Smile on the Face of the Pig

John Bull

Description

1950s Britain - when life was great if you had the guts to live it.Murder, lurid courtroom dramas, gypsy horse fairs, eccentric admirals, child brides, and falling in love - it's all in a day's work for cub reporter John Bull.Meet a cast of characters - from the parish clerk who dresses like a French resistance fighter, complete with rifle over her shoulder, to the medium whose spirit guide (her soldier boyfriend killed in World War II) gets in touch by pinging her suspender belt.The Smile on the Face of the Pig is a cheeky expose of life in the 1950s: crazy nights at the theatre with the old-time music-hall stars, skinny-dipping by starlight, drinking with the freebooting river-folk, and riding through the freezing night on a BSA motorbike chasing the Big Scoop that will carry him to Fleet Street, fame and fortune.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 11 décembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909183117
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Title Page
THE SMILE ON THE FACE OF THE PIG
Confessions of the Last Cub Reporter
By John Bull



Publisher Information
First published in 2011 by
Chaplin Books
1 Eliza Place
Gosport PO12 4UN
Tel: [phone]
www.chaplinbooks.co .uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright John Bull
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in its contents.



Acknowledgments
Thanks to those at the News , past and present - Debbie Croker, Ian Plowman, Roy West and Graham Hewitt, and all those reporters whose ideas I pinched: Peter Michel, Trevor Fishlock, Alan Biggs and Phil Griffiths. Thanks also to David Trenbirth; Michael Heaps of Kingswell, Berney, Mangnall and Heaps; Patrick Miller; my editor Amanda Field; Bay House School; and Miss Fenella Fielding. (There are many others - but who would want to follow Fenella?)



