Belgian Youth Abroad

(New month old post: first posted 13th January 2015)

Hugo, my foreign language exchange partner, thought himself the Belgian equivalent of Dick Rivers “the French Elvis Presley”. He dressed like Dick Rivers, sang like Dick Rivers and combed his hair like Dick Rivers. And like his role model, he was fascinated by popular American culture.

I think that was the main reason he wanted to visit England – he thought it was like America. English fashion and music were taking over the world. ‘Swinging’ London was also the fictional home of Hugo’s other hero, ‘The Saint’, alias “the famous Simon Templar”, played by the young and debonair Roger Moore, recently syndicated with subtitles on Belgian television. He looked so good I could almost have fancied him myself.

The foreign language exchange scheme, ‘La Jeunesse Belge à l'Étranger’ (Belgian Youth Abroad), made England easily accessible. It paired Belgian and English teenagers to stay with each other and their families.

And so, one sunny July afternoon in the mid nineteen-sixties, Hugo, and around thirty other excited Belgian teenagers, travelled north on a train to Yorkshire. As they rattled over the river and canal bridges, those that had been in previous years knew they had reached their destination.

Meanwhile, waiting expectantly on the station platform, their exchange partners squinted into the glare to catch a first glimpse of the approaching train. The clatter and thump of railway gates locking against their stops, and the clunk of railway signals bouncing into the clear position, announced its imminent arrival. I was oddly distracted by the image of Wendy Godley standing quietly at the end of the platform with the sun shining straight through her thin summer dress.

How on earth would we match Hugo’s expectations? It wasn’t Elvis Presley or Roger Moore that had recently performed in our town, it was Wilfred Pickles and his quiz and interview show ‘Have A Go!’, broadcast on the Light Programme, the most old-fashioned and parochially working-class show on the wireless. Its mainly elderly audience always joined in to sing the opening theme song: 

Have a go, Joe, come on and have a go, You can’t lose owt, it costs you nowt, To make yourself some dough. So hurry up and join us, don’t be shy and don't be slow. Come on Joe, have a go!

Hugo would surely be bored out of his mind.

The train drew up in a hiss of hot steam, a whiff of coal smoke and the turmoil of slamming doors, waving, cheek-kissing and excited foreign accents. I found Hugo and helped carry his luggage to our house.

I need not have worried. A big difference between our own trip abroad and Hugo’s to England was that whereas we had stayed mainly with families dispersed across French-speaking Belgium, the Belgians stayed close together in our small Yorkshire town. At the same time we were hosts to a similar number of German exchange students. So we had thirty Belgian teenagers and thirty German teenagers, many for the first time away from their parents, all in effect on holiday together with their sixty English hosts. There would be no difficulty in finding things for them to do; they would create their own entertainment. Indeed, Hugo had already been hard at work creating distractions of his own.

“Zehre was zees gehrl on zee trhrain,” he said, “Marie-Christine. Vehry byutifurl. She stay ‘ere en England too. She stay weedz an Engleesh gehrl called Wendee. You know whehre she leev?”

That disclosed Hugo’s main preoccupation for the next two and a half weeks. Whereas my activities in Belgium had depended almost entirely on Hugo and his family, Hugo quickly started to organize things for himself. As a handsome, energetic combination of Dick Rivers and the famous Simon Templar, he was irresistible to Belgian, German and English girls alike, and all their friends and sisters too. He worked through them one by one, sometimes in twos and threes, greatly assisted by my dad’s ancient bicycle which he had commandeered to give himself a level of independence that often left me to my own devices. Hugo was entirely different to how he had been at home in Belgium: “un garçon sérieux,” his parents had said.

Most afternoons, groups of Belgian, German and English teenagers congregated in the park, played tennis or football, and wandered around visiting each others’ houses or drinking Coca Cola in coffee bars. Most evenings there were lively parties, some still remembered for entirely the wrong reasons. I got to participate too. Such an intensity of social activity was completely new to me. I had to learn quickly.

One afternoon, Hugo having gone off somewhere with Wendy Godley and Marie-Christine, I found myself on my own at the park with Wendy’s sister, Sandra, who was also ‘vehry byutifurl’. Whereas Wendy had always completely ignore me, Sandra was the opposite. She kept asking me things that seemed to mean more than just the words she used. With reference to the pictures (cinema): did I think it cosy at the Carlton? Would I like a ‘Wonderful Life’? Had I thought about ‘A Hard Day’s Night’? Would I enjoy ‘Sex and the Single Girl’? She was forever touching me, walking near enough to brush hands, and sitting so our knees came into contact.

