Phyll

Phyllis Margaret Crombet-Beolens née Preston (10.09.1922-13.12.2005)

Phyllis aged around 22 years old.

Parents	Thomas	Ellen Preston Née Winfield (1900-1931)
Siblings	Hilda
Partners	Eric
Children	Jean	Rick

Jean & bo write:

Phyllis Margaret Preston (my Mother) was born on 10th September 1922 the second daughter of Ellen and Thomas. Life was hard between the wars; her Father was a soldier and had been on active service with all the trauma of fighting in the trenches, he was an alcoholic or at the very least a binge drinker. She didn’t talk much about her childhood as it was too upsetting for her, although once she told me of an early memory of her mother crying and believed that her Father was a violent man when drinking and had regularly hit her mother.

Ellen, had a burst appendix and although she had been taken to hospital she died when mum was about 9yrs old. Her and her sister Hilda stayed with their Father for a while, which would have been difficult, at that time there were no benefits or social work support. Mum remembered waking and smelling gas and her and her sister ran into the garden and then to their Grandmother who also lived on Canal Street Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. She maintained that her father had tried to kill them all. Hilda her sister who was 18 months older said she was unsure of this, but thought they had been scared by the gas lights flickering as their Father had told them stories about being gassed in the trenches and the only warning was that their lamps used to flicker.

Mum & Hilda c. 1929

After this incident they both stayed at their Grandmother’s home but were then split-up. Hilda went to live with Aunt Mag and uncle Bill who had not long been married (Margaret, who was Ellen’s sister – and William Gibbs). Thomas insisted that my Mum stay with him. I am not sure how long this was but know that Mum deeply resented this, when Mum finally went to Aunt Mags she never forgave her because she thought that they had wanted Hilda and not her. (With hindsight it must have been very hard for this fairly newly married couple to take on two children. It’s pretty certain that they decided not to have children of their own.)

Mum told me that she had finally been taken away from her dad because he had tried to strangle her when he was drunk and she ran away. She also said to me that when he was drunk he’s spend all he had down the pub or throw it to kids in the street arriving home with nothing for them to live on all week. (Mum hated anyone touching her around the throat which gives credence to her story.)

Hilda, cousin Eileen & Phyll

 Mum was intelligent but always felt they treated Hilda differently. Mum said she passed for High school but was told they couldn’t afford to send her so she would have to go out to work. She went to work at Dickinson’s Paper Mill where Uncle Bill worked for 40 years. She found herself in the drawing office, which she enjoyed.

At the beginning of WW2 she was working a capstan lathe and doing some sort of engineering work in a munitions factory. She also worked in the NAFFI. By this time she had left home and shared a flat with a friend (Win) in Newmarket (the ‘home of racing’ with a number of horse racing stables). This was where she learned to ride, as the horse racing had stopped due to the war and all the young men (grooms and jockeys etc) called up they badly needed people to exercise the horses at the stables there. So Mum and her friend Win (both town girls ) volunteered.

American and British soldiers were stationed all around the area. They went out to the local dance Halls together and that’s how she met Eric my father. 

Mum and Dad met and married 20th May 1944 after a total of six weeks courtship; it was wartime and relationships developed very quickly in those days. Her wedding dress was made from parachute silk, her best friend Win was Maid of Honour (she too had been married but divorced soon after). The one bridesmaid was my Dad’s younger sister Rita who was 12yrs old. Uncle Bill gave her away.

When they met my Dad was 18 and he lied about his age telling her he was 25 (just as he had to get into the Army in the first place). It wasn’t until the signing of the marriage certificate that she found out his real age, and only then because his parents had to sign because the age of consent at that time was 21. Much to her disgust, she was 22 so from then on she didn’t tell anyone her age and never forgave Dad for deceiving her.

They had a couple of nights in a London hotel for their honeymoon and then Dad went back to fight. Three weeks later he was on the beaches in Normandy and Mum spent a few months with Win still working and going out dancing. During this time she broke her ankle stepping down a curb and an American soldier helped get her to hospital, visited her and brought her flowers, she told him she was married and she told dad all about it and he wasn’t impressed! At this time in Britain the Yanks were despised by the British troops (at the time they were said to be “over dressed, oversexed and over here!”)

Sometime after, probably after D Day 1945, Mum moved in with Gran and Granddad in Sussex, I (Jean) was born in May 1946 in Brighton Hospital, my Father I believe got a pass to go home for a few days. Mum had a tough birth which she told me about often …..They had put operation socks on her ready for a caesarean after many hours of labour and she was so scared of the operation that she popped all 6lb of me out.

When the war ended Dad came home briefly, then he was posted back to Germany as part of the Occupation Forces. When dad was demobbed in 1948 both my mother and I hardly knew him, Dad got a job as a timber cutter/woodsman and we all moved to Wiston in Sussex to a cute little attached cottage. Mum was not a country girl, but here she learned to be one, oil lamps, candles, tin bath hanging on the back of the door, red painted stone floors to scrub, lighting the copper for water for a bath, the postman coming in and leaving the post on the table, making beetroot sandwiches for Dad to take to work, it was a whole new world for her. Meat was in short supply, so Dad shot rabbits and game birds for the table. One day Mum saw this bird in the field nearby thought it was a pheasant and got Dads gun to shoot it. Luckily she missed as it was one of the Peacocks that the landowner had bought at great expense.

