Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  ‘It must have been somebody else,’ the man blustered.

  ‘No, it was you,’ I said calmly, but feeling my heart banging away in my chest. ‘You see, the bully forgets, but the bullied never do.’ With that I left him standing there. My wife later said that I perhaps should have resisted that temptation to say what I did. After all, it was such a long time ago and children can be very cruel. But then Christine was never bullied at school. I am afraid that I was unable to forgive and forget, since this particular bully showed no remorse, how could he? He had forgotten his cruelty.

  27

  On some wet Saturdays in winter, when the sky was slate grey and the air icy cold, I stayed at home in the living room, with a blazing fire in the grate, making model Spitfires from Airfix kits while listening to the light programme on the Bakelite wireless. I spent a great deal of time listening to the wireless; the entertainment programmes, plays and quizzes were my favourites. I recall the soft Dublin accent of Eamonn Andrews and the strong Yorkshire twang of Wilfred Pickles. Wilfred Pickles presented a quiz show called Have a Go, which was popular with all the family and at its peak attracted an audience of twenty million. He would ask his wife, ‘How much money is there on the table, Mabel?’ and if the contestant won he would shout, ‘Give ’em the money, Barney.’ Those taking part were often asked, ‘Are you courting?’ or ‘Have you had any embarrassing moments?’

  The quiz programme Top of the Form intrigued me. It began with the stirring ‘Marching Strings’, played by Ray Martin and his Orchestra, and then teams of boys and girls with frightfully posh accents, all of whom seemed remarkably well-informed, battled it out to see who was the brainiest. I could visualize them sitting behind a long table in pristine white shirts, school ties and fancy blazers with gold beading, earnest expressions on their faces. I never missed the exciting adventures of Dick Barton and his Cockney sidekick ‘Snowey’ White, the serial in which each episode began with the fast-moving ‘Devil’s Gallop’ by Charles Williams.

  I would listen to The Goon Show with Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe, Michael Bentine and the outrageous Spike Milligan. I loved the characters: Hercules Grytpype-Thynne with the fruity British upper-class accent, the ex-Indian Army officer, Major Dennis Bloodnok (‘Damn those curried eggs’), and the British jobsworth (‘You can’t park that ’ere, mate’). I used to amuse my friends by mimicking the silly Goon voices of Eccles, Bluebottle and Minnie Bannister.

  Most Sundays before lunch (which we called dinner) I would listen to The Billy Cotton Band Show or Two-Way Family Favourites, with Jean Metcalfe and Cliff Michelmore, when service wives and sweethearts would request records for their husbands and boyfriends serving in occupied Germany and Cyprus. The room would be filled with Glenn Miller, Doris Day, Guy Mitchell, Rosemary Squires, Winifred Atwell, Russ Conway, and every week selections from Oklahoma! and Carousel would be played. A favourite request was for Ann Shelton to sing, ‘Lay Down Your Arms and Surrender to Mine’, with its dire lyrics.

  In 1959 my father arrived home carrying a black and white television, with a small grey screen set in a shiny brown veneered and ungainly wooden cabinet with a pair of double doors at the front. He placed it in the corner of the living room and it changed our lives. Instead of playing games of Monopoly, chess or draughts in the evening, my father now, most evenings, spent a deal of time transfixed, facing the small grey screen. I have to say television initially held little interest for me. At first all I recall were the dreary documentaries, boring interviews with experts, political commentaries, newsreel programmes, cookery lessons from the heavily bearded Philip Harben, gardening hints from Fred Streeter, quasi-quiz shows like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and What’s My Line?, finishing with the po-faced clergyman reading the Epilogue, whom I rarely saw because I was in bed by the time the television shut down at eleven o’clock. Books still held sway in my life.

  Of course, I had seen televisions before. The big national event of my childhood was the Coronation on 2 June 1953, a day the Daily Mail called the ‘Crowning Glory’, and we were invited, along with other selected neighbours, into Mr and Mrs Marshall’s house three doors down from us to watch the ceremony on their newly acquired television set. Two million people had television sets at the time but few of them lived on Richard Road.

