Just Another Friday Night In Memphis - Part 1

This story has it's origins in a request from a woman I have never
met, never spoken to, and don't even know really exists. She called
herself Katrinia and asked, no insisted, that I tell her the story
behind a poem I have posted on this site and others (FJWSMB). Over a
two-week period last August I wrote and emailed it to her in bits. It
came to about 18,000 words. Since then I have expanded it, encouraged
by friends on ABC and elsewhere. The most recent reader has bullied me
in the last week to post the story on this site. As it now extends to a
little under 50,000 words and is growing weekly, I hesitatingly agreed
to post it in sensible chapters of approximately 3000 each.

It has been written in 'first person', and mainly in journal style. The
reason for this is that it was my intention to get all the relevant
details and incidents logged, and then re-write it in 'third person'
with more descriptive text and dialogue. The rather persuasive argument
inflicted on me was more than I could withstand.

It is still 'work in progress' and may eventually end up as I
intended.

'Just Another Friday Night in Memphis'

I was a 'war' baby, born on 26th January 1944 in Uxbridge Hospital,
Middlesex, the son of a Belgian Jew/Italian Catholic father and a
Scottish Presbyterian/Italian Catholic mother and along with countless
others had a pretty poverty stricken early life. There are five of us
kids in the family, the eldest is my brother Ted eight years older than
I, the second eldest my brother Peter eighteen months older, and then
myself George, the youngest brother John, sixteen months younger is
next and lastly my only sister Anne, three and a half years younger. My
parents lived at various addresses in London during the war and my
mother used to tell me how she had a chest of drawers in which she
would put us kids to protect us during air raids. By all accounts my
father was absent for much of the war, at least according to my mother,
who said variously that he was a conscientious objector or that as a
non-British citizen with an Italian mother he was an undesirable alien
and liable to see out the war in prison if the authorities caught up
with him. The truth may never be known now as both of them are dead but
my mother would relate how she was visited fairly regularly in the war
years by police officers that were trying to find him!

My father left my mother when I was 4yrs old and embarked on a
relationship (that lasted until his death at the age of 81 in 1991),
with a woman he met through his work. To the day she died, a few weeks
short of her 81st birthday, my mother never forgave my father for
deserting her and though I remember a man by the name of Charles Hole
attempting to form, what I think would have been an honest relationship
with her, she steadfastly refused to take another man and spent the
last 40 yrs of her life celibate. Thinking back on those days now it
must have been awful for a lone woman in her late thirties with five
kids to bring up and no man to lean on or to cuddle her and give her
love. (Although she has been dead now 12yrs my heart still bleeds for
her). Anne was only 6 mths old and Ted 12yrs old. My mother worked hard
to feed and clothe us but there never seemed to be any time for cuddles
or kisses and I don't remember any bedtime stories, games or holidays.
We lived in a shack with a corrugated iron roof in an area of Essex,
portrayed a few years ago, in a TV series called 'Plotlands'. It was a
wooden building with an asbestos lining, linoleum flooring, and the
only soft furnishings were rugs my mother made from old clothing cut in
strips and threaded into sacking in patterns; they were quite common in
those days in the homes of poorer people. No electricity, no toilet, no
bath, no water, no sewers, no proper road and worst of all, no
loving.

I remember my first day at school in Pitsea; I wore a grey flannel
battledress-style jerkin, buttoned up to the top because I remember I
didn't have a shirt underneath. My mother had given me a hard-boiled
egg for my lunch and put it in my breast pocket and buttoned the flap.
When lunchtime came I unbuttoned the pocket and found the egg had been
squashed during the morning and it wasn't as hard-boiled as it should
have been; the yolk had leaked out and congealed and the egg was
inedible. I spent the afternoon with three pieces of wood and a hammer
and nails and made, what for me, passed for an aeroplane which I
proceeded to 'fly' up and down the corridor outside the
classroom.

Because our only source of water was a stagnant well in the back garden
I had to take a bucket the half-mile to school in the mornings, hiding
it in a hedge and recovering it after school, so I could fill it from a
council standpipe located in a little brick-built box with a
green-painted steel door and secured with a Yale type lock to which all
those who qualified had a key. I used to fill the bucket within an inch
or two of the brim but by the time I got home it was half empty, mainly
because it was too heavy for a young boy to carry and now and again I
would tip some out to lighten the load as I tired. I'll remember
carrying that damned bucket of water the half-mile home till the day I
die.

