purposes, I assume) before being filled by hand with scalding-hot water from the kettle boiled on the stove. This was then topped up with cold water via a big white jug, after which we took our turns bathing en famille.
I remember the outside toilet, the coal shed, Mr Simpson the greengrocer, and the rag and bone man—who I was a bit scared of—but if I’m honest that’s just about it, apart from how upset my mum was when the Council made a compulsory purchase, not only on our house and our shop, but on our whole street, not to mention hundreds of other houses around where we lived, to make way for something so instantly forgettable I’ve actually forgotten what it was.
As a result of this compulsory order we were forced to move to council housing and another part of town some three miles away, which for a working-class family was tantamount to emigrating to Australia. Although many years later my brother did emigrate to Australia and he assured me it was not the same at all.
For my part I wanted to break out of the council estate which we were forced to call home and where I was brought up mostly. From day one I felt compelled to escape those grey concrete clouds of depression.
The house we lived in was of no particular design, in fact it was of no particular anything. It was more nothing than something. In short, it was not the product of passion. Council estates don’t do passion, they just do numbers.
The estate I lived on didn’t even do bricks. Huge great slabs of pebble-dashed prison walls had been slotted together in rows of mediocrity as an excuse for housing. Housing for people with more pride in the tip of their little finger than the whole of the town planners’ hearts put together. People like my mum, who had survived the war as a young girl whilst simultaneously being robbed of her youth by having to work in a munitions factory. People like my dad and my uncle who had fought overseas to protect us from other kinds of Nazis.
How dare they ‘home’ these fine people in such an unnecessary hell?
It was waking up to this backdrop of pessimism and injustice every day that made my childhood blood boil. It was like the whole place had been designed to make you want to kill yourself. A curtain of gloom against a drama of doom. I hated the unfairness of it all.
Why did some people, for example, who lived not more than half a mile away, have a detached or semi-detached house that looked like someone may have actually cared about how it turned out? How come they had nice drives and nice cars and a pretty garden at the front and the back?
Not that I begrudged the owners of such places, or rather palaces as they appeared to me, on the contrary—good for them. I just thought things should be the same for my family.
The apathy of it all also drove me crazy. Why did people who lived on these estates all over Great Britain accept this as their lot? Why did mums and dads bother going to work each day to be able to pay the rent for these shitholes? The authorities should have been paying them to live there, with a bonus if they managed to make it all the way through to death.
So there you have it, that’s where my initial drive came from. It wasn’t that I was bullied at school or the early death of my dad, or any of the other predictable psychobabble reasons often wheeled out to explain success. It was purely and simply that I wanted a better life.
Top 10 Things I Remember about My Dad
10 The back of his neck creasing up on the top of his shirt collar
9 The fact that he never took me to a football match
8 His belly, which went all the way in if I pressed it with my finger
7 His vest-and-braces look
6 The smell of Brylcreem
5 His snooker-cue case
4 His handwriting (which was beautiful)
3 His smile
2 His voice
1 How much my mum loved him
Dad is, sadly, a faint and distant memory for me.
Although he was around for the first thirteen years of my life, I only have a few vivid recollections of him as a personality. I remember him mostly as being just a great dad. What else does a dad need to be?
He was, however, relatively old for a dad, especially in those days, and to be honest I wish he had been a bit younger. Having said that, I’m only a couple of years ahead of him now where my own son is concerned and if my wife and I are lucky enough to pop out another little sprog or sprogette any time soon, I will more likely than not be almost exactly the same age to our second child as my dad was to me.
But Dad was also older in his ways. He was a proud guy from a proud time who met my mum at a dance. Dancing was the speed-dating of its era, something we might want to learn from today.
Mum still says, ‘You can tell all you need to know about a man if you dance with him—proper dancing that is.’ And as the dance halls have disappeared while divorce rates have gone up, it looks like she may well have a point—she usually does.
Whatever Dad did on the dance floor that night, he obviously did it very much to my mum’s liking, as from that day onwards, right up until now, some thirty years after he passed away, my mum’s heart is still the sole property of one Mr Martin Joseph Evans.
My sister and I were once stupid enough to ask Mum if she had ever considered remarrying. She looked at us as if we had lost our minds—brilliant, beautiful and hilarious all at the same time.
Martin Joseph was a straight up and down suit-and-tie man for the majority of his waking hours. He was also a handsome bugger with a permanent tan which Mum insisted he received as a reward for serving with the RAF in Egypt during the war. I believed her—it was a cool story.
Dad worked hard every day except Sunday, leaving at the same time every morning and always arriving home at the same time every evening—a quarter past five, more than a minute or two after that and Mum would start getting worried whilst Dad’s tea would start getting cold.
He played snooker once a week, where he apparently enjoyed a pint and a half of bitter, but other than that, unless he had a secret life none of us knew about, that was him.
Except, of course, for the gee-gees.
Ah, now, there you have him. Dad loved the horses.
There’s a famous phrase that goes something like: when you want to know who wins on the horses you need to bear something in mind: the bookmakers have several paying-in windows but only one paying-out window. That should tell you all you need to know about where most of the money goes.
Not that this should have concerned Dad as he was indeed a bookie; he was the enemy and his betting story is the strangest I’ve ever heard. My dad’s entire bookmaking career both started and finished before I was born.
He set up his ‘bookies’ shop in the fifties with a pal of his, and by all accounts, particularly their own, they did pretty swift business—as most bookmakers do.
Warrington was a typical working-class town in those days, and many an honest man’s one and only indulgence was a flutter on the nags once or twice a week. Dad and his partner were happy to facilitate such flights of fancy—until, that is, one day when the frost came down.
This was no normal frost, however, but an almighty frost—a frost that would last not for days or