That day in the park, I was sitting on my bicycle with hands on the brakes, and Sandra stood so closely that, oh so casually and accidentally, her tummy pressed firmly against my fingers. She felt warm through the softness of her strikingly red top. Then, with mischievous blue eyes looking straight into mine in a way that was impossible to refuse, she asked whether she could have a ride, pausing excessively before adding “on your bike, I mean.” I got off, she got on, wobbled a bit because it was too big for her, and then rode off towards the park exit, her ample bottom astride my saddle. I followed on foot, but she had disappeared. To be truthful, I was rather annoyed. If I wanted my bike back, I had to go get it.

I walked the half-mile to the Godleys’ house wondering what to say. The front door opened and Sandra waved me inside. She was alone in the house and had changed out of her red top into what looked like a flimsy nightdress. I wasn’t sure where I should look. Then, in one of those instants when different choices could have taken my life along a very different course, “I made my excuses and left” as newspaper reporters used to say. “Fled” would be a better word.

I often wondered how things might have turned out otherwise. It would have been good for me at that stage of my life to have had a very special friend, especially someone so funny, lovely and ‘byutifurl’. My coldness must have been hurtful. But we weren’t in ‘swinging’ London. The ‘swinging sixties’ did not reach our part of Yorkshire until the nineteen seventies or eighties. We would have become the subjects of the kind of nudges, winks and whispers that circulated round town for weeks.

There was one other thing too. It sounds terrible now, but Sandra went to the Secondary Modern School. Grammar school boys did not go out with modern school girls. We were turned into arrogant snobs.

I didn’t tell Hugo. Goodness knows what he would have made of it.  

More Memories of 1960s Belgium

When this blog began in 2014, I naively wrote rather long posts – even longer than now. Some exceeded two thousand words. One was “In England They Eat Cat Food” about my visits to Belgium in the nineteen-sixties, part of which I reposted earlier this month. Here is more.   

My overriding impression was that, even after twenty years, the Charleroi region was still recovering from the economic privations of war. Hugo lived in a coal mining region in a house without mains water or sewerage. It was grimy and industrial – how I imagined parts of Yorkshire in the frugal 1930s. 

Hugo’s dad took us on sight-seeing trips. We climbed the Lion’s Mound, a conical hill with a stone lion on top marking the site of the Battle of Waterloo. In Brussels we saw ‘le mannekin pis’, a hideous, two feet high, bronze fountain of a naked boy urinating into a basin. We visited the Atomium, a bizarre, futuristic, three hundred foot, nine-sphered construction in the form of an iron atom, a gleaming statement of post-war confidence erected for the 1958 World’s Fair.  

But post-war confidence seemed in short supply. We went several times by ancient tram to an equally ancient cinema in Charleroi. Neither the trams nor the cinema looked as if they had been painted since the 1930s. I sat through endless French films listlessly monitoring the slow rotation of the only thing I understood, an illuminated clock at the side of the screen labelled ‘Tic-Tac Pontiac’.
 

Charleroi Trams in the 1960s

In Charleroi there was an old-fashioned street fair of a kind unseen in England since before the war. One stall was an ornately decorated fighting booth where all-comers were invited to challenge boxers and wrestlers for a share of the takings if they could survive three rounds. The Master of Ceremonies banged a drum and goaded passing men with accusations of cowardice and feebleness. This, together with the provocative posturing of the fighters, quickly collected a crowd which goaded and postured back. 

Perhaps the crowd contained provocateurs to raise the temperature. Things started to become volatile. A scarred but muscled boxer looked much too intimidating for anyone to take on, but one of the wrestlers, a bald thin chap hardly bigger than me, with an effeminate leotard and ridiculous handlebar moustache, soon attracted a challenger who impudently threatened to pull off his whiskers. The pre-show was probably more entertaining than the fight itself – I don’t know, we didn’t pay to go in. Why oh why didn’t I take photographs?

Another stall had a platform with huge slabs of meat hanging from metal hooks, and a barred window at the back. A snarling black-faced wild man with a bone through his nose peered menacingly through the bars. The showman roused the crowd by cutting off chunks of raw meat and throwing them into the cage for the savage to devour. He then heated a thick iron rod in a brazier until it glowed brilliantly red, and seared it into the hanging meat which spat and sizzled as it burned, giving off clouds of rancid smoke. He reached into the cage with a meat hook, caught the wild man around the neck, violently pulled his arm through the bars, and rubbed the red hot iron hard across the palm of his hand to demonstrate his immunity to pain. Again, we did not pay to go in, but I wonder for how many years afterwards the stall was allowed to continue. In England by then, we were beginning to find the comparatively innocuous Black and White Minstrel Show rather objectionable.

