helixtandl

Ch 2 p 4 Mum and School.

April 6, 2020 helixtandl3 Comments

My mother’s maiden name was Eleanor Alice Hunt. She was born at London Fields, Hackney. On the birth certificate her father was shown as Arthur Hunt and her mother as “Ellen” Hunt. This should have been “Eleanor”, and was an example of my grandfather’s airy disregard for detail in official matters. He always called my grandmother “Ellen”, and if it was good enough for him, it should be good enough for the Registrar. My grandfather’s profession was shown as “Butcher”.

My mother spent most of her life up to the Second World War in Frampton Park Road, Hackney, she and my father taking possession of the two top rooms in the house after their marriage in 1921. As a boy, I used to climb a sycamore tree in the back garden that had been planted by my mother as a seed when she was a child.

My mother did well at school scholastically, but with money needed to help with the household expenses, she left at the age of fourteen and started work as a machinist at a local shirt factory. She pursued this occupation until her marriage to my father, after which she devoted herself to looking after the household and her children.

My earliest recollections of my mother are of a fair haired, very attractive, bluish-green eyed woman who loved me probably above all else in the world. To my father, she was “his girl”, and he cherished her and remained scrupulously faithful to her until the end of his life. My mother had long, naturally wavy hair that she subsequently had bobbed in the fashion of the time, and used to curl with hot tongs. She never wore make-up, which for some reason she disliked. Many women eschewed make-up in those days. I think it may have had something to do with the Victorian concept that only “fast” women wore that sort of stuff.

My mother had a true Cockney sense of humour and like my grandmother, she worked hard. She kept our two rooms scrupulously clean at Frampton Park Road, and I have a whole range of memories of her kneeling on a piece of sacking and scrubbing the lino flooring (we used to call it “oil cloth” in those days in London). I also remember her and my grandmother stoking up the copper in the Wash House to do the weekly wash, manipulating the heavy mangle amidst clouds of steam, scrubbing on the scrubbing board, and hanging out interminable rows of sheets and clothes in the back yard.

Having lived all her life in the east end of London, and drawing the conclusion that any sensible person would arrive at, my mother’s ambition was for her children to lift themselves out of the ignorance and poverty of our environment, and to this end she always tried to direct us.

When I first went to Infant School, in Paragon Road, Hackney, opposite the Public Library and the big Telephone Exchange, my mother used to take me there in the morning. Every afternoon she would bring with her an old tin can that we would place on the tram lines running along adjoining Mare Street. When a tram came along I would shout with laughter as it rattled past and squashed the tin flat in a most satisfying manner.

After the Infant School, I received my education at three other schools. These were, the Hackney Free and Parochial School, which was the elementary school and stands to this day in St. John’s Churchyard, Hackney. Then by the grace of scholarships and my parents’ scheming to finance me, I progressed to Upton House Central School, and one step higher to Parmiter’s Foundation Secondary School.

However, the Hackney Free and Parochial School will always be My School, for there I spent my happiest childhood days. There the teachers seemed to have a real interest in their pupils.

Of all my teachers I remember best Mr Bowles, a small man with large horn rimmed spectacles, but how well he knew his job of handling boys. Tragedy struck him during my later years at the school when he lost his wife. I wonder if Mr Bowles ever knew how my childish heart overflowed with sympathy for him then? I remember too fierce, bald headed Mr Atkins, the history master. He stirred my imagination with tales (delivered with fine histrionics) of the sabre toothed tiger, prehistoric man, and the first Roman invaders of Britain. On one occasion also, when I was standing in front of the class he gave me the biggest clout I had ever received from anyone for turning away when he was speaking to me. I suppose I deserved it. The next year Mr Atkins offered a book as a prize for the best historical essay and I won it. Mr James, too, springs into my vision, the kindly, grey moustached headmaster who called all his pupils by their Christian names and always had time to listen to any one of them. We all rather looked up to Mr James. Apart from his kindness and obvious ability, he was the only member of the staff who had a university degree.

And, of course, no Hackney Parochial boy who was there with him could ever forget “Jimmy” Hollick, a veritable Mr Chips. Jimmy had himself been a pupil at the school in the eighteen seventies, subsequently becoming a student teacher, and then being promoted to the full status of master. He was tall, hoarse voiced and very short sighted. His suits were always impeccably tailored and sat well on his broad boned but spare frame. He wore pebble glasses with extraordinarily thick lenses, and had to hold papers within a couple of inches of his wrinkled face in order to read them. He was the deputy headmaster, a Hackney local boy who had made good.

After Mr James’ retirement, Jimmy Hollick became head until, in the early days of the war, a piece of shrapnel received during an air raid put out the sight of one of his failing eyes and ended his teaching days for ever. He was a good man with a fine understanding of children. Jimmy specialised in the teaching of geography. It was he who slung a map across the blackboard one day and first said to me the magic name “Australia”.

Jimmy Hollick and Mr Bowles used to take the swimming classes together at the local (indoor) baths. At different times during the day, classes of boys would form up in a row in the school playground, “quick march” through the little gate into the silent, tree-filled Hackney Churchyard, then up and across to busy Mare Street. We used to get about half an hour of actual swimming, two boys sharing a small “box” with an inadequate wooden seat to dress and undress. Leaning precariously over the edge of the pool, and generally getting themselves soaked in the process, Jimmy and Mr Bowles would encourage breathless boys to hang on to the bar and make appropriate leg movements, yelling to make themselves heard above the din. Or else they would induce some intrepid young man who had almost mastered the art to allow his arms to be fitted into a couple of loops hanging from an overhead wire and then be lugged up to the deep end, puffing and blowing and madly waving his arms and legs.

I never saw Jimmy Hollick actually swim, but Mr Bowles once donned a bright blue costume and volunteered to take part in a race. However, he gave up half way, informing us that he was unable to see where he was going without his glasses. We all readily accepted the explanation at the time; indeed it rather tickled our boyish sense of humour. However, in the light of adult experience, I look upon it with some scepticism, believing that Old Bowlsiefound the exertion of the race too much for him and decided to give it away.

Every Christmas, partitions which divided three classrooms at the school would be folded back so that one large hall was formed. A wooden platform was erected at one end, curtains were rigged up, and each class set about devising a sketch or short play. I remember that I took the part of the heroine in a cowboy melodrama at one of these Christmas shows. I can’t remember the plot. But I know that all rules of chivalry went by the board, because I had a tremendous life and death struggle with the villain of the piece, falling over and severely bumping my head on one of the iron desks in the process. The villain was well and truly plugged by the hero’s six guns, and the curtain fell as I swooned (very nearly literally) in his arms. The gun reports, horses’ hoof beats, and so on were provided by our effects man who stood hidden behind a small curtain, knocking the usual coconuts together and striking the blackboard with a hammer. We looked forward to Christmas at that school, and thoroughly enjoyed our annual show.

