Chapter Five: Back to school

From early childhood to leaving home in my late teens, there was one thing in life that I could absolutely depend upon. At 07:00am sharp each weekday morning, Mum would wake me up with a cup of tea. I bloody love tea. Often, if I’m at home alone of an evening, I’ll ponder on whether to have a beer, a gin & tonic or a glass of wine but, more often than not, I settle on a dish of tea. Not that I go in for any of these fancy blends like Earl Grey, Darjeeling or Lapsang Souchong you understand. Just give me a pot of common or garden loose leaf Irish Breakfast Blend from Fortnum & Mason & I’m a happy boy.

Mornings in 1960s term time at Conway Road were always hectic. Particularly in winter months when I would put off getting out of bed until the last possible moment because the bedroom would be freezing cold. We’re talking ice on the inside of the windows here. Like most 50s’ built houses, there was no central heating. Just coal fires in the two downstairs reception rooms. So, the drill was, having ensured that school clothes were strategically placed the night before, I would swing out of bed ensuring not to step off the bedside rug and onto the ice cold linoleum. Whipping off the pyjama bottoms taking great care not to pull the drawstring into a knot, on went the knee length socks and Marks & Spencer white pants. My cocktail dress-sized vest firmly tucked into my knickers, then it was on with the shirt, short trousers, slippers and jumper. With the linoleum crackling underfoot I was off to the bathroom for a hands and face wash in cold water topped up with a splash of hot from the kettle.

Incidentally, as a child, my vest rarely left my back. Every Friday evening, the immersion heater would go on for the weekly bath. I would only remove my vest once stood in the tub immediately prior to lowering my vanilla blancmange coloured, skinny torso into the allotted 6–8 inches of water. Once out and dry, I would don a clean vest which would stay on until the following week’s bath night adventure. Oh, the joy when we eventually had central heating installed and I could wallow in enough water to make my willy float. I used particularly to enjoy a bath with Mr Matey*- a lovely widower who only lived a couple of doors away. No, I didn’t get that from Peter Kaye. He probably got it from me!

By 08:00am Mum and I would be out of the door to walk the 30 minutes or so that it took to get to school. Leaving the leafy opulence of Conway Road and Park Lane, we’d head through the dark stews that were the Woodland Street council estate, passing the Top o’ th’ Trent public house before nipping down a long L-shaped ginnel which led us to the top of Shepherds Street. From there we’d pass the Staffordshire School Meals Service central kitchens, often with racks of Bakewell Tarts or Sponge Puddings out cooling on the pavement, into Kingsfield Road to arrive at the school gates on Gunn Street. Having been given my dinner money and a mortifying kiss, mum and I would part company; her to go into the infants school building and I to head off to the junior school. There I would meet up with pals Roy Lowe, Robert Brindley & Kevin Errington to carry out our early morning duties as milk monitors. This involved distributing crates of school milk to the ends of the two long verandas that separated each year group’s trio of classrooms. For the uninitiated, the Education Act 1944 made it a duty of local education authorities to provide school meals and milk for the under 18s. The milk came in glass bottles containing a third of a pint. Served at morning playtime, it was lovely most of the year, but if the weather was very cold, the milk would freeze and push the silver foil top off the bottle. And in the summer, bearing in mind the milk wasn’t kept refrigerated – yuk! In 1968 the Labour government withdrew free milk from secondary schools for children over eleven.  Conservative Minister for Education Margaret Thatcher withdrew free school milk from children over seven in 1971, earning her the nickname "Thatcher, the Milk Snatcher". **

In addition to my crate hefting activities I was also a highly trained telephone monitor, spending one lunch time a week sitting in the office of headteacher Mr. Wilson to answer phone calls while he went to lunch. I think I only ever took one call. By the end of that day, I was like a limp rag.

When not hosting glittering evenings of high class society entertainment, the hall at Kingsfield was pretty much the hub of school activities. The predominant odours were now stripped back to school dinners, floor polish, disinfectant and sawdust-sprinkled vomit. Back then, the casual vomit was commonplace. We’d think nothing of it. Spew and go, that was our motto. Is it me or is the casual throw up just not as popular these days? Maybe it was to down to lower standards of food hygiene. Or warm milk. Possibly.

While I’ve well and truly lowered the tone, no thumbnail sketch of school life would be complete without mention of the boys’ toilets. In a separate block situated slap bang in the middle of the playground, these had no roof. Actually, the cubicles may have done. I wouldn’t know. ‘Number twos’ in school time were certainly not part of my bathroom schedule thank you very much. But the urinals were al fresco. Getting caught short in the middle of a rainstorm was not a good idea. I’m not sure how high the wall was but boys will be boys & I defy anyone to say they didn’t attempt to wee over the wall and into the playground. I don’t know if anyone ever managed such a feat. Some claimed that Kevin Farr once did but who can say, who can tell? Suffice to say that at playtimes there was definitely an unmarked exclusion zone beyond the urinal wall.

