Eye of the Storm

by Peter Ratcliffe

  Several of my schoolfriends had newspaper-delivery rounds, but I didn’t think the job was worth it. Getting up at five or six in the morning to deliver papers and then doing it again in the afternoons after school, and all for seven shillings and sixpence (37½ pence) a week, seemed like a mug’s game to me. In the mid-1960s, however, during the summer holidays in Little Hulton when for two weeks most of the town’s factories and works shut down, I manned a newspaper stand for a firm called Tillotson’s, which owned the Bolton Evening News, among other titles.

  By six o’clock each morning I’d already be at work, selling the national dailies under a covered newspaper stand alongside a bus stop in the centre of town. In the afternoons, I sold the Bolton Evening News and the Manchester Evening News to people as they made their way home. When the boss came round to check the figures at the end of the day, I would tell him that I had been short on deliveries of one of the nationals. He would note the shortfall, which he would then be able to reclaim from the newspaper distributor who supplied the stand, and I would pocket the money I had made from selling the papers that had supposedly not been delivered. Apart from what I trousered in ill-gotten gains, I was paid about £10 a week for running the stand. In those days, that was about what a lot of grown men were earning – and I was only fourteen years old.

  During the rest of the summer months I worked in Tillotson’s newspaper shop in the town, running a machine which printed the ‘Stop Press’ items on to the back of each edition of the Bolton Evening News. When I had run off several dozen, I would take them down to the bingo hall, where I would hold a copy up and shout, ‘Night racing … Last winners.’ Since almost everyone had a bet at one time or the other, I’d usually sell the lot. It always seemed to be pissing down with rain, but on an average evening I’d make about fifteen shillings (75 pence), and on a really good Friday night double that amount. In the days when people were paid at the end of each week, you could be sure of them having enough money for a flutter on Fridays.

  Even though I was only fourteen, I used to have to buy all my own clothes from money I’d earned. Luckily I still wore short trousers for much of the time, which didn’t cost me as much as full-length ones. I was also still being sent to church every Sunday by my mother, which did mean wearing long trousers. I’d go to early Mass, and by the time I got back my father would already have made the breakfast. It was always porridge, which he used to cook the night before and warm up in the morning. It was really horrible stuff, so thick and lumpy that you might have eaten it with a pick and shovel, and I hated it.

  One Sunday morning after Mass we were sitting round the kitchen table when my father, noticing my distaste for the glutinous grey mass in front of me, ordered, ‘Eat your porridge.’ He knew that I didn’t like it, so he stood behind my chair and repeated, ‘Eat your porridge. If you don’t, I’ll empty the bowl over your stupid little head.’ By then I had done everything I could to improve or disguise that porridge. I’d stirred in cold milk and put sugar on top of it, and poked it around the bowl with my spoon. But I still couldn’t bring myself to eat it. Twice more my father ordered me to eat it, and twice I refused.

  I had just bought my first long-trouser suit, which I had put on for Mass that morning. It made no difference to my father. I just sat there while he took hold of the bowl and poured the porridge all over my head. The whole lumpy, sticky mess, milk and all, ran down my face and collar all over my new suit and down my legs.

  Just then my mother came in, and saw straight away what had happened. Turning to Dad, she snarled at him, ‘You swine!’ Then she grabbed the HP Sauce bottle off the kitchen table and belted him across the head with it, almost knocking him cold. It opened a gash in his head that looked like an axe wound, and blood went everywhere, adding to the porridgey mess on the floor. I never had to eat my father’s porridge again; but then, their marriage didn’t last much longer, either.

  I was not very big for my age during my schooldays, although I could hold my own in a fight. I had joined the Salford Police junior boxing club, partly to learn to defend myself, and partly because I was beginning to take an interest in girls, and hoped my fighting skills would attract them; I had never paid them much attention until then. Nor did they pay me much attention, and even as a boxer none of them looked at me twice. The whole business was fraught with traps for the unwary or inexperienced teenager, in any case. We used to call the girls we knew by their surnames, because if you used a girl’s first name she would think you fancied her. I would have used everyone’s Christian names if I could have got away with it, but all my mates would have taken the mickey.

  For one reason or another I didn’t have much luck with the opposite sex during my early teens, or for some time afterwards, for that matter. Until one night, a couple of years later, when I was working on a building site in Preston, my Irish mates on the shovel took me into a pub. They started joshing a good-looking, large-breasted girl, and asked her which of us she fancied. She pointed to me. So began my first real affair, although it only lasted for three months before she ditched me. She said I was a boring bastard. I probably was. God knows how it lasted even as long as it did, because I hadn’t the slightest idea how to treat a girl properly. I knew about sex, in a pretty basic sort of way, but she didn’t seem to be as keen on that as I was. But then, being more experienced, no doubt she expected a more virtuoso performance. Whatever the reason, though, I was dumped.

  It was not a new experience for me, as it happened, for my parents had conditioned me to it some years earlier. Perhaps they had one fight too many, or perhaps the incident with the HP Sauce bottle still rankled, but they decided to split up – or at least, my mother did. She found herself another man and went off with him to live in Morecambe, a run-down resort town on the Lancashire coast. When she left in a furniture van, I went with her. I was nearly fifteen years old and didn’t have much choice, although my father didn’t see it that way. To him, my departure was as great a betrayal as my mother’s behaviour.

