By the same author
THE DALES SERIES
The Other Side of the Dale
Over Hill and Dale
Head Over Heels in the Dales
Up and Down in the Dales
The Heart of the Dales
A Wayne in a Manger
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Stars
A Load of Old Tripe
POETRY
published by Puffin Books
It Takes One to Know One
The Day Our Teacher Went Batty
Family Phantoms
Don’t Tell the Teacher
PENGUIN QUICK READS
All These Lonely People
Road to the Dales
The Story of a Yorkshire Lad
GERVASE PHINN
MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
MICHAEL JOSEPH
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2010
Copyright © Gervase Phinn, 2010 2010
‘Burnt Norton’ from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and in the USA copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1984 by T. S. Eliot, reproduced by permission of the publisher Houghton Miffin Harcourt Publishing Company ‘Dreamboat’ lyric reprinted by permission of Winston Music Publishers © ® 1982 ASCAP
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated into future editions of this book.
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-14-196463-8
Contents
Acknowledgements
When I was a Boy
Foreword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Postscript
Good Parents
For my parents, Pat and Jimmy Phinn,
who allowed me to dream
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my wife and family for their continued support, and to my editor, Lindsey Evans, who has been exceptionally wise and patient throughout.
When I was a Boy
When I was a boy:
My bunk bed was a pirate ship
That sailed the seven seas,
My sheets they were the silvery sails
That fluttered in the breeze.
I’d dream of clashing cutlasses
And the crack, crack, crack of the gun
And the boom, boom, boom of the cannons
And the heat of the tropical sun.
I’d dream of far-off oceans
And treasure by the ton,
And mountainous waves
And watery graves
And islands in the sun.
Foreword
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
– T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
T. H. (‘Taffy’) Williams, headmaster of South Grove Secondary Modern School, stood on the stage in the school hall. He was a striking-looking figure: tall, lean, straight-backed, with short silver-white hair neatly parted, dark Celtic complexion and those pale blue all-seeing eyes. It was the leavers’ assembly.
‘Today, you will be leaving,’ he said in that deep, resonant Welsh valley voice of his. ‘Today, you will walk down the top corridor of the school for the last time, past the row of classroom doors through which you have entered many, many times over the last four or five years, and you will go out into the wide world beyond. Some of you will start work and leave behind the complexities of English grammar and the frustrations of algebra and trigonometry, the dates in British history and the maps of far-off countries, and you may well be heartily glad of that. Some of you have chosen to continue your studies and move on to A levels and maybe college or university. But whoever you are and whatever you do, as you walk down that corridor for the last time, I want you to pause for a moment and remember one thing: life is like that corridor, lined with many different doors. Some will be bolted and barred and however hard you push and pull, strike and shout they will remain forever closed to you. Some will be wide open and you will walk through with little effort and no hindrance. Some will be ajar, and with a little exertion and curiosity, you will be able to see what lies behind. Most doors, however, will be closed – but they will seldom be locked. These are the doors of opportunity, boys. The doors of opportunity. It is up to you which of these closed doors you choose to try, and to discover what is behind, waiting for you –’ he paused for effect – ‘and which to pass on by.’
I guess for many of the pupils in the school hall that heady July morning the headmaster’s metaphor was lost upon them, but for me, an ambitious, rather studious, idealistic sixteen-year-old, those words have remained a vivid memory. The closed doors in my own life have been rarely, if ever, locked and I have been immensely fortunate that I have had caring, supportive, encouraging people all along t
he way who have helped me through them.
I should say from the start that this account of my early life is no misery memoir. It will not stand on the bookshop shelf under the heading ‘Tragic Life Stories’ along with the heart-rending autobiographies of unbelievably unhappy childhoods – nightmare families, loveless homes, brutal parents – all described in vivid detail; of children beaten and starved, rejected and abused, bullied and tortured. Such accounts, where the authors describe how they have overcome the huge disadvantages of miserable upbringings, have become instant best-sellers and the reading public appears to love them. Perhaps in doing so the readers’ own lives seem less wretched and more bearable. Perhaps they are heartened by these sad stories of children who have a shining spirit to survive, cope and forgive. For me, such memoirs are painful to read, for mine was a very happy childhood. I did not suffer from great poverty as a child, nor was I born into an affluent and privileged home. I was not smacked or told I was unwanted. I was not bullied by my brothers or told by my parents I was a disappointment to them. I felt loved and cherished.
