Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (22 page)

Although it began to snow a little, a group of us left school at lunchtime and took the train from nearby Cambridge Heath Railway Station to White Hart Lane. By the time we reached the stadium, the snow had stopped and the match went ahead. It was a terrific game and, even though we were fully expecting some punishment the following day, most of us thought it was worth it. Most of us except the Spurs supporters that is, as Burnley romped to a convincing 3–0 victory. On the way home, John, who normally had a very cheery disposition, worked himself up into a right old state, complaining bitterly,
‘Well, that wasn't worth getting fucking detention for! I wish I'd never gone. Spurs were fucking useless!' He went on and on about his team, pulling every single player to bits, berating them for their shortcomings and eventually dismissing the whole team as ‘fucking wankers'. He then lapsed into a long silence and refused to say any more. I had never seen him in this sort of mood before. Even trying to change the subject brought no response from him and he just sat on the train staring darkly at the floor. Although I felt a bit sorry for my friend, I have to say that I thought, on balance, it probably was worth getting detention for – it had been such a brilliant match.

The next day, we arrived at school waiting to be summoned to see our form teacher, who was now Mr Hume, or even worse, the Head, but nothing happened. No one said anything. It was all a bit puzzling. Eventually, I asked Murray, who was not a football fan and therefore had not been to the match, if anyone had noticed we were missing yesterday afternoon. ‘Of course not,' he said, ‘we all got sent home just after lunch because there was another blizzard.' Result! Something good had come from that freezing winter at last, although John still wasn't in complete agreement with that sentiment.

Cricket also continued to figure high on my list and, as I got older, I was able to travel further afield to see it, going to Lord's and the Oval several times as well as Leyton. And a new sport, Ten Pin Bowling, was introduced from America in 1960. As it happened, the first bowling alley to open in this country was at Stamford Hill, just a short bus ride away. John and I decided to try it out not long after it opened. Very bright and brash, it seemed typically American and we loved it. We started going
fairly regularly. Stamford Hill Bowling Alley stood on the site of a former cinema. Sadly, in some ways, this was just the start of the trend towards cinemas closing down and being replaced by bowling alleys. Cinema audiences were dropping everywhere, largely as a result of people staying in to watch television. At the time, we weren't concerned about this as we became keen on bowling.

Also in 1960, while I was still twelve, I started going to see a sport that was to become an all-consuming passion. Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dad and John used to go to speedway at Harringay every week, so, although I was deemed too young to go myself, I heard a lot about it from them. It was at this period that speedway rivalled football, with tracks such as Wembley and West Ham attracting crowds of over 50,000 on a regular basis, but, during the 1950s, speedway declined and by the end of the decade there were very few tracks left around the country and only one in London at Wimbledon.

I had remained interested in the sport to the extent of following results in the newspapers and when I was riding my bike round the fields at the back of the prefab I pretended to be one of the top riders of the day, in particular Harringay's Split Waterman or West Ham's Aub Lawson, mainly because I liked their glamorous-sounding names.

So, although I had never actually seen any speedway live, I was steeped in its tradition. In fact, I was named after a speedway rider, Norman Parker, the Wimbledon captain. Many years later, Mum told me how this came about. When John was born, Dad went off to register his name without even consulting her, as it was Jewish tradition that the firstborn son
would be named after his father's father, which in this case was John. When it came to me, the tradition was that I should be named after the mother's father, so I should have been William, but Mum, who had never forgiven Dad for not even asking her about John's name, said she didn't want to name me William and really didn't care what I was called. It was at this point that John suggested naming me Norman. Although he went to Harringay every week, he was, for some reason, a Belle Vue (Manchester) supporter. Their captain was Jack Parker, Norman's brother, so he reasoned if it was good enough for his hero to have a brother called Norman, he should have one too. As Mum wasn't too bothered, she agreed, so Norman I became.

At the end of 1959, there was a small revival in speedway and a number of old tracks returned, including New Cross. Dad always used to buy the
Evening News
on his way home from work and, one Wednesday evening in May 1960, I saw an article about that night's meeting at New Cross, a Britannia Shield match against Norwich. I looked up and said to Dad, ‘Can we go?' Much to my surprise, he said, ‘Yes.' New Cross wasn't far away by car, about half an hour through the Rotherhithe Tunnel, so off we went.

When we got there, we bought a programme and on scanning through it I noticed that the very first race amazingly brought together the two heroes from my bike-riding days, Split Waterman, now New Cross captain, and Aub Lawson, now with Norwich. It was a terrific race, which Lawson just managed to win. Watching these latter-day black leather-clad gladiators hurtling round the track at impossible angles, spraying flying cinders behind them, handlebars almost touching and seemingly
on the verge of crashing at every corner was incredibly thrilling. And from then on I was hooked.