I left eventually and went to other schools, but I never enjoyed them half as much, except when a very fine linguist by the name of Algernon Montgomery taught me the first elements of French at the Upton House Central School. I learnt the elements of algebra, geometry, trigonometry and mechanics and promptly forgot them. I gained some knowledge of biology, physics and chemistry. At Parmiter’s Foundation, history meant mostly learning long strings of dates and any understanding of this subject I may possess was picked up mostly from reading books after I left school. The best thing that I retained from my education was an excellent knowledge of French phonetics and later of the language itself. I liked this and had a bent for it. I was then spewed out into the world equipped with a School Certificate and good for little else but pushing a pen.

I had failed to matriculate because in changing from one school to another I had missed out on some basic mathematics, and had never been able to pick them up. Mathematics was a compulsory subject in matriculation in those days, and if you failed in that it mattered not at all how good you might be in other subjects. After the war I found that every worthwhile avenue of study was barred to me unless I went back to the beginning and matriculated all over again. This I was unwilling to do, and the absence of any concession in this regard was one of many reasons why I finally left England and went to Australia.

I mentioned at my last school that I would like to go in for journalism. I personally wrote to some forty or fifty newspapers, but was unable to get a traineeship with any of them. Thankfully, my school found me a job on The Hairdressers Journal, a trade paper run by Messrs. Osborne and Garrett, known as “Ogee’s”. This was a Soho firm that made hairdressers’ equipment and ran a large department store for the public and the trade. It was at this office that I started work at the age of sixteen some months before the outbreak of the 1939 – 1945 World War 2.

Ch 2 p 3 Hope Springs Eternal

April 6, 2020 helixtandl2 Comments

In the middle 1930s my father gave up his studies at evening classes to take up pencilling for a bookie at the local greyhound races, most evenings at the big Hackney Wick Stadium. My father was quick at figures, and the money enormously increased the family income. After my father had got a little capital together, he decided to set up as a bookie on his own. He had a flamboyant brass name-plate made with the words “Harry Foxon” printed across it in red, and he ordered a large, multicoloured umbrella. Now it was he who was the boss, and he employed someone else to do the pencilling for him.

That first season it seemed as if his luck had really turned. Nothing he could do was wrong. Every night my mother and we children would wait up for him. And when she asked him in that Cockney voice of hers: “‘Ow did you go, ‘Arry?” he would smile and reply with that Yorkshire accent which he never lost: “We’ve woon.”

Every night he won. He hardly had a losing meeting. He bought himself an expensive suit and my mother had a new frock. That summer we, who had never had a seaside holiday before, went to Jaywick, a new resort close by Clacton-on-Sea, in a hired car. We spent a fortnight at a bungalow that cost my father twelve guineas to hire. He had four hundred pounds in the bank, and was opulent, for remember, those were the days when four hundred pounds were really worth four hundred pounds. In all my life I had never had such a marvellous holiday, neither had my mother, neither had my brother nor my two sisters. We basked in my father’s glory, and for fourteen wonderful days the sea piled itself unceasingly upon the shore while at night the lights of the bungalow colony rivalled the stars in the blue-black sky.

My grandfather had struck a bad patch and lost his “float” with which he bought his stock of meat. My father “staked” him to begin anew and gave him a little extra on top.

It was when we came home that my father’s luck turned for the worse. Before he had been able to do nothing wrong, but now he could do nothing right. One losing meeting followed another. He managed to pick up a little towards spring, and the following summer he hired a very inferior bungalow at Jaywick for a week only. But the holiday was a gloomy one. It was impossible to capture the carefree happiness of the previous year. Bookies were going broke one after the other at the stadium, and my father knew he had not enough capital behind him to see him over this run of bad luck. Why didn’t he quit? Well, hope springs eternal.

Shortly after we returned home he went to his final meeting. He was in debt and had to borrow to extricate himself. He had made his last throw to beat poverty.

He now made occasional visits to “The Dogs”, as a punter, in the hope of a big win which would put him on his feet, but had little success.

A worse misfortune was to follow, however. A safe at my father’s firm was robbed – a safe to which my father had had access. The police were called in, and when my father’s circumstances were known, the inspector in charge immediately decided that he was responsible. In vain my father protested his innocence. The police had solved the problem to their satisfaction, and seemed content to leave it at that.

For days an atmosphere of gloom pervaded our house. My grandfather was earning little money, my uncle was out of work, and even my grandmother’s charring seemed to have fallen off. Now it seemed certain that my father would be sacked, if not prosecuted. After many anxious days, however, it turned out that there was not enough evidence to prosecute and that my father, in view of his previous good record, would be allowed to continue working. We were still in debt, but at least the breadwinner was not in the unemployment queue.

My father was then in his late thirties. He eventually became Assistant Personnel Officer of the firm and Councillor in the Borough of Hackney. Did he rob the safe? Of course he didn’t. I know because he and my mother were struggling to pay off debts for long months afterwards. But more than that, and notwithstanding the bookmaking interlude, my father was such an honest man and so much of an idealist that such a deed would have been beyond him.

Another memory of my father is that eventually, after many years of loyal service to the Borough of Hackney as a Councillor, he became Mayor. On one particular occasion he suddenly realised that the Annual Mayoral Reception clashed with the Jewish Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement and fasting. He immediately set back the Reception so that the Jewish members of the population should also have the opportunity of participating. Knowing my father, I can state categorically that this was not done out of political motives – he was not that kind of man. Rather his action came from his own innate sense of what was fair and just. Nevertheless, he was pleased when subsequently the Jewish Community presented him with a medallion, struck to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of the resettlement of the Jews in England at the time of Oliver Cromwell. On one side of the medallion is a seated woman holding in one hand a scroll reading “1656 – 1956”. In the other hand she holds the Tablets of the Law. On the reverse of the medal are portraits of Oliver Cromwell and Menassah ben Israel, the Dutch Jew who helped negotiate the resettlement. On this side is also depicted the Seven Branched Candlestick or Menorah, the logo, if you like, of all things Jewish. The medal was presented to my father by Rabbi Lehrman at a reception following a service of thanksgiving and dedication held at the New Synagogue, Edgerton Road, London, N.16, in the middle of April, 1956.

I have written about my father at some length and am hesitant about how to conclude. I can only say that he loved me dearly, and I loved him in return. I have met many men in many walks of life, but I have never met one man anywhere who could hold a candle to my father. My father did not reveal himself to people easily. But once you knew him, you could only admire him. After my mother died, my father and I struck up a correspondence, he in England and I in Australia. I visited him twice in England, once with my wife, Irene, and he visited us twice in Australia. We both had a compulsion to write, and through our letters we became very close. It was a late flowering of a wonderful friendship that I shall never cease to treasure in my memory.

