was an unhappy situation.
They really only took us in for the money.
But of course, I was older and
even more objectionable than I
had been when I was younger,
because I started to protest to
my poor mother a lot in postcards,
very ungrammatical and misspelled postcards
were pouring to London.
>> What were you saying?
>> Get me out of here.
I don't like it. I'm going to go home.
And of course, the government very much discouraged that.
But my mother, being a good soul she was,
she paid our way back.
>> So what was so intolerable about
this household in Devonshire?
>> The old guy who ran the small holding was very gruff,
very aggressive, just an unpleasant human being.
And I wasn't very exposed to that before.
So I was in protest.
He had a daughter.
I don't think she was their natural daughter.
A young girl of maybe 15 or
16 living in the house
and she had to do all the washing up.
And a lot of the chores around the house.
He was very aggressive to her,
and they often had rows at
the dinner table and my brother and I were there.
And it was very unpleasant.
I knew I didn't like it.
One other thing.
He used to go and collect pig food.
People who put out any food scraps.
He would pick them up from buckets.
The people would leave them on the side of
the street in front of the house.
And of course, he made me go with him.
And of course, I didn't care for scraping out this dude.
You can imagine there was no food in any case,
and we're picking up the scraps of what little food
there was and he always made me scrape the bucket into.
He had built a trolley with a trash can.
I had to get the bucket.
He pushed a trolly in.
I did the scraping,
and I didn't like that work arrangement and another.
>> How did your brother react?
>> Because he was much younger, of course.
So I was 12, so Roy was only six.
Well, Roy is a very undemonstrative kind of person.
So he didn't make a lot of protest.
>> Did you feel a responsibility for him?
>> Yes. I did because I took his part
once in when some kid was picking on him,
I got him involved.
I got crap beaten out of me,
but I did intercede.
>> So you got to come back to London
because you pleaded with your mother?
>> Yes. She paid our way back.
I couldn't tell you what the fare was,
but she wouldn't have had a lot of
money to devote to that,
but she was good enough to do it.
But then I say in my book,
I think we got back in about August of '44.
And in January, '45,
a rocket fell fairly close to where we lived.
And my brother that morning had gone
around the corner to a friend's house to
play in his house, and rocket fell.
I can't give you exact figure,
but it blew the front of
their house and several houses along there.
Unfortunately, they were playing in the back of the house.
I wasn't there, but my brother got a gash.
And he was the only one in the end in all the war of
our family who got injured.
>> So did you see him with that injury?
>> Yes. And there was a gash on his head.
It was nothing too bad,
but the point being,
I had instituted my mother to bring us back.
I had my brother been killed,
who would have been really culpable me.
>> Is that something you thought about
later or was it at
that time that you felt you've been stricken?
>> I'm not the kind of person to
feel a lot of guilt about anything.
But I realized later on that had he been killed,
who would have been responsible? Me.
>> So you only evacuated one more time?
>> No. That's three times.
The short one right at the beginning,
the long one in Gloucestershire
and the short one in Devonshire.
>> And at that point you had returned.
When did your father join the Royal Army Service Corps?
>> He was called up in June of 1942.
It was late in the war, really.
But because he was an older man,
he was 40 or 39 and six months when he was called up.
They called up the young men at the beginning of the war.
They worked up the age scale as the war went on.
And so he was called up in June of 42.
I happened to have that date in
my head because as I say in my book,
when my father came back four years later,
I was such a dumb youth.
I never questioned him anything very
much about his war experience.
>> And he was a driver?
>> He was a tank transport
he'd hauled the tanks on those big trucks,
and he actually went
to North Africa very quickly after he went in the army.
He came home once on a leave.
I have to mention this because in those days,
so the British troops had to carry
the rifles with them all the time. So he would come home.
But I think he came twice before he went overseas
and he would let
me wander around the house with his rifle.
Fortunately, it wasn't loaded.
And I'd take potshots at
imaginary Germans and that was great fun to me.
>> So when did he board the ship?
>> He sailed from Greenock, Scotland,
which is a Port just west of Glasgow on
the River Clyde and
they went out and joined up in the convoy.
And in those days,
any convoys, if any ship got sunk from the convoy,
the others were not allowed to stop
and pick up any survivors in the water.
