 
### The Onion Peeler

By Malcolm Whyman,

Copyright 2011 Malcolm Whyman.

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

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## "As life's onion you peel

## And each layer you reveal

## You may be surprised to discover

## Whatever you do and I'm sure that it's true

## One thing always leads to another"

Chorus to the song _Tony the Tramp_ by Malcolm Whyman.

For my wife Julie Whyman, without whose help, encouragement and dedication to the detail, this book would never have been completed.

Thanks to Paula Blackman for her editorial work.

Thanks to Stacey McMullen for preparing and editing this book for online publication.

And many thanks to Dave Pike for his help & encouragement.

### Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Epilogue

End Notes

### Chapter One

My first remembered experience was courtesy of Hermann Goering. It was the night of the Nottingham Blitz, 9th May 1942. Hull had been attacked the night before and London the night after, when the capital suffered one of its worst raids of the war. I was two years old.

The air raid sirens were screaming and searchlights probed the night sky. My mother hurriedly zipped me into my powder blue siren suit, an all in one garment similar to a babygrow. The siren suit was recommended by the government; it was very warm and a quick way of covering night attire prior to going down to the air raid shelter. Mr. Churchill, the Prime Minister, wore one; his too was powder blue. Safely zipped up, my mother carried me downstairs and into the Anderson shelter[1] in the back garden of my grandparents' house. My grandmother and my great aunt Julie were already there, crouched on one of the two single planks that served as seating in the dark, dank shelter. It was a clear night: the apple trees in the garden were visible through gaps in the sacking that hung over the shelter entrance. A tall Leylandii tree in our neighbours' back garden was in silhouette and pointing an accusing finger up into the night sky. My grandfather, a veteran of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, the Boer War and the First World War, was on fire watching duty. A few bombs didn't faze him. He refused to go down to the shelter despite the pleas of his wife and daughter, and instead made tea for us all, much to the amazement of my grandmother; it was the first time in their married life that he had even ventured into the kitchen. There was some speculation among the women that he might also manage to boil an egg, but they were never to find out. He considered tea making to be the thin end of the wedge and the kitchen the domain of women.

The anti-aircraft guns, installed in a patch of woodland close to what is now Raleigh Island, opened fire, almost drowning out the roar of bomber formations flying overhead. Bombs fell half a mile away, demolishing a row of houses but missing their intended target, the Raleigh Cycle factory, which was now churning out munitions.

I was too young to appreciate the danger we were in, but I had never seen my mother and grandmother so distressed and, like a contagion, their fear and tension enveloped me. Great Aunt Julie, a devout Christian, put her fate in the hands of God and prayed silently. For some years after, I ran for home on hearing an approaching aircraft. The adults could distinguish the sound of enemy planes, which, unlike our own, made a throbbing sound. The reason for this was because the German pilots desynchronised their engines to confuse sound detection devices fitted to the anti-aircraft guns

We remained in the damp, musty shelter for what seemed like an eternity, until the guns ceased firing. A long, continuous blast from the air-raid siren signalled the all clear. The guns fell silent: the raid was over. We could return to our beds but we would have difficulty sleeping. Two raids in one night could not be discounted.

I was born just after war was declared, in the village of Asfordby, not far from the market town of Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire. My parents, both originally from Nottingham, moved to Asfordby two years before I was born, when my father, a civil servant, secured a job at The Ministry of Defence gun range. When war was declared, my father, despite his reserved occupation status, promptly joined the army. Our bungalow was in close proximity to the gun range, a marshalling yard and a power station. My parents feared that these would become targets for German bombers and decided that my mother and I would be safer living with her parents back in Nottingham. As it transpired, there was wisdom in their decision: Asfordby was bombed and though our house was spared, others on the road were badly damaged.

My grandparents' house was at 26 Westholme Gardens, off Western Boulevard, a part of the main Nottingham ring road. A 1930's semi-detached set at the end of a cul-de-sac, it was in an area favoured by the respectable lower middle class. The house was home to my grandfather, Alfred Edward Greenwood, and his wife, Pelham, nee Newbold (named by her father after Pelham Road in the Nottingham city centre; he had remembered the name Pelham and thought it attractive), and her sister, my great aunt Julie, known to us all as Aunt Julie. They lived quiet, insular lives, visited only by close relatives, most frequently by their daughter Audrey, her husband, Bill, and my cousins, Joan, Pamela, and David, who were all of a similar age to me. Less often, Great Aunt Alice, my grandmother's older sister, would call on us, usually on a Sunday when she felt it her duty to encourage her sisters to attend the Methodist church in Nottingham City centre where Granny and Grandad were married. Granny and Aunt Julie rarely left the house and came to view their Sunday outings as a rare treat. Her two older sisters were thin, but my granny was round and fat. On climbing the stairs, she would do a small trump on every step causing us children to snigger, much to the embarrassment of our parents.

My grandfather was of medium height, gnarled and stocky, with hostile blue eyes set in a bald Germanic head. Observing him sitting on the back door step, his few remaining teeth clamped on his pipe, it was difficult to imagine that he had once been a man of passion, but as my mother confided to me some years later, Dada (as his children called him), was in his youth not a man to be crossed or denied. My grandmother was originally engaged to Grandad's younger brother, Ernest, but Grandad had stolen Granny's affections and married her. His father was outraged at what he termed 'this treacherous alliance' and disinherited my grandfather in favour of his younger brother. Unwelcome in his father's house and with career options limited, my grandfather joined the army, serving in China and South Africa and in France during the First World War. During his years in the service he had fathered two daughters, my Aunt Audrey, born in 1915, and a year later my mother, Alma, in 1916.

Service life must have left him with a taste for adventure, for on his demobilisation at the end of The Great War, and without consulting his wife; he sailed for Canada and the Alaskan gold fields. It was some sixty odd years since the deposits had been discovered, so one assumes that the pickings were lean by the time he arrived: and so it proved to be. It was almost a year before he decided that prospecting for gold was heart breaking and unprofitable and booked his passage back to England. During his time in Canada he had failed to support my grandmother and their children. This had forced her to take out an order against him for non-payment of maintenance. As a consequence, he was arrested as soon as he set foot on English soil. Hauled before the court, an order was made against him for back and future maintenance. His reaction to this humiliation was an indication of his stubborn and begrudging nature. He distributed my grandmother's maintenance payments among several Post Offices, obliging her to travel extensively in order to collect them, and this in an age when motorcars were rare and public transport was not as comprehensive as it is today.

It was at this time that Aunt Julie left her job in service and joined her sister. No doubt Granny needed all the support she could get, both emotional and physical. Incredibly, given the vindictive way in which my grandfather had behaved, reconciliation was somehow achieved. One might be tempted to believe that it was cheaper for my grandfather to be re-united with his wife than to live apart from her, and that Granny was prepared to put up with the old curmudgeon for the sake of financial security for herself and her daughters. Whatever the arrangements, Aunt Julie remained with the household, helping with the chores and child rearing. Given Grandad's taciturn nature and Granny's timidity, Aunt Julie's presence was of vital importance to Granny's mental well-being, as she always had her sister at her side to confide in and join her in a united front against Grandad if he ever looked as though he might get out of hand. Although I never heard a whisper that might suggest domestic violence, I suspect he was the type of man who wouldn't hesitate to inflict mental cruelty.

Some semblance of a normal marriage must have been maintained as a son, Alfred, was born in 1923, two years after their reconciliation, but Granny didn't have much enthusiasm for the physical side of her marriage. After the birth of Alfred she withdrew all sexual favours, having decided that three children were enough. Understandably, Grandad didn't think much of this arrangement, once remarking to my father that he had two women in the house and couldn't get his leg over either of them. I doubt whether he would have approached Aunt Julie, she being a spinster virgin with a strong sense of Christian morality. Abstinence notwithstanding, by the time my mother and I arrived, the three of them had settled down to make the best of it. It was possible my grandfather might have had a bit on the side, but he was an unlikely ladies' man, and probably concluded that he was too comfortable where he was to rock the boat.

Granny's domestic skills were somewhat limited, so it fell to Aunt Julie to direct the household affairs and chivvy a sense of order and routine into her sister. I think that Granny, rather than being lazy, was just an unenthusiastic housewife, a disposition she passed on to her daughters, for neither of them could be described as house-proud. Aunt Julie lived with her own personal tragedy. As a young woman she had been engaged to a young man (whom my mother described as a religious maniac) who had thrown himself off the Trent Bridge and drowned. The slaughter of the Great War had scythed down most of the young men of marriageable age and Aunt Julie, unable to find a husband, remained a spinster. There was only one occasion when I witnessed her lose her fabled equilibrium. My grandfather kept a large parsley bed and had come to an arrangement with the fishmonger who visited the street once a week in his fish van. For a few coppers off the fish price, my grandfather allowed the fishmonger to take whatever parsley he needed to decorate his fish. On one occasion, before picking his parsley the fishmonger had taken the opportunity to relieve himself behind the garden shed. Aunt Julie, unaware of him, came to hang out the washing and caught sight of his manhood in full flow. Screaming, she ran weeping into my grandmother's arms. Of course she had seen the appendages of her great nephews when they were babies, but later confided to my mother that she had no idea that they grew so big. Needless to say, the fishmonger had to manage without his parsley thereafter. My mother would gleefully recount the 'disgraceful' episode to other female members of the family, in which the offending organ, like the fish in a fisherman's tale, grew larger by the telling.

There were no labour saving devices in the 1940's: washing was done by hand, and though electric irons were available, neither Granny nor Aunt Julie were prepared to use them, considering such innovations dangerous. They preferred instead the old fashioned flat irons heated up on a prehistoric gas stove. There was no fridge, so keeping food cold was a problem; a marble slab in the pantry was all that stood between sour milk and liquid butter. Sometimes in very hot weather the items to be kept cold were sat in a bowl of cold water. Carpet cleaning was done first by sprinkling the carpet with used tea-leaves to lift the dust, and then sweeping them up with an old Ewbank[2]; this left the house smelling of stale tea for some days afterwards. The only source of entertainment in the house was a large wooden radio, but only Grandad was allowed to twiddle with the knobs. Throughout the day the radio was largely silent, and after the nine o'clock evening news, when the old man insisted on everyone going to bed, it was switched off. We did have a piano in the front room. My mother would sometimes play and sing to it, but only when the old tyrant was out. The piano came into its own on birthdays and at Christmas time when Aunt Audrey, a fairly accomplished player, knocked out all the old favourites such as 'Roll Out the Barrel' and 'She'll be Coming Round the Mountain'. I don't remember Grandad ever joining in such sessions but he wasn't sufficient of a killjoy to complain about them. Perhaps it was because Uncle Bill kept him occupied with a few games of cribbage in the dining room.

I can't imagine that my grandfather had always been the way he was. In his youth he must have had a lighter side to his nature; after all, he did manage to charm my grandmother into marriage. Watching him gripping the arms of his chair so tightly that his knuckles turned white, it was a possibility sometimes mooted by my mother that he suffered from some form of battle fatigue; certainly he had spent long periods in the trenches during the First World War. When I was a small boy, I did attempt to engage him on the subject but he always seemed reluctant to talk about his experiences. After the First World War, if a soldier was physically fit when demobbed that was all that mattered. Little was known about such phenomena as post-traumatic stress disorder. I have said some unkind things about my grandfather but it is possible that he was attempting to deal with shellshock, a condition that was beyond his control. In later life, when working with other First World War veterans I encountered similar behaviour, but as a child I was unable to understand and looked upon him as the all round bogey-man. Fortunately I had the protection of three women who understood him better than I did. I was well looked after and nurtured, but not overly spoilt. Much attention was paid to good manners in general and table etiquette in particular. Slang words were frowned upon as vulgar and common. My wife snorts with laughter now when I tell her that one of our neighbours once gave me a cowboy outfit for being the best mannered little boy on the road. With my credentials for good behaviour having been duly endorsed by the neighbours, I was free to discover a wayward life of my own, the way to which lay through the back garden gate my grandfather had constructed to give direct access to a few acres of long abandoned allotments.

The allotments were now overgrown with trees and shrubs and dotted around with derelict brick sheds. They were known to local people as the Cherry Orchards, which they may have been at some time in the past, but search as I may, I never found a cherry tree. I was about three or four years old when I was tall enough to unlatch the gate and make a few small, tentative excursions. I must have been observed, for subsequently the gate was tied shut. I was not deterred and soon developed the patience to untie the gate and resume my wanderings. This was bliss compared with the stultifying atmosphere and discipline of a house full of old fogies and my grandfather's oppressive presence. Stretching across the top of the old allotments, and at their outer edge, was a path known as Colliers' Pad. As its name suggests, it was used by miners from the Aspley and Whitemoor estates and served as a short cut on their journey to and from the Radford Pit. Decades of coal dust dropping from their work clothes had turned the Pad coal-black. For some months, the Pad was as far as I dared go. Later, out rambling with older boys, I was delighted to discover a fully functioning farm, with fields of corn and cows grazing in pastureland. This was between Chalfont Drive and Aspley Lane, barely half a mile from our house.

During the summer of 1944, Chalfont Drive, the next road up from Westholme Gardens, was in the process of being extended to what would become the local Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency. German and Italian prisoners of war were bussed in from their camps to dig the foundations and lay the hardcore for the road. I busied myself chucking lumps of rock about in an attempt to help out. My efforts, I decided, were appreciated, for they caused much amusement among the prisoners who always gave me a brushing down before I made my way home. My mother disapproved of these visits, perhaps fearing that I might be accused of fraternising with the enemy, but to me they were just decent men who liked having me around.

Beyond the Colliers' Pad was a patch of scrubland, sometimes used as a football pitch by the local boys, and home to an enormous elm tree. For many years there had been speculation as to how tall it really was, but no one ever came up with the answer. I decided to ask my uncle Alf. Uncle Alf, first mate in the Merchant Navy, was home on leave after being shipwrecked yet again. He assured me that I had come to the right man. Uncle Alf was one of my heroes: he kept a revolver in his kit bag for quelling mutinies and warding off pirates. While an apprentice, he had climbed the tallest mast of a sailing barque and had stood on the topping off button. If anyone could climb that tree and measure it, Uncle Alf was the man. He rummaged around in his kit bag and retrieved a small polished box, which I assumed must be a large measuring tape, and accompanied by a gang of excited local boys determined not to miss the drama, we set off for the mighty elm. Having reached the tree, we were surprised to see Uncle Alf continue on past it until he was a hundred feet or more away. He then opened his box and took out a strange looking instrument, sighted it on the tree, and pronounced that it was ninety-three feet, two and a half inches exactly. Disappointed at not witnessing an heroic climb, we demanded to know how he could be so sure. He told us that he would reveal the mysteries of the sextant when our maths could cope with it, and that an officer and a gentleman didn't tell lies. With this we had to be satisfied. Alas, he never got around to teaching me how to use his sextant.

With the big elm behind me providing a prominent landmark, I set off for more distant adventures, discovering a landscape of rolling hillocks (known locally as the Humps and Hollows), and beyond that an ancient woodland, which in springtime was carpeted with bluebells. A stream meandering through the wood was clogged with empty shell casings. Nearby, the camouflaged barrels of anti-aircraft guns jutted menacingly through the foliage. On hearing the voices of their crews, I decided that I probably shouldn't be there and turned back. It wasn't the Brazilian rain forest, but to a diminutive Jungle Jim it was a notable discovery, and later on a useful one: in the harsh winter of 1947, when fuel was almost unobtainable, I was able to return with my mother on a logging expedition. This was the winter when friends and I built an igloo in the turning circle at the end of the road. We built it in November and it was still there in the May.

My attempts to emulate Marco Polo were seriously disrupted when I had to start school at Whitemoor Infants, where the Education Authorities attempted to bring some order to the uncharted waters of my mind. I was four and a half years old and my only academic achievement so far was the ability to spell the word 'little'. It impressed my mother, but looking through the windows of the long row of classrooms, and the bent heads of the pupils scribbling away, I was gripped with anxiety and refused to let go of my mother's hand. There was no means of escape as she led me down the unfamiliar corridors, which smelt unpleasantly of boiling cabbage and sour milk. My destination was Miss Maltby's infant class where clay modelling was in progress. This didn't seem too bad, and before long I was engrossed in making an egg in an egg-cup, for which I received lavish praise from Miss Maltby and had the honour of having it placed on a shelf with similarly prized specimens. There they remained for such time as it took for our embryonic egos to drain out of them, after which they were discreetly returned to the clay tub to be recycled into other 'major works of art'.

When my mother returned to collect me at the end of the afternoon session, I was able to tell her that I quite liked school, little knowing that playing with clay would be gradually phased out and replaced with times tables learned by rote, and an introduction to pen and ink. I was left handed, and though the barbaric practice of making left handers write with their right hand had been abandoned, it is no easy thing to push, rather than drag a pen loaded with ink across a page without blotting it. Writing with the left hand also covers what has just been written, making the task even more difficult. As a consequence, my written work would have pushed the proverbial spider into the upper echelons of penmanship.

For six months I bore it with fortitude, not helped by the onset of the severe stammer that was to blight the rest of my school life and beyond. But respite came in the form of chicken pox: a period of three weeks' quarantine at home was recommended to allow it to run its course, but with the caveat that I was forbidden to mix with other children. It was going to be a lonely three weeks. Casting around for some activity to relieve the boredom, I started work on an elephant trap outside the back garden gate where it led out onto the old allotments. The intended victim was my grandfather, as elephants were rare in our neck of the woods. In order to trap him, I would have to complete the work before Sunday, when the old man used the gate on his way out to his afternoon walk. This gave me six days to prepare it. The soil was soft and sandy, so I made good progress, covering the pit with foliage at the end of each digging session. After six days of toil, the trap was nearly two feet deep. I was so engrossed in my work that I failed to hear my mother calling me in for tea. I was just completing the finishing touches when my mother discovered me. "Dada could break a leg down there," she said, peering into the pit. "You'd better fill it in after tea." I feigned innocence, mumbling something about digging the trap to deter scrumpers from stealing our apples.

Some days later, still smarting at the discovery of my elephant trap, I decided to examine the contents of Grandad's shed. Ever cautious of my curious fingers tampering with his belongings, Grandad always made sure his shed was locked and the key placed on its hook on the kitchen dresser. After diverting my granny and Aunt Julie from their kitchen duties, I sneaked the key from its hook, opened the shed door, and spent a happy hour, undetected, riffling through all the forbidden delights: saws, planes, machetes, chisels, and other sharp implements, the purpose of which were a mystery. Mission completed without mishap, I discovered that in my excitement I had misplaced the shed key. What to do? No time to hang about, just shut the shed door and hope for the best. Grandad was furious and convinced that I was responsible for the keys' loss. For a week he was calling for retribution. My granny, Aunt Julie and my mother stood their ground and defended me. "You have no proof," they told him. Then a week later I found the key; it had worked its way into the lining of my jacket. The problem was I couldn't just hang it back up.

My solution was to push it through a hole in the pocket of Grandad's gardening coat and into the lining, similar to the way that I had originally lost it. When the subject of the shed key came up again, I suggested to my mother that she take one more look in Grandad's gardening coat. The old ogre received both barrels from the women of the house. His discomfort and embarrassment were acute. This was better than an elephant trap and nearly as good as Christmas. I wouldn't like to give the impression that my grandfather and I were always at war; we did have a truce from time to time: a bit like Christmas day in the trenches. He would take me on short walks; he was knowledgeable concerning nature and taught me what could be eaten, such as elderberries, the new leafy shoots of hawthorn trees, which he called 'bread and cheese', and in the autumn the haw berries. He helped me overcome my fear of bees by encouraging me to put my hand into our big lavender bush and allow the bees to crawl all over it. He once took me for a walk along the Trent Embankment, but let himself down. After warning me on several occasions to stay away from the water's edge, he gave me a clip round the ear. Justified though he was, I bridled at this assault on my person and resumed hostilities immediately. I should have taken this incident as a warning: two years later, my father took my cousins and I on a similar trip, and while playing about near the water's edge, I fell in and nearly drowned. The water was over my head when an elderly gentleman fished me out in the time-honoured manner, with the handle of his umbrella. To complete my embarrassment, my father removed all my wet clothing in front of my two female cousins and sundry spectators. I then had to travel home on the trolley bus with only my father's jacket to cover my nakedness. Fortunately we were not living at my grandparents' at that time, which saved me the further embarrassment of having to face my grandfather who, I was sure, would have had difficulty resisting the opportunity to snigger and gloat.

### Chapter Two

When victory in Europe was announced a street party was organised. Tables were pushed together all down the street and covered with tablecloths. An array of party food, not seen for five years, appeared. Scarce items, such as tinned salmon and tinned fruit, were brought out of hoarding. Cakes and pastry were made using real eggs and precious butter. Eggs were so scarce during the war that, in our house, it was normal to have half an egg each. Elderly neighbours, rarely seen, joined in and did their bit. The sense of relief brought people back to life. The residents of Westholme Gardens had stuck together and had looked after each other throughout the war. Now, at last, there was a feeling of optimism; they were learning how to enjoy themselves again. Their men would soon be coming home. But not Mr. Stevens from No.6: to his disgust, at the age of forty-two, he had received his call up papers and been sent off to fight the Japanese. At that time, forty-two was considered middle-aged. When I met him twenty years later he was still grumbling about it. That he was lucky enough to have survived to express his umbrage didn't seem to have occurred to him. By the time victory in Japan was announced, and celebrated with another street party, we all knew that he was alive and well, which added extra poignancy to the celebrations. When my grandfather joined the other ancient firewatchers to put out their last pretend incendiary bomb and curl up their stirrup pumps for the last time, we knew the war was truly over.

When the war in Europe ended on 8th May 1945, I was about five and a half years old. The gas mask that all children took to school could finally be discarded, as could the blackouts that covered all house windows. Rationing was still in force and would, with minor adjustments, remain so for some years to come.

As the first Christmas since the defeat of Germany approached, I was looking forward with exited anticipation to a visit from my father's youngest brother, Uncle Barry, not least because on such occasions as birthdays and other celebrations, he never failed to bring me some unusual and unique present. Although I had a sneaking respect for my Grandfather and greatly admired my mother's brother, Uncle Alf who was serving as an officer in the merchant navy, I received little if any affection from either of them. My greatest love and affection was reserved for Uncle Barry. His visits were occasions of unalloyed joy for me. Most important of all, he came to see me and then spent hours performing conjuring tricks usually involving a book and an old silver sixpence, which he gave to me at the end of his visit. Here was a true kindred spirit who knew how to stir the imagination of a small boy, perhaps being only seven years older than myself; it was not too long since he had been a small boy himself. His gifts had a whiff of the subversive about them in contrast to the stuffy, self-improving variety favoured by most of my relatives. He made these presents himself and my mother viewed them with great suspicion, suspecting that rather than being tutored in the ways of righteousness, prescribed by the older generation, I was being taught the fine arts of sabotage. This was hardly surprising, as his presents usually resembled complicated explosive devices with wires and batteries connected to small, mysterious contraptions that ticked and whirred. I am sure my mother suspected some diabolical conspiracy, fuelled by her firmly held belief that all the Whyman males had anarchic tendencies and marched to a different drum. I think, she was afraid that I might blow myself up, for no sooner had Uncle Barry left the house than my mother, her hands trembling, confiscated these potential bombs and hid them. The explanation being that I was too young for them at the moment. Of course I was furious and searched for them everywhere, rifling through chests of draws and the tops of wardrobes but to no avail. After months of virtually non-stop interrogation, she eventually confessed that she had buried these dangerous devices in the garden. This was a mistake. I at once set out upon a treasure hunt that brought me into direct conflict with my grandfather, who objected to the random excavation of his kitchen garden. My mother's attempts to reduce Uncle Barry's influence achieved nothing. She could only stand and watch as whenever he called on us, I received him with all the enthusiasm of a royal visit. He was however yet to produce his piece de resistance, which in my opinion elevated him to the status of a god.

Just before my seventh birthday, he took me to the Goose Fair and regardless of expense, accompanied me on a terrifying orgy of excitement, as we sampled all the most dangerous rides. He then encouraged me to try my luck on most, of the many amusements for which the fair is justifiably famous. Uncle Barry obviously knew that to children, quantity has a quality all of it's own. By the end of our Goose Fair adventure, I was sticky and feeling slightly groggy, the result of too many choc-ices and too much candyfloss. I was festooned with balloons and fancy hats and clutching numerous fairground prizes, the winning of which had cost much more than they could ever be worth. My grandparents would have been most disapproving of such super spoiling but I would have been the envy of small boys everywhere.

My grandparents generation and to some extent my mother's, still adhered to the old adage that a child should be seen and not heard. I think Uncle Barry grasped that I was in need of some robust, male attention and set out to provide it. There are times when a child needs to be made to feel special. Uncle Barry did this for me and it is a gift that I have carried with me all of my life.

Christmas 1945 would be the same 'make and mend' affair that it had been for the last four years. Crepe and coloured paper decorations were retrieved from boxes stored on the tops of wardrobes, and pinned up, at my insistence, in every room in the house, plus some new ones that my mother and I made our selves. My cousins, Pamela and Joan, came to spend Christmas Eve with me, all of us sleeping in the same bed: a novelty in itself, but combined with the excited anticipation of a visit from Santa Claus, we were unlikely to get much sleep: nor did we. On Christmas day, none of us could remember going to sleep as we were hoping to catch Santa filling our optimistically large pillowcases with presents. But we must have slept, for they were duly filled with all manner of stuff, some bought new and some second hand: it made no difference to us. The first boatloads of oranges were coming into the country, so we all got an orange: a rare treat during the war. The Canadian Red Cross donated Christmas parcels for the children of war-torn Britain and we received one of these between us, filled with sweets, chocolates, and small novelty toys. We were delighted with our parcel and to this day I try to buy Canadian Cheddar cheese as a small thank you.

On Christmas day, my father's parents paid us a visit. My paternal grandfather, Grandpa Whyman, had also served in France during the First World War and been invalided out suffering from shell shock and deafness. As was usual on such visits Grandpa Whyman played a few games of cribbage with Grandad Greenwood, while my grandmothers, my mother, and my aunts, great and small, drank tea and nattered about their domestic concerns. My cousins and I were too busy with our Christmas presents to pay much attention to the adults. As darkness fell there was the usual singsong round the piano in the front room, but this time 'The White Cliffs of Dover' had a great deal more significance. The world it seemed would very soon be free.

After victory in Japan our enemies had been defeated, but another one descended upon us: smog, the result of burning sub-standard coal in domestic fires and power stations. It killed thousands of the elderly and vulnerable in an epidemic of bronchitis and other lung conditions, until the Clean Air Act was passed and smokeless zones were established. When the smog came down we were allowed to leave school early, following our teachers in a crocodile to our various destinations. There must have been a dozen or more of these 'pea soupers', as they were called, every year throughout the 1940's. During the war there were no streetlights, but after the war, when they were switched back on, it seemed to make little difference; we could still only see a few inches in front of our faces. Due to the good will of our teachers, and the kindness of older pupils, we all usually made it home without serious mishap.

Throughout 1946, the nation's fighting men started to come home, and Westholme Gardens welcomed its heroes back in the time-honoured fashion. News of a homecoming quickly circulated among the neighbours. Mr. Sparks, in his grocery van that stocked almost everything that was available, came to the street twice a week. His visits provided an opportunity for the housewives to swap news and gossip. As a result, on the day each man or woman was due home, every house flew Union Jacks from its bedroom windows. There were twenty-six houses on Westholme Gardens that had sent twelve men and one woman to war, and all of them returned home without serious injury. But some of us were to learn that physical injury was only one of the hazards of war. Nevertheless, it was still a minor miracle[3]. I was hoping my father would be home for Bonfire Night, the first since 1938, but he was still in Yugoslavia. Bonfire Night was an opportunity for people to get rid of six years' worth of accumulated junk, so we ended up with a bonfire nearly ten feet high in the turning circle at the bottom of the street. No one seemed bothered about scorched fences and burnt hedges, and there were a few of those before the night was out. Fireworks were rationed, so it was decided to pool them and take it in turns to light them. We now had most of our men back home and there was a carefree party atmosphere that lasted long into the night.

The run up to Christmas 1946 found me blighted with severe toothache and my first appointment with the dentist was arranged. It was discovered that I had several abscesses and some of my milk teeth needed removing. The suffocating sensation of the evil smelling rubber device used to deliver the gas sent me into an uncontrollable panic. I leaped out of the chair, tearing off the offending gas mask, and proceeded to dismantle gas pipes and other connected equipment, scattering instruments in all directions. Eventually, the dentist, his nurse and my mother managed to subdue me, and, held down by three pairs of hands, I succumbed to the gas. This experience left me with an abiding hatred of dentists, but in future the dentist was not going to be easily avoided. The National Health system was just getting into its stride and school children's teeth were a priority. Accordingly, an examination took place at school to deal with all the bad teeth, green teeth, and in some instances no teeth at all.

Those needing treatment were sent to the Children's Dental Clinic, on Chaucer Street in the centre of Nottingham. When the first victims returned to tell their tale, it emerged that the clinic was held in a long surgery lined with dentists' chairs. There, men with blood-caked aprons, and blood-smeared hairy hands and arms, hauled the teeth out of the wretched mouths of terrified, weeping children, casting teeth nonchalantly into buckets already overflowing with gory diseased molars. If that didn't scare the shit out of you, they also drilled and filled teeth without anaesthetic. This did not sound like a child friendly experience but more akin to the surgeon's cabin on the HMS Victory at Trafalgar. I took all necessary action in order to avoid this horrible experience, including truancy if need be, and also destroyed the nurse's notes that informed my parents that I needed treatment.

My father was the last service man on the road to return home and received the same flag waving welcome reserved for the other men and women. I was seven years old when he and my mother met me at the school gates. I had not seen him for three years and sprang into his arms like a monkey, a memory my father treasured until the day he died. My father was much distressed by the severity of my stammer and set about ensuring that I could defend myself in the likely event of bullying or teasing by other children. He had been a keen amateur boxer and had fought for his regiment. He set about teaching me to deliver a straight left by tying a ball of paper to a string and dangling it at head height from a branch of one of our apple trees. When I could hit the pretend nose ten times out of ten, he declared himself satisfied, saying, "It wouldn't deter a skilled boxer, but skilled boxers don't generally go about taking the mickey out of kids with speech impediments." I was still an enthusiastic wanderer and treated the adjoining old allotments as my own personal fiefdom. While out beating my boundaries one day, I came across a circle of beautifully built, small, igloo shaped grass huts. They had certainly not been there the day before and seemed to have sprung up like mushrooms overnight. Fearing that the grass huts might be inhabited by a tribe of pygmies, I decided to go for reinforcements. I soon gathered together a band of local boys, and all armed to the teeth with spears and homemade bows and arrows, we sneaked through Grandad's back garden and into the allotments. We approached the huts with extreme caution, bows and arrows at the ready. Standing before each hut, we called out for the inhabitants to surrender, and on receiving no reply, sent a volley of arrows flying through the entrance. Having had no response from the other huts, as we approached the last one we were disturbed to hear a snuffling and rustling coming from the interior. Our bravado vanished in an instant and we stood frozen to the spot as, very slowly, a hedgehog staggered out, blinking in the sunlight. On close examination, the huts proved to be expertly constructed, perfectly round and as delicately woven as a Persian carpet. It would be a few years before science fiction comics appeared, but had we been familiar with them, no doubt these extraordinary little houses would have been attributed to the work of extra-terrestrial beings. We used them as dens until they eventually disintegrated, but never discovered who had built them.

Uncle Alf returned home around the same time as my father, but all was not well, for though he was physically unharmed, he was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He had served on the ships of the Merchant Navy convoys taking supplies to Russia, and had survived when, on three separate occasions, his ship was torpedoed from underneath him. His symptoms included nightmares, during which he had flashbacks of the times he had spent in an open boat in the icy waters of the North Sea. He fought his depression bravely, but it would be a long time before he could go back to sea again. Desperate as he was to return, the Merchant Navy needed its officers to be one hundred per cent fit; for the time being he was unable to pass the medical.

With the war over, my family was now receiving the butcher's bill. My Uncle Ken returned from the Royal Navy hospital where he had been recovering from a fall on the deck of the Ark Royal. He had severely damaged his back and would wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life. My fathers' sister, Aunt Sheila, served in the WAAF[4] and had one of her legs mangled in a barrage balloon cable. She was lucky not to lose her leg, and walked with a pronounced limp. Most tragic of all, my father's brother, Uncle Lawson, had died in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. My father, who for the moment only suffered from recurring bouts of sand fly fever, had been on one occasion blown out of his slit trench on the Salerno beachhead. He re-gained consciousness ten days later on a hospital ship bound for Alexandria, Egypt, completely black and blue all over his body. On another occasion, while serving as a despatch rider, he was attacked by a German plane and machine-gunned off the road. When he came to, he thought he was covered with blood from head to toe, but had in fact been thrown into a field of tomatoes. He had though received a bullet that went through his thigh and into the fuel tank of his motorbike, which fortunately didn't explode. His wound was close to the Whyman family jewels; this was good news for my brothers and sister: another inch or two the wrong way and they would never have been born. For the moment my father was all right, but two World Wars had changed the face of my family forever.

With the birth of my brother Philip, in March 1947, my grandparents' house was getting overcrowded. Uncle Alf needed peace and solitude in order to recover. Despite a number of attempts to get back to sea, the Merchant Navy still considered him unfit.

We spent the next year and a half living first with my mother's sister, Audrey, and her family, and then with my father's sister, Sheila, and her family, but still had no news of our council house. House building had not been a priority during the war, and with the return of millions of service men and women, the housing shortage, despite the government's massive building programs, remained acute. Uncle Alf at last decided that if he couldn't get back to sea, the next best thing would be to live near to it. He moved down to Plymouth where he landed a job in the ironmongery trade. He never gave up his ambition to rejoin the Merchant Navy and fifteen years later, having taken his Master's ticket, he was taken back as a tanker captain. He was a brave and determined man.

With room now available at Granny's, we moved back to Westholme Gardens, making this my fourth move in four years and, for me, yet another school, Robert Shaw Primary. Here the staff were more able to pay attention to the needs of individual pupils; they quickly sent my parents a letter informing them that, as my stammer was so severe, an appointment could be made for me at a newly opened Speech Therapy Clinic, ominously housed in the same building as the dental clinic, on Chaucer Street in Nottingham. After an examination, it was suggested that I could have some sort of operation on my throat, but there were risks attached to it. Mercifully, my mother turned it down, and I remained uncured. When I was ten and a half, I took the eleven plus exam and failed. Moving around from school to school didn't help, and neither did my stammer.

Then, just before my brother Charlie was born, in October 1949, we were allotted our long awaited council house at 10 Orion Close, on the newly built Bilborough Estate. It had been a three-year wait. My new school, John Player Secondary on Denewood Crescent, Bilborough, had a bad reputation. It was separated into two schools, one for boys and one for girls, but there was no interaction between them. Our house was within the school's catchment area and I had no other choice but to attend.

Our new council house was brick built, unlike most of the others on the estate which were constructed of steel and concrete. It had three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a lounge, a dining room and kitchen downstairs, and, an unheard of luxury in those days, a downstairs toilet. Outside were two outhouses: one for coal and the other that we used as a shed. There was a good-sized garden, back and front, which pleased my father, as he had an inclination to indulge in a bit of horticulture. Living in other people's houses, this was a pleasure that had so far been denied him and he proved to be an adept gardener. My mother was also pleased to be at last the mistress of her own house, particularly the kitchen, though her efforts in the culinary department were less successful than my father's in the garden. We had no furniture, so everything had to be bought new, and it took some weeks before we had everything we needed, but eventually we settled down to what we all hoped would be blissful family life.

Player Secondary School, built around 1920, occupied the centre of Denewood Crescent and had earned a long-standing reputation for toughness. Its catchment area, which included Denewood Crescent, were where the residents of the Narrow Marsh slums had been re-housed some years before, following their demolition. Narrow Marsh was considered to be the worst slum in Europe. The ex-slum dwellers still retained some of their old habits and were said to keep their coal in the bath. Certainly the rag and bone men among them kept their horses and carts in their front gardens and were a common sight on the way to school. For me, coming from the leafy suburbs, it was a source of amusement, but just a fact of life for the residents. Knowing the history of the inhabitants of the estate, it was with some trepidation that I enrolled at the school where they sent their children. The pupils at Player School certainly looked a tough lot, many of them with skulls shaved to the bone and daubed with gentian violet: ringworm, scabies and impetigo were endemic. It was plain that most of the boys came from poor backgrounds of the 'first up, best-dressed' variety. Plimsolls in summer and Wellingtons in winter seemed to be the standard footwear. In the hungry '50's, all manner of eccentric clothing was pressed into service by cash-strapped parents. Cut down long trousers, old scout uniforms and ex-army great coats were so common that no one bothered to comment on them. By the standards of the other pupils, I was quite well dressed when I started at the school, but as my parents' circumstances deteriorated I became indistinguishable from the rest; an almost total disregard for my personal appearance didn't help matters.

With such a bunch of hard cases to deal with, the teachers had only one effective way of maintaining discipline: the strap. But unpleasant and painful as it appeared when I first started at the school, I soon learned that some straps were to be feared more than others. A few teachers favoured the regulation taws, a lightweight three-tongued strap. This was the only legal strap, but other teachers, realising that this ineffectual instrument was held in sneering contempt by most of the boys, opted to fashion more robust weapons of their own. These varied in weight and pain inducing properties, starting with the taws and ending the scale with the monster wielded by the metal work teacher, Mr. Leeman. This beast, made from half-inch thick industrial leather belting, could deliver a hand-numbing blow that remained painful for days. Needless to say, it was the most feared of all the straps. It spent most of its time pickling in a jar of vinegar, which stood on a shelf behind Mr. Leeman's desk. Pickling, we were told, made it doubly effective. Unfortunately for the teachers, the frequent use of the strap reaped diminishing returns as the boys became inured to it. Among ourselves we devised the correct way to receive it: that was to remain silent and expressionless, as though the blow had had no impact at all, and then to walk nonchalantly back to our desks. So strong was the code that it was rare to witness a boy disgrace himself by shedding a tear. The strap was used to punish minor offences such as talking, not paying attention and chewing gum and sweets in class. Anything major, such as deliberate disruption, or offering a teacher violence, was dealt with by the Headmaster, Mr. Jones. For truly heinous crimes, a boy could be caned on the stage at assembly.

