If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Else Will
ERIC SYKES

For my mother

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Under Starter’s Orders

The World of Flat Caps, Overalls and Boots

My Country Needs Me

The Beginning of What’s Left

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Also By The Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

UNDER STARTER’S ORDERS

On 4 May 1923 I was born, but in giving me life my mother sacrificed her own. Officially recorded as ‘Harriet Sykes, née Stacey, died in childbirth’, cold, clinical and final: cold and clinical yes, but final? We shall see. Although my mother had departed this life, she hadn’t abandoned me. I know this to be true, from instances in my life too numerous to be passed off as mere coincidence, in fact some so inexplicable, so impossible, that they can only be described as miracles. As for my poor father, one can hardly imagine the depth of his despair, the rising panic as his whole world collapsed around him—his beloved Harriet in exchange for this red-faced wrinkled intruder. How was he to manage? He already had a two-year-old son, Vernon, and, good grief, at the time Father was only twenty-three years old, an ex-sergeant in the occupation forces in Germany and now, in this land fit for heroes, a lowly labourer in a cotton mill, which in those early post-war years was no more than being a white slave, the manacles being the need to eat.

Counsellors had yet to be invented, social workers didn’t exist and the Citizens Advice Bureau was not even in the pipeline; but on the plus side, people cared more, and neighbours and anyone else who knew of the tragedy at 36 Leslie Street, Oldham, offered not only their condolences but, more to the point, food, and cast-off clothing; and apparently one old lady offered a kitten. It was heart-warming but it didn’t solve the problem. Before long the cavalry arrived, as my distraught father knew they would, his parents, Granddad and Grandma Sykes, and my late mother’s family, the Staceys, were not far behind.

It must have been a very sombre get-together. What was to be done? Most likely I was asleep at the time, so I can only surmise what happened next. Grandma Stacey was to take Vernon—after all, he was two years old and house-trained—but she refused point blank to take me as well. I discovered many years later that Grandma Stacey had been against the marriage in the first place, and Father was persona non grata in her house. However Mother used to visit regularly with her small son Vernon and ergo he was the only memory of their daughter Harriet had left them, whereas in their eyes I was partly responsible for the loss, and in truth I probably was.

What then should be done with me? My father couldn’t take me with him to the cotton mill every morning and crèches were unheard of in those days. However after a time a solution was found. I was to be deposited with a kind spinster called Miss Redfern who lived in Davies Street, or it may have been Miss Davies of Redfern Street—I didn’t keep a diary in those days. I’m now in my eighties and I still haven’t got round to it.

Of the two years of my displacement I have only vague memories, of my surrogate mother’s house: the smell of furniture polish, and above my cot a huge parrot that squawked incessantly from the time the black cloth was taken off the cage until it was mercifully covered up again at bedtime. It was my constant companion until eventually I was returned to the custody of my father at 36 Leslie Street, much less salubrious, with no smell of furniture polish (we didn’t have enough furniture to warrant the extravagance), but at least it was home. In later years my father told me that neither he nor anyone else could understand what I was babbling about. Hardly surprising, as I’d never learned English, but spoke fluent parrot. At two years old I was incontinent, and still unsteady on my pins, because learning to walk too early was not encouraged in case it led to rickets.

Cataclysmic changes had taken place during my absence at Redfern/Davies’s. My father had married again and already I wasn’t the youngest in the family: I had a little brother, John. He was still only at the sleeping and eating stage of development, but already I’d taken to him. It was the beginning of a close, warm-hearted friendship that was to last a lifetime. Apparently I hovered round his cot most of the day, impatient for him to grow up so that we could play together. When John was twelve months old or there-abouts we’d hold conversations. I would come out with something and when I’d finished he’d wait for a moment or two before the penny dropped that it was his turn to speak, and when he obviously couldn’t he’d gurgle, splutter and blow raspberries, making both of us laugh with sheer joy. It must have been the first time in my life that I laughed—the parrot must have found me a very dull ha’p’orth.

Two or three years later John was growing into a beautiful little boy, and one of the highlights for me was John’s bedtime. Mother cradled him in her arms, then, sitting herself down in the rocking chair, she would begin singing. Softly she sang a hymn, the same one every time, but she didn’t sing the words. It was ‘bee bough, bee bough, bee bough, bee bough’, each word synchronised to each rock, and a gentle patting in the same tempo; she ‘bee boughed’ in an absent-minded voice, staring into space as if I wasn’t there. I don’t think I was jealous, envious, or left out. It never even occurred to me that no one had ever sung me to sleep, embraced me or kissed me; I accepted as a natural progression that in our house I was last in the pecking order, and strangely enough it didn’t bother me at all. Although I was unaware of it at the time, being a non-playing lodger relieved me from all responsibility and I was free to live in the fantasy world in my head, which transcended the hopelessness of the surrounding poverty and deprivation that typified most cotton towns in the late 1920s. Incidentally the hymn that Mother ‘bee boughed’ I discovered years afterwards was ‘O God, our help in ages past’.

Another little incident occurred some months later. Vernon was not with us and John and I were still a-bed. I wasn’t asleep; I’d just heard the front door close as Dad set off for work. Some minutes afterwards, Mother came into our bedroom, clambered over me and lay between us for a moment. Then she turned on her side to cuddle John. The sight of Mother’s back was as if I’d had a door slammed in my face. A few moments went by, and I had an over-whelming urge to put my arm around her, but I was too shy, so I turned my back on her and worried about my pet tortoise, which had been missing for several days. Perhaps I had no need to worry: Dad had reassured me that tortoises hibernated, then, realising that he’d lost me with the word ‘hibernate’, he explained to me that my tortoise had stolen away to a safe place in order to sleep through the winter. Half mollified, I accepted his explanation, although it never occurred to me at the time that it wasn’t yet July. I must have dozed, because when I opened my eyes again Mother had gone and so had John, and I then began to wonder if I’d dreamed about her turning her back on me to cuddle him. I was much too young to understand my silent cry for help, my desperate yearning to belong, to be acknowledged—even a smile would have sufficed.

I must have been about six when I woke up one cold autumn morning feeling different. Somewhere at the back of my mind a hazy thought began to take shape. I had the stub of a pencil somewhere and I could buy a small notebook from the little shop on Ward Street. Then I forgot what these preparations were for, but then suddenly it all clicked into place. It was a brilliant idea: I was going to take down motor-car numbers, and I wouldn’t tell anybody about it because if I did they’d all be at it. I couldn’t wait to get started. Bolting down only half a Shredded Wheat, I dashed upstairs for the stub of pencil, down again, and then out of the door as if the house was on fire, stopping at the corner shop to buy a small notebook, which cost a penny (incidentally my entire fortune), and in less than five minutes I was sitting on the edge of the pavement. No one ever referred to the pavement: they were ‘t’flags’, and the street or thoroughfare was ‘t’cart road’, and so from the shop I ran down to Featherstall Road and sat on ‘t’flags’ with my feet in ‘t’cart road’. Once settled, I opened my little notebook, pencil poised for action—so far so good. My head swivelled from side to side in case I missed a number and I made a mental note that when I’d collected fifty numbers it would be enough.

I wasn’t being over-optimistic: after all, this was the main high-way from Rochdale to Manchester. However, time passed and I reluctantly reduced my original aim of fifty motor-car numbers to twenty. It was coming up to dinnertime and now the cold, gusty wind was beginning to dampen my enthusiasm. I shivered, but sat on, book held stoically in one hand, pencil not quite so poised. I decided to abandon the enterprise if a motor car didn’t appear before the next tram…Three trams later there was one coal cart, wearily pulled by a dozing horse, reins loosely held by a sleeping driver; sometime later a large cart coming the other way, carrying enormous barrels, the heavy load drawn by two off-white, huge beasts, trotting proudly on big hairy feet. Turning my head to the right, I disinterestedly watched yet another tram wrenching itself round the corner from Oldham Road into Featherstall Road to rattle and grind its way down the single track to the loop, where it stopped to allow an ‘up-tram’ to pass in order to join the one track to Royton, and from there made a sharp turn right to Shaw Wrens Nest or to carry on to Rochdale. But alas, there was not a motor car for miles. Pencil, notebook and hands now deep in jacket pockets, feet drumming against the road to coax a bit of warmth back into them, I must have looked a picture of abject misery, and hungry with it, when a voice behind and above me broke into my self-imposed despondency. ‘’Allo, ‘allo, ‘allo,’ and I recognised the brogue of our local bobby or, to give him his full title, Constable Matty Lally. He was an imposing figure of a man, built like a full-grown water buffalo, which gave a great sense of security to the law-abiding and made him a fearful presence in the darker side of the community.

‘What are you doing there, lad?’ he said. ‘I’ve had my eye on you for the last half hour.’

‘I’m collecting motor-car numbers,’ I said, as if I’d been directed to do a survey.

He shook his head sadly. ‘You’ll get piles sitting there,’ he said, and moved himself off.

As I watched him go, the import of his words hit me. When Matty Lally spoke, everybody listened, and hadn’t he just told me I’d get piles? I assumed that he meant that piles of motor cars would be along any minute and my enthusiasm returned. So I renewed my vigilance, having finally decided that one motor car would be enough. How was I, six or seven years old, to know that Matty Lally had been referring to a nasty bottom problem and not piles of motor cars?

However, the enterprise was not a write-off. As I was about to leave, a ramshackle boneshaker turned the corner and trundled towards me. It was moving so slowly that I was able to walk alongside it while taking the number, BU something or other—I forget now, but it’s not important.

We lads who lived in Leslie Street considered ourselves fortunate in having the Mucky Broos right outside our front doors. ‘Broos’ were small hills, and these were ‘Mucky’ because they were just a large expanse of dirt; rare blades of sickly grass struggled to exist and even though the rain was frequent, the soil was worked out—even weeds preferred to take their chances in the cracks on the pavement. Most days the Mucky Broos were just two acres of slippery, glutinous mud, but they had dry periods as well. The area was triangular in shape, bordered at the top end by Ward Street Central School and on the other side by Ward Street itself, with Leslie Street the base of the triangle. Not very inspiring, but the Mucky Broos were our playground. My best mate was Richard Branwood, whose little sister Martha was used when required in a supporting role.

On one occasion we dug a trench and, with poles for rifles, re-enacted the Battle of the Somme. A couple more lads joined us as we leapt out of the trench and then charged towards the imaginary Germans, only to retreat and sprawl on the ground to have our wounds attended to. Martha, the little sister of mercy, knelt by me, stroking my forehead gently, a sad smile on her face. I liked this bit: it left me with a pleasant, warm feeling that I’d never experienced before, and I couldn’t wait to be wounded again when we repeated the whole process. It was exciting, but after a few more sorties we all wanted to be dead, so we all lay spreadeagled in the dirt, exhausted. After a time I raised my head and discovered that it was not only getting dark but Richard and the other lads had gone and, more importantly, so had the nursing staff, so I went as well.

However, that wasn’t the end of the matter. The following morning an irate neighbour called at our house and demanded we fill the trench in, as it was a danger to man and beast. He claimed that on his way home last night he’d fallen in, and he rolled up his trouser leg to show my father a nasty graze. Dad sucked in his breath and sent me off to fill in the trench.

Reluctantly I did as I was told. No more mock battles of the Somme, no more charging over the top—but if the truth were known, what I would miss most of all would be the little nurse with the sad smile stroking my forehead. It was the first time in my young life that anyone had shown me tenderness, awakening emotions in me beyond my understanding but taken for granted by most children.

Fortunately my cup was always half full and never half empty, so in five minutes I had forgotten all about the Somme and I was galloping over the dips and hollows of Texas, pointing my two fingers like six shooters and cleaning up the bad lands. On another day with some of the lads, off-white hankies tucked into the backs of our caps to shield our necks from the pitiless sun, although there wasn’t much of that in Lancashire, we were in the French Foreign Legion and with poles over our shoulders we marched over the burning sands—to us the sands were burning whatever the weather. When we had tired of the desert, we had lots of other pursuits. One of my favourite games was Ducky Funny Whip. How it got this name is a mystery, but we certainly didn’t make it up. A ‘ducky’ is a smooth stone, and there were plenty of them scattered about the Mucky Broos. We each picked one out; the size was immaterial, provided you were strong enough to throw it. Having each found our own ducky, we stood in a queue while whoever was ‘It’ placed half bricks on top of one another to about three feet high, finally putting his own ducky on top. Then the game commenced. One by one we hurled our duckies to try to knock the column of bricks over. When a lucky throw brought the target down, we all picked up our duckies and ran away to hide amongst the dips and slight rises of our Mucky Broos. When ‘It’ had rebuilt his pile of bricks and put his ducky on top, he endeavoured to find someone, and when he did he tapped them and ran back to his column of bricks and cocked his leg over it, and he wasn’t ‘It’ any more. However, if the unfortunate who’d been spotted managed to beat ‘It’ back to the target and knock the column down before ‘It’ could cock his leg over it, everyone ran away to hide again and the process continued. Older people will understand and forgive the dog’s breakfast I’ve made in trying to explain what was, in fact, a very simple pastime, not as mentally challenging as chess but to us urchins infinitely more enjoyable. Ducky Funny Whip was a team game best played when the nights were drawing in, as lying in the shadows made it more difficult for ‘It’.

Dad and most other working men hated Mondays, and looked forward to Friday night and a wage packet; above all Friday was the gateway to the greener grass of the weekend. Naturally young children had a different aspect to the week; we fought to keep heavy eyes open as bedtime approached, because that would end another day, but every morning was a new adventure. However, as for the grown-ups Friday night was our favourite, as for John and me it was our bath night.

First the rumbling in the backyard as Dad lifted the tin bath from the nail on the wall, staggering through the door with it on his back like a tortoise from outer space while Mother closed the door behind him to keep out the cold. There is nothing so soothing and delicious as a warm soapy bath in front of a blazing fire and even when soap got into our eyes it was a small price to pay for this weekly luxury. Once we were out of the bath, everything was warm—the towels, the milk—and best of all we felt clean and shiny. Roll on next Friday. If only we could carry these moments of happiness and contentment into adulthood.

Another pal of mine was John Broome, and when I was a little older his mother kindly gave me an overcoat, grey and much too large. When I wore it, only the top of my head and my feet were visible, but it kept me warm through two winters, when it finally fell to pieces before it could be handed down again.

It was an unwritten law that to qualify for use of the Mucky Broos one either lived in Ward Street or Leslie Street. We regarded it as our private and exclusive play area, and as far as I can remember no stranger ever played there or attempted to take it from us, which is hardly surprising, really, as there were thousands of Mucky Broos in Oldham and ours was well down the list of much sought-after properties. We played cricket in the summer with a pile of coats for the wicket and football in the winter with two piles of coats for the goalposts; an old tennis ball sufficed for both sports. In the soft summer evenings quite a few people in Ward Street sat out on chairs watching our games; folks who lived on Leslie Street stood in the doorways, as they didn’t have the advantage of a pavement on which to place their chairs. For them it was only dirt but to us lads they were an appreciative audience and they spurred us on to ludicrous heights, and we played whatever game we were into with extra panache. We lads were all mentally in an England shirt and the couple of dozen watchers were a packed Wembley.

When it was completely dark, we wandered over to Ward Street for another of our distractions. Whoever was ‘It’ faced the wall of a house and shouted “M-I-L-K, MILK” and at the same time we advanced slowly towards him from across the street. A clever ‘It’ would start slowly with ‘M’ and then rush ‘I-L-K’, whirling round, and anybody caught moving took his place. This game was illuminated by the light from the toffee-shop window, a shop which never seemed to close in case somebody wanted a box of matches or a jar of pickles or even toffees. When we had money we were in the shop like a flash, with a coin on the counter and asking for a ha‘p’orth of ‘all round-the-window’, which meant that the lady took a toffee from each of the boxes on display. When the lamplighter approached with his long pole to touch the gas mantle in the lamp opposite we had added illumination. The game continued until Mother’s high-pitched voice called into the darkness, ‘Eriiiiic’, and sadly that was the end of my night’s entertainment.

Of course it wasn’t all play. I had my day job helping to lay the table and sometimes drying a plate during the washing-up, but my most important assignment of all was being responsible for cutting old newspapers into squares to hang on a nail in the lavatory at the bottom of the garden.

I can’t remember John ever taking part in our rough and tumbles on the Mucky Broos. Although he was now old enough, Mother wanted to keep an eye on him and I was quite happy with this arrangement. After all, John was the centre of her universe and, much as I enjoyed his company indoors, during our games I was glad to be relieved of the responsibility of looking after him. I couldn’t anyway as I was too busy enjoying myself.

Some Saturday mornings Mother gave us tuppence each to go to the Imperial, the picture house better known as ‘the Fleapit’. It wasn’t too far away, on Featherstall Road, almost opposite my numberplate collection station. She gave us tuppence so that we could afford the best seats and wouldn’t have to mix with the scruffbags in the penny seats. John and I had other ideas: we didn’t mind sitting with the ‘untouchables’ so that we had the other penny to spend on toffees.

There was always a cacophony of noise before the programme started, whistles and laughter, and scallywags running up and down the aisles, but the babble dwindled quickly when the lights went down. Usually there was a serial every Saturday morning. The most scary one I remember was called The Shadow. Two men were talking together or, to be more accurate, miming talking together—what they were discussing was written at the bottom of the picture. Then suddenly the music went into low menacing phrases. It wasn’t really an orchestra but a woman at the piano in the pit, and as she pounded out a crescendo the shadow of a hooded person crept along the wall towards the two men. This was nail-biting stuff. We all knew what was going to happen, but nobody closed their mouth. Slowly the shadow raised an arm, holding the shadow of a weapon, to bring it crashing down on the head of the nearest man, who collapsed immediately. His colleague whirled round, drew his pistol and fired at the shadow, which was useless, it seemed, because the shadow, completely oblivious, sidled off the screen. There were, of course, no sounds of gun shots—after all, most films were silent in those days—but the lady pianist was working herself into a frenzy to build up to the ‘to be continued next week’. The lights went on again before the next effort, but conversation was now subdued as The Shadow was discussed.

Sometimes the serial was followed by a comedy, but romance was anathema to us and a couple kissing was greeted with whistles, boos and showers of orange peel being hurled at the screen until the lights went up and the manager walked on stage and immediately we were subdued. He had a rough voice and he threatened us all with expulsion if we didn’t behave. Meanwhile the film was still running, partly behind him on the silver screen but mostly on him as he spoke, and by the time he left the stage the offending scene was well past, or at least indecipherable until the lights went down and the lady pianist began again with sloppy arpeggios. Romantic films weren’t often shown but whenever there was a kissing sequence it invariably provoked this situation. Sometimes I felt sorry for the manager: he probably had to show what he was given, films that a decent cinema would reject out of hand. But we still looked forward to the next Saturday morning.

Already I am now seven years old and still haven’t decided what my career is going to be, although grown-ups always seem to ask me what am I going to be when I grow up. In truth, I haven’t given it a thought—I have enough problems enjoying my childhood.

Wakes Week in the cotton towns of Lancashire was the annual holiday. These holidays were staggered—for instance, Royton’s Wakes followed Oldham Wakes, and Rochdale’s Wakes came after Royton’s and so on, the reason for staggering obviously being so that only one town would be closed down at a time and Lancashire’s cotton production would continue with hardly a hiccup.

Naturally we all looked forward to Oldham’s Wakes. A travelling fair visited Oldham for the week, and the stalls of Tommyfield market were removed and replaced by the fair. The biggest attractions were the roundabouts, with prancing horses moving up and down under garish lights as they whirled round the mechanical orchestra belting out brassy cymbalised melodies; screams and laughter from the dodgems; coconut shies; hoopla stalls; roll a penny. There was usually a boxing booth, outside which two tough, battered characters dressed for the boxing ring stood on a raised platform with their arms folded. Next to them, only half their size but twice their IQ, the barker spoke through a megaphone, announcing that any contender lasting three rounds with either of his roughnecks would receive a pound. Many a brave lad accepted the challenge, and took off his shirt and vest to have his boxing gloves laced while the crowds bustled in to surround the ring. When the place was full, the barker fastened the tent flap and climbed through the ropes to announce the first bout. I was too young to go into the booth, but I asked Dad what went on inside. He shuddered and told me that few of the young hopefuls survived even into round two: most of them, blood-spattered with shocked eyes, were helped from the ring by their mates, and others, more prudent, chickened out before they had a chance of stardom. Dad swore that he would never set foot in a boxing booth again. He said it was a human abattoir and just to watch left him feeling sick and debased. All that remained in my mind was what is an abattoir?

One Wakes Week Dad had an exciting surprise for us. He told us that we were going to Blackpool for four days. To say we were delighted would be putting it mildly. For us Blackpool was our Shangri-La, our fairyland wherein it was Wakes all the year round.

John and I had never been on a train before, so having a compartment to ourselves on the Blackpool train didn’t register until Dad said he thought it would have been crowded during Wakes Week. Mother and Dad sat opposite each other by the window but we didn’t sit anywhere as we were too excited to be still. There were so many things to see: hedgerows whizzing past, meadows dotted with cows intent on cropping the grass, some raising their heads to glance curiously at the train, a black horse in the next field; and in the split second it took to vanish behind us we searched frantically for a white one, which was worth a toffee in one of our competitions that made the journey more exciting, as if we needed more excitement.

Then my father bent towards us and pointed to the horizon, and together we screamed, ‘Blackpool Tower.’ This was the highlight of our journey and we staggered and lurched on to the seats as we began to slow down and soon the train huffed importantly into Blackpool Central station. We were overawed by the sheer immensity of this austere Victorian building, with arches high above the concourse and hurrying passengers alighting from the train. It had never entered my head that there were others besides us making their way to Blackpool, so wrapped up were we in wonder in our own private compartment. As we passed the engine driver, Dad said, ‘Thank you’, and the engine driver, leaning out of his cab and wiping his hands on an oily rag, nodded and winked at John and me, while behind the engine driver a huge sweating man in a singlet, shovelled coal to feed the insatiable appetite of the boiler, his face lit by the glow. I backed out of the station, my eyes never leaving the old train driver enjoying his pipe, and I decided there and then that one day I would drive the Blackpool train.

Dad determined to take us along the promenade so that we could get a closer look at the fabulous tower, but unfortunately as we turned into the Golden Mile we were targeted by the screaming wind, which made progress almost impossible as we made our way to the boarding house. The waves were hurling themselves at the sea walls, flinging white spray into the air that was gleefully accepted by the wind and helped across the road to drench anybody stupid enough to be out on a day like this.

Without hesitation, Dad lifted John into his arms and Mother grasped my hand, and we all staggered into the shelter of the nearest side street. The calm and peace not ten yards from the frantic onslaught of the wind and sea were unnerving. As Dad wiped John’s face with his hankie, a policeman strolled across to us.

‘Been swimming?’ he enquired sarcastically.

Dad puffed out his cheeks and replied, ‘It’s a force-ten gale out there.’

The policeman shook his head. ‘Bit of a blow, that’s all. It’ll be all right tomorrow.’

Well, he was certainly correct in his weather forecast. On the morrow there was no wind to speak of, just the odd gust; but it was quite cold—‘bracing’, the landlady said. So John and I paddled in the pools by the sea wall left by the receding tide. Mother kept a watchful eye on us while Dad took a tram to a place called Uncle Tom’s Cabin to see if any of his mates were there. This was a favourite watering hole and he may well have met someone he knew: after all, it was Oldham’s Wakes Week and visitors to Blackpool would most likely be Oldhamers.

The next day Mother took us down to the Pleasure Ground on the south shore. This was ten times bigger and more awesome than the travelling fairground that toured the Lancashire cotton towns. John and I rolled a penny each down the slots but won nothing, and Mother yanked us away before we got the bug. We had a ride on the prancing horses in between eating candy floss—we didn’t eat any supper when we got home and in fact during that visit we ate enough candy floss between us to stuff a medium-sized mattress. Dad spent the day at Uncle Tom’s Cabin and so we only saw him long enough to say, ‘Bye, Dad.’

On the Wednesday Mother took us by tram to Bispham and I had the feeling that if it hadn’t been too expensive we would have gone as far as Fleetwood, where Dad said you could get the best kippers in the world. Incidentally he wasn’t with us, as he spent the day at Uncle Tom’s Cabin again. On the last day it absolutely threw it down—the rain was unbelievable—and against the rules of the boarding house we were allowed to stay indoors and play draughts and snakes and ladders. We would have played ludo, only we needed four players and Dad wasn’t present as he was at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By and large we had a marvellous holiday. Even Dad was over the moon, as he’d won a shilling at darts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And so our wonderful few days by the sea came to an end, and now my ambition was to be a train driver on the promenade at Blackpool.

One Sunday Mother got John and me ready and told us that we were going to Grandma Stacey’s for tea. It was the first I’d heard of Grandma Stacey, but in those days little boys didn’t ask silly questions like ‘Who’s Grandma Stacey?’ We took the tram to a much posher part of Oldham, a world we’d never seen, and I remember thinking that the further we travelled the more austere our surroundings were. When we finally arrived at our destination, I was overawed by the quiet, aloof elegance of the Victorian terraces. We were aliens in a land of privilege as we walked furtively uphill to the address of Grandma Stacey.

The front door was opened by an old lady whose bottom jaw trembled as if she was cold, with a long black dress ornamented only by a cameo brooch at her throat and hair swept up at the back and held tightly in place by a large comb. This turned out to be Great-grandma Wilson. She didn’t speak, even after Mother’s ‘Good afternoon’; she just opened the door wider, turned and floated along the passage, to disappear in a room, and after a moment she reappeared and looked at us, whereupon Mother ushered us forward and we went into a more cheerful atmosphere.

