The Old Gaffer

We finally moved from the awful flat to a house we all called ‘76′. My brother could now come home to be educated. 76 was close enough to 88, my grand- mother’s house, for her to help out when Willie had to work late. Unless one has never lived in a terrace house on the bend of a road, and a tight inside bend at that, one cannot possibly imagine the consequences. As far as the house is concerned, the bend starts at the kerb on the far side of the road, then there is the road, the footpath, the front garden - however meagre, only then does one arrive at the front face of the house, which, for road symmetry, must be the same width as the rest of the houses on the straight. The house is like a slice of sponge cake, wide at the front and narrow at the back and the degree of squeeze is determined by the depth of the house and the tightness of the curve. 76 had a front room, a second room on the ground floor before arriving at a side entrance to the
garden, the kitchen and then the scullery, and throughout this parade of rooms and spaces, the width narrowed inexorably. It was as if the house had been squashed in a ‘V’ shaped vice. Don’t get me wrong, it was a palace to what we had been occupying previously, the freedom, the independence, the joy of a place all of one’s own was immeasurable. It was just a funny shaped house with an even funnier shaped garden. It was just our own personal slice of speculative mismanagement.

The hall leading from the front door to the living room had a kink where the staircase started. On the wall at the kink was fixed above head height the shilling-in-the-slot gas meter which had all sorts of interesting pipes, name plates, covers and seals, each with its own resonance when hit by a lead air-gun slug. So the Wyatt Erp Era of gun law opened, and also open season on gas meters. I had swapped something or other for an air-gun pistol and it was my pleasure, especially at holiday times when I had the house to myself, to sit at breakfast and practice the ‘quick draw’. The target was the gas meter, not as a whole, but the various units, and success was signalled by the sound each gave off when hit. As you can imagine, this palled after a while and I advanced to using a mirror and shooting backwards over my shoulder.

All the years I knew her, Willie was subjected to fearsome migraines and never more so than at 76. It had never been a severe problem for me before, when she was ill I fed myself, but when my brother joined us circumstances changed. We started having greater choices; this included roasts, Yorkshire puddings, boiled salt beef and carrots and so on. The problem was we had no refrigerator, only the wooden ’safe’ in a cool place in the garden, with its wet cloth in the heat of summer, wet earthen crocks with dripping towels and other devices to prolong the life of meat, and milk in particular. Willie would buy a roast for the weekend but often the migraine would strike and I would have to provide the dinner. In this way I learned to cook anything, stews, roasts, even pastry when my interest had been awakened enough for a meat pie. I spent the morning running up and down stairs receiving orders for each stage as it arrived, given in a weak, pained, wavering voice, but in time it became routine.

By comparison, in about 1935, my Aunt Min, our school-teacher aunt, had a marvellous one-room flat in Russell Square which I envied. For its time it was well in advance of the norm. To start with it was approached by a lift and was so high one could see right across London to the East. Off a tiny hall was the bathroom, a wardrobe, a general storage cupboard and, what interested me most, was a small cupboard which contained the refuse bin which was emptied by the building staff from the corridor through a small door into the corridor. The room itself was not exceptional except for the cupboard in the lounge which opened to reveal itself as a tiny kitchen with stove, sink unit and storage. To me it was the life to aim for. At 76, aged about 14, for the first time ever, I was given a room in which I could do what I liked, and it was then I started designing multi-function furniture for the bed-sit, some of which I saw later in magazines. There were two pieces in particular, one impracticable, one later commonplace. The first was a rotating wardrobe with doors back and front so in one position it was a wardrobe, in the other it was a larder - totally daft, although years later, in a one-(tiny)room flat I was to use a wardrobe for both functions. The other was a bed with a bed-head for sitting up against when in bed, which folded down to form an occasional side-table when the bed was transformed into a divan as part of the seating arrangements. I believe it was ahead of its time.

I was on board a corvette in Belfast Harbour; while repairing a set and talking to the wireless operator, an officer stuck his head into the office and said “Williams…” and then he stopped. “I thought you were Williams, ” he said, “You sound just like him.” I smiled, he left and I got on with the job. Then Williams turned up. I discovered I knew him, he had been in my class at school. It was strange meeting him under those circumstances, and later, thinking about what had happened it led me to believe that schools have a stronger moulding influence on their pupils than they are credited with.