Our education consisted of the talk and chalk variety and endless paragraphs copied from the blackboard. History embraced kings and queens, the dissolution of the monasteries and the Corn Laws. Geography mostly covered the British Empire. English literature attempted, but failed, to interest us in the classics. English language devoted much of its time to parsing sentences. Art was taught using powder paint and sugar paper: almost impossible materials to work with. As with most stammerers, reading out loud in class was torture. The teachers seemed to fall into two categories: those who never asked me to read out loud and others who apparently thought that I might derive some therapeutic benefit from the experience. The worst of the latter was the RI teacher, Mr. Bowley, who was also the school scoutmaster. I was delighted when in my second year, aged twelve, he was charged with sexually abusing some members of his scout group and promptly dismissed. Our teachers were hard working and dedicated, but they must have felt like missionaries attempting to save the souls of cannibals. Most of their pupils were semi-feral. Despite the boring nature of the lessons, our teachers deserve some credit: few pupils from Player's were unable to read, write, and add up by the time they finished school.

In our first year, playtimes were dedicated to a game of marbles, which involved empty bullet cases. There were plenty of these about at the end of the war, apparently brought home by demobbed soldiers. There were also many live rounds in circulation. Boys would bash the end of the live cartridge with a brick, which resulted in some serious injuries and the occasional fatality. Empty bullet cases were used as the target in the marbles games and became the prime commodity in a complicated barter system. The most popular items traded were horror comics, chewing gum and lead soldiers. Odd pennies and halfpennies were acceptable when all else failed. All these items had a fixed exchange rate and disagreements or fights were rare.

My fellow pupils, for all their rough and ready appearance and lack of social graces, were as affable and kind-hearted as any set of young boys anywhere. Despite their war-like reputations, I experienced no attempts at bullying and none of them ever mocked or took the mickey out of my stammer. There were two or three boys with hair lips and cleft pallets but they were never subjected to mockery either, although they could have been prime targets. This was before the National Health System got around to correcting this condition. The school was, however, not without its bad apples: it did produce a couple of murderers. One pupil, David Denis, aged thirteen, hacked his grandparents to death with an axe. Another, Brin Masterman, unusually for Player School ex-pupils, became a prison officer in later life. He murdered his wife by pushing her down the stairs. I was involved in a friendly wrestling match with the latter while we were still at school, never thinking for a second that I might be locked in combat with a future murderer.

So far I had been given no opportunity to use my carefully nurtured straight left, but when the inter-house boxing tournament was announced (an event in which every boy was expected to take part), I was not unduly worried. I despatched my first three opponents, all nursing bloody noses, in the first rounds of the contests and was fairly confident of receiving a cup. After the third match however, the sports-master took me to one side and told me, on pain of being disqualified, to concentrate on the body in future. I was a bit miffed at this piece of advice, as I would be bereft of my killer punch. My next opponent was under no such constraints and I was soon receiving treatment for a bloody nose myself. I was understandably furious but knew better than to complain. Nearly sixty years later the injustice of it still rankles.

By the second year at school, the marbles players had discovered something infinitely more interesting: wanking. What is sometimes termed 'the solitary vice' was anything but! Classrooms were furnished with desks with lift up lids, behind which enthusiasts could indulge themselves without being observed by the teachers. The back row of the class was their prefered location and wanking races became their passion. The first to ejaculate was deemed the winner and small wagers were placed on the results. Teachers must have been aware of the activity but I don't recall any of them ever drawing attention to it, even though it went on while lessons were in progress. It may have been school policy to ignore it providing it didn't get out of hand, ha ha. By the time they had reached thirteen, the back row boys had graduated to the real thing. I came across three of them one evening while crossing a recreation ground that bordered the estate. A well-built girl of fourteen or fifteen, with swarthy features and lank, dark hair, was lying on the newly mown grass, her grubby bra hitched up under her chin, and an equally grubby pair of knickers thrown to one side. The three boys, all with their short trousers round their ankles, were fondling her big round breasts and taking it in turns to mount her, hopping on and off like frogs at mating time. She was lying there uncomplaining, and wearing the smile of a contented attention seeker. So engrossed were they in their newfound sport that they gave no thought to me; I passed quite close to them and they must have seen me.

My mother gave birth to my brother Charlie a few months after we had moved into our council house. She now had three children to look after and was not happy with her lot. Cracks began to appear in my parents' relationship and it soon became clear that neither of them were cut out for marriage and children. I am sure that had they not had children, their marriage would have crumbled. Although my mother was a reluctant housewife, to put it mildly, and an uninterested cook, she tried to be a responsible mother. However, my father made her job almost impossible: in short, he behaved as though he were a single man. His preoccupation with motorcars made one feel as though he was allergic to public transport. As a consequence, the jobs he took invariably included a car, and most were poorly paid. He attempted a couple of private ventures with money borrowed from relatives (he never had any of his own), but as usual, the car came before everything else. Once it was standing outside the house he lost interest. Strangely, his relatives indulged him with little complaint. According to my mother my much loved uncle Barry shouldered the repayments on one of my father's cars, but rather than sell it and relieve his brother of the burden, my father continued to use the car, and seemed oblivious to the hardship he was causing. His benefactor was not out of sight and out of mind, but living a few doors away across the road. My father's addiction to cigarettes was another drain on resources. While out fishing with him one day, my brother Philip and I counted three empty cigarette packets drifting down from where he was fishing; each one would have contained twenty Players cigarettes and that was only an afternoons fishing. If I said that he stayed at home a couple of nights a year, it would probably be an exaggeration. He was also an ardent whist player and spent most nights at whist drives, after which he would go for a few pints, and inevitably, for he was a tall and handsome man, would find himself unable to ignore the blandishments of an attractive woman, if not initiating the proceedings himself.

These dalliances would not go undetected by my mother as my father left clues too often for it to be carelessness. He seemed intent on goading my mother into fits of jealous rage. If that was his intention, he was more than successful. After smouldering all day, brooding on his iniquities, the moment he stepped through the door she erupted. Her tongue was cruel and vicious, and a long litany of his crimes and shortcomings would be heaped upon his head. When she ran out of those, the characters of every member of his family received similar treatment. Her problem was that she never knew when to shut up, and my father, after enduring a lengthy period of verbal violence, would end up slapping her. In her book, being slapped by one's husband was, if anything, worse than adultery. The tirade would then continue with even greater fury until they were both exhausted and made their separate ways to the same bed. We children were awake and terrified, stiff with apprehension, and wondering if this time, one of them might kill the other. After a night like that, and there were many of them, we were expected to attend school and concentrate on our lessons. My mother never seemed to realise that nothing was going to change my father's behaviour and that all she was achieving was the traumatising of her children and the blighting of our life chances. Coming from her parents' house of genteel poverty, she considered certain classes of people beneath her, but I am sure that among the ex-slum dwellers of Denewood Crescent most of their children experienced a greater sense of security, and received more affection than we did. Ours was a Spartan existence: Christmas cards, birthday cards and presents were non-events: we never received any. I felt sorry for my brothers: I at least had had ten years of receiving those things at a time in a child's life when they are important.

Fortunately for me, at the age of eleven I was able to get a paper round. Out of my eleven shillings wages I was obliged to hand over half of it to my mother, but at least I had a few shillings to spend on sweets, comics and the occasional trip to the cinema. Living in a house like ours, where contention was the norm, any form of escapism was welcome. My paper round gave me the opportunity to indulge my blossoming interest in naked women. Before I delivered them to the customers, I was able to peruse such sexually titillating publications as Tit Bits, Reveille, and the nude photographs in the Amateur Photographer, the only magazine that published complete nudity. I also gleaned some knowledge of human perversity from The News of the World, sometimes referred to as 'The News of the Screws', but it was some time before I understood some of the more obscure euphemisms woven into the text.

At the age of eleven, a short walk from our house I discovered the local lending library and took full advantage of it. It was free and I could borrow six or seven books a week. Carried away by the adventures of Biggles, Warrels and Just William, I was too engrossed to bother about the mayhem going on around me. The library was a great friend and did much to further my education. Within five years I had read my way through most of its books and graduated to the Central Library in the city centre.

Reading apart, I spent as little time in the house as possible. The new estate was almost surrounded by what had once been woodland. The trees had been felled prior to the war and had pollarded themselves. The new growth now stood around twenty feet high and was home to rabbits and foxes, and other wild life too nocturnal or too timid to be observed by school boys crashing about. These woods provided a deeply satisfying frisson of adventure and I spent many happy hours, regardless of the weather, wandering about in them either alone or with friends. The Wollaton Canal, now abandoned, was another place of adventure and distraction. In its deep, eerie locks one felt the presence of long-dead narrow-boatmen and crossed along the ancient wood and iron lock gates with great caution. One slip and there would be no way out. It would be a brave swimmer who would dive in to rescue you. In the fishing season, small boys and men would be dotted along the banks of the basins with a keen eye on their floats, for there were some large fish in there. The bailiff charged small boys tupence a day and never asked to see their licence. It was an inexpensive day's sport and very therapeutic. My mind was completely oblivious to worldly troubles while concentrating on the tip of a float.

One of the woods ran along the side of Wollaton Pit, which at that time was still being worked. With two friends, I sought the source of a small stream that ran through the woods. We traced it back to a three feet diameter culvert, and decided to carry on up into it in order to find out where the water was coming from. We were thwarted on our first attempt by the lack of a torch, but a few days later, having obtained one, we set off again up the dark tunnel, crouching almost double to avoid the low roof. It seemed to go on forever and we looked in vain for a light to indicate that the journey was coming to an end. Just as we were getting a dose of cold feet, a small light appeared and we continued toward it. On reaching the source of the light, we found that we had travelled underneath the spoil heaps of the pit and ended up in an inspection chamber on the canal bank, used for the miners' shower water. We returned the way we had come. Later, realising how dangerous it could have been had there been a flash flood or a roof fall in which we might have been trapped, we decided not to repeat the experience.

Every year, Player School sent those of its pupils who wished to go, to a summer school called Pipewood camp, for the whole of the summer holiday. The fee was miniscule, enabling poor parents to pay. When I asked my father if I could go he said no, and surprised us all by saying that it was his intention to hire a caravan on the East Coast for our summer holiday. No one took him seriously as we had all been disappointed many times before by his rash promises. When the date of the intended holiday arrived, we were all stunned to learn that for once he was telling the truth. We loaded up his latest passion, a pre-war Wolsley, and set off. Our destination, he told us, was Hogsthorpe. We arrived at the campsite ninety miles away without mishap, which in itself was a minor miracle, as most of his cars broke down well before they reached their destination.

The caravan stood alone in an unprepossessing strip of wasteland, half a mile away from the owners, who were farmers. The caravan was ancient; the paint was peeling and it was constructed of wood. Cooking facilities consisted of a large, battered, brass primus stove. My mother, with two small children to cook for, plus the rest of us, was not impressed, saying she had never cooked on a primus stove before and didn't intend to try now. It began to look as though we would spend the entire holiday eating sandwiches, which did nothing to raise our already deflated spirits. My father, ever the optimist, eventually got the thing working and managed to produce a passable stew, which was to be reproduced in various guises for the rest of our stay. Conditions in the caravan were cramped, and the stench of paraffin was all pervading, as though the very woodwork had been pickled in it. We sought to overcome this unpleasantness by eating outside. Then, to add to our woes, it started to rain in torrents. After spending a night in the evil smelling van, my mother's temper began to fray. My father, in anticipation of this, revealed his plan to go fishing, and duly roused me from my bed at six o'clock the next morning to accompany him.

Our destination was a large lake fabled for its huge carp. One glance at the map revealed the real reason why my father had chosen this location for a holiday: the whole surrounding area of the East Coast contained some of the best course fishing in Lincolnshire. We arrived at the lake with the early morning mist still on the water, and were confronted with a large sign informing us that the lake was for private fishing only. This perturbed my father not a bit. He'd fought for it and he was going to fish in it, sign or no sign. By mid-day we had caught one small perch and then a heavy rainstorm blew up which made further attempts to fish impossible. We packed up and drove back to the caravan in driving rain. For the next three days it rained non-stop while we all looked glumly out of the van's tiny windows, watching the ground outside turn into a quagmire, with nothing to look forward to but another of my father's dubious stews. His carefully planned fishing holiday in tatters, my mother hastened to agree with him that it was time to go. We all piled into the old car, mightily relieved to be going home. The end of the school summer holidays was approaching and I became concerned that I hadn't managed to get a suntan. All the Pipewood camp kids would look as though they had spent a month cruising the Mediterranean. Mucking around in the outhouse one day, I discovered a tin of permanganate of potash among my father's gardening fertilisers. I had read somewhere in a Boys Own magazine that this could be used to achieve a fake tan. I took the tin up to the bathroom, filled the bath, and poured about half a tin of permanganate into the water, which immediately turned a bright purple. This did not concern me, as at that time, I believed implicitly in the veracity of Boys Own 'handy hints and tips'. I immersed myself completely in the bath of purple liquid, and just to make sure, steeped myself in it for half an hour or more. When I eventually got out of the bath and looked in the mirror, I was horrified to see that I had dyed myself bright purple from head to foot. I put on my underpants and went downstairs to gauge my mother's reaction. My parents fortunately saw the funny side of my experiment, their only comment being to the effect that I would be the one doing the explaining. I was still purple when I returned to school and was expecting at least a prolonged ribbing; to my surprise, neither the teachers nor the pupils mentioned it. It was a measure of their accepting nature. They probably thought I was suffering from some obscure skin disease and didn't want to embarrass me by drawing attention to it.

At the end of my third year at Player School, aged thirteen, I, along with other pupils from the new estate, was offered the choice of either staying on at Player or moving to a brand new comprehensive school on our estate. I opted for the new school, Glaisdale Comprehensive. It was said to have better facilities, such as tennis courts and a dedicated pottery studio. The overriding attraction though was that it was a mixed school, and that meant girls, a species in which I was just beginning to take an interest. My sap was rising, but nature had ordained that, for me, there would be no opportunity to play the field. Almost from the first day of attendance, I was smitten by a blue-eyed girl, with short, curly, blonde hair and an attractive, womanly figure. I don't think she had the same passion for me, and though on one occasion I persuaded her to go to the cinema with me, there was no kissing and cuddling. For three years I carried a torch for her to no avail.

Then, one evening when we were both sixteen, in the paper-shop doorway I plucked up the courage to kiss her. I received an enthusiastic response, but in an instant my passion died as quickly as it had been kindled three years before. She suffered from a worse case of halitosis than Blacky, my friend Ronnie Dove's dog, and nobody would allow poor Blacky to come within five yards of them. I was almost swooning with nausea, and not knowing how to break the embrace, I placed my hand on her breast in a most intimate way. This was too much for a well brought up young lady, and she pushed me away. With considerable relief, I bade her a swift goodnight and was on my way. There was obviously no depth to my feelings for I barely gave her a thought thereafter. In those first few weeks at my new school, I had no way of divining the future and the waste of emotional energy I was going to invest in her.

The most striking feature of my new school was the teachers, who appeared to be younger and more enthusiastic than the worn out, leather-elbowed men of Player School. I was now a pupil in a co-ed system and it was refreshing to be taught by men and women, in contrast to the all male staff of my previous school. My Player School records did not follow me, and after two weeks I was placed in what was euphemistically called 'the remove'. It was, in reality, a dustbin for dead heads. I have no doubt that the reason for this was because of my stammer-induced reticence. In a phrase, they thought that I was thick and decided to examine no further. By the next term, after coming top of the class (no great feat in the remove), I was elevated to the B stream. I made the top five the following term and would have been promoted to the A stream had I not been due to leave school at the end of term.

During my last term I had made a large sculpture of a miner, based on one of my neighbours. It was solid: not a practice recommended in the construction of clay models as there is a tendency for them to blow up in the kiln due to air pockets. The sculpture was so large it would barely fit into the kiln and would have to survive three firings. Against all the odds, and despite the dire predictions of the pottery teacher, it came through its ordeal unscathed and claimed its place among the prize exhibits made by other pupils. As my last term came to a close, an open day was organised to showcase the school, it being one of the government's new comprehensives. My masterpiece had an exhibition case all of its own, and photographs of it appeared not only in the local press but in one of the nationals as well. I was inordinately proud of my sculpture and hoped, on the strength of it, to land a job incorporating some sort of creative element. Just before I left school I asked where the model was, assuming it was in some safe place, only to be told that a window cleaner had knocked it over and smashed it. This had apparently happened a few weeks previously and no one had bothered to tell me. At that time, GCSE examinations and sixth forms had not yet been introduced into comprehensive schools, so I left school with no qualifications at all. Apprentices were paid a pittance, barely pocket money, and I knew that I could expect no support from my parents. I was fifteen years old and I realised my future lay in the dead end jobs market.

My first job was that of draper's assistant at Hardy's Textile Warehouse on St. James's Street, near the city centre. It was the first job I had applied for. The wages were only two pounds, five shillings a week: not much, even by the standards of the times, but it was a start and I had no intention of being out of work while I looked for something better. My father bought me a new bicycle, a gaudy machine as its name 'Palm Beach' suggests, but it was robust enough and had the right amount of gadgets, such as calliper brakes, front wheel dynamo, and four speed Sturmy-Archer gears. I was not surprised when I learned that while he accrued the kudos of buying it, I would be paying for it at the rate of ten shillings a week. I would also be paying five shillings a week for the new set of clothes that he had bought for me for my job interview at Hardy's. After I had paid my mother a pound a week for my board, I was left with ten shillings for myself, but that was still twice as much as I had earned from my paper round and I didn't complain. My duties at Hardy's Textile Warehouse were for the most part tidying up bolts of fabric and sweeping the floor. I soon realised that I had undersold myself by at least a pound a week. Worse still, the job was boring and looked set to remain so for the future. After a few weeks I gave in my notice. Mr. Hardy, a small, fat, jovial man, said he was sad to see me leave so soon, but didn't offer me any more money. He was a decent old man and once, when my manager complained in my presence that I didn't show much initiative, Mr. Hardy rounded on him, saying, as he recalled, at my age neither did he.

Sensibly, I had secured another job before giving in my notice. My new job was also in the textile trade, at Drapery Supplies on Middle Pavement, Nottingham. It paid three pounds, five shillings a week, a pound more than Mr. Hardy, and it was a similar five-mile each way bike ride from home. My duties included delivering small parcels around the city centre to other small wholesalers trading in men's and women's underwear. For these deliveries I was provided with a carrier bike, similar to those used by butchers' boys. It was so ancient that spare parts for it were impossible to obtain. When the brake shoes wore out, it was so dangerous that I took to using my own bike to make my deliveries. I objected to the heavy wear and tear that I was inflicting on my bike, for which I was still paying ten shillings a week. Despite my continuing complaints, the firm refused to buy a new delivery bike of their own, and as a result, after three months I started to look for another job.

A friend was currently working for a firm of dyers and finishers called Welden and Wilkinsons, situated in Old Basford, and he informed me of a vacancy, so I applied for the job and was taken on. The great attraction of the new job was the money. It paid a pound more than the last one. It was supposed to be an apprenticeship, which took four years to complete, but anyone of average intelligence could have completed it within a few weeks. I became what was known in the trade as a 'legger'. My job was to pull damp socks onto a flat, leg-shaped former, and pass them across a bench to the time-served man who was known as a 'trimmer'. His job was to check the seams and slide the socks, which were still on their formers, into a steam press. The press resembled a larger version of an old fashioned printing press. An iron bar with a large, cast iron ball at each end was swung round to open and close it. The trimmer put the socks into the press and the legger, after a few minutes, took them out again, stripped the socks from their formers and neatly stacked them in piles of a dozen. He then pulled more socks onto the formers before passing them once again to the trimmer. The cycle was repeated and repeated and repeated. It was the most boring job I had ever encountered. My trimmer, Frank Soar, didn't make the work any easier to endure. A veteran of the First World War, he was as grumpy and taciturn as my grandfather and considered by all to be a legger's nightmare. After three months I could bear it no longer and left to take a job at Bairnswear on Nottingham Road, in Sherwood. They were manufactures and wholesalers of women's and children's woollen knitwear. So eager was I to get away from Frank that I took a ten shillings drop in wages. The firm also produced rug wool for the hobbyists who made their own rugs, and it was in this department that I was to take up my post as foreman's assistant: not as exulted as it sounds.

It was with some trepidation that I arrived for my first day at work. Bairnswear employed predominantly women, and my friends had issued dire warnings to the effect that there were a lot of coarse women employed in the textile trade. This was endorsed by my former trimmer, Frank Soar. In one of his rare moments of talkativeness, he informed me that the last war had made women feel more independent, and that a lot of them had lost their fear of men and were becoming a law unto themselves, and that he, for one, would never work with women. The warnings concerned practices of so called 'initiation' that factory women inflicted on young boys, such as taking down the boys' trousers and smothering their nether regions with machine grease. There was also a prank known as 'cock bottling', which involved filling a small school milk bottle with grease and forcing a young boys penis into it. The result of this indignity can be left to the imagination. As it turned out, my concerns were groundless. The female workforce did contain a rough element, but they were harmless, and although they could express themselves in crude terms, their conduct never descended to the level of the notorious 'cock bottlers'. The only time I saw the women behave badly was on the firm's annual trip to London. Bairnswear was a paternal, old-fashioned company, and every year all the employees were given a couple of pounds for spending money and treated to a day trip to London aboard a specially chartered train. I didn't drink at the time and spent most of the day travelling around the capital by tube, gawping in horror at the devastation wrought by the Luftwaffer. It was twelve years since the end of the war, but the damage to the city was so severe that it would probably take another twelve years of rebuilding to restore it[5]. The factory men and women would head straight for 'Dirty Dicks' and spend most of the day drinking. After a day on the booze, the mayhem on the train back to Nottingham can be imagined. The appalling drunken behaviour among the women was an education, and robbed me of any illusions I might have had concerning the fair sex when I realised that women can be just as obscene and bawdy as men.

My new foreman, Harold, 'Arold' to the girls, was a kind and intelligent man of around forty, with short, curly, white hair. After showing me the ropes he seemed quite pleased with his new assistant. Harold treated me like an adult and was never patronising, in contrast to many of the older men I had previously worked with. My job was to bring up large bales of rug wool from the bale store and distribute them among the 'winders'. These were the women who, with the aid of a machine, wound the hanks of wool from the bales onto cones. My next task was to load up the creels, which were large, aluminium constructions with a hundred and seventy pegs on either side. The cones of wool were fitted onto the pegs, and the loose ends of all three hundred and forty cones of wool were drawn together and tied with a length of sisal twine. The creel was then wheeled into position behind the cutting machine. We had two of these machines, both identical. They were constructed of aluminium and Heath Robinson would have been proud of them. The bundle of wool threads was drawn along the machine through a series of grabs. The grabs then pulled the wool along and past a roll of paper that wrapped itself around the wool. A roll of gummed tape, moistened by a piece of felt attached to a glass reservoir full of water, then stuck the two sides of the paper together. The wool, which now resembled a paper-covered sausage, then passed under a guarded blade, similar to those used on a bacon slicer. The blade chopped off two and seven eighths of an inch long packets of wool, which were checked by the girl machine operative against a wooden block, then packed into cardboard boxes and labelled.In theory, these cutting machines shouldn't have worked, but they did. There was nothing high-tech about them, just ordinary, everyday materials, but they were fine examples of the inventor's art. Harold and I were very proud of them, Harold the more so because he had helped to invent them. They were all the more precious because they were the only two of their kind in the world and we held the patents for them. It was a source of smug satisfaction, knowing that our only competitor was forced to sell his customers a small device similar to a bean slicer, which would only cut one piece of wool at a time. As long as we held our patents, we would always have the competitive edge.

After labelling, the boxes of rug wool were stacked on a palette, and using a truck known as a Colis, I wheeled them round to the warehouse. A young man of around nineteen, slender, with dark, slicked back hair and a nose that any anteater would be proud of, then took charge of them. His name was David and it was his job to assemble the rug wool orders. He seemed to know the history and personal details of every employee, including their sexual preferences and marital status. It soon became clear that much of his knowledge was gleaned from personal experience. David told me, without a trace of embarrassment, that he was gay. He made no secret of it: his sexual orientation was common knowledge. He was popular with both men and women. In 1956, homosexuality was a criminal offence and one might assume that he would be the subject of homophobic abuse, but if he was, I never witnessed it.

The reason why he seemed so immune soon became clear. For most young men, the 1950's were a sexual dessert. Due to the absence of reliable birth control, few unmarried women were prepared to take the risk of pregnancy; most women wanted an engagement ring on their finger before they would even consider giving up their virginity. As a result, among the single, male population, sexual frustration was the norm. Into the breach stepped David, who was happy to give oral sex to any man who sought his services. A significant number of men in the factory had done so over the years, including some of the most unlikely macho candidates. I was relieved to be told that my much-respected foreman, Harold, was not among them. When I asked David what possible pleasure he could get out of his activities, he explained that he just enjoyed making people happy. There were, however, more revelations to come. These involved the boiler man.

One lunchtime, David asked if I would like to see the boiler room. I thought it an odd suggestion, but I had never been there before and followed David down the dimly lit concrete stairs. Cyril, the boiler man, was shovelling coal into the furnace, naked to waist, with sweat running down his dusty back. He turned around to greet us, looking enquiringly at David, who assured him I was to be trusted. He then shook my hand. He had the figure of a heavyweight boxer, with not an ounce of surplus fat on him, and film star good looks topped off with a good head of curly, black hair. His voice surprised me: he spoke in the simpering tones adopted by camp gays, which was incongruous with his macho appearance. Cyril looked me over with a wolfish grin, as though I were some tasty morsel, saying to David, "Shall we show him our toys?" David gave a nod of assent and Cyril turned to a steel locker. After unlocking it, he proceeded to lay out its contents on his wooden bench. If it had been David's intention to shock me, then he succeeded, but I made a brave attempt to conceal it. The locker contained what must have been the best collection of sado-masochistic implements in the country. The paraphernalia of the boiler man's passion included whips, chains, manacles, and a variety of gags. I was treated to a detailed description of what each piece of equipment was used for. Handling 'the toys' seemed to turn them both on and Cyril enquired whether I would like to join them in a session. I thanked him for his kind offer but declined on the grounds that I was not yet ready for that sort of thing, but would be in touch through David if I ever felt the inclination. I realised that away from prying eyes, David the boiler man and fellow enthusiasts, both colleagues and outsiders, spent many happy lunch breaks down there. Sitting in the canteen, eating my lunch, I was left to ponder the bizarre nature of human sexuality and what some people considered to be pleasurable.

Later, I was told to avoid the knitting wool section of the warehouse if the racks were rattling. I asked why and was told that rattling racks meant that the foreman was servicing his secretary and could turn nasty if he was disturbed. I began to think that I was working in a factory peopled by deviants and sex maniacs, but I never saw anything untoward. In common with most teenagers, I enjoyed the smutty gossip and was agog with prurient curiosity when anything of a sexual nature was being discussed.

Harold and I were the only two males in our department. All the other workers were women within an age range of fifteen to sixty. Four of them, all young girls, worked on the cutting machines and the rest were winders. We all got along very well for the most part, but Harold and I sometimes had to intervene in their squabbles as one or two of them could be quite volatile. I never knew Harold to raise his voice, nor was he prone to displays of anger. If there were disputes, he could usually settle them with a few quiet, well-chosen words.

Rock and roll had just hit the music scene and the Palais dance hall in the centre of Nottingham put on rock and roll disco sessions on Friday lunch times. We had an hour and a half for lunch, so on Fridays the young girls and I would spend it at the Palais, where they did their best to teach me to dance. I would change into a pair of black drainpipe trousers in order to look the part on the dance floor, but Harold never commented on them, or on the bizarre hairstyles I adopted from time to time, including a huge Tony Curtis quiff, sideburns down to my chin, and a DA[6]. Harold was around forty at the time, and no doubt we thought of him as an old fogey, but he never acted like one by criticising the younger generation. He had no children of his own, which was a shame: he would have made a good father. Harold was more than tolerant with me. Providing all my tasks had been completed, he didn't object to me taking a book behind some boxes, or attempting to complete the Telegraph crossword puzzle. He would even go so far as to warn me if the senior management was on the prowl. No doubt he smiled at some of my reading matter; I was into philosophy and psychology at the time, and for a teenager this was pretty heavy stuff.

I was still sixteen when I started attending Mrs. Jepson's Dancing School, not so much for the dancing, but because I had been told it was a good place for picking up girls. Mrs. Jepson taught only ballroom dancing, which was still very much in vogue, and refused to teach rock and roll, considering it to be rather common. She was very strict about ballroom etiquette, insisting that any lady asked for a dance must accept unless she had a very good reason for refusing. This ruling made it easier for shy teenagers like myself to get acquainted with the opposite sex. It was at Mrs. Jepson's that I met my first real girlfriend, Carol. Carol had dark, curly hair, brown eyes and a good figure. Her attractive features were marred only by slightly protruding front teeth, which I overlooked, being more interested in her other attributes. Not that I was likely to receive the privilege of unwrapping her: she was too smart for that, and for all my teenage bravado, with my mother's warnings about getting young girls pregnant haunting me, I was too nervous to attempt it. Buying condoms would be difficult. Barbers never asked me if I wanted 'something for the weekend' and I doubted whether I would be served in a chemist's shop.

Condoms at that time were for the very brave or the very desperate. It would be some years before the Featherlite and the lubricated varieties become available. For the present we would have to endure the thick, talcum powdered obscenities which returning National Service Men assured me were just repackaged army surplus. They were never designed for pleasure but more as a protection against venereal disease. I was told that using one was like washing your feet with your socks on, but nothing compared with the latest '50's innovation - the reusable condom, which was so thick it was probably produced by Dunlop rather than Durex, and was more like washing your feet with wellingtons on.

After about a year, Carol and I spit up and I was still a virgin. The following year was one of unrequited lust and bicycle riding. I had fitted my Palm Beach with drop handlebars, and with my friend Victor, spent weekends and holidays touring Derbyshire and the surrounding counties, sometimes covering a hundred miles or more a day. When Victor was called up for his National Service, I was at a loose end and began to frequent the newly opened coffee bars in the city centre where small live bands played skiffle music. Clad in my powder blue, James Dean jeans and carrying the latest Penguin Classic, I posed as a person with literary ambitions.

So it was Mrs. Jepson's at the weekend, dressed in suit and tie, then bohemian coffee bars in the week. By now I had persuaded one of the older men at work to purchase some condoms for me and I carried one around in my wallet for a year, after which I threw it away fearing that it might have become perished. Despite a few near misses, I was still a virgin and had no prospects of being responsible for a peak in Durex's sales figures.
Chapter Three

When I was eighteen, returning from the coffee bars on the late bus home, I met Tony Ball, known to all his friends as Tess. Pugnacious of feature and temperament, he was an embryonic 'angry young man' and we found we had much in common. Our hair was longer than was considered respectable and we both wore duffle coats; he referred to his as his shroud. We read the same books and we were also both sick of living at home, he, because he was forever in conflict with the middle class aspirations of his parents. His mother took the magazine 'The Lady'. She was probably the only woman on the estate who did: while delivering papers I never came across a copy of it. His father had high ambitions in the energy business and was permanently studying to further his career. Tess worked for what was then the Central Electricity Generating Board, and was supposed to be studying for something called 'The Higher National'. He was not, however, applying himself with the same dedication as his father, and herein lay another bone of contention. My reason for wanting to leave home was simple: I couldn't take much more of my parents' turbulent relationship; neither of them were mellowing with age. Tess and I met frequently on the late bus to Bilborough. Usually he had been to see his girlfriend who lived on the other side of the city. He showed me a photograph of her; she was a nurse and very pretty. And here lay another of his problems. Her parents were strict members of the Salvation Army and no amount of blandishments or promises of an engagement ring would persuade her to have sex with him. He was convinced that, in the privacy of a place of his own, things might change.

After a couple of months we began to see each other socially, spending time together in the pubs and coffee bars. I didn't drink at the time but Tess liked a few pints: another thing his parents disapproved of. It didn't take long before I also got a taste for the stuff and we spent more and more time in the pubs together. Eventually we decided to find a flat to rent and Tess offered to look round the estate agents and post office windows. I think he was even more desperate to leave home than I was. He soon found us a place in one of the city's suburbs, West Bridgford, known locally as 'bread and lard island' as it was assumed that in order to finance their large houses, the residents must have to economise on their food. The reality was that most of them took in lodgers. The place Tess found for us couldn't be described as a flat; it was just two rooms under the eves of a large house, but the price was right: two pounds, five shillings a week. An old lady, whom we assumed was widowed, owned the house. The other occupants were her daughter, an attractive, blond woman of about thirty years of age, and her husband, of whom we saw little. Our two rooms were sparsely furnished. One was a lounge cum dining room cum kitchen. The only means of cooking was a Baby Belling stove. The bedroom was furnished with two single cast iron beds and two wooden lockers for our clothes. We had made the break and now we would have to look after each other. Tess was nineteen, as I would be in a few weeks time.

We chose my birthday as the date for a flat warming party. It was also an opportunity to meet Tess's friends, most of whom were ex-grammar school pupils, both boys and girls. Our rooms were on the third storey and not connected to the front door bell, so we rigged up a system of our own, which consisted of a length of string dangled to the ground from our side window and attached to a couple of saucepans in the living room. On the night of the party this arrangement worked well; we didn't want the landlady, or her daughter, continually answering the doorbell.

Nearly all of Tess's male friends were acquaintances from his schooldays at High Pavement Grammar School. Most of the girls were from High Pavement's female equivalent, the Manning School for Girls. Everyone seemed to come from working class backgrounds and there was no trace of snobbery. I was interested to find that, despite my lack of formal education, my command of the English language was as good as, if not better than, most of theirs. The party went well, with lots of drunkenness and dancing, marred only by one fool who rolled himself up in the carpet, causing problems for the dancers. We eventually managed to unroll him and persuaded him to go home. I was told later that Mickey Finn had a reputation for eccentric behaviour and not to take him seriously. Overall, the party was a success. There were no serious breakages and no one had thrown up in our shared bathroom. We received no complaints from our landlady: a very good indication that our youthful exuberance would be tolerated.

Two other friends of Tess's, sisters called Yvonne and Paddy, had attended our party, and I had been attracted to the younger one, who was sixteen. I suppose one could call her handsome, for she was not a conventional beauty; above average height for a girl, she had short, dark brown hair and brown eyes. At the party I had arranged to take her for a drink and after a few weeks we became an item. Yvonne was more mature than most sixteen year olds, and certainly more confident. After a few months we decided to have sex. There was no coercion on my part: she was not a woman who could be persuaded to do something that she didn't want to do. We would, however, have to wait until Tess was out of the way. A couple of weeks later Tess was in London banning the bomb and we had the flat to ourselves. Waiting for Yvonne to arrive in the afternoon I felt nervous. I realised I had no practical knowledge of sex at all, and very little knowledge of the appropriate bits of the female anatomy. I thought back to my previous experiences with girls, groping for some inspiration.

The first time I had seen a naked female I was eight years old. Pat Jarrot was the same age. She lived in one of the larger houses on Western Boulevard and her parents were thought to be well off. Certainly her father never counted the change in his pockets and was never aware that while he slept, Pat stole quite substantial sums of money from his jacket and trousers, on one occasion a ten shillings note, a tidy sum in 1947. She would take my friend Roy and me to the local sweet shop and stock up on mountains of sweets, liquorice sticks and kaylie[7]. The next step in her ritual was to invite us into the garage where she would take all her clothes off. Not until Roy or I had shown her our penises were we allowed to gorge ourselves on the ill-gotten gains. After the first strip show, Roy and I lost interest. There was nothing to see: it was the sweeties that held our attention. My next excursion into the mysteries of womanhood was with my old girlfriend, Carol, where I confirmed what I had been told, that 'the nothing' I had observed on Pat Jarret, was in fact, 'the everything' where girls were concerned.

The only time I had come close to having sex was at a party held in a bungalow on the Wollaton Park Estate. Our hostess was a fourteen-year-old girl, the daughter of a vicar. I was seventeen. She took an instant shine to me and bustled me into her father's study. I was expecting a chaste kiss or two, but after a few minutes of heated embrace, she removed her knickers and began fumbling with the zip on my jeans. I was facing a terrible dilemma: go ahead and risk what could be disastrous consequences (those were the days before I carried a condom), or back off and risk her derision and a blow to my manly pride. I was saved by the Almighty, or more accurately, his representative on earth. Fruity tones could be heard booming from the kitchen, "Come along boys and girls. Its time to go home." The vicar had returned home early from choir practice and was good-naturedly clearing out his daughter's guests.

The pans in the living room began jangling. Yvonne had arrived. I lost my virginity on one of our cast iron beds, without fuss. Yvonne appeared to suffer no discomfort and seemed indifferent to the proceedings. There were no bells ringing, no flashes of forked lightening, and a complete lack of passion. Though I knew no better at the time, I had the feeling that something was missing. The experience was more akin to a medical procedure than an act of lovemaking. When I asked Yvonne why she had done it, her reply was, "Out of curiosity." Reflecting on it later, I concluded that with practise, no doubt things would improve, but it would be a long time before I had the opportunity again. Yvonne's period was late and took three weeks to arrive, during which time we were both wracked with fear and apprehension and in no immediate hurry to repeat the experiment. Some weeks later, when I realised that neither the condom nor I were to blame, my enthusiasm returned, but Yvonne's didn't. I felt that attempting to encourage her into having sex again would prove counter productive and decided to let nature take its course.

