JUST LIKE THAT...

I was browsing through WH Smith`s bookshop this morning, looking for nothing in particular, when my eye caught a biography of Tommy Cooper. Now, Tom was arguably the funniest funny man there`s ever been - he really didn`t have to tell any jokes to have his audience in peals of laughter and, of course, he was famous for being a hopeless magician. Some of his one-liners have stuck with me ("I went to buy a camouflage jacket but I couldn`t find any.")

Anyway, I didn`t buy it but I thumbed through the first few pages and was astonished to discover that he and I had a couple of things in common. Although Tom was born in Caerphilly in Wales, his family moved to Langley in Hampshire when he was about two years old. Now, Langley is a straggly village next to Blackfield between the refinery village of Fawley and the New Forest. During the war, my mother and I lived with my aunt and uncle at 40 Hampton Lane, Blackfield and it was from there that I first went to school at Fawley Primary School. When my father eventually came home after five years as a prisoner of war in Germany, we moved to Hythe, where I resumed my `education` at Hythe Primary School. From there, at the age of eleven, I moved on to the secondary school at Hardley, which is about half way between Hythe and Blackfield.

Tommy Cooper`s biography recounts that, from his family home in Langley, he first went to school at Fawley Primary School, then on to Hardley Secondary School and when he left, he got a job at a shipbuilders yard in Hythe. It all makes sense now I know that both he and I were Hardley educated.