In our school, situated as it was in the heartland of the cockney accent every Friday during a pupil’s first term, all the new entrants were gathered together and taught phonetics and what amounted to elocution. We mimicked the vowels, the consonants, silly phrases about cows, peas and pace which stressed the difference between what was said inside and outside the school. We mimicked the master, Oxbridge to the teeth, so we too were now receiving an Oxbridge slant.

To extend the theme of mass moulding even further, both geographically and educationally, when I started at Queens University Belfast, as a mature, ex-service engineering student, there were only a few English students, most were Northern Irish with just a smattering of foreigners and members of the Commonwealth. Out of forty of us I believe there were something like fifteen of us who were ex-service, many married, some with children, all on grants, all with only one chance, no second bites of the cherry, all ambitious with ground to make up, all studying like mad. For the rest, they were straight from school and within a few weeks they found we were a force to be reckoned with.

From my perspective as an outsider, both from origin and age, I discovered unconsciously that the men and women who had come straight from school seemed to fall into categories conditioned by their schooling. Their attributes and outlooks seemed the same within each group and yet so disparate group by group. Without being specific, there were schools which produced people who were relatively innocent to a point of being almost naive. One group could have been classed as puppyish; another had the insouciance of the English Public School. There were some who had suffered such a strict and rigid regime that now they were out from under the repressive supervision, they did not seem to know quite what to do with their freedom. There was a tough crowd, polite but hardy, nothing would get past them and there were others who seemed so reserved as to be non-existent. To generalise is unfair to the individual, and probably many would not agree with my assessment. However, the fact that I have convinced myself that I discovered this apparent segregation in attitude and approach subconsciously, and that I believed it to be true at the time, must say something for the mass moulding of character and the responsibility the teacher has for the end product of his school.

Oxbridge and ex-Public School staff ran our school on Public School lines - as closely as one could for a day school. We had PT every day, vaulting over boxes, doing running somersaults, walking the high beam and everything one can imagine doing in a fully equipped gymnasium, including a shower afterwards. We played seasonal games twice a week, assembly with hymns every morning. Prefects were allowed to thrash, yet no one complained. A strong sense of pride, fostered by a good academic success rate both at school and after, ensured the popularity with parents. The pride was greatly publicised by names on mahogany-faced boards in gold leaf in the Great Hall, that could be read when the message from the platform was too banal. This pride was dented a bit when some Hitler Youth came over on exchange, taught us hand-ball and thrashed us, then proceeded to beat us at tennis. If cricket had not been beyond the German vocabularies of our upper sixth, we could well have be beaten at that too.

There was snobbery between us and other schools in the area which we thought beneath us, which I place squarely at the feet of the staff. We had a woodwork department in which the woodwork master was replaced by a teacher who spoke with a working class accent, worked very much with his hands and had probably come from an artisan background. I suspected he had started life apprenticed to a trade in the North and then had worked hard to reach an academic level. One never saw him in the staff room and rarely, if ever, in the company of members of staff. He taught maths as a subsidiary subject but woodwork and metal work were his preoccupations. We had to choose between learning Classics, or Woodwork and metalwork for Matriculation, I chose the latter, and have never regretted the grounding which has helped me throughout my life, and which made training in the Navy considerably easier. Looking back though, I think tuition in both subjects would have been more beneficial,

It was in my second year the new crafts teacher arrived. Below average height, built like an international rugby hooker, he had hands like vices. He appeared dour. Looking back, and taking into account later experiences with him when we were evacuated, I believe he was probably just reserved. In two terms he single-handedly ripped the workshop to pieces, built steel covered metal work-benches, installed a forge, a lathe, a vertical drilling machine and a plethora of new implements we had never seen before’, while teaching. Then he proceeded to teach us to make EPNS pierced napkin rings, twisted pokers for home fires, the dangerous art of spinning copper - improperly set up, one could lose fingers, ears, chunks of cheeks, as men in the engine Sheds at Crew did, spinning the copper domes for the valves on top of the steam engines. To me it was a period of my schooling I looked forward to every week.

