Beginning my story of remembering from early age my father and mother had a small farm at Piltdown in Down Street where I was born near Maresfield but of course I do not remember any thing of that place and why they left there til we came to Hove where we were in rooms in Coleridge Street. I don’t think we could have been there long and moved to a house opposite no.24 where most of the family were born, about six of us.
My old father was sort of a van man to a nursery in Hove near the railway station I believe the name of Head ? After a time he worked for the Hove Corporation as a dustman, then from there he went to work at the Portslade gas works in the part that they called the water gas plant. In the centre with long sorts of pokers, there were several men on each poker but had to work any time. I don’t know whether any one used to see flames coming out of the chimney at the west end of the gasworks plant, when oil used to be turned on to the red hot coke. After a time this formed the clinker which had to be taken out, this was very hot work, he did try to make a suggestion to make this work easier but the bosses did not want men telling them what to do and in the end he had the sack. I don’t know how many years he was there I should say it was round about 12 years there when he took up a smallholding and started a little coal business with the idea of when I left school at 14 I could carry on, but not being coal business minded I let him down in that respect.
He used to send me to evening classes. We had to do home lessons and evening classes in an evening class which was in a big building opposite the Hove Town Hall. The family was increasing, I had all sorts of jobs to do dusting all rooms every day and on washing days my job was to get the copper going before going to school and do the mangling when I came home. I used to earn a few coppers doing other people’s wash mangling. When I first went to school I had to pay this school being a church school in Coleridge Street (called Coleridge Street College) but after a time it was sort of a national school. The head mistress was a Miss McCarthy but unfortunately I was a very bad stammer sufferer and had to go to evening class whether it was a class 1 or class 7 to read to get me out of this stuttering.