They had to keep rolling.
So if your ship was hit,
you were on your own.
But he sailed so far out into the Atlantic
to avoid the German submarines
operating out of the West Coast of France.
The Germans had four or five big ports
where they operated the submarines from,
and they operated in the Bay of Biscay
and so they skirted that by going at one time.
He was closer to the United States
than he was to Europe and eventually,
they turned southeast and went through
the straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean.
And when they were only 60 miles from Algiers,
which is Algeria they got
hit by aerial torpedo and the boat hold,
and it went down fairly fast.
My father had to slide down a rope,
hanging down the side of the ship into
the water and swim to a raft.
But of course, the convoy moved on,
his ship was one that was,
there might have been one or two others.
I'm not sure. But the convoy moved on.
So he was bobbing around in
the Mediterranean on this route
with other men, of course.
But the British Navy had
some destroyers circulating and he was picked
up after about an hour of being
on this raft and was taken to Algiers,
which was their original destination.
>> And when did your family
discover the news that that ship had gone down?
>> I'm sorry. I don't really and truly know that.
I don't know when we learned.
I don't remember how my mother reacted.
I can't answer that question.
>> So he was gone out of your life for four years?
>> Four years.
>> So you wouldn't have seen him
then again until about 46?
>> Forty-six, June of 46.
He left in June 42.
He came back in June of 46.
I was already finished
school and working when he returned.
>> So do you remember the end of the war?
>> Yes. It was a jubilant time.
I think a friend and I even went
up to the west end of all the crowds.
Of course, the thing that still left me with
deep impressions were all the foreign troops
in London and England during wartime.
There's a million and a quarter American GIs
prior to the invasion of Normandy.
But we had thousands of troops from Canada,
New Zealand, South Africa, Australia.
And of course, I was always
impressed with all these uniforms.
And I think seeing all these foreign soldiers is what
first jingled my imagination
about foreign countries. I really do.
>> So you recognized them by their uniforms?
>> Yeah, and many of them had very distinct hats.
The Australian hat.
GIS, the Americans said we had
lots of American sailors in England.
And many kids try to collect the badges
the cap badges that the military have.
I became a badge collector
along with hundreds of other kids.
>> And what was life like then in the months,
in the years, first years after the war?
We know that there were shortages still at least
in Britain that had to be dealt with.
>> Yes. Well, the irony of all of this is food rationing
in Britain went on until I think it was 1954,
almost nine years after the end of the war.
Food rationing ended in Germany in '49, I think it was.
So the Germans did away with food
rationing four or five years before the British did.
That seems a little bizarre
when we were supposed to have won the war.
>> Do you remember its impact
specifically on your family?
>> Well, as I've said,
I know that we survived a lot on
American-dried egg, American-dried milk.
>> Still after the war?
>> Yes, for some time after after the war.
Although my recollection of that is a little bit hazy,
so I'm reluctant to really make
any firm statements about that.
I remember the American contribution
to my diet during the war, very much.
>> Let's transition to
what we were talking about very early on.
You were 11, you were at
Salisbury Road School and
this was a sort of big moment. Do you want to elaborate?
>> Yes, the bigness of
all these deals from the fact that in
those days and I believe it's been done away,
but there used to be what was called
the 11 plus exam because you took it when you were
11 years of age if you were going to
a state school and if you passed the test,
you could go on to grammar school,
which gave you more of an academic background.
If you failed, you went to
a so-called vocational school where
you supposedly learned some skills
which were virtually non-existent,
as far as I'm concerned.
So it was a big government hoax in my book.
And of course, my sister passed it but
life being full of ironies my parents
wouldn't let her go on to grammar school.
A lot of working-class,
Brits felt girls didn't need an education.
They were going to get married and have children
and man the home front.
So she's the only one in
our family who passed the 11 plus.
I failed it, my younger brother who did go
on to become an engineer failed it also.
So anyway, I went to this,
I think it was called Sandringham Road School,
which is a vocational school and
they did have a few carpentry work
benches in there and a few beat-up old tools,
and that was about the extent of
the vocational education and of course,
you learned virtually nothing else.
Now, I will admit I was a bad student.
