21. The Natural Urge To Lie

When our parents have got over being dewy-eyed over their new chick and stopped making cooing noises to us, they embark on a crash course of turning little bundle of joy into a responsible member of society, by ramming a long series of "don'ts" down it's throat. Usually high in the top 20 of these is telling lies. I'd like to take a bet that every one of us has had "You lie to me and I'll tan your bum" thrown at him after Mummy and Daddy suddenly face up to the fact that little bundle is no different from any other little horror and can look them straight in the eye while lying like the clappers.

 

What is not realised is that lying is a natural instinct and as such should be cultivated and taught properly like any other subject. An 'O' level  in lying ought to be a must as a qualification for any job worth having and certainly no candidate for local or parliamentary election should be accepted without a first class degree in fabrication.

The largest participant sport in the country is the noble art of angling and non-followers just can't make out why. The answer is obvious - it gives the best opportunity for the human race to give free reign to one of it's basic instincts in all it's various degrees - the natural urge to lie.

I am not a good fisherman for one good reason and that is I am not a good liar. It's got nothing to do with catching fish, just that I can't stretch the truth in the subtle way of the top class angler. Believe me, I've tried it, but after seeing the look of pitying disbelief in the eyes of my audience, I gave up trying and now only tell the truth. I used to think I had a touch of death when it came to handling a rod, sat for hours drowning worms, tempting fish with bits of bread, cheese, part-boiled spuds and sausages and never had so much as a knock. This is one of angling's tense moments, when the alert angler drops his hand to his rod like a cowboy going for his gun, because his float has moved and his is ready for the strike. The only time my float moved was when the maggot got hiccups through swallowing too much water, and as for getting a bite, this is when a fish takes a nibble at the bait in a moment of carelessness and by the time you've heaved up the line and got it caught in a hopeless tangle up a tree, it is at the other end of the lake telling all his mates, well the only bites I ever got were from the gnats which put so much poison in me that if I had got a snake bite, the snake would have died first, and I had got resigned to the fact I just hadn't got what it takes to be an angler. Making the tea - yes, humping all the gear for the family - fine, driving miles to a lake teeming with tench, carp, roach, bream all begging to be caught - expert, but as for catching any of them - flippin useless. Until one day when I'd been wondering, as per usual, how the hell can the line tie itself into a cats cradle without being touched by human hands, it suddenly dawned on me that I had never actually seen anyone catch a fish.

Been told about twenty pound pike, three pound roach, monster fish that fought better than my old tom-cat on passion outings, but never seen 'em. All the blokes round the lake had been as motionless as me, hour after hour, except for the odd move when they made a cup of tea or nipped in to the bushes to have a quick pee. I saw the light, nobody catches any, they made it all up, prefabricated the whole bloody issue. That's what they did while they sat there all that time, perfected their tales they would tell to innocent and honest people like me.

In other words, followed natures basic instinct, which causes Mum and Dad's little cherub to swear blind he hasn't been at the jam when it's smeared all round his cake-hole.

The natural urge to lie. From that moment I knew I'd never be a good fisherman and it had nothing to do with lack of expertise or want of trying, just that I am one of natures misfits. A basically honest person who can't tell a good convincing whopper. So I made up my mind there and then, that I'd be what nature made me and tell only the truth.

 

 

Strangely enough from that time I started to catch fish, and knowing how ill equipped I was for enlarging upon my petty successes, I have stuck firmly to my resolution - to tell the truth. It's paid well too, as my catches have got bigger and bigger and I have been spared the indignity of going red while telling people of the wonderful fish I have caught. It's a great pity that I am so handicapped in being unable to tell a good lie. This will stop me being a top class fisherman I'm afraid. Just imagine what a really good angler could have made from the carp I got last week when at the lake. I was quite alone, as it was late, and had made my last cast for the day, when the line shot out like an express train and it was only by anchoring my body against a tree that I was able to stop myself being dragged in to the water and it took me two solid hours of playing that fish before I got it tired and near enough to get the landing net under it. Unfortunately, the handle of my net was only made of mild steel and broke under the strain of lifting it clear of the water and the fish got away, so in all honesty I can't claim it as a catch. A good fisherman would have made a fine yarn from that and I'm tempted now and again to have another try at it, but I know my limitations, so I think I'll be content with being truthful and leave the lies to folks who are able to do it with the ease that nature has so luckily endowed upon them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

20. On The Seventh Day

aka Religious Instruction

I don't remember much of the religious instruction that was forced upon me as a child, mainly because my father made me wear an Eton collar when attending Sunday school.

