Not A Patch on Going Hopping

In the nineteen forties and fifties People didn’t go on holidays nearly as much as they seem to nowadays. One good reason for several years was obviously the war but I’m not sure that people like us holidayed a great deal in the nineteen twenties and thirties either. Some in the community who were designated by my mother as Better People than us, Mrs Frost of Springhead Road for example, were determined to ignore the war and courageously set off in 1941 for their annual week in Broadstairs, or Folkestone often to visit relatives. In Mrs Frost’s case it was the sister who conveniently ran a guest house in Hastings but on this occasion her plans were ill fated. The reason for this was we found as she breathlessly relayed the story to the curious customers in Hilda Simms’ corner shop, that she had been targeted by a Dornier just overhead when she and her sister were about to step into Plummers. They were almost gunned down where they stood and would have surely perished if it hadn’t been for a brave little Spitfire, rising up above the enemy plane and giving chase. Later her nephew told her that the Dornier had fallen into the sea and the Spitfire had done a double victory roll to cheers from the onlookers on the blustery seafront below. After that experience which grew ever more dramatic with each retelling, Mrs Frost paid more heed to the fact that we were a country at war and decided to put all thoughts of holidays on hold for the duration.

It was all very well for people like the Frosts, I was told, whose income was very well supplemented by the piano lessons given in the front room after school each day, but those of us further down the social scale could only contemplate such extras once the Holidays with Pay Act was passed in 1938 whether or not a war was on the horizon. Even then it benefited only those workers whose wage rates were fixed by Trade Boards and were thus awarded one week on full pay, no questions asked. This was seen as a great step forward. By 1948 a couple of our neighbours spoke of booking a week at Butlin’s in Clacton. The Scutts family who lived at the top of Springhead Road quite close to The Leather Bottel had actually been there twice according to Barbara who was in my class at St Botolph’s. However, Barbara was known to exaggerate. Rita Jenkins confidently told us that she was being taken to a place called Skegness which was miles away and her mother was busy sewing her two new summer dresses. I began to seriously hanker after the undoubted glamour of a holiday camp!

The first such camp was opened by John Fletcher Dodd at Caister-on-sea in 1906 and called, unimaginatively, Caisters. Nobody I knew ever talked of going there so I have no idea what it was like but the one run by the entrepreneurial Billy Butlin at Clacton sounded most attractive. My father got a week’s paid holiday along with everyone else at Bevan’s Cement Works and after a great deal of argument, with my mother maintaining that she would prefer to have a day here and a day there such as Southend-on-Sea and Whipsnade Zoo, Clacton began to be discussed and then quickly discarded once it was realised that all campers were expected to join in the Fun. Apparently we were a family who were not especially good at Fun and so, disappointingly, a week was booked in a boarding house at Ramsgate instead. We paid for bed and breakfast, a cot in the room for my brother, one bath each during the duration of our stay and no eating fish and chips in the room.

I no longer remember a great deal about that week except that it was not an unqualified success and the sun did not come out until the day we were leaving. My mother complained a lot about it being impossible to wash and dry nappies and berated me each morning for not eating the breakfast that had been paid for but I was a picky eater and not keen on anything that contained obvious globules of fat which I was always told was the Goodness in the meal and which I most decidedly did not believe. There seemed to be a great deal of Goodness in the slices of black pudding and fried bread on my plate. The grim faced landlady was clearly not overly enthusiastic on her chosen profession and once the guests left the premises after breakfast the front door was firmly locked until five pm when they were reluctantly allowed to return, minus fish and chips and without making undue noise.

