May 2010
I might be said that May 1947 was not the best of times at which to enter the world. England was trying to shake off one of the most severe winters in living memory and Lancashire was still under several feet of snow; I have been told that the most reliable of transport in Wigan at that time was a stout pair of boots and a large shovel. Even though the Great War had finished, rationing was still biting hard. Times were tough, especially for a large and growing family.
The men folk had just come back home from the war and, like most of the Baby Boomer generation, I suppose I had formed a very small part of the victory celebrations. My father had to quickly re-establish his career as a school teacher and his job took us to Prestatyn in North Wales and then, before my third birthday, to Grays Thurrock, where he joined the Economics department of Grays Technical School and I shortly afterwards began my academic life at Culford Road Primary.
One of my earliest memories of school was the size of the desks – they were so large that I had to sit bolt upright just to be able to see over the top. However, later in life, as a police officer, I was sent to my old school in answer to a burglar alarm and I was amazed to find that I could hardly squeeze my slim body underneath those desks any more.
I was, in those days, a typical boy; a scruffy little oik – shirt always out, holes in my trouser knees and shoes scuffed to a uniform leather finish where they had once been polished black. But, for all of my general scruffiness, nothing could possibly compare to my handwriting. My teachers would despair and I would regularly find myself standing outside the Headmaster’s study, where three raps across the palms with a thick ruler was considered a tried and tested method of improving poor handwriting. Sorry, Mr Meyrick, but it didn’t work!
It was there, however, that I discovered an interest in English and I loved to write essays with, I am told, a vivid imagination, even though they were mostly illegible.
At home, as the youngest of five children, I was accorded certain privileges: being allowed to scrape the last of the custard from the bowl; having permission to leave the dinner table to play while the adults continued their long and dull conversations and thereby avoiding the washing up.
There were, of course, downsides too. There was only seating for four in the lounge, so, in the days before fitted carpets and central heating, I was usually to be found acting as a draught excluder, playing with my soldiers and army lorries on the stained wood floor in front of the door, while the family all listened to the wireless, on those Sunday afternoons before 24/7 television – Billy Cotton’s Bandshow, Sing Something Simple with the Adams Singers, the exciting science fiction series Jet Ace Logan and, later in the evening, the scary thriller, The Little Red Monkey, whose theme tune would strike terror into my heart and sent me scuttling off to bed.
My mother had been a Baptist Sunday School teacher in Lancashire and we had an organ, not powered by electricity, but by the pumping of two bellows with the feet. On this magnificent machine on Sunday mornings, she would play her favourite hymns, like ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and ‘There Is A Green Hill Far Away’, while we stood around her singing our hearts out.
At Christmas my older siblings tried to keep the magic alive for me for as long as possible: ‘You must be in bed before he comes, or all you’ll get in your stocking is a lump of coal’; the sound of sleigh bells on the landing to reinforce the threat and ensure my compliance. I remember one very special year, when Santa came early. Hidden on the top shelf of my mother’s wardrobe was a large sandy coloured teddy bear. Mum was clearly not amused when I came rushing downstairs clutching my present and shouting, “He’s been! He’s been!” From that day onwards, September the third was always Sandy’s birthday. On successive Christmases came his wife Pansy and their two children, Teddy and Titch.
All too soon, however, I grew too old for teddy bears and became tired of toy soldiers; I moved on to model railways, spending many a happy Sunday afternoon with two mates, combining our track and filling the lounge with a complicated railway world, often having to dismantle it at the end of the day without a single train having actually run on it. Then a short spell of Airfix models (at a time when small boys were still allowed to buy UHU glue.)
Then onwards and upwards and into Palmers Endowed School for Boys, where I soon developed a passion for Chemistry. Together with my best friend, Tony, we set up a rudimentary laboratory in the cellar of our Victorian house. There we skipped all of the ‘ooh!’ and ‘aah!’ experiments, concentrating only on the ones that either went BANG! or smelt foul (we once tried to synthesise Methyl Mercaptan, which is supposedly the most evil smell known to man – and I think we might have almost succeeded!) All too often, it seemed, the cellar was filled with acrid fumes that sent us scuttling up the rickety wooden staircase choking and fighting for breath.
Many, many happy hours were spent in that rank environment until, one day, Tony ‘liberated’ from his father’s wardrobe a Luger pistol bullet that he, in turn, had ‘liberated’ from a German officer. Having waived the traditional Health and Safety evaluation, we fixed the bullet in a clamp and lit a Bunsen burner underneath it. I cannot even begin to describe the noise – I have never in my life before or afterwards experienced anything quite so loud! But the sound was the very least of our worries - the bullet ricocheted around the solid concrete walls at a hundred feet per second … while the cartridge case, obeying Newton’s Third Law, travelled in an equal and opposite direction … while we hid under the bench … waiting to die! That could have been the end of my life, but they do say that ‘Fortune favours the stupid.’
We obviously survived the experience and it could be argued that that day marked the approximate end of my childhood.