A fire was burning brightly in the grate and an old man in a pillbox hat with a tassel was seesawing slowly back and forward in a rocking chair, busily puffing on a white clay pipe, which had a lid on it, his eyes never leaving the burning coals. We three stood around, hardly breathing in case he turned to look in our direction. In front of us there was a table covered by a startlingly white cloth and on it a small plateful of sandwiches and three bowls of prunes. Then the little old lady with the quivering jaw entered with a jug full of hot custard and poured it over the prunes, after which she made a silent exit and we never saw her again on that visit; nor did the old man in the rocking chair interrupt his quiet vigil over the fire. When we’d finished we stood around in silence, which was oppressive and broken only by the hissing and spluttering of the fire and, more dominating, the sonorous ticking of an old polished grandfather clock sneering down at us. Mother said, ‘Well, er…we’ll be off then,’ and glared at us until in unison we said, ‘Thank you for my tea,’ and that was the end of the ordeal.

On the tram going home Mother told us that the old lady was not Grandma Stacey: she was not at home today, and neither was my brother Vernon. The old couple we’d met were Grandma Stacey’s parents, Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Wilson. She also explained why they didn’t speak: it was simply because they were both in their nineties. I must confess that this remark had me puzzled for days. If you were over ninety, were you not allowed to speak? Or, more worryingly, perhaps at that impossible age they’d forgotten how it was done.

Subsequently we went to tea for three more Sundays. On the last visit I think Mother must have taken John to the lavatory for I was left alone with Great-grandpa Wilson, still rocking, still puffing and glaring at the fire. I just stood and watched him. I was good at standing and watching—I’d had enough practice at home. Then Great-grandpa Wilson took the pipe out of his mouth and the old man I’d previously thought incapable of speech broke his silence, but it was as if I wasn’t there—I’d had enough practice at that as well. Taking the pipe out of his mouth, he said, ‘Last night she didn’t come home till after nine o’clock.’ He put his pipe back in his mouth, puffed for a while, took it out again and said, ‘I reckon she’s got a fancy man somewhere,’ and that was the end of what could scarcely be described as a conversation—in fact I wouldn’t have dared open my mouth. I just stood and watched, and his stare never left the fire. Many, many years later, when I was working for my living, Great-grandpa Wilson’s words came back to me, and with a flash of insight I realised that he had been referring to Grandma Stacey, who was seventy-two at the time; and on mulling over those awful prunes-and-custard ordeals I realised that Great-grandpa Wilson must have been born in about 1836. What a wealth of memories must have been staring back at him from the fire! Victoria was Queen when he was young, but did Great-grandpa Wilson know this? After all, there was no such thing as a wireless in those far-off days; he would have been middle-aged before it had been invented. He must have been aware that Prince Albert, Victoria’s consort, was German, but when Albert died an early death and the whole country mourned, how would Great-grandpa Wilson have learned of this tragic event? There were few newspapers and probably none at all in Oldham, which in those days was mostly forest and grassland, and certainly there were no newsagents. Perhaps information was conveyed by the town crier, but then would Oldham have been big enough to warrant such a luxury, and how did the town crier get the news in the first place? Questions, questions, questions. In the middle of the nineteenth century there were no such ‘get-abouts’ as the motor car, trams were yet to come, and there would have been no roads for them to travel on; horses and coaches were the only means of transport and then only for the gentry. To be abroad at night when there were no lights to illuminate the paths was to make oneself vulnerable to rogues and vagabonds. What a rich tapestry of first-hand knowledge stared back at Grandpa Wilson from the fire! I would have sat at his feet just to listen, anything, yet the only time he spoke to me was to slag off Grandma Stacey, his seventy-two-year-old daughter who hadn’t come home till after nine o’clock. What was he afraid of—a highwayman? Oh, what a missed opportunity!

The next time I saw Great-grandpa Wilson was when Grandma Stacey took me by the hand and led me into a quiet bedroom to pay my respects to him as he lay peacefully in his coffin. Other people whom I’d never met stood around in quiet groups, but no one seemed particularly upset. When Grandma Stacey took me back downstairs, a different drama was taking place. I was fascinated as I watched one of the mourners—a large, untidy man in a bowler hat, with a large pointed nose with a large dewdrop hanging on the end of it reluctant to leave home—rummaging in the shelves of a magnificent bookcase, occasionally stuffing his pockets with anything that took his fancy. It later turned out that he was one of the uncles—so my father told me about a week after the funeral. Staring into the fire he said bitterly, ‘Your Great-grandpa Wilson promised me the harmonium.’ As there were only the two of us present, I assumed he was addressing me. After a time he went on, ‘Your Uncle Albert pinched it,’ and, as if to clinch his case, he added, ‘He was seen pushing a hand cart up Waterloo Street and that harmonium was roped on to it.’ I remember thinking, ‘Thank God for Uncle Albert’: the last thing we needed at our house was a harmonium, and Dad struggling to play every night when he came home from work, his feet going up and down on the treadles like a demented cyclist on an exercise bike, his head bowed over a sheet of music he couldn’t understand.

Some days later Dad’s words came back to me. ‘He promised me the harmonium’, he’d said, and he’d stressed the word ‘me’ as if he was entitled to it, but to my knowledge he’d never met the Wilsons or Grandma Stacey; nor did he accompany us for our prunes and custard. More importantly, he hadn’t gone with me to look at Great-grandpa Wilson in his coffin. So why should the old man promise him the harmonium? I gave up there, and I still didn’t know who Grandma Stacey, Great-grandpa Wilson and Great-grandma Wilson belonged to.

Children when I was young were generally predictable. For instance, if we were walking sedately anywhere with a solemn expression on our faces it would be almost certain that we were on our way to school, church or the doctor—in other words a destination that was mundane, dutiful, boring or simply somewhere we weren’t keen to arrive at; but if our target was pleasurable, we ran, and we enjoyed the run, full of excited, pleasant thoughts of where we were going.

So it was with John and me every Tuesday during the summer holidays, when Grandma Ashton baked bread and muffins. From home to Royton seemed to us like miles, and for little legs it was, but we ran all the way, up Featherstall Road, turning left at the Queens, along Oldham Road past Boundary Park Hospital and Sheep’s Foot Lane, which led down to the workhouse next to the lunatic asylum and Boundary Park, the home ground of Oldham Athletic Football Club. We were now halfway to Houghton Street, where the Ashtons lived at the foot of Oldham Edge. As we turned into Houghton Street we could smell the warm loaves and muffins, which gave us a fillip for the last fifty yards. Breathless and flushed, we raced through the open door, John to fling his arms around the knees of Grandma Ashton, who held her arms wide so as not to embrace him in her flour-caked arms.

Grandma Ashton wasn’t thin and austere like Grandma Stacey but dumpy and warm, always with a tired smile on her face, wearied by years of caring, feeding and bringing up her daughters, Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edna and of course our mother, Florrie. Her only son, Stanley, had been killed at Mons during the Great War and I don’t think he had been twenty years old. Grandma Ashton was the rock upon which the whole family depended. Granddad Ashton always seemed to be sitting by the fireplace, even in summer, and like Great-grandpa Wilson, staring into the glowing coals, a lopsided grin on his face.

The fireplace was the focal point of most households then, and even some of the poorest managed to find coal. During the winter our mother and father sat on each side of the grate, us children standing, the gas mantle flickering behind us as the wind whistled malevolently through the keyhole of the back door. Sadly in the present day the fire has been replaced by central heating, paradoxically warm yet heartless, and the fireplace is no longer the focal point of a room. Again regretfully families now sit grouped round the television set and this modern world is no better for the change. In the burning coals you could see whatever picture you wished, but from a television you only get what you are given.

Now I’ve got that off my chest, back to Grandma Ashton’s. Whenever she baked, there was always a small lump of dough for John and me, which we shaped into little men; currants for buttons and eyes, then into the oven with them. I really looked forward to going to Grandma Ashton’s. It was fun, especially once when John and I stayed the night. It was a great adventure, sleeping in a strange bed, and when the night lightened into morning we were yacketing excitedly together when the door opened and Auntie Emmy and Auntie Edna, still in their nighties, sprang into the room, Auntie Edna wielding a sabre. We dived under the covers, shivering with fright, and screaming for Auntie Edna to spare us, while Auntie Emmy was laughing fit to bust.

The memory of that sabre has always fascinated me. I took for granted that it had once been issued to Granddad Ashton. It was the weapon of cavalry; ergo Granddad Ashton in his youth fought his battles on horseback—that is, if he had ever seen action. Perhaps he had been too young for the Charge of the Light Brigade, but surely he must have been in some other battle. Come to think of it, I never ever heard him say anything. In any case, I wasn’t old enough to think of a question.

Apart from John, the only other person I’d ever really taken to was Auntie Emmy. She always looked upon me with kindness and understanding. Whenever I visited the Ashtons with John, Auntie Emmy invariably greeted me with a warm smile, as if we were two conspirators with a hidden agenda, although such a highfallutin philosophy never entered my head, let alone crossed my mind. Auntie Emmy must have known about my real mother’s death; in fact everyone was in the know—except me. I was a rowing boat adrift on a foggy night in the busy shipping lanes of the channel. Perhaps that is why she took a special interest in me, though not, I must add, out of pity, and the rapport between us was genuine.

On one occasion when I had a raging toothache it was Auntie Emmy who took me to the dentist, an old man who must have gained his degree in the nineteenth century when possibly the only dental appliance was a pair of pliers. His surgery was the front room of his house, lit only by two gas mantles. He wore an old cardigan and a shirt fastened at the neck by a stud but with no collar.

Pushing his glasses on to his forehead, he gazed short-sightedly into my mouth. ‘Which one is it?’ he asked.

I looked across at Auntie Emmy.

‘You have to show him,’ she said helpfully.

I was at a loss for a moment. For most people visiting the dentist the toothache seems to disappear the moment they step over the threshold, and so it was with me, and I was afraid that I might point out the wrong one.

Luckily he put his finger in my mouth and waggled a tooth, and the pain was instantaneous. I jerked violently.

‘I thought it was,’ he said complacently, blissfully unaware of how close he’d come to losing a finger.

However, it was a quick, efficient extraction and triumphantly he held out the molar for me to see. There was a dark hole in it, no wonder it had caused me so much suffering. I was delighted and amazed that it had all been so quick and painless. I smiled at Auntie Emmy and was even more amazed when the dentist patted me on the head, called me a brave little man and gave me a toffee—a toffee of all things! He was probably looking forward to seeing me again in the very near future.

When we returned to Grandma Ashton’s, I gave the toffee to John and then we had tea—well, they had tea, but I had to make do with a glass of milk because I was in no condition to eat. But my day wasn’t ended. It was dark when Mother, John and I got on the tram. Mother was between John and me and I was squashed between her and a dozing old man. Why we had to sit there was beyond me; after all, apart from us and the conductor the tram was empty. No one spoke as the tram buckled and clattered up Oldham Road, and then almost imperceptibly the old man closed his eyes and began singing softly to himself in a cracked, tuneless voice. I was intrigued, and I turned my head to observe him more closely. Immediately Mother put her hand under my chin and whipped my head smartly to the front. After a short time I slowly turned to look at him again furtively and what impressed me most was his nose. It was large, round, extremely red and pockmarked, but before I could take a closer look my head was jerked back to neutral. The old man was still singing when we got off and straight away as the tram disappeared I asked Mother what was the matter with him, but Mother was reluctant to answer and I wondered if she’d heard me. Then she said, ‘That’s what you get from eating too much pork.’ This explanation, brooking no argument, knocked me flat. I was so impressed that I never got round to asking about the man’s nose; and it had such a profound effect on me that I avoided pork until I was well into my twenties, although I must have consumed buckets of alcohol since Dad bought me my first half a pint on my sixteenth birthday. The lesson to be learned here is: don’t muck about with the truth when dealing with children.

Now in the year 2003 I’m at my desk wearing headphones as I listen to a programme on the radio. I sit back in my chair staring at the ceiling wherein lies inspiration when, half listening to the disembodied voice from the radio, a man is urging us to clean up our rivers. This doesn’t particularly concern me as I don’t own one but his next remark has my full attention. The voice mentions Manchester Ship Canal. Immediately my mind races back to when I was about ten years old and standing on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal, clutching a damp towel round my thin white shoulders, my lips blue with cold, teeth chattering like a pair of demented castanets, and looking round occasionally in case there was an approaching bobby, because swimming, splashing about and especially diving or jumping off the lock gates were strictly forbidden. We weren’t too bothered, though. In the event of a constable hurrying towards us, we’d simply jump into the water and swim to the opposite bank, and scrambling out we would pull faces at the sweating arm of the law, the width of the scum-laden, smelly canal protecting us. The police must have been aware of this tactic and wisely kept away—they had better things to do.

Deciding it might be warmer in the water, I was about to jump in when I noticed a small black object floating through the half-open, decaying lock gates. As it moved slowly towards the shrieking, juvenile, splashing mêlée, I was able to see what it was: a poor, dead dog floating majestically along, legs stiff and pointing to the sky. I quickly shouted a warning. I had to shout twice over the hullabaloo, pointing at the dog. When they realised what it was, there was panic as they parted to allow the dog unhindered passage to its Valhalla—just another incident on the turgid Manchester Ship Canal.

Returning to the present, I turn up the volume of my radio to hear the news that now at last the Manchester Ship Canal has been cleansed and purified, oxygenised or whatever, and for the first time in living memory can be enjoyed by the natural inhabitants, fish. But then the marine expert goes on to say, ‘In the old days, anyone found frolicking about in the oil-scummed waters of the canal was unceremoniously hauled out and rushed off to hospital to have their stomach pumped.’ On this note I switch off, and once again stare at the ceiling, recalling the dead-dog incident. It wasn’t unusual—sometimes dead cats, rags of clothing and unmentionables floated calmly along—and when the weather was unusually hot there was always a gang of young herberts splashing about among the jetsam. To my knowledge none of us went down with malaria, typhoid, yellow fever or beri beri. The only real threat was hypothermia, and certainly no one was hauled out and rushed off to the infirmary to have their stomach pumped. I can only assume that in those days our bodies developed an immunity to diseases not yet known to man.

It’s a good job my father didn’t get to hear about my frolicking in the Manchester Ship Canal. He had never chastised me physically before, not even a slap round my bottom, but if he found out he would be driven to break the rule of a lifetime. Luckily for me he never showed any interest in where I’d been, who I’d been with or how I’d managed to rip my jersey. If he’d asked me, I would have answered him truthfully—we lived in a moral climate. However, I was apprehensive that day when I returned home from the Manchester Ship Canal, hair all damp and spiky, that he would say something like ‘Where the dickens have you been?’ and like George Washington I would have to tell him.

One Saturday morning I came running into the house, not because it was cold outside, nor because it was dinnertime. The explanation was simple: I hadn’t been out for more than a couple of minutes and was idly chucking stones at the lamppost just outside when Jack had lolloped out of the ginnel and barked at me. Jack was a wirehaired brindle dog and we had a mutual dislike for each other. He’d never forgotten that I’d once hit him with a stick when he’d had his back to me. He’d been more shocked than hurt and, ashamed of his cowardice, he’d been after me ever since. It was an unfair contest, as he had teeth and could run faster than me. Luckily I wasn’t too far from our vestibule door, but even as I slammed it on his slavering chops he kept up his barking and frantic scratching on the door.

I sauntered into the kitchen.

Mother said, ‘Hark at that! What have you done to him now?’

And taking John by the hand, she brushed past me, opened the door and shooed Jack away, and he went without further argument. While she was gone I noticed a near stranger in the room. It was my brother Vernon, and he was looking at me as if he could smell something nobody else could. My father was sitting in front of the fire, reading The Green Final, a newspaper someone had left in the tram on his way home from work the night before. My father wasn’t actually reading it as he was in the middle of an argument with Vernon, which I had inadvertently interrupted. Vernon was on one of his visits, and he always seemed to upset Dad, who was used to overlookers and managers berating him at work but was definitely against being taken to the cleaners by his eldest son.

‘Dad,’ said Vernon, ‘you don’t understand…’

I didn’t wait to find out what was beyond my father’s comprehension. I’d seen the signs on his face, which was the colour of a Cox’s orange pippin.

I went to Mother and John at the front and listened attentively while she discussed the price of bread with Mrs Turner, our neighbour. I’ve no idea how the battle in the kitchen went, but for the next few days we were three in the bed. By the time Vernon came upstairs John and I were usually asleep, but what I did learn during his stay with us was that his real home was with his Grandma Stacey in a beautiful house where everyone had a chair to sit on at meals and he didn’t have to stand at the table as we did to eat. The way Vernon had always spoken of Grandma Stacey, Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Wilson you’d think they were all closely related to royalty, and his disdain for 36 Leslie Street and all its occupants was plain for all to see. Poor deluded Vernon. It never crossed my mind that if he was related to the Staceys, so was I.

Birthdays came and went like any other day; we neither received nor sent cards, as they were unaffordable luxuries—in fact I don’t think newsagents in our area even stocked them. But Christmas was something else. A few days before the ‘big one’, most houses began their preparations: sagging paper chains of merry colours criss-crossed the room from gas mantle to any other protuberance on the opposite wall, and small Christmas trees, festooned with tinsel and cotton wool, always sprouted in practically every home and certainly where there were children.

One particular Christmas Vernon, John and I had been saving for months to buy a present for Mother. Vernon was now permanently home but much more likeable, so he hadn’t been completely brainwashed and he didn’t argue with Dad as he would have in the past. On Christmas Eve the ‘old ’uns’ had gone out for the evening and with our pooled resources Vernon (ten), John (six) and I (eight) stole out of the house into the darkness of the Mucky Broos. Puffed, we dropped to a stroll by the chapel round by Robin Hill Baths and made an excited final burst up Barker Street to the lights of the shops. It was then that we received our first shock. There was a phalanx of people, almost a solid wall of Christmas Eve shoppers, all in good humour but unfortunately for us impenetrable. The three of us held hands tightly, John in the middle hemmed in by a sea of raincoats, great coats, long jerseys and scarves. To say we were frightened would be an understatement. It was only about seven o’clock and the shops didn’t close till nine. To add to our folly, none of us had any idea what sort of present we were looking for. Panic-stricken, I held tightly on to John’s hand—if I let go I might never see my brothers again. John wasn’t tall enough to see above the midriffs and I wasn’t tall enough to look anyone in the eye. Desperately we tried to retrace our steps—after all, we could always postpone giving a present until Easter—but there was no way out. There was a sudden surge of people behind us and we found ourselves in an ironmonger’s shop. Thankfully it was fairly empty, which was hardly surprising, as nails, baths, hammers and bicycle chains are not at the top of everyone’s Christmas shopping list, but it would do for us: the sooner we got back to the sanctity of the familiar and peaceful Leslie Street the better. Pointing to a saucepan up on a shelf, Vernon asked the price. He seemed to know what he was doing, and John and I watched him, our mouths agape with admiration. Vernon took a knotted hankie out of his pocket and watched the man count out the contents; Mother would have a Christmas present after all.

Our Christmas mornings were predictable yet wonderful. Like most other children on Christmas morning, we woke well before our normal reveilles in eager anticipation of the most exciting day of the year. Our stockings, which had hung over the fireplace the night before, were now at the foot of our bed. Kneeling quickly up in the bed, we took a stocking—it didn’t matter which as they were all the same, each lumpy with an apple, an orange and some nuts. This was only the prelude: there would be more goodies under the tree downstairs. This Christmas morning, when it was light enough, we marched into Mother’s bedroom—she was still in bed but Dad was downstairs lighting the fire—and Vernon and I pushed John forward. He proudly held out the saucepan as we all piped ‘Merry Christmas, Mother.’ After we were dressed, and it didn’t take us long as we all slept in our shirts anyway, as we clattered downstairs we could see the rosy flickering on the kitchen wall reflected from the cheery fire in the grate. Dad hurried upstairs with a cup of tea for Mother and the hurly-burly of another Christmas Day began.

Every year our main present was always a Cadbury’s Selection box, which we joyously received as if it was a surprise, but the real surprise was usually a present we could all share. This year it was a Meccano set, which we pounced upon eagerly because, according to the blurb, with Meccano we could build anything. For the rest of the morning screws and nuts littered the floor as we salivated at the delicious aroma coming from the stove as Mother cooked the dinner. And what a meal it turned out to be: Yorkshire pudding with onion gravy to start with, followed by rabbit, roast potatoes and cabbage. When the table was a ruin of bones, bits of cabbage and dirty plates, we all thanked Mother, who said it was much easier to cook now with a new saucepan. Even to this day I bet that if we were all granted a wish for something to eat our answer would be unanimous: a rabbit.

For the evening party we all went down to Grandma Ashton’s for the traditional fun and games in which we children and the adults took part. When we arrived at 8 Houghton Street, there was already a Christmassy feel about the evening, with laughter, warm spicy smells, holly around the picture of Uncle Stanley, mistletoe in a strategic position over the door, and on the table Mint Imperials, mince pies and, best of all, luscious black Pontefract cakes like the buttons on an undertaker’s overcoat. Cups of tea for the ladies, something stronger for the men; we had sarsaparilla from large stone bottles, which when empty would be filled with boiling water to warm many a cold bed.

The games were the same as last year, but who remembers, and what does it matter? We children were led one at a time into a darkened kitchen; I was the first to go. I was told to kneel, facing a large white cloth, behind which the light of a torch shone through, and was instructed in a sepulchral voice to put my nose against the light and follow its every movement. My nose never left the light, which I followed slowly up the cloth, and as my head cleared the top a cold, wet sponge was slapped into my face, I yelped, everybody in the kitchen laughed and I joined them. John and Vernon both yelped as I did, and I laughed before the grown-ups because I knew what was going to happen. This was turning out to be a really great Christmas.

Gleaming with excitement at the thought of the next romp, the three of us were in the kitchen, which was now lit by candles. Auntie Emmy started to blindfold me, and so I assumed that I was to be first again for whatever was in store. She led me from the kitchen into the front room, where I was helped to step up on to a plank of wood, and again the sepulchral voice informed me what was to happen: ‘You are going on a flight and you must be very brave.’ Already I was trembling, especially when the board I was standing on began to rise up and up and up, until finally I banged my head and the sepulchral voice went on, ‘You have just hit the ceiling, and now you must jump.’ I was petrified: I couldn’t possibly jump down from where I was at the top of the room. But they urged me on, and eventually I took a deep breath and gave an almighty leap. There was a roar of laughter as Auntie Emmy took off the blindfold and the realisation dawned that I had only really been lifted about six inches. Sheepishly I smiled—it was such a simple mind-over-matter diversion. Auntie Emmy had been kneeling in front while I was blindfolded and as the three-foot plank was being slowly lifted by Dad and Joe Waterhouse, an uncle in waiting until he married Auntie Emmy, Auntie Edna had bumped a book on top of my head, which I took to be the ceiling, and the illusion was complete.

Vernon was next. He wasn’t petrified at all and when Auntie Edna banged the book on top of his head, he just smiled and whipped off his blindfold to loud groans of disappointment—he must have remembered last year’s party. John didn’t have a go as he was already fast asleep, and it was time for us to be taken home, leaving the grown-ups to their own Christmas games.

Grandma Ashton’s seemed to be a meeting place for all our relations. I recall evenings when Dad, Uncle Joe and two other men I cannot bring to mind played cribbage for a ha’penny a point. Before the cards were even shuffled, the curtains had to be drawn and the front door locked, as gambling was illegal—such was our respect for the police, which in this present day sounds overcautious, as the players neither lost nor won more than tuppence an evening.

Northmoor Council School, built before the Boer War, was about half an hour’s walk from across the Mucky Broos up Chadderton Road, past a huge black shiny boulder on the left, which was reputed to be a meteorite from outer space, awesome in itself and, even more frighteningly, said to be bewitched and evil. I never walked by it without crossing my fingers, looking straight ahead, although I watched it out of the corner of my eye in case it did something untoward. That was my daily journey to school, my first small step on the road to education, but after that fatuous fanfare I can recall only very little of my early schooldays.

Question: ‘How old were you when you enrolled?’

Answer: ‘Don’t know.’

Question: ‘What was the name of the headmaster?’

Answer: ‘She was a headmistress.’

Question: ‘What was her name?’

Answer: ‘No idea.’

It would be a very dull interview indeed. I remember the headmistress, a motherly, plumpish lady with white hair, for one unforgettable incident. Every morning, first thing, the whole school assembled for prayers, which culminated with a hymn: the headmistress stepped on to a podium, took up her baton and raised it—this was the only still moment of her performance—and then, crash, bang, wallop, we were off…Arms flailing about, she conducted with gusto in a way reminiscent of a flight controller on board an aircraft carrier guiding a drunken trainee pilot down on to the deck. Not only was it fascinating to watch, but on one particular occasion there was a highlight yet to come. So frenetic was her conducting that there was a flash of colour beneath the hem of her frock and a voluptuous red garter made its appearance, slid down her leg and rested round her ankle. We all waited for the other garter to appear, but we were disappointed. Sadly the garter never appeared again and I assumed she had bought herself a pair of braces. That is my only recollection of the headmistress. In fact I cannot bring to mind other members of the staff, even though they stood behind the headmistress at prayers.

I invariably looked forward to playtime, unless it was raining, when I would have to stand shivering under a sheltered bit of the schoolyard with the others who didn’t possess raincoats. No one except the staff was allowed to remain in school during playtime. Worse still, we could see the teachers staring through the rainspattered windows in order to keep an eye on us, steaming cups of tea in their hands, and biscuits. As we watched enviously there was a sound of thunder, but in fact it was the rumbling of a mass of small stomachs at the sight of the biscuits. When the weather was good playtime would be a blessing—a shrieking, screaming, laughing riot of sound, skipping ropes for the girls and tennis balls kicked all over the place by the lads. One of the more popular games was Jubby. Kneeling, we flipped marbles or glass alleys into a small dent in a corner of the school yard and then we—unfortunately I have forgotten what we did then, but we enjoyed it.

