I Went There On My Bike: Part 4
After my first taste of France, I went back to the UK to continue my studies - and to plan my next big adventure ...
Summer in Wymeswold
It was not only in France that 1959 was a good summer. It was also the best summer in England since 1947. For some years, I had had a holiday job working in a grocer’s shop in the village of Sileby, seven miles from my native village. I went there on my bike nearly every day. (On odd occasions, when the weather was bad, I got a bus to Loughborough and then a train to Sileby.) The shop was a big old-fashioned grocer’s shop. Coincidentally, the owner’s son, Ronnie Hill, had been in the same class as me at school, but this was more of an embarrassment than an advantage – I was his dad’s employee. The main shop was in Loughborough – the biggest and best grocers’ in the town. There were four other employees in the Sileby shop. The manager, Eric, who was married, but not averse to extra-marital relationships, Fred, Peter and Charlie, who were all single – and very different. Fred, like Eric, was middle-aged (which, I suppose, when you are 19, means ‘over thirty’!). He ‘fancied’ one of the customers. Peter was about 25 and also fancied one of the customers. Peter, like me, was a good table-tennis player and we found somewhere to play sometimes. Fred, Peter and I often played dominoes at lunch time. Charlie was homosexual, though at that time, talking about that was taboo. He frequently asked me to go ‘up the apples’ with him to the storeroom, but I managed to avoid being there alone with him.
I enjoyed working in the grocer’s shop. In the course of the years, I did all the jobs in the shop, apart from boning bacon. One of my first jobs was to skin a Cheddar cheese. This was a horrible job. The cheese was big, heavy, greasy and smelly. It was hard work for a small sixteen-year-old. My main job was making up orders. Customers phoned in their orders to Eric or Fred. We put the goods into cardboard boxes and Charlie delivered them. Quite a lot of food still came in bulk – lard, cheese, biscuits – and we had to weigh them and put them in paper bags or grease-proof paper – hardly any plastic in those days! We were allowed to eat the broken biscuits, which meant that sometimes more biscuits were broken than should have been. I knew the price of everything in the shop. Apart from butter and eggs, the prices didn’t change very much from year to year. I can still remember that a tall tin of Heinz baked beans was 1/4d, while a small one was 8d. A bottle of whisky was an enormous 37 shillings – over a third of a working man’s weekly wage! They paid me £5 a week for four full days and two half days.
I also served in the shop and was quite good at working the cheese cutter and ham slicer. Towards the end of my career in the shop, I was briefly allowed to use the bacon slicer. That indulgence came to a bitter end, after I cut my finger. A week later one of the customers came back to the shop with my blood-stained bandage, which she had found in her bacon!
In that summer of 1959, my parents had been married for 23 years. They had never spent a night in a hotel together. They decided to go on a week’s coach holiday to North Wales. (My father had never been ‘abroad’ before.) They had a wonderful time and glorious weather. (They repeated the experience the following two years – to the Isle of Wight and Great Yarmouth with diminishing returns.) At this time my 79-year old grandmother had had a house built just down the road from my parents. She was charged with looking after me, while my parents were away. As, by this time, I had developed a taste for Indian food, she decided to make me a curry – a complete novelty for her. I think she was quite excited about doing this and she spent all day preparing the meal. But she was deflated afterwards: she told my mother “He gobbled it up in three minutes!”
Back to Manchester
Having passed the preliminary examination in June, I returned to Manchester in October 1959 to embark on a two-year course leading up to finals at the end of the third-year. This would be interrupted by a compulsory term in a French University and a voluntary year working in a French school. Nevertheless, the work that we did (or didn’t do) in October 1959 would be examined in June 1962. I will return to the main coursework later in the run-up to finals.
There was one two-term course with an examination at the end of it, which counted towards the final degree. This was a French history course, focused on the eighteenth century. We had a good lecturer, Dr Hampson, and we learned about the works of Montesquieu and tried to understand the French Revolution. In spite of my best endeavours, I did not do terribly well in the examination, scoring a Lower Second Class.
We also had a twelve-week course of lectures from a visiting professor, Professor Wagner, on phrases hypothétiques. Twelve hours on ‘if’ clauses! He was a good lecturer. As a consequence, I know much more than most French people about the construction of ‘if’ clauses and rarely make a mistake!
I stayed in the same digs in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, along with Brian. All the others changed. Most of the newcomers were studying Chemical Engineering at the Faculty of Technology. They were a boisterous crowd. One evening when we came back to the digs “someone” had hung a red light stolen from some road works outside the front door of 20 Salisbury Road. Mrs Higgins was furious and gave us all notice to leave. The others all left, but eventually Brian and I were allowed to stay as we had been “led astray”.
Brian hardly ever went out other than to go to the University for his lectures. He was, however, a member of the Mathematics Society. At Christmas in the first year, he decided, uncharacteristically, to go to their Christmas Party. As he was very “tight” with his money, he decided to go on his bike, as he did every other time he went to the University buildings. He had a smart newish “racing” bike with drop handlebars. The next day he was very crest-fallen: his beautiful bike had been stolen. By the following Christmas, he had acquired an old bike. He again decided to go to the Maths Christmas Party on his bike. That bike was stolen too!
Continued to Part 5: My Year Abroad
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