This was a large white collar so wide that the top nearly cut your ears off when you turned your head, and the bottom made dents in your shoulder blades, and was worn outside the coat lapels giving you the appearance of a walking wedding cake.
Enduring the mickey taking of my mates, without being able to take a swipe at them for fear of decapitating myself, fully occupied my mind, and I didn't absorb much of the ways of the Lord.

However I seem to remember that He made the earth and it's inhabitants in six days, and put His feet up on the seventh.

Now, whatever the boffins tell us about evolution and hereditary traits, they can't successfully explain why all God’s creatures have an irresistible urge to do something that is quite out of keeping with instinctive reason, and what's more, do it no matter what the consequence.

Why do lemmings suddenly march off and drown themselves in their thousands*, bats hang upside down to sleep when it's just as easy to sleep the right way up, eels travel all the way the the Sargasso sea and salmon battle their way up rapids to spawn, when both could quite comfortably have a bit of the other right where they were?

I think the answer is in the obvious explanation and that is that God was tired after all that hard graft and felt He was entitled to have a bit of fun. After all, it would be dead boring to watch all creatures great and small doing exactly what the were supposed to do for ever and ever, amen.

So, He put in the make up of every being, something stupid, something that would be so contrary to reason, that He would always be sure of having a giggle, when Songs of Praise on the Telly got on his nerves. Even He would get browned off being lauded all the time. Only human, ain't it ?

The naked ape, that's us, has two natural functions. One, to see how prolific he is when it comes to siring offspring, and two, to see how many nasty ways he can invent to destroy himself.

So God instilled an urge in him, to record all his noble efforts, so that posterity could read all about his struggles, the gag being, there won't be nobody to read it when he eventually succeeds in fulfilling his destiny.

Thus at some time or other we try our hand at keeping a diary. I had the urge to do it at the age of fourteen** and recorded the daily scene for a whole year. I came across it, amongst other relics of bygone days, when having a clear out of things you can't take with you. On reading through it, I thought that God must have been tired out on that seventh day, as this little joke on homo sapiens misfired a bit, because while keeping a diary was useless when it came to posterity, I got immense pleasure reading about times I had forgotten.

I was back in the days when school girls were all gymslips and pigtails and as sexy as suet pudding, when school uniforms were what your elder brother had grown out of plus new patches on the seat of the pants and elbows of the coat, when school meals were usually a paste sandwich clutched in the hand while you played football in the playground, when bits of blotting paper soaked in ink and darts made from broken pen-nibs flew thick and fast across the class room, and when the throwers of such missiles got two on each hand from Sir if caught.

Psychology hadn't been invented then, and Sir maintained a fair discipline at a very low cost. The price of a new cane, when the old one broke, or a swift thump on the unwary Herbert who didn't duck fast enough.

We weren't any the worse for it, as it was accepted that if you were mug enough to get caught then you got punished, no hard feelings on either side. Any homicidal feelings towards that rotten sod Sir, died by the time your fingers stopped tingling, anyway you were too busy holding your hands between your knees or sitting on them, to be able to do anything about it in the interim.

 

I read references to teachers I hadn't thought of since leaving school.

Old Gobbo, so named because he sprayed you with spit if he spoke to you any nearer than five feet away.

The Twickman, who's r's sounded like w's, who invariably prefaced his maths lesson with "I'm going to show you a mathematical twick".

Bogey, who continually picked his nose during the science talks, and what was worse, flicked it at you if he thought you were not paying attention.

Mr. King (History) was affectionately known as Dot and Carry one, because he walked that way. A smashed kneecap at Mons (World War 1) made his right leg stiff as a poker and he swung it in a semi-circle to get it along, but this affliction in no way impaired his ability to give you a swift boot up the arse if he caught you mocking him.

Mr. Ede was an excitable little Welshman whose accent was so broad, that my class, who struggled to learn French under him, are probably the only people who speak it with a Welsh accent.

Beaky Harrison, whose enormous schnozzola had a permanent drip when it was cold and which joined up to the end of the shag fags he smoked during his spell on duty at playtime.

Wat Tyler, a temporary teacher, took over when Dot and Carry was on the sick list, and told us that nothing of importance happened before the Great War and to our great delight, spent his history sessions telling us yarns of his own dubious adventures during that period. The Heads swiftly gave him the push when he found out about, but I think that Mr Tyler has something there as Wat Tyler 1914-1918 remains clear in my memory, whereas the life of Charles II which we weres supposed to have learned, is still a complete blank in spite of all Dot and Carry's efforts to cram it into us when he returned. 