I wasn't interested in school at that time,
but the government didn't make much of an effort
to make it be
a serious student either as far as I'm concerned.
>> So were you thinking about your future,
your career at that point?
>> No, not then.
I didn't think about my future until I got to
be 18 and suddenly I was pushed out.
I was in the working world.
>> But you finished school at 14?
>> I finished school at 14.
>> And at what point did you take a job at the newspaper?
>> Few months later because I started.
Do you want this much detail?
I got a job and my mother got me my first job.
Around the corner, there
was something called the London Cooperative Society,
which was a big department-type store
right around the corner from us,
was where they had a milk bottling plant,
a shoe repair plant,
a mattress repair plant,
and my mother got me a job in the mattress repair plant.
And what my job was to see people in those days
didn't throw away mattresses like we do in America.
You sent them, had them fixed cleaned and fixed up,
and used them again for the next 29 years.
So I was ripping open these mattresses,
pulling out the stuffing,
and that was milled,
re-milled because a lot of it was content was horse hair.
The cover was cleaned and put back together in.
I have no idea what that cost,
but that was my first job, but of course,
it took me about a week to discover I didn't like
it and I was looking immediately for something else.
My next job was as a messenger boy in an office in
Central London that made printing blocks,
blocks that were in the printing process.
I can't give you the technical details of this.
They were metal forms on wooden blocks that were
used to produce advertisements
in newspapers and magazines.
And I took these things around in a Satchel,
carried on my back,
riding around London to deliver these things to
different newspapers and magazine offices.
I didn't like that after a few weeks either.
Then one day I had to
deliver some blocks to Fleet Street,
which is where the newspaper industry was
concentrated and still is, I believe,
although it shrunk much now and I saw a job
in the London office of the provincial newspaper,
the Birmingham Malan Post,
Britain's second biggest city.
And so that's how I wound up working for a newspaper.
But the big thing about that was
there I was exposed to educated people for
the first time in my life
and somehow, I took an interest.
>> So how did it begin to change for you?
What did that job mean for you and how did you begin
to open up and
for more books to read these sorts of things?
>> Well, just because I was
among not that they had
any dealings with me particularly,
but I was in the office
and these various reporters would come
in and talk with the sub-editors and I
began to see that this
was a different kind of human being.
These were men who knew what
the hell they were talking about.
And one reporter took an interest in
me and said to me on several occasions,
if you wanted to be in the newspaper business,
you're going to get some education
and that's when I started going to night school.
He told me I should start reading,
and I did start reading and I'm
still reading 83 years later.
>> Well, I want to talk about one incident when
you collected
an advanced copy of one of
Churchill's speeches for the paper. Do you recall that?
>> Yes, I do.
>> And what did that involve?
>> The interesting thing was Mr. Churchill
had a home in Central London near Hyde Park,
the park one of the parks in
Central London just off the park.
I can't remember the exact address
but I went there on a bus from the Fleet Street
and went to the house
and I'd been told I mustn't go to the front door.
I had to go to the Trajan's entrance,
which I assumed would be around the back.
Well, when I went around the side of the building there
was a big wall you couldn't get to the back of the house.
So I went back around the front and
I noticed it was steps down to
a door below the street level.
So I banged on the door,
took them a while to answer the door,
but I wasn't invited in.
I was told to wait outside.
That shook me up because I thought I was going
to get in and see Mr. Churchill.
I never saw Mr. Churchill.
But another interesting little thing.
As I was waiting there have been told to
wait I noticed it
along because we were below the street level,
and down at the base of the wall,
lots and lots of crates with
empty wine bottles and beer bottles.
So I'd never seen anything like this.
I went over and picked up a few bottles,
couldn't pronounce any of
these names mainly French product,
and yes, Mr. Churchill liked
his whiskey and wine and brandy,
I'm sure but he earned it.
>> And so you started attending night school.
And did you do that with purpose?
Did you have something in mind? Oh, yes.
>> Yes. I was then aiming.
I had this vague hope and
vision of trying to become a reporter.
So I took English,
I took shorthand, I took typing.
But I went four nights a week and I kept it
up until I went in the service four years later.
>> Was that obligatory going into the service?
>> Yes. In those days,
national service like it was in America for a while.
But the Brits was the first country
to switch to volunteer force, I believe.
