I Could Have Been a Contender: Memoirs of a Black Sheep

me.

CHAPTER 1

Gassed at the bottom, buried at the top

Who am I? I am Eric Scott: Journalist, novelist, playwright. Home is Brisbane, Australia. I’ve had a hectic life and have sometimes been almost famous. If you Google me you’ll get a few thousand hits or so.

I have fallen dead drunk with superstars, dined with glamorous actresses, talked with the most famous people of stage and screen, had three novels and two books of one-act plays published and seen many of my children’s, teenage and adult plays performed on many stages - oh and I’ve had five wives.

I never quite made the celebrity list, but I could have been a contender if I had tried harder.

I was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up a gutter rat in Reigate Road, in the Nottingham suburb of Basford, England, which stood at the lower end of the working class scale.

Back then I was Eric Parrott, son of Ron and Edna Parrott kin to brother Ray and sister Glenys.

In 1939 Reigate Road was a unique place to grow up. The gasworks, which cooked gas from black coal residue sat at the bottom of this cobble- stoned, red-brick terrace house lined street, while the local cemetery loomed large at the top.

Gassed at the bottom buried at the top was the local saying.

In the middle of the street was Mrs Smith’s shop. A converted house that sold everything from bread and custard powder to the coveted Rowntree’s fruit gums. Mrs Smith had opening hours, but she was always happy to bring in a bit more business at the back door when she was officially closed.

On the bottom corner was the local grocery store. And on the other side stood a factory that manufactured wicker work, mainly baskets, and the windowless walls were great for bouncing footballs against.

After the gasworks had cooked the black coal; extracted the gas and piped it into houses for cooking and heating (and sometimes suicide) purposes, the residue became a smokeless fuel called coke. In those days there was no other type of coke even on the horizon!

On cold winter days we would queue-up for a hundredweight bag of coke to keep us warm for the week. And it didn’t always smell bad, just when the wind was in the wrong direction.

Conservation in those days had something to do with bottling fruit and making jam; and greenhouse gasses helped tomatoes grow in the greenhouse.

The cemetery held no ghostly fears for us. It was a good place to find flowers for the school’s annual Harvest Festival and the tall sandstone wall was a secure way for us to enter the fenced off grounds of the local cinema, an ornate shaped building called The Futurist. In those grounds grew the biggest and juiciest blackberries in the neighbourhood. We could also crawl into the depth of these monster plants and create cosy little dens.

The street was filled with an odd assortment of residents. There were reasonably well-off people whose boys wore pin-striped suits and others whose kids always had the seat of their pants torn and patched and sported grubby knees. The adults generally kept themselves to themselves, but on Saturday night there was sometimes an altercation in the street when language was foul, voices loud and fists flew.

The local pub, The Shoulder of Mutton, was just around the corner at the gasworks end of the street. It was no more than a couple of minutes walk (there anyway, sometimes it took longer walking back) from any house in the neighbourhood.

There was no problem with the children then, we simply went to the pub with our parents and sat with the other kids in the pub backyard eating crisps and drinking lemonade, dandelion and burdock or Tizer. Life was simple if not easy.

was there that my Dad used to send me with a jug for a pint of ale. Once I tried sipping it and didn’t like the taste. And I was staggered when I got home and Dad told me off for drinking his beer. I couldn’t fathom then how he knew; it was only a tiny sip!

The time was the beginning of World War 2. Windows were covered in black-out curtains so no chink of light could escape to show Jerry where to drop his bombs, and there were no street lights. Most of us kids - there were seven or eight little gutter rats - didn’t even know what street lights were. To us they were tall, green-painted poles fit for climbing and swinging on the ladder-support cross piece. They were remnants of the old days of gas lighting.

We all had fun, but some had more fun than others. My parents were strict when it came to bedtime. It didn’t matter that it was the height of summer and it never got dark. Seven-o-clock and we had to come in and go to bed.

On those nights I would lay awake for hours listening to all the other kids shouting and yelling and having a good time. It was a time of sheer frustration and boredom.

