It's Not What You Think

by Chris Evans

  Martin Joseph was a straight up and down suit-and-tie man for the majority of his waking hours. He was also a handsome bugger with a permanent tan which Mum insisted he received as a reward for serving with the RAF in Egypt during the war. I believed her—it was a cool story.

  Dad worked hard every day except Sunday, leaving at the same time every morning and always arriving home at the same time every evening—a quarter past five, more than a minute or two after that and Mum would start getting worried whilst Dad’s tea would start getting cold.

  He played snooker once a week, where he apparently enjoyed a pint and a half of bitter, but other than that, unless he had a secret life none of us knew about, that was him.

  Except, of course, for the gee-gees.

  Ah, now, there you have him. Dad loved the horses.

  There’s a famous phrase that goes something like: when you want to know who wins on the horses you need to bear something in mind: the bookmakers have several paying-in windows but only one paying-out window. That should tell you all you need to know about where most of the money goes.

  Not that this should have concerned Dad as he was indeed a bookie; he was the enemy and his betting story is the strangest I’ve ever heard. My dad’s entire bookmaking career both started and finished before I was born.

  He set up his ‘bookies’ shop in the fifties with a pal of his, and by all accounts, particularly their own, they did pretty swift business—as most bookmakers do.

  Warrington was a typical working-class town in those days, and many an honest man’s one and only indulgence was a flutter on the nags once or twice a week. Dad and his partner were happy to facilitate such flights of fancy—until, that is, one day when the frost came down.

  This was no normal frost, however, but an almighty frost—a frost that would last not for days or weeks but for months. Four months, to be precise. All racing came to a halt and consequently all wagering. It was the steeplechase season, the favoured genre of the northern man, but the race courses fell silent, the jumps remained unchallenged, the stands stood empty.

  Every morning, day in day out, bookies and punters alike, would wake up and draw back the curtains, hoping and praying for a break in the weather, but for weeks on end to no avail.

  Eventually, when the break did come, the respective members of both parties could not wait to get back to the business of backing. With news of a change in the weather rumoured the night before, there was a palpable excitement in the air. The horses would soon be free to commence battle once again—as would the punters and the bookies.

  Dad, eager to return to business, was up and out the next morning way before dawn; his shop would be the first in town to open that day. The early bird catches the worm, as they say, but little did Dad know this worm had ideas of his own.

  There was a man, you see, a man who liked to bet, an honest man, a working-class man, the type of man of whom I have already made mention. This particular man used to walk the three miles or so to work every day. He worked in a factory making soap powder. It wasn’t the greatest job in the world, but since the war it was all he’d ever known; it was a wage and for him that was enough.

  He would pass Dad’s betting shop every morning on his way to work, but it would never be open as it was too early and although he bet with Dad at the weekends, during the week he always placed his bets at the next betting shop on his journey, just before his work.

  However, this morning, Dad’s shop, as I said, was the first to open in town that day.

  The man, not unlike the horses, was chomping at the bit to get back into the action, so when he saw Dad’s shop with the blinds up and the open sign hung on the door, he had no hesitation in entering.

  ‘Morning, Martin.’

  ‘Morning, Fred.’

  ‘Am I the first?’

  ‘You are indeed and a pleasure to do some midweek business with you at last.’

  ‘Well, what an honour. Let’s have a look then, shall we?’

  ‘Please go ahead.’

  And with that, good old Fred started to study the form from racing pages Dad had pinned to the walls of his establishment half an hour previously.

  Fred mused for a while, casting his eye over the various ‘opportunities’, before finally plumping for a choice. He placed his usual style of bet. It was a forecast—that’s the way Fred always betted, and lots of people used to bet that way. The chances of winning were next to nothing but it was a lot of excitement for very little risk, not dissimilar from how the lottery is today. However, if a forecast did come in, there would be no need for any more shifts at the soap factory, that’s for sure.

  And that is exactly what happened. The frost had thawed, the horses had been saddled, Britain was racing again and Fred went and picked a string of winners.

  The bet wiped Dad out. He was the only bookie I have ever heard of that was taken to the cleaners by a punter.

  The win was so huge, he couldn’t afford to pay Fred straight off, but he was a man of his word and vowed to return him every penny that was owed. Unlike his partner, who would have nothing to do with the whole affair. He reasoned that Dad should never have taken on such a bet without first laying it off, something he himself would have insisted upon doing.

  Why hadn’t Dad done this? In truth, who knows?

  Maybe it was because he didn’t have the time to do so with business being so brisk and all—on the first day back after the longest forced break in jump racing since the war. Maybe he was too excited and had simply forgotten. But maybe it was also because he took a chance.

  Maybe he took a chance that the odds were massively stacked in his favour and massively stacked against Fred, and as a man who knew his maths well and his racing odds even better, he thought it was a risk worth taking—a safe bet, if you like. But as we all know, there is no such thing.

  From that day onwards Dad’s wealth would never be financial, but that doesn’t mean to say he would never be rich. He had a woman he adored and who adored him back and he was the head of a loving family. ‘It’s not what you’ve got in your life, it’s who you’ve got in your life,’ he used to say. Now there’s a wise man. A very wise man indeed.

