The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  While we were still living in Johnstone, my twin sisters, Marion and Annabelle, were born. They came three years after me, in 1939, in the same maternity hospital. Not long after their birth, I tried to drown them. They were having their bath and my mother left the bathroom for a moment. She came back to find that I was pushing their heads under the water. Quite common, I suppose, for a first born to be resentful when a younger sibling arrives – and even worse when it is two of them. My father was carried round his RAF base on the day they were born, as if it was somehow a triumph for him.

  We left Johnstone a year later, in 1940, when I was four years old, so I have no other memories, real or imagined, of my Johnstonian years. Would I have been a different person if I had remained living in Johnstone all my life, if my parents had not moved and I had gone to a local school and college, as my baby record book predicted? Would I have been looking around while in Johnstone for the people I sat beside at school, the first pub I went to, the girls I took out? My Scottish accent would certainly be intact today, which would be good, as I have gone through life with a nondescript accent which no one can place.

  I would obviously not have married the same woman, as I would never have met her, or had the same children, or ended up in the job I wound up in. Decisions and developments would not have been the same, so, yes, my life would have been totally different. And yet I would still have been me, presumably.

  4

  ON THE MOVE

  When we moved in 1940 it was to a foreign country – England. I don’t know why. It just seemed to happen. Aged four, no one is going to explain things to you. I now realise it was to do with my father’s job. He was still doing some sort of clerical work as a civilian, connected with the RAF, but now he was being moved to 14 MU in Carlisle, an RAF maintenance unit. Was it demotion, promotion, or just bureaucracy, moving people around for no reason?

  As a child, you never think of asking such things. You are more concerned with playing with your friends or stuffing your face. Everything else you just accept. A bit like adults really, when it comes to wartime. You are there not to reason why there is a war, just to do what you are told.

  Our arrival in Carlisle was one of the moments my mother often spoke about later, which was not like her. She never moaned or complained, blanking out anything unpleasant, but it clearly had a great effect on her.

  We arrived in the winter of 1940, just before Christmas, in the freezing cold. The three successive winters from 1940 to 1942 were incredibly cold, a sequence of nightmare winters that have not been equalled since. They went down in folklore, all over Europe, because it was not just in England that the effects were felt. It was the height of the war, so ships got stuck, despite the icebreakers, troops could not move, supplies got frozen.

  My mother came down to Carlisle on the train from Glasgow, clutching me by the hand and struggling with the twins, who were then eighteen months old, plus bags and bundles of belongings. My father was nowhere to be seen. He did not figure at all in my mother’s memory of the arrival, nor did she explain why he was not with her. At work, still in Johnstone, or what? He just never seemed to be there at vital, domestic or family, times. Which, of course, was pretty typical of men in those days.

  She did have her father with her, that thin, silent, weird-looking, whistling man whom I can barely remember. He had a free pass for the railway, as a railway worker, and probably for my mother as well, which would explain why we all came on the train.

  We arrived in the dark to this empty council house in a strange town, with my mother knowing nobody. There was no heat, no fire, no furniture and no lights. Electricity existed, but the previous occupants, long since gone, had taken all the bulbs. My mother staggered around, with the three of us crying and moaning, while she herself began to feel sick and ill. Our little pathetic, refugee-like family must have been spotted by the next-door neighbour, a cheerful cockney woman called Mrs Dembow, who after an hour or so, hearing us clattering around and the children crying, came in with a pot of tea and some lightbulbs. So my mother could at last see the full horror of the new home.

  I, of course, can recall nothing of our arrival, or how distraught my mother was, but I do remember those dreadful early winters in Carlisle. It became quite exciting and dramatic – the whole street blocked in by snow, which didn’t melt for months. Standpipes appeared in the street, as in every house the pipes had frozen solid. Our school was closed, so we played in the snow every day.

  For my mother, though, there was no fun, no amusement or novelty in being frozen in. Even worse when she realised the cause of her sickness. She was pregnant once again, without having been aware of it.

  In Carlisle, they turned out to speak a different language, or at least with a very different accent. Yet Carlisle is only just in England, ten miles over the border, an ancient border city, where the Romans built a fort and through which Hadrian’s Wall ran. Then, when they left, it was fought over for centuries by both English and Scots and was part of Scotland at one time. Carlisle’s history has therefore always been bound up with Scotland’s. There shouldn’t really be such cultural and social and linguistic gulfs.

  Most people in the UK are not quite sure where Carlisle is – wondering if it is in Scotland or perhaps Wales. Its uncertain and remote location makes Carlisle feel that it gets ignored by most of the rest of England. It has a chip on its shoulder about being cut off, so far from London. Unless there are floods, then it makes the TV news.

  I was not aware of any of that at the time. It just seemed we had landed somewhere abroad, where we were the migrants. I had not realised till then that my mother’s accent was so broad. People from Motherwell are considered, even in Scotland, to have a very broad if not rough accent. I have her on tape, Super 8 and video films, so I know what she sounded like, but I have no sound recording of my father. He didn’t say enough for me to remember his voice, but Scottish, obviously. When he did talk to me, he seemed to be doing a lot of shouting, ordering me to pipe down. He maintained my voice annoyed him, gave him a headache. Bloomin’ cheek, as my mother used to say, which was the worst, unkindest remark she ever made about anybody.

