The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  We rushed out of the park, down the hill, and were joined on the way by gangs of other kids till we were a large crowd, all chanting what we had just heard: ‘The Co-op’s Got Bananas!’

  And it was true. The Co-op had received its first supply of bananas in living memory, at least to those whose conscious memory like mine only stretched back seven years to the beginning of the war. I rushed home to tell my mother, as I had no money on me. She queued up and was allowed to buy three bananas – enough for us to have half a banana each, or a sliver a day for a week, if we sliced our share really thin.

  That evening, my mother ceremonially peeled and carefully cut the three bananas in front of us, giving us a half each. The twins and Johnny immediately ate their share but I cut my half into thin slices, determined to spin it out for the rest of the week, to make them all jealous, not knowing that a banana, once peeled, goes brown and mushy.

  Over the previous year or so, my mother had often given us mashed boiled parsnip, squashed up on a plate, telling us it was bananas. Then, as she didn’t lie, telling us that it was a joke, but reassuring us that, really, bananas did taste like that anyway. So now we had the real thing in front of us at last. I felt like Christopher Columbus testing some of the exotic fruits of the New World which Europeans had never tasted before. Or Sir Walter Raleigh, having his first cigarette.

  The texture of my small sliver of banana was interesting, but the taste was a bit strange and rather disappointing. Didn’t taste at all like mashed parsnips, which really, on reflection, I think I preferred . . .

  7

  THE DREADED ELEVEN-PLUS

  When we returned to Carlisle in 1947, we came back to the same council estate at St Ann’s Hill, but to a different house in a different street, 28 Caird Avenue, where we lived from then on, happy ever.

  We were happy in the sense that at last we were settled. Our family then stayed in Carlisle, without another move, and I look upon Carlisle as my hometown. But so many of my memories of Carlisle throughout the fifties are shrouded by greyness, dreariness, dust, noise and smoke. And being cold all the time.

  Was this the fault of the fifties, with its ongoing rationing, austerity and deprivation, despite the triumph of our so-called victory? With open coal fires the only form of heating, and often the only form of cooking or boiling the kettle, no wonder the dust and dirt never settled. Or is my memory clouded by entering my teenage years, when you become dissatisfied, start wanting to move away, from wherever you are? Or was it because of Carlisle itself?

  In the fifties, Carlisle was a factory town, which visitors might find hard to believe now, since it has all been cleaned up and prettified. There were many thriving textile factories which continued until very recent times – such as Dixon’s, Buck’s, Morton Sundour and Ferguson’s. Dixon’s factory chimney, 320 feet high, was said to be the tallest in the land when the factory was opened in 1836. The chimney is still there, one of the city’s landmarks, though they have chopped a bit off the top. Later came the heavier industries, such as Cowans Sheldon who made cranes.

  Perhaps the best-known factory among the general public is Carr’s of Carlisle, the oldest biscuit works in the world, where the manufacturing of biscuits by machinery, as opposed to by hand, was begun by Jonathan Dodgson Carr when he opened his first factory in 1837. In the 1950s, Carr’s employed around 2–3,000 workers, mostly women.

  All these factories, churning out their products, night and day, meant that the smoke and dust seemed constantly to hang over the centre of the town. All British towns with any industrial presence were like that. And there was no escape from the dust, the noise of the lorries and the factory hooters.

  If by chance you went ‘up street’ – as we said in Carlisle, meaning going into the town – at a time when a shift was finishing and all the gates opened, you were swept aside in a sea of humanity, hordes of workers in their boilersuits and headscarves, desperate to get home. The main bus terminal, where I got my bus home to St Ann’s Hill, was in the centre of the town, opposite the Old Town Hall, so if you hit the end of a shift, the queues stretched for miles and you might as well walk.

  And yet, despite all this activity and workers swarming around, the town always seemed to be dead after five o’clock. Everything closed. That was it. Most provincial towns in the UK were like that in the fifties. Shutters went up, shopkeepers went home. Cafés and restaurants, of which there were few, locked their doors. Thursdays were even worse, for that was half-day closing in Carlisle. Oh God, it was depressing.

  During that decade growing up in Carlisle, I was totally unaware that the place had any historic heritage. I knew we had a cathedral, but never visited, and a medieval castle, but it seemed cut off from the town. The Old Town Hall was right in the middle, but was little more than a dark blob behind the bus shelters, with the public lavatories in front. I just never knew it was an eighteenth-century gem. Today, it has been cleaned up and revealed to be a rather gorgeous gentle pink. Pink! Round the corner, I used to go regularly to Tullie House, a grim and dour and forbidding building which housed the public library. Now, the world can see that it is a magnificent Tudor building set in immaculate gardens. Who knew? Not me. I think I must have been in a dream in the fifties, or lost in an industrial haze. Or too busy living my own little life.

  Our house in Caird Avenue had three bedrooms, so that was an improvement, with an indoor lavatory and bathroom, but an outside washhouse. We even had a front parlour. At the back of the house were the ‘lotties’ – the allotments – which had probably been thriving during the war but had now been left largely to grow wild, waiting for the next round of council estate building. Johnny and I created a hole in the back hedge and went into the lotties most days after school to play. It was a bit rough for football, as the ground was ridged and uneven, but made a great adventure playground.

