Never on the Never-Never

I grew up with the firm knowledge that acquiring too many things on Tick was undesirable at best particularly when the items were those that might appear on a regular weekly shopping list. So generally we paid up front for our sugar, flour, bread and potatoes or else as my mother declared – we went without! To be fair we did not go without all that often because we were also a family that prided itself on good management and those things we did go without were, I was told, those we didn’t need in the first place. Mostly this revolved around her opinion and not mine or my brother’s because we were rarely consulted and whilst my father was still alive neither was he.

On the other hand many of our neighbours and certainly members of our own extended family were believed to be always up to their eyeballs in debt and it was made very clear to me that this was not a good way to run your life and very nearly tantamount to digging yourself into an early grave. However even at an early age I fully understood that it was unlikely that you could become up to your eyeballs because of an overdeveloped leaning towards grocery items. It seemed clear that it was portable radios and Raleigh 3-speed bicycles that might prove to be your undoing and we most definitely did not go in for such extravagances desirable though they might be. For one thing our 1935 Art Deco style bakelite wireless still worked perfectly well even though it was rather too awkward in size and shape to carry around with you and although I had been promised a bicycle if I worked hard and passed the 11-plus exam, when I failed the idea was not further mentioned.

My mother was proud of the fact that unlike many of our neighbours we never had to hide from the Tally Man but it was some time before I understood why he was so unpopular since his outward appearance was essentially smart and he seemed to be polite and smile a lot. He also had an appealing range of goods inside his blue van so the often prevailing attitude to him seemed curious. It was obvious even to an eight year old that his position hovering always between approval and animosity must have made his job unnecessarily stressful. It can’t have been easy to be a York Road regular destined to knock on doors that were so often not opened although I was aware that this also happened from time to time to the rent collector from Porter, Putt & Fletcher. Because we were Good Managers we never found ourselves in that position either and I was frequently reminded that we weren’t like some scrambling to hide away on the stairs of a Monday morning on account of the rent man. These persistent warnings with regard to what could happen if you slipped from the straight and narrow fiscally had the desired effect and even now I am nervous even contemplating the use of my credit card.

From early in the twentieth century many working class families, together with those aspiring to the lower middle class, were attracted by the hire purchase schemes offered for seamless acquisition of high priced household goods that would normally be beyond their reach. However over time many of the lenders were said to abuse their positions. They were alleged to charge excessive rates, set harsh terms for repayment that frequently enabled them to reclaim goods without notice and add undue levels of interest on payments. This was finally addressed by the Hire Purchase Act of 1938, proposed by Ellen Wilkinson who was later to become Minister of Education in Clement Atlee’s government. Among other things the Act restricted lenders from entering a purchaser’s property without notice and it required them to clearly state the terms of all agreements. Ellen had been born into a poor but ambitious family, her father was a cotton worker who finally bettered himself by becoming an insurance agent. She had embraced socialism at an early age and eventually, inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 joined the British Communist Party. She was to remain a fervent lifelong supporter of better opportunities for working class girls and was largely responsible for the drive to increase the school leaving age from 14 to 15.

It became perfectly acceptable for us to start buying items of clothing from Littlewoods Mail Order Catalogue by 1947 which presumably was because my aunt became an Agent. The original company began in 1923 and provided venues for sports betting called Littlewoods Pools in partnership with John Moores who withdrew from the venture early on following a significant business loss in the first season. Notwithstanding these start-up hiccups football enthusiasts like Uncle Harold became devotees immediately and generally remained so for life. And furthermore the developing business off-shoots of the game made women like my mother feel that on Tick catalogue shopping was almost respectable.

Littlewoods dominated some households. It seemed to me that the complete silence that was required for my tetchy uncle to fill in his weekly Pools form always coincided with our regular visit and it took an interminable amount of time during which Aunt Mag hovered over any of us under the age of twelve hissing loudly with forefinger poised on lips that we should be quiet because Uncle’s Doing His Pools! And if we did not immediately pay heed she might add threateningly that he would not be best pleased if he couldn’t concentrate because there was a lot at stake. This made the outcome sound like something close to a matter of life as normal or being thrown out onto the streets. As for the form filler himself any intrusion into the total quiet that he demanded gave rise to a salvo of expletives of the kind only usually heard from our grandmother. His youngest daughter, Ann said I was lucky that my own father was not a football follower and that she hated the Pools as much as going to church and the library. Knowing that she did not seem to be overly engaged in either of those activities I was suitably impressed.

