If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will

After a few more Sundays we were really swinging, to the extent that I was encouraged to do sixteen-bar breaks. I’d no idea where these came or how long were sixteen bars. I just beat time until they all stopped playing and the pianist said, ‘Take it away, man,’ and I went into a drum routine, starting on the chair seat, ‘rack-a-tacket’ on the back of the chair, on the linoleum part of the floor to the arm of the settee, all to the accompaniment of ‘Yea, man, go for it.’ It was heady stuff.

A couple of Sundays later we were at the stage of getting together a programme for dancing and suggesting names for the band. There was ‘The Oldham Serenaders’ and ‘The Swinging Four’, but the favourite was ‘The Blue Rhythm Band’. I have no excuse for what happened next. Whatever possessed me to even consider we were ready for public scrutiny? But on the spur of the moment, unbeknownst to the rest of the band, I placed an advert in the Oldham Evening Chronicle: ‘THE BLUE RHYTHM BAND WILL PLAY AT ANY FUNCTION, DANCES, WEDDINGS, ETC. MODERATE TERMS’ and to my astonishment it was in the local paper that same evening. I couldn’t wait to take the cutting with me to show the lads next Sunday. My troubles, however, were just beginning. On Wednesday, only two days after the advert had appeared, I received a reply. I was absolutely flummoxed: it had never entered my head that somebody would write back—my thought process had ended with the advert.

Fortunately the letter contained a telephone number. Good, I only had to tell them that we had another engagement on that particular Saturday. Yes, that was it—simple. Standing in a telephone booth, I dialled the number and a very attractive woman’s voice answered. No, she hadn’t sent the letter; she was only the secretary to Mr Flintock, the secretary of the club. Her voice was so pleasant and seductive that I found myself discussing terms for an evening of dancing at a municipal hall in Hollinwood. Having agreed a fee, I was now a worldly business tycoon and ended the conversation by saying I was looking forward to seeing her at the dance.

It wasn’t till I’d walked halfway down the street that the enormity of my brashness came home to me. If only I had the address of the recruiting officer of the French Foreign Legion, I could be halfway to Sidi-Bel-Abbes by Sunday. Alas, this was not to be, and when I faced the lads on Sunday I confessed abjectly and fully. They looked at each other, and then the pianist said, ‘We’d better get down to it.’ We had only one Sunday left before we took to the road. Oh, how I loved my comrades at that moment, and how much I was looking forward to a week on Saturday! I was in the lofty realms of euphoria again, leaving myself wide open for the sucker punch. It was later that evening when the bombshell burst: I didn’t have a drum kit. I certainly couldn’t turn up at our debut with a pair of drumsticks and an old kitchen chair. Once more I fell on my feet. The pianist’s brother ran a musical instrument shop and I hired the accoutrements for the Sunday only and on the condition that I returned them in good order. I agreed and walked away with as much as I could afford, which unfortunately didn’t include a bass drum, but already I had an idea about that.

The days dominoed down to the fateful Saturday, and to seven o’clock in the evening, by which time the dancers were already changing their shoes in the cloakroom. The communal hall itself was a barn of a place, with chairs all round the dancing area and a stage where we would soon be performing. We were late, through no fault of our own: three trams had refused to take us on board. Normally tram conductors were in the main accommodating, but we were an odd collection. I was laden down with the big drum that I had borrowed from the Scout troop and a hired gold-glitter snare drum under my arm. The rest of the kit was packed in a suitcase crammed with the foot pedal for the big drum and a stand for the snare drum, not forgetting a carrier bag of sheet music. One witty conductor asked which one of us was Oscar Rabin.

Eventually thirty minutes later we were on the stage, busily sorting out our instruments. The bass player helped me with my stuff and picked up what he surmised was the stand for my snare drum. He looked at it curiously and then nudged me with it and whispered, ‘What’s this for?’ Now he’d opened it out I understood. In my hurry to get out of the musical instrument shop I’d hired myself an ordinary music stand instead of the stand to hold my crowning glory, the gold-glitter snare drum, but the music stand would have to do for tonight.

