As I’ve mentioned, after National Service in the RAF, Uncle Dennis came to live at our place. He had been serving in Cyprus, and it had been going off royal out there, what with Johnny Turk and the Bubbles at each other’s throats.
Like all my uncles, I called him Unc, but being half the age of any of my older relatives, he was more like an older brother. He was a cheerful presence, but he wasn’t a soft touch by any means. Spends were earned: he used to give me a couple of bob a week if I polished his shoes.
As we were pushed for space, Uncle Den shared my room, where we slept Morecambe and Wise style. He brought with him a kitbag full of rare and desirable swag. I blagged a couple of choice pieces: a pair of steel-framed aviator sunglasses with Zeiss lenses in their own stainless-steel case; a pair of tropical-weight RAF-issue pyjamas, pale blue Egyptian cotton with darker blue piping around a lido collar, crying out for the addition of a silken night cravat; and a bayonet in a scabbard. What he was doing with a bayonet in the RAF, I don’t know.
But his greatest contribution to the household was the gift of music, by virtue of his beautiful pale blue and cream Dansette record player, auto-change even. Long-players and vinyl records were a new thing, and he had a bunch of them: Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Mel Tormé, Peggy Lee, Jo Stafford, and an EP by the Goons featuring the ‘Ying Tong Song’. He also brought his aforementioned paperback library.
Dennis had hoped to resume his previous employment at L. Gardner and Sons, a light engineering firm in nearby Patricroft, where he had operated some dangerous machinery, probably a lathe. However, since leaving the RAF, he had suffered several blackouts, and could no longer work in his former role. Nevertheless, Gardner’s took him back, and by virtue of night school and day release, he retrained as a draughtsman and became a white-collar worker.
The RAF, universally known since the war as the Brylcreem Boys, were regarded in the popular imagination to have a bit more cachet than the other armed forces. So Dennis was getting a lot of action in the dating world, which gave me a glimpse into the exciting life of the eligible young bachelor. One pretty girl after another would come knocking at the door: Barbara, slender, pallid, and quiet; Pearl, curvaceous and a keen cyclist; and then there was Margaret – all in search of the dashing Dennis Barnes in all his brilliantined pomp.
Speaking of hair products, take my advice. Don’t ever ingest them.
Uncle Dennis had a chest of drawers in which he kept shirts, colognes, gentlemen’s depilatory requisites, and what I thought was booze. One day I was rooting around like the professional nosey-parker I am, and came across a hip flask-sized bottle of Bay Rum. The label featured a galleon, so there was no reason to suspect that this wasn’t the well-known buccaneers’ beverage.
Glug, glug, glug. And, what the . . .? Huh . . .? Projectile nausea! Don’t make my mistake: Bay Rum is a hair tonic.
Upon his return, noticing the crustless pizza at my feet, Dennis quickly guessed the sequence of events. No sympathy. My predicament was greeted with the humour-free sarcastic laugh he saved for such occasions.
‘You bloody necked it, didn’t ya? Well, you’ll do me . . . it’s for your hair, you daft sod.’
The bayonet that had come my way via Dennis was a prize possession. It had been blunted – you couldn’t have cut a slice of bread with it – but it was a beautifully made piece of kit, which looked good and made a satisfying shlang! sound as it was unsheathed.
I was crazy about swords and fancied myself as quite the swashbuckler. It’s a good weapon for me. I present a narrow target and I’ve got quite a reach, what with my legs. Consequently, I feel that I have some claim to the title ‘the finest swordsman in all England’; if I’d taken up fencing, I think I could have been an Olympic gold-medal contender.
The acquisition of weaponry was very important for me and the other kids in our neighbourhood: dangerous times. I got a double-barrelled popgun one Christmas. It was a Tri-ang, a really solid number made out of steel with a wooden stock. Each barrel had a breech-loading piston that shot out corks attached to a string, so you wouldn’t have anybody’s eye out. What was the point of that? I wanted to actually hit something or someone, so I cut the string off. Then I thought, why stop at corks? Any missile could be discharged from the barrels by means of the spring-loaded pistons, at quite a velocity. Why not ball bearings? With just a pair of scissors I converted my gun into a weapon with which I could have actually taken someone’s eye out. It came into its own particularly in the run-up to Bonfire Night, when I could buy bangers; I put one down each barrel so the gun fired with a satisfying explosion. The trick was to shoot them out so they detonated in mid-air; a truly terrifying thing to witness. It looked like I was packing a real shotgun. ‘Fuck off! Bang! Fuck off! Bang!’ We were always getting up to no good with explosives. Tooled up. You had to be.
In the 1950s, there had been a breakdown in parental authority owing to the absence of dads during the Second World War, the mums struggling at home, and kids going feral. This was the generation that became Teddy Boys, as is evidenced in the preamble to The Blue Lamp, which featured Dirk Bogarde as a proto-Ted with a gun, and launched the TV career of Jack Warner as Constable George Dixon.
\At this time, there was a massive problem with un-decommissioned firearms. Demobbed soldiers had returned from the war with portable souvenirs, including Nazi daggers and Luger pistols swiped off dead Germans. The Luger, being a very attractive sidearm, quickly became a staple of any discerning criminal’s wardrobe. With a rise in armed robberies and growing concern about Luger-toting Teddy Boy gangs at large on the streets of Britain, an arms amnesty was put in place in 1960. One day when I was off somewhere else, some government official came round the houses collecting any outstanding weaponry, and my mum bottled it and handed over my treasured bayonet.
I went fucking mad. ‘You did what? You surrendered my sword to the authorities? Blimey, what did you do that for?’
‘I’m not having weapons in the house,’ she said.
My every attempt to expand my arsenal was thwarted by my parents. I had a mate at school called Kevin Dynes whose older brother Jim, the last Teddy Boy standing, was the owner of a pump-action Webley pistol, a beautiful silver thing modelled on the aforementioned Luger. It only fired slugs, so you couldn’t kill anyone with it unless you really made a point of it: if you shot them up the throat from two inches away, possibly; or maybe in the eye socket or the temple; or perhaps if you went for that soft bit near the submandibular glands.
Jim had recently acquired a Diana air rifle much like the one used by Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, so this rendered his pistol superfluous. I swapped all my American comics for it, but when my dad clocked it, he went crazy. ‘Bloody hell, you are not having a bloody gun! Give it back to him. Bloody hell.’
I told him that I couldn’t reverse the deal because I’d touched black, and as the ritual has it, ‘Touch black no back.’
Dad said he didn’t care, and Jim could keep my comics, but I wasn’t having the gun.
‘But, Dad, everybody’s got one!’ I protested feebly.
‘I don’t bloody care, it’s not the bloody Wild West.’ Mutter, mutter, mutter. ‘Bloody gun in the ’ouse!’
He wasn’t having any of it, so I returned the Webley unconditionally, but Jim, decent cove that he always was (deep down), gave me my comics back.