As I related previously, my paternal grandparents were up in Yorkshire. As we lived in London when travel for the working man was an almost impossible luxury, we rarely got to see them. My Yorkshire grandfather, James, after whom I was named, actually saw me when I was young and visited Yorkshire, but I cannot remember him. They tell me that he created a tremendous scene on a bus on one occasion when my Mum was carrying me in her arms and nobody would offer her a seat. After my grandfather had finished lashing the passengers with his tongue, several seats were offered. This would be the kind of man he was, from what my father has written about him. A photograph I have shows a firm jawed man in a cloth cap and a substantial moustache looking unflinchingly at the camera. The eyes are smallish, but set fairly wide apart and quite unwavering. Some fairly wide set frown marks show faintly above the level eyebrows. Here is the face of a stubborn Yorkshireman who thinks about a problem and then, having come to a conclusion, sticks with it to the bitter end. No need to wonder from where my father inherited his stubborn streak.

Although my grandfather spent his young years in the army and then a lifetime of hard physical work in the coalmines, he had a heart murmur and should have been permanently on light duties. Nevertheless he lived an active life until his death at the age of sixty-five. I have visited his grave at the village of Grimethorpe, in the churchyard and hope to pay my respects several times in the future before I, too, pass on. My Yorkshire grandfather was a dark, swarthy man. He was well known as a “stirrer” who never hesitated to tell the mine bosses what he thought of them if he believed he wasn’t getting a fair go. In later years this prejudiced his chances of being taken on in the local coal mines. James Foxon’s father, William Foxon was also a miner. When James Foxon was twenty-seven years old, he married Fanny Sanderson, twenty five years old, from the Yorkshire town of Huddersfield, whose father was also a coal miner.

A photograph I have of my Dad’s mother when both she and my grandfather must have been close to sixty shows a no-nonsense woman who still retained her black hair without any grey, with a fairly rugged cheek structure such as I recall in my father.

I have personally but a single recollection of my father’s mother. It is a memory of a dark haired, elderly woman in a long Victorian dress, rolling me on the grass, bending down, tickling me, and laughing as I laughed. A vivid recollection is that she had a “wall-eye”. I was not sure for many years whether this was a true recollection or a dream. But checking with my father when the subject came up in conversation during one of his visits to Australia, he confirmed that my grandmother did indeed have a “wall-eye”, the result, apparently, of a stroke she had suffered.

I must have been about ten years old when my mother approached me quietly and told me that she and Dad would be away for a short while. Dad’s mother had died, and they had to travel up to Yorkshire for the funeral. I was alone with my maternal grandmother for a couple of days. When Mum and Dad returned, Mum confided in me that Dad had wept at the graveside. As I had not known my Yorkshire grandmother closely, I could not feel deeply about her, but I realised that if my Dad had wept he must have been very upset.

Ch 2 p 2 Towards a satisfactory philosophy

April 6, 2020April 6, 2020 helixtandl3 Comments

I always remember my Dad being utterly dependable and like the Rock of Gibraltar to his family. Despite this, when I was a boy my Dad and I were not close. After leaving the Irish Constabulary he was employed first by the Manufacturers of Gibbs Dentifrice, and I remember well the many cut-outs of fairies and “ivory castles” representing strong teeth which he used to bring home to me. Afterwards he worked for Clarke Nichols and Coombes, the confectionary manufacturers, as an engineering storeman.

The depression was at its height – or its depth. As soon as one man stepped out of a job – or was pushed out – there were ten waiting to take his place. My father who had a young and growing family to support must have been sick with worry during all this time, hence his preoccupation which I interpreted as coldness and aloofness.

There were occasional jewelled moments. I remember Christmas when my father and mother prepared a Christmas tree, and lighted candles were a “must” for my father. I remember how he used to bring home the Mickey Mouse Weekly with its coloured cartoons for us children every Friday night. And there were the hidden presents always produced after I had gone to sleep the evening before my birthday, so that I should discover them when I awoke in the morning – my mother also played a part in this, of course. I remember the only occasion when I played football with my father – one twilit evening on Hackney Common as the sun went down and we finally could no longer see the ball. I would not exchange this golden memory for any money in the world.

So my father worked hard for his family during a time of unparalleled economic difficulty, and I, only half understanding the problem, thought that he was very reliable, but distant.

With a background of generations of coalmine labourers, invariably cheated and swindled by the proprietors, my father hated naked capitalism and was convinced of the validity of the tenets of humanitarian socialism. His unalterable belief was: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” This definition alone will indicate that he was never a communist, although, in common with so many men of good will in England in the twenties and thirties, the abject failure of the Russian social experiment grieved him.

Settled in London, a permanent resident of the Borough of Hackney, he began to work long hard hours for the British Labour Party. By the introduction of a socialist system the working man would at last get a fair go, men of good will and economic understanding would unite the world, and war and poverty would be no more. If these ideals seem empty and illusory in the affluent latter part of the twentieth century, they most certainly did not in the nineteen twenties. At that time the world was emerging from the utter carnage of the first Great War, but all that greeted the heroes returned from the battlefield were poverty, class distinction and more poverty. Never was a revolution closer at hand in England than during the late twenties and early thirties.

In addition to his political activities, my Dad began attending evening classes where he commenced the study of electrical engineering. Thus, although he always did his duty by his family, my Dad inspired in me feelings of awe and respect rather than close affection. It was clear to me that he was enormously intelligent. I did not think that I would ever be able to obtain his clarity of thought and power of intellect.

I remember that there was one day when I turned over in my childish mind what would happen if my Dad were without a job – a thought that haunted everybody during the depression. I thought: “He is our father – he will have to look after us somehow. It is his duty”. Then, as I considered it further, it suddenly flashed upon me that my worries were without foundation. My father was so intelligent that he would always be able to support us. Furthermore, it was a duty from which he would never shrink because, if he was nothing else, he was the kind of man to whom principle and duty were the most important things in life.

From that moment on, I was never afraid again. Although I was very young, I understood clearly that despite the fact that we were poor, we were as secure as any family could ever be because my father united us and would always protect us, whilst my mother’s love for us was unbounded.

Parents have such an important influence on children. Some things learnt in childhood almost unconsciously from parents can affect one’s whole future outlook. I remember, when I was very young, before I went to school, I would make paper boats from pieces of torn newspaper, in a fashion taught to me by my mother. During the winter months, when we had a fire going in our small living room upstairs at Frampton Park Road, I would put the paper boats at the edge of the grate, then watch as they exploded into flames.

I would pretend that they were German battleships from the First World War, torpedoed by allied submarines. One evening, I sat by the fire watching one of my paper boats burning, and saying quietly, “The torpedo has struck. The boat’s on fire. All the Germans are jumping into the sea and getting drowned…..”.

My father from his chair said suddenly in a sharp voice: “You’re not to say that, do you hear? Just stop it. It’s a terrible thing in wartime for ships to be torpedoed and people drowned”. I have never forgotten that remark. The truth of it cut into my childish play and showed me the reality in a way that has never left me. I did not play my burning boats game again.