In his store he kept all the expensive and or dangerous bits and pieces which today would walk the plank. Stealing then was not a problem, there was the odd thief who was generally caught and expelled, but nothing was locked up anywhere in the school, except the school shop and the tuck shop. With permission, we were allowed to fix things, as a privilege, and if we had taken on a project which was behind or took more time than allocated, we could work at it in free periods. It was then I discovered him sitting in his office with a cup of tea or sandwiches for his lunch, something the other Staff would not have dreamed of doing, they were entitled to school meals, even when they were not on ‘dinner duty’. I felt sorry for him, a childish presumption based on my own gregarious outlook. In fact, later, I was to find he was a very sophisticated man with cultured tastes and he probably preferred his own company to the racket of the Staff Room.

When we were evacuated in Sussex, he had to try to maintain our progress in metalwork without proper facilities as we would be examined not only on written work but a half-day practical. That first winter in ‘39 was fierce and the snow was heavy. One day he came upon some of us trying to make a toboggan out of scrap timber, fruit boxes and the like. He called us into his house, produced some decent wood and guided us in the making of one which would seat three grown boys at a time and was properly constructed with metal runners. Once the ice was broken, we went there on several occasions for tea with his family and it was then that I really appreciated the worth of the man. I have often wondered if he was ever really accepted by his peers at the school, or even whether he wanted to be. All I know is that I owe him more than just matriculation in metalwork

Every week there is something new which demands our attention, affects our lives and causes change for change’s sake. Much is in the cause of appearing to care, rather than caring

Gas-Guzzlers are being taxed unfairly I believe, because the government wants to appear eco-friendly. I personally hate them; parking spaces were never painted to accept these monstrosities, thereby making getting in and out of one’s own car a contortion. At roundabouts they are like lorries and obscure one’s view. Half are driven purely for the Mummy Run, and parked outside schools in estate roads and so don’t help make through traffic flow easily, and get behind a slow one and passing is almost impossible. However, that is not the point, they cost an arm and a leg, so the Vat must have been shattering, we all are taxed on our petrol and as they are Guzzlers, allegedly, they pay more tax - it is unfair, it contravenes their rights by being selected for special attention, it was imposed without a reasonable period of warning, so the owners were caught on the hop. They have already, as others, paid their dues by differential, what has been legislated is, I believe a type of arbitrary action without due process, just to appear eco-friendly and is despicable.

Shopping bags, the last comment The other day I wrote a piece about M&S stopping providing bags and proving to my own satisfaction the idea was silly. I realise it was a sop to the Green Lobby, looking for Brownie Points, but it is so inconsistent. As I deal mostly in Tescos I weighed a number of their ordinary bags and found they weigh 8 grams each. Then weighed the plastic packaging other items came in and they ranged from the box which had contained a small cheese (16g) to a small box for chocolates (58g), In my experience plastic boxes for tools, electrical and electronic components are of thick and heavy plastic. So is this gesture by M&S going to save the world on its own? Or is all plastic packaging going to be banned, or is it just another pointless band- wagon?

The Psychological ploys of Vendors are not new. That old chestnut of charging £X and 99p goes back to the days of farthings. I can understand the placing of certain items at eye level or ‘jammer goodies’ where small children will see them, that is common sense, and if you are not careful 3 for 2 will fill the pantry to overflow. But what I really wonder is whether the Stores carry out exercises because they have been told they are effective, or have they really carried out surveys to check. I can’t really see logistically how they could have. One ploy which drives me mad is shifting product positions not only on the shelf, but shifting whole aisles, on the principle shoppers will see new items. A fallacy! The shopper is so frustrated he or she either asks, which takes up the time of the staff, or gets what is easy and goes somewhere else for what he or she couldn’t find. Have they checked peoples’ reaction to the ploy?

