Bill and Peter always called their father "Dad" as did Mum, but his parents and friends called him "Chris." As a child, Chris had been desperately spoiled, and as his mother, known to the boys as Grandma Mitchell used to imitimate, had been a bit of a physical coward. As a grown man these traits tended to persist. For example, Chris was terrified, really petrified, of both mice and cats! If a cat came into the room, his eyes would pop out of his head in terror. Mum seemed to hold it against him, and as a young child Peter was surprised that she wasn't more sympathetic. After all it wasn't his fault he was afraid...
Why his Dad was afraid of cats and mice Peter never knew for sure. But when Chris was a boy, most everyone had a cellar, and lots of women were afraid of mice. Grandma Mitchell was one such woman. If she had to fetch something from the cellar, she would sometimes first send the boy down to scare away the mice before she herself would enter. The mice presumably also attracted cats. Perhaps the association of cats and mice with the darkness had elicited this apparent phobia.
Christopher Gibbs Mitchell, as Peter's father had been christened, had been a Captain in the British army during World War I. He had been called into the service in 1914 and must have looked quite smart in his uniform. Peter's mother had been christened Kate Beatrice Dorothy Taplin. Kate was dark and beautiful, slightly taller than Chris, and they probably fell in love for all the wrong reasons. As the magnitude of the war created an atmosphere of pessimism, they imagined he'd be killed in the war and wanted to live out their short lives and have children. Bill was born two years later (1916) and Pete four years thereafter (September 29, 1920). The tragedy of their marriage was that Chris survived the war, for he and Kate were not at all well suited to a long term relationship with each other.
Even when the two boys were quite young, their Mum didn't seem to respect their Dad much. In retrospect this seems a bit surprising as he exhibited many remarkable qualities. But he apparently hadn't displayed particular bravery in the war, and after all, he was afraid of mice and cats! Although he preferred to be called Captain, his wife didn't like the designation and never used it. She may have felt that he had never really earned the title. Peter often used to consider his own feelings, wondering if he'd rather be brave and dead, or cowardly and alive.
In spite of Kate's negative attitude towards her husband, Chris was an interesting and talented man. He was left-handed by birth, but as he had been forced to write with his right hand as a boy he was ambidextrous, and interestingly, his handwriting was recognizably the same regardless of the hand he used. He had an amazing mathematical ability: He could multiply four digit numbers in his head with accuracy and facility. If, for example, you asked him the product of 3742 x 5898 he would think for about 30 seconds and then spew forth the correct answer. He was a human calculator! He also enjoyed and excelled in sports, particularly tennis and golf, and he actively participated in home parlor and card games. The two boys often played such games with him as part of the family routine although their Mum never joined in. He was 41 when Peter was born.
Chris Mitchell was undoubtedly a competent engineer, and after receiving his B.Sc. degree in Engineering from the University of London and serving his stint in the war, he became a highly respected civil servant. His title at the time of Peter's birth was Engineering Inspector at the National Ministry of Transport. By the end of his life he had designed road systems for about one-fifth of England. He instigated some rather original practices such as the use of one way streets in Birmingham, a plan which got him in temporary trouble with the dissenting merchants. For his services to Britain he received an OBE (Order of the British Empire) which he used to call his "Old Boiled Egg." If he'd lived longer he might have been knighted.
At home Chris was sometimes selfish. He had a quick temper, and when he lost it, could be quite unpleasant. At work, however, this apparently never happened. He had about seventy employees under his direction, and due to his patient helpfulness and apparent congeniality he was well liked. Whenever Peter or his brother encountered their Dad's employees or professional contacts, they always spoke most highly of him. A Miss Walker, his personal secretary and close friend, worked with and was faithful to him to his dying day. Her attitude toward him seemed to exemplify the high esteem with which he was regarded in engineering circles.
In spite of his engineering and administrative competence, the boys' father lacked demonstrable imagination, and he had no appreciation of or talent for music or art. Their Mum was just the opposite. She was highly imaginative and loved both musical and artistic endeavors. In fact, Kate played the piano quite well, and she also painted a bit. Unfortunately she and her husband had little in common, except perhaps for sex, and they never seemed to achieve anything one could equate with a spiritual union. In fact, they seemed to cultivate their differences! Where one of them excelled the other was deficient, and when one enjoyed something the other didn't. For example, Chris was an exceptional bridge player but Kate hated the game. While he also enjoyed tennis and golf, she didn't want to play. On the other hand, she greatly enjoyed a good concert or an outing to the art gallery but he was both color blind and tone deaf and never went.
They were constantly bickering, often over trivia such as whether there were one or two bridges at a particular spot over the river, and the young Peter wondered why they didn't just stop their fussing and be more sensible. Interestingly, after Chris died, Kate and Bill formed a close but similarly antagonistic relationship as though both derived some sort of satisfaction from this type of argumentative bantering. It is possible that the unpleasantness of the home environment affected Bill adversely, but these family problems were more educational than disruptive to Peter. Thus, at an early age he gained some experience at being solitarily serene in a chaotic world.