My father claimed to be an agnostic. But his biblical and social principles were better than those of any cleric that I have ever met.

In our area of London there lived a large Jewish minority. Although we lived cheek by jowl there was little intermingling. The Jews kept to themselves and so did the goyim. Frampton Park Road was a Christian street, although there was a synagogue in Devonshire Road. This street intersected Frampton Park Road about half a mile up towards Clapton. In the opposite direction, only about sixty yards from us, Frampton Park Road crossed Well Street, changing its name to St. Thomas’s Road, and becoming a pure Jewish street for about a mile, right up to Gore Road and Victoria Park. There was a synagogue a few hundred yards down from Well Street, and on Saturdays, bearded men in long caftans, tall silk hats, or homburg hats used to discuss earnestly and gesticulating matters of importance in harsh, guttural Yiddish. No doubt the finer points of Talmudic Law were at issue. But, of course, in those days, I had no idea what the Talmud was.

The visible presence of a sizable and quite different minority gave rise to a deal of anti Semitic feeling. The 653 trolleybus, which ran between Upper Clapton and Mile End carrying many Jewish workers from their homes to their jobs in Whitechapel, became known as “The Palestine Express”. It was a joke, but one with a faintly unpleasant savour. Neither were the peace, love and harmony of our neighbourhood helped by the shocking unemployment existing at the time. These strange foreigners (thought the goyim) must surely be stealing jobs which native born, red-blooded Englishmen ought to have had. It never occurred to them, of course, that an Englishman could also be a Jew. Christians faintly disliked their Jewish neighbours. For their part, the Jews faintly distrusted the Christians.

One day, struggling to solve this problem (I must have been about nine years old), I said to my father, “Dad, do you think we ought to stop the Jews from coming to this country – because they’re taking our jobs?” My father stopped what he was doing, looked at me very seriously, then bent down so that he could talk to me face to face. “Listen son.” he said, “Always remember that if a man comes to this country, works hard and honestly, and keeps the laws of the country, then he has as much right to be here as you or I have.”

I have a crystal clear recollection of that statement of my father, and I believe it to be the most important remark that anybody ever made to me in all my life. It was a never to be forgotten signpost towards a satisfactory philosophy.

Ch 2 p 1 Uncle Arthur and My Dog

April 6, 2020April 6, 2020 helixtandl4 Comments

The small room on the mezzanine floor of our house assigned to my Uncle Arthur was littered with old radio parts, clocks, pieces of gramophones, and similar junk. In those early days of radio – known as “wireless” at that time – my uncle displayed an ability to put together all sorts of receivers, from crystal sets to super heterodynes. We had no electricity in our house – only gaslight. So he was always making up huge batteries comprised of dozens of used dry cells obtained from the garbage tips. These he wired together and placed in water. He also had excellent ability to mend watches and clocks and to put together bicycles. Unfortunately the one thing he lacked was the ability to capitalise on these skills. At the best of times a “loner”, his continued unemployment over the years had sapped his self-confidence and self respect to the point where he had become withdrawn. He sought refuge in dreams of winning fortunes in one of the many newspaper competitions. He became a misogynist, purely because he could not relate to women, and affected to despise those he could not get on with.

My uncle was a victim of that terrible depression which followed the First World War. The poverty and economic malaise of that time ruined people’s lives, not only from the material point of view, but also psychologically. In war one has cases of mental break down. Economic depressions with resulting unemployment also give rise to tremendous upsets and deep mental strain.

Tell any man for long enough that he is stupid and useless, and he will eventually come to believe that he is stupid and useless. Deprive a man long enough of the opportunity to use his skills, and he will lose those skills. Deprive a man long enough of the opportunity to work and he will forget how to work, and eventually not want to work. This was the invisible but terrible abyss into which my uncle had fallen. He had lost incentive and he had lost self-confidence. Thereafter, every idle day increased his disadvantage.

My uncle’s reactions to our difficult environment enraged my grandfather. He, too, was under strain. He, too, for one reason or another had found difficulty in obtaining employment. So he had gone out and created his own job by becoming a barrow boy. It was a man’s duty and sacred trust to bring some money at least into the family to help keep things going. Wake up England, for God’s sake! Why did my uncle not try harder?

My grandfather’s outbursts of rage alternated with moods of deep disappointment that his only son had not made a better job of facing up to life’s difficulties. There was thus the worst kind of antagonism between the two. It was the antagonism of a son who knows that he has disappointed his father, and of a father who has been disappointed by his son. Although everybody knew that it was there, for the most part it was silent. However, there was the occasional explosion.

I remember one occasion – I was very young – when a quarrel broke out between my grandfather and my uncle as I was sitting on the polished fender in front of the fire in the downstairs living room. The exchange of words became heated. Suddenly my uncle picked up my grandfather’s greasy old bowler hat from the sideboard and smashed his fist into the top, denting it. My grandfather gave a roar and charged towards him. Just in time my mother came dashing down the stairs and pushed herself between them, screaming at them to stop. I had got up and was standing in the centre of the room, my heart beating wildly, terribly afraid of the strength of these two men, far bigger than I, who shook the floor as they lumbered to meet each other. But my mother was between them, and my grandmother now appeared to put a stop to the fight.

I have rarely been so upset in all my life. To see a father and a son fighting is terrible. My uncle, tight-lipped, turned, put his tattered and dirty cap on his balding head, snapped a pair of bicycle clips around his ankles, went into the passage where his old bicycle stood, and was gone. He did not return until very late that night. God only knows what thoughts went through his mind as he cycled around the streets of London.

My grandfather, with the slam of the front door, sat down on a chair, hid his face with the palm of one hand, and began to sob. It was the first and last time I ever saw him cry. It tore my heart out.

My mother put her arm around his shoulders.

“Never mind, Dad. Never mind.”

My grandfather sniffed a little, and then got up. He carefully pushed his greasy bowler hat back into shape, put it on his head and struggled into his overcoat. Then he too was gone with a slam of the door. He returned earlier then my uncle, for the pubs closed at half past ten. He was heavy footed, lurched along the passage, and went straight to his bed.

If, in some ways, my uncle was the problem child of the household, in other ways he was indispensable – to me, at least. Near to where we lived was a very large expanse of open ground known as Hackney Marshes. Every Saturday my uncle would take me to Hackney Marshes with a penny fishing net and a jam jar with a piece of string tied around its neck to make a handle. For hours on end we would sit together on the banks of the River Lea, fishing for the bright, darting minnows that filled its waters. Sometimes we were lucky enough to catch a wriggling, white-bellied newt, looking like an outraged miniature dinosaur and frantically waving a long, gold-edged tail. After my uncle rolled up his trousers, we would paddle side by side in the soft, warm mud of the shallower parts, bound together in the earnest search for “tiddlers”, understanding each other’s deepest thoughts without exchanging a word, the cares of the world completely forgotten.

