Michael D.Heath-Caldwell M.Arch.

1933

Memoirs of J.A. Heath-Caldwell

When they (Parents) came back (from Hong Kong)  they settled in a house in Fareham, Woodcroft House, Southampton Rd, where my father worked in the HMS Victory or in the Gas School, in Portsmouth.

Danny, Violet, James, Pat behind, Cuthbert and Ros. 1933

Woodcroft was originally two houses joined into one but still with a wall up the middle of the garden. We were there until he was axed in about 1934 1935. This was when the Navy was cut back because the Government, in peace time, people did not expect another war and they wanted to save money and by then he had made up his mind that he wanted to become a clergyman in the Church of England, partly because while he was out in Hong Kong, a young curate called Henry Bains there talked with my father and my father said he had a religious experience, and that is all he said. I would have liked to have been more detailed account of his experience but he never got around to telling me that. 

My father joined the Church and went to a theological college, I don’t know where he went, which one it was, but his remarks to me was that he thought that around about Easter time with the Crucifixion, he said that there was a lot of mental illness amongst the young students that he trained with. He did not have the set curriculum that the other theological students had, he was given a list of books to read and let loose amongst the books more or less, that was his training. 

In many parts of the world of course, particularly in NZ when things have been handed down they have all been fragmented in a great degree. Uncle Caldwell appeared to Grandma (a ghost). I saw nothing of that but heard about it. And I think it as being as Uncle Caldwell willed Linley Wood to go to the youngest son and it did not. Maybe Uncle Martin’s death prevented that and my father inherited Linley Wood but did not want to be a glorified estate agent so sold L.W. and bought the Pound House with the money. That was sold to him by Booth, Shepherd and Co Real Estate Agents in Dorchester in 1946.c. 

I then went to a nursery somewhere in Southampton Road in Fareham and all I can remember about it is that I kicked and screamed under the table, and apparently that was not a good thing to do, and I don’t know how long that lasted.

But then following that they sent me to another kindergarten place school and there I can remember a French teacher who taught us French, she showed us pictures of things and said what they were and I can remember her showing us a picture of the moon and her saying “Au Clare de la Lune” means by moonlight. And that was one thing I can remember from there, where I would have been five or six.

And then my father took over this rectory in South Wiltshire in the Salisbury Diocese and he became rector there, it was a small village and there were three other villages that were in his parish, one of them had been a separate parish in the years before, it had a huge rectory in it, and that was empty when he went there in 1936. 

Fareham. I used to sit on the wall at the end of the garden that overlooked some classrooms of a school which was just the other side of the wall, and I found if I made faces at the pupils in the classroom just down below me things happened. So what happened was that they put glass on the wall so that I could no longer do that.

Another thing that happened there was that I played with matches in a woodshed and it was a lean to wood shed and I ignited the wood in a box in the shed and then I went up on top the roof of the shed on top of the fire underneath and said look what I’ve done. They managed to put the fire out and no harm was done to me, but that was playing with matches.

And in Fareham when I suppose I was about 5 years old my father would take me for walks along the creek going by Farham and there were rubbish dumps there and on one occasion he picked up a wounded seagull which he brought home to Woodcroft in Southampton Road and he reared his rescued birds until they were able to take flight again.

And sailing ships used to tie up at Fareham’s quays. I saw them. And I also saw steam trucks powered by a boiler under the cab and they left trails of red and white hot embers on the road. And I can remember seeing them on the road under the arches of the railway viaduct crossing the town. 

My father left the navy after we had been in Fareham for a period of about five years. There I went to a nursery school where I was taught a little bit of French. I also used to listen to my father’s stories. He used to take me for walks and one of the stories was how the sea became salt because a magic mill that produced anything that people wanted to produce, produced salt on board a ship that these people were on, and the ship began to sink because of the weight of salt so they had to chuck the magic mill overboard, salt of course in those days was quite a vital commodity in some places, it was not like it is today, more expensive the further away you got from the salt deposits. Anyway that was one of the stories he told me.

Fareham was quite close to the hills overlooking Portsmouth where there were lots of forts. We passed those things. There was a Fleet Review in about 1933, 1934, and there my parents took me in the car to look at the lights of the fleet all lit up at Spit Head. An incident that happened there was that a radio commentator, one of the first doing that sort of thing, this was very early in the age of broadcasting said “The Fleet was all lit up” and he was absolutely drunk at the time and there was a bit of a stir about that. 

When I went out to Hong Kong with my parents in 1932-34, my three sisters were left behind living in their holidays from school with my grandparents and a governess had been retained to look after them at my grandparents place. When I came back from Hong Kong and set eyes on them I hadn’t realized I had sisters, and they called my father, ‘Our father’ whether this was sort of playing on the first words of the lords prayer.