On Easter Sunday we went to watch a noisy carnival at the nearby town of Fontaine-l’Évêque, where a procession of children, uniformed musicians and costumed characters, some wearing enormous papier maché heads, walked through the centre throwing treats to the spectators shivering in the rain and sleet. 

I went out late one night after dark with Hugo and his friends equipped with buckets of paste and wallpaper brushes to put up “Marche Anti-Atomique” posters on noticeboards and any other suitable surfaces around the village, to the consternation of Hugo’s father who declared I would be deported if caught by the police. It goes without saying that we simply ignored any ‘défense d’afficher’ (no bill posting allowed) notices we came across.

Hugo and his friends also ignored the widespread ‘défense d'uriner’ notices, going about their business brazenly in full view of the road, even when caught in the glare of car headlights. But then, a country that has a peeing cherub as one of its main tourist attractions is hardly likely to have any inhibitions about urinating in public.

Hugo’s friends had no inhibitions about smoking and drinking. Neither had minimum age limits in Belgium, and teenagers openly did both without disapproval. A couple of friends flamboyantly smoked the local ‘Belga’, ‘Visa’ and ‘Zemir’ cigarettes, which came in paper packets of twenty-five at a fraction of the price of the cardboard packets of tens and twenties in England,. Like most European cigarettes, they had the distinctive, musty smell of Turkish tobacco, very different from the milder American variety in England. I took a couple of packets home for my dad. I don’t know what happened to them. I never detected their pungent odour in our house. I suspect my mother put them in the dustbin.

The street scenes in this a ten-minute video of Charleroi trams in the nineteen-sixties re-capture my impressions of the place very well. The same YouTube channel also has a clearer video (with sound) of the nineteen-eighties when it still looked much the same.

If you can't see it, the video link is: https://youtu.be/ma6xm-ztt8g

No England They Eat Cat Food

New Month Old Post (originally posted 12th September, 2014)

“What do you eat in England?” Hugo’s dad asked me in English.

“Food,” I said, trying to be funny.

He translated for Hugo’s mother and sister. Horrified, I realised I might have implied that what we were eating now was not what I thought of as proper food. 

It was my first meal with Hugo and his family in Belgium. I was there on a foreign language exchange trip. Hugo’s dad seemed concerned that, not only was I having difficulty in understanding their French, but that I might also be unfamiliar with their food. They had asked whether I would like beer, wine or water to drink, and not being sure how to reply I had said wine. That was a new experience for me at fifteen. Had I tried to stand up I would have fallen over. Was I red because of the wine or embarrassment?

The food certainly was different. I can’t remember the details now, but there were a lot of meaty stews with lots of bread and weak fizzy beer or bottled water with every cooked meal. There were no familiar bowls of breakfast cereal, but thick chunks of bread and jam dipped into huge bowls of black coffee which rapidly acquired a disagreeable film of jam, butter and breadcrumbs on the surface. They enjoyed an unpleasant vegetable called “le chicon”, a kind of blanched endive with a bitter taste. In the days before ubiquitous international cuisine and mass foreign travel, food did differ across countries and regions. I was just going to have to cope with it. I was there for two and a half weeks.

Hugo and his parents lived in a square, average-sized detached house on a hill a few miles west of Charleroi. It was one of three or four on a busy road with an open valley at the back. The region was brown-field rather than green, the main economic activity being coal mining. Across the valley at the back was an open-cast mine from which a constantly moving, overhead bucket conveyor, carried coal past Hugo’s house to a railway somewhere across the road. Nearby, industrial buildings and black metal structures mingled with terraced housing in grimy cobbled streets.

View Behind Hugo's House
the spoil heap remains today, wooded over

It did not dishearten me. It resembled parts of Yorkshire around Knottingley and Pontefract not far from where I lived. My own town constantly echoed to the clatter of railway wagons and the roar of ships loading coal. Nor was I bothered that the toilet was in an outhouse. I had used outside toilets too. What did surprise me was that the house had no mains water. In the kitchen, instead of a tap, was a hand pump to draw water out of the ground. The toilet looked normal, but there was no water in the bottom, just a dark hole through to a cesspit. A swarm of black flies buzzed gleefully in and out of the hole, not somewhere you would want to sit any longer than necessary, but it made things interesting when standing for a pee; you could try to beat your personal best for the number of flies swilled down.