Once a week, if my mother had a few pence to spare for us, my uncle would take me by the hand in the evening and lead me round the corner to the local picture house. There we would sit in the front row and watch the latest screen adventures of Miss Tallulah Bankhead, Mr Gary Cooper, Miss Jean Harlow, and a very young Mr Clarke Gable.

“The Empress” picture theatre had been rebuilt in the early thirties and, in the fashion of the day, a Wurlitzer organ had been installed which would rise on a lift during the interval. Spotlights would play on it from all parts of the theatre and popular selections would be given by the organist to the accompaniment of appropriate coloured slides flashed on the screen. The organist was a musician of rather better than average ability whose surname was Milton. He never failed to get an ovation after a performance, which he acknowledged by turning to the audience and bowing low before resuming his seat and pressing a button, which turned off all the lights and set in motion the descent of the organ and its player into the orchestra pit. They billed him as “Milton at the Mighty Wurlitzer”, but we locals always used to talk about going to see “Milty at the Mighty”.

One day Milton disappeared, and another organist was engaged. I cannot remember his name. He could not have been anywhere nearly as spectacular. A few weeks later, in the Sunday News of the World we read a story to the effect that Milton had committed suicide on Dartmoor. The poor fellow had apparently cut his throat.

We take people for granted, never thinking that they, too, have their problems. Many times I had watched Milton turn round and smile as he acknowledged applause after a performance. Yet that smile must have hidden a deep and intractable problem that nobody even suspected.

My uncle probably took my father’s place in my early childhood, for Dad was engaged in other struggles at this time. Dad did, however, spend some of his time with me, and I particularly remember the occasion when he took me to Club Row, that Sunday morning flea market of east end of London, to buy me a dog.

As all Cockneys know, hundreds of dogs are sold every Sunday at Club Row. You can’t move for fox terriers, greyhounds, chows, Churchillian bulldogs, squash-nosed pekes, canine freaks, Dalmatians, Alsatians and innumerable yelping mongrels, the results of clandestine canine encounters behind the dustbins. Whichever way you turn you get furry bundles of life thrust into your face while hoarse voices invite you to “Buy a dog puppy, mate”. They are all “dog puppies”. Bitches on heat can create traffic jams in London’s narrow streets with their swollen canine populations. In Club Row it is debatable which are louder, the voices of the dog salesmen or the excited barks of the animals themselves. As you push your way through the crowd, one hand on your wallet, pedigree papers are waved wildly in front of you. It is said that if you take a dog into Club Row and lose him at one end of the street, you can be one hundred per cent certain that you will be able to buy him back from somebody at the other end.

There are literally hundreds of dogs to choose from in Club Row. How then could one possibly pick a “stumer”? Well, my dear old Dad did. He was a highly literate and most intelligent man, and I was so happy to be with him in Club Row buying a dog. But I think that it was after we bought Pat that I first realised that my father’s judgement was not infallible.

My father was a humanitarian, a socialist, a staunch Labour supporter with an innate sympathy for the underdog. Perhaps he felt sorry for this miserable, watery-eyed terrier with a lot of Irish in him and a lot of unidentifiable antecedents to boot. Perhaps he wanted to rescue him from his dirty, unshaven and clearly unsympathetic owner, Anyhow, he paid ten shillings for him, which was quite a lot in those days, even though a greasy lead was thrown in, and I walked away the proud owner of a dog.

For about thirty seconds, Pat tried to get back to his previous owner. Then he completely forgot about him and devoted himself to a continuous olfactory exploration of the sides of the houses lining the streets. If he came across something interesting, you had to stop until he had satisfied his curiosity, otherwise you would have to drag him stiff legged half way along the street before he would admit defeat and recommence his nasal examination of the area. This was typical of Pat whom we quickly found to be his own dog; who considered nobody but himself.

He had seemed to be very contented during the walk home. But as soon as we had settled him in the downstairs living room in an old box with a couple of sacks, he turned moody, showed the whites of his eyes viciously, growled when I stroked him, and tried to snap off one of my fingers. We optimistically hoped that this was just due to his being in a strange house. However we subsequently learned that it was his normal behaviour after a walk, when he was tired, making it clear to all and sundry that he wanted to rest.

There was a great deal of Irish and a great deal of terrier in Pat. If he was annoyed, he never hesitated to show it, and once he got his teeth into something, he would never let go. He hated the postman, whose knock drove him berserk. He would grasp the postman’s trousers in his teeth and you literally had to prise his jaws open before he let the unfortunate man go. The postman approached our house and we awaited his arrival with equal trepidation.

We tried to keep Pat locked up whenever we expected the mail to be delivered. But Pat was cunning. Sometimes he would slip out quickly when the front door was opened. He might disappear up the street for a couple of hours, pursuing his private affairs. Then he would arrive back at exactly the same time as the postman, and Kathleen Mavourneen! The donnybrook was really on and we had great trouble.

Motorcyclists, too, used to annoy Pat intensely. If my grandmother happened to be talking at the door and a motorcyclist passed, Pat would come dashing along the passage from the interior of the house, slither into the street, struggling madly to make a turn, then take off like a rocket. Our street was a long one, and motorcyclists took the opportunity to accelerate. But Pat was a ball of muscle with plenty of stamina. He would rapidly pick up speed and shoot away until he was only a small white and brown barking dot on the horizon.

He was jealous, too, and poor old Mary Anne, our cat who had formerly graced the hearth in the downstairs living room, when she was not roaming the back yards of the neighbourhood, now found herself banished to the coal cellar.

Pat was a fighting dog, and it was unsafe to take him out without a leash. Even then it could be hazardous. Pat never encountered another dog without going for the unfortunate animal bald headed. Neither did it matter what size they were. If they were small, Pat shook them like rats and returned flushed with victory, entirely impervious to the representations made by their hysterical and irate owners. He had won the war – let the politicians talk about the peace. If the dogs were big, then there was simply more for Pat to get hold of. He would still have a go, and return bloody and rather irritable, but unrepentant. On these occasions my grandfather, who recognised in Pat a similar moody, dissatisfied personality, would gently sponge his wounds with pieces of cheesecloth dipped in olive oil.

Pat blotted his copybook almost beyond redemption when he broke into the rabbit hutch at the end of the garden. For a few moments he was in an Irish terrier’s paradise, chasing startled rabbits all over the flowerbeds and snapping their necks one by one. After this his fate hung in the balance for a long while. But my mother used all her powers of advocacy and my father finally sanctioned a reprieve. Sadly, Pat sealed his fate a few months later.

A chicken coop had replaced the rabbit hutch and we had in it several birds we were fattening for Christmas. I came into the garden one day to find the coop suspiciously quiet, and suddenly noticed that a large hole had been made in the corner of the wire netting. Pat had been at work again and all the birds were dead.