I carried on tightening the ropes on the big drum, flicking my finger against the skin to satisfy myself that it was taut enough for a quick step. All this time there was a puzzled silence from the waiting dancers. They were mostly middle-aged women—it must have been some kind of Mothers’ Union anniversary, or something like it. I fixed the foot pedal on to the big drum and balanced the gold-glitter snare drum on to the music stand, giving it two experimental taps to make sure that it didn’t bounce off. The pianist had opened the lid of the upright piano before placing his pile of music on top within easy reach. Then with an arpeggio the tuning began, by which time the dance should have been in full swing, having started forty-five minutes ago.

Apart from us musicians the place was tight with the silence of amazement, even when the pianist nodded his head and opened with a Paul Jones. Usually this was just a preliminary so that everyone could get acquainted. The ladies went round in a circle, the men walked round the ladies in the opposite direction and when the music stopped couples facing each other were either delighted or lumbered as they then slid into a foxtrot or a waltz.

None of this mattered at this particular dance, though, as nobody left their seats to take the floor. They just sat stupefied all through our massacre of ‘Here We Come Gathering Nuts in May’.

I was the first to crack. I had enough difficulty keeping the snare drum on the music stand, but a greater problem arose with the big drum. Every time I stamped on the foot pedal the big drum slid forward a few inches, and when the pianist had done about sixteen bars another calamity occurred: the pile of music on top of the piano dropped down into its innards, silencing the melody. We were left with only the thin whining of the fiddle for the tune, and only the Irish could dance to that. The situation was teetering dangerously close to farce. Stretched out almost flat on my back, looking as if I was on a recliner in my desperate attempt to get my toe on the foot pedal of the big drum before it ended up on the dance floor, I glanced fearfully at the immobile punters…Hostility, disbelief and outrage were the dominant expressions, directed at us maliciously. It was then that I noticed the secretary, who had met us on our belated arrival. He was standing in front of the stage, beckoning to me. I abandoned the big drum, went forward and bent down to hear what he had to say.

It was short and to the point. ‘What are your expenses?’ he hissed through gritted teeth.

I was so embarrassed that all I wanted at that moment was for a pile driver to trundle up and hammer me into the ground. I looked again at the lynch mob on the dance floor and whispered to him, ‘Is there a back door to this place?’

‘Behind you,’ he replied curtly. Then he turned to the audience with a grovelling smile and asked, ‘Is there anyone here who plays the piano?’

An old lady put up her hand and while we were feverishly struggling to collect our paraphernalia she was already thumping away at ‘Carolina Moonbeams’. For a moment there was no response: the dancers were still shell shocked. Then, realising that they weren’t going to get their money back, reluctantly they began to search out partners to express their grievances to as they shuffled round the floor.

After our escape we didn’t wait for the tram and once we were at a safe distance from the communal hall we decided to walk home,—no mean feat, as it was all of three miles. Strange as it may seem, we were not downhearted. On the contrary, as we began to see the funny side of it I started to chuckle, which fathered a snigger and then a laugh, and soon we were all shrieking with maniacal laughter. Every so often we had to stop, offload and dry our eyes and our noses as we were shaken by another paroxysm of howling. It was carnival night at the asylum.

How could we have conceivably been a success with our amateurish blundering into a situation we were in no way competent to deal with? We had got away with it this time, but there’d be another and another until we were old enough to realise that all youth is not necessarily fireproof.

Meanwhile changes were taking place at the Rutland Mill. The storekeeper received his call-up papers and within a week he was serving in His Majesty’s army. The next time he came to bid us farewell was on his embarkation leave, a hero. All we young bucks envied him and still very few shots had been fired in anger. His leaving the storekeeper’s job left an important vacancy, and I wasn’t going to let a chance like this pass by unnoticed. So from dogsbody in the office I became the new storekeeper, back in my beloved overalls, once more a worker, and I could sit on the upper deck of the tram and light up a Woodbine without embarrassment. My duties varied. I was responsible for all the goods that made a cotton mill operative. My storeroom was in the yard annexed to the main factory, a large airy room. On each wall but one there were wooden shelves about two feet in depth, divided into compartments three feet long and deep towering up to the eighteen-foot ceiling. These shelves were stocked with everything to keep the factory supplied with the necessities of life: different-coloured crayons to identify cops from the card room, electric light bulbs, nails, nuts and bolts, toilet rolls for the office staff and heads of departments—it was rather like a shop with everything costing only a signature.