In general the war was fun, especially watching Spitfires and Messerschmitt warplanes dog-fighting in a clear blue sky, and we had a great time hiding under the kitchen table when the air-raid sirens went and the German bombers were roaring over head.

They actually dropped bombs on Nottingham, but they mainly fell in the River Trent, which in the moonlight the Germans mistook for a road. Our town suffered little damage and we were too young to wonder about what happened in London, even when we met the refugees; strange talking, pasty-faced youngsters, who were absolutely alien to us.

The adults, God bless them, were never eager to add fear to our already deprived lives.

We also had air-raid shelters - concrete bunkers at the bottom of the street - but we never used them - only for more nefarious activities like games of Doctors and Nurses with the little girl gutter rats.

My family had one real wartime shock though; Dad was conscripted into the army, despite being almost blind. Luckily for him some medic caught on to the fact that he couldn’t see more than two feet in front of him and would be more of a menace to his own comrades than the Germans. So he returned home to an eternally grateful wife who, as well as caring for her first-born, was nursing baby Ray.

Dad was a labourer. He could use a shovel as well as an Irish navvy. But he always said the best job he ever had was as drayman working for Shipstone’s Brewery. In those days, huge shire horses were still used to pull carts loaded with barrels of beer. His job was to help unload the barrels and roll them to hoists that lowered the barrels into the pub cellar.

Every day he would go off to work and we would sometimes see him sitting proudly, riding shotgun along with the driver. He loved his job, especially the free pint of beer he received at each stop.

The trouble was he never came home sober. So Mum eventually put paid to that and made him give up. He never stopped talking about that job until the day he died.

He was sharp as a tack, but his own upbringing and the great depression had left his education lacking. Despite his bad eyesight, he read all the newspapers from front to back. Even my weekly dose of comic books - Wizard and Hotspur - tended to be devoured before I got my hands on them He also had a good grasp of the political situation and was all for the working man, a strong unionist even taking on the job of shop steward at one time.

Dad’s poor eyesight wasn’t helped by pouring over the small print of the racing form every day. He had various systems, but was never a big winner - but then, with his sixpence each-way bets was never big loser either. He also had a tough love attitude to us kids. But I can never remember him laying a finger on any of us. Just a glance up from the newspaper was enough to make us behave. He also had a wicked, biting sense of humour. If I was bullied on the street and went home complaining that someone had hit me. His reply would always be: well hit him back!

We were poor, and we were lean and hungry - hunger pains were part of life at that time for everybody- but we never starved. And it wasn’t all about lack of money. There simply wasn’t enough food to go round and everything was rationed, bread was grey and coffee came only in bottles called coffee and chicory essence.

Nothing was ever wasted in our house. Leftover bread crusts and old bread were stored in a box until they had dried out and then used for a bread and milk breakfast. Potato peelings and vegetable scraps were given to local pig breeder, or boiled and mashed to be used as feed for backyard chickens.

The rear entry to our Reigate Road terrace house was reached by walking through the little alleyway in the middle of the block and then past the other house backyards. Ours was the last house in the block, so we had a wall separating us from next door on one side and at the bottom was a towering (to us little gutter rats) wall that separated the entire street from the next one.

Communities were so tight knit in those days that the houses over the wall in Silverdale Road were alien territory. They might have been in another city for the mental distance between residents. The street was defended at all times by the Silverdale Road gutter rats, so neither set of kids from backing streets ever met except in battle.

Our back yard had a patch of dirt we called a garden and because of this Dad decided to buy a pair of young chickens to fatten up for Christmas. Not hens, roosters, which fed on anything they could find and grew into mighty beasts that looked more that emus than chickens.

One day Dad decided to test out the culinary delights of his homebred chicken meat.

Not being adept at animal slaughter, he had no idea how to kill a bird so he grabbed it by the neck and swung it round in an arc until it stopped squawking. It proved to be tasty meal despite some hovering guilt because we were eating a pet.

The remaining rooster was on high alert after that. There would be no cornering it and the only way to get the thing into its pen at night was to chase it around the yard with a broom: A bit like lion taming really.