There was tension among the foremen at work: something of importance was taking place. A vacancy in higher management was being filled and two of the foremen were being interviewed. I was relieved to hear that Harold was not one of them. Harold's wife worked in the office and she was privy to information of which the other foremen were unaware; the management already knew who they were going to appoint and it was neither of the foremen. In due course, a splendidly dressed young man, wearing a stiff collar and sporting a public school tie, with an accent to match, appeared in the various departments on a tour of inspection. He was an affable enough young chap, without pretensions and not in the least patronising, but the two failed candidates would take their time in warming to him. I felt sorry for them: I could imagine their interviews. For all their ability and detailed knowledge of the departments, dressed in their Sunday best flannel trousers and tweed sports jackets, their Nottingham accents would betray them. In this still class-ridden society, they would be unable to compete with the exotic creature who, in their view, had robbed them of their promotion. I was pleased that Harold had not been subjected to the same humiliation. It would take another two generations before these class barriers began to crumble.

Back at the flat, Tess and I tried to establish some sort of routine for domestic stability: not easy for two young men who had never been away from home before. Our cooking skills were minimal. We were disinclined to make an effort at tidiness. Washing the pots was a chore exacerbated by the need to go down to the bathroom, on the floor below, for cold water. We then had to boil it on the Baby Belling, which was slow and inefficient, a problem we encountered when attempting to cook anything, which we did every night, considering a hot meal to be one of our priorities. We had a problem managing our money: we spent most of it on beer and cigarettes. Our expenditure on food was inconsistent. On Fridays and Saturdays we had fillet steak and chicken, which were expensive in the '50's. By Sunday, after a huge fried breakfast and a roast for dinner, we had little money left for the rest of the week. Our biggest expenditure was on the mammoth quantities of beer we consumed at the weekend: ten pints a night was not unusual. Fortunately, Tess developed into an ace forager. Whilst trying to elicit sympathy from the shopkeepers by drawing in his cheeks to resemble a starving man, he trawled the grocers and greengrocers of Arkwright Street (one of the cheapest places in the city to shop) for bacon bits, cracked eggs, frying tomatoes, perished fruit and vegetables, and broken biscuits. His efforts went a long way towards staving off malnutrition.

To supplement our diet and drinking habits we also resorted to petty theft. We gate crashed rich kids' parties whenever we got wind of one and carried off whole cheeses and other luxuries we couldn't afford. On a good night, we were able to "liberate" whole bottles of whisky or vodka. The Dancing Slipper, a small ballroom just down the road from us, had a weekly jazz night, and on one occasion not only did we manage to slip in without paying, we also stole three-dozen bottles of light ale, which we hid under our duffle coats. Weighed down by eighteen bottles each, we had difficulty stopping them clanking on the way out. We were nearly bent double by the time we reached the flat, where we drank nine and a half pints each of the light ale over the next two nights. The management had left a convenient hatch in a studded wall; the bottled beer was stored on the other side of the hatch, and it was a simple matter to poke our arms through and take as much beer as we could carry, not counting what we consumed on the premises.

We never passed a phone box without pressing button 'B'. (In those days if a connection could not be made, the caller retrieved his money by pressing button B'.) Many forgot to do so, and two or three pence, though not a lot of money, was always welcome. Today I look back at our behaviour with horror. How could two people who had never stolen anything in their lives before turn into petty criminals? For that is what we were. I think the answer is to be found in the influences we were under at the time. Yes, the government was still made up largely of aristocrats. And debutants were still being presented. The cold war was still cold, but the class war was slowly moving from the back burner towards the front one. We had seen the John Osborne play 'Look Back in Anger', read 'Room at the Top', 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' and 'The Catcher in the Rye'. In Cuba a revolution was under way. We read The Guardian when we could afford it, and thought of ourselves as lefties and class warriors, with a dash of the bohemian for added romance. We were striking out at the establishment and redistributing wealth. That we were the main beneficiaries of our activities was an issue that we never cared to address.

In the summer of 1959, Tess and I set off on a hitch hiking tour of the British Isles and Ireland. We had two weeks holiday in which to complete it. We had ten pounds cash each, and a huge slab of Gorgonzola cheese that we had lifted from a party the night before we set off. It must have weighed about three pounds and we were hoping that it would last us for the two weeks, along with anything else we could scrounge. Once on the A1, the hitching was easy and friendly lorry drivers helped us to reach our first overnight stop before nightfall: a youth hostel near to Stranraer, Scotland.

The next morning, after a breakfast of bread and cheese, we took the ferry to Larne in Northern Ireland. We had only walked a couple of hundred yards from the harbour when two policemen in a squad car pulled up beside us and enquired where we were headed. When we told them we were hitching to the south, they seemed a bit suspicious and asked us to get into the car. They probably thought we were IRA men in disguise, but on recognising our British accents they became friendly and offered to take us to Belfast. They had scant regard for speed limits and we reached the city in double quick time. There was an embarrassing moment when one of the policemen asked what the funny smell was; we had to tell him that it was Gorgonzola, which they found highly amusing. The incident made us nervous: after all, the cheese was stolen, though we doubted that an all force alert had been put out as far as Northern Ireland. The friendly policemen dropped us off on the south side of Belfast and by the evening we were in a youth hostel in Dublin.

We were delighted to find that Southern Ireland was almost a foreign country, and that Guinness and cigarettes were much cheaper than they were in England. After more bread and cheese, we spent the evening trawling round the Dublin bars. There was no such thing as draught Guinness in those days; it came in quart bottles with corks stoppers and was much stronger than the stuff exported to Britain. As a consequence, we were quite drunk when we arrived back at the youth hostel and crawled gratefully into bed. The next day we set off for Waterford. There were few cars on the roads, but those that were invariably stopped for us, and the drivers, many of them priests, were happy to share whatever food they had, and of course we never refused anything to eat.

When we arrived at Arthur's Town, the ferry to Waterford, which was two miles across the bay, had stopped running, so we booked into a nearby youth hostel for the night. The next day the weather was so beautiful that we decided not to go to Waterford, which is quite a large city, and instead decided to explore the countryside around us. We found that Arthur's Town was not a town at all, but a very small hamlet where the local fishermen landed their catch. The fishermen were most generous and when we asked if we could buy a couple of their mackerel, they gave us as many as we could eat for nothing. The rocks around the seashore were covered in large mussels, which we collected, cooked, and stored in Guinness bottles full of vinegar. The hedgerows abounded with brambles; the blackberries were as big as golf balls and we gorged ourselves on these as we rambled to and from the local pubs. Some pubs were just one dusty room with a few labourers standing at the bar, drinking and talking in a language we barely recognised as English. A one-legged old lady, who must have been approaching eighty, ran the youth hostel. She kept a few chickens and a cow. We bought eggs and milk from her, which cost almost nothing. With our cheese, which the old lady insisted we keep in an outhouse, our free mackerel, free mussels, and free blackberries, we barely spent a pound on food the whole time we were in Ireland. All of our money was spent on Sweet Afton cigarettes and bottles of Guinness. Inevitably, we started to run out of money a couple of days short of our planned stay. After bidding a heartfelt goodbye to our friends the fishermen and the old lady, we headed back to Dublin and the youth hostel in order to catch the Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead ferry the next day.

Wales was the last leg of the tour, though we were not to see much of it. We landed at Holyhead late in the evening and there were few cars disembarking from the ferry. Trudging across the bleak island of Anglesey on what seemed to be its only main road, in the pitch black, for there were no road lights, it seemed that our luck had deserted us. But what must have been the last vehicle to leave the ferry, one of the new Volkswagen Campers, pulled up for us. Better still, the driver, another generous Irishman, was heading for Derby. We arrived back in Nottingham in the early hours of the morning, ravenously hungry. We retrieved what remained of our Gorgonzola, which, to avoid further embarrassment, we had imprisoned in a plastic wash bag. There was enough to spread on a few Ryvitas, which were the only edible items in the flat. On close inspection, we noted that the reeking, almost liquid mess of cheese had become home to a number of maggots. Not to be deterred, we picked them out with a pair of tweezers and found the flavour of the cheese to be unimpaired and, if anything, improved.

We arrived home on the Thursday, Friday was a day of rest and on Saturday we decided to have another party. Our friends were interested to know how the grand tour had gone and a party seemed to be the best way to celebrate its successful conclusion. Once again, there was much clanking of kitchen utensils from our makeshift bell, loud music, dancing and drunkenness. On Sunday our landlady served us notice. She was quite nice about it, explaining that while we were away, she realised that she had forgotten what it was like to have a peaceful house and that she had enjoyed it so much that she would not be letting out our rooms in the future. To be fair to her, we were not ideal tenants. Because all our friends were still living at home, our flat was like a magnet to them. Pub closing time was at ten o'clock in the evening; last orders were at ten to ten and there was no drinking up time. No-one wanted to go home at that time, so at the weekends in particular, people were calling on us at all hours, clanking our bell and then stumbling drunkenly up two flights of stairs. If anything, the old dear had been more than tolerant and we accepted our notice with good grace. While we were on holiday, Tess had allowed his beard to grow, intending to emulate Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, but on Monday, his first day back at work, his superior warned him that if he didn't shave it off he risked dismissal.

The revolution was faltering. The reactionaries were still in the saddle. We had little choice but to go back to our parents for we had no money for a deposit on another flat. Sadder but wiser, and weighing a stone less than when we had left home, with our lungs and livers probably looking like lace curtains from consuming too many cigarettes and too much booze, we slunk back in to the bosoms of our families. I don't think mine noticed that I'd been away in the first place.

My parents had not undergone a damascene conversion during my time away from home and continued to make life a misery, not only for themselves, but also for everyone else unfortunate enough to have to live with them. As a consequence, I spent as little time at home as possible and more and more time at Yvonne's parents' house, staying over at the weekends and visiting in the evenings during the week. The house, a large, five bedroomed detached, was set in quarter of an acre of land and sported an impressive pair of iron gates at the entrance. It was also fitted with central heating, an unheard of luxury in the 1950's.

Yvonne's family consisted of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, her sister Paddy, and her brother Charles, who was away serving in the Fleet Air Arm. Mr. Robinson, known to his wife as Robbie, had in his youth emigrated to Canada and become a Canadian citizen, but during the war had returned to Britain with the Canadian Air force. He now worked a few miles away as a civilian at the Canadian air base at Langar airfield. The central heating had been installed at Robbie's insistence as he suffered from a chest ailment. He was ten years older than Mrs. Robinson, who was known as Topsy, and though only in his early sixties, he tired easily and took to his bed at eight o'clock at night. Yvonne followed him an hour later at nine. Paddy was often out with her boyfriend. Topsy and I, who stayed up late, were left to keep each other company. We grew very fond of each other, watched the television together, and chatted late into the night. Topsy enjoyed American westerns such as 'Raw Hide' and 'Bonanza'. She had a keen eye for beefcake, making lascivious comments on the physical attributes of her favourite hunks. We would talk for hours on all manner of subjects, some of them quite intimate, but she never quizzed me about mine and Yvonne's love life, perhaps preferring not to know.

There was nothing to know. After our first sexual experiment, Yvonne had firmly shut up shop and was not about to reopen any time soon. After about three months, Topsy said that as I was spending more time at her house than at my own home, I might as well move in permanently. I was happy to agree. Finances were arranged and I became, to all intents and purposes, a member of the family. Apart from Robbie, everyone else worked with animals. Paddy was a nurse at the PDSA, Yvonne ran a poodle parlour from the double garage, and Topsy was in the process of building boarding kennels in a barn-like structure behind the house.

There were also two dogs in residence that belonged to the sisters. Yvonne's was a black standard poodle called Hi-Fi, and Paddy's was a white one called Jodie. Topsy soon completed her boarding kennels and dogs began to arrive. Not all of the dogs were kept in the kennels. At their owner's request, and for a slightly higher fee, the more timid and pampered breeds such as miniature poodles, were kept in the house and each of us had one of these hot-house flowers sleeping in the bedroom with us. The only other exception was Bert the bulldog, who slept in Yvonne's poodle parlour in the garage below my bedroom. Bert was a canine geriatric of some eighteen years of age. Though when in a bad mood he could exude aggression, I became fond of him and whenever I got the opportunity I took him for his twice-daily walk. As Bert was virtually toothless his bad moods never bothered me; the worst he could do was to give me a nasty suck. He did however have other vices. He stank to high heaven. Not a pleasant prospect when sleeping above him with the windows open and the wind in the wrong direction. Like most of his tribe he sometimes had difficulties with his nose and snored loudly in his sleep, which ordinarily did not disturb me. However, on one notable occasion, it did. A miniature poodle called Pernod (to everyone's amusement, his overdressed and wealthy mistress insisted on pronouncing the 'd') was billeted with me one night and slept on my bed. I was awoken by Pernod howling with terror. Bert was snoring away like a demented chainsaw, and no doubt to a dog's sensitive nose Bert's stink could be discerned seeping up through the floorboards. It was all too much for poor little Pernod, who promptly shat himself, hosing diarrhoea all over my head and blankets. The old bulldog could still rustle up the fear factor, even while fast asleep. He would have been proud of himself. Shouting with indignation and anger, I awakened the entire household. Robbie turned over and went back to sleep but the women, still in their nightdresses, were quickly on the scene, shoving the soiled items into the washing machine and helping me to wash my hair. It was, however, some days before the smell disappeared from my bedroom, despite liberal doses of air freshener.

When my two weeks summer holiday came around, I asked Yvonne if she would like to go to Ireland. Topsy and Robbie raised no objections, so we made our preparations and set off to hitch hike to Holyhead. Unlike the grand tour with Tess, we were heading straight to Arthur's Town and the old lady's youth hostel. The journey to Holyhead was swift and uneventful. Drivers are more willing to give lifts to hitch hikers when travelling with a female. We were in good time for the ferry and landed in Dun Laoghaire in the early evening, hitching the short distance to central Dublin where we spent the night in the youth hostel. Youth hostels at that time separated the sexes and we spent the night apart. We set off early the next morning and, courtesy of the kind Irish drivers, were in Arthur's Town by midday and spent the afternoon exploring the local countryside. The next morning we caught the ferry to Waterford, famous for its good quality glass tableware, and spent the day looking around the city. I had contrived to miss the return ferry by turning my watch forward, and having succeeded in this deceit the second phase of my plan was to book into an hotel for the night. I hoped the Irish air and the novelty of being away from home in a strange city might lubricate the chains of the drawbridge and bring it rattling down. To this end, I had committed an offence in Irish law by importing a packet of Featherlites. I was expecting trouble at the four star hotel, Dooley's, in the centre of Waterford, when I attempted to book in as Mr. and Mrs. Whyman. Ireland, at least on the surface, was still a very religious country and I feared that we might be asked for our marriage certificate, but the desk clerk gave us no more than a cursory glance, despite the absence of luggage. After a couple of drinks at the bar, we went upstairs to bed. I was contemplating the final phase of my carefully worked out plan. But like the man with a blowpipe attempting to give a bear a pill, the bear blew first. Yvonne, smart as ever, had worked out a pre-emptive strike. Just as we were about to get into bed, she fastidiously laid out a hand towel and deftly administered 'one off the wrist'. Not what I was hoping for at all, but better than nothing. It was the first and last time she rendered such a service. When we returned to the youth hostel early the next morning, the old lady gave us a knowing look and handed us a telegram. It was sad news. When we had left the house two days ago, Robbie had been in bed recovering from a bout of bronchitis. There was no suggestion that his condition was serious, but he had suddenly died from a heart attack the previous night. Robbie was a decent chap and although I never got to know him very well, I always accompanied him to the pub on Sunday lunchtimes. He had enjoyed a few pints of 'Worthington E' before his Sunday lunch.

We packed, said goodbye to the old lady and set off for England. Too preoccupied to take much notice of the passing scenery, we arrived back home the next day in time to help with the funeral arrangements. There was a respectful air of solemnity about the house but no uncontrolled weeping. Robbie had always been treated with respect, but I had never witnessed much human warmth between him and the rest of his family. Topsy was sufficiently flippant as to confide that she and Robbie had had sex the night before he died, a rare occurrence, and she was pleased that he would be going to his grave a happy man. After the funeral, Topsy, having downed a few Pimms number ones, her favourite tipple, explained something of her relationship with Robbie.

Her father had been a director of Unilever and quite wealthy. After a convent education she had met and married a charming but irresponsible young man called Jack; strangely enough, his surname was never mentioned. From Topsy's description, he sounded like a poser in Oxford bags, being dragged along by a couple of borzois, but Topsy was in love with him. This made it doubly sad when, following the pattern of all sad love stories, having spent all of her money he left her with a child, Charles, and pregnant with another, Paddy. On the rebound she meets Robbie, the handsome Canadian Airman, who promises to look after her and the children. Two years later another child is born, Yvonne, who is the only true Robinson; the other two have their names changed by deed poll. For some years, nothing disturbs the calm waters of their relationship and they buy the lease to the High Peak Hotel in Matlock Bath. Enter David, a spar miner, the son of a vicar and a regular customer in the bar, with whom Topsy embarks upon an affair. So intense are their feelings for each other that Topsy agrees to take the children and live with David in his spartan cottage on the wooded hillside above the hotel. Robbie, however, was not prepared to accept the break up, and while the hotel business slowly deteriorates, he haunts Topsy day and night in an effort to bring about a reconciliation. After a few months, Topsy agrees to rejoin Robbie for the sake of the children, spar mining being a precarious way to make a living, and the cottage having no gas or electricity and only an earth toilet. It was not a fit place in which to bring up young children. The hotel business collapses. Robbie gets a job at the Canadian air base and they buy the house in Radcliffe-on-Trent where we all now live. But it was a bit more complicated than that, as I was later to discover.

Prior to going on holiday, I had applied for a job in sales promotion with Hovis McDougal, the well-known millers of Hovis flour, based in Macclesfield. I had attended two interviews, one in Nottingham and the other in Macclesfield. I had somehow managed to control my stammer but did not have great hopes of being offered the job. However, on retuning from holiday, I was surprised to receive a letter informing me that the job was mine if I still wanted it. I did, and promptly wrote a letter of acceptance.

On my return to work the following Monday, I informed Harold of my decision to leave. He was very supportive and said that in his view I was sensible to do so since there was little hope of promotion as I would be waiting for dead men's shoes - namely his. He was only forty-four and in the rudest of health, so it could be a very long wait.

Sales promotion sounds rather grand but it wasn't. Hovis were millers and sold their flour to the big bakeries such as Mother's Pride and Wonderloaf. My job, along with a team of three colleagues, was to visit the bakeries and accompany their salesmen, known as rounds-men, in their bakers vans (today they would be known as delivery/salesmen). Bread was still being delivered door to door. Our job was to persuade the bakers' customers, both retail and wholesale, of the benefits of Hovis bread: a rather silly job, given that the rounds-man knew his customers much better than we did. If anyone could persuade a housewife to swap her white loaf for a Hovis, he could. It was much more productive to help the baker to finish his round early by tidying his bread trays and other useful little tasks, and let him get on with the promoting. This method of doing the job usually worked well. The last thing the baker wanted was the Hovis man spending time with his customers and holding him up. Head Office would not have approved. They seemed to have overlooked the practicalities of their scheme. Instead of making some simple arrangements with the bakery to reward the rounds-man for selling Hovis, and do away with their own promoters, they gave our supervisor a well-paid job and a nice little empire of his own. But of course we would also be without a job so, not surprisingly, no one was stupid enough to say anything. Not that they would listen to any suggestions from us: we were right down at the bottom of the food chain, for, as ever, the only way up to the top was via a public school. No one, no matter how good, was ever promoted from the sales promotion teams.

Though sometimes tedious, the job did contain an element of adventure. We were sent off to strange towns and cities for a week or two at a time and booked into reasonable hotels. All expenses were paid and we fiddled our accounts mercilessly. There was no way of checking what or where we had eaten. Our appetites probably seemed quite modest compared to those at the top, with expense accounts much more lavish than ours. The job's main drawback was the hours. It could mean a very early start in the morning; some bakers' rounds-men started as early as four o'clock, and that meant going to bed at eight. They did however finish around twelve noon, which gave us plenty of free time to explore whichever town we happened to be working in. We were paid by cheque, which went straight into our bank accounts in Nottingham. This was a novel way of receiving our wages for most of us, for at that time only the upper echelons received their salary, as they called it, by cheque. The inability to access my money easily, and the added boost of my fiddled expense account, meant I was able to save. This was over half a century ago. There were no holes in the wall and banks were reluctant to cash each other's cheques; even when they did, it took lengthy, expensive telephone calls from one bank to the other. Surprisingly, after more than fifty years and despite the advances in technology, it takes as long now for a cheque to clear as it did then. As usual, when something nice happens to the banks they want to keep it for themselves, but when something nasty happens they want to share it with their customers.

Eighteen months after we had first met, Yvonne and I became engaged but set no date for our wedding, which I assumed would be at least a couple of years away. I was intent on having enough money saved for a deposit on a house before we married. Most engaged couples put their names down for a council house. I had had enough of the dreary isolation of the new estates, with their single pub and one row of shops. I didn't intend to start married life on one.

In the period after Robbie's death I was working away almost every week, returning only at weekends. Although the house seemed to run as smoothly as ever, it soon became clear that Topsy's financial position was much more precarious than I could have imagined. Though widowed, she received no widow's pension and no pension from Robbie's place of work. Her only income was from the rent Paddy paid and Yvonne's earnings from trimming poodles. She received nothing from the boarding kennels as they were only taking enough to repay the bank loan she had taken out to build them. Even more disturbing, the house itself was on a short private mortgage. This meant she was directly responsible to the previous owner who, when she got behind with the repayments, was not inclined to be sympathetic. She was also behind with the kennels loan. The position was dire and demands for repayments were a daily feature of the post. When I enquired why she was not receiving a pension from Robbie's employer, which she seemed to think she was entitled to, she told me that all enquiries to the Canadian base had been met with a blank. She had no entitlement they told her. I thought this a strange state of affairs but said nothing. Was Robbie a bigamist with another wife in Canada? Were he and Topsy ever married? One thing was sure: there was no way she was going to be able to keep the house, and would be lucky to escape bankruptcy. In the event, there was no escape and Topsy made an appointment with the Official Receiver and declared herself voluntarily bankrupt. The receiver, however, agreed to let her remain in the house until arrangements could be made for it to be sold. This would happen after her public examination in the County Court, when all revenue from her estate would go towards the repayment of creditors. But that would be six months away, giving us all time to consider our next step.

After her gruelling sessions with the Official Receiver, which took a week, Topsy decided to visit her old friend Maisy, whom the family referred to as 'aunty' but in fact was not a relative. Yvonne, Paddy and I decided to have a party while she was away and invited Maisy's daughter, Audrey (who was referred to as a cousin) over for the weekend to join us.

The party, as with any other event organised by young people, was the usual mixture of music, drinking, dancing, horseplay, and mild hanky-panky. I, mollified by a few cans of beer, found myself in Topsy's bedroom with cousin Audrey, where, with her enthusiastic co-operation, mild hanky-panky soon turned into serious hanky-panky, and then sex. This was my second sexual experience and it was very different from the first: it was torrid, erotic, and deeply satisfying. The only regrettable part was that due to my inexperience it didn't last very long. I did manage, however, to leave not one, but two small puddles on Topsy's richly embroidered purple eiderdown: a problem I had to deal with the next morning. I confess that my indiscretion aroused in me few feelings of guilt and I looked upon it as part of a learning curve from which Yvonne might later benefit. I had discovered how sex should be, and naively thought, given time, that's how it would be. Audrey left the next morning as planned. It never happened again, and though she did visit from time to time we never spoke of it. Both of us had drawn a discreet veil over our brief encounter.

Time was running out; we would have to leave the house in a few weeks. Paddy, on discovering she was pregnant, had already left and gone to live with her boyfriend's parents prior to getting married. Topsy, in the absence of anywhere else to go, was toying with the idea of going back to Scotland to stay with relatives, but she would be taking Yvonne with her. With a distance of some three hundred and fifty miles between us, the odds of my engagement to Yvonne surviving did not seem promising. After various discussions with Yvonne and Topsy, it appeared that there was only one honourable solution, and that was to get married as soon as possible and find a place to live for the three of us. This would mean that Yvonne would have Topsy to keep her company while I was away. Good sense suggested that an inexpensive registry office wedding was the right thing to do, for setting up home as newly weds would not be cheap. I did have savings, but paying for a church wedding and reception would certainly diminish them. But romance prevailed over good sense. We both felt that some shoddy little affair in a registry office was not the way we wanted to start married life together.

I was twenty-one and Yvonne was eighteen years old when we were married in Radcliffe Parish Church on 4th March 1961. It was the same church where we had buried Robbie nine months before. The reception was held at the Radcliffe Country Club and attended by fifty or more guests. Everything went smoothly, but as I had anticipated, it was a costly affair, including the church and reception, plus bridesmaids' dresses; their presents; flowers for the church; taxis, and a month's rent on our new flat. There was little spare money, making it necessary to buy our bedroom suite on hire-purchase. Most of my two years' savings disappeared in one day, leaving us barely two weeks wages left in the bank.

Our flat was on Davis Road, West Bridgford: it was self contained, unfurnished, with two bedrooms. By our wedding day, it was comfortably furnished and we had everything we needed. On the afternoon just after our wedding, there was only one thing I had forgotten in the excitement: condoms. I went to the barber's shop in the local precinct and was surprised to find that the barber was a sour faced, middle-aged woman with grey hair. When I asked her for condoms, her face turned purple as she told me, furiously, that she didn't sell them. I returned to the flat still covered in confetti, feeling betrayed; one of the last bastions of masculinity was now in the hands of this woman. It had been no use asking her for 'something for the weekend'. I was eternally grateful when my best man, Malcolm O'Grady, gave me a packet, wishing me "Bon appetite." My third sexual experience was much the same as my first, but I had little time to think about it. Even had I been able to afford a honeymoon, it was out of the question. Hovis, with the insensitivity of all big business at that time, would not allow me to take a single day off. The day after our wedding I was off to Scotland. Thus we started our married life: apart for the next six weeks.

I spent three weeks working out of Glasgow, and another three weeks based in Edinburgh, having a pleasant time taking in the scenery from the passenger seat of a baker's van. The Scottish bakers were kind and co-operative, and from Hovis's point of view it was a successful tour. With the help of the friendly bakers we managed to overcome the prejudices of the conservative Scottish housewives, most of whom, in normal circumstances, would not have bought anything other than white bread. No sooner was I back in Nottingham than I was out on the road again, all over the country, working out of other towns and cities, large and small.

I spent a very enjoyable day with a young Lincoln baker who threw himself completely into the business of selling Hovis. His was a retail round of some three hundred customers and he was at great pains to prove to me how popular he was with them. Every customer was bribed, threatened, or cajoled into buying a Hovis. We were so successful that we sold out half way through the round and had to return to the bakery to re-stock. At the end of the day, we calculated that in addition to their usual bread order, almost every customer had bought a Hovis: some three hundred in all. Those customers that were out had one dropped into their bread bin. We had beaten the record for selling Hovis by a long way.

At the end of each week I sent in a list detailing my daily sales, as I was on a small commission. Head Office queried the figures for this particular day, suggesting that I had made a mistake. I wrote back, pointing out that the bakery would confirm my figures. I confessed that my success was due, in no small part, to the high degree of co-operation that I had received from the rounds-man and that such co-operation was very rare and not to expect results like that every day. Head Office accepted this explanation but didn't put two and two together regarding the ease with which bakers' rounds-men were able to sell Hovis if they were encouraged to. A consistently high- scoring colleague on our team was himself an ex-baker's rounds-man and once confided to me the secret of his success. As we all knew, the rounds-men were inveterate fiddlers and had all sorts of scams going. This individual was acquainted with them all. He told me that, once he had figured out how the bakers were fiddling, he had only to allude to the scam to be rewarded with complete co-operation. No amount of persuasion would induce him to part with his valuable knowledge, which irritated the rest of us; but who could blame him?

The loss of the house meant that Yvonne had lost her place of work. With commendable enterprise she had negotiated with the up-market department store Debenhams, in Nottingham city centre, to allow her to open a poodle parlour in their store. This would give their customers the opportunity to have their dogs trimmed and shampooed while they were shopping. The opening date had not yet been set but it would be up and running within a few weeks and would, we hoped, soon improve our finances.

While I was away working in Skegness, I received a telephone call from Yvonne telling me that an electrical fire had started in the airing cupboard of the flat. It had destroyed most of our clothes and bedding and rendered the rest of the flat uninhabitable. I received the call on the Wednesday, but, because of Hovis's usual inflexibility, I was unable to get back to Nottingham until the Friday night. Fortunately, a friend of my father's kept a caravan by the side of the river Trent at East Bridgford, five or six miles away from the flat. My father's friend, Mr. Donavan, kindly allowed us to use the van rent-free until we found other accommodation. He had already installed Yvonne, Topsy and the dog, Hi-Fi, when I arrived. Under other circumstances it would have been a pleasant place to spend a few weeks fishing and rambling around the countryside. The caravan was only just big enough to accommodate three adults and a large dog. For newly-weds it afforded little privacy. Despite three months of marriage, I had spent barely six weekends at home. On the Monday, I was working away again and had little choice but to leave house hunting to Yvonne and Topsy.

After three weeks, Topsy found us a place to live and we became caretakers, or more accurately, Topsy and Yvonne became caretakers; I was at home only at the weekends. Holroyd and Son were estate agents whose offices were situated on Wellington Circus, in the centre of Nottingham. It was a three-storey building of some splendour. The first two floors were their offices and the top storey was a self-contained flat, which, in exchange for some light cleaning duties, was rent-free. We moved in almost immediately and considered ourselves very lucky, congratulating Topsy for persuading our landlords to let us have the flat despite my absence during the week and the presence of a large dog. With no rent to pay we were able to replace the items we had lost in the fire, and the office cleaning was but a small inconvenience.

We had been caretakers for about three months when Yvonne announced that she was pregnant. Two weeks later, after working away, I arrived home to find that Topsy had left after what Yvonne described as a domestic disagreement. Yvonne seemed reticent to go into detail and I could only conclude that it was over something petty. The result was, however, that Topsy was now living with her son, Charles, who had recently left the armed services and was living locally.

Yvonne's pregnancy and Topsy's absence brought about a dilemma for me, exacerbated by Hovis's decision to send me back to Scotland again for a six-week tour. I felt I couldn't leave Yvonne alone in the flat for much longer: she was cleaning three flights of stairs, twice daily. There was an agreement with Hovis on the amount of time we spent away from home and I had already spent more time away than I should have. I wrote to Head Office pointing this out and received a reply which stated, in so many words, that they were ignoring the agreement and were giving me two weeks paid notice as I was clearly not happy with them; they were releasing me immediately. This blatant arrogance was typical of the higher echelons of big business at that time, which was still lumbering along under the management of ex-public schoolboys, whose high-handed incompetence would eventually become apparent to shareholders and bring about an end to the 'old boy' system.

I now had two weeks in which to find another job. Yvonne's condition had by now become apparent to our landlords, Holroyd's, and I had to agree with them that a third floor flat was not a place in which to bring up a child. As a consequence, they offered us one of their houses at a reasonable rent. We were on the move again. The next priority was to find a job. I applied for and was offered a job with Burtons the Tailors, and though it paid less than Hovis, it was a five-minute bus ride from our new house at 18 Dunlop Avenue, Lenton, into which we had already moved. I wanted to be on hand for Yvonne until the baby was born. Paddy had somehow managed to get in touch with Topsy's former lover, David, who was living in London, working in the scrap metal business. A reunion was arranged and their relationship quickly picked up where it had left off. Within weeks, Topsy had moved down to London where she and David were married. Shortly afterwards, David, who was a steel demolition sub-contractor, offered Paddy's husband, Terry, a job, and they too had moved south, leaving me as Yvonne's sole support.

My position at Burtons was that of senior sales assistant. The next step up was assistant manager if and when a position became vacant. On the sales floor things were very formal and we were supposed to address each other as 'Mister'. Our manager, Mr. Dancer, known to his staff as 'Horrid Harry' (although no one would have dared use his first name in his presence), was a man in his mid-fifties, of extremely small stature, with a chicken neck and eyes like boiled sweets. His main preoccupation was what was known as 'doing the week', which meant selling the same as, or if possible more than, the corresponding week of the year before. Most of the staff seemed to be chosen on the basis of their height. It seemed clear that he prefered his staff to be as small, or better still, smaller than he was. Customers must have noticed that the shop appeared to be staffed by midgets. Only the assistant manager and myself were approaching six feet tall. I worked on the upper floor, which was the 'ready to wear' department, selling suits, overcoats, raincoats, trousers and jackets. If it looked as though we were not going to 'do the week', we were all in for a bad time. Horrid Harry would run around, eyes bulging and red in the face, berating any member of staff who failed to make a sale. This silly behaviour produced a lack of confidence in his staff and 'a pass the parcel' mentality developed. Anyone who felt in danger of losing a customer (and many people did just come in to browse) would pass him on to someone else further up the chain of command, junior sales to senior sales and so on, until Horrid Harry himself was lumbered with them. These customers were known as 'shnorrers', a Jewish term for time wasters, and Horrid Harry invariably lost them. This was a cause of great glee and produced sniggers among his staff. This stunt couldn't be pulled too often as an irate Harry made life unpleasant for the rest of the day, but we were prepared to suffer for our little pleasures.

Yvonne and I were slowly getting the house ready for the arrival of the baby, but money was tight. Yvonne was six months pregnant and had to let her assistant, who was now a competent poodle trimmer, take over. This meant hiring an assistant for the assistant, which in turn meant little money would be coming in from the parlour for some months and I would again be the sole breadwinner. It was a period of some austerity. We could only afford to go out once a week, on a Friday night, where we joined Tess and our old friends in the Dog and Bear's darts room, but even then we had to be careful what we spent. The baby had to come first. Despite the lack of cash, we still had a telephone and a television; most people at that time had neither. As the time approached for the baby's arrival we were surprisingly calm, despite the inevitable pressures and stress. Yvonne and I had lived harmoniously for nearly three years, including the time spent at her mother's house. I don't recall us ever having a row, or even a serious disagreement, which was one of the reasons I felt so confident that our decision to marry early would not prove to be a mistake.

Our son, James Anthony Whyman, was born in the June of 1963. Yvonne's sister, Paddy, came down from London to give moral support and act as midwife's assistant. At that time husbands were discouraged from being present at the birth of their children. Yvonne and Jamie came through without serious complications, which was a great relief. We chose the name James simply because we liked it, and Anthony after Anthony Ball, his godfather and my best friend, Tess. He gave Jamie one of the first Premium Bonds ever issued, for the sum of one pound, which was a lot of money at the time. Paternity leave was unheard of in the '60's; Horrid Harry had refused my request for a day off, so it was work as usual. I couldn't risk the sack with a new baby to provide for.

As with all newborn babies, there were sleepless nights and nervous moments. Fortunately, I had the experience of caring for my two younger brothers to fall back on: nappy changing and bottle-feeding were nothing new to me. Yvonne was a competent mother and housewife and soon got to grips with the new routine. As Christmas approached, we began to experience one of the worst winters in living memory, even worse than that of the notorious one of 1947, which presented us with difficulties keeping the house warm. We had to confine ourselves to one room in the house, with the coal fire. As Yvonne began to do some part-time work at her poodle parlour, there seemed every reason for optimism. Horrid Harry had even promoted me to the alterations department. I was now competent at measuring customers for suits and the alterations department required similar skills.

Christmas was not an elaborate affair; we were not in a position to spend too much money but we did get down to the pub for Christmas Eve, where my old friend Tess invited us to a New Year's Eve party at his new flat. After enduring a year and a half living with his parents, Tess had broken out again and was sharing a flat with two of our acquaintances, Jack Davis, and J. J. Bartholomew, known to everyone as Bart. Tess's flat was very close to where another old friend, Seth Miles, lived with his mother. Very kindly, Mrs. Miles agreed to look after Jamie while we were at the party. It was a short walk from our house so we wheeled him down to her in his pram.

The party was a great success, if a party can be measured by the amount of people that attend it. There was much socialising and banter as we all prepared to welcome in the New Year. As midnight approached, I went looking for Yvonne to let her know it was time for 'Auld Lang's Syne'. She wasn't in the lounge or the kitchen, or two of the three bedrooms. The third bedroom was locked from the inside. I banged on the door, since she had to be in there, demanding that it be opened. I continued banging for a minute or two until the door was finally unlocked. Jack and Yvonne were alone, and Jack was sitting very close to my wife on the single bed. I could have turned around and walked away but my anger and sense of betrayal were too intense. As far as I was concerned, if a husband finds his wife locked in a bedroom with another man, there is only one conclusion and only one response. I had never hit a seated man before, but without hesitation I was prepared to make an exception for him. I punched him hard several times in the face; he was too stunned to respond. The revellers stopped in mid-song and rushed into the bedroom, finding a blood-soaked Jack and a distraught Yvonne, who was screaming hysterically. I had stepped back from Jack, and as I turned, I saw two of his friends who I thought might try taking up cudgels on his behalf. However, I think the situation was immediately apparent and they must have thought better of it; instead they carried Jack downstairs to the kitchen to clean him up. I grabbed Yvonne by the arm and pulled her out of the party and silently we went to collect Jamie from Mrs. Miles. After collecting our son, we began the walk home. I was silent, waiting for an explanation, but incredulously, Yvonne attempted to gain the moral high ground by attacking me for what she described as my unwarranted and brutal assault on Jack, almost, it seemed to me, as though she and Jack were the injured parties. She seemed incapable of taking responsibility for her own actions, blaming me instead. A snatch of conversation in the darts room some weeks before now began to make sense. I had heard my friend, Dick Spooner, mention to someone that he had met Jack and Yvonne in the city centre. At the time I had dismissed it as having no more significance than a casual meeting, but now in the light of what had just happened, it seemed that the meeting was far from casual and more in the way of an assignation. I concluded that their 'friendship' was probably of some weeks standing and assumed that it had just been cemented in the privacy of a locked room. I was churning with tension by the time we reached the house and spent a sleepless night, not least because my left hand was giving me great pain. The next morning I visited the hospital, fearing my wrist might be broken. An X-ray showed a small fracture and I left the hospital with my wrist strapped up and then went back to work[8].