Then there was Kreamy Lynch who was probably the original Brylcreem boy as he had thick black hair which he plastered so lavishly with brilliantine that it ran down his face and neck so much that he looked as if he had his head in a bird cage.

And our Art master, who, besides being very Bohemian in outlook and appearance, dwelt under the sobriquet of Camel dial, not because his face resembled a camels', but because we all thought it looked like the other end. 

These were but a few of the hard worked, underpaid band of dedicated tutors, who did their utmost to transform the sow's ear mob of urchins of the late twenties and early thirties into the silken purse citizens of the late thirties and early forties.  As I said, Sir was the guv'nor in these days, maybe because he had everything in his favour, like a dirty great cane and also the support of our fathers, who wore full of apt phrases, such as :-

"Spare the rod and spoil the child" and

"Children should be seen and not heard"

I don't know whether it was the true concept of correct moulding of character, but I don't think it was all that wrong, as later events proved.

Anyway, my diary, which I hope gave God the degree of relaxation He intended, certainly helped me in one respect, although I hadn't realised it until I remembered those Sirs of yesterday.

Our Headmaster was known as Rip Roaring Reg because of his habit of tearing off defaulters, in the loudest strip they’d ever heard in their young lives After reducing the quaking miscreant to a quivering jelly of nerves with the sheer volume of his voice, he would suddenly request, in a very mild tone, that the cane and book be brought to him please then after briskly slashing six of the best down, three on each hand, thanked the offender attending and dismissed him with a fog-horn roar, of "next".

He also taught us poetry. He was a Robbie Burns addict, and must have suffered agonies trying to teach and make us appreciate the indecipherable Burns lingo. I never did, but one tiny bit of his poetry has always stuck in my mind. 

"Oh wad the Lord some giftie gie us
tae see oorsels as ithers see us" ***

Well, I don't think many people are that gifted, certainly not me, but remembering those Sirs of way back I thought that perhaps I'd been granted a wee bitty of a giftie, as I seem to see ithers as a funny lot, or p'raps it's just my warped outlook.

Anyway, you need a bit of a laugh at times, as I think God did, on that seventh day.

Notes:

* An urban myth that became widespread after this behaviour was shown in the Walt Disney documentary White Wilderness in 1958. The animals in the film were not wild animals jumping off the cliff voluntarily, they were bought by the producers and pushed over the edge of the cliff. Nice work, Uncle Walt.


** That was 1930/31


** The final verse of "To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church", 1786, and is actually:

"O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!"

We take the opportunity to wish 

A Happy Christmas and Prosperous New Year to:

• The television mogul who manages to kill off and bury deep in the abyss of idiots from whence they came Coronation Street, Crossroads, Sale of the Century, The Incredible Hulk, Monty Python's Flying Circus and the Bionic Man, Woman and Dog

• Joe (I Love England) Bugner, but only if he promises not come back from America

• Liz Taylor and the final instalment of her boring marriage saga

• Elton John and his definite final retirement

• The honest trader who quotes straight-forward prices for his good without giving a lot of bull about how much you save by not buying them at the ludicrous figure he says they are worth

• The dustmen if they don't leave us up to our armpits in muck and flies more than once a year

• Frank Sinatra and his definite final retirement

• All punk rockers for their outstanding influence on young people in the art of decent, courteous behaviour

• The Mirror and The Sun, if they don't progress from the boob pictures to full frontal exposure, which they're trying hard to do

• The Canadian P.O. if they'll strike at any other time than the Xmas Period as they usually do

• Mohammed Ali and his definite final retirement

• Mr 5% Jim, if he'll let us have more as he does everyone else

• The person who'll tell Eamon Andrews to get stuffed when he wants to tell the world about their life

• ERNIE, if it ever coughs up any of my premium bond numbers, which I've had since 1958

• All traffic wardens. May their work to rule last forever

• Professor Magnus Pyke, who can be interesting when he's not acting like a caffeinated windmill

• Any contestant in Mastermind who can't answer a question that I can

• Any horse in a show-jumping competition who refuses at the high wall and slings its rider through it

• Readers Digest, if they'll stop bombarding me with adverts of their damn books just because I bought one from them years ago

             

Christmas 1983

PEACE AND GOODWILL TO ONE AND ALL

🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

19. The Six Fillings

If Mother Nature hadn't given us a stomach, she wouldn't have punished us for making pigs of ourselves, by keep on filling it with nosh. But give us a stomach she did, and then filled our mouth up with teeth, to make us suffer.  Not only that, but gave us an inbuilt fear of getting anywhere within ten miles of a dentist. Mother Nature is no doubt wonderful, but if she ever assumed human form, I bet she'd have razor blades sewn to her knickers , if you get what I mean. No pleasure without pain.

