A Face in the Crowd

A face in the crowd

Part 1

After many years of leading a life where my nearest and dearest didn't have a clue what I had been doing - for half of it at least - I have decided to put pen to paper, so to speak. Well, fingers to keyboard, after all, I'm no dinosaur. I'm a modern man, if you ignore my age. Technology doesn't frighten me - very much.

Doing clandestine work for the faceless establishment of any country is often a thankless, dirty and decidedly unglamorous task. And it is often done for reasons other than monetary gain. I started when I thought I could make a difference to the quality of life for my family and neighbours but as time went by I realised it was much like a game and none of us involved took it too seriously, except when you were at the sharp end.

I don't intend these jottings for anything more than my own amusement and if someone else should happen to read them, all well and good. Although my kids are now adult, they may be surprised to discover really what their suburban Dad had been up to. I am going to write about the way things were, some of the changes I've seen, and things I've done, but mainly these are my ramblings, generally constructed of anecdotes that may help to show my life for what it is and has been and not what people think it has been. It's really difficult to decide what should be included and what's to be left out, so I've left some facts out, changed some happenings and names, and occasionally twisted the truth to protect the innocent, as they say. Although this story doesn't seem to be overloaded with innocents. The bits I've left out don't change the essence of my recollections but may keep me out of trouble. Some of what I've done and seen has been sensitive, to say the least. Oh! what tangled webs we weave....

I shall also use common terminology rather than technical words for ease of understanding. If this gets read, I'd like it to be fun!

Now I look back on events in my life with something like amazement. After all, I'm only Mr. Average: nothing special, not very strong, not particularly brave, not bright - in the academic sense (I never have grasped spelling and grammar; my computer sorts those for me these days). At the impressionable age of about seven years, I was told I was a slow learner. But this was before dyslexia had been invented. (Why is dyslexia so bloody hard to spell?) I'm not tall, but I must admit to being dark and handsome. I know that if you knew me, you'd say so too, so I don't mind admitting it. Well, now it's not so much dark and handsome but darkish and handsome. Time and life have taken their toll and a few(?) white hairs have crept in. Soon I’ll be able to say, ‘I can still see a few black hairs.’ And as my eyesight weakens, I can't see my wrinkles too much. I'm not vain but I do have a good sense of humour and an over-developed sense of the ridiculous, which I must say has helped me through a tight spot on more than one occasion.

Life as a young child had not been easy, but as I didn't know anything to the contrary, it didn't really make any difference to me at the time. I was loved, fed and sheltered. It was all I knew. I thought it was great then and I still think I had a great childhood. My loving mother and grandfather played a massive part in my enjoying it. Poor but happy. I'm not saying that for effect. There were times when Mum had to go without food to see we kids were fed. As I said, poor but happy.

Having been born in the closing stages of the Second World War and growing up just after it, I had many undesignated playgrounds. Bomb sites, air-raid shelters and the like were all over the place. In retrospect, the down side of my childhood was that many of what we now consider everyday items were in very short supply or not available at all. Steel was at a premium and manufactured goods had to go for export so the country could recover financially from the war. Rationing, I ask you, who'd have it? The population still had the “make and mend” mentality which had been instilled during the war. Can you imagine a spoonful of sugar, a knob of butter, a couple of ounces of meat, an egg or two, per week? Meat was rationed in the UK until Independence Day (4th July) 1954. I was ten by then. Sharpening a razor-blade to make it do one more time? I can just remember it, I was fascinated. Granddad used to sharpen his razor blades by bending the blade against the inside of a glass and rubbing it backwards and forwards.

'It just takes the burrs off,' he'd say, or, 'It'll do one more shave.' It had to, he couldn’t get any more.

It seemed to do the trick. Then of course, I didn't know what it meant to try to shave with a blunt blade. But I'm been married now. If women are the fairer sex, how can they blunt a razor blade so easily on their fair bodies, when men can’t on their ‘tough as boots’ faces? Just another of the world's great mysteries!

