Road to the Dales

by Gervase Phinn

  At twelve I fell in love with Alma Cogan, the beautiful singer who appeared on stage in fabulous glittering voluminous dresses. She had a warmth and charm that captivated her audiences and when she sang she had a little sexy giggle in her voice. When I saw her beneath the lights looking down at me sitting in the stalls, I knew she was singing just to me:

  You dreamboat, you loveable dreamboat,

  The kisses you gave me set my dreams afloat.

  I would sail the seven seas with you

  Even if you told me to paddle my own canoe.

  I looked forward most to the appearance of the comedians on stage and I laughed until my sides ached at the very best of the crop. Nearly all the stars at Blackpool came from the music hall tradition: Big-hearted Arthur Askey (‘Hello, playmates’), Tommy Cooper (‘Not like this, like that’), Richard (Dicky) Murdoch, Jimmy James with the huge glasses, trilby hat and loud tie and his gormless sidekick Eli, Dickie Henderson, Freddie Frinton, Beryl Reid, Arthur Haynes, Joan Whitfield, Norman Evans, Sandy Powell (‘Can you hear me, mother?’), Professor Jimmy Edwards and Chic Murray. There was Frankie Howerd, who managed to have his audience doubled up with laughter though he said nothing inherently funny but just spluttered and ‘Oooh-d’ and ‘Ahhh-d’, jettisoning the script and departing into some wild fantasy of his own. ‘No, don’t titter,’ he would spout, contorting his face. ‘Pleeease, titter not,’ he would continue in his strange throaty voice. ‘Oh, pleeease yourselves.’ These comedians knew only too well the comic power of accent and mannerism to create a character, and the catchphrases that were used helped the audience to bond.

  I could never understand why my mother disliked the man with the silly laugh and the ukulele. She was easily shocked by anything that related to sex and the lyrics of George Formby’s songs certainly had no appeal for her. Later when my brother Alec started to play the ukulele and bought a booklet containing some of George Formby’s more suggestive numbers, including ‘When I’m Cleaning Windows’ and ‘My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’, it was promptly put in the dustbin.

  ‘You’re not singing those songs in this house,’ she said.

  Later we retrieved the booklet from the bin, intrigued, as children so often are when parents forbid something, and examined the ‘indecent’ lyrics, which, by today’s standards, are pretty tame:

  Honeymooning couples do,

  You should see them bill and coo.

  You’d be surprised at what they do,

  When I’m cleaning windows.

  Pyjamas lying side-by-side,

  Ladies’ nighties I have spied.

  I’ve often seen what goes inside,

  When I’m cleaning windows.

  The blushing bride, she looks divine,

  The bridegroom, he is doing fine.

  I’d rather have his job than mine,

  When I’m cleaning windows.

  Top of the bill at the variety shows was often Al Read, Salford’s comic chronicler of working-class Lancashire life with his meaningless catchphrases of ‘Right Monkey’, ‘You’ll be lucky, I say you’ll be lucky.’ His weekly radio shows drew audiences of 35 million and his humour still stands the test of time. It was a humour that was observational and absurd rather than vicious. Unlike some comedians of today, he was never malicious or spitefully critical of others. He steered clear of religion and politics and his material had no edge to it. It was just inoffensive and funny, and made funnier still by the deadpan delivery and the range of voices he employed. He was a brilliant observer of the domestic scene, with his vignettes highlighting the idiosyncrasies of everyday life. I learnt much about timing and use of voice from this master of repartee.

  My favourite of all was the great Hylda Baker with her silent stooge, Cynthia, who managed to keep a face as rigid and serious as a death mask throughout the performance. Hylda Baker was a small woman (four foot, eleven inches) and characterized the fast-talking gossip. Her catchphrases, ‘She knows, you know,’ ‘Be soon I said, be soon’ and ‘You big girl’s blouse’ became household words. It is reputed that when she appeared at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, Noel Coward observed, after the performance he had ‘endured’, that, ‘I would wring that woman’s neck – if I could find it.’

  Hylda Baker was a direct descendant of Mistress Quickly and Mrs Malaprop and the precursor of Connie, the character who appears throughout my Dales books. She was one of those people who mangled and murdered the language with malapropisms and non sequiturs to great comic effect. In her moth-eaten fox fur, ill-fitting checked jacket, large handbag over the arm and misshapen hat, she had the audience rolling in the aisles with her facial contortions and her misuse of English. She would wriggle her body as if she suffered from chronic worms, crimp her hair, adjust her massive handbag and announce to the audience as she came on stage: ‘I don’t think you’ve had the pleasure of me.’

  ‘I can say this without fear of contraception,’ she would say. ‘I went to the doctor and he was stood standing there, his horoscope round his neck. He said I had the body of a woman twice my age. You flatterer you, I said. I nearly had a coronary trombonist and fell prostitute on the floor.’

  She would look up at her silent friend. ‘Oooo,’ she would mouth, ‘Have you been with a fella? Have yooo? Have yooo been with a fella?’ Cynthia would stare into the middle distance with a blank expression. ‘She knows, you know,’ Hylda told the audience. ‘Oh yes, she knows, you know,’ she would repeat and the whole audience shouted back the phrase. Simple, innocent, silly material but hilariously funny.