Very soon we got pally with a family who sat near where we did. Naturally, they all received their nicknames from Dad. Chief character among them was ‘Fuzz', so-called because he had fuzzy hair. He spoke very slowly and was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. His friend was called El, who was the complete opposite. Sharp as a razor, he spoke at a million miles an hour. His mother was more interested in the refreshments than the racing and got up several times during the evening to go to the little tea stall. She was known as ‘Mrs Cups of Tea' and, finally, there was Fuzz's father, whom we called ‘The Authority' as he knew everything there was to know about speedway. People would come up to him from all over the stadium to ask him questions. He never failed to give them an answer, even to the most obscure enquiry.

Eventually, more London tracks reopened, including, in 1963, Hackney Wick, which was the other side of Hackney Marshes. It took me about twenty minutes to walk there so I became a regular. The following year, West Ham also reopened and I went there every week as well. By the time I was eighteen, I was going to speedway twice a week most weeks and sometimes three if there was a good match on at Wimbledon. My friend John also became a keen speedway fan so we used to go to all the meetings together, even going to Wembley when they put on big meetings, such as the World Championship Final.

T
he first major outing for our new car came when we used it for our summer holiday in 1959. From 1950 to 1958, we had always gone by coach to a holiday camp. This time, with the freedom the car gave us, we decided to tour the West Country, stopping off at guesthouses for bed and breakfast wherever the fancy took us. Our first stop was Gloucester, where we met my uncle Jim and his wife Audrey. Uncle Jim was Mum's brother and this was the first and last time I ever saw him. We then went round Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, finishing up with a look at Stonehenge on the way home. This was in the days when you could walk freely among the stones. I even had my photograph taken sitting on top of one of them.

For the most part, the car behaved well. The only hairy
moment we had was when we were trying to get up Porlock Hill, in Somerset, a 1 in 4 gradient. We just about struggled up in first gear; it seemed to take forever. I don't think 1950s family cars were made to take this sort of thing in their stride as they are today.

For the next few years, our car took us on touring holidays around the country as we went to Wales (North and South), the Lake District and Scotland. Our trip to North Wales was probably the most memorable. This was in the year following our West Country adventure, where we had had no difficulty in booking overnight bed and breakfast as we went. We decided that our first stop would be Colwyn Bay and because of our previous year's experience we agreed that we wouldn't just take the first B&B we came to but could afford to be selective. So we started off in optimistic mood and weren't too fazed when the first few guesthouses we came to were full, but, as time went on and still no rooms were to be found, we began to get a bit apprehensive so we went along to the Tourist Information Office and asked where we might be able to find bed and breakfast for the night. The woman behind the counter shook her head and blew her cheeks out. ‘There won't be any vacancies this time of year,' she told us. ‘The best thing you can do would be to go out a few miles and see if you can find anything.'

So we got back in the car and drove a little way, coming to a small village called Mochdre. We could see a number of guesthouses, so we started again, but same result. Then, just as we were losing hope for the night and having visions of sleeping in the car, we saw a house a little way up a hill with a ‘Vacancies' sign outside. We knocked on the door and asked if there were
any rooms available and the landlady said, ‘Yes, I have a couple left.' Were we relieved! No thought now of being choosy and not taking the first B&B we came across. I think it could have been the stables out the back and we'd have taken it.

We were so chastened by the experience and so happy with the place we'd found that we abandoned the idea of touring and decided to remain there for the whole week of our holiday. As it happened, we needn't have worried as we had a very nice stay. The rooms were very comfortable and the breakfasts excellent. There was an added bonus in that the landlady's father kept us entertained at breakfast with tales of his army days dating back to the First World War and bemoaning the fact that you couldn't buy Military Pickle any more, as apparently it had been his favourite breakfast accompaniment when he was young. He apologised to us every single morning that there was none available for ours. On our last day, we went shopping in Station Road, the main shopping street of Colwyn Bay, for some presents to take home and there, on display in the window of a grocer's shop, were jars of Hayward's Military Pickle. We bought one and, as we were leaving the bed and breakfast, we gave it to the old man. I have never seen anyone so grateful in my whole life. He was absolutely speechless and his jaw just dropped. It was as if we had performed some miracle, magicking it up from thin air and bringing him the one thing that would make his life complete. We didn't like to tell him that Military Pickle was freely available – and probably had been for many years – in a shop just a few miles away.

So, using Mochdre as our base, we drove out to a different place each day. It was while doing this that we took a ride on the
world's first commercial hovercraft in its initial year of service. For our trip out one day, we decided to visit the seaside resort of Rhyl. When we got there, we went down on to the beach, where the hovercraft was due to take off for Hoylake in Cheshire.

