Towards the end of the war, my father was on warden duty when a doodlebug hit us late at night. My mother and I were in the shelter and my father came down, his face covered in brick-dust and blood trickling from his forehead. ‘I’m all right, Lou,’ he told my mother. ‘But we’ve lost everything.’
Croxteth House was reduced to rubble and we were moved first to a two-roomed temporary accommodation in Wickersley Road, Battersea, and then to Usk Road, at the top of Clapham Junction West Hill. Our balcony overlooked the railway. Bertie arrived home on leave once in his navy outfit, all nice and white, and whenever one of the boys came home they’d be cooked a special breakfast of bacon and eggs. But, while Mum was preparing this treat for Bertie, there was a terrific explosion.
As Mum walked to the kitchen the blast lifted up the thick lino from the floor, stopping the door, which had been blown off its hinges, from hitting her in the face. Soot blackened the flat and all you could see of Bert was his white teeth and eyes, looking like a Kentucky minstrel. ‘Oh, Bert, look at your eggs and bacon!’ said Mum. She was more concerned about the pile of soot over his eggs and bacon than the fact the front of the flat had been blown away! It turned out a V2 had dropped on the other side of the railway embankment, shielding us from a blast that had killed 42 others.
Eventually, Croxteth House was rebuilt and we moved back again. Most of our personal belongings and family ‘treasures’ were lost, though. We had to make do with very few possessions. Furniture was non-existent. You had to improvise tables and chairs from tea chests.
Understand: these were really hard times.
The slogan before and during the war was: Your Country Needs You. Now that the war was over, you needed the country; I was young enough not to be disillusioned with the way the system worked and old enough to be aware that those with nothing got nothing. My four brothers, and our father before them in WWI, had been willing to lay down their lives for their country. When the war was over, though, they got very little in return. On being demobbed, you had the choice of either a Prince of Wales checked suit or a blue pin-striped suit and a gratuity of about £60 to £80.
Everybody you saw those days was dressed in the checked suit and I could sense some of the bitterness and resentment that accompanied their paltry reward. My brothers George, Wally, ’Erbie and Bert were only skilled at killing the enemy, so the jobs they were offered were quite lowly: digging trenches at the top of Northcote Road and building prefabricated houses, mostly made of asbestos. The boss didn’t like them, so they got the sack after two weeks.
My brothers Wally and George then put their money together and, with a little extra from my father’s meagre savings, bought a stall, and a horse and cart. They parked it on the corner of Princess Head, Battersea, and sold fruit and vegetables with a sideline in logging. I helped them, although I was still at school, and we went scavenging on bombsites, dragging out old rail sleepers, cutting them up with large cross-saws, then chopping them up into bundles to sell as firewood. I was in my element working with my brothers.
But a freezing winter and an impoverished neighbourhood did not make for good business, so George went back to work doing what he was used to in the navy. He shovelled coal off barges on to a conveyor belt in the Thames for Nine Elms power station. That was a terrible job, breathing in all the grime and dust in a hold full of coal, and the tough existence was etching lines into his face. He was a good-looking chap, with fair skin and blond hair, but he was ageing prematurely. There must have been a couple of kilos of coal dust in his lungs and he still suffers with his chest today.
The war had done nothing to dispel people’s mistrust of uniforms – those of coppers and authority in general. You trusted no one. Officers shot you in the First World War if you lost your nerve or were slow getting out of the trench and they, in turn, were executed by the soldiers. Shot in the back. My father told me about that. So, if someone came out of the army and saw someone thieving, they would look the other way as long as the victim wasn’t one of their own. That attitude was very prominent in the period after the war.
We had lived on the edge. A German bomb could have ended our existence at any moment, but in our youth we felt we were invincible. We were too busy enjoying the excitement and exhilaration of discovery – and Milky.
Milky Big Tits was a good sort. Big busted, with blonde hair down to her waist and nice long legs. Just the type of girl I always fancied. I was 14 and a virgin when I met her. Milky (her real name was Olive) was a couple of years older than me. She was brazen and adventurous. Nobody could wish for a better introduction to manhood than spending some sticky moments with a girl as eager to please as she was. ‘Catch me and I’m yours,’ she’d say. From time to time she would allow one or two other boys to catch her but she was physically able to resist our advances if she didn’t fancy the outcome.
Milky went beyond the call of duty. The more we indulged, the more she enjoyed it. It was a lot like the film Once Upon A Time In America! The backdrop to this nonsense was anything but romantic. We had a kiss and cuddle ending in a knee trembler against a brick wall within the compounds of a bombed-out school at Larkhall Lane, just around the corner from our old council flat in Wandsworth Road, which was being rebuilt.
Sharing these sexual encounters with mates extended Milky’s horizons even further. After I’d had my wicked way, I would talk her into letting a pal have a go. Without too much persuasion, she would say, ‘All right, but just this once.’
Then they would start queuing up: Johnny Brindle, Ronnie Mitchell and the Long brothers – George, Teddy, Tommy and Jimmy. Jimmy was only a little kid at the time, probably about nine or ten. When it came to his turn, the big boys would shove him to the end of the queue and Milky would snort, ‘He’s too little. He can’t do it!’
But little Jimmy was determined. ‘Yes I can, yes I can,’ he’d insist. Every time he was pushed out of the queue he’d race to the end and wait patiently for another chance.
Taking pity, we’d plead, ‘Come on, let him have a go. At least he’ll shut up.’ Eventually she’d relent but it was all over in a wink and none of us ever discovered whether Jimmy had made it, or not, or whether Milky was aware of the fact.
Milky, like the rest of us, had experienced the ravages of war. Two years earlier, sharpnel had smashed through a brick and grazed her breast, so perhaps enjoying life meant that much more to her.
With the war, very few schools were left standing and I left mine at the age of 14, with few qualifications, and got a job with South Western Railways as a driver’s mate delivering goods in London and all over southern England. We started off with an old Iron Horse, a three-wheeler petrol-driven truck that you would hook up to a horse-box and use to take the horses to different stables. We then graduated to a Bedford truck, which had tarpaulin sheets on the back and could hook up to trailers, some with containers already loaded. The jobs were diverse. We could be delivering fruit to Covent Garden one day, and gold to the Bank of England the next. Sometimes we’d take a load of metal drums filled with coins to the Royal Mint. When delivering bullion, we were paid an extra £2 on top of our £5-a-week wages for the heavy work involved.
Alfie, my driver, was not backward when it came to nicking loads of fruit from the market. We’d take luxury items like lovely Cape grapes and peaches and fruit. In those days, you never saw anything like that at local shops, and down it would go under the seat in the front cabin of the truck, hidden by a blanket. Alternatively, we’d deliver a load and damage some of the parcels, pulling out some of the contents, like shirts perhaps, from the middle. Everybody was doing it: crane drivers in the docklands would always drop a load on purpose. If it was a crate of whisky, they would nick a few bottles of Scotch that had remained