Category: General

In the 30’s the middle class had aspirations of, if perhaps not ‘ectually’ moving up a class; perhaps being accepted as an appendage to the upper classes. This involved display, like a cock pheasant in the spring, only it was even more prevalent among the females who were the prime movers, having nothing else to think about through the day. In ’39 I was evacuated to Sussex along with 500+ other boys and masters from our school, I was 16, impressionable, in a totally strange milieu, amid total chaos. The poor recipients were caught on the hop and so were we. It was then I met everyone from the Lord of the Manor, to gypsy itinerants – country folk.
At that time, it seemed to me, the boundaries of class were more clearly defined and more stringent than in London – more like the Raj I knew in Africa, and, ignoring the plight of the poor Africans, the rest accepted it and didn’t, as today, rail against it. In Sussex, the gradation ran roughly like – Landed Gentry, Lord of the Manor (LOM) – Gentleman Farmers, the Professionals, the Cloth, and New Rich – Tenant Farmer, Trades People and Craftsmen – Labourers – Itinerants, Seasonal Workers and the Unemployed – the Evacuee. The nouveaux riches wouldn’t even say good morning to us, yet the LOM, with the marvellous name of Sir Amhurst Selby Bigge, not only made our path smoother, he entertained us to tennis parties in summer, on his lawn. The Farmers welcomed us as did the rest, and as we were thrust on all but the LOM, we went to the local secondary school with the locals, we gradually melded, but even then, we knew our place.
In the 30’s mostly only the pretty rich had a car and an offer of an outing was an occasion. As far as I can remember I only rode about ten times as a guest from 1930 – ’39 In the days of the two seater, with the Dickey seat at the back, the visitors sat cramped in the Dickey seat, open to the elements, and lucky to be there even if they could see little past the hood. Later, with saloon cars we were all together, although ridiculous ritual and absurd display had to play a part. The visitor, to show gratitude brought along a large bar of – would you believe – Motoring Chocolate, fruit and nut, milk chocolate. On the back of the better cars there was a cast iron, hinged carrier on which it was obligatory to display a huge cabin trunk, plastered with hotel labels to demonstrate you were a traveller of wide experience. Inside it there might be nothing, or a wicker picnic hamper. It was de rigueur to hoot when you passed a car of the same make; years later people touring on the Continent hooted when they saw another with a GB plate. There were a lot of other rituals, the most absurd and class ridden was the salute of the AA Man. The AA were dressed in WW1 army cast-offs, rode on a motorcycle/side-car combination and directed the traffic as and where required, or else stood at a crossroads waiting to be called. As you passed with your AA badge displayed, the AA Man jumped to attention and gave a very smart salute. The bit that took me to the fair was that if he failed to, some drivers reported him.