The seaside for me meant sticks of rock and sometimes candy floss, brass band music and pebble beaches. I was not at all eager to go on the enforced walks along The Front in gale force winds and longed to be back in York Road playing Hopscotch with Molly. I feared and detested the wheeling gulls, suddenly of an infinitely more massive variety than those that circled the Gravesend promenade. Their eyes seemed permanently fixed upon me and whatever it was that might be edible about me yet they observed my small brother in a much more benign fashion. Even then and only in his second year of life, his joy at their presence was palpable as he stretched out plump infant arms towards them making earnest sounds in a baby argot that they half seemed to acknowledge. Their hostility was reserved mostly for me so when walking I kept as far away from their sea wall perch as possible and concentrated my thoughts on the ice cream I had been promised. But all ice cream cones appeared to cost sixpence in Ramsgate which was Daylight Robbery and so put on hold in favour of fish and chips. Although eating fish and chips on the beach should have been fun it turned out not to be because of the ongoing proximity of the scavenging gulls. I found myself once again being mercilessly harangued on account of food, this time for not eating my allocated piece of battered hake which was what the avian predators were intent upon taking ownership of. And so I cried bitter tears of frustration and misery and told my long suffering parents that I hated holidays and never again wanted to have one.

By way of compensation and what now stands out as an island of excitement was being taken into a bookshop and being told by my father that I could choose a book to read and to keep. This certainly did not happen very often because I was expected to get all my reading matter from the local library except at Christmas and birthdays when I was sometimes bought second hand books from Gravesend Market. I didn’t mind that they were second hand because having my own collection of books was wonderful and made me feel important as I read them again and again. I can’t actually remember any other time when a book had been purchased, pristine and immaculate from a proper bookshop. My father strongly recommended Tales From Shakespeare by some people called Charles and Mary Lamb or A Child’s History of England by Charles Dickens but to his dismay I firmly rejected both of these ideas and instead spent a long time deliberating the various merits of The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies as opposed to the The Enid Blyton Book of Nature. I finally chose the latter which at six shillings and sixpence also turned out to be Daylight Robbery. All in all it was not a successful holiday which was a pity with it being our very first and my mother said she would be glad to get back to her own bed and holidays were not all they were cracked up to be. What’s more she wouldn’t be making the same mistake again and would never have believed the price of things in Ramsgate. She would certainly not complain about Gravesend and Northfleet prices again. If the truth be known, a week by the sea wasn’t a patch on Going Hopping and that was a fact.

When we got back to Northfleet, however and people began to ask how our week away at the coast had worked out, I was surprised to find that far from revealing how disastrous it had been she chose to wax lyrical about it and said we were already considering booking for the following year. We might even book early to be sure of getting a good room in the afore-described and previously much maligned guest house. When I protested that I thought she had hated the experience just as much as I had I was told to Button my Lip because that was no business of anyone else. Only my grandmother and aunts were told the truth and it did not seem to surprise them with Old Nan making comment that Ramsgate and Margate were much overrated and she had never held with them and would sooner go to Southend any day where both the weather and the whelks were glorious. And she agreed that as true as she stood in our kitchen none of these new-fangled seaside guest houses with their fancy prices were a patch on Going Hopping!
Such a disaster was never to happen again and the following year, my Uncle Harold who had become a senior foreman at Dusseks in Crayford and had no fears about using the telephone for the purposes of making holiday bookings suggested that the entire family should try a week at a place called Swalecliffe at the Hilltop Campsite to be precise. My Grandmother immediately approved and said it was not far from Herne Bay and within easy reach of Whitstable and the delights of everything that Pearsons had to offer and that was a place she remembered well from donkey’s years ago. Three chalets and two caravans were duly organised to be shared between us and walks to Tankerton to try the icecream together with visits to Whitstable for oysters and chips were already being excitedly discussed. We four were to occupy one of the caravans which turned out to be called Victoria and was situated directly opposite the much more desirable chalets appropriated early in the piece by Old Nan and various aunts and cousins. The second caravan, called Waterloo, was bigger and generally more impressive than ours and four teenage cousins had immediately taken possession of it. This did not meet with my mother’s approval of course but the occupying youths maintained that their heights demanded more room than Victoria offered and then even my father looked affronted.