A regular visit to the house was the rent man, who visited all the houses to collect his boss’s shillings worth of flesh. He would stop outside a front door and knock heavily enough to alert half the street, but inside the house it would be ignored if money was tight. His answer to this ploy was to sneak round the back to confront the recalcitrant renters.

We didn’t know our rent man was around the back on one particular day until we heard frantic screams for help. We rushed into the yard to see our mighty rooster sitting on the six-foot two-inch tall rent collector and methodically trying to peck out his eyes.

Out came the broom and the psychotic rooster, wings flapping and eyes red with hate was pushed back into its pen. I can’t remember what happened to the rooster after that. But do know the rent man never visited our backyard again.

CHAPTER 2

Sex and the single gutter rat

Reigate Road was not where I was born, but it is the first place of which I have memories. Life before that was just myth and tales from other people. Mum told me I was walking at nine months of age and at just past 18 months was sent down the road to (successfully) fetch the doctor when Mum was about to give birth to my little brother, Raymond William.

Looking back at the old photos I can see that Mum was a gorgeous young woman and I knew she had curly auburn hair. Dad was a handsome, Oxford- bagged man who obviously had a lot of sex-appeal and the aggressive bravado that went with living with the name Parrott.

Dad was, like his mother, a talented piano player. He knew no music, but could hear a tune and play it by memory almost instantly, which made him a popular man in the pub at the weekend.

When he was single he used to tell the girls his name was Ron Rachmaninov.

Of course kids don’t know whether their mother is pretty or not. She is just THERE. She puts the food on the table, mends, and washes the clothes and hands out any necessary, or more often in my own mind, unnecessary, punishment. I grew adept at curling up into a tight little ball when, after coming home with the toes scraped out of my shoes, she started to belt me round the backside with them.

When I first heard the legend that red-haired women had bad tempers, I laughed. I knew it was no legend, just God’s honest truth. But Mum’s temper cooled as quickly as it heated up and it was out to play again, with her threatening to tell Dad if you do it again, whatever my brother and I had done.

She had some great rows with Dad who was always infuriatingly cool. One time the butter dish flew across the room. Dad calmly wiped the butter from his face and continued reading his newspaper. Another time it was his dinner that it him over the head. This time his reply was a cracker. He dipped his finger into the gravy that dripped down his face and said: It needs more salt!

Maybe her temper was the result of her own frustrations. She was a highly intelligent woman, with a quick mathematical brain and had been a top scholar in her schooldays. But like most working class people in those days, education counted for nothing. Mum’s generation left school as soon as they could and went to work at whatever textile mill had a vacancy until they got married and had kids, or as was quite popular at the time, vice versa.

For Mum, there was no choice. She and her four siblings, older sister Hilda, younger sister Betty, Les, and Jack, were left orphans. Mum would never talk about her parents except to say they died of cancer, very close together.

It was a time of great bitterness for her as I discovered later. It was, she told me once, when she stopped believing in God. But she never let that bitterness encroach on her marital family. She managed the money, would not borrow a penny, and occasionally took a job herself. If she wanted a new anything, she would go to work until she had earned the money she needed and then got back to being a housewife.

And through all this she had one motto for her children: There is a better life than this, go and find it.

The family attitude was: If your father is a labourer, you will be a tradesman: If you father is a tradesman you will be a professional. We were encouraged to better ourselves. I did exactly that. I went to work in a suit. I bought my own home and car. I was also the first family member to get a divorce! I was the black-sheep, but I was still loved.

My mother was one of the best people I ever knew. She held no prejudices and opened her heart everyone. Mum lived to be 92 and could still tie me in mathematical knots when, in 2005, I visited her in England for her 90th birthday celebrations.

Because of the strong personalities of my parents I never felt a need to deny my roots. I did become a literate, well-spoken, and well-presented human being in an intriguing profession. But I was never happier or more comfortable than in the local pub with my extended family of parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and cousins.

