Bootneck Bootneck

By Frank Croskerry

From an early childhood of post war austerity in a bankrupted Britain, the book is Croskerry's journey from a troubled adolescence to a life of normality. The story illustrates the contrast between the blue Royal Marines of his fathers generation to the Royal Marine Commandos of the 1960's. Whether you are a former serviceman, a baby boomer, or just someone looking for an adventurous read, you will enjoy a nostalgic walk through a transformative period of our time.

Croskerry is the middle son of five brothers born between 1940 - 1949. He was born in Northern Ireland to an Irish father and mother from Yorkshire and raised in the south of England. He prefers to be described as of British heritage but proudly Canadian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Apr 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781773700441

Book preview

Cover-Front.jpg

To Janice

And in loving memory of Ben TC

Table of Contents

PART 1

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

PART 2

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

PART 3

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

PART 1

Chapter One

The Royal Marines formed my earliest memory of my father as he was still serving in the Corps when I was just a toddler.

We shared an odd relationship over the years.

I loved him as a boy loves his father, but growing up I was more terrified of him than any son really ought to be. It was quite a natural thing, because I knew no other way and could only compare my situation with that of other boys much later, by which time I was too embarrassed to even discuss it. My brothers were subject to the same discipline, but I was generally much more deserving of it. They could write their own memoirs of the same time period with quite different views, and I claim no copyright over their opinions or recollections.

The following is totally my version of growing up in that family during that time.

I don’t know, I guess everyone loves his dad. I know I was always mortified by the thought of either parent dying. Dad had only his own upbringing and then a career in the Royal Marines to refer to for experience before he married my mum.

By the time I was of punishment age, he was already middle-aged and I think quite out of his depth. He could come up with no other way of dealing with it, and I know he suffered remorse after the sessions. He was tall for his time at around six foot three, emphasized by his always-upright stance and slim build. His foul temper was only one aspect of the man, and he had many endearing qualities, often highlighted by his lilting Irish brogue. My female cousins adored him.

Well, now he is gone, and there is a great gap in my life where he once was. Alive he was always thirty-eight years older than me, but as I write this, he is only sixteen years my senior. If I’m lucky, I may one day be as old as him or even older, but he will always be my superior, no matter what I do or achieve.

His birth certificate listed his name as James, which was also his father’s name, with many more of that name in the family tree, but when he enrolled in the Royal Marines, he called himself Sheamus (his spelling). Other common spellings are Seamus or Shamus, and Dad sort of combined the two. His family also called him Sheamus, as did my cousins. The only person I remember calling him James was the parish priest. Mum called him Mick!

Mum was fifteen years younger than Dad, and the age difference caught up with them as Dad got into his later years. She had five boys by the age of twenty-seven and in very lean times, but she managed to raise us all as physically healthy lads.

Later in life Mum was the matron of a local nursing home. After she retired it was decided that Dad would be better off in that same home. With him out of the way, Mum became quite dependent on alcohol and was seldom sober from then on. She had been imbibing for some time, but Dad seemed to be a controlling influence to some extent, although he was sometimes equally as out of control.

Growing up I remember Dad being the worse for wear after a drink or two on occasions, but Mum seemed to manage quite well without it. Her habits changed in her middle age, and she gradually took to the bottle. She had many warnings and advice, particularly from my brother Pat, by now a respected doctor, but things simply went from bad to worse. Eventually she was the victim of a house fire, the cause of which was blamed on an old electric blanket. Be that as it may, the drink was the real villain.

Her funeral was a morbid affair, made gloomier by having Dad there to witness it. He had the bewildered expression of someone caught in an unlikely event. Basically, he had never expected to outlive her.

Dad’s funeral eighteen months later was by comparison a much happier occasion, with the Royal Marine bugler to play his Last Post, arranged by my brother John.

After my father’s funeral, I flew back across the Atlantic and realized I hardly knew anything about him, or my mother, come to that. He told us once that his father was thrown in the harbour at Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast for having the audacity to apply for a job being a Roman Catholic. This was during the depression of the twenties, after which they left Belfast and went back to the country. Grandad was not the greatest swimmer.

He never really spoke about being a youth or about his years in the British Forces except for vague references to his hair-cutting times or the inhospitality of the uninhabited island where he built an airstrip in the middle of the Indian Ocean during World War II—in the Maldives, I believe. On my birth certificate he is listed as a Colour Sergeant, Royal Marines, formerly farm labourer.

