During the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 we spent more time in our small community, Sunninghill, about 30 miles from central London. This enabled us to spend more time chatting with neighbours with whom conversation had previously been limited to a “Good morning. How are you?” as we walked to the train station or returned from the local shops. One such neighbour is Maurice.
We had often seen Maurice busy about his garden or trimming his hedges. For several years we had seen his wife also, until her death a number of years ago. Maurice is quite deaf and does not wear his hearing aids outdoors for fear of losing them, so our lockdown conversations are sometimes limited to an exchange of greetings, an assurance that we are both well, and usually the instruction to give his greetings to my “good lady”. In one laborious conversation I learned that his birthday is in June and that last June he was either 99 or 100.
Our conversations with Maurice began during the first lockdown in Spring 2020 when we saw a ladder leaning against a lamppost in his garden. He explained that he had installed an extra light to reduce the risk of falling. Over the year he described his maintenance routine. In the Spring his niece brings him tomato plants which he grows in pots and then freezes for use year-round. Then comes the apple harvest. He invited us to help ourselves to apples from his trees. He explained that he had once left some outside in a box, inviting passers-by to help themselves. Instead, local boys staged an apple fight. He has a long holly hedge, which he trims every year using a home-made platform to reach the top and to measure the desired height of the hedge.
Over many conversations we have pieced together parts of Maurice’s long life. He was brought up by his mother not to marry, as he tells it. From an early age she taught him to cook, telling him that ”If a man can cook he will never go hungry.”
War offered Maurice independence from his mother. He enlisted as a deck hand in the merchant navy and joined the crew of 40 men on a small Swedish ship. When the crew discovered that he could cook, they appointed him ship’s cook, and were delighted to be served something “other than bloody fish”. They sailed to the far north of Canada and then down the coast of the USA ad on to northern South America. The ship was small enough to navigate up rivers that the larger vessels in wartime convoys could not. Their most frequent cargo seems to have been sugar, although on one occasion three aircraft were packed on the deck.
One destination was the Demerara River in British Guyana (now just plain Guyana). Maurice once spent three months cooking for the crew in tropical heat. The reason was that one crew member could no longer face the trials of a long ses journey home in convoys under the threat of German torpedoes or bombs. So, this colleague smashed the ship’s radio. It took three months for a replacement radio to reach Maurice’s ship. Cooking in intense heat made Maurice ill, so he was put off ship in New York and spent two months recovering in the home of relatives in northern New Jersey. He commented that he could have married there, but instead returned home to his mother.
Despite the fears of his colleague, Maurice told me, his vessel was much less likely to be sunk by a torpedo than the larger ships in the convoys. Since submarines carried a limited number of torpedoes, they aimed to sink the bigger ships carrying larger cargos. His cooking duties gave him spare time between meals to look around. On more than one occasion he saw a torpedo pass underneath his ship on its way to a larger one in the inner convoy. Thus, his ship was relatively safe until it neared Britain when German bombers were a more significant threat.
After the war Maurice ran his own small enterprises. One was the sale of plastic flower arrangements to entertainment and wedding venues. Another was the sale of scale models. He was also kept busy building the house where he still lives. He explained that he had no formal training as a builder or architect, but had observed construction methods during his travels and applied that knowledge to his home.
Maurice’s mother seems to have been successful in preventing him from marrying until after her death. Romance finally arrived on a bus trip. Maurice heard a woman weeping. He comforted her and discovered that she was recently widowed. The couple married and lived happily in Maurice’s self-built home. His wife wanted an aunt and uncle to move in, so Maurice expanded the house to accommodate them.
I recently visited Maurice to deliver a small Christmas cake that Jan had made for him. He was busy putting away supplies from his weekly supermarket shop and was wearing an extremely colourful jumper. He explained that his wife knitted one sweater for each day of the week.
When I ask Maurice how he is, he sometimes explains that he does not feel too well, but then adds philosophically that there’s nothing for it but to keep going.