Alongside the ‘Jubby bandits’, another line of kneeling ragamuffins played in pairs a game of Skimmy On. This entailed skimming tab cards alternately at two other cards leaning up against the wall. If you knocked one over, you scooped up all the cards that had missed the target: then another card was placed up against the wall and round two was on. To see these lines of ‘skimmers’ and their intense concentration was like observing Northmoor’s version of one-armed bandits in Las Vegas. Incidentally, those tab cards, better known as cigarette cards, came in most packets of cigarettes. They disappeared about fifty years ago, if not more, and as cigarettes are not politically correct I don’t envisage those wonderful educational cigarette cards coming back, more’s the pity.

Another memory of Northmoor’s is when, after school had ended one day, I dashed out into the pouring rain. It was bucketing down and I was in two minds as to whether to run back into school or swim home. I did neither and, ducking my head, I raced across the street, only to find that the pavement was dry. When I turned round I discovered that the monsoon on the other side of the street was still pelting down. I stared at this phenomenon, a solid wall of rain two yards away. After a short time I rushed off home to relate this extraordinary experience. I expected amazement or at least astonishment, but all I got in reply was a bored, ‘It didn’t rain here.’ That’s all I can remember about Northmoor Council School…funny about the garter, though.

Every Saturday morning Dad sent me up to Grandma Sykes to see if she wanted any errands to be done. This was odd, because he and Mother were reluctant to send me on errands at home. Many years later my father told me that he would never send me out on errands because of my woolly-headedness. I would very likely not remember which shop I was going to, and even if I arrived at the right place I would have forgotten why I was there. Why, then, did Father send me to Grandma Sykes to see if she wanted any errands done? It couldn’t be because he disliked her—after all, she was his mother. Perhaps he just wanted me out of the way for a time. When I arrived at Grandma Sykes I asked her about it, but she just smiled, shook her head and sent me off on an errand, which was no answer at all. It must have been preying on my mind, because I went into the butcher’s and asked for five pounds of King Edwards, and by the time I reached the greengrocer’s I’d forgotten the potatoes and came out with a cabbage. Grandma sighed heavily, took the cabbage from me, donned a shawl over her head and we made our way to the shop together. As we walked, she casually remarked that she and Granddad Sykes together with Aunt Marie, Dad’s younger sister, and Uncle Ernest, Dad’s brother, would soon be moving in with us. This information was of such importance that it banished all the other rubbish from my mind.

Two or three days later, the invasion was upon us. They hadn’t far to come, as they lived in Tilbury Street, which ran along the top of Leslie Street. Everything they owned was carried from their house to ours—the cost of a removal van would have been infinitely more than the value of their assets. My father and Granddad Sykes staggered down the path lugging a large double bed, followed by Grandma Sykes and a neighbour edging sideways holding a mattress between them as if inciting the watchers to jump out of their bedroom windows on to it, Aunt Marie, with an armful of blankets and not far behind Uncle Ernest, hidden under a moth-eaten armchair, slipping and slithering in front of me. ‘Every little helps,’ they said, handing me an ashtray—‘A Present from Hastings’—and a three-legged stool which must have been handed down through generations of farmers.

Stanley Taylor, who was walking out with Aunt Marie, lurched along the uneven ground with a ragged, worn-out carpet on his shoulder. Mercifully it was rolled up, and so its threadbare condition was hidden from the critical watchers. As the column made its way to number thirty-six it must have been reminiscent of Dr Livingstone’s first expedition into darkest Africa. Within a few more hours the Tilbury Street house was stripped bare, and that evening the changeover was complete. Granddad and Grandma Sykes, Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernest had finally made 36 Leslie Street their new home.

So now there were nine residents: Granddad Sykes’s family in the front bedroom, and in the back bedroom Dad and Mother in their corner and John, me and Vernon in the bed opposite. Nowadays it would be deemed overcrowding but to Father it was halving the rent.

Our house, like millions of others, had four rooms, two up and two down, but the hub of all this domesticity, the nerve centre, the engine room, was the kitchen, the one room that was communal. Nine of us ate our staggered meals there. Washing up, washing clothes and washing ourselves took place at the sink, which was next to the stove. Breakfast time was the busiest period before the workers left. No one wide awake enough to converse muttered ‘Look at the time’ or ‘Is there any Shredded Wheat?’ It was feverish, like a railway buffet when the train is due in. During melancholy moments I fervently wished we could have our kitchen back and our own bedroom, but almost immediately I would be ashamed of my uncharitable thoughts.

Grandma Sykes was my favourite. Once I returned home from my primary school, stiff-legged, tearful and as far down in the depths of despair as I’d ever been because I’d messed my pants and had been sent home to get myself cleaned up; it was this disgusted dismissal in front of the class that had been the final straw. However, when I entered our front door I was met by Grandma Sykes. She was on her own and when she saw me she wasn’t cross or anything. She just said, ‘Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.’ Then she lifted me on to the draining board, and took off my shoes and stockings so that I could put my feet in the sink. ‘By jingo,’ she remarked as she peeled off my pants. ‘What have you been eating? Any farmer would pay good money for this lot.’ In spite of myself I chuckled, and by the time I’d been cleaned and dried, and had half a slice of bread and dripping in my hand, I felt a wave of warm affection for her. I stood in front of the fire, watching the steam rising from my damp, clean pants, and when everybody came home that evening Grandma didn’t utter a word about the drama that had taken place earlier in the afternoon; it was our secret. So as far as I was concerned, I’d be happy for Granny to stay with us for ever.

Granddad didn’t say much. He and Uncle Ernest worked at the same place, and when they came home in the evening, Granddad washed his hands and face at the sink, followed by Uncle Ernest. Then they’d sit down for their supper, which was usually a plateful of baked beans, and as I had eaten much earlier the sight of Granddad and Uncle Ernest slurping their way through those delicious baked beans had me salivating. To be hungry was the norm, but it didn’t help to be constantly reminded of it.

I saw very little of Aunt Marie. She was very rarely home by the time I went to bed. She worked in a shoe shop along with a man called Stan Taylor, and it wasn’t long before they were courting. She never brought him home to meet her parents, but that was understandable—where would he sit? And a meal was out of the question, unless he brought his own. Many, many months later they were married and the mystery man became my Uncle Stan. I met him for the first time at some family gathering or other and I took a shine to him from that moment. I secretly observed him standing in a little group of relatives. He had a perpetual smile on his lips, and occasionally he would nod at something.

The discussion was apparently about Stanley Baldwin, our Prime Minister—I knew that because Granddad talked of little else. Everyone put in his four pence except Stan. He didn’t utter a word, but nodded now and again, raising his eyebrows at something or other. I was waiting for him to join in but he didn’t, and I came to the conclusion that he must be a very wise man who kept his counsel; or to look at it another way he could be stone deaf and couldn’t hear a word anybody said. Anyway, Aunt Marie was the first to spread her wings. When she and Stan married they went to live in a little village called New Longton, not too far from Preston, away from Oldham for privacy but close enough in case of emergencies.

Uncle Ernest was next to go. Still in his mid-teens, he enlisted in the Royal Navy and in peacetime that seemed like a pretty smart move—sailing the high seas, three meals a day, not much pay but regular, and when he’d served his twelve years he’d still be young enough and with sufficient skills to obtain a steady job ashore. So his departure from 36 Leslie Street left only Granddad and Grandma. Two down and two to go, but already I was missing Aunt Marie and Uncle Ernest. Is there anything so fickle as a child’s thoughts?

As a child I was a very sickly specimen. In fact my father told me many years later that a doctor, shaking his head sadly as he looked at me, said, ‘You’ll never rear him.’ Naturally, being but a few months old, I was totally unaware of the doctor’s opinion and I simply continued to live. On the other hand when John came into the world he must have shone like the evening star. He was a beautiful baby, radiant, healthy and, judging by his ever-present smile, comfortable with his surroundings. It was inconceivable that any germ or virus would defile such a perfectly healthy child. Hospitals weren’t full of little ‘uns like John; the wards were more likely to be occupied by people like me. On the other hand, it is all clearly logical if you think about it: what self-respecting germ is going to be satisfied with a stale crust when there’s a leg of lamb on the table? Poor John happened to be the latter, and he was carried off to hospital with scarlet fever. I was mortified, and the atmosphere at home was dark and sombre, as if the gas mantle had gone out and we didn’t have enough for the meter. Weeks seemed like months, but it all ended happily when Mother collected him from hospital, and although it was foggy outside the sun was in our hearts. But it left me with a sobering thought: if scarlet fever could happen to John, was I next in line, and would Dad start worrying all over again if it was possible to rear me?

Illness struck once more, and to everyone’s astonishment it wasn’t me. It was Vernon this time and, more serious than scarlet fever, he had the dreaded diphtheria, which was high up on the mortality list. Why Vernon? He’d always looked pretty healthy to me—after all, he’d virtually been brought up at the Staceys’ on a more balanced diet, too costly for Leslie Street. Prunes and custard don’t encourage diphtheria, so why him? Truthfully if I could have changed places with Vernon I would not have hesitated. I felt better equipped to deal with illness than either John or Vernon.

On that black day the clang of the ambulance bell opened practically every front door in Leslie Street, not out of idle curiosity but because the residents were bonded together by a genuine concern and sympathy for the grieving household. Inside 36 Leslie Street, as we waited apprehensively while a burly ambulance man was upstairs preparing Vernon for his admittance, something extraordinary happened: a little black bird flew in through the open front door into the kitchen, turned and flew out again. My stomach was gripped by a cold foreboding. It was a bad omen. A few moments later, the ambulance man made his way carefully downstairs, carrying Vernon, wrapped in a blanket, his face white and bloodless, and his eyes closed as his head lolled against the ambulance man’s chest. I was convinced that I’d never see Vernon again, but, God be praised, as usual I was being over-dramatic. After some weeks, or it may have been longer, Vernon was cured and discharged from hospital. Dad walked him home and what a joy it was when he arrived! Mother, John and I shared a huge smile of welcome. In those long-forgotten days in the north-west we were certainly not demonstrative, but our faces said it all. We were a whole family again. It had been a harrowing time—first John smitten by scarlet fever, and then Vernon struck down with diphtheria—and the most I could contribute was a runny nose.

Oddly enough for a delicate child, I never saw the inside of a hospital, not even to visit John and Vernon; but I hadn’t escaped completely unscathed. I was laid low for a few days with mandatory mumps, and I must say I quite enjoyed the experience, propped up in the bed with hot milk; and, best of all, Grandma Sykes brought me a comic to read every day, wiped my face with a warm flannel and combed my hair. I’d never had such personal care and attention in my life.

On the day of the doctor’s visit, Grandma Sykes was like a nervous chicken awaiting a fox, plumping up the pillows, giving my face an extra shine, stuffing the comic in a drawer, even running a damp cloth over knobs on the bed rail until there was a rat-a-tattat on the front door. Grandma smoothed her apron and gave me a warning look as if to say, ‘Don’t go away.’

Dr Law was respected by the whole community, where it was generally accepted that he was a fine man. I’d seen him in his surgery a few times—once just to pick up a prescription for cough mixture, and on another occasion when John had pink eye and I went with him—and on each occasion Dr Law was seated behind his desk, which we had to go round so that he could examine little patients without having to bend down. On the two days when he had called at our house about the scarlet fever and diphtheria I hadn’t been at home, and I’d never actually seen him standing up, so when he had to duck his head to enter the bedroom where I was prostrate with mumps I got quite a shock. He was immense, well over six feet tall; his brown hair had an off-centre parting, and he exuded good health and breeding in stark contrast to the pinched white faces of undernourished Lancashire.

As he approached the bed, he spoke in a deep, melodious Irish brogue. ‘And how are you this morning, young man?’

Grandma, following him in, brought up a chair.

‘Thank you,’ he said in a dark velvet voice that made her blush, and he sat down to put his stethoscope on my chest. ‘’Tis a fine morning,’ he said as he listened to my heartbeat.

I nodded, as it was still uncomfortable to speak.

He stood up and, placing his stethoscope in his bag, he said, ‘You’ll do.’ Then he nodded and Grandma saw him out.

When they’d left the room, I slipped out of bed and wobbled over to the window. As Dr Law climbed into his trap, he said a last few words to Grandma, raised his trilby to her, and then slapped his reins on the pony’s rump and clip-clopped to his next patient. Oh, if only I could grow up to be half as good a man as Dr Law.

There was only one drawback to the billeting arrangements. At five thirty every weekday morning, the knocker-up came, a man shouldering a long pole with wire prongs on the end of it with which he tapped on the front bedroom window like brushes on a snare drum to let my father know that it was time to rise and shine. However, Granddad was in the front bedroom now, and so he had to scramble out of bed in his shirt, tippy-toe to the window, push it up and stick his head out to let the knocker-up know that they’d got the message; then, pulling the window down, he tiptoed on the cold oil cloth into our bedroom to wake up my father. This done, he’d tiptoe back to his own still-warm bed, because his place of work was closer and he didn’t have to get up until seven thirty—what luxury!

The services of the knocker-up cost my father a penny a week. Imagine: on those cold, dark, winter mornings, the unfortunate man would have to tap, tap on bedroom windows 240 times a week just to earn a pound, barely enough to keep him out of the workhouse. And by the way Granddad didn’t tiptoe in order to be quiet: if he’d put his feet flat down in winter they might have stuck to the below-zero linoleum.

Talking of shirts: they were the standard sleep attire for males; the ladies wore nighties. We all knew about pyjamas, of course—we’d learned about them from American films. We were aware that the well-to-do brushed their teeth, but a toothbrush had yet to make its appearance in our house or in any other domicile on our patch. Most of the grown-ups ate with false teeth, their smiles a bright uniform plastic. These dentures were heirlooms and, like spectacles, were handed down. Using these was better than having porridge at each meal.

Across the road from the top of Houghton Street where the Ashtons lived was the start of Oldham Edge, a large area of sparsely grassed ups and downs that could have originally been a breakaway from the Pennine chain. It was bisected from the Royton end to the heights of Oldham by a straight road in desperate need of repair possibly, in fact almost certainly, built by the ancient Romans. The whole hilly, hummocky area rose to magnificent views of commercial Oldham. A dozen or more black factory chimneys belched dark smoke straight up on a rare calm day but in a capricious wind all the smoke would suddenly veer at right angles to the chimneys and then move as one in another direction like synchronised smoking. On Sundays, however, there was no such entertainment as the cotton mills enjoyed a day of rest and it was on these days that the workers—the younger ones, that is—got together for their sport on Oldham Edge. In the summer there was cricket, but there were not many matches because of the weather and because flat bits of Oldham Edge were sparse. In the winter there were games of football requiring unknown talents when dribbling along the side of the hill, which had piles of clothing at either end for goalposts.

I once played footie one Sunday when the light wasn’t good and ominous dark clouds had been assembling since early morning until the whole of the sky was black. I can’t remember how the game was afoot when the heavy leather ball flew over my head and before I could pull myself together I was trampled under a stampede of players. There must have been forty or fifty a side on that pitch, and as they were mostly young men wearing ordinary working clothes it was difficult to know who was on the opposing team. How I got involved in the first place, wearing my only shirt and an old pair of off-white army underpants over my own short pants, I’ll never know. Then the ball went over my head again, this time in the opposite direction, and I was faced by a sweating mob chasing the ball. I didn’t hesitate: I joined them. I could have been trampled to death. Then, to make matters worse, the monsoon broke, as heavy a deluge as I’d ever seen. Immediately the pace of the game eased up. It had to, as within a few minutes large areas of Oldham Edge were waterlogged and to kick a ball when it was floating was against all the rules of the game. Everything spluttered to a halt when one of the young bucks picked up the ball and walked disconsolately homewards, and everyone slouched off. It was too late for running and we were all wet through.

Hair plastered to my head, I went as well, but not home. The nearest port of call was 8 Houghton Street. When I knocked on the front door it was opened by Auntie Edna, and straight away she turned to shout into the room, ‘Another survivor from the Titanic.’ I later discovered that I’d turned up at the wrong football match: I should have been enjoying a kickabout with other little boys half a mile away.

Standing on the bed one day, I found that I could just about reach the bulkhead, a small space beneath the rafters, and I was curious to know if anything was stored there. I wasn’t tall enough to see, but by swinging my arm about I came into contact with a leather suitcase. I swept it down on to the bed in a cloud of dust. It wasn’t heavy, and so at first I thought it must be empty, but when I opened it I found an old dog-eared hardback book, with a yellow cover, entitled Tudor Kings and Queens of England. I wasn’t too interested, because my attention was drawn to the lining of the suitcase, which was an old newspaper. I opened it out and my eye was taken by drawings of slim young women advertising dresses buttoned at the neck but with skirts down to the calves—very daring, as the paper must have been at least ten years old and the present year was barely into the 1930s. It had the latest styles, mind you, all priced under a pound, and the most modern handbags from Italy, less than ten bob. There were no photographs in the newspaper just drawings. How I wish now that I’d kept it to the present day, but then again how many things would I have kept had I ‘some power the giftie gie us’ (Robbie Burns). I was just about to close the case and chuck it back when a sudden thought swept through my mind. Tudor Kings and Queens of England? I’d never read a book in my life but there’s always a first time. Taking the book downstairs, I sat on a buffet and flipped through the pages. I realised that it was going to be a stiff test because it contained no pictures.

Chapter One and I embarked on my first literary expedition. Page two, page three—diligently I read every word, not understanding any of them. By dinnertime I was three parts through the turgid, boring kings and queens of England, but with a slice of bread buttered with condensed milk I pressed on. Dad, who was out of work in the depression of the thirties, came home after a fruitless job hunt, took off his cap, coat and scarf and, seeing that I was already eating my dinner, stuck a slice of bread on the end of the toasting fork and held it over the fire. I wished I’d thought of that, but then again condensed milk and toast was unthinkable. I went back to my book. I hadn’t far to go now, and I was devouring the book page by page, reading every word religiously. I even read what some unknown had written on the bottom of page 163: in a spidery hand he’d scrawled, ‘Remind Amy about Saturday.’ I remember turning the corner of the page down in case I might want to read it again. It was intriguing…Perhaps Amy was his intended, or maybe they were already married and what was happening on Saturday? A dance, a football match…Ah, but could the writer be a girl and Amy her best friend? I stared unseeing at the page before me, and then I pulled myself together and concentrated—only a few more pages to go now.

Eventually near teatime I came to the most wonderful part of the book: just two words, ‘The End’. Snapping the book shut I stood up and stretched. I’d been hunched for hours but it had been worth it.

I casually edged towards my father and said, ‘Dad, I’ve just read a book,’ as if I’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

He said, ‘What’s it about?’

I stared at him blankly. I was flummoxed. Wasn’t it enough that I’d read it? After all, that was the achievement—surely I didn’t have to understand it as well. On second thoughts it might have been better to have counted the words instead of reading them. Then I could have said, ‘Dad, there are twenty-five thousand, four hundred and twenty-six words in this book, not counting the title.’ I just looked at him. He was staring at me pitifully, as if I was slightly backward, and on reflection I think he had a point.

I can’t ever recollect my father having a serious talk with me or anyone else for that matter. He was a quiet, gentle person and never, ever, did I hear Dad swear, to the day he died in 1972, but if provoked beyond all endurance he always used the same innocent alternative. It was ‘broad lastic’, uttered through gritted teeth. It scared the daylights out of us. I know it sounds innocuous, but throughout my life I probably heard as many expletives as any other veteran, and none as dangerous as ‘broad lastic’ when growled by my father.

He was a man of principles and on election day he would vote Conservative, the only one in a community of staunch, long-live, die-hard Labourites. Dad even put a photo of our local Tory candidate in the front window. This was unfortunate for John and me when on the day before the votes were counted the young sons of Labour supporters came out with rolled-up yellow paper bound by string, which they whirled about their heads, and lambasted us for betraying the working class. However, on the following day all was forgotten and we carried on playing together as if nothing had happened, which was true as the Liberals usually got in.

Every Sunday, while other tired, weary fathers lay a-bed till dinnertime, our dad was preparing himself for his morning’s hobby: he was a campanologist or, in common parlance, a bell-ringer.

Whatever the weather, he would stride across the Mucky Broos to St Mary’s Parish Church, not in his drab, worn, workaday clobber, but completely transformed in black bowler hat, overcoat—always unbuttoned—flapping behind him like an opera cloak, stiff white collar, black tie and highly polished shoes protected by pearl-grey spats, which intrigued me. I can remember watching him fastening them over his shoes, dexterously making them secure with a buttonhook, which he always replaced on the mantelpiece, out of my reach. Every time I watched him going to church my heart swelled with pride, even though I knew that in the lining of his bowler was rolled-up newspaper to prevent it from falling over his eyes, that his overcoat had only one button left and that his shoes once belonged to his father and had more balled-up newspaper in the toes to prevent him from walking out of them in the damp Broos. From a distance he was a real bobby-dazzler, but close up the rag-and-bone man wouldn’t have given him fifteen bob for the lot. Anyway, what do fancy clothes matter? It’s the man inside that drives the engine. Dad looked forward with excited anticipation to his stint in the belfry, just as a keen football supporter will push his way through the turnstiles at Boundary Park to stand for almost two hours on a cold, windy terrace to watch Oldham Athletic.

Arriving at the church opposite the war memorial, he strode over the gravestones, one of which was for a whole family: husband, wife and six children, who all died within a week in the year 1734. What a tragic story behind that! If this was the graveyard, how old was St Mary’s Parish Church? I can imagine my father opening the great front door which led to the stone steps winding their way up to the belfry, ‘Good mornings’ to the seven other ringers, overcoats and jackets on hooks in the corner, sleeves rolled up as they approached their allocated places, a nod from the conductor, and then with a creak and a rattle of the bell ropes the Sunday morning silence shattered by the clamouring of the bells. The opening round was usually reasonable, but then the rot set in and the bells seemed to compete, jostling with each other for a piece of the action. It was as if a mighty hand from above had scooped up all the bells to fling them down to earth, clanging and banging as they bounced down Barker Street.

I don’t wish to sound disloyal, but the bell-ringers cocooned in their sheltered belfry do not get the full benefits of their efforts. I’ve never mentioned this observation to a soul and to all campanologists, in spite of my uneducated criticism; and in fact I would never ever swap the bell-ringers for the soul-less chimes of a press-button carillon. As I was writing this I heard a loud grinding noise: it could have been my poor father turning over in his grave…

Vernon and I were in the old St Mary’s Parish Church choir and John joined us when he was eight years old. Also in the choir was Dad’s older sister, Aunt Mag, and an alto Aunt Marie, Dad’s younger sister, who was the first lady bell-ringer in England. Mother was exempt because she was cooking the dinner. How’s that for a family record? We almost outnumbered the congregation. While Dad and Aunt Marie were bouncing up and down on their ropes, Vernon, John and I were making our way to the church to bring joy and hallelujah to the faithful and this journey by Robin Hill Baths, up Barker Street, and through the Tommyfield market was at times an eerie experience. Every Sunday morning Oldham was a ghost town; it was as if the whole population had been spirited away to a distant planet.

Apart from the battle of the bells, the occasional distant cockcrow and the clacking of our footsteps, all was silent. Walking through a deserted Tommyfield was a depressing experience. The whole area was littered with the detritus of a hectic Saturday night—cardboard boxes, straw, wrapping paper, chip paper—disturbed from time to time by a marauding wind, but on days when it was really blowing the predominant noise was the flapping of the stall coverings, like the sails of a three-master crossing the Bay of Biscay in a force nine. This was bend-forward-and-hold-your-cap weather, which we preferred to the malignant calm as we made our way to church.

As for Saturday night, the market was a cacophony of voices, laughter and the constant shuffle of hundreds of feet tramping through the stalls lit garishly with single electric light bulbs or lamps, blue smoke busily curling through the lights from a chippy or a hot dog stand, candy floss machines for young and old. No two stalls were alike—clothing, footwear, crockery, herbal remedies, cheap jewellery; in fact that little world of Tommyfield market catered for almost everything, and if money was tight many people just shuffled round to enjoy the quick-fire repartee of the vendors. Strange as it may seem, the crockery stall invariably drew the biggest audience. A fat jolly man held a dozen dinner plates, slapping them as he announced, ‘I am not going to ask you five shillings…I’m not even going to ask you four bob,’ and then with a triumphant slap he would launch his punchline, ‘Half-a-crown the lot.’ There was a stirring in the crowd, and after a slight pause there was a surge forward, hands outstretched proffering half-crowns while two assistants busily wrapped dozens of plates in old newspaper. Most of the crowd would not even have house room for a dozen dinner plates, but it was Saturday night and what a bargain! There was more crockery to be had, more people to be had and above all there was entertainment. And now as the dawn of Sunday morning creeps silently over Tommyfield, what a contrast to the night before!

I was getting older by the day; in fact in a couple of years I’d be in double figures, so I should have known better…but my friend Richard and I were up to our old shenanigans after nightfall. It wasn’t brilliant, it wasn’t even funny, but you have to remember that in those days we didn’t have wireless, let alone television. Here’s what we did. We’d reach up and rat-a-tat the door knocker of a house in Ward Street, and then scoot across the cart road, flinging ourselves on the darkness of the Mucky Broos to watch the developments. Someone would invariably open the door, and look up and down the street, only to find it deserted. Then they’d close the door, wondering if they had imagined the whole thing. As I said, it wasn’t brilliant, but when did a bit of mischief deter a child? We took it in turns to rat-a-tat another door and another until the game palled.

