Parky: My Autobiography (2 page)

Sammy’s father signed the parish register with a cross. Sammy wrote in a fine copperplate hand. He had left school at twelve and was largely self-taught. He was the first literate member of his family. He wrote clearly and he was particularly adept with numbers, a talent he put to use in a daily attempt to beat the bookies with a complicated series of multiple bets. He bet in tanners and would send me to the bookie’s runner who lived two doors away. He was a tiny man of dark hue whom I took to be a West Indian until I realised his colour was caused by the fact he never washed. My granddad said he was the sort who kept coal in the bath.

His office was the public telephone kiosk down the street, from where he would phone the bets he had taken to his boss, who lived in a nice house with a tennis court. Later, when I became a journalist and before we had a phone of our own, I used to have to follow him into the phone booth. I would wear gloves to handle the receiver, holding it as far as possible away from my ear while bellowing through the mouthpiece, which I had covered with a cloth. It was said he was the most successful bookie’s runner of the lot because the police never raided his house. They were scared of what they might catch.

Sammy’s wife, my grandma, was a tall and bony woman, missing most of her teeth and deaf as a post. She was also short-sighted, which enabled her husband to cheat her during their daily game of dominoes. He would put threes against fives, twos against sixes, and she’d cry, ‘I don’t know how he keeps on winning.’

She didn’t say much apart from that. Her deafness imprisoned her in a silent and solitary world. She rarely went out and spent her life wearing pinafores.

She worshipped my father who was the main breadwinner of the family. He lived at home until he was nearly thirty, still tipping up his wages and being given spending money back. The family was trying to pay off what they had borrowed to survive the general strike. They were enslaved by poverty.

One of my father’s sisters, Aunt Lavinia, rarely moved from the front room where she would sit all day watching the street through lace curtains. Sometimes I would sit with her. One day a local girl, heavily pregnant, walked by. Lavinia watched her passing and said to herself, but loud enough for me to hear, ‘She should have it sewn up.’ I didn’t know what she meant but it sounded drastic.

Sammy never took his family on holiday. He lived to his mid-seventies and never visited London. He went once to Leeds, walking the thirty miles there and back to see Bradman play. His only other excursion was a bus trip to Blackpool with the local working-men’s club. The story goes he was so disappointed with the local beer he had one pint and started walking home.

He worked at the pit for sixty years or more, ending up with my father as his boss. In the drastic winter of 1947 when the pit lane was blocked with snow drifts, only about four men managed the three-mile walk to Grimethorpe Colliery. Sammy Parkinson was one of them. I knew he was my father’s father but I couldn’t make the connection. As a child I could not understand how a man as vigorous as my father, as full of life and laughter, could have sprung from such an environment.

John William Parkinson – he preferred Jack and I was always Jack’s lad – had a talent for ignoring misery or circumnavigating poverty. He would say: ‘If you don’t have money, you never miss it.’ He didn’t care. Once he was rid of his teeth – in those days you had them removed as soon as possible because they were too expensive to keep – and had a set of pearly gnashers there was no stopping him.

My mother remembers him as a dandy, wearing double-breasted tight jackets, Oxford bags with twenty-six-inch bottoms, patent leather shoes with pointed toes and a trilby hat with a snap brim. He was good-looking with wavy brown hair, blue/grey eyes and an athletic figure. My mother noticed that whenever he went out on a double date with her brother he always ended up with the prettier girl. He was a good dancer, taking lessons at Madame Woodcock’s Emporium of Dance in Barnsley. It was here he learnt the scandalous new form of dancing, which involved holding your partner close and dancing cheek to cheek.

My mother was present at a local dance hall when John William Parkinson and a partner (who my mother in her book describes as ‘no better than she ought to be’) danced with bodies so passionately entwined that the other dancers stopped and became spectators. My father smooched his partner around the dance floor, timing things so that the dance finished as he foxtrotted through the door and into the night. ‘Just like Fred Astaire,’ my mother observed. The room was aghast at such wanton behaviour. My mother was smitten.