There was no bathroom; you washed in a bowl of warmed water at a washstand in the bedroom. Once a week we walked the half-mile to Hugo’s grandfather’s for a bath. He had a normal bathroom, except there was no hot running water, so the bath was filled with water heated on a stove. To save fuel you took turns. Being the guest, I was allowed to go first, so at least the water was clean, but it could be scaldingly hot.

Bearing in mind their water came untreated from the ground, it was unsurprising that Hugo’s family habitually drank weak beer with meals, but I was surprised that teenagers of my age could buy and drink alcohol without restriction in the equivalent of English coffee bars. In England, as I was later to find, it took a certain courage to go into a pub for the first time, even on reaching the age of eighteen, but we spent hours in Belgian cafés drinking the local Maes Pils, Extra Pils and Stella Artois (years before it was available in England) and playing ‘kicker’ (pronounced ‘keekay’, the table football game with wooden footballers fixed to spinning metal rods), which the Belgians played with incredible skill. I could never replicate their unstoppable bullet-like shots, executed with a near-imperceptible flick of the wrist. The only way I could get any kind of power was by vigorously spinning the rods right round, but that was not allowed.

As the days passed, I realised I was having a great time. In fact, I returned the following year, and then for a third year after that. I even improved my French a little.

I supplemented the Belgian cuisine by carefully rationing out precious biscuits brought from home. It gave Hugo’s sister the perfect come-back to my earlier faux pas insulting their food. They had Kit-E-Kat cat food in Belgium, but not Kit Kat chocolate wafers. Watching me undo a red and silver wrapper, she choked in triumphant delight as she struggled to get out her words.

“En Angleterre ils mangent des aliments pour chats”, she said.

Votre Billet Monsieur?

(First posted 27th August, 2014)

“Billet?” “Votre billet, Monsier?” I will never forget the French word “billet” for as long as I live.

I had been staying with a Belgian family on a school exchange visit. They had put me on the right train at Charleroi and I had waved goodbye with feelings of relief and sadness: relief at no longer having to struggle in French and sadness because I had had a great time and would miss them. Having been there on my own for two and a half weeks, I was looking forward to being with English speakers again.

My French had improved enormously, although not enough to be entirely aware of what was going on. Sometimes things just happened without forewarning, such as going out sightseeing, or into town, or to the cinema, or to visit someone. You rarely knew what each moment would bring. At the age of fifteen it seemed simplest to cultivate an attitude of passive acceptance. It served me well that morning.

I was to join the rest of my school party at Bruxelles-Midi. After less than thirty miles, or should I say forty five kilometres because it was a Belgian train, the train reached Brussels and started to slow down. It came to a stop. I peered out anxiously to read the station name. “No, not this one,” I decided. It was Brussel-Zuid. Everyone else got out. I sat watching the bustling foreign platform, quietly waiting for the train to move on. It was a big mistake.

The problem is that Belgium is a two-nation country. There are the Walloons who speak French and live mainly to the south of Brussels where I had been staying, and the Flemish or Belgian-Dutch speakers who live to the north. The two nations are suspicious of each other, and, where they intersect, as in Brussels, signs are written in both languages to help minimise the antipathy. The station name, Brussel-Zuid, appeared to be Flemish for Brussels South. I wanted Bruxelles-Midi, which I decided must mean Brussels Central. I should have known better. Just rudimentary knowledge of French is sufficient to realise how very wrong this is. I must have left my French back in Charleroi in my eagerness to get home.

I knew something was not right as soon as the train started to move. The names on the station totems flashed alternately in Flemish and French, Flemish and French, Brussel-Zuid and Bruxelles-Midi, Brussel-Zuid and Bruxelles-Midi. With helpless horror, I realised they were the same station. The names switched in time with the clickety-click of the wheels as the train picked up speed. Not only do the two kinds of Belgians disagree about which language they speak, they cannot even decide what this particular station should be called.

‘Midi’ is of course French for ‘mid-day’. It is one of the first words you learn, as in après-midi, meaning afternoon. Because the sun is in the south at noon, the French-speaking Belgians in their wisdom call the southern station Bruxelles-Midi (Brussels Mid-Day). Where else would you find such logic? How come they were allowed to keep such eccentricities when we had to give up our shillings, pence, pounds, ounces, pints, gallons, feet and inches? They used to be perfect for bamboozling the French and Germans.

