|
A few people on reading my story have said that I should
continue to map out my life on paper, but on reflection
I have decided that it would cause me too many problems.
Even in my early years I have left a few locations a bit
vague so as not to identify people. My later life is interwoven
withother people and if I was to stick to all the nice things
it would be very boring and if I told the truth the whole
truth and nothing but the truth I might lose a few friends
and no doubt the wife would hit me on the head with the
frying pan. So I have decided to dip in here and there.
Motor Cars
Going back to the days in Batley with my brother Bob, we
had made contact with our mother who now lived near Retford
in a small village called Ranby. Well in order to cut transport
costs we bought a tandem and used to cycle the fifty miles
or so, we used to set off from Batley just after midnight
and arrive shattered about six in the morning. On one occasion
we borrowed an old van from Charlie Stringer a famous junk
man in Dewsbury, half way to Retford the blinking thing
broke down, we spent hours trying to get it going and eventually
found a lump of old lino in the petrol feed, we stuck to
the tandem after that.
Jumping forward to the nineteen sixties I bought my first
car, it was a 1936 Rover saloon which made it about twenty
six years old, Barbara and me set off for London and the
south coast with about £15 in our pocket and about
£5 in the Post Office Saving's bank. The trip down
the Great North Rd. was like a comedy film, the radiator
boiled over about every forty miles and we had to let it
cool down and then fill up with water, we had the boot full
of quart pop bottles full of water. The Al was not the three
hour dash to London it is today but meandered through town
and village, through the main streets of Doncaster and Retford
and too many places to mention. One good thing about the
open road of those days, there was no yellow lines and you
could stop in the middle of towns and do a bit of shopping.
On the way back after our grand tour about ten miles short
of Retford the big end went with a blooming big bang and
we had to drive the last seventy miles home at about ten
miles an hour in the dark. We had to stop at a garage and
get some cans of oil and spent that last seventy miles filling
her up with oil as well as water. I sold the Rover for eight
pounds for scrap and as it only cost me fourteen pounds
when I bought it we were not too unhappy.
Our next car was a total disaster, we paid £100 for
an Austin Somerset advertised in the local paper, we were
like babes in the wood and bought a real duff car from a
conman who brought the car to our house and without any
real checks we gave him our savings and he left us the car.
Every thing that could go wrong with a car did, after a
new engine and other new parts week after week we gave in
and I took the car to a sale on commission dealer in Leeds.
Well he sold the car for thirty pounds and then would not
give me my money, each time I went he gave me a different
excuse, well after a while I went round with a gang of my
bigger mates and we all went into his little office and
he sort of changed his mind and gave me the money.
My next car was a dream, a Morris Oxford, it was only two
years old and we ran it for about six years and then sold
it to one of my mates who kept it through my next three
cars and every time we saw him out in it Barbara would tell
me off for selling it.
I could go on boring you about each of my cars, thirteen
to date, but I will just say that we have never been without
a car since that first Austin, we bought our first new car,
a Datsun Sunny in the mid eighties and felt we had really
arrived. The motor car has given us a great deal of pleasure
and I feel that in years to come people will think of the
days of the car as we now think of the days of the cowboy.
Politics
1 suppose by the time I came out of the Navy You would
say I was a bit of a communist, I never joined the party
or got involved in any active work with them but I did read
the Daily Worker from time to time and did steep myself
in the works of Marks and Engles together with books like
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists also went to the meetings
Of The Free Thinkers at the Mechanics Institute at Bradford.
I once got involved in a debate with a catholic priest on
the existence of God in which we had a real ding dong battle,
the priest had a fine sense of humour and when a member
of the audience asked him what he would do if the late Henry
the Eighth entered the room, he replied 'I would ask the
ladies to leave'.
I got a lot of my political inspiration from the work of
Thomas Pain and I feel I was too much into freedom of the
individual to be happy with the communist state together
with powerful central government which did not seem to fit
in with Marx’s withering of the state and freedom of
the people.
So what did I do, I went and joined The Socialist Party
of Great Britain a purist Marxist party that considered
the Communists to be state capitalists, the Labour Party
a reformist party propping up the capitalist state, and
the Tories and Liberals to be outright enemies of the working
class. We had six members in the Bradford Branch spread
round the West Riding, there was Albert Yarrow from Wakefield,
Vera Barrett from Bradford me from Batley and three others
who's name I can't remember. We used to go round door to
door like the Jehovahs selling the Socialist Standard and
each year we attended the annual conference held at Red
Lion Sq. in London. From then on most of my friends and
my father considered me to be a bit of a nutter. Sadly I
was not able to bring down the government and bring in utopia
but I did get involved in lots of smashing political arguments.
On one occasion MI5 checked up on me at my place of work
and asked my boss for information about me, they said that
it was known that I read the Daily Worker, and that was
under a Labour government.
All my working life I have being involved in trade unions
and was an active member of the NUR when working on the
railway and became active at branch officer level when I
moved to Leeds at the Post Office. It was when running the
annual Post Office Union dance at Leeds Town Hall that I
met my future wife Barbara, she was a smashing dancer and
I asked her to dance giving little regard to the fact that
I could not dance for toffee. I was so bad that I thought
it would be better if we sat down and had a coffee.
On joining the catering department I took on the job of
secretary of the catering managers north eastern branch
and got involved nationally with the national catering committee
and from there to being a member of the national executive
of the Post Office Managers Union.
To change the subject the catering managers used to attend
Hotel Olympia the national catering exhibition held at Earls
Court and one year I was a member of a joint Post Office
and Royal Navy team entering an exhibit. There was three
from the Post Office and Two from the Navy working together
and wait for it, the two Navy men were both Lieutenant Commanders
and I were working with them on first name terms, I did
not let on that I had been a navy cook.