He was born in the reign of Edward the Seventh and the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, just six years after the reign of Queen Victoria and twenty-five years after Charles Darwin, in Ballymote, Upper Downpatrick, Northern Ireland. His mother, Rose, was by then thirty-seven, and his father, James, was thirty-five. He was their second son, but they soon added two more boys and two girls.

Dad’s earlier years involved many aspects of agricultural life with very little education. He saw the British Army as a way off the farm. He enrolled in Belfast, and for some reason he never told us, he ended up in His Majesty’s Royal Marines. Maybe a Royal Marine was on duty at the time in the recruiting office.

So there he was—a Bootneck!

That would have been about 1927–28, and he took his pension in 1949. There ought to be a book right there, but there isn’t. Of those twenty-something years, there is hardly enough to fill a page from what he related to my four brothers and myself.

He never said much about the time before the war except that he served on a lot of ships and taught himself how to cut hair, which earned him an extra bob or two. He sailed on the great Dreadnought battleships among other things, and until the Second World War he had a pretty cushy job, by his own admission. He became adept enough to later cut Earl Mountbatten’s hair, and for the rest of his life he kept the telegram calling him off ship in Valletta Harbour, Malta, to administer his scissorships on His Lordship.

As we grew up, we had to sit quiet and still in a chair on weekends while the old man gave us the short back and sides with the consoling words, If you move again, I’ll murder you, so I will. His antiquated hand-operated trimmer pulled out as much hair as it cut. He later acquired an electric machine that was much less painful. Whenever he said he’d murder me, I quite believed he would keep his word one day if I pushed him a little too far. He’d get away with it for sure.

Dad never understood the concept of a good talking to; it was his belt or nothing. Whenever he threatened us, he promised us something else into the bargain. In fact, I grew up with completely the wrong interpretation of what a bargain was. A bargain was something to be avoided at all costs.

I don’t know how he managed to get any tips with a temper like that, and maybe that’s why he never took it up in civilian life. I pictured him telling Mountbatten to keep still or he’d murder him, so he would, and that would start a fit of the giggles and a solid whack in the ear for my troubles.

I used to envy my friends who went to a regular barber and got to read the comics until it was their turn. Mr. Bishop, the barber in Alfred Square, was friendly and smiled as he limped around the chair with his huge boot on one foot and a normal shoe on the other. He’d let you move as much as you wanted.

During the war Dad served in the Indian Ocean building an airstrip on some remote island as he started to move up the promotional ladder. The number of men enlisted in the Royal Marines had quadrupled, and old soldiers like my dad were called upon to take charge.

Later he was sent back to Blighty, where he trained for and was to have been involved in the commando invasion of Sicily but was held back for a hemorrhoids operation. He wasn’t a commando but was fully trained in landing craft and would have been utilized in that aspect. He later boasted that the piles probably saved his life.

By war’s outbreak he was already a seasoned Royal Marine—what was called a three-badger, one badge for each four years of good conduct. He had never even contemplated promotion. He never had the education for it. He was doing too well out of his barbering anyway. He was promoted from marine acting corporal eventually to marine acting sergeant major and was involved in the D-Day invasion.

I have a photo of him displaying his sergeant majors crown on his wrist and his solitary medal, a Blue Peter, for fifteen years of good conduct. His war medals were yet to come. He always seemed more proud of the Blue Peter than of his other medals. He said everyone got those medals, but the Blue Peter was rather special and much rarer.

On D-Day he was a flotilla sergeant major in command of a dozen landing craft. That in itself must have been a very harrowing experience. Dad kept it to himself. Imagine being in command of all those flat-bottomed landing craft fighting through the rough seas toward the Normandy beach—crashing through the waves in the biggest flotilla ever, in the biggest invasion ever. Meagre words that visualize the enormity of that event can never do it justice. He was there for history in the making. Doesn’t bear thinking about!

They wouldn’t make any of his ranks substantive because of his lack of education. After the war, and to get back to the Depot Royal Marines in Deal, he took it into his own hands to reduce himself to marine and get on with the hair cutting. This allowed him to be with his wife and, by then, three sons, me being the latest, coming just a couple of months before the armistice in Europe. The powers that be decided to make him a substantive corporal for all of his efforts during the war, a rank he kept until his discharge. He never had to utter his rank again with the preface of marine, acting.

During the last couple of years, he served at the Depot Deal cutting the hair of all the new recruits. After his discharge and while I was still very young, he nearly bought the shop across the street from our house to turn into a barbershop, but he never finished the deal. It ended up being a pork butcher’s, where I later worked part-time. My brother Mike’s second marriage was to the daughter of the owner of this shop.