That day at work was one of the most unpleasant I have ever spent. Preoccupied by the events of the night before and suffering with my injured hand, I fended off all enquires concerning my bandaged wrist by saying that I had slipped on the icy pavement.

Yvonne and I had not spoken since the walk home the night before and I was determined to clarify the situation. Was she having an affair? Was it a one night drunken aberration? Had she, in fact, had sex with Jack? I could get no direct answers to these questions. She seemed intent on turning the situation onto its head. She was blameless and I was the cause of all the unpleasantness. She had a string of accusations to level at me. Namely, that I didn't love her. How could I? I had been asleep when her sister came upstairs to tell me that Jamie had been born. I was stunned. Jamie was now six months old. Surely something so hurtful and wounding would have been difficult for her to suppress, especially given the importance she now attached to it. Surely she would have made me aware of her distress long ago. Even had it been true, it was not a thing that Paddy should have passed on to Yvonne when she was just out of labour. However, it wasn't the truth. A man would have to be made out of stone to be able to sleep on such an occasion: women sometimes died in childbirth and I was fearful for Yvonne and our baby. When the activity had ceased suddenly downstairs and I heard no sounds of rejoicing or a baby crying, I had feared the worst and had clamped my eyes shut when Paddy walked into the room to break the bad news. Now, no amount of tears or persuasion would convince my wife that I was telling the truth. I was devastated that she refused to believe me after all we had been through together. I had received no hint that she had been so unhappy with me while I was doing what I considered my best to be a good husband and father. Other complaints bordered on what I considered to be the farcical, given our financial position. The first was that I never wore casual clothes: "I wore suits." I explained, "because my job demanded it." (They were subsidised by Burtons and we couldn't afford casual clothes.) "I was boring," she said, "and never did anything." Once again, I tried to explain to her that 'doing things' cost money, whether it be going to a concert or eating out, and as we had a small baby and a meagre income, sacrifices had to be made. I wasn't complaining: why was she? Then came the demands: she wanted a dress allowance and two nights a week out with her friends. How did she think we were going to afford a champagne life-style on a mild and bitter income? It was beyond credulity.

To act as a peacemaker, Topsy came from London and we eventually agreed to try to keep our marriage together, contingent upon me meeting Yvonne's conditions. If I wanted to keep my wife and son I had little choice but to agree. I was surprised at the ruthlessness with which she pursued her demands. This was a facet of her character that I had not seen before and I could only conclude that she was suffering from some form of post-natal depression.

Yvonne now seemed satisfied; she had her dress allowance, although I had no idea where the money was coming from, and her two nights out a week with her friend, her assistant at the poodle parlour. I put the events of New Year's Eve behind me and concentrated on trying to be a good husband and father. I was aware that sex, never a frequent event in our married life, had now become almost non-existent, but hope prevailed over experience. We were all together, and that was all that mattered. As our married life appeared to assume its former harmony, the knot in my stomach began to ease. On Yvonne's nights out, I was perfectly happy sitting in front of the coal fire, reading, with Jamie on my knee. So it would have continued had Yvonne not made the mistake of staying out well beyond her normal time. One evening she was still not home by midnight. Worried, because at that time the pubs closed at ten o'clock, I walked to the end of our road just in time to see a taxi pull up and Yvonne get out. The other passenger was clearly Jack Davis, who sped away in the taxi as I chased after it. Crushed and defeated, I now understood what the dress allowance and nights out with friends were all about; for nearly the last three months of our reconciliation, she had deceived me. I walked back home in silence with Yvonne trailing behind me. As we entered the house, she silently went to bed. I decided any discussion was pointless and did the same. I spent a sleepless night with my mind in turmoil, but still managed to crawl to work the next day. I couldn't bear to be in the house with Yvonne. There was nothing more to say; I said nothing and nor did she. For the next three nights I went straight to the pub from work, without eating, and sat alone trying to make sense of my life. After two or three pints I went home, knowing Yvonne would be in bed by nine o'clock. On the fourth day, I returned home to find that Yvonne had left and taken Jamie with her. There was no note. All that was left was the shell of my marriage. My old friend Tess was very supportive throughout my troubles, and after three nights spent alone in my own house, with its depressing memories, Tess suggested that I join him and Bart in their flat as Jack had now left. After the New Year's Eve incident, Tess had been furious and had refused to speak to Jack, who left under a cloud and was now presumably with Yvonne.

I accepted his offer, even though he must have known I wouldn't be much fun to be around and probably thought that I should be under suicide watch. The loneliness of my own house was unbearable and I was glad of the company. The next few weeks were one of the most miserable times of my life and I will always be grateful to Tess for his patience and care in getting me through it. My preoccupation with the whereabouts and safety of my wife and son consumed me, and inevitably my work suffered, culminating in a huge cock up in my alterations department. Somehow, I managed to mix up the tickets for the alterations, and customers were coming out of the changing rooms looking like well-dressed tramps, with trousers six inches short and sleeves covering their hands, waists too tight or ridiculously wide. These bizarre sights left the customers dumbfounded or amused, and the staff doubled up with barely contained mirth; but Horrid Harry of the bulging eyes was understandably furious. I suspect that if it were not for the intervention of the assistant manager, Derek, who was aware of the stress I was under, he might have sacked me on the spot. A week later I was transferred to another branch, surprisingly, to re-organise their alterations department which was in a mess. Years later, these incidents at work make me laugh out loud, but at the time it was humiliating and traumatic.

My new manager was like a breath of fresh air: a six-feet four, jovial Geordie, who had himself been divorced (which still carried a stigma in the early '60's), he could not have been more sympathetic. I repaid his kindness by making his alterations department a model of efficiency. There were no 'pass the parcel' routines at his branch, and once the alterations department was straightened out, it was not difficult to distinguish myself on the sales floor. The Holy Grail of Burtons was 'the double and the triple'. To achieve these, the salesman had to persuade a customer to buy an extra pair of trousers to go with his suit, i.e. 'double', and on top of that, an overcoat or a raincoat, hence the 'triple'. We received a small commission on these sales, and by dint of the relaxed atmosphere and lack of pressure, I soon found myself competing with the manager as top salesman and in line for promotion. But it had all come too late.

I felt the need to put some distance between Yvonne and myself as I was not sure what my reactions would be if I met her and Jack in the pub or on the street. In the event, Yvonne made contact with me through a mutual friend, asking if I would like to babysit Jamie for her, giving me the opportunity to see my son. Of course I was pleased to see Jamie, but the circumstances were painful. She insisted on bringing him to what had been our home: presumably she didn't want me to know where she was living. With some misgivings I agreed, but told her not to bring Jack into the house for his own safety. I tried to behave in a civilised manner, made difficult when Yvonne insisted on regaling me with the details of her nights out attending pop concerts and meals at restaurants. Jack was an electrician down the pit and earned a lot more than I did at the time. The conclusions I drew were not complimentary. The situation seemed sordid and unacceptable and a clean break appeared to be the only solution.

I had received a letter from Topsy, who throughout the break up had remained neutral but supportive. It contained an offer from David to join his sub-contract steel demolition team in London. My brothers-in-law, Terry and Charles, had been working for David for some months. Charles had transferred to drive the scrap-yard crane and Terry was off work recovering from a broken arm sustained while trying to winch up a large galvanised tank. The winch cable had broken, springing back with a bracket still attached to it; fortunately it caught him on the arm and not the head. Accidents like this were not uncommon in the scrap business. David was now two men down, hence the offer. Mindful of the dangerous nature of the scrap trade, I gave David's offer some careful thought. It would be an opportunity to put some distance between Yvonne and myself and the wages were over twice what I was earning in Nottingham. So despite some initial misgivings, I decided to accept the offer and head south.

I was still paying the rent on our house, which remained just as Yvonne had left it. She had taken everything she needed for herself and Jamie, so I arranged with my father to dispose of what was left and if possible pay any outstanding bills. I wrote to Topsy and David telling them that I would be coming to London as soon as I had served my two weeks' notice at Burtons. My manager did everything he could to persuade me to stay, but in the end agreed that, given my circumstances, I was probably doing the right thing. When I made my farewells, he told me that if it didn't work out, I could come back and work for him at any time. As a farewell present, he told me that Horrid Harry had been dismissed for conduct unbecoming. Apparently he had made his young cashier pregnant. Burtons was an old-fashioned firm and expected better things from its married managers. On the train journey down to London, I amused myself by imagining the poisonous little dwarf preparing to ravish the cashier: taking off his vulgarly polished shoes; removing his trousers, and to avoid spoiling the creases, placing them carefully on one of the firm's hangers; then standing before the young cashier in his long, old-fashioned underpants and suspended socks while she stroked his paunch. I gave up at this point as my mind flinched from adding further details.

I arrived at Topsy and David's flat in the June of 1964. I spent the first night with them and moved the next day to a bed-sit of my own. The following day I started work. It was a baptism of fire. If I had any illusions about being fit, I was quickly relieved of them. David paid good money but one didn't get it for nothing. Brave and tough himself, he expected no less from those he employed. Out on the job at seven o'clock in the morning, the first contract was the demolition of a huge pre-1914 boiler. Boilerplate is the fillet steak of the scrap industry. It has to withstand extreme pressures and this requires steel of a very high quality. The plate on this monster must have been an inch and a half thick. It had to be cut into three feet by eighteen-inch chunks to avoid the loss of steel caused by excess oxy-propane cutting. Each cut produced an inch wide band of slag. We then had to man-handle it onto a lorry. Between loading, in order to get at the steel it was necessary to dig out barrow loads of white asbestos from the interior of the boiler. No one seemed to either know or care that the stuff was dangerous. It wasn't until some years later, when the perils of working with asbestos were exposed, that I became aware of the dangers myself. I had been working in it up to my knees, without a mask, and barely able to see through the dust.

After three weeks, my landlady rang Topsy as she was deeply concerned about my physical condition. I was too tired to eat or bathe. When not working, I spent the whole time sleeping. I must have been surviving on the lunchtime sandwiches and two or three bottles of Guinness. Topsy and David had also become concerned for my welfare. Fortunately, a bed-sit had become available in the same house as Paddy and Terry's flat, so I moved into the vacant bed-sit and made financial arrangements with Paddy to cook for me.

After about six weeks my body adjusted to the hard physical labour, helped by Paddy's wonderful cooking. I ceased to feel tired and began to explore my surroundings. I went occasionally to Eel Pie Island to see the up and coming bands of the time, like The Rolling Stones and The Yard Birds. I also discovered a folk club in Richmond where, for the first time, I heard live musicians playing and singing the songs I had first heard years ago on Radio Eireann. My father rarely paid the rent on our old Redifusion set, but for some unknown reason I could always get Radio Eireann, which invariably played a selection of folk music. It is Radio Eireann I must thank for introducing me to what has become one of my principle pleasures. Reawakened to folk music, I bought a cheap guitar, took lessons and spent many hours practising in my bed-sit.

After the big boiler, our next job was to demolish the machinery at a steel hardening shop at ICI, on the outskirts of London. Large quantities of cyanide are required to harden steel and the place appeared to be glistening with it. A crystalline crust clung to every surface. It was clear that the workshop hadn't been used for years. A cabinet on the wall contained two bottles filled with the antidote to cyanide poisoning, to be taken immediately if one suddenly smelt bitter almonds. The caretaker, who was always snooping around, had worked in the hardening shop during the war. He told me the tragic story of a fifteen year old boy, who, on being told that cyanide was a deadly poison, drank a cup full of it from the tank and died on the spot. Why did every job we had undertaken so far have an added peril attached to it, beyond the obvious dangers of steel demolition?

Worse was to come. David had a contract for 'trimming the loads' of scrap boats. These were coasters sailing from London to Germany. It entailed climbing down a steel ladder twenty feet into the vast open holds of the ships, and levelling out the layers of scrap as the huge dockside cranes delivered it in equally huge grabs. We cowered into the side of the ship as each grab full was delivered and hoped that nothing dropped out. At the height from which the cranes were operating, even a medium sized bolt would kill you. Our job, between grab loads, was to scramble out over the scrap, which was predominantly car chassis parts, gearboxes and engines all dripping with oil, and with bare hands, make sure that the scrap was evenly distributed across the ship's hold. After three days of this, I think even David's nerves were frayed. It struck me as a nasty form of Russian roulette.

When the annual Cleethorpes jazz festival came around in September, I arranged to meet Tess and Bart there and share a tent. I hadn't seen any of my friends for about three months. I had grown a decent beard by that time; nobody in David's squad shaved, as he insisted that nobody had time for that kind of thing. A full set was de rigueur. Affectations, such as goatee beards, were scoffed at. I looked very different from my Burtons days of suits, collars and ties. I was earning enough money to buy whatever I liked and probably resembled something approaching the hippies of some years later. Inevitably, Yvonne and Jack were at the festival, but I made no attempt to go out of my way to speak to them, confining myself to polite pleasantries when contact was unavoidable. It was a pleasant break and I returned to London ready for the fray.

Our next job was to remove the steel and metal from a now defunct tannery by the side of the river at Kingston-on-Thames. Arriving on site, notices stuck up everywhere reminded us of yet another extra hazard: anthrax. I didn't know if a cure for this nasty disease was available, but the diagrams illustrating the symptoms were enough to strike terror into the bravest hearts. The exterior of the building was predominantly constructed of wood, supported by steel girders. The ground floor was like a chessboard of concrete curing tanks, sunk into the ground, with only a foot wide walkway between them. The tanks were full of the most evil looking liquid of a greenish hue, and smelt as bad as they looked. We would have to take care when negotiating these hazards. They looked as if they could strip the flesh off one's bones in two minutes flat; that's if they didn't poison you first. I wondered how many millions of dormant but hungry anthrax spores were floating around in them.

My brother-in-law, Terry and I were detailed to start work on cutting up the steel girders that supported a mezzanine ten feet above the tanks. David busied himself in another part of the building, smashing the huge phosphor bronze bearings out of two First World War tank engines that the tannery had pressed into service to power its machinery. (We sold the metal we found and shared out the proceeds; phosphor bronze was the most prized of all the metals.)

As Terry cut up the girders with an oxy-propane torch, it was my job to carry the cut lengths down the treacherous walkways to be loaded onto the lorry. On one of my return trips, I noticed a spark from Terry's cutting torch jump into a patch of oil, which immediately burst into flames and then crept along the tannery floor towards the tanning tanks. We always kept a bucket of water handy for such eventualities; but one bucket of water failed to douse it. I had noticed a hose reel on the far side of the ground floor and dragged it along the narrow walkways, attempting to keep it out of the greasy tanks and calling for one of the brickwork demolition men to turn it on. When I reached the seat of the fire, which was now in full blaze, it soon became apparent why firemen undergo such rigorous training in the use of hoses. A fire hose some four inches in diameter, with the full force of water going through it, is an uncontrollable serpent even on firm ground; in the hands of one man, standing on a twelve-inch walkway, the hose was lethal. I couldn't go forward into the fire - it was too fierce - and I couldn't abandon the hose because it would, in all probability, have gone thrashing around on its own and knocked me into one of the filthy, liquid filled tanks. I was under the mezzanine; the ceiling was low and the room was filling up with smoke. The flames had burned their way through the mezzanine and up to the roof. Men removing the tiles could be heard sliding down to escape the flames and I wasn't sure whether anyone knew I was still in there. I remember thinking what a horrible way to die: either burn to death, or be drowned in that disgusting liquid. Suddenly the hose went slack and a dim figure came cautiously working its way towards me. It was the man who'd turned on the hose. When he failed to see me come out, he had turned off the water and come looking for me. I owe that man my life. Three fire brigades attended the fire. There was no shortage of water as the tannery backed onto the Thames. Houseboats on the opposite side of the river were badly scorched, but miraculously no one was hurt. It's been said that a near death experience concentrates the mind wonderfully, but I soon had other things to concentrate on.

Yvonne had let it be known, through her sister, Paddy, that she was seeking reconciliation. For some time after the extraction of a painful tooth, the tongue probes the empty space as though mourning the loss. And so it was with me: my mind was always wandering to the empty space in my life. I still missed my wife and child, but would reconciliation once again be the triumph of hope over experience? I was just beginning to achieve some peace of mind after a long period of pain and uncertainty. It was now nearly nine months since that dreadful New Year's Eve and the taxi incident. Yvonne had told Paddy that she felt Jamie should be with his father, and I agreed with her. To achieve that end, I had to trust to one more throw of the dice; it would be cowardly not to. I knew that I would reproach myself thereafter if I didn't at least try.

Yvonne came back with Jamie in the middle of September. My bed-sit was too small to accommodate the three of us, so we set about house hunting again. By a stroke of luck, not only did we find a place quickly but it was a whole house, and it was free, along with the gas, electricity and coal. In return, we were expected to provide a meal once a day for our landlady's aged father, who occupied one of the downstairs rooms. The old boy rarely came out of his room and was no trouble at all. He was also happy to baby-sit for us, thus providing us with a built in grandad and giving us the opportunity to go out together whenever we wished.

It was a pleasant, three bedroomed house in a quiet district of Houndslow, and very convenient for me as I had just swapped jobs with my brother-in-law, Charles. I was now the crane driver in the scrap-yard and Charles had moved to the demolition team. This meant that I would be working a five and a half-day week instead of six or seven. The money was a bit less, but our free house more than made up for it and it was only a short bus journey to the scrap-yard. Yvonne didn't need to go to work: I was earning enough money for us all. To keep her company, I bought her a German sausage dog for her birthday. I was determined that money would not be a problem and just threw the contents of my wage packets into the sideboard drawer for Yvonne to spend as she saw fit. Jamie was now two years old, and at night-time, trouble free: once asleep he never woke until the morning. I took the credit for this, as at his bedtime, I would play and sing to him and found him an appreciative and uncritical audience.

My crane resembled one of the Martian fighting machines from H.G. Wells's 'The War of the Worlds'. The cab stood on top of a steel girder tripod, twenty feet high, and sported a fifty-foot jib. It was called a Butters Shear Leg, and dated from before the First World War. Charles spent a couple of hours teaching me how to operate it. He warned me to watch Percy, the yard foreman, who received tips from the tatters[9], whose loads he supervised and prepared with the help of the slinger[10], in readiness for the crane to lift. The more lifts he achieved, the more money he made. Percy had a habit of encouraging the crane driver to ignore the safety warnings in the cab. A flashing red light and a buzzer would indicate to the driver that the crane was overloaded. The crane was in danger of toppling from its tripod if these warnings were ignored. Ominously, the crane had fallen once before; on that occasion the only injury to the driver had been caused by the first-aid box in the cab, which had fallen on his head, but there could easily have been a fatality. After Charles's briefing, I was on my own. For the first couple of weeks on the crane I found myself operating it in my sleep, but as I became accustomed to it I soon settled down and became a fairly competent crane driver, Percy not withstanding. Compared to the demolition squad, it was like an office job. Yvonne had been back for about three months and everything seemed to be all right until two weeks before Christmas. It was a Friday night and I turned to her in bed to give her a cuddle. She stiffened, and told me she was leaving with Jamie the next day, and returning to Nottingham. No warning and no apology. As can be imagined, I didn't sleep much that night. She must have been keeping all her options open and corresponding with Jack throughout the whole time she was in London, probably through her sister. I don't think that Topsy would have agreed to play a part in a deceit of that nature. I was disappointed and angry. Once again, all my efforts had been in vain. There was nothing more I could say and nothing more I could do and I was determined that there would be no more reconciliations. I was working overtime at the yard and on the Saturday morning she left I was up early enough to watch the little white van arrive to take them back to Nottingham. As it drove away, I had a feeling that it was not going to be a very merry Christmas.

I informed our landlady of my change in circumstances and though she was sympathetic in the extreme, it was obvious that I could not fulfil my obligations to her aged father and that she would have to find someone who could. She gave me two weeks grace in order to find alternative accommodation, during which I found lodgings locally, in central Houndslow. My new landlord and landlady were a strange couple: he was ex-SAS and she was Burmese. Despite her occupation as a nurse, she encouraged and revelled in the gruesome, blow-by-blow accounts of the actions her husband had been involved in during his time in the army. Since I took my meals with them, his stories were not an aid to digestion, particularly when I was served with stewed heart, a dish I had not encountered before and have no desire to encounter again. War stories apart, they were an affable couple and did their best to make me comfortable. For a week or two after Yvonne left I spent my evenings in the pub. This only served to exacerbate the depression into which I was slowly sinking; so in order to avoid sinking into alcohol fuelled self-pity, I gave up drinking completely. I needed a clear head if I were to come to terms with my situation. I eventually convinced myself that I had done everything in my power to save our marriage, but that did nothing to diminish my sense of personal failure, or alleviate my depression.

I accepted an invitation from Tess and Bart to spend Christmas with them at their flat back in Nottingham. I duly arrived on Christmas Eve in time to go out with them for a drink at the Bell Inn, in central Nottingham. I had suspended my abstinence for the festive season as I had no wish to put a damper on my friends' festive spirits. Unfortunately, Jack and Yvonne had chosen the same pub. I was uncomfortable in their presence, to say the least, even though they were not in our company. In an attempt to relieve the tension, I drank too much and barely made it back to the flat, where I spent most of the night vomiting. Tess, with great tenderness, looked after me and eventually got me safely into bed. I can honestly say that it was the worst Christmas Eve I have ever spent. Before I left Nottingham, Tess and Bart assured me that there would always be a bed for me at their flat should I wish to return. This resonated with what I was already thinking: that given my present state of mind, I would be better off among friends.

On the train journey back to London, I spent the time considering where my life was going. Driving a crane is a responsible job, but with my mind in turmoil I could not concentrate properly and might be a danger to my workmates and myself. I concluded that the only safe course of action was to give up my job. Staying in London now seemed pointless anyway, as the only people I knew outside of the scrap-yard were Yvonne's family, and given the recent developments, I had no wish to embarrass them with my continued presence.

After serving a fortnight's notice, I took the bus to the Great West Road and got off at the Firestone Building, giving that magnificent art deco edifice barely a glance. It was my last day at the yard. The crunch of my boots on the icy canal towpath that led to the crane seemed louder than they should. The canal too was iced over, with a low mist hovering over it obscuring the reeds and dead rushes. All was silent as I trudged along. It was a depressing atmosphere, and as the crane loomed up out of the mist I had a strange sense of foreboding. My last day, however, passed without incident, but when it was over I was relieved to be down on the ground again. Tragically, three weeks later the crane toppled over, killing the new driver.

I said goodbye to the odd couple I had been lodging with and thanked them for their kindness. I then caught the train back to Nottingham. It was just over five years since I had first met Yvonne and it all seemed a terrible waste of time and emotion.

After a few days in Nottingham, I felt that moving back had been the right decision. The depression, however, still clung to me and I could find little to savour in life. I had resumed my teetotal regime after returning to London and refused all offers to join my friends down at the pub, which they found odd at first, but eventually accepted without comment. Tess and Bart were sympathetic and caring without being intrusive, never neglecting to invite me out but never pushy when I refused, which was probably what I needed. I tried to repay their kindness by keeping the flat tidy, cooking for them and taking the washing to the laundrette. This was good for all of us as they were out at work all day, and it gave some structure to my life. It was nice to be able to pamper them a bit and they appreciated it enormously.

After a few weeks of living in a supportive atmosphere, my depression began to ease. I started to play my guitar again and take a bit more notice of the world. My money would soon run out and it was imperative that I start to look for work, but it would have to be something that was not too stressful. One prospective employer had the cheek to ask me why I had grown a beard, almost as though it was a sign of deviant behaviour. Nottingham was much more conservative than London: the beard had to come off. I eventually landed a job as a warehouseman, assembling orders of ladies underwear to be dispatched around the country to various shops. I found it suited my situation well. It was not too taxing and I got on well with my foreman, a short, fat, jovial Pole called Frank. The money wasn't very good, but sharing the flat was inexpensive so it wasn't a consideration.

After two months at work my depression slowly eased, and one morning in April, as I was walking through the Park Estate on my way to work, I suddenly realised it wasn't there any more. It felt as though the stone I had been carrying around in my chest had been lifted out. I started to go to the local pub for a couple of pints and enjoy a game of dominoes with Tess and Bart. I experienced no ill effects from the drink, which was a great relief as I had always been partial to a few pints. Just as important, I began to take an interest in women again. Tess and Bart were keen rock climbers and encouraged me to join them on their climbing expeditions to Wales and the grit-stone edges of Derbyshire. I still felt a little fragile, but the fresh air and exercise did me a lot of good. While climbing in Wales, I was halfway up a route when a chap who was climbing higher up the mountain peeled off and came hurtling past me. Fortunately he was tied on. The rope arrested his fall, but he still continued to bounce up and down for a while as the rope stretched. As soon as he had stopped jiggling up and down, he scampered up the rock face as though nothing had happened. Such cold, physical courage impressed me but at the same time gave me pause for thought. Doing dangerous things for a living was one thing, putting your life at risk for fun was quite another. After that incident, my enthusiasm for climbing waned rapidly.

The old gang in the Dog and Bear darts room were growing up. Some were returning from deferred National Service[11]. Others had extended their time in the Services to obtain better rates of pay. Some, having obtained their degrees, were returning from university. Tess, Bart and others, were engaged to be married. The atmosphere in the darts room was less boisterous as people matured. The talk now among the women was of babies and houses. Among the men it was jobs, money and careers. Even the most unlikely were metamorphosing as they prepared to become responsible husbands, wives and parents. In some cases, where the crude methods of birth control had failed or not been used at all, there was little choice but to take the 'shot gun' option. In the early '60's, single motherhood was barely tolerated. Having already spent three years caring for a wife and child to no avail, I wished them well, but was in no hurry to join them and did my best to hide my pessimism. It soon became apparent that I had little in common with my old friends and would have to search elsewhere for companionship and stimulus.

In 1965 the folk music revival had reached Nottingham and an old acquaintance from the skiffle days had opened a club on St. James Street, in the centre of town. This gave me the opportunity to enjoy the music, as I had in London, and mix with like-minded members of the opposite sex. I was attracted to the strong element of social comment in folk lyrics, particularly in the work of contemporary singers such as Ewan MacColl, and at that time, Bob Dylan. I thought that popular music, which concentrated solely on love themes, was too limited in its message and was likely to give people unrealistic expectations, but perhaps personal experiences had coloured my judgment.

Tess and Bart were now married and to help pay the rent and utilities I now shared the flat with Phil Potter and Don Redwood, who had just completed their courses at the Art College. They were both in work but finding things boring at their respective advertising agencies. There was a feeling of deja-vu about their attitude to housework, which reminded me of Tess and me in our first flat. Gone was the smooth routine that Tess, Bart and I had followed; in its place was a chaos of dirty dishes, cooking utensils, unwashed sheets and clothes and unswept carpets. I knew that this behaviour was par for the course for young men who had just left home and so attempted to tutor them in the ways of righteousness. My efforts were in vain, and in the end I looked after myself and left them to their own selfish devices. Don developed the eccentric habit of sleeping in a tent, which he had built for himself in the living room. I would return home after a night in the pub, looking forward to a quiet cup of cocoa, to find Don and his girlfriend humping away in the makeshift tent. Fortunately for me, but not for Don, the girlfriend left him. Writing to him some weeks later to inform him that she was pregnant with his child, she said she wanted no further contact with him. She had found another man and would shortly be getting married. The news didn't seem to concern him and it was difficult to know whether to offer sympathy or congratulations. It did mean, however, that for a while the living room was a more peaceful place at night. Don was a sensitive and intelligent man and good company. We became good friends, but I could never persuade him to sleep in a conventional bed and accused him of playing the eccentric artist.

When the summer holidays of 1965 arrived I was twenty-four years old. Don had found another woman to share his clotheshorse tent and I decided to seek a bit of peace by hitching down to Weymouth, in Devon, to see an old school friend who was now serving in the Royal Navy. I got some good lifts and made it in record time, even making a detour to have a look at Newquay where the hippy scene was supposed to be in full swing. I spent four enjoyable days with my old friend O'Grady, who insisted on buying the beer every night and was not too rude about my attempts to play the guitar I had brought with me. Not wishing to wear out my welcome, I then set off to hitch back to Nottingham.

I was not so lucky with lifts this time and I was still in Devon when night fell. To make matters worse, it began to rain and those few cars that were on the roads were reluctant to stop for me. I was still walking towards Honiton at midnight. The rain was coming down in sheets and I hadn't seen a car for half an hour. I was contemplating spending the night wet through, under a hedge, when a minivan swept past me and skidded to a halt a few yards down the road. I ran to it as fast as my rucksack and guitar would allow and found, to my surprise, it was being driven by a very attractive young lady of about twenty years old. She apologised, saying she was only going about ten miles down the road but at least I would be out of the rain for a while. I accepted her kind offer, saying that a young woman on her own, in the middle of nowhere at midnight, is taking a risk giving a lift to a stranger. She explained that, for some reason, the fact that I was carrying a guitar was sufficient reassurance to make her stop for me. Perhaps she thought that musicians were less likely to be murderers and rapists.

When she reached her turn off, she confessed that she couldn't send me back out into the rain and that she was taking me home. A few miles after her turn off, we entered a pair of huge iron gates and onto a road which ran through a carefully manicured estate. Two or three miles further on, she pulled up in front of a very large mansion, complete with stables. I followed her into a kitchen that was bigger than our entire flat, where she made me a pheasant sandwich and fetched her father's decanter of single malt whisky. By the time we were about two thirds of the way down the whisky, she was looking at me with considerable fondness. I began to think that I was about to become a character in one of my own folk songs: the daughter of the manor picks up wandering troubadour and takes him to the stables for a roll in the hay; the troubadour walks away whistling in the morning. However, her confidence subsided, probably because her parents were in the house. We finished the whisky and she found me a sleeping bag, saying it would be best if I slept in the back of the mini van. As she requested, I made sure that I was away at first light to avoid being spotted by the estate workers and hauled before the magistrate for trespass and vagrancy. It was much better than a hedge bottom, but not as good as a roll in the hay. I was very grateful to her but I would not be walking away whistling.

I arrived back in Nottingham without mishap to find that the five-pound note I had placed in the bureau at the flat had disappeared. Five pounds was almost half a week's wages at that time; I would now be woefully short of money for the rest of my two weeks' holiday. Don and Phil denied all knowledge of it. The flat was on the ground floor and Phil suggested that a burglar could have climbed in through the open window. Phil's traumatic childhood had left him with a somewhat wonky moral compass but I had no proof that he was the culprit. All I could do was to avoid putting temptation in his way in the future.

I was doing quite well for girlfriends at this time, which, after the Yvonne episode, went a long way to restoring my battered self-esteem. One girl I had abducted from a private party at her parent's pub in Derbyshire. I was out climbing with Tess and Bart and we were camping just down the road. The party was held in the back garden of the pub and was in full swing when we passed on the way home from another pub. Leaving Tess and Bart to carry on back to camp, I climbed over the locked gates, grabbed a drink and a sandwich and mingled. She was blonde, slender, and the most attractive girl there. In my semi-inebriated state I was determined to have her. It was amazingly easy; she was back in my tent before her parents realised that she was missing, but she did get a roasting the next morning. She travelled all the way from Derbyshire every other Sunday, on her day off, to see me. This arrangement suited me as I had other girlfriends. Viva I had met at the folk club. She was Jewish, with dark skin, dark eyes and curly hair. She was also blessed with a nice round bottom and large breasts. She had recently returned from working on a kibbutz in Israel after her Turkish lover had been shot dead by the Arabs. It was Viva who acquainted me with oral sex, an exotic pleasure I had only heard about but never experienced before. Then there was Di.

My usual drinking haunt was the Bell Inn in the Nottingham market square, which from time to time hosted local jazz bands. It was on one of these occasions that my attention was captured by the band's girl singer. Miss Dianne Seagrave, as she was introduced, was possessed of one of the best blues voices I had heard so far. Specialising in Bessie Smith numbers, she was a larger than life figure, both on and off stage. Clad usually in an old army shirt, black tights, a pair of battered pixie boots, and with a pint pot in her hand, she was queen bee to a coterie of admirers of both sexes. Outspoken, forthright, and with no regard for niceties, to many people she was a frightening prospect. She could spot a phoney a mile away. Airs, graces, and affectations received short shrift. Such belligerence made most men give her a wide birth, but I found her fascinating and attractive. She was the first woman I had encountered so far who expected to be treated on equal terms by men. Women drinking beer from pint pots in those days was frowned upon, but any smart arse foolish enough to comment upon it, or make any other sexist remark, was made to feel as though they'd gone through the gearbox of a battleship, steaming backwards. I made a point of not joining the fan club, instead speaking to her at the bar. She always bought her own drinks, mercifully, as her capacity for beer was prodigious. We became friends, lovers, and drinking partners.

The mid '60's was a time of musical and social transition. Beatniks were metamorphosing into hippies; teddy boys were becoming mods and rockers; rock and roll gave way to the Beatles, the Liverpool sound and the music of the Rolling Stones. Jazz was on the wane, helped along by the attitudes of those who considered it bad form to dance to it, and instead encouraging audiences to sit in rows as though it were a religious experience. In Nottingham, folk music was still finding its feet. All these influences mingled at the Bell Inn for a while, until it settled down to become the preferred meeting place for jazz fans, hippies and students. In the years that I drank in the Bell, in the '60's and '70's, I can recall only one incident of trouble. The eighty-year-old landlady and proprietor, Mrs. Jackson, swiftly dealt with it.

The nightclub scene was still in its infancy. Drinks and entrance fees were expensive and such places were considered by many to be seedy and mere meat markets. Di, with her two flat mates, occasionally patronized one of them called The Hippo. I refused to go anywhere near them. The idea of paying an entrance fee to drink expensive and inferior beer was anathema to me.

On the odd occasion, I took Di to the Dog and Bear darts room to see Tess and Bart and some of my old friends. The atmosphere in there was very blokeish. The prim and respectable new wives and fiancées sat in one corner, which the men openly referred to as 'tots corner', drinking shorts and Babycham, while their partners swigged their beloved Worthington E around the darts board. 'Tots corner', where the talk was of babies, houses, and clothes, bored Di. Her interests were sex, drinking numerous pints of beer, and singing, probably because she excelled at all of them.

Looking back, Di was probably one of the first liberated women in Nottingham. She was as open and forthright about sex as she was about everything else. One of the first things she taught me was the location of that elusive little creature the clitoris, which never seemed to be in the same place twice and only sprang to life once you had found it. I had discussed the existence of the clitoris with male friends previously, but no one seemed to know whether it really existed or if it was just a myth. This did not say much for those of us who considered ourselves to be a bit of a stud. Had I been in possession of this knowledge some years earlier, my previous girlfriends and wife might have benefited. I am full of admiration for the fortitude with which they endured my uneducated performances. Sadly, such were the times that women were embarrassed to discuss sex in detail with their partners and both suffered accordingly.

After some weeks, Di left her shared flat and moved in with me. It was not wholly successful as Don and Phil were still as undisciplined around the house as they had ever been.

Some weeks earlier, I had encountered Yvonne in the Bell. She was alone and confirmed what I had previously heard: Jack had left her and gone back to his former girlfriend. The irony now was that she was alone with a small child, in Nottingham, without her family and unwelcome among both Jack's friends and mine; a similar situation to the one in which I had found myself after she had left me in London. I had little sympathy for her but good manners prevailed and I introduced her to Phil, who was with me at the time. A relationship of sorts developed between them. One night Phil chose to bring Yvonne back to stay the night at our flat. I thought this was unwise of Phil and perverse of Yvonne. Di, who detested Yvonne, put on a display of sexual pyrotechnics that could be heard not only in Phil's bedroom, but also probably at the end of the road. The last straw came when, one night, we discovered Don underneath our bed trying, as he put it, 'to improve his knowledge of sexual relations.' Di was no prude, but even she thought this was going too far. We had had enough. We decided it was time to move on and find a place of our own.

We found a furnished flat in what was once The High Peak Hotel on Forest Road. In former days, the huge, rambling Victorian building must have been quite impressive: now it was run down and converted into separate flats and bed-sits. Forest Road was notorious as a haunt for prostitutes, and some, no doubt, used the hotel for servicing their clients. Respectable people refused to live there, but the rent was cheap and we didn't consider ourselves respectable anyway. The only inconvenience was that, on occasions, Di was mistaken for one of the working girls. We joked about it, saying here was an opportunity for her to have a career change but she said she was too emotional for the job. She was extremely jealous. While at the old flat, she had returned home after a night out with her girlfriends, and upon finding me asleep in bed, proceeded to pour a jar of marmalade over my head and drunkenly accusing me of being unfaithful and demanding to sniff my penis. I chased her down to the bus stop at the end of the road clad only in my underpants. In the presence of an astonished queue for the late night bus, I caught hold of her and dragged her back to the flat, by which time my shock and anger had evaporated, unlike the marmalade that was still dripping down my neck. She was also highly sexed, which ordinarily was not a problem, but on one occasion when I was suffering from the flu and unable to accommodate her, she hit me over the head with our portable radio. In the '60's, portable radios were heavy, cumbersome things, not pocket sized as they are now. Frightened, she locked herself in the living room for the night, even though thus far, despite all provocation, I had never been tempted to hit her. I did come close to it from time to time, particularly when she started throwing crockery in my direction. Fortunately this was not often and since she never managed to hit me, she must have been aiming to miss. There is no doubt that she had what are now euphemistically called 'issues'. At the age of fourteen she had become pregnant. Her parents refused to let her keep the child and she subsequently gave birth to a baby boy in an unmarried mothers' home. A few days after the birth, she was forced to give her son up for adoption. The callous treatment in the home and the loss of her child was a trauma that never left her. She still carried a photograph of the baby. She found it hard to forgive her mother for sending her away in order to maintain a hollow respectability and to avoid being judged by the neighbours. I disliked her mother intensely: she was bigoted and judgemental and never seemed to have an encouraging word for her daughter. It was not difficult to understand why, in a misguided attempt to seek emotional comfort, Di had gone off the rails. Her father was a decent and affectionate man who appeared to be very fond of his wayward daughter. Di always maintained that her father had argued in favour of letting her keep the baby but was overridden by her mother. One wondered if he ever felt guilty for not standing up to his wife more firmly, and if he ever recognised the effect that this failure had had on his daughter.