Yet another case of government selectivity in seeking popularity I am imaginative, and I’m not basically hardhearted, so, as a great grand father, I can sympathise with the parents whose child has been abducted in Portugal, and sincerely hope for a successful outcome. What I find amazing is the dichotomy this incident has created. Millions of pounds have been promised, there may also be a fund; millions throughout the world are hitting a website, there has been a report on every news item for weeks, and a media feeding frenzy. The other day it was reported on BBC News, another child had gone missing, it received merely a passing comment. Dozens of our men are being killed, in wars unlikely to be solved, also with a passing comment, and I wonder how much compensation there will be for the grieving families. Yet our Prime Minister-in-waiting singles out this occurrence in Portugal for special attention. Perhaps, as he is not in office, no one has told him of the plight of the immigrant girls and young women, forced in to prostitution and being killed as a warning to the rest, when they rebel.

The Bizarre World Of The Hospital There was one accident which outshone all the rest, it was spectacular, it was predictable and it might have been my fault - concussed I never really found out, I had just sold my cycle and bought another one, once again for a pound, another second-hand one which was to last me well into the 60’s. It was another sit-up-and-beg version, but the paint was pristine and it had a three speed Sturmy Archer gear which rated it as a flying machine in those days. Three of us were out on a ride around. The other two had new bikes and were putting them through their paces. Unfortunately I had not done all the servicing I should have done prior to my first venture on the new bike, the brakes were almost non-existent. We had been cycling from the top of a hill and were coming down at speed towards a major road, which crossed, and, of course, had right of way. The other two stopped at the junction, I went on, and on, until I was brought up short by the handle of the rear door of a car against my head behind the ear. That was the last I heard until I awoke in hospital.

Apparently I lay in the road using language I could have been expelled from school for and being given brandy, the worst stimulant for someone with concussion. When I came to I found a policeman beside the bed who asked me what had happened and I was able to tell him what I believed to be true, that I had been hit by a motorcycle,. That ended police enquiries. The next visitor was a distraught mother, her hat slightly askew from her hurried departure from home, and her inevitable diaphanous scarf equally awry. She informed me I had broken my back, and I was on boards and not allowed to move. This was the prelude to the main event, which was a week in hospital with a cracked skull, a broken collarbone, a cracked arm and concussion, beside minor contusions.

I was in a fracture ward, which was full of characters. In those days broken legs could mean months in hospital and I suppose the atmosphere was a little like prison where the old lags know the warders and all the dodges. The familiarity between the nurses and the men was an eye-opener to a fourteen year old. I was the only young person in the ward. The man in the next bed had been run over by a lorry loaded with bricks which had separated his chest area from his pelvis, or something like that. Whatever was actually the case, it was greeted by all as a miracle that he had lived, let alone that he could now walk with only a slight limp, because one leg was shorter than the other, after they had sewn him together.

Then there was the bookmaker who was wheeled from ward to ward as a living and breathing reference to the skills of the staff and the surgeons in particular. The fact that it was also a demonstration of what could happen  to a welsher at Epsom Downs seemed to have escaped the staff in their desire for plaudits. If it had been me in that wheel chair I think I would have insisted on some sort of mask, say a balaclava, so no one would know who I was. Of course he may ‘have seen the light’, people often act out of character under those circumstances. Apparently at the closing of a very unsuccessful meeting he had been sneaking off when someone thrust a knife into his heart and the surgeons not only got him from Epsom to Tooting, they took the knife out of him and sewed up his heart.

I think some of the men tried to embarrass me just for something to do and some of their stories were pretty lurid, especially of what they assured me the night nurses got up to, but I had been brought up to respect women, I had no choice, I was surrounded by them, so I took the joshing in the spirit I assumed it was intended. When it was discovered that my back was not broken I was put in a cot on the balcony, overlooking a square of grass, where the windows were opened every day and life seemed transformed from what it had been in the ward. There I came across a man who had to stand considerable banter because he had fallen on ice on the front steps of a brothel. Apparently he had spent an enjoyable night with one of the ladies, she had provided breakfast, but as he left he slipped on the steps and broke his leg. It is not difficult to imagine the flood-gates that opened from the other men in the hospital ward with that little tit-bit to work on. My education in barely a week was enormous.

I often wonder if young people, with shiny new degrees lecturing us on TV, in dictatorial terms, with such conviction, have really had any experience of the problems they are allegedly solving. I have met a number of those problems head on, at a time when they were not thought to be so. From the age of eight, I, and many of my mates regularly carried blood blisters on our buttocks or hands from caning. We were high spirited, and when we thought we were right. rebellious, but not vandals, nor did we feel oppressed.

