Russell & The Haystacks

I was born in Tring at The Bearsted Memorial Hospital in 1943. We lived in a 3 bedroom house on Beaconsfield Road. Dad was in the army and away most of the time that we lived there.

The back of the house had a nice garden with flowers and strawberry bushes and a place where my mum told me that the fairies lived.

Across the road and down the street a bit, were fields where I would play with the other kids on the street. The fields had haystacks on them and it was fun to climb the haystacks and show off my daredevil skills by jumping off. It was during one of these jumping episodes, while demonstrating my skills to my friend Margaret, that I landed badly and broke my collar bone.

So there I was at two and a half years old in an ambulance being taken to the local hospital. It was only a greenstick fracture so it wasn’t too bad. Nevertheless I was uncomfortable for many weeks while the fracture healed.

Russell & The Coal Shed

My mother had a rheumatic heart from an illness she got while a teenager. Outwardly she looked fine but she required a lot of rest and was often unwell and usually had a nap in the afternoon. While she was napping I was usually napping as well. As I got older and my afternoon naps came to end I was left to play by myself. This meant playing in the house or in the backyard. One day while my mother was sleeping I was outside in the backyard amusing myself. The strawberries were ripe and so I felt I should eat one, which I did. Then after a while I got tired. I went back to the side door of the house but somehow I couldn’t get it open. “Now what”, I thought to myself. I remembered that my old pram was in the coal shed on the other side of the house. So I opened the coal shed door closed it behind me, climbed into my pram, stuck my thumb in my mouth and fell asleep. Sometime later I woke up and tried to get out of the pram. It seemed that getting in was a lot easier than getting out and soon I realized I was stuck. I couldn’t get down from the pram. Now what was I to do? It was very dark in the coal shed but I could see the daylight creeping in around the edges of the door. It was very scary now that I was wide awake. I started to yell “hello” as loudly as I could but there was no one to hear me. So I did what any 3 year old would do, I stuck my thumb back in my mouth for comfort and went back to sleep. Eventually I was woken up by my mum who was outside in the backyard calling my name. “Russell” she yelled. And then I heard her call to our next door neighbor “have you seen Russell, I can’t find him anywhere?”. I was wide awake now and I yelled back “mummy I’m in here”. Mum opened the door and in the daylight she could see that I was completely covered in black coal dust. It was all over my clothes and my face. Everything was covered in black; all except for my little pink thumb.

Later that day mum discovered that some of the strawberries were missing. “Who ate the strawberries”, she asked me. “The fairies,” I replied. She laughed and said “yes, it must have been.”