My mother was the daughter of a blacksmith from Yorkshire. We probably got to know a little more about her because in the early days we lived in the same town as our Yorkshire grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Ireland, where the others were, was another world.

My Yorkshire grandparents, being blacksmiths, had the contract for the local council in Normanton, Yorkshire, which included shooing all the council horses, but they saw the inevitable onslaught of mechanization and sold up. My grandfather went down to Kent and worked for some time in the colliery serving as blacksmith for the pit ponies. They opted to buy a public house in Deal, the Queen’s Arms, after getting bombed out of a pub in Dover. No one was hurt in the bombing, but the pub was a write-off. There was at that time an exodus of coal miners from the north converging on the Kent coalfields, and our hometown became a haven for displaced northern miners. Just about every friend we had growing up had at least one parent from the north, and it was just as normal to hear a northern accent in our part of the south as a southern one.

Our town, Deal, is situated on the southeast coast of England between Dover and Sandwich. The coal miners now had the southern coastal breezes to take away memories of the drudge of the coal mines. Apart from that, their situation hardly changed, as they still wheezed with the much-denied silicosis. There was a conspiracy among local doctors, who were in the pockets of the mining authorities and denied them their medical problems. They worked on despite their crippling diseases, hacking and coughing their way through life. They stood on the side of the road waiting for the pit bus like a group of dejected zombies. The buses picked them up from designated points around the town and carried them off to toil beneath the ground, and then bring them home again. After their pithead bath, we would see them again with their heavily mascaraed eyes and haunted looks. No amount of washing ever totally cleaned the eyes. In the evenings many of them drowned their sorrows in the numerous pubs and clubs of Deal.

The Deal miners mostly worked at Betteshanger, but there were two other local pits: Snowden and Tilmanston. They could never quite wash all the coal dust away. Even if they could, they were still betrayed by the black tattooed scars on their faces and arms, each one the legacy of an accident underground indelibly sealed with coal dust.

Deal was also the depot for the Royal Marines, and the town was the subsequent meeting place of my parents. Growing up we were aware of the barracks and that it was the place of the Royal Marines, but it was another world quite beyond the normal goings-on. What went on behind those ominous walls was an enigma to us, and the bugle calls and occasional marching parades with military bands just added to the mystery.

We understood that Dad had once been part of that mystery and that it was a part of his always upright bearing and immaculate dress code. He never told us much about that illustrious corps, saving his nostalgia for his home in Ireland and his youth as a farm labourer. He also told us ghost stories. It was normal for us Deal boys to resent the bootnecks, and hostilities did occur when older lads met up with off-duty marine recruits who were competing for the same limited supply of young ladies. Girls who did go out with the marine lads were unfairly labelled as bootneck mattresses and off-limits to local boys afterward.

My grandad owned a pub that had good clientele—both the miners with whom he had a northern affiliation and the Royal Marines who came in to admire his well-endowed daughters. Grandad had the wits about him to recognize the gift horse his four grown and shapely daughters had to offer him. There was my mum, Aunt Agnes, Aunt Kathleen, and then the youngest, my aunt Wyn. It wasn’t the first time he had utilized family talent, as some exiled Normanton native extolled to me how my grandma Rowley could swing the hammer as good as any man in the smithy.

By the time I knew Grandma, she was mostly housebound, obese, and diabetic. I remember going to visit her on a regular basis by order of my mum. Her bedroom was in the front room of the upstairs in the pub, where she had her bed and large desk or writing-bureau. There were other old furnishings and a dusty old carpet. She loved to eat big oranges and boxes of dates but never shared them. She would get me to count and recount the big white five-pound notes she had in the desk. The value of this huge amount of money meant absolutely nothing to me . . . yet! Her bedroom was out of a Dickens novel, and she resided in her bed like royalty, which was basically what she was to us at that time. Grandma had her own smell, which was mostly camphor, urine, and ancient furniture polish. There was an old unused fireplace in this room, and my dad said that Grandad had a rolled-up oil painting stuffed up the chimney. Dad said it was some war loot that a returning soldier had sold to Grandad, and he thought it might be worth a lot of money. Nobody ever saw it again, and I always think of it as the Madonna with the Big Boobies of later fame in the British TV spoof ’Allo ’Allo.

Grandad’s luck held for a few years, and he speculated in other properties during and after the war until he had a babies’ clothing store, a dance hall called the Majestic, and some other small holdings. I remember him telling me later that during the war he could have bought any house in our town for fifty pounds. By the time he told me this, they were considered desirable residences and were out of a normal budget. At the time, though, we were being bombed fairly regularly, within artillery range of the Germans, never mind the Luftwaffe. House insurance was not available. Later on, Grandad and Grandma decided to buy a pub in the east end of London, giving up the Queen’s Arms, but that’s jumping ahead!

