The Ted Ray Show was very popular, but I never liked him, as he seemed too slick and pleased with himself. I still listened to it, as my mother enjoyed it. There was a character called Mrs Hoskins, who was always ill and would be moaning to her best friend Ivy about her latest ailment. ‘Eee, Ivy, it was agony.’ But she loved one of her doctors. ‘Young Dr Hardcastle, he’s luuuuvly.’ Totally banal remarks, but the audience laughed and clapped and listeners went round repeating them. Are all pet phrases, which comedians use, then and now, always totally stupid? Nice to see you, to see you nice. How pointless is that?
Even now, though, after all these years, I can still find myself saying, ‘It was agony, Ivy’ when something unagonising happens.
I suppose my all-time favourite radio programme as a child and early teenager was Dick Barton – Special Agent, which started in 1946 and was on the Home Service each evening. Dick was rather smooth, well bred, well spoken, while his two sidekicks, Jock and Snowy, were Scottish and cockney, and spoke accordingly, just in case you were not sure which was which. I can still hear the music playing, tarran tarran, tarran tarran, and the mad rush to get into the house, even if I was in the middle of an exciting game of football. I had to be at the radio at 6.45 each evening, along with every other child in the post-war year.
I can’t remember listening to any of the famous wartime broadcasts, such as Churchill going on about so much being owed to so few, or the King telling us the war was over, but of course they have been repeated so many times since that I can persuade myself that, yes, I was glued to our radio at the time, I remember it well.
I have vague memories of an election where all the kids went out into the streets chanting slogans. ‘Vote, vote, vote for Mr Attlee, chuck old Churchill out the door, for we’ll buy a penny gun, and shoot him up the lum, for we don’t want Churchill any more.’ This was in 1945 when we were living in Dumfries. ‘Lum’ was another word for chimney. We might also have chanted ‘shoot him up the bum’. I was only nine and don’t recall listening to the result, or taking in that it was the most enormous and unexpected landslide, with Labour getting a majority of 145 seats over the Tories – after all Churchill had done for the nation. We were not a political family, and I never heard politics being discussed. There had been a sudden groundswell in favour of Labour at grassroots level, which the experts appeared unaware of. The theory, now, is that yes the war was won, but the nation didn’t want to go back to the old prewar class system, with its inequalities. They wanted a fairer society.
I don’t remember the 1950 election either, when Labour were returned but with a slim majority, only to be ousted by the Tories in 1951. I suppose I was too busy playing football, or glued to the radio, listening to Scotland v England, the only time we got live broadcasts, apart from the FA Cup final.
I knew all the names of the Scottish team, in fact the names of most of the famous players of the day, and the clubs, and the strips, and the names of their stadiums, but never took in the names of politicians, apart from the prime ministers. I remember Hugh Dalton as a baddie, possibly because as Chancellor of the Exchequer between 1945 and 1947 he put up the price of beer, which made him very unpopular. Perhaps that was why Labour never got in again in 1951, despite all their marvellous socialistic innovations in health and education. Ordinary people were fed up with yet more belt-tightening, and continual rationing.
TV sets gradually started to appear during the fifties, although our family never had one. The first BBC TV broadcast was in 1936, the year of my birth, from the Alexandra Palace in north London, but during the war, from 1939 to 1946, all TV was suspended – another ruse to fool those Jerries.
It is an urban myth that when TV returned in 1946, the announcer said, ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted.’ It was in fact the famous Daily Mirror columnist ‘Cassandra’, aka William Connor, who began his first column after returning from wartime service with those words. What the first BBC TV presenter said, on starting broadcasting again after a six-year gap on 7 June 1946, was, ‘Good afternoon everybody. How are you? Do you remember me, Jasmine Bligh?’ Jasmine Bligh was one of the original three BBC announcers from their prewar service.
The first time I was aware of TV was on 2 June 1953 for the Queen’s coronation. It was the first time that TV came into the lives of most people. Before then, only around half a million homes had TV sets. In 1954, a year later, there were three million. Ten years later, it was thirteen million.
