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Floss was a handyman at Ramsgate’s huge funfair called Wonderland. He worked on the Big Dipper. Early every morning he sent two cars round the track loaded with sand bags, watching the reaction of the wooden structure as the car went round, to gauge any weaknesses. Next it was my turn for a free, if solitary ride, as a third check. Can you imagine what Health & Safety would make of that today?
Evening was the best time to be there, it was vibrant, with a cacophony of sound and a kaleidoscope of coloured lights winking on and off, and I absorbed the hectic atmosphere of the constantly eddying mass of humanity, along with the excitement of it all. When I went on these protracted holidays it was my practice, even duty, to return home with a small present for each of the family. This time I had had so many incursions into the wallet I was almost totally broke. What with the cinema trips, smoking, the funfair at Ramsgate and the even more expansive funfair at Margate, called Dreamland, I had only pence left and was at my wits end – well almost, I still had the slot machines to fall back on. Families descended like locusts on the one-armed-bandits. They were impatient to win and when the pickings were poor they too, like the locusts, moved on. It was then that I moved in, with just the odd penny here and there. I would give a heavily patronised machine, the opportunity to play one or two more games. Most times it worked. On the last evening I could not waste money on bus fares and cycled to the fairground. There I set about the stalls. Buying presents was out of the question, just a matter of playing the odds and knowing when to stop. Having increased my shilling into something like five, I went in search of other games of chance where I had reasonable odds, I won a glass bottomed tea tray, plaster of Paris elephants of all sizes, coated in black mica, a milk jug, toffee, and chocolates for Val. The things were equally disparate and cheap, but I was no connoisseur, merely a boy trying to get himself out of a jam. That night I cycled back to Pegwell Bay with the tyres birring happily along on the tarmac, a smile on my face which could not be rubbed off by the passage of the wind, no matter about the lonely days and the long hours spent touring for its own sake, the elation of that evening put it all behind and made that holiday one I never forgot,
It was at this time that I bought a packet of Will’s Goldflake cigarettes and sat in the cinema, in the afternoon, in the dark, enjoying a taste I was only once again able to enjoy. There is something about the taste of those first cigarettes one smokes which is indescribably satisfying – like the taste of real Naval rum, never to be experienced again. In fact it was many years later, when I restarted smoking after a longer than usual period of abstinence, that I savoured for a brief period that wonderful sensation and taste.

Some aspects of the economy, recently been brought to my attention, are in themselves are not unlawful, but they have a considerable effect on the viability of production in this country. A friend of mine recently had their house overhauled by a builder, and then asked him to carry out additional work. He said that he was going out of business because he could no longer compete with the prices offered by immigrant Polish companies, who were undercutting him. I’m not criticising the Polish people, if the system is there for their advantage, then they are perfectly at liberty to make use of it. We are finding that when a large company in a given area up-roots its production and takes it to the Far East, or India, the area in which it functioned can become seriously economically disadvantaged as a result of the unemployment, and the effects on the local industries and outlets. If, immigrant companies are set up, the workforce is immigrant, paying low wages, and such wages that are paid are being sent home to a foreign country rather than used to support the economy in the area in which the work is being done. This is a parallel of manufacture and construction being carried out abroad, with the same effects on our economy. I am conjecturing that those immigrants have a lower standard of living than the indigenous nation, in order to send more money home. Recently there was a case of eight men living in a very small bungalow. These facts are understandable, and are not criminal, but their apparent growing effect is clearly not to our advantage. The areas in which immigrant workers are now filling posts, is getting wider with time. Theoretically there must be a balance between the cost of indigenous labour, and the viability of the output, but it would seem that there is a flaw in this theory somewhere. It worked in the past, so why does it not work now?

One reason that I have put forward before, is that those who are using foreign manufacture, or foreign labour in this country, must be pocketing the profits, and possibly not spending them in this country, because the money does not seem to be following the usual path. When companies are selling articles on the basis of buy one, get one free, then either they were overcharging in the past, they’re on a path to destruction, or treading water in the hope of things getting better in the future. Recently the government was coagulating itself on a 6% rise in employment levels in manufacturing, but they didn’t say what the base level this came from. I’m afraid that we are faced always these days with statistics that mean nothing to us because the background is in shadow. `

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.