The family had a day maid who did the housework. Chris usually brought her to the Mitchell home in the morning and returned her back to her own house in the evening. One day when Peter was five or six, Sissy told him that his Dad had told her all about babies! This Pete related to Mum and was surprised to see that she became upset. Several nights later while standing on the top of the stairs, he overheard his Dad say to his mother, "How did you know about me and Sissy?" Mum responded by saying "Pete told me!". "Oh blow," Peter thought, "I shouldn't have said that." This may have been the beginning of the rift between the two parents. Nothing significant probably ever transpired between Chris and Sissy, but as Kate was quite shy about personal matters and also a bit prudish, she couldn't forgive even the slightest breach of faithfulness. As the marriage was never well integrated, it gradually became impossible for them to live together. Although they didn't formally divorce, a lasting separation eventually followed.
The house in which Peter was born was at 19 Rustic Avenue in Mitcham in the County of Surrey, about ten miles outside London. Their half duplex two story home was on an earthen road stabilized by buried discarded railroad ties. The house and community were probably representative of middle class suburban London in the 20s.
Rustic Avenue was a cul-de-sac off of Streatham Road. As one walked along Streatham Road, one invariably encountered a disabled veteran of World War I selling matches to try to stay alive. At the base of the cul-de-sac was a railway line up an embankment for steam driven trains which connected the neighboring towns. As a young boy Peter would go under the wooden fence and find things, anything: pipes, fixtures, bottles, rocks, interesting plants, small animals, etc. These he brought home and left about the place, inside or out. His mother never seemed to mind the accumulation of his junky odds and ends.
The Mitchell family had a motor car, an Overland, a rather prestigious possession at that time. It was an open four-seater, and in the winter one could pull a hood over it. With mounts made of camphorated cellulose nitrate (now called gun cotton) screens or curtains could be mounted to protect the passengers from the weather. The family would often go on day outings on the weekends, driving through the nearby chalk downs, open country with expansive, chalky hills. The boys found these events enjoyable, particularly when noontime picnics were planned. Thus in spite of their Mum and Dad's differences, the family unit was a strong one, and all of the boys' early personal ties were with family members.
Few people had cars in those days, and prior to the advent of automobiles it had been common to dump hot ash from the home fire into the middle of the road. Such activities infuriated Chris as sometimes when they were out for a drive they would hear a loud "bang" and realize that a hot coal had burst another tire. Then, grumbling and cursing, Chris would have to replace it. It was not uncommon for him to lose his temper and pound on the door of a nearby house to inform the inhabitants of their stupidity.
In town there was a speed limit of 10 mph. One day Kate, who had taken the initiative to take driving lessons and master the Overland, was stopped for speeding. A policeman with a stop watch on the side of the road had pulled her over and claimed she was going 15 mph! She became enraged and, subsequently, with the aid of others successfully protested the use of the law for such unnecessary and insulting activities. Kate was clearly a spirited individualist, and the two young boys quickly came to appreciate her view that rules and regulations were not to be blindly accepted, but were temporal and always to be questioned and evaluated by each member of society. It was every person's responsibility to think for him or herself and to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
The family sometimes visited the two sets of grandparents. Whenever they drove over to Grandpa and Grandma Mitchell's in a place called EALING the two boys had to put on their best suits, sit in the sitting room of the grandparents' rather elaborate home for at least a couple of hours and be good boys. What made all of this worthwhile was that at the end of the visit Bill and Peter would be given a 10 shilling note (50 p) which was quite a lot of money in those days! Although they consequently looked forward to the conclusion of these visits, it was not until much later, when they were older, that they came to appreciate Grandpa and Grandma's personal qualities and form a lasting bond with them. The reasons were obvious. Bill enjoyed reading while Pete liked doing things, and they certainly didn't like having to dress up merely to sit around and smile. The rigidity and formality of these encounters also prevented them from feeling much personal affinity. Besides, Grandma Mitchell, though harmless, was the world's greatest liar! She was always telling transparent tall tales, trying to take credit where credit was not her due, and this bred a feeling of mild contempt which the family members sometimes expressed covertly, or even openly during their return trips home. For example, Grandma Mitchell had two servants, a cook and a house maid who did virtually everything about the house for her. Grandma always made out that she had baked the cakes the visiting family ate although she never had. One day the cook put an unmixed egg into the cake, probably to embarrass her. After cutting into the rubbery, hard baked egg, Grandma angrily called the cook into the sitting room from the kitchen for an explanation. The guests got a great laugh out of this incidence for they had known the truth all along. The cook may have quietly enjoyed the joke as well although she never let on.
