Open Writing

My father was an engineer, but was regularly in and out of work. He was a keen member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and in the late 1920s and early 30s he was often on strike, which caused heated arguments between him and my mother.

He was no lazy man, and if unemployed would work at anything. Once he went round with a small suitcase selling clothing. Another time he found work at Standard Fireworks. Then he was chopping firewood at the workhouse. He even got a job as a lamplighter. The street lights were all gas. He had a long pole with a latch at the top worked from a catch at the bottom. He opened one of the panels then turned on the gas, made a spark and the lamp lit. He went round the local area doing this as it started to get dark. He kept his lamplighting pole behind the front door. Then in the morning he turned all the lights out. Near the top of each lamp-post was an arm and he went with a ladder, leaned it against the arm and cleaned the glass panels of the lamp.

Fortunately the engineering situation gradually improved and eventually he was again in regular employment.

When we were at school, my mother used to go out cleaning two mornings a week for some of the wealthy people who lived in big houses not far away. Of the families for whom she cleaned, one owned an engineering company and another a bakery. Both made my parents an offer of a job for me when I left school. There was no doubt in my father's mind where I would work. Because of his own experience the verdict was 'You're not going into engineering - people will always have to eat, so it's the bakehouse.' I had no choice in the matter.

So, at fourteen I started work, not at first in the bakehouse, but as a van boy delivering bread with a basket on my arm from one of the vans, in and around Huddersfield, for a wage of ten shillings (fifty pence) a week. I liked to be out with the van but wasn't too keen on the bakery, where I was destined to work after about a year. In the winter I had Monday afternoons off to go to the Technical College and then went to
classes again in the same evening.

The afternoon classes were practical ones where we made scones, cakes and buns etc. which we could bring home afterwards. The classes in the evening were on theory, about wheat germ, for instance, or the strengths of different flours, and I used to be bored to tears with them. The teacher was a quiet inoffensive man, most appropriately named George Baker, and he spoke in a low monotonous voice. One evening I fell asleep at my desk and awoke to find, to my embarrassment, his face about a foot away from mine, and he asked, 'Are you enjoying your little nap?' I eventually graduated from the theory classes to ones where we were taught to ice and deco¬rate cakes, which were much more interesting.

After a year as a van boy I went into the bakehouse. Our hours there were 6.30 a.m. to about 5.15 p.m. for five days a week and then Saturday mornings, 5 a.m. till around 10.30 a.m. We had one week's holiday a year (with no pay), when we went to Blackpool. The only time I ever heard my father sing was during the few days before we left for Blackpool. Train from Huddersfield to Manchester, change there with an excited father shepherding us from one platform to another. It was a wonderful adventure - then it was back to work. However there was a local holiday in September, Saturday to Tuesday, so sometimes we could go to Blackpool again.

My father started work at 7.30 a.m., whereas I started at 6.30; so I was first out of bed in the morning. I got up at 5.45 a.m. and my first job was to rake out the ashes from last night's fire, and then light a fire to warm things up a little for my father. I made myself a cup of tea but we had breakfast at work about 8 a.m., the time depending on whether a batch of bread was ready to go into or be taken out of the oven, left by the night shift.

**

To read Jack's vivid account of his wartime experiences, To War With The Bays, please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/to_war_with_the_bays/