In a music lesson in secondary school, the teacher was playing a record of the Overture to the Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and explaining how a few bars of the music imitated the braying of an ass. Gilly Potter, my mate, and I sat together; we were undoubtedly asses. The teacher replayed the record, Gilly and I, instinctively brayed on queue. I had to fetch the punishment book and cane, Gilly and I received 6 blood blisters on our buttocks to take home.

In elementary school, a poem set for homework was twice tested the following day. After further learning in a classroom, where the rest were being taught something more interesting, those still below par, had to learn again, then bend over and had strokes of the cane punctuating each omission to help the appreciation of poetry. In my own home, a cane hung from a hook on the kitchen door and could be applied for all sorts of reasons. There were other abuses, bullying, clips round the head for incompetence, etc,

At secondary school we were caned by the prefects for minor infringements, like not doing the lines they had given us for running in a corridor. Most of us took it as part of life, it hurt momentarily; it was an obvious risk one took for disobeying the rules, but psychologically, life was so full, we hadn’t time for it to become a real concern.

As to sex, in single sex schooling, and unless we had sisters, we had no truck with girls until we were about 15, and even then we were totally naive; and while there were dirty stories going the rounds, I distinctly remember when I was about eleven, having no idea what the guy telling the story was talking about. Swearing, sex and salacious talk was rare in front of children, to the extent that when an aunt was being divorced, it was only discussed when I was absent, I was ten at the time. Sexual child abuse and other deviances, to my certain knowledge were never aired in general company, mainly because they were ‘not nice’ the final arbiter in so much pre WW2.

Would I be wrong in thinking that religion-supplied recreation and stimulation in the old days served the community well, particularly in those dull, dark winter nights, through clubs, Scouts and Guides and other activities for the young, even if they abandoned it later in life; but that the root causes of delinquency today are through the lack of parental control, exercise, stimulation and also debilitating boredom, not abuse and some of the other factors usually offered? Am I right in thinking, in effect, the parents should be held actively responsible, and there should be more recreational areas and facilities?

The thought that in the not too distant future Soph and I will not be driving, and will therefore be forced to take taxis to go shopping, brought to mind the corner shop of old. Like farms where the barns had the most pleasant smell of hay, feed, leather and horse, these shops had the smell of their own, compiled from jute bags on the floor containing potatoes, kindling, and dog biscuits, and the provender and spices on the shelves. To their regular customers the shops were always of interest, because knowing the taste of the customer, the shopkeeper not only talked as a friend of long standing, but would introduce new products for their delectation. Under the awning, on the pavement would be the veg, the eggs, and glass-topped boxes of biscuits. Nothing was too much trouble, and often whole discussions would take place between the customers waiting and the shopkeeper. Today shopping can be either a matter of completing a list as quickly as possible, or drifting in the hope of finding bargains. There is nothing personal, merely business.

The combination of the car and the supermarket has changed all that. Large conurbations are now built without a single shop, or a small area given over to selected shops, most of which are each part of a combine, having centralised purchasing and consequently the same products in every shop. In the old days, if you were a regular customer, the shopkeeper would buy in a small quantity of a particular brand that you chose, for you, and the chances are that others would try it. Now the shop determines the choice, the brands and the quantities. This is why mail-order has developed to enable people to purchase selectively.

To quite a considerable extent the shoppers are to blame for the loss of the corner shop, in their search for bargains. I know of cases where people have been to specialised shops to seek advice and view the wide range those shops hold,, and when they have discovered that the supermarket is selling the same product more cheaply, they buy there, forgetting that the increased costs in the shop cover the overheads for carrying a wider selection, and paying a knowledgeable counter hand. In this way the specialised shops go out of business, and your choice is what the supermarket has to offer, which will definitely not contain some of the dearer, and perhaps more imaginative versions of the article.

I am just sorry that the young people of today have to go to a museum to discover what a corner shop used to be like. But as an exhibit it won’t have the atmosphere, the smell, and the bustle that those shops had in their heyday.