After three months at The High Peak, we decided to move. The estate agents, C. O. Day, had a number of cheap, terraced properties on its books and within a week of enquiry we were given the keys to 126 Birkin Avenue, in the Hyson Green area of Nottingham. Our house, like most of those around us, was one of a terraced row. Downstairs there was a kitchen, a living room and a front room, or what the older generation referred to as 'the parlour'. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a small attic room. There was no bathroom and the toilet was outside. In 1965 this was standard, but these inconveniences were, of course, reflected in the rent, which was low. The house was unfurnished, which meant we had to scrounge stuff from friends, or buy it from junk shops. A tin bath hung on the wall by the outside toilet and was filled by boiling up water in saucepans on the old gas stove that the previous tenant had left behind. Things were primitive but the house was warm and free from damp. We had been in our new home for only a few weeks when Di announced that she was pregnant and confessed that she had deliberately stopped taking her pill. My first reaction was outrage, and a feeling that I had been sexually mugged. In view of her experience with her first child, an abortion was out of the question. So it was in for a penny, in for a pound, and hope that a new baby would resolve some of her problems and settle her head. She was very concerned that the baby should not be born out of wedlock, which surprised me. Perhaps her mother's influence was at work, or maybe she wasn't the rebel she professed to be. Despite some misgivings, I agreed with her.

The first problem was divorcing Yvonne, which I knew was going to be an expensive business. I approached a solicitor and set things in motion; the grounds for divorce would be Yvonne's adultery with Jack Davis. The cost of the divorce proceedings, I was told, would be a sum approaching two hundred pounds, or to put it in perspective, about fifteen weeks wages. There seemed no alternative but to find a better-paid job. All court and solicitor's expenses would have to be paid in advance of any proceedings taking place.

Di, whose natural home was the dole office, occasionally did agency work. She decided to pull her finger out and found employment at a firm of plasterers, as a wages clerk. I went back to the scrap business, working for McIntyres, a medium-sized firm in the Lenton district of Nottingham, employing around twenty people. I was no stranger to hard work but the first few weeks back in the scrap business, until my hitherto semi-sedentary body adjusted once again to hard labour, were totally knackering. If anything, McIntyres drove its work force even harder than David. At the London scrap-yard the only means used to cut steel was an oxy-propane torch; at McIntyres there were a variety of mechanical aids. There were three pairs of shears that looked like huge pairs of scissors. These could chop up anything from a thin steel pipe to a fair-sized girder, but if the operator lost his concentration, or the shears malfunctioned, nasty accidents could result. I have seen an operator lifted up bodily from the ground on the end of a heavy steel pipe that the shears refused to cut, and his head smashed against the corrugated roof of his shelter, which fortunately was too flimsy to do too much damage. There were also two presses: these were steel boxes, about four feet square and two feet deep, set into the ground. These were then filled with pieces of 'light-iron'. Steel rams then came in and squashed the steel into eighteen-inch solid blocks. Such was the power and malevolence of these machines that there was little room for mistakes. On my first day at the yard I was set to work operating the 'chipper'. This was a ten-foot tall by four-foot wide steel box with a hopper at the top. I was given a pitchfork and a drag (similar to a pitchfork but with three tines, and bent at right angles to itself) and pointed towards a mountain of steel turnings[12]. My job was to pitchfork the steel turnings into the chipper's hopper. It was like hurling huge balls of steel spaghetti into the mouth of a mechanical giant, who, with an ear-splitting growl and a crash of steel teeth, deposited finely chipped turnings onto a heap at the other side. It was a never-ending job: as soon as the heap of chippings was large enough, it was shovelled onto a lorry and taken away, while the mountain of turnings was continually replenished. In order to gain some respite, I eventually devised a way of disabling this implacable machine: if I fed it an oversized ball of spaghetti turnings, it would suffer a form of constipation and groan to a halt. I could then have a fag and a rest while the mechanic unblocked it.

Eventually, I was rescued from the 'chipper' by Terry Munns, who was a fellow ex-Player School pupil. Terry was the driver of one of the firm's lorries, which was used to pick up scrap from various engineering works around the city. He was tremendously strong and very conscientious. I had difficulty keeping up with him at first, but he was sufficiently satisfied with my performance to recommend me for a pay rise. Such was his standing with the management that they gave me the rise without hesitation. Terry soon moved on to a better-paid job. I was sad to see him go: he was a lively, intelligent man and a good person to work with. My next driver, Stan Tilley, was in most respects just the opposite of Terry: he was totally illiterate and spent most of his time moaning. I had the misfortune to remain with Stan for the rest of my time at McIntyres.

Di was heavily pregnant by the time we attended court on the 28th March 1966 for the divorce proceedings. In those days divorce was taken very seriously. Even the plaintiffs had to complete a questionnaire detailing any instances of adultery committed by themselves. In order to encourage truthful compliance, a court official, known as the Queen's Proctor, supposedly spent his time verifying the truth of the completed questionnaires. Bearing this in mind, I cut the list in half and named three of my sexual partners, dating from the time Yvonne and I had became estranged up until my appearance in court. I considered this a gross invasion of my privacy, and that of my sexual partners, given that I had remained faithful to my wife right up to the point where our marriage had finally disintegrated.

Standing before the judge, I was told that he had received a letter from Yvonne. Although the contents of her letter were not disclosed in court, the judge concluded that my behaviour had been disgraceful, and were it not for the fact that Miss Seagrave was pregnant, would not have granted the divorce. I began to wonder who the injured party was: Yvonne or myself? How much the contents of Yvonne's letter had influenced the judge's conclusions, I had no way of knowing. As far as I was concerned, she was the party responsible for the break up of our marriage and I could see no point in her writing to the court for any other reason than to discredit me. If this was so, then it seemed an incredibly vindictive thing to do. The only way she could discredit me was by not telling the truth. A few days later, in Judge's Chambers, custody of Jamie was given to Yvonne. No maintenance order was made, or even requested. In the end it made no difference. On the 27th July 1966 my divorce to Yvonne was made final and absolute on the grounds of her being guilty of adultery with the co-respondent, Jack Davis.

We had managed to pay for the divorce and now Di was determined that we would be married before the birth of our baby. At the Nottingham Register Office, on the 26th August 1966, Di and I became man and wife. Our baby was born at home with the help of a midwife. At Di's request, I was present at the birth. My friend Seth Miles, whose wife had just had a baby, told me that a man's reluctance to be present at the birth of his children was not because he didn't love his wife, but because he did. Standing there helplessly while Di suffered the ordeal of giving birth to my daughter, I had a tendency to agree with him. Childbirth seemed a painful and traumatic event and not one I would like to witness again. After what I had seen, I couldn't understand how a woman could willingly have more than one child.

Di named our daughter Zoë Charlotte Whyman. She was a caring mother, but if I had hoped that she would settle down to motherhood and married life, I was to be disappointed. She was just as turbulent as she had been formerly. The difference now was that my job was physically very demanding. It entailed getting up at six-thirty in the morning and not returning home until six-thirty at night. The demands of our new baby meant sleepless nights and constant vigil. Di's need for attention, both emotional and sexual, had, if anything, increased. Unfortunately, her attention seeking was not confined to the positive. Any attention was welcome, as I discovered when tormented to distraction and physically and mentally exhausted, I took a slipper to her bottom, only to find that she interpreted the outrage as a positive experience, congratulating herself for firing up my emotions to the point where I lost control.

After the slipper incident, I had run out of options. I could go down the violent road, with who knows what horrible consequences, or shut down and ignore her tantrums. There seemed no prospect of finding common ground. I reached the conclusion that she would never have a proper sense of proportion, no matter how much I tried. I felt I had two choices: either become a tyrant or a doormat; there was no in between. Realising that I was unable to change things and suffering from exhaustion, tension and depression, I began to close down, with inevitable consequences. Approximately a year after our marriage, I arrived home from work one evening to find Di, her mother and my daughter about to be driven away in a taxi. Reflecting on the irony of the situation, I raised no objections, concluding that for the moment it was the best solution to our problems. It would give us both some time to consider where we were going. After a week or so of peace, I began to see our relationship in perspective and realised that it was destructive beyond repair. To continue with it would be to put my sanity at risk. Di was one of those people who thrive on emotional drama; like a cushion, one could poke her in one place, only to find she would pop out in another, totally unscathed. I, on the other hand, realised I was a man who was ill equipped to deal with an ongoing war of mental conflict. Before marriage and the birth of our daughter, Di and I had been good friends and enjoyed a mutually stimulating relationship. I admired her both for her quick intelligence and her unconventional approach to life. Stability and responsibility seemed to have conspired against us when our former freewheeling lifestyle came to an end. The opportunity to visit pubs and pursue our musical ambitions became rare and perhaps we fell to blaming each other for what we had lost. I knew that I would often miss her and mourn her loss, but a lifetime of unremitting trench warfare was not a proposition I could bare to contemplate. I just wasn't built that way: I needed emotional security and stability. Di seemed incapable of giving me either. It was, however, to be a long goodbye. Di and I would meet up from time to time in the Bell and end up in bed together. It was a dangerous thing to do as far as I was concerned, but not unusual when marriages are in their death throes.

For some weeks after Di left, I remained on my own in the house on Birkin Avenue. This time I experienced a sense of relief. I felt that things had run their inevitable course. I had no wish to re-engage with Di. My previous attempts at trying to patch up a failed marriage had been a disaster.

I agreed to let a friend and his girlfriend spend the night at my house. The girlfriend was a nurse whom I had met briefly once before. Thea, dressed in her unprepossessing uniform and wearing heavy, thick glasses, with her hair in a bun, and clumpy shoes, I thought quite dowdy and a bit too conventional looking for my taste. However, when she arrived at the house after a night out with her boyfriend, she looked a very different creature. Dressed in a short, figure hugging silver dress and with long, dark hair swirling round her shoulders, she was transformed. The dark, heavy rimmed glasses were gone and underneath she was beautiful and compelling. I suddenly found her sexy and alluring. She was, however, my friend's girlfriend, so I pushed all lascivious thoughts from my mind and sought the single bed in the spare room. Thea had gone upstairs first and called me into the front bedroom to unzip her tight dress. I thought it an inappropriate request, really a job for her boyfriend, but I did as she asked. I was, however, even more surprised when she removed her dress in front of me, revealing a junoesque figure of exquisite proportions. Fearing an embarrassing confrontation with my friend, I made a quick exit and went to bed thinking that alcohol could have loosened her inhibitions and that she would probably regret the episode in the morning.

About two weeks after the unzipping incident I met Thea again. This time in a bar where a local folk band was playing. We exchanged pleasantries and had a few drinks together. At the end of the evening, she asked if I'd like to stay at her flat as it was close by and the buses had stopped running. When we arrived, there was only one bed, which she suggested we share, but warned me there was to be no hanky-panky. I was not in the habit of forcing my attentions on women, so I kept my underpants on and went to sleep. I was woken up in the morning by a hand creeping into my underwear. Thea and I went on to see quite a lot of each other after that. Thea was the convent-educated daughter of fairly wealthy parents, but she was free-thinking and liberated, telling me that she was perfectly capable of supporting herself and was not looking for a man to keep her. I found her outlook very refreshing after my previous experiences with women. When she discovered that I occasionally slept with Di, she took it in her stride, declaring that as Di and I were still married, this was perfectly understandable. How long Thea would have tolerated this situation I have no idea. It was, however, obvious to me that as far a Di was concerned, I was playing with fire, and that if my resolve weakened and a reconciliation came about, I would be back to square one. I had no intention of allowing that to happen, as I could see no future in it. A moment of weakness was all that it required, but as it happened, the situation was about to be resolved for me.

The previous summer, Di and I had hitched down to Cornwall to stay with Di's friend Eileen, and her husband, Archie. Archie ran a small craft jewellery business from their bungalow in Hale, a sleepy seaside resort not far from St. Ives. I had got on well with Archie, so when he suggested that I come down the next season to help out with the jewellery, I said that I would give it some serious thought, thinking at the time that Di and I could have a working holiday. I had remained in contact with Archie, sending him various tools that I picked up from the scrap-yard. When I wrote telling him that Di and I had split up, he wrote back to say I should come down to Cornwall anyway, as it might help to clear my head. About the same time, my old friend Seth Miles, from the Dog and Bear darts room days, was having marital troubles himself, and was considering leaving his wife, Shirley. Consequently, as I suppose is natural, we spent a fair amount of time in the pub discussing our next moves. When I mentioned Archie's offer to Seth, he said that if Archie was agreeable, he would like to join me when he had resolved his marital difficulties.

One Friday night in The Flying Horse, which at that time was the city centre's gay bar, a writer friend, who was himself gay, asked Seth and me if we would like to continue on to a party. Neither Seth nor I were homophobic, so we agreed. The flat, in the Mapperley Park district, was the usual gay mixture of glitz and shabby chic, decorated with posters of gay icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Dusty Springfield. As we entered, someone gave me a bristly, tobacco-laden kiss, which I found most unpleasant and wondered why women didn't complain more often. Not wishing to offend my hosts, I passed it off with a joke and sought safety in an old armchair, where I remained as the whiskey was passed around. Needless to say, there were no women present. A couple of theatrical party-goers entertained us with short cabaret acts, and, as the night proceeded, couples slipped off together into other rooms, of which there seemed to be many. This left me and a slim, camp guy, who seemed very enamoured with Seth. To my surprise, Seth appeared to be enjoying the proceedings. He left the room, and I assumed that he was going to the toilet, which was downstairs on the same floor as the kitchen. When I followed him a few minutes later, I met him on the stairs, on his way back up with a slab of butter in his hand. I was sleepy and drunk by now and fell asleep in my armchair. A sudden kerfuffle from Seth's direction woke me up to find him with his black, bri-nylon underpants round his ankles, and two white bottoms flashing in the pale light of the street lamps that streamed through the windows. Even though I was still half asleep, I suddenly understood what the butter was for. Leaving them to their intimate moment, I made myself comfortable and went back to sleep.

Seth and I made our way home in the early hours of the morning. The following evening we met up in the pub, where Seth told me that his marital troubles had taken a turn for the worse. Shirley was furious with him for staying out late, but incandescent when she examined his trousers and underpants, which he had carelessly dropped onto the bedroom floor. A bit of butter, it seems, goes a long way. She now thought she had proof positive that he was having an affair and asked him to leave the house within the week. It looked as though we would be going to Cornwall sooner than we thought.

I gave in my notice at McIntyres scrap-yard and arranged for Di to move back into the house. After paying all outstanding bills, and giving Di some money for my daughter, Zoë, I calculated that I had enough left from my week's wages and holiday pay to last for about three weeks if anything went wrong with Archie. I packed my rucksack with only the clothes I needed, and, along with my guitar, left the house at five o'clock on the Saturday morning to join Seth on the ring road that led out of city to the south.

Chapter Four

The heavy bakers' van threaded its way through the narrow Devonshire roads on its way to Cambourne. At five o'clock on Sunday morning I had cadged a lift at a transport café on the outskirts of Exeter. The journey had been a grueller; lifts had been few and far between, maybe because it was a weekend and there was less commercial traffic on the roads. It had taken far longer than I had anticipated. Seth and I had started the journey together, but we knew that, out of necessity, we would have to split up; a person hitch-hiking alone had a far better chance of getting a lift than two people loaded down with rucksacks. Lifts had been so thin that we had to take whatever was offered; that meant travelling through the night, and I had no means of knowing where Seth was.

My experiences in the bakery business while working for Hovis came in handy as I kept the baker entertained with trade anecdotes from all over the country. He was, however, keen to make good time and had removed the governor[13] from the van's powerful engine, which allowed him to exceed eighty miles an hour along some very narrow and dangerous roads. It was a terrifying ride, and I was more than a little relieved when at last I stepped down from the cab onto Cambourne Hill. An hour later I had hitched my way from Cambourne to Hayle and was sitting in Archie and Eileen's kitchen with a mug of coffee and a bacon sandwich. Within the hour, an exhausted Seth staggered through the back door to join me.

Archie and Eileen had met five years ago in Newquay while doing seasonal work in the hotel trade. Archie, a Glaswegian and a joiner by trade, was working as a maintenance man, and Eileen, from Nottingham, was a chambermaid. Both were a bit odd looking, with asymmetrical faces and noses that bent in opposite directions, which might have accounted for their mutual attraction. According to Archie, who was outspoken about such matters, after a short courtship he had made Eileen pregnant during a beach party, and considered his offer of marriage a magnanimous gesture. I thought that he had the better of the bargain. Archie tended to be a bit of a tyrant, but Eileen doted on him and was an affectionate mother to their two small daughters, who were both much prettier than their parents. After their marriage, and at the end of the season, Archie and Eileen decided to shun the big cities from which they came and settle in Cornwall, as they felt it offered a better quality of life and a better environment in which to bring up their children. Archie quickly found well-paid contract work as a joiner and bought the bungalow where they now lived. Somewhere on his travels as a joiner, Archie had encountered the Cornish craftsmen who worked with the local serpentine stone, making jewellery and other small items for the gift shops that abounded in even the smallest Cornish hamlet. Realising that anyone with a modicum of skill could do the same, he decided to give up joinery and become a craft jeweller. Archie didn't confine himself to serpentine stone; it swiftly became apparent that the same polishing techniques used to polish serpentine stone could also be applied to wood and metal, which gave him a far wider range of jewellery to sell to the gift shops. This was Archie's second season. He had been designing jewellery all through the winter and, with our help, hoped to expand his business into Devon and beyond.

Breakfast over, Archie took us on a short walk to the Old School House to meet Mad Pete, the sole occupant of what turned out to be a semi-derelict, nineteenth century stone building. Pete had rooms to rent and was quite pleased to let Seth and I have a bedroom each for a modest rent. Mad Pete was a tin miner by profession and a biker by persuasion. He had been dubbed 'mad' by the locals, who complained about him to the council on a regular basis. His crime was that of roaring along the sleeping Hayle sea front on his motorcycle, at five o'clock in the morning at the end of his shift, doing in excess of a hundred miles an hour. Despite the complaints, Pete persisted with his anti-social behaviour and seemed to enjoy thumbing his nose at his neighbours.

The Old School House had not been used as such for many years. Its previous tenants had included Augustus John, the painter, and the writer Compton Mackenzie. The front door opened onto a small hallway from which the stairs led directly up to the first floor. A door to the right of the hallway opened onto the ground floor which, prior to Pete taking up residence, had been a coffin maker's workshop. Now with the rotten floorboards removed, it had become a repository for junk. There were three large bedrooms on the first floor and a good-sized communal kitchen. Though sparsely furnished and with bare floorboards, the bedrooms were clean and each contained a double bed. The School House would be difficult to heat in winter but for the moment it suited our needs. There was, Pete informed us, another resident: a ghost. A female pupil had hanged herself in the small, enclosed yard at the back of the school. She was said by the locals to haunt the place and was one of the reasons why the School House was difficult to rent out. Neither Seth nor I were superstitious, so we paid scant attention to the story, treating it as a joke.

We spent a few hours resting, recovering from our journey, and then took the short walk into Hayle to buy food and bedding. Archie had recommended Pratt's Army Surplus Store in Hayle's small town centre, where we bought ex-WD[14] sheets and blankets, plus some huge flags to use as bedspreads. In the evening we went to the pub and returned to the School House well mollified on St. Austell's beer, which was surprisingly cheap, and under the protection of the flag of the Norwegian Navy we slept the sleep of the just, undisturbed by ghosts.

Archie called for us at ten o'clock the next morning and, in the back garden of his bungalow, we started our new career as 'Cornish craftsmen'. 'Made by Cornish craftsmen' featured in Archie's advertising blurb, which caused some amusement among those who knew that the jewellery was made by two Englishmen and a Scotsman. The materials we used to make the jewellery were at the bottom of the Moes scale[15] and required no complicated polishing machinery. Archie had built a rudimentary lathe using an old electric washing machine motor connected to a spindle via a fan belt; the whole contraption was then fitted to a bench. Various grades of tungsten carbide paper were stuck onto circular pieces of plywood and attached to the spindle. Pieces of stone, wood, or metal could then be polished by pushing them manually against the revolving discs, working through rough to smooth abrasives. The resulting baroque shaped pieces were then brought to a high gloss using jewellers' rouge, or some similar compound, applied to a polishing mop which was also attached to the spindle. The materials themselves were inexpensive, apart from the pewter and the finings[16], which were bought commercially. The rosewood and mahogany off-cuts cost nothing, as did the lignum vitae which we acquired from the Plymouth dockyards where it was still being used to make ships' bearings. The serpentine stone could be hacked out of the cliffs around the seashore, but it was of varying quality and often not worth the time spent collecting it. It was often cheaper to buy it from someone who owned a decent seam.

The job was labour intensive and repetitive but there was great satisfaction in turning an unattractive lump of wood or stone into a sparkling item of jewellery. The only part of the job that I really hated was using 'the slicer', a thin tungsten carbide wheel used edge-on to slice up the serpentine stone into thin pieces approximately six millimetres thick, to make them more manageable. This blade was as sharp as a bacon slicer and unguarded (Health and Safety officers never visited us). One slip and my guitar playing days would have been over forever. Seth, fortunately, didn't mind 'the slicer' at all and was happy to spend all day risking his fingers. There was of course a great temptation to create designs of our own, usually when Archie wasn't looking, as he considered such activities as 'playing'. He explained that 'playing' should be confined to the off-season, and that for now, he wanted tried and tested designs he knew he could sell. If we persisted in 'playing' we were sent to the 'gem stone department', which was housed in Archie's loft. He had started importing semi-precious gemstones in pebble form. These were already tumble-polished but had to be sorted, some for pendants, and the smaller stones matched up into pairs for earrings and cufflinks. Once sorted, the stones were stuck onto their respective finings and then stood in a tray of sand, ready to be cured in the oven. In the summer heat the loft was stifling and the work was boring, but it served as a very effective antidote to 'playing'. Setting aside the gemstone department, our career as craft jewellers proved to be very enjoyable. We started work at ten o'clock in the morning, worked until one in the afternoon when Eileen made us a huge sandwich, and then finished at four. By half-past four we were on the beach for a couple of hours, sunbathing and surfing. If the weather was too hot for comfortable working, Archie, his family, Seth and I would all pile into Archie's Mini and spend the whole day on the beach. It was like one long holiday. The contrast between working at the scrap-yard and working for Archie couldn't be greater. Though Archie was not over-generous, we earned enough for our needs, which included a few pints of beer every night and a packet of cigarettes. We also managed to keep the bailiff at bay by sending home maintenance money for our children.

From time to time Archie, Seth and I would drive into St. Ives, about five miles away, for a drink. In season the town bustled with holidaymakers who the locals called 'emmets' or 'grockles', which translated means ants. There were many pretty girls among the visitors, and though the male seasonal workers prayed upon them mercilessly, neither Seth nor I had much luck in St. Ives. Hippies had made the harbour wall their home, and in the evening rows of sleeping bags were laid out awaiting the return of their stoned owners. Many residents had saved up for years to buy retirement homes in and around St. Ives, and the sight of their harbour wall covered by what looked like multi-coloured seals, infuriated them. It seemed to them that these young people had retired even before they started work. Petitions were sent in to the council, which was run by the Plymouth Brethren. The Brethren also took a dim view of the hippies' work ethic, but it seemed that the police had no powers to remove them. We looked like hippies ourselves and our sympathies lay with the wall dwellers.When Archie went out on his selling trips he would sometimes take Seth and me with him, giving us the opportunity to see the rest of Cornwall. His customers were dotted about all over the county and south Devon. In this way, we managed to visit almost every town and village worth looking at.

Thea and I had been writing to each other since I had left Nottingham and it was decided that she would hitch down to Cornwall and spend a week's holiday with Seth and me. On reflection, she thought it safer to travel with a companion, so her friend, Sue, another nurse, decided to come with her. Thea and Sue arrived in the middle of August. They were both attractive young women, so not surprisingly they made it to Hayle in record time. As we only had two bedrooms it meant that Sue would spend the week sharing with Seth, who gallantly opted to sleep on the floor. The arrangement worked well, and as far as I was aware, no hanky panky took place as Sue was happily engaged to someone else. The weather was hot and sunny, which meant that Thea and Sue could spend most of their time on the beach where Seth and I joined them after work. Of course, we had a bit of fun telling the girls the ghost story, but neither took it seriously. The holiday went well as both Thea and Sue were not difficult to please and both managed to get a decent suntan. On their last night, we all went to bed early, as they would be setting off at seven o'clock the next morning. In what seemed like the middle of the night, Thea and I were woken by a loud and sustained banging on our bedroom door. The ghost sprang instantly to mind, but it was a more earthly noise than an unearthly one. I leaped out of bed, leaving Thea cowering beneath the blankets, and wrenched open the bedroom door expecting to meet the fabled spectre, but instead found myself confronting a small man, in a greasy suit, with a briefcase in his hand. By now, Seth and Sue had come out of their bedroom to join me in remonstrating with the intruder who had so rudely roused us from our beds. Sue was in her nightdress and Seth and I wore only our underpants. Before we could lay violent hands on the villain of the piece, he introduced himself as a private detective from St. Ives. How he had gained access was a mystery. He demanded to know which one of us was Mr. Seth Miles, and Seth indignantly told him that he was, demanding to know what he wanted. The investigator then informed him that he was working for a firm of solicitors, who had engaged him on behalf of Mrs. Shirley Miles to provide proof of his adultery. The detective had seen Seth and Sue come out of the bedroom together, so ipso facto, he had his proof, and there was no point in denying it. Vigorous denials of adultery and protestations that sharing the same room was merely a matter of convenience were brushed aside, and Sue, to her complete horror, was informed that she would be cited as co-respondent in Mrs. Miles's divorce case. The fact that Sue was engaged and would have to explain to her fiancé the circumstances in which she had been found in another man's bedroom was bad enough, but knowing that she was innocent was galling in the extreme. How the detective came by his information regarding where, and with whom Seth could be found, quickly became apparent. Thea confessed that despite my warnings to the contrary, she had discussed her forthcoming holiday with other nurses in the hospital canteen; as Shirley was also a nurse at the same hospital, it was only a matter of time before the news reached her. We said goodbye to Sue and Thea, thinking that Sue would have plenty of time to give Thea a piece of her mind on the journey home.

As the holiday season drew to a close in mid-September, Archie had less and less work for us. St. Ives began to look like a ghost town as the gift shops and restaurants closed down and their owners set off for their winter breaks in warmer climes. Only two pubs remained open in the whole of St. Ives and the hippies had gone. The big Cornish party was over, and all that was left to do was the cleaning up. As we were hoping to find work to see us through the off-season, Seth persuaded me to join him in renting a terraced cottage he had found at St. Earth Praze, about two miles up the hill from Hayle. Across the road from the house was the Smugglers Inn, which thankfully remained open out of season. We could look out of the front and back bedroom windows of the cottage and see the sea raging on either side of the promontory. St. Earth Praze was an isolated hamlet comprising of one row of terraced cottages and the pub. It was a long way from anywhere, so Seth decided to buy an ex-Post Office Morris Minor van; these were, at the time, being sold off when the Post Office considered that they had reached the end of their working lives. Fortunately Seth had passed his driving test while serving in the RAF.

It transpired that the only work available was turnip lifting, which would not start for a couple of weeks, but Seth, a time-served painter and decorator, was offered a job painting the outside wall of a supermarket and generously asked me to help him out. The supermarket was built on the top of cliffs that swept down to the sea. Standing on a four-tier ladder, fifty-feet up the supermarket wall, with the sea crashing down on the rocks below, was a harrowing experience, and though I was glad of the work, I was relieved when we had finished it.

Seth had brought his portable typewriter with him from Nottingham and I took advantage of it to brush up my typing skills by writing to my friends back home. I was running seriously short of money by then and was agreeably surprised to be sent a five-pound note, unsolicited, along with a letter from my old friend Don Redwood. He had recommended me for a fortnight's work back in Nottingham, building a model for a trade stand for his employers, Theatre and Display. I had no desire to spend the winter lifting root crops if I could help it, and Seth had applied for a job as a cow inseminator, which, if he were taken on, would mean that I would be without transport. I wrote back to Don accepting the model job and informed Seth of my plans. Fortunately Seth had made plans of his own and was intending to travel to Nottingham as he had some arrangements to make with his wife, Shirley. It later transpired that Shirley, to the relief of her fellow nurse, Sue, had dropped the divorce proceedings and was now considering taking the children with her to join Seth in the cottage at St. Earth Praze. I dropped Thea a line letting her know of my return and warning her that it would probably be very early in the morning. Two days later, at five o'clock in the evening, Seth and I set off in the Morris Minor van to travel through the night, hoping the van would live up to its reputation for reliability and get us back to Nottingham without mishap. It behaved impeccably throughout the twelve-hour journey, and at almost exactly five o'clock in the morning, we arrived at Thea's shared flat. Her bedroom was on the ground floor, with her bed just beneath the front window. She must have been lying awake waiting for me. One light tap on the glass was enough; she opened the window and I climbed through and slipped gratefully into her bed.

I decided, on my first day back, to pay Di a visit and pick up a few clothes. At around midday, I arrived at our old house and let myself in. There was a large pair of boots at the foot of the stairs, an indication that she was entertaining a boyfriend. I called up to her and after a few minutes she came downstairs with the man who would become her future husband. He was a good-looking Geordie and seemed a decent enough chap. All I could hope was that he would have better luck with Di than I had had. I was hoping to see my daughter but she was over at Di's mother's for the night, where, for the moment it seemed, she spent most of her time.

In the afternoon I went to see John Griffin, the Managing Director of Theatre and Display. The firm was housed in a tumbled down, wooden building in a run-down area of the Radford district and slated for demolition in a few months time. Mr. Griffin, known as John to his work force, was a small, thin, lively man in his late forties. He was the creative force behind the firm, which specialised in the building and painting of theatrical sets for amateur light operatic societies, and the occasional trade display stand. John, who I was to discover later was a man of many talents, gave me well-drawn designs for the model I was to make and left me to get on with it.

Model making was something that I had not previously attempted, and as the order for the trade stand depended upon the model, I approached the job with some trepidation. It took two weeks for me to complete the model out of balsa-wood, after which the customer inspected it and, upon declaring himself happy with the design, gave the go ahead for it to be built. The trade stand didn't take long to build as it was constructed mostly of tongue and groove; the reason for this was partly because, once the show was over and the customer had no more use for the stand, the wood could be recycled into scenery. I stayed on to help with the erection of the trade stand at the new National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, where to John's, and the customer's delight, out of two hundred entrants it won first prize for its design.

With my commission completed, I was preparing to return to Cornwall when one of the staff at Theatre and Display gave notice and John asked me to take his place for the opera season, which was now underway and would last until February or March. The alternative was pulling turnips back in Cornwall. Another consideration, if I returned, was that Seth's wife and two children were now installed in the two bedroomed cottage and I would have to find other accommodation. With all these things in mind, it was with some relief that I accepted John's offer.

The staff at Theatre and Display consisted of John, the Managing Director and Stage Designer; my old friend Don Redwood, who was the Scenic Artist; Don's girlfriend Jo, who did a bit of everything; and a snappily dressed individual called Hugh Doyle, who seemed to do very little but pore over John's stage plans. I later learned that he was an ex-prisoner who had just done seven years for armed robbery and was out on parole with John as his mentor and guarantor. My job was to arrange the order in which things were painted and constructed, then to help out making props and painting undercoats on the flats, ready for Don to paint the scenery.

Most of the stage sets were constructed for theatre groups belonging to The National Operatic and Dramatic Association. Amateur theatre groups usually hired their sets off the peg, but these often didn't fit the dimensions of theatre stages, which vary enormously. This was the cheaper option, but often left many unsightly gaps in the sets. Theatre and Display had adopted a 'made to measure policy'. Every stage set was designed individually to fit a particular stage, but only the more affluent societies could afford us.

It was a job for a fit person, as some of the flats could measure six feet by twenty-two feet and were anything but light. The first sets we completed were for the musical 'The Maid of the Mountains', which didn't impress me much during the fit up, when they seemed drab and uninspiring. But among his many talents, John was an expert lighting technician, and once the sets were lit, they came to life in glorious colour, with a fairytale quality that was just what musicals require. I was captivated, and congratulated myself on finding a job that I really enjoyed. The theatre is another world; it incorporates song; dance; music; art; acting; writing; designing and directing. If one likes the life, which can be precarious, there's bound to be something, somewhere to engage your talents.

With work secured in Nottingham for the foreseeable future, Thea and I decided to find a flat together. After looking at one or two properties that were little more than doss-houses, we eventually found a self-contained flat in the Meadows, on Arkwright Street, above an electrical shop. Arkwright Street and its surrounds were also slated for demolition, but it would be seven years before the work started, and we hoped to find better accommodation well before then. Most of the surrounding properties were Victorian terraced rows, inhabited by the less well off working class. The local shops were a bit seedy and run down, and the neighbourhood had a less than salubrious reputation, but food shopping was cheap and we were close to the city centre. The bulldozers were already moving into Radford, where Theatre and Display had its workshops, which meant that alternative accommodation had to be found. Fortunately the council offered us a large chapel, at a low rent, in another run-down area: St. Anne's, on Woodborough Road, Nottingham. Shifting all the scenery was hard work, but we managed to transfer the firm to the chapel in one weekend and were ready to continue building sets on the following Monday.

The working hours, though nominally nine 'til five, were not taken seriously, and the wages were intermittent. No one else seemed bothered by these vaguaries, and at first I found it difficult to understand how this casual attitude had come about, but as the season progressed, I began to understand why: John was a design junky. Almost without exception, his stage designs were so complicated that there was never enough time to build the sets in normal working hours; this made it necessary to work overtime and weekends to complete them in time for the show. No one was keeping a record of how much overtime they did. It would have made no difference if they had: there was never enough money to pay them. Bearing in mind that on many occasions we were working until midnight, the only way we could physically recover and get enough rest was to come in late the next day. This meant that our working hours were all out of kilter.

Don, the Scenic Artist, worked as hard as anyone, but despite his prodigious talents as a figurative artist, he was not really cut out for painting scenery, which requires a very broad-brush approach and looks all the better for it. Don was a perfectionist, and many of his backdrops would not have looked out of place in the National Gallery. At first, I thought he was, once again, playing the eccentric artist, but later realised that it was just one facet of his anarchistic nature. Don's working hours had started off like everyone else's, but as the days and weeks progressed, he turned up an hour or two later every day and worked an hour or two longer at night. Eventually he was starting work when the rest of us were leaving, working through the night and leaving when everyone else was turning up for work. As it was my job to organise the progress of the sets, this erratic behaviour often brought Don and me into conflict, as he could never tell me when the backcloths would be finished. They needed time to dry, and on many occasions Don ended up finishing some items of scenery after they had been erected in the theatre. This practice did not inspire confidence in our customers. Another problem was that John's lavish sets would confuse the amateur stage managers, many of whom were unable to read stage plans, with the result that either large parts of the scenery wouldn't be used, or the stage managers would ring us up in a state of panic, asking us to do the fit up for them. Usually it was me who had to travel by bus or train to theatres all over the country to assist these benighted souls. On the occasions when John accompanied me, he always insisted on driving back to Nottingham, no matter how late at night. I had been warned that he had a nasty habit of falling asleep at the wheel and so opted to spend these nights alone on vast stages, sleeping on the house curtains: a very eerie experience

Inevitably, despite working us all to a standstill, the sets couldn't be brought in on budget, particularly if outside joiners had been brought in to build some over-complicated pieces of scenery. Unlike us, these guys insisted on being paid. When the bank dried up, there was only one answer: the partners. John had two partners: firstly Ted, a retired Players worker from whom John had managed to wrest quite large sums of money, and who, in order to protect his investment, could be persuaded in an emergency to part with even more; and secondly Ken, a second-hand car salesman with the most drink-sodden nose I have ever seen. Unusually for a second-hand car salesman, he was also interested in the arts and could recite the whole of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat at the drop of a hat. Ken was a bit more savvy than Ted and had long ago written off his investment and had no intention of throwing good money after bad. From time to time John would advertise for more partners, but despite his plausibility and his ability to paint the firm's future in mouth-watering terms, while I was with him, he never managed to find anyone to take the bait.

Eventually the exhausting season came to a close. The last hastily painted and still damp flats were loaded onto the lorry at eleven o'clock at night and we waved the driver off. He might just make it in time for the fit up the next morning. Fortunately the gay pub across the road had a regular lock in; we were well known to the landladies and with a couple of taps on the window we were welcomed in for a well-earned pint. As usual, there was little money for wages and we were all too tired and broke to stay very long.

Assembled in John's office the next afternoon, he informed us that the firm was virtually broke. After a long, gruelling season of hard work there was very little money left in the pot and no work for the foreseeable future. "Did anyone have any ideas how we were going to survive for the next three months, until the next show season came around?"