Nowadays with the disposable society it all seems a bit of a joke. Undoing string, not cutting it; saving elastic bands for re-use; keeping jam pots, tobacco tins for nails and screws, etc. The new word for it is green. Now we recycle. Then, as I said, it was "make do and mend." The war-time government had coined the phrase and instilled it in the population. I grew up on make do and mend, which is a good basis for being green now.

I grew up living in a Canadian prefabricated house, commonly known as prefab. It was great. In 1947 when we moved in it had such luxuries as a fridge and a bath. Neither were common in those days, much of the housing stock was Victorian, but the devastation across Britain from the German bombing meant housing was in short supply. It's an ill wind….. The Canadian prefabs were brought in to replace the old housing stock which had been destroyed. The German bombers had done a pretty fair job of starting the slum clearance in London and other cities. The prefabs were fitted out to a high standard and were great to live in. They looked crap from the outside but it was a hell of a lot better than living cramped in a Victorian terraced house, with a tin bath which came in on bath nights and an aerated larder for food storage. In addition to the amenities they were equipped with when they were built, in the '50's, central heating was installed. Looking back they were so way ahead of any other housing in the UK.

The prefabs were intended as a short term fix to the housing problem. Five years was reckoned to be their useful life. Some of them I know were around for thirty years plus and I bet some are still in use today. The really were bloody marvellous.

Back to the war. My father had been very badly injured serving on the North Atlantic Convoys. Even his life seems to me to have been unreal. At the age of twelve he started working in the coal mines. His father (I don't remember him) became an officer of an early miners' trade union, which meant anyone bearing his surname became persona non grata with the mine owners. As the mines weren't nationalised then, that also meant they were out of a job. Father, his brothers, cousins and uncles were all thrown out of work. Unemployment in Scotland before the war was an awful thing. It was not like today; there was very little support so Dad moved south and did any work he could.

He spent a while long distance lorry driving, and we're talking the long distance between London and Glasgow here. At that time, many of the roads were of very poor quality and there was a twenty-miles-per-hour speed limit on lorries. Remember, very few people had licences to drive and, as I've said, the roads were poor. But more importantly, the brakes were an anchor which he threw out when he wanted to stop. (No, of course not, but they were about as useful as an anchor.) Very few people had a licence to drive, I don’t know if one was needed because there were very few motor vehicles and the driving test hadn’t been invented.

Then he settled on the idea of going to sea and he served in the merchant navy as a cook. During the war he took on the additional job of an anti-aircraft gunner. I can remember him telling me the weapon he had to use was a Bofors, a Swedish make of double-barrelled automatic anti-aircraft gun. You fired it standing up and leaning into it as you pulled the trigger. The Bofors he was to use was located at the stern of the ship.

In my mind's eye, I can just picture a scene aboard ship: the old fella is cooking a soufflé or some such, when the air-raid warning goes. I don't quite know what he'd have said but my sense of the ridiculous kicks in here. Think about it and put your own ending to it.

He may have been a cook, but he was not at all effete, far from it. When I was a young boy, I once saw him lift an upright piano by himself, and this was after his massive war injuries. My father attributed his recovery to the study and practice of yoga.

'Once McIndoe and his team had physically repaired what they could,' Dad said, 'the rest was up to me.'

Sir Archibald McIndoe was the pioneering plastic surgeon who worked on badly injured air-crew, etc.

When I asked him why he took up yoga, he went into one of his stories. I really knew better than to ask but sometimes it was easiest just to let him talk. Dad was not economical with words. He had a vast vocabulary, spreading across three or four languages and he seemed to use it all. All the time. But the reason his stories seemed to take such a long time was he'd consider every phase for a few seconds before speaking it.

A short version of his story is as follows: his ship had moored off the coast of India and he and his shipmates had been ferried ashore for some leave. They had a fair walk into the nearest town and on the way he noticed a man standing on his head by the side of the road. When returning to the ship hours later, the man was still on his head. Dad sat down to wait. Finally the man righted himself and Dad asked, 'Why have you been standing on your head?' The short answer: yoga. Dad practised yoga from then on. He firmly believed that yoga kept him alive and he used it whenever he felt his body needed an extra boost.