Packaging Away back in their 20s and 30s measuring in grocers’ shops was cruder, more varied covering a much greater range of weights. Families were so much larger, their diet more simple, so they purchased fewer articles in greater quantities. I remember buying a stone of potatoes, weighed on a beam balance. Dried beans, porridge, sugar and other granular products, also dried fruit, were sometimes shovelled with a brass gauged trowel of standard volume, into pokes, pyramidal bags formed in the wink of an eye by the grocer from a pile of brown paper on the counter, and the flaps tucked in, in a flash. . The grocer always added a small extra to ensure fare quantities. Packaging was for meat, greasy articles and special items. The market stall holders might use bags, but most wrapped things in old newspaper.

M&S are stating that they are proposing to charge for plastic carrier bags in the future, and are running an experimental period in Northern Ireland. I don’t really believe that previous to this the bags were discounted. It could be part of the pseudo ecological front we are being fed daily from every quarter. Someone quoted Lidl’s policy of not providing bags free, but that doesn’t stand up, because the throughput is so different, and if you have a large quantity of items, the speed with which they are put through the cash register makes packaging so impossible that one tends to chuck everything into the trolley, unpackaged. The other day I saw a woman in Tesco’s, with four of her own bags in a trolley, and a mountain of shopping, dithering and taking ages as to which bag each item should go into. The cashier and I watch this in frustration, and it dawned on me that there was no way this trial will be a success, because it will involve the companies in increasing the cashout units, as people fumbled unaided with their own bags. I can see some problems in having bottle bank type containers to recycle the bags. and shredders would be open to vandalism. I believe allegedly free bags are here to stay.

I don’t think I ever met anyone, outside of a professional cyclist, who had more accidents within a year than I did and most of them were not my fault - hand on heart!

I was about fourteen when I bought my first bicycle and that I’m sure was mainly to save money on tram fares to school. For whatever reason I was allowed to buy a second-hand bike for a pound, not an insubstantial amount when considered against the basic wage, a ’sit-up-and beg’ bike and characterless. It was probably WW1 vintage. It needed painted, had only one gear -I was enamoured with it. I had it about a month when I decided to go on my first real journey, I would visit an aunt. , some two to three miles away. She was not in, so I thought Crystal Palace is only a little further, I’ll go and look at that - only another three miles. When I had seen the Crystal Palace, perfunctorily, I thought I would go to see an uncle at Orpington - about ten miles. They were out too. It was at that point I saw a signpost which said that Tonbridge Wells, only ten miles more and I was becoming blas?, and once there Hastings beckoned - with no thought for the return journey, just the sea, the pebbles and the glory to come. I had no food, no protective clothing, but enthusiasm. There were some marvellous names of small settlements along the way, but the only one I now recall was Peas Pottage.

Pole Hill and River Hill to a cyclist are like crawling up the side of the Eiger, Hasting was about 55 miles from home, some ride for someone who had only been cycling for a month. When I arrived at about two o’clock, I carefully put the bicycle in the under-promenade car park and sat on the beach for an hour until I knew I had no choice but to leave for London. That return journey towards the end, was torture. As I climbed the last of the two great hills I fell asleep while standing on the pedals going up the hill and found myself in the gutter with the bike on top of me. Ultimately I arrived home close to midnight to find a very worried mother. The following day I stayed in bed, exhausted, but the expedition had given me a taste for long rides and from then on I went to Brighton, Hastings and other seaside resorts, and back, for a day’s outing as a regular occurrence, still on the bone-shaker.

For me, cycling is best as a solitary occupation. Most of my companions wanted to stop for refreshment, couldn’t mend a puncture and did everything to hamper the smooth progress of the day. The whole essence of long distance cycling is rhythm, the rhythm of the pedals, the wheels on the road surface, regular eating, a little at a time and the same with drinking, and above all the rhythm of the mind. I found cycling gave one room to think without distraction, a solitary ride did not have to be a lonely one. With all the time to see the countryside, the clouds, the wild life and to just think about all of that or just anything, it was wonderful and if the war had not come along I am sure I would have pedalled the whole of England.