Anyway, on the subject of teeth. It never ceases to amaze me when people say "Oh, I'd far rather have my own", when they discover that you sleep with your grin in a glass on the bedside table. Being able to proudly boast that you have all your own teeth, also means that you have all the attendant joys that go with them. Like getting that sharp stab of pain when your cold beer gets in the hole where you should have had a filling done but were too windy to let the dentist get at you with his drill, or having a smile like a November sky, with it's beautiful shades of grey, yellow and black, no matter how you scrub with paste and brush making your gums as tender as a baby's bum.

I think one of the best days of my life, was when I went to the dentist to have six teeth filled. I must hastily say. that on no account would I have done this voluntarily, I a genuine A1 first class coward when it comes to inflicting pain on my person, but this time I had no choice, as the P.O. doctor had it down on his report that six teeth wanted filling, and the Post Office would not grant my establishment as  postman unless six teeth got filled, I don't remember the doc ever looking at my teeth, apart from the usual investigation to see if I was breathing and the correct response happened after I coughed (presumably to ascertain that I could be classified postman and not postwoman), he did nothing else. Perhaps he felt that just a little extra should go down on his report to justify his position as M.O. for P.O.

Anyway, I duly presented myself, quaking, at the dental surgery, to let the gnasher inquisitor have a go at me. He was reputed to be a good workman at his job, but sadly lacking in comforting bedside manner. I had occasion to go to him once before, when a raging toothache drove me to his door, I'd been told he never turned anyone in pain away, and neither did he. One look at what must have seemed like a tortured gargoyle (my face) and he had me in the chair and tooth out in a couple of ticks. Then holding aloft the offending molar in the forceps, said in a tone of disgust, "filthy thing", and threw it over his shoulder in the general direction of the waste bin. I had the feeling that he though I'd deliberately harboured bubonic plague in my mouth, and what I'd suffered was just retribution for doing so. However, he read the report and grunted, "Right, let's have a look" and after doing so, said "You don't want any fillings". The sigh of relief from me must have sounded like I'd got a puncture, and I remember gabbling something about never having any trouble with them, when he chopped me down with "They've all got to come out, your gums are septic". I thought that a spark of human kindness broke through when he added "I could save one or two if you like", but decided he was only saving a bit of overtime for the future, so said he better take them all out. He didn't seem overjoyed at losing what could have been a lucrative income from messing about with the few he could leave in for filling etc.

Eventually, he got his own back by taking them out in two sittings, which was OK, excepting that he took out the complete left side first, top and bottom, and I went around looking like half a vampire  until he took the rest out. People used to back away an put their hands up to their necks when I smiled.

The final chapter of my disassociation with Ma Nature's scourge of the cake-hole and my adoption of man's finest invention, plastic gnashers, demonstrated again my dentists efficiency and his down to earth approach to his job. I went to have the plates fitted, rejoicing, that at least I would be free from toothache, fillings, gumboils, and the description of toothless wonder which had been stuck on my since extraction day number two. The top set fitted beautifully, although I felt my mouth was full of tombstones, but the bottom set perched on the gum like a six and a half hat on a seven and a quarter head. As I gingerly tried to press the plate over the gum, he watched my efforts for a few seconds , then, as his impatience at my timid approach boiled over, grasped my jaw with his fingers on top of the teeth and his thumb beneath the chin, said "You've got to be firm with them", and crunched his fist shut like a steel vice. I'm sure my kneecaps shot up and down my shins like yo-yos and certainly the shout that burst from way back n my gullet and made me jump, must have nearly deafened him, but he never turned a hair, just said, "Like that". Mind you, he was right, they went on all right, at the expense of a fair amount of gum skin and it was a fortnight before I dare take them out to clean them. It's not so easy to be firm  when you're on the receiving end, but as I said, he knew his job and the end product of a session with him resulted in you having a well fitting set of gleaming teeth, fully MOT'd.

This is more that I can say about the bods at University College Hospital, which at one time trained the future dentists of our land. I went there once, way back, and you were examined and the work that had to be done was marked out on a chart which you took to a waiting room, adjacent to the operating theatre. This only had a partition wall, which didn't reach to the ceiling, so that, while you couldn't see the men at work, you could hear everything that went on. I went in first,  gave the bloke in charge my chart, and three young trainees took over my body. They sat me in the chair, strapped me round the waist, and bunged a dirty great funnel over my face, telling me to count to ten (I'd paid two bob for gas, being a coward and not wanting to know what was going on).