There used to be an apocryphal story concerning the visit of the Queen to the Chelsea Pensioners’ barracks. She had been talking to several of the elderly gentleman in their red coats, and she asked one how he passed his day, he replied,’ Your Majesty, sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits’. That basically is my situation these days, and today I was just sitting and thinking about the way the populace thought of their MPs and government in the past and how they do today. In the 30s and 40s they were almost revered. Radio was the only communication link, apart from newspapers. Every house practically had at least one newspaper delivered every day of the week, the head of the house would read the headlines before rushing to work, and the rest of the house would have all day if they needed it, but politics only became really of interest at the time of the election, not as today, the daily diet of several programmes devoted to it. The BBC prided itself on its accuracy and is probity, with the result that there was not a spate of four letter words in filmed dialogue, nor were politicians harangued while they were trying to justify themselves. People have often question whether the Royals were right in meeting the populace on its own level. I believe the same thing applies to the politicians. In the old days everything was kept under wraps, there no wholesale examinations of ways and means by so-called pundits, who have an agenda of their own. Through the repetitive political interviews, with contrary approaches to a given subject, the public is getting weary, disillusioned and thoroughly apathetic. Matters are discussed that for the man in the street are beyond his ken and the subject that he is really worried about, such as the source of the money that we need to get us out of the difficulties, is never mentioned

For the sake of those who have only recently joined, here is a golden Oldie, to the rest, I ask your indulgence. I have said in the intro I was a latchkey child of a one parent family, I was also the baby sitter for a brother whose main aim was to gum red bars of Lifeboy Carbolic Soap with relish. I had just been introduced to ball-bearing roller skates and, when not at school, lived on wheels from breakfast until bedtime. It was a way of life which had been denied me in Africa because there were few paved areas on which to skate, but now I had discovered them, I was learning fast, if at the cost of sheets of my skin.
One Saturday, Mother instructed me to take charge of Baby, who was sitting in one of those old fashioned, deep bodied, prams nannies would wheel in Hyde Park. I was rarely intentionally mischievous, rather I was inventive and given to ill-considered impulses. This time, becoming bored with pushing Baby round the roads at a snail’s pace, with no opportunity for adventure or self expression, I thought of the idea of skating with the pram, so two birds could be dealt with at one go, duty and speed. This too became boring until I realised that I had been doing the circuit the wrong way. If I tackled it anticlockwise I would have to descend a steep hill, instead of climbing it. This opened up a much better prospect and I proceeded to perfect the Toboggan Run system of perambulation, whereby the perambulator became the toboggan with Baby acting as ballast.
At nine years old I found this system so simple and so splendid I wondered no one had thought of it before. One skated to the top of the hill by any route. When on the flat, one turned the pram round, ducked under the handle and grasped the sides of the pram with the hands, put the chest on the back rim of the pram, and then skated as never before. When the whole unit was reaching Mach 2, one lifted one’s feet, skates and all, and then tobogganed down the hill accelerating the while, much to the enjoyment of Baby.
The game went on for the rest of the session until the moment when Mother rounded a corner to be met with the sight of her last-born hurtling towards her and no sign of anyone controlling the pram. I was hidden by the hood and the body of the pram and was almost alongside Baby as a passenger. In spite of the fact that Baby clearly thought the whole idea marvellous and also in spite of my assurances that it was absolutely safe, Mother put an end to a sport which might have had international recognition.
The success of the venture outweighed the punishment to such an extent I can’t remember the form retribution took, but then I always did take punishment as a rod to be borne in the search for excellence