On our first cursory exploration of our new premises, dismantled and stacked away in the basement we had discovered a well-constructed shed, in perfect condition. I now suggested that we advertise it for sale and hopefully make a few pounds out of it. An advertisement was duly placed in the local press. The response was overwhelming; it seemed that there were a lot of customers out there looking for a shed, and they were prepared to pay thirty-five pounds for it, which, to put it in its proper perspective, amounted to a good two weeks wages for one person. Before we delivered the shed, I took careful measurements of each section, with a view to building more if it turned out to be a practical proposition.

Fortunately, John was not above taking chances, and though our bank account was empty, he somehow managed to get six weeks credit out of a local timber merchant. With the arrival of the timber, I set to work reproducing sheds. I nailed jigs to the basement's wooden floor and built an electric saw using Archie's lathe principle, which worked well enough, as most sheds are constructed of light-weight timber. When things were running smoothly, I could produce three or four sheds a week. It was hard work. Commercial shed builders used heavyweight, air powered staple guns and purpose-built jig tables: I had to make do with a hammer and nails. Working with the jigs nailed to the floor was back breaking, but if we were to survive until the next season, it had to be done. I had very little help, as the rest of the team was busy repairing and repainting the flats and backdrops in readiness for the next season[17].

Three months and many sheds later, the deposits for the future shows started to come in and we were back in the scenery business. Sadly, John had his own plans for me. The sheds were a nice little sideline and he had no intention of stopping the shed business and letting me carry on with the scenery. Plus we had another mouth to feed: John had taken on a young woman, a theatrical student who had just finished her studies at the Bristol Old Vic, the same theatre where John himself had been trained some thirty years before, and he was busy impressing her with his genius. As usual, the designs were over-complicated and the sets expensive to build, which resulted in a three-week period when no wages were available. I might have put up with this had I been doing something I liked, but building sheds did not come into that category. If I didn't want to spend the rest of my days toiling away in the basement of the chapel, with indifferent prospects of getting paid, there was only one option and that was to leave. There was no doubt in my mind that John Griffin was an exceptionally talented man who would have been a great asset to any theatre company, but he was a maverick who would find it difficult to take direction from others or to tailor his designs to a budget. Like many talented people, he was so consumed by his own ambitions that he could often be oblivious to the needs of those around him. By dint of his hypnotic personality, he had managed to keep the firm afloat, and with luck, would continue to do so. I had learned a lot from him, and not all of it concerned the theatre, but his boundless enthusiasm now had little effect on me; he would have to rely on the remaining acolytes to carry him forward. With a heavy heart, but no regrets, I gathered my possessions and dismantled the electric saw (which I had paid for). I would quickly need to convert it as I had decided to try my luck making jewellery. I was twenty-nine years old and still had no idea what the future held. One thing was certain: I had now become too independent to hold down a conventional job.

Thea accepted my unemployed status without fuss and, as a gesture of confidence, lent me ten pounds to buy the materials I needed to start my jewellery business. I was completely broke. Despite several requests, John either couldn't, or wouldn't, pay the back wages he owed me.

I did have one more string to my bow. Prior to going to Cornwall, I had invented a range of huge, crepe paper flowers, about fifteen inches across, that I had hoped to be able to sell to the gift shops, forgetting that they would be too big and fragile for the tourists to pack in their suitcases. They had received much favourable comment but few sales. On the off chance, I took them into the flower shop next door to our flat, where the lady proprietor, to my surprise, ordered a dozen yellow ones for immediate delivery. Thereafter, with luck, the flowers would provide a small but steady income until the jewellery came on stream.

A friend, John Bowring, who owned a stamp shop near the railway station on Arkwright Street, let me have a small room above his premises for a peppercorn rent. I reassembled my saw bench and converted it for jewellery polishing. After a couple of weeks I had enough samples to present to the small boutiques and trendy jewellery shops in the centre of Nottingham. I made a couple of reasonable sales but then ran into trouble: most of the shops wouldn't deal with me until I was registered for purchase tax[18]. Another problem was that those who did buy paid by cheque and wanted six weeks credit. Clearly my hand-to-mouth business needed a decent injection of cash if it was going to be a success. I also needed transport, and that meant passing my driving test and having enough money to buy a car. Christmas was approaching and it looked as though it was going to be a lean one.

I was always on the lookout for new designs and one day, passing a hardware shop, I noticed foot wide strips of paper with tiny mosaic tiles of all different colours, each individually attached to its backing paper. The strips contained hundreds of small tiles and cost about a pound each. All that was required was to stick them onto their finings to turn them into rings, cufflinks and earrings. I decided to take some of these items, along with samples of my other jewellery, on one of my by now infrequent trips to the Bell Inn, to see what the reaction was. I knew a lot of people in the Bell, and as Christmas was approaching they were looking for unusual presents. The jewellery was well received, which was a great boost to my confidence, and by the end of the evening I had nothing left to sell. Most of the items were made using the tiles, which cost me virtually nothing. To give some idea of the profit margin, the rings sold for three shillings each: a pint of beer cost about two shillings, as did a packet of ten decent cigarettes. So far, I had been so broke that I could barely afford a couple of pints, but on this occasion I was well mollified by closing time. Throughout the period leading up to Christmas the jewellery continued to sell well in the Bell, and my paper flowers were doing okay in the flower shop; apparently customers were using them as Christmas decorations. Thea and I spent Christmas Day with her parents in Newark. Understandably, they harboured dark suspicions regarding my character and probably thought me an unsuitable partner for their daughter. I didn't blame them; I was a divorcee (soon to become a double divorcee, an ex-scrap man, and on the face of it, a drifter with no prospects at all. But as soon as they had concluded that I was not the double-headed demon of their nightmares, things loosened up and we got along well from then on, despite their reservations.

With Christmas over, the flower and jewellery trade slumped. I applied to register for purchase tax and an inspector arrived at the flat to assess me. As soon as he realised how little business I was doing, he advised me not to register as it would cause me more trouble than it was worth and would involve expensive accountants. He even bought a piece of jewellery. Unusually for a hardened customs official, he must have felt sorry for me. Now I was stuffed: I still couldn't sell to most of the shops, despite my attempts to register. As my little business was now virtually strangled at birth, I needed to find some other way of making money. I could have signed on at the labour exchange but the prospect was too depressing to contemplate. I was determined not to take another dead-end job. Having suffered for my freedom, I was not about to give up now.

Across the road from our flat was a junk shop that had once been a fishmonger's. There were no windows at the front of the shop, which was completely open to the street. When not open for business, a large roller shutter was pulled down covering the whole front of the shop. It was rented by an unlikely couple. Dave was small, in his late thirties, with a sparse mop of blonde, curly hair, a weather-beaten face, and looked ten years older than he was. Sam, who ten years earlier could have been quite attractive, was at least six inches taller than Dave. She was about twenty-six years old, but with bad teeth and badly dyed hair she looked a lot older. Sam's claim to fame was her daughter, Jenny, whom she proudly proclaimed had been fathered by the folk singer, Donovan. I doubted this, as Sam's relationship with the truth was so tenuous as to be almost non-existent. As we were close neighbours, I met them frequently either on Arkwright Street or in the local shops. As soon as they had assured themselves that I was not an undercover taxman or a plainclothes detective, they invited me into the shop for a cup of tea and a chat. I later learned that Dave had had more than one brush with the law and paid most of his bills on receipt of a County Court Judgement. Bailiffs were regular visitors to the shop and Dave was on first name terms with all of them, but as most of the stuff in the shop would not be worth transporting to an auction, they always left empty-handed. More often than not, it was Sam who invited me in for tea as Dave spent his time clearing houses to replenish the stock in the shop. Sam was lazy, and dealing with customers bored her; she could barely get out of her chair to attend to them, and at every excuse she would ask me to mind the shop, as she always seemed to have some urgent shopping to do. I soon got the hang of the business, and while Sam was out shopping, I managed to take more money than she did all day. This was not lost on Dave, who was well aware of Sam's lack of enthusiasm, so when he asked me to mind the shop full time, it suited everyone. Sam was delighted, and so was I as the prospect of the dole office receded yet again. I threw myself into my new role with enthusiasm, wandering around the four floors of the shop, wearing a battered top hat and carrying a gnarled old cane, like some latter day Bill Sykes.

When I first arrived at the shop, most of our customers were students and doss- house owners looking for cheap furniture for their flats. Dave was too mean to buy anything other than junk. It soon became apparent that there were other potential customers: those looking for items to restore and re-upholster, and others who didn't mind paying a bit more for an attractive piece of furniture. I was paid commission only and it was in my interests to persuade Dave to go upmarket a bit and take his buying more seriously. The new approach paid off and we were soon selling to a more affluent clientele. Prior to the mid-'60's, the antique trade had confined itself to items made before the year 1860. The British Period Furniture Association had decided that anything made after 1860 could not be properly described as an antique. The reason for this was that with the arrival of the industrial revolution, handcrafted furniture had given way to that made with machinery. This left whole swathes of beautiful Victorian and Edwardian furniture in limbo: the established antique trade wouldn't touch it and most ordinary people wanted modern furnishings in their homes. Fortunately American and Continental dealers were not so fussy and appreciated the beauty and craftsmanship of Victorian and Edwardian furniture, machine made or not, and they began importing it. The British had always loved their furniture and the houses of the older generation were crammed with it, but as people began to 'go modern', the old stuff was being discarded by the van load. At about the time I became a junk salesman, the export trade in 'not quite antiques' began to take off. Junk shops in London were visited on a regular basis by Americans anxious to fill their forty foot containers, which were being shipped to the States in their hundreds. Dutchmen, Germans and Danes crossed over from the continent with huge vans to fill, and the time was approaching when even London couldn't satisfy their demands. Already, dealers who specialised in what became known as 'the shipping trade' were making forays into northern towns to replenish their stocks.

The first indication that the shipping trade had reached Nottingham was when one day, a white Cortina with a roof rack pulled up outside the shop. The driver, who introduced himself to me as Tony, was overweight, had a bad case of acne, and was wearing an expensive suit. Having absorbed some of Dave and Sam's antipathy to callers wearing suits, I was at first cool and wary of him. I was still dodging the National Insurance Stamp man and had no idea how I was going to explain my two years' absence from the system to the taxman. Tony was eighteen years old at the time and I was nearly thirty. He was a bit too young for a Tax Inspector, and after my initial caution, I quickly realised he was a genuine customer desperate to spend some money with us. And not just some money: if we could supply his needs, it would be, compared with our usual punters, a lot of money. Tony began to call twice a week and I gave Dave a list of the items he wanted to buy. I was intent on making as much commission as possible and Tony's custom gave my earnings a considerable boost. As the weeks progressed and it became clear that neither of us was out to screw the other, a relationship of trust developed and we became friends, a situation that was to be Dave's undoing.

On one of his visits, Tony told me in confidence that Dave was being less than honest about the price he was paying for the furniture. This was really important to me, as the difference between the price Dave paid and the price I charged Tony was where I made my commission. Tony sometimes visited the same junk shops as Dave, and on one occasion Dave had bought a china cabinet and left it with the price ticket still on it, to be picked up later. Tony, who had visited the same shop earlier, later asked me how much Dave had paid for the cabinet. When I told him, he informed me that Dave was inflating his buying prices in order to reduce my commission. I was furious and told Tony that I would be looking for my own shop as soon as possible. He agreed that I was wasting my time where I was and surprised me by saying that when I found a shop, he would like to join me. This would be a good deal for me as I had little buying power viz a viz money, and no transport. Tony had both.

I didn't have to look far for a shop to rent. An old boyhood friend from Westholme Gardens had started up in the antiques trade and had rented two shops on Arkwright Street, about half a mile away from Sam and Dave's junkshop. My old friend, Dave Parr, had started out over-optimistically, and now found that one shop was sufficient for the amount of trade that he was doing. He gave me a good reference for the landlords and two weeks later I had the keys in my hands. I had become the proprietor of 5B Arkwright Street. Tony and I named the shop 'The Jug and Bowl Antiques'. We decided on the name because most people knew what an old jug and bowl washing set looked like, and where there was an old jug and bowl, there were likely to be other, similar old items. The rent and rates together were less than five pounds per week, so we were pretty confident that we could make the business pay, providing we didn't take too much out for ourselves. Neither of us were high maintenance: Tony lived with his mother in a council flat in Woodborough, and Thea and I were now living in a small terraced house in West Bridgford. Thea's father had guaranteed the private mortgage of one thousand seven hundred pounds and the repayments were less than the rent on our Arkwright Street flat.

Tony's main customer was a London dealer who specialised in supplying the American and Continental markets. Allen Cox of Allen's Antiques was a small, squat cockney who, as they say, knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. He personified what had been said about the new breed of dealer: a jovial illiterate, with a tank full of petrol and a buccaneering spirit. Tony had previously been operating from a small, run down storage room, which meant that no one else had a chance to look the goods over. This was convenient for Allen, who, without competition, could pay more or less what he liked. Once our shop was open for business, Allen had lost his monopoly. He wasn't happy, but still drove up from London every Saturday to buy whatever goods Tony and I had collected together for him. Things were not priced individually but sold in lots according to what they were: jug and bowl sets; gate leg tables; grandfather clocks, etc. All had fixed margins, for example all jug and bowl sets were sold 'right through' at two pounds, ten shilling per set, good, bad or indifferent. This meant that we could pay up to two pounds for a set if we had to. We sometimes had thirty or forty sets to sell at one time and there was no time for either party to haggle over each set. For some reason, Allen trusted me rather than Tony to add up his bill, which often came to three or four hundred pounds.

This was a mistake; we were not very fond of Allen, and with encouragement from Tony, I almost always managed to overcharge him by ten or twenty pounds. We didn't feel too guilty about this: as the Americans were now basing their operations further and further into northern towns, we were beginning to discover what our shipping items were actually worth, and Allen was not always passing on the price increases to us.

Though in no way rich, I was now better off than I had been since leaving the scrap-yard two and a half years earlier, and could afford to visit the Bell and other town pubs as often as I liked, which I did most nights. Thea preferred to stay at home and share a bottle of Martini with her sister, Adele, who had recently married and was now living with her husband, five minutes walk away. On one of my nights trawling the pubs, I came across a sparsely attended folk club at The White Hart pub on Glasshouse Street, in the centre of town. It was organised by left-wingers of various persuasions who had formed an allegiance with the British anti-apartheid movement, which was slowly gathering strength. The resident band comprised of three people playing guitars, one of whom was Paul Wapplington, a friend of Seth's and a fellow ex-Player School pupil. An up-and-coming local artist, Paul was a striking figure, larger than life in every sense of the phrase, with long, dark, curly hair and a full black beard. On recognising me, he came over and asked if I could play the banjo. I told him I couldn't, but said that if I could find one I would give it a try. "Good," he said. "You should be able to play in about three weeks and then we want you to join the band." This suited me, as having it seemed secured my livelihood, I was looking for another adventure. By good fortune, Adele's husband, Steve Whitely, himself a good guitarist, had a banjo hanging on his wall and was happy to let me borrow it. I was not yet rich enough to buy one of my own. I spent a few days wrestling with it until, with the help of 'Pete Seeger's Banjo Tutor' I managed to convert a guitar picking system to suit the banjo. I spent a few hours practising with Paul, and three weeks later, wracked with nerves, I joined the The Scheme folk band. My first outing on stage was a knee knocking experience, but at the end of the evening, both the members of the group and the audience agreed that my playing made a big difference. I wasn't sure if this was a compliment or not, but I was still with the band a month later. I now had two new careers: antique dealer and banjo player. Banjo playing was more a labour of love as there was little, if any, money in it. Life was getting interesting.

### Chapter Five

It is often assumed that the antique trade buys its goods solely from auctions, but this is far from the truth; other sources include advertising in the local press and people bringing goods into the shop for private sale. In the 1970's, the bulk of our goods were bought from what were known as 'knockers or clappers', a shadowy breed of men, and occasionally women, who go from door to door enquiring if the householder has anything of value for sale. In Nottingham, the clapper's day started at around eight o'clock in the morning in the Elbow Café, where a dozen or more men, looking like market traders in shabby suits, would gather for breakfast. Although only a minority of the clappers were Jewish, the conversation would probably be unintelligible to most people as it was sprinkled with Yiddish terms. These were probably learned from the previous generation of clappers, who were predominantly Jewish, and prior to the antiques boom, bought mainly gold and silver door to door. After breakfast they would pair off and if on foot would work locally, whilst those with cars would drive further afield. The 'pairing off' was partly for company, but was also a means of pooling knowledge, which was important, as the usual arrangement was to share the profit from all goods bought. These were, almost without exception, unscrupulous men who would not hesitate to hold back some small but valuable items from their buying partner, to be sold later without their knowledge. As a result, violent arguments were frequent and partnerships changed on a regular basis, until eventually the original pair, having sworn to behave properly, would resume where they left off. None of them ever kept their word and before long they would split up again.

The first two hours of the clapper's day were spent working house to house, and in order to buy what they wanted, a variety of scams were employed. For example, the most frequently used ruse was to offer the householder a ridiculously high price for a battered modern sofa, and an equally ridiculously low price for an expensive antique clock. The next step would be to pay for the clock and explain that they would be back later with transport and would pay for the sofa when they collected it. They never had any intention of returning for the sofa, and the clock would be in the boot of the car when they drove away. At twelve o'clock midday the pub beckoned, and the partners would spend a couple of hours having a liquid lunch, after which, and often in an advanced state of inebriation, they would continue working until a decision was made that the day's wages had been earned. Having sold the day's haul to various antique shops, they would then gather with their fellows in the Peacock Inn, on Mansfield Road, to continue drinking. All too often, in drunken forgetfulness, the items of jewellery secreted from their partners would be brought out for admiration. Arguments would ensue, ending with the injured party storming out of the pub, vowing never again to work with the other. Nobody took these rows seriously, as they all knew that they were guilty of the same thing; they just didn't like their noses rubbed in it. The drinking would continue until closing time, interrupted only when one of the company would declare himself 'elephants'[19], and fall off his stool in a drunken stupor. He would then be carried out into someone's car to await the end of the session. Alcohol induced fits were not uncommon. It seemed that, to clappers, drunkenness was a way of life, and from what I gathered, those with wives and families were just as immoderate in their habits as those without. Divorce rates among them were inevitably high. One of the reasons for their precarious life style was that they could sometimes make large sums of money for a very small outlay. I remember one clapper's tale where our hero had set out in the morning stony broke, borrowed somebody's milk money left under the milk bottles for the milkman, bought a pair of Victorian brass candle sticks next door, and then sold them to an antique shop for a tidy sum. Having provided himself with buying money, he had then returned the milk money. I'm not too sure about the return of the milk money, but it's a good example of the way clappers operated.

There were, however, exceptions to the easy come easy go clapping fraternity, and Tony's father and mother were among them. Though they were now divorced and living apart, George and Dora worked as a team and made a reasonably good living. George wearing a porkpie hat, with a pipe in his mouth bore a passing resemblance to Sid James. He led a frugal life, and lived with Tony's sister, Lorna, and her husband, Terry. George was an active member of The Socialist Party of Great Britain, an old fashioned Marxist party, and was more likely to urge his customers to buy the party's paper, the Socialist Standard, than rip them off. His main preoccupation was avoiding what he called 'tax wallahs', who he imagined to be lurking around every corner. His long suffering ex-wife, Dora, had long since forgiven him his dalliance with another woman, with whom he had produced a son now a year or two younger than Tony, but her experiences with her unfaithful ex-husband had left her with her nerves in shreds and addicted to Valium. She could easily become agitated and scold Tony for hours. Dora couldn't abide waste of any sort and the only way Tony could keep her quiet was to open up her precious cans of hoarded chunky chicken, one at a time, and threaten to start on the tins of salmon if she persisted. Sadly, while they lived under the same roof, this was the only way he managed to get any peace.

Next door to us on Arkwright Street was the Primrose Café. The owners, a Greek couple, lived upstairs where, most nights of the week, the husband ran a gambling school which didn't break up until around ten o'clock in the morning, when he would come staggering down to the café for his breakfast. Next door to the café, a couple from Leicester had bought the huge corner shop and opened up as an antiques emporium called 'The Trade Winds', which was aimed at the public as opposed to the shipping trade. The husband was called Maurice, a tall, swarthy and very handsome man, whose main interest was confined to clocks. He was far too down to earth for the tedious job of attending to pernickety customers and spent most of his time fiddling with his clocks. Rumour had it that Maurice was an ex-bank robber who had spent his loot lavishly stocking the shop. His wife, Florence, was just the opposite of her husband. On the surface, she affected to behave like the sophisticated lady antique dealer, but beneath the careful make up and beautifully styled blonde hair, lay a fiery temper. Her relationship with Maurice was a turbulent one and their rows would often spill out onto the street. On one or two occasions, Florence had been seen running down Arkwright Street in her nightdress, closely followed by an irate Maurice, brandishing an antique cutlass and threatening to slit her throat. No one on Arkwright Street considered their behaviour unusual enough to call the police. Florence would come to our shop nearly every day looking for bargains, but we discreetly avoided mentioning the midnight dramas, as by the morning, she had recovered her sophisticated poise. We managed to keep a straight face while Florence was in our shop but would find much amusement in prurient speculation concerning the cause of their rows, which we found hugely entertaining.

Florence had a passion for antique glassware and enjoyed adding to her own private collection, which she kept in their flat above the shop. Tony and I would mischievously help to expand her collection by visiting Jessops who, we had discovered, stocked a range of reproduction glassware that was almost indistinguishable from the antique originals. After applying a bit of dust to the item, we would allow Florence to discover it for herself. We didn't have to make much profit on it as we could always go and buy another one (which we often did), and bingo, by some uncanny coincidence she now had a pair, which made them even more valuable. Thanks to Jessops' glass buyer, who seemed to have an eye for reproduction antique glass, they started to stock a range of Victorian cranberry glass, the originals of which were highly sought after. Even more collectable was cranberry glass decorated with white enamelled figures, know as 'Mary Gregory'. My old friend Don Redwood was out of work at the time, so we bought him a small kiln and set his artistic talents to work producing Mary Gregorys, using Jessops' range of cranberry glass. Florence loved these, and over the weeks bought dozens of them for her collection. We weren't too bothered about them being exposed as fakes, as Florence kept them in a huge glass case in her flat where they were not exposed to the eyes of smart-arsed antique dealers. Inevitably, there came the day when Florence herself visited Jessops. She was furious, to the point of threatening us with a good hiding from Maurice if we didn't refund her money. However Maurice was a dyed-in-the-wool male chauvinist, and found his wife's humiliation quite amusing as it demonstrated that she wasn't as smart as she'd led him to believe. When she eventually calmed down, we persuaded her to put the glassware on show in her shop, sold as seen and without authentication, arguing that if a connoisseur like her could be fooled, so could others. The Mary Gregorys sold well and she continued to buy them. Until Jessops discontinued the range, we continued to manufacture the fake Mary Gregorys and sold them not only to Florence, but also to other dealers. Thereafter, however, we always made sure the customer knew what they were buying.

Florence's other passion was her only daughter, Charmaine, a pretty young girl of fourteen who was presently attending an expensive private boarding school, from which, Florence assured us, she would emerge as the complete lady and then go on to distinguish herself at Oxbridge. We had great fun teasing Florence, telling her that she was wasting her money as we already had our own plans for Charmaine. As soon as she reached sixteen, Tony or I would seduce her, make her pregnant and then marry her. In the fullness of time, all that Florence had worked for, including her glass collection, would fall into our hands, and Charmaine, instead of going to university, would spend the rest of her days having babies and scrubbing floors. At the time we thought that Florence wasn't taking us seriously, but we must have put the wind up her. After her sixteenth birthday, we never saw Charmaine again. When we enquired of Florence when we would next see her lovely daughter, she declared that if she could help it, we would never see her again. Florence was taking no chances.

On Christmas Eve we had been trading for four months. Tony and I bought Christmas dinners from the Primrose Café and ate them in the shop, after which we did a quick stock check. It emerged that most of our profit resided in 'mistakes', which, to avoid being confronted with them, we had shoved down the cellar. Money was never an issue: we took what we needed and never counted it. We had a similar sense of humour and were tolerant of each other's foibles. More importantly, though we had very different outlooks and pleasures, we were good friends. We were enjoying the business and having fun. We had survived so far and looked forward to better things in the New Year.

The Scheme Christmas party was held in our new home, the function room of the Bowling Green Pub on Canal Street. The move had been forced on us, as our former venue at the White Hart Inn, on Glasshouse Street, was so cold that the audience of a dozen or so die-hards were forced to keep their overcoats on. The move to the Bowling Green proved to be a good one. It was a much bigger room and well heated, and though at first our tiny audience looked lost in it, a few innovations soon attracted a larger crowd. We built a stage using beer crates and plywood, and installed a crude PA system. At the back of the stage we built flats, and decorated them with radical posters of Che Guevara, Angela Davis and other prominent figures in the revolutionary movement. One of the band members, who worked at the Playhouse, borrowed a couple of stage lights and lit the whole room up in dramatic primary colours. All this had to be set up and dismantled every club night, but it lent credibility to our new venture, and would in time, we hoped, pay off. Our musicianship was appalling, but what we lacked in expertise we made up for in enthusiasm. Our small ad appeared in the Evening Post, announcing our presence, and on Tuesday nights at eight o'clock the room started to fill up. Ours was a broad church and all denominations of the left were welcome to display their literature. As a result we had Trotskyites, Maoists, and a number of other factions attending the club, but despite the rivalry, and in some cases downright animosity, between them, we had no trouble to speak of. Of course we had our detractors, mostly members of other folk clubs, who sneered at our use of the PA system and complained that folk music ought not to get mixed up in politics. We didn't consider ourselves to be a folk club as we incorporated other forms of entertainment. Our entertainment included poets, small rock bands, slide shows and stand up comics. As for the politics, it brought in more people than it put off. Nottingham University was a much more radical place in the '60's and '70's than it is now and most students were happy to be associated with a bunch of 'dangerous reds', as we were sometimes called. We gave our support to every radical and left wing cause at one time or another, ranging from the anti-Vietnam War campaign to the Upper Clydeside ship builders. When General Franco of Spain threatened to garrotte some Basques, he received a telegram from the club. Such was the retribution threatened should the executions take place that General Franco changed his mind and ordered a reprieve! Well, that's what we preferred to believe. It wasn't long before we came to the attention of the British security forces, and plain-clothes police officers began to appear in the audience, probably tipped off by Eric, the pub's ex-policeman landlord. Paul picked up his phone one day and heard a recording of himself, engaged in a former conversation. None of this bothered us, as we were careful not to indulge in any illegal activities. We were, however, quite flattered by the attention we were receiving.

At the beginning of the new year, a dealer who specialised in clocks visited the shop. Vienna wall clocks were plentiful at that time and our new dealer bought as many as we could get hold of. The problem with Vienna wall clocks was that, during the First World War, and in a burst of patriotism, people had taken off the German eagles that sat on top of their pediments and disposed of them, thus rendering them incomplete. Those clocks lucky enough to escape intact were always worth more money. The answer, we decided, was to make our own eagles out of plaster of Paris. We ordered some rubber moulds and set to work in the basement of the shop. As soon as the plaster eagles were dry, we dipped them in a bath of suitably coloured glop and stuck them on top of our clocks. The eagles were not as good as the originals, but our new dealer was happy with them and asked if he could buy them separately to complete his large stock of clocks. We didn't fancy spending hours making plaster eagles, so we advertised for someone to make them for us. Eventually we found an old retired couple who lived in the Radford high-rise flats. They embarked upon their new career with great enthusiasm and a total disregard for their health and living conditions. Every room in their tiny flat was pressed into service, and every surface was soon covered in a thick coating of plaster dust. They worked night and day in shifts, and produced far more eagles than we could sell. We didn't have the heart to stop them and our cellar was soon stacked high with unsold eagles. It was like the Sorcerer's Apprentice: their whole lives seemed to revolve around eagle making. Unfortunately for the old couple, the problem produced its own answer. They had been so poor prior to making eagles that their new-found wealth had overwhelmed them. They had taken to the whisky bottle with a vengeance, and both died of alcohol poisoning within weeks of each other, leaving us with a cellar full of plaster eagles as their legacy.

The next few months passed fairly quietly, apart from an amusing episode with some lost gold. At that time it was illegal to hoard gold, but most people in the antique trade, including Tony's father, George, ignored this and dealt in it regardless. For years, gold had been making its way down from Scotland to London in the form of crude ingots, shaped like tennis balls cut in half. The story went that a criminal outfit was diving on a Second World War German ship that had sunk off-shore in Scotland, while transporting bullion for the Nazi regime. This gold was then passed from dealer to dealer, each taking a small profit, until it reached Hatton Gardens in London. Tony had persuaded his father, who was one of the chain, that gold would prove to be a good investment, and that rather than sell it on, it would be more profitable in the long run to save it. After a few months, George had collected together a small fortune in gold ingots and, typically, he began to worry about it, fearing that his hoard may be stolen or discovered by 'tax wallahs'. After careful thought, he decided to rent a plot on an allotment site, coincidentally called the Klondike. In the dead of night, he and Tony buried the gold. After a few weeks George began to worry again, this time fearing that someone might have noticed their nocturnal activities and started nosing around his plot. Tony decided that the only way to placate him was to dig the gold up again. Unfortunately, in the dark they had failed to mark the spot properly, and two nights digging yielded no results. Now, George was in a blind panic, fearing the worst. Tony and his father dug over ninety percent of the plot before they located the elusive cache. No doubt the next tenant would reap the benefit of their endeavours.

As expected, business began to slow down in the run up to the summer holidays, giving us the opportunity to clean up the shop, which was in a deplorable state. We rarely, if ever, washed our coffee cups, so it was with some surprise that, every morning, I noticed the mugs were spotlessly clean, but I said nothing, assuming that Tony was going through a hygienic phase. He later told me that he also had noted the freshly washed mugs and assumed that I had been washing them. Then one evening, to our horror, the true mug-washer made an appearance in the form of a huge rat, who was making his way in and out of our kitchen by way of an air vent and feasting on the sugar residue left in the coffee mugs. Maurice, at the Trade Winds, owned a Jack Russell terrier called Chucky, and offered to come round with his dog, which, he assured us, would make short work of our rat. Chucky was fourteen years old at the time but had lost nothing of her skill and instinct. We stood back in admiration as she swiftly cornered and killed the rat by bashing its head violently against the quarry-tiled floor. For a few weeks afterwards, we lived in fear that we might have contracted leptospirosis or Weils disease, both particularly nasty diseases passed on from rats to humans, and which can be fatal if not diagnosed and treated quickly.

The summer months in the antique trade are very lean times. American and Continental shippers take their extended vacations and one can sit in the shop thinking that the entire business has come to an abrupt end almost overnight. At the beginning of August, Tony and a friend decided to spend a couple of weeks in Cornwall. They duly loaded a barrel of lager into our new Volkswagen van (for which Tony had traded in his Cortina) and set off, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs for a fortnight. To offset the boredom, I took my banjo down to the shop. As I was just starting to teach myself Bluegrass Style, I hoped to get in some serious practice, undisturbed, in the back of the shop. For a week I barely saw a soul apart from Maurice and Florence, who were suffering the same drought of custom as I was. On the Monday of the second week, I was rudely disturbed, in the middle of playing 'Foggy Mountain Breakdown', by a lone American enquiring about various items of stock. Thinking he was a tourist who had just stepped off the train, I didn't take him seriously and gave him a few inflated prices. When he left the shop I expected never to see him again, but an hour later he was back with Maurice, who explained that he was a serious shipper. Norman Lilley introduced himself and explained that, if the prices were right, we might do some good business together. I had sold him a couple of hundred pounds worth of furniture from the main shop when Maurice suggested that Norman might be interested in the contents of our cellar. I doubted it, but took him down to the cellar anyway. There, among almost a year's worth of mistakes, Norman was like a young boy in a toyshop. He bought stacks of oval meat plates, cracked jugs and bowls, clocks that nobody else wanted, and a mountain of other dusty junk that unscrupulous knockers had managed to foist upon us, most of which we considered valueless. By the time Norman had finished, I had sold him over two thousand pounds worth of what Tony and I considered rubbish. Norman, however, was delighted with his purchases, and, after supplying me with a list of his requirements, promised to return in six weeks time. As he left, he advised me to rent larger premises as he would have seven thousand pounds to spend on his next visit if we had the right goods. If he was true to his word, Norman was just what we had been looking for. When Tony returned from Cornwall and I showed him the money, he could barely believe our luck. In his opinion, when he had left for Cornwall, there had been less than five hundred pounds worth of stock in the whole shop.

We still kept the Arkwright Street shop, but heeding Norman's advice, rented an old chapel from the council for ten pounds a week and set about filling it with the goods that he wanted: Edwardian furniture, pottery and glassware. This was taking a chance, as many of the items were specific to Norman. If he failed to turn up as promised, we would be lumbered with them and almost back to square one.

It soon became obvious that we needed help shifting all the furniture around, but we were too busy to spend the time to find the right person for the job. Then, as though guided by some outside force, Harry Maskell stepped through the door of the shop asking for work. Harry was in his late thirties and was the archetypal brick built shithouse; a smaller version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he became famous for his ability to carry a double wardrobe over his shoulder. Later he became known as 'Harry the Horse', but this was not solely due to his prodigious strength.

Ralph Moiser was another great asset to us in those early days. Ralph worked for a small auction room and owned a box van, which he used for collecting items for auction. He informed us when anything cropped up that we might want to bid for, and helped us with house clearances, which we had just began to move into. Ralph seemed drawn to the seedy side of life and numbered among his friends petty criminals and prostitutes; some of these friends would later prove his undoing. He was, however, a personable and charming companion. Ralph and Harry hit it off immediately: they were both divorced and shared the same taste in women. They became notorious at the Palais' 'Grab a Granny' night and while in no way inviting trouble, when prowling the underbelly of the city's nightlife together looking for women, they were a formidable team.

As the chapel began to fill up and Norman's arrival became imminent, we were becoming nervous, and wondering if we had perhaps put too much faith in a person thousands of miles away whom I had met only once. A telephone call from Cincinnati, where Norman had based his business, put us out of our misery and reassured us that he was on his way. Norman limped through the shop door the next day. He had failed to remember that British traffic drove on what he called the 'wrong side' of the road and had received a glancing blow from a passing car, and though not badly injured, he was very tired. Tony drove him to the West Bridgford Hotel, where we had made a booking, and arranged to pick him up to take him out for dinner later that night, after he had rested. It was essential that we keep Norman in Nottingham until he had spent all of his seven thousand pounds with us. To this end, Tony and Ralph hatched a plan, which in essence resembled a honey-trap. Ralph had arranged for one of his prostitute friends to be in the restaurant at the same time as Tony and Norman, and having affected an introduction, Norman, we hoped, would go for the girl and stay around for a bit of fun. We would be paying the prostitute, and Norman would think that he had found a genuine girlfriend. The plan worked perfectly and for the next six days Norman was our unknowing captive. The girl had been given instructions to wear him out so that Norman was too exhausted to argue about the prices. By the time he left, we had all of his money and he had all of our goods. The chapel was bare.

We now had the wherewithal to move up a gear and decided on a sustained advertising campaign. The adverts would not be the conventional small line ads used by other dealers, but a devoted quarter of a page, made up of line drawings of the furniture we were hoping to purchase. Resembling a wild-west poster with a large black WANTED across the top, the advertisement would appear in the Nottingham Guardian[20], a sister paper to the Nottingham Evening Post. No one had attempted anything like it before. It engaged the public's imagination completely and was a great success: the phone in the shop never stopped ringing with people wanting to sell. I had been taking driving lessons for some weeks, as it was becoming clear that, with the increase in business, Tony was going to need help with the house calls and with ferrying customers about between our shop and the chapel-warehouse. I was lucky enough to pass first time and upon returning from the test centre and entering the shop, Tony, delighted at my success, suggested that I drive one of our dealers to Newark in our VW transporter van. The poor man, unaware that I had just passed my driving test, suffered a hair-raising journey. I did, however, manage to get to Newark and back without causing a serious accident, which was a great boost to my driving confidence; sometimes the deep end is the best place to start (unless of course you're the passenger).

No one could have predicted the next stroke of luck. The reporters on all the national newspapers went on strike for better pay and conditions, with the result that their papers could no longer operate. The Nottingham Evening Post and The Nottingham Guardian employed very few union members among their reporters and continued to go to press; this meant that they were the only newspapers available. As a result, their circulation went through the roof; so while we were only paying local rates for our ads, we were receiving massive coverage because the paper was being distributed throughout the whole of the Midlands. Our adverts were almost a daily feature in the two local papers and the telephone was red hot. This situation continued for some weeks, and by the end of the strike, by most people's standards we were earning extremely good money.

Antique dealers have always been treated with suspicion by the general public and branded as rip-off merchants who prey on the ignorance of their customers. There is no doubt that there are those who richly deserve this opprobrium, but the customers themselves are not beyond reproach. Buying from the public could sometimes be a risky business: a deal could be concluded and a list made of the items purchased, only to find on returning to collect them that the customer had removed some of the better pieces, arguing that the missing items had never been included in the deal. An example of this dishonesty very nearly got us into serious trouble with the police. Tony had bought a number of expensive items from a private house, one of which was a three-foot long model of a steam locomotive. On returning to collect the goods, and having previously paid for them, he was angry to find that the customer had removed the steam engine. In the end, the customer prevailed, and a disgruntled Tony returned to the shop with what remained of his purchases. On examining a small chest of drawers, we found that it contained a number of stamp albums. We were not familiar with stamp values but, on inspection, the albums appeared to contain a number of rarities, such as first day covers of the first Zeppelin flight, and others celebrating the aeroplane flights of the Wright Brothers and Bleriot. Given the customer's behaviour, Tony declared that the stamps were ours. He had bought the chest of drawers, ipso facto, the contents belonged to us. By coincidence, a London dealer of our acquaintance happened by the shop, and though he could not put a value on the stamps himself, he offered to take them to London for appraisal and bring them back on his next trip. The next day, two plain-clothes police officers paid us a visit enquiring about the whereabouts of the stamps, as apparently the customer had reported them either missing or stolen. It was not made clear if we were being accused of theft; horrified, we denied all knowledge of the stamps. The shop was crammed to the rafters and the goods, including the set of drawers we had bought from the complaining customer, were buried at the back of the cellar, which had also been pressed into service. We bought time by explaining that it might be a few days before we could get to the items in order to search through them. The policemen seemed happy with this and left, saying they would be back in a week's time. To our relief, the London dealer returned with the stamps a week later and informed us that they were of very little value. The next day we were able to hand over the worthless stamps to the policemen. This, plus the fact that we considered ourselves lucky that the incident was taken no further, were the only consolations we got out of this particular skirmish with a member of the public.

