Just Another Friday Night In Memphis - Part 2

(I thought I would post one part every day or so, if that's
ok)

My father, who had spent the previous few years living and working in
West Africa with his partner Olive, (he was still married to my mother
and though we rarely saw him he always provided for us, albeit at
little more than subsistence level) returned to England and decided he
wanted the house we were living in for himself. In 1957 he purchased
another shack for six hundred pounds out in the countryside several
miles away and moved us all into it. For us it was a retrograde move, a
quarter of a mile from a proper road down a muddy track half way
between Southend and Chelmsford, this place had water and electricity
but no bath or toilet, so we used what was euphemistically known as a
'bucket and chuck it' toilet, and a tin bath in the kitchen which was
filled from a gas water heater over the sink, and was emptied by
dragging it to the back door step and upending it out the door.

It meant also that I had to move to a new school, not that I minded, I
was glad to get away from the awful class ridden system at Westcliff.
Because I hadn't achieved much at the Grammar school the local
education authority insisted that I undergo an assessment by an
educational psychologist to determine my IQ and decide whether I should
be allowed to attend another Grammar school or be sent to the local
Secondary Modern. The assessment involved a series of tests, both
mental and visual. I found these tests, even at my young age, to be
mildly insulting, they were the kind of things I would expect a seven
year old to cope with easily. It was decided that I should continue my
Grammar education but as the local school was still in the final stages
of construction I was sent to a Technical school in the interim. I
spent a year at the Technical school followed by a year at the new
Grammar, Rayleigh Sweyne.

A day or two before the end of the spring term 1959 the headmaster
called me to his office. I had never been a problem pupil but I was not
a conformist, mainly because I felt inferior to most of the other kids;
I wasn't like them so I determined to be 'different'!

'Come in Van Win', he said, as I reached his open door, 'sit down, I'll
be with you in a moment'.

He finished writing something in a book and looked up at me with a
stern expression on his face.

'Right boy, if you don't have your hair cut and get a proper school
uniform before the start of next term, don't come back! I don't want
you in my school, do I make myself clear?' he stared at me icily.

'Ok', I replied, rising from the chair, 'don't expect me back; I don't
want to be here either!'

For a split second I detected anger on his face that I dared to speak
to him as an equal, he stiffened slightly as if about to vent his
temper on me but then he realised he was going to be rid of me, which
is what he wanted, and he decided to let it be.
He glowered at me for a moment and then said, 'You may go'.

I left his office and slowly walked back to the classroom with mixed
feelings. Part of me was elated that I had finally escaped from the
'prison', but another part of me was filled with foreboding about the
future and what was going to happen to me in the years ahead.

I had never been a popular boy at any of the schools I attended but
then I wasn't unpopular either, just insignificant. By the time I left
school, early, at the age of 15, I was an emotional wreck who's only
ambition in life was to meet the 'Jill' to my 'Jack' and live in a
'Rupert' book until we became 'Darby and Joan' and walked off into the
sunset holding hands.

Throughout these years my mother continued to work at a full time job
and then keep house when she got home. I will forever feel guilty that
I didn't help her when I should have, in fact I now think I was a
disgrace and didn't deserve her; at the time none of my brothers or my
sister treated her much better, we were all a disgrace! The poor woman
struggled for years and we just took her for granted and didn't even
tell her we loved her. The house was falling to bits and she didn't
have the money to repair it and the rest of us didn't give a
damn.

As a consequence of this I never brought anyone home; I was too ashamed
of our poverty. I can remember at the age of 20 some friends who had
never visited my home before unexpectedly came to see me and when I
opened the door I was mortified. I grabbed a coat and left with them
before one of them asked to use the toilet. I only relate all this
because it gives an insight to my personality. Anyhow I never seemed to
get many girlfriends and the girls I did date would stand me up more
often than not. As you can imagine I didn't have a lot of self-esteem
and nothing's changed since!

There were several other lads that lived locally and I soon became part
of their circle. We had other things in common apart from age, we were
all from relatively poor families and lived in substandard houses, in
fact one of them, a friend to this day, lived in a house with no gas or
electricity and his family used paraffin lamps for lighting and only
one of the families had a bathroom as far as I can remember. One of the
group had an older brother who worked on a local farm and in the school
holidays we would work on the farm for pocket money. I remember the
summer of 1958 driving tractors and sitting on the binder, walking the
fields with a pitchfork making stooks with the sheaves of wheat and
eventually collecting the corn and making wheat stacks. That summer was
the only time I felt happy for any prolonged period, the weather was
lovely and I was with my mates having a good time feeling close to the
earth.