  When we arrived back in Carlisle in 1947, I immediately re-entered Stanwix school, the primary school I had been at four years before. This time, though, I had a Scottish accent and was known in the playground as Scotty. But I wasn’t bullied or victimised for it, or picked upon in any way. Gradually, after a year or so, I lost my Scottishness and was speaking like all the other kids.

  At school, I had some problems at first with maths because in Scotland we had recited our times tables in a different way. Same tables, of course, with the same results, but different wording.

  I picked up again with Reg Hill, my old friend from Deer Park Road, going on the bus to school with him as in the past. Which was handy. Not just having a friend, but someone from the same council estate among all the Stanwix upper classes – or so I imagined them at the time.

  I remember being scared of Miss Tinn. Teachers who were scary or notorious always do seem to have great names. Miss Tinn had a grey bun and was thin and steely and as sharp as a tack.

  I have two school reports from my earlier spell at Stanwix school, from 1942 and 1943, when I was aged six and seven. I see my teacher in Class 2 was P. Cooke. Was it a she? Must have been. All the male teachers were away. I got 10 out of 10 for arithmetic, which surprises me, as I don’t remember being any good at that stage, but only 5 out of 10 for composition. Bloomin’ cheek. For spelling I got 4 out of 10. Under conduct in the first report it says, ‘Rather talkative’. In the second it says, ‘Fairly good, rather talkative’.

  I also have a report card from my Dumfries years at Noblehill and it is interesting to see the list of the subjects we were studying during the war. Apart from English, arithmetic, history and geography, our Scottish curriculum included nature study, handwork or sewing, drill and singing. At Stanwix, there was a separate category for spelling.

  I was rubbish at spelling, and still am. I can go into a trance wondering whether it should be sow or sew, disappoint or dissapoint – appalling, isn’t it, after all these years and all these words I have shifted, or do I mean apalling . . .?

  As for my handwriting, that is also awful. I make notes all the time when I am out an
d about, ideas for my various columns, but I can’t read them, unless I write them out carefully and neatly in capitals the moment I get home. At primary school, particularly in Scotland, they were very hot on handwriting. I used to have to sit for ages writing out exercises with a scratchy pen – a nib on the end of a piece of wood which usually splayed the minute you pressed on it. You dipped it in an ink well in your desk, usually splattering ink all over the page. I often had to write the same few words, page after page, not just to spell them right, but to form them all in decent lettering. Otherwise I would be kept behind after school. Yet I never seemed to improve or get neater.

  I see that there were forty-nine in my Stanwix class, out of whom I was ranked fifteen in 1943. At Noblehill, my class had forty-four pupils, but there is no ranking order. The size of each class surprises me, yet I don’t have the impression of the classrooms being crowded, either in England or Scotland. Today, of course, you hear moans from local parent groups if their precious little treasures are in classes of more than thirty. And yet in the forties and fifties, there were no teaching assistants, no one helping out the class teacher, listening to the slow ones reading or blowing their noses. The class teacher was on her own. I don’t personally think class size is the vital factor – it’s what happens inside that matters.

  The teachers coped on their own with such large numbers thanks to all the rote learning, and by putting the fear of God into us, giving everyone a sound clip round the ears if they misbehaved or got their sums wrong. The worse pain was being grabbed by the ear, hoicked out of your little wooden desk, then dragged down the aisle to be humiliated in front of the whole class. If they couldn’t be bothered to drag you out they rapped you across the knuckles with a wooden ruler or hit you with a blackboard duster. That was agony.

  But, of course, no one complained. All our parents had been through the same regime when they were at school. It was how children learned. Some teachers were less brutal than others, and would rarely hit you, but corporal punishment of some sort was normal. For really awful behaviour you would get taken to the head, who would give you the strap. In Scotland it was called the tawse, a thick leather strap, usually with a few strips at the end, which was brought down hard on your hand. I don’t remember it being administered on the bottom in primary school. That was for public schools. We read about that in the comics and chortled when the miscreant put a book down the back of his trousers to lessen the pain.

  You recited your times tables and your poems by rote, the whole class speaking aloud in unison, then pupils might be asked questions individually. In most lessons, the whole class would be asked to put up their hands if they knew the answer to a question. Often you put your hand up out of nervousness, not knowing the answer, but not wanting to look stupid or draw attention to yourself, praying you would not be asked. When you did know the answer then you shouted ‘ME MISS, ME MISS, ME MISS!’, hoping to be asked and be given a star.

  There was one really nasty teacher who made the whole class stand up when she was checking our maths. She would go round the room, rattling out the questions – ‘Seven times five, boy?’, ‘Nine times eight, girl?’ – and you would have to fire back the answers at once, which most people could. You were allowed to sit down if you got your answer right. The ones who got three answers wrong had to go to the front, where they were poked and pushed with a ruler till eventually they got something right. Oh, the fear and trembling this teacher instilled in the class. And yet to this day I am a whiz at answering my times tables, unlike my dear children and grandchildren, who take forever and then have to get out their calculators.