I came into the picture in Ireland just prior to the war’s end. My parents had decided for some reason that the family would be a little safer there than in the south of England. Mum said earlier on in the war she was walking my next older brother Patrick along a street in Deal when an air raid came on quickly and she didn’t have time to make it to a shelter. A fighter came flying at rooftop height with cannons blazing, and she threw herself across the pram to protect the baby. She also said she could see the pilot clearly and would never forget his yellow skin and slanted eyes. We thought our mum had seen the only Japanese pilot in the Luftwaffe. If on target, those cannon rounds would have gone through Mum, Patrick, the pram, two car engines, and a couple of brick walls. Now Ireland was the place to be! The war was almost over, and Jerry was firmly on the run. The family spent almost the entire war in the most dangerous part of England. I now find it difficult to understand that logic, but there I was, an Irishman in the family, which everyone would tell me was lucky!

My grandparents lived in the country beside a place called Ballykinlar, and I was born at the infirmary in Downpatrick, County Down. A lunatic asylum! Whenever I bragged about it, my old man looked at me knowingly and told me that only one of us was conceived in Ireland, and it wasn’t me. We never did work that one out. He took it to his grave, and we certainly couldn’t ask Mum a question as delicate as that.

I’ve always considered myself British and proud of the qualities of those four nations. I obviously don’t recall anything of life in Ireland, as I was only a few months old when we moved back to England. My first recollection as a child was moving into the house next to the Queen’s Arms, which I assume was owned by my grandparents. The house and pub were on the high street, which was the busiest street in the town and probably busier than it is now. The traffic was still primitive, with not many motorized vehicles and a lot of horse-drawn carts for milk, fresh grocery delivery, and the rag-and-bone man. The large handcart was still popular and very practical. Most vehicles had the registration of JG on their number plates, making it easy to spot a tourist or stranger. Motorbikes were the noisiest of the high street rolling stock.

We had a small front yard with a gate to keep us from running out into the deadly traffic, and we were encouraged to stay outside in all weather. The house had a small room as you entered and a kitchen, or scullery, as my mother called it to the left of that. There was an outside toilet, and from the front room a staircase on the right led up to two bedrooms. The kitchen had a stone sink with a cold tap and a gas stove, and the outside toilet had a flush cistern. This was what we would call today a low maintenance house, but that wasn’t a big selling point back then, for good reason. These were the only services the house had, apart from a gas light in the kitchen and another in the living room. There was also a gas light at the top of the stairs. We took a candle with us up to bed as there were no lights in the two bedrooms.

On rare occasions, we got to listen to a radio, or wireless, as we commonly called the thing. The music of the time was wartime favourites like Glen Miller, Vera Lynn, and other Band music. The conditions we lived in were far more austere than even during the war, but we knew no difference and didn’t know we were poor at all.

We were told we had won the war after all, so we must have been better off than the rest of the world. Everyone seemed to be more or less in the same boat as us anyway. We were constantly reminded that children in India were starving, and we assumed we had it pretty good. The truth was that the war had left the nation bankrupt, and immediately after the war we had it tougher than the duration.

We had a few pieces of furniture and an old upright piano that Grandad had stored there. In the living room there was a coal fireplace, and it was a cozy affair when it was lit occasionally on cold nights when Dad could afford the coal. Dad would get coal slag from the miners, which, if cared for properly, could keep a fire going all night but afforded little in the way of heat. The miners wanted to get rid of the slag anyway to make room for their free coal delivery once a month—one of their very scarce luxuries. The roof leaked like a sieve, and most of Mum’s cooking pots were used to catch water before it made its way downstairs.

By this time there were four boys, after my brother John put in an appearance. I had reached the running around stage and was farmed out to my grandad to give Mum a chance to catch up. While Grandad’s back was turned and during a beer delivery, I took a dive headfirst into his cellar. From what they tell me, it was touch and go as I had a compound double fracture of the skull. Our family doctor was a surgeon and decided he could fix me if my dad could first cut my hair away. He knew my dad to be gifted with the scissors. Dad would forever tell me it was the toughest haircut he ever had to give, but at least I kept still, I think, without any murderous threats. Tough to imagine cutting the hair on the indented skull of your eighteen-month-old kid. I couldn’t do it. Old doctor Hall pulled the skull bone back from the brain and made some kind of repair. With the short back and sides haircut from Dad, I sported a whopper of a scar.