There was just one woman on our estate who had a TV set, Mrs Porter, who lived in Fraser Grove, opposite Reg’s house. She bought it specially for the coronation. The rumour was that she had won some money on the pools. Her family and chosen friends were allowed to sit in her front room and watch it. Close neighbours were allowed to stand at the back of the room. Not-so-close neighbours stood outside in the front garden, looking through the window. The rest of the estate, who were not on such intimate terms, were reduced to standing out on the pavement, staring over the hedge, hoping for a glimpse of our lovely new Queen. Fat chance, as the TV was so small and so blurry and so far away, but goodness the excitement. I played football instead.
But I did clearly remember the big event close to the coronation – Edmund Hillary’s conquest of Everest just a few days before, on 29 May 1953. With, of course, plucky little Sherpa Tenzing. We all knew about him, but he was merely a native helper, so got second billing. The following year, on 6 May 1954, Roger Bannister ran the world’s first four-minute mile. I didn’t see that either, but naturally I was proud to be English, sorry, I mean British, and alive and well at such a clearly stirring, inspiring time for our island nation. So, yes, we were happy then. Mostly, anyway.
12
FRANCE, JOBS AND GIRLS
In my last year at the Creighton, in 1952, aged sixteen, with O-levels coming up, I went on a school trip to France. To improve my French, of course. The strange thing is I always thought I was pretty good at French. As good as the teacher anyway, who was probably about my level – i.e. had an appalling accent and knew very little. Looking through my Creighton reports, I see I got around 50 per cent for French in the first two years, then by the fifth year I was getting 72. Clearly gifted.
It was the main thing that distinguished the Creighton from ordinary sec mods – we did O-levels and we did French, which felt awfully smart. My mother would often say to me, when her neighbour Mrs Forsyth popped in, ‘Go on, Hunter, speak some French.’ I would refuse of course. We intellectuals were not performing seals.
I don’t know how my mother managed to pay for my school trip to France. Did the school help? I have no memory. I was obviously the privileged one as none of my siblings ever went on a school trip, certainly not abroad. My mother had never been abroad, or been in an aeroplane. My father had not been abroad either, but he had been in an aeroplane, as he was always quick to tell us. It had only been a flip round the base when he was in the RAF, but it still counted. He had been up in the air.
I am surprised now that a school like the Creighton, in the far North of England, at a time of post-war austerity, could manage a foreign trip. Makes it sound more like a posh private school. What you don’t realise at the time, as a pupil on any sort of overseas school trip, is that it is a jolly for the staff. They want to get away from the dreary round of everyday school teaching – and have, presumably, a subsidised holiday.
We went on the cross-Channel ferry, Dover to Calais, which was exciting enough, but not as much as the social and cultural shock of actually being in France. It smelled different for a start – the whiff of Gauloises, the hint of garlic, the funny smells from the lavatories and bathrooms.
God, their plumbing and lavvies seemed disgusting to our awfully refined tastes and noses. The plumbing in our hotel was a different system from ours at home, and very slow and noisy. The public toilets outside had fierce old biddies sitting in them, glowering at you, telling you off, shouting out because of something you did not know you had done wrong – and then
demanding money, or at least forcing you to leave something in a hat. Then once inside the smelly cubicle, all there was was a hole in the ground. Call that a lavatory? We could not believe it. We were caught between shock-horror and sniggering. When we heard that the old harridans were called ‘dames pipi’ it made us practically wet ourselves again.
French bikes were different, with fatter, red tyres. The bottles of orange juice, with their fat little bottoms, looked and tasted different. The haircuts and the clothes, especially French school uniforms, were all new to us. The food, of course, was totally exotic.
The French had also suffered through those awful war years, some far more than us, but it didn’t seem like it. At home we were still on starvation rations; we suffered endless shortages and when there was food in the shops it was mainly awful, with little choice. By cheese what we mainly meant was Kraft cheese, introduced in the UK from America in 1949, little processed slices, wrapped in packets, which we considered the height of sophistication. Today, being of course genuinely sophisticated, I would not even classify it as cheese. But in France in 1952, the shops and stalls were teeming with a vast array of cheeses, most of them too smelly or scary-looking to even touch, as well as fruits and meats, most of which we had never seen before. Frogs’ legs, ugh, that made us sick, just thinking about it. Oysters and mussels and assorted shellfish, you are not getting any of them down my gob.