It was volunteer force. But in my time, ee had to go in.
>> And you were in the Royal Air Force?
>> I was in air force.
>> And so what were your duties in the Royal Air Force?
>> Well, by that time,
I could write shorthand and type.
So I became a shorthand typist.
>> So they sort of took advantage of your skills?
>> And I had studied well and I knew my subjects well,
I was fairly good, I believe.
In the vasos myself.
>> And when you came out of the service,
what did you do next?
>> Well, I went back to the job I had before because I
I had quit newspaper after three years,
and I started working for
a book publishing company in this sales office.
I worked for the salesman. Again, I
was more or less a secretary.
That's what I was, though I
didn't like to be called a secretary.
And I went back to that for a while,
but meantime that particular company
had been sold and so I switched to another company.
And a small publishing
and I happened to publish the Royal Air Force magazine.
So I was working for Royal Air Force magazine.
They published a few other things as well,
but the one that really interested me was
the Royal Air Force magazine.
But as you mentioned,
I got this weird idea that I wanted to do something for
humanity and quit that job
and signed up to be a nurse for nurse training.
Also, another aspect of this was,
I really wanted to get away from home.
I felt I needed to leave home.
And in those days, working class mothers,
I believe had a feeling
you shouldn't leave home until you get married.
Unlike in this country where kids leave
home very easily and freely in working class Britain,
this was not done.
Mother seemed to be offended by this.
So by becoming going into nurse training,
I could leave home,
with a valid reason.
Which was part of my motivation but I was
also like to kid myself that I really
wanted to do something for humanity.
After a few weeks of dealing with bedpans,
I decided I really didn't care about humanity.
[LAUGHTER] I left that after six weeks.
I'm not going to look at.
>> You described yourself in
the book several times as fickle.
>> [LAUGHTER] Maybe that's putting it mildly.
>> So you hadn't settled necessarily.
And so let's go to that idea after the war,
you were seeing all of these servicemen
from different places around the world,
and you began to travel.
>> Yes.
>> A good deal.
>> Well, somewhat. I never had money,
but yes, I wanted to travel and see the world.
Because I should have joined the Navy or something,
but I didn't do that.
But yes, I was interested in other places.
And well, eventually, I emigrated to Canada.
>> Well, I want to talk about your job in Germany.
When you were working for the Air Force Exchange Service.
>> This is many years later, of course.
>> So this is with the Americans.
>> Oh, yeah.
>> In Germany. So these these bases
that have been established post war.
And what were you doing with the exchange service?
>> I started out in the services,
not in the retail side of the house.
And let me just give it a little preface here.
You have to realize that
the Exchange service is big business.
They doing $10 billion a year.
Why? Because the US military is so big.
And this was the Armed Air Force, change service.
The Navy has an exchange service.
The Marine Corps has a exchange service
and the coast guard has a exchange service.
>> So what's the exchange service doing?
>> Well, the department store on the basis.
You can buy everything from
a safety pin to an automobile.
>> This is like a commissary?
>> Well, the commissary,
there is a separate entity called the commissary,
but that sells food
and they sell at good prices to the US.
The exchange didn't sell well,
we sold some items,
but the commissary is what
provides the military with food.
Obviously, the soldiers get fed by the army,
but this is for dependence of the military.
And because the US military is so big,
there are a lot of dependents.
So it's a huge community on each base.
You buy food at the commissary,
you buy pins and automobiles at the exchange service.
>> And what did you do?
>> I was in the services department.
Sorry, I first of all,
started in plans and headquarters.
Later on, I got into the field in services.
So I had two careers.
First, I spent number of years in the plans department,
and that was writing plans,
in the military, you have to write everything down.
You can't do anything unless it's written down.
>> Documentation.
>> Documentation, basically.
Yeah. And we had lots of documentation.
But then later on,
I once again got tired of
that and wanted to get into operations.
So I got into services.
And the services side, Randy, garages,
the beauty shops, the barber shops,
the concessions, and several other things as well.
We had the contract for the truck rental.
We had the contracts with U-Haul,
what's the other big one?
It's a couple of them.
But we had the exchange of the contract.
That was one of the things I handled.
And of course, because
they're always moving the troops around.
