My mother used to knit her way through movies. She had a gift for designing knitwear. She would create a pattern while watching a film and then come home, write it down and send it off to Stitchcraft, a company specialising in knitting patterns. She was paid three quid a design. I learned to type, as soon as my fingers could cope, by setting down her patterns on a battered old Corona. The first line I ever typed was ‘KI,PI,K2TOG . . .’
She continued her career for many years, one of her patterns being modelled by a young Roger Moore, and a Fair Isle pullover she created was worn by Paul McCartney. More importantly, what she taught her son, who sat by her side in the cinema, to the gentle sound of clicking needles, was that it is possible to earn a living while having a good time.
As we waited for the war to end our sheltered life was disturbed by the arrival of Auntie Florrie and Uncle Harry from London. They had been bombed out of their flat in King’s Cross. Harry hated being away from his beloved London. He went back almost straight away. Florrie stayed and eventually took charge of a hostel for evacuees at Rogerthorpe Manor, an old and neglected country house surrounded by damp and bowed trees that looked like graveside mourners.
It held a strange fascination for me, particularly as some of the inhabitants were as mysterious as the house they lived in. In the main these were the soldier-husbands of the occupants, who came on leave or sometimes because they had been invalided out of the army. One such casualty sat all day, cross-legged, wearing only a loin cloth, looking out of the window. I was nine or ten at the time and I remember standing in the doorway of his room, staring at him, waiting for a move. After a while his back trembled, I heard a sound and realised he was weeping.
On another occasion, a soldier on leave from combat in the desert asked me to show him the way to the village shop where he wanted to buy cigarettes. When we arrived there the shopkeeper said he hadn’t any. Cigarettes were in short supply in wartime and he was clearly keeping them for his regulars. The soldier reached over the counter, took him by the shirt front and said, ‘Mister, I hope you’re telling the truth.’ He came away with twenty Woodbines. On the way back, a car backfired and the soldier dived to the pavement, flattening himself against the concrete. When he got to his feet he apologised. He was trembling.
When next I marked the Allied advance on our map, I remembered that soldier, although it was not until a few years later I really understood what had happened.
3
CUDWORTH,YORKSHIRE AND ENGLAND
When I was five I experienced two important events. I went to school for the first time and my father took me to see Barnsley FC play at Oakwell. When I returned from the first day of formal education and was asked what I thought, I replied, ‘It was all right but I don’t think I’ll bother any more.’ Similarly, when asked at half-time my opinion of watching Barnsley, I said, ‘It’s all right but can I go home now?’ Whereas I can believe my assessment of school was to prove both sensible and perceptive, I never stopped thanking my father for keeping me at Oakwell.
Snydale Road Junior School was a doddle. I loved reading so they put me in charge of the library. I maintained order by employing Horace Copley as my sidekick. Horace had thumped me in the playground. Horace thumped everyone at school just in case anyone doubted he was the boss. With Horace at my side the library was a quiet and well-ordered place. Forty years later, when I returned to the school with a film crew for a documentary, a tough-looking kid stuck up his hand in class and said, ‘My granddad says he used to beat you up at school.’
I didn’t need to say it, but I did. ‘Is your granddad called Horace Copley?’
He nodded.
‘It’s true.’
‘Told you!’ he said, thumping the child next to him.
I captained the school cricket team, which pleased my father who, since my birth, had been preparing me for the day when I played for Yorkshire. As far as he was concerned it wasn’t merely a possibility but a certainty that one day I would wear the White Rose. He drilled me in every spare moment on the basic principles of the game. Play forward, play back, elbow high – show them the full face of the willow, nothing fancy. By the age of eight I had a solid defence and a hatred of getting out.
After school we would play in the street and under the light of a solitary gas lamp as the day faded. Once I batted for a week scoring 2,023 runs before having to declare because my mates wouldn’t bowl at me any more. Weekends we would play on a strip of land between Bailey’s fish and chip shop and a house owned by a miserable old harpy who kept our cricket balls when they went over her fence. In soccer season she stuck a garden fork in our footballs. We repaid her every Mischief Night by daubing her door handles with dog poo and shoving mice through her letterbox.