  After one show I waited in the rain at the stage door to get her autograph. There was no one else waiting and my father doubted if she would appear. Perhaps the doorkeeper felt sorry for me and had persuaded her to come down, for after a while, still in her stage costume, the comic genius came out and signed my book.

  ‘Have you been stood standing there, have you, you little man?’ she asked of the wide-eyed little boy. I nodded. ‘I bet you’ve been to the Blackpool illucinations, haven’t you?’ I nodded but was lost for words. ‘Do I get a kiss?’ she asked me.

  ‘No,’ I replied, colouring up. Then I caught sight of Alma Cogan making her way to the stage door. ‘But I’ll kiss her.’

  Hylda Baker’s last years were spent in a nursing home in Horton. She died at the age of eighty-one, alone in Horton Hospital in 1986. Britain’s once most popular comedienne had been largely forgotten. When I met her niece at a literary luncheon in 2001, she was comforted to know that many years after her aunt’s passing the unique talents of Hylda Baker were still appreciated and that her comedy lives on.

  It was a nostalgic journey when I returned to Blackpool after half a century. I was there with my one-man show and performed on the same stage as my heroes of comedy. On the promenade the smell of donkey manure, candyfloss and seaweed had remained and took me back to my youth. I sat for a moment on a bench and recalled a little boy dressed in khaki shorts, white cotton cap and sandals, wearing cheap plastic sunglasses and with his Brownie box camera around his neck on a string, walking hand-in-hand with his father. Before leaving I bought myself a set of false teeth made out of pink and white rock with sugar pink gums.

  32

  At the end of my junior school career, all the children in the fourth year at Broom Valley Juniors sat the Eleven Plus. This examination, born out of the Butler Education Act of 1944, determined whether children would continue their education at the academically selective grammar and high schools, or, in the case of failure, at the technical or secondary modern schools. The whole structure of the Eleven Plus was based on the spurious premise that academic ability was based on a normal curve of distribution, that there are a few people at the top (the bright), a few at the bottom (the least able) and the vast majority in the middle (the average). The problem was that nobody had ever proved that academic ability was distributed in this way. Further problems levelled by the examination’s critics were the relatively crude nature of the tests and the inher
ent unfairness. Which school a child went to in the 1950s depended not merely on academic ability or the performance in the examination, but on whereabouts in the country he or she lived. Nationally less than 20 per cent of the children sitting the Eleven Plus went on to grammar schools, but it could be as high as 40 per cent (as in Westmorland) and as low as 10 per cent (as in Sunderland).

  Most of those in the fourth year at Broom Valley Juniors were resigned to the fact that they would not pass, but I, ever the optimist, thought I was in with a good chance. On the positive side I knew I was good at reading and writing and could cope easily with the questions about language. I could commit information to memory and my general knowledge wasn’t too bad. I had a quick wit, a wry sense of humour and had the ability to tell a story. On the negative side I was not good at thinking on my feet, and arithmetic and problem-solving, major parts of the assessment, were not my strong points.

  On the big day the forty-three top juniors of my class trooped silently into the hall as if we were to face an execution squad. We were all equipped with two sharp HB pencils, a clean eraser and a ruler. The desks had been moved out of our classrooms and arranged in serried rows facing the stage. The headmaster, Mr Morgan, clutching a thick wad of papers, explained how important the examination was, how we had to try our best and check through our paper carefully when we had finished. No one would be allowed to leave the hall until the end of the ninety minutes. He told us that there would be no talking, no sniffing and coughing, no getting out of our seats, no going to the toilet and anyone discovered copying would be in serious trouble. Those who had not done as we were told and brought a clean handkerchief were issued with paper tissues.

  I had never seen an Eleven Plus paper before. I knew that some in my class had been practising on old papers in preparation for the test and that Harper’s Bookshop in Rotherham sold such papers, but I was unfamiliar with the format when presented with the booklet. My parents were not into the business of cramming and practice papers, private tutors or any kind of hot-housing and there was no stress in the house in the build-up to the examination.

  When I worked for Rotherham Education Authority I managed to acquire a copy of the paper I sat at the age of eleven. There were five sections: arithmetic, general English, comprehension, general knowledge and composition. In the general English section children had to identify parts of speech, punctuate, insert inverted commas, form plurals, change tense, provide synonyms and antonyms and answer a further range of other grammar and punctuation exercises. One wonders how youngsters today would cope with some of the questions in the composition section:

  Write a short account on any four of the following: Everest, Westminster Abbey, The Gothic, William Shakespeare, Queen Salote, The Maoris.

  Write an imaginary talk between an eagle and an owl.

  Write a story ending with the words: ‘… and that is why the old sailor was allowed to keep his parrot.’

  The adventures of a library book.

  I imagine that I, like many, floundered in the arithmetic part of the test with questions like this:

  A colony contains 30,000 people, made up of English, Dutch and natives, in equal numbers. Each year the English lose one tenth of their numbers and the natives add one tenth to their numbers. The Dutch remain unchanged. What will be the population of the colony at the end of two years?

