The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

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  THE CO-OP’S

  GOT BANANAS!

  A selection of books by Hunter Davies

  The Beatles: The Authorised Biography

  The Glory Game

  Gazza: My Story (with Paul Gascoigne)

  A Walk Around the Lakes

  William Wordsworth

  Boots, Balls and Haircuts

  The Eddie Stobart Story

  The Beatles, Football and Me

  The John Lennon Letters (ed.)

  The Biscuit Girls

  The Beatles Lyrics:

  The Unseen Story Behind Their Music

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2016 by Hunter Davies

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Hunter Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-5340-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-5342-6

  Typeset in the UK by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd are committed to sourcing paper that is made from wood grown in sustainable forests and support the Forest Stewardship Council, the leading international forest certification organisation. Our books displaying the FSC logo are printed on FSC certified paper.

  To my dear wife, the best thing that ever happened to me . . .

  CONTENTS

  Intro

  1. Family Background

  2. A Jaunt to Johnstone

  3. Hunter’s Record

  4. On the Move

  5. Back to Scotland

  6. Me and the War

  7. The Dreaded Eleven-Plus

  8. Creighton and Asthma Attacks

  9. Problems with my Father

  10. My Mother

  11. Entertainments

  12. France, Jobs and Girls

  13. Grammar Cad

  14. Women and Work

  15. Up at Durham

  16. Jobs for the Boys

  17. Teenagers Arrive

  18. Margaret

  19. Hold the Front Page

  20. Dreaming Spires

  21. Ready for Action

  22. Water Drama

  23. Hello Manchester

  24. Manchester Life

  25. Sad Cyprus

  26. A Death in the Family

  27. London Calling

  28. London Life

  29. Double Thrills

  List of Illustrations

  INTRO

  On the morning of 9 October 1954, I woke up in a Norman castle. Quite a change from the previous eighteen years of my life which I had spent in a grim, unheated, crowded council house sharing a bed with my brother. We did have a bath and, no, we did not keep coal in it, but the bathroom was too cold to enter and anyway we had no hot water.

  Quite normal, for those post-war years. Millions of us were in the same austerity boat and around half the population lived in rented or council property. My family circumstances were perhaps a bit bleaker and sadder than some, not that I was really conscious of it. It was just how it was, living like most of the neighbours seemed to live.

  But now I had found myself in a suite of well-appointed rooms in an historic building, once the splendid home of Prince Bishops, today a World Heritage site. I had a bedder to make my bed, maids to serve me meals in the Great Hall, new words and phrases to understand, such as buttery, battels, Senior Man, JCR, SCR, sconcing, ‘oaks up’. A new life to learn, a new life to live. And it was all free. Even my train fare from Carlisle the day before had been paid for.

  What was happening to me was not at all normal for an eighteen-year-old in the 1950s, a period when only 4 per cent of the population went to university. But again, I was not really conscious of this, of being in any sort of elite. It just seemed how it was, what you did.

  All the same, I was a bit dazed and confused, not quite sure how I had got there. I just seemed to wake up that morning, my first day as an undergraduate at University College, Durham, open my eyes, and find myself there.

  At breakfast in the Great Hall I tried to identify the accents of the others. I had not heard a southern accent before, not in the flesh, only on the radio, nor even Birmingham or West Country, and certainly never come across anyone who had gone to a public school. I wondered if my accent stood out.

  The second and third year chaps seemed so grown-up, knowing all the ropes, swapping banter with Eddie the butler, flirting with the maids. Many did look incredibly mature, having done their national service, seen the world, fired guns, probably shot people. That was one thing hanging over me – the thought of national service. At least I had three years ahead, safe in an ivory tower.

  Carlisle and home was already another world, receding fast in my mind. Would I lose contact with my parents, my sisters and brother, move away emotionally, socially and culturally, forget all those eighteen years at home? Perhaps even be embarrassed by them?

  When you are one of only a tiny percentage of lucky beggars you can’t expect the remaining 96 per cent of the population to understand or sympathise with you. Not like today. Everyone and their aunty seems to go to ‘uni’ today.

  I was aware it could afford me opportunities and experiences denied to my own parents, and all their parents before them. Let’s hope I didn’t muck it up, fail my exams. Oh, the shame and ignominy for my mother.

  At dinner that night, in the Great Hall, wearing my gown, listening to the Latin grace being read by one of the scholars, I was on a table with about twelve other first years, first days, all my age. I realised, looking round and listening, that they were mostly like me. From their conversations about their sixth forms and A-levels, they appeared to have come from the same sort of grammar schools. Despite one or two being louder and more boastful than the others, they were apprehensive, nervous.