I don’t suppose for a moment that without a good storekeeper the factory would have ground to a halt, but it might have limped a bit. I didn’t spend all my time in the storeroom. Whenever a lorry piled high with bales of cotton pulled up outside the warehouse, it was my job to offload it. Manipulating the hoist, I sent the clamps high into the air, where the lorry driver caught them in order to fix them round the bale. Then with a downward movement of the handle I lifted the load clear, lowering it gently on to a waiting trolley, where it was wheeled away into the maw of the cavernous warehouse. The next bale was clamped and the same procedure ensued, and so on.

It could be dangerous: in the unlikely event of the bale tearing itself free of the clamps and hurtling to the ground, if I happened to be underneath it, looking the other way, it would be goodnight Vienna, and I would be carted off to the mortuary with a very flat head, half my size and twice as wide. With the tall doors of the warehouse open it was a pleasant enough occupation. In the summertime the warehouse was always the coolest department in the mill, but in winter a polar bear would have been in serious danger of hypothermia. I offloaded the bales wrapped up like one of the crew of Scott’s Antarctic expedition. Blizzards in a Lancashire winter were frequent, but the bales still had to be unloaded until thankfully I closed the enormous twenty-foot doors and hurried off to a room adjoining the general offices, where a hot mug of tea helped to bring my circulation back to normal.

Nobody knew where I would be at any given moment, but hanging about in my storeroom wasn’t an ideal way to pass time away, until I had a brainwave. I bought a lilo, hauled it up the shelves to the top one just under the ceiling, and laid it out so that I could lie comfortably, reading books or just resting. It was high enough to be unseen by anyone on the floor fifteen feet below, but a good vantage point for me to observe them. So that I would not fall off my perch if sleep overtook me, I nailed the long handle of a brush across the edge. It was the perfect bunk on an ocean-going liner. On one occasion, a labourer from the mule room poked his head round the door and called me. Had I been on the floor I would have asked him what he wanted and as long as he signed for it he could have taken away his articles; but when this particular man came in, he decided that I wasn’t there, had a quick shufti round and then snatched two light bulbs and stuffed them in his pocket. He was about to leave when I shouted, ‘Oi!’ He stopped in his tracks, looking round. ‘Put them bulbs back,’ I yelled. He didn’t hesitate: he put the bulbs back and ran out terrified. He was the gofer for the mule overlooker but he never entered the storeroom again without first knocking on the door, giving me time to climb down before shouting, ‘Come in.’

In the course of my work I was able to visit any part of the mill to check on supplies. Sometimes I’d just be bored by long stretches in my secret bunk and in truth I had no object in mind but I walked purposefully with energy and foresight, ostensibly carrying out my duties. The operatives in the mill seemed to enjoy my passing through, exchanging cheery badinage. One morning I was chatting away to a couple of big piecers who were eulogising about Bing Crosby. My face lit up: Bing was my idol too. Spotting a bucket resting aimlessly in the corner, I picked it up, stuck my head in it and sang ‘When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day’. I finished off the song with a ‘boo boo deo voihm’ and when I lowered the bucket the couple of lads were now a dozen, obviously impressed by my rendering. With smiles all round, and like a seasoned artiste, I left them wanting more. Some of them started to call me ‘Bing’ and from then on there was always a bucket handy when I went up into the mule room. I vocalised other Bing offerings but the favourite was ‘When the Blue of the Night’.

The bubble had to burst. Some of the big piecers were leaving their machines to gather round when I put my head in the bucket. I was in particularly good voice one morning and I finished up with the usual ‘deo voihm’, but when I took the bucket from my face the audience was not what I expected: it was the manager himself, all thin, six feet two of him. I attempted a sickly smile but he was unmoved. Either he didn’t like Bing Crosby or in the last few weeks production at the mill had dropped disastrously. The manager, who must have been in his seventies, spoke in a quavering voice, but as always he was economical with his words. ‘Get your cards,’ he said, and he left, the mule room. I looked round but all my newfound fans were frantically busy at their machines.