My mother was definitely Put Out but she said so only to my father who pointed out that if she hadn’t agreed to Harold doing the telephoning more claim could have been made to one of the sea-facing chalets. He was perfectly capable of making a telephone call if needs be and that was a fact. Then they had the kind of argument I had become in recent months accustomed to which generally resulted in tears and a long silence followed by my father storming off on his bike. Later I was to understand that he then had a habit of meeting a Fancy Woman at the Ingress Tavern in Stonebridge Road where they had Shrimp Brand beers and was said to have even contrived the conflict in order to keep these appointments. On this occasion, however, he had little chance of doing so as the campsite at Swalecliffe necessitated a rather complicated journey back to Northfleet. Instead he stalked determinedly over to the clifftop and navigated his way down to the cold, windy, pebbly beach and sat hunched against one of the groynes.

Swalecliffe was not by any means perfect and couldn’t be compared with Going Hopping but nevertheless our annual holiday for a number of years was to involve the Hilltop Campsite which over time became more acceptable and gradually we were able to rise through the hierarchy somehow and ensure that we occupied one of the cabins rather than Victoria or even Waterloo. Overall each member of the extended Constant family found these sojourns by the sea infinitely preferable to boarding houses in more salubrious parts of the Kent coast. The campsite afforded a great deal more freedom and tolerance for the kind of familial behaviour that came naturally to us, sing songs and beer drinking after dark for instance, and the occasional robust altercation. To be sure it was conduct that sometimes earned disapproval from other campers and caused comments about Diddicais, but in later years even that would be seen by my brother as eccentric and quaintly tribal.

Things were to remain that way for a number of years with a regular group migration of the Constant aunts complete with spouses and offspring from Crayford and Northfleet for the annual invasion of Swalecliffe. 1954 was the fateful year when Aunt Mag, the sister who had always been closest to my mother, suddenly announced she wasn’t going to go to that Hilltop Campsite again now that their Margaret was getting married and their Ann growing up so fast too. In fact her Harold had booked for them to go to Weymouth that year, to a very nice boarding house on the Front. A first floor room with All Found and as many baths as you wanted. They might give Hopping a miss too because it wasn’t as if they really needed the money now that Harold had got his promotion to Foreman in Chief down at Dusseks.

My Aunt was never to be forgiven for this particular piece of perfidy because she had announced it out of the blue and as Bold as Brass with not a thought that her widowed sister might like to join them because by then my father had been dead for several years. Oh No never a mention but that was Mag all over. She had never really been one to consider the feelings of others and you only had to think back to that time at Margate before the war and the way she had behaved about the borrowed shoes to get the measure of Mag. Anyway we wouldn’t have gone with her even if she’d gone down on bended knee, not for all the tea in China. As far as we were concerned Mag could stick her holiday plans in Weymouth where the sun didn’t shine! I mean who would want to go to a dead and alive hole like that anyway? And as for giving Hopping a miss that year, well you could have knocked my mother down with a feather when she said that. She could be a crafty cow at times and it didn’t do to trust her and she’d always been one for putting on airs and graces when she’d no reason to. Her Harold liked to throw his weight about too if the truth be known. Well we could go down Hopping on our own couldn’t we? We certainly didn’t need Mag nor Harold to hold our hands, promotion or no promotion because we were perfectly capable!

And in the end that’s what we did, on one of the special Hoppers’ Trains from London Bridge that left in the early hours of the morning carrying hundreds of pickers to Paddock Wood, Faversham and Maidstone to the Hop Gardens. We didn’t know it at the time but it was the last season of the special trains because the need for hand pickers was fast coming to an end. Old Nan and Little Violet came with us because it turned out that they hadn’t been invited to Weymouth either, not that they would have gone even if that cow Mag had begged them to. As we settled into our train journey Old Nan, never slow to lay criticism where it was due observed that though she said it herself, Mag, her first-born, was at times All Fur Coat and No Knickers. As for that good for nothing Harold of hers, that silly bugger never knew whether he wanted a shit or a haircut. But you couldn’t help some people. They wouldn’t be told!

