Viva Lewes Issue #143 August 2018

COLUMN
Lewes Out Loud
Plenty more Henty
Our illustration this month shows the brightly
coloured dust jacket for the 1936 edition of Chums
Annual for Boys. I bought it locally, over ten years
ago, from Bow Windows Bookshop in the High
Street. The hefty volume is full of thrilling adventure
stories like Red Falcon – The Pirate Hunter
and Sheba – The Magnificent by a certain Captain
Oswald Dallas.
Vividly illustrated in black and white, with four
coloured plates, the 400-page publication promised
‘innumerable articles and pictures on adventure
and sport’, all for a modest eight shillings and
sixpence. Four years later, of course, many of the
schoolboys who would avidly read these tales
of swashbuckling heroism would themselves be
involved in real life and death dramas in the early
stages of the Second World War.
For me, 1936 was the year my adventures began
for, let’s face it, life itself is an adventure into the
unknown and only the final phase is predictable
for all of us. As a schoolboy, for example, my first
trip abroad was to Holland just after the war. For a
fifteen year old, that was an adventure.
Sailing from Harwich into ‘the unknown’ – well
Zandvoort actually – a different language, food and
girls, one of whom, Inie, became my pen pal for
several years. Remember pen friends?
National Service was a two-year adventure in the
mid-1950s when, for a good part of the time, I
defended the people of Leighton Buzzard from
nuclear annihilation with my Olivetti typewriter.
Emigrating to the West Coast of America in 1960
was exciting enough and the journey across from
New York in a Greyhound bus pre-Palin and
Portillo was almost life enhancing.
Inevitably, on retirement to laid-back Lewes,
things have quietened down somewhat and what
counts as an adventure these days is trying to get to
St Leonards by train without incident. “Trespassers
on the line at Collington” most recently. Back to
Eastbourne everyone!
Or how about boarding a number 124 bus at the
bus station, as my wife and I did early one Saturday
morning in June, for a magical mystery tour through
the joys of East Sussex? An adventure because we
soon discovered that Vernon, our driver, (we were
alone apart from one gentleman who was reading a
newspaper) had recently moved down to the south
coast from South London and was driving the picturesque
route to Eastbourne, through Glynde, Polegate
and Pevensey for the first time, with passengers.
“Makes a change from Lewisham” he chuckled, “Bus
replacement tomorrow at Three Bridges!”
One or two brief encounters to end with. I enjoyed
a decent scoop of locally produced ice cream from
‘Ez Tutty’ on the High Street, served by Sam, who
agreed that the ice cream parlour should surely offer
a ‘Tutti-Frutti’ speciality. And in Eastport Lane,
I checked out the well-being of a woman who was
crouched at the foot of the flint wall to Grange
Gardens. Chirpy local resident Ali reassured me
that she was only sowing wild poppy seeds. Silly
me! John Henty
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