I remember dreaming that I was in the wolf wood up the zoo and all the wolves were howling like mad for food that they fancied as they chased me. Sounded like a lot of banshees, getting louder and louder until I realised it was me, and  I was on the floor of the theatre having slid under the strap and had kicked my shoes clean off my feet. These three idiots were holding me down, laughing their heads off. I'd been in the washroom for a while, washing my mouth clear of blood, when a chap came in, looking a bit the worse for wear and said, "Was that you in the chair just now?" I said "Yes" and he said "Blimey, you should have heard yourself, two of the women waiting fainted, and some of the blokes turned green, talk about having teeth out, sounded like you were being castrated".

Afterwards I found that they'd broken two teeth level with the gums and had to go and have them extracted some time later when they went bad and started to ache. Well, they were only learners, so I couldn't moan but when people say they'd sooner have their own teeth, I silently bless the day I went for six fillings and got a set of plastic gnashers instead.

18. The Invention

At some time or other in our lives, every one of us must have had the thought that if we try hard enough we could invent something that nobody else had yet thought of, but was so simple and obvious that how mankind had existed without it all this time, was one of the mysteries that only God could answer. Every now and again, some idiot presents the world with an invention that nets him a quick fortune, and is so simple that you could kick yourself for not having got in first, because, well you could have thought of that, couldn't you?

The answer lays in the old saying "you can't see the wood for the trees" or in other words, the best hiding place is right under your nose. After all, how many generations of blokes, with frozen fingers, had to leave their flies undone after having a jimmy-riddle, because their hands were too cold to do them up, before some bod nipped in to invent a zip-fastener*. Dead simple, wasn't it? Anybody could have thought of it, right under your noses, well give or take a couple of feet.

And how would women's liberation have got underway, if someone hadn't invented the bra for them to wave in the air? So there again was a simple solution which some clever so and so spotted, and is now rolling in the lap of luxury.

Perhaps inspiration would come more easily if we though of inventing something that would benefit our fellow creatures, rather than make our bank manager get out the port and king size cigars when he saw us instead of saying "About your overdraft, Mr Snooks".

As, for instance, the invention I came across when driving on holiday one year. We pulled in to a typical roadside café, with usual signs all over it. Eat at Pete's. Good pull up for drivers. Coaches welcome. Ladies and gents toilets at back etc etc etc. It was a very hot day, and after driving for some time through towns with one way circuits that nearly had me round the twist with frustration, as no matter which way I went, I came back to the town centre, and when I did get out it was on the way back to the town I'd just left; my wife and I were dying for a lovely quiet refreshing cuppa away from the madding crowd. The bloke who invented Hampton Court Maze was a novice compared to raving maniacs who plan the average one way system. Anyway, Eat at Pete's hove into view along a long lonely country road, which, according to the map, didn't exist, but was the only exit we could find from the jungle of road signs and prowling traffic wardens, waiting to pounce with their little plastic covered tickets at the ready.

The Taj Mahal couldn't have looked more beautiful than this corrugated jewel, nestling on it's carpet of loose dirt and empty Coca-Cola cans. We parked and made for the door where lay the soul reviving peace of a quiet sit down with a cuppa and maybe the added luxury of a cheese butty, as it was, after all, holiday time.

The thought of it hastened our steps towards the door which I opened in anticipation of joys to come, and was met by a blast of sound which bloody nigh knocked us back to the car. This bejewelled retreat, from the stresses of the one way circuit, was as a beautiful woman who nurtured a viper in her bosom. In this case, a damn great juke box standing in the corner, blaring out top of the pops, at the top of its strident metallic lungs. Well, the need of refreshment overcame all thoughts of retreat, and as I went to the counter to order, I came across this heaven sent invention which should have netted its inventor untold material gain and a place among the immortals to boot. Among the top twenty records available at a tanner a go, there it lay, the inspiration that sets a man above the beasts, a silent record, once without a groove, two whole minutes of silence bought for a miserable sprasi. Was there ever a better bargain offered to the road-weary traveller? I spent as many sixpences as I could manage to get in without smashing the teacups in the race to get to the monster before the local youths, who no doubt, felt that this was an intrusion into private lives, and could possibly have dangerous side effects in later years.

Young people cannot operate without the accompaniment of noise and too much silence unsettles them, possibly to the extent of eventual impotency, who knows?  Maybe the unknown genius who had invented this gift to homo sapiens had deeper motives than golden silence and was really concerned about world population explosion. Only posterity will tell, and should it prove true, the silent record will be hailed as the most infallible contraceptive since the advent of the pill.

