If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will

Once when Mother was filling in a form to enrol John in something or other, John was at her elbow when she filled in ‘name of applicant’ and wrote ‘John Stanley Sykes’.

‘Who’s Stanley?’ he asked and she told him that Uncle Stanley was her brother who was killed at Mons during the Great War.

She said that most people had a middle name and some people had several names but they were mostly royalty. When she saw that John was still a little perplexed she told him that Vernon had three names as well, Vernon Wilson Sykes—Vernon after his father and Wilson the family name. Apparently when he asked what my middle name was she said, ‘He hasn’t got one’, but with my newly acquired knowledge I knew the reason: all the relatives had been used up and there was no one left for me.

Some days later when John told me all this he said that he didn’t think this was fair, and if I wanted to call myself ‘Eric Stanley Sykes’ he was more than willing to share. I thanked him but said I was quite happy with the name I had. Significantly, though, all through his life I never heard him refer to himself as ‘John Stanley Sykes’, nor sign his name as such, and here is the difference between my two brothers, for Vernon on the other hand was inordinately proud to sign himself V.-Wilson Sykes. Poor Vernon, he had left the Wilson household convinced he was better than the ménage at 36 Leslie Street and unfortunately it was an attitude he carried all through his career. He would take a job convinced that in two years he would become managing director and life, unlike Hollywood, doesn’t work like that.

Not having a middle name didn’t bother me at all, but my subconscious wasn’t wholly satisfied until Joe Waterhouse and Auntie Emmy were married and they christened their only son Eric. God bless you, Auntie Emmy.

It appears that everyone had been party to the secret of my birth, but I wish they’d let me in on it. I wouldn’t have told anybody. One thing is certain: I wasn’t going to give up Granddad and Grandma Ashton. I was now an honorary member the Ashton family and John’s mother was still mine as well, and if I left matters alone things would just carry on as before—and they did: Dad had his bellringing, and Mother cooked the meals, did the shopping, dusted and polished every day. My real mother was forgotten. As the saying goes, you never miss what you’ve never had. But somewhere in the great unknown a young woman called Harriet Stacey had other ideas.

In my exciting days of growing up, technology was desperately trying to keep pace with the introduction of motor cars as they began to proliferate, and for the first time an intriguing method of car control emerged. They were called traffic lights: red for stop, amber for wait a while and green to allow you to drive on. They would not change automatically to accomplish this. A car had to drive over a strip of rubber in the road about five yards before the lights, when the lights would turn to green and the car would drive on. The light would stay green until another car travelling in a diagonal direction went over its own rubber, changing the lights in front of it from red to green and the original lights from green to red. It was an ingenious invention and provided us children with hours of hilarity. On Sunday mornings when Oldham was a ghost town we ran from home to the traffic lights, which were at the bottom of Barker Street on our way to church, so as to have plenty of time to take turns at changing the colours, John jumping on one rubber strip while I stood in Barker Street ready to change the lights back. It was not as much fun as Ducky Funny Whip but it stretched our technical capabilities.

Every time I went out from our front door I only had to glance up to my left to see Ward Street Central School, an elegant red-brick building on two floors. All this austere magnificence I’d taken for granted as I played and romped through my early life. On my first day as a pupil there I could stand in the school yard looking down from a higher perspective and surveying all the familiar places. How small were the houses of Leslie and Ward Streets, and the Mucky Broos were not as vast as I’d thought they were. As I looked down at my old stamping ground I wondered if this was what they called higher education.

The headmaster, Mr Parker, was a tall, thin, cadaverous man with a face reminiscent of the Easter Island statues. We didn’t see much of him most of the time, but when we marched along the corridor we instinctively dropped our voices as we passed his study. The door was never open; it was a room of mystery and the boys who’d been inside weren’t very keen to go in again. If, for instance, the teacher considered your wrongdoing so appalling that three strokes of the strap would be insufficient to fit the crime, you would be sent to the headmaster’s study, with words that were of the same gravity as a judge intoning, ‘You will be taken to a place of execution…’ Luckily in all my days at the school I experienced this ordeal only once.