My journey through childhood was neither a painful nor a shameful one. It was blessedly free of poverty, neglect, cruelty and exploitation and I have many fond memories. I have never subscribed to the prevalent view that childhood is simply a stage on a road to adulthood, something to be got through on the way to something better, and, unlike some writers of the many memoirs and autobiographies I have read, I have never sought to distance myself from it or to negate it. Indeed my childhood has acted as an inspiration for the present and the future, a place to which I sometimes escape, where I can, in a sense, avoid growing up.
There are some, of course, who believe that those of us who have had a pretty ordinary, uneventful and happy childhood really have nothing much to write about. ‘When I look back on my childhood,’ writes Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir of Childhood, ‘I wonder how I managed to survive it at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worthwhile.’
Well, my childhood was very happy and extremely worthwhile. I thank God that it was so very different from Frank McCourt’s. Mine was a joyous upbringing. Growing up, I imagined that all children had loving and amusing parents like mine, who wanted the very best for their children, who read not at them or to them every night but with them; parents who talked with them, sang to them, laughed with them. I thought all pupils had committed, enthusiastic and good-humoured teachers who enjoyed the company of the young and did their very best for them. My life was full of happiness and conversation, music and books.
To recall childhood is without doubt the most vivid and convincing part of any autobiography, for our early memories are preserved in a bright, new and exciting world of first experience. What is so striking and extraordinary is that these recollections of a time, which will never come again, change, disappear, and then suddenly return to us after many years. The smell of seaweed, the sight of screeching gulls circling over a wind-roughened sea, the sound of crashing waves, the taste of candy floss, the feel of the wind blowing wet sand in my face, the tang of brine so sharp it stings my lungs … All these things take me back to the seaside and the memory of walking down the promenade at Blackpool clutching my bucket and spade in one small hand, the other held tightly by my father. The sight of the steam train on its journey from Settle to Carlisle, clickety-clacking down the line, puthering sulphurous smoke and smut and sounding its shrieking whistle, reminds me of the heady childhood days when, as a boy, I stood on the bridge over the railway line waiting for the engine to thunder beneath and envelop me in a cloud of acrid smoke.
So this is my story, a memoir of an ordinary boy who met some extraordinary people, and the journey he was able to embark on as a result of the many doors opened for him in his early life. From my earliest memories of infancy and growing up, my story shows the powerful influence of my family and friends, schooldays and holidays, leading on to my first tentative steps into the adult world, those formative years that shaped who I am and what I became.
Some autobiographies seem to me to owe more to the imagination than many novels, and perhaps what follows may seem to the reader to be in that category – after all, I am a storyteller. As Dr Johnson once observed, ‘No good story was ever wholly true.’ So, in recalling my past, I have inevitably embroidered, made and dropped stitches, and some recollections, I guess, are not entirely reliable because they have been viewed in the surreal light of early experience. I am also sure that some of my memories are rose-tinted, as memories often are, and that the passing of the years has allowed my memories to be recast in a better light. But, above all, I have tried to be honest, open, and entertaining as well. Out of respect for their privacy, I have changed the names of some of the people who appear in these pages.
1
I was born Gervase Richard Phinn on 27 December 1946, the same year as George Best, Noddy Holder of Slade, Paul McCartney, Edwina Currie, Janet Street-Porter and the infamous Harold Shipman and Peter Sutcliffe. This was the year Winston Churchill warned of the Iron Curtain descending over Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, the year the Nuremberg war trials returned death sentences on leading Nazis, including Ribbentrop and Goering. Lord Haw-Haw was hanged for treason and the United States Navy tested the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. The Bank of England, coal and other industries were nationalized and Heathrow airport opened. Strapless bras became popular and Tide, the revolutionary detergent designed for automatic washing machines, landed on the shelves in the corner shops.