Before the mouth took on a cynical twist: me at age 17



Chapter One
The Great Freeze
The first flakes came spinning out of the January night sky as our family took the ferry home to Gosport from the panto Cinderella at the Kings Theatre, Southsea. I wanted to stay on deck to watch the magic crystals fall from the sky. Gosport never used to get more than a dusting of snow and, being an 11-year-old schoolboy, I didn’t want to miss any of it. I needn’t have worried. That bitter winter of 1947 we had more than enough to satisfy even the most romantic kid.
My father said that the wind that howled for weeks on end came straight from the Urals in Russia. Some parts of the country suffered terribly: it was a blow that Mr Attlee’s government, struggling to get the country on its feet again after the devastation of war, probably didn’t deserve. Our teachers talked about factories working only part-time, the railways grinding to a halt. There wasn’t enough food or coal. Many people died before their time - vulnerable babies, the elderly and the sick.
The first blizzard left snowdrifts such as few Gosport folk had ever seen; before they could be cleared, more came, snow on snow. Most pavements had a wall of dirty, black ice piled up from attempts to clear it. We had days when the snow seemed to thaw, only for the night to freeze everything again. Apart from the well-used bus routes, cars and lorries had to drive in the tracks left by others. There were still a lot of horse-drawn deliveries then. We felt sorry for the horses, shivering under their blankets. In our road, Queen’s Road, I remember neighbours struggling to free the coalman’s mare when she slipped and fell, tangled up in the harness.
My mother went about padded up: two cardigans under her coat and a scarf permanently tied round her head and face. Even glamorous Elsie, the likely miss from the next street, began to look like a Russian grandmother. The lady next door was seen in the garden one day chopping up the kitchen table to burn on the fire. My father, who always prided himself on being well-shod, had the bright idea of burning old shoes. They actually did offer a surprising amount of warmth. We shared this discovery with family and neighbours and by the time the long, long prayed-for thaw came in March, I don’t suppose there was an old pair of boots left in the town.
For most of us kids it was a delicious ‘time out of time’. The old town was surrounded by a defensive moat and that, of course, was frozen solid. Boys and girls walked about on it, treating it like a country lane. It gave us a unique opportunity to go places without bothering to ask - like St George’s barracks. All we had to do was slither down the bank behind the burnt-out shell of the Ritz cinema and walk under the bridge in Walpole Road, by-passing all fences, gates and guards.
For a change we’d go the other way along the moat: apart from a detour where the town fathers had thoughtlessly placed the swimming pool, we could walk on the ice all the way to where the sluices fed the moat from the harbour and Haslar creek. I’d stand with my friends under the little road bridge by Holy Trinity Church, eavesdropping on the conversations of passers-by above, mostly submarine sailors from HMS Dolphin. Very educational that was. We made a toboggan from a soap-box, and fitted it with hardwood runners. This we took to the high, sloping ramparts behind Canon Barclay’s Holy Trinity vicarage. It was a satisfying Cresta Run, and at the bottom, if you didn’t overturn, you shot straight out onto the ice.
Most locals wouldn’t have said that Gosport in 1947 was attractive, and the dirty snow and slush on the streets did not add much charm. Though in the open, looking out over the harbour to Pompey, we were treated to vistas of white solitude framed by a sky of black ink - very dramatic, very romantic. From Ann’s Hill, the highest point in Gosport (actually an arch over Queen Victoria’s old Gosport-to-Fareham railway line with an altitude of 21ft-ish), look to the east and you’ll see ... nothing. Because there is nothing. The view over Portsmouth Harbour goes on across the eastern flatlands of England, the North Sea, the north German plain, the plains of Poland, the empty, endless versts of Russia to the next highest point, the stark mountains of the Urals. The coldest place. At least that’s what one of my teachers once told us. But then, he was a dreamer. “ Ou sont les neiges d’antan?” asked that earlier romantic poet François Villon. That’s where the snows of yesteryear pile up: take my teacher’s word for it.
Thanks to my luck in passing the new 11-plus exam, I was one of the chosen few Gosport kids to be given a ‘grammar school’ education for free. We were the first full scholarship intake: until the advent of the 11-plus, parents had had to pay for a grammar-school place. For mine it might have seemed a blessing - but it wasn’t an unalloyed joy.
“I’m so pleased with you,” said Mum, unveiling the brand new, gleaming black Hercules bicycle, my reward for scoring high marks in an ‘at-first-sight intelligence test’ - similar to those our class had been practising every day for a year (still, only five out of 30 passed). My love of reading - the Beano, the Dandy, Rupert, schoolboy stories and adventure yarns - did it for me. I’d also got through a stack of obscure adult books, because until I went to the senior school I had no idea that Gosport had a children’s library. None of the stern women who staffed the public library ever thought to mention it to me as I heaved some vast tome of Macaulay’s Essays or Thomas De Quincey’s Memoirs of an English Opium Eater onto the desk to get it stamped.
The downside of a scholarship to the grammar school, as my Dad - a man as near a Communist as a man could be without carrying a party card - was quick to note, was that we ‘intelligent’ ones would be taught to ape middle-class attitudes and values and therefore would grow away from our families. I can’t recall all the many, many times over the next six years my mother Nell said to me: “I wish you’d never gone to that damned school.”
Oh, I loved my family, still do. But I did suffer many young years of needlessly being ashamed of them - and even more ashamed of myself for it.
And that wasn’t all. There may have been no fees to pay, but there was the uniform to buy, plus school satchels, sports gear, and so on, all available only from one Gosport shop, Hart’s, who held a monopoly. And woe betide any kid whose desperate parent tried to provide a cheap alternative to, say, the regulation green blazer. The other kids made his life a misery until in desperation, the nipper managed to ‘lose’ the blazer, forcing his hard-up Mum into God knows what personal pain to raise the cash for a proper one. For some working mothers, I imagine it might have meant being obliged to stay on a bit late at work on a Friday to help the manager ‘cash up’ for an extra quid - if you get my drift.
Gosport County Grammar School’s curriculum involved exotic subjects like French, Latin, Geometry, Algebra, Chemistry - and Physics, which in my ignorance I thought was a sort of Keep Fit. But the best bit for me was the school building itself - redbrick and white stucco in the Arts and Crafts style, with a circular tower at one end. It had been built in the early 1900s as a technical institute and still incorporated the Public Library. On the front elevation, facing the High Street, was a decorative bas relief depicting, in triumphal style, the landing of Bishop de Blois on the shores of Gosport. In grateful thanks to God for saving him from shipwreck, he named the place ‘God’s Port, Our Haven.’
A popular school joke had the Bishop, after his happy landing, taking one appalled look at the town and falling to his knees, saying: ‘Lord, can we have another look at that chart?’
The ground floor housed two well-equipped laboratories, one for Chemistry and the other for Physics, and there was a Biology lab upstairs, alongside what was known as the Botany Corridor, a long working counter beneath a galleried window, with high-stools for students to sit on while dissecting little animals. The beautiful assembly hall rose two floors with a full-scale arched window at the west end. A balcony crossed the east end at first-floor level and