This was the second time I’d been sacked from the Rutland Mill, but I’d learned the lesson from my first dismissal. I ignored it and continued to be the storekeeper. A few weeks later when the mule overlooker passed me in the yard he said, ‘You must have a great guardian angel looking after you.’ Naturally I didn’t give it a second thought until the next time.

I must have been about sixteen when I had dancing lessons, not tap or ballet but ballroom dancing. I attended evening classes twice a week at Eddie Pollard’s Dancing Academy, in Hollinwood. I never saw Eddie dance himself. He collected the fee at the door and put on the records, old seventy-eights, on an even older gramophone. Without wishing to boast, I was a pretty good dancer. I didn’t get many partners, because I was a very young sixteen-year-old and like a fool I concentrated on learning to dance rather than assignations. I could do the fishtail and the running six and could even get round the floor without watching my feet. I wasn’t too fussed about the waltz, and the foxtrot was OK. However, the quickstep was my metier. I don’t quite know why I have mentioned all this, except now I’m a senior citizen I can still do a fishtail but in all my life I’ve never met a woman who can manage it.

One Sunday morning we had a very pleasant surprise. Uncle Ernest came to visit us on one of his leaves. What a fine figure of a man he cut in his navy uniform as he stood with his back to the fire, Vernon on his left and me on the other side! He spoke modestly of actions at sea in which he had taken part. Vernon and I drank in every word, watching him with admiring eyes. Obviously he couldn’t tell us what ship he was serving on or where any operations took place. In fact he was reluctant to answer all our many questions and it was only when he had left that I realised that we should have talked about something else. As it was Sunday we had Yorkshire pudding and onion gravy, but today we all had a smaller portion in order to heap his plate, as the dinner was now in his honour.

Needless to say, we were all in the war as well. Firewatchers were introduced and once a week, according to a roster, a few of us spent the night on the roof of the factory with sand and stirrup pumps, in order to deal with any incendiary bombs released by the Luftwaffe. The Rutland Mill was situated on the edge of the moors, bordered by grassland, so at night on the factory roof we were surrounded by impenetrable blackness; the millions of stars above were the only visible proof that we were not upside down. The nearest target for the German bombers was the city of Manchester, ten miles to the south; and Liverpool was another danger area, much further away to the north-west. In all the time of our firewatches no one was called upon to put out an incendiary, no one even saw an incendiary and to be brutally honest none of us ever heard an aircraft, friend or foe—in fact Churchill and his war cabinet would have been much safer holding counsel in the boardroom of the Rutland Mill.

It was now clear that I would soon be called up to lend my shoulder to the wheel (what a useless choice of words). My mate Bobby Hall and I discussed which service we could volunteer for. We were both physically fit from our camping excursions and a brief dallying in Health and Strength, in which we had practised co-ordination of muscles, centralisation of the abdominal wall, pectorals, latissimus dorsi—we knew it all, almost as if we’d been preparing ourselves for the service of King and country. Bobby made up his mind to volunteer for the navy, but I had other plans: my ambition was to train as a fighter pilot. I desperately wanted to be one of the few who were owed so much by so many, according to Churchill, and that is why I would opt for the Royal Air Force—that is, if the war was still on.

How I came to regret that last thought about the duration of the war! On 25 November 1941 the flagship HMS Barham was torpedoed off the coast of Egypt, and five minutes later she capsized, exploded and sank. The War Office despatched over eight hundred telegrams expressing condolences to parents, wives or any next of kin. Granddad Sykes opened the buff-coloured envelope with dread in his heart. ‘We regret to inform you that your son…’ Now as for so many other grieving families the war had laid its clammy hands on 36 Leslie Street, and never again would we see Uncle Ernest, but to this day I can still visualise him standing with his back to the fire in the warm aroma of roast lamb.

As I sat in my storeroom one day, gazing at the blank whitewashed wall, an idea began to form. I took a handful of coloured chalks and began to sketch a flight sergeant pilot looking up into the sky. It was life sized from the waist up, with wings above his left breast pocket and three stripes on his upper arm topped by a crown. It wasn’t bad—in fact people began to come into the storeroom on some pretext or other in order to see the sketch. The huge expanse of whitewashed wall was inviting and in a short time I’d sketched the head of the mule overlooker. His round, white, podgy face dominated by spectacles wasn’t too difficult. More people came in and chuckled as they recognised the expressionless face.