What started off as an innocent prank led to thoughts of running away to join the French Foreign Legion. We had a teacher called Mr Barker and, as opposed to Mr Parker, he was overweight by many a ton and known to all the school as ‘Fat Barker’. Unfortunately one afternoon while in his class I’d sketched a fair likeness of Mr Barker stark naked with his belly hanging out. In my drawing he was facing a woman also in the altogether, both of them with their hands down by their sides. It wasn’t erotic—it wasn’t meant to be. I thought it was funny and I was proud of the likeness. I showed it to my classmates and in no time at all Fat Barker became aware of the chortles and sniggers, and, spotting the paper being passed on, he intercepted the exchange and ordered it to be brought to him. He glanced at it, and then, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes, he looked more closely, and without a word he hurried out, leaving the door open. I peered round at the class and everybody was suddenly interested in their exercise books. Typical, I thought: two minutes ago I was a hero and now I had the plague. Fat Barker returned and with a gesture despatched me to the headmaster’s study. He stood back from the door as I passed him as if I might be contagious. There was no appeal, no call for explanation. He knew that the ludicrous figure was meant to be him; the woman could have been Miss Thomson, another teacher.

When I entered the headmaster’s domain, the great man was looking at the sketch. After a time he folded it over until only the bottom of two pairs of legs were visible, held it out to me and said, ‘Did you do this?’

I whispered, ‘Yes, sir,’ and that was it.

I got six strokes of the leather strap on my hand, but it really didn’t hurt that much. He was getting on in years, and I suspect he did himself more damage in wielding the strap than he inflicted on me. But that was only the corporal punishment. What was so embarrassing, so shameful and degrading, was having my name entered in the punishment book. I had a criminal record already and, good grief, it might affect my job prospects if this became public—even worse should Dad get wind of it. As I returned to the class, Mr Barker was holding the strap and I thought for a minute I was going to get a second helping, but he ignored me and I slunk to my desk, an outcast.

Secretly I was glad that Mr Barker hadn’t administered the punishment himself, as he really knew how to hurt you. I remember in glorious Technicolor my first larruping from him. I forget what I’d done to deserve it but there I was in front of the class while F. B. measured his distance. It was to be the first of three. I braced myself and as the leather came whistling down I moved my hand and he caught himself an almighty whack on his knee. This brought a great smothered snigger from the class and three more strokes were added to my original sentence. As Mr Barker taught a mixed class, we lads had to show a bit of bravado whenever we were about to be chastised. It was unmanly to cry in front of the girls, but to tuck your right hand under your left armpit after the punishment was acceptable. Girls were never punished, and I’m sure they secretly revelled in the spectacle as some poor devil held out his hand for the strap. Is this a trait in women? After all, during the French Revolution they took their picnic lunches and their knitting to enjoy the work of Madame Guillotine…But I digress.

One of the popular myths going the rounds regarding the strap was that a hair from one’s head laid across the palm of the hand would take some of the sting out of the blow. It was worth a go, and I tried it a couple of times, but it didn’t work for me, so I packed it in. Had it been a success I could well have been bald before I left school.

Apart from daisies, dandelions and buttercups, I can’t recall ever seeing any other flower. I wouldn’t have recognised a bluebell if you’d rung it violently into my good ear. Even in Westwood Park the rhododendrons were not a riot of colour; they were in fact a dirty grey from the fallout of the factory chimneys of the cotton mills, which caught me at a disadvantage when some joker or other named a festival Beautiful Oldham. Every year schoolchildren had to paint or draw a daffodil and those judged to be winners had the satisfaction of having their efforts pinned round the walls of Werneth Fire Station. The doors were opened to the proud public, and talented offspring pointed out their own contribution to their parents—in my case ‘Eric Sykes, aged twelve years, Ward Street Central School’. It was a marvellous exhilarating day out, culminating in a walk through Werneth Park all in our Sunday best. The daffodils round the walls were at least all yellow but back in the classrooms where we had all competed it would have been a psychiatrist’s nightmare. Most of us had never seen a daffodil and like a rumour some of the entries were greatly distorted.