  It was not many weeks before they got fed up with Morecambe – which was not at all surprising, given the nature of the place then – and my mother’s new man took a job in Preston, a city about thirty miles away.

  So he and my mother took off. There may have been room for me in the house in Preston where they were going to live, but I was caught in a bind. I’d just got a job and didn’t want to risk giving it up and being out of work. I simply couldn’t afford to leave and start the whole business of trying to find work again, which, for an unqualified fifteen-year-old in the 1960s, was almost impossible anyway. It was better for me to stay behind and live in a crummy boarding house in Morecambe.

  It was ironic, really. I hadn’t wanted to leave home. Instead, home had left me.

  Chapter Two

  SEAGULL’S NEST was a red-brick house whose dreary frontage was not improved by a front door that somebody had painted in a shade of bilious green. It stood five streets back from Morecambe’s sea front, a yellowing cardboard ‘Vacancies’ sign permanently hanging from a string in its bay window. It seemed the sort of place that would always have vacancies.

  The only other ‘guest’ in the boarding house was a middle-aged man with one leg. Every night he clumped about in his room like Long John Silver, needing only a talkative parrot to complete this picture. He was what we then called a queer, and even at an age not usually remarkable for its tenderness towards others, I sometimes felt a bit sorry for him. Having only one leg was surely tough enough without being gay as well (this was before homosexuality was decriminalized), and the chances of his finding a partner in Morecambe must have been all but non-existent.

  I loathed Morecambe. But I stayed on my own there for six months because the wage I received as an apprentice plasterer on a building site – £5 a week – meant that I couldn’t afford to move from Seagull’s Nest. The boarding-house rent left me with just 10 shillings (50 pence) for the week, although my rent also included meals. Every working day, without fail, t
he landlady gave me a packed lunch of grated-cheese sandwiches. I loathed cheese sandwiches, as well.

  I decided that I wasn’t cut out to be a plasterer, so I left Morecambe and moved to Preston, where I got a job as an apprentice joiner. I started work on the British Home Stores on Fishergate. The one good thing about Preston was that I was playing a lot of football whilst I was there. Two guys on the local team I played for worked at the Labour Exchange, and not long afterwards I went to share a house with them in Ribbleton, a suburb of Preston. I was now earning a few bob and life became a bit easier. Not much, it was true, but a bit.

  Always football crazy, I set off to hitchhike to London one Friday night in September 1968 to watch Manchester United play against West Ham. I got my first lift around midnight at the Preston junction of the M6 and arrived in London at about midday. Once at the Hammers’ ground at Upton Park I found that the gates had been smashed down by the mob and I got in for free. And to make matters even better, United won 3–1.

  Thereafter, however, things began to go wrong. At the match I met a friend who had also hitched down, so we decided to thumb lifts back north together. We waited for ages until, eventually, we got a lift in a van as far as the Northampton turn-off on the M1. By now it was three o’clock in the morning and pouring with rain. There was a telephone box at the junction where we’d been dropped, so we crammed into it and tried to get some sleep.

  But two guys crouching on the floor of a telephone box is not exactly comfortable – although I’ve since slept in places that made that phone-box floor seem like the Ritz. We shivered and dozed fitfully for an hour or so until, some time after four o’clock in the morning, a man banged on the door and asked if he could use the phone. We struggled out into the rain and, soaked through, walked into Northampton, still wearing our Manchester United scarves and hats. Plodding wetly through the dark town, we finally reached the station, only to find that the ticket inspector, thinking we were trouble-makers, would not let us into the station. It was here that we decided to separate.

  Wearily, I went on, heading out of Northampton and thumbing each vehicle that passed me. Eventually, the driver of a big, brand-new, completely empty motor coach stopped and took me as far as the Derby junction of the M1. It was now ten o’clock in the morning. From the junction I walked twenty miles to Matlock with not even a sniff of a lift. I was absolutely knackered. On arrival at the station there was a train about to leave for Manchester. I raced to the ticket window, hoping to give my name and address in exchange for a ticket. The man on duty there said he didn’t have time to sell me a ticket, and to get on the train immediately as it was about to leave. I hadn’t even opened my mouth. I should have had the sense to ask him how much the fare was.

  At Manchester, I left the train and made my way to the barrier. When I was asked to show my ticket, I simply said that I’d lost it. The ticket collector didn’t say another word. He just blew his whistle, at which two policemen arrived, who immediately led me off to an office, where they asked how far I had come. Foolishly, I said Matlock, and that I didn’t remember how much I’d paid.

  They’d heard lies like that before, and were no more inclined to believe mine than anyone else’s. Telling me that I would be charged with an offence, they took my name and address before escorting me to a bus and paying my fare to Preston. By now, I was completely exhausted. I slumped on the back seat and fell asleep. I awoke as the bus was driven into a large garage. When I asked the bus driver where we were, he informed me: ‘Blackpool’. I couldn’t believe my bad luck, for I was now faced with another hitchhiking expedition back to Preston. I eventually made it home in the early hours of Monday morning.