So put your minds at work and try to think of something that will enrich all people instead of only yourself, and you will find inspiration abounding.

This is what I have done, and am now working on a cure for lumbago, slipped disc, and all the numerous back ailments that afflict us today. As it will be in common use before this article is printed, I'll tell you all what it is that I have done.

It's a pair of scissors, three feet long, available in two grades, standard with wooden handles to be operated with two hands, or deluxe which expand from six inches to three feet, to be used with one hand from the hip, to enable folk with dodgy backs to cut their toenails without bending.

So carry on trying and I'll be happy to hear of your efforts and will write about them in a future article, if you would care to let me know about them.


Notes:

*Says wikipedia: the zipper beat the button in 1937 in the "Battle of the Fly", after French fashion designers raved over zippers in men's trousers. Esquire magazine declared the zipper the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men" and among the zippered fly's many virtues was that it would exclude "The Possibility of Unintentional and Embarrassing Disarray".

Pleasingly (though I'll hazard, not from Grandads perspective) I've typed up this piece with that modern-ish jukebox, the CD player, on windows wide open and the Wharfedale's banging out a little bit of Iron Maiden, little knowing the narrative I was starting on a half hour or so ago. Next door will be wishing I had me the silent record.

Actually, silent records have a bit of history - see the attached.
http://musicweird.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-sounds-of-silence-brief-history-of.html

17. Living Rough

I read that there are more people living rough at this point of time than ever before. At this point of time is one of those queer modern phrases which have crept into the English language and freely translated means right now. Anyway I don't know whether the writer of the article had been counting them or not, but I am disputing his statement and saying there were far more on the road in the early thirties. Why? Because they had no bread, man. (Another queer phrase meaning boracic lint. Skint.)

They weren't living rough doing their thing. (Trans: too idle to work). They were just pawns on the chessboard of free enterprise and of no consequence until the war, when they quickly reached queen position. In the modern jargon, your country needs you, man. (Trans: someone's got to die, so guess who?). I met up with a few of these lads one summer night in '32 when I held the important post of tea-boy at a coach painters* in Little Albany St, N.W.1.

What's left of Little Albany Street. Sep 2017. www.instantstreetview.com

From this palace of industry, (Trans: rat infested, bug ridden, converted stable) I sallied forth at ten-thirty, one o'clock and half past four to Old Bills Cafe in Osnaburgh St bearing a long pole on which hung a dozen or more tin billy cans, and repeating in my mind a list of the workers requirements. Like two of drip, two of marg, or five woods, or half of Digger shag, and each can to be charged to the brim with a pennorth of tea.

We lived well then and no expense was spared when it came to the inner man. England's mighty empire sprang not from the Industrial Revolution or the playing fields of Eton, but from the cuppa char and two of drip of the British Working Man. My efforts were rewarded with the generous stipend of the 12/6d a week and whatever I could fiddle by milking their cars of their petrol and flogging it back to the owners when they came to collect. At 1/3d a gallon this added up to a tidy bit if we had a good week.

One Friday, the guv'nor, an enlightened employer who had the well being of his staff at heart, came up on a 50 to 1 shot with a quid on the nose, and on returning from the boozer in a extremely benevolent frame of mind (Trans: p----d as a newt), informed his staff en-bloc, that there was no work tomorrow so they might as well all sod off to safhend on a beano and he'd give us a tenner for the beer. Then quickly added that he wasn't bloody well paying us wages as well.

The London Gazette 7 July 1931

The cold reasoning brain of your true executive will always supersede the mind befuddling fumes of four ales. So as work was cancelled for Sat and a tenner bought enough wallop to float the Queen Mary in those days and paid our fares as well, (1/9d return cheap excursion), the morrow found us disporting ourselves around the old mud heap, Southend-On-Sea.

Late evening found us engaged in a hotly disputed contest in The Ship Inn with a team of gentlemen from a jam factory. The best of three dart games, twelve aside, losers to pay for the beer. It was one all and the decider was well under way and I was sat in a corner with the jam factory tea boy where we had been put by our respective foreman with a bob each to buy beer and crisps and strict orders to keep out of the way. He was named Nathaniel , stood about four feet nothing and was as muscular as a pair of anaemic braces. If he'd laid on the beach the winkles would have queued up to kick sand in his face. I was no Charles Atlas then, either, but we both felt ten feet tall as we supped our halves of four ale and puffed Woodbine smoke towards the ceiling and bragged of our importance as tea boys. He told me he also had to chop up the wood for the raspberry jam. When I said "Eh?" he said that raspberry jam was made from turnips and the pips were bits of wood chopped up fine to make it look real. I believed every word being very naive at the time and he was so serious. I still have my doubts and raspberry jam is still called wooden pip jam in our family. We suddenly realised that it was ten minutes from the departure time of the excursion train and on telling our foremen both got the same answer - "P--- off!". So we did and ran like the clappers (Trans: quickly) to the station and got there in time to see the train steaming up the line. As it was the last train home we strolled back to the pub to find it closed and deserted. Where all the darts revellers had gone so quickly was a mystery to us, so we wandered to the beach and that is where we met up with a bunch of lads who were living rough.