I was on the express train going north to Antwerp. Not only that, but all the other passengers now seemed to be Flemish speakers who might be unhelpful towards someone attempting to speak in French. I caught the attention of a smartly dressed but kindly-looking young woman sitting opposite me. With an awkward and badly modulated “Excusez-moi, Madamoiselle”, which stopped the conversation throughout the whole carriage, I asked anxiously in French whether the station we had just left was Bruxelles-Midi. Fortunately, she answered in a French accent I was able to follow. As the train shot through another station without stopping she confirmed that it was.

“Ce que je vais faire maintenant?” (What am I going to do now?), I asked with resignation.

“Descend ici” (Get off here) she said. It was a considerable relief to be told there was another stop before Antwerp, at Brussel-Noord (Bruxelles-Nord or Brussels North).

I left the train. This was a much quieter station. I sat with my luggage on the deserted platform. Before too long a train came in the opposite direction. I got on, sat down, and fiddled sweaty-handed with the ticket inside my trouser pocket. It quickly became an illegible, misshapen pulp. For all I knew, the train could have been going anywhere. I just hoped it was going back to Bruxelles-Midi and not straight to somewhere in Germany or France. As I said, if you were fifteen, on your own in Belgium in 1965, unable to understand much of what was going on, the only thing you could do was to adopt a position of passive acceptance. Psychologists call it ‘learned helplessness’. 

Inevitably, a ticket inspector came. He was dressed in a smart dark uniform which gave him an intimidating authority that made me think of the Gestapo. I handed him the lump of papier-mâché that had once been my ticket. He screwed up his eyes as he examined it, then looked back at me, then back at the ticket, and then at me again, and with an air of complete disbelief said “Votre billet, Monsieur?” “Votre billet?”

“Billet” – it’s the French word for ticket.

I was lucky. He concluded he was dealing with an anxious young English idiot and let me get off at Bruxelles-Midi.

Peyton Place and Top Deck Shandy

(First posted 7th April, 2015)

Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.

“What rubbish?” was my fifteen year-old self’s first thought, but something in that luxuriant opening sentence and the sensuous description of New England’s “lovely womanly Indian summer” enticed me to read just a little further. By the end of the first few pages, with their sprinkling of references to whores, peckers and venereal disease, I decided it might be prudent to study it more discreetly. I looked up the meaning of Indian summer and read on by torchlight under the bedclothes.

In those days, a child reading ‘Peyton Place’, even a fifteen year-old, would have been as shocking as the furore that followed its publication in 1956. The book was banned in Canada until 1958, and even later for the more delicate Australians.

It is tame stuff compared to what children are exposed to now, but, unlike today, our innocence was well-protected. In contrast, our physical safety received little thought. We could wander wild for hours near roads, rivers and railway lines, and climb trees and light fires. Nowadays, things are the other way round. While depravity and consumerism roam free, health and safety are controlled to the point of paranoia. Carefree freedom ran off with childhood innocence.

One affair that illustrates these changes for me is the Top Deck Shandy Pan Books promotion of the 1960s.

It was when I had my first party. Hugo, my foreign-language exchange partner from Belgium, was with us, and around fifty other Belgians and Germans were staying nearby. The party was subject to three parental conditions: (i) numbers were limited and by invitation only; (ii) the bedrooms were out of bounds, enforced by my mother’s washing line wound tightly round the door knobs; and (iii) there would be no alcohol. We were, however, allowed Top Deck Shandy, so we bought in several dozen cans.

What is incredible about Top Deck Shandy is that despite being supposedly a low-alcohol drink marketed to children, it then had an alcohol content of 2% proof (about 1% by volume), equivalent to almost one quarter the strength of beer. Nowadays, it would be illegal to sell it to anyone under the age of eighteen, yet, in the 1960s and 1970s, it could be seen on school trips without any concerns raised by teachers. Things are now so different that children have been excluded from school for innocently taking in cans of perfectly-legal ‘Ben Shaw’s Bitter Shandy’ (0.5%) and shops have refused to sell zero-alcohol wines to pensioners unable to provide proof of age. No one is prepared to risk being accused of promoting under-age drinking.

You would have to drink fifteen cans (5 litres) of today’s ‘Ben Shaw’s Bitter Shandy’ to consume an equivalent amount of alcohol to one bottle of beer. You would probably be sick before you got there.

The party with the Belgians and Germans was brilliant. No one turned up uninvited, no one got drunk, and thanks to Hugo’s popularity with the girls, boys were hugely outnumbered. Nothing got out of control, unlike at a couple of other legendary parties around this time. There were just two consequences. One was that my young brother had to take the next morning off school because he was kept awake very late. The other was that I had several dozen Top Deck Shandy labels. At the time, Top Deck Shandy was running a Pan books promotion. For every six labels you sent off, you could select a free paperback book from a list. I had enough labels for nearly all of them.

