Читать книгу Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words - Max Arthur, Max Arthur - Страница 33

Dad was an engine driver. He drove a steam train between Plaistow Station and Aldgate East. My brothers used to wait for him and he'd take one at a time on his engine for a little ride. When he came past our house on the goods train, he used to toot us up and my mother would come out to the garden and he'd thrown her a side of bacon and a huge lump of coal for our fire. That happened very often. There was a lot of pilfering like that. One day he came home and he had about ten pairs of new boots in his bag. We all had a pair. Another day, he came home with six bottles of whisky and gin. He hid them in the coal cupboard underneath the boards. He used to come home with all sorts of things: thirty bars of Fry's Chocolate Cream, a bag full of crabs and shrimps, all sorts. It helped us a lot – his wages was only £2.10 shillings. Every day of his life he went to work on bread and cheese and a can of tea. The railway police came to us once but they didn't find anything. My cousin Frank was also an engine driver and he lived round the back of us. The railway police went in his house and his wife tried to hide all the bottles but the police heard them clinking and they locked him up. He lost his job.

My mother was nearly always drunk, so I used to take my three brothers out of the house when I got home from school. One day, when my dad got home from work, he couldn't find my mother anywhere. We went out into the garden to see if she was there and we found her in the chicken shed on the ground, blind drunk, all the chickens running over her. So he picked her up, fetched her indoors, washed her and put her to bed nice and clean. He never said a word to her about it, not an angry word ever. He had the patience of a saint.