I drifted out of active political life and became a sort
of labour voter. Each year I take my wife to the polls in
the car, I vote labour and I think she votes something else
and I wonder why bother going.
In 1982 I attended the TUC at Blackpool as a delegate from
my union and sat and watched the union leaders. By the end
of the week which the ordinary workers pay for with their
subs I felt there was not much in it for them. I am still
a bit of a political misfit.
10 SPRING GROVE TERRACE LEEDS 6
I don't believe in ghosts, there is no such thing, but
10 Spring Grove Terrace was haunted, I say' was', because
it has now been Pulled down and there is a kids playground
built on the site. The house was a back to back terrace
house and comprised of cellars with toilet, live in kitchen
and large front room with a fine bay window, two bedrooms
and two attics containing a bathroom. So if you wanted a
wee when You were in the bath it was a long way to the cellar.
The ghost was a bloke who lived on the landing between
the bedrooms, he was not a lot of trouble, but you do feel
uneasy with some one just outside the door.
The light switches were solid brass and when you put the
light on you could hear the click, well Harry, that's what
we called him, used to turn the lights off, it was a bit
odd but he never turned them on. At the dead of night he
used to come into the bedroom, Barbara spoke to him one
night thinking it was me out of bed, and then noticed I
was there in bed beside her.
She used to tell me about him and I humoured her, until
one night we were both awake in bed and he put out our light
out with a click and we both saw him standing in the doorway,
he was not all that clear but you could tell it was a young
man, I jumped up and shouted, told him to bugger off and
he seemed to go.
The very next day we moved the bed so that we could not
see the door when we lay in bed. our cat, Scruffy we called
her, would not go upstairs and never did, she just stood
at the bottom of the stairs and her hair would stand on
end.
Susan my little sister, she was about nine at the time,
came to stay over night. In the middle of the night she
screamed out and we ran in to her, she said a man had been
in the bedroom we had to take her into our bed for the rest
of the night.
Then my Mother came to stay, she liked to read in bed and
she went up to bed about ten and took a book with her, about
half a hour later she was banging on the floor and shouting,
we both ran up and she said that I had gone into her room
and put the light out.
The presence of Harry was also noted by a friend of mine
who used to stay overnight from time to time and he said
the room was spooky. One night Barbara, was having a bath
in the attic, the second attic I used as a photographic
darkroom so the attic was blacked out when I heard her screaming,
I ran up to her and she was in a panic in total darkness,
he had put the light out, the switch was not in the attic
but down on the bedroom landing wall, that was her last
after dark bath. Another funny thing, we had a tobacco jar
standing on a corner cupboard in the front room, we were
saving up for a new engine for the car and were putting
money in this jar. One day we returned home together and
the jar had exploded into a thousand pieces which were all
around the room together with the money.
We had a medium lady come to the house, she said she felt
him, well she would wouldn’t she, but it was best not
to upset him, he seemed apart from a joke or two with the
lights to be harmless and have no evil intent, she warned
that if we tried to hound him out he might turn nasty. So
we just went on living with him, he did not come into the
bedroom again but we heard his footsteps from time to time
and the lights would go out now and again, but it could
not really be happening because I don't believe in ghosts
anyway. As I said at the start of this story the house has
gone and there are kids swings there now, wait a minute'
is one of those swings moving ?. But like me you don't believe
in ghosts do you ?.
Speeling or is it spelling
I started reading comics at a very young age, probably
because of My life style in which I had to make my own entertainment.
I played at make believe or pretending, I could be a king
or better still a young prince going round doing good deeds.
I taught my self to read with comics like the Dandy and
soon passed on to the story telling comics. I think that
in some way I started to read before I could spell, I knew
all about Treasure Island and Mark Twain and later in life
I used to sit and read Marx, Julian Huxley, Upton Sinclair,
Bernard Shaw, Sinclair Lewis and lots more. The funny thing
is that I could read and understand but there was lots of
words I could not pronounce never mind spell.
I found my poor spelling to be a real problem, people say
you can always use a dictionary but to use a dictionary
you need to know the first letter or two. In the early sixties
I was running a Refreshment Club, had an Off Licence Shop,
and did Trade Union branch work, all jobs that involved
me in writing and I decided to meet the problem head on,
I took on the job of editor of the Branch monthly magazine
and forced my self to get involved in more and more writing
work. I did correspondence courses with the National Council
of Labour Collages and Ruskins and in the end was able to
get by with the occasional dip into a dictionary.
One benefit that can flow from a spelling problem is that
you need to develop other skills, you need to learn how
to speak in public with limited notes and master the art
of add libbing particularly if you are involved in National
Trade Union work which can involve you in some stressful
speech making from small meetings up to Annual Conference.
I did discover one thing about well educated people they
were often over confident and put too much weight on logic
and did not make allowance for peoples self interest, emotions
and as Edgar Allen Poe said mans perversity.
Now ten years after retirement I am banging this story
out on my Atari ST and find that I am slipping back into
my bad spelling habits, but at least I've got the spell
checker that can sort out words like hte but what about
Pease and piece, there and their, been and being, bare and
bear and or and ore and whore...... HELP.
WE have lots of young people especially lads today who
have no jobs and seem to have no prospects, many of ' them
neglected their education for one reason or an other, they
have poor communication skills and often have problems in
reading and writing making employment in this age of the
computer very difficult to find. Instead of teaching them
basic wood work or sending them to boot camps why not give
training in the full range of communication, speaking, reading
and writing which will improve their confidence in them
selves and give them a better chance in the world of work.
Last but not least if you are a young person with spelling
problems do something about it and seek help.
|