Indefatigable, my Dad, pure highland determination and strength. And his blood now runs through my heart. Stubborn, it has been said; proud, definitely; tenacious, certainly.

I have a few recollections of visiting Scotland and Dad's family. I was very young the only time I went as a child. I guess I was four or five years old. This was a few years after the war had ended and Dad was driving again. He'd bought an old London taxi during one of his trips ashore. This was to be our conveyance to Scotland. There were very few cars around then. When Dad parked outside the prefab, it was about the only car in the road. And if you're a football fan, the road was White Hart Lane. Yes, I supported the local team when we lived there. Although the local team was in the next borough and their ground wasn't actually on White Hart Lane. I don't care much for football now.

Dad, with help from Granddad, added a door to the old taxi's open luggage bay next to the driver’s compartment and they installed a seat. The night before our departure the taxi packed up. The dynamo stopped working. Dad stripped it down and through the night unwound the windings, repaired the break and rewound it. At the time I had no idea what he'd done, or the enormity of the task. Rewinding electric-motors and dynamos is skilled work. Dad was a cook!

Did I say Dad was indefatigable? Believe it. Many years later, when he was an old man, I visited him in the little house he'd retired to in Scotland and I found him in reasonable health, although by then his eyesight was failing and he had been registered blind. He was repairing his TV, using a strong light, jeweller’s eyeglass and great big magnifying lenses. He'd taught himself radio and TV repair, so he could keep up with the racing results. Definitely indefatigable.

Back to my trip to Scotland. The dynamo had been refitted by the time I woke up. I didn't know about it till years later. We set off on time and made good progress from Wood Green in north London. We travelled up the A10 and onto the A1. Going through Peterborough, at a roundabout, the home-made door parted company with the taxi. Not only did the door go but Granddad, who was leaning on it, went out too, complete with home-made seat. Thankfully no-one was hurt. But picture the scene if you can. Is it really me with a sense of the ridiculous or is life full of wonderfully funny happenings but we're too busy to notice?

Scotland was a great adventure for a young lad. So different from what I knew. With new aunts and uncles and loads of cousins, it was fabulous. Some of my father's brothers and sisters were barely older than me. After Dad's mother had died, his father, Old Sanny, married again. There were sixteen children from the two unions.

One very special aunt, Lizzy, who was a few years older than me, took us onto the moor. It was just a walk from the back door. The hamlet in which they lived is about a thousand feet above sea-level. Bloody cold in the winter. All the kids from the area played on the moor and we were among a crowd of kids. We reached a place called Wallace's Cave, a cave in an outcrop of rock where the hero William Wallace is reputed to have camped on one of his long marches south. The cave is said to run from Coalburn to Lanark. To me it was all a great adventure. I was a little town boy, out in the big wide open spaces for the first time in my life and loving it.

Then Lizzy, bless her, called out, 'Watch out for the bear.'

So I didn't even go inside. Strangely, the fun vanished straight away and I was on the lookout for the bear for the rest of my stay in Scotland. About fifty years later, at my Dad's funeral actually, Lizzy reminded me of this in front of many of those who'd been there and a fair number of the next generation. She didn't just remind me; she went into great detail and embellished it at every turn. We all had a good laugh about it. But still, the small boy inside me remembered the fear of the moment.

Over the last twenty-five years or so I have been a frequent visitor to Scotland. But more about that later - possibly - maybe.

Mum and Dad's marriage didn't last too long. As with so many wartime romances, they couldn't take the strain of peace. Dad's injuries could only have made matters worse. After his ship, an oil tanker, had been torpedoed and sunk Dad, who had been badly burned, had been left for dead in the bottom of an open boat for ten days, before the boat was found and he, with other shipmates, was rescued.

