Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  When I arrived in 1937, my parents were renting two rooms, heated and lit through a gas meter, at the top of a terraced house in the Earlsdon district of Coventry; I was born in the back bedroom at a time when home births were more common. They moved to a newly built house of their own in Radford, with three bedrooms and a garden front and back, when I was a few months old, and stayed there until my father died sixty-four years later. I was nearly two when the war came. My father volunteered first for the Fire Service and then for the army and I never saw him until he was discharged in 1946, when I was eight. I had no memory of him before then.

  Our house in Coventry was damaged by bombing – it was a few hundred yards from the Daimler and Dunlop factories, both prime targets for the Luftwaffe. During the raids, we hid in an Anderson shelter in the garden. Children were made to lie on top of each other on the floor, which was flooded with water, and we emerged after the raid soaked to the skin.

  On the night of the big blitz on Coventry in November 1940, the house of my Gilchrist grandparents, who had also moved to the city, was struck by fragments of a bomb that had landed in a neighbour’s front garden. My grandfather had left the bomb shelter to go into the house and was thrown across the room by the blast. I remember my grandmother cutting a loaf of bread the next morning and finding a piece of glass inside it.

  My grandfather never really recovered from the head injuries he suffered that night and died soon after the war. I remember him sitting silently in a rocking chair by the fire and teaching me to box. I would charge at him and he would send me crashing across the room with his huge miner’s hands. When I wasn’t at school, I used to take his billycan of tea to the village factory where he worked. His job was carrying heavy sacks – the only job he could get.

  On the morning after the raid on Coventry, my Trelford grandfather put me onto the back seat of his Austin Seven – I still remember the registration number: OG7041 – and told me to stand up and look through the tiny rectangular back window while he drove round the devastated city. All he said was: ‘I want you to remember this.’ I was just over three years old by then and I believe this experience must have provided my first childhood memory.

  I can still see the collapsed buildings, most dramatically the burning cathedral, with water running everywhere, fires still raging, the roadblocks and the piles of sand. There were large wrapped packages at the top of the rubble on each bombed house. It was only later that I realised these were dead bodies waiting to be collected.

  My father was in Aldershot, preparing for embarkation overseas, when he heard about the bombing of Coventry. He asked for leave to go there, which was refused, but he went anyway. When he arrived, having walked and hitch-hiked all the way, he found all three family homes empty. We had all – my mother and me and both sets of grandparents – been evacuated back to Durham, where both sides of the family had their roots, and we stayed there for the rest of the war.

  My mother took us to live in a village called Stillington, near Stockton-on-Tees, which was dominated by a huge slag heap on which we used to try to fly our homemade kites. She had to live on twenty-two shillings a week and rented a tiny terraced house with two small bedrooms and an unlit lavatory in the yard. The yard was so frighteningly dark in the evening that I would be in and out of the loo in seconds, a habit that has never left me. I have a vivid memory of visiting a young friend of my mother’s to see her new baby in a house that had oil lamps and water running down the walls.

  Looking back, the war must have been a terrifying ordeal for my mother, still in her mid-twenties and bringing up two young children – my sister Margaret had been born after my father’s last embarkation leave and some years passed before he even knew of her existence. She was an unwanted child, which my mother took few pains to hide.

  It was a difficult birth, which meant that my mother had to stay in hospital for three months while I was billeted with my Aunt Mary, who got married, with me as a page boy, while I was living with her. Although Margaret grew up with a loving husband and family, she had problems with depression in later life and is now in a care home with Alzheimer’s disease.

  My mother wouldn’t have known if Great Britain would win the war or if her husband would ever return from it, or what would happen to her then. I will never forget an evening when I upset a pan of treacle that was being warmed on the open fire to make toffee and seeing my mother burst into tears. It wasn’t so much the loss of the toffee that caused her such misery, I suspect – though the treat must have cost money she could barely afford – but her generally bleak and lonely situation.

  I was always top of the class at the village school, which caused me to be bullied by the Mercer twins, a couple of village thugs. One day my maternal grandmother came to collect me from school – she of Irish descent – and saw the Mercer boys hitting me as they tried to pinch my sixpence pocket money. When I saw her, I crossed the road and rushed for safety into the haven of her skirts. Instead of cuddling me, however, she turned me round and told me to go back and punch them, which I did, thrashing at them through my tears. The Mercer boys never bullied me again.

  An older boy took me to see some Italian prisoners of war breaking stones in a valley. When people jeered down at them, the Italians responded by smiling and waving. My guide said he knew where they were billeted, so after they were marched off we followed them to a field where they lived in huts.

  Security must have been minimal – I suppose the authorities thought the Italians would rather sit out the war in safety than try to make a hazardous escape – and we got close enough to peep through the curtains into one of the huts. When we were seized by strong arms and carried inside, we were naturally terrified. But the prisoners came up and hugged us and plied us with sweets and chocolate. We obviously reminded them of the families they had left behind in Italy.