The regular broadcast that so engrossed men of similar ilk could be heard weekly on the BBC and the reading of the Results was heralded by an instantly recognizable march by Hubert Bath called Out of the Blue. The game results themselves were read by someone called James Alexander Gordon and eventually his voice became as soporific to me as he who read the iconic Shipping Forecast for years. I was totally disinterested in football and as this was long before we had a television set I had never seen a game. Football was simply something that preoccupied boys until they eventually reached the age of reason and a great many of their fathers who never seemed to grow out of the habit. In those days it would have been a very odd girl indeed who expressed an interest in such an activity. Nevertheless there was something almost reassuringly hypnotic about the rhythmic voices emanating from the radio and informing listeners of the most recent successes and failures of clubs throughout the country –and like it or not I became totally familiar with their names; Aston Villa, Arsenal, Blackpool, Birmingham City, Burnley, Colchester, Everton, Huddersfield, Sheffield United, Stoke City, Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers among them. And the latter would always cause a nod or a headshake from my passionately absorbed Uncle depending upon how well that team had performed simply because Wolverhampton was his place of birth and was according to him the finest place in Britain. He said this so often that even when I was seven I wondered why he had torn himself away from the place to live in Crayford and work at Dussex.

My younger brother was never interested in any aspect of the game even when some devious encouragers began to iron out its reputation calling it soccer and pretending it was more significant than it really was. The only attention he ever showed was brief and to Tottenham Hotspurs when he wondered why a cockerel appeared on the club’s badge. Nobody knew but a long time later he discovered that they got their name from Harry Hotspur a medieval English nobleman who appeared in Henry IV Part 1 and was noted for his riding spurs and interest in fighting cocks. Bernard’s interest was transitory to say the least though he managed to note that a Turkish side also had a cockerel on their club badge and were called the Roosters whilst Bradford City were known as the Bantams. This was merely a quiver of curiosity towards a flurry of feathers. Meanwhile Uncle Harold, not in the slightest bit concerned with any variety of cockerels fighting or otherwise, duly completed the Pools for years without a significant win and only gave up when BBC TV began broadcasting the results on Grandstand each week. I don’t remember him winning any amount that caused the slightest ripple of excitement in the family unless of course he chose not to share such an electrifying piece of news. Aunt Martha thought that was perfectly possible because Harold could be a devious piece of work if ever there was one and Mag had been heard to say that herself but Aunt Rose visiting from Petersfield thought he had far too big a mouth to keep it shut under such circumstances. My mother carried on knitting and wisely said nothing.

The Constant women were definitely more concerned with the mail order catalogue that Littlewoods first sent out to their then existing pools subscriber base in the early nineteen thirties than the game itself. The new venture had gone down well with many Pools Wives then effectively becoming retail agents, collecting money for goods ordered by friends and family. Because her oldest sister was to eventually proudly describe herself as a Littlewoods Agent, my mother adjusted to this particular category of on Tick buying quite effortlessly. She did, however, object to the undue pressure that reared up from time to time to make more purchases than she was altogether comfortable with. And she was largely only truly at ease with pale pink or blue underclothes and nightwear in plain old fashioned fabrics like winceyette or flannel. Regardless of this though Littlewoods grew as both a retail and betting organisation and, at its height, had over 25,000 employees.

As time went by and we became a one parent family money became tighter than ever. A tentative exploration was made of what the Rainbow Stores in Stone Street, Gravesend could offer on what was known as the Never-Never. My mother always behaved as if she was letting the side down when she embarked upon one of these purchases, outlining all the reasons for and against the idea for several weeks in advance and generally behaving as if she was in danger of being incarcerated within a Dickensian debtors’ prison. I remember her excitement when finally a much vaunted portable radio set appeared triumphantly on the front room sideboard along with the sherry trifle made in advance for Sunday’s tea. Although called a sherry trifle it had simply been exposed to sherry essence and the radio beside it, maroon rexine covered was, like its Art Deco predecessor rather on the ungainly side to be truly classed as portable. It was explained to me that it could be plugged into a power source of course but it also worked via batteries which in fact turned out to be a very expensive way of listening to Radio Luxembourg’s Top Twenty at 11pm each Sunday evening. But at least I could now listen in bed so at the age of fourteen I began to see that sometimes there might be a positive side to a reasonable degree of debt.