It couldn’t possibly go on unchallenged and the more doors we knocked on the closer we were to discovery—and so it was on one particular night. It was my turn to rat-a-tat, which I did peremptorily, but there was no time to cross the street, as the door was opened immediately by a young athletic man. I was almost paralysed, scared out of my wits, and I ran panic-stricken for the corner of the street. Richard was already safe in the anonymity of the dark Broos. My little legs were no match for the confident stride of an angry man, and as I rounded the corner his heavy hand grasped my collar and lifted me off my feet, and I am sure he was about to do me serious damage when a deep Irish voice from the darkness shouted ‘Oi!’. I was petrified, and more so when I recognised Constable Matty Lally. I could have survived a blow but not a custodial sentence. I wasn’t too relieved when Matty Lally advised the man to go back home and leave it to the law. The man went off muttering—no one argued with the law—and when he’d gone I tensed for the well-deserved official wallop; but the policeman bent down to me and whispered, ‘How many motor-car numbers did you get?’ I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about but it was a great let-off.

It wasn’t until I was well tucked up in bed that I connected Constable Lally’s ‘How many motor-car numbers did you get?’ to my motor-car spotting day on Featherstall Road—and I lay there wondering what a remarkable memory he had to recall an incident that must have taken place years ago. It was my last thought before sleep took over and sadly that was the last time I saw my new-found friend Constable Matty Lally.

Dad’s hobby was mending pocket watches. Well-to-do men sported pocket watches chained across the front of their waistcoats—wrist watches were, as yet, an unknown in the cotton towns of the northwest—and so to see Dad bending over a backless watch, eyepiece screwed into his eye socket, was a fairly regular occurrence. But on one particular day he was immersed in a larger contraption with dials along the front. He was peering into the innards of the thing with such concentration that he didn’t notice me. In fact if the house had fallen down he would still have been bent over his work, standing on the foundations. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds because he was insulated from his surroundings by a large pair of earphones clamped round his head.

‘It’s a wireless set,’ he said, answering my enquiry. ‘A cat’s whisker,’ he added, which left me no wiser—what had all the wires and valves got to do with our Tiddles? ‘There’s something there but I can’t make out what it is.’

‘Can’t you make it louder?’ I said helpfully.

He took off his earphones and pointed through the window at the house opposite, in whose backyard was a tall mast as high again as the house. As far as I was concerned it had always been there, but I had assumed that it was a flag pole, although on Remembrance or Empire Days I’d never seen a Union Jack fluttering from it. ‘He can get signals from all over the world with that: it’s a wireless mast.’

Then he stared into his own little contraption and I noticed one of the valves flashing a feeble light nervously, like a child attempting its first step. Quickly Dad slipped on his earphones and listened excitedly for a few moments; then he took off his headphones and transferred them to my head.

I listened intently, and then with a shriek I yelled, ‘It’s a band, it’s a band.’

A moment of history marking the day I heard magic from the airwaves.

I don’t know how, or from whom, or what day I learned that the one I thought was Mother was not my mother at all, and that in fact my real mother had died when I was born. I couldn’t absorb it at first, and when I did it wasn’t earth-shattering: I took it in my stride. It wasn’t a catastrophe—after all, a catastrophe to a little boy is when he puts his hand in his pants pocket and finds a hole where his hard-earned penny should have been, so the news of my real mother was hardly a tremor on the Richter scale. However, a few days later when Dad and I were alone in the kitchen—it must have been Sunday morning because Dad was shaving at the sink, towel tucked into the top of his trousers as he stropped his razor and then pinched his nose to shave his top lip—taking the bull by the horns, I blurted, ‘Dad, what was my real mother’s name?’

He cut himself and after a ‘broad lastic’ he glanced round and, satisfied that we were alone, he muttered, ‘Harriet.’ Then he took a little piece of paper and stuck it on to his top lip to make the blood coagulate. Next he lifted his face to the ceiling and began scraping under his chin.

Thinking that I’d at last opened the door, I said, ‘What was she like?’ and he cut himself again. Why didn’t he just go to the barber’s?

Exasperated, he put down his razor and sent me out to play, and that was the end of the matter. But I didn’t let go. Every time we were alone together and I approached him he found some excuse to forestall any question. I had to know why it had been kept secret from me for so long but as I cleared my throat to ask, the drawbridge came down with a bang—it was a ‘no-go’ area. Nevertheless in the mess of half-formed thoughts and ideas lurking at the back of my head questions as yet unformed required answers.

A few mornings later, I was luxuriating in bed between sleep and full awareness, John not yet awake by my side, the beginning of a perfect day—when suddenly a roller blind in my head shot up, illuminating my mind. No questions or answers about my real mother but, more importantly, explanations! I knew now why the lady called Mother lavished so much love and attention on John: John was her son and I wasn’t. I now understood why Dad was reluctant to even discuss my real mother: it would have been extremely tactless even to mention her name in front of Mother. His life began again when he married Florrie Ashton. The discovery also clarified the three sets of grandparents—the Staceys, the Ashtons and the Sykes—and here was a troubling thought: would I have to give up the Ashtons for my own kin and join Vernon at Grandma Stacey’s? I shuddered. Grandma Ashton must have known about me for years but she’d always treated me with kindness and affection as John’s best friend. It also made it clear why many people regarded me as an adoption gone wrong—a puzzling thought, but now I knew the reason I was strangely comforted.

Once when Mother was filling in a form to enrol John in something or other, John was at her elbow when she filled in ‘name of applicant’ and wrote ‘John Stanley Sykes’.

‘Who’s Stanley?’ he asked and she told him that Uncle Stanley was her brother who was killed at Mons during the Great War.

She said that most people had a middle name and some people had several names but they were mostly royalty. When she saw that John was still a little perplexed she told him that Vernon had three names as well, Vernon Wilson Sykes—Vernon after his father and Wilson the family name. Apparently when he asked what my middle name was she said, ‘He hasn’t got one’, but with my newly acquired knowledge I knew the reason: all the relatives had been used up and there was no one left for me.

Some days later when John told me all this he said that he didn’t think this was fair, and if I wanted to call myself ‘Eric Stanley Sykes’ he was more than willing to share. I thanked him but said I was quite happy with the name I had. Significantly, though, all through his life I never heard him refer to himself as ‘John Stanley Sykes’, nor sign his name as such, and here is the difference between my two brothers, for Vernon on the other hand was inordinately proud to sign himself V.-Wilson Sykes. Poor Vernon, he had left the Wilson household convinced he was better than the ménage at 36 Leslie Street and unfortunately it was an attitude he carried all through his career. He would take a job convinced that in two years he would become managing director and life, unlike Hollywood, doesn’t work like that.

Not having a middle name didn’t bother me at all, but my subconscious wasn’t wholly satisfied until Joe Waterhouse and Auntie Emmy were married and they christened their only son Eric. God bless you, Auntie Emmy.

It appears that everyone had been party to the secret of my birth, but I wish they’d let me in on it. I wouldn’t have told anybody. One thing is certain: I wasn’t going to give up Granddad and Grandma Ashton. I was now an honorary member the Ashton family and John’s mother was still mine as well, and if I left matters alone things would just carry on as before—and they did: Dad had his bellringing, and Mother cooked the meals, did the shopping, dusted and polished every day. My real mother was forgotten. As the saying goes, you never miss what you’ve never had. But somewhere in the great unknown a young woman called Harriet Stacey had other ideas.

In my exciting days of growing up, technology was desperately trying to keep pace with the introduction of motor cars as they began to proliferate, and for the first time an intriguing method of car control emerged. They were called traffic lights: red for stop, amber for wait a while and green to allow you to drive on. They would not change automatically to accomplish this. A car had to drive over a strip of rubber in the road about five yards before the lights, when the lights would turn to green and the car would drive on. The light would stay green until another car travelling in a diagonal direction went over its own rubber, changing the lights in front of it from red to green and the original lights from green to red. It was an ingenious invention and provided us children with hours of hilarity. On Sunday mornings when Oldham was a ghost town we ran from home to the traffic lights, which were at the bottom of Barker Street on our way to church, so as to have plenty of time to take turns at changing the colours, John jumping on one rubber strip while I stood in Barker Street ready to change the lights back. It was not as much fun as Ducky Funny Whip but it stretched our technical capabilities.

Every time I went out from our front door I only had to glance up to my left to see Ward Street Central School, an elegant red-brick building on two floors. All this austere magnificence I’d taken for granted as I played and romped through my early life. On my first day as a pupil there I could stand in the school yard looking down from a higher perspective and surveying all the familiar places. How small were the houses of Leslie and Ward Streets, and the Mucky Broos were not as vast as I’d thought they were. As I looked down at my old stamping ground I wondered if this was what they called higher education.

The headmaster, Mr Parker, was a tall, thin, cadaverous man with a face reminiscent of the Easter Island statues. We didn’t see much of him most of the time, but when we marched along the corridor we instinctively dropped our voices as we passed his study. The door was never open; it was a room of mystery and the boys who’d been inside weren’t very keen to go in again. If, for instance, the teacher considered your wrongdoing so appalling that three strokes of the strap would be insufficient to fit the crime, you would be sent to the headmaster’s study, with words that were of the same gravity as a judge intoning, ‘You will be taken to a place of execution…’ Luckily in all my days at the school I experienced this ordeal only once.

What started off as an innocent prank led to thoughts of running away to join the French Foreign Legion. We had a teacher called Mr Barker and, as opposed to Mr Parker, he was overweight by many a ton and known to all the school as ‘Fat Barker’. Unfortunately one afternoon while in his class I’d sketched a fair likeness of Mr Barker stark naked with his belly hanging out. In my drawing he was facing a woman also in the altogether, both of them with their hands down by their sides. It wasn’t erotic—it wasn’t meant to be. I thought it was funny and I was proud of the likeness. I showed it to my classmates and in no time at all Fat Barker became aware of the chortles and sniggers, and, spotting the paper being passed on, he intercepted the exchange and ordered it to be brought to him. He glanced at it, and then, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, he looked more closely, and without a word he hurried out, leaving the door open. I peered round at the class and everybody was suddenly interested in their exercise books. Typical, I thought: two minutes ago I was a hero and now I had the plague. Fat Barker returned and with a gesture despatched me to the headmaster’s study. He stood back from the door as I passed him as if I might be contagious. There was no appeal, no call for explanation. He knew that the ludicrous figure was meant to be him; the woman could have been Miss Thomson, another teacher.

When I entered the headmaster’s domain, the great man was looking at the sketch. After a time he folded it over until only the bottom of two pairs of legs were visible, held it out to me and said, ‘Did you do this?’

I whispered, ‘Yes, sir,’ and that was it.

I got six strokes of the leather strap on my hand, but it really didn’t hurt that much. He was getting on in years, and I suspect he did himself more damage in wielding the strap than he inflicted on me. But that was only the corporal punishment. What was so embarrassing, so shameful and degrading, was having my name entered in the punishment book. I had a criminal record already and, good grief, it might affect my job prospects if this became public—even worse should Dad get wind of it. As I returned to the class, Mr Barker was holding the strap and I thought for a minute I was going to get a second helping, but he ignored me and I slunk to my desk, an outcast.

Secretly I was glad that Mr Barker hadn’t administered the punishment himself, as he really knew how to hurt you. I remember in glorious Technicolor my first larruping from him. I forget what I’d done to deserve it but there I was in front of the class while F. B. measured his distance. It was to be the first of three. I braced myself and as the leather came whistling down I moved my hand and he caught himself an almighty whack on his knee. This brought a great smothered snigger from the class and three more strokes were added to my original sentence. As Mr Barker taught a mixed class, we lads had to show a bit of bravado whenever we were about to be chastised. It was unmanly to cry in front of the girls, but to tuck your right hand under your left armpit after the punishment was acceptable. Girls were never punished, and I’m sure they secretly revelled in the spectacle as some poor devil held out his hand for the strap. Is this a trait in women? After all, during the French Revolution they took their picnic lunches and their knitting to enjoy the work of Madame Guillotine…But I digress.

One of the popular myths going the rounds regarding the strap was that a hair from one’s head laid across the palm of the hand would take some of the sting out of the blow. It was worth a go, and I tried it a couple of times, but it didn’t work for me, so I packed it in. Had it been a success I could well have been bald before I left school.

Apart from daisies, dandelions and buttercups, I can’t recall ever seeing any other flower. I wouldn’t have recognised a bluebell if you’d rung it violently into my good ear. Even in Westwood Park the rhododendrons were not a riot of colour; they were in fact a dirty grey from the fallout of the factory chimneys of the cotton mills, which caught me at a disadvantage when some joker or other named a festival Beautiful Oldham. Every year schoolchildren had to paint or draw a daffodil and those judged to be winners had the satisfaction of having their efforts pinned round the walls of Werneth Fire Station. The doors were opened to the proud public, and talented offspring pointed out their own contribution to their parents—in my case ‘Eric Sykes, aged twelve years, Ward Street Central School’. It was a marvellous exhilarating day out, culminating in a walk through Werneth Park all in our Sunday best. The daffodils round the walls were at least all yellow but back in the classrooms where we had all competed it would have been a psychiatrist’s nightmare. Most of us had never seen a daffodil and like a rumour some of the entries were greatly distorted.

I’m not sure, but I think we only had one lady teacher at Ward Street Central, Miss Thomson, blonde, medium-sized but bulging. As I think back she reminds me of Miss Piggy in The Muppet Show. Anyway on one occasion I was kept in class to write out some lines before I was dismissed. Head bowed, I was writing ‘I must not do…’ whatever it was for about the hundredth time, with four hundred more to go, when a shadow fell over me. I looked up and Miss Thomson was perched on the edge of my desk, looking down at me in a peculiar way. She was hot and her make-up was beginning to cake, and little beads of perspiration dotted a faint moustache which I’d never noticed before. After a few moments she said, ‘You have very long eyelashes for a boy.’ I thanked her, she gave me a long peculiar look and, picking up my uncompleted lines, she said, ‘That’ll do,’ and left the room. For some inexplicable reason my mind raced back over the years to when I lay wounded and the little nurse with the sad smile stroked my forehead.

Then there was Mr Wilton. He was our English teacher. I think he enjoyed listening to himself a darn sight more than we did. Well built, he wore a grey suit and for the street he wore a brown trilby with the left side of the brim turned down. I suppose that this was how he imagined a poet would wear his hat. Incidentally, why must we have an English teacher? I could have understood it if I’d been French or Greek but I not only spoke English fluently but could read it as well. Mr Wilson was groaning on about something or other and my interest in the lesson waned. I looked out of the window and my eyes were drawn to our house. One day, noting that the front door was closed, I turned my head to the house in Ward Street, where I made my abortive rat-a-tatting and had my last brush with Constable Matty Lally, and suddenly something extraordinary caught my eye: in the middle of the Mucky Broos two dogs were stuck together, bottom to bottom, trying to run in opposite directions. It was intriguing, and I was wondering what was going on when a woman came out of her house and threw a bucket of water over them, and they came apart, like greyhounds leaving the traps at the races. I turned back towards the blackboard and with a start I almost bumped my face against Mr Wilton’s jacket. He had been leaning on my desk, baffled as I was, no doubt, by the goings-on outside. I thought he was about to discuss it, but I was way off the mark. ‘Sykes,’ he said, ‘I am endeavouring, in my humble, stumbling way, to add a little knowledge to that treasure house above your eyebrows, but as you prefer to ogle lasciviously at a rutting perhaps you’d be more at home in the Zoological Gardens?’

I looked at him in wonder, thinking that to learn English could be an advantage.

Mr Sutcliffe was our sports master, a tidy, tall, black-haired man; it must be said, that in his sports jacket and flannels he looked ideal for the part. It was also rumoured that he played cricket for Werneth Second Eleven, which in my mind only was open to doubt. For one thing, he wore spectacles with lenses as thick as the bottom of a pop bottle, making his eyes look like blackcurrants; also he never seemed to like cricket. When we were all eager to be marched down to where we played our organised games, he would be looking at the sky, hoping for rain, or even bad light, in which case we spent the sports hour in the gym, practising imaginary cover drives, leftfoot-forward off-drives, back on non-existent stumps for an imaginary short ball. We did all this synchronised to a record on a wind-up gramophone, usually of ‘The Blue Danube’.

These exercises in the gymnasium were no substitute for the real cricket, at which Mr Sutcliffe was a semi-pro. Perhaps he was embarrassed to have to shepherd a crocodile of boisterous, happy schoolboys through the streets on the way to the cricket ground. This was in fact a large area of fairly flat ground, with goalposts at either end for footie; and, because there wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen, our cricket was played on coconut matting. We didn’t have two ends—in fact I don’t think we had more than four stumps, but that was just right: three for the wickets and one for the bowler. There was only one pad, which was buckled on to the left leg, and if you happened to be left-handed, tough.

Mr Sutcliffe would throw the ball to someone, anyone, and point out somebody else to bat and the game began. Mr Sutcliffe looked on with a bored expression, occasionally glancing at his wrist watch so that he wouldn’t be late getting back to the warm common room. However, in one particular session he took off his jacket, handed it to me and picked up the bat, which I’d laid down while I buckled on my pad. He threw the ball casually to one of the lads, and then he surveyed the fielders, gesturing for them to spread out more. It was obvious that he’d done this before on a much higher canvas. Nodding to the bowler, he took up his stance and we all crouched in readiness. What happened next was like a page out of comic cuts. It was an innocuous ball, not quick, but falling short, and then for some unaccountable reason the ball reared up and caught Mr Sutcliffe on the bridge of his nose. His glasses flew off, and he stumbled back, knocking his stumps over.

‘Howzat?’ screamed the bowler.

Mr Sutcliffe struggled unsteadily and glared myopically around him. The bowler was quick-witted and, seeing Mr Sutcliffe’s glasses on the ground, took the opportunity of merging with the rest of the field.

‘You stupid boy,’ he yelled at nobody. ‘I wasn’t ready. What’s your name?’

There was no answer and when I picked up his glasses and handed them to him he saw that there was no one at the other end. We all knew who the bowler was, but there wasn’t a chance in a hundred that anyone would give him away.

One thing is certain, though: Mr Sutcliffe wasn’t much of a cricketer. Any decent batsman for Werneth would have hooked the ball for six.

That was the end of cricket for the day, and so I didn’t have my turn with the bat. Dissatisfied with the world in general, I limped off, although there was nothing wrong with my foot—my limp was because of the cricket pad buckled on to my left leg, obviously made for someone much taller than me. Ah well, I still maintain it was another century I never made.

Our classes weren’t always mixed. For instance, the boys attended a carpentry class and the girls beavered away at domestic science, mainly cookery. Mr Barker’s class, as I mentioned earlier, was mixed and to my shame I can’t remember any of the girls, not even the one I was passionately in love with, although she didn’t know it. I never approached or spoke to her but I recall following her home to the centre of Oldham, where she disappeared through the back door of a pub, and then with a great sigh I turned round and floated home in a euphoric haze.

My most vivid memory after school finished for the day was watching the staff going home. Mr Barker went hatless, dragged along by the weight of his stomach down Ward Street towards Featherstall Road in order to catch a tram to wherever he was going. The English master, Mr Wilton, would invariably be striding casually twenty yards behind him—perhaps they didn’t like each other. Some of the teachers went the other way to board trams going in another direction. No member of the staff, not even the headmaster, possessed a car. Cars were still a rare sight and an expensive novelty, and teachers, as today, were underpaid; but even so all the male staff managed to wear suits with a collar and tie and Miss Thomson wore respectable frocks.

I may have treated the staff with a levity they don’t deserve. Discipline was paramount and by and large they were all respected, and we pupils had no difficulty in addressing the masters as ‘sir’ and the lady teachers as ‘miss’. Although I wasn’t a credit to the school academically, when I finally left school, like every other pupil I could read, write, add up, subtract and divide. In other words, I had been equipped with the basic skills, preparing me for the next stage of the journey, and thankfully that did not include sex education—that was an adventure to come, as and when the bugle sounded. I have long had a theory that pupils who pass their leaving exams with high marks in every subject may be star pupils but when they face the real world they lose a lot of their sparkle and can be likened to a blind man whose guide dog has left home. On the other hand, many, many brilliant entrepreneurs, artists, writers, etc., proudly boast that their final reports were abysmal, so I wasn’t as upset as my father when he read what the headmaster had written as a footnote to my school leaving report: ‘Inclined to be scatterbrained’. Ho hum, you can’t win ‘em all.

My schooldays were over and presumably I was well equipped to take my place as a member of the working class. First, however, let me sum up the last fourteen years. They were mainly a pleasurable experience, although there were bad times as well, but I haven’t included these simply because I can’t remember them, and to my adolescent mind the bad times invariably happened to other people. For myself there were only two major problems: trying to keep warm during the cold winters which swept across the north-west for several months and staving off hunger, a condition endemic during the depression of the early thirties.

In looking back over my schooldays at Northmoor and Ward Street Central, I am appalled by my lack of attention to my education. For instance, when the history master declaimed that William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 following the Battle of Hastings, that was the last thing I heard. But in my mind’s eye I saw William beaching the long boat, French soldiers leaping into the surf to storm the beaches yelling Gallic obscenities at the British troops, and King Harold looking up towards a shower of arrows a very silly thing to do—and his ostler, too late with his warning, gasping as King Harold said, ‘Ooh’, and slid from the saddle with an arrow in his eye—‘The King’s copped it.’ And just then I was brought back to the present day as the bell went for us to change classes, but whatever subject, maths or woodwork, my imagination still wove vivid pictures of the tale of the Battle of Hastings, until a geography lesson in which the mention of Mount Kilimanjaro had me halfway up the mountain pursued by Zulus before the bell rang for the end of the day.

So it is hardly surprising that academically I wasn’t exactly a star pupil; in fact wallowed about for most of my schooldays at the bottom of the class. That is except in one subject, art, and the marks I got for this, year by year, were never less than ninety-eight out of a hundred.

During the last week of my school life, parents of the pupils about to enter the uncertain world of work were invited to a half-day visit to the school in order to wander round inspecting some of the projects their offspring had been engaged in. My parents couldn’t be there because Dad was working in the Standard Mill in Rochdale while Mother had taken her old job back in the card room of another mill about three miles beyond Royton. What with their wages plus Vernon’s and soon, hopefully, mine we would be able to afford rabbit every Sunday. Dad usually took a sandwich for his dinner in the factory but Mother fared better. Grandma Ashton cooked something nice and hot, put it in a basin, wrapped the whole thing in a red-spotted hankie and made her way to the tram stop. When the tram arrived, she handed Mother’s dinner to the conductor and he put it on the floor by his feet; then ‘ting ting’ and off went the tram about three miles down the line to where Mother met it, the dinner was handed over to her and perhaps ‘Smells good, missus’ from the conductor and off to Rochdale. This private delivery service occurred every workday, no money, no ‘What’s this, then?’—all smiles, even when it was raining. Oh, what a gentle, caring age we lived in!

To return to parents’ day at Ward Street Central School: as the star pupil in art, I was given a large sheet of rough paper, three feet by two, with carte blanche to paint whatever I fancied. Without hesitation I began to sketch a huge liner thrusting headway through a choppy sea. Parents filed into the classroom to watch my progress. I was completely enraptured—it was turning out to be a good painting. While wiping my hands on a rag, I surveyed my work, wondering if a couple of fish being thrown about would enhance the bow wave. I dismissed the thought as I still hadn’t finished the superstructure. By this time the room was beginning to fill up with parents, and two teachers were enlisted to keep the crowd moving. I was daubing red paint on the paper, creating the first of three funnels, when a man’s hand shot out, pointing to the bows and exclaiming that I’d forgotten to paint in the hole for the anchor. He was loud, and there was a crush of people eager to spot the mistake. I was pushed forward and in flinging out my arm to save myself inadvertently I upset the pot of red paint and my marathon work was over: Michelangelo had fallen off his pedestal and his floating Sistine Chapel disappeared under a spreading red sea. My hopes were dashed; I’d had visions of hanging it over the dresser in the kitchen. Optimistically I thought, There is plenty more where that came from, which just goes to show that you can’t be right all the time.

In fact I was the only one in the school to be offered a scholarship to the Oldham College of Art, but that would have meant an extra two years of schooling, which was out of the question, as we couldn’t afford the luxury. But it didn’t bother me in the least. When I left Ward Street Central School at the age of fourteen I was eagerly looking forward to bringing home a wage packet earned manually in a workman’s overalls.

In 1937 I walked through the gates of Ward Street Central School for the last time, fully equipped to make my contribution to the national debt. It was the same year that Aunt Marie and Uncle Stan were blessed with a child, a daughter Beryl. Our tribe was growing, and apart from my brother Vernon and my half-brother John I now had a beautiful baby cousin.

THE WORLD OF FLAT CAPS, OVERALLS AND BOOTS

Having left school, I still had no idea of what I wanted to do or how I should go about attaining an interview. It was the normal practice in those days for a father in a good steady job to recommend his son to the foreman, or even the manager, so as to ensure that the son followed in his father’s footsteps. They could then make their way together to and from their place of employment and have their tea at the same time when they got home. However, no self-respecting father would push his son into a cotton mill and Dad was no exception. He had better plans for me, in short to put in an application for employment in the Post Office.