  My mother was not best pleased when I reported this escapade. ‘Fraternising with the enemy,’ she said disapprovingly. ‘You could have got yourselves hanged for that.’

  Although we were living in an isolated village, we weren’t very far from military targets in Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough, Newcastle-on-Tyne and Darlington, and at night we could hear the enemy bombers massing overhead and could stand at the front door of the house and see the bombs dropping at an angle on the factories and shipyards. They were all some miles away, but were lit up eerily by the searchlights. For a child, it was like watching a fireworks display.

  For my mother, however, it brought back such terrible memories of the bombing of Coventry that she was paralysed with fear – a fear that communicated itself to my little sister and me. She would sometimes take refuge in the tiny cupboard under the stairs, shaking uncontrollably, and would drag us in beside her.

  It took me some time to overcome the sense of anxiety my mother had instilled in me – if, in fact, it ever really left me. Recently I came across a line in John le Carré’s book about his life that had a special resonance for me: ‘I remember a constant tension in myself that even in great age has not relaxed.’

  I was especially fearful of the noise of aircraft overhead, because I had seen for myself what destruction they could cause. Even after the war, if I could hear the buzz of a plane while I was lying in bed, I would wait nervously until the noise had passed. It would then take some time for me to feel safe enough to go to sleep, just in case it came back.

  There were only two books in the house, both free offers from John Bull magazine. One of them, called How Much Do You Know?, I devoured eagerly and could probably recite most of the facts from it now, seventy years later. The other, How It Works and How It’s Done, was about scientific and technical matters. I never even opned it.

  • • •

  When the war ended, we returned to Coventry. At the junior school there I entered into a competition with other boys as to who had the tallest dad. All our fathers had been in the war, but none of us could remember them. I talked myself into being the winner. It was a source of some embarr
assment, therefore, when my father was finally demobbed and turned out to be barely five feet tall.

  My main achievement at Hill Farm junior school was playing Pau-Puk-Keewis in a performance of Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The reason I mention this is that I had to do the wild Beggar’s Dance, which Pau-Puk-Keewis performed at Hiawatha’s wedding – and some elements of this frantic style may still be traced in my dancing as an adult.

  My uninhibited style of dancing – so out of character really – has been much commented on, notably by Private Eye. It caused an embarrassing episode when I attended a party given by British Airways, where my wife Claire was then working for their television arm. In the course of one dance I threw out a leg and my shoe shot across the dance floor and almost hit the chief executive.

  • • •

  My father was a salesman for a wholesale tobacconist (later he moved indoors and became a manager) and sometimes he allowed me to go round with him as he called on his customers. I remember a particular occasion when I saw him talking to George Mason, who had been a legendary pillar of the Coventry City defence and became a publican on his retirement.

  George was a giant of a man who towered over my father by at least a foot and a half, yet Tom never looked in the least embarrassed by the disparity in size between himself and every adult he met, and plainly regarded himself as the equal of any man. Being of under-average height myself (though a good six inches taller than him), I think I may have learned that lesson myself through watching the self-confident way in which my father conducted himself.

  ‘Stop looking!’ was the recurring household cry of my childhood when my father finally found his keys. Nobody had moved a muscle to search for them: we would roll our eyes and get on with eating our cornflakes. It is a classic Freudian cliché that someone who has mislaid their keys doesn’t really want to go to work. No wonder really; as a non-smoker, it must have seemed strange to devote his career to selling cigarettes, and as a moral man it must have affected his view of himself when it became clear that smoking killed people.

  • • •

  Although I won a scholarship to Bablake School, this didn’t cover all the fees and extras, and my father struggled to afford the amount he was required to pay. When I was sixteen and poised to enter the sixth form, he arranged for me to visit Alfred Herbert & Co., a factory in Coventry that made machine tools. He was clearly hoping that I would leave school and become an apprentice, but the noise of the factory horrified me; in any case, I was determined to stay on at school and go to university.

  We argued about it. My father was naturally concerned about the money it would cost him if I stayed on at school. And, of course, no one on either side of my family had ever been to university. My father finally gave in after talking about my prospects to one of my teachers. He was forced to take on a second job to pay for it. After working all day from nine till five, he would have a quick meal at home then go off to work as a clerk at Pickford’s, the removals firm, checking lorries in and out until ten at night. It was only later that I fully realised what a sacrifice he had made for me.

  This prolonged absence from home, following six years away in the war, could hardly have helped his marriage, especially given that my parents were not temperamentally well suited to each other in the first place. He retained some of his parents’ Methodist mentality – high-minded, hard-working, teetotal. I can still recall the dread I used to feel when I heard them arguing. My mother, with her Irish–Scots background, liked a bit of fun. There was a period when she got a job as a waitress in a restaurant known as Fishy Moores, near the bus station, and I have never known her to be so happy.

  My father hated her working, regarding it in an old-fashioned way as some slight on himself, suggesting that he couldn’t provide enough money to keep her. My mother loved the job – not only, I suspect, because it got her out of the house and allowed her to mix with people, but because she was earning her own money and not having to rely on her husband for pocket money, as women who stayed at home often had to do in those days.