  It suddenly struck me, seeing myself in them, as them, that for the first time in my whole life I was with people all beginning at square one. We were all equal, more or less, poised on the same starting block. Until then, for various reasons, I had always felt an outsider, behind the others.

  Surely that had to be a good thing. But where might it lead, if I survived my student years? Would I manage to find something to do with my life? Six years ahead, say, at the end of the decade, finally fleeing the fifties, what would have happened to me? In 1960, what would I be, who would I be, where would I be living, and with whom?

  1

  FAMILY BACKGROUND

  ‘I am going back
to the Highlands,’ my mother used to say towards the end of her life. She never lived in the Highlands, but only visited now and again as a child, so I can’t believe she had many memories, just images she had been told about, fantasies which had gathered in her mind.

  ‘I am going back to Australia,’ she also used to say, right towards the very end. She had never been to Australia, so goodness knows where that had come from.

  There are places we remember from our lives, some have changed, some are gone, some might not even have existed.

  I have decided, at long last, that I am going to go back to the place where I was born. So, obviously I have been there, in my life. I am now aged eighty, yet I have never been back to my birthplace – which was Johnstone. I have been to other parts of Scotland, to Edinburgh for example, loads of times over the decades. And it’s not far, really, just a few hours on the train. What has been stopping me?

  Is it prejudice, something I have against the place I was born? But how can it be, when I have never been and don’t really know anything about it. When asked, I always say I am Scottish, because I am proud of it, pure Scots on both sides. And if Scotland had become independent in 2014 I would have applied for a Scottish passport, if they had ever got round to such things.

  I suppose it is partly because I don’t really know where it is that I was born. I know that factually I was born on 7 January 1936 in Johnstone in the county of Renfrewshire, which is near Paisley, not far from Glasgow. I have no image of Johnstone, let alone any memories. In my mind all these years I have seen Johnstone as a dot somewhere on the edges of the Greater Glasgow sprawl, part of the old urban, industrial Clydeside shipping heartland, once so dominant in Scottish and British life but now decaying and sad-sounding. Who would want to go there, unless they had to? After all, I left it when I was four. My family were just passing through.

  If, of course, I had been born somewhere more exotic or glamorous or interesting and exciting and famous, then I am sure I would have had occasions over the years to pop in, poke around and say, ‘Hi, you don’t know me, but I am one of yous, oh yes, I mean och aye.’ We don’t pick our own birthplace, no more than we pick our parents. It’s all chance, there is nothing you can do about it.

  One advantage is that it is a blank slate; if you have left that place as young as I did, nothing has been painted or marked on it. I won’t be able to stand around and say, ‘When I was a lad, these were all fields, goodness the views from here were sublime’ or, more likely, ‘This street was full of factories, the smoke and the noise were awful and the poverty, my dear the poverty.’ For I remember nothing. Johnstone just happens to be the place where I came into the world.

  My father, John Hunter Davies, was born in 1906, so was thirty when I came along, quite old for those days. His father, Edward Davies, was some of sort of engineer, not a professionally qualified one, more probably a fitter who looked after various machines in the steelworks.

  The family lived in Cambuslang, which is on the other side of Glasgow. They were upper working class, as far as I can make out, for they owned their own house on the Hamilton Road, where I spent many holidays when I was growing up. I loved staying there. It seemed so huge, with little attic rooms on landings and bedrooms which were holes in walls and a wooden pulley suspended over the kitchen table with clothes drying.

  My father had a sister Jean and three brothers, Eddie, Alex and Jim. Jean went to Glasgow University and became a teacher at Hamilton Academy, which was unusual for women from that background and at that time, but then Scotland always prided itself on its education system, offering more chances of higher education compared with the English system. Alex also became a teacher. Jim, the youngest of the family, became some sort of clerk and then a rent collector but considered himself a poet and playwright. He did once have a play performed at the Byre Theatre in St Andrews. It was in Scots dialect, Lallans, the old language of south and central Scotland, and was called The Hands of Esau. I was once forced, as a teenager, to stay up late while he read it aloud to me and found it excruciating. Till I fell asleep.

  My mother, Marion Brechin, came from Motherwell and her family were less educated, less cultured, and rather looked down upon by the Davies clan. Her father was from the Highlands and had been an engine driver, which my mother always said was the aristocracy of the working class, the best job any ordinary working man could aspire to, a job for life, with great status. So she always maintained. But if this were true, why had they never managed to buy their own house, like my Davies grandparents? All families have little secrets, mostly piddling, minor mysteries about which you never ask till it is too late and they have all gone. I suspect Grandpa Brechin was not in fact an engine driver but a fireman, assisting the engine driver, but it did mean he got free travel on the railways.

