Philip Hoare - Spike Island - The Memory of a Military Hospital

Like the privet cutway that ran up the back of our house where my brothers used to catch bucketfuls of slow worms, these wild places produced tales of innocence and loss, of murder and abandoned babes in the wood. From Church Path, the stream flowed through the old clumps of bamboo planted by the inhabitants of the cottage, past Mr White’s concrete pool and widened out into Miller’s Pond, a still, deep pool overshadowed by the tall brick arches of a railway viaduct. There were tadpoles and sticklebacks in the water, and it froze solid in winter, its glaucous ice spiked with dead bullrushes. On our way to the park we would walk past the pond, and I’d lean over the low wall and look down into its brackish water, imbued as it was with another local legend.

One Sunday in February 1909, Alfred Maurice Mintram, the fourteen-year-old son of Charles Mintram, a coal porter who lived at Fir Grove Road – the road which crossed ours – was spending the afternoon sliding on the iced-up pond. A witness to the subsequent enquiry was walking round the pond ‘when someone shouted that there was a boy drowning’.

He ran round the bank, and saw a constable taking his tunic off, and together they went to the lad’s assistance. They got to within four yards of him, and witness called out that they would soon get to him. Deceased replied, ‘Hurry up, I can’t hold on much longer.’ The next minute, the ice gave way, and they were all struggling in the water. There was ice between them and the boy, and it was impossible to reach him. There were no ladders or ropes or anything they could have used. The boy threw up his hands and went down …

Reported to the coroner, in the still, formal air of the courtroom, the boy’s last words – plaintive, panicking, banal – seemed to presage a forthcoming tragedy which would strike the inhabitants of these streets and households. The melodramatic fatalism of the scene is compounded by postcards depicting the boy’s funeral, his classmates clumped together on a cold day in February, dressed in their Sunday best, bearing wreaths. Another card shows Alfred’s humped grave in Sholing churchyard, surrounded with laurel leaves and a row of five bouquets laid along its top, each protected by an odd wire frame like an upturned hanging basket. Three years later, the same families would lose brothers, fathers and lovers who foundered, like Alfred Mintram, in icy water, uttering similarly plaintive cries as Titanic sank.

I have only a vague memory of the house in which I was born, in Portswood, on the other side of the Itchen which divides Southampton as clearly as the Thames divides London. ‘Akaba’ had been the home of an army officer, and had been empty for some time when my newly-married parents discovered it in 1941, and managed to lease it, for one pound a week, from the major’s widow.

The house was a large, semi-detached, red-brick villa; the names engraved on its lintel and those of its neighbours – ‘Rahwali’, ‘Gwalia’ – were as redolent of the last century as the street itself, named Osborne Road after the late Queen’s Isle of Wight retreat. The monkey puzzle tree that stood along the road was a further mark of Victorian gentility, its spiky exoticness somehow reminiscent of a colonial past. Superstitiously, we’d hold our breath as we passed it, for fear something awful might befall us.

Set on the corner of the road and raised above pavement level with a walled garden, Akaba had a turret which loomed proprietorially over the junction on which it stood. It also had bellpulls to summon servants from its kitchen and scullery, and a wide mahogany staircase which turned at right-angles past a stained-glass landing window. Not that I remember much of this. My only memory – indeed, my very first memory – of Akaba is of waking in my cot; I must have been less than two years old. Gripping the wooden bars, I hauled myself out of prison and, reaching up to the bedroom doorknob, carefully descended, with a toddler’s halting step, the big, wide, dark stairs illuminated by pale coloured light, looking for my mother. It must have been summer – it was still daylight – and as I made my surprise entrance in the sitting room downstairs, I saw the upturned and startled faces of my parents and three brothers. Amused at my audacious jailbreak, my mother scooped me up in her arms and carried me back, with certain praises for my adventurousness, to bed. It is a virgin memory, of a life light and uncluttered and untainted by anything other than love. The dark red brick of the house in which I lived did not register on my consciousness.

In 1962, our house – which my parents had by now bought – was compulsorily purchased to make way for a bypass which would remain unbuilt for twenty years. When it was finally constructed, the planners had no need of the land freed by Akaba’s demolition, which was promptly acquired by a neighbouring garage and yet became a victim of the combustion engine as a forecourt dedicated to the display of used cars. In the meantime, saddled with an empty property, the council had tried to rent out Akaba, but found it difficult to lease. Tenants complained that it was haunted and called the police; later an exorcism was performed. Perhaps we’d left our spirits behind, although as my mother pointed out, the ghosts may have been due to the fact that we had left an unwanted upright piano buried in the garden which still tinkled as you walked over it.

So we left Osborne Road and its monkey puzzle tree, holding our breath, driving in a family convoy – mother, father, my three brothers and their vehicles, my baby sister and our dog – for the sunny suburb of Sholing, away from the urban traffic which was already swallowing up Portswood. For my mother, it was a homecoming. Born that side of the Itchen, schooled in Sholing, she knew its valleys and lanes and funny little corner shops, its peculiar character, its strange mixture. It was a place where she felt at home.

My second-ever memory is of the house in which I would grow up. Ruddy cheeked, round headed, blond haired and four years old, I ran excitedly through the front door and up the uncarpeted stairs accompanied by Bimbo, a blackish mongrel of erratic temper who later grew so wild and savage that when he eventually ran off, his absence went unregretted, at least by my parents. Having reached the top, we both promptly fell all the way back to the bottom, landing, unharmed, at the foot of the stairs. Soon after I had another accident, in the corrugated iron Anderson shelter which still stood in the garden. Trying to reach a large metal and wood model locomotive about half my size on an upper shelf, the train fell on my head, and – in my remembrance, at least – momentarily knocked me unconscious.

The incident left me with an abiding image – as though knocked into my head – of the metal and wood of the toy and the metal and wood of the shed and its dark interior where a family had once sheltered from falling bombs. But life in Sholing was quiet now, following the pre-ordained, uneventful rites of suburbia. I went to a Catholic primary school a mile away in Woolston. St Patrick’s had been founded in 1879 by Fr Henry Patrick Kelly, the chaplain to the military hospital at Netley; its school hall was the old Edwardian ‘tin church’ of green-painted corrugated iron, and the rest of the school buildings consisted of the remains of what had once been the local police station. The boys’ toilets were roofless and open to the air, but dark and smelly inside, and in the grounds stood a bunker-like concrete air raid shelter, overgrown with brambles like barbed wire. A pair of classrooms were housed in corrugated iron huts like extended versions of our Anderson shelter, while in the far corner of the playground stood another shed, a smaller cousin of the tin church, also painted dark green. ‘Miss Enright’s hut’ had also come from Netley, where it had been the matron’s quarters in the First World War.