A life in letters: Dunlop family

The Dunlops were our next-door neighbours in Westerton, staying just up the hill from us, at 11 Maxwell Avenue.  Their son, Lawrence, who must have been about fifteen years older than me bought the shell of a blue three-wheeled car.  He never seemed to make much progress with his plans to restore this vehicle, and rather to my parents’ annoyance, it sat in the Dunlop’s drive, just opposite our back door for many years.

Occasionally when I was a child Mrs Dunlop invited me in to watch her television, and it was on her settee that I encountered Bill and Ben, the flowerpot men and their friend Weed.  Earnest Dunlop lent me a copy of Frank Brennand’s 1960 book Sink the Bismarck which I devoured enthusiastically. I was vaguely familiar with the second world war through catching a few episodes of a television series based on Sir Winston Churchill’s history of the War when I was having tea with a school friend in the early 1960s. I remember each episode ended with an ornate metal gate in arch in a stone wall closing, apparently without touch from human hand as the credits rolled and the haunting theme-tune, which I can still remember played.

I remember Earnest Dunlop subsequently saying to my parents that he hoped they hadn’t minded him lending me the book. Fortunately they didn’t have an issue with this, despite the fact that it wasn’t one of the ‘cadet editions’ which were available, and which I despised – edited versions of adult books, bowdlerised so that they would not be offensive to young readers, or  rather the parents of young readers. Sink the Bismarck was perhaps the first adult book I ever read, and I felt thoroughly sophisticated.