I greeted this suggestion in a lukewarm fashion. I’d often chided Vernon because he worked somewhere in an office. Polished shoes, collar and tie—that wasn’t my idea of a workman. I wanted to work in overalls, sweep the streets, the chimneys, clean windows, anything as long as I could come home weary and dirty with a good day’s work behind me. But the Post Office—I would go to work clean and tidy and come home in the same state, and I didn’t consider selling stamps a proper job. However, my attitude changed when my father came home with a bit of newspaper he’d picked up on the tram and he smoothed it out to show me an advertisement urging school leavers to apply to the Post Office for positions of telegraph boys. My face lit up. The main argument in favour of the Post Office to Dad was a job for life, but for me, I was already sold on a uniform with a stiff peaked cap, a black belt and a pouch—all this and a bicycle too. Excitedly, I sent in two applications, both of which were ignored. Bitterly, I thought, ‘It’s typical of the Post Office—neither of them have been delivered.’

Meanwhile, not far from the top of Featherstall Road was Emmanuel Whittaker’s Timber Merchant’s, and I have no idea how it happened or who did what but all I know is that on Monday next I was to start work as a timber merchant. I had no inkling of what I was expected to do, but no doubt they’d tell me when I arrived.

So it was with outward calm and inward trepidation that I made my way up Featherstall Road, thrilled by my overalls washed many, many times to a faded blue, bought possibly from a sale at a second-hand or even a pawn shop. Had my overalls been new I would have looked like a raw beginner, if only I was old enough to shave. I crossed Featherstall Road at the exact spot where seven years ago I had attempted a career as a car number collector. There were other people making their way to work, some of them overalled like me; women were bound for offices or shops, and there was a man at the tram stop, in bowler hat, collar and tie, eyeing me as if he was superior. I tried to spit in order to make a point, but it wasn’t too successful: it didn’t go anywhere but just dribbled down my chin. I brushed it away, too late, and he was sniggering when he boarded the tram. Rounding the corner of Featherstall Road, I stopped suddenly as if I’d just walked into a brick wall. There on the other side of Oldham Road was the formidable office building of Emmanuel Whittaker’s, and to the right the heavy iron entrance gates to a yard which housed countless orderly stacks of wood, some covered by huge tarpaulins. A daunting prospect loomed before me and it took all my willpower to approach this man’s world.

Undecided, I was standing outside the gates, all courage gone, when two or three young bucks and one older, laughing at some joke or other, walked through the gates. The older one stopped and looked at me, and said, ‘Hurry up, lad, or you’ll be late.’ All fears dispelled, I joined him and we walked in together.

My benefactor turned out to be my number one. He was on the cross-cutting bench. The wood on rollers moved towards him, he pulled the large circular saw through them, and then he pushed them along his bench to me. I hoisted these three-foot-long battens on to a large leather pad on my shoulder and carried them through to another shed, where two elderly men were nailing battens together to make crates, which would then be lorried down to the cotton mills to hold the cops—a cop being a cone of cotton thread wound on to a spindle. These two men rarely spoke—they couldn’t, as I never saw either of them without a mouth full of nails—but by golly they could knock up a crate in the time it took me to bring another batch of battens. So for the next few loads I was striding out as if I was dropping back in a marathon and as the pile of battens began to get larger I was falling behind. Sweat was rolling down everywhere when my mate switched off his cross-cutting saw, helped to load me up and said, ‘Now take it easy, otherwise by dinnertime we’ll be having a whip-round for your parents.’ It was kindly meant, but I was determined to earn my wages. However, when I got home that night I fell asleep in the middle of my baked beans on toast.

A few days later I learned a little dodge, which was the beginning of my indoctrination into the shady world of the working man. Rather than being sent to an early grave with a pile of battens on my leather pad, I was assigned to another job. This entailed going round the carpenters’ shop to take their orders for dinner, which was usually a hot meat pie with a dollop of mash on top. My mouth watered at the thought of it but as it was sixpence it was out of my price range, and in any case I lived close enough to go home for midday meals.

As I wrote down their orders I also collected the money, and this is where my trade union education began. When I returned from the shop at dinnertime with an armful of sustenance I was met at the gates by my new mate on the cross-cutter.

He said, ‘Did you get any change from the shop?’

I said, ‘Yes, eight pence.’

Quickly looking over his shoulder to see if we were being observed, he folded my hand over the coins and hissed, ‘Stick it in your pocket, lad.’

Perplexed, I looked at him. ‘It doesn’t belong to me,’ I said guilelessly.

He shook his head sadly. ‘Listen, lad,’ he said. ‘You’re not the first to collect dinner money and you’re not the first to get change from the shop but you will definitely be the first to hand over the money to that lot.’ He jerked his thumb to the joiner’s shop. I was about to object when he carried on, ‘Some of the lads who collected dinner money before you are still working here.’ I still couldn’t get my head round the gist of his words. This must have been obvious from the blank look I gave him, for he sighed, ‘If you start giving change back to them you’ll be putting a noose round the heads of all the dinner lads before you.’

‘But it would be dishonest.’

‘Go ahead, then: sell your mates down the river. I give up.’ And shaking his head, he strode away.

It didn’t take me long to decide which path to go down and that night I went home eight pence richer, which was almost ten bob a week, but some of the blinkers had been taken from my eyes. I realised now that the working class I’d been so proud to join was not as far along the road to Jerusalem as I’d first imagined and secretly, and a little shamefaced, I accepted my corruption as my entrance fee to the world.

A few months later I found myself in a different location, opposite the cross-cutter. My new assignment was on a machine called the fore-cutter. The cross-cutter was a much older, capable and efficient man in a boiler suit and a very old trilby, sides pulled down to protect his head and neck from flying wood shavings and splinters. His job was to feed a dirty long plank of wood into the fore-cutter, where it would slowly move through the blades and emerge at the other end planed and shiny. It was up to me to take it off the rollers and stack it with the others in time for the next twelve-footer. It sounds simple enough but the storm of wood shavings and chippings flying from the machine was much greater in volume than it was at the front end so an old hat was found for me. Nowadays one would certainly wear gloves to protect the hands from splinters and goggles to protect the eyes, but in the early thirties at Emmanuel Whittaker’s these had never even been considered. Every fifteen minutes or so the machinist would switch off to allow me to sweep the shavings through a square, two-foot opening in the floor, and at the break I would go down the ladder to spread the sawdust and chippings more evenly. When I got to the bottom of the ladder I was up to my waist in sweet-smelling wood, so it was a slow job to spread the load.

As I write this, it suddenly occurs to me what a fire hazard the sawdust and chippings must have been, but then I doubt that safety regulations were prevalent in those days. Come to think of it, I can remember at least three comrades with missing fingers.

Again I was moved to a different job. Whether I was up- or downgraded I’ve no idea, because my wage was the same. I was now a painter, but not exactly in the Van Gogh school. In fact I wasn’t really a painter at all: my task was to prime the wooden window frames with a pink primer. At least my assignments seemed to be getting less onerous. Was the management experimenting, trying to find a job that would suit me, or, more likely, trying to find me a job I could do?

I threw myself into my new work. Proudly I returned home every night with my overalls stiff with almost as much paint as I applied to the window frames. After a couple of weeks I knew I had found my niche. No chance of losing fingers, no chance of a hernia from carrying more than my strength—it was going to be a pushover. But little did I know that splashing about with paint was a boobytrap. First I went down with painter’s colic. This was not life threatening, but unfortunately the colic mushroomed into something more serious: exactly half of my face broke out in eczema, from the middle of my forehead, down the bridge of my nose and under my chin, while the other half of my face was completely unblemished.

Mother took me by tram to the skin hospital in Manchester. A middle-aged lady doctor treated the suppurating side of my face and my whole head was bandaged, with two holes cut into the bandage for my eyes and a slit for my mouth. Every Tuesday for months we made the journey, as in Son of the Invisible Man, to see the doctor, who would unwind the sticky bandage, view the affected area and shake her head in defeat. The eczema hadn’t spread—it was down exactly half my face—but neither had it improved. She applied more lotions, bandaged me up again and told my mother that I would have to be admitted to the hospital. She should take me home now as there was no bed available and as soon as there was a vacancy the hospital would let us know. It shouldn’t be too long a wait but if we had not heard we should report as usual to the outpatients’ clinic on the following Tuesday.

When my mother told me what the situation was, I was horrified and waves of panic swept over me. For me it was a terrible week: I dreaded the days that followed and prayed that I would not be admitted. Every Tuesday for the past few months as we’d sat on the long benches in the outpatients’, sometimes waiting for ages for our call, I had looked round me to see some terrible skin afflictions. One or two of these poor wretches were in dressing gowns, inpatients obviously, and some of those sights were horrendous. After a time I refused to look and just stared at the floor until my call came. At least I went home every night, but now the thought of lying alongside these nightmares in a hospital ward gave me the shivers.

Next Tuesday came and I was sitting opposite the lady doctor, listening as she told my mother that there still wasn’t a bed vacant, and my spirits rose a little. Then she began to unwind the bandages and my self-pity evaporated somewhat; after all, this wonderful lady had to deal with skin diseases all the time and most likely much worse than mine. When the unveiling was complete, a cool breeze caressed my face and there was silence for a moment or two. Then the doctor beckoned Mother across and together they stared at me in amazement. The doctor nodded and said calmly, ‘This is what I have been hoping for. It’s the shock—it must have been.’ She repeated herself: ‘The shock of having to be admitted to the hospital is the trick,’ and as I looked into the mirror I understood. There was not a blemish on my face; a pink tinge where the eczema had been but that was all. I was cured. No more eczema, no more bandages and certainly no more Emmanuel Whittaker’s.

Once again Auntie Emmy came up trumps when she asked me if I would like to spend a week’s holiday in New Brighton. She said it was Uncle Joe’s idea, but I had a shrewd suspicion that she was being diplomatic. As far as I was concerned I couldn’t wait to pack my swimming costume and a towel, a Just William book to read in bed and, naturally, a pullover.

So I went with Uncle Joe and Auntie Emmy to New Brighton, a place not renowned for its amusements, its main attractions being an open-air swimming pool with diving boards and a shopping arcade. In fact we spent every day at this manufactured oasis, except when it rained, which it did for a large chunk of our holiday, which we spent in bus shelters and shop doorways. Umbrellas were an unnecessary expense, affordable only by bank managers, local officials and the well-off. On sunny days Uncle Joe and Auntie Emmy lounged on deck chairs by the pool, and I sat on the grass beside them, ostensibly reading my book but all the time watching furtively the goings-on around me. We made an ideal holiday trio. Auntie Emmy sucked Mint Imperials from the bag on her lap, listening to the beat of a popular tune blaring from hidden loudspeakers, while Uncle Joe, knotted white hankie on his head, scanned any discarded newspaper he’d managed to scavenge on his way from the digs. As he was fair-complexioned, his only concession to sunbathing was to undo the top button of his shirt. But nobody went to New Brighton for a tan: although the sun was out it wasn’t strong enough to cast a shadow.

People were splashing about in the pool but as yet no one had used the diving boards. I was a useful swimmer but my greater joy was high diving. As a young hopeful I had learned to dive from the lock gates on the Manchester Ship Canal and I had since improved from the top board at Robin Hill Baths, a few hundred yards from my home in Leslie Street. Now in New Brighton I eyed the top board by the pool. It was higher than anything I’d ever come across before, but I could manage a swallow dive, which was the nearest thing to flying, upwards and outwards, arms stretched out like wings and brought together for the final plunge: it was exhilarating, spectacular and fairly simple.

I stood up and announced that I was going for a swim, and Auntie Emmy said, ‘All right then.’

Walking down to the pool, I was conscious of my thin, white, emaciated body. I was fifteen years old, midway between the roundness of childhood and the chunky hardness of an adult, and I was fed up with the old gibe of many, who should know better, whenever I dived in the water at Robin Hall Baths: ‘Who’s thrown a pair of braces in?’

However, on this day, instead of diving off the side of the pool I made my way up the ladders to the highest board. On looking down, I had qualms as I saw the little figures below staring up at me, Auntie Emmy, shading her eyes from the sun, on her feet now. For a wild moment I thought of abandoning my madcap desire to show off, but then the thought of making my way down the ladders again was too shameful. I walked to the edge of the board, controlling my breathing, I stared outward and the next moment I was floating down almost in slow motion, and when I brought my arms forward for the entry I looked along my body, I could see my legs and feet together and I plunged into the water. It was the most exciting dive I’d ever attempted, and when I heaved myself out of the pool I noticed that all the noise and shrieks from the bathers had ceased and they only had eyes for me: it was my moment of glory.

When I got back to Auntie Emmy she was wiping her eyes, as she’d been crying. ‘Who learnt you to do that?’ she said.

I was shivering so much that my shrug went unnoticed and as I towelled myself Uncle Joe remarked wryly, ‘I can think of better ways to commit suicide.’

But the main memory of New Brighton eddies around my mind for one other landmark. On the day following my historic dive, a new entertainment visited the pool: eight beautiful girls, all blonde, same height—they might well have been octuplets. They were sponsored by a newspaper and announced as the Daily Mirror Eight. They danced to recorded music, perfectly synchronised. They were fantastic and I was mesmerised. Fifteen years old, and innocent, I was vaguely aware of the difference between men and women—this was made obvious when I watched them in their bathing costumes—but women had aroused no strange feelings in me until I saw the Daily Mirror Eight. Auntie Emmy said they were going back to the digs and I said I wouldn’t be long. In fact five minutes later I followed them, and as I walked through the streets in a haze of wonder a coach drew up alongside and, would you believe it, out stepped the first of the Daily Mirror Eight, the other seven close behind, making their way into a hotel. Not one of them noticed me, mouth agape, eyes shining with adulation. I hadn’t expected them to look my way, and if they had I would only have blushed. I was in love with all eight of them and that was enough for me. What a wonderful place to live in!

Oldham was the major cotton town in Lancashire in my opinion. Others will undoubtedly disagree. Cotton towns all had one thing in common: they were tired, and weary, and it would take another few years to fill the gaps left by the bloodbath of the Great War. Oldham Town Hall was a quiet, austere Victorian building, with heavy, stone pillars at the front, and except for the dirty, smoked brickwork it could have been reminiscent of the Parthenon in Ancient Greece; in fact most town halls in northern towns seemed to have been constructed from the same blueprint. Across the wide roadway from the town hall in Oldham was the Cenotaph, an evergreen memorial to the young Oldham lads who would never again walk up West Street or Barker Street for a Saturday night out in the Tommyfield market; and overlooking the Cenotaph, St Mary’s Parish Church.

It is poignant to bring to mind Armistice Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Each year when the church clock struck the eleventh hour all traffic stopped, trams ground to a halt, horses pulling carts were reined to a standstill, and cyclists dismounted and stood to attention by their bikes. Every pedestrian remained where he or she was; men removed their hats and women bowed their heads. The silence was almost tangible. Then after two minutes a soldier on the roof over the church doors, head and shoulders visible above the black stone battlement, put a bugle to his lips and the melancholy, evocative strains of the ‘Last Post’ pierced the veil of silence. Not until the last note had faded away did the town re-activate itself.

Alongside the church was the commercial heart of Oldham: dress shops, chemists, solicitors, Burton’s fifty-shilling tailors, Woolworth’s, Whitehead’s Café and, squeezed in the middle of all this affluence, a brave little greengrocer’s shop. It really was tiny, just one room crowded with a counter, a tap without a basin and no space for a lavatory, the nearest being the public toilets at the top of West Street—quite a distance for a weak bladder.

The over-worked proprietor was Sam Hellingoe, a round, darkvisaged man, not tall but compact. Alone he collected fruit and vegetables from the market in Manchester, laid out his daily purchases on a bench in front of the shop, and then hurried inside round the counter to serve his customers. If there weren’t any he swept the floor, polished the apples or wiped the counter as if it made any difference. He was always busy, but sadly his age was beginning to slow him down and reluctantly he decided to take on the expense of an assistant. This was a momentous decision because money was tight, so his assistant would have to be willing, able and above all thick enough to toil every day except Sunday for a pittance—and that is how I came to work there.

Mr Hellingoe, was forever in a flat cap and brown dustcoat—as a matter of fact in all my time in his establishment I never saw him take his cap off, not even to scratch his head—and like a dutiful assistant I followed suit in a flat cap, brown dustcoat and, hallelujah, my first pair of long trousers. Beneath my overalls at Emmanuel Whittaker’s I had still been in the short pants from my schooldays, but now I wore a pair of Vernon’s cast-offs, a bit long in the leg with a shiny backside, but I didn’t care: they were the bridge into manhood.

Each morning I met Mr Hellingoe on the Croft, where his small van was parked. We never exchanged ‘Good mornings’, we just nodded, and he squeezed himself into the driving seat, putting the gear shift into neutral before letting off the brake. Then I moved round the back of the van and when he gave me the thumbs up I began to push. It was hard work, but I’d only about a hundred yards to go to the top of West Street, where I gave him an extra running shove to set him off and the van slowly trundled down the hill. I watched it disappear like a very old tortoise on ice. It was all downhill to Manchester and that was his destination. Eight miles is a heck of a long way to freewheel, but I did say money was tight; after all, he had to pay me fifteen shillings a week—I had Tuesday afternoons off but worked until nine in the evenings on Saturdays—and petrol wasn’t cheap.

As time went on, I grew accustomed to the work. Mr Hellingoe was away for longer periods and I became self-assured, looking after the shop on my own, weighing out potatoes, carrots and Brussels sprouts with fallible dexterity on the old scales, popping the goods in a paper bag, and then ‘ting ting’ on the till, ‘There you are, missus, three pence change,’ or whatever. One day, however, I overstepped myself. An old lady clutching a shiny purse was feeling the fruit, squeezing the bananas, smelling the cabbages. I watched her covertly as she turned her attention to a box of apples and suspiciously I wandered casually from behind the counter. If anybody was going to walk off with a Cox’s pippin without paying it would be me, and why not? My wages weren’t princely and to make up the deficit I ate more of the stock than my Friday night’s wages were worth. Underneath the counter was a huge rubbish box. Overripe or beginning-to-smell fruit and vegetables found a quick exit into it, but amongst all this detritus there was quite a hefty amount of healthy apple cores, pears, some with only one bite out of them and banana skins, because while in charge of the shop I ate fruit by the sackful, but if a customer came in, wallop, the half-eaten fruit would find its way under the counter. But that’s between you and me.

Getting back to the old lady, who was now outside the shop, eyeing the rabbits hanging there: having selected one, she brought it in and dumped it on the counter.

‘How much?’ she said, and I told her, and here’s where I overstepped the mark.

Having watched Mr Hellingoe deftly skinning them, I blurted out, ‘Would you like it skinned?’

She looked at me doubtfully and said, ‘Can you manage?’

I winked at her and began the process. It was just like undressing a baby and she watched, probably marvelling at my dexterity—that is, until I came to the last bit. The rabbit was now stark naked and all I had to do was pull the last of the fur over its head.

‘There you are, madam,’ I said triumphantly, but when I jerked the fur over the rabbit’s head I was horrified to see that the fur must have torn because there was still some left on his head like a crew cut.

‘I’m not having that,’ she said and stormed out in high dudgeon.

What was I to do with the naked rabbit? I couldn’t chuck the whole thing in the rubbish box: Mr Hellingoe would know how many rabbits had been hanging outside. Then a smart wheeze crossed my mind. I still had the fur and all I had to do was to dress the rabbit again. The back legs were easy and I’d just got one of the forepaws clothed when Mr Hellingoe returned and I was caught literally red-handed. But instead of hitting the roof, he just smiled and said, ‘Take that home to your mother. You can have it for your Sunday dinner.’

I was overjoyed and at the same time ashamed of the amount of fruit I’d got through illegally, and I made up my mind that anything I took from the stock I’d replace with money in the till. At that moment I would willingly have pushed Mr Hellingoe all the way to Manchester and, if it would have saved him petrol money, all the way uphill back to Oldham.

When I went home that night I was awash with good thoughts—and wide open for the sucker punch. It wasn’t long in coming. I arrived home and casually tossed my wage packet on the table; then while Mother checked the contents, I pulled the rabbit from behind my back like Houdini at his best and said, ‘Voilà’.

She didn’t smile. ‘Why did you buy a rabbit?’ she said, still holding my wages, and my heart plummeted. Mr Hellingoe had stopped it out of my wages—the crafty old devil. Mother didn’t help matters when she said, ‘And he’s overcharged you as well.’

During the time I was helping to keep Mr Hellingoe’s body and soul together something momentous was happening in an old building just in front of Tommyfield: a new Oldham Scout troop was being formed. As I passed it on the way home I decided to drop in. There were about twenty or so urchins in a circle round the edges of a fairly large room. Half of the boys were still at school but quite a few of us were working for a living. A tall figure in a black cassock down to his ankles stood in the middle and made a short speech, welcoming us all to the formation of the 113th Oldham Scout troop and I relaxed. I noticed three of the older ones holding kettle drums, and as there was one not being used on the floor by them I casually picked it up and stood with the other three. They handed me a drumstick and in no time at all we were marching round the room in single file to the beat of our four drumsticks. By the end of the evening we were all members of the 113th Oldham Scout troop and speaking for myself it was the best evening’s work I’d ever done.

Scouting was to make me fitter and healthier, and give me selfassurance and the comradeship that had been so lacking in my past; but the most important part of this initiation was that I met Bobby Hall, a butcher’s boy. He was also one of the drummers and there was an instant rapport between us. Neither of us could drum. We both showed promise, though; and in a matter of months a banner led the troop on church parade, with four drummers with white ropes hanging beneath our drums and a big drum, and to cap it all looking pretty smart in our new Scout uniforms. The troop was divided into four patrols and I had already been appointed patrol leader of the Peewits. Bobby was troop leader, next in line to the Scout master, who turned out to be the curate at St Mary’s Parish Church. We never saw him in any uniform other than his cassock, but he was accepted nevertheless. The months went by and in that time I gained two armfuls of proficiency badges, all round cords; and my greatest achievement and the most coveted was that I became a King’s Scout. I must have been an awesome figure to the spotty herberts of my Peewit patrol as I explained how to tie knots, put a tent up and recognise the mating call of an owl. I took great pleasure in helping my little band gain proficiency badges of their own, and in return they paid me the compliment of listening to me as if I was Baden-Powell’s grandson.

I don’t know what has happened to the Scout movement these days. I haven’t seen a parade of Scouts for years but the writing was on the wall when I last saw a Scout jamboree on television. Gone were the broad-brimmed Scout hats, which were replaced by berets; and, worse, they all wore long trousers. Perhaps I should move with the times. Well, all I can say is tell that to the beefeaters.

It wasn’t long after the rabbit fiasco that my employment in the grocery trade came to an end, my place being taken by Mr Hellingoe’s daughter, a comely lass, I should think in her mid-twenties. I thought she was smashing but I wasn’t old enough to fancy her. I felt a bit hurt at being given the elbow, but then again she was his daughter and perhaps she worked for nothing as it was all in the family.

I’ve no idea how I came to start work in Shaw, a far-distant cry from the fleshpots of Oldham. Whereas I used to walk to work at Hellingoe’s, from Featherstall Road to Shaw was a fair tram ride. Even more extraordinarily, my new employment was at the Rutland Mill, a cotton mill, but thankfully not in the dark satanic part of it. I was to be the new office boy and I looked forward to it, completely forgetting how I sneered when my brother Vernon started to work in an office, but knowing him as I did I expect he aspired to an invitation to the boardroom table.

At least I had Saturdays off, and I put these rest days to good use, especially in the long summer days. Bobby Hall and I, now ex-Scouts, were still attracted by the lure of camping under the stars, miles from anywhere. For instance, on a typical Saturday afternoon we’d meet at the bus stop in the High Street of Oldham, both of us overloaded with heavy backpacks containing potatoes, eggs, bacon, bread and butter, cushioned by sleeping bags while our rolled blankets were tied securely on the top, frying pan and saucepans, enamel mugs hanging from the straps—we were always well prepared, living up to the Scouts’ motto. From Oldham we went out into the country, perhaps Delph or Saddleworth. Having offloaded our kit and ourselves from the bus, we began our journey to our camping grounds. Our favourite destination was a place called Chew Valley, a massive terrain of huge boulders interspersed with trees and streams. We trekked anything from five to eight miles into this deserted landscape to a rare patch of grass about six feet from a fast-moving stream. We kept our eyes open for dead trees. Within sight of our tiny Shangri-La, and would hurl a rope over a long sapless branch and give it a quick tug to bring it crashing to the ground. Being so dry, it broke into manageable pieces, which we hauled the short distance to our camp.

The first thing was to put up the tent. Everything was then piled inside, in case of inclement weather. The fire was next and thanks to the deadness of the wood a saucepan full of water was soon heating while one of us peeled the potatoes. Then the light began to fade and the stars appeared until the whole of the blackness was crowded with a glittering, sparkling ceiling…Sausage and mash had never tasted so good. A few minutes to digest it, tin plates rinsed in the stream, and then, relaxing on our backpacks, sipping our mugs of freshly brewed coffee, we sighed with happiness as we lit our first cigarettes of the day. Even now I feel blissful contentment overcoming my senses as I recall that first drag on a Woodbine. The silence of our surroundings was disturbed only by the spitting hot logs in the fire and the eternal symphony of the rushing stream’s hypnotic melody. Sleep came easily as by and large it had been a hectic day. Being old hands, we knew that blankets piled on top don’t keep you warm: it’s the blankets underneath that do that, as cold comes up from the earth. Automatically now we pounded out a hollow in the ground for our hips—in fact no bed in the most expensive hotel in the world could have been as comfortable—and when the birds and the daylight opened our eyes on the Sunday morning, we were well rested, hungry and ready to enjoy the day. Light fire, wash in the stream, fry bacon and eggs, the whole breakfast including slices of bread toasted on the tip of green saplings and once again the enamel mugs of coffee, followed by…yes, you’ve guessed it, the first Woodbine—not a bad way to spend a summer weekend.