But in Reigate Road, that future was unimaginable. We spent our hours in the street, in the dark during the winter, playing hide and seek in and out of the alleyways, hiding in coal closets, toilets, behind the ivy that covered the wall, and the dark was ideal for boy-girl experiments. Today people talk of the sexual revolution, the popularity of casual sex, and the sexualisation of the young. Looking back I see there is nothing new in the world.

For us gutter rats sex was a normal part of life. We did it and thought nothing of it. One girl delighted us all by doing handstands without her underpants. It made for interesting viewing for curious boys.

Sometimes we boys were, in today’s terms, sexually abused, mind you at the time we thoroughly enjoyed the naughty escapades. Teenage girls babysat and those same teenage girls taught us about sex. We learned more when we joined Joe Hawley’s gang. Joe lived on the other side of the wall on the opposite side of the street in a council house in a street next door the Shoulder of Mutton.

Like many of the kids in the neighbourhood, Joe’s father was a miner and Joe was a big brawny lad. He was a couple of years older than the rest of us and his was the top gang in the district. You had to be in it to have any prestige.

Back in the air raid shelters Joe and the gang brought in a couple of willing girls. He showed how to do it and it didn’t take long for all of us to become adept at the game and enjoy its pre-adolescent excitement. We stayed happily in this hive of constant sexual activity until calamity hit with the biggest scandal the street had ever seen and the exodus of a disgraced family; much to the chagrin of the gutter rats.

In the house opposite ours lived a new family with a teenage daughter. Her Mum and Dad both went to work and when the girl came home from school, she was home alone. Obviously she became lonely and started to make friends with us gutter rats and invite them into her house. We were really intrigued when Joe Hawley deigned to walk down our street to pay a visit. We felt it she had to be someone important.

My baby brother and I had not yet been invited to these street meetings, but we watched with interest as other boys and girls looked furtively but we watched with interest as other boys and girls looked furtively around and then opened the front door to disappear quickly inside. We discovered from a blabbermouth that there were daily orgies going on there. I demanded entrance and was finally allowed to enter this forbidden den of earthly delights, followed by my little brother.

This was a piece of real-life fantasy we wanted to last forever, until baby Ray piped up at the dinner table at home. With all the innocence of someone passing on an interesting bit of gossip he brought forks to halt half way to mouths as he said: Colin Baxter has fucked Rene Saunders.

I gave him a death stare and shook my head to try to shut him up, but to no avail, within seconds the story was told; within minutes the entire street knew, within hours loud outraged conversations echoed over the cobblestones and children were kept inside. Within days the family had gone.

We just wondered what all the fuss was about. She was a nice girl, we thought, who had good parties.We did however play some more innocuous games. We played Hopping Tommy in the street. That is a game where protagonists stand on one leg, arms folded and try to shoulder charge the other off his one leg.

We played Kiss Me Catch Me with the girls, who always had a safe area if they didn’t want to be caught. Then there was marbles and Truth Dare or Promise which inevitably ended in dare of some sort.

We didn’t have hoops so we bowled car tyres up and down the street; we popped tar bubbles and collected car numbers. I have no idea why. We had page after page of numbers written down, but didn’t know what to do with them. We stood on the railways bridge and took train numbers too, hoping to see the bright green Flying Scotsman loco or the streamlined Mallard train. We also collected cigarette packets, cigarette cards, and tourist guide books from faraway places like Torquay and Bournemouth and we read books from the library or listened to the radio. Obviously we did not have many toys.

I quit playing sex games when I reached puberty. I learned what dire consequences could occur, not from birds and bees talks from parents, such things were never mentioned, or from school, but from the usual sources of information: the Reigate Road gutter rats.

Unmarried mothers were seen to be even more scandalous than Rene Saunders and her orgies. The fear of getting a girl pregnant scared us half to death!

As well as being sexperts we learned to be petty criminals; we learned how to steal apples and shop lift. We had an expert thief in our midst - Maurice Harriman. His mum ran a shop and when we went off for a camping trip to a nearby field with matches and an army mess tin. He always turned up with tinned food of some sort, nicked from the shop front. He was handy bloke to have around in those ration book days.