In the ’30s, youngsters thought they were being terribly secretive , and of course, clever, by talking a simple ‘back slang’. I haven’t heard it for years, but perhaps I now move in the wrong circles. It was simple enough, you took the last letter or syllable of a word, made it the first, added ay and that was it. A common usage was ‘scram’ and because ‘m’ in front was difficult it became ‘amscray’.
However, that was for children, in the real world, the world of my great grand parents, some of whom were poultry men, they spoke ‘Butchers Back Slang’, where whole words were reversed, ‘old’ became ‘d-lo’ and so on. A moments thought will reveal the problems this system had, ‘th reversed is tricky and ‘h’ became ‘ch’, so it really became a language with short cuts. My mother learned it as a child. I doubt it has stood the test of time, I never hear it at the meat counter in Tescos.
My mother’s refusal to take second best, and my dalliance combined to ignite an inflamed interchange in Butcher’s Slang. I was very young, and to me shopping was an opportunity to view the world in general at a gentle pace, purchasing was a necessary by product. On one occasion I produced, in lieu of a bag of groceries, a huge, plaster-of-Paris Alsatian dog, bought after long deliberation and a hard sell by the barker, from the tail-gate of a lorry.
On another day it was merely going, buying and returning – no diversions. However, instead of the regular butcher, who knew me, and more to the point, my mother Ellen, a young counter-hand served me, and because I was a mere boy he used his freshly acquired business acumen to pass off meat he wanted rid of instead of what he had been asked for. When I arrived home Ellen met me in the hall, the parcel was unwrapped, words passed, the apron came off with a flourish, the hat went on with a long hat-pin jabbed viciously into the bun. Arms were hastily thrust into an overcoat and with the slam of the front door still ringing in our ears, Ellen took off at the run, the parcel in one hand, me trailing like a kite on a string from the other.
By this time the shop was full, but Ellen, normally courteous, was roused out of her calm by righteous indignation. I tried unsuccessfully to remain in the street, but I had to stand in the footlights, scraping a tentative foot in the sawdust, while Ellen in her accentless English told the staff what she thought of their conduct. I indicated the miscreant, and it was at this point that the criminal made a fatal error, he referred to Ellen as a ‘D-lo woc’, (Old Cow) and a few other unprepossessing names in the same language. What the young aspirant to the Butcher’s Guild did not know was that Ellen had spent her youth in Deal, Kent, as the grand-daughter of a butcher and poultry man, with a shop which was festooned at celebration time with fowl of every description and of the very best quality, while he stood in the doorway of the shop, straw boater on his head, blue and white apron stretched across his ample person and a steel hanging from his waist. In this environment, Ellen had learned ‘Butcher’s back-slang’. T he rest is history, and predictable.

We live in the present, anticipate the near future, refer to the immediate past, and occasionally think nostalgically, but rarely look deeply into the future. Until two years ago, I looked upon myself as having the abilities and the energy of someone 40, until I was seriously injured, and I became a full-time carer, with absolutely no knowledge of what faced me. For this reason, now after two years experience, I propose to set out, my amateur knowledge of the problems that one faces, the knowledge that one must obtain, and what is available in the way of care, supplied by local authorities and the health service. It is a very steep learning curve.

The first thing you have to accept is that you are the most important person, not the invalid for whom you are caring. The work will be tedious, long, and severe, and the carer is often not aware of the stress that they are under. It starts off almost immediately, and readily becomes a 24 7 responsibility. Professional medical people, nurses and doctors, coming to aid the patient, will say to you, ‘take care of yourself’, this isn’t a throwaway remark, it could well be that the experienced medical person is seeing the signs of stress in you and warning you so that you may take some rest, or if necessary arrange for the patient to be put in a home, for what is known as ‘a respite period’, to allow the carer to recover. This is, a common occurrence. If you fall ill the patient will then have to go into hospital or a home, with all that that implies. You must understand that when you are sleeping your subconscious is awake, questioning every movement of the bed of the patient, and every sound. This means that your rest is precarious and adds to the stress

The second important function is the supply of medication. The patient will be under a number of very serious pills and perhaps medicines. The timing of some of these is very vital, and it is your responsibility, to see that the patient receives the correct medication at the stated time. This sounds rather obvious, but it is difficult in a home environment to be so marshalled. Friends call, there are minor domestic uphevils which distract the carer and it could be hours later that the carer discovers that they forgot to give a pill or pills. Recently I myself was on 20 pills a day, and for safety I put all the pills for a whole day, into a small container, then I could count them and confirm whether I had taken them or forgotten to take them. How one achieves this strict regime is up to the individual. There are packages available which can be supplied by the chemists and can help, and one can buy other proprietary brands which might help.