I suppose the cosmopolitan, southern classes in England were used to much of this French food – possibly cockneys, too, as we were led to believe they swallowed eels for breakfast covered in jelly and other creepy-crawly stuff. But in Carlisle, and I am sure many other provincial towns, when we went out, at home or abroad, which was rare, to a caff of any sort, all we looked for were chips, sausages and fried eggs.
Just going out into the street in France, with your eyes closed, breathing it all in, listening to the sounds, everything felt totally foreign. The very air felt French.
Going back today, France doesn’t seem all that French, not as it did then. Was it the newness of it all, or our youth? For young people going to France today for the first time, I suspect the novelty is far less. We all eat the same stuff, have the same drinks, go to the same sort of shops, use the same mobile phones, wear the same clothes, listen to the same music – and the smelly urinals have all gone. Well, almost. We are all Europeans now. You have to go much further in the world to feel truly abroad these days. Or stay in London. That is probably today the most exotic city in the world.
We stayed at the station hotel in a little town called Abbeville, in northern France, in the Somme département. The local girls of our age totally ignored us, making us feel hick and provincial, and of course we could not exchange one word of French with them.
During the stay, we had one day and night in Paris. We took in some of the sights, the Seine and the Eiffel Tower, but then I fell ill with asthma and had to stay all day in my room. It must have been the excitement that brought it on. Or the Gauloise smoke. The French seemed to smoke even more than the Brits, and much stronger, smellier stuff. The French teacher, the one I had always mocked for being useless at French, chose to stay behind in the hotel with me while all the others went off on some cultural expedition. I felt guilty ruining his pleasure, his trip.
I learned very little French during the trip, much less spoke any, and just made silly jokes about pee-pee and French signs like ‘Sortie’. What sort of sortie did it mean, sir? We spent a lot of time looking for cheap presents to bring home to our parents. For my mother, I bought a toy Eiffel tower in a snowstorm globe, and a very miniature bottle of three-star Cognac for my father. Both were immediately put in our cocktail cabinet where they remained, unshaken, undrunk, forever, but were proof to the neighbours that one of the family had been to France, oh yes.
Back home, in my final year at school, in the fifth form as it was then called, I can’t remember doing a lot of revising for my O-levels – but I did an awful lot of other work, in order to earn money. From the age of fourteen, I had had a job – not down the mines, or up chimneys, but it seemed just as knackering. I was a paperboy, lugging a huge bag round our streets, having to get up in winter in the dark and the cold. I had been on a long waiting list before I got the job.
The job was at Clark’s, the grocery and newsagent at the top of the hill, beside the Redfern pub, which served our estate. Mr Clark always looked miserable and moany, especially first thing in the morning, marking up the papers, worried that some of the paperboys would be late or non-existent. He wouldn’t open up the shop if we arrived early, making us stand out in the frost. He could be seen marking up through the window, his brow furrowed, his face gloomy. I would often go over the road with one or two other boys and climb over the wall of a nursery opposite, and steal apples, scared stiff I would be caught.
I often did sleep in, and my mother would have to shake me awake. Sometimes I would have asthma and literally be unable to get out of bed. When that happened, my mother would wake the twins and persuade one of them to go and do my round for me. Which would mean being eternally grateful, and paying them when I got my wages.
I did that paper round for about four years. It meant I got to know all the front doors of all the surrounding streets, all the gardens, all the letterboxes, and most of the people. At Christmas time you made a point of hanging about. It always seemed to be the scruffiest, most impoverished family who gave you half a crown as a Christmas box, while the more affluent-looking pretended you did not exist, that the fairies had brought their paper. Perhaps sixpence if you were lucky.