When I was working at the Rutland Mill in Shaw, Saturdays were once again bright and pristine; I no longer had to work till nine o’clock as I had done in the fruit trade. I was older, possibly wiser, although I wouldn’t put money on it, and certainly a few shillings more affluent, and I had two stalwart mates. As well as Bobby Hall, Jack Cleaver was one of my pals. A strange lad, usually the target of our heartless humour, he wore glasses, steel-rimmed and held together by a strip of sticking plaster, and he had light straight hair which he pressed with open fingers to create waves. If the world was not exactly our oyster it was most definitely our winkle. Our main Saturday night attraction was the Gaumont cinema at the end of Union Street. As for the film, the question we first asked ourselves was, ‘Is it a talkie?’ and the second, ‘Is it in colour?’ This didn’t bother us a bit: it was Saturday night, hey, lads, hey and the devil take the hindmost.

The Gaumont cinema was a large, luxurious emporium showing the latest films and up-to-date news, not forgetting Arthur Pules at the mighty Wurlitzer. For many Oldhamers the perfect panacea for the end of a stressful working week was a Saturday night at the pictures. Just relaxing into the armchair-like seats was an experience to savour. Uniformed usherettes busily showed patrons to their seats; one usherette stood against the orchestra pit, facing the audience with a smile as she sold crisps, peanuts, chocolates and soft drinks from a tray strapped round her shoulders; another usherette patrolled the aisles, selling various brands of cigarettes and matches from a similar tray. There was a general feeling of content in the audience, excitement slowly rising under a subdued babble of conversation. The audience were the same people who had gone off to work during the week in overalls, dustcoats, ragged clothing and slightly better garb for office workers, but at the Gaumont cinema they had all, without exception, dressed up for the occasion. All the men wore collars and ties and the ladies decent frocks and in many cases hats as well. What a turn around from my dear old flea-pit Imperial days; no running up and down the aisles chasing each other and certainly no whistling, booing or throwing orange peel at the screen during the sloppy kissing bits. In all fairness, though, I must add that that was only at the Saturday morning shows and we were children enjoying a few moments not under supervision or parental guidance. In fact when I was old enough to go to the Imperial for the evening films the audience even then dressed up and enjoyed the films in an adult fashion.

Back to the sublime at the Gaumont cinema; as the lights went down, so did the level of conversation. A spotlight hit the centre of the orchestra pit and slowly, like Aphrodite rising from the waves, the balding head of Arthur Pules would appear as he played his signature tune on the mighty Wurlitzer. He was a portly figure in immaculate white tie and tails, hands fluttering over the keys and shiny black pumps dancing over the pedals as he rose into full view, head swivelling from side to side, smiling and nodding to acknowledge the applause; but for all his splendid sartorial elegance, having his back to the audience was unfortunate as the relentless spotlight picked out the shape of his corsets. Regular patrons awaited this moment with glee, judging by the sniggers and pointing fingers. We were no exception: having all this pomp and circumstance brought down by the shape of a pair of common corsets on a man was always a good start to the evening’s entertainment.

At this point the words of a popular melody would flash on to the screen—for instance, the ‘in’ song of the day, ‘It Happened on the Beach at Bali Bali’—and, after a frilly arpeggio to give some of the audience time to put their glasses on, a little ball of light settled on the first word of the song. In this case the first word was ‘It’; then it bounced on to ‘Happened’; then it made three quick hops over ‘on the Beach at’; and then it slowed down for ‘Bali Bali’. The women sang with gusto and the men just smiled and nodded.

Happily this musical interlude didn’t last too long. Arthur Pules, the organist, was lured back into his pit of darkness and the curtains opened on the big wide screen. The films at the Gaumont were a great improvement on the grainy pictures at the Imperial, and so they should have been: after all, the film industry had made great strides in the eight years since John and I had sat in the pennies, dry mouthed as the shadow moved across the wall to clobber one of the unsuspecting actors.

After two hours of heavy sighs and wet eyes ‘The End’ appeared on the screen and the lights in the auditorium came up, bringing us all to our feet as the drum roll eased into the National Anthem…no talking, no fidgeting, simply a mark of respect for our King and Queen.

From the cinema we made our way eagerly to the next port of call, the chippie at the top of Coldhurst Street, for our customary fish and chips sprinkled liberally with salt and vinegar, and salivated to the top of Belmont Street, where Bobby Hall lived. Conversation was on hold as we stood in a circle, the steam of the hot fish and chips mingling with our clouds of breath on the cold night air. Finally with sighs of satisfaction we saw Bobby to his door, and then Jack and I made tracks through the darkness to 36 Leslie Street.

Sunday evening was just as interesting. Our little gang met as usual and made our way down to Union Street, where hordes of people strolled down one side of the street to the end, crossed over the road and walked up the opposite side. It was habitual, the Sunday night paseo. Chatting and larking about, we joined the parade, just a few young blokes without a cogent thought between them, but this was not so—we were all of the same mind: GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS! We were growing up; it was the April of our lives. Should we come upon a linkage of girls we immediately locked on behind them, a decent space between us lads and our quarry. The girls threw covert glances over their shoulders and for our part we pretended to be oblivious to them, Bob and I laughing at nothing, and Jack staring ahead with what he perceived to be a steely glint, which didn’t quite work because his eyes were slightly crossed to start with. And another weekend hit the dust.

The offices of the Rutland Mill were palatial, with high ceilings in the boardroom and the general office; these were separated by a washroom, which had two gleaming taps above the basin and at the far end a toilet. All the office doors were either mahogany or rosewood, with shiny cut-glass door knobs; the windows were long and curtained, the bottom half of frosted glass so that the workers would be unable to look in on their betters, and more importantly, we wouldn’t have to look at them. In the first few weeks I felt embarrassed by the cheapness of my suit—Vernon had always been taller than me; but I did polish my shoes so that at least I could walk about the office with more confidence. Filling most of the space were two long desks. On one desk was a girl at one end and me at the other, and at the opposite side an older man facing me and a woman facing the girl, both more important than us; on the second desk a clerk even more important and facing him the big panjandrum, the boss man of us all, the secretary Edmund Taylor. From where he sat we were all within the orbit of his baleful gaze. As he looked at us over his glasses, we doubled our work rate. He never smiled and I surmised that he was either unhappy at home or nursing a grievance that he was grossly underpaid.

My duties were not too taxing. Most of my time was spent entering crate numbers of cops into an enormous ledger. The sheer size of this book gave me a sense of importance. Another duty of mine every week was to take the wages in a huge tray up to the mule room, where the big and little piecers queued for their hard-earned pittance. That was the only occasion I had to go into the mill, and for the first time my heart went out to my father, who was a big piecer at the Standard Mill in Rochdale. The treadwheel in old prisons would have been preferable to a few days in the mule room, where workers, barefoot on the oily, uneven floor, continuously walked up and down between the in-and-out movement of the mules piecing up cotton strands that broke with monotonous regularity; the heat was stultifying and the noise horrendous. Another regular duty of mine was to top up all the inkwells and distribute new blotting paper to the other members of staff.

When we acquired electricity at home is a mystery. It seems that one day we were holding the taper to the gas mantle to bring soft light to the room and the next we clicked a switch on the wall and a brighter light shone from a sixty-watt bulb. I can’t recall any major upheavals in our lives at 36 Leslie Street—no electrician tearing up the skirting boards for wires and connections. Now we had a wireless plugged into the mains no less, and you can’t do that with gas, but our listening was rationed because of the expense, unless it was something special; and on Sunday 3 September 1939, a fine, warmish day, sitting on the steps to the backyard, face turned upwards to the sun to take advantage of the passing summer, I heard Mr Neville Chamberlain, our Prime Minister, informing us all that from today we were at war with Germany. I was only sixteen years old, so I accepted the news with equanimity; I didn’t honestly believe it concerned me. The next day the air-raid sirens wailed over the land and I still wasn’t convinced it was real; in any case it was common knowledge that it would all be over by Christmas. Here a very strange thing occurred. Aunt Marie received a letter from her brother, Uncle Ernest, who was in the navy, assuring her that there would be no war. It was dated 21 August 1939, but ironically the letter was delivered the day after war was declared. In his letter Uncle Ernest told Aunt Marie that he was now serving on HMS Adventure, which in the past had been in reserve but now was commissioned on active service.

Contrary to popular expectation, the war was not all over by Christmas, and war in the air and on the high seas was taking a heavy toll of British lives; and at home Uncle Ernest was constantly in our thoughts.

During this moment of history, when I was still filling inkwells at the Rutland Mill, only once was I in trouble. Next to me, the girl on my desk was new, a little older than me but very self-assured. I didn’t really get on with her, as she treated me like a minion—‘Bring this’, or ‘Pass me that’ or, once when I sneezed, ‘For heaven’s sake, use a hankie’; and while I appreciated the fact that she was slightly superior in office seniority, she had been with us only for a few days whereas I was an old hand. Anyway, one dinnertime I happened to mention that the cotton mill was a frightening place at night, especially now that the war was in full swing and all the windows were blacked out. Ken Smith, the senior clerk, was about to leave the office and as he was passing he said that the mill was a frightening place during the day. Clever Clogs snorted. He looked at her and continued. ‘Some time ago, he said, when he was doing my job, as he was about to enter the passage a man walked towards him carrying an arm on a piece of paper, followed by two other workers who were supporting the man who had lost it. He’d had an accident with a fan belt and there was blood all over that passage, and that was in the middle of the morning, he said, and some say that his ghost still comes along the passage at night. The story scared the pants off me. A cotton mill at night is never silent: it creaks and groans, and somewhere in the factory something falls to the floor. But when he’d gone she said she wasn’t afraid of the dark.

‘You’re pathetic,’ she said.

That did it. ‘All right,’ I replied. ‘Go up into the mill tonight, then.’

She said she couldn’t tonight as she was going to the pictures and that was that.

But the following night when everyone else had gone and the factory was deserted apart from us, as she was stamping the mail she gave the last stamp a violent thump, turned to me and said, ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ As she stormed out of the office, I thought, What’s the matter with her? Then it all came back to me—my challenging her to go into the empty black mill. I dashed after her to the beginning of the long stone passage that led to the steps up to the card room and stared into the blackness, but it was too late: there was no sign of her. I hadn’t a torch or anything—it had never really occurred to me that she would take up the dare. I gulped. Then again, she was so cocksure and I hadn’t forced her. Tentatively I called her name. The silence was deafening, so I called again, louder, but to no avail. So I shrugged and wondered if she’d gone home, leaving me standing there like a bridegroom wondering if it isn’t too late to call it off. But when I went back to the safety of the bright office, I saw her coat over the back of the chair, so I knew she had gone into the card room. Suddenly I’d had enough. If she wanted to play silly games, that was up to her. I had a tram to catch, and when she returned to the office full of triumph I wasn’t going to be sitting there to applaud, and she could put that in her pipe and smoke it.

However, when morning inevitably came there was a strained atmosphere in the office when I arrived. The girl was not there, but more remarkably the secretary was, and he looked as if he’d had a serious illness and hadn’t yet shaken it off. ‘Come into the boardroom,’ he rasped, and I followed him into the hallowed magnificence reserved for the chosen few. He sat at the enormous table. ‘What happened last night?’ was his opening gambit. For a moment I didn’t understand; then the events of the night before came back to me and I told him as much as I knew. In a quiet voice he filled in the rest. At about three o’clock in the morning he had been called out of bed by the police. The front door of the office was wide open and on entering they’d spotted the pile of mail unposted and the girl’s coat slung over the back of the chair. The secretary dutifully posted the letters and put out the lights. Nobody gave going into the factory itself a thought and it was only when the women arrived in the morning to start work in the card room that the girl had been discovered in a half-full skip of bobbins, fast asleep. Again the secretary was called back to the mill and, observing that the girl was on the verge of a breakdown, instructed the other girl in the office to take her home and call a doctor. Then I arrived, the only one in Shaw apparently unaware of the calamity at the Rutland Mill.

The secretary gave me a severe rollicking, ending with the fatal words, ‘Get your cards,’ which in everyday parlance means, ‘You’re sacked.’ I was appalled by what had happened to the girl and ashamed at my cowardice in not going to find her. Anyway, head down, I shuffled from the boardroom and sat at my desk, still in heavy shock. Then the secretary came back and sat in his place, and, probably from force of habit, on seeing him in his familiar seat I opened the enormous ledger and started, in a daze, to enter the numbers in the correct columns. The fact that I had just been given the sack never entered my mind and the secretary didn’t press the matter; we both carried on as if it had never happened. The girl didn’t return to work, so in all probability the secretary had concluded that he couldn’t afford to lose two members of his staff in one day.

When I travel back in time to when I was just gone sixteen years of age, one particular incident in that historic year of 1939 springs immediately to mind. It was not the declaration of war but something more significant in my life than the inevitable conflict to come.

It all began to snowball one Sunday afternoon, when I found myself in a friend’s house. How or why I was there I’ve completely forgotten, but one thing sticks in my mind: in the front room there was an upright piano and anything musical had always attracted me. I should add that I played the mouth organ, which hardly entitled me to call myself a musician. Any fool can press a piano key and get a result, and we all do it, but when my friend sat down to play, I listened with awe as he knocked out a popular dance tune. What impressed me more than anything was that he never once looked down at his hands, and without a break in the music he looked towards the door and said, ‘Come in, Arthur.’ Another youth entered, carrying a violin case, which he opened, and after a few tentative tuning notes they segued into ‘The Blue Danube’. Then with more panache they went into a swing version of the same thing. I was transfixed, absolutely spellbound. If only I could play the guitar, we could form a British Hot Club de France. Surely the guitar wasn’t too difficult to learn? I desperately wanted to be a part of the action and before I could stop myself I blurted out that I played the drums, which wasn’t strictly accurate: all I possessed was a pair of drumsticks from my Scout days. The next Sunday afternoon I brought them along. I was the last to arrive and I was introduced to another member of the group, who played the bass, which belonged to his father, who fortunately was in hospital for a month or two. In a short time we were into the first few bars of ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’. I was perched on the arm of the settee, drumming on the seat of a chair, and I’ll tell you something: it wasn’t at all bad—we were definitely in the groove. My friend on the piano had a healthy pile of sheet music and the rest of us busked it.

After a few more Sundays we were really swinging, to the extent that I was encouraged to do sixteen-bar breaks. I’d no idea where these came or how long were sixteen bars. I just beat time until they all stopped playing and the pianist said, ‘Take it away, man,’ and I went into a drum routine, starting on the chair seat, ‘rack-a-tacket’ on the back of the chair, on the linoleum part of the floor to the arm of the settee, all to the accompaniment of ‘Yea, man, go for it.’ It was heady stuff.

A couple of Sundays later we were at the stage of getting together a programme for dancing and suggesting names for the band. There was ‘The Oldham Serenaders’ and ‘The Swinging Four’, but the favourite was ‘The Blue Rhythm Band’. I have no excuse for what happened next. Whatever possessed me to even consider we were ready for public scrutiny? But on the spur of the moment, unbeknownst to the rest of the band, I placed an advert in the Oldham Evening Chronicle: ‘THE BLUE RHYTHM BAND WILL PLAY AT ANY FUNCTION, DANCES, WEDDINGS, ETC. MODERATE TERMS’ and to my astonishment it was in the local paper that same evening. I couldn’t wait to take the cutting with me to show the lads next Sunday. My troubles, however, were just beginning. On Wednesday, only two days after the advert had appeared, I received a reply. I was absolutely flummoxed: it had never entered my head that somebody would write back—my thought process had ended with the advert.

Fortunately the letter contained a telephone number. Good, I only had to tell them that we had another engagement on that particular Saturday. Yes, that was it—simple. Standing in a telephone booth, I dialled the number and a very attractive woman’s voice answered. No, she hadn’t sent the letter; she was only the secretary to Mr Flintock, the secretary of the club. Her voice was so pleasant and seductive that I found myself discussing terms for an evening of dancing at a municipal hall in Hollinwood. Having agreed a fee, I was now a worldly business tycoon and ended the conversation by saying I was looking forward to seeing her at the dance.

It wasn’t till I’d walked halfway down the street that the enormity of my brashness came home to me. If only I had the address of the recruiting officer of the French Foreign Legion, I could be halfway to Sidi-Bel-Abbes by Sunday. Alas, this was not to be, and when I faced the lads on Sunday I confessed abjectly and fully. They looked at each other, and then the pianist said, ‘We’d better get down to it.’ We had only one Sunday left before we took to the road. Oh, how I loved my comrades at that moment, and how much I was looking forward to a week on Saturday! I was in the lofty realms of euphoria again, leaving myself wide open for the sucker punch. It was later that evening when the bombshell burst: I didn’t have a drum kit. I certainly couldn’t turn up at our debut with a pair of drumsticks and an old kitchen chair. Once more I fell on my feet. The pianist’s brother ran a musical instrument shop and I hired the accoutrements for the Sunday only and on the condition that I returned them in good order. I agreed and walked away with as much as I could afford, which unfortunately didn’t include a bass drum, but already I had an idea about that.

The days dominoed down to the fateful Saturday, and to seven o’clock in the evening, by which time the dancers were already changing their shoes in the cloakroom. The communal hall itself was a barn of a place, with chairs all round the dancing area and a stage where we would soon be performing. We were late, through no fault of our own: three trams had refused to take us on board. Normally tram conductors were in the main accommodating, but we were an odd collection. I was laden down with the big drum that I had borrowed from the Scout troop and a hired gold-glitter snare drum under my arm. The rest of the kit was packed in a suitcase crammed with the foot pedal for the big drum and a stand for the snare drum, not forgetting a carrier bag of sheet music. One witty conductor asked which one of us was Oscar Rabin.

Eventually thirty minutes later we were on the stage, busily sorting out our instruments. The bass player helped me with my stuff and picked up what he surmised was the stand for my snare drum. He looked at it curiously and then nudged me with it and whispered, ‘What’s this for?’ Now he’d opened it out I understood. In my hurry to get out of the musical instrument shop I’d hired myself an ordinary music stand instead of the stand to hold my crowning glory, the gold-glitter snare drum, but the music stand would have to do for tonight.

I carried on tightening the ropes on the big drum, flicking my finger against the skin to satisfy myself that it was taut enough for a quick step. All this time there was a puzzled silence from the waiting dancers. They were mostly middle-aged women—it must have been some kind of Mothers’ Union anniversary, or something like it. I fixed the foot pedal on to the big drum and balanced the gold-glitter snare drum on to the music stand, giving it two experimental taps to make sure that it didn’t bounce off. The pianist had opened the lid of the upright piano before placing his pile of music on top within easy reach. Then with an arpeggio the tuning began, by which time the dance should have been in full swing, having started forty-five minutes ago.

Apart from us musicians the place was tight with the silence of amazement, even when the pianist nodded his head and opened with a Paul Jones. Usually this was just a preliminary so that everyone could get acquainted. The ladies went round in a circle, the men walked round the ladies in the opposite direction and when the music stopped couples facing each other were either delighted or lumbered as they then slid into a foxtrot or a waltz.

None of this mattered at this particular dance, though, as nobody left their seats to take the floor. They just sat stupefied all through our massacre of ‘Here We Come Gathering Nuts in May’.

I was the first to crack. I had enough difficulty keeping the snare drum on the music stand, but a greater problem arose with the big drum. Every time I stamped on the foot pedal the big drum slid forward a few inches, and when the pianist had done about sixteen bars another calamity occurred: the pile of music on top of the piano dropped down into its innards, silencing the melody. We were left with only the thin whining of the fiddle for the tune, and only the Irish could dance to that. The situation was teetering dangerously close to farce. Stretched out almost flat on my back, looking as if I was on a recliner in my desperate attempt to get my toe on the foot pedal of the big drum before it ended up on the dance floor, I glanced fearfully at the immobile punters…Hostility, disbelief and outrage were the dominant expressions, directed at us maliciously. It was then that I noticed the secretary, who had met us on our belated arrival. He was standing in front of the stage, beckoning to me. I abandoned the big drum, went forward and bent down to hear what he had to say.

It was short and to the point. ‘What are your expenses?’ he hissed through gritted teeth.

I was so embarrassed that all I wanted at that moment was for a pile driver to trundle up and hammer me into the ground. I looked again at the lynch mob on the dance floor and whispered to him, ‘Is there a back door to this place?’

‘Behind you,’ he replied curtly. Then he turned to the audience with a grovelling smile and asked, ‘Is there anyone here who plays the piano?’

An old lady put up her hand and while we were feverishly struggling to collect our paraphernalia she was already thumping away at ‘Carolina Moonbeams’. For a moment there was no response: the dancers were still shell shocked. Then, realising that they weren’t going to get their money back, reluctantly they began to search out partners to express their grievances to as they shuffled round the floor.

After our escape we didn’t wait for the tram and once we were at a safe distance from the communal hall we decided to walk home,—no mean feat, as it was all of three miles. Strange as it may seem, we were not downhearted. On the contrary, as we began to see the funny side of it I started to chuckle, which fathered a snigger and then a laugh, and soon we were all shrieking with maniacal laughter. Every so often we had to stop, offload and dry our eyes and our noses as we were shaken by another paroxysm of howling. It was carnival night at the asylum.

How could we have conceivably been a success with our amateurish blundering into a situation we were in no way competent to deal with? We had got away with it this time, but there’d be another and another until we were old enough to realise that all youth is not necessarily fireproof.

Meanwhile changes were taking place at the Rutland Mill. The storekeeper received his call-up papers and within a week he was serving in His Majesty’s army. The next time he came to bid us farewell was on his embarkation leave, a hero. All we young bucks envied him and still very few shots had been fired in anger. His leaving the storekeeper’s job left an important vacancy, and I wasn’t going to let a chance like this pass by unnoticed. So from dogsbody in the office I became the new storekeeper, back in my beloved overalls, once more a worker, and I could sit on the upper deck of the tram and light up a Woodbine without embarrassment. My duties varied. I was responsible for all the goods that made a cotton mill operative. My storeroom was in the yard annexed to the main factory, a large airy room. On each wall but one there were wooden shelves about two feet in depth, divided into compartments three feet long and deep towering up to the eighteen-foot ceiling. These shelves were stocked with everything to keep the factory supplied with the necessities of life: different-coloured crayons to identify cops from the card room, electric light bulbs, nails, nuts and bolts, toilet rolls for the office staff and heads of departments—it was rather like a shop with everything costing only a signature.

I don’t suppose for a moment that without a good storekeeper the factory would have ground to a halt, but it might have limped a bit. I didn’t spend all my time in the storeroom. Whenever a lorry piled high with bales of cotton pulled up outside the warehouse, it was my job to offload it. Manipulating the hoist, I sent the clamps high into the air, where the lorry driver caught them in order to fix them round the bale. Then with a downward movement of the handle I lifted the load clear, lowering it gently on to a waiting trolley, where it was wheeled away into the maw of the cavernous warehouse. The next bale was clamped and the same procedure ensued, and so on.

It could be dangerous: in the unlikely event of the bale tearing itself free of the clamps and hurtling to the ground, if I happened to be underneath it, looking the other way, it would be goodnight Vienna, and I would be carted off to the mortuary with a very flat head, half my size and twice as wide. With the tall doors of the warehouse open it was a pleasant enough occupation. In the summertime the warehouse was always the coolest department in the mill, but in winter a polar bear would have been in serious danger of hypothermia. I offloaded the bales wrapped up like one of the crew of Scott’s Antarctic expedition. Blizzards in a Lancashire winter were frequent, but the bales still had to be unloaded until thankfully I closed the enormous twenty-foot doors and hurried off to a room adjoining the general offices, where a hot mug of tea helped to bring my circulation back to normal.

Nobody knew where I would be at any given moment, but hanging about in my storeroom wasn’t an ideal way to pass time away, until I had a brainwave. I bought a lilo, hauled it up the shelves to the top one just under the ceiling, and laid it out so that I could lie comfortably, reading books or just resting. It was high enough to be unseen by anyone on the floor fifteen feet below, but a good vantage point for me to observe them. So that I would not fall off my perch if sleep overtook me, I nailed the long handle of a brush across the edge. It was the perfect bunk on an ocean-going liner. On one occasion, a labourer from the mule room poked his head round the door and called me. Had I been on the floor I would have asked him what he wanted and as long as he signed for it he could have taken away his articles; but when this particular man came in, he decided that I wasn’t there, had a quick shufti round and then snatched two light bulbs and stuffed them in his pocket. He was about to leave when I shouted, ‘Oi!’ He stopped in his tracks, looking round. ‘Put them bulbs back,’ I yelled. He didn’t hesitate: he put the bulbs back and ran out terrified. He was the gofer for the mule overlooker but he never entered the storeroom again without first knocking on the door, giving me time to climb down before shouting, ‘Come in.’

In the course of my work I was able to visit any part of the mill to check on supplies. Sometimes I’d just be bored by long stretches in my secret bunk and in truth I had no object in mind but I walked purposefully with energy and foresight, ostensibly carrying out my duties. The operatives in the mill seemed to enjoy my passing through, exchanging cheery badinage. One morning I was chatting away to a couple of big piecers who were eulogising about Bing Crosby. My face lit up: Bing was my idol too. Spotting a bucket resting aimlessly in the corner, I picked it up, stuck my head in it and sang ‘When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day’. I finished off the song with a ‘boo boo deo voihm’ and when I lowered the bucket the couple of lads were now a dozen, obviously impressed by my rendering. With smiles all round, and like a seasoned artiste, I left them wanting more. Some of them started to call me ‘Bing’ and from then on there was always a bucket handy when I went up into the mule room. I vocalised other Bing offerings but the favourite was ‘When the Blue of the Night’.