  The police were not going to forget me, and it was obvious that I was going to be in deep trouble. I had no idea what the penalty was for attempting to defraud the railway, or whatever offence it was I’d committed, but I wound myself up into believing that it might be very severe. Then I had a brainwave: I went down to the army recruiting office in Preston and told the recruiting sergeant that I wanted to join up. A large man with a brick-red face, he scowled at me and, clearly used to youths arriving one jump ahead of their day in court, asked whether I had a criminal record.

  ‘Not yet, but I will have’, I told him. ‘I got booked last night for riding free on the railway.’

  The sergeant took this in his stride, remarking, to my relief, ‘We’ll soon get that sorted out.’ He sat me at a table, took down my details, and had me complete all sorts of IQ and aptitude tests before sending me on my way, telling me that I would be contacted in due course. I went back to work, still bluffing my way as an apprentice joiner. I didn’t have much skill or interest in carpentry and couldn’t see myself doing this for the rest of my life.

  True to his word, the recruiting sergeant contacted me three days later. He had fixed an appointment for me to have a medical and said that he had talked the police into dropping the charges, since, if I had a criminal record, I couldn’t go into the army. He told the police that I would send the price of the ticket I’d dodged, plus 10 shillings for the bus fare home, and they had accepted the deal. I was in the clear.

  I packed in my job as an apprentice and signed on at the Labour Exchange, where I was sent off to numerous jobs by my mates who worked there. The jobs ranged from labouring on building sites to working in a dairy, hooking crates of milk from a conveyor belt on to milk trucks. The job wasn’t particularly interesting but it paid well, and there was plenty of milk to drink.

  There I was, four months short of my eighteenth birthday, and fed up with Preston, fed up with my work, fed up with the way I lived. And now that I was off the police hook, I was damned if I was going to go into the army. Even I knew, however, that escaping the military once they had their hooks into you was no easy matter. I therefore decided to emigrate to Australia, on a £10 assisted passage which the government there was advertising in order to attract people to the life Down Under. The recruiting sergeant was very nice about it, all things considered, when I telephoned to tell him the good news. No doubt he thought the army had had a lucky escape.

  A few days later I presented myself at Australia House in Manchester, where I filled in a load of forms, one of which asked whether I was willing to serve in Vietnam if I was called up by the Australian Army. I signed it; indeed, I’d have signed anything to get out of Preston. The city’s slogan in those days was ‘Proud, Pretty Preston’. ‘Pissing-down Preston’ would have been more like it. I kept thinking about all that Australian sunshine, and about Bondi Beach, and then I ran out of things to think about because I knew little about Australia, except that it had kangaroos and aborigines and was a hell of a long way away.

  I must have been acceptable to the Australian immigration authorities – or at least the forms I’d filled in must have been – for in due course Australia House telephoned to say that I was to stand by to fly out on the following Friday. I had elected to fly out because I couldn’t afford to go by ship. In fact, the £10 emigrants’ fare was the same for either mode of travel, but by sea you had on-board expenses for several weeks as you sailed to the other side of the world. Then the blow fell. They phoned again to say that as I was under twenty-one years of age I needed written parental approval.

  Getting my mother to sign the papers proved easy enough, but I still needed my father’s signature. I hadn’t seen him in years, but I knew that he was still living in the same house and I remembered the phone number. So I called him.

  ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Peter who?’

  ‘Peter, your son.’

  There was a long pause. Then he said, ‘What do you want?’ Clearly things had not changed much.

  I explained that I needed to talk to him, and he grudgingly invited me to his house on the following Saturday. He was pleasant enough when I turned up, especially as we hadn’t seen each other for about four years. We went to watch the speedway at Belle Vue in Manchester and afterwards had a fe
w drinks. It was then that I told him that I was emigrating to Australia. He thought it was a good idea until I mentioned that he’d have to sign a paper giving his consent. Then he stopped thinking it was a good idea. In fact, it became a very bad idea. If I got into debt, he said he’d be held legally responsible for the money owed. So he wasn’t going to sign, and that, as far as he was concerned, was that.

  I wasn’t done yet, however. Back in Preston I forged his signature on the document and took it to Australia House. Luckily, before I could pull the papers out of my pocket a woman clerk told me that my father had telephoned to say that he refused to sign the paper, and had made it clear that he was not prepared to argue the toss about it.

  As I stood there, feeling shattered, with all my dreams about Australia going down the drain, the woman patiently explained once again that without both my father’s and mother’s consent I would have to wait until I was twenty-one. My father had well and truly queered my pitch. Cunning as ever, he had been at least one jump ahead of me, for he must have guessed that I would forge his signature after he’d refused to endorse my application.

  Now I was really depressed. Although I had the job in the dairy, I knew that my life was going nowhere. As I sat slumped miserably on the top deck of a bus one morning, with another exciting day of hooking crates of milk to look forward to, I saw a massive billboard bearing a famous British Army recruiting poster of the time: ‘Join the Professionals and become a Soldier of the Seventies.’ I jumped off at the next stop.