I’m not sure, but I think we only had one lady teacher at Ward Street Central, Miss Thomson, blonde, medium-sized but bulging. As I think back she reminds me of Miss Piggy in The Muppet Show. Anyway on one occasion I was kept in class to write out some lines before I was dismissed. Head bowed, I was writing ‘I must not do…’ whatever it was for about the hundredth time, with four hundred more to go, when a shadow fell over me. I looked up and Miss Thomson was perched on the edge of my desk, looking down at me in a peculiar way. She was hot and her make-up was beginning to cake, and little beads of perspiration dotted a faint moustache which I’d never noticed before. After a few moments she said, ‘You have very long eyelashes for a boy.’ I thanked her, she gave me a long peculiar look and, picking up my uncompleted lines, she said, ‘That’ll do,’ and left the room. For some inexplicable reason my mind raced back over the years to when I lay wounded and the little nurse with the sad smile stroked my forehead.

Then there was Mr Wilton. He was our English teacher. I think he enjoyed listening to himself a darn sight more than we did. Well built, he wore a grey suit and for the street he wore a brown trilby with the left side of the brim turned down. I suppose that this was how he imagined a poet would wear his hat. Incidentally, why must we have an English teacher? I could have understood it if I’d been French or Greek but I not only spoke English fluently but could read it as well. Mr Wilson was groaning on about something or other and my interest in the lesson waned. I looked out of the window and my eyes were drawn to our house. One day, noting that the front door was closed, I turned my head to the house in Ward Street, where I made my abortive rat-a-tatting and had my last brush with Constable Matty Lally, and suddenly something extraordinary caught my eye: in the middle of the Mucky Broos two dogs were stuck together, bottom to bottom, trying to run in opposite directions. It was intriguing, and I was wondering what was going on when a woman came out of her house and threw a bucket of water over them, and they came apart, like greyhounds leaving the traps at the races. I turned back towards the blackboard and with a start I almost bumped my face against Mr Wilton’s jacket. He had been leaning on my desk, baffled as I was, no doubt, by the goings-on outside. I thought he was about to discuss it, but I was way off the mark. ‘Sykes,’ he said, ‘I am endeavouring, in my humble, stumbling way, to add a little knowledge to that treasure house above your eyebrows, but as you prefer to ogle lasciviously at a rutting perhaps you’d be more at home in the Zoological Gardens?’

I looked at him in wonder, thinking that to learn English could be an advantage.

Mr Sutcliffe was our sports master, a tidy, tall, black-haired man; it must be said, that in his sports jacket and flannels he looked ideal for the part. It was also rumoured that he played cricket for Werneth Second Eleven, which in my mind only was open to doubt. For one thing, he wore spectacles with lenses as thick as the bottom of a pop bottle, making his eyes look like blackcurrants; also he never seemed to like cricket. When we were all eager to be marched down to where we played our organised games, he would be looking at the sky, hoping for rain, or even bad light, in which case we spent the sports hour in the gym, practising imaginary cover drives, leftfoot-forward off-drives, back on non-existent stumps for an imaginary short ball. We did all this synchronised to a record on a wind-up gramophone, usually of ‘The Blue Danube’.

These exercises in the gymnasium were no substitute for the real cricket, at which Mr Sutcliffe was a semi-pro. Perhaps he was embarrassed to have to shepherd a crocodile of boisterous, happy schoolboys through the streets on the way to the cricket ground. This was in fact a large area of fairly flat ground, with goalposts at either end for footie; and, because there wasn’t a blade of grass to be seen, our cricket was played on coconut matting. We didn’t have two ends—in fact I don’t think we had more than four stumps, but that was just right: three for the wickets and one for the bowler. There was only one pad, which was buckled on to the left leg, and if you happened to be left-handed, tough.

Mr Sutcliffe would throw the ball to someone, anyone, and point out somebody else to bat and the game began. Mr Sutcliffe looked on with a bored expression, occasionally glancing at his wrist watch so that he wouldn’t be late getting back to the warm common room. However, in one particular session he took off his jacket, handed it to me and picked up the bat, which I’d laid down while I buckled on my pad. He threw the ball casually to one of the lads, and then he surveyed the fielders, gesturing for them to spread out more. It was obvious that he’d done this before on a much higher canvas. Nodding to the bowler, he took up his stance and we all crouched in readiness. What happened next was like a page out of comic cuts. It was an innocuous ball, not quick, but falling short, and then for some unaccountable reason the ball reared up and caught Mr Sutcliffe on the bridge of his nose. His glasses flew off, and he stumbled back, knocking his stumps over.

