‘Gardenia Court’ Mam had written, 'off Smedley Road , off Queen’s Road’
Billy rode down Queen’s Road, checking off various landmarks: bus depot, Harrigan’s Dance Academy, Clifton Street, Smedley Road.
‘At last,’ he said aloud. ‘This is it.’
He pedalled down the road and there, at the end, he beheld what seemed like a whole city of tenement blocks: Hyacinth House, Hazlewood House, Hawthorn House.
What lovely-sounding names, he said to himself. What a pity they’re all slums.
He freewheeled down Hazelbottam Road and then he saw it - opposite a large shirt factory - a dirty, dilapidated building all on its own. GARDENIA COURT, the sign said. He turned left into the approach road and was attacked by a pack of snarling mongrel dogs, which barked furiously and determinedly at his back wheel.
He dismounted and walked a few yards along the pavement. There, sitting on a low wall, was a buxom girl in her early twenties, singing to herself.
‘Baa baa black sheep,’ she mumbled, saliva gathering on her lips.
‘Excuse me,’ said Billy. ‘Do you know where the Hopkins family live?’
‘Ockins,’ she babbled. ‘Ockins.’
‘Right,’ said Billy, getting the picture. Then, more kindly, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Annie,’ she sputtered.
He walked a little further into the cul-de-sac which ran by the side of the tenement block. He looked up at the filthy grey building with its mean, ugly verandas, which seemed to be used mainly for hanging and draping out the washing. Sitting at the bottom of one of the stairways were two shabbily dressed boys, about his own age, playing cards.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Can you tell me where I can find number forty?’
‘Oh, h’excuse me,’ replied one of them, mocking his accent. ‘Well, h’aren’t we posh, then? Whadda y’think we are - a bleeding information desk?’
‘Try the next hovel,’ said the other lad.
‘Hovel?’ said Billy. ‘What’s that?’
‘Are you bleeding daft or wha’?’ said the first one. ‘Hovel. The stairway. The entrance.’
‘Right, ta,’ Billy said.
He hoisted the bike on to his shoulder and entered the stairwell. ‘Hovel’ was indeed the right word. The first thing that hit him on the ground floor was the vile stench of stale urine and pickled herrings. On the first floor his nostrils were assailed by a second, more powerful smell - that of sour cabbage mixed with onions cooking. The third floor was worse, with its stink of rancid cheese and human excrement.
‘Shut your bleeding mouth, yer stupid cow!’ roared a gruff male voice from number 38.
‘Don’