The bubble had to burst. Some of the big piecers were leaving their machines to gather round when I put my head in the bucket. I was in particularly good voice one morning and I finished up with the usual ‘deo voihm’, but when I took the bucket from my face the audience was not what I expected: it was the manager himself, all thin, six feet two of him. I attempted a sickly smile but he was unmoved. Either he didn’t like Bing Crosby or in the last few weeks production at the mill had dropped disastrously. The manager, who must have been in his seventies, spoke in a quavering voice, but as always he was economical with his words. ‘Get your cards,’ he said, and he left, the mule room. I looked round but all my newfound fans were frantically busy at their machines.

This was the second time I’d been sacked from the Rutland Mill, but I’d learned the lesson from my first dismissal. I ignored it and continued to be the storekeeper. A few weeks later when the mule overlooker passed me in the yard he said, ‘You must have a great guardian angel looking after you.’ Naturally I didn’t give it a second thought until the next time.

I must have been about sixteen when I had dancing lessons, not tap or ballet but ballroom dancing. I attended evening classes twice a week at Eddie Pollard’s Dancing Academy, in Hollinwood. I never saw Eddie dance himself. He collected the fee at the door and put on the records, old seventy-eights, on an even older gramophone. Without wishing to boast, I was a pretty good dancer. I didn’t get many partners, because I was a very young sixteen-year-old and like a fool I concentrated on learning to dance rather than assignations. I could do the fishtail and the running six and could even get round the floor without watching my feet. I wasn’t too fussed about the waltz, and the foxtrot was OK. However, the quickstep was my metier. I don’t quite know why I have mentioned all this, except now I’m a senior citizen I can still do a fishtail but in all my life I’ve never met a woman who can manage it.

One Sunday morning we had a very pleasant surprise. Uncle Ernest came to visit us on one of his leaves. What a fine figure of a man he cut in his navy uniform as he stood with his back to the fire, Vernon on his left and me on the other side! He spoke modestly of actions at sea in which he had taken part. Vernon and I drank in every word, watching him with admiring eyes. Obviously he couldn’t tell us what ship he was serving on or where any operations took place. In fact he was reluctant to answer all our many questions and it was only when he had left that I realised that we should have talked about something else. As it was Sunday we had Yorkshire pudding and onion gravy, but today we all had a smaller portion in order to heap his plate, as the dinner was now in his honour.

Needless to say, we were all in the war as well. Firewatchers were introduced and once a week, according to a roster, a few of us spent the night on the roof of the factory with sand and stirrup pumps, in order to deal with any incendiary bombs released by the Luftwaffe. The Rutland Mill was situated on the edge of the moors, bordered by grassland, so at night on the factory roof we were surrounded by impenetrable blackness; the millions of stars above were the only visible proof that we were not upside down. The nearest target for the German bombers was the city of Manchester, ten miles to the south; and Liverpool was another danger area, much further away to the north-west. In all the time of our firewatches no one was called upon to put out an incendiary, no one even saw an incendiary and to be brutally honest none of us ever heard an aircraft, friend or foe—in fact Churchill and his war cabinet would have been much safer holding counsel in the boardroom of the Rutland Mill.

It was now clear that I would soon be called up to lend my shoulder to the wheel (what a useless choice of words). My mate Bobby Hall and I discussed which service we could volunteer for. We were both physically fit from our camping excursions and a brief dallying in Health and Strength, in which we had practised co-ordination of muscles, centralisation of the abdominal wall, pectorals, latissimus dorsi—we knew it all, almost as if we’d been preparing ourselves for the service of King and country. Bobby made up his mind to volunteer for the navy, but I had other plans: my ambition was to train as a fighter pilot. I desperately wanted to be one of the few who were owed so much by so many, according to Churchill, and that is why I would opt for the Royal Air Force—that is, if the war was still on.

How I came to regret that last thought about the duration of the war! On 25 November 1941 the flagship HMS Barham was torpedoed off the coast of Egypt, and five minutes later she capsized, exploded and sank. The War Office despatched over eight hundred telegrams expressing condolences to parents, wives or any next of kin. Granddad Sykes opened the buff-coloured envelope with dread in his heart. ‘We regret to inform you that your son…’ Now as for so many other grieving families the war had laid its clammy hands on 36 Leslie Street, and never again would we see Uncle Ernest, but to this day I can still visualise him standing with his back to the fire in the warm aroma of roast lamb.

As I sat in my storeroom one day, gazing at the blank whitewashed wall, an idea began to form. I took a handful of coloured chalks and began to sketch a flight sergeant pilot looking up into the sky. It was life sized from the waist up, with wings above his left breast pocket and three stripes on his upper arm topped by a crown. It wasn’t bad—in fact people began to come into the storeroom on some pretext or other in order to see the sketch. The huge expanse of whitewashed wall was inviting and in a short time I’d sketched the head of the mule overlooker. His round, white, podgy face dominated by spectacles wasn’t too difficult. More people came in and chuckled as they recognised the expressionless face.

Elated by my success, I added other bosses and even the secretary of the mill, my first boss, as I had an inexhaustible supply of crayons of many colours. The whole of the hierarchy was now on my wall, head-on or in profile, smiling or glowering, everyone recognisable. Word soon spread and each came into view the portraits and sheepishly give their own visage a cursory glance, and they came back again to examine their faces more closely when they thought I wasn’t looking. It wasn’t a storeroom any more; it was the portrait gallery of the Rutland Mill.

However, one face was missing: that autocratic phissog of the manager. There was an ideal space in the middle of his workforce, a perfect placing; and more than that, whereas the others were life size the manager, as befitting his rank, would be twice life size. I hadn’t seen him since the bucket episode but he was an easy target. Some days later I was standing halfway up my ladder, shading in the wispy, white hair of his head, when there was a commotion outside the door. I was too wrapped up in my art to take notice, but then the door burst open and one of the workers in the ware-house crashed in, in a muck sweat, saw me up the ladders and said, ‘There’s three lorryloads stacked up waiting to be offloaded.’ Turning, he was about to dash back when he stopped suddenly. He turned round and for the first time he saw that the man holding the ladder steady was the manager.

‘Oh, I didn’t see you, sir,’ he said.

The manager, with his face sideways, so that I could sketch his profile, and without moving his lips, ordered the man to find somebody else to work the hoist.

The portraits remained long after I had left to serve my country and although the inside of the mill was painted twice a year, one wall remained inviolate. It was never painted over and when the mill finally closed in 1963 the flight sergeant, my first sketch, was still staring into the sky.

MY COUNTRY NEEDS ME

On or about my eighteenth birthday I left home to join the Royal Air Force, taking with me a carrier bag containing shaving kit, soap and a handkerchief, which for the few early years of my life had been pinned to the front of my jersey but had been hardly used when my sleeve was available. In addition I had a bag of Mint Imperials for the journey and half a crown for emergencies. I walked the five or six hundred yards from home until I reached the Methodist Chapel; then I stopped and looked back to 36 Leslie Street, just one of a row of ordinary houses, overlooked on the right by Ward Street Central School, with Ward Street on the left, all surrounding two acres of wasteland fondly known as the Mucky Broos, and at the far end of Ward Street, Featherstall Road. I swallowed a lump of nostalgia in my throat. It wasn’t exactly the New Jerusalem, but it had been my own secure little world for seventeen years.

At Oldham Central station I am the only occupant of the windswept platform. A porter emerges from a door, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. He takes out a huge pocket watch and looks down the line. Then he sees me and obviously comes to the conclusion that helping me on to the train with my carrier bag wouldn’t warrant a tip and he disappears inside again to finish off his breakfast. Turning, I examine the Nestlé’s chocolate machine but as I feel for some coppers a strident bell announces that a train is due, and at that moment, chugging asthmatically, it comes round a bend and squeals to a halt in the station. No one alights and I am the only passenger to get on. The guard’s piercing whistle brings my head out of the window in time to see him wave his green flag before adroitly nipping back into his compartment, and with a hoot of indifference the train leaves Oldham, bearing me to the beginning of a new life in the Royal Air Force, cue music, go lights, stand by curtain. Every now and again I indulge myself in a spot of melodramatics, and believe me, there isn’t a dry eye in the house—all, of course, in my imagination, which explains my sometimes vacuous expression.

Padgate was my destination, a collection point for new recruits. Naturally I didn’t know anybody, and I was too shy to rectify this. Others more convivial hung about in groups, enjoying the start of a new adventure, all in civvies, the only piece of uniformity being cardboard boxes containing our civilian gas masks slung around the shoulder by a length of string. I remember standing open-mouthed, listening to a group whom I took to be Poles or Czechs. They were neither. I was about a couple of thousand miles wide of the target: they were all from Glasgow. Looking around at the motley collection of would-be heroes my heart sank. I knew that the war wasn’t going well, but if they were enlisting the likes of us the situation was worse than I thought. By lights out I hadn’t said a word to anybody. In fact the last time I’d spoken had been back at home when I said, ‘Well, I’ll be off then.’

I climbed into a top bunk and, stuffing my head into my rolled-up jacket, which was to be my pillow, I cried silently, tears pouring from me until I ran dry; stifled sobs racked my body in a bout of self-pity and homesickness. I hated change, but this wasn’t just change, it was a monumental leap into the unknown. It never struck me that my misery was the ending of my youth and the beginning of my education, the door opening to manhood.

Lesson one came the following morning. Everyone had left the hut to parade outside, except that is the old sergeant, two smart characters in sports jackets and flannels, possibly thirtyish, and me, fascinated by the three of them whispering together. Then one of them took out his wallet and surreptitiously passed over something that crinkled into the sergeant’s big hand. While it was disappearing into his trouser pocket, he glanced around to check that they were alone, and with a start he spotted me, and barked, ‘Outside, you, or I’ll have you on a fizzer.’ I hurried out, followed by the irate NCO, but the two ‘nudge, nudge, wink, winks’ didn’t leave the hut. Nor did they appear on any other subsequent parade and I learned my first lesson in the academy of life: there’s always a way round everything if you have the wherewithal.

On one of our next parades we were all in uniform, well most of us, some partially fitted, some ill fitted and one or two fit only for the dustbin. We were being instructed in the art of forming fours, dressing, halting, about turning, etc.—not a taxing programme for us lads, but there’s always one…Ours was an obviously well-educated, well-connected youth, six feet four, with a podgy, lumpy body misshapen by three square meals a day since birth in houses where dinner was taken in the evening and not at midday. Apparently there wasn’t a uniform to fit him, so when we all paraded he lined up with us in his civilian suit and his box gas mask held round his shoulders by string; the only bit of uniform was a forage cap, which was obviously too small and looked even more ludicrous when worn perfectly straight on top of his head. He viewed everything with disdain, as if he’d just woken up in a rubbish tip. But this wasn’t all. He was dysfunctional: his legs and arms were strangers to the rest of his body, he couldn’t march, his right arm went out with his right leg, and when the order came ‘By the left, quick march,’ out went his left foot and so did his left arm, so he marched with a sort of lopsided gait. The way he managed to keep his hat on defied all the laws of gravity. The loud bellowing, the cajoling, the demonstrations of the drill sergeant were useless. To put it simply, he was a misfit and no further use to the RAF, and within two days he was demobbed and back in civvy street. Poor lad, I felt sorry for him. On the other hand, I wish I’d thought of that—but then again I was happy where I was, and he undoubtedly enjoyed a much better life in his ancestral home than he did in our Nissen hut.

After a few days of spit-and-polished boots, button burnishing, inoculations and drill, we were ready for our first posting. It was…Blackpool. When I read this information on the noticeboard my heart surged with joy. Sixteen weeks in Blackpool, the whole summer in Blackpool—I could scarcely believe it. Accommodation and food were free, and on top of that we received money to spend, so you can imagine my euphoria as I shouldered my pack and rifle to rough it in the land of my dreams.

On arrival at Blackpool Central station our intake was paraded so as to be informed of the allotment of billets, and once again my cup of happiness was dangerously near the top. We were not to live in barracks, Nissen huts or tents; we were billeted in bed-and-breakfast guesthouses a short walk from the tower and even shorter to the promenade. Perhaps this was a dream and I was still in Padgate with my head buried in the jacket.

As I made my way up the stairs of my guesthouse, carpeted stairs too—what a novelty, I stood at the door of the bedroom, wondering if I should knock. I could scarcely believe my eyes. Perhaps I should have taken my boots off before I entered. There was no tatty, torn linoleum on the floor but instead a thick wall-to-wall carpet, a rug in front of a dressing table—a dressing table no less, twin beds with white pillows, eiderdowns, bedside tables with lamps and a glistening chandelier above. It was more palatial than anything I had ever seen, even in films. I couldn’t wait for bedtime, or maybe I should now say, ‘Roll on lights out’. Apart from Padgate, it was the first time I’d had a bed to myself. Then an awful thought struck me: I had been sent to the wrong address and any minute now an irate air vice marshal in a dressing gown full of medals would walk in and bellow, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ But it was no mistake.

The man sharing the room was slightly taller than me, with light floppy hair above a boyish, unlined face; even so I reckoned he must have been pushing thirty. He merged effortlessly with the room, moving gracefully as he unpacked an enormous suitcase and placed bottles of various potions on the dressing table, two monogrammed hairbrushes, even a box of powder. On removing the lid he dipped in a powder puff and patted his face, scrutinising every inch of it in the dressing-table mirror as if yesterday he was somebody else. Satisfied, he turned away from the mirror, looking over his shoulder to check that everything at the back was in order, and resumed his unpacking, placing a pair of purple pyjamas on one of the beds and thus claiming his territory. I placed my razor and a comb on my bedside table and the housewarming was over.

The following morning was a rude awakening. My room-mate, whose name I’ve quite forgotten, had already gone, leaving a heady smell of perfume behind him, and I realised that I was going to be late. I ran to the parade area and with a feeling of dread I saw ranks of blue in front of a flight sergeant standing on a low wall and addressing them in a loud commanding voice. I squeezed myself into the rear rank, but not carefully enough. I knew that when the flight sergeant, without any pause in his welcome speech, said, ‘Take that man’s name’ he was referring to me, and that evening in the office of the CO (commanding officer) I was on a charge of being late on parade, for which damnable sin I was awarded four days jankers. In other words, each evening in full equipment, including backpack and tin hat, I was to be found kneeling to scrub the floor of the orderly room. From a distance I must have looked like Quasimodo searching for his contact lens. After four days of scrubbing the same piece of floor, my punishment was over and I learned my second lesson: if you are about to arrive late it is better not to arrive at all. When I spotted the whole mob lined up I should have gone back to bed; they wouldn’t have missed me.

The most important part of our training was learning the Morse code, essential to wireless operators. Our schoolrooms were at the Winter Gardens, a venue I played many times years afterwards in a more peaceful, pleasurable age. Incidentally, the mastering of the Morse code was a doddle for me: I was already proficient and could send and receive in Morse code as fast, and in some cases faster, than some of the instructors. I’d mastered this skill when I was sixteen in order to be a wireless operator in the merchant navy. On reaching a fairly competent standard, I applied to the Marconi School of Wireless in Manchester and I’m sure they would have accepted me but for two monumental obstacles. First, not too difficult, I had to get my father’s permission but the second, the impossible barrier, was in the small print: the course would cost fifty pounds, almost as much as our house was worth, so joining the merchant navy was out of the question, which was probably just as well because the war was imminent and, as I was to learn later, the German U-boat packs were no respecters of young British seamen and my chances of being seventeen would have considerably diminished.

However, here I was in an extraordinary, sunny Blackpool, marching, drilling, doing rifle practice and dozing through the lazy afternoons in the Winter Gardens, fitter than I’d ever been. I even enjoyed guard duties, standing as smartly turned out as the Grenadiers outside Buckingham Palace in tin hat and full blancoed webbing with bayoneted rifle, enduring endless box-Brownie camera snaps and trying not to blink when the shutter went.

The weeks rushed by too quickly for my liking. I was now conversing with my instructors at a speed too fast for ordinary erks. Physically I could have run to the top of the Matterhorn thanks to PT every day on the beach; I was suntanned to a deep walnut, clear eyed and bushy tailed; I even looked forward to guard duty, although we were only guarding Marks and Spencer’s. Marching to the corner, clattering my boots on the pavement as I effected a copybook turn before marching smartly back to my clattering halt, left turn, order arms and a last stamp of standing at ease—awesome; all the holiday makers sitting outside their digs enjoyed watching my every movement and when I stood easy they all relaxed and lifted their newspapers or continued their interrupted conversations, the show over until the next time I got itchy feet.

It was heady stuff. I was a bulwark of the Empire, so enveloped in a world of self hero worship that I didn’t hear the screaming child being dragged along by a harassed mother who stopped and pointed to my bayonet and snarled, ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll tell that man to stick his knife in you.’ The lad wiped his snotty nose on his already overworked sleeve and then, taking a few steps up to me, he kicked me fiercely on the shin, wearing clogs. I was so startled that I let go of my rifle and it crashed to the pavement. The newspapers went down, all the talking stopped as if in a drill movement and all heads swivelled in my direction. I picked up my rifle just as the sergeant marched out to see what the commotion was all about, and again I was on a fizzer and an apple-sized bruise on my leg was no defence.

Apropos of nothing, I learned a very important wrinkle while on guard duty. At night, if you feel tiredness creeping into you, hold your rifle with the butt on the ground so that the point of the bayonet is under your chin. If tiredness seeps insidiously into your brain, your head begins to nod and ouch, you’re wide awake again.

Strangely enough, I never saw my room-mate during the day, so he obviously wasn’t a trainee wireless operator. No matter, we went out for a drink together some evenings to the Queen’s Hotel. We never drank more than a half pint of bitter each, but I couldn’t help noticing that whereas I took hefty swallows from my glass he sipped his daintily; and we never really conversed. His eyes furtively searched the customers as if he was looking for somebody and one evening as we made our way back to the digs he said, ‘We nearly got off tonight.’ I didn’t answer because I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, for as far as I could recollect there hadn’t been a woman in the room except the one behind the bar and he always ignored her.

It must be remembered that I had spent all my life up to a few weeks before in Oldham, which was hardly the sophisticated centre of the universe; and in those days homosexuality was a word we had never come across, let alone understood. I was still an innocent abroad and I suspected nothing. My room-mate was a very pleasant, likeable fellow and even if he did use face cream and wear pyjamas it only went to show that he came from a well-to-do background in which his gentle, superior ways were the norm. Conversely he must have thought of me as one of the peasantry, a bumbling village idiot who went to bed without washing, clad in my RAF-issue vest and underpants. For my own part I felt lucky to have found such a delightful room-mate.

On one occasion I received a cake from home. The last one had been a disaster, as the mice had had most of it, although I’d put it in my kit bag to guard against such a catastrophe. This time, however, I stood on my bed and hung the cake in my shirt from the chandelier. This way it would be out of reach of the little terrors. My room-mate was asleep, or I assumed he was. I turned off my bedside lamp and settled down on my back, hands behind my head, awaiting the sandman and wondering if I’d tied the cake bundle securely enough. My lids were getting heavy when suddenly I was wide awake. Inside my bed I sensed rather than felt something crawling towards my thigh. It could only be a mouse…Very gently and slowly, I withdrew my arm from the back of my head, and then crashed it down with all my strength—and my room-mate yelled, ‘Ouch!’ Quickly I put my lamp on and he was abject with apologies. I couldn’t grasp what he’d been up to, sliding his hand into my bed. He must have been dreaming. He kept saying sorry and that he wasn’t like other men: he had been a ballet dancer before he’d been called up, and he missed his friends. I didn’t know what he was babbling on about. When I switched my light off and settled down, he was still talking and the penny still hadn’t dropped about his motives; in fact I was only glad it hadn’t been a mouse. I was no wiser when a few days later he was demobbed. Apparently he had turned up on parade wearing lipstick and mascara. What’s so terrible about that? I’d known him for only a few weeks but I missed him when he’d gone and was glad that I’d not been born into the aristocracy and made to wear make-up.

However, on balance my training in Blackpool was idyllic, but nothing lasts for ever, and we marched and drilled to the band of the Royal Air Force in our passing-out parade on the forecourt of the Metropole Hotel. Filled with exultation, I considered signing on for a full twelve years—it wasn’t such a bad career. After sixteen weeks of high summer in Blackpool, I was bronzed, fit and well out of the chrysalis I’d brought with me to Padgate. I thought the war was a doddle and felt privileged to have been invited to take part. But I didn’t quite know it all: I still had a lot to learn and one of the hard rules of life is that when the birds are singing and the sun is shining and you are in a state of utter content, that’s the danger signal and in the middle of a happy smile, wallop! The sucker punch.

Eagerly scanning the noticeboard every morning for the where-abouts of my posting, I didn’t care where it was. Any operational airfield would suffice. At least I’d be sending and receiving messages that mattered, chatting up members of the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), with aeroplanes taking off one after another for Berlin or the Ruhr, whatever was the target for the night, counting the aircraft as they returned in the lightening sky of early dawn, and with the WAAFs. The mess hall would be mixed—good grief, would I ever get time to sleep? Sadly, like so many of my optimistic fantasies of things to come, it bore little relation to the actuality, but I lived in hope and my heart leapt when I saw my name on the noticeboard the following day. It straightened itself out when I read my posting to a place in Herefordshire called Madley and, underneath, ‘All personnel above report to guard room to collect travel warrants at fourteen hundred hours.’ So at two o’clock I stood before the corporal in the guard room, which in peacetime had been the children’s department in Marks and Spencer’s. As he was making out my movement order, I asked him if Madley was a fighter or a bomber station.

Without looking up he said, ‘If you see a fighter or a bomber at Madley, he’s lost.’ I didn’t get it, and as he handed me my documents he took pity on me. ‘All in good time, laddie. You’re still in training and if I were you I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to put my head on the bloc.’ I didn’t get that either. What it is to be ignorant!

Madley itself may be a delightful little town but the place where the three-ton lorries deposited us in the early darkness preceding the onset of winter, was barren and pockmarked by Nissen huts, corrugated iron and concrete floors—Blackpool had hardly prepared us for this. The first morning at Madley dawned cold and grey. It seemed like only yesterday we were in shirt sleeves, basking in the golden summer of Blackpool. How quickly the seasons change! Greatcoats now unpacked were the order of the day.

We were paraded and after a short address the commanding officer gave us a lot more information, which was mainly carried away on the brisk east wind; then he called four of us out and for some unknown reason I happened to be one of them, and we became class leaders. We were given black armbands with the letters ‘CL’ in white, and we had to wear them on our sleeve. Our duties were not too onerous. We had to line up our allotted section and then march them off to the classes. Afterwards we marched them back again, and when we shouted ‘Halt’ and ‘Dismiss’ our responsibility was at an end. Why we had been chosen to be unpaid, stripeless NCOs I will never know. There were quite a few sergeants and corporals better equipped to do our basic duties, but they were permanent staff and presumably had other duties such as counting the pencils after we’d left at the end of our course and replenishing stocks for the next intake. Secretly, though, I really enjoyed my taste of authority.

We were in Madley for further training. There were fewer drills, less marching, and no guard duty at all, but there was more about the complex inside of a wireless set and naturally a quicker, more competent way of receiving and sending messages in Morse Code, call signs, contacts, wavelengths—in fact everything a wireless operator should know.

I had not expected to be posted somewhere for further training; after all, I thought we’d passed out. At this rate we’d still be under instruction when the war ended. I was beginning to wonder when, and if ever, we would be posted on real active service. The only aircraft we’d seen up to now were Halifaxes, Blenheims, Messerschmitts, Dorniers and Spitfires, but unfortunately they were all hanging from the ceiling of one of the classrooms. When would we be close enough to touch a real one? When would we be posted to an aerodrome? I fervently hoped to fly as a wireless operator air gunner.

At last one grey, blustery morning the noticeboard was full with postings. The marching, saluting and PT were over, and we were about to be distributed into the real war. Eager faces scanned the board and there was an electricity in the wind, almost tangible, as the lads broke off to join mates who had been posted to the same destination. I found myself alone, searching the noticeboard for my name. It wasn’t there. Carefully I went through all the lists, but I was definitely absent. It could only have been a clerical error and I wasn’t unduly worried—after all, I was a much tougher hombre now, an ‘old sweat’. But in fact these false premises didn’t last. The next morning reality dawned when I saw a convoy of three-ton lorries and the whole intake, loaded with packs and kitbags, hopped on board to be transported to the railway station. My Jack the Lad attitude disappeared in a wave of abject panic. By midday the camp was deserted. I’d been abandoned, and was marooned in a ghost collection of empty Nissen huts. There was no babble of voices as the lads left the mess hall to douse their mess tins in a drum of greasy lukewarm water, or the odd burst of laughter; now all was as silent as the inside of a pyramid stranded on a dreary, windswept stretch of a forgotten part of Herefordshire. The officers, NCOs, cooks, etc.—the permanent staff—were still here, and I wandered about in an advanced state of shock, hoping to be noticed, but for all the attention paid to me I might just as well have climbed a tree and joined the rooks. I sat miserably on my bunk in the empty Nissen hut, shivering in my greatcoat with one of my blankets round my shoulders, as the stove was black and cold. I was sinking into the deepest depression I could remember. When I’d descended to the lowest point of despair, an idea hit me, so obvious that it surprised me that I hadn’t thought of it before—I could have saved myself a whole lot of anguish.

Full of old madam, I strode in to the administration offices and demanded to see the CO. The corporal I addressed was startled out of his wits. This was quite out of order: no erk had ever marched in before and demanded to see the Lord God Almighty. Then his whole demeanour changed from bafflement to one of under-standing.

‘Are you 1522813 Sykes?’ he said, looking at a form before him.