Some customers would not have welcomed the return of some of the items we found in their furniture. One incident in particular concerned the widow of a clergyman. We arrived at the vicarage to buy a kneehole desk and found that one of the drawers was locked and no key could be found. We kept big bunches of keys at the shop for just such occasions and promised to return the contents, if any, once the drawer was opened. In the course of our conversation with the vicar's widow, it had emerged that the room where the desk was kept was used only when her husband's friend came to stay. When we arrived back at the shop, the locked drawer was opened and we were astonished to find it crammed with sado-masochistic implements, which I recognised instantly as similar to those belonging to the boiler man at Bairnswear. We now understood what the vicar and his friend had been up to in that locked room. To spare the old lady's embarrassment, we decided against returning the implements; it would have been too unkind.

While some customers had too few scruples, from time to time we encountered one who appeared to have too many. In response to our advert, a Mr. Worthington, who lived in Long Eaton, telephoned saying he had a roll-top desk for sale and, hoping to increase its value, he had re-polished it. There was a good chance that I would have to disappoint him, as few people are skilled enough to restore old furniture and take it badly when told that they have probably done more harm than good. Mr. Worthington's case proved to be the exception, and on examining his desk, I was surprised to see that he had done an excellent job of restoration and paid him accordingly.

Over a cup of tea in the back room of his house, I learned something of his situation. He had been unemployed and on benefits for two years, he told me, due to a back injury, and on the death of his parents, the house, along with all the furniture, had been left to him. As money had always been tight and he and his wife had two children, his only concern was to mitigate the impact of unemployment on his son and daughter, who must come first. Furnishings for the house and clothes for himself and his wife were not a priority. His two children, both in their early teens, came home from school while I was there; both were well mannered and well dressed in their school uniforms, which Mrs. Worthington, with consummate dress-making skills, had made for them. Both children owned what appeared to be brand new, shiny bicycles and I was amazed when Mr. Worthington confessed that he had built them himself from various spare parts. He then showed me his back garden, which resembled a seaside funfair, with miniature rides and a helter-skelter. He had also installed a pool and surrounded it with sand to resemble a beach. All this he had made without spending a penny, using scraps of material from builders' skips. He may be poor, he said, but if he couldn't take his children to the seaside, he could, in some measure, bring the seaside to them. Back in the house, a perfectly tame sparrow flew in and perched on my shoulder; this was the family pet, and I remember thinking to myself that you couldn't get much more frugal than that. I asked Mr. Worthington if he would like to do some restoration work for us, but he refused, saying that although it was an attractive offer, his principles wouldn't allow him to do work on the side while he was drawing the dole.

Norman, the American shipper, came every six weeks, continuing to add to the coffers, and the arrangement with the 'girlfriend' prevailed. Everyone was happy. We had rented another warehouse from the council, four times bigger than the chapel, and stuffed it full of furniture. We did, however, still use the chapel, along with the Arkwright Street shop. In almost no time, we became the biggest antiques shipping concern in the Midlands and added to our empire by buying the lease on a large, four-storey shop on Canning Circus, which had previously been an antiques market. We filled all four stories of the shop and set it up as a retail outlet. We saw no reason to change the name given to it by its previous owners, who, with little imagination, had called it Circus Antiques. The Arkwright Street shop remained our headquarters and here, the money changed hands; our bank was just three doors away.

Tony had lost weight, grown his curly hair into a ringlety mop and sported a moustache; he still clung to wearing suits, which he now bought from Paul Smith in his newly opened little shop in the Lace Market. With the confidence of maturity, he had discovered the glamour of nightclubs, where he proved to be a talented, if somewhat eccentric, dancer. To complete his new image as man about town, he had acquired a very attractive girlfriend called Susan, and bought one of the new MGB GT's. I took over the VW van, which I considered sufficiently modest not to compromise my socialist credentials.

During our first three years of business we had neglected to keep any accounts. The first hint of impending trouble came from a friend who worked at the tax office: risking dismissal, he informed us that a letter had arrived at the office, written in an illiterate hand, informing the Inland Revenue that we were tax dodgers. A week or two later we were summoned to appear before a tax inspector. Among the knockers there was a drill for such occasions and we followed it to the letter; we dragged out our most ragged and worn out suits, removed watches and jewellery and duly appeared before the inspector looking like tramps. The inspector was surprisingly pleasant, and once convinced that we were indeed numerically challenged, sent us away with the recommendation that we engage a book-keeper and an accountant. The only person I could trust to understand how our accounts worked was my father, who at the time, and to my mother's dismay, as it offered too many opportunities for hanky panky, was working as a taxi driver. My father, as an ex-civil servant, dusted off his book-keeping skills, and, despite the lack of proper accounts, somehow managed to cobble together three years' books. We were expecting a huge tax bill but when it arrived it was only a fraction of what we had anticipated. For his efforts, we bought my father a Jaguar and kept him on, not least because VAT was being introduced and was now payable on second-hand goods, which had previously been exempt. The tax authorities at least had a human face, but as some people in the trade were soon to discover, the goons from Customs and Excise came from a much crueller world.

One of Norman's best sellers in America was Florentine blue pottery, otherwise known as 'Flo'blue', and we could never get enough of it. The original pottery was characterised by its soft, washed out, cobalt blue, which bled out of the decoration and into the surrounding white glaze. The bleeding was not intentional: it was the accidental result of a combination of high temperatures and the early lead glazes, which had long since been outlawed as a health hazard. After making enquiries, we managed to track down Blakney & Sons, a firm in Stoke-on-Trent who were said to be making a very good reproduction Flo'blue. This sounded promising and we arranged to pay them a visit. Their range was indeed as good as its reputation and included all the items on our shopping list, such as moustache cups and saucers, shaving mugs and vegetable tureens. Unfortunately, Mr. Blakney, of Blakney & Sons, had a full order book, and despite dangling our prodigious buying power under his nose, he proved to be a man of rare principle and refused to give us priority over his existing customers. We left Stoke-on-Trent feeling frustrated and thwarted; we had become the spoilt boys of the antique world and were used to getting our own way. On the journey back to Nottingham, we decided that if we couldn't buy Flo'blue, we would make it. The clever and resourceful Don Redwood had cracked the secrets of the Mary Gregorys, so why not the secrets of Flo'blue?

Don, ever eager to conquer unknown territory, set about his new venture with the zeal of a crusader, while Tony, never a person lacking in enthusiasm, visited Don every day to examine the results of the tests he was conducting using the tiny Mary Gregory kiln. It soon became apparent that Flo'blue would not easily yield up its secrets and that no amount of encouragement from Tony was going to hasten the process.

The business continued to flourish well into the next year. We were now not only buying the contents of houses, but had become property speculators and bought houses as well. The warehouses and shops were full to bursting point and we were looking forward to Norman's return after the summer break; but in September, we received an unexpected telephone call from the States. The caller identified himself as Mr. Alvin Klein, an antique dealer and colleague of Norman's, who was also based in Cincinnati. Alvin informed us that Norman was having a cash flow problem and would be unable to return to England for a few months. Norman was, he said, concerned that we might be stuck with his goods for a while and had given him, Alvin, permission to come to Nottingham to purchase them instead. In order to confirm this story, we attempted to contact Norman but we were always told that he was in The Pink Pussy Cat, which we later learned was a sleazy, girly bar in downtown Cincinnati and Norman's second home. We left messages but received no reply. When he arrived, Mr. Klein, a small, round, Jewish gentleman, was treated to the same hospitality hitherto afforded to Norman, including the same 'girlfriend'.

A few days after Mr. Klein's arrival, my father was surprised when Norman appeared, unannounced, at his office in the Arkwright Street shop. My father, in some agitation, rang us at the chapel where he knew we were with Alvin, who was busily putting his sticky identification tickets all over Norman's goods. The news of Norman's arrival sent Alvin into a blind panic and he immediately started to barricade himself into the chapel, confessing that far from being Norman's friend, he was his biggest competitor; more concerning was the news that Norman carried a gun. Fearing for the consequences if the two of them met up, I rang my bewildered father back at the shop and asked him to take Norman across the road to the Queens Hotel for a drink; but I didn't mention the gun. I was a bit concerned, but thought the old solider would be able to handle himself in a crisis. The next two hours were spent in feverish activity; Klein was in Norman's hotel with Norman's 'girlfriend'. After telling Norman that the West Bridgford Hotel was fully booked, we quickly found him alternative accommodation at the Albany Hotel in the centre of the city. Now another 'girlfriend' had to be found, as we had told Norman that the original one was 'on holiday'. This was made difficult as Ralph[21] had recently been given a four-year prison sentence for handling stolen goods and Tony and I had no experience of procuring prostitutes. Harry came to the rescue as, through his friendship with Ralph, he was on familiar terms with many 'ladies of the night' and quickly found us a glamorous replacement. Norman remained unaware of the drama going on around him, and confessed that he was indeed having a cash-flow problem and was only paying us a courtesy visit before travelling to Sheffield the next day to conclude some other business. The affair didn't end too well for us, as the lying Klein managed to get our container out of United States Customs without paying us for his goods. He owed us two thousand pounds, which at that time was the equivalent of the average person's wages for six months. We had allowed him six weeks' credit until his container arrived in the States. Ordinarily, the container could not be released without our written permission and we concluded that Klein must have had the help of a corrupt customs official, as release without permission was unprecedented.

At last, Don phoned to say that a dramatic breakthrough had occurred in pinning down the elusive formula for Flo'blue. Tony and I rushed over to his little pottery at the back of his wife's clothes shop in Carrington. The scene was one of mayhem; like the eagle-makers before him, the house and shop were thick with clay dust, as were his two children. Driven by the alchemist's dream of making gold out of base materials, Don and his wife, Josephine, had cared little for household chores and even the light grey kitten, we were told, was originally black. But there, lying on Don's bench, was the Holy Grail: beautiful shards of perfect Florentine Blue, better by far in colour than the intransigent Mr. Blakney's, and Don assured us there was not a speck of lead used in the glaze. We immediately picked up Don's phone and ordered a bigger kiln.

A large room in our new warehouse was swiftly cleared of furniture in readiness for the installation of the new kiln. Carefully chosen examples of old pottery were then sent to master mould makers in Stoke-on-Trent, and from the master moulds, working moulds were taken. Within a few weeks, the pottery was up and running and Tony, in his excitement, was the first in every day, anxious to see the kiln opened. So eager was he to see how the firing had turned out, that on a number of occasions, he had persuaded Don to open the kiln prematurely. The rapid drop in temperature resulted in the entire kiln full of pots blowing up with an ear splitting racket that sounded like a sustained burst of machinegun fire. As one hundred vases exploded one after the other, we stood there, mouths open, hands pressed to our ears. The resulting loss of revenue soon taught him a lesson and thereafter he confined himself to searching around for ever-more originals to be copied. The kiln made a continual clicking sound and Tony proudly told the dealers who came to buy the new Flo'blue, that every click was worth a hundred pounds. The pottery sold well and it was not long before another kiln was ordered, three times bigger than the first.

The Scheme Club was still flourishing. We had weathered the 'winter of discontent' (when the electricity was switched off for hours at a time) by using car batteries hooked up to strings of small bulbs, which gave the room a dismal, sinister atmosphere in keeping with its anarchistic reputation. This was in the days of the hand-pump, which needed no electricity, so the landlord had no trouble pulling beer. In the summer, to give the club greater social cohesion, we organised bus trips into Derbyshire and made prior arrangements with a café to provide a set meal for us all at lunchtime. After lunch we would go to a pub for a few pints and then on to a place of interest, such as the tram museum at Crich, or the Blue John mines at Castleton. Nobody really wanted to visit these places as they would have preferred to stay in the pub, but the committee felt that an injection of culture was the better alternative. The Maoists among us would head for the hills, from where muffled explosions would indicate the successful detonations of home-made bombs in readiness for the revolution. After our enforced cultural interlude, we would once again seek out the nearest pub big enough to hold us all, and then down numerous pints of beer until closing time, making sure we bought enough carry-outs to last us throughout the journey home. The return journey was always a fraught one: fuelled by excessive alcohol, smouldering resentments between the various political factions erupted and fistfights were not unusual. At the end of the journey, the terrified driver was tipped lavishly for his indulgence, and among the members, a discreet curtain was drawn over the whole proceedings. When it was announced from the stage, on the next music night, that the trip had been a total success and that a good time had been had by all, there was not a voice dissenting, indicating that hostilities had once again been suspended until the next trip. On reflection, these bus trips were horrendous affairs, but the bus was always over subscribed and no one would have missed them for the world.

One of our music nights had been interrupted by an anonymous telephone call warning Eric, the landlord, that a bomb had been planted in his pub. The police, along with sniffer dogs, were called in, and until it was established that the call was a hoax, we, relishing the excitement, continued playing music on the traffic island opposite the now cop infested Bowling Green pub. Our support for the Irish civil rights movement was well known and some disgruntled Protestant must have decided to make life difficult for us, but Eric, whose politics were no doubt diametrically opposed to our own, feared that his pub's reputation would suffer and had been looking for an opportunity to get rid of us. He didn't have long to wait.

Every so often, we put on a Scheme Special. Anti-sweatshop and child labour exploitation was the theme chosen for the night in question, and Kinshot, our resident stand up comic, had worked out a routine especially for the occasion. His act involved examining and discarding each piece of his clothing when, in his opinion, child or sweatshop labour had been used in its manufacture. It was a novel and clever striptease: not one of his garments proved to be innocent. He was just removing his underpants, to a huge roar of applause, when an enraged Eric stormed into the room. He was convinced that extreme left wing politics were now being compounded with indecent exposure, and instant expulsion followed.

Finding a new home was easier than we anticipated, given our reputation. The landlord of the Fox Inn on Parliament Street suppressed his natural Tory instincts in favour of the pub's takings, and gave us his function room. He went further when he realised how much money we were generating for the pub, and allowed us to have a lock in. It was business as usual, and the revolution was still just around the corner.

Not long after our move to the Fox, a group of young ladies residing at the YWCA joined the audience. Apparently, the YWCA is a secular organisation and anyone can take advantage of its facilities, which include long-term residential rooms to rent, from which men, not surprisingly, are excluded. The new girls came to the club initially out of curiosity, but soon realised that there were ample opportunities for meeting men. Even revolutionaries appreciate female company and the girls were not disappointed. Most quickly found partners and suffered endless Marxist analyses without complaint. I quickly became friendly with one of the group, an attractive Tunisian who was in England on a teacher exchange scheme. Our friendship rapidly progressed to an affair and after three months I realised that I was smitten. Thea and I had been together for six years and the relationship was getting tired for both of us. I rented a flat in the Victoria Centre, a two-minute walk away from the YWCA, and Thea and I parted amicably and without recrimination.

Sabeh Caid-Essebsi was the granddaughter of the deposed Bey, or King, of Tunisia and entitled to be addressed as 'princess'. She was a member of the Tunisian aristocracy and was on familiar terms with President Borgiba and members of the Tunisian government. But what was she doing in virtual exile in England and consorting with a godless infidel? As the details of her life back in Tunisia emerged, it appeared that she had had a brief affair with a Jewish man. The Arab-Israeli war was in progress at the time, and Sabeh had come to the attention of the Tunisian Security Forces, who had informed her father of the affair and kept her under close surveillance. To keep his wayward daughter out of further trouble, her doting father had arranged the teacher exchange and insisted, in the absence of a Muslim equivalent, that she stay at the YWCA, which he fondly believed to be the Christian equivalent of purdah.

The year was 1974. I was thirty-four and Sabeh was twenty-six years old when we met. She was sexually liberated, and though nominally a Muslim, I never knew her to attend a mosque. Far from the cloistered life that her father had intended for her, she found England much to her taste, in contrast, for a woman at least, to the controlling and claustrophobic atmosphere of a Muslim state. She was good fun, attractive, well educated and very spoilt: not at all a suitable companion for a dedicated socialist. Prior to leaving Thea and renting the Victoria Centre flat, the only place where Sabeh and I could cement our relationship was the back room of the Arkwright Street shop. I confess that, as a staunch republican, I took considerable perverse pleasure in knowing that the only thing between the bare, royal arse and the filthy floor was a dusty furniture blanket. I had to be on my ideological guard at all times, as in a good-natured way, she derived great enjoyment out of attempting to corrupt me. Wanting to know why I continued to drive an old van when I could afford a sports car, she said, " If one could afford nice things, then one should have them." In some ways she did corrupt me; I soon embraced the idea of going out to restaurants to eat where formerly I had condemned the practice as a shameful waste of money. When a dealer asked to exchange his debt to Tony and I for a Triumph Stag sports car, I found that I enjoyed driving it, and to Sabeh's delight, kept it. I salved my conscience by telling myself that it was just another piece of stock. I was expecting the comrades to take a dim view of my new Stag, but by now I was viewed as something of an oddity, and when Johnny Peck, the communist candidate for Bulwell, stood for election, I took my red Stag to the polling station to ferry his constituents back and forth. The Tories were furious, probably considering me a species of hypocrite, but Johnny's supporters were delighted to be driven to the polls in a posh car and applauded me when I demanded to know why the workers should always be expected to put up with second best.

As autumn approached, Sabeh's father died suddenly and she flew back to Tunisia immediately for his funeral. Unsure how long the mourning process might take, she was unable to say when she might return. In an attempt to cheer me up, Tony booked us a few days holiday at San Tropez in the south of France, and despite my protests, insisted on taking me to Paul Smith's shop to kit me out. Within a few months of opening his first small shop, Paul's flair for design was recognised among the night clubbing fraternity and he swiftly became the playboy's outfitter of choice. As a valued customer, Tony was on familiar terms with Paul, who soon fitted me out with the appropriate jet setter's outfits, which included a beautiful white linen suit, a dark blue velvet suit by Yves St. Laurent, plus various shirts and shoes. This was not my preferred style of dress but Tony begged me to indulge him, as clad in my usual scruffy jeans and cheesecloth shirts I would be unable to accompany him to his beloved night clubs when we got to San Tropez. On viewing myself in the shop's mirrors, vanity prevailed and I was soon enthusiastically sorting through Paul's stock as though it was a child's huge dressing up box.

It was the first time that I had flown in an aeroplane and the first time that I had been to a Mediterranean country. Forgetting that I was rapidly becoming one of them, I was fascinated to see how the other half lived as we joined them in the posh restaurants, night clubs and beaches of the south of France. Money was no object, and in our Paul Smith outfits we blended into the cosmopolitan society of San Tropez perfectly. We met a couple of English girls on Pamplona beach and spent some evenings with them. They were good company but had no intentions of allowing themselves to be seduced and we did the usual holiday thing of swapping addresses. While in a restaurant one night, I mentioned to the girls that I had developed a taste for ratatouille and bemoaned the fact that it seemed unavailable in Britain. On returning to England, I was surprised to receive a tin of ratatouille through the post from one of the girls, along with a note saying that she had bought it in Sainsbury's.

When we returned from France, we had another potentially important customer waiting for us: this time a Canadian lady. Audrey Fitt was in her early forties, attractive, slim and sophisticated. Her Cherokee ancestry was born out by her dusky skin and striking profile. More importantly, she had loads of money to spend on furniture and Flo'blue, but in order to keep her entertained in Nottingham (in the same manner that had been so successful with Norman) we needed a 'boyfriend'. Male escorts were almost unheard of at the time, so we cast around for an alternative.

There was little time to lose and our eyes fell upon Harry, our well-hung warehouse manager. We took him to Paul Smith's to be suitably suited and booted and lent him one of our Stags for the duration of Audrey's stay. We introduced Harry to Audrey as one of our directors, whose only wish was to make her stay with us as comfortable as possible. The lantern-jawed Harry turned out to be a great success as 'the thinking woman's bit of rough'. Certainly Audrey always asked for him to accompany her on subsequent buying trips, but despite all Tony's and my probings and teasing for details, Harry and Audrey's lips remained sealed and both refused to reveal the true nature of their relationship.

When the big new kiln, which had ten times the capacity of the old one, was up and running, it became necessary to recruit more staff. I was always being petitioned by the out of work Scheme Club members, so the available new positions were quickly filled. There was always the possibility of trouble among a workforce of left wingers, so I arranged for a dozen 'Daily Workers' to be delivered every day to the pottery: not that anyone appeared to read them, but they came in handy for wrapping up the pottery. I suppose many of them ended up in the States where, no doubt, the papers' contents were carefully scrutinised by the security forces. No political slogans appeared on the pottery walls; the only evidence of left wing activity were the small busts of Chairman Mao dotted about the nooks and crannies between the legitimate pottery. This caused much amusement among our customers who, while selecting their purchases from among the vast shelves of finished pottery, would suddenly be confronted by a sombre looking Chairman Mao, his head rising out of the top of a vase, peering down in disapproval at all the capitalist activity going on around him. These busts were the work of two Maoists, who, on finding a ready market for them among their comrades, had embraced private enterprise. We were expecting Karl Marx to make an appearance anytime soon but the Communist Party members among the workforce objected to the exploitation of the great man, threatening to smash them if they were produced. We didn't object to the Mao's providing they were being made at lunchtimes and there was spare room in the kilns.

We employed all means short of criminality to improve the firm's profitability; along with the 'girlfriends' and 'boyfriends' for the overseas customers, we attempted to corrupt the young ladies who sold us our advertising space. It was my job to take them out for dinner and wheedle discounts out of them. This was a pleasant task as Christine, the lady from the free papers, was extremely attractive and very sophisticated. She had been educated at Roedean and reminded me of John Betjeman's 'Joan Hunter-Dunn'. Shirley, from the Evening Post, was a stunning and highly intelligent black woman. At times I began to wonder who was corrupting whom, as it was as much in their interests to sell me advertising space as it was in my interest to get good deals. But whatever was going on, we all had a lot of fun.

We had for sometime been buying better quality items from auctions. I found the dealers who attended auctions tedious and pretentious. I preferred the more robust approach of the shipping trade, where a cursory glance at an item was sufficient to determine its saleability, to that of the prissy antique shop owners, who seemed to confuse the antique trade with the medical profession and subjected each piece to an ostentatious forensic examination. I preferred doing house calls with my father, where the customers were more down to earth and there was a real chance of finding a hidden treasure. Tony, for his part, didn't mind attending auctions and had devised a way of circumventing the rings[22], which at the time were legal and operated in most auction houses. Somehow he had managed to corrupt the head auctioneer at one of the major local sales rooms, persuading him to remove and hide some of the vital parts of expensive clocks and pieces of furniture, thus substantially bringing down the price when the item went under the hammer. With this ploy, Tony could easily outbid the rings, after which the missing parts were retrieved. Eventually the rings came to the attention of the Monopoly's Commission and were outlawed.

It had now been three months since Sabeh had left and though I had written her a couple of letters, I had received no reply. I had also spoken to her once or twice on the phone, where she seemed decidedly evasive. I found difficulty in accepting the fact, but I suspected, deep down, that there was only a remote possibility of her returning and decided I had to try and get on with my life. Thea's sister, Adele, had recently parted from her husband and we turned to each other for consolation and company. Adele was as beautiful as her sister, and like Sabeh, she was a dedicated hedonist who revelled in all the pleasures of the flesh. When Adele moved into my Victoria Centre flat Thea was furious with me, which I found difficult to understand as she had a new boyfriend of her own. On reflection, it may have been an insensitive thing to do and probably confirmed her parents' suspicions concerning my character. Thea's father was no doubt barricading the front door of his house in nervous anticipation that his wife would be next.

With the business gliding along smoothly, we decided to funnel some of our spare cash into the purchase of a prestigious thatched house in a posh area of West Bridgford. We had been in the process of buying some antiques from the owners when they informed us that the house would soon be on the market; we agreed to purchase it there and then, thus saving them estate agents fees. Ostensibly the house was to be used as a showroom for our more desirable antiques, but as it featured a small, dedicated dance hall, this room held a particular allure for Tony, who was developing into an enthusiastic party animal. Not satisfied with being just one of many men about town, Tony had bought a white V12 E Type Jaguar and become 'the man' about town. Lavish parties were arranged at the house, reminiscent of those thrown by the Great Gatsby. Huge candelabra-lit tables were arranged across the rolling lawns and loaded down with huge bowls of punch and delicacies of every description. Without a trace of embarrassment, lefties from the pottery and The Scheme Club rubbed shoulders with Tony's nightclub friends, and with all reservations regarding conspicuous consumption temporarily suspended, they guzzled champagne and gorged themselves on caviar and Roquefort cheese with the same relish and abandon as their capitalist counterparts.

At the end of the party season, we drove the E Type to the south of France and put it through its paces on Route 66. It surpassed itself on the straight, reaching in excess of a hundred and forty miles an hour, but on tight bends it couldn't compete with the more manoeuvrable BMW's and Mercedes. The E Type was so long that it needed a hinge in the middle. These were the days when one could drive quite recklessly, which I confess I thoroughly enjoyed, but with the advent of speed cameras and a dawning sense of greater responsibility, my enthusiasm for fast cars has now diminished.

Some days later, on the morning of our return journey, after thoroughly indulging ourselves in San Tropez, we were so hung-over that we decided to load the car onto the night train to Paris and accompany it in a couchette. This was not as extravagant as it sounds as the E Type barely did ten miles to the gallon. After a good night's sleep, we unloaded the car at the Gare du Nord and, much to the appreciation of the Parisians, who greeted us with waves and whistles, we drove down the Champs Elysees with the top down, our long hair blowing in the breeze. What posers we were: but what fun.

On our safe return to Nottingham, Harry informed us that there was 'trouble at mill'. There had been complaints of exploitation and calls for 'worker's control'[23]. I assumed that this was just the distant rumbling before a demand for a wage increase and decided to head it off with a suggestion of my own. I gathered the workers together and asked which of them would like to form a worker's control unit, and which of them wished to stay with us and be exploited. A third opted for worker's control, and in accordance with their wishes we built a studded wall down the middle of the pottery and gave the worker's control group a kiln of their own, promising to buy from them whatever they produced. Led by the semi-nocturnal Don Redwood, discipline soon broke down and the controllers were turning up for work at all hours. Their production plummeted, as did their earnings, and they soon discovered that there was a price to be paid for independence. Their pride, however, prevented them from asking to rejoin the 'exploited' on the other side of the wall. Eventually we gave Don a payout for his part in setting up the factory and gave him a car and a kiln. The controllers then moved to a small factory of their own, where the ingenious Don managed to make fake and very rare Goss cottages[24] to sell to the antique shops. Unfortunately, they failed to inform their customers of the cottages true provenance and compounded their mistake by visiting the same shops twice. On one occasion the customer, having been made aware by a collector that the cottages were fake, rang the police, who arrived not long after the controllers had fled.

In order to avoid any more unpleasantness, the controllers decided to up sticks and try their luck in Cornwall, making legitimate craft pottery. When I visited them a year or two later, they were making beautiful pots but were still as undisciplined as ever.

Just prior to the formation of the workers control unit, we were paid a surprise visit by the local Factory Inspectors. Fortunately, we had made the workers well aware of the dangers of 'potters rot', or silicosis, which is caused by the inhalation of clay dust, and with a bit of encouragement they kept the pottery clean. The inspectors declared themselves satisfied with the pottery's hygiene and left; but while the inspectors were going about their business, I noticed Don surreptitiously hiding a large sack and decided to investigate. To my horror I discovered that the sack contained lead powder. When I questioned Don about it and complained that he had assured me that our glazes were lead free, he told me that though this was essentially true, the lead was used in flo-pots[25] during the firing, a process known as fuming. When one entered the pottery in the morning after the kilns had been firing all night, the whole room was blanketed in a grey fog. I had assumed that the fog was caused by transfers burning off the pottery inside the kiln: now I was not so sure. If lead was escaping into the atmosphere of the pottery, the workers were at serious risk of developing lead poisoning. That was not all: many of our pots could be used domestically as containers for food and there was a risk of lead release. I sent three of our longest serving potters for a blood test and took samples of our pots to the public analyst for lead release tests. There was a strong possibility that we were poisoning half of America. Two weeks of sleepless nights followed while waiting for the test results, all the time wondering what the repercussions would be if the tests proved positive: probably a few years in Sing-Sing, even if we did escaped the electric chair. To everyone's relief, all the blood tests and lead release tests turned out to be negative. After the lead scare, the news that our 'priceless antique vases' were blowing up on mantelpieces all over America was a minor problem. We knew what was causing the explosions: Tony's initial enthusiasm for opening the kilns prematurely had over-stressed the pottery and the more delicate items, such as vases, were potential time bombs. Luckily no cases of serious injury were reported and we knew this had only affected probably a couple of hundred vases. The kilns were now fitted with temperature cams, which brought the temperature down at a steady rate, thus eliminating the problem.

In 1976 we received notice from the council that the pottery was in an area due for demolition. We soon found alternative premises and with some misgivings, signed a twenty-year lease on a factory on Low Pavement in the Lace Market. I had reservations about this leap into the dark because of the length of the lease, but Tony was as enthusiastic as ever and looking forward to making ever-larger pieces of pottery which, he assured me, would secure the pottery's future. Two large truck kilns were ordered, and special beds for them were in the process of being excavated in our new premises when we received an urgent phone call from the landlord, asking us to meet him at the factory. On our arrival, the landlord was in a state of near apoplexy as he explained that the factory was built on a sandstone cliff and that, like most sandstone foundations in Nottingham, it was probably honeycombed with caves. If this were the case, then the heavy kilns could break through the floor dragging their electric wiring with them, and go bouncing around in the bowels of the earth, from cave to cave, forever. We realised that this wasn't just very bad news for us, but for anyone occupying premises in the area, as at the very least, all their mains fuses would blow. Our first thoughts were that the whole new enterprise would have to be abandoned, leaving us with a twenty-year lease on a factory we couldn't use. The only way to determine whether or not there were caves beneath us was to deep-drill all over the floor, and we watched nervously as the specialist we had engaged started to work. In all, about thirty drillings took place, any one of which could spell disaster, but after a very tense week the factory got the all clear and the big truck kilns were safely installed.

We had started off making shaving mugs but were soon making giant plant pots on stands with specially commissioned cast brass, lions-paw bases and experiments were being conducted in an attempt to decorate toilets and washbasins. Tony was now convinced that there was a fortune to be made out of the Flo'blue, and to celebrate bought a brown Rolls Royce convertible. I duly inherited the E Type, rationalising that I might as well get a bit more fun out of it before I swapped it for something more practical. The workers were accustomed to borrowing our posh cars to impress their girlfriends, so there were no murmurings about 'capitalist running dogs'.

With the new pottery up and running, Tony was anxious to take the Rolls Royce on a trip to the Continent, and concluded that the best way to see what it was capable of was to drive to the Alps, which would also give us the opportunity to do a bit of ski-ing. We invited our respective girlfriends to accompany us and then, after trooping off down to the sports shop to buy the appropriate gear, we set off for Innsbruck, in Austria.

The trip to the Alps nearly ended in disaster before it started. We had decided to drive through the night and found that the winter weather while driving on the German autobahns was atrocious, with driving rain, heavy, gusting cross winds and sleet. In order to shut out the glare from the oncoming traffic, I was wearing sun- glasses while driving. The girls were asleep in the back of the car and Tony, sitting next to me, was also asleep, with his head leaning against the window. Driving at ninety miles an hour, the heavily sprung Rolls was swaying from side to side like a jelly and proving difficult to handle at speed. Suddenly, Tony woke up to find himself staring into the abyss of roadworks about fifteen feet deep, with the nearside tyres a mere couple of inches away from the edge. With admirable restraint, he gently leaned over me, took hold of the steering wheel and steered the car away from disaster. My sunglasses had created an optical illusion, making the warning poles along the roadworks seem much further away than they were. We were all lucky to be alive. The rest of the journey was uneventful and we arrived safely in Innsbruck the next morning. We booked into the best hotel we could find and had a few hours sleep before checking out the town's skiing and drinking facilities, which we found to be excellent. We hired boots and skis and spent the first week mucking about on the slopes. None of us had skied before and most of our time was spent flat on our backs, but it was really good fun and we avoided serious injury. I was not much enamoured with the ski lifts, dangling hundreds of feet up in the air, with only one bolt between me and eternity. It would have been a trying experience at the best of times but my hangover-induced anxiety made it ten times worse. We took full advantage of the après-ski scene, to such an extent that although we had taken several thousand pounds with us, we ran out of money after a week and had to ring Nottingham in order to have more wired out to us. Three days later we had spent money at such a rate that we decided to cut our holiday short and head back to Nottingham. When we reached Lille, in Belgium, we decided to stay the night and continue on the next day. By now we were so short of money that looking at the window display of a fancy restaurant, we had to decide whether it was going to be a decent meal or a decent place to stay. Around the corner we found a remarkably cheap pension where we booked in before returning to the restaurant. After blowing most of our remaining money on dinner and plenty of wine, we returned to the pension where the concierge, on handing us our room keys, gave the girls a look of undisguised disgust. The beds were clean but the rooms were surprisingly spartan. We were a little put out to hear that there were no facilities for breakfast but were told that a cup of coffee would be brought to our rooms in the morning. Through the entire night and the following morning we could hear couples arriving. Eventually the truth dawned on us: we had booked into a brothel. Despite the nocturnal activities of the other guests, we managed to get some sleep and the morning coffee was welcome.

Driving through Dunkerque on our way to the ferry, Tony missed a red light at a traffic island and hit a Renault. The door of the Renault sprang open, and to our horror, we watched as a small baby flew out and landed on the traffic island. The police were soon on the scene. Tony was taken into a police van to be breathalysed and the baby was taken to hospital to be checked over. By a stroke of luck, the baby had landed on the only soft and muddy bit of the island and, to everyone's relief, proved to be uninjured. After waiting around to assure ourselves that the baby was all right and Tony having passed his breathalyser test, we continued on our journey. We had just enough petrol money to get back to Nottingham, but including what we had already spent, plus the repairs to the Rolls and the Renault, which turned out to be another couple of thousand pounds, it had been a very expensive trip.

We tried various configurations of living in our fancy house. Tony's mother, Dora, insisted on giving up her council flat and moving in with him at The Thatches. For the most part Tony was kind and sympathetic to her, but her eccentric behaviour and loathing of extravagance drove him to the brink of insanity. Eventually he bought her a new maisonette, where she resigned herself to living alone. Adele and I moved in for a while, more to keep Tony company than anything else. I gave up the Victoria Centre flat as I had decided to buy a bungalow in Radcliffe-on-Trent, anticipating correctly that Tony's nocturnal life style and noisy girlfriends might eventually prove too much for us.

During this time, Tony bought a Great Dane dog called Winston, the reason being he told us, that with expensive cars always parked outside, the house could become a target for burglars. I mentioned that installing an alarm system might be a better option but he seemed to have a genuine affection and a rapport with the huge beast, so I left it at that. As a houseguest, Winston was a nightmare and we began to receive complaints from our neighbours; he had developed a talent for escaping in the evening and paying our neighbours nocturnal visits. His favourite trick was to press his huge head against their French windows while families were sitting down for dinner. The shock of this Hound of the Baskervilles impersonation can only be imagined. All he was after was food, but this cut no ice with some of our elderly neighbours. Winston finally disgraced himself beyond redemption: while I was stroking him one evening, he grabbed my head in his huge jaws and only Tony could persuade him to release me. I was in a state of shock for some time, but the resulting wounds were only slight. I did, however, think it wise to get an anti-tetanus injection. Although I was registered with a doctor, I had never visited him. When I arrived at Dr. Turner's surgery, I was told that his was an alternative practice and that he had no anti-tetanus serum on the premises. He did however agree that if I bought the serum myself from the local chemist, his nurse would administer the injection. Some months later, I heard that he had been struck off. I was relieved that while I was registered with him I was lucky enough not to have suffered a serious illness. We decided to take our chances with burglars and Winston was palmed off onto a friendly farmer. With Winston banished and safety for visitors now assured, we made the mistake of employing one of Thea's girlfriends, on her recommendation, as a cleaner. She was free to eat and drink anything we had in the house and took liberal advantage of our booze cupboard, staggering home pissed as a chocolate frog after her cleaning sessions. Unfortunately she became over-familiar with our private lives and while we avoided leaving used condoms lying about, it didn't prevent her from counting the empty packets. Exaggerated stories concerning our extravagances and sex lives were being relayed back to Thea, and then passed on in prurient detail to the rest of West Bridgford and greater Nottingham. This distressed and embarrassed Adele, and despite the inconvenience, the cleaner had to go.