I know what I got because they were, until not so long ago, in a box in the loft. My first choices were predictable: ‘The Dam Busters’ by Paul Brickhill, ‘Dr. No’ by Ian Fleming, ‘The Saint Goes On’ by Leslie Charteris and ‘The Satan Bug’ by Ian Stuart (a pseudonym of Alistair MacLean), books I would probably have bought or borrowed from the library anyway. Frank Edward’s bestseller ‘Stranger Than Science’ was another memorable selection, a set of supposedly true accounts of strange events beyond scientific explanation. I’m not ashamed to say I devoured it uncritically. Then, beginning to run out of options, I decided that Nevil Shute’s ‘A Town Like Alice’ was likely to be all right because, after all, he had been the chief engineer building the R100 airship at nearby Howden. It turned out to be a soppy romance but enough of an adventure story to be enjoyable. Lastly, with hardly anything left to choose, I sent for ‘Peyton Place’ by Grace Metalious.

Peyton Place sold 60,000 copies in its first ten days. It has been described as a depiction of life in a small New England town, stark and crude in its search for realism. I thought the small New England town in which it was set might be interestingly like the small Yorkshire town where I lived. It wasn’t.

It goes on quite a lot about straining, such as when, observed from a distance by her husband, the unfaithful Ginny Stearns walks off with a stranger, “... her breasts and thighs straining through her dress to rest against the stranger’s side” (page 81). Then on page 108, when the thirteen year old Allison MacKenzie parades in front of a mirror wearing padded foundation garments “... the top of her new dress swelled magnificently, the fabric straining against her rubber breasts...”

The book is obsessed with breasts. One biographer of Grace Metalious suggests that defining women according to their breasts was only to be expected in an age when Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield filled the screens, but feminist ideologies escaped me then. I was simply fascinated that Betty Anderson’s nipples were “always rigid and exciting and the full, firm flesh around them always hot and throbbing” (page 203), and I paid careful attention to the dangers explicit in the scene, when Rodney Harrington, driving a speeding car, takes his hand off the wheel to reach for the hard exposed breasts of his female companion and drives straight under a brightly lit trailer truck (page 314).

I know the page numbers because I noted them down faintly, in pencil, just inside the back cover, so I could find them again. I especially liked page 150 when Michael Kyros rips off Constance MacKenzie’s still wet bathing suit and “... she felt the first red gush of shamed pleasure that lifted her, lifted her, lifted her and then dropped her down into unconsciousness.” It produced strange stirrings in the trouser department.

Clive Anderson said that radio is like television but with better pictures. If this, by extension, applies to novels, it was surely true of Peyton Place. I have never seen either the film or television series it spawned, but I cannot image that five hundred episodes of the 1960s soap could sustain the same intensity, despite having Ryan O’Neal, Dorothy Malone and a very young Mia Farrow. On the 14th August, 1965, around a year after the author, Grace Metalious, drank herself to death at the age of thirty-nine, I noted in my diary it was one of the best books I’d ever read.

Today similarly scandalous tales of drunkenness, incest, rape, abortion, illegitimacy, high-school sex and patricide are everywhere, not least on pre-watershed mainstream television drama set in schools. They leave nothing to the imagination and you are in no doubt that these things could easily occur even in small towns in Yorkshire. Still uglier things, obnoxious and amoral, are widespread on the internet. Peyton Place would hardly count as soft porn now.

Am I mistaken in thinking the world a much kinder place, free and innocent, when you could feel grown-up drinking 2% shandy, and reading Peyton Place under the bedclothes was the height of wickedness? 

 

 

Notes

- You can download a PDF, Epub or Mobi (Kindle) copy of Peyton Place (and a large number of other public domain books as mentioned in my preceding post) from https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160613. Some of the television programmes are on YouTube. The names of the characters differ slightly in the English, American and television versions.

- Top Deck Shandy may have had paper labels in the 1960s, as opposed to the printed cans of the 1970s pictured.

- This interesting article touches upon how insidiously our health and safety culture and gender stereotyping were already beginning to change by the 1970s. 

- The sale of alcohol in the U.K. is regulated by the 2003 Licensing Act which prohibits the sale of alcoholic drinks stronger than 0.5% by volume to anyone under 18 (see section 191 ‘meaning of alcohol’).  

