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Growing Up

Autobiography

 

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One thing I remember distinctly about my early childhood was that we were always moving house. I think this had something to do with our precarious financial position – if you can’t pay the rent, you move. Our first move I recall was dramatic. We went to live with Auntie Ada.

Ada was not an Auntie, but a friend if my mothers. She was also a staunch member of the communist party, and she introduced us to walking which she called rambling. The walking was done by getting a train to to one of the towns in the Penines. The Penines are a low range of hills between Lancashire and Yorkshire, some 2000 feet high. They were, in their higher parts, bare of trees, with waterfalls, cliffs and large areas of moorland. The lower valleys were dissected by stone walls.

We did not stay long with Ada, but moved to a fairly large, as I remember, in Higher Broughton. I recall there was a large tree in the garden that we used to climb. We moved from there to a house in St James Road, Higher Broughton, where we gradually established ourselves. This must have been in the 1930s and I would have been seven years old.

I started school close to Willows Street. We had a teacher who was Jewish and I enjoyed school.

The house in Willow Street was one of a row, it had a front room that traditionally was the best room and used only for special occasions. The other room we lived in and there was an annex for cooking. The toilet was separate outhouse near the back of the house. There was, if I recall rightly, no bathroom. It was traditional to go to a bathhouse, or for us kids a tin bath.

From this house in St James Rd I continued my schooling at what was called Grecian St Elementary School.

In the early 1930s there was an influenza epidemic and being susceptible, I was put in a large hospital called Hope Hospital. At first I had a bed to myself, but as the epidemic progressed, they put another child in the bed with me and eventually there were three other children in MY bed. One of my companions had a condition which I believe has the name ‘St Vitus dance’ and could not keep still. One incident that alarmed me was a patient who was having difficulty breathing and the nurses rushed oxygen equipment to him and dropped it breaking a glass container. Shortly afterwards they put a sheet over his face and I knew he was dead.

As well as attending primary school, Jewish boys, not girls, had to attend Hebrew School Cheda (sp?). The main reason for this was in order to read a passage from the Torah when one became a man at he age of thirteen. After day school at Primary school was over, I would go to learn the Jewish Alphabet. This is a kind of script with characteristics of European script written with a broad quill, but none of the characters are the same and instead of reading from left to right, it is read in the opposite direction.

For most of my time my Hebrew teacher was Mr King, Kingey we called him. Kingey was tall and athletic and I now know he was a sadist. From what I remember he maintained dicipline by frequent use of the cane. It was a pastime among the students to find and destroy these canes, but Kingey seemed to have an inexhaustible quantity stashed in places we had yet to discover.

At eleven and twelve I was a chubby little fellow, blonde haired, peach skinned and Kingey gave me special treatment.

He would keep me back after class and on the pretext of caching me would put me over his knee. I told my parents, but they simply said I must have done something wrong. I tried prayer, but it made not the slightest bit of difference. If Kingey did nothing else, he created for me a healthy sceptisism about an all seeing and loving god. I was on my own and Kingey was great example of a sadism and hypocrisy that I had the misfortune to come into contact with.

One other part of Cheda was that the school was attached to a synagogue the higher Crumpsall School. Many of the Boys in the Cheda were also in the Choir. I had a good voice and so was in the choir. Mr Fairman was the choirmaster and was very impressed with my voice and wanted me to take lessons and have it trained so that it would not be lost when my voice broke. At that time we had moved to St James Road and we were having difficulty paying the rent even with a lodger. I may have mentioned it at home but I knew there was no money.

My uncles used to go to the local town markets. Uncle Eric used to sell smallgoods. He also used to sell contraceptives on the quiet. This was illegal in those days before the second world war. Uncle Eric worked mainly at the weekends. Before he worked the markets he had worked as a musician in the cinemas. At matinees he would play the piano and in the evening he would appear in a tuxedo, playing trumpet, with three other people as a small orchestra. The introduction of sound films put an end to all this.

On Saturday afternoon I would often go to the market with one uncle and for working from 10 in the morning to nine at night I would earn 15 cents. This may sound a very small amount but my first weekly wage was seven shillings and sixpence, the equivalent of seventy-five cents.

Uncle Joe had an unusual and very productive business. It was mostly based on lost property sales, but he also bought up bankrupt businesses, so at one time he might be selling groceries or anything else he had bought cheap. Uncle Joe became in relative terms, very rich. He had a large house in a high class suburb (Prestwich), a big car, an attractive well dressed wife and even a maid. Eventually he moved to a more impressive house in Boulton, became a concillor and eventually Lord Mayor.

Uncle Joe gave me a chance to work on my own. He would drop me at the market with a load of lost property and I would set up a stall and pitch the way my uncles did.

One of the advantages of being on my own was that I could buy my own lunch and this was a rare treat because there were stalls that sold dairy produce, good bread, cheese, and Horlicks, a hot health drink. I became an addict. This of course was before I had left school and was on Saturday. I would often arrive home after 11pm tired but exhilarated, my hands black from handling money.