As a young man, Grandpa Mitchell worked as a foreman in a quarry in Portland, a little island off the coast of Britain. When the stone found there was heated in large furnaces, it turned into the best cement in the world, Portland cement. Later, when in his middle years, Grandpa realized he had a flair for business, invested in some firms, and eventually became director of a company called Minimax which made fire extinguishers. It proved to be just one of several lucrative ventures with which he became involved. Kate's father (Taplin as Bill and Peter used to call him) was a commercial traveler, a wholesaler, from whom grocers in small towns could obtain their goods. Although he wasn't Jewish, he lived with his wife in Fulham, which at that time was one of the Jewish sections of London. He may have chosen to live in this area because housing was cheaper there than elsewhere. There was no appreciable stigma associated with being Jewish in London, and practical matters took precedence over others. The boys enjoyed visiting the Taplins, partly because of their informality and congeniality. The family never had to dress up for these visits and the house always smelled good. Among the wonderful associated aromas were herbs, roasted chestnuts, and the smoke of Bruno Flake tobacco which Grandfather Taplin took out of a brown tin. When you're young you notice these different sorts of odors, and they leave impressions which linger and turn into nostalgic memories. However, on the side of the house was a huge, dark, fearsome coal hole. As a boy Pete was always afraid that something would come out of it and get him. He avoided it like the plague, and following these visits, he sometimes had nightmares in which the monsters of the coal hole played a central role.
The two sets of grandparents didn't associate; in fact, they hardly knew each other at all! Class differences were strong then, and neither couple felt inclined to crack the social barrier. While Grandpa Mitchell had successfully pulled himself up, Grandfather Taplin was satisfied with his more lowly profession. He enjoyed the interactions which resulted from the selling of goods to the owners of little shops. However, the job was not without its occupational dangers. Peter remembered Grandfather Taplin relating a story of two sellers who got into a fight over which of them should sell to a particular shop. In a rage, one of the sellers accidentally poked the other in the eye with his umbrella and killed him. This rather extreme example of the potentially damaging consequences of competition in a free enterprise society used to make Peter shudder whenever he thought of it.
There were other attractions to Grandpa and Grandma Taplin's place. In the back was a narrow but well kept garden and chicken coop. The young Peter loved to play in the garden, watch things grow and talk to the chickens. There were lots of snails in the garden, and he was fascinated by their eyes at the ends of stalks which retracted when they were touched. Although the chickens loved to eat them, he never considered using these interesting creatures as a source of chicken feed. This would have violated some sort of respect for the rights of each exquisite living thing. It seemed immaterial that they were small, slimy and so little like human beings. There was only one other household Bill and Peter occasionally visited and this was only with their Mum; it was the home of Auntie Gertrude. Auntie Gertrude, Kate's sister, was a skinny spinster with a piercing voice and a strange habit. While sitting in an easy chair in her rather dingy living room she would roll a lemon, back and forth, over and over, under her foot. She claimed that by softening the lemon in this way she could get more juice out of it when it was sliced and squeezed...
The two sisters didn't really get along, and Kate never fully approved of Gertrude. Maybe Gertrude wasn't bright enough; maybe her fault was her single life style, or maybe, as is so frequently the case, the two sisters, very different in temperament, just didn't like each other. Because of their differences and because these visits held no particular attraction for the two boys, they were always a bit of an ordeal and not something Bill and Peter looked forward to. As a girl, Kate had proven to be very bright, and as Grandfather Taplin valued education, he had strongly encouraged her as a girl in her school work. She excelled and later received a scholarship to an excellent and quite famous private school, for some reason called "Haberdashers' Ask's." This happened to be the school where Chris Mitchell and his brother Gottfrey who were of a higher class were enrolled. Grandpa Mitchell also valued education, and it didn't bother him at all paying a handsome sum of money to get the best education available for his two young sons. It was there, at Haberdashers' Ask's, that Chris and Kate met. Perhaps the class differences made their subsequent personal differences all the more difficult to bear.
Before they entered school, the boys' Mum was largely responsible for the educations of Bill and Pete, and because she believed in treating them as intelligent equals rather than infants, they were forced to recognize and respond to a higher level of verbal communication than is experienced by most babies. She never reduced the English language to baby talk but spoke to her boys as though they were educated adults. Both boys learned to talk early and had sizable vocabularies before they were three. Her expectations and respect for intellectual independence may have caused them to become infused with a high regard for individuality and a tolerance for personal eccentricity. They imbibed many attitudes, values and interests from their mother. Her preoccupation with music, for example, was quite naturally passed on to them for she played the piano every day, and this exposure became a part of them. Music and art, like life, were not to be accepted or rejected; they were simply there, a part of their infant existences, and the boys became accustomed to the sound of the piano just as they came to recognize the sound of their mother's voice. Both Bill and Pete developed a lasting love of music which became associated with and was as natural as their love for their mother.
"Hallo!" said Piglet, "What are you doing?"
"Hunting," said Pooh.
"Hunting what?"
"Tracking something," said Winnie-the-Pooh very mysteriously.
"Tracking what?" said Piglet, coming closer.
"That's just what I ask myself. I ask myself, What?"
"What do you think you'll answer?"
"I shall have to wait until I catch up with it,"said Winnie-the-Pooh."
A.A. Milne
Winnie-the-Pooh
Peter winning the 80 yards race for boys under seven.
Peter and Bill in the Wolsley.
Mary, Pete, Bill and Helen