I have always considered myself accident prone and some say that being so is an indication of laziness. I can’t agree. Take my first cycle accident, nothing could be more bizarre. I was cycling up a steep hill when the handcart in front of me pulled out and started to pass a parked car. I then pulled out to pass the cart and a taxi coming behind pulled out to pass me. There we were, strung out like washing on a line, right across the road, when a cyclist coming down the hill at speed was forced to shoot out into the centre of the road to avoid hitting the cab head on, instead he chose me to hit head on. I flew over my handlebars, his handlebars and landed several feet up the road. My front wheel was a mess. Again, I had been ice-skating and was seated on my bike outside Streatham Ice rink waiting for my friend when it happened. The bike was supported on one pedal on the pavement and I was lounging on the saddle with my feet on the handlebars, my arms across my knees and my chin on my arms when I received a blow which changed all that. An idiot on a racing bike, with his hands on the low grips of his handlebars, cycling head down, ran straight into the back of me. More than my pride was bruised and the rear wheel was twisted out of recognition. I made him give me his name and address but I was never able to persuade his mother to pay for the damage and in those days there was neither Legal Aid nor a Nanny State, it was every man for himself. No 3. It was a wet morning with the rain teeming down. I was stopped in the middle of the main road waiting to turn right, if and when the opportunity presented itself. In the distance was a tram coming towards me. Suddenly I was hit from behind with a resounding thump by a motorcycle and I skated along the tramlines like a stone in the Scottish game of curling, until I was brought up against the cow-catcher device on the front of the tram which was shuddering to a halt. Laziness? I think not.

I’m a belt and braces man, where it comes to serious matters. I don’t fly by the seat of my pants, so when I read that Gordon Brown has sold off our gold reserves for a pittance, alarm bells ring. My problem is that I do not understand high finance. I was brought up in an era where we earned our money by trade, and down at the docks you could actually see what we were exporting and what we were importing. Today it seems we are dealing in money, and intellectual properties all by electronic communication. However down at the docks there are still ship loads of containers coming in from abroad bringing in commodities at prices that no one would ever have imagined, they are so low; and it’s not as if the quality suffered .as a result. In consequence, it is unsurprising that people are running into debt, they can’t resist a bargain, and when they see things priced as cheaply as they are they feel that they are only spending a small amount of money - until the card account comes in.

The real wealth is held in just a few hands, while the government is creating new taxes at an unprecedented rate, the latest being the revival of that old chestnut, paying for refuse collection. I am assuming that a large portion of our income as a nation comes from trading on the stock exchange. One only has to look at the rise and fall of other markets, such as the Japanese, to realise that there is a level of instability built in to these dealings. If we no longer have a gold reserve then it would seem that we are open to being plundered.

The loss of our impregnable borders, and the rush across Europe by immigrants to come here, to work for pay, in order to send money home to their families in distant countries, must inevitably make a drain on our internal finances, which should be based on the natural circulation of money. On top of this we are paying £450 a week to maintain migrant youngsters in accommodation, and in excess of £1000 a week to maintain the miscreant migrants in jail. To me, with my simple attitude to finance, this doesn’t add up, and can’t be justified. The cry is that we need these migrants to fill jobs, and yet we are appalled that our own youngsters are staying away from school and have the literacy and numerousy of seven-year-olds. These youngsters are clearly not being taught properly, their interest is not being aroused, and their parents are negligent. Would it not be better that these youngsters were taught to fill the posts that the migrant workers are filling? There is no shadow of doubt that they would expect to be paid a lot better once they are qualified, but even then taken overall, surely this is a more secure approach than having itinerants here for a short spell, and leaving when they have earned enough. This is not building skills for the future, it is denigrating our stock of skilled workers yet again.

With the increasing national internal debt, comes a side effect. I believe we have replaced simple pleasures, such as walking in the country, simple hobbies and sports, with acquisition, shopping, and servicing the need for the capital to pay for it. This in turn means working longer hours as a family, having less time with the children, even taking on extra work. I am convinced that people are not as happy overall, as their parents and grandparents were, there is too much pressure, too much worry, and far too much hurry. When I was at school I learned the poem which started off with ‘What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare, no time to see when woods we pass, where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.’ In school today, instead of appreciating the sentiment, the children will probably be tittering at the word ‘nuts’, our language has been so degraded - it is almost impossible to construct a flowery sentiment without it having another connotation..