She was even more beguiled when she heard from her brother Tom of an encounter involving his future mother-in-law. Tom had asked my father to make up a foursome with his bride-to-be and her sister Gertie who, in spite of her name, was a looker. They finished their evening back at the girls’ home where their mum, a formidable woman with a posh accent, afraid Gertie might be mixing in the wrong company being escorted by a miner, began asking my father about his prospects.

My father answered with amused good nature until the mother asked the direct question: ‘Tell me, young man, do you have any money in the bank?’ Whereupon my father replied: ‘I ought to have, missus, seeing I’ve never taken any out.’

Some time later a group of them went to the cinema. My mother sat between my father and her current boyfriend, a grammar school boy with ambitions to be a teacher. She found herself slipping her hand into my father’s and realising he was the man she wanted to marry. He told her he had loved her since the day he first saw her and had waited for her to grow up until he declared his love. In her book my mother notes that while she found the notion of him waiting for her to be romantic, having seen him dance, she had no doubt he’d had ‘a bloody good time while waiting’.

Much later, when my father was trying to tell me about sex, a lecture that involved birds’ nests and sparrows’ eggs, I asked him what kind of sex education he had received. He said the local vicar, who was also the captain of his first cricket team, had warned him that inappropriate touching of his willy would make it fall off.

Mother, on the other hand, relates in her book that she was told if she kissed a boy more than twenty times she would automatically become pregnant – which might explain why I was born twelve months after they were married in 1934, and maybe why, as Mother says, it was a complete surprise to both of them.

2

JACK’S LAD

Aside from World War Two breaking out, the other significant event of 1939 was that we moved house. We left ‘Debtors’ Retreat’ four hundred yards behind and moved into what the locals sarcastically termed ‘Millionaires’ Row’. It earned the title because it housed one or two white-collar workers, including a surveyor and the council’s finance officer. We moved next door to the local sanitary inspector, which pleased my mother.

Maurice Bennett was the sort who liked to know everything about his neighbours. He was a tall, beaky man who loved peering over the garden wall, making your business his. That was fine by my father, who loved a natter. Indeed, if he couldn’t find anyone to talk to, he would often converse with himself. All was well until Maurice Bennett, neighbour, became Mr Bennett, council official.

In those days miners were given a free ton of coal each month as part of a pay deal. It was an excessive amount for a small grate in a council house, so my father would load our shed and then distribute what was left over to people who didn’t get the concessions, mainly pensioners. One day, as I was helping my dad shift the ton of coal, Maurice Bennett stopped by.

‘Now then, John Willy,’ he said, which was his first mistake. No one called my father John Willy without getting his ear chewed off.

‘Jack,’ said my dad. ‘The name is Jack.’

‘Well, Jack lad,’ said Mr Bennett, ‘it has come to my attention that you are distributing coal to people in the vicinity who don’t get the free ton. I must point out that this is against regulations. I don’t want to report you so we’ll just say this is friendly advice.’

My father seemed to take the rebuke in untroubled fashion. ‘Thank you for the warning,’ he said. Mr Bennett left to get the bus to work. My father said nothing until we came to loading the last two barrowloads of coal. ‘This way,’ he said, and went down the Bennetts’ garden path and filled his coal shed with an illegal load.

‘Let’s see him explain that lot away,’ said my father.

Mr Bennett never mentioned it again.

Our other neighbours were really strange. One woman suffered from a form of religious mania and would sit all day in the bath while her husband poured jugs of water over her. She thought she was being baptised in the river Jordan.

We celebrated our move with our first family holiday. We went to the newly opened Butlin’s Holiday Camp at Skegness. He didn’t know it at the time but when Billy Butlin devised his all-action holidays he had my father in mind. My dad entered and won the wheelbarrow race, the tennis tournament, the hundred-yard dash, the three-legged race, the knobbly knees contest, the high jump, the snooker final and was doing well in the table-tennis competition until I ruined his chances of a clean sweep. My parents had left me with a babysitter and I had walked away and become lost. My earliest childhood memory is of sitting on the counter of a café being fed ice creams by a blonde woman and seeing my mother and father coming through the door to collect me. According to my mother, I told my rescuers that she had run away from me.