So I grew up without a father around. Although he and Mum didn't live together, I saw him when I could up until a short time before his death. My memories of Dad at home are mixed. One is of great tenderness, caring for a sick child. I was considered too ill to go with the family to a New Year's Eve celebration. Dad nursed me. I can still remember the bread and butter I had requested in response to his gruff question: 'Would you like anything to eat son?' being cut into tiny triangles.

Him a hard drinking Scot, giving up Hogmanay celebrations to care for a sick son. That's not how I really remember Dad. Maybe it should be.

Another memory is me getting a thick ear. I had only skidded my toy car's black tyres across a newly decorated wall. That's life!

Again, not having a father around seemed normal to me. Shit, it was normal. Many of my friends didn't have fathers: dads not returning from the war, unknown fathers after a wartime fling, GI brides, etc. It all meant that many kids didn't have fathers around.

Yet, as a young child I had the wonderful guiding hand of my maternal grandfather. Jim Smith. Fantastic man. A real old soldier. He had been a regular soldier through the First World War and then during the 1920s and into the 1930s. Granddad was always well turned out. Having been a soldier for such a large part of his life, he never appeared unless he was neat and tidy. Most of his jobs were ones requiring him to wear a uniform. Being an upright six-footer he looked good.

Granddad lived with us. He was a strict man. I guess it was his military background. When my brother or I misbehaved he'd make us sit still for ten minutes. Sometimes if we’d been really naughty we were made to sit facing into the corner. Can you imagine what it was like for an energetic young boy to sit still? During the punishment, I'd ask, 'Can I get down now Granddad?' He wouldn't even look out from behind his paper but would somehow know the time and he'd say, 'That's only four minutes.' He never raised a hand to either of us boys. And that says something about the man, as we were a real trial to our Mum. We were boys.

It seemed normal to have Granddad there but years later when I spoke to Mum about it, I was told a very sad story. She told me, 'Nan was courting before the First World War and her sweetheart was called up and then reported missing in action.' She went on to say, 'Nan met and married Granddad and then we kids came along. Eventually, long afterwards Nan discovered that her old flame, Albert, had survived.' He was then living in a little country cottage in the village of Lilley, in Hertfordshire, north of London. He was blind, had lost a leg and was diabetic. Nan left the family to go and care for him. She continued to care for him until he died. Granddad accepted Nan going off to live another man. He even visited them.

(Another, aside here. Albert, it seems, was a distant relative of my wife's. Funny old world ain't it?)

I used to go to the country to stay and remember Nan asking me, 'Go and get some milk, love.' I would toddle off down the road to the farm to get milk, still warm from the cow. I don't give a rip what the government's health experts say about contamination, etc. That milk tasted like milk and I believe if it's taken fresh and the cows aren't mucked about with, it'll do us no harm. I think we're sterilising ourselves into a corner. Humans are not as resilient as they used to be. Food poisoning is on the increase. I think it's been forgotten that we used to hunt and eat mammoth. And I bet people ate it till it was gone and not until it reached its ‘sell by date’.

Mum re-married. An old school sweetheart. She and Vic were happily married till he died nearly forty years later. He was a real father to me. He accepted and relished the role. We became great friends and I still miss him. Always will.

The mention of White Hart Lane a little while back brought a number of stories back to my mind. When I was about eleven or twelve, Auntie Rose, really an old school friend of Mum's and Vic's, asked, 'Johnny, would you like to earn a bit of pocket money?'

'Yes please.' I was up for that. 'What do I have to do?'

'Come to the café on Saturday and park the bikes for the men going to see Spurs.'

Hundreds of men took bikes to the match each Saturday and wanted somewhere safe to park them. Auntie Rose and Uncle Len ran a café opposite the ground in Park Lane, Tottenham and they used a patch of ground at the back for bike parking.

It was simple, when men came in with a bike; you gave them half a cloakroom ticket and put the other half in the brake of their bike. The rest is simple to work out. I can't remember for sure how much was charged for the service, I think it was sixpence. But I do remember that double egg and chips in the café was one and six, old money. That converts to seven and a half pence. It's just a memory.