In order to raise money to replace our confiscated equipment we devised a means of ensnaring the lunchtime drinkers at the nearby pub on Sundays. As they lurched home at chucking-out time, they would stop and watch our game and offer drunken advice. We would challenge them to bowl me out. Twenty balls for a sixpence. They never refused. They would take off their jackets and come racing in like fighting bulls. What happened as they approached the delivery crease always depended on how many pints they had drunk. When I tell you that these were eight to ten pints a session men, you’ll understand that anything was possible. There were those who spun round and ended up delivering the ball in the direction they had approached the crease. Others forgot to let go of the ball and charged past me in drunken flight. One or two delivered a challenge but we were never out of pocket. On a good day we’d make a bob or two.
The drinkers didn’t know it but they were, in fact, cricket’s first sponsors.
Looking back, I am struck by the freedom I had as a child. When I wasn’t playing cricket or soccer I was roaming the village and surrounding countryside as Wilson of
The Wizard
. Wilson was my favourite character from the many comics I read as a child. No one knew his age. He lived in the hills in North Yorkshire on a diet of spring water and berries and would leave his native habitat only to achieve some astounding new feat of athleticism. He ran the first three-minute mile, set the long-jump record with a leap that carried him so far out of the pit they couldn’t properly measure it, and won the marathon running in diver’s boots. His most spectacular feat was leaping a pit of spears while carrying two buckets of cement in order to quell a native uprising in Oogoboogo Land, or whatever passed as the name of an African country in those innocent days.
All these feats I surpassed in my imagination as I raced through the fields of my youth. Later in life, wondering in print whatever became of the Great Wilson, I was informed he had gone missing over the Channel during the war. He had been the greatest Spitfire pilot of them all with 195 kills but had disappeared on a routine mission over the Channel, just like Glenn Miller.
When I wasn’t Wilson I was lying in the long grass watching my dad play cricket. The field, located next to a farmyard, was bounded by sloping wheat fields and when the sun shone on the ripening grain, golden ripples appeared to flow up the hillside. Just visible over the brow of the hill was the pithead gear of Grimethorpe Colliery, just in case we thought we were in Elysium. My father was a fast bowler with an action based on his great hero, Harold Larwood. He was quick and aggressive and never short of a word or two. As a spectator I often wondered what was said when my father engaged the opposition in conversation. Later on, when I played with him, I found out.
My very first senior game for Cudworth was against Grimethorpe, very much a local derby. It was just after the war, I was eleven and we had a new fast bowler, a soldier who had married a local girl. He bowled a first over of real pace and hostility, at the end of which my father said to their opening bat, ‘What’s tha’ reckon, then?’
‘By God, Jack, he’s quick,’ he said.
‘He is that but tha’ should have seen him before he was gassed,’ said my father, a remark which caused so much confusion it won us the match.
The Cudworth team of that time was rich in character. There was George Roberts, our big hitter, who had a tin leg. He wore one pad only, so that when the ball struck his false leg it would make a noise like Big Ben striking.
‘How’s that?’ the bowler would say.
‘One o’clock and all’s well,’ George would reply. He had an eye like a sparrowhawk and would hit the ball into the cornfields and beyond.
His rival as a big hitter was Norman Stewardson, whose bat was bound with a vellum-like sheath and weighed a bit less than a large sledgehammer. If anyone queried the origin of his bat’s covering, he would say, ‘Kangaroo skin.’ When asked where they could find such an implement, he would reply, ‘First of all you’ve got to find your kangaroo.’
My father’s partner with the new ball was a tall and handsome man called Jim Baker. He had the longest run-up I had ever seen. He went back so far my father explained to me that they had to cut a hole in the hedge at one end of the field to accommodate him. And of course I believed him. Then there was Jack Berry who bowled leg spin at medium pace and was one of the best club cricketers I ever saw.