Class registers taken; the school day would start at 09:15am with morning assembly. This involved sitting cross legged on the hard floor of the hall which I hated. I’m just not built for leg crossing. After assembly the hall walls would echo with the happy sounds of children prancing about in PE vest & knickers to “Music & Movement” broadcast on the wireless by BBC Schools Radio. This I also hated. I’m just not built right for prancing either. I took me several years to realise that the physical activity to which I am most suited is lying down quietly, gently clenching and unclenching my fists.

School dinners were served ‘family service’ style at 12:15pm. Seated at tables of eight, often with a member of staff at each, food would be brought out in metal containers and plated at table. Conversation & good table manners were positively encouraged. These meals were lovingly prepared & cooked in the Shepherds Street kitchen not half a mile away by a dedicated team of highly trained catering professionals & distributed to schools around the Biddulph area.  They were disgusting!  Gristly meat, lumpy grey mashed potatoes, liver so hard you could mend your shoes with it. Vegetables were pretty much cooked to mush and occasionally contained foreign bodies such as caterpillars, bugs and, on one memorable occasion, a sink plug complete with chain. At one stage, Staffordshire County Council sent in two lovely catering advisors to spend a fortnight working alongside the Shepherd Street staff to up the standard of food production. This I particularly remember because the two middle aged ladies lodged at our house, were wonderful company for Mum & made a great fuss of Tim & me. I’m reminded of them every time I see the teddy bear ladies on “The Repair Shop”.  There was a big improvement in food quality for a while but, sadly, it didn’t last.

Not that it was all bad. Lobby (mentioned in chapter one) was a particular favourite, partly because it came with no accompanying vegetable mush, served instead with slices of “Wonderloaf” white bread with which to mop the gravy. Puddings were pretty good too. Treacle sponge, apple sponge, pear upside down, all served with lashings of custard. People used to fight over who got the skin off the custard but personally I can think of nothing worse. Number one all-time favourite dessert with me was ‘flirty cake’. Served with green custard, this was a very firm chocolate shortbread. So firm & short in fact that the pressure of cutting into it with a dessert spoon could, and often did, result in a chunk ‘flirting’ off the plate at high velocity. You could have someone’s eye out if you weren’t careful. I found that the trick was to smother the cake in the peppermint custard which acted as a flirt suppressant or dampener if you will. Whatever one thought of school dinners, times were hard and for some children these were possibly the only square meal they had. Lunch over, we’d be let loose in the playground to fill the remaining break time playing marbles, hopscotch, skipping and “What’s the Time Mr. Wolf?”

Amongst my playmates were Carolyn & Cynthia who were in the same class as me, & my male associates. In junior school, Cynthia definitely had a ‘thing’ for me but I was far too shy to do anything about it. Besides which, I had a ‘thing’ for Carolyn which I was also too shy to act upon. Anyway, it might have made life a tad awkward & a gentleman never comes between friends. The Code of the Hirsts don’t you know? We were also in the same class in Grammar School. In fact, as Carolyn and I were in the same infant’s reception class and remain Facebook friends to this day, that surely qualifies her as my oldest friend.

Random memory: There was a boy in our year called Geoffrey Garside who was the son of the local undertaker. Mum used to tell us that, when he was in her class in the infants, any picture he drew always featured men in black top hats. For years she kept one of his masterpieces at home. It depicted Christ on the cross at Calvary & yes, Jesus, the robbers and all the disciples were wearing top hats.

These days, in common with most schools, I daresay Kingsfield now has the appearance of a maximum security facility. I’m so grateful to have been brought up in a world where we played out behind unlocked school gates with only a set of spiked railings and a trio of formidable dinner ladies to keep us from harm.

The rest of the school day was taken up with lessons. Don’t ask me what they were about. I wasn’t paying attention.