I am accident prone and wont to make snap decisions. At fourteen I bought my first bicycle, second-hand, for a pound, and learned to ride it. It was a heavy, characterless brute, with only one gear. A month later I went on my first real journey, to visit an aunt. She was out, so I thought the Crystal Palace is only a further six mile. After the Crystal Palace, I went on, and to cut a long story short, I found reasons every time I reached the goal to go to the next one, until I found myself on the beach at Hastings, 50 miles from home, at about two in the afternoon. I celebrated by sitting on the stony beach for an hour. I recall a marvellous name from the journey, a village called Peas Pottage. On the return, Pole Hill and River Hill were like crawling up the side of the Eiger. Twice I fell asleep standing on the pedals, going up the hill, and finished in the gutter with the bike on top. I arrived home near midnight – my reception was ambivalent, but I now had a taste for long rides on the bone-shaker. Today I would have been run over on that hill.
My first cycle accident was bizarre. Cycling up a steep hill, the handcart in front of me pulled out to pass a parked car; I pulled out to pass the cart, a taxi coming behind pulled out to pass me, we were strung out across the road like washing on a line. A cyclist coming down the hill at speed, shot out into the centre of the road to avoid hitting the cab head on, instead he chose to hit me. I flew over my handlebars, his handlebars and landed up the road. My front wheel was a mess. On the second accident, seated on my bike, supported on one pedal on the kerb, feet on the handle bar, waiting for a friend, an idiot on a racing bike, his hands on the low grips, cycling head down, ran straight into the back of me. I got his address, met his mother and that was that – a shut front door. No 3. Crash was on a wet morning with the rain teeming down. Stopped in the middle of the High Street, waiting to turn right, with a tram in the distance coming towards me, suddenly I was hit from behind 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.
The Bizarre World Of The Hospital. One accident outshone all. With a ‘new’ one-pound bike with three gears – a flying machine, two friends and I set out. They were putting new bikes through their paces, mine needed servicing, my brakes were almost non-existent. Decending a hill at speed towards a major cross road, the others stopped at the junction; I went on, until I was brought up short by the handle of the rear door of a car against my head behind the ear. I heard no more until I awoke in hospital, and when I came to, a policeman was beside the bed asking me what had happened. I was able to tell him that I had been hit by a motorcycle – end of police enquiries.
A distraught mother, hat askew, scarf equally awry, informed me I had broken my back, was on boards and not allowed to move. I had a week in hospital with a cracked skull, a broken collarbone, a cracked arm and concussion, beside minor contusions. In a fracture ward full of characters, the atmosphere between the patients and the nurses, I assumed was like prison, where the old lags know the warders and all the dodges – broken legs could mean months in hospital. It was an eye-opener to a fourteen year old. The man in the next bed, run over by a lorry loaded with bricks, had separated his chest from his pelvis. It was greeted by all as a miracle that he had lived, let alone that he could now walk with a slight limp, one leg being shorter than the other. A bookmaker, wheeled from ward to ward as a living reference to the skills of the staff and the surgeons in particular, was also a demonstration of what could happen to a welsher at Epsom Downs. Apparently at the closing of a bad day, he had been sneaking off when someone thrust a knife into his heart. The surgeons got him from Epsom to Tooting, took the knife out of him and sewed up his heart.
I think some of the men tried to embarrass me to pass the time, their stories were pretty lurid, especially about the night nurses, but I had been brought up to respect women, I was surrounded by them at home, so I took the jokes in the spirit intended. In short order I was put in a cot on the balcony, overlooking a square of grass, with windows opened every day and life totally transformed from the ward. There I met a man who had to stand considerable banter because he had fallen on ice on the front steps of a brothel. On leaving, after breakfast, he slipped on the steps and broke his leg. The flood-gates really opened when the ward heard that little tit-bit. My education in barely a week was enormous.

The Terraced Wedge
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 pie, 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 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?

I have had to exercise discipline on others, been the recipient of it being implemented in every form, from lines to a leather belt, and I have had to exercise it on myself, often unsuccessfully. Punishment in any form is transient, and in excess is self defeating. Take a simple example of shock treatment – having worked daily where swearing was filthy and as constant, I am no prude. In charge of a large team of men, rarely if ever swearing, bad language was rarely used in my presence out of courtesy. Something was amiss, so criminally stupid that I swore,. The atmosphere was electric and still, and the expressions on the faces of the staff were enough to show the point had been thoroughly made. I was caned regularly in all my schools, by teachers and prefects, not for villainy, more from making fun, mild rebellion, or not suffering fools gladly. We all had to bear caning without malice or stress and accept it as the norm. Life was too absorbing to do otherwise. There were, though, sadists, especially in the teaching profession with egos out of all proportion. One primary teacher, was very keen on ‘may’ being used instead of ‘can’. When a child of nine put up his hand and asked could he go to the toilet, he went through endless torture until he used the word ‘may’ and some in extremis embarrassed themselves. The smile on the teacher’s face said all. One can only assume that no parental protests were made because taking the child from that school was worse for a parent than the child’s ordeal,
. Now, on reflection, I believe self -discipline is the nub of the problem; there is no possibility of ‘imposing’ discipline, it can only be administered by oneself, a concept which rarely seems to be taken seriously and certainly never aired in the general context of the matter. I am firmly convinced from my own experience that a beating serves only to put a temporary full stop to a situation; it introduces a feature, so violent, that what went before it is dwarfed. Beating has a minor roll, and is only valid if it is then followed by persuasion to impose self-discipline – though not in those terms. The follow-up is rarely implemented and if there is no other outlet for the energy which has engendered the anti-social behaviour in the first place, and no self-discipline to quench the fires, the punishment as such ceases to have any validity.