That afternoon my father led him away, Pat jumping gaily about in expectation of a run on Hackney Marshes. They finished up instead at the local vet. Pat was still expecting fun and games, and scrambled happily on to the table. He was barely aware of the injection that put him quietly to sleep.

Ch 1 part 2 Gran’dad and family.

April 4, 2020 helixtandl4 Comments

Sometimes my grandfather would have meat left over, and as there was no refrigeration, this became a problem in summer when the weather was warm and flies abounded. My grandfather would soak the meat in a solution of brine placed in the tin tub where we children had our occasional baths.

In the houses of those days there were no facilities for baths or showers. If you were an adult, you paid a visit to the public baths in another part of the borough. If you were a child, Mum gave you a sluice in a tin tub on the Wash House floor.

Sometimes the meat would remain in its brine bath over the weekend. On Monday, in spite of all efforts to keep it clean and free of pollution, maggots could be seen crawling. The meat was an investment in money that my grandfather could not afford to lose. He would scrub the maggots off, then plunge the meat again into a solution of water and potassium permanganate crystals to give it back its red colour. Somehow, with his blarney and salesmanship, he always managed to get rid of it. Nobody seemed to complain, and fortunately none of his customers ever got food poisoning.

My grandfather had a sardonic sense of humour, and was an eternal nonconformist. I had picked up an ancient typewriter at the Kingsland Waste flea market, so my grandfather got me to type out little cards with the words:

I never did figure out what a “meat banger” was, unless it referred to the way he used to chop and hack at his pieces of meat. However, my grandfather took great pleasure in distributing the cards with a lordly air to his rather bemused customers.

His insistence on calling himself Dick Hunter, instead of Arthur Hunt gave untold trouble in later years after his death, when setting the family history record straight. My grandfather’s sense of humour frequently kept us from despair. On one occasion there was a plague of black beetles in the Wash House where he used to cut up his meat and he was anxious to get rid of them in case he received a visit from a Health inspector, who might forbid him to trade. When putting down powder, plugging holes and fumigations had all failed to kill the pests, I asked him one day

“How are we going to get rid of them, Gran’dad?”

“We’ll get rid of them all right, Jimmie”

“But how?”

He thought for a moment.

“Well, I’ve got an idea. I think I’ll catch one of them beetles and paint ‘im blue”.

“Paint ‘im blue?”

“Yes. Then I’ll let ‘im loose. All the other beetles will mistake ‘im for a policeman and run away to escape being arrested. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

My grandfather was vastly amused, but it didn’t seem very funny to me. I thought we still had a serious problem.

My grandfather was basically a very kind man. We were all on the edge of insolvency in those days, and many a Friday I would go with my grandmother to the pawn shop to pawn the sheets for a few bob to tide us over until some money came in from somewhere. However my grandfather had his stock in trade – there was always some meat somewhere in the house.

Although my father had permanent work his wages were meagre. But there was always a joint of meat or some stewing steak for my mother when she wanted it. Gran’dad would come upon her unexpectedly, one of his better portions of meat in his hand and say, “There you are, Nellie. Get that down your scrags. It’ll make the kids strong.”

On Sundays, too, when my grandfather was carving the joint in the downstairs living room – my mother cooked her own dinner late on this day – he always set aside meat for me, which my grandmother made up with mustard into a juicy sandwich. I used to take my sandwich, sit on the polished iron fender before the open fire, and bury myself in the reminiscences of Gracie Fields, or the serialised biography of Edgar Wallace, or any other “confessions” carried that Sunday by The News of the World.

During the week I used to come to my grandfather every evening and receive the sum of one penny for The Evening News and one halfpenny for myself. Twice a week I also used to receive the sum of twopence farthing for a quarter of an ounce of ‘British Oak’ shag, which my grandfather would smoke in a foul old clay pipe.

With this money I used to trot across Well Street to Mr Williams, the newsagent, and buy the paper. On my way back I would stop at Ernie’s, the sweetshop, and lay out my halfpenny as advantageously as possible on sweets. I would dawdle as much as possible going back in order to read most of the news before my grandfather. What news it was, too! The test matches – Don Bradman was always scoring – the record breaking runs by Sir Malcolm Campbell in his “Bluebird” – The flights of Miss Amy Johnson. The international outlook didn’t bother us in those happy, far-off days. Sometimes, when I hadn’t finished the newspaper, we would have arguments about who was to have it. My grandfather thought that having paid for the paper, plus an additional delivery fee, he should have first claim. These arguments were generally settled by an amicable compromise in which my grandfather would take one half and I the other.

My grandfather loved reading.

He had left school at twelve, but he loved to read books. They were restricted for the most part to the works of Edgar Wallace and Nat Gould, the two most famous writers of thrillers and racy tales of the day. But I would wager that my grandfather had read almost every book that those two prolific writers had put out. Gran’dad would sit in a chair in the downstairs room, stockinged feet on the mantelpiece, the rear part of his legs presented to the fire for warmth, and he would read for hours. I have often wondered what kind of a man he might have been had he had the opportunity for a better education and had his interest in reading been channelled in a productive direction.

It never occurred to me that my grandfather was mortal until he had a serious illness in the early days of the 1939-45 war. He had contracted a carbuncle on the back of the neck, and had to spend several weeks in the Hackney Hospital. This was a place in which he was at first terrified to stay. For local tradition had it that once one went “into the infirmary”, who knew if or when one would come out. My grandfather did come out, but he had shrunken and lost weight, and his skin was an unhealthy yellow. I was also growing up rapidly, and my own increasing weight and height probably added to the impression. But my grandfather was never again the man he used to be.

In October 1941 I was called up for the army, and some months later found myself stationed a few miles outside London at the town of Staines. I got home for weekend leaves, and saw my grandparents occasionally. They had been bombed out twice, and were now living in a cramped little tumbledown house about ten minutes walk from their original home. My grandfather became weaker and more shrivelled. I think that the disruption caused by the air raids and the war must have contributed to his ill health. He, like so many others of that terrible time, were also affected by the snapping of the link which had bound him to the same house and the same street for thirty years. (The street had now disappeared and only a rubble-strewn waste of land remained).

I missed visiting my grandparents one weekend, and when I came next to the flat in which my parents were living, (the local Council had finally allocated it to them because their former home had been destroyed), my father met me with a serious face.

“We’ve got bad news for you, son.”

I could feel within me before he spoke further what it was all about.

“Gran’dad’s dead?”

“Yes”.

One night my grandmother had awoken to find my grandfather struggling to get into bed. His face seemed partially paralysed, and he could not speak. He had been to the toilet and must suddenly have collapsed. They took him to hospital, but he died shortly afterwards. They said that he had died from the debilitating effects of a carbuncle on the back of the neck and cirrhosis of the liver.