Most of my early education was at Grecian street Elementary School apart from very early days at Waterloo Rd School. I spent my formative days at this school. We mostly had men teachers but I recall a Mrs Miller who introduced us to plants. For a very small sum it was possible to buy a terra cotta pot, a hyacinth bulb and poatting mix. It was a time when things were very tough at home, but it was a dormant seed. I had seen the possibility, and that it was a simple process.

Mr Small and Mr Gate looked after years 8 and 9 respectively. The class size, was, if I remember rightly, 45 and the cane ruled. The school yard was tarmac and we played fairly primitive games that required a minimum of equipment.

There was a school bully called Billy Bergan. I was regarded as a good fighter and a fight was organised for a morning playtime. I went in time quickly and got a headlock on him and brought him to the ground. I didn’t have him there for long before a teacher on duty, seeing the crowd, came and stopped the fight and took us to the headmasters office. I had never see the headmaster close up. I remember him being very clean, small and wiry with ginger hair. He told Billy to touch his toes and gave him three strokes of the cane. Billy blubbered and then it was my turn. The sensation was a burning pain, I didn’t cry. I made sure of that

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And buy large bundles of umbrellas and gloves. I also learnt how to repair umbrellas, mainly fitting new ribs taken fro umbrellas that were past repairing. Uncle Joe made a very good living from this occupation. He had a very good motor car, a 24hp Morris> He lived in a large house in Prestwich, at that time a very high class suburb. I began working for Uncle Joe and Uncle Eric before I had left school. I left school at fourteen, mainly because it was compulsory to do so.The market job was mainly at weekends and I needed a job for the whole week. I had another uncle, Harry, who had a factory and he made cycle accessories such as cycling jackets, capes leggings and hats. The job was as an errand boy. In a way it was a way of paying back Uncle Harrry because he had given me a bicycle as a bar mitzva present. Unfortunately, the bike didn’t last long, it was stolen. The bike I used for Uncle Harry was a heavy one with carriers at the front and back and I quite often carried heavy loads.

It was while I was working for Uncle Harry that war broke out. In the first world war Harry had been a quarter master sergeant and had managed to turn the job into a way of making money. He looked on this new war, not as most of us did with dread, but as a golden opportunity. One of his first designs was a satchel for a gas mask. When the war broke out it was assumed, as was the case in the first world war that gas would be used and it was compulsory to carry a gas mask.

One of the effects of the war was that many skilled men went into the forces. The government, aware of this, offered courses to unskilled people to take up these trades. I began a course to become a fitter, a skill that I hadn’t even heard of. It was actually a job that I already had some skill at. I had begun taking bikes to pieces and repairing them so I knew what a file was.

The course in fitting was at the engineering section of a large soap works. There was an instructor and you were given a place on a bench with a vice, a number of files, a scraper, access to a micrometer, a faceplate and a set square. The task was to take a piece of mild steel, file and scrape it into a square exactly three inches by three inches by one quarter of an inch plus or minus one thousandth of an inch. After a few days I managed this task to the satisfaction of the foreman. The next task was to drill a series of holes in this and file a one and a half inch square in this to plus or minus one thousandth of an inch.

After about three weeks I had completed this task and was sent to work as a fitter at the Shell Petroleum Company Maintenance Depot at Trafford Park. This was about 10km from where I lived and took 45 minutes on my bike. The day I started I was given a number of spanners and a screwdriver and told to take the cylinder heads off the Gardiner engine of a Scammell Diesel. This was no great problem as I had taken bicycles to pieces and had even built my bicycle from parts.

I found the work interesting and the two mechanics I worked for, once they saw I was a likely lad were very helpful. Eventually they would send me out in the van to take diesel pumps and injectors to be serviced. The place I went to was called Simms and was only ten minutes from home. I asked if they needed any fitters> There was at this time an acute shortage of tradesmen due to people being called up for service in the armed forces and despite the fact that this was a reserved occupation many men went and volunteered. As Simms had a shortage they gladly accepted me, so I went back and gave my notice.

Apart from the time I saved cycling to work, the hours at Simms were considerably shorter. I worked on magnetos mainly but did some rewiring and voltage control boards.

The workers at Simms were not much older than I was and on Friday night when we got paid it was the custom to go to the pub, usually the Half Way House, and down three pints of beer, throw up in the toilets and then stagger home. I might have done this forever, but I had this desire, probably a very romantic one to fly.

The house we lived in after being bombed out of St James Rd. was a much larger than we had ever lived in. The only reason we were living in this house was because it had been unoccupied and we had been bombed out. We were asked if we would billet airmen who were about to be posted overseas, and this we agreed to do. The airmen we billeted were only a little older than I was. They had just completed their initial training and were being sent overseas to do their flying training. There was no place in Britain where this could be done safely and there were also very few airfields that were not fully committed to the war. The scheme was known as the Empire Air Training Scheme and cadets were sent to Canada and Southern Rhodesia.

I asked some of these cadets how easy it was to be accepted as a cadet. ‘A piece of cake’, ‘Easy’ they said. ‘What’s an equation?’ I asked. They showed me and it seemed relatively simple. I applied in due course went for my interview and was accepted on the 3rd of February 1942.

 

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