The Secondary School Part 2 The educational system, so hacked over today, was relatively new to secondary schools when I started, (See LCC and the Secondary School ) and the philosophy of parents doing everything to ensure their little darlings got the best education was, if anything, more prevalent then than it was in the post-war years until now, the 2000’s. When I was very small my grandmother pushed me to and from school, four times a day, a mile or more away, to ensure I went to what was considered to be the best elementary school, and later when I was able, I walked it on my own. Next, I cycled four miles or more in heavy traffic, suffering two accidents during that time on the way to school, in order to go to the best secondary school in the area. Incidentally I do not believe any legislation, outside a totalitarian state, will ever remove the desire for personal choice completely.

Discipline By The Prefects My Secondary School, had a prefect hierarchy and school captain at its head. They had authority to thrash, in certain circumstances – The system was severely flawed. The original crime was insignificant, the miscreant was awarded lines to be handed in by a certain time. I was both a customer of ,and part of a syndicate, who wrote lines for a fee, using a number of pencils taped together, as no one checked closely. Failure to hand the lines in on time doubled the dose. Failure again and one was called before the Prefects’ Meeting. This was a pantomime, scripted to enhance the status of the prefects and belittle the criminal. One stood outside the library, laughter issued through the door, then finally the door would open and the lamb would be led to the slaughter. The charge was read out, the School Captain asked the transgressor if he had anything to say – pointless, the decision was already made, any comment would be taken as insolence, and being harangued further and even receiving extra punishment. The malefactor was then asked if he wished to be caned by the prefects, which meant the strongest, with a lust for blood, or have the matter referred to the Head Master, a personage on terms with God, both because of his Doctorate of Divinity, but also because of his exalted position – a rhetorical question. Even though one had taken the opportunity of putting on two extra pairs of gym shorts, it hurt.

Returning to a British school in 1930 seemed totally alien from what I had experienced in Africa. The hours were different, I had to walk over a mile each way to school, morning and afternoon and the classes were bigger. When I arrived we worked with rooms lighted by gaslight in winter afternoons and, worst of all, I was out of my depth through losing two whole years of schooling. I sat next to a boy who constantly wet himself and there was a permanent aroma. We were not allowed to change seats because it saved the teacher calling the roll twice a day, as we sat in alphabetical order – unfortunately. I remember one teacher who had come from New Zealand and who seemed only to teach Maori customs. She had us making endless native huts and constantly drawing maps of the place.
There was a strong amateur dramatic interest in the school with end of term plays and it was about this time that I learned sword dancing. The swords were made in the school woodwork shop, where the woodwork master was not averse to throwing bad work at the head of the poor incompetent who had made it, and he rarely missed. The dance called for eight participants and as we danced round we put the swords to our shoulders, and with a good deal of pushing and wrestling, twisting and turning, we managed to get the swords locked together to form an octagon, rather like a large Jewish Star. The whole shape was held in the air by one sword, by the team leader; when it was lowered the swords were withdrawn with a flourish, clashed together high in the centre, like the thin spire of a church and then the dance continued. We gave exhibitions, why I never quite understood, because it was a very dull dance, every bit as dull as Morris Dancing, especially as we were too young to get well oiled before we started. I suppose that was the main difference. I also became re-acquainted with discipline. (See Sex & Child Abuse) Nowadays young people seem to think for themselves more than we did, they are more cynical and less malleable, or do I imagine that?
Believe it or not, it was an honour to be ink monitor. Can one think of any greater example of brain washing than to make a child actually want to go to school earlier on Monday morning and stay later on Friday afternoon than his compatriots, get his hands filthy dirty with an almost permanent stain and perhaps ruin a perfectly good shirt into the bargain, while he washes out a whole boxful of grungy, chipped, china inkwells of their coagulated mess, then mixes the astringent smelling powder and finally refills them. Not content with that he has to carry the trayful up several flights of stairs and place two in each desk with the inevitable spillage and further chore of cleaning up, all the time worried should this honour be taken from him.
There were the art classes where the inept were cheek-by-jowl with the insouciant, and plagued by the competent who always came just when things were going wrong, with words like ‘Isn’t that nice,’ said with all the insincerity of a street pedlar, hurriedly followed by an entreating ‘Come and see mine’, a plea for praise and perhaps a statement of insecurity. It was strange that in a school where none were undernourished, why the licence to have biscuits and hot Bovril after a swim in the swimming bath of a neighbouring school, was such a great inducement that few, if any, brought notes of excuse. That was the era of cigarette cards. No one failed to collect them, but some collected them for a strange game like a coconut shy. The boys had areas along the playground wall marked out rather like the Oche for darts. Against the wall were propped cigarette cards at intervals and the players would stand at different lines, depending on the distance from the wall, and by flicking a card of their own, from between their fingers, they had to try to fell a cigarette card leaning against the wall. If successful, one received a number of cards equivalent to the offer for each line, say two, three or even ten if it was a back line. There were tricks of course. The stall holders would bend the cards slightly so they arched away from the wall and were thus stiffer to hit. The throwers, – or I suppose, the suckers – would use stiff cards because they flew better and harder and they also adopted a scything technique so they could fell more than one target card at a time, to the annoyance of the stall holder.
There were no lollipop ladies; policemen were stationed at crossing points and held the hands of the smaller children as they crossed the traffic in flocks. The children vied for the favours of the policeman and most policemen reciprocated by giving the appearance of being interested in their stories