‘Howzat?’ screamed the bowler.

Mr Sutcliffe struggled unsteadily and glared myopically around him. The bowler was quick-witted and, seeing Mr Sutcliffe’s glasses on the ground, took the opportunity of merging with the rest of the field.

‘You stupid boy,’ he yelled at nobody. ‘I wasn’t ready. What’s your name?’

There was no answer and when I picked up his glasses and handed them to him he saw that there was no one at the other end. We all knew who the bowler was, but there wasn’t a chance in a hundred that anyone would give him away.

One thing is certain, though: Mr Sutcliffe wasn’t much of a cricketer. Any decent batsman for Werneth would have hooked the ball for six.

That was the end of cricket for the day, and so I didn’t have my turn with the bat. Dissatisfied with the world in general, I limped off, although there was nothing wrong with my foot—my limp was because of the cricket pad buckled on to my left leg, obviously made for someone much taller than me. Ah well, I still maintain it was another century I never made.

Our classes weren’t always mixed. For instance, the boys attended a carpentry class and the girls beavered away at domestic science, mainly cookery. Mr Barker’s class, as I mentioned earlier, was mixed and to my shame I can’t remember any of the girls, not even the one I was passionately in love with, although she didn’t know it. I never approached or spoke to her but I recall following her home to the centre of Oldham, where she disappeared through the back door of a pub, and then with a great sigh I turned round and floated home in a euphoric haze.

My most vivid memory after school finished for the day was watching the staff going home. Mr Barker went hatless, dragged along by the weight of his stomach down Ward Street towards Featherstall Road in order to catch a tram to wherever he was going. The English master, Mr Wilton, would invariably be striding casually twenty yards behind him—perhaps they didn’t like each other. Some of the teachers went the other way to board trams going in another direction. No member of the staff, not even the headmaster, possessed a car. Cars were still a rare sight and an expensive novelty, and teachers, as today, were underpaid; but even so all the male staff managed to wear suits with a collar and tie and Miss Thomson wore respectable frocks.

I may have treated the staff with a levity they don’t deserve. Discipline was paramount and by and large they were all respected, and we pupils had no difficulty in addressing the masters as ‘sir’ and the lady teachers as ‘miss’. Although I wasn’t a credit to the school academically, when I finally left school, like every other pupil I could read, write, add up, subtract and divide. In other words, I had been equipped with the basic skills, preparing me for the next stage of the journey, and thankfully that did not include sex education—that was an adventure to come, as and when the bugle sounded. I have long had a theory that pupils who pass their leaving exams with high marks in every subject may be star pupils but when they face the real world they lose a lot of their sparkle and can be likened to a blind man whose guide dog has left home. On the other hand, many, many brilliant entrepreneurs, artists, writers, etc., proudly boast that their final reports were abysmal, so I wasn’t as upset as my father when he read what the headmaster had written as a footnote to my school leaving report: ‘Inclined to be scatterbrained’. Ho hum, you can’t win ‘em all.

My schooldays were over and presumably I was well equipped to take my place as a member of the working class. First, however, let me sum up the last fourteen years. They were mainly a pleasurable experience, although there were bad times as well, but I haven’t included these simply because I can’t remember them, and to my adolescent mind the bad times invariably happened to other people. For myself there were only two major problems: trying to keep warm during the cold winters which swept across the north-west for several months and staving off hunger, a condition endemic during the depression of the early thirties.

