Читать книгу The Silk Road and Beyond - Ivor Whitall - Страница 6

According to my dear old mum, babies that would fit into a pint pot and were born prematurely weren’t always likely to survive in the pre-NHS days of 1946.

But not me! Here I was, early as usual, bawling my way into this world via Leek maternity home. Ivor, a small baby with a small name.

While still very young, my family, including my brand new baby sister Patricia, were uprooted to go and live next door to an Ansells pub in Tenford, Staffordshire. The name of the pub still baffles me to this day, The Ship Inn . . . The Ship Inn! For crying out loud, there wasn’t even a culvert near the pub, let alone somewhere to park a boat, and we were at least 100 miles away from the sea.

As with many working class families in the 1940s and ’50s, life was hard, not that us kids knew it.

A cold tap and a tin bath filled with hot water boiled on the kitchen stove were the norm. Depending on your seniority and status in the family hierarchy, you might be the last person to ‘enjoy’ the, by now, lukewarm, grimy and less than salubrious bath water. How come Pat was senior to me? An unlit outside toilet that was emptied once a fortnight completed the rosy domestic picture.

“A cold tap and a tin bath filled with hot water boiled on the kitchen stove were the norm.”

Then, in 1957 we had a ‘change of fortune’ when Dad was asked if he’d be interested in managing The Ship, as the landlord and 11 of his ‘honest’ tenants had decided to abscond without paying the rent, and to add to the ignominy, pocketed the takings! Within a week we were installed in the comparative comfort of the pub. Blimey, as well as the beer on tap downstairs, we’d got hot water on tap in the bath upstairs! And . . . luxury of luxuries, it came with an indoor toilet and a chain pull flush! For us kids it was a different world as we also had unfettered access to a 2-acre field and large wood to play in.

For a while life seemed good, but Dad wasn’t a well man, having a history of pancreatic problems. To add to his woes, in 1960 he was diagnosed with gallstones and taken into hospital for a routine operation to remove them. Seemingly on the mend, a month later, once again feeling poorly, he was re-admitted. At five in the evening, Mum phoned to ask how he was, to be told, ‘He is doing well Mrs Whittall,’ and, happy with the news, she went back to running the pub. An hour later the phone rang. It was the hospital, and I could literally see the blood drain from her face as she was informed her husband, my father, had died! Poor Mum was distraught; Dad, with his history of pancreatitis, had succumbed to a major haemorrhage.

I was 14 years old and without a dad. To add insult to injury, facing my final year in school, Mum decided to move us away from all our friends and family to Pelsall, near Walsall. I felt like it was one disaster on top of another and it had a really negative effect on me. So much so that I had become an extremely angry young man. Without my mother’s knowledge, I left home and headed for the ‘bright lights’ of Blackpool, managing to find accommodation in a ‘doss house’ and a job at the infamous fun fair, working on the waltzer and big wheel. I’m not saying it was the making of me, as I was always independently minded, some might even say cussed, but my growing up was a short, sharp learning curve. I was not long a boy among men. In November, at the end of the 1961 season, my anger had dissipated enough for me to try and make a go of it back home with Mum.

“Bloody hell! I certainly knew how to pick the jobs. Still, I was as fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.”

I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I wanted to do but I had a good work ethic and was keen to earn money. For the next two or three years I tried my hand at anything and everything, which usually involved hard manual labour. From an ‘improver plasterer’, a posh word for a specialist labourer, to bread rounds man, where I passed my driving test, to delivering heat-treated metal fabrication in a Mini Pick-up, and the realisation I loved driving.

Maybe the die was cast! I was still flitting from job to job and somehow found myself driving a small Thames Trader lorry, working as a coalman at the local Co-op coal yard. Hard work doesn’t begin to cover it. With soaking wet hessian sacks dribbling rivers of black dust down the back of your trousers and pointy lumps of steam coal trying to gouge a hole in your kidneys, bloody marvellous it wasn’t . . . But at least I was driving!

Still unsure as to what I wanted to do employment wise, but certainly deciding that life as a perennially dirty coal man wasn’t the profession for me, I answered an advert from a local builder, Joe Giles, for a labourer/driver. Offering me nine old pence an hour more than I was already being paid, I jumped at it and one week later found myself at the wheel of a dilapidated petrol-driven four-wheeler. I was carting everything from sand and ballast to slabs and cement; this was fine until I realised it hadn’t any tipping gear and everything had to be shovelled or handballed, on and off!

Hell! I certainly knew how to pick the jobs. Still, I was as fit as the proverbial butcher’s dog.

Slowly a hazy career path was opening up in front of me as my next job also entailed driving, this time for a steel stockholder. Once again I found myself delivering metalwork in an asthmatic four-wheeler. Loading and unloading was a serious business and executed by an ancient crane that would have done credit to a 1950s Meccano set. This was bolted to a static lorry parked at the back of the yard and was a serious danger to life and limb. Operated by compression, you wound it up with a cranking handle and then flicked over the lever hoping it would start. A puff of smoke and the distinctive sound of a single pot Lister meant it was up and running. It would lift relatively heavy objects with apparent ease, but try putting them down again! The operation required nerves of steel and perfect judgement as the cargo’s descent was only controlled by the operator, in this case me, working a manual choke brake attached to the cable. The whole kit and caboodle could quite easily, and often did, end up crashing onto the deck! It was a nightmare, and not for me as I valued my extremities too much.