  This seven-year-old, clutching his Coronation mug, crown piece and little cloth Union Jack on a stick, saw very little from the back of Mr and Mrs Marshall’s ‘lounge’ but was given a running commentary and a selection of personal asides from Mrs Evans, our other neighbour, about the dress, the coaches, the horses, the abbey, the guests and anything or anybody else that appeared on the screen. The rain poured down, so that many of the dignitaries, monarchs and heads of state were hidden behind umbrellas. One guest, Queen Salote of Tonga, endeared herself to those assembled in the Marshal’s lounge by waving from an open-topped carriage, wet through but smiling as if the sun shone on her face. Occasionally Mrs Simcox from up the road, the least monarchist among the group, added her half-pennyworth – she would have no truck with kings and queens – which was followed by indignant outbursts. This was post-war Britain, of course, when we all stood for the National Anthem at the end of a film. No one would have dared remain seated or, even more unthinkable, walk out of the cinema while the band played. It was certainly not the era to make the slightest criticism of the royal family and the new young Queen.

  The television in the corner of our living room soon began to be of interest to me when more programmes for younger viewers appeared. For small children there were The Wooden-tops, Muffin the Mule, Andy Pandy, Sooty, Listen with Mother, Pinky and Perky and The Flowerpot Men and Little Weed. There was not the surfeit of action films, reality shows, soap operas and cooking and antique programmes which make up so much of the television schedule today, but there were American situation comedies that amused me. I liked George, with the lugubrious expression, in The Burns and Allen Show, the dead-pan humour of Jack Benny and the dizzy but endearing blonde in I Love Lucy, but the programmes I really loved were the exciting cowboy and historical adventures: Rawhide, with the youthful Clint Eastwood playing Rowdy Yates, Casey Jones the eponymous engine driver who always managed to avoid disasters on the line, Gunsmoke and Ponderosa. William Tell was a favourite, and always started when the hero shot the apple from his son’s head. It was accompanied by the lively music of the William Tell overture and the rushing sound as the bolt from the crossbow flew through the air and split the apple in half. I would sing along with the inane lyrics:

  Come along, come along with William Tell,

  Come along to the land he loves so well.

  I guess in this day and age there would have been a warning for children not to try the feat with the crossbow at home. I loved to hate the outrageous and vastly overweight Lamburgher Gessler, a master of overacting, who did a wonderful facial expression which I used to imitate. Other programmes I never missed were Zorro, with the masked crusader, with his flashing sword and flashing teeth, and Robin Hood, in which a youthful Richard Greene, as the dashing hero, in extremely clean tights and with a jaunty feather in his cap, always managed to foil the goatee-bearded and permanently glowering Sheriff of Nottingham. On the way to school we would all sing the music that accompanied the opening credits:

  Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen,

  Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men.

  Feared by the bad, loved by the good,

  Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.

  Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, became something of a cult figure. When I was ten or eleven there was the craze for Davy Crockett hats. The television series started the widespread enthusiasm for this ridiculous headgear, and every boy on our street was soon sporting a large fur muff with a tail dangling down the back. The hats were made of different-coloured rabbit fur. Mine was a pale ginger. It looked as if I had a tomcat on my head. To go with my Davy Crockett hat my brother Michael made me a leather waistcoat, dyed black and with
pale leather stitching. He bought thirty or so silver threepenny bits from Mrs Harrap, who ran the post office, drilled each one and sewed them around the edges. I was the envy of the street. Mr Fowler at the top of Richard Road made me a whip and, much to our neighbour Mrs Evans’s irritation, I would practise cracking it and trying to whip tin cans off the wall which separated our two gardens.

