Everyone starts Somewhere

A few years after my Raleigh Chopper bike, I phoned my mum from Romford and told her that I was going to buy a car. There was silence at the other end of the phone and she said that under no circumstances should I buy a car.

So I bought a motorbike....


It was early November 1974 and I really did not know how to ride a motorbike, the Yamaha YCS1, 180cc bike was below the "legal" 250cc level, so I could ride on a provisional licence, obtained a few weeks before, just after my seventeenth birthday.

The number plate was WUW339G according to my diary.

At the time I was living with a family called the Wilsons, the father actually secured my loan, which, if memory serves me, was over one hundred and twenty pounds, a fair old debt for someone who was earning about fourteen pounds a week (before about nine pounds of expenses).

It was soon to prove a lot more expensive.

Cars

Starting from 1974 to when I retired in 2007, I thought I'd list off the vehicles I've owned. Every one has a story...

Yamaha 180cc Motorbike
Ford Popular 100E : Written Off (on purpose, sold for scrap)
Volkswagen K70, side swiped, respray
Wolseley Hornet : Written Off
Ford Transit Van (bought to move back from London in 1977)
Hillman Imp
Mini Van, cost 15 pounds green repaint
Mini Clubman Estate, white, rust bucket - Ormskirk Auctions
Mini black
Austin 1100 : Only had this for one day!
Austin Maxi : Written Off
Ford Escort - blue
Ford Mk2 Cortina : Stolen and returned, red car, blue hood
Ford Mk1 Cortina, no door handles
Ford Mk4 Cortina : Stolen from outside MFI
Hillman Imp (never learn)
Ford Prefect (never learn 2)
Honda Melody
Ford XR3i (Write off from Germany)
Ford XR2 (first new car)
Ford Mustang 2.3L
Honda Civic SI
Volkswagen Corrado G60
Honda Civic Hatchback CX

At some point I should bring them all back to life with further stories.

Low Fidelity

I recently rediscovered an old cassette tape I’ve kept around for over thirty years now, It was recorded in February 1975 and it’s the Soul Show from Radio City, Liverpool. Its packed full of the type of the Soul music that I loved back then and a genuine time capsule for me.

This reminded me of a prized possession I have in my room, it’s a little Philips transistor radio that I bought myself for my 17th birthday in 1974. It was bought with most of my first pay packet from the Ford Motor Company. I’m quite gobsmacked to think, that besides a few diaries, that’s about all I have to show for those apprenticeship years.

This brings me to the joy of such an item when you’re young, I’d sit in my bedroom in the digs in Hornchurch, Essex, where I was living at the time, listening to crackly Radio Luxemborg or Radio Caroline, on the medium wave, well into the early hours of the morning, a couple of batteries providing almost endless mono entertainment for a young lad living alone, far away from home.

Of course, it wasn’t long before I had a few friends, discovered Rum and Coke, Pubs and Nightclubs, full of loud, stereo Soul music with incredible bass and fidelity...

...and of course the dancing girls.

And then it all went to rat shit.

Rewind..

Top Row... Chris Heyes, Judith Hillier, Jacqui Coughlan, Susan Barlow, Chris Lawrenson, Susan Benbow, Oonagh Waterhouse, Front Row: Wendy Boardman, Joyce Whitley, Janet Bradshaw, Diane Goddard, Kim Hewitt, Carol Wilson and Beverley Dyson.

Back to 1972......

Here's a question for the translucent masses, Did I try to go out with a girl called Christine Lawrenson at one point?, I personally have no idea any more, 32 years of washing my brain with beer has taken it's toll.

My experiences with girls were not excellent at school. I was seeing Yvonne Blakemore but, in retrospect, I don't think she was "seeing" me. I can recall quite vividly around March 12th 1971 at 4.15 pm she kissed me when I was seated on a low wall down the road from the school, I clowned and fell off the wall for effect, I don't think I've hit the ground yet........

In the later school years, my very good friend Joe Haines and his girlfriend Katrina Burns tried to fix me up with Christine Lees and I remember snogging with her in Katrina's garden shed (under a sheet because we were both excessively shy) - I foolishly gave her a love bite on her neck like a complete rookie and arranged to see her on the Friday night, Joe came with me for support and I, shy again, asked him to go and knock on their front door, he did and her dad grabbed him by the scruff of the neck (while I waited oblivious in the stairwell) well, talk about nipping a relationship in the bud, I don't think she talked to me for a month.

I do remember letching after the aforementioned Chris Lawrenson though, can't remember any associated stories, so I think she gave me the brush off. Now, there's an interesting snippet to publish on the web, Catherine Cookson eat your heart out!

The other thing I remember is that I was in the final year, 1974, and there was a lovely 15 year old girl I really fancied in the fourth year, I'd bumped into her (on purpose) a few times in the corridor and we'd expressed interest in each other. The school disco was the meeting place, the plan was set, the night of the disco, I remember walking across the hall floor and saying to her that we were definitely going to have a dance, then, at some point in the night (before THE dance) some boy kicked the divider in at the boys toilets. This was discovered and the dance was stopped. All the girls were sent out into the yard and the boys were grilled, and grilled, nobody admitted guilt and all the girls went home, and that was that.

And if you take all the pathetic stories and stack them on top of one another, you'll have created my life.........

Proof of Life

An entry from an older blog, June, 2004 :

More fragmented memories :

I only realised that there may actually be a God the day that one of the most annoying boys in our 1975 apprenticeship year at the Ford Motor Company, Dave Hopkins, almost cut his finger off with his term project bandsaw, even our most sarcastic and grim lecturer "Big Will" was happy that day.