THE FUSE BOX IN THE COAL CUPBOARD

Tess Leyton came back to Northfleet after an absence from the area of seven years and rented the Finches’ old house just a few doors away from us. She brought with her a brand new husband called Bill, an impossibly handsome teenage son called Ramon, named for a cinema heartthrob of the nineteen thirties, and a small daughter called Junie. She was also proudly accompanied by a breeding pair of canaries because she was seriously contemplating going into the cage bird business. We had not quite decided upon the acquisition of the budgerigar called Ricky that we eventually owned for several years and so a canary was being earnestly considered because of the anticipated beauty of its song. My mother was confident she might learn a great deal from Tess Leyton because investing in a bird and a cage was of necessity an expensive business in those days and we were a family that did not have money to burn as I have probably explained previously.

Tess immediately renewed her acquaintance with us saying that she and my mother were Old Mates. My mother, not accustomed to people seeking her friendship, was flattered by the attention though she said that back in 1944 they hadn’t been particularly close and one of the reasons for that was that Tess had then lived in Shepherd Street. It might only have been a hop, skip and a jump away but wartime was wartime when all was said and done and Doodlebugs were known to be unpredictable. What’s more in those days Tess had been considered somewhat Blousy and some locals, like Grace Bennett of Buckingham Road even referred to her as a Slummock and a Proper Two Ton Tessie which wasn’t altogether congenial. But then Grace always had a sharp tongue and it didn’t do to get on the wrong side of her. To be fair Tess Leyton could never have been described as a small woman and was always loud and opinionated. Before painting her too black though there was the tragedy of her Little Nova, the previous small daughter, to be considered. That poor little mite had been lost following an accident involving boisterous play on top of an Anderson shelter which might never have happened if the shelter had been properly installed in the first place and not just thrown up half baked.

Little Nova had been named for Nova Pilbeam, a well-known actress of the nineteen thirties. We wondered who Little Junie had been named for but it seemed rude to ask and Tess did not venture to tell us right away. What she did tell us, however, was that Little Junie was precious and that they had almost Lost her at birth, she was also delicate and Dr Outred was very keen indeed to keep a special eye on her. My mother seemed to debate as to whether or not to reveal that I was also delicate and decided not to for which I was grateful. Eventually we were to learn that Little Junie had been named in honour of June Allyson, an up and coming American actress that the rest of us had barely heard of. Tess was an avid film fan and went to the Majestic in Gravesend with her Bill every Saturday evening without fail. Occasionally when her Ramon was not available for watching Little Junie, she would come along to our house and share a bed with my brother until her parents returned.

Back in the Shepherd Street days of World War Two when Grace Bennett said there had been talk that Tess had at times been no better than she ought to have been, she was not a Leyton at all and I’m not even sure if I ever knew what her name once was but I did know that her original husband was called Ron and he had met with a nasty accident when his old push bike with the basket on the front collided with a 496 bus in the blackout. The basket had been piled high with purloined paper from Bowaters where he was doing essential war work because of his eyesight. Sad though the accident was my mother had never really taken to Ron and that might have had something to do with him not having received his Calling Up papers. She always found such situations challenging. Old Mrs Bassant next door said if his sight had been better he might have actually seen the bus and he should have been issued with proper cycling glasses in the first instance if the work was so essential.