The third important function is the overall relationship between the carer and the invalid. It can depend on the mental and physical state of the patient, whether he or she is amenable, it also depends on your own physical condition, whether you are able to carry out the functions that are required. In my case I had a broken spine, which meant that I had to manoeuvre furniture in such a way that I could help the patient dress and undress, without actually stooping my full height. In these circumstances a local Trust, on a request by the doctor, will supply people who will come to your house at fixed hours, every day, to carry out certain functions, such as helping to make meals, washing and dressing the patient, and if necessary in particular cases, helping the carer if he or she is also handicapped. In my district we have a very good system, but by talking to other carers it would appear that there is a postcode lottery. If the patient is at all insecure on the feet, is essential that they use a rolator at all-times, as a fall is very serious and can be fatal

Finally I just want to mention the problems of catering. With this level of caring it is difficult to go shopping, but shopping online makes life bearable. An additional freezer is an advantage, and adopting some form of rotation of the menu makes catering more simple. One can cook a large amount of mashed potato, then, using an ice cream scoop, parcel out balls of the mash into boxes and freeze for future use. In the same way one can get large amounts of meat, cook it and box it in small boxes. Frozen vegetables are a must. One of the problems of catering is that friends and relatives feel bound to bring you meals, when you already have some leftovers in the fridge.

Sometimes, something important, or tragic can force one to sit back and think deeply and analyse the cause. Recently a young friend of mine, with two university degrees, and being chartered as well, has lost his job, something that would never have happened a few years ago. Away back in time, most jobs were a job for life, and in most cases, it was the individual who chose to move, not the employer who forced him. It would appear that the way the shops are closing, where the bigger shops are almost empty for the first half of the week, shows an incredible change in our financial situation. In the past that I mention, people had small savings which was essential, and they were paid often on a weekly basis, and paid their bills on a weekly basis. Debt was frowned upon. If you analyse this, you will realise that now people are able to run up colossal debts with the use of the credit card, or cards, and the problem is that the banks are constantly persuading you to take out another card, While the banks have a lot of responsibilitie for the credit crunch, a high proportion of people have also contributed to it. The credit card is a convenience, not a necessity, nothing more, and if it can be so dangerous, as it would seem, one might wonder if it is in the interest of the country not to put a sensible limit on the amount of debt that one was allowed to achieve. The current allowances are in thousands of pounds, but the average shopper doesn’t think in those terms

I don’t suggest that this will be the solution to the credit problem, merely a break on things getting worse, and perhaps a chance to increase the rates of recovery.