  I didn’t take to some of the programmes. The precocious, clean-cut, cheeky-faced boy actor with the tinny American drawl in Circus Boy rarely got a word in before he was turned off. Another hero of the small screen who was given short shrift was the Lone Ranger. In his tight pants and his silly little mask which didn’t fool anyone, he was too clever by half. He was always shouting, ‘Hi-ho, Silver,’ which was really irritating, and he never seemed to get dirty. He would be accompanied by Tonto, his buckskin-clad Indian sidekick, who spoke in strange broken English and was constantly saying ‘Kimo-sabe’.

  All the adventure programmes were deeply moral. Cruelty, greed, selfishness, unfairness and unlawful behaviour were never rewarded and good always triumphed. This was good clean fun, for the fights never ended in the horrific death of the villain. Nobody was maimed or lay writhing in agony on the floor. There was no loss of blood from a gunshot wound or a sword, for our heroes, who had high moral principles and were far too compassionate and well-meaning, merely disarmed their opponents. There might have been a bit of rough and tumble, a few thrown punches, but nothing too excessive or frightening.

  Then came The Six-Five Special, Crackerjack with the small bespectacled Peter Glaze and Leslie Crowther with the irritating smile, Juke Box Jury with David Jacobs, and Armchair Theatre, which I was occasionally allowed to watch. It was all inoffensive material – no innuendo, rude jokes, bad language or gratuitous violence and certainly no sex. Mum kept a very keen eye on the programmes and banned me from watching anything she deemed unsuitable. She refused to allow me under any circumstances to watch Quatermass, the science fiction series, on the grounds that it was far too frightening for an impressionable boy. It is a wonder that she allowed me to read Treasure Island.

  My mother had a habit which, when I recall, still brings a smile to my lips.

  We would all be watching a programme, the children on the carpet beneath the television cabinet, my father in his armchair, and a love scene (very mild by today’s standards) would appear on the screen. It might involve a semi-clad couple in an embrace, but little else.

  ‘Turn it off, Jimmy!’ my mother would snap, as if he were responsible for it. Dutifully my father would rise from his chair and turn the knob.

  Most people my age will remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated and I am among them. There was a deep sense of shock in the house when the news came on the television, and I remember my mother weeping and my father sitting in a chair silent and serious-faced. Another television programme I have a vivid memory of was a documentary on the Holocaust. It was screened late at night and there was a warning that viewers might find some of the material distressing. I was sixteen or seventeen at the time, and Mum and Dad told me I should put away my books and come downstairs because there was something I should see, that all people should know about. We sat in silence staring at the small black and white screen and not a word was said. When the television was turned off, my mother was clearly deeply upset and said that what had happened in those death camps should never ever be forgotten, for it showed mankind at its most evil. I still see those recurring images of chalk-white, emaciated bodies, stick legs and arms, blank faces, deep-set eyes, shaven heads, semi-naked skeletons wandering aimlessly through the high wire gates. I still shudder at the memory of tangled masses of bodies shovelled into deep open graves and the traumatized faces of the liberating soldiers.

  Today television has become integral in the lives of most children, and in this age many have a television set with DVD player in their bedrooms. They can watch from six in the morning to late at night, hopping from one channel to the next and often watching the most unsuitable material. But in the 50s and 60s television was not so important in children’s lives, for there wasn’t the variety on the screen and there were other things to occupy our time.

  There was poetry in those early television programmes, squeezed in between the quizzes and the plays, the news and the variety shows. It was not traditional verse read by earnest poets; it was in the form of advertisements, which employed all the figurative language of poetry – repetition, rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, simile, metaphor, onomatopoeia. At the time these adverts were considered revolutionary, but far from destroying the fabric of the nation, as some would have us believe, they added to its richness, colour and gaiety and were memorable in their catchy tunes and clever lyrics. I remember the jingles to this day:

  You’ll wonder where the yellow went

  When you brush your teeth with Pepsident (toothpaste)

  Murraymints, Murraymints,

  Too good to hurry mints (sweets)

  You’ll grow a little lovelier each day

  With fabulous pink Camay (soap)

  Opal Fruits – Made to make your mouth water (sweets)

  We are the Ovaltinies, happy girls and boys (milky drink)

  The Milky Bar Kid is big and strong

  The Milky Bar Kid just can’t go wrong (chocolate bar)

  P … p … p … pick up a Penguin (biscuit)

  A million housewives every day,

  Pick up a tin of beans and say:

  ‘Beans means Heinz’ (baked beans)

  I still have a great weakness for Marmite spread on a slice of fresh white bread and recall the clever little ditty that advertised this enduring product:

  If Ma might give me Marmite for my breakfast,

  If Ma might give me Marmite for my tea,

  If Ma might give me Marmite for my supper,

  How happy I and Pa and Ma might be.