  It is interesting to note that the person who set the paper needed a few lessons in English grammar himself:

  My best friend is tall and dark. I am nine and he is ten. Read the following sentences and write down my best friend’s name.

  Harry is younger than me. He is short and dark. Dick is ten.

  He is a tall boy with fair hair. Tom has dark hair. He is older than me and is a tall boy. Frank is a tall boy with dark hair. He is nine.

  I recall filling in the front page of the paper incorrectly and having to madly rub out my mistakes. Mr Morgan eyed me, shook his head, but said nothing. The test (apart from the arithmetic) was not too onerous and I went home reasonably confident that I would be among those wearing the grammar school blazer with its fancy badge with the Archbishop’s mitre on it.

  Towards the end of the term brown envelopes popped through letterboxes all over the country to tell parents if their son or daughter had been successful or not in passing the Eleven Plus. The night before the announcement of the results I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, my body twitching and turning, measuring the passage of time by the alarm clock on the bedside table. A mood of doubt settled upon me and was made more intense by the silence. I was down for breakfast early that Saturday morning but couldn’t eat a thing. I stood by the window in the front room waiting for the postman. When I saw him trundling up the hill, I ran to the end of the drive and waited at the gate to collect the envelope.

  I recall my mother wiping her hands on the towel in the kitchen, taking the brown envelope into the living room, opening it and reading the contents slowly. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said, ‘you didn’t get through.’

  Mum and Dad were very philosophical about it, and certainly didn’t appear to show any great disappointment at my failure or start with recriminations. Having spent a lifetime in education I have met parents fixated on the educational performance of their children and who pressure them to achieve. Undue pressure, in my experience, very often stifles a child’s creativity and undermines his or her confidence, and constant criticism and stress can develop into depression. As I write, there appears in the paper the story of a promising student who took his own life after gaining poor results in his A levels. It is a tragic case of a young man who felt he was a failure and a disappointment to his parents.

  My father’s attitude was that the test was but a piece of paper and I should put it behind me. But I felt my lack of success deeply.

  Unlike some other parents on our street, my mother and father had not promised their child anything if he passed. They merely told me to try my best – I could do no other. Some of my friends had been promised a bicycle if they passed, as if this would be a real incentive for them to work that bit harder – something to aim for. I wondered how they felt on failing and not getting the desired reward.

  As I clutched the letter and started crying, my parents explained that all my friends in the street would be going to the secondary modern and that I could do as well there if I worked hard, but their words didn’t soften the blow. I felt a failure and I felt indignant and angry too. I had so wanted to go to the grammar school, to walk proudly up Moorgate to the great castle-like edifice with the towers and turrets, attired in my black blazer, grey flannels and cap with the golden badge. At the time I expressed my annoyance and perceived unfairness by complaining and grumbling, until my parents told me to put it behind me and get on with things. It had happened and that was that. It was sensible advice.

  I recall my sister, Christine, being particularly supportive of me at this time. She put her arm around me and comforted me, telling me it was not the end of the world. But it seemed so for me. Christine had passed her Eleven Plus with flying colours. She was bright and successful, loved school, was popular with her peers and was Deputy Head Girl at Notre Dame. Everyone was sure she would do well in life.

  I learnt a great deal about Notre Dame, for Christine would tell things about the school to my parents over tea. I knew all about how relentlessly competitive and selective the convent high school was, how the girls were streamed into ‘A’ and ‘B’ classes, that they studied Latin, Spanish, geology, scripture and all these other strange and exotic-sounding subjects. There was also something called ‘deportment’, in which they were taught manners and etiquette and ‘morals and ethics’, the main content of which seemed to be to warn the girls against the dangers of predatory boys. At college I courted a convent girl who informed me that the advice from one nun was: ‘Never sit on a boy’s knee, girls, unless you have a telephone directory or some other thick book between you both.’ I wonder how many convent girls took such a tome to the da
nce at the village hall. Another story, perhaps another urban myth, was that the convent girls were not allowed to wear patent leather shoes for the Christmas party in case they reflected their knickers.

  I had witnessed how each afternoon Christine would go into the front room after tea and spend most of the evening completing her homework. I looked forward to joining her. My brothers, Michael and Alec, although clever and successful enough at school, were not as industrious as my sister and polished off their homework in record time.

  Christine liked to tell me about Notre Dame. I knew about the long dark corridors at her school down which the nuns glided slowly and silently, the no-talking rule when in school, the many rules to be obeyed, the constant merits and detentions and finally the ultimate terror – to receive a severe talking-to from the headmistress, the formidable Sister Monica. Physical chastisement was unnecessary; one look from Sister Monica was all that was needed.

  My sister had to wear a smart and stylish uniform, only available from the authorized school outfitter: crisp white blouse, green pleated skirt, white ankle socks, a boater in summer and a green beret in winter and the regulation small white gloves. Full uniform had to be worn at all times to and from school and girls caught without it would be in trouble. Each morning the girls would be inspected on their arrival at the school, and should a skirt not be the regulation length or the beret not on straight, the offender would get a demerit. The rules at the school were remorseless.