Proudly fondling his bright chrome, 3 battery, EverReady torch, I first met Kendall on about 18th September 1950.
We were two New-Boys at Desmoor School in class 1A, with Patrick Grattan, Henry Green and Ian Oak-Rhind, plus two from the previous term, Elstobbe and Parkinson.
Today, his manner of speech and tidy desk would probably place him on an Autistic Spectrum, and it wasn't long before his oddity was noticed and Parkinson took to thwacking him over the head with his own three layer, wooden pencil box.
My intervention made a temporary enemy of Parkinson but brought no sign of friendship from Kendall, until the third Saturday. Mr. Champion's geography class ended slightly early, so taking the classroom globe and amid much protestation, requisitioning Kendall's torch as the Sun, he explained the equinoxes. The sign of friendship came that evening, when with the globe, torch and a tennis ball, I explained to him the solar and lunar eclipses. I am ashamed to this day, that it was I who left his torch on, flattening the batteries, but didn't own up.
From there our friendship grew as we found shared interests. His inkling for things mechanical emerged when he returned the following term with a large Solex carburetor, from which he lovingly extracted and replaced the jets on Saturday afternoons, and I was able to further that interest because next door to our house was an agricultural repair business, and he was quite envious that I could explain how the distributor chopped up the electricity from the coil and directed it to the sparking plugs.
On one "Sunday out", Matron thought him ill because he wouldn't eat his breakfast, but it transpired that it was only the anticipated excitement of telling his father about camshafts and the difference between side and overhead valves. I was no more clever than he, but I had a pre-war Puffin book that explained it all in pictures.
He championed his father's Jowett, I my grandfather's Lanchester, and we had many philosophical but ignorant discussions about which was the better, mirrored in Trix and Meccano electric motors or Sturmey Archer and Derailleur bicycle gears, but our greatest bond was building a crystal set together, which unfortunately only seemed to pick up "Voice of America"
So passed the "happiest days of his life", always blighted by sport, but eventually culminating in near heaven, running the motor mower over the tennis court and being allowed the cut the long grass with an Allen Oxford scythe.
I was invited to stay with the family on their seaside holiday in a railway carriage at East Wittering. Three things stand out, him 'rescuing' his brother and me when we found ourselves out of our depth. His mother having the radio on all day (at home it was only on for children's hour and the news), and him urging his father to believe me, that to get a fish hook out of lad's toe, didn't require a doctor's surgical skill, but brute strength to push it on though and cut off the barbs.
We wrote to each other a couple of times at public school, and thirty nine years later, via his brother through a campanologist constable, I found him and invited him to a "40 years on" Dinner, but he didn't come.
Part of our education was to learn by wrote:- a piece of prose, a poem, a chunk of each testament and a psalm, which he seemed to easily accomplish. At the end of our first week, I vividly remember admiring him for getting awarded a "Good Set Mark" as the first in the class to correctly recite:-
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh even from the Lord: who hath made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: and he that keepeth thee will not sleep.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel: shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord himself is thy keeper: the Lord is thy defence upon thy right hand;
So that the sun shall not burn thee by day: neither the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: yea, it is even he that shall keep thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in: from this time forth for evermore.
Bless you Alastair,
"Jaybird".