It was through him that we learned the art of shop-lifting, which was how I increased the value of my stamp collection. We were as adept as the Artful Dodger and his cohorts, but like all criminals we became complacent.

There were three of us, Maurice, myself and Ray. The system was simple. We went into Woolworths (the Crazy Clarkes of the UK at the time). I leaned over the counter; Maurice lifted items from the display and dropped them into the bag Ray was carrying. All went well until an item missed the bag and fell onto the floor. Ever efficient Ray bent down to pick it up and so brought attention to our little group and swiftly the store detective swooped. We were taken, panic stricken, into the manager’s office.

The bag was inspected and all the useless junk laid out on a table. The detective took our names and addresses and told us we were banned from the store for life. He also warned that the police would be informed and to tell our parents to expect a call from the local constabulary. We then each got a clip round the ear and were sent packing.

We took our time getting home. Maurice the expert told us to keep our mouths shut: nothing was going to happen. But my fear was what would happen if the copper turned up at the door unannounced. A shoe around the backside would be nothing compared to the rage Mum would fly into if a policeman knocked on the front door.

This was because the police made regular appearances in the street, mainly for the usual suspects. And the suspect families were looked down on (it was good to have someone to look down on) so a copper knocking on our door would be humiliation of the most extreme.

We tried to forget it, but it was impossible, so we confessed, got the beating we deserved and were sent to bed without any tea. Mum went to the Harriman’s shop and dropped Maurice in it. Of course he hadn’t said a word, hardened little crim that he was. I don’t know what punishment he got, but it didn’t seem to bother him and of course, the policeman never did arrive. We didn’t shop-lift again and I was a teenager before I returned to the store and even then it was with a tinge of fear.

It was old fashioned justice and it worked. Of course in those days kids didn’t have ‘rights’; they did as their parents demanded and the school teacher had total respect from student and parents. If we got whacked by the teacher for misbehaving we got an extra whack at home for good measure.

But there were other things just as important as sex and thieving: Cowboys and Indians, football and Dick Barton: Special Agent for three. We would ride our trusty steeds a la Monty Python, with lots of clicking and whinnying, shooting wildly from our imaginary six shooters amid much argument as to whether you were dead or just "winged’.

I often preferred to be an Indian, so I could swiftly pull an imaginary arrow from my imaginary sheath and shoot those dratted cowboys unerringly through the heart. Sword fighting with Elderberry bush wands (yes we had them well before Harry Potter) was popular too. Then there was no doubt then as to who was dead or not. There was usually a bruise to show where you’d been hit.

Dick Barton was a radio serial that came on at 6.45 every weeknight and no matter what was happening it stopped and we raced home. The streets were deserted as Dick and his mate Snowy were on air. They were adventures in sound not to be missed.

The other thing we all eagerly anticipated (apart from Christmas) was the shooting down of a German warplane, which was a fairly regular occurrence. We cheered on the Spitfire as it spun and spat cannon fire at the enemy, we cheered even louder when the tell-tale plume of oily smoke shot from the enemy plane and the engine spluttered to a stop. We watched the Spitfire swoop off into the blue in search of more prey while the enemy plane would spiral slowly down to earth. We waited for the parachute to open and hoped that the stricken pilot would land in our street so we could capture him and become heroes. It never happened so when we realised that, we concentrated on the plane and tried to judge where it would fall and race off in the general direction; hoping it would fall in Lacey’s Field or some other local open space and we would get there before the army and grab priceless souvenirs.

We knew one boy who had a whole swastika on a piece of metal he had collected from a wreck. We were never so lucky. The only time we ever actually arrived at a crash site the army was there before us. We tried to sneak round, but the sight of 303 rifles; the crunch of shiny boots on the ground and a terse bugger off was enough to deter even the staunchest souvenir hunters.

So we played our way through the war, carrying our Mickey Mouse gas masks in cardboard boxes wherever we went with never a thought to the danger we were in from Herr Hitler and his massive Army, Navy and Air Force.

CHAPTER 3

Gutter rat caged

The turning point in the war for me was neither Dunkirk nor even D-Day, but it was more dramatic in my eyes. It was the day I started school.