1966

Yet again, England are out of the World Cup, eliminated by a tactical master class from Croatia that revealed the wobbly defence and ineffectual attack hinted at in previous games, overshadowed by goals from set-pieces. The team did well to get to the semi-final, and should get better as they get older, but it seemed unrealistic to expect they would win it this time. So we have to wait at least another four years for another chance to repeat the glories of the 30th July, 1966.

This time was quite reminiscent of 1966. Like now, the north of England at least had seen some warm, dry, sunny days, although not as dry as this year, and everyone was behind the team. I watched it on television with a few friends. It was a Saturday afternoon. Our Belgian foreign-language exchange pen-friends were staying and Hugo was cheering for West Germany. When they scored first we had to expel him from the room. He went upstairs to listen on the transistor radio.

England then scored twice to take the lead, and we would probably have allowed him back in had he wanted, but he stayed upstairs until, one minute from the end, the Germans equalised and he came down mocking and taunting, and was immediately banished again. The rest is history. The match went to extra time, and England scored twice and won.

Not only can I remember watching it, I can still list the whole of the winning team: Gordon Banks in goal, full-backs George Cohen and Ray Wilson, half-backs Nobby Stiles, Jack Charlton and captain Bobby Moore, forwards Alan Ball, Geoff Hurst, Roger Hunt, Martin Peters and Bobby Charlton. I asked someone of similar age to me whether he could still name them all, and he did so without difficulty: Englishmen of a certain age with shared memories. Sadly, some members of the team still living remember nothing of it at all because of football-induced head trauma.

Was it really fifty-two years ago? Am I old? In those days anyone whose memory reached back that amount of time, say back to the First World War, really did seem old. I hope that’s no longer true.

This time, England will now play Belgium in the third-place play-off. I suspect the Belgians will win; they are far too good for us at the moment. I wonder what Hugo is thinking, and if he remembers where he was in 1966.

The Great Cigarette Machine Robbery

Tasker Dunham remembers his short-lived career as a master criminal

Today there is an entire industry devoted to the security and protection of automatic vending machines, supplying various kinds of locks, straps, anchor kits, anti-jam coin devices, solvents and cages (one fittingly named ‘Defend-A-Vend’) for the war against hammer attacks, lock picking, graffiti and the ingress of liquids, lollipop sticks and other unwanted items. Such measures, together with sophisticated physical, optical and magnetic currency validation techniques, make vending machines as safe from theft and vandalism as possible.

They must have been much more vulnerable in the past when simple coin-in-the-slot machines seemed to be screwed unprotected to the wall of just about every tiny corner shop in the land. No doubt people were then generally more law-abiding and respectful. Perhaps, therefore, I should take this opportunity to confess that I wasn’t, and to ease my conscience by recounting how I once regarded cigarette machines as my fast-track route to a career as a master criminal.

 

Cigarette machines were everywhere. For half-a-crown (two shillings and six pence, the pre-decimalisation equivalent of 12½p) you could slide a packet of ten out of a drawer at the bottom and get a few coppers in change as well. If it sounds cheap, it was. Allowing for inflation, half-a-crown in 1968 had similar spending power to around £2 today, whereas the actual price of ten cigarettes now is around £5.

The most popular cigarette at the time was Embassy which had been re-introduced as a filter brand in 1962. It quickly captured almost a quarter of the market although after the end of the decade its dominance was usurped by the smaller and cheaper Players’ No. 6. Both brands had gift vouchers to encourage loyalty, and both were heavily marketed: the vertical red-on-white stripe of Embassy and the blue-green bands of Players No. 6 were familiar to smokers and non-smokers alike. It was big business: approximately 45% of the adult population smoked, well over double the percentage today.

Other products were available from vending machines too, for example chocolate, chewing gum, sweets, stamps and so on, and of course these still exist, except that over the last few decades they have deserted dark and lonely street corners for new positions in brighter, safer, less isolated locations, mostly indoors, such as in schools, sports centres, motorway service stations and railway station concourses.

Cigarette machines, however, have disappeared completely. The sale of tobacco from vending machines was banned in England from the 1st October, 2011, subject to a fine of £2,500. The aim was to prevent the sale of cigarettes to children. 

Belgian 50 centimes piece and English sixpence

The vulnerability of vending machines was brought home to me on the way home from one of the foreign language exchange trips mentioned in previous posts. Waiting to change trains at Doncaster station, our group of respectable and well-behaved grammar school scholars discovered that the Belgian 50 centimes piece was exactly the same size and weight as the English sixpence, despite having only one seventh of the value (actually they were half a millimetre smaller and 0.05g lighter than a sixpence but this would have been within the tolerances allowed for wear through use, and the exchange rate then was 140 Belgian Francs to the pound). Most of us still had several of these otherwise worthless foreign coins left in our change, so we flocked and screeched like excited seagulls around the Cadburys chocolate machine on the platform, leaving it empty.