Those early teenage years were somehow idyllic; though none of us had
any money we had a friendship and camaraderie that surmounted all the
hardships our respective families had to endure. We never missed any
opportunity to earn ourselves pocket money and one particular escapade
that I remember involved the elder brother of one of the group. He kept
chickens, lots of chickens and sold the eggs to the Egg Marketing
Board. One night in late summer a fox got into one of the sheds that
housed 200 chickens, and before the noise of squawking birds attracted
the attention of my friend's father, the fox managed to kill 40
chickens. The next morning three of us volunteered to get rid of the
dead birds, we promptly picked out the least damaged, plucked and
gutted them, then touted them round the village for 5 shillings each.
By the end of the day we had ?2 each, we had never had so much money in
our lives.

In the yard were several old sheds that had been there for years and
were filled with all sorts of household junk. One Saturday morning we
gained access to one of these sheds and found amongst other things, an
old wind up gramophone, the kind in a mahogany cabinet with Queen Anne
legs, and a huge pile of old 78rpm records. The only one I can remember
the title of was 'Guitar Boogie' by a guy called Arthur Smith. Later in
life I became familiar with his recordings through my interest in
popular music. Anyway we had no use for the records and so we took
piles of them across the road to where there was a pond in the corner
of a farmyard. We spent a couple of hours skimming them across the pond
and marvelled at the way we could get them to take off from the surface
of the water. We eventually ended up at different points on the bank
and the game ended when one record launched from the other side of the
pond took off and came directly towards my head. I only just had time
to raise my arm in protection when the record shattered on my forearm
and left me bleeding profusely. Some years after this event several
pieces of shellac appeared under the skin on my arm; they must have
been deeply embedded and taken all that time to come to the surface. I
still have these pieces of record in my arm after 45 years. I truly
have music in me! I like to think it's 'Guitar Boogie'!

Over the next two years I had several jobs, mostly factory labouring
with no future and very little money. It was only in later years that I
realised they had all been part of my 'life education' and so had some
ultimate value to me. The first job was at a factory run by a German;
he had been a fighter pilot and had been shot down over England in the
Battle of Britain and interred until the end of the war. In Germany he
had run a small engineering business making steel rulers and tape
measures and had grown to like England so much during his enforced
holiday that he stayed and brought his machinery over from his homeland
and re-established himself in Essex. He was an only child and his
father was dead, his mother however was very much alive and she came to
live with him in England and worked at the factory. She spoke almost no
English and in fact hated the English people, whom she still regarded
as the enemy, and was always as nasty as she could be, shouting at
everyone in German and scowling all the time.

As the 'new boy' it fell to me to make the tea for everyone; about
fifteen men and 'the nazi' as everyone referred to her. The boss and
his mother always had their camomile tea made in a china teapot that
she had apparently purchased in New York whilst on holiday with her son
a year or two earlier. Everyone else's was made in a large canteen
style upright stainless steel coffee pot. I also had to walk the mile
into town every morning and collect everyone's sandwiches and rolls
from a bakers shop, returning before tea break at 10am. I hadn't been
there long before I started to be verbally abused by two or three
bullies and also the 'nazi'. After a week or so of this abuse I decided
to take revenge and one morning whilst in town getting the sandwiches I
called at a chemists shop and bought a large packet of Epsom salts.
That morning I put most of it in the large pot and the rest in the
china pot; by late afternoon I was the only one still functioning
normally. This obviously didn't go un-noticed because I was relieved of
tea duties and treated with a bit more respect from then on.

After several other similar jobs I found myself working on the farm I
had spent summer holidays helping out on. During the course of
haymaking in August the cutter bar on the mower broke and the foreman
and I took it to the next village to be repaired by the blacksmith. As
it happened we had forgotten to bring part of the bar and the foreman
returned to fetch it leaving me at the blacksmith's shop. The smithy
was engaged in some forge work, heating a large cultivator tine in the
fire and beating it on his anvil and I stood by watching intently. He
noticed I was watching and eventually spoke to me,

'Are you interested in this matey?' he said, looking at me
curiously.

'Well I've never seen it done before, and it looks interesting' I
replied.

He carried on for a few minutes and as he dipped the newly sharpened
tine into a trough of water in front of the forge to quench it, he
looked at me as a large cloud of steam belched forth and said, 'Do you
want a job?'