School, well, the least said about that the better. As I've already said, I'm no academic. Tons of common sense but no good at exams as a kid. The older I got the better I got, until I got too old to bother.

I think I'll gloss over my school days. But there are a few things I will say. I don't want you to think I'm a complete prat. One thing is that the cane was still in use and it was a good deterrent. Another is that I attained GCE 'O' level in Woodwork. I still love working with wood. The final thing I'll say about my school career is that I was one of eighteen boys invited to make up the first fifth year class the school had ever known and after the extra year, I still left before my sixteenth birthday. That seems very young when I look back.

We kids used to play wherever and whenever we could. We always seemed to be playing. Long hot summers, deep snowy winters. Just the way they should be. The 'swing' park, where we played most, was just a slab of concrete. The swings, and other playground equipment, had been removed because the raw material had been wanted for something else, probably the war effort. On the other hand there is a story which sticks in my mind: a boy was climbing on the top of the high slide's roof and fell off, landed on his head and killed himself. I'm not sure which is the truth but either meant that the kids only had the slab of concrete to play on. We did OK. There were other parks but this one was near home. As well there was the pond park. That one, surprisingly, did have a pond.

At the swing park we played football, cricket and raced our trolleys. I can hear you say, what's a trolley? Well, different areas had different names for these home made carts. All they were was a set of old pram wheels nailed to a board, with another swivelling board for the front axle; this front axle had a piece of string attached to it, a bit like reins on a horse, to help steering and to give something to hang on to. One kid sat on the board and steered the trolley with his feet on the swivelling front axle while another kid pushed it along. Simple but great fun and loads of scope for innovation. Instead of sitting on the board, some kids modified old vegetable boxes and nailed them onto the board and sat in the tub affair created. If the box was nailed a little way from the back of the trolley, the second kid could sit on it, behind the rear axle, and push it along with his feet. Or they could run along behind pushing and then kneel on it when the trolley came to a slope and ride down.

At the other park, the pond park, we played boats, caught frogs and paddled. We weren't supposed to paddle but we did. There was a nice little slope at the pond park, so our trolleys were great fun there. Additionally, from the pond park back home was all downhill, just. No pushing.

There was also a cinder track for racing bikes at the pond park. I wasn't really into push-bikes that much but it was fun to watch other kids racing. Of course we fell off, we overturned the trolleys, we crashed, but most of all we laughed. All the kids skinned their knees and elbows. Well, playing on concrete you would, wouldn't you? Kids in those days were tough little things. They seemed to bounce more than they do now.

Of course kids got hurt. I have often been told the story of when I fell into an air-raid shelter and split my head open. An older boy, about twelve or thirteen years old, carried me home. My brother raced into the house screaming (maybe in glee) 'Johnny's dead. Johnny's dead. Johnny's dead.'

I wasn’t. Mum, as capable as ever, didn't panic, she just patched me up. She often said she wondered how the other lad, covered in blood, explained the situation to his mum. She never found out who he was to thank him properly.

We got clips around the ear for misdemeanours from anyone in authority, and then the incident was forgotten. It seems a lot better than the long costly court process which appears to be the answer in today's society.

We kids used to make our own toys. Imagination played a greater part than toy-making skills though. Bows and arrows were always favourites. We'd cut bows from the privet hedge and arrows were sticks which were sold as plant props. We'd persuade Mum to let us have some of the old ones and stuff them in our belts and off we went. Robin Hood, cowboys and Indians, knights of the round table, anything which halfway fitted. We made swords out of two bits of firewood, daggers the same. Spears and lances were just longer sticks, usually from the privet hedge.

If we were going to play a game of war, we little soldiers would form makeshift machine guns and rifles from sticks. Very often these toys would be taken home and put safely in the coal shed for the next time. But next time we'd find another makeshift sword, gun or whatever.

Catapults were another favourite. I'm a little ashamed to admit but I still have one. Back to the privet hedge and scrounge a piece of elastic for the propellant. Inventive little mites, we were always busy.