I was living down in Romford, Essex hanging out with a chap called Pete Benjafield who had what we felt was a wicked Ford Cortina dressed up to look like a 1600E and one of my "best ever" friends Mark Gaskill who originated from Enfield Street in Wigan where his dad had a garage. At about the same time I was married (March 1976) I was recruited into the safety engineer program which meant they were going to bounce me around a bit, so I worked at Dagenham forge for a stint which was the most depressing place on the planet, then I was (at my request) transferred up to the Speke plant near Liverpool. We moved everything back north to Skelmersdale, Lancashire.

After planning and having our son in 1978 we settled down to quite the family life for a short time, things at Fords were not working out so I ejected and went working for a company in Skelmersdale called Wortley Conveyers, then onto a mining equipment company in Wigan (Gullick Dobson) fundamentally drafting at it’s lowest level, however they let me complete my Higher National at Wigan Technical college which is where I met Paul Martin (who, after my divorce, introduced me to Karen). Hopefully this entry isn't sounding too much like my resume.

In the middle of 1979 things went sour with the marriage and it started an 18 month spiral into divorce. Dark mental days for your host my invisible friends, dark days indeed.

In the same time zone, to reinforce the phrase "it never rains but it pours" Gullick Dobson made me redundant when the mining industry went into recession, following that I was a die-design draftsman at Alcan in Skelmersdale, likewise, within six months they folded and closed the plant down. redundant again. In 1981 I was officially divorced, broke, depressed and alone.

So, no work available because of the recession, I applied for a grant and went to a teacher training school in Ormskirk, Lancashire doing Mathematics and Art. Nice women to me ratio at the school (8 to 1), at 23 years old I was a born again teenager drinking and ravishing young women. My grant money evaporated as quickly as the alcohol so I had to get an evening job at a credit checking agency, 3 young guys and 126 varied aged women. That was a good year and certainly refreshed the parts that other beers could not reach.

At the end of 1981, early 82, unable to survive on a grant and tired of having a different girlfriend every two weeks I finally got myself the real job at APPH, as I've said, this was a Landing gear company in Liverpool (strangely, right next door to the Ford plant in Speke) and of course I had started seeing this girl called Karen from Wigan and was in with her crowd of young people at the Poacher.

Next time, we'll regress further......

The death of a Wolsley Hornet

It was a rainy Sunday morning in 1977...we (me and my first wife) were trying to decorate a room at our house at Inglewhite in Skelmersdale, Lancashire. Tempers were flaring because I was (and probably still am) not the person to be around when complicated items like wallpaper and painting apparatus are about. She asked me to drive to the petrol station to get some cigarettes - so I rushed out, not in the best of moods (as I didn't like her smoking) to the Shell gas station on the dual carriageway up by the M58, got her some cigs then drove back. The roads were a bit slippery and on the main corner negotiating the Skelmersdale Concourse I lost control and slammed into the concrete banking thus reinforcing my idea that wallpapering and life don't mix too well.

I was draped through the windscreen opening, the windscreen had fortunately been knocked completely out by the top of my bonce and lay on the bonnet in one piece, I had a cut on my forehead from the rear view mirror and the fact that it was raining, combined with the white shirt I had on, made me look a right mess. I tried to start the car again (not realising that the engine had been pushed back about 10 inches - in a Wolseley Hornet that is significant!) when two policemen walked around the side of the police station (The concrete banking was part of that fine establishment).

They ran over, took one look at the situation and the blood spattered remains of this poor person who was obviously in a bad way, then dragged me out and rushed me over to the station...(I was in fact quite unhurt aside from this cut to my forehead) they rinsed my head and put a huge bandage around from their first aid kit (If it had been serious I'd have been a gonner, they had a bandage, a tube of Savlon, some band aids and a box of corn plasters). The ambulance came three minutes later (the ambulance station was next to the police station which was rather convenient).

On the way to Ormskirk hospital we had to pass by Inglewhite, I asked the driver to take me home so I could explain to the missus what had happened, reluctantly he let me. I knocked on the door, (complete with head bandage and blood ravished shirt) looking like an Indian survivor of a terrorist attack, presented the wife with her cigs and briefly explained the situation.

I think I got out of doing any more wallpapering that day.

Back to the start....

An older blog of mine "The Fool on the Hill" is in danger of fading into even more oblivion than it already is, I'll take this chance to change direction and include some relevant stories from that blog :

When I was a baby the first thing I think I remember was a window, Looking out of my pram and seeing a sash window. as I said, at least that's what I think I remember as it is my lifetime ago and the mind is a minefield with marshy patches – I often wonder if that type of image will be the last thing I ever see in some bright hospital room or nursing home somewhere!

Full circle.

I picked up some prints that I had developed from negatives discovered in a box in mum and dads garage in North Wales, one of them, previously unseen, shows a one year old me, with my grandad, in front of that very window.


I look at this picture of me when I was a baby, half a century ago and I am now as old as Jack Edwards who is holding me there,

I am now almost a 52 year old man and I realise that we are the same yet not the same. I have my grandads DNA, some of his passed on memories and experiences, and a duty to record them somewhere. As for the baby, well, my bones have grown and the skin has a lot more weathering now, lines drawn on the canvas of life and great memories of what a special life it has been.

I've focused up to now on a single year of my life, but I think there is a lot more to tell, along the way, the puzzle pieces will grow and perhaps reflect the story as seen from this side of the eyeballs.

Postnote : The Fool on the Hill blog has been transferred to a sustainable one, see link on right.