This is where we begin – before the beginning ! –
And it all starts in 1950
‘Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come…Wordsworth

It is on a hill, covered in grass and purple heather, and there is a beautiful red sunrise, or sunset, and Peter is with a group of other children – the ‘lost boys’ perhaps ? The children are all happy and beautiful, and very young, and they are walking purposefully toward the brow of the hill, and toward the glowing, red and purple clouds. And then a journey by train, with two people that Peter didn’t know, which ends up in a ‘living-room’ in a strange house, and a nice meal. Peter’s adoption, as far as we can ascertain, took place in 1949, so Peter’s childhood took place in the nineteen fifties, in a London suburb called Hounslow, near Heathrow Airport, (which was at that time just emerging form its wartime guise, to become an international airport), and Peter was adopted by a couple called Mr & Mrs Crawford.
Jane and John Crawford were lucky – they had survived the War, despite John Crawford spending his war service in the Middle East, and Jane Crawford having to cope with the bombing in both Hounslow, Newcastle and central London. Their wartime experiences undoubtedly caused them some significant emotional scarring, but in nineteen fifty, like so many relatively young people who had survived the war, they were hoping to start a new life in, what was for them, a safe and peaceful, post-war world. But the world, that to our Peter seemed perfectly normal, was a world that had been traumatized by years of war, and almost all the adults in that world had been equally traumatized. ‘Nine eleven’ may have traumatized many people, both in New York, and in many other parts of the world, but what we must imagine was a ‘nine-eleven’ almost every day for years on end, culminating in the London Blitz , the fire storms of Dresden and Berlin, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And on a lesser scale it was a world, for many years after that war, haunted by rationing, ‘make-do-and-mend’, and bomb-sites.So the people who had decided to look after Peter, even although they had survived the war, were not like the adults of today. They had seen things and done things that most of us now would find hard to imagine, and hard to ‘stomach’, and had been forced to go through years of privation, danger and seemingly endless waiting. So the peace was, to those people, very precious. Something that they had been barely able to hope for.They were, for the most part, committed to make a better world for their children, but they would always be somehow disconnected and remote from those young people. Their experiences, about which they found it almost impossible to talk, would always separate them from those who grew up with no direct experience of the horrors and anxiety of war. But who were these people – Jane and John Crawford ?
Of Peter’s grandparents he only knew one. This was ‘Granddad’; his adoptive mother’s father. ‘Granddad’s’ real name was Richard Walker, a master plumber & foreman of a small private company. Strictly speaking he was a Victorian, having been born in 1876 in Edinburgh. His work was one of the high technologies of the Victorian era, & his background could be found in the milieu which spawned many of those technologies; namely Scottish Presbyterianism. Although fond of his whisky, he was, moreover, committed to hard work & the pursuit of a respectable & good living which would grant him independence & the respect of his peers.
For him, as for most people during the Victorian & Edwardian eras, with the exception of the upper classes, leisure was a rare commodity taken, mainly for the children’s sake, at Christmas, Easter & Bank Holiday. It was a precept of the Protestant Work Ethic that ‘work, & success through work, were justified means for salvation – that Satan made work for idle hands & that to work hard, bring up your family & leave them with a skill, a trade or a business so that they could follow in your footsteps, was a man’s privilege & duty’. The concept of working to finance periods of leisure & ‘having fun’ was totally alien to ‘Granddad’s’ generation. Although rather simply stated here, this attitude & philosophy was dominant among the lower classes during the decades around the turn of the century. When, inevitably, the Great War came, it undoubtedly shook the foundations of these working class values, although not to the extent that it effected political, intellectual & aesthetic endeavours. Returning soldiers demanded ‘Homes fit for Heroes’, & there was even a General Strike in 1926, but still, as a result of education, the influence of the churches &, in many cases their own convictions, the majority of workers & small entrepreneurs continued to live by the values of the previous generation. ‘Granddad’s’ wife, ‘our Peter’s’ adoptive ‘grandmother’, Jane, was Roman Catholic, so their marriage, for that time, was unusual to say the least.As was the custom, the children of the marriage were brought up as Catholics, which put an unfortunate barrier between Richard and his children. When Richard Walker died, in the nineteen sixties, he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, although as he was convinced during his final illness that he had won the Football Pools, and had taken to reading the newspaper upside down, this decision seems to have more to do with his rabidly Catholic daughter Mary, who was nursing him, rather than any rational deliberations or spiritual awakening on his part. ‘Our Peter’s’ adoptive mother was born in Jarrow, in 1914, the youngest of a family of five. The eldest child of Richard and Jane Walker was Margaret, always known as Maggie. The next was Richard, the only son. Then came Mary, and finally ‘our Peter’s’ adoptive mother, Jane.Two years after little Jane was born her mother, Jane – the mother – died, and it was left to Maggie to bring up the family. Richard never re-married, and the children undoubtedly missed the love and care that a mother could provide. Peter’s adoptive mother, being the youngest, and needing most care, was regularly farmed out to relatives, and most often to her great aunt, Sarah, who lived in a huge Victorian apartment in Princes street, close to John Knox’s house, in Edinburgh.Holidays were usually spent at the local coastal resorts of Cramond, Leith, Musselburgh or Port Seton, and on other occasions there were trips to Holyrood, the Castle and Arthur’s Seat, and the Royal Botanical Gardens.

_____________________________________________________
This site is under construction.
Further text and many more images will be uploaded in the very near future.
for more information about Peter & his life & times go to:
http://www.scribd.com/Crawfordpeter
or read it here
_____________________________________
A new chapter has been added to ‘The Lord of the Harvest’ –
part of the blog ‘Through My Eyes’
PLEASE NOTE – THE BLOGS ‘GREAT ART’ & ‘OTTO LOHMULLER’ HAVE BEEN DELETED BY WORDPRESS
WE ARE DOING ARE BEST TO HAVE THESE BLOGS RE-INSTATED
_____________________________________
OTHER BLOGS BY PETER CRAWFORD