With Ron now completely out of the picture, when Bill appeared on the scene with the return of Tess and her canaries, my mother found him much easier to take to in the early time of their acquaintance. However, even this scant regard was to diminish following my father’s death and that unfortunate development was one hundred per cent due to the fuse box in the coal cupboard.
Each small dwelling in our York Road terrace, and also those similar that surrounded us was blessed with the convenience of electric light and the necessary fuse box lived adjacent to the coal in the cupboard under the stairs. Before the dawn of electricity in the area lighting came in the form of gas lamps attached to the walls, supplemented at times with conveniently mobile paraffin lamps. I can’t remember, and perhaps I never actually knew when the gas lighting became totally obsolete and when I was very small I clearly recall the wall lamps still being lit in my bedroom from time to time.

Both gas and electricity supplies were fed with coins into the mysterious slot meters that lived among our coats and scarves at the bottom of the steep narrow stairs leading to the floor above. Gas had been installed throughout the country at the turn of the twentieth century and by the 1920s there were more than seven million users with average families spending between one and two pounds per annum on the commodity. Our gas meter had a very Edwardian look about it, was only slightly threatening and was regularly and confidently fed with dull, dark pennies. For years I had been allowed to drag a chair underneath with a coin in my hand and, feeling important and grown up, operate the lever when the supply inconveniently expired during the roasting of the Sunday dinner. The copper coins dropping into the receptacle gave a satisfying clank which grew more muted as the meter filled. Even though its odour was disagreeable and the lighting of the rings of the stove in the corner of the scullery was exhilarating even to watch, in its entirety the miracle of gas was familiar. I knew that middle aged women who lived on their Nerves or had husbands who Drank sometimes chose to end their lives by uncomfortably placing their heads in ovens, often without even a cushion to support them, but nevertheless I had few qualms regarding its danger. This was only because electricity was said to be much more perilous. It was certainly much more costly.

The spread of electricity had been slow to proliferate through English towns and villages, particularly so in unambiguously working class streets and terraces such as ours. When it did come to York Road the small and sleek, much more modern and important looking meter sitting alongside that of the gas company demanded one shilling pieces. This was to my mother’s mind an eye-watering expense and therefore leaving lights on by accident when exiting the house was an ofence that would not be forgotten for days and she was open mouthed in amazement when my newly engaged cousin Margaret announced that what she wanted more than anything as a wedding present was an electric bar heater. Quite apart from the infinitely lower cost of gas, in our house we came to feel that whatever its shortcomings, it was a much more convenient energy source. This feeling became ever more entrenched and this was largely because its delivery did not depend upon fuses of any kind. Fuses were what was categorically wrong with electricity although we had not quite realized this whilst my father was still alive. This only proves that what looms large and significant in anyone’s life depends entirely on their current circumstances.

For instance Pearl Banfield from number six, once she started Going Steady with someone called Graham at the age of seventeen said that the local electricity supply was definitely the thing she found most abhorrent about living in York Road. What had previously been insufferable to her and where she had my total support, was the outside lavatory but now her engagement was looming her attitude had changed. This was because now that they were Serious, Graham was allowed to visit on Saturday evenings and sit with her in the front room. The humiliation of the lights suddenly going out and everyone rummaging in pockets and purses for a shilling piece was embarrassing in the extreme Pearl declared. It did not happen at Graham’s house where electricity was delivered effortlessly followed by a monthly bill which his mother ensured was paid regularly. Pearl lived in fear of the extinguishing of the Saturday evening lights, just as she had once lived in fear of Graham needing to use the toilet.

My mother became equally preoccupied with possible interruptions to the supply and for her it was not the fact that there might be a paucity of one shilling pieces because she now took the precaution of having one or two at hand, but rather because a Fuse might need to be Mended and that was most definitely a man’s job. After December 1951, with my father no longer present and my brother still much too young to be considered male enough for the job, we would of necessity remain without avant garde lighting until an Uncle or older cousin dropped by to visit. I never thought this was too much of a calamity as we still had the illumination of gas available to us but she was distraught to be without the comfort of the wireless, unable to do the weekly ironing and as the years went by, unable to watch the ten inch television set.