Council estates did have affluent people, with nicer gardens and hedges than most of us, who had certain airs and graces and considered themselves superior folks, which was surprising, as most of them worked at the MU and didn’t have any betters jobs than my father, until he was ill.
The most popular papers were the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, but quite a few took the News Chronicle and the Daily Herald. Only one house took the Telegraph. I don’t remember ever delivering a Times or a Manchester Guardian.
I then took on an evening paper round as well, which meant delivering to the new estate, still being built behind the lotties. It was a longer walk but was after school so the hours were more civilised. I didn’t know the houses over there, or the people, and hardly ever saw them.
After my sixteenth birthday, in January 1952, I dropped the evening paper round and took on a different job at Clark’s, in addition to the morning papers – delivering groceries on a bike.
The reason for doing all these jobs was to buy my own bike. My parents could not afford one, and they never gave me any pocket money. I would not have had money otherwise, apart from Christmas presents from our Cambuslang relations.
I bought a green Raleigh Lenton Sports with Sturmey Archer gears, my heart’s desire, a model and a colour with the right drop handlebars and gears that I’d long ogled. I can still smell it now. When it was new and virgin, the tyres and metal and rubber had an aroma of newness, the same as you get with a new car, which is so sweet and strong and overpowering. You clean and polish it all day long, trying to keep its virginity, then you forget, can’t be bothered. After a few weeks it smells of roads and traffic and sweaty bums.
I bought it at T.P. Bell’s in Abbey Street, where generations of Carlisle teenagers had bought their bikes, paying it up at a rate of 13/11 a week on the never-never. It did seem to take forever, perhaps a year or two. I think the cost was around £20, a huge amount, double what a working man would earn in a week, plus of course the interest that had to be paid. So it must have taken at least fifty weeks to pay it off.
But, oh, the freedom and independence it gave, able to go out into the country, or across town, without needing money for the bus. Being alone, on a bike, you look purposeful, as if you are going somewhere. Unlike walking alone, cycling alone does not suggest you have no friends, no one who will come and do things with you. You are a free spirit. Even more so, if you are a girl.
I used to think that that Raleigh bike, that model, in that colour, was unique to T.P. Bell’s, and therefore unique to Carlisle. Never realised that hundreds of thousands of boys all over the country were at the same time lusting after that selfsame bike. Talking one day to John Lennon, it came out that he’d had exactly the same bike. I think his Aunt Mimi bought it for him. I don’t remember him ever talking about delivering papers or having any after-school jobs. Spoiled, if you ask me. He did of course live in a semi-detached private house, not on a council estate.
My grocery delivery job paid more than doing the papers, which was how I was able to fund the payments on my bike. The job was mainly on Saturday mornings, when housewives got their week’s shopping, which they had ordered earlier. Their orders would be packed up in individual cardboard boxes by one of Mr Clark’s shop assistants and I would stack as many as I could on my bike – my shop bike, not my own gleaming Raleigh Lenton Sports.
It was a heavy, ungainly, unwieldy, old-fashioned delivery bike with a massive straw basket at the front. It often fell over while I was loading, so I would have to brush the dirt off any groceries that landed on the pavement, hoping nobody had noticed. Starting off was fine, as Clark’s was on a hill, so I whizzed down, the wind blowing my hair, singing away, but coming back afterwards to the shop, struggling up the hill, even with an empty basket, that was agony, Ivy.
The weekly shopping orders would contain HP Sauce, Crosse & Blackwell’s salad dressing, Bisto, Heinz beans or spaghetti hoops, Bird’s Custard powder, Carnation milk, Rinso, Shredded Wheat, fish or other funny pastes, Oxo cubes, sugar, Spam, perhaps some Rowntree’s fruit gums and Spangles for the kiddies. It was mostly tins, packets of non-perishable heavy goods that housewives did not want to lug home. And, of course, almost everyone got at least one loaf. I was so pleased when sliced bread came in. It meant that if the bike fell over, sliced bread, being covered, was not ruined, just bashed. It also seemed lighter.
The Co-Op's Got Bananas Page 12