I was one of the ‘baby bulge’ children, growing up in the Welfare State, at a time when Stalin finally died, Sir Edmund Hillary scaled the highest mountain in the world, the recent 1944 Education Act had firmly established grammar schools, technical high schools and secondary moderns, and the country celebrated in grand fashion the accession of a new young Queen. It was an age when Muffin the Mule and The Flowerpot Men made their first appearances on television, when Alma Cogan, ‘the girl with the giggle in her voice’, sang ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’, and the comedian Al Read entertained us on the wireless with his inoffensive anecdotes. It was a period when the great Stanley Matthews played in the Cup Final, there was little unemployment, the National Health Service was in its fledgling years, and sweet rationing ended. This was a new age, full of optimism and good humour, free from the privations of the war years; it was a time when young people started to assert their individuality and independence. The blue and brown serge suits of the ‘demob style’ gave way to bold, colourful designs in clothes. Teddy Boys outraged the older generation as they strutted around the streets like latter-day Edwardian dandies, dressed in their pale blue frock-coats with velvet collars and their ‘brothel-creeper’ shoes, when Lonnie Donegan sang ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight?’, when skiffle groups flourished, milk bars opened and fish fingers made their appearance.
I came into the world weighing eight pounds and one ounce at Number 1, Richard Road, Rotherham, delivered by the midwife, Nurse Mabel Knowles. I know this to be true because Miss Knowles, then in her eighties, came to see me when I was performing my one-man show, An Evening with Gervase Phinn, on stage in Barnsley many years later. ‘I’ve seen you with no clothes on,’ she said mischievously after the performance. ‘It was me who brought you into the world.’ Then she added, ‘You were a big baby and had a lot to say for yourself and you’ve not changed much, have you?’
I was the fourth and last child of Richard James (Jimmy) Phinn and Margaret Patricia (Pat) Phinn. The eldest of the children was Christine Moya, then came Michael Anthony (Mike) and Alexander James (Alec). I was the last, the least able and probably the most indulged.
My mother, certain I was to be a little girl, decided on the name Elizabeth Ann Mary and bought a pink, frilly cot in readiness and matching pink, frilly clothes. Christine had hoped for a little sister to look after and play with, so when she saw me – a round, red and very vociferous baby boy �
� she was said to have scowled and sulked. It took a few days before she would hold me, but then she spent much of her time around the cot and the pram. Later when I grew a little bigger she would sit me amidst her dolls and practise being a teacher.
Just after I was born my parents moved up the hill to Number 19, a pre-war, shiny redbrick, semi-detached house, three up, three down, with an inside toilet, a small front garden and long back garden. The house was larger than Number 1 and had the advantage of being up the hill, well away from the busy Broom Valley Road, with a spacious detached garage, a garden shed and a greenhouse. Unlike other houses on the street, it also had French windows in the living room and a gate at the end of the garden, which led to a large allotment. We had a small back yard, a tussocky lawn, a rockery and flower borders all dominated by a large blossoming cherry tree. Mum and Dad had the double bedroom at the front of the house, Christine the small boxroom at the rear, and I shared a room with my brothers. Michael had a single bed, Alec and I shared a double.
Downstairs there was a small kitchen, a narrow hall and an all-purpose living-cum-dining room, where we spent most of our lives. The living room had an open fire and each morning one of the boys would go through the ritual of clearing out the ashes and putting them into a bucket by the back door for Dad to later put on the garden. Then the coal-scuttle was replenished and screwed-up balls of newspaper were arranged in the grate, with bits of chopped wood and lumps of coal placed on top. I loved the open fire and would toast pikelets (thin crumpets) before covering them liberally with butter. In winter, I would roast chestnuts in the embers. They would pop, spit, and come out of the fire with blackened shells and soft, sweet interiors.
I remember setting off for school each morning past houses with every chimney belching out smoke from fires like our own. I would arrive at the top of Alma Road, where a cocktail of pollutants from the Don Valley mixed with the coal smoke from the houses to produce a cloak of thick, evil-smelling smog. It had a corporeal presence; it felt like something you could reach out and touch. Sometimes, when the steelworks were in full production, the carbon and the sulphur would burn your windpipe if you didn’t wear a scarf around your mouth, and you could taste and feel its damp greasy fingers on your skin. It was like the backdrop of a novel by Conan Doyle.
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