Restoration of antique furniture is a time consuming and expensive business, particularly with regard to inlaid items, and we had long been looking for a restorer of our own. Occasionally we had plain pieces re-polished at an upholsterer at the Trent Bridge end of Arkwright Street. Oddly, we were never introduced to the man who was going to do the work, until one lunchtime, when the proprietor was away, Ernie, the French polisher, came out to examine a piece we had brought in for restoration. It turned out, on enquiry, that his employer paid him a pittance, so we swiftly took the opportunity to secure his services with the offer of a substantial increase. Ernie was seventy at the time and had been officially retired for five years. Before retirement he had been a commercial French polisher but had found it depressing sitting around at home doing nothing. He had, he told us, worked for the upholsterer for about three years, polishing modern furniture, and was looking forward to attempting something more challenging. We gave him the back room of the Arkwright Street shop and told him that we hoped the work would not be more challenging than he anticipated, whilst wondering if we were expecting too much from the old chap. Despite being seventy, Ernie's career change proved to be a resounding success; devising his own methods, he became an expert at restoring walnut and inlaid furniture, and was, in our opinion, one of the best restorers around. Ernie was a charming and intelligent man. At the age of sixteen he had lied about his age and volunteered for the Great War. Unusually for a First World War veteran, he confessed that he had enjoyed his time in the army and was proud of the medal he had won for excellence in the use of bomb, bayonet and bullet. At the end of the Second World War, after working in a glider factory, he had divorced his first wife and married a woman twenty years his junior. His present wife dyed both her own and Ernie's hair jet black, but unfortunately her attempts to restore hair colour didn't match his heroic triumphs with the furniture. Whilst raven black hair on the craggy faced Ernie looked more than a little incongruous, on seeing Ernie and his wife together, one was reminded of a pair of ageing Goths. I considered that Ernie should be an example and an inspiration to all retired people, proving that even at the age of seventy, one can have a career change and end up being as good as the best.

The furniture and the pottery were still selling well. Norman had resolved his cash-flow problem and continued to return every six weeks to fill up our coffers, while a full page advertisement in the Yellow Pages kept me busy replenishing the stocks. At this time, my father and I did most of the outside buying and Tony concentrated on selling the antiques and running the pottery.

Tony's father died after a short illness: a sad event but not unexpected. George had been suffering from stomach ulcers for years, no doubt the result of worrying too much about 'tax wallahs'. A recent operation to remove them revealed that the ulcers had turned cancerous and within three months George, at the age of sixty-three, was dead, leaving Tony a small fortune in gold and jewellery. Tony faced his father's death stoically, apart from a few tears at the hospital after collecting George's wristwatch and gold ring. He threw himself into his work at the pottery where his experiments with ever-larger pieces were coming to fruition.

For the next two years nothing seemed to mar the firm's progress. The pottery was selling well, as were the antiques. We spent our summer breaks on the Mediterranean and our winter breaks in the Alps, and in between, experimented with horse-riding and flying lessons. We dined at the best restaurants in the city and Tony's enthusiasm for nightclubs and pretty girls remained unabated. We did however have a couple of near misses with the law: driving the E Type one night, Tony, who was heavily intoxicated, was pursued by the police. Even drunk, Tony was a brilliant driver and soon lost them, but realising that the police would have the car's registration number, he decided to abandon it and report it stolen. The police were having none of that and decided to prosecute anyway. A solicitor was engaged and we duly arrived in court. Glancing round the courtroom, Tony was horrified to recognise one of the policemen. After abandoning the car, Tony had sought the anonymity of one of the city's busiest pubs, where he ran into one of his nightclub friends. Recounting his recent dramatic escape, he failed to notice the plain-clothes policeman next to him who was taking a keen interest in the conversation. With a sudden blinding flash of recognition, he realised that the same man was in court and about to give evidence against him, so swiftly changed his plea to guilty to the charge of failing to stop for a police car. He explained to the court that he had been too ashamed to tell his sick father the truth, that he was guilty as charged, but as his father had recently died, he now felt free to plead guilty. The bench took a sympathetic view of this explanation and instead of a driving ban, imposed a hefty fine. The E Type was a marked car after the court case and traffic police followed me nearly every time I used it. I gave it to my brother, Philip, to drive after explaining what had happened. He worked for us at the pottery and lived at Clifton, next door to the Fairham Pub. The car spent most of its time in the car park, giving the impression that the pub was used by Jack the Lads. This caused much amusement among the down to earth regulars. Strangely enough it was never vandalised.

Policemen seem to have a more than healthy suspicion of antique dealers and a natural assumption that every one of them is dealing in stolen goods. It came as no surprise, therefore, when one evening, just as my father was about to leave the shop, two plainclothes policemen came in enquiring if he had recently bought a silver challis. My father admitted that he had, and after retrieving the challis from his desk drawer, along with the receipt of payment, was promptly arrested. The reason for his arrest, the police informed him, was that the challis had been stolen that morning from St. Mary's church in the centre of the city, and that it was worth many times more than my father had paid for it. The thief, he was told, was already in custody. Tony, my father and I, all thought the story had a hollow ring to it and sounded as though the whole thing was a set up. My father had a bad time of it during the weeks leading up to his trial and was much upset when his name appeared in the paper. Apart from a few County Court Judgements, this was his first brush with the law. Tony and I considered my father's arrest to be an outrage and an attempt to get at us. All of our reputations were at risk, all the more so because the challis was a holy object and would make a small sensation in the local press. We engaged the services of the best lawyer we could find and eventually, after a lengthy legal battle, the charge was dropped. The case cost us an arm and a leg, but it fired a warning shot across our bows and we were very careful thereafter to vet unknown people who came to the shop with items to sell. Later in the week during which his charge had been dismissed, my father had a stroke of good luck: while doing a house clearance he was given what appeared to be a still-life print. On close examination, it turned out to be an oil painting by the much sought after artist, Edward Ladell. The sale of the painting more than paid for his legal costs. We never did discover why the police had been so keen to prosecute my father.

I was thirty-seven years old when the summer slow-down of 1977 arrived, and it seemed to go on forever. For months there was hardly a dealer to be seen. The recession that eventually hit Britain was, as usual, the result of a recession in the States. To make matters worse, the pound began to rise against the dollar making it unprofitable for the American dealers to come to England and buy British goods, which included antiques. The antique export trade is perhaps uniquely positioned to survive such events; the answer is to lower the price of the goods to the point where it becomes profitable for American dealers to buy again. Even if it means taking a loss on the goods already in stock, since we, the dealers, determined the price, we could then pay proportionally less for goods subsequently purchased. As our main source of goods was the general public, this strategy worked most of the time. The commercial world, with fixed wage bills and fixed material costs, lacks the same room for such manoeuvres. Our problem was that we were now part of the conventional commercial world. The pottery had a fixed wage bill and fixed material costs. We couldn't ask the pottery workers to take a drop in pay, and we couldn't ask our suppliers to cut their prices. As the situation worsened, which it did throughout the remainder of that year, the only option was to stockpile the pottery and attempt to find retail outlets in Britain. Attempting to sell to British retailers would be difficult. While our somewhat rough and ready pottery was just what the antiques trade wanted, as it resembled the originals, as far as the British retail trade was concerned, what we were making was seconds, if not thirds. However, optimistically, we considered the prevailing economic climate to be a passing squall and felt that we had sufficient resources to weather it.

The Scheme Club folded with a bang rather than a whimper. Paul Wapplington, one of the club's founders, lead singer in the band and all round personality, had for sometime been showing disturbing signs of autocratic and paranoid behaviour. Turning up late and keeping the band waiting, demanding his own seat as well as a seat for his mistress, he was, in short, acting like one of the small time communist dictators that ruled places like Albania and North Korea. Until recently, Paul had also been the MC, but in an attempt to curb his power, my good friend Ray Connolly had taken over the job. Raymond, whose capacity for beer was in direct inverse proportion to his size, was not only a good singer and MC but was also, like Paul, a CP member and able to challenge Paul's more outrageous political statements. I can't remember Ray ever losing an ideological argument: he could cling on to the point he was making like a terrier until his opponent gave up in exhaustion. On the fateful night in question, two famous founders of the British folk revival, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seegar, were booked as the guests for the evening. Paul, and his mistress Val, as usual turned up late, interrupting MacColl's and Peggy Seegar's performance, and then, when it resumed, continued with their conversation. Ewan MacColl understandably objected to this and complained to Paul from the stage. Instead of politely shutting up, Paul informed MacColl that he himself didn't object to people talking while he was singing, to which MacColl replied that perhaps that was because Paul wasn't worth listening to. Further insults were traded, during which MacColl called Paul a 'fat-belly'. This was too much for Paul who stormed the stage, where a scuffle took place during which the highly respected MacColl had his shirt torn from his back, and Val, who was waving a mic stand about, had to be manhandled to the floor. Fortunately, a member of the audience managed to part the warring parties and Paul and Val were thrown out, after which (and all credit to their professionalism) a shocked MacColl and Peggy Seegar managed to carry on with the show. Paul's shocking behaviour couldn't go unchallenged, and Raymond and I went round to his house with a letter, signed by the committee, demanding his resignation. Paul was a big personality with many talents and virtues, but like many big personalities, his vices were equally magnified. Given MacColl's tremendous stature in the folk world, and bearing in mind that he was also a member of the Communist Party, The Scheme had lost all credibility. As Paul was the band's lead singer, it would take some time to find a replacement, and after much soul searching it was decided to put the club in mothballs for a while until the stain of our disgrace had faded. The entire committee fell upon its sword and for the time being the club folded. The Scheme Club was an important and much cherished part of my life and I found it heart rending to see it crash, so spectacularly, in flames.

As we approached the New Year things were getting dire: the pottery stocks were building up and storage became a problem. Reluctantly we began to make redundancies. This eased the problem of over production, but redundancies in themselves are expensive and cause cash-flow problems as they soak up money that might otherwise be used to continue trading. The next six months were a continual battle to keep the firm afloat. We had a twenty-year lease on the pottery factory and a long lease on the Canning Circus shop. Neither would be easy to sell given the economic climate. In order to ease the situation, we were often forced to sell the flo-blue for less than it cost to produce. Tony spent his father's entire legacy in an attempt to prop up his beloved pottery, but we still had to make more redundancies. The pottery business was gobbling up money at an alarming rate and starting to affect the antiques side of the business, making it difficult to pay the advertising bills, which had always been substantial. The money generated by the antiques was promptly eaten up by the pottery. Eventually, despite Shirley's best efforts, the Evening Post pulled the plug. Without our main source of advertising, we were now in big trouble and the firm began to eat itself. We were having to burn the boat to feed the engine, and the engine was taking us in only one direction. It would take a miracle to save the firm. Unpaid bills were piling up and bailiffs were starting to pay us visits, slapping tickets all over our furniture. The banks were sending snotty letters complaining about unpaid overdrafts and loans. We were up to our necks in it and staring down both barrels of the Official Receiver's shotgun. In a fit of whimsy (as neither of us gambled, and probably to calm our nerves), Tony and I went across to the bookies and placed a bet. The horse was called 'The Dealer'; it was only a small bet but the horse won against the odds. With our winnings we bought a huge, gallon bottle of Bells Whisky and took it back to the house for a board meeting. The conclusions were not good: we were trading while insolvent[26].

The pottery workers were soon in no doubt of the firm's precarious position. The Electricity Board switched off the power, making it impossible to fire the kilns and thus, in effect, closing the pottery down. We had enough money to do one of two things: either pay the VAT, the insurance stamps and PAYE, or pay the workers holiday pay and redundancy money. The workers won; the other agencies would have to whistle. When all the workers had safely taken to the boats, Tony and I were the only ones left standing on the deck and steeling ourselves to go down with our ship. Before we turned ourselves in to the Official Receiver, a van was hired and every decent piece of furniture we had left was loaded into it. The Copenhagen Auctions were reputed to still be doing well and British antiques were in demand. It was the last throw of the dice if we were to escape complete penury, and just about legal. On 7th August 1978, we stepped into the Official Receiver's office on High Pavement and declared ourselves bankrupt. Surprising as it may sound, it's quite expensive to go bust: Tony and I were charged a hundred pounds each for the privilege of becoming paupers, even before we saw the Official Receiver. I suppose the fee is to make people think twice before declaring themselves bankrupt for petty amounts of money.

Going bankrupt at that time was a week-long ordeal. On our first day with the Official Receiver we were ordered to write out our life stories, starting virtually from being born until our fall from grace. I assumed this was to give some indication of character and qualifications. Thereafter, one's finances, debts and assets are subjected to extreme scrutiny. When we failed to pay our VAT bill, the VAT men had called at the shop demanding our books, and after complementing my father on his immaculate book-keeping, had taken them away for close inspection, no doubt harbouring suspicions of VAT fraud. The VAT men refused to give the books to the Receiver until they had finished with them. This meant that our affairs had to be dealt with using only estimates, a memory test that a bankrupt, in his agitated state, finds difficult to deal with. For the first couple of days the receiver was quite stern with us, making blood-curdling threats about sending us to prison if we didn't answer his questions honestly. Later, he seemed to realise that he wasn't dealing with a pair of hardened criminals and softened to the point of bringing photographs of his antiques for our appraisal. A date was set for the creditors' meeting, which we were obliged to attend, and a few days later saw us back in the Receiver's office. We were not looking forward to a grilling from our bank managers (with whom we had often been less than honest), but in the event, and to our relief, no one turned up, and the Official Receiver recorded that, in his view, we were just the victims of circumstances. We would still have to face the ordeal of our public examination before a judge in court, but for the moment at least, we had escaped a stretch in clink. A not uncommon reaction among bankrupts is that one is made to feel like a criminal rather than a failed entrepreneur. This had a profound effect upon Tony and I, who vowed that thereafter, someone else would have to boost the economy by employing people and taking chances. From now on, we would attempt to live in the cracks of capitalism.

The life of a bankrupt in those days was not a happy one; all possessions were seized and sold to pay off creditors, including houses, furniture, cars and any other items of value. I even heard a tale of a bankrupt who was forced to sell his pet pedigree dog. Even the clothes on one's back could be subject to forfeit if they sported designer labels. All one was allowed to keep was a bed and the tools of one's trade. A bankrupt was not allowed to have a bank account without first informing the bank that they were bankrupt, which meant that no bank would allow you to open an account anyway. A bankrupt was allowed only fifty pounds credit, which in effect meant that one could not have gas, electricity, or telephone accounts in one's own name. In fact, the first thing that happens once you are declared bankrupt is that all these services are cut off. My brother, who had taken over my shop on Arkwright Street, also had his electricity cut off, no doubt because his surname was the same as mine. The Official Receiver has the right to pry into your earnings and take anything in excess of what he considers you need to live on. If you need a motorcar, it must be a very cheap one and you have to get the Receiver's permission to buy it. In short, for the duration of the bankruptcy, which in those days lasted five years, one became the Official Receiver's creature. He owned your arse and you were basically fucked. It has been estimated that it costs about half a million pounds to create a job. We had created twenty jobs for six years and spent everything we had trying to maintain them. I think we could be forgiven for feeling that our treatment was overly harsh and bordering on the barbaric.

Fortunately my friendship with Thea had survived my affair with her sister and she had rented me a bolt-hole in the form of a small bedroom in her recently purchased five-bedroomed house. It was there that I retired to lick my wounds and contemplate what other 'nasties' might creep out of the woodwork in the months before our public examination. Other dealers had informed us that the VAT man was asking questions about us and trying to trace a grandfather clock on which he suspected we had failed to charge VAT. An American dealer had complained to the police that we had resold a desk that he had paid for and left behind on a previous trip, and the police were trying to trace me for an unpaid motoring fine; even bankruptcy won't erase a motoring fine. It then emerged that even the FBI were looking for us and were visiting everyone that had been connected with us, in an attempt to track us down. This sounded ominous, but if the Feds wanted to speak to me, they would have to find me first. I was desperately seeking a smidgen of optimism to enable me to face the future when an awful smell began to permeate the house. Thea and I eventually traced it to the pantry, where, dead and stiff in a corner, was my cat, Kelly. I had rescued him as a tiny kitten, when he was only a day or two old, from a doorstep, where his mother had abandoned him. For a few weeks, until he could lap milk, I fed him with an eyedropper. He grew up to be a big, healthy cat, and against the odds, he had survived nearly ten years. It was an ill omen and helped to plunge me into even deeper despair. Just when I was beginning to think things couldn't get any worse, news came through from his sister that Tony was incarcerated in a Danish prison. Unable to resist the Copenhagen nightclubs, he had been caught driving the van around the city, clad only in his underpants, blind drunk. In Denmark, drink-driving means an immediate three month prison sentence and the impounding of the vehicle. I suspected that the stress of recent events had at last got to him.

I didn't have the luxury of lying in bed all day feeling sorry for myself; somehow or other I had to get out and earn some money. I could have gone on the dole, but that would have been a humiliation too far, if that were possible. I needed something to do to keep my mind off things. Not everything I owned had fallen into the hands of the Official Receiver; anticipating the crash, I had stored a few things in Thea's garage, and these I managed to sell through what was now my brother's shop, to raise a few hundred pounds. A friend had recently started to publish and distribute a small free paper and, as a quid pro quo for livening up the paper with some spoof joke ads, he ran my own small ads for nothing. This bit of small-time antiques buying and selling kept a roof over my head and went a long way to keeping me in booze, which, I am not ashamed to say, was a great anaesthetic; at least for a few hours in the evening it kept the demons at bay. I paid off the motoring fine, but the VAT man eventually caught up with me in the shop, where, in the back room, I was subjected to the most sustained grilling I have ever experienced. My back was to the gas fire, and so intense was the questioning, and so concentrated was I on avoiding incriminating Tony and myself, that only after it was over did I realise that my jeans were scorched and my backside burned.

It says something about the Danish authorities and their trusting nature that they allowed Tony out of prison to attend our public examination at the County Court. Perhaps they thought the impounded van was sufficient of a hostage. On his return to England, Tony was surprised to be picked up at his sister's house by the Nottingham police, who had arranged for him to talk to the Federal Bureau of Investigation at West Bridgford Police Station's interview room. After first assuring Tony that they had no jurisdiction in Great Britain, the Americans began asking questions concerning our business transactions with our old friend Norman Lilley, and more specifically, asking if he had ever offered for sale any items of antique jewellery. It emerged that the Feds had long suspected Norman of mob connections and they believed that in return for short-term loans to finance his antique business, Norman was bringing stolen jewellery over from the States to sell in England. Norman had been overheard by an undercover agent, placed in The Pink Pussy Cat in Cincinnati, drunkenly bragging about these exploits, during which The Jug and Bowl had been mentioned. Tony assured them that we had no knowledge of stolen jewellery, and was too smart to admit it, even had such illegal transactions taken place. The disappointed Feds returned to the American Embassy at Grosvenor House in London. It was as well to get the problem resolved, given that our own Customs and Excise Officers would have been interested in Norman's jewellery smuggling, and might have attempted to implicate us.

To our relief, the public examination went through without any embarrassing 'nasties' being revealed that could have resulted in our statutory five years' bankruptcy being extended, and we left the court together, as they say, sadder but wiser men. Tony returned to Denmark to serve the last two months of his prison sentence, where, for the first time in his life, he read a book from cover to cover. I think it was a crime thriller, but some suggested that the Holy Bible might have been more appropriate. I continued to eak a living, buying and selling through my brother's shop. After writing the taxman a letter pleading extreme poverty (known in the business as a 'groveller'), my tax bill for the year was correctly assessed at five pounds. The only other good news was a letter from the Official Receiver informing me that my bungalow had been sold and that, as it was registered in Adele's name as well as mine, she was entitled to half of the two thousand pounds profit. Adele had never contributed to the purchase of the property or the mortgage and decently gave me her thousand pounds back, which eased my finances considerably.

For a few months, Tony and I hoed our own row, doing whatever it took to keep body and soul together, at the same time attempting to avoid the attentions of the Official Receiver, who may or may not have had his minions out spying on us.

Meanwhile, unnoticed by the majority of people, in response to the economic climate and instability in other parts of the world, the price of gold and silver was rapidly rising. If we could take advantage of it, the very recession that had brought us down was now throwing us a lifeline. Very tentatively, we placed very small, pre-paid ads and began to buy gold and silver. The great beauty of gold and silver is that it can instantly be exchanged for money. One can buy an ounce of gold one hour and sell it the next; barring small fluctuations, the selling price is always stable. This means that only a small capital outlay is required and the only equipment needed is a set of scales, a magnifying glass and a bottle of nitric acid to determine the quality.

At first the response to our ads was just a trickle, but as the price of gold rose to an unprecedented eight hundred dollars an ounce, it became newsworthy and the television took it up in a big way. A further boost was the attempt by the American Bunker-Hunt brothers to corner the world silver market. This resulted in a huge leap in the price of silver, which rose from two pounds to twenty pounds an ounce. The millions of silver coins still in circulation suddenly rocketed in value: pre-1947 coins were worth over ten times, and pre-1920 coins over twenty times their face value. The problem then was how to take full advantage of the situation without drawing attention to ourselves. Big ads in the Nottingham papers were too risky, so we took out a quarter page in the Derby Evening Telegraph, and booked a function room at the Assembly Rooms in Derby for a week. The response was overwhelming: the television had done most of our advertising for us; people only needed to know where to sell their gold and silver. Tony resolved the initial cash-flow problem by persuading one of his nightclub friends to lend him a couple of thousand pounds. We made contact with a couple of Hatton Garden gold-dealers, who were prepared to drive up from London to buy our gold and silver almost on a daily basis This solved the cash-flow problem almost completely. The Derby operation became the blueprint for similar operations in towns and cities all over the country, from Newcastle in the north, down to Norwich. Unavoidably, we sometimes spent weeks away from home. It was a hectic life, but we lived in the best hotels and were making enough money to once again eat at the best restaurants. Saving money would have been counter-productive, as we needed every pound to buy the available gold and silver. I remember one evening, while buying gold in the function room of a hotel in Stoke-on-Trent, I ran out of money and had to resort to giving my customers vouchers while I waited for the London boys to arrive with the cash.

If I had harboured any dreams about becoming a pop star, this lifestyle quickly extinguished them; if going on tour was like this, I could understand why so many pop stars resorted to drugs. Even in the midst of plenty, one felt isolated and detached from reality, without friends and family to use as touchstones, and there was a tendency to compensate by over-indulging in everything. But while the price of gold remained high and the public wanted to sell, there could be no let up. To maximise our resources, Tony and I worked in different cities. People were just as happy to sell their gold and silver as we were to buy it, and long queues formed outside the hotels we were operating from. Victorian and Edwardian gold and silver pocket watches were too heavy for their own good: they were worth more for their metal than they were as beautifully crafted watches. There were instances of antique Georgian silver being scrapped: the silver content was worth more than the items themselves. Buckets full of pre-1947 silver coins were being scrapped and bus conductors, sorting through their change, made a killing. Dentists who had, perhaps for years, saved the fillings from gold teeth, were cashing them in. Sinister looking men were offering us bags of small, oddly shaped, burnt nuggets, which we eventually identified as the gold from cremated corpses. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. The 'gold rush', as it inevitably became known, lasted, with minor lulls (due to a drop in the gold price), for almost eighteen months. In one lull, the price of one antique Georgian silver caddy-spoon, sold as an item, made enough to pay for me to spend a five-week holiday island hopping in Greece. Apart from this holiday, we were working often until ten o'clock at night, seven days a week, until the gold rush petered out. On my fortieth birthday in 1980, as a thank you, I arranged a party at one of the city's best French restaurants for the people who had helped me through the bad times. The good times were rolling again.

Throughout the gold rush, we had been left undisturbed to get on with our business, apart from the Weights and Measures Officers who came to check the accuracy of our scales, and it seemed apparent that the Official Receiver was no longer much interested in us. The unhealthy life we had been leading had taken its toll and had knackered our immune systems. A slight scratch on Tony's arm had developed into a huge, festering sore and I had fallen victim to a plague of boils. I estimated that I had made enough to keep me in idleness for a couple of years and was looking forward to a rest, but Tony, as ever, had other ideas. He was going to set up an antique shop in America and wanted me to buy the furniture to fill his containers. This made good sense as it would put him, and his money, beyond the reach of the Receiver's tentacles and provide me with, what would appear to be on the surface, a steady and comfortable job working for an American company; on paper at least, I would be working for a pittance. Tony and I meant what we said when we vowed never to join the system again. We couldn't join the system again even if we had wanted to: because of the bankruptcy rules, it would be another four years before our affairs would become our own and we would be able to lead the lives of free men.

We made an informal arrangement with a colleague in the trade to rent part of his warehouse, and I started to buy furniture in readiness to fill the containers. Meanwhile, Tony flew to San Diego in California where friends, who had settled there a year before, had agreed to help him find suitable premises. Tony, who was incapable of thinking anything but big, had decided that the shop would have to be large enough to accommodate the contents of three, forty-foot containers[27].

I had driven to Heathrow airport in the red, top-of-the-range BMW coupe I had inherited during the gold rush, when it was used to ferry gold down to London. Leaving the car in the airport car park, I had boarded the plane to Los Angeles. I was preparing for trouble with the American immigration authorities as Tony had telephoned to say that he had been picked up on the computer at Los Angeles airport and asked by immigration if he was the same Tony Hallam whose previous address had been 5b Arkwright Street, Nottingham, England. Fortunately, the officer had believed him when told that he had never heard of the place and that he was Anthony Hallam, the name on his passport. If we thought that the Feds had forgotten about us, we were obviously mistaken, but despite my nervousness on arrival, I managed to clear immigration without a hitch, and much relieved, stepped out of the check-in area and into the fierce Californian sunshine.

Outside the airport, Tony was waiting for me in the Yellow Rolls Royce convertible that I had shipped out to him in one of the furniture containers. Two hours later, we were drinking chilled Budweiser on the veranda of his magnificent, rented beach house in San Diego, a hundred feet from the ocean's edge. I was carrying with me a thousand British Royal Family trees and some newspaper clippings.

Some months earlier, Tony had bought a number of reproduction antique items from a Los Angeles importer. Among them was a twelve-inch ceramic doll, which had captured no one's attention until Tony's girlfriend, Anna, saw it and noted that it bore a remarkable, if unprepossessing, likeness to Princess Diana. Tony, never one to let an opportunity pass, had promptly ordered a container full of the dolls from China, and set the machinery in motion to mail order them all over America. The interest that Americans take in the British Royal Family is difficult to overestimate, and the dolls, along with their Royal Family trees, were a phenomenal success. Inevitably, the right-wing British press got hold of the story and all hell broke loose; photographs of the hideous Princess Diana doll were published and there were calls for the perpetrators of this gross insult to Princess Diana and the Royal Family to be locked up in the Tower of London. I brought the news that, despite all the bluster, the British authorities and the Royal Family were powerless to do anything to stop the sale of the doll: their jurisdiction did not extend to America and they would have to get used to the idea that, in our case, they were impotent. At the Coronado Hotel in San Diego, there were many toasts to Princess Diana. After all, it was the first time that a member of the Royal Family had been helpful to us. The succeeding Prince William dolls and Prince Harry dolls were more attractive than their mother, and amazingly, no one noticed that Prince Harry came with brown eyes instead of blue.

It was the last day of my working holiday in California and I was wandering naked around the sales floor of our San Diego antiques emporium, a converted old chapel on the corner of Ninth and E Street, which in deference to the American notion that London is the only city of note in the British Isles, had been called London Antiques. My reflection was caught by the hundred or so mirror-fronted wardrobes that the Americans call 'armoires' and a similar number of dressing tables they call 'vanities'. The early morning California sun was beginning to burst through the stained glass windows as I turned into the spacious vestry, where the walls were covered in abstract paintings. The artist, Lynn, my American girlfriend, was lying naked on a futon in the middle of the room. The day before, she and I had driven over the border into Mexico, and then on to the picturesque little town of Ensenada. After spending the day roaming round the colourful bars and cafes and listening to the ubiquitous Mexican bands, we had stopped for a meal at a famous Mexican lobster bar situated on the cliffs high above the Atlantic, sipping ice cold white wine, while looking out to sea. After the last couple of years back in Nottingham, trying to claw my way back out of the abyss, this change in fortune seemed to border on the surreal, but in America everything is possible, even for a couple of bankrupt, illegal immigrants without green cards. That's shallot.

###

###  Epilogue

Most of the characters listed below enhanced my life enormously and I have long forgiven those who didn't.

Tony Hallam

Had I not met Tony, it is possible that the limits of my ambitions would have been confined to my small antique shop, where I could have made a modest living without taxing myself too much and leaving plenty of time for playing music, somewhere in the back of the shop. But Tony's boundless enthusiasm and energy were contagious, and the opportunities thrown at us by chance would have been irresistible to anyone with even the slightest spark of adventure in their soul. On the whole, I enjoyed my excursions into the world of the other half. It was a turbulent ride: sometimes hair-raising. I had often wondered what pleasure the rich derived from their wealth, and now I knew.

I continued to send furniture containers to Tony for five more years, until he turned over to reproduction antiques completely. On his return to England two years later, it was evident that he had developed, to put it mildly, an unconventional way of doing business. Tony had always enjoyed sailing close to the wind but it seemed to me, that he was intent on brewing up his own personal firestorm and anyone around him could get seriously burnt in the conflagration. With this in mind, although over the next twenty years we co-operated on a number of ventures, went on holiday together and had many, tremendous boozy nights, I always maintained a safe distance from the seat of the action. In 2007, the British Security Forces, thinking he was involved in financing terrorism, or some form of money laundering, raided Tony's safe deposit box in Harrods and recovered several million pounds on which he had failed to pay tax and VAT. His entire family became embroiled in the ensuing investigation and had their lives turned upside down for nearly a year. Tony, who was importing silver jewellery from Thailand, spent a lot of his time in Bangkok. He was there when the balloon went up and sensibly decided to stay put. There is currently a warrant out for his arrest should he ever attempt to return to England and an almost certainty of a year or two in clink. I think a knighthood would be more appropriate.

Uncle Barry

At the age of eighteen Uncle Barry was called up to do his two years national service in the army and a few years later he married my much loved Aunty Barbara. Over many years she has proved to be a devoted wife and a loving mother to their seven children. Uncle Barry, despite predictions to the contrary, managed to curb his natural waywardness, and take his responsibilities as a husband and father seriously. My affection for him has never dimmed and my relationship with his children are one of easy familiarity born out of our shared love and respect for their parents.

**Tony Ball** (Tess)

My old friend and first flat mate, Tony Ball, married and had three children. He gave up his job with the NCGB and became a successful market trader. He sadly died at the age of forty-eight.

**JJ Bartholomew** (Bart)

J.J. Bartholomew (Bart), my other flat mate in the Park Road flat, married and had two children. He went on to work for his uncle's electrical components firm. Bart inherited the firm when his uncle died. He must have made a success of it, as he has recently been seen driving a Rolls Royce.

Don Redwood

Don Redwood, my ex-flat mate and ex-Theatre and Display colleague, the developer of the Flo-blue, and artist, still lives in Cornwall with his wife Josephine. He has two children and now makes a living out of his paintings.

John Griffin

The charismatic John Griffin of Theatre and Display, while driving back from a theatre in the early hours of the morning, fell asleep at the wheel of his car and died in the resulting crash.

Archie Ferguson

Archie became a successful importer of jewellery. He left Eileen for a younger woman two years before his death due to an asbestos related illness in 1991. Eileen never remarried and now runs a cats refuge.

Seth Miles

My old friend, Seth Miles, from the Cornish School House days, was briefly reunited with his wife, Shirley, in our old cottage at St. Earth Praze. Following his divorce, he stayed on in Cornwall and went on to own and run a successful jewellery gift shop in Mousehole. He bought and restored an old Wesleyan Chapel to use as his residence and also as a studio. Seth died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-eight. He was a good friend and I still miss him.

**Paul Wapplington** (Wappo)

Paul Wapplington, the artist, singer, musician and leading light of The Scheme Club moved to Portugal, where he bought a smallholding with his Portuguese wife Fatima. With the collapse of the Soviet Union he embraced the Green Party. Like Don Redwood, he makes a living from his paintings.

Ernie

After the demise of The Jug and Bowl, Ernie went to work for Maurice and Florence at The Trade Winds. He eventually retired aged eighty-three, and died a year later.

Maurice and Florence

Maurice and Florence inevitably divorced. Florence went back to Leicester and Maurice bought a small island on the River Trent. Returning drunk from the marina one night, in a small boat, he fell overboard and drowned. He left five hundred pounds behind the bar at the Navy Club on Arkwright Street, to be spent on a boozy wake in the event of his death.

Ralph Moiser

Ralph spent a blameless life for the next twenty years. He made his living sending furniture containers to auctions in the United States and he then retired to live in Spain with his devoted partner Maggie.

**Harry Maskell** (Harry the Horse)

Harry became an expert at packing containers for export. His expertise has been in great demand until the present day. I am always pleased to see him when I bump into him on my (these days) rare trips to the auctions.

Yvonne

My first ex-wife, Yvonne, remarried and had two more children.

**Dianne** (Di)

My second ex-wife, Dianne, remarried and had another child.

Sabeh Caid Essebsi

Sabeh came back briefly on three occasions over a period of five years. On the last occasion she announced that she had come back to marry me, but it was too late. After the cavalier way she had treated our relationship, I was unable to trust her and we said our last goodbye at the Midland Station, where she caught the train to London before flying back to Tunisia. I never heard from her again.

Thea

Thea never married but has a son, and we remain good friends.

Adele

Adele married twice and has one son. As with her sister, we remain friends.

The Scheme Band

The Scheme band reformed in 1990 with myself, Ray Connolly and another ex-band member, Carl Moore. The reformation was initially intended to give us a platform for our opposition to the poll tax, but the band continued to play, with considerable success, in pubs and clubs around the Midlands for a further seven years. We were eventually reconciled with Paul, who joined us in the band whenever he left Portugal to spend time in England.

My son James

Yvonne's mother Topsy and I remained good friends for many years and through her I was able to keep abreast of Jamie's progress. When Topsy died twelve years ago that roll passed to Yvonne's sister Paddy. On many occasions I have asked her to make it clear to Yvonne that if my son ever wished to make contact with me, I would be more than happy to see him, so far, sadly, this hasn't happened.
My daughter Zoë

After Di remarried we saw almost nothing of each other and I could glean very little of Zoë's progress from mutual friends. However some years ago Di and her husband divorced. Since then we have occasionally met socially and Di has been able to pass on news of our daughter. As with Jamie's Mother, I have left Di in no doubt that should Zoë ever wish to contact me I would be delighted to see her, but yet again, so far as I am aware to date, Zoë has expressed no such wish.

As for me

It is now December 2010 and I am just putting the finishing touches to the writing of this book. I still enjoy nosing around antique shops and playing music. My greatest pleasure however, is sitting in front of the fire with my third and last wife, Julie, sharing a bottle of wine.
End Notes

[1] An Anderson shelter comprises of a trench, four feet wide by six feet long, and excavated to a depth of two feet. The base trench is lined with concrete and the trench is then covered with two curved sheets of corrugated iron, which are covered with earth: very uncomfortable if one has to spend any time in it. I was told after the end of the war, that they would not survive a direct hit but were safe from bombs dropping outside a perimeter of ten feet.

[2] A Ewbank is an old fashioned, wooden carpet sweeper. Ewbank are still producing modern sweepers.

[3] The government had learned its lesson from the First World War when too many men were demobbed at once, swamping the labour market. This time, there was a phased demobilisation.

[4] Women's Auxiliary Air Force.

[5] I later went on a youth hostelling trip to the Rhineland in Germany and witnessed the damage that the allies had inflicted on Aachen, Cologne and Coblenz, where the devastation was even more severe than that meted out to London. Whole swathes of these cities were burnt and blackened wastelands, with barely a building left standing. As my companions and I travelled through these places by bus, there might have been a tendency to say, "Serves them right," but we were all shocked into awed silence.

[6] DA stands for 'Ducks arse', which is a hairstyle worn by Teddy Boys in the 1950's, where the hair is swept to the back of the head to resemble a ducks bottom.

[7] Kaylie was a fizzy, sherbet flavoured, powder.

[8] New Year's Day was not a bank holiday in the 1960's

[9] A tatter is either a rag and bone man or a gypsy who collects and sells scrap metal.

[10] A slinger is the person who attaches the load to the crane.

[11] National Service. Every male in Britain who was born prior to October 1939 was obliged to complete two years service with the Army, Navy or the Royal Air Force. Service was deferred if one went on to higher education, e.g a degree course at a university.

[12] These are long spirals of steel waste, the steel equivalent of wood shavings

[13] A governor is a device to prevent a vehicle from being driven in excess of a particular speed.

[14] WD stands for War Department.

[15] The Moes scale is a scale of hardness of different substances, starting with chalk, which is graded as one, and diamond at the other end of the scale, which is considered the hardest substance, rated at ten.

[16] Finings are commercially manufactured components, such as earring clips, chain catches and the metal backing studs for cufflink etc.

[17] Blank flats and backdrops are always painted grey as this makes them more able to absorb the stage lighting.

[18] Purchase tax was the forerunner of VAT and administered in much the same way, with the exception that it applied to all shops and manufactures, no matter how small their turnover. The only exemptions were second-hand shops.

[19] 'Elephants' is rhyming slang for elephant/s trunk - drunk.

[20] The Nottingham Guardian was closed down by the Nottingham Evening Post in 1973.

[21] Throughout Ralph's prison sentence, his partner Maggie had remained faithful to him and Ralph's hat hung on the hallstand as a reminder until he came home. He was still wearing the same hat twenty years later.

[22] The rings consisted of a group of dealers who would assemble at the auction where, in order to avoid competition between themselves, only one dealer would bid for the chosen items, which, at the end of the sale, would be taken around the corner and knocked out (or divided out) amongst themselves.

In order to discourage members of the public who may attempt to bid against them, they would bid up the item well above its true value.

[23] Workers control: this is where the workers control the means of production and the management is paid a salary for administration work and is accountable to the workforce, rather than the other way around.

[24] Goss cottages are the rarest pieces of crested china. There were a number of crested china factories but among the antiques trade, Goss was considered to be the most collectable.

[25] A flo-pot is a small ceramic pot, similar to a saltcellar, filled with various chemicals and placed inside the kiln. When the kiln is firing, the chemicals send fumes up into the kiln, which then alter the properties of the glaze.

[26] Once a company or individual realises that their debts outweigh their assets, it then becomes illegal to continue trading.

[27] A forty-foot, by ten foot, by ten foot steel export container holds, on average, about one hundred and fifty pieces of furniture; all spaces are filled with small items of glass, pottery and metal ware.