To most boys coming from my background, religion was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It was an entre into the Scouting Movement, which, was church affiliated, offered bun fights and picnics’ in lieu of TV On cold wet winter evenings, apart from the Cubs and Scouts, there was the CCC, Children’s Christian Circle. Held in a barren church hall with rows and rows of hard chairs, we sat to be entertained by missionaries, back from all corners of the world, with lantern slides of people in strange lands with even stranger habits, such as having wooden plates in their lower lips or fingernails which seemed to go on for ever and clearly made life a plague. If we were enticed beyond the attraction of the eccentric, it could only have been by something cheap and innocuous like a glass of orange squash at half-time, Missionary Societies were hard up. Our church had had a change of vicar, the new one hailed from Ireland, that place off Wales where music hall artists came from.

The night which changed my religious outlook was totally unheralded. It was the usual CCC night, wet, cold and dank, with little heating and the regular crescendo of noise. We were awaiting the arrival of the speaker and the vicar to introduce him. I was cocked up comfortably on the back legs of my chair, my feet on the rails of the one in front, chatting happily,. The new vicar appeared. He looked round, and started to walk down the centre aisle surveying the rabble. I took little notice of him - was just aware of his presence, so did not recognise Nemesis when it arrived. My first intimation was when I disappeared over the back of my chair to hit the floor with a thump. When he had approached, the vicar had asked, “Would you do that at home?” - indicating the feet on the rails and the tipped up chair. Truthful to the point of being, in the eyes of the vicar, impertinent and unrepentant, I had said I would, which was true, at which instant the vicar’s fist struck and struck hard. What followed that evening was a blur but in spite of the combined efforts of my mother, and Miss Batley, my Sunday school teacher, I ended my association with our church. I was sorry. I loved church on Sunday, listening to the bobs, doubles and trebles being rung by the full peal. I was a bugler, drummer and patrol leader in the Scouts, I would miss the fun of it all.. In spite of the ‘turning the other cheek’ bit, Miss Batley was hammering on about, I believed that Christianity’s preaching of ‘love thy neighbour’ should start at source and not be interpreted as a thump in the chest. “Enough already!” It was worse than I had anticipated. By not attending church parades I was then chucked out of the church Troop, I was a pariah - I was unacceptable, by inference unclean! For a while I mooched about on Sundays with my heathen friends, but Mother finally put her foot down and demanded that I must attend church, any church, so I and the heathens inaugurated the Religious Round.

The Religious Round It shows the cohesion we had as a group, told to attend; the others decided to accompany me. We would turn up at a meeting, it might have been Sunday School or a church service. At each new venue, the greetings we got were amazing. To find a small group of boys, aged about eleven, turning up on the doorstep, un-coerced, was probably unheard of. We, in turn, found it amazing, that so many sects could preach the same message in so many different ways. On one occasion, we went up some stairs to a scruffy loft, where the chap in charge was an ex-Canadian Mounted Policeman we all knew. He, as usual, was in the Mounty dress uniform, green-khaki trousers with a yellow stripe down the sides of the legs, polished riding boots and a blue jacket with chain-mail epaulettes but for once no wide-brimmed hat - incongruous, to say the least. We always attended for a few weeks, reading and discussing the handouts on our way home. Whether we learned much I cannot say, but I think many of the protracted arguments with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses on the front doorstep in later life might show that some of the teaching had been absorbed, along with growing scepticism, agnosticism and general apathy, leading to atheism.

We went out of our way to sample all we could; the one we liked best was the Salvation Army. They sat us in the front pew, opposite the roaring brass, and it was fantastic. There was an atmosphere almost akin to hysteria that was infectious. Looking back in retrospect, it was the street corner service transferred indoors. Of all the religious groups I have come in contact with, I believe they are among the most selfless, and their contribution to the lot of the stranded serviceman was invaluable in its intrinsic if not religious sense, and I will always be grateful. Presumably now the cardboard-city dwellers are the recipients of their care as we were during the war.