16:00pm & after a bit of hanging about waiting for mum, we’d be off home to arrive in plenty of time for Children’s Hour on the BBC. Only the two channels in those days of course and, as mother disapproved of much of the ITV output, (I’ve no idea why) this limited the choice to on or off. Blue Peter with Valerie Singleton & Christopher Trace. Zoo Time with Johnny Morris. Crackerjack with Eamonn Andrews, Pip Hinton, Jillian Comber, Lesley Crowther and Peter Glaze. Another huge favourite was ‘Vision On’ with Tony Hart. Imagine my thrill when many years later, I got to be Tony’s support act on some of his live stage appearances. And we had cartoons like Captain Pugwash, Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog. Terrific. Children’s TV ended at six o’clock when the BBC evening news bulletin commenced. No 24 hour rolling news in those days. You either read it in the paper in the morning or heard it on TV in the evening. Actually, we got most of our news from the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4) which was pretty much always on in the kitchen. I only have to hear the first few bars of “The Archers” and I’m back there arguing with Tim over who would wash the dinner things and who would dry. Our wireless was a great Bakelite valve-driven affair with a manual tuning knob. The signal would drift in and out from time to time which I missed when we replaced it with a transistor radio. The six o’clock TV bulletin tended to be quite dry, formal and held no interest for me. So, I’d take that as my cue to beetle off to my bedroom to play with Meccano, or the train set or read a book such as Professor Branestawm or one of the Jennings stories. I’d maybe practice something from my growing collection of professional magic tricks. Lots of my friends had magic sets, the sort of thing you’d get for Christmas with plastic props, bits of coloured string and flimsy playing cards. But in my case, courtesy of Mr. Father, I had some really nice professional, stage sized effects many of which he had made by hand or had been purchased from the Supreme Magic Company. Built to last, I still have most of them. They’re in perfect working order and performable today.

There was always something to occupy the mind. The only times I was actually bored was church on Sundays, sitting on those hard wooden pews while some bloke in a black frock with his collar on back to front bleated on about Obadiah and the Minor Profits. For some reason the punchline from the pulpit: “But my brother Esau is a hairy man while I have smooth skin” stands out in the memory. Afternoon tea in a strange house while Mum had a one to one natter about the price of fish could also prove mind & bum numbing. But I think being bored from time to time is a good thing. It stimulates daydreaming, imagination & creativity.

I don’t ever remember it dawning on me that Mr. Father had gone for good. Just a general getting used to it, I guess. Sometime around about the age of 7 or 8 years we started to go to stay with him, Barbara & Elizabeth (Liz) during school holidays at their home in Harlow, Essex. Built under the New Towns Act of 1946, it was very different from Biddulph. New housing estates, new shops and I’ve no idea why this comes to mind, a sports centre where you had to go upstairs to the swimming pool. I’m not sure how Liz felt about two smelly boys chipping up for the hols but we had a great time. There’d be walks in Epping Forest, days by the sea at Frinton, and trips into London. We were taken to a recording of “Easy Beat” featuring Lulu & the Lovers” and “Round the Horne” at the BBC’s Paris Studio in Lower Regent Street. I sat next to actor and comedian Terry Scott. I also remember an outing to the Victoria Palace to see “The Black & White Minstrel Show”. As spectacular as it was, even at my young age I was baffled as to why they were “blacked up”.

Back at home, Mum worked hard to keep life on an even keel and, if I’m honest, I quite liked it just being the three of us. Tim was at the Grammar School by day and had relocated to the small bedroom, leaving me to make my vast bedroom as untidy as possible. I was also starting to do gigs at local social occasions. Although now I rarely got to see Dad perform anymore, when I was doing a show, I’d carefully watch the other performers, especially the comics. There were a couple of ‘Uncles’ who were family friends of Mum & Dad’s who he had met through performing, who would take me to shows with them from time to time. Uncle Harry Lockley was a ‘dove’ magician, producing umpteen beautiful white birds. These would be put into a large birdcage and the climax of the act was for them to disappear, cage and all. I think it was Harry that once had a visit from the RSPCA because they’d received a report that his doves had died during his act. Turns out he had dyed them with harmless food colouring to produce a rainbow effect. Both he and ‘Uncle’ Clifford Hough were extremely generous with their time, giving me bits of ‘business’ and helping with technique. I learned so much from watching them from the wings.

As we didn’t have access to a car, Mum and I would need to be picked up to go to shows along with my various props & paraphernalia. I was still only around 10 years old at this time but Mum was not just my chaperone. Mine was a patter act and some of the effects I did had a ‘sucker’ element to them. Lulling the audience into thinking they could see how the trick was done, at the point when a spectator might be expected to shout out “You turned it round” or “It’s up your sleeve.” I would prove to them wrong with a surprise revelation and step forward to take their generous applause. At least that was the idea. Trouble was, when you’re 10 with an unbroken voice and as cute as a button their natural inclination was to mutter a silent “Oh bless the little chump” and say nowt. This would be mother’s cue to pipe up in ringing tones from the back of the hall and save the act! She was also my agent, managing my diary, confirming arrangements and, when appropriate, negotiating a fee. There was one time when a local vicar came to the house to request that I entertain at the annual Sunday School Christmas Party. I think he was expecting a freebie. When Mum told him that my fee would be ten shillings (about £12.00 today) his response was “Ten shillings? But he’s only a boy!” With great hauteur Mother pointed out to him that professional magical apparatus cost money, not to mention the amount of time I had to devote to rehearsal & turning up on the day. I got my 10 bob and Mum didn’t even charge commission. Best agent I ever had!

*Mr. Matey being a ‘no tears’ bubble bath for children.

** Source: Wikipedia