There was a lot of business for truck rental.
A lot of soldiers moved themselves.
>> And through this exchange service,
you eventually met a woman named Julian First?
>> Yes.
>> Who's that?
>> My wife. Well,
she came to work for the exchange.
I was in the European headquarters
of the exchange service,
in Nuremberg, Germany, and she came to work for them.
She had gone from Germany to England and spent
about six years in London where she learned English,
of course, and she could write English shorthand.
And so she became a secretary.
And because she could speak English,
she wanted to use it when she came
back to Germany from England.
And so she came and started with the exchange.
So an office romance.
>> What about her attracted you?
>> I can't answer that question.
Wow. She was an intelligent woman,
attractive and likes to read and is a great hiker.
She hikes the pants off me today.
So, a number of things.
And I was then in my 30s already,
early 30s and never married up to that time.
So it was a good idea to get married.
>> But you had a small wedding?
>> Yes, we did. You really want the detail, right?
We just got married in the Nuremberg City Hall,
a civil ceremony. No church wedding.
So the morning of the wedding.
Julie did take a taxi from where
she lived to the city hall,
but I went to my own wedding on the street car for $0.25.
I spent $0.25 on the street car to
go from where I lived to the city hall for the wedding.
So you can't do it more economically than that.
>> How did you tell your parents that you were
marrying this German woman?
>> Well, I never anticipated.
Because I didn't particularly like that.
My hopes of becoming a reporter had gone down the tubes.
But I saved my money and
had about $1,000 when decided to come with a friend.
I didn't do this by myself.
I was with a friend. We came to America.
And came to America because we had met
this New Zealand guy
and he worked in the Canadian Pacific.
He was on one of these around the world.
A lot of Australians and New Zealanders they must feel
this pang or pull from England,
because that's where so many of them came
from originally, they want to go back.
And so they undertake these around
the world tours lasting two, three, four years.
And this guy had reached Toronto Canada,
and worked for the Canadian Pacific,
and he was always talking about San Francisco.
I'd see him in the local library reading books on
San Francisco and he was
always on about this great city of San Francisco.
That's what fired up me about
coming to America and went to San Francisco.
So that's I don't know if I would have done
it if I hadn't met this New Zealand guy.
>> So the Air Force Exchange took you back to Germany,
but then eventually after you'd married,
you returned to the United States?
>> Yeah. Well, I would.
They moved us like
they moved the military every few years.
So I knew I was going to be going back to America.
Julie, I told
her right away and we began to get a bit serious.
That I would be going back and by that time,
I knew I had to hang onto my job
because I was now my mid-30s.
I had switched around so much.
I knew this is one job I needed to hang onto.
>> And you stayed with the Exchange?
>> I stayed in the Exchange office.
>> But when did you retire?
>> 1993.
I was 60 years of age.
>> And how did you end up in Georgia?
>> Daughter. We had two children in Germany
and one of them became an attorney.
She did her undergraduate work in Florida and
came up to UGA in Athens.
>> That's correct.
>> Athens. Yeah. And became
an attorney and she used to come to Atlanta quite a
bit and she said that she was going to settle here.
She never did like moving,
she didn't like when we had to move.
So she wanted to settle down.
I will admit I would like to have gone back
to California after I retired,
but housing prices are so great, couldn't afford it.
So we decided to come
to Atlanta to be with our oldest daughter.
>> And you wrote a memoir titled A Life In Shadow.
So why did you call it that?
And why did you decide to write it?
>> Well, because I had this great interest in
writing since age 14 and joining the newspaper.
And I did for many years,
operate as a freelance writer.
I had this government job,
but the government job never really stimulated me.
So I took up freelance writing and did it for
quite a few years and met with
some success, not great success.
And you certainly won't get
rich on freelance writing, but I enjoyed it.
So something that satisfied my ego.
>> And what was the significance of the title?
>> Well, I felt I made a lot of mistakes in my life.
And I did suffer depression.
And that went on for quite a few years until I
finally went and got
some professional help and he put me on a medication.
Boom, it was gone like that.
So that's the shadow in the title.
>> Mr. Davis, I appreciate it.
I am going to end there.
>> We're going to end?
Well, thank you very much. Thank you, folks.
>> Thank you.