My poor, dear old Gran’dad. My grandmother told me that she had the feeling that he did not want to live any longer. The mean streets, the narrow life, the continual work, work, work for nothing had finally filled him with disgust. He wanted to rest. I hope that in his last moments he experienced peace and rest.

My grandfather was always so hard up that he could not afford to put stamps on his old age pension card. So under the English system of those days, he did not qualify for the old age pension until he reached the age of seventy. He was sixty nine years old when he died – within a few months of drawing his old age pension. He worked hard every day of his life, first to look after his family, and second to make other people rich. At least he could have boasted that he never took anything without working damned hard for it and that he never accepted a favour from anyone.

My maternal grandmother was a small, wrinkled woman with a slightly humped back and work-worn, thick-fingered hands. Her long grey hair was plaited and coiled in a bun at the back of her head, and she wore a fringe in front. The money my grandfather earned was never enough to pay all the bills, so my grandmother was invariably out charring at other people’s houses to make up the difference. A regular client of hers was an old Russian Jewish woman even more wrinkled than she, who lived a few streets away, and through the generosity of “Old Booba”, candlesticks, matzos and kosher delicacies used to find their way into our home. My grandmother worked, if anything, even harder than my grandfather. I never knew her to rest. If she wasn’t scrubbing somebody else’s floor, she was scrubbing her own; or she was washing clothes in the big, steaming copper in the Wash House; or she would be sweeping, beating carpets, cooking or seeing in some way to the comfort of others.

She only allowed herself one luxury. Every evening at about nine o’clock she would take a coloured, ornamented jug to the pub just at the end of the street and bring herself back half a pint of bitters. I think that she deserved it.

My grandmother was fond of all her grandchildren, but especially of me. When I was born I had a deformed face – some would say that that is still the case. However, my grandmother massaged my face for hours when I was young and eventually restored it to something like normal balance. Nan was always prepared to make me a strong cup of milky tea with a new crust from a cottage loaf, to which I was particularly partial. Being only a child in those days, I never thought to consider how much butter and bread and tea cost and how hard Nan worked physically to get those little extras.

My siblings were two sisters and a brother. My elder sister, Nellie, born in 1926 was the student of the family, always sitting in a corner studying. My second sister, Dolly, born in 1928, became an archivist at the London Guildhall. My brother Harry was born in 1931. Of all the family he displays most the intelligence of my father and the humour and business orientation of my grandfather. He started work in the London Water Board, and later went into partnership with a friend in a camera business. He did not marry until he was thirty. He then found himself short of money to buy a house and hit on an infallible way to amass enough capital to start himself off. Using his knowledge of cameras and photography, he proceeded to make moving pictures – of the type that were at that time unlawful in England, and carried a heavy penalty if detected. If they had known, my father would not have approved, my mother would have been deeply shocked, and I do not know what others might have thought. However, Harry needed money to set himself up and provide for his family. Nobody was going to give it to him, so he earned it by supplying a demand. I always thought that it was an amusing, original and enterprising example of “Foxon get up and go”. Once he achieved enough capital, Harry dropped the movie business and settled into successful family life.

Ch 1 part 1 Hackney

April 4, 2020April 4, 2020 helixtandl2 Comments

I was born on 26^th April 1922 in my parents’ bedroom in Frampton Park Road, Hackney, London. The grandiloquent name of the street hid narrow-gutted houses of small dimensions, which would today be condemned.

The house in which we lived was one of a very long, hundred year old terrace of houses, slowly sinking into the London clay. I can remember, as a child, watching the moon through a crack in the brick wall, which seemed to get wider as the years went by. Periodically the repairman came to patch it up, but it always reappeared. We rented the house for a few shillings a week, and the landlord’s rent collector was a remote and austere man, who lived in another part of the neighbourhood. I suppose the frontage of the house would have been about fifteen feet. Entering into a narrow passage, first on the right was the parlour, used as such only at Christmas. For the rest of the year it was my grandparents’ bedroom. The next room on the right was the kitchen-cum-dining room. It had a large open hearth and a bright steel fender in front of it, kept scrupulously burnished by my grandmother. Here I sat for hours as a child reading books about cowboys and Indians. At the end of the passage was what we called “The Wash House”. This contained a copper with room for a wood fire underneath for doing the weekly washing, a large old fashioned mangle with timber rollers and a handle on a huge iron fly-wheel, a gas stove, and a cement sink with a single tap for cold water. Here we washed our clothes, washed the crockery, washed ourselves, and cooked. The Wash House also contained a large chopping block where my grandfather, who was a self-employed butcher, chopped up his meat prior to offering it to the public. Sometimes, at night, huge black beetles would invade the Wash House, attracted by the residue of small pieces of meat. We conducted continuous warfare against them, but never let on to the health authorities.

Half way along the passage on the left hand side, was an even narrower staircase. This led to a landing and the entrance to the toilet, and a small mezzanine appendage or attic overlooking the pocket-handkerchief back garden. (There was no front garden, all the terrace houses giving directly on to the footpath). In this room lived and slept my Uncle Arthur, my mother’s brother, who was a leather cutter by trade, but who for most of his life was unemployed. (These were the days of the great depression in England). From the landing, four more stairs changed direction and led to the two top rooms of the house. One was a bedroom, the other a general living room. In the living room we children did our homework, had our meals with our parents, and generally spent the evening with them. In the bedroom three large beds were jammed around the walls. My two parents slept in one bed, my two sisters in another, and my brother and I in the third. While my mother was giving birth to her children, we were scattered about the other parts of the house. At these times I remember my father telling me in his Yorkshire dialect that “Mam was poorly”.

In those days, with chimneys from two million households belching coal smoke into the air, London was a fog-ridden city. Sometimes, when the pea-soupers came down, you almost literally could not see a hand in front of your face, nor yet find the street where you had lived all your life. If you blew your nose, particles of grime from the fog appeared on your handkerchief. Many a foggy morning I can remember lying in bed looking up at the recently lit gas light on the wall of our communal bedroom, and listening to my father clatter downstairs, slam the front door and walk to work. He always walked to his job at Hackney Wick to save the bus fare. As his footsteps echoed down the street, I would hear him hawking and coughing. The fog upset his wheezy chest, never too good in the early morning.

We children had the entire run of the house and the small garden at the back. However, whilst there were no restrictions as far as we were concerned, my grandparents generally kept themselves to the ground floor, while Mum and Dad kept to their two top rooms. My uncle spent hours gazing gloomily out of the window of his small bedroom, unable to get work, losing confidence in himself. Sometimes Barney, who ran the handbag factory in Well Street, just down the road, would offer him a few weeks’ work. Barney always wore a smart overcoat and a brown trilby hat, and I knew when he had been around because of the lingering smell of the cigarettes, which he chain-smoked. But the work always cut out after a few weeks or a few months, and my uncle would be unemployed again. The depression and the general poverty of the time ensured that the lumpen proletariat² could never get off their backsides, no matter how hard they tried. The worst thing was that men of good potential were psychologically downgraded and destroyed by their continuing inability to get work.