  * * *

  Top 10 Best Things about Mrs Evans Senior

  10 Her name, Minnie. She was named after a horse but it suits her perfectly

  9 Her obsession with death and anything or anyone dying

  8 Her art for telling stories for hours on end and hardly ever repeating herself

  7 Her magic hotpot from the war recipe, hardly any meat but oh so meaty*!

  6 Her directness—second only to her vivid imagination

  5 Her vivid imagination

  4 Her rapier wit

  3 Her wicked laugh

  2 Her selflessness

  1 Her love for my dad

  My mum is a formidable piece of work, simple as.

  When she had her cataracts done on her eyes, for example, she was well into her sixties and she requested only a local anaesthetic—this was so she could stay awake during the operation and see what was going on. Not an easy thing generally, but especially as this particular operation involves the popping out of the eyeball and the resting of it on one’s cheek, while the back is then duly sawn off ready for a new, artificially improved lens to be attached.

  Upon hearing a patient had requested such a thing and for such reasons, the consultant surgeon was at first a little shocked before becoming aware of the prospect of a rare opportunity. He wondered if he could also make the most of the situation with a request of his own. He asked my mum if it would be alright for him to invite some students in to watch the procedure and, if she could bring herself to bear it, would it be permissible for them to ask her questions as it took place? Mum was over the moon, she couldn’t get enough—apparently she had the students in stitches the whole time she was being operated on.

  Before we were born Mum was many things, but for most of my childhood, she was a state-registered nurse.

/>   Mum was one of the original night nurses. She started off working in psychiatric care at a place called Winwick Hospital, notorious in the area for being the local nuthouse. Looming large off the A49, it was set back in glorious green parkland and looked exactly like a Victorian prison, though it never had been. This was a proper insane asylum, designed and built solely for that purpose. At one time my dad, my brother and my mum all worked there. As a consequence of this I had been through the infamous heavy black iron gates many times. I even had the pleasure of wheeling the odd harmless ‘patient’ down some of its eight miles of corridors.

  After several years of diligent service with the loonies (she said it was exactly like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, still her favourite film) Mum went on to work at Warrington General Hospital. She always worked nights so she could be with us, her children and her husband, to whom she always referred as Dad, in the day. Her hours were shiftwork, always 10—6, usually, three nights on, four nights off, alternating with four nights on, three nights off.

  Now of course this was all well and good, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this meant she would be getting very little sleep. Here’s one of Mum’s work days:

  Finish at 6 a.m., picked up by Dad, home soon after, where she would grab a quick half-hour’s shut-eye ‘in the chair’. She would then make Dad his breckie, get my sister and I up and ready for school, feed us and then see us out of the house just before nine. Next she would start on the housework and go to bed just before lunchtime where she would languish until three o’clock before having to get up to prepare for the family’s return. After making our tea and washing up, she would have another quick half-hour’s shut-eye ‘in the chair’ before getting herself washed and dressed for work and ready for Dad to run her back to the hospital for her next night shift. By my reckoning that’s no more than three hours’ sleep a day!

  During all the years she did this, I never heard her complain once. In fact she only ever laughed about the crazy episodes her and her colleagues came across while the rest of us were in the land of nod. Like the Christmas Eve that Mr Jolly died whilst on the loo: she thought this was hilarious and seeing as it was she and her pals who had to get his trousers back up around his bottom and hump him back to his bed, they felt a little laughter was the least they were allowed.

  After Dad passed away Mum was forced to take on the one remaining role she’d been spared thus far.

  Never the greatest at maths; my mum now had to handle the family accounts.

  I remember distinctly her sitting us down and telling us the score. She told us she’d sold Dad’s car for eighty pounds and that was it.

  ‘That was what?’ we wondered.

  ‘That was it,’ she repeated, ‘that’s what we, as a family, are now worth.’

  Our house was rented from the council and we didn’t own anything else. Mum had resisting selling Dad’s car before he died as a mark of respect and so the neighbours wouldn’t talk, but now he was gone, so was the Vauxhall.

  ‘OK, fine,’ we thought nonchalantly. We didn’t really understand what a big deal it was to have so little money and as far as we were concerned things had always been alright anyway. Until Dad became bedridden we’d always had days out and a week away in the summer and nice Christmas presents and sweets at the weekend.

  My mum went back to work immediately, although probably as a magician rather than a nurse, as a few years later we had a family bank account with some proper ‘rainy day’ money in it, added to which somehow she’d managed to buy our house! Alright, it was only a couple of thousand pounds, but nevertheless.

  Maybe there was something Dad hadn’t been telling us. Mum was a fox with the finances.

  * * *

  *I asked my mum for this recipe on countless occasions for the book. She kept fobbing me off for weeks until I informed her the deadline was imminent and it was now or never, at which point she merely replied: ‘Time and patience!’