  We took a little bit of Scotland with us when we moved to Carlisle, as immigrants usually do. My mother joined a church with lots of Scottish members – Warwick Road Presbyterian – and at home we managed to get the BBC Scottish Home Service on the radio, read the Scottish Daily Express during the week and the Sunday Post at the weekend.

  There was, naturally, a large Scottish community in Carlisle, but I don’t remember any Scottish people in our street. We seemed to be surrounded by cockneys or Geordies, families like us who had been moved from elsewhere to work on the RAF unit.

  We lived on the St Ann’s Hill council estate on the north side of the city at 25 Deer Park Road. Doesn’t that sound idyllic, which I suppose it was, as we had a whole semi-detached house with two bedrooms and there were woods to play in not far away.

  About half the whole nation at the time lived in rented accommodation, most of it council housing. The movement for better housing started after the First World War, the government deciding that the only adequate solution to the housing question was to build houses specifically for the poor.

  Carlisle was one of the earliest councils to make use of the government subsidies and their first council houses opened in 1922. As more estates were added, they provided a variety of styles and accommodation. Some had bay windows, some parlours, some proper indoor bathrooms and indoor lavatories. They were desired and occupied by many lower white-collar workers who might well at other economic periods have tried to save and pay a mortgage to acquire their own house.

  The city architect credited with this enormous expansion was Percy Dalton. He is still remembered in a street named after him on the Raffles estate, Dalton Avenue. I used to think he was the same person who made the peanuts. I felt quite proud that someone from Carlisle had done so well. Alas, that was another Percy Dalton.

  The St A
nn’s estate was built in the 1930s, so was quite new when we moved in. It was council owned, and we paid council rent, but its main purpose was to house workers from 14 MU, which had been created in 1938, when the RAF took over the old Kingstown aerodrome. Almost all the fathers around us worked at the site.

  There were seven RAF maintenance units spread all over the UK and each carried a complete range of stock and equipment, from paperclips to aircraft engines, just in case any of the units got hit during an air raid or infiltrated and wiped out by some of our nasty enemies. They were heavily guarded and all classified as secret, which meant no outsiders ever got in or knew what went on inside.

  At one time, at the height of the war, there were 4,300 people working at Carlisle 14 MU – 784 uniformed airmen and the rest civilians – it was enormous, spread over seven different sites with massive hangars and thirteen miles of its own railway track. A good half of the workers were women, who had replaced the men during the war years.

  I never found out what my father did there. I think his days of taking round the wages to other sites were over and he now sat at a desk shifting bits of paper or counting paperclips. He did sometimes bring home pads of MU notepaper and pencils, so there were some perks.

  I started at the local primary school, Stanwix, when I was five. It wasn’t all that local, as I had to get a bus there, up a steep hill. Stanwix – pronounced with the ‘w’ silent – was considered ‘clarty posh’, meaning posh in an ostentatious and vulgar way. It was full of the lower, ambitious middle classes in private semi-detached houses and Victorian terraces. The council house kids who came up the hill from the St Ann’s estate tended to stick together. We did feel envious of people who lived in their own homes and had a garage and, even more fortunate, so it seemed to me, their own front-door bell. Council houses always had knockers. Tenants trying to get above their station could not build their own garage but installed their own bell.

  Not long after we moved to Carlisle, in February 1941, my mother gave birth to her fourth child, John, always known as Johnny, to differentiate him from my father John. Johnny was the sole English person, living with five Scots, as we liked to tease him as he got older.

  I suppose my mother must have taken me to Stanwix school in the early days, but in my recollection I always went on my own, or with my best friend, Reggie Hill. He lived in the next street, Fraser Grove. His street had been named after the father of the author George MacDonald Fraser, who had been a well-known doctor in the town. In the 1930s there were four Dr Frasers who had come to practise in Carlisle, which shows the Scottish connection had always been there – and also how good Scotland had always been at producing doctors.

  Reg’s dad, like mine, worked at 14 MU, having originally come across from the Northeast. His father, also called Reg, had at one time been a professional footballer for Hartlepool United before being transferred to Carlisle United. I found this hard to believe when I was first told. Football to me seemed the most glamorous possible profession, yet he seemed to be an elderly, shambling, burly figure who never spoke. But then dads didn’t in those days.

  There were family sports held each year at 14 MU, for the children of all the people who worked there, with real money as prizes. One year, Reg and I trained for weeks in our streets in the dark, determined to win something, but we never did. So we put our hopes in collecting up as many empty pop bottles as possible, left over from various picnics. You had to pay a penny deposit on soft drinks and you got the money back when you returned the bottles. It was a boiling hot day and we were totally exhausted carrying all these bottles back from the wilds of Kingstown to Clark’s, the local shop on our council estate. When we got there, triumphant, they refused to give us a penny for any of them. Said the bottles had not been bought from their shop and were a different brand anyway. Bastards.