  Stars and badges or some sort of rewards and recognition for good behaviour and performance at primary schools are still with us, for my two younger grandchildren, aged six and seven, are always delighted when they get gold stars or stickers, taking it ever so solemnly and seriously. Let’s hope it lasts. It usually does throughout primary school. Most kids are keen to learn at that age, look up to and respect the teachers. The problems come later.

  One reward, nay honour, for being good and/or teacher’s pet was to be made pencil monitor. You gave out the pencils each day and were in sole charge and had exclusive access to the pencil sharpener. This was not one of those titchy sharpeners the size of a rubber but one of industrial size and strength, clamped to the edge of the teacher’s desk. You could very easily have used it for grinding up a whole cow, and have enough mince for the entire school for a year.

  Milk monitors also had high status – handing out and collecting up the milk bottles each day. All primary school children during the war and later got a little bottle of milk each, about a third of a pint. In winter, the milk would often freeze so you would have to put the bottles on the radiators to thaw, trying to time it so that they were ready at the right time. In summer they could curdle and no one wanted to drink it; the smell was enough to put you off.

  The most responsible job of all at primary school, usually given to a senior child in the top class, which meant it was usually a girl, was to be the savings monitor. All schools had a savings club, run by a teacher, but often they needed a little helper who could be relied upon.

  The idea of a national savings scheme was started by Palmerston’s government in 1861, to encourage ordinary workers to save and also to provide money for the government. It was called the Post Office Savings Bank at first, then during the two world wars they became known as National Savings and special certificates were issued as an extra incentive.

  You brought in a shilling every week to school, were given a savings stamp, then in due course when you had sufficient to make a pound – i.e. twenty shilling stamps – they were exchanged for a real certificate which you stuck proudly in your little blue savings book. The certificate told you that if you kept it for four years it would be worth twenty-five shillings, or something around that figure. It was a way of saving, getting a return on your savings, and also helping the war effort.

  There were posters and adverts in the newspapers and on hoardings proclaiming the joys of National Savings, with local committees organising events and drives to raise as much as possible. There were also endless special targets in particular regions. The good people of Carlisle would be told that if they raised £10,000 in a month it would buy six Spitfires, or £100 would be enough for two bombs, or £10 would purchase two bullets. I’m sure our particular shillings did not actually go towards a Spitfire but disappeared into the pot from which the government helped itself.

  Some lucky child in some schools, but not all, was given the job each Friday of taking all the shillings to the post office and getting the appropriate number of savings stamps. I am amazed they never got mugged, or ran off with all the money, or lost it. Oh, we were so trusting then.

  I have just opened my Noblehill school report again, the one for 1946, and where it says ‘Signature of Parent or Guardian’ my father has signed it – J. H. Davies. It is in ink and rather spidery, yet done with a flourish. Underneath his signature he has drawn a straight line with two dots underneath, to finish it off, making his mark.

  I don’t think I had ever noticed it before but suddenly it brought him back, a solid, physical remembrance, a relic of his life. Now I study it closely, like an archaeological artefact, I can see signs of his hand shaking, which I am sure I was never aware of at the time, not back in 1946. I have also just turned over one of my Stanwix school reports for 1943 and discovered there is a typewritten message on the back. It is not addressed personally to Mr and Mrs Davies, but would appear to be a duplicated message to all parents. I didn’t know schools could do photocopying or at least duplicate printing in those days. The message apologises for no school magazine being issued at present – I am surprised they had one at all, as the war was on. It then goes on to give a stern warning, in heavy quotation marks, as if they are quoting from some official directive:

  In far too many cases there is a lack of earnestness and concentration despite the possession of brain power. L
ittle individual effort is showing. It has been noticed that some children think it necessary to be spoken to twice or three times. It is such a pity that children with ability should lack the grit to use it. Will you please help by insisting upon immediate and complete obedience in the home.

  Oh my God, did they mean me personally? Or was there a group of slackers in my class of seven-year-olds – which included me?

  So much for me remembering the fiendish discipline, the rote learning, the ear-pulling and knuckle-bashing, being scared to answer back – yet this is a piece of written proof, one I have never read before, which suggests that some of us, including me, were getting totally out of hand and what we needed was ‘complete obedience’. Goodness, I wonder what my parents thought when they read it. My mother never disciplined us at all, as far as I can remember, while my father never seemed to be involved in any family matters. Perhaps I was a right little tearaway when I was seven, but have wiped it from my mind. Or was it teachers being teachers, the same as in every generation, moaning about the lowering standards of behaviour.

  It is interesting that I still have these school reports, from over seventy years ago. Obviously my mother must have preserved them, each time we moved, put them in some drawer somewhere, and I eventually inherited them when she died. Yet she was never a person for collecting memorabilia. We had no bookshelves in the house, no space to keep and store anything that wasn’t strictly necessary, that didn’t serve a prime purpose, such as feeding us or keeping us warm.