The Dog And Badger Medmenham

A Memory of Medmenham.

I was born in 1942 at the then Liston Nursing Home in Marlow. My first memories are of the Dog and Badger in Medmenham, where I lived for six years, with my mother, and my grandparents, John and Lillian Nye. The pub was my home, almost, from birth. My memories are particularly of the beautiful garden, not then, as yet, sacrificed to a larger car park. There was a corrugated iron 'summer house' , with playthings such as gas masks. A swing hung from a tree, which when pushed by an adult could reach the highest height. I remembered loving to eat out in the garden, particularly rice pudding. Many times, it seemed, I shared breakfast with Lt Commander Don Clayton, who I supposed rented a room at the inn at that time. I liked him and was very impressed by him, and shared a grapefruit with him for breakfast, pretending, I think, that I liked them, despite the sourness. My grandfather was required to run races with me in that garden, somehow I always seemed to win. However following a visit to a hospital in Windsor to have my tonsils removed, the races suddenly stopped, perhaps my grandfather was ageing!
The Hospital carries memories of masked people, doctors and nurses, leaning over me around a large very bright light, and demands to eat scrambled egg which I hated, and ice cream, which I liked. One day a view from a ward window provided the excitement of a mounted military band, after all this was Windsor.
I remember, a trip on the train from Marlow up to London, on the Marlow 'Donkey', to pick out a Christmas present at Hamleys. There was food for the train, minced beef and mash potatoes, in a glass jam jar, eaten with a spoon. London, bright lights, and black gapeing holes, like rotten teeth, of bombed out building and rubble still. The winter of 1947 yields memories of huge snow drifts, tobogganing, and being thrown from the toboggan by my mother's sister, Betty, when we were headed at speed for a dense hedge. This was followed by being towed on a rug over the ice over a pond by skaters. Another deep impression was of peeing deep yellow circles in the snow.
Spring brought floods to the village, the Thames bust its banks, and an Army DWK or 'Duck' brought wet villagers out to sleep on the floors of the bars at the Dog and Badger. I must have been five, for my grandfather drove me back from my first school at Dial Close, in Marlow, through the floods, water started to pour into the car, around the bottom of Danesfield Hill, but we kept going and made it. That was the year I started school, I had a great big breakfast, eggs, bacon fried bread and tomatoes, but I shed bitter tears, I did not want to go to school. I knew somehow that my school 'career' would be a very unpleasant experience, and it proved to be so, over many years. I had been quite content around adults, my mother, her sister Betty, my grandmother/nana, a host of 'mothers' and my grandfather, sometimes sullen, but never with me, and all the customers. All the characters, John Newton, and his theatrics, Clive Upton, Don Clayton, Uncle Bruce, Watson -Keith, the American, who married my aunt and could never succeed in his honest attempts to teach me to tie my own shoes.
The village of Medmenham during the war was on the fringe of the war, but there were a couple of bombs that fell in the village, one damaged the Post Office, next to the 'Badger' and the other ruined Mr Jones's new house, he had evacuated from London to escape the Blitz! I was told Grandpa had constructed an Andersen shelter in the garden, but when the bombers came over we had to shelter in the cellar because the Anderson Shelter housed black market petrol. A bend in the Thames by Medmenham, apparently, was an excellent guide to the German Bombers bound for Coventry, particularly by moonlight. There was also 90 Group HQ, from "from whence my natural father". RAF Danesfield, I now learn was 'the' centre for Three D photography, vital to the war effort, pulling even people from Hollywood and their expertise. Strangely I learn this from a programme shown on American PBS TV in Tucson, Arizona, where I now live, approaching my 70th year. I also remember that near the end of the war my mother had an American boyfriend, from Arizona, who wanted her, and me, to come to live here with him.