This was a big deal. I was one of the youngest kids in the street and each year more and more of my comrades went to school, leaving me at home with a rapidly diminishing circle of playmates.

It was September 1941. I was four years old going on five and as tough as they came. I nearly had a blue fit when my mother informed me that she was taking me along for my first day at school. The stubbornness for which I eventually became known (I call it determination), showed its first signs of life.

If I couldn’t go along with my mates, I wasn’t going at all, I declared. But Mother won out and dragged me very unwillingly to the school gates; I soon spotted people I knew and shot off to find them without a backward look. Mum let me go on my own from then on.

I would march to the top of the street, turn left at the stone-mason’s yard and down to the Futurist Cinema roundabout where Valley Road crossed Nottingham Road; across the Belisha Beacon, past the oily smelling gasometer, a huge steel-framed skeleton that contained a massive tank which was high or low depending on the amount of coal gas it housed, to Scotland Road and Scotland Road Primary School.

It took no more than ten minutes to walk there and of course traffic was non-existent. Only school head masters had cars and they would be a tiny Morris Minor or an Austin Ruby.

Even on my first day, I was no stranger to the school yard. Many times, with Joe Hawley’s gang I had shinned over the metal spiked fence to escape authority when we were caught scrumping (that was Basford slang for stealing) apples from the adjacent orchard. But it looked so different crammed to the gills with boys and girls - all of them older than me. However I stuck my hands in my pocket and wandered over to hang with Joe Hawley, who was flirting with a tall pretty girl I found out was called Winifred Hamer. He took one look at me and punched me on the arm. It hurt. I wanted to cry but I dare not. Besides I was incensed that he preferred talking to some silly girl than one of his own gang members.

I wandered away to join the kids bouncing a ball up against the air raid shelter walls.

School was not exactly what I expected. Memories of those early days are hazy; we had to drink a small bottle of milk every day which was usually warm. The only fridge in those days was the front door step in winter. Then bottles froze and the cardboard tops were lifted by the milk as the cream pushed into an icy delight. In summer we had to hope for the best by storing perishables in the cool depths of the coal cellar where meat was also kept in a fly-proof meat safe.

We were provided with school dinners every day, which were a godsend to most families; it was ration-free food. They were never the tastiest of meals even for half starved little children, but we never left a scrap.

Mostly I think our school time was spent longing for the holidays to arrive: the long summer when we went to outdoor swimming pools or fished for minnows and Robin Red Breasts at Billy Bacons field by the River Leen.

The Redbreasts would last for several days in jam jars and even longer when we learned about changing the water. And the minnows lasted for weeks before turning up their fins.

The most exciting holiday though was Christmas, which was greatly celebrated by my family. The run up to the great day had a traditional mantra: How long to Christmas Mum?

Well was the reply, first its Goose Fair, then its Guy Fawkes’s night, then its Eric’s birthday, then Ray’s birthday ... and then it’s Christmas!" That amazing feast of entertainment kept us going through the long winter nights.

Goose Fair ... on the green sward of Nottingham Forest Park the Mayor of the City of Nottingham in all his finery and golden chain climbed a rostrum and rang a bell. Then: I’m the Mayor who opens this fair for three days only, he would call out to the keen, anticipatory crowd.

The bell was rung again and the fair opened. Diesel engines were ramped up to turn generators that created electricity for the dazzling light display and the record players to churn out the latest pop tunes that rang out through loudspeakers. The lilt of the steam organs on the merry-go-round added to the din and the rides began to turn.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the end of October were magical times for us gutter rats. First it meant a bus ride to Hyson Green, and then we walked through the crowded streets lured on by the smell of cooking - mushy peas, roasting chestnuts and hot potatoes along with the tangy smell of cockles, mussels, and whelks, all mouth-watering smells that made young stomachs rumble.

In this first year of school the mechanical rides were a bit scary for my young soul and I had a mildly delicate stomach that reacted to violent circular movements, also I had a dangerous curiosity and a vivid imagination.