Elated by my success, I added other bosses and even the secretary of the mill, my first boss, as I had an inexhaustible supply of crayons of many colours. The whole of the hierarchy was now on my wall, head-on or in profile, smiling or glowering, everyone recognisable. Word soon spread and each came into view the portraits and sheepishly give their own visage a cursory glance, and they came back again to examine their faces more closely when they thought I wasn’t looking. It wasn’t a storeroom any more; it was the portrait gallery of the Rutland Mill.

However, one face was missing: that autocratic phissog of the manager. There was an ideal space in the middle of his workforce, a perfect placing; and more than that, whereas the others were life size the manager, as befitting his rank, would be twice life size. I hadn’t seen him since the bucket episode but he was an easy target. Some days later I was standing halfway up my ladder, shading in the wispy, white hair of his head, when there was a commotion outside the door. I was too wrapped up in my art to take notice, but then the door burst open and one of the workers in the ware-house crashed in, in a muck sweat, saw me up the ladders and said, ‘There’s three lorryloads stacked up waiting to be offloaded.’ Turning, he was about to dash back when he stopped suddenly. He turned round and for the first time he saw that the man holding the ladder steady was the manager.

‘Oh, I didn’t see you, sir,’ he said.

The manager, with his face sideways, so that I could sketch his profile, and without moving his lips, ordered the man to find somebody else to work the hoist.

The portraits remained long after I had left to serve my country and although the inside of the mill was painted twice a year, one wall remained inviolate. It was never painted over and when the mill finally closed in 1963 the flight sergeant, my first sketch, was still staring into the sky.

MY COUNTRY NEEDS ME

On or about my eighteenth birthday I left home to join the Royal Air Force, taking with me a carrier bag containing shaving kit, soap and a handkerchief, which for the few early years of my life had been pinned to the front of my jersey but had been hardly used when my sleeve was available. In addition I had a bag of Mint Imperials for the journey and half a crown for emergencies. I walked the five or six hundred yards from home until I reached the Methodist Chapel; then I stopped and looked back to 36 Leslie Street, just one of a row of ordinary houses, overlooked on the right by Ward Street Central School, with Ward Street on the left, all surrounding two acres of wasteland fondly known as the Mucky Broos, and at the far end of Ward Street, Featherstall Road. I swallowed a lump of nostalgia in my throat. It wasn’t exactly the New Jerusalem, but it had been my own secure little world for seventeen years.

At Oldham Central station I am the only occupant of the windswept platform. A porter emerges from a door, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. He takes out a huge pocket watch and looks down the line. Then he sees me and obviously comes to the conclusion that helping me on to the train with my carrier bag wouldn’t warrant a tip and he disappears inside again to finish off his breakfast. Turning, I examine the Nestlé’s chocolate machine but as I feel for some coppers a strident bell announces that a train is due, and at that moment, chugging asthmatically, it comes round a bend and squeals to a halt in the station. No one alights and I am the only passenger to get on. The guard’s piercing whistle brings my head out of the window in time to see him wave his green flag before adroitly nipping back into his compartment, and with a hoot of indifference the train leaves Oldham, bearing me to the beginning of a new life in the Royal Air Force, cue music, go lights, stand by curtain. Every now and again I indulge myself in a spot of melodramatics, and believe me, there isn’t a dry eye in the house—all, of course, in my imagination, which explains my sometimes vacuous expression.

Padgate was my destination, a collection point for new recruits. Naturally I didn’t know anybody, and I was too shy to rectify this. Others more convivial hung about in groups, enjoying the start of a new adventure, all in civvies, the only piece of uniformity being cardboard boxes containing our civilian gas masks slung around the shoulder by a length of string. I remember standing open-mouthed, listening to a group whom I took to be Poles or Czechs. They were neither. I was about a couple of thousand miles wide of the target: they were all from Glasgow. Looking around at the motley collection of would-be heroes my heart sank. I knew that the war wasn’t going well, but if they were enlisting the likes of us the situation was worse than I thought. By lights out I hadn’t said a word to anybody. In fact the last time I’d spoken had been back at home when I said, ‘Well, I’ll be off then.’