Page 34 - My Story (final)

understood that we didn’t have a lot of money and showed me ways to save with cheap cuts. Every young
couple needs a Mr. Rapp in their lives! At Christmas he taught me how to make my own brawn (head
cheese) which was delicious, and he was always ready to put a tongue in brine ready for me to cook. Later
he let me into the secret of making my own brine. His pride and joy was his Mercedes which he kept
shining and polished at all times. Every drop of rain was lovingly wiped off – now there’s a vehicle we
should have bought, if only we could have afforded it then.

All this time Peter was auditing and studying to take his accountancy exams. He made about £7
a week and I a little over £5 on which I could easily keep house.

Meanwhile Jackie and Peter had been living in Army accommodation in Stockwell while Peter did
his National Service in the Grenadier Guards orchestra – that’s right, orchestra, not band. They are the
ones who play indoors for royal occasions like ordinations. They now decided to have a baby. With
Peter’s release from the Grenadier Guards he went to work for the BBC as a sound engineer and they
moved in with my parents until they could gather enough money to finance a house.

My parents, whose taxes Peter had been dealing with since he entered the family, had taken
Peter’s advice and bought a house in Boreham Wood. These houses, built for the London County Council
to house “higher income” people, were now being offered for sale at very favourable prices so my parents
bit the bullet and bought. It was a good investment for them and they were very happy in Boreham Wood.

th
Lesley was born on March 17 , 1956 and was a beautiful baby.

My Peter must have become a fully-fledged accountant some time in 1957 and his first thought
was to get out of auditing. We started watching the ads and applying for jobs. He eventually landed one
as office manager to Hunter Douglas in Beauchamp Place in South Kensington, working under Hank Ballin
and earning an unheard of £850 a year. We both loved Hank and his wife, Annalisa, as soon as we met
them, and they remained our friends until their death, his from ALS and hers from dementia in the early
2000s. Working in South Kensington meant shopping in Harrods and we still have the Scrabble Peter
picked up there as well as nutcrackers which now serve to pop the tops off Champagne bottles, and some
nifty corkscrews.

We were now affluent enough to join a book club – the kind that sent you especially printed new
books each month. We read, amongst others Margaret Drabble, Thor Heierdahl’s Kon Tiki and Gerald
Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals which had us both laughing aloud.

With all this money coming in we could think about taking a holiday and we booked to take a
skiing trip to Norway to a place called Geilo, this in January 1958. What fun that was! Not the trip over –
it was by boat from Newcastle, overnight, and I think I threw up the whole way. Peter was OK and went
up and mingled with the rest of the tour and we proved to have three or four lads from Malcolm
Campbell’s Bluebird team. For those of you who don’t know the Bluebird was originally a car which for a
time held the land speed record, driven by Sir Malcolm Campbell. After he died his son decided to build
a boat and try for the water speed record and our lads, employed by Norris Brothers, were working on
the new models.

So, it was a great vacation. We learned to ski – I discovered that my nose bled when I was above
a certain height and I left many a bloody trail down the Norwegian mountains. We partied a lot and took
a day out and travelled to Oslo by train and saw the amazing murals in the Oslo Town Hall, looked at the
Vigeland sculpture park and ate lots of sausages and drank a lot of beer because those were the only
words we knew in Norwegian!

Going back across the North Sea another woman who had been on the trip suggested that if we
downed a couple of gins and then kept moving, we would not get sick so we did that – running round the
deck all night. Peter laughed at us and retired to bed where he passed a very uncomfortable night but
the two of us were fine, if sleepy the next day. Still, I’ve learned my lesson – you fly across the North and
Irish Seas. Boats are not for me.

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