On a couple of occasions Mary Newberry who eventually replaced Old Mrs Bassant next door promised to send her Charlie in after work but obviously forgot all about it and had to be reminded twice because she was a silly cow if ever there was one - and even when he did turn up he said he needed the right kind of fuse wire and a special trip had to be made over to Woolworths next day. All this caused a great deal of stress so once a friendship had been re-established with Tess Layton and innumerable afternoons had been spent with her drinking Mazawattee tea and dunking Nice biscuits, a tentative request was made that her Bill might come along and deal with the fuse problem. Tess said he would be only too pleased to help out because if there was one thing you could say about her Bill, it was that he was obliging. Everyone said so! He turned up as promised just after five o’clock, even armed with fuse wire and was delighted to find that we had stocked up and had several different thicknesses of wire wound efficiently around a card just waiting to be deployed. There was nothing worse, Bill said, than using the wrong wire because you didn’t want to overload the circuit did you? And of course we didn’t want to do that under any circumstances.

Bill Leyton most willingly, with very good grace, did mend the fuse and executed the task in just a few minutes, refusing a cup of tea and even saying that he was only too glad to be of assistance. So all would have been well had it not been for my mother, overcome with gratitude after several power-less days pressing a two shilling piece into his hand urging him to treat himself to a pint at The Prince Albert in Shepherd Street. To be fair he initially vehemently declined to avail himself of this unexpected pint and she, just as resolutely insisted that he should do so and so after a small tussle he pocketed the florin and thanked her very much.

This was undoubtedly a faux pas extraordinaire although I was seriously perplexed as to why at the time. My mother’s indignation was extreme as she both rebuked herself for the folly of the request for help and berated the now long gone recipient of the reward to all who would listen. My small brother and I were harangued over hours and asked what kind of man takes a couple of bob from a widowed neighbour? Did he really think she had money to throw away on the likes of him? Mending a fuse was a doddle after all for a man like him. It took the biscuit, it really did. Did he think she had money to burn? Would she be scrubbing her knuckles to the bone around at the Lovell’s every Monday morning in all weathers if she could afford handouts for what rightly should have been a favour?

My grandmother and aunts were similarly addressed because when you considered the fact that he was happy to take her money, bold as brass in fact you had to ask yourself what decent man would lower himself like that. What about all the tea that lazy slummock of a wife of his could knock back? Not to mention the biscuits! Yet when you dropped by her place you’d find the milk would only ever be sterilized and the biscuits never ever Bourbon or Custard Creams.

When she told Grace Bennett the criticism which had now turned into a barrage of abuse, was of course strictly between the two of them but you could have knocked my mother down with a feather when he actually put his hand out to take that couple of bob from her. Quick as a flash he was – couldn’t wait to pocket it! She was never going to stoop to ask him again and next time she ran across Tess she would clean her something rotten. And Grace said well she herself had never taken to Tess Leyton and hadn’t she always said that Blousy Cow was not to be trusted? You only had to think back to the first husband and the stolen goods and then there was the pair of them always out on a Friday night gallivanting and those poor kiddies left to fend for themselves. Grace was only glad my mother had finally seen the light because she wouldn’t be told would she?

Of course the matter of the pocketed florin was never brought up with Tess Leyton because if there was one thing that my mother lacked it was moral fortitude or what we would now refer to as backbone. Furthermore the next time the fuse needed attention, after almost a week without power, and no convenient visits from teenage cousins she did in fact ask for Bill Leyton’s help once again. And once again she firmly pushed a two shilling piece in his direction, only this time with pursed lips and a raised chin. And once again after an initial refusal he pocketed it at which she bridled a little and folded her arms disapprovingly as she thanked him very much for his help in a voice that was imperceptibly too loud.

She was thus destined to continue to feel affronted but as far as was possible she spent less time drinking Mazawattee tea with Tess Leyton. It was around that time that the decision to buy Ricky the budgie was made and in any case the canary breeding idea came to nothing in the end – like all that woman’s tomfool notions!