Old Dr. Hall was also the famous lifeboat doctor, another interesting story.

Grandad blamed himself for the accident but said it was all the Huns’ fault. His reasoning was that they had rendered him almost totally deaf at Ypres, which he always pronounced wipers. He was an artillery man, so it was probably our own guns that did the damage. He told me later in life that he was a blacksmith to the regiment horses, which were numerous in that theatre of war. I later learned that he was listed as a driver with the Royal Field Artillery and that he may have served in Gallipoli. Much of his past remains a mystery to this day. He simply never discussed it.

I can remember the parents coming to visit me at the local hospital. I tried to encourage them to stay, but I never recalled anything of the accident. Mum said I used to perform tricks to keep them amused, and when they left, they had to do it one at a time and wave from outside the window until they eventually had to make a run for it. I can still remember the nurse holding me up to the window during a very weepy goodbye. Those are my very earliest and most tender memories.

I was instilled with the normal love a child has for his parents, but, thinking back, we were brought up without any outward signs of affection. A nodding look of approval or a smile at some minor achievement were all we could hope for, and it was generally enough. Dad could make you feel good with one favourite phrase of his: Right you are, boy! With the faintest smile, those four words could be the only encouragement a boy might need. It would forge the personalities that we would exhibit in one way or another, and for me, anyway, it gave me disdain for unnecessary emotion or compassion in life. The ingrained inability to exhibit affection is a serious default in my personality even to this day. Compared to other children, we weren’t exposed to normal acts of affection but were encouraged to always do the right thing.

Maybe the war and lean years of austerity trying to raise a young family had hardened my parents, but their loyalty combined with the ignominy of bringing the family name into disrepute was overemphasized, much more than might be expected from a poor couple. My parents quite often exhibited generosity beyond their means, particularly where nonimmediate family was concerned, but they were certainly not emotionally articulate. Eventually I was released and back to 147, as we referred to it—the house next to the Queen’s Arms. I was still fitted with my turban, as Grandad called it.

Two more events highlighted my time at this little house.

I got my fingers caught in the chain of a bicycle left in the front yard for my amusement. I remember the frantic screams of my mum and her sisters as they thought this accident-prone toddler was about to lose all his fingers, which were firmly enmeshed in the rear cog of the bike. Grandad came away from his pub with his smoking pipe and calmly undid the chain, releasing my fingers, which, though a bit sore, were merely dirty. Grandad took me back into the pub and sat me on the bar to relate my history like I was some mini-Houdini.

The other incident amounted out of my utter boredom and curiosity.

I was left to my own devices with a couple of fairly large ball bearings. These were quite readily accessible to kids in Deal as they were part of the work scene of the collieries. I was sitting by the piano idly playing with ball bearings when I placed one in my mouth. Before I knew it, it was gone. This was quickly followed by its mate, and after sitting quietly for a moment or two, Mum looked over at me and with that maternal instinct realized something was wrong. I can still remember the ease with which I swallowed them and the reason I took the second one. I figured it was just evidence of the missing one and would be better off out of sight and with its mate. Mum was on to it straight away and demanded to know of their whereabouts. Obviously I couldn’t produce the bearings on demand and was rushed off to see old Doc Hall again, who always seemed amused by my company. He had me X-rayed and showed my mum the big villains in my intestine. Mum was still a little hysterical and thought I should have an operation, but the good doc told her to take me home and that in a day or two I should pass them naturally. He gave Mum a copy of the X-ray, which hung with great distinction behind the bar at the Queen’s Arms for long afterward.

Mum sat me on a potty in the kitchen for the next couple of days and encouraged me to strain till I passed the orbs. Even when she was somewhere else in the house, she would yell, I can’t hear you, like some sergeant in boot camp, and I had to keep up the effort. When she was in the kitchen with me, I found that if I made my face red with straining, she would ease off with the yelling. My battle with hemorrhoids later in life probably had its origin with this episode.

Well, the old doc was right, and in a day or so my mum was rewarded by the solid thump of the first missile hitting the tin pot, shortly followed by its mate. You’d think Mum had won the lottery with the jubilation that went on, and she soon had them washed up and over to the pub, where they assumed pride of place just below the picture of my insides. The only difference was that they were now black balls, my little digestion system having removed the chromium plating. Grandad got some terrific mileage out of this one. He would sit me on the bar and his customers would look at me and shake their heads in astonishment. I was the celebrity, and they gave me threepenny pieces. I could tell they were waiting for me to swallow them. If they only knew what it was like to sit on the potty for two days with Mum, the sergeant major, hovering, they would have known that I would have difficulty swallowing even legitimate food for quite the while.