The steward was standing outside, shouting, ‘Just three seats left. We're about to leave. If anyone wants to board, hurry up! One-way tickets only.'

‘Come on, let's get on,' said Dad to Mum and me and started running down the beach.

Mum and I held back and I said, ‘It's just one way, how will we get back?'

Dad, still going as fast as he could and very conscious of what was at stake, shouted back, ‘We'll deal with that when we get there. This is our chance to be a part of history.'

So we got our one-way tickets and got on. It was a bit of a strange experience, skimming over land and sea, something few people had done before. And it was made even more odd by the fact that all seats faced backwards. There was also a powerful smell of petrol, so it wasn't a wholly pleasant experience but when we landed we each got a certificate to show we'd ridden on the world's first hovercraft in its first year of service. After arriving in Hoylake, we had to get a train to Liverpool, another train to Crewe and then a bus back to Rhyl before driving back to our digs. We got back very late and practically the whole day had been spent travelling, but Dad had been right and it was worth it to play a role in a small piece of history.

With the 1960s being a time of growing affluence among working-class families, more and more people were starting to go abroad for their holiday. And we were no exception. Although
we continued touring Great Britain in our car, we now started to take a second week's holiday to enable us to go to Europe. We took our first foreign holiday in 1960, a coach tour to Bruges, Brussels and Paris. Dad particularly loved the Belgian part of the holiday as we drove through many of the places he had been stationed in or had visited during the War and he spent a lot of time pointing out various sites to us and reminiscing about them. For me, the most interesting thing I found about Belgium was the enormous size of the chip portions they served up with every meal and the fact they smothered them with mustard pickle.

When we arrived in Paris, our guide told us that he had arranged an optional excursion to a show at the Moulin Rouge that evening and said he would be passing round a brochure explaining what sort of show we could expect to see if we went. As the brochure came round, I caught a glimpse of what it contained by looking through the gap in the seat backs while the couple in front thumbed through it. What I managed to see showed mostly scantily dressed and semi-naked women with large fans or kicking up their legs, dancing on a stage. When the couple in front passed it back to Mum, who was sitting next to me, she said to me, ‘Would you like to have a look?' So, did I? I was dying to have a look, but I just felt so embarrassed sitting next to Mum that I said, ‘No, it's all right.' So Mum passed it back to Dad, who was sitting behind next to another man. They seemed to take a long time scanning the pages and in truth I was a bit shocked and felt slightly uncomfortable – I'd never thought of my Dad as having any interest in women other than my mum. I suppose it was the first time it had ever
occurred to me that Dad was a man as well as my dad, and might take an interest in scantily clad women. After all, he was in his forties now and to me a bit old for that sort of thing! As it happened, he didn't think it would be very suitable for me to go to the Moulin Rouge at my tender age so we opted out of the excursion, but I expect he wouldn't have minded going.

The following day, while leaving Paris to get back to Calais for the ferry, we stopped in a small town for a coffee break. The guide told us to be back in half an hour and if anyone wasn't back then the coach would go without them. On our way back to the coach, we passed two members of our party walking away in the opposite direction. At the appointed time for leaving, the two men still weren't back, so the guide said, ‘Well, I did warn everyone. We will just have to go without them.'

Dad got up and said, ‘We've just seen them, they can't be far away. I'll go and get them,' and promptly walked off the coach to look for them. As he turned the corner, the men came back round a different corner and got on the coach. At this, the guide said, ‘Right, we'll have to go now.'

Now it was Mum's turn. ‘You can't go,' she said, ‘you know my husband has gone off to look for these two. He'll be back in a minute.'

‘Sorry,' said the guide, ‘you were all warned.'

‘I can't go without my husband!' Mum yelled at him.

‘Well, you'll have to get off as well then,' was all the guide could say.

By now, I was feeling really panicky. I couldn't let the coach drive off without us, so I went to the door and stood with one foot on the step and the other on the pavement. I was praying
the coach wouldn't start off but I thought he wouldn't dare with me in this position. The guide moved towards me and Mum screamed at him, ‘Don't you dare touch my boy!'

Just then, I could see Dad coming back up the road. Was I relieved! After he'd got back on, the guide gave us all a lecture about how it was important we leave on time to keep to our schedule. Mum was furious with him and everybody else on the coach, especially the two men who had caused the incident, since they hadn't said anything when the guide was threatening to go without Dad. For the rest of the day, whenever she saw the two men she just glared at them and refused to speak to them.

And that was our first taste of holidays abroad. However, it didn't put us off and we went to Austria – one week in the Alps for £20 – and Italy in the next couple of years, as well as continuing our tours of Britain.