However those in positions of privilege, with the advantages of a better education and assured income, never ceased to turn up their noses at people whom they considered socially inferior. So the joke and the curse of English society, the class system, continued its merry way, one stratum of society looking down on another, but up to somebody else, until you arrived at the Establishment who controlled all the wealth and power, and they, of course, looked down on everybody.

The lumpen proletariat, for their part, were resigned to their lot. Every Friday and Saturday night the pubs were full, and many men and women spent what little extra money they had on getting riotously drunk. On these two evenings, as chucking out time arrived, crowds of revellers would wend their way home singing songs such as “Nellie Dean” and “She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” beloved of East End Londoners.

My grandfather was not a singer, but when he was moody or discouraged, he was a drinker. He had once sworn off the demon drink for two years, but it was a temporary interlude. For most of his life, like most East Enders, who had no other future except poverty, he liked his beer.

My grandfather and grandmother with whom we lived – the people who were always “Gran’dad” and “Nan” to me – were my mother’s parents. My father’s parents were coalmine workers, up in Yorkshire. Although it was only half a day’s journey by car in today’s terms, most of the time they could not afford the train fare during the depression, let alone a car. So we hardly ever saw my father’s parents.

My maternal grandfather was a short, pot-bellied man with a broad nose and tremendously strong arms. One of his grandmothers, according to the family story, had been a Jewish girl – the family name was believed to be Simmons. This would not be surprising as there had always been a large Jewish minority in the East End of London, and some intermarriage was to be expected. My grandfather’s left wrist, which had been broken when he was a lad, had never set properly, and was crooked and gnarled. He strengthened it by means of a greasy leather strap. His dark hair was thinning and starting to turn grey. Sometimes, when he had had a sluice in the Wash House and was feeling good, he would break into a favourite ditty. I never heard it before or since, but I always remember it with a smile.

“Once upon a time

When the birds shit lime

And the monkeys chewed tobacco ……”

This was Arthur Hunt, or Dick the Butcher as he was known in the neighbourhood. My grandfather’s father was John Hunt, by profession a coal heaver, but grandfather was brought up in an orphanage.

One never worries much about family antecedents when one is young. Subsequently those who might have been able to supply information have themselves passed on. I do know that both my grandfather and my grandmother were born in 1872, and were twenty-two years old when they married. They had met “at the orphanage”, so my grandmother also must have been brought up there. The marriage record shows that at the time of her marriage my grandmother’s father was a carpenter, (deceased). Whatever the explanation, they must both have had a difficult childhood.

When he was young my grandfather was apprenticed to a butcher, learnt his trade well, and as a young man came to own a horse and cart and a stall in the local market. Alas, for all his blarney and expertise at butchery, my grandfather had one fatal flaw. Every time he made a profit he went into the nearest pub and passed it over the counter to the publican. My grandmother finished up running the stall in the market, while my mother and uncle, as children, played underneath. Meanwhile Dick the Butcher lorded it in the public bar.

My grandfather lost his stall, and since he was unable to work for a boss due to a deep rooted dislike of taking orders, finished up pushing a barrow of meat around the streets to make a living.

The daily routine, as I remember it, went something like this: at about half past three in the morning he would get up from bed, go into the Wash House and brew a saucepanful of strong tea which, for some reason known only to himself, he would call “Australian Tea”. He would share the tea with our cat, who was known as Mary Anne, then wash and shave and take the old, grinding, double decker tram to Smithfield Market. Here he would buy enough meat to last him the day. If the price was right and the weather not too warm, he might buy enough to last him longer. He would put the meat in a sack, hump it on his shoulder and bring it back by tram to our house. In the Wash House it would be cut up on the wooden block and placed in two cane hampers, which my grandfather always kept scrupulously scrubbed and clean. He would then walk across to the house of a plump, florid, middle aged lady who made a living hiring out the many hand-barrows she owned. If I remember rightly the charge was threepence for the morning and sixpence for a whole day. The hampers with the cut meat would be placed on the barrow, and my grandfather would push them around the streets until he had sold the lot.

At one stage (I would have been about eleven or twelve) I used to push the barrow for my grandfather every Saturday morning, when there was no school. He used to introduce me to all his customers as his grandson. I felt out of place and shy, but I was very proud to be helping my grandfather in his work. He used to give me sixpence for my morning’s chores, which was a great deal of money for a small boy in those days.

Jim’s own introduction

April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 helixtandl2 Comments

Dedication

TO IRENA, MY BELOVED KIBBUTZNIK, LOYAL WIFE
AND DEVOTED MOTHER TO OUR CHILDREN

This Ripping Yarn is dedicated to Lucinda, a.k.a. Mrs Irene Foxon, who insisted that these factual events be written down.

“Although you always did deplore
My frequent locking of your door,
With gentle, kind and boundless tact
You pardoned this egregious act;
And swore – despite my mortal sin –
You’d save me from the loony bin.
Should I grow frail and get the flutters
You’d keep me from the House of Nutters.
And I — to show that I’m true blue –
Will do as much, my dear, for you.“

My life story is basically the prosaic tale of a boy from the English working class who completely failed in his ambition to become a journalist and creative writer.
Nevertheless, he escaped from the East End of London and the English class system, which had held his family in thrall for generations. It was ironic that this should be at a time when class distinction and the petty differences separating man from man had at last began to break down in England. I came to Australia, which I thought to be a land of greater opportunity at the age of twenty-seven. I had nothing, but I worked hard and managed to survive, as did millions of others in a cutthroat capitalist society. (It would have been cut throat had it been a communist society or any other society. For the nature of man is such that although he is a social animal, he is also, and paradoxically, cunning, individualistic and self-serving).
The story of Jim Foxon, Australian and ex-Pom, son of Harry Foxon, ex-Yorkshire coalminer and Mayor, was partly written in my 59th year, but much of it is taken from my notes and diaries written when I was in my early twenties and early thirties. Although there are some things, which might have been better excluded, I have left them in because they help to give a clearer picture of “the artist as a young man”. And even in conversations, where dialogue indicates that I had total recall, I had written the matter up with a good recollection of the event, so the recall was probably reasonably accurate.

Although my intention in writing this story is to give my family a stronger sense of identity, I also hope that it may in some way entertain or benefit others.
Jim (December 1979)

What is Jim’s Book?

March 31, 2020April 2, 2020 helixtandl1 Comment

Jim loved writing. At nineteen his goal in life was to be a top notch journalist. His first step on the ladder was for a hairdressing magazine in Soho, London. Despite WW2 intervening, changing his career, and moving across the world to Australia, Jim continued to write stories, poetry and his diaries.

A lifetime later, he compiled his notes and recounted his life on typewritten pages, which he then bound and presented to his daughter Trish.