At this stage, sugar and candy of any kind was still on ration, so the odd threepence was hardly any earthly good to me anyway, and after playing with them for a while I lost interest and discarded them.

Grandad always drank his tea out of the saucer and ate his peas with a knife, all of which I found extremely clever and entertaining!

Opposite our little house was the shop kept by old Bert Smith and his wife, Winnie. He took a shine to me at an early age (probably because of my regular cameo appearances in the pub). The shop was a junk store that sold all the useless stuff Bert collected as he trudged around town with his old handcart. I never saw anybody actually purchase anything from the shop, where old Winnie would appear from a back room at the sound of someone entering. It was on the corner of the high street and Farrier Street and was just the one room. In the back was a sitting room. I never went upstairs, but there must have been a couple of rooms up there. They didn’t have children of their own by now, and one year after we had moved up the high street, old Bert took me to the Christmas social for kids put on by the local fire brigade, of which Bert was a volunteer. That Christmas they had a talent contest, and old Bert got me to sing. I had learned Hearts of Oak at school and gave it a go with great gusto. It was the only song I knew anyway. I won the first prize—a plastic space suit. When old Bert delivered me home, he related what a big hit I had been, evidenced by the smart space suit I held in my sweaty little hands. After he had gone, Mum and Dad took the space suit away and locked it up in the front room for Christmas.

Mum and Dad had their names on the council housing list for quite the while, and the appearance of my brother John must have tipped the balance. Soon after we were given the house farther down the high street numbered 173. From then until this day, my whole family would refer to these two abodes as 147 and 173. This house was much bigger than the last and had electricity. I remember standing on a chair and flicking the switch on and off until I got a thick ear from someone or other.

My oldest brother, Michael, was now assuming the mantle of responsibility of three siblings inferior to him. The biggest attraction of this house was the opportunity to explore. There was no front garden, the traffic passed just a couple of feet from the front of the house, and the street was only wide enough for one vehicle at a time. This would lead to its demise later with the mad modernization of the sixties, which would also see the end to 147, the Queen’s Arms, and the Majestic Dance Hall. We had a basement with two large rooms and a coal cellar. There was a manhole for coal delivery accessed from an enclosed alley connecting our house with the one next door. There was a long back garden, which was walled in, and at the end of was, unusually, a small market garden. This place grew the most delicious apples I have ever tasted and without the pesticides that were about to appear. We were up and over that wall with regularity, and I’m sure it contributed to our well-being over the next few years. Old Mr. Whitlock who owned the market garden must have thought that his soil was becoming infertile because we made sure we didn’t just deplete the trees around our house, but we had the cunning, natural to the young rascals we were, to ransack the whole of his orchard evenly.

The house was on three levels, with a bathroom and large bedroom on the middle level and three more bedrooms on the next level. Every room had an electric light, and only the last bedroom in the front of the house could be considered small, with room for just one single bed. The middle bedroom had room for a big double bed and a smaller one.

Later, when Dad left the stewardship of the West Street working men’s club, he got a job at the Royal Marine Barracks and began his pursuit of acquiring surplus materials. His new job was as an electrician’s mate, which meant he was the right-hand man to a qualified electrician. One of his acquisitions was a used water-immersion heater, which he installed in our upstairs bathroom along with a used copper tank. From the very beginning the tank leaked, and the old man would get out his soldering iron and with his newly acquired skills would patch the thing. As fast as he repaired it, it would spring another leak until eventually the copper tank became a silver tank. The solder was, of course, acquired from our ever-benevolent barracks.

It worked for years, though!

Dad’s next adventure came about by an accidental discovery of a couple of dangling wires in the darkest corner of the cellar. He checked them with his testers and found they were live and situated before the meter to the house. With some of his newly recycled wire, he connected it with the immersion heater upstairs, and lo and behold we had free hot water. The only problem was that if the water heater was switched on after dark, the street lights immediately outside the house dimmed quite alarmingly, so the water heater had to be on in daylight time only. Dad knew roughly when the meter man was due to be coming, and the device would be disconnected a few days in advance. This went on for years and compensated for us not getting free coal like the miners. There would have been no noticeable difference in our consumption as we had relied on the gas copper to heat the water prior to this unexpected benefit.

Dad had always said how much he would like a little girl, and he was to be disappointed one more time with the arrival of James, our final brother. I remember this one coming and the fuss that everyone made, and I also remember Dad saying the game was up and there’d be no more additions to this little pack of his.