The Very Poor And The Not So Poor I would like to relate the story of me and the beef dripping. Not far from my Grandmother’s house was a Victorian slum building known locally as ‘The buildings’. It was not unlike a poor version of the tower-blocks of the 60’s, though without balconies, bathrooms and air. A central, spiral, wrought-iron and concrete stair led from the street to four or five landings, and the roof seemed to be flat when viewed from street level. It was like a dirty cube of concrete, dumped amid single storey shops and lock-ups.
Inside this hell-hole lived our flotsam and jetsam, shadowy figures we never saw and some who were on display day and daily with their pitch and begging bowl. We hear stories of beggars who have fortunes in their mattresses and whether true or apocryphal, it was said that one of the tenants of the buildings died, leaving a mattress full of money. He was a poor creature in every sense. Whether he was unhygienic or not, he looked it, his pores seemed ingrained with dirt. He had lost his left arm and his left leg in some war or other, probably The Great War-to-end-all-wars. I was too young to distinguish war medals which he carried in full view on his chest. He carried something never seen today, a hurdy-gurdy, a rectangular organ suspended on a strap from the shoulder, which could also be set on folding legs. It was a development of the music box and one played a number of tunes by grinding a handle at one side. This man would stump, literally, on a peg leg, with his single arm grinding away and an enamel collecting cup attached to the front of the box. What was left of his left arm was held in a fold of his sleeve by his side.
To digress for a moment, there was the case of the man and wife team who begged outside Woolworth’s. My mate at school was the son of a Water Board Inspector who was required to carry out enquiries at a house in a street near Woolworth’s. It turned out that the whole terrace of some five or six houses belonged to someone who was an absentee landlord and he, the inspector, would have to make an appointment to see the owner or owners, which he did. They were absent all right, they were at their work. You’ve guessed it! Imagine his surprise when he found that the little lady, respectably dressed, selling iron-holders, little squares of thick woollen material, bound together by an edging tape for holding the old fashioned cast-iron flat-iron, (I should know I made many of them as a child for presents for relatives) and her equally respectably dressed husband who sang in a quavering voice outside Woolworth’s for money. They owned the whole block.
To return to the matter of the roast beef dripping, On the second or third floor of the buildings lived a woman and her several children in conditions of squalor, and from time to time it was my duty to take to these people a huge bowl of roast beef dripping and a few other items. I hated those expeditions. Gran insisted, in spite of all protestations, and she was not unaware of the depths of my emotions. I hated the smell, the dirty, dark, dank hall, the awful stairs, and the embarrassment of handing over the bowl, not for myself, but for the woman. It all seemed so demeaning, which I’m sure it was, but nonetheless she was grateful. I believe it was an exercise designed to force me to see the other side of life, to rub shoulders with real poverty. Once I made Gran let me taste bread and dripping and, with a lot of salt, one could acquire a taste for it.