I was drawn into the tawdry reaches of the sideshows and the ghost train.

Now there was a ride I enjoyed as a terrified youngster all the way to cool teenage-hood when it was a great ride to take a girl on. The arm would rest on the back of the seat (just like at the movies) ready to coil into an embrace when the girl became scared. They always did, phony and flirtatious or not!

But that year I was only flirting with imaginary danger and, with heart racing, paid my thruppence for the ride and went through the horrors that imagination can bring. Th e whistles and roars, the tickling feather and cold breath that came through the darkness, aided by my imagination turned the ride into a Devil’s playground, with Hell around every sharp bend the carriage went round. And yet for all the fear, there was always the reassuring knowledge that everyone who went in came out at the other end, blinking into the bright lights.

Then I wandered through the spruikers wondering which amazing exhibit would be worth my few remaining threepenny pieces. Was it the bearded lady; the amazing Siamese twins; the world’s tallest man, or the world’s shortest man?

It was a hard choice, but one year I eventually settled to see the dead body of American cowboy outlaw Jesse James. I knew about Jesse James, shot in the back by the dirty coward Mr Howard.

But it was a disappointment. The body as such could have been anything. Then I tried to look 16, which was pretty pathetic for a snot-nosed six year old and walked up to the tent where scantily clad beauties straight from the Arabian nights promised punters all the excitement of the Orient: See the belly dancers in all their glory: A show for adults only.

I heard the words that were a constant in my youth when I tried to reach the cashier’s box. Bugger off, she said, so I did, my mind reeling as I wondered what exactly belly dancers in all their glory looked like.

I stared at the boxing booth where a young black man, shiny and well muscled stood silently staring into the crowd along with a motley crew of other fighters, mostly overweight and white, while the spruiker called out for opponents for his fighters, offering a pound note for anyone who went three rounds with his world champions.

It seemed to me even at that stage that there was something different about the black man. He looked tougher than the rest and more confident.

I saw him again in the same booth many years later. This time he looked more like the white guys, overweight and over the hill. In between times this man Randolph Turpin had won and lost the world middle weight championship and beaten the legendary American Sugar Ray Robinson. I went in, avoiding the eye of the spruiker in case he decided to put me in the ring, and watched the fights.

The local bully boys came and were demolished in the main by the pugs in the ring. Occasionally someone was allowed to go the distance and win the pound.

I didn’t know what was going on really, but I felt the excitement of watching gladiators perform in the prize ring.

I got more than my fair share of the pugilistic art a couple of years later when running to catch the bus to get home from Goose Fair. A huge (to me) boy asked me what time it was. I told the boy I didn’t have a watch and to ask a copper. He didn’t think this was funny and said: Well you’re going to have the time of your life and then smashed me in the eye with his big fist.

I think I sprinted a 10 second 100 yards and was on the bus, heart pumping before the pain and swelling set in.

But this earlier time after the excitement of seeing bloody noses and some slick dancing feet (which was the most I saw from my height) I spent the rest of my money on the motor bike ride pretending I was Dick Barton chasing a pack of villains, apart from a penny or two on the slot machines, the precursors of poker machines, hoping to double my money but rarely doing so. Or I would try to throw a ring over a gold watch, or bob celluloid ducks to win prizes.

It didn’t happen often, but one year I did win a plaster Dutch Girl doll, which Mum kept as a treasured item for many years until someone accidentally broke it. More than likely it was my brother who, as he grew older became adept at breaking things and tipping our baby sister Glenys from her pram.

We all loved Goose Fair. It was a haven of warmth on those cold autumn nights.

However, much I loved the fair, I enjoyed the Sunday morning after even more. At midnight on the Saturday, the fair would close and the carnival workers had to work swiftly to dismantle the rides and the tents and stack them on huge trucks ready for the next stop.

In the brisk and often frosty morning air the gutter rats would again climb on board the trolley bus and make our way to the Forest where the sight could not be more different from the night before. The grass was pale where the rides had covered it and heaps of rubbish were piled everywhere. It was those rubbish piles we homed in on; for it was there that buried treasure lay.