In looking back over my schooldays at Northmoor and Ward Street Central, I am appalled by my lack of attention to my education. For instance, when the history master declaimed that William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 following the Battle of Hastings, that was the last thing I heard. But in my mind’s eye I saw William beaching the long boat, French soldiers leaping into the surf to storm the beaches yelling Gallic obscenities at the British troops, and King Harold looking up towards a shower of arrows a very silly thing to do—and his ostler, too late with his warning, gasping as King Harold said, ‘Ooh’, and slid from the saddle with an arrow in his eye—‘The King’s copped it.’ And just then I was brought back to the present day as the bell went for us to change classes, but whatever subject, maths or woodwork, my imagination still wove vivid pictures of the tale of the Battle of Hastings, until a geography lesson in which the mention of Mount Kilimanjaro had me halfway up the mountain pursued by Zulus before the bell rang for the end of the day.

So it is hardly surprising that academically I wasn’t exactly a star pupil; in fact wallowed about for most of my schooldays at the bottom of the class. That is except in one subject, art, and the marks I got for this, year by year, were never less than ninety-eight out of a hundred.

During the last week of my school life, parents of the pupils about to enter the uncertain world of work were invited to a half-day visit to the school in order to wander round inspecting some of the projects their offspring had been engaged in. My parents couldn’t be there because Dad was working in the Standard Mill in Rochdale while Mother had taken her old job back in the card room of another mill about three miles beyond Royton. What with their wages plus Vernon’s and soon, hopefully, mine we would be able to afford rabbit every Sunday. Dad usually took a sandwich for his dinner in the factory but Mother fared better. Grandma Ashton cooked something nice and hot, put it in a basin, wrapped the whole thing in a red-spotted hankie and made her way to the tram stop. When the tram arrived, she handed Mother’s dinner to the conductor and he put it on the floor by his feet; then ‘ting ting’ and off went the tram about three miles down the line to where Mother met it, the dinner was handed over to her and perhaps ‘Smells good, missus’ from the conductor and off to Rochdale. This private delivery service occurred every workday, no money, no ‘What’s this, then?’—all smiles, even when it was raining. Oh, what a gentle, caring age we lived in!

To return to parents’ day at Ward Street Central School: as the star pupil in art, I was given a large sheet of rough paper, three feet by two, with carte blanche to paint whatever I fancied. Without hesitation I began to sketch a huge liner thrusting headway through a choppy sea. Parents filed into the classroom to watch my progress. I was completely enraptured—it was turning out to be a good painting. While wiping my hands on a rag, I surveyed my work, wondering if a couple of fish being thrown about would enhance the bow wave. I dismissed the thought as I still hadn’t finished the superstructure. By this time the room was beginning to fill up with parents, and two teachers were enlisted to keep the crowd moving. I was daubing red paint on the paper, creating the first of three funnels, when a man’s hand shot out, pointing to the bows and exclaiming that I’d forgotten to paint in the hole for the anchor. He was loud, and there was a crush of people eager to spot the mistake. I was pushed forward and in flinging out my arm to save myself inadvertently I upset the pot of red paint and my marathon work was over: Michelangelo had fallen off his pedestal and his floating Sistine Chapel disappeared under a spreading red sea. My hopes were dashed; I’d had visions of hanging it over the dresser in the kitchen. Optimistically I thought, There is plenty more where that came from, which just goes to show that you can’t be right all the time.

In fact I was the only one in the school to be offered a scholarship to the Oldham College of Art, but that would have meant an extra two years of schooling, which was out of the question, as we couldn’t afford the luxury. But it didn’t bother me in the least. When I left Ward Street Central School at the age of fourteen I was eagerly looking forward to bringing home a wage packet earned manually in a workman’s overalls.

In 1937 I walked through the gates of Ward Street Central School for the last time, fully equipped to make my contribution to the national debt. It was the same year that Aunt Marie and Uncle Stan were blessed with a child, a daughter Beryl. Our tribe was growing, and apart from my brother Vernon and my half-brother John I now had a beautiful baby cousin.

THE WORLD OF FLAT CAPS, OVERALLS AND BOOTS

Having left school, I still had no idea of what I wanted to do or how I should go about attaining an interview. It was the normal practice in those days for a father in a good steady job to recommend his son to the foreman, or even the manager, so as to ensure that the son followed in his father’s footsteps. They could then make their way together to and from their place of employment and have their tea at the same time when they got home. However, no self-respecting father would push his son into a cotton mill and Dad was no exception. He had better plans for me, in short to put in an application for employment in the Post Office.