I said, ‘Yes,’ and the mystery was solved. He handed me a travel warrant for me to go home for seven days’ leave. Transport had been arranged to take me to the station. When I asked why I hadn’t gone with the others, he told me that they’d all passed out with the rank of AC2 whereas I had been promoted to AC1. Wonderful! My next step up would be leading aircraftsman, and then corporal—my fantasies rattled on, and I was up to the rank of warrant officer, when the corporal rudely interrupted by handing me my travel warrant and instructing me to be at the transport section at fourteen hundred hours.

The mess for the ‘other ranks’ was closed as they’d all left, and as I was the only ‘other rank’ I ate in the sergeants’ mess with the permanent staff. It made a pleasant change to eat Maconochie’s stew off a plate rather than from a tin. I sat next to the sergeant who had been in charge of our intake, and as we munched he told me that he was a regular and had served overseas. He painted such graphic visions of desert, date palms, camel trains, sun and generally what a wonderful life he’d enjoyed in the RAF until Hitler came along. Again my life’s ambition veered sharply in another direction: I would sign on as a regular in the RAF and wallow in the fleshpots of the world. I told him that I was being posted to an airfield in Swaffham, Norfolk, and he looked at me with a puzzled frown on his face.

‘An airfield in Swaffham?’ he repeated, and I showed him my travel warrant.

‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some enquiries.’

And he went over to the next table and jabbered earnestly to another sergeant. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but there was a lot of head shaking and pointing at me. Then the sergeant stood up, and at the same time carried on with another sergeant. I don’t think my sergeant was making much headway, but when the performance began again, this time between him and one of the cooks, I decided that enough was enough and the train wouldn’t wait, so I legged it to make my own enquiries.

After leaving Madeley with a light heart I went home for seven days’ leave. When I arrived, the house seemed deserted. There was only Dad and Mother—John was now in the navy and Vernon, I believe, had been posted to Ireland; ergo on my seven days’ leave I was the only sibling at home and I spent as little time as possible in residence. I strutted all over Oldham and Royton, buttons brassed, boots as shiny as a Nubian’s bald head; I called in on everybody I knew and quite a few I didn’t; I practically slept in my uniform, applying wet soap to the crease line inside my trousers, which I then carefully placed under my mattress so as to effect a razor-sharp crease for the next day’s exhibition.

The seven days’ heady admiration, as I like to think they were, soon came to an end and I boarded a train for Swaffham. When I arrived at my destination, I was briefed by the transport officer, and I discovered that seventeen other RAF wireless operators had arrived, and as they were all AC2s and I was an AC1, I was put in charge. When I asked the officer about the airfield, he replied that there wasn’t one for miles, and he looked again at my travel vouchers. ‘Yes, you’re in the right place,’ he said, ‘but this is an army base,’ so once again it seemed that my posting to an airfield had been put on hold.

As my duties entailed mainly marching them here and there, there was very little difference from when I was a class leader at Madley, except that this time I had the rank. It was a posting I didn’t understand: surely the army had its own wireless operators? I wasn’t an expert in army procedure, but I felt sure that they must have advanced from the heliograph and semaphore. I can’t remember seeing any of my air force buddies from the course at Madley, and apparently no one recognised me, but as I was one grade above them they were probably under the misapprehension that I was an ‘old sweat’, and after my stint as class leader at Madley I was well versed in marching them from A to B with all the aplomb of a regular flight sergeant.

On our first day I was ordered to march our contingent to the parade ground to await the regimental sergeant major’s inspection. We stood in line in desultory fashion until I saw him approach. He wasn’t marching; he was walking casually as if he was leaving the senior NCOs’ mess, but I was taking no chances. I brought the lads up to attention and to my surprise they did it. The sergeant major instructed them to ‘stand easy’ and then he made his way along the line, asking the odd question and, judging by his smile, receiving some very odd answers. Finally he came to me.

After looking me up and down, he asked, ‘What’s the difference between an AC1 and an AC2?’

I was flummoxed. He might just as well have asked me what was Vera Lynn’s address. So I blurted out the first thing that came to mind, ‘Sixpence a day, sir,’ which I thought quite reasonable under the circumstances.

‘Is that the way you look upon your war effort?’ he asked.

‘The only way, sir,’ I replied.

He looked at me for a time and then almost to himself he muttered, ‘It’s going to be a long war.’

Well into the evening I wrestled with my answer. What was the difference between an AC1 and an AC2?

Each day I marched my seventeen-man contingent to a small place allocated as a classroom for us. Then at mealtimes I marched them to the mess hall. Afterwards I marched them back to our classroom. On the whole they marched pretty well in step, except for one youth, about six feet four. This tall pile of loose bones, with black-rimmed glasses, didn’t actually march; he ambled, and that made me feel slightly uneasy. He was always reading some book or other on the march, and when I stared pointedly at him he’d raise his eyes from the book and give me a dazzling smile. What could I do? I had no real authority and in any case he was thoughtful enough always to march in the rear on his own so that the rest of the squad couldn’t see him. That infectious smile hasn’t changed to this day and we have remained friends. His name is Denis Norden.

Why we were attached to the Second Army was a mystery to all of us and I suspect also to the War Office. I assumed that the First Army were the desert rats in the North African campaign. Apart from these two armies there was the Fourteenth Army, known as the Chindits, fighting a hazardous war in the dark, steaming jungles of Burma, but that leaves eleven armies unaccounted for, and even if you include the Salvation Army there are still ten others in action. As far as the Second Army was concerned, we were being assembled for an assault on the coast of Europe known as the Second Front, and if we were being prepared for the Second Front, what was the First? Questions, questions, questions. What I found most difficult to digest, was how would our attachment of eighteen RAF wireless operators increase our chances of winning the war? But what did we know? We were a very small cog in a massive, unwieldy contraption called ‘Hostilities’.

We were with the Second Army but not of it. They held their parades and we were not included; their every move was governed by King’s rules and regulations, ours by whatever sprung to mind. The RAF pay structure was different from theirs: had I not been an honest idiot I could have put myself down for ten pounds a week—or perhaps not, but I doubt if the army CO was getting that sort of money.

Our schoolroom possessed a blackboard all along one wall. Again questions arose: why were we in a schoolroom and what was there to learn? We were all under the impression that we were fully trained. Another stumbling block was where we were to sit. There were three rows of desks, but they were for infants. It would be impossible for Denis Norden even to contemplate sitting there—we would never get him out. In the event he perched on the desk top, and most of the others followed his example. When they were all finally settled, fags lit up, one of them polishing his boots, and Denis of course engrossed in the pages of his latest book, the others eyed me with a kind of expectancy and I looked back at them, hoping for suggestions. It was then that I noticed a stick of white chalk in the gully beneath the blackboard and, without further thought, as if someone was pulling the strings, I sketched the innards of a wireless set, roughly remembered from a textbook we had had during our course at Madley. The diagram remained clear in my mind but what it represented I had not the faintest idea. It didn’t really matter: it was all a subterfuge. If we were visited by the army CO or his adjutant, it would appear that I was instructing the class in the intricacies of a wireless set—please God they were as ignorant as I was. I explained the plot to the class. One of them would be a lookout to warn of any approaching brass hats and the rest could do as they pleased. It was unanimously accepted and immediately someone started shuffling a pack of cards, and even Denis lowered his book; but there was one exception—there’s always one…In this case it was a little genius called Shackmaster. He was only about five feet four but intellectually he couldn’t have been much behind Einstein. If, for instance, you were talking about the Suez Canal and you happened to mention it was almost forty miles long there would be a snort and Shackmaster would quietly exclaim, ‘Exactly one hundred miles long. It was built by Lessops,’ and before you knew he would be vouchsafing the height of the Sphinx. This we tolerated, but on subsequent days we were to be well in his debt.

Each day we marched from the mess hall to the schoolroom in order to relax and enjoy ourselves. My scheme for a holiday home was cruising along when a sudden cry from the lookout warned us that the CO and his adjutant were approaching. There was a flurry of frenzied activity and when the two officers entered the room the class was facing the blackboard in rapt attention. On seeing them I sprang to attention but the CO ordered me to carry on and I did. Tapping the blackboard with my knuckle, I said, ‘Shackmaster, should this be a triode or a double diode triode?’ Shackmaster was magnificent. He rattled off such verbal babble of technical mumbo-jumbo that Marconi must have wondered where he’d gone wrong, but when Shackmaster started on about electrical impulses bouncing off the stratosphere and megahertz, holding up my hand I stopped him, as, baffled and bewildered, the two officers had left. The cards were being dealt again, Denis opened his book at the marker and I rubbed the board clean and invited Shackmaster to chalk a different diagram on the board in case the two officers came back. Oh yes, you’ve got to be several jumps ahead to be a skiver!

I was still punch drunk at Shackmaster’s grasp of the mysteries of a wireless set. He was, without a shadow of a doubt, streets ahead of anyone I’d ever met, but he was not perfect. Oh no, he was unable to see the funny side of anything, even when he looked in the mirror. Comedy to him was a frivolous waste of energy which left him open to ridicule. For instance, somebody might say, ‘I saw a Blenheim yesterday with one of its four engines blazing.’ You didn’t have to address this to Shack, only make sure he heard it, and as usual his snort would be bang on cue and he would reply, ‘It couldn’t have been a Blenheim. A Blenheim only has two engines.’ This would be greeted by cries of derision and send Shackmaster scrabbling in his pack for his book to prove his point; the trap was set and poor Shack was sniffing the cheese. Somebody else would pipe up, ‘I saw it too. Shack’s right—it wasn’t a Blenheim, it was a single-engined Halifax.’ By now Shackmaster would be almost apoplectic with rage. How could we describe a Halifax bomber as single-engined? On reflection I take no pride in how we baited the poor lad, but I think I learned a very important lesson in life. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are academically, top-class master of this and that: all these achievements must be sprinkled with humour or else your superior knowledge is worthless. I didn’t tease Shack after that; you don’t take a blind man to visit the Tate Gallery.

The schoolroom was situated on the edge of a largish forest and as the days were getting warmer I applied and got permission to carry on our refresher course outdoors. The next day we carried a large table deep into the wood, followed by benches to sit on around it and presumably to discuss wireless problems. The four people not at the table were the lookouts and we all carried on from where we left off in the schoolroom, except most of us were stripped to the waist in order to get ourselves a healthy tan.

But too much of a good thing is more than enough or, to put it another way, we were all getting a bit cheesed off with our daily shirk. Lying out in a sun-dappled wood, writing home, reading, playing poker and throwing darts at a board tacked on to a tree may be all very well for an elderly coachload on a mystery tour, but as far as we were concerned there was a war on and again, why were we here? It was painfully obvious that the army had no idea why we had been tacked on to their ration strength; they’d obviously had no instructions from above and frankly I’m sure we were becoming a source of embarrassment. We were billeted with the soldiers, and in the evenings we had drinks with them in the local, but as far as the war was concerned we were strangers.

It was then that an idea came to me. It was daring and risky, but at least it would be positive. I went to see the army commanding officer. I was shown into his office immediately and straightaway I came to the point by asking him what exactly we were supposed to be doing attached to the Second Army. He threw up his hands and said, ‘I’m as much in the dark as you are,’ which came as no surprise, so I fired my first salvo by suggesting that we should be sent on leave.

He pondered this for a minute or two and I took the opportunity to leap in with a reason for requesting leave. I told him that we hadn’t been on leave for over six months. He was visibly taken aback by this and I wondered if I’d gone too far, because prior to our posting to Swaffham a few weeks ago I’d enjoyed seven days at home and I presumed that so had the rest of my lads. But I was worrying for nothing. The CO brightened and agreed that we should have leave; in fact I think he was glad to see the back of us for a week. The only stipulation he made was that we couldn’t all be absent together and we would have to go two at a time.

Game, set and match. Five minutes later I was breaking the good news to the lads, asserting that as I’d gone out on a limb for this leave I would be one of the first pairing, and the other lucky erk would be drawn out of a hat. Folding up the names, I put them into my glengarry, and with all the mob following I took it into the next hut and asked one of the squaddies to pick out a name. Holding the cap at arm’s length above my head, the army lad reached up and fumbled around and came out with a bit of paper, which I handed over to the nearest of our mob. Unfolding it, he read, ‘Hoppy Holden’. Immediately there were cries of ‘Fix’, ‘Stitch-up’ and ‘It’s a fiddle’, etc., because it was no secret that Hoppy and I were close mates. Then one of the lads blurted out, ‘All the pieces of paper have the name Hoppy Holden written on them,’ but when I upturned the cap on the bed they could see that this was not the case—it was perfectly legitimate. However, there was a trick in it. Inside our forage caps was a ridge and having had a few words with the army wallah, backed up with a packet of fags, I’d made sure that all the other names were on one side of the ridge and Hoppy’s name was on the other, et voilà!

When I walked into our house they wanted to know if I’d deserted as it was only a few weeks ago that I was on seven days’ leave, and to be quite honest the days dragged by. I was keen to get back to the rough and tumble of Swaffham. Sadly, when I returned all future leave was cancelled. There was a flap on and we were all issued with travel warrants for a place called Gatton Park just outside Reigate. Into my third year in the air force and although there were plenty of aircraft whizzing about the sky I had yet to see a plane on the ground, and I’d never even seen a WAAF.

From the bustling, busy little market town of Swaffham to the quiet gentility of Gatton Park—what a difference, what a contrast! As the lorry deposited me inside the gates, I was deeply moved by the rolling splendour. Perhaps I was dead and this was the first staging post to heaven. Acres of grassland surrounding a wood, stately trees from the saplings of Elizabethan days—I was enraptured. There wasn’t a tree in sight in the part of Oldham near Featherstall Road. Had there been one we would have been up and down it like a squirrel with its tail on fire. The centrepiece of Gatton Park was an elegant Georgian mansion and, just a few strides away, a private chapel, the whole bordered by shiny manicured lawns, and I couldn’t get over how green the grass was, a totally upper-class strain of the greyish blades sprouting from cracks in the Mucky Broos like the tufts of hair in an old man’s ear. For the moment a wave of nostalgia swept through me, but it was only a moment. I just stood by my kitbag, pack still on my back, lost in wonder as I took in a section of bright sparkling water almost hidden by the house.

The home of the Colman’s mustard family, Gatton Park, was their fiefdom. This I learned later from one of the estate workers who lived in a row of much humbler dwellings a discreet distance from the big house. This local, who turned out to be one of the gardeners, added. ‘Isn’t it amazing that all this splendour was built by the little bit of mustard you leave on the edge of your plate?’ This I didn’t understand. I’d never left a bit of mustard on the edge of my plate—in fact mustard and I had yet to be introduced.

With a sigh of content I accepted the fact that once again I’d fallen on my feet. Granted it wasn’t the operational flying station I had been eagerly expecting, but then again there were more things in life besides the war. I was shaken out of my reverie when a voice yelled ‘That man there.’ I whirled round to see a sergeant beckoning to me. He was with a group of new intakes, milling around, kitbags at their feet, packs still not offloaded. To me they were all strangers and to each other, the only thing we had in common being the badge sewn on to the sleeve of our uniform of a fist clutching bolts of lightning denoting that we were all wireless operators.

After a meal, which would be better described as iron rations, suggesting that the cooks were new as well and didn’t yet know where everything was, the sergeant led us down to a row of tents by the side of one of the roads. Eight of us were allotted to each one. It was only when we crouched in a huddle underneath the ridge pole that we realised that eight of us in the tent was going to be a tight squeeze; three of us would have been one too many. Perhaps if we left our kitbags outside?

It sounded like a good idea until one miserable git said, ‘What if it rains?’

We looked at each other in dismay—there’s always one in a group.

Then someone else piped up with, ‘What if one of us is taken short in the night? Unless he’s by the tent flap he won’t be able to get out.’

Somebody else suggested getting a bucket, but he was overruled when somebody else said, ‘There isn’t room for a bucket.’

In the event it wasn’t as catastrophic as we’d made out. Half the tent would be on watch while the other half slept. Had they told us this at the outset it would have saved a lot of aggro.

The Colman family were not now in residence, as the whole area of Gatton Park had been commandeered by the RAF for the duration of the war. Already there were several air force bods established on the estate—mainly administration, cooks, general duty men. Naturally officers had commandeered the beautiful home of the Colmans and, of course, the officers’ mess, leaving the other ranks to occupy the cottages. Trust the base wallahs to get their feet under the table while the lads at the sharp end presumably had to make do with tents. We were under no illusions: when we were sent off to join the action they would remain at Gatton Park until they were evicted by the cessation of hostilities.

After a few days we were organised into watches, as we would be in wireless contact with satellite stations twenty-four hours a day. More menacing still, the transmissions would be made from the backs of Bedford trucks equipped as well, if not better, than a static wireless office. Another week passed and still we didn’t have a CO, but our luck couldn’t last for ever; nor did it.

I was on duty watch. I wasn’t actually at my set—in fact I wasn’t even in the truck. Stripped to the waist, I was sitting on the steps, face upturned to the warm sun. I wasn’t entirely out of touch with my satellite stations: inside, the volume on my set was full up. Headphones hanging within earshot, I dozed gently, when suddenly a shadow fell over me.

Sleepily, I lifted my hand to shade my eyes when a harsh voice said, ‘Where’s your shirt?’

‘It’s in the van,’ I replied, settling down again.

The voice, now affronted, spoke again, ‘Well, put it on at once, and say “sir” when you address an officer.’ My heart sank: it was the end of the holiday.

The following morning we were paraded to hear him make his commanding officer speech. He was only a flight lieutenant, a middle-aged man who had a perpetual look of surprise on his face. He wore an officer’s peaked cap but he’d taken the stiffener out of it so that he would look like Jack the Lad, but he addressed us all as if he was expecting a raspberry at the end of each sentence. From now on there would be discipline; any misdemeanour, no matter how minor, would be punished; he was going to lick us into shape, etc. Most of it was delivered at me and I knew from that moment that he was going to be a problem, the enemy within.

Throughout my life I have followed courses of action on the spur of the moment when two minutes of rational thought might have dragged me back from the abyss. This was the case when one Sunday morning in Gatton Park we were marched down to the chapel to attend the service. We halted opposite the arched door-way, and we were straggling forward, dragging off our headgear before we entered, when for some unknown reason I put my cap back on my head, broke ranks and stood at ease until the others were all inside and I was alone. I was motivated by a barrack-room lawyer memory that taking part in a church service was not obligatory, and if on religious grounds you objected to entering a church you would be excused. Why on earth did these idiotic ideas catapult me into situations beyond my control? But the die was cast.

One of the real sergeants sauntered over to me when all the rest were inside sorting out their hymnbooks. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said in a world-weary voice as if I wasn’t the only one that morning to come out with some crackpot notion.

‘I’m not going into church, sergeant,’ I replied with the assurance that I had a good case.

‘Aren’t you C. of E.?’ he snapped at me.

Good grief, that was a critical flaw in my stance. Why had I requested Church of England to be stamped on my identity disc? There were lots of other religions I could have claimed: Muslim, Trappist monk, Buddhist. My brain raced as if I was an inept politician trying desperately not to answer a simple question, but before I could blurt out an adequate response he’d marched towards the door and entered the chapel, whipping off his glengarry just in time.

I realised I’d won the exchange. All I had to do now was to stand at ease and enjoy the warm summer breeze. I was looking the other way, so I didn’t notice the approach of the senior officer until he spoke.

‘What’s the problem, lad?’ he said in a quiet, fatherly voice.

I sprang to attention and spluttered the first thing that came to mind. ‘I don’t believe in it, sir, not with the war and people being killed.’ Actually I’m sure these words bear not the slightest relation to what I actually said—it poured out in fluent gabble.

He looked at me uncertainly, and then reasonably he said, ‘Why not give it one more try?’ and as he said it he gently propelled me into the chapel.

It was embarrassing to say the least. All heads were turned towards the entrance as we came in. Then the senior officer, his arm still round my shoulder in case I made a break for it, led me to a place next to him on the front pew—‘Officers only’.

As we sat, the padre came over to where I was sitting, and, laying his hands on the ledge in front of me, he began a lecture on why it was imperative that everyone should be Christian. After a few minutes he took his eyes from me and to the chapel in general he said, ‘Let us pray for all our wayward lambs.’ There was a shuffling as the congregation knelt and I did the same, blushing like an eastern sunset as my thoughts sped off at a right angle, as I noticed that, being in the officer’s pew, I had a hassock to kneel on and I am sure the erks were on bare boards, ha, ha.

Perhaps that lunatic action of mine was responsible—but I shall never know. If my memory serves me right, I can’t recall any more church services at Gatton Park.

One night I was on the midnight-to-eight watch, waiting for the welcome sound of the lorry bringing our relief from the camp. After the formalities of handing over were complete, we’d board the lorry, which would then take us back to camp for breakfast and, best of all, a few hours of blissful oblivion in our blankets. The night watch had been particularly draining, but the sun was strong and the birds were twittering ‘Good mornings’. What a pity to waste such a glorious summer asleep! On impulse I waved the lads off—there’d be plenty of time to sleep when we’re dead—and I started the long walk downhill to the town. Reigate was still unexplored, as far as I was concerned, but at least I knew where the WVS was (the Women’s Voluntary Service), a canteen run by bright-eyed, tweedy women with perpetual smiles who dished out tea and buns, rock cakes, sweets, and cigarettes to anyone in uniform who happened to drop by. These surrogate mothers giving up their free time for their highly valued war effort were a different world from the exhausted, shawled women of the Lancashire cotton towns. I banished the thought. They probably had a WVS in Oldham too, but somehow I doubted it.

Contentedly I munched on a bun—it was a good idea of mine —and sipped my tea. It tasted much better drunk from pottery. Also it was a well-known fact that the tea we drank at the camp was liberally dosed with bromide in order to dampen our appreciation of the opposite sex. The things we believed…Sighing with content, I continued to munch. Who needs sleep? I was feeling warm and comfortable and in a strange way the incessant babble of conversation was receding, as if someone was turning down the volume. The next thing I knew was that I was jerked out of a state of well-being by a crashing snore, and it was only when I noticed other servicemen staring at me that I realised that the snore had been mine, ruefully answering my cocky assertion, ‘Who needs sleep?’

I couldn’t stay in the WVS any longer. I put down my half-eaten bun and hurried into the fresh air. It was invigorating and once again I was wide awake and Reigate was my oyster. I took in my surroundings. Reigate itself was a flurry of activity during the day, with masses of servicemen—RAF, army, Poles, ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service), a veritable league of nations. The British drove sedate old three-ton Bedfords, which pulled up at traffic lights with an apologetic wince of brakes; and now there were Chevrolets pulling up at the lights, doing at least forty miles an hour, stopping dead when they pressed the foot pedal with a triumphant chooooo of the airbrakes, shattering all the gentility of this lovely old town—the Canadian Army had arrived, careering everywhere, giving the impression that there was no speed limit in Toronto and beyond. But the envy of all the young bloods were the Canadian despatch riders. Even these weren’t just men on motorbikes: they rode Harley Davidsons, the nearest thing to a horse on wheels.

The realisation hit me that I was still only twenty yards or so from the WVS and I’d been standing on one spot for the last twenty minutes, gawping like a hayseed from the mountain country. Then a motor horn peeped and a Bedford pulled up by the kerb. I hadn’t even seen it arrive and had no idea why he was tooting. Could I have been asleep on my feet? He called out ‘Eric.’ Oh, blessed chariot! I dozed through the third gear of Reigate Hill and when we arrived back at camp I took off my boots, and that’s all I could manage before sleep overtook me.

All the wireless operators were relieved of duties, two at a time, in order to take driving lessons. The cars were ordinary family saloons and the instructors all civilians, and for the next few weeks we shuddered and stuttered, veering erratically and at times bumping on to the pavement. Fortunately we were taught the rudiments of driving on the quieter roads surrounding Reigate. It was hairy, but I was quite pleased with myself, considering I’d only sat in the front of a vehicle once before. I was only ten at the time and that was when the lunatic who drove the bread van offered me a lift. He was obviously a racing fanatic, because he had me clutching on to my seat as he made his way up Oldham Road, crouching over the wheel, his foot flat on the accelerator, double declutching, making louder engine noises with his mouth than the motor itself; then, with spittle swinging from his lips, he stamped on the brake so suddenly that I slid down under the dashboard. ‘Don’t go away,’ he said as he plunged through the shop door with an armful of loaves, but I’d had enough and when he emerged I’d gone. I almost perspire now at the thought of that crazy half mile. On reflection we couldn’t have been doing more than thirty miles an hour, but that was unsafe for a bread van.

Anyway, when we were considered proficient enough as drivers to be tested, we were trucked off to Croydon—busier than Reigate—to be examined by a senior civilian instructor. I passed my test, but I think only just, because as I stepped out of the car he said, ‘As a driver you’d make a good commando.’ I never discovered whether this was praise or sarcasm.

A very interesting interlude, but that was only the first course; the main dish was driving a three-ton Bedford. We were chucked in at the deep end, at the wheel, in convoy and, if that wasn’t hazardous enough, at night. It wasn’t too bad once I could change gears without having to fiddle for the lever. The tricky part was keeping a distance of thirty yards between me and the tail light of the lorry in front. A lapse of concentration could be at the least embarrassing. The hooded headlights didn’t make matters easier; a half-inch strip of illumination doesn’t give a driver confidence. When I learned the reason for this crash course (unfortunate choice of words), that if, when we were in action, anything happened to the driver we would be able to take over, enabling the war to continue, this led to much conjecture at our camp at Gatton Park. We were now sure in our minds that we were a new innovation in the RAF, the first of its kind: an MSU or mobile signals unit. At least we knew now that we’d be mobile, but where would we be going?

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