Jeff & Roger
Peg and Whisk had two boys. Jeff was born in July 1943 in a nursing home at Holybourne, just outside Alton, while Whisk was serving with the RAF and Peg was living with her parents at The Eagles on Windmill Hill. Roger arrived five and a half years later. Jeff admits the age gap meant they had little in common at first, and Peg used to say he treated his little brother with disdain, though he remembers being “generally pretty kind and supportive, as befits a big brother”. Either way, “as we grew older, the age gap seemed to shrink, and we became firm friends”.
Whisk had been a radar mechanic in the war, so when he was demobbed he opened a shop to sell and repair radios. To a small boy it was an Aladdin’s cave, with every imaginable electrical part in a huge chest of shallow drawers. Whisk advertised it in the Alton Herald with verses of his own, which ran to several stanzas and ended in capitals: MEADOWS: A GREAT LITTLE ELECTRICAL SHOP AT THE TOP OF MARKET STREET IN ALTON.
Why are the people of Alton
So pleased and so proud and so smug
Because of a little electrical shop
For a fuse, or a bulb, or a plug
The family lived behind and above the shop. The kitchen and dining room were at the back, and the lounge was upstairs with a view down Market Street; if the boys were too noisy up there, Whisk banged on the ceiling with a broom handle. A keen photographer and an inveterate do-it-yourselfer, Whisk filled the house with built-in cupboards, made a bay of the street window, and gradually retreated to his cellar darkroom. Peg took up the slack, and the shop became known for miles around for its lampshades.
Peg’s parents, Fred and Nell, lived next door and were part of everyday life. After supper they all played Canasta, with Nell, a cunning player, often going out and leaving the others holding a fistful of melds. Fred had been a gymnast and a keen sportsman, and he taught all his grandsons to play cricket and, Jeff suspects, tried to teach them to be gentlemen too. Christmas had its rituals: after breakfast the family climbed the stairs to the lounge singing Jingle Bells, oldest first, with Fred and Nell leading and the two boys at the back, and then opened their presents youngest first.
Sunday lunch was another ritual, a roast with everything a little overcooked, as was the custom. Whisk carved, served everyone else first and often ended up with the scrag end; Roger always got the crunchy bits from the potato pan. Afterwards Jeff would offer to help Roger with his homework, a ruse to get them both out of the washing-up, and kick him under the table if he missed the cue. Jeff was envious of Roger’s model railway, which Whisk fixed on a shelf around his bedroom so that the train ran in and out of cupboards, along the windowsill and across the back of the door.
In summer the family headed for Hayling Island, playing I spy and counting cars on the way. Fred and Nell came too, and so did Peg’s sister Eile, her husband Vin and their boys, Peter, Roy and Paul. Vin’s Riley and Whisk’s blue van were parked to make a camp with a tent on the third side, and Whisk took the seats out of the van so that everyone had a seat. They swam, built sandcastles, buried Whisk in the sand and played cricket on the hard sand when the tide was out. Later there was a static caravan at Elliotts, where Whisk made a three-hole putting green on the tiny lawn.
As teenagers the brothers went on family holidays to Wales, where they tried their parents’ patience by chanting “Ogmore Pritchard” in what they imagined was a Welsh accent, and Jeff led Roger up a cliff so steep that they feared they would be stranded at the top. Roger went to Gregg’s School in Eastleigh and travelled there by train every day. On the train he met “a bright and beautiful seventeen-year-old girl” and decided she would be ideal for his brother. Jeff joined him on the train at the next chance to see for himself, and “Roger was right. Tiffa was irresistible.” When Tiffa later broke Jeff’s heart for a while, it was Roger who comforted him and, as Jeff puts it, probably gave him “little-brotherly advice to get a grip”. Jeff and Tiffa married in 1966.
In the summer of 1976 Roger and Judi and their girls left for Singapore. The photograph taken in the garden at Lenten Street just before they went is the last of the whole family together. Over the years the two families spent Christmases and holidays together on both sides of the Atlantic and in Italy.