  Top 10 Double Acts

  10 Little and Large (I don’t care, I loved them)

  9 Abbott and Costello (Saturday mornings, there was little else on television)

  8 Bodie and Doyle (the kings of cool)

  7 Pixie and Dixie (left-field, and nowhere near as predictable as Tom & Jerry)

  6 Ernie and Bert (I wanted to be Ernie but fear I will end up becoming Bert)

  5 Morecambe and Wise (of course)

  4 Zig and Zag (…more later)

  3 Lennon and McCartney (they wrote the only songs I really know)

  2 Tom and Max (my cousins, both international rugby players and top boys all round)

  1 Mum and Dad (a loving but lethal combination)

  Dad never once hit me—he didn’t have to, I was scared enough of him as it was, not all the time, just when he wanted me to be. Is that what good parenting is all about? Scaring your kids half to death at precisely the right point for precisely the right amount of time—selective scaremongering at will, if you like? Is this how parents get their kids to behave? With the threat, tacit or otherwise, of physical violence? It definitely worked in our house.

  In Dad’s case the simple raising of his voice or the odd glare in my direction was enough to instil the fear of God into me—I don’t know what I feared, I just did. I wasn’t scared of my mum at all but I didn’t have to be, she had figured out the genius and infallible Mum and Dad combo threat. How about this…

  Mum (If I had done something wrong sometime in the afternoon):

  ‘You mark my words (another one of those phrases I’ve never really understood) your father is going to want to hear about this when he gets home.’

  My goodness me, those words still send shivers down my spine even today. The Mum and Dad dreaded combo—just the threat of the man who never hit me was enough to make me conform.

  I remember waiting and listening when Dad arrived home after such an episode to see if Mum would carry out her threat and tell him. More often than not it looked like she hadn’t, as the evening would continue as normal, first around the dinner table and then another relatively uneventful family night around the telly. With each passing minute I would become slightly more relaxed about the fact that I was probably in the clear. The thing was, though, I never knew for sure, not even the next day, whether I was definitely off the hook or not. This was the master stroke.

  Had Mum told Dad? Had Mum told Dad and Dad had decided to let it go? Had Mum told Dad so he knew what had happened and then Dad told Mum that he would pretend he didn’t know what had happened; making her look more compassionate in the process?

  Whatever the scenario, it worked like a dream. I remember Mum would often sit there for the rest of the night and every time I glanced her way she would give me one of those motherly knowing looks, the count-yourselflucky look. She would then also go on to benefit from several days of me loving her even more for not grassing me up to the big guy.

  Our dinner, or tea as we referred to it, was often prefixed with the phrase, ‘Your tea’s on the table!’

  And it would be, literally. We would join the dinner table at the last possible minute where we would remain for not a second longer than it took to wolf our food down. We were not a family who sat and chatted, at least not over tea, not much over anything to be honest. My poor mum would make a proper full-on meal every night and we would all reward her by sitting down for no more than seven or eight minutes before leaving her as quickly as we’d arrived with the ingratitude of a huge heap of dirty plates and pans to wash up. No wonder she’s never been that impressed when I cook her a meal!

  I don’t know when Mum and Dad did their chatting—if they ever chatted at all. I’m guessing they did, but maybe not—my sister and I were pretty much around all day, every day, and I can never remember them having any private time whatsoever to speak of. I never heard them argue, that’s for sure—not the once. Maybe there wasn’t that much to discuss or argue about. We were a simple family unit with simple family needs. Maybe they really were the happiest c
ouple in the world or maybe Dad did have a secret life and thought the less he said about anything the better.

  When it came to ‘S-E-X’, for example, the mere suggestion of any of our family talking to teach other about such a subject would have caused us all to flee the house screaming. Most families that I knew were the same.

  All of my friends and I, without exception, had absolutely no formal training in the science or art of anything to do with what goes on between a boy and a girl down below from any of our parents. Now, I really loved Mum and Dad, but come on guys, you have to tell your kids about the thrills, the spills and ultimately the pills that surround the desires of the flesh.

  I didn’t get the information from my parents, I didn’t get it from my elder sister or brother and I didn’t get even get it from school—well, not really. I had to fumble around and figure the whole tawdry affair out for myself. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun or exciting, but a guiding hand would not have gone amiss. If you’ll forgive the expression.

  Top 10 Resounding Memories of Primary-school Life

  10 Mr Warburton, the school caretaker, who looked like he’d been cast from Grange Hill. He was perfect: brown overall, flat cap, pipe, black plastic specs, the works

  9 Mr Antrobus, our headmaster saying, ‘If you can’t say anything good about a person don’t say anything at all’

  8 Going swimming once a week on a big red Routemaster bus, never having enough time to get dried properly afterwards and wondering how come the other kids didn’t seem to have this problem—did they have special quick drying skin?

  7 The hot chocolate from the vending machine after swimming

  6 The first day I told my dad it would probably be a good idea if he stopped kissing me goodbye outside the school gates when he dropped me off

  5 Making plasticine puppets that took me ages to produce and then performing a play with them on a stage constructed out of a crisp box (they’d fall to pieces before the end of the first page of dialogue)