At the end of the fair, the game stalls dumped all their damaged goods ready for the council cleaners. We sifted through these broken pots and statues and soft toys and kewpie dolls to find something intact.

One year I found real treasure, and entire statue of an Alsation dog, with just the tiniest chip out of its plaster ear. When I took it home Mum said it was lovely and, like all such things, it had pride of place before my brother broke it.

After the fair, the countdown to Christmas continued. Bonfire Night was next.

"Remember, remember the fifth of November

Of gunpowder treason and plot.

We had a man called Guy Fawkes to thank for a marvellous celebration. On November 5 in 1605 he was a member of the English Gunpowder Plot rebels, and was caught guarding a hoard of explosives that had been placed under the House of Lords in London. He was arrested and along with the other plotters was dealt with rather fatally.

King James was the monarch who survived the assassination attempt, and all the good people lit bonfires around London to celebrate him dodging the bullet. The custom stayed through the centuries.

Although the date appeared regularly in the Christmas count-down, I was ten years old before I actually saw one. The first time I experienced a bonfire was in 1945 when the war in Europe ended - VE Day in May - and the second came in August when Japan surrendered and we had a big VJ Day celebration.

Then the lights came back on and Guy Fawkes Night was back with a vengeance.

I don’t think any of us kids knew the real historical significance of the celebration, but we did know that we had a huge bonfire, roasted potatoes in the ashes and let off as many fireworks as we could get our hands on. Catherine wheels, Roman candles, penny bangers, jumping jacks to drive the girls crazy and, for the rich kids, rockets, fired from empty milk bottles, that exploded in cascades of stars in the sky. Not for us gutter rats though - they cost sixpence each.

I used my meagre money supply on roman candles, mainly because they flamed in so many different colours as they burned and ended with a final whoosh of fire into the sky. Bangers had no appeal to me. Light the blue touch paper and retire was the warning on the fireworks. With banger you lit it, threw it, and awaited the short fizz and the bang.

Hardly worth waiting for compared to my Roman candle or the swiftly spinning, fire-spitting, Catherine Wheel. We raised the money for these fire crackers by creating an effigy of Guy Fawkes, which consisted of a pair of trousers and a coat stuffed with newspapers that usually looked more like a scarecrow.

We would sit him an old pram and find a busy corner to sit and tout for money from passers-by asking: Penny for the Guy mister? Like all enterprises there were good days and bad, occasionally a rich and compassionate soul would throw in a silver shilling, enough for a dozen penny bangers or half a dozen Roman candles.

Sometimes the local copper, if he was in bad mood, would move us on, but we came back as soon as he left . We were in more danger from the big kids in street gangs outside our area. The predators would sometimes move in on unprotected members of Joe’s gang and grab any takings. That was when I learned that I could run fast!

Our neighbourhood bonfire was usually built at the bottom of Joe Hawley’s Close, for several reasons: first there would always be someone to keep an eye on our growing pile of wood as we each scavenged for anything that would burn and tossed it on the top.

Those rival gang members were likely to sneak up when no-one was around and steal as many combustibles as they could carry. When this happened, our gang would be rounded up and we would make a silent foray into enemy territory, under the cover of darkness, and take back what had been stolen and as much more as we could carry.

One time there was a guard on duty, but with more than a dozen of us raiders, he was overpowered and tied to a telegraph post. I never found out whether he wriggled free of his bonds or had to stay there all night and froze. I don’t think I really cared much.

On the big night we would stand in the frosty November air awaiting the lighting of the pile of wood, old packing cases, worn out chairs, pieces of fencing, logs, cardboard suitcases; anything that would burn. They often grew to more than three metres tall.

Once the flames roared we would get as close to the fire as we could to relish the unaccustomed heat. When the wood was reduced to ashes, it would be time to throw in the potatoes to roast - or burn black in most cases. We held big sticks, ready to roll the potatoes out when we considered them cooked. Impatience too often won and the spuds came out black, hot but still hard, but somehow they tasted unbelievably delicious.

The two birthdays quickly passed, with sometimes a birthday cake but