We now had Michael Joseph—I don’t know where the Joseph came from, but dad had a brother Michael—then Patrick George, Patrick being our patron saint and George being a concession to my grandad on my mum’s side. I am Francis James (I discovered fifteen years later that Dad had actually put Frank on the birth certificate); the James bit was an anglicized version of his own name, Sheamus. Mum’s grandad was called Francis. John Kevin came next, and we were never sure who he was named after. My dad was probably a bit bored by that point. Kevin Barry the Irish rebel song was probably an inspiration for his second name. And then came James Malachi, again James after himself and his own father but now with the distinction of the first name. Dad must have leafed through the Bible to come up with Malachi, although the name was common enough in Ireland.

I had an uncle Frank, who was my mother’s brother, and also an obscure uncle in Ireland called Frank. My English uncle Frank, or I should say my Yorkshire uncle Frank, was a bit of a black sheep and a prodigious drinker. He worked for Grandad off and on for a while but ended up down the pit. He was among The Bevan Boys who were consigned to work in the coal mines though he had wanted to join the military. When we moved from 147 to 173, my uncle Frank and his family took over 147 and stayed there for years. Frank was my mother’s younger brother, and his family followed closely behind ours. He had girls, with the exception of the one boy, Francis.

We went down to 147 to play with their family, but they were quite a bit younger, so we could be easily bored. I was quite fond of Uncle Frank, both for his extroverted ways and also because he was the only person I had known who could drive a car. When Grandad had one, it was always Uncle Frank who was the chauffeur. Grandad had a big black Wolseley with red leather upholstery and small flower holders in the rear. Uncle Frank sometimes took us for a Sunday drive out in the country. He wasn’t the authoritarian that most other adults were, and he seemed to actually enjoy the company of the younger generation.

Around this time my Edwardian father became a subscriber to Rediffusion, which was a sort of cable radio service. It had a wooden speaker box with a volume control on it and a selector switch in the window with the choice of A, B, C, and D. By selecting one of these letters, we were straight away in reception of one of the four BBC stations available. A minor miracle of the times! Whereas we had to switch the older wireless on , wait for it to warm up, and then tune the crackling stations to one of the many marked on the dial. The dial in those old sets was an exotic trip through Europe with cities like Paris, Warsaw, Moscow, and other great places along the bands. You had to constantly adjust the tuning knob as the stations drifted in and out of tune. With our little wooden box, we could go straight to channels A, B, C and D, which we understood without all the gibberish. Now we had something to listen to, and like the kids of today who are babysat by television and video games, we had our radio dramas and comedies to keep us out of trouble, especially on the long dark evenings of winter. Programs like Hancock’s Half Hour would have us running home on a Tuesday evening, and Journey into Space could keep us spellbound and produce nightmares when sleep took us later. There was only one channel worth listening to, as the others had opera, boring political talks, or lectures all the time. Some of our friends had more sophisticated sets and were able to get Radio Luxemburg, where all the really good new music was, but it would be a while before we had that in our house. Later, Mum had her beloved red transistor radio, which was almost always on in her kitchen, but that’s jumping ahead.

Mum and Dad were busy running the West Street working men’s club, so most evenings we were left with my brother Mike in charge, or preferably one of my aunties would watch over us. Leaving Mike in charge was like putting the wolf in charge of the sheep. Mike was like a modern-day Fagin and would decide how the game was going to be played, sending us off in all directions to steal apples, pears, plums, or whatever else. Eating a stolen apple was a tricky business as you attempted to avoid the maggots! Sometimes he led an expedition onto the roof, and we would, one by one, squeeze out of the bathroom window on the second floor and shimmy up the drainpipe to the roof. Even little James was hauled up there at the age of one or two, much to the horror of the lady next door, who would have a nervous breakdown at least once or twice a week. She eventually told the parents because she said we were close to getting killed and she couldn’t take it anymore. That brought on one of the old man’s beatings, when he would usually lose it and have us leaping around the bedroom like a circus act as he snapped his belt. You could jump the bed or get under it, but you couldn’t hide from that belt. He could find you anywhere and force you back into the show with a flick of his wrist. He wielded that belt like a sabre. It’s still a bloody mystery to me how he became so adept with that thing, I mean, what the hell did he do to get that good at it, how could he possibly practice it, and on whom?

I have a perfect arrow-headed scar on my arse to this day!

