What's in a Name?

I have little information from John's childhood in a working class family between the wars, but a photograph shows him at age two and a half with a stuffed animal in a photographer's studio and another at age four, holding a model boat that had been given to him by his adored older brother Eric, who was a merchant seaman. In 1932, when John was seven, a legacy from Margaret's parents enabled her to buy a small house in the village, to which she moved the children, with her sister as their caretaker. Margaret kept her job as matron, continuing to provide the family's principal income.

Like most boys of his generation, John left school at age fourteen; unlike most of them, he found immediate employment, signing indentures as a carpenter's apprentice with Will Hopkins, a contractor in Gravesend. It was 1939, the year Germany invaded Poland, starting several months of "phony war," during which John bicycled daily to Gravesend, seven miles from South Darenth, to learn his trade. Hopkins was a strict and demanding master, but a generous and exuberant man, fondly known to many as "Uncle Hoppy." His contracting business prospered, despite the great depression, and he was an outspoken evangelical Christian, inclined to haranguing his men about their eternal destiny at unpredictable moments but also literally to giving the coat off his back to a jobless man or bringing him home for a meal, even though he couldn't hire him.

In the spring of 1940 Germany invaded France, and several older Homes "boys" whom John knew were called up. Jim Marsh, who later married John's sister Mary, was sent with the British Expeditionary Force to France, escaped from the beach at Dunkirk, and later fought in Italy; Arthur Wells, already married to Peg and a member of the home guard when war broke out, spent the entire war training infantrymen, though even in that non-combatant role he was wounded in the face by shrapnel from a grenade that exploded during an exercise; and Cecil Whyman, Marjorie's husband, was sent to North Africa, where he was terribly wounded and returned home physically shattered, having barely escaped with his life.

When Germany began its air attack on England in August, 1940, the young apprentice cycling to Gravesend was fascinated, terrified, and distracted in equal measure by the vapor trails, snarling engines, and calamitous descents of fighting Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Messerschmidts in the skies above southern England. Now with a room of his own in the little house on New Road, John began carving wooden models of the planes he saw, suspending them in dogfight attitudes from the ceiling, perching them for take-off from his dresser.