One year I remember my mother bought a couple of goslings in late
summer. They were to be fattened up for Christmas but by mid-November a
fox had taken one of them and we had to guard the other one carefully
or have no Christmas dinner. A couple of days before Christmas my
mother told my brothers and I we had to kill the by now full-grown
goose, and I was terrified! My brother Ted held the goose by the legs
and Peter and I laid a length of wood across its neck and stood on the
ends. Ted started to pull and the goose started to squawk and flap it's
powerful wings but we weren't heavy enough to hold the wood down and
eventually the gooses head slid under the wood taking all the feathers
off the back of it, Ted fell over backwards and let go of the goose
which took off making an awful racket. In the end our mother chased the
goose around the garden with a billhook taking swings at it until
finally she connected and the gooses head came off. The sight of the
headless goose running amok with blood spurting from it's severed neck
was more than I could bear and I covered my eyes until my brother said
the goose was still. I had nightmares about the incident for
years.

Another memory from those early days concerned a packet of icing sugar
my mother had bought in the weeks before Christmas to ice a cake she
intended making. In those days just after the war there was rationing
of most things and if you didn't have coupons you didn't get the goods.
Icing sugar was a rare luxury in our house; we didn't have sweets very
often not because we didn't have coupons but because we didn't have any
money. My mother put the box of icing sugar on the top shelf of the
larder and I knew it was there. Whenever she wasn't around I would
stand on a chair and help myself to a teaspoonful thinking she wouldn't
miss just the one spoonful, but of course over a period of weeks the
box gradually emptied and when it came time to ice the cake it was all
gone! I don't remember whether or not I was punished but I certainly
felt bad about the cake!

In the following summer the well, which contained brackish water fit
only for washing, became so stagnant that mother said we had to clean
it out. My brothers and I spent all day emptying it with a bucket
attached to a length of rope and when we got to the last six or eight
inches they made me go down a ladder to fill the bucket with an old
saucepan. The well was probably only twelve feet deep but to a
seven-year-old boy it looked like a hundred feet; it was dank, water
dripping constantly from the walls and there were frogs and other
disgusting life forms at the bottom. My brothers thought it would be
good fun to remove the ladder and leave me in the well and before I
could stop them, it was gone! My mother had gone shopping and my
brothers went off to play leaving me in three inches of water looking
up at the tiny circle of sky above me and screaming myself into a
frenzy with fear of dying down there. After what seemed like hours my
mothers face appeared at the top, I was sitting in the bucket crying,
she made my brothers rescue me and then beat the daylights out of
them.

The only heating we had in the shack was from the cast iron kitchen
range that she did the cooking on, and in the winter she would put old
house bricks in the oven and when we went to bed we would each have a
hot brick to keep us warm. There were only two bedrooms in the place
and my mother and sister had one, and my second eldest brother, Peter,
and my younger brother, John, and I shared the other. We all three
slept in a double bed and Peter made sure he slept in the middle. I
lost count of the mornings I woke up on the floor at the side of the
bed with John on the floor on the other side. I don't remember whether
Ted had a separate bed in our room or whether he slept in the living
room; it was a long time ago now!

Ted was eight years older than me and spent a lot of his time staying
with his physical education teacher who had befriended him. Eventually
the teacher was to be killed in a flying accident at Icomb in Gloucestershire
and when he was twenty-one Ted married his widow who had been left with
three daughters. I wasn't aware of it at the time but those early years
were to scar me for life and leave me with needs that have never been
fulfilled to this day. I was of average intelligence but very sensitive
and trusting of others, probably because I needed approval. Because of
the deprivation of the immediate post-war years, I grew up with a
terrible inferiority complex, always believing I wasn't worthy, never
expecting anything good to happen to me. To this day I haven't been
able to shake off these feelings of being inferior, that nobody really
wants me, that others dismiss me as a failure and although friends tell
me that I'm nothing of the sort the successful intimate relationship I
desperately needed and searched for all my life has evaded me. It
seemed I was always a loser.