But this was small-time, low-value stuff. Tobacco was big-time, high-value, as my Belgian exchange partner, Hugo, demonstrated when he visited England the second time. To supplement his English currency he smuggled in a few dozen packets of tipped Belgian cigarillos which he had no trouble in selling at a handsome profit to my smoking school mates and anyone else who wanted to buy them. It was rather cynical and calculating because Hugo himself didn’t smoke. The cigarillos looked like pencils and reeked like old socks, and for the last few days of the school term the bike sheds had the atmosphere of a Middle Eastern hookah den.  

So, in a flash of insight, the creative combination of disparate ideas and trains of thought, I came up with the perfect crime. I would rob cigarette machines using counterfeit half-crowns, and corner the market for cut-price Embassy and Players No. 6. The only difficulty was how to make the fake half-crowns.

Bronze penny and silver half-crown

One idea was to glue two pennies together. Copper pennies and silver half-crowns were almost the same size, pennies being 31mm in diameter and half-crowns 32.3mm, but pennies were thinner and lighter, 9.4g to 14.1g. I didn’t know this so precisely at the time, and if I did I would have been talking in inches and ounces, but I naively guessed that there must be some kind of weight-sensitive mechanism inside the machines to distinguish lighter pennies from heavier half-crowns, and that two pennies together might fool it.

Glueing them together was the easy part thanks to Evo-stick impact adhesive, but the resulting disc was too thick. Round at the corner shop after dark, it went into the slot all right, fell down inside, and stuck. All I’d done was to put the machine out of action for the night. I wonder how many people cursed at the loss of their half-crowns before the shop opened again the next day. I bet Don Blackburn, the shop keeper, wasn't too pleased either.

The next idea was to glue two pennies together and file them thinner. After a couple of hours of filing I gave up. Penny metal (then bronze, a copper alloy) is much harder than you might think. From the state of my hands I decided that the coarse file I was using, known as a bastard file, was very aptly named.

By then my project had gained the interest and enthusiasm of my friend Alan from school who suggested putting the double-penny on the railway line to let a passing railway engine do the job of thinning the disc. We put it on a secluded bit of track beyond the end of the street and waited. A useless two-car multiple unit came along first. It knocked the disc away and we couldn’t find it anywhere. Another two pence lost. Presumably it’s still there somewhere, hidden in the ballast.

We tried again another day. This time we were rewarded by the appearance of an impressively large and heavy ‘Austerity’ WD 2-8-0 locomotive hauling a fully loaded train of coal wagons. It certainly flattened the disc, except that it was now far too big and no longer stuck together. Further hours spent glueing and filing the two flattened pennies failed to create anything even slightly near to the size and shape of a half-crown. With write-off costs now mounting to six pence, an entirely different approach was needed.

In a previous post I mentioned my dad’s hazardous antics making medallions out of melted lead. There was the answer, we would mould half-crowns out of lead. Alan came round with some bits of old lead pipe one afternoon when there was no one else in the house. We melted them in an empty beans tin on the gas cooker, and carefully holding it with a pair of pliers, tipped the molten lead into a half-crown sized mould made out of aluminium foil. When it cooled we found we had manufactured a silvery metal blob of no particularly identifiable shape.

Alan next came round with some pliable clay – he seemed to be able to source all kinds of unusual materials – and we made another mould. This time on first sight things seemed to have gone have very well. We had a perfectly round half-crown sized lead disc, perhaps a little too thick but not excessively so. With a bit of filing to smooth off the rough bits off we were ready to try it in a machine. Late that night at the same machine as before, we popped the coin in the slot and, well, it didn’t stick this time, it went straight through and dropped into the reject tray. It must have been too heavy.

There isn’t really a satisfactory end to this tale. We talked about drilling holes in the disc to make it lighter, but I don’t think we ever did. The end of the school holidays intervened and we lost interest. Our careers as master criminals had to be put on hold while we studied for our ‘O’ levels. Top gangsters like Ronnie Biggs and the Kray twins would probably have taken the view that we were too conformist and without sufficient nastiness or dedication to join their ranks. I can, however, confidently attribute my less than impressive ‘O’ level performance to lead poisoning.

The image of the cigarette vending machine is © Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.The Belgian coin and English sixpence are public domain. The other image is my own.