Banksy (3 page)

We had no bathroom, the kitchen sink was where matters of personal hygiene were attended to in the form of a twice-daily wash. But Friday night was bath night. A tin bath was taken down from its hook in the shed, placed on newspaper in front of the living-room fire and laboriously filled by Dad with kettles of hot water. First to go was Dad, then Our Jack, then David, Michael and finally, the youngest – me. Being the fifth user of the same bathwater, it’s a wonder I didn’t get out dirtier than when I went in. The Friday-night bath ritual was not restricted to the Banks household. Everyone I knew had just one bath a week. It was also the only time I changed my vest and underpants. I wince at the thought now, but that’s how it was, for me, for every young lad I knew. There were no modern labour-saving appliances such as washing machines to switch on every day. Our clothes were washed every Monday, in the kitchen, with a poss tub and dolly, after which, Mam would hand-rinse everything and then put them all through a hand-operated wringer before hanging them out on the line to dry or, in the event of rain, on wooden clothes horses dotted around the living room. Come Tuesday they would be dry. On Wednesday they were ironed and then put away ready for us to wear again on Friday after our bath, and so the cycle was repeated. This was typical of the many domestic routines adhered to, week in, week out in our house. Mam’s life must have been as monotonous as mutton, as regular as a roll on an army drum. That my childhood was always happy, secure and filled with a warm heart, though money was always tight, is all the more to her credit.

In the forties and fifties it was not done for parents and children to show each other outward signs of affection. I had a happy childhood, Mam and Dad were caring and, in their own way, loving, but never tactile or overtly affectionate. My family was not unusual in this. I never came across a family in which the parents hugged and kissed their children, or, devoted any considerable one-to-one time to their offspring. It just wasn’t the done thing. Life was hard for the vast majority of families I
knew, a matter of daily survival. It was commonly believed that if children were showered with hugs and kisses at every opportunity they would grow up to be ‘soft’, incapable of coping with the daily grind of working life. By not hugging and kissing at every opportunity, parents believed they were doing their children a favour, instilling in them independence and the ability to cope with the rigours of adult life. Moreover, parents did not have free hours to spend playing with their children even at weekends, or to read to them before bedtime. Because the household chores were so labour intensive, the precious time Mam devoted to my three brothers and I, she did so while undertaking some aspect of housework. Mam would talk to us, acknowledge what we were doing and encourage us in our play while either washing, ironing, preparing a meal or attending to some other daily chore.

Dad, meanwhile, was no different to any other father in that he would come in from work and have his tea. Having satisfied himself that my brothers and I had been up to nothing untoward that day, he’d settle down to read the evening paper. Dad’s time immersed in the
Sheffield Star
was sacrosanct. The Victorian notion of the male as head of the family was still very much in evidence and in order for Dad to evaluate and make decisions that affected family well-being, he felt he had to know what was going on in the world. Or, at least our world, which extended as far as the Sheffield boundaries. Gossip apart, his only source of information was the local evening newspaper and woe betide my brothers and I if we ever interrupted his reading of it.

Mam read the
Star
too, though always after Dad and usually when I was getting ready for bed. Mam and Dad reacted in different ways to what they read in the paper. When Dad disapproved of some item of news he would tut and sigh and usually conclude with the statement ‘They want locking up,’ or, in the case of something appalling such as a serious assault or murder, he would elaborate with ‘They should lock them up and throw away the key.’ As a small boy I believed that this was a genuine
punishment administered by the courts, in which the judge would pronounce the grave sentence that the defendant be locked up and the key thrown away – whereupon the constable would suggest that the canal would be the best place for it. I still think of this when I hear or read this popular phrase.

In contrast, Mam’s reading of the paper often appealed to her sentimental side. Such sentiment was invariably applied to the predicaments of people she had no knowledge of, and never would. Her interest in the lives of people entirely remote from her world was like the fascination today for the trials and tribulations of characters from TV soaps. The fact there were other people, rich and poor, enduring emotional upheaval in their lives on a day when she was not, was something of a comfort to her. ‘I see the brother of the Earl of Harrogate has died,’ Mam would say aloud on reading the piece, no doubt aware only then that there was indeed an Earl of Harrogate with a brother; ‘there’s always trouble for somebody in this world.’ Thus she was confirmed in her belief that life was a sea of troubles.