Shortly after the war the government started to build 'new towns' to
accommodate people moved from the uninhabitable ghettoes that made up
large areas of east London around the docks. These areas were in a
terrible condition partly as a result of the awful pounding they
received from the bombing raids during the blitz and partly because
they had never been repaired and maintained in the first place. Most
had no bathrooms and only outside toilets, and they were hardly fit to
live in. One of the first towns to be built was Basildon and to acquire
the land needed the government slapped compulsory purchase orders on
everything in the designated area, and that included our shack in
Pitsea. It stood on an acre of land covered with fruit trees and my
father was compensated in the sum of fifteen shillings for each tree,
which boosted the sum he received for the shack quite considerably.
With the compensation paid by the government my absent father bought a
house near Southend, and my mother, brothers and sister were duly
re-located. This was the first house I remember living in that was on a
proper road, had a bathroom and toilet and electricity. Suddenly we
were elevated from the 'peasant' classes to just plain poor.

I was no scholar but became the only member of my family to pass the
eleven-plus examination and qualify for admission to a Grammar school,
although I was so socially disadvantaged that it became a cross to bear
that eventually broke me. The school, Westcliff High School, considered
the best school in Southend at the time, was a single sex school, which
only served to heighten the competitiveness and aggression of the kids.
This was encouraged by the faculty as character building and anybody
that was not ambitious was seen as a waste of time. Apart from
woodwork, to which I took like a duck to water, I wasn't a raging
success at anything, probably because I spent most of my time coping
with the middle-class snobbery and the feeling I didn't deserve to be
there (I actually had one teacher hiss in my ear, at the age of 11,
'What's a working class kid like you doing in our school?').

I was the subject of a certain amount of bullying and taunts from
better off kids and I remember at the age of 12 losing my temper one
time and lashing out in self-defence just as the PE teacher entered the
gym changing room. He was an ex-paratrooper instructor and, I later
realised, part of the 'establishment' with its inherent middleclass
attitudes. He decided the quarrel should be settled according to the
Marquis of Queensbury and we were obliged to don boxing gloves and get
in a makeshift ring. He told us the rules and blew his whistle and Alan
Wand, the other boy, came dancing out of his corner shadow boxing, all
his mates were cheering him on shouting stuff like, 'Go on Alan, show
the moron how WE do it!' I stood there for a few seconds completely
bemused by his antics then stepped towards him and took a swing at him.
I caught him on his shoulder and he lost his balance and fell to the
floor, I immediately went for 'the kill' and swooping on him started to
beat the hell out of him. The teacher blew his whistle, leaped forward
and dragged me off, the by now exceedingly groggy Alan. He sent me to
my corner, pulled Wand to his feet, and raised his hand declaring him
the winner on points! He hadn't landed a single blow, but he came from
the right side of the tracks! This boy or at least his family was to
re-surface in my life albeit in a tenuous way, forty years later.

There was one other experience I had there that I remember vividly.
During my second year there I had an English teacher by the name of
Savage; he was anything but! Fresh out of teacher training college, the
kids sensed they could take liberties with him and would frequently be
unruly and disruptive. I liked the man and felt sorry for him and as a
consequence never joined in the sport. He eventually had enough of the
treatment, lost his temper and gave the whole class 200 lines. At the
end of the week when the lines were to be handed in I was the only kid
who hadn't done them. He gave me a further week but I declined to do
them and he demanded I see him in the staff room after school. He asked
me why I refused to do the lines and I explained that I wasn't guilty
of anything and therefore didn't deserve any punishment. He felt he
couldn't back down, and there was no way I was going to, and he
ultimately gave me the choice of either doing the lines or being caned.
I insisted I was innocent and defiantly refused the lines and rather
than lose face he caned me.

That school had several major effects on me, the first being that I
learned the class system will always prevail and that sometimes the
innocent have to take the punishment for the guilty (a valuable lesson
that has helped me in later life), and secondly, it gave me a deep
seated hatred of privilege and inequality. It also made me politically
aware; I started there not knowing what politics were but by the time I
moved to a another school two years later they had made me a socialist
for life! Looking back now as I write I can see I had already developed
a strong sense of justice and fairness that has stayed with me all my
life, I haven't always lived up to the high standards this requires but
in my heart I know I've tried.