Trixie our black Labrador dog used to sit under mums chair and growl when we had visitors, which was not often, Mum loved her and she was very protective of us all.  Mum had spent a week in hospital in a cancer ward having an operation, she had some womb trouble after me, and they told her she couldn’t have more children. She said it was a trick, and experimental medicine, as 10 months after this she had my brother in June 1949 – the doctor kept referring to him as her miracle baby.

The next move for mum was back into the town of Faversham as Dad had become a policeman. Mum didn’t work during this time as she was too busy with me starting school and my brother who caught every germ going and was slow to walk, they were lean years and food rationing was still in force. A couple of years later we all moved to West Malling and into a police house, which was just what she needed, she always told me she wasn’t maternal and she had enjoyed working so, as soon as my brother turned five, she started part time work at a grocery shop in West Malling, then in the shop in British Legion Village a few miles away, and from there it was a Milk Bar in Maidstone, a canning factory at Barming, and later catering. When we kids were on school holidays she would spend the summers strawberry picking so we could be in tow. But, soon we were packed off to 7B for the summer. (I (bo) remember being with mum strawberry picking for ‘Lord Plunket’ one of the large landowning families. I remember we used to have our picnic lunches of hard boiled eggs sprinkled with salt and bread and margarine sitting in an old railway wagon.)

Mum on the Police Station steps 1961

Later, as wages improved, we would all holiday together in Cornwall.

Mum, Cornwall, c.1962

Mum was a good cook in later years but as she said herself she couldn’t boil water when she first married. She did the catering for the Chelsea Football Club a few times and worked the café stand at Brands Hatch Racing circuit. Her doughnuts and madeleines were very good. She made many friends and was hard working, Dad was on shift work so it worked out, in later years sometimes my brother and I would get home before them, we learnt to make a cup of tea and light the gas stove and later prepare dinner. Mum loved dancing and went out dancing on a Friday or Saturday night with her girlfriends, Dad wasn’t into that and I think was quite jealous at times but being a policeman can be an unsociable job.

After this she went nursing at Leybourne Grange, a hospital and village that took care of those with mental disabilities. Nursing was the career for her, she found it rewarding and used to do three 12 shifts a week sometimes more. She often bought patients home or out of care so they could shop in the local village or go to the cinema. Ahead of her time she treated her charges as real people and was often in trouble when she blew the whistle on staff who ill treated the patients.

(Its worth noting that in those days many of the patients had ended up in such places not because they were ‘feeble minded’ but because they were ‘morally corrupt’ and mum knew people who had been put there because they had got pregnant out of wedlock or had ‘strayed’. By the time mum was nursing them they were so institutionalised it was hard for them to live in any other way. Nursing was mentally and physically demanding I often remember making her cups of tea or taking her a cold flannel as she suffered migraine headaches on a day off and stayed in bed in a darkened room.)

In the picture above she has a bandage on her hand when she scalded it making tea at work. She also once took the top of her finger off with a bed! 

The double bed Mum and Dad shared for years had a bolt midway each side of the spring base so it could be folded. The bolt had sheared off on her side so Dad had put a round bit of wood under (like a log) to support the frame.  One morning mum got out of bed, putting her fingers over the edge as usual. However, the temporary bolt broke and her finger was trapped between the bed and the log. Her instinct was to pull it out immediately leaving a wedge of soft flesh from her fingertip behind. Of course it bled profusely!   She laughed later about Dad trying to put her Bra etc on while she held her finger in the air, but it was bad for weeks. It was bound up and had skin grafts done on it, which meant trips to East Grinstead Hospital which was the place which developed skin grafting for badly burned airmen during WW2. She was lucky because after the war years skin grafts in particular were experimental.

We also remember her having two operations in one year (1963) a hysterectomy followed by a gall bladder removal. I (bo) was a teenager and she went to Westminster Hospital in London for the operation. One day I went to visit her there with a gang of my mates, a great excuse for a day in London.

Bo, Mum & Jean – Isle of Wight c.1963

I (bo) have abiding memories of being at home with mum on a Sunday watching old black and white movies on the TV. Before we settled down to watch the likes of The Maltese Falcon or The Thirty-nine Steps she would send me off on my bike to the one shop that opened on the Sabbath, to buy us sweets and fizzy drinks. Often the chocolate would set off a migraine.

Marins Bay 1983

This is probably the only picture of mum on a beach without a coat… it was a standing joke in the family that us kids would be making sandcastles in our cossies, dad would be paddling in his rolled up trousers and vest and mum would be fully clothed and maybe wrapped in a blanket!

One of the best things about mum was her independence of thought. She had been a card-carrying member of the communist party at one point and she and dad would have huge (safe) rows about politics and the issues of the day like capital punishment and abortion. We kids were encourage to join in and defend our own points of view. Despite dad often taking a right wing line and my mum the left they were both labour voters and liberal in their own ways. Dad always wanted the ‘punishment to fit the crime’ and mum always erred on the side of mercy fearing miscarriages of justice. Nothing was taboo to discus from lunacy induced by the moon to whether Hanraty had actually committed the A6 murders.

2004