That I always felt secure in childhood was, I am sure, in no small way due to the small routines of home life. On a Saturday lunchtime, for example, we always had fishcake and chips. Fish may well have been cheap and plentiful, but fishcakes were cheaper still and much more in keeping with a tight budget. It was my job to fetch the fishcake and chips and I did this on a bicycle that had more than a touch of Heath Robinson about it. To buy even a second-hand bicycle was beyond our means but when I was about twelve I cobbled together a contraption from spare parts found discarded on a bomb-site. The front wheel was missing many of its spokes, the brake blocks were worn down to the metal and the hard bakelite seat had a habit of swivelling around whenever I adjusted my position which made for not only an uncomfortable, but often perilous ride. It was on this conveyance that I collected our fishcake and chips on a Saturday.

There were two fish and chip shops in our neighbourhood,
but Dad always insisted I went to the one five streets from where we lived because the chips were fried in dripping. I’d ask for six fishcake ‘lots’ (i.e. ‘with chips’), put them into my mother’s string bag and pedal off home. Riding that old bike was a precarious business at the best of times; with a fully laden string bag swinging from the handlebars it was downright dangerous. Once the bag became entangled in what few spokes were in the front wheel. The bike immediately ground to a halt, stood vertically on its front wheel and I was pitched headfirst on to the cobblestones of the street, my hands outstretched in an attempt at breaking my fall. I had skinned the palms of my hands but, far worse, dinner was scattered all over the street. Terrified to go home and ask for more money I simply scooped up the fishcakes and chips off the ground and rewrapped them in the newspaper as best as I could before limping home. I spent that dinner suppressing nervous laughter as I watched Dad bemusedly picking little bits of grit off his chips. My brothers, less particular in their eating habits, simply wolfed their fishcake and chips with all the enthusiasm and relish of lads who seemingly hadn’t seen food for a week.

That old bicycle again served me well on Saturday mornings when Mam would give me a shopping list and ask me to cycle to Tinsley Co-op to fetch the groceries. The shop was only in the next street but such was the grocery order, it was better to take the bike than walk as the numerous paper carrier bags full of bulky groceries could be hung from the handlebars and seat. The weekly order rarely varied: a pound of sugar; a pound of butter, not pre-packed but wire-cut from a large block then wrapped in greaseproof paper; plain and self-raising flour; bacon and sausage; three loaves of bread, two white, one brown; a dozen eggs; a drum of salt, either ‘Cerebos’ or ‘Saxa’, Co-op marmalade and jam; ginger snaps, rich tea or ‘Nice’ biscuits; Shippams meat paste for the making of sandwiches; Oxo cubes, Bisto, Echo margarine for baking; tinned fruit; Carnation milk; Heinz (sometimes Armour) baked beans; Ye Olde Oak luncheon meat and the only sort of salmon I knew existed – tinned (the
Co-op’s own-brand variety, as John West salmon was out of our budget). There was a lot more, but that was the core of the order every Saturday morning, week in, week out, year after year. The lack of variety was testament to the limited choice available in a country still struggling in the aftermath of rationing. The fact that I was never bored by the food placed before me just goes to show how clever Mam was at using the limited ingredients at her disposal.

It is now a constant source of amazement to me that, with all her chores at home, Mam also had a part-time job as a cleaner-cum-cook up at the Big House, the home of the ‘well to do’ family of one of Sheffield’s lesser steel magnates. I never saw inside the Big House nor glimpsed the family who owned it. The large Victorian house – rumoured to have seven bedrooms and (amazingly) a bathroom – was hidden from sight by a high, soot-blackened wall; the children went to different schools from ours; the parents never patronized the shops in Tinsley.

Mam’s job took her into this different world, where she did ‘a bit of cleaning and a bit of cooking’. She never talked about her work there or the people she worked for. I suppose she felt it her duty not to gossip, not to ‘carry tales’ as she called it. The family must have treated her well – she certainly wouldn’t have stayed in that house if she hadn’t been treated with respect. The only regular time Mam spent away from the daily chores of our house was when she went to do similar work in the Big House. Looking back, Mam’s quality of life must have been pretty awful. Dad rarely took her out, even for an hour to the local pub. Our house was where Mam spent most of her adult life. That she made that draughty house a loving home full of warm smiles, is my abiding memory of her.