  Reg seemed to be about my height as well as my exact age when I first met him, but then suddenly he started to shoot up, leaving me behind, feeling like a midget. His family had nicknamed him Toddles, because he used to toddle along when he first learned to walk, but as he got older he hated the name. I would use it, just to annoy him. Once he got stronger than me, he would beat me up if I dared call him Toddles, especially in front of other people.

  On the way back from school each day, Reg and I would wait for our favourite bus, letting others go past just because we wanted to catch the Dummy. This was a small, single-decked bus, rather a funny shape, as if it had a bit cut off the front. All the school kids loved it as it was so unusual.

  We got on it one day, pushing our way to the back, which was considered the best place to stand. We were right up against the rear emergency door, which had a huge handle and a sign saying it was not to be touched. As we were bumping away down Etterby Street, a cobbled hill leading down from Stanwix towards our council estate, the back door of the bus flew open. It could have been our own fault, or perhaps some other kids had been playing with it.

  Reg and I fell out – right into the path of a lorry that was following behind. Goodness knows how it managed to brake and avoid us. I have no memory of what happened, as I had been knocked unconscious. I came to sometime later to find I was lying in a ward at the Carlisle infirmary.

  The first our mothers knew about it was when a policeman arrived at their front door, to inform each of them we were in hospital. My mother then had to catch a bus into town and make her way to the infirmary on Wigton Road. Going into Carlisle was always an ordeal for her, as she had no sense of direction. I never did ask my mother about what happened when she heard the news, how she had reacted, how she had got herself to the hospital, what she must have been dreading.

  When we eventually got back to school, none the worse, it made us something of local heroes, having survived what could have been a serious accident, if not death. It helped to cement our friendship, me and Reg, something we had in common, a shared experience.

  But then the bond was suddenly broken. Once again, out of the blue, we were on the move. In 1943, after three years in Carlisle and with me now aged seven, we were moving back over the border to Scotland. Reg and I promised to write to each other, and we probably did, for a few weeks, but then it all petered out as I got to grips with being in yet another foreign country, even though it was one from whence I had come.

  5

  BACK TO SCOTLAND

  Dumfries has a similar sort of history to Carlisle: Roman occupation, lots of battles and castles, cross-border looting, till eventually it settled down. It is about a third the size of Carlisle, population around 32,000, not a city like Carlisle, as it has no cathedral, but it is a royal burgh, having been given that honour in 1186.

  In school in Dumfries I learned only Scottish history, a lot of it totally foreign to English schoolchildren, about William Wallace – portrayed by Mel Gibson in the film Braveheart – defeating the English, and also Robert the Bruce. It was in Dumfries that Robert the Bruce slew his rival the Red Comyn, giving him an extra stab to make sure he was dead and shouting, ‘I’ll mak siccar!’ I remember learning this phrase but never really knew what it meant, which of course is ‘I’ll make sure’.

  Dumfries’s most famous resident was Robert Burns, who lived there from 1788 till his death in 1796. My mother endlessly recited Burns poetry, as most Scottish people of her generation did, and knew all his songs, which I also learned.

  People from Dumfries, and followers of their football team, Queen of the South, are known as Doonhamers. The phrase is said to have originated in the nineteenth century in Glasgow, when lots of Dumfries folk went up there to work on the railways, dreadfully missing their hometown, always wanting to go back ‘doon hame’.

  My father had been forcibly moved to Dumfries to do the same sort of job as he had done in Carlisle. So there must have been some sort of RAF presence, yet I don’t recall the name of any local aerodrome or RAF maintenance unit ever being mentioned. In Carlisle, 14 MU was referred to all the time, a legend throughout the city.

  I can
remember my father talking about the American servicemen he was working with, and on one famous occasion – famous in our family – him coming home with a tin of fruit. Inside were pineapple chunks, oh joy!

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if after all these years he turned out to have been an undercover government agent, engaged on some secret work, reporting on our so-called allies, the Americans. Or could he have been some sort of go-between involved in that mad, farcical meeting between Rudolf Hess and the Duke of Hamilton? Hitler’s deputy flew to Scotland on his hopeless peace mission in May 1941, when we were living in Scotland, and of course my papa did know the Duke of Hamilton, so he once boasted.

  These ridiculous thoughts have only just struck me now, but as children during the war we had such mad fantasies all the time, convinced that spies and agents were everywhere, constantly watching us. If someone we didn’t like was horrid to us, told us off, well then he or she must be a spy. They could be anywhere, so we were led to believe. Government posters warned us that walls have ears, careless talk costs lives, you must always beware, never reveal any possible information, not even your name or address in case, er, I am not quite sure what might have happened. We followed anyone acting suspiciously, like Emil and the Detectives, making notes on their movements, taking it in turns to observe them, ready to report them to, well, we never got that far.

  One of the wartime rumours that spread though our school was that the Germans were dropping parachutists in local woods – disguised as nuns. So what you had to do if you saw any nuns suddenly running around was to check if their legs were hairy. Then you would know they were up to no good.