Thinking that it must be better than mucking out cows every morning I
answered him with a nervous, 'I'll give it a try, I'll try anything
once!'

'When can you start?' he asked.

'I'll have to give a weeks notice' I replied.

'Ok, the pay is £8 a week, Monday to Friday and Saturday morning. I'll
see you at 8 o'clock the Monday after next then', he was speaking
whilst he worked and didn't look up. I was 17yrs. old and was about to
become an apprentice blacksmith, my first 'proper' job.

Arthur Benson, the smithy worked alone and lived next door to his
workshop with his wife, Jesse and two kids. He had a son George, a
couple of years younger than I and a daughter Jean, 5yrs younger and I
used to see her go to school every morning and come home in the
afternoon, and her mother would send her out to the workshop with a cup
of tea for me. I thought she was gorgeous, mainly because she was, but
also because she would smile at me and led me to believe she liked me.
I always thought it an odd coincidence that she also belonged to a
crowd of youngsters in her village, but they were all girls. By the
time she was 16 and I was 21 we were seeing each other even though her
father disapproved. He would be nasty to me to get me to stop seeing
his 'baby' but her mother liked me and approved. (To get to work I had
to walk a mile and a half to the bus stop and then had to walk back
after work. In the evenings I would repeat this journey to see Jean.
Years later I worked out that I had walked a total of over 6000 miles
to and from the bus stop.)

I spent about five years working at the blacksmiths shop during which
time I learned how to do forge work, dismantle and repair all kinds of
farm machinery, re-condition tractor and combine harvester engines,
gained a certificate for gas welding and worked on practically all the
farms in the surrounding district at a multitude of different jobs.
During the infamous winter of 1963 we received a phone call from a
local pub that Arthur used regularly. The publican said all the
plumbing had frozen and some of the pipes had started to leak; could we
come and help him. During that day we repaired nineteen burst water
pipes, copper, iron and even some lead pipes. I very soon became adept
at plumbing!

One of the funniest incidents that occurred during this period of my
life happened one sunny morning at the farm across the road from the
smithy. We had turned up to repair a machine in the farmyard and had
only just closed the gate when 25 piglets escaped from their pen. The
foreman and his 3 workers were chasing these animals and having very
little luck. I sat on the bumper of our van with tears of laughter
streaming down my face when a piglet dashed past me and the foreman
made a grab for it, he missed and toppled into the slurry pit which was
used to hold all the pig muck. This was like a lagoon about forty feet
square and eighteen inches deep; the muck was eventually spread on the
fields for manure. The foreman emerged from the pit covered from head
to foot in pigs muck and had to be hosed down to clean him up. His
clothes stank so bad his wife burned them!

During this time I spent a year attending a drama school in the
evenings with the intention of becoming an actor, but this died a death
when Jean said it was acting or her, she didn't like the fact that I
was the only guy in a class of twelve and I suspect thought that I
would eventually cheat with one of them. Like a fool I chose her. My
eldest brother was married, my second eldest lived in South Africa, my
sister had left home and my younger brother had gone to attend my elder
brothers wedding leaving me at home with just my mother. I wanted to
fly the nest but felt obliged to stay at home and take care of my mum.
The pressure from Jean's father made it almost impossible to work with
him, he never called me by my name but would always refer to me as 'the
boy', this made me feel even worse about myself, then when I was 21 my
brothers came home from Africa. It was just before Christmas 1965 and I
remember driving down to Southampton to meet them off the 'Windsor
Castle' and bring them home. In the previous few months I had
redecorated my bedroom and let Peter and his wife Folly (her real name
was Florence) have the use of it whilst I moved into Johns room and
shared. Soon after Christmas Peter and Folly moved into a flat in
Southend and I had my room back. With John now at home I seized the
opportunity gave in my notice to Jeans father, and joined the merchant
navy, getting a job with Esso as a petty officer mechanic. After all
the unfriendliness Arthur accused me of leaving him in the lurch,

'It's not a good time to go', he said, and offered me more money to
stay.

'It's never going to be a good time!' I replied, and told him I'd made
up my mind, but he didn't like it and complained about my decision to
anyone who would listen.

Esso put me on the payroll and told me to go home and wait and when
they needed me they would send for me, meanwhile I would receive a pay
cheque every week. I thought this was great; I was getting regular
money and didn't have to do anything.