On Sunday lunchtimes Dad would invariably go off to the pub to meet his mates, leaving me to help Mam cook the Sunday dinner. The preparation of the Sunday roast was always done to the accompaniment of the wireless. I would shell the peas or, if we were having lamb, chop the mint. In those days we would
have either lamb or beef – and that piece of meat would be made to last until Tuesday. Chicken then was still an expensive luxury, and we only ate turkey at Christmas.

At noon Mam would switch on the wireless for
Two Way Family Favourites
. On the rare occasion when I heard its title music, ‘With a Song in my Heart’, nowadays, I can immediately smell a Sunday dinner. The idea of the show was that everyone had a special song in their heart for someone they loved, whether they were in the forces overseas or had relatives who had emigrated. The programme was two way in that it linked a family at home with a loved one abroad. Two presenters in London were linked with colleagues in Cologne and Cyprus (places where our armed forces had a considerable presence) and later, when the programme expanded its remit to include the growing number of people who had emigrated from the UK, Toronto and Sydney.

This being a time of National Service, the show relied heavily on mothers requesting a current hit – usually one of sugary sentimentality sung by the likes of Dickie Valentine, Eddie Fisher, Vera Lynn and Alma Cogan – for their squaddie son. These requests usually ended with a plaintive message, along the lines of, ‘1954 is not too far away’ – the given year usually being two years hence, the duration of National Service. The addresses of the squaddies were always announced as care of their British Forces overseas posting number: BFPO 271 Cologne, BFPO 32 Cyprus, BFPO 453 Gibraltar – code words for faraway places that were a mystery to me, other than that it was where soldiers lived.

This weekly reminder to the nation that Britain still had a military presence abroad, served to maintain the misplaced notion that we were still a major power in world affairs when, in truth, the days of the Empire were long gone.

BBC radio, though changing, still managed to convey a sense of a past in which class distinction was prevalent. This was exemplified by
Family Favourites
, the presenters of which had
plummy voices that set them apart from me and everyone I knew. Presenters such as Cliff Michelmore, Muriel Young and Ian Fenner, while sounding sincere and never patronizing, were indicative of a system that didn’t allow anyone from Tinsley, Attercliffe or any other area I was familiar with, to work as radio presenters. While some people may have been broadening their horizons through military postings abroad or emigration, the expectations of the Sheffield folk I knew still never extended beyond the steelworks or the pit. No one ever told us there was a world out there waiting for us too.

Family Favourites
was followed by an hour of comedy, which I loved. First was the
Billy Cotton Band Show
, a mixture of amiable humour from Alan Breeze and Bill Herbert, novelty songs and danceband tunes from the veteran Billy Cotton Band. Billy always began his introduction to the programme by announcing the week’s guests, such as pianist Russ Conway, then, more often than not, making some comic reference to a football match of the previous day. This was especially the case if England had played Scotland, as one of his resident singers was Kathy Kay, a Scottish lass with whom Billy would indulge in playful teasing if England had been triumphant. Billy’s opening lines would then be interrupted by a heavenly voice shouting, ‘Hey, you down there with the glasses… get orn wi’ it.’ Billy’s response would be his catchphrase, ‘Wakey! Wakey!’ bellowed at the top of his voice, at which his band sprang into action by playing his signature tune, ‘Somebody Stole My Girl’, popularly known as ‘Tan, tanner, rah, rah, rah…’

The
Billy Cotton Band Show
’s mix of variety show humour, from Alan Breeze and Bill Herbert, and well sung ballads was universally popular. The band members, seemed to me to be older than God; many of them, I was later to discover, were indeed getting on in years and had been with Billy since he first started his band back in 1925. The show always ended with a spectacular instrumental version of something like ‘The Dambusters March’ or ‘On the Quarter Deck’. Even in variety
shows we were constantly reminded of Britain’s military past. In so doing, the myth of Britain still being a superpower was perpetuated in the minds of the people.