  I was so fascinated by the television jingles that I took to inventing some of my own and entering competitions. At eleven I tried my hand at the Brooke Bond PG Tips Competition, where entrants had to complete the sentence, ‘I drink Brooke Bond PG Tips because …’ in twenty words or less. The other entries can’t have been very good, for I won the runner-up prize (a cheque and some packets of tea) with my effort:

  It perks you up,

  When you pick up a cup,

  And it’s the only tea for me.

  This small masterpiece was my first published effort. I was now a paid writer.

  28

  Like most boys I liked football and swimming (but wasn’t much good at either), and I liked excursions on my bike. Some weekends in summer when I was ten or eleven, me and my friends (I was a member of the gang) would take ourselves up to the building site or to Archer’s Farm on Moorgate. We would walk up through the allotments at the back of my house, along a path of beaten mud overgrown with nettles and across the fields, lifting the dried cowpats with sticks and disturbing a buzzing cloud of yellow horseflies. Then we would climb the five-barred gate and run across to a small copse where we had built a den out of dead branches, cardboard, bits of rusty corrugated tin and asbestos roofing. There were five of us and we would spend all day there, with our den as the base. We would climb trees and swing from the branches on a rope, daring each other to run through the stinging nettles. We would have mock fights, cowboys against the Indians, British against the Germans, Flash Gordon against the aliens, and run wild across the grass, dodging the wet cowpats and skimming the dried ones at each other.

  To become a member of the gang everyone had to go through an initiation ceremony. It was Tommy, the self-proclaimed leader, who thought it up, and as new members joined they were sworn to keep secret what went on at the ceremony. I was the last to be initiated and had endured sleepless nights thinking of what terrors were in store for me. The members of the gang had already told me that it was a horrible ceremony but that if I failed to pass the three tests I couldn’t become a member.

  When
the dreaded Saturday for the initiation arrived I couldn’t eat my breakfast and felt my stomach doing kangaroo jumps. On the way to Archer’s Farm, where I was to meet the gang members at nine o’clock, I began to imagine all sorts of dire rituals.

  Mr Archer was busy milking the cows when I arrived and the four gang members were waiting for me outside the barn. I was taken inside without a word and blindfolded.

  ‘First you have to stroke a dead rat,’ I was told by Tommy. My hand was guided to a cardboard box, the sort shoes come in, and the lid taken off. My hand was thrust inside. I touched something wet and furry. I could imagine the black shiny coat, the pointed face, the cold dead eyes, the needle-like teeth, the claws and the long grey tail. I had seen enough rats on the farm to know what they looked like. I took a deep breath and ran my fingers across the fur.

  ‘He has passed the first test,’ said Tommy.

  Then I was taken across the barn to some ladders and told to climb up. I knew this part of the barn. There was a sort of balcony, not too far off the ground. Below were bales of hay. We had often leapt off and I knew the hay would break my fall. Blindfolded it was a different matter. Suppose they had put something in the hay beneath me? I was positioned on the edge and told to jump.

  ‘There aren’t any pitchforks or rakes down there in the hay, are there?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s for us to know and for you to find out,’ Tommy told me.

  ‘There had better not be,’ I said.

  Before I could say anything else I was pushed forward and I landed safely in the hay.

  ‘He has passed the second test,’ said Tommy.

  By now I was thinking that I had done rather well, and was pretty confident that I would sail through the third and final test.