This little charade would leave us all pretty sore and sorry for ourselves, and the old man would have indigestion for the rest of the evening and would not able to eat a thing. If my dad could be summed up in one word, it would be dyspeptic. It was indigestion that prolonged my dad’s life. He knew when he was eating that it was just a matter of time before one of us would piss him off, so he would lay off the food early knowing the coming effects. He would turn this into a lesson for all of us, pronouncing everything in moderation, always leaving some food on his plate secretly hoping we might ease back a bit on our own consumption, which he saw as eventually ruining him. During his career in the Royal Marines, he grew used to having spare money at his disposal thanks to his hairdressing skills, but his increasing brood of boys was steadily turning him destitute.

Pity he didn’t use the same moderation with his belt.

I think we kept Dad in pretty good shape in his middle age, and he stayed tall and slim all his life. On reflection, I don’t know how my mum could have put up with the thrashings as she listened downstairs to the chaos above her, but she never interfered or intervened. Indeed, she was most often the source of the beatings as she related our misdemeanors to Dad.

With Dad being so much older than Mum, he fought the battle of the age gap for most of his married life. He had a recipe of his own for massaging his scalp with a mixture of olive oil and methylated spirits, which was supposed to stop balding. I don’t know how he didn’t set himself on fire as he smoked his hand-rolled cigarettes and poured this barbecue starter on his head, but it never did any good as far as I could see. He used to dye the hair jet-black as well, which gave him an Asian look, but he still looked a lot older than Mum, who wasn’t much older than us really.

One of the biggest entertainments we had growing up was the sea. We lived just two blocks from the seafront. In the summer it was the biggest playground in the world. On summer days we would meet on the seafront and spent as much time up there as was allowed. We ran home for a meal and stayed on the shady side of the street because the other side was too hot for our bare feet. Deal was exposed on the south coast and was subject to a northerly wind most of the time as it funnelled its way up the English Chanel. Consequently, it always seemed to have a refreshing cooling effect even on days when the pavement was hot. You didn’t need any money when you had good weather and the sea was relatively calm. You were just like everyone else as long as you had a pair of swimming trunks and, if you were really lucky, flippers to go with it. Even one flipper was not to be sneezed at. Mostly, though, we shared flippers and the inflated car inner tube and played all day, even forgetting to be hungry.

Sometimes the shingled beach formed a bank and the sea simply toppled over. The water warmed up away from the main ocean and became a natural bathing area for smaller kids and mothers with babies. From the seafront on a clear day you could see the coast of France and also the masts of shipwrecks on theGoodwin Sands. One job we tried to get was helping boat owners winch their boats up the shingle beach, pulling the tarred wooden planks away from the stern of the boat and repositioning them in front. The idea was to keep the boats keel on the boards and off the pebbles while it was being pulled up the beach by a petrol-powered winch. There never seemed to be quite enough boards. The winches were recovered from car wrecks, and some of them still had the whole front of the car, bonnet, wings, and bumper in place, proudly showing their mobile origins. Austins, Standards, and even big Bedford truck engines for the heavier fishing luggers lined up along the promenade. It looked like a beached convoy from the front!

Sometimes if we had enough money we pooled it together and rented a boat from old Tommy Upton along the seafront. He usually had a parrot on his shoulder, which was busy most of the time trying to eat old Tommy’s ear. Tommy himself always seemed to be busily chewing his own tongue; at least that’s what it looked like since he had not a single tooth in his head. Tommy had about ten boats, mostly what we called skiffs and a couple of fishing boats that could stand rougher weather. He only allowed two to a skiff, so for two shillings we procured the boat and rowed it along the shore out of sight of old Tommy, and everyone joined in the fun. Sometimes we took the boat right out to the Goodwin Sands with two in the boat and two or three of us swimming along the sides. One of us in the boat would be the lookout for jellyfish, which we avoided like the plague. This was when the weather was particularly good and the sea as calm as a millpond.

We never spent too much time out there, being scared out of our wits in the first place with all the stories of quick sands and ghosts of the dead sailors. Some Deal fisherman would see us out there and Old Tommy would find out where we had been and ban us. We took turns, and by the time our turn came around again, he would have forgotten the culprit.

The solitude of the seafront was an ever-changing scene where you could even sit happily on your own. I loved to see the waves come crashing in on the beach with the great cacophony of sound and the sucking retreat as they oozed out over the shiny pebbles for the next onslaught. No wave was exactly the same, and when the weather was bad, the sea was even more entertaining. I gazed out at sea and dreamed of one day sailing the whole world. After a storm, the shingled beach would be a completely new landscape with treasures to be found if you searched hard enough. Sometimes the storm would be bad enough to tear the shingle right out of the beach, revealing patches of sand, but eventually the shingle would be brushed back up or down, restoring our precious pebbles. Quite often we found a penny or, on a very good day, a piece