Through the 30’s habits started to change at a snail’s pace, but it was so smooth one wasn’t aware of it. In the bigger shops they had those lovely wooden balls containing money or receipts, rising the full height of the shop at a twitch of a string, then rolling gently along metal tracks, with points and stations, one of which was the cashier in a bird cage half way up the building. As a kid I hated shopping, but made an exception if we were going there. Progress spoilt it all, the vacuum pipe system was introduced and your cash set off for the cashier with a thump and a hurstle like an asthmatic. As for cards – where’s the glamour?
This was a period when the man in the street hadn’t discovered germs to any extent and not in the millions which are allegedly battering us today. We had carbolic soap which was an attractive red, and women wasted their money on scented stuff. We carried hot water upstairs to have a standing wash, went to the Public Baths for a swim or a bath as we chose, and the WC was either attached to the back of the house or down the garden, thankfully open to the breeze. Of course we were risking all sorts when we ate, we had bought food from Coster stalls, thoroughly handled, bread unwrapped and no tongs to lift it, and Sainsbury’s, in most high streets, handled everything, and to my endless joy, took butter out of a box in huge chunks, set it on the counter, cut it with wooden hand moulders, then proceeded to club ounces of water into it as it was moulded into pounds etc. The speed, precision and dedication the counter-hands portrayed with the patter and the water had to be seen to be believed. – how did we ever manage to stay so healthy?
Of course there was not the same amount of kissing that goes on today. We were the hangover from the stern Victorian era when one showed little emotion. Also we had to risk the odd bout of the trots, we had only a ‘safe’, no fridge, It was a wooden cupboard residing out doors, with a perforated zinc panel in the door, covered with a wet towel in summer in which perishables were stored, and the system was not fool proof, as this fool can testify.
What with riding like sardines in public transport, eating in unsupervised cafes, ice cream off pedalled carts, put together by the cyclist from a tub, muffins and crumpets carried on the head of a bell-ringing-vendor – they tasted marvellous toasted on a Sunday over a wood fire, and on and on.., I believe we built up an immune system second to none – nature’s way.

I expect like me, you have been listening to the pundits and politicians with ever decreasing belief that they know where they are going and what is best for us. The level of disagreement I find frightening, and the problem is that they take their values from just a short base, instead of realising that the problems really started many years ago. They talk about improving manufacture, what they mean is finding a few more jobs, not to getting us back to where we were 20 years ago, then manufacturing so many items of considerable expense that we now have to buy from abroad. What they don’t seem to see is a large proportion of the populous has a totally new way of life than in the past. Their eating habits are more expensive, because so much of it is pre-packed. The throwaway society is making inroads into the economy when you can buy a piece of furniture costing several hundred pounds, and after a couple of years nobody wants it. It would not be so bad if the furniture was manufactured in this country, and not giving people serious complaints in their backs. If you can be bothered, cast your mind around the significant purchasers you have made in the last year, and try to judge if any of them were made in this country. We are told that almost every house now has a computer, and we know where they are made, certainly not in this country. The same applies to cars, gardening equipment, clothing to a great extent, and then there are all these call centres springing up in the East and the Subcontinent, that are staffed with people who are not technically skilled but merely answering a set of questions, with standard answers, and if you ask something slightly more complicated, you get no help whatsoever. It was not like this in the old days, the telephone people, then, were keen to help you, now is a matter of how cheaply you can offer a half baked service and can get by. Those call centres should all be in Britain. If you are an inventor and someone takes an interest in new product the chances are it will be manufactured at the Far East. If an entrepreneur decides to come up with a new product and gets it manufactured abroad, he alone will be the beneficiary of the greater part of the savings, not those who are purchasing the articles, or the government.

I can’t understand why the government, who allegedly has very bright people within its t ranks, and presumably who understand basic economics, and must be aware that you can’t spend what you have not earned. When the government talks about borrowing in quantities that I simply can’t imagine, without some change in policy I can’t see how we can pay it back. It would be nice if one of the senior members of Parliament explained how we can get out of this mess, without manufacturing. I travel a lot now in taxis, having given up my car, and I find that all the taxis are of foreign manufacture, and the drivers are despondent not only for themselves but their children

To most boys coming from my background, religion was a means to an end rather than an end in itself. It was an entrée 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.