Читать книгу A Life of Pride - Alan G Pride - Страница 24

We left at 5p.m on August 29^th, 1951 – my 21^st birthday. A crowd of friends and relatives saw us off from Broken Hill Airport. On the flight to Sydney in a DC3, I sat next to a girl called June Gough, who later became the famous singer, June Bronhill. (Her family used to live next door to us and I would pinch grapes off their grapevine.) We arrived at Mascot four hours later, thrilled by the sight of Sydney by night from the air.

The ship sailed five days later for a voyage of six weeks, via Sri Lanka, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea and up the Suez Canal. We were a couple of country boys, free at last and loving every minute of it. The calm weather, flying fish, exotic ports and bargain shopping; the other ships we passed, like the Orontes and the Pettah. We stared at the busy military camps along the Suez Canal and the Egyptian civilians jumping up and down along the banks, exposing themselves to us! They detested the English.

Our next stops were at Naples, Marseilles and Gibraltar, beautiful ports, but still militarised after the war and showing a lot of bomb damage. We saw a dozen or more hulks of ships on the banks of Marseilles Harbour, sunk during the war, including the hulk of the Orient Line’s Orford.

We finally set foot in England on October 10, after more than five weeks at sea. What with all our impulsive shopping and sightseeing, Reg and I had only 30/- between us. We went into a bar near the docks at Tilbury to consider our next move, me wearing my ‘Broken Hill teenage best’ clothes: wide-bottomed trousers, embroidered black and yellow shirt, chunky-heeled western boots and a trilby hat. A seedy-looking bloke sidled up to me and muttered, “What’s yer racket?” Obviously he took me for a gangster. I was taken aback, sure that I was the last word in style!

We caught a train into London. Someone told us that Paddington was a good place for accommodation, so I pawned my nice silver cigarette case and lighter for £7. Off we went, knocking on doors asking for lodgings. Funny, all these women along the street would say, “No!” and slam the doors. Finally, a helpful woman explained to these naïve boys that we were actually in a street of brothels.

That certainly wasn’t what we wanted, so we kept walking and finally came to a B&B sign in Stanhope Terrace. For £2/5- a week, we got an attic room with a roof so low that we had to bend over to put our shirts on. It didn’t matter though; next day we got work at Handley Page aircraft factory in Cricklewood, me as a fitter and turner and Reg as my assistant, just like back home. So soon after the war, there were plenty of jobs around.

Our hours would be 8 a.m ‘till 5.45 p.m. At morning tea time, we headed to the canteen and the first person I spoke to there was a pretty young London girl, Patricia Varney. Naturally I chatted her up and she liked what she saw. Not because I was a cheeky young bloke and fancied myself as a chick magnet, but because she’d just been to the pictures and seen the dramatic ‘40,000 Horsemen’ starring Chips Rafferty, about the Aussies in World War I.

This made me seem more glamorous than the English boys she’d been dating, she told me later.

Outside work hours, I threw myself into sightseeing, movies and dances. I didn't dance much myself, it was just that dances were the best places to meet girls. The weather was still mild and the London people couldn’t do enough for Reg and I when they found that we were ‘fair-dinkum Aussies’ from ‘Down Under’. I remember the election night of October 25^th. I walked from Paddington to Westminster Bridge, and back through packed streets with cheering crowds, smoke-bombs and traffic jams, as Winston Churchill was elected Prime Minister.

By early December, Reg and I had left Paddington for a much more comfortable flat closer to the factory – and to Pat, who lived with her mother in a tiny flat in Finchley Lane. I dated other English girls, but soon she was number one. She’d had a much harder upbringing than mine, being evacuated as a tiny kid out of London during the Blitz, sent to stay with an abusive family up north, and at other times taken into the Underground train tunnels with her parents to shelter from the bombs. (Because of that, she always hated being in small, closed spaces.) She remembered being carried through the London streets by her father, with the bombed city in flames all around them.

Her parents had separated and she and her mother had to work hard to make ends meet. Now they were both at the factory canteen, serving tea out of huge pots with the milk already mixed in. (They thought it funny that I expected to add my own milk.) I was soon having lots of good meals at their place, luckily for me, since I’d been spoilt by my mother and never taught to cook anything. Smoked cod, boiled in water, was the best I could do; that, or eating out at the cheap Lyon’s cafes.

With Reg in our “Broken Hill Teenage Best”!

Pat Varney.