  As a child, up to the age of ten or so, I spent some of my summer holidays living with my Brechin grandparents. They lived in an upstairs council flat on the Bellshill Road in Motherwell. I never looked forward to it, compared with my Cambuslang relations. It was cold and cramped and my Grandma Brechin was very bossy. She had a yappy Highland terrier called Sheila who ran round the little flat, barking to be taken out. She would go mad if my grandmother forgot to take her hat off and ran around in a frenzy, convinced she was about to go for a walk.

  Grandma Brechin used to make crowdie, pouring sour milk into a muslin bag, tying it up and leaving it overnight to drip over the sink. In the morning for breakfast you scraped out the white cheese, like goat’s cheese, which had formed in the muslin bag. It was surprisingly delicious spread on toast.

  My grandfather didn’t speak, even when we played Ludo together. He would sit and stare out of the window, emitting a constant breathy whistle which had no notes, no tune, clearly unaware of what he was doing. His other activity was unfankling – i.e. unravelling – endless bits and balls of string which he had picked up in the street.

  My mother had three sisters. The oldest, Aunt Maggie, emigrated to Canada when quite young. Then there was Bella, who lived nearby in the Buildings and was broad Glasgow, with an even stronger accent than my mother. Jean, the youngest, was very pretty and quite refined, but delicate and always ill, resting on a day bed whenever I was taken to see her. Which I thought was my fault, as I was always being told to pipe down when I was young.

  Her husband Tom was a hero in the war, a chief petty officer on the submarine that was the first to break the German blockade of Malta when the island was on the brink of starvation, for which he received a medal. They had one daughter, Sylvia, who was my age so they tried to get us to play together, but she was very serious and solemn. Last I heard of her she had become a nun and gone off to Africa.

  ‘Oh, I loved school. Don’t you love school, Hunter? Oh, I loved school.’ That was one of my mother’s constant refrains throughout my childhood. I never thought about school as being something to be loved or not loved. It was simply there, a place you had to go. But my mother insisted her schooldays had been nothing but wonderful.

  If she had loved school so much, and was good at all her lessons, so she said, why had she left at fourteen and not stayed on longer? That was one question I often asked her, when I got a bit older. She would look puzzled. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Did I leave at fourteen? I suppose I did.’

  In 1922, aged fourteen, she went into service for the next few years, as a live-in domestic, a tweeny, with a series of Church of Scotland ministers and their families. She always reminisced how one day she had taken the Reverend Eric Liddell breakfast in bed when he came to visit the minister she was working for. Before entering the Church of Scotland, Eric Liddell had been a famous Scottish runner, appearing at the 1924 Olympics. His strong religious beliefs meant he refused to train or run on Sundays, as was portrayed in Chariots of Fire, the 1981 film about him.

  When my parents met, my mother had stopped working as a domestic servant and was serving in the NAAFI in Perth. My father was in the RAF. Over a cup of excellent NAAFI tea, their eyes
met. Presumably.

  During the war there were always jokes on the radio about the awful food and tea in the NAAFI, but I never quite understood what this ‘Naffy’ was. It stood for Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes and was created by government in 1921 to run recreational services for the British armed forces, selling goods to servicemen and their families. It ran clubs, bars, shops, supermarkets, launderettes, restaurants, cafés and other facilities on most British military bases, and also canteens on board Royal Navy ships. Commissioned officers were not usually supposed to use the NAAFI clubs and bars, since their messes provided these facilities.

  I don’t know at what age my father joined the RAF, or what he did beforehand, if anything, or if he joined as a boy from school. I have photos of him in RAF uniform, and also playing in his RAF football team. He once told me that the squadron leader, sitting in the front row of one group photo, was the Duke of Hamilton, or perhaps later became the Duke of Hamilton. Most families, however humble, have pet stories they trot out over the years in which they worked with, or met or saw or just passed in the street or nearly almost met someone who later became well known. Celebs, as we call them today.

  My parents got married in Motherwell in 1934. My dad was twenty-eight and my mother twenty-six. I don’t think the Davies family were exactly thrilled by the arrival of my mother into my father’s life, a mere NAAFI girl, tall and rather bony, who seemed nervous and awkward. My father had apparently been engaged to or going out with a teacher, who was greatly liked and approved of by all his family. Something had gone wrong; possibly she dumped him, which was why he married my mother on the rebound. Who knows the truth about these situations – or if the people ever know it themselves.