I was a last-minute replacement for a senior member who was injured in the pre-match knock-up. They put me in the deep amid the cow slop and the daisies, out of the way. Jack Berry was bowling and the batsman went for a slog and top-edged it in a high and spinning loop to where I was fielding. I remember nothing except diving and the ball sticking in my hand. But what I will never forget is my heroes picking me up and congratulating me and the look of pride on my father’s face.
I was eleven years old, playing with the big guys and on my way to grammar school.
4
THE NOBLE ART OF BEACH CRICKET
‘No supermarkets, no teabags, no lager, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Shops on every corner, red telephone boxes, Lyon’s Corner Houses, trams, steam trains. Woodbines, Senior Service, Smog. No automatic washing machines, wash every Monday. Central heating rare, chilblains common. Abortion illegal, homosexual relationships illegal, suicide illegal. Capital punishment legal. White faces everywhere. Austin Sevens, Ford Eights. A Bakelite wireless in every home, television almost unknown, the family eating together. Heavy rationing, sides to middle. Make do and mend.’
That is how the historian David Kynaston sums up the immediate postwar years in his excellent book,
Austerity Britain
.
Looking back, my memories of childhood are black and white, now and again sepia. It wasn’t until the sixties I started recording in colour.
‘Make do and mend’ had its virtues. There was a certainty and closeness about life in a pit village that was comforting for the child lucky enough to find its embrace. There was also poverty and oft-times, because of it, drunkenness and violence. There was madness, too. I had a friend whose mother was driven crazy by worry and the physical and mental brutality of her husband. I never saw him beat her – although the consequences were apparent – but on more than one occasion I witnessed his merciless taunting, which would always end with her distressed and weeping, being comforted by her son, my mate.
I used to stand there like a statue, thanking God my parents were not like that. One day, my mate’s father walked past me, smelling like a tap room, and, nodding towards his distraught wife and son, said, ‘Never get married, lad.’ And he ruffled my hair.
I was safe in the perfect cocoon of my home, with my loving parents and an extended family never less than a street away. When my mother started work at the Co-op as a shop assistant in 1943, I was fed and watered by my two sets of grandparents, who lived next door but one to each other. That is if I managed to avoid several aunties living along the route, who, if they saw me passing by, would insist on feeding me. I sometimes had three teas in one afternoon. All my family were rock-solid working-class people, law-abiding, sober (more often than not) and loving.
When the genealogy programme
Whose Life Is It Anyway?
asked if they could research my life, I told them they would find nothing to intrigue them. They smiled, knowingly, and said, ‘That is what they all say, but we always find something.’ Six weeks later they called. ‘You were right,’ they said. What they didn’t add was, ‘You have the most boring background of anyone we have so far researched.’ But they didn’t have to. I already knew.
Boring it might have seemed to outsiders, but far from it to the child growing up happy and beloved in a warm and secure nest. The time was austere; we had just come through a war, we were underfed and dressed like refugees. The pit village we lived in would never win a beauty contest, and its men did a dangerous and dirty job. Yet, I look back on my childhood there with great affection and no little gratitude. You could say my situation has changed somewhat in the intervening years, but if I could rewrite my life I wouldn’t alter a line of my early childhood.
This contentment was due in no small part to my father who, as they said of someone else, was ‘born intoxicated’. Life to him was not all underground misery, inhaling coal dust, fouled lungs, a struggle. In my father’s view, that part existed only as an interlude between seasonal merrymaking.
Christmas was his favourite. What we used to do for Christmas was share a pig with three or four other families. Throughout the year we would take it in turns to clean and feed it and then, just when we were getting fond of it, my old man and his mates would send for the local gamekeeper, who would slaughter anything for a couple of bob and a pint or two. I can remember standing outside the pig sty – a very small child – tears running down my face at the noise of the carnage inside.
One year someone pinched our pig. They waited until it was fattened and ready for the kill and then spirited it away at dead of night. We never found out who it was but ever after we mounted guard on our pig sty from November onwards, saving it for the slaughter man. Our Christmases really began when the pig was jointed, jellied, pied, sausaged, rissoled, trottered and shared out among the owners.