A little history gives a slant on what people say. We thought we were Middle Class, we had the social graces, the accent, the interests, but not the cash. We, my mother, brother and I, had just returned from Africa under the British Raj, where we had lived and, I suppose, acted like landed gentry, with a fleet of servants. We were part of an extended family, and from time to time, through difficult circumstances, farmed out round the family for periods ranging from months to years. So, we had no airs and graces, no strong drives, living took up most of our attention, but we did not feel deprived, we, the children, accepted and mostly enjoyed life. Those circumstances alone are rare today, with two bread-winners per household and few extended families.
At Christmas we all had fixed routines and protocols which seem to have gone, mostly through affluence and expediency. Then, indeed in our case up to the 70s, the children and often everyone hung up a stocking, either over the fireplace, on the end of the bed, or were given one on Christmas morning, even grannies. We knew we would get nuts, an orange of some sort, a piece of coal, carefully wrapped, sweets and three or four items. Today, the children have entirely different tastes and expectations. We have watched great grandchildren growing up and never cease to wonder, not only at the presents they receive from friends and relatives, from the moment they hatch, but the number, size and quality. They would never fit into a stocking now.
Granted we were married in wartime, but we thought our wedding was super and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Now there are hen parties in foreign countries and the men, not to be out done get drunk in another country as well. The wedding is in a remote romantic spot, and, what with the travelling and the presents, over recent years the exponential rise in these standards, because that is what they are – standards, has left me amazed – and that is only for the relatives and close friends. The honeymoons are also unbelievably lavish at a time when the young people are only starting out. I’m not being a Scrooge, nor a party poppa, although I sometimes can be, what people do with their lives is their business. I have just watched, and wondered where it will finish. Those Joneses, everyone seems to feel they have to keep up with, have a lot to answer for! With the rising cost of housing, weddings and life generally, one cannot be surprised the younger folk are cohabiting, if they can even afford that, and unlike our generation – not many of us left – marriage itself can be tenuous.
Chauvinism exposed. I can’t remember, but I don’t suppose that the word chauvinism featured very much in the vocabulary of the man in the street, in the 30s and 40s. There used to be a silly story, which had more truth than humour, about an Italian who was asked his views on life, and he answered ‘ I digga da pit, to earnna da mon, to buya da bread, to getta da strength, to digga da pit!’ As I was brought up by women, it was only after the war that I lived in a house where the head of the house was a man. None of us at that time took exception to the fact, that he and I contributed very little to work in the house, other than maintenance and gardening. One came home, read the paper, ate the evening meal, and spent most evenings with the family. Occasionally, at times of pressure one might help with the washing up but it was rare. Similarly, we wouldn’t have dreamed of attending a birth, let alone participating.
Recently, Sophie, my wife, had been so ill she was incapable of doing more the sitting still, with the result that I found myself as a carer, with all that entails. I’m not suggesting that I found it irksome, merely time-consuming, in many cases time wasting, and very tiring. I of course, in my 80s, would be more tired than most. But what it did do was make me realise, in the past, just how much we had denigrated the work of the housewife as being ‘ woman’s work’, something simple and easy, and I suppose, beneath us. Over the years things have obviously changed not only in my own household, but even more with the younger people where it seems, the roles have no clear definition, they are certainly interchangeable. In those ancient times the head of the house, was exactly that, what he said went, and the fact that this was only superficial in many cases, and those laws were modified by those carrying them out was never discussed. Today, chauvinism seems to be found more in the workplace than in the home. You never know, it might just disappear from there too.

When we first heard the King’s speech on the wireless, it was really a celebration of the Empire and its reinforcement, tightening the ties. My first recollection of Empire Day, although I know it was celebrated in most schools in England, was when it was celebrated in Livingstone. Unsurprisingly it was a ‘great day’, which started with some form of military ceremony presided over by the Governor of Northern Rhodesia, followed by presents, games, and finishing with a bun fight for the children.
There was no doubt the early indoctrination of patriotic ideals and the strength of the bond between most of the population and the Crown was a feature of English life before the war, and never more so than in 1935 when we had The Jubilee, the Royal Funeral and then the Coronation of George VI. On the actual days of celebration there were sporadic street parties, and all the towns and villages were decked out. The papers had a field day with special editions and school children were involved up to the hilt. All the Crowned Heads of Europe and the potentates of the Empire were assembled and London was agog. Souvenirs were on sale everywhere and the LCC gave every child a commemorative EPNS spoon and an embossed or painted mug for both occasions and, in the case of the Jubilee, there was a separate parade by the King and Queen and all the panoply down The Mall at about midday. Public transport and special coaches brought the children there. Stalls, toilets and first aid stations had been erected in the Park and the youngsters had to be in place quite early. I was there, in the front row halfway down the Mall and constantly there was something to watch. For the first hour the excitement was enough but then we would see troops of soldiers on horseback, police on horseback and other people passing and re-passing, and each time a cheer would go up. The trees, lamp standards and the streets were decorated with flags and bunting from the real celebration and the atmosphere was electric. For whatever reason, patriotism was tangible.
On a purely personal level I regret the advice given to the Royals to come off their dais and try to meet the commoners on the same level. Their own history should have warned of the pitfalls awaiting them and if they had only followed the progress of the Continental Press, after all they are fluent in the languages, they would have seen where it would all lead. Changing course, no matter how or when, will never retrieve what, in effect, we have all lost. The Dutch achieved the change, but I suspect their press is either more controlled or less aggressive.