Ship Hotel, Southend On Sea

At first I thought that a lot of other blokes had missed the last train home as there were dozens of them sitting around on the beach, the seats, and in the shelters on the front, but Nat told me they were all on the road. He seemed well versed in human affairs and spoke as if being a tramp were a classified occupation. Something like being a cowboy. There were young fellows of our age, middle aged men, and elderly chaps. English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. Chatting, smoking, some in earnest discussion, others just staring across the water. All with one thing in common. A large bundle containing all their worldly possessions. 

We got talking to a group of lads of our own age. A couple of Scottish boys on their way to Portsmouth in hope of joining the Navy, a Welsh lad who'd been trying to get work in the Kentish mines, a Geordie who was just looking for work anywhere, and three chaps from Notting Hill who were trying to get bookings as an acrobatic act around the seaside shows. They obviously weren't having much success if they had to bed down on the beach at night, but their spirits were in no way dampened by this. Full of life, they gave us all a demonstration of handstands, backflips and balancing then stripped off to have a swim in the sea. They were chivvied out by the patrolling fuzz (Trans: night shift from the local nick) who moved everybody off the beach to the shelters on the front with strict instructions to stay there till dawn then shift our bodies as far from Southend as possible before the dawn patrol got around. None of the lads seemed envious of the fact that Nat and I had homes to go to and were there because we'd missed the last train whereas they were there because they'd nowhere else. I got the feeling that we were being granted membership of their community for the night and were the ones who needed advice, freely given, on how to keep warm and comfortable on the hard wooden seats which faced the keen off-sea breeze. We awoke around dawn and thrown over Nat was a ragged overcoat to help keep him warm. Like I said before, he looked like an advert for 'Consumption and how to live with it' so perhaps the lad who owned the coat thought he might snuff it during the cold, early hours and there would be some awkward questions asked. But I prefer to think it was the compassion of a lad who had nothing, for another boy who was his guest for the night. An unknown soldier of the Cenotaph of the vast army of British unemployed of the Thirties, many of whom were on the road.

And I'll still bet there ain't so many today no matter what the writer of that article says.

Lies, damn lies and statistics? These statistics prove Grandad to be correct.

                                                     

Notes:
* The only coachworks on Little Albany Street my very modest research - I really haven't looked hard -  turned up was dissolved in 1931. See the extract from the London Gazette.

16. English Traditions

Us Brits are very proud of the ancient traditions that have developed and been retained throughout a thousand years of history. We love to parade them at every possible moment in front of the visiting tourist, not that we give a monkey's whether they like it or not. We like 'em and that's good enough for us, but if the visitors go back home and tell their mates to come over and bung a few bucks, francs, or liras into the UK coffers, well, all the better for us.

The must be sense of the 'Come to Britain' tourist propaganda program are too well known for me to enlarge upon here, but I think a better job of presenting us British to these foreign visitors, would be done if we got 'em away from Buck House and all the bods who make such a palaver about changing over to guard it, and got them round a few places that are truly representative of this Sceptred Isle.

Like a picket line at British Leyland, a traffic jam in the Edgware Road, a bus queue practically anywhere, a casualty queue at any hospital, the gents in most boozers, and so on ad infinitum.

There is one place I would plump hard for the visitor to visit, and that is the artists exhibition which is held every Sunday along the Bayswater Road. This is an exhibition in the truest sense of the word. Here, anyone who fancies that he has created something that they can flog to somebody, can hang it on the railings of Kensington Gardens from the Broad Walk to nigh on Marble Arch, if they can find a space.

I may have mentioned it before, but in case you missed it, I'll tell you that I was pupped in Paddington, a stone's throw from Queensway, or Queens Road as it was called then. In fact, I did my first paper round from a shop which stood where the Queens Ice Rink is now sited. The whole area was so English that it could well have been the original setting for "Upstairs Downstairs".