My father forgave me but he couldn’t forgive Adolf Hitler. With war imminent, we cut our holiday short and returned home early so that he might be better prepared to repulse Adolf’s ambitions.

First he joined the local fire-fighting unit and, armed with a bucket and a hand pump, demonstrated how he had been taught to rescue us in the event of our house being hit by an incendiary bomb. The nearest the Luftwaffe came to Cudworth was fifteen miles away when it bombed Sheffield. His training might have come in handy ten years later when our house accidentally caught fire but on that occasion he simply picked up the burning sofa and bundled it through the living-room window. I know because I was standing behind him when he did it.

Our Anderson shelter set the standard for the rest of the street. Not only did my father bury it deep in our garden but he camouflaged the top with earth and grass. Flying over it, the German pilots must have thought it was a giant mole hill.

When the sirens sounded, Dad would march us down the shelter where we would sit with gas masks on, awaiting our fate.

One day he brought a canary into our sanctuary. They were used down the pit to test for methane gas. The first night there was a panic because the bird closed its eyes and my father thought the end had come. In fact, it was having a nap. From that point on, my father sat making noises through his gas mask, rattling the cage to keep the bird awake and alert. The next night, we found it lying stiff in the bottom of its cage. My father put it in a box and we buried it on top of the shelter. He said it had died fighting Hitler. My mother said she’d had enough of all the nonsense and she was sick of spending her evenings with a gas mask on. So our air-raid shelter became a relic of the war until we dismantled it and discovered the curved sheet metal made wonderful, if lethal, sledges in the bitter winter of 1947.

This was not the end of my father’s personal feud with Adolf. He pinned a huge map over the fireplace to trace the course of the Allied advance through Europe. Every day we would listen to the BBC News and in red crayon mark the boundaries of the latest success. In many ways, in spite of my father’s obsession with Hitler, the war passed us by. Miners were not required to join up. They were essential workers, therefore our village was comparatively untouched by the sorrow of war.

My own view was that the fighting wouldn’t last much longer because we had John Wayne on our side. Aged eight or nine I was already a veteran movie-goer. Our cinema was called the Rock, which we always said had something to do with the seats. My first cinema memory is of my father being warned by the management that unless he improved his behaviour he would be kicked out. At the time he was falling into the aisle, helpless with laughter at Laurel and Hardy.

He loved comics. I grew up on Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton, Ben Turpin, Wheeler and Wolsey, Abbott and Costello. He took us to the theatre to see a comedy double act called Collinson and Breen. It must have been wartime because they were dressed in army uniform. It was my mother’s birthday and we celebrated with a box at the Theatre Royal, Barnsley. It was the first time I had visited the theatre and I remember the plush reds and golds. But most of all I remember the deckchairs. Our box had three of them and we sat, as if on Bridlington beach, watching the turns.

My mother, a good-looking woman and at her best for the occasion, attracted the attention of the taller comic of the double act, who kept giving her saucy winks. She loved the attention but Dad became restless. As they took their bows the tall one started blowing kisses in my mother’s direction. This was too much for the old man who would have undoubtedly made it on stage for a punch-up had it not been for his deckchair collapsing as he struggled to get at the leering comic. I’ve had better nights in the theatre since, but none more dramatic.

During my childhood, theatre was a rare treat – mainly panto with Norman Evans, Nat Jackley and strapping-thighed principal boys. Cinema, on the other hand, became my second home and the source of all my aspirations. It was here I decided I wanted to be a journalist. I’d still marry Ingrid Bergman and we’d live in a house next to Barnsley Football Club.

I went to the movies with my mother four nights a week and with my mates on Saturday for the children’s matinee, when I would scour the dustbins outside the cinema for scraps of film. In those days, if the movie broke down, as it often did, the projectionist would make a crude edit and bung the leftover bits in the bins. I once found about six inches of a Charlie Chaplin film and kept it in my pocket for many years, feeling its smooth texture, dreaming of Hollywood.