I was introduced to the mysterious and slightly exotic idea of Provident cheques when I was about to start work and after a lot of discussion as to whether it was a good idea we applied for one to equip me for my new life as a commuting shorthand typist. A twenty pound cheque was to be paid back each week to the Provident Man – one pound each time but on twenty one occasions. The final momentous payment was the Provident Man’s personal reward for providing the money in the first place – at least that’s how I saw it. At the time this was viewed as an excellent way of buying clothes and the shops accepting the cheques all had a discreet information notice in the window. I rather liked the fact that the word Cheque was used in the first place, implying in my immature adolescent mind that I might actually be mistaken for someone who operated a Bank Account. My cousins June and Pat had both acquired their glamourous working outfits via the good offices of the Provident Man although Aunt Maud said later that for her June it was a waste as she’d ended up working as a kennel maid at the Crayford Dog Track. June said she’d never been keen on the Burgundy New Look coat and matching high heeled shoes in the first place but her mother wouldn’t be told and apparently wanted her to look as smart as possible for her first job. Old Nan commented that although she said it herself, her third daughter Maud could be as silly as cats’ lights at times and it wasn’t any wonder at all that her June was much the same.

Being quite unaccustomed to buying new clothes I was desperately anxious to examine what the Gravesend fashion establishments had on offer and perhaps to talk loudly about Cheques as I did so and of course twenty pounds seemed like a fortune to me. We started in New Road and progressed slowly into the High Street. After several hours of vacillation I became the owner of a grey woollen Swagger style coat with a faux leopard skin collar together with an oatmeal tweed long sleeved dress, a black slim-line skirt, a red twinset and black Cuban heeled shoes with matching plastic that looked just-like-leather, shoulder bag. Quite a lot could be done with twenty pounds in May 1956. Being completely unfamiliar with the idea of owning so many new items of clothing all at once I felt distinctly light headed for several hours afterwards as I reverently examined them spread out across my bed. I was already more than a little anxious about the repayments and wondered what happened if you failed to make a payment. Did the Provident Man demand the dress back perhaps? And would he eventually return it if and when the debt was paid?

The most momentous on Tick, Never-Never decision was when we headed back to the Rainbow Stores in mid-1956 to seriously investigate the idea of finally becoming owners of a TV set. We were definitely the very last York Road residents to take the plunge towards the delights of the Telly and my brother said that at school he was looked at incredulously when he admitted our disadvantaged state. How could a respectable ten year old live without Crackerjack? Now, however, with my new status as a working woman earning the huge sum of five pounds per week it was clear that we would at last be able to justify the regular twenty five shillings repayment which seemed to go on for ever. We studied a great many models and I can no longer remember whether we finally decided upon the Decca, Pye or Bush version but I do know that ours featured a smart dark French polished cabinet on slim legs and an extraordinarily impressive fourteen inch screen. We ended up quite dizzy with elation that Saturday afternoon and had to revive ourselves with cups of tea from the stall in the market before heading home. Things were definitely looking up!

The set arrived on the following Tuesday and Bernard told me he had sat in school all day oblivious to everything around him, gazing through the classroom windows and imagining he could just decipher the words on vans navigating the area. Which one might be from the Rainbow Stores? He had never felt such sublime exhilaration. By the end of that week we were a trio that had feasted upon Gunsmoke, Hancock’s Half Hour, Opportunity Knocks, Sunday Night at the London Palladium and Armchair Theatre to mention just a few of the entertainment gems on offer. My mother quickly decided that she loved Dixon of Dock Green above anything else whilst Bernard rapidly became addicted to Zoo Quest and was then a lifelong fan of David Attenborough. Owning our very own black and white television set with its vast fourteen inch screen was a critical moment in his short life and meant that he would no longer endure regular spikes of envy and resentment when local mothers called their offspring in from their regular after school play on the street to watch Popeye or Worzel Gummidge. And in those early days he even rushed home from school to take in the adventures of Muffin the Mule and Andy Pandy though he was clearly a little too old to be truly interested. Furthermore having felt seriously side-lined in June 1953 at the time of the Coronation he felt that should Queen Elizabeth ever feel the urge to repeat the grand event he would be able to watch it from the moderate comfort of his own home rather than wait hopefully to be called inside that of a neighbour. Regardless of the many arguments Against as far as my brother was concerned there was undeniably a permanent place for the Never-Never in the life of a working class boy.

As for investing money in the Pools well that was a completely different matter. Old Nan always said that you didn’t have a dog’s chance of winning with Littlewoods because everybody knew it was rigged. For one thing you never met anyone who’d had a win did you? Not a proper win that would buy you a stand-alone house on Blackheath or even a semi-detached in Bexley. Even Mag’s Harold thought he might have been better off ditching Littlewoods and throwing his lot in with Vernons. When I asked nobody seemed to know if Vernons had a catalogue of course but it’s more than likely that they did.