Queens Road was an English bastion, firmly planted by it's broad base in Westbourne Grove, with it's long taper of genteel shops, lorded over by the imposing edifice of Wm. Whiteley, which always waved the Union Jack from its dome towards the end of the road as it embedded itself into Bayswater Road. Foreign persons were definitely not encouraged, and ragged arsed herberts as myself were only allowed up there before seven a.m., in order to deliver the papers to the upper crust residing in Inverness Terrace and the roads around. All for two bob a week including Sundays.

All very English and democratic, as Wm. Whiteley sold off yesterday's stale bread and cakes to the deserving poor living on the wrong side of the Harrow Road across Royal Oak station if they presented themselves at six a.m. with a tanner and a shopping bag round the back entrance. Must look after one's own, you know.

I don't think that Queens Road ever recovered from being debased by the building of the Queens cinema bang opposite, during the thirties. It tolerated the Roxy in Westbourne Grove as a concession to progress, anyway it could pretend to be unaware of it's existence, being round the corner, and it knew that a high standard of hygiene was maintained, as the usherettes, who were always dressed in black, came round at regular intervals and sprayed the audience with Flit guns.

I hadn't been along the Queensway for many years, until the other Sunday, when my wife and I went to see if we could buy a picture at the artists exhibition in Bayswater. We drove up Inverness Terrace from Porchester Road and parked at the end and started our long trek from the Broad Walk along the park railings towards the end. It took nearly three hours, with stops for ice-cream and hot dogs, which were sold from vans and barrows parked among transport of every make and age. Creations of every form of art hung from the railings or stood on the pavement. Etchings, oils, rubbings, collage, pencil, water colours, pictures made from watch and clock works, nuts and bolts, everything imaginable. Modern art, some of which looked as if the artist had sat his or her bare bum in a tin of paint and slapped around all over the paper. You could almost hear the seal clapping it's flippers. Representatives of every creed and culture were there in abundance, all trying to flog their own peculiar form of culture.

Only one thing was held in common - a mistaken idea of the value of their work. We saw a set of water colours of the Pool of London, one of which we liked, and promptly looked for the vendor. A bloke with a mass of matted rats' tails on his nut and a terrific Zapata moustache waved a half sucked lolly at us from the van he was sprawled against, and said, "You interested, man?" I said yes, how much was he asking, and he replied the big one was £60 and the others £48 each. I said that I didn't want to buy a Renoir, and I'd give him £10 for the one I liked, whereas he shrugged and said "That's the price, man" and resumed sucking his lolly. I thought that if he stuck to those prices, he was liable to be eating lollies for the rest of his puff and wished him a good morning. I added, "Mr Picasso", but very softly, as he looked a mite fierce. Probably because he was a bit fed up with a monotonous diet of inflated ego and Mr Whippy.

We badly needed a cup of char, so I said we'd stroll down Queensway as there was always a decent tearoom somewhere along there. We walked the length of Queensway past Hungarian, Armenian, Italian, Indian and the inevitable Chinese restaurants all doing roaring trade and filling the air with continental and oriental pongs, most of which were very mouth-watering but we didn't fancy eating many of the queer looking objects hanging in the windows, most of which seemed to have been cooked in varnish.

It wasn't until we got nearly to Whiteleys that we found a Wimpy Bar, tucked coyly back from the road but still valiantly flying the English flag, metaphorically speaking*. The place was full of people of every race bar ours, all nattering  their nuts off in their own lingo, excepting a clergyman seated by himself in a corner. As he seemed to be the only link left with Queensway's past, we sat on the next table and ordered two cups of tea, but were out of luck as they only had espresso coffee. Well, we settled for that, sub-consciously strengthened by the vision of the Church in the next table. However, thing are never as they seem, cos as we got up to leave, I saw that the magazine he was so intent on, was not the local parochial news, but the latest edition of Men Only. Perhaps he was meeting the Devil on his own ground, but as blokes dress themselves in anything these days, I don't think so.

Still, I definitely would recommend the artists exhibition as a must for the foreign visitor, who wants to soak himself in some English tradition, and whoever he is, he'll also find some link with home there.

Notes: 
I've edited this piece quite heavily, and, in trying to give it some coherence, I may have lost the point of the original.

Whiteley's Department Store met its demise, closing in 1981, and  re-opened in 1989 predictably enough as a shopping centre. More pleasingly, the Sunday Bayswater Road artists exhibition continues to run, having been established for over 50 years. See  https://www.bayswater-road-artists.co.uk/

* Wimpy Bar - the well known chain of fast-food restaurants, is, of course, actually American and only came to Britain in the 1950's when Lyons obtained a license to use the brand.