  Once, when I was earning a good salary, I decided that the best birthday present I could give her was cash. She was in her favourite armchair by the fire, where she would normally sit reading, knitting or doing a crossword. When I slipped her the wad of notes in a roll, it disappeared among her cushions like lightning before my father could see it.

  They fell out badly over her love of bingo. She liked it mainly for the company it provided, but my father was shocked at her gambling and made his moral disapproval only too clear. But he couldn’t prevent her leaving the house while he was at work, so he had to lump it. It turned out that she was quite successful at bingo, and at the fruit machines in the same casino, and one day she came home with so many coins in her handbag that she couldn’t bear the weight and had to keep stopping and resting the bag on garden walls. This became a favourite family joke.

  At the party to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary, she was heard to interject at one point, while someone was extolling their wonderful marriage, saying: ‘We’ve had our ups and downs, you know.’ How much distress lay behind that remark we could only guess at.

  • • •

  While he was living on his own in Coventry as a young man, my father had developed a love for the music hall, where he would go to entertain himself. After the war, he used to take me to the Hippodrome, where the number of the act in the programme would be shown in lights by the side of the stage. I was entranced; it was such a colourful change from dreary village life in war-time County Durham.

  I remember seeing Ted and Barbara Andrews – ‘and little Julie’, the future Hollywood star appearing at the age of ten; the Irish tenor, Cavan O’Connor (‘I’m only a strolling vagabond…’); ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea with her little banjo; and a number of comedians, including Rob Wilton, Max Miller and Arthur English. Deep down, I sometimes think Tom would have liked to have shed the Methodist inhibitions instilled in him as a child and become a stand-up comedian.

  His jokes could be pretty awful. I still remember the frozen look on the faces of some old ladies when he told them a slightly risqué tale. We knew a story was coming up when he uttered his favourite phrase: ‘Funnily enough…’ I thought of repeating some of his jokes here, but they might have made him sound (to use another favourite phrase of his) a bit barmy, which he certainly wasn’t.

  When Roy Hudd produced a book about the history of the music hall, my father wrote to him about the various acts he had seen. Hudd wrote back saying: ‘You’re luckier than me. I only write about these people. You actually saw them.’ When he was in his eighties, he went to Birmingham for what was billed as an Edwardian music hall and attired himself accordingly. When it was pointed out to him that he was the only member of the audience who had dressed up for the occasion, he replied: ‘I can’t help it if other people don’t know how to behave.’

  When my parents came down to London to see me one weekend, I persuaded my father to join me and some Observer colleagues, mostly from the sports department, at a snooker club near the office called Duffer’s. Casting aside any reservations about gambling he once had, he suggested playing for a small wager; my colleagues looked doubtful – he was quite old and barely high enough to see over the table. By the end of the evening, however, he had cleaned out their wallets.

  Another time, both my parents came down to London to see Donald Sinden in a Westminster farce. It was a matinee and I arranged for them to meet the actor in his dressing-room after the performance. Whenever I bumped into Donald at the Garrick Club, where he was a prominent member, he would say: ‘We Donalds must stick together.’ He thought we should have a lunch of Donalds, but with Bradman and Wolfit long gone we couldn’t think of any other Donalds we wanted to dine with. (Funnily enough, Donald Trump’s name never came up.) These conversations would usually end with Sinden saying: ‘Ah well, we’d better have lunch together then.’

  When I ushered my parents in to see the great man, he was in
his usual effusive and deeply courteous mode, despite having just completed an energetic performance in which he had hurled himself around the stage at a time when, to put it mildly, he was some way past his first youth. He put his arm round my tiny mother and boomed down at her in his best stage baritone: ‘There’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask you, Mrs Trelford. Why did you call him Donald?’ To which my mother replied shyly: ‘I don’t rightly know.’

  • • •

  Like many soldiers, my father always shied away from talking about the war, but he talked freely about some of the places where it had taken him, such as Cairo, Sicily, Milan, Rome and Trieste, and had photos of himself in some of them. When he was in his late eighties, I took him to the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall, where he became absorbed in a map of war-time Europe and started pointing out the route he had taken through North Africa and Italy. We were amused to hear an astonished young Scandinavian student say to his backpacking friends: ‘There’s a man here who fought in the war!’

  He had never been abroad until the army took him there, which was probably the case with nearly all British servicemen in the Second World War. My parents only went abroad together once, when I arranged for them to go to Venice for their golden wedding anniversary. My mother hated flying (a first experience for her at the age of seventy-one) and my father distrusted the food, so I don’t think they had a very good time.

  On one occasion, when I was leaving their house in Coventry after telling him I was about to pile my young family into an old Jag and drive them to the South of France, he waved goodbye at the garden gate – then, with a stricken look on his face, turned back and asked me to wind down the car window. I couldn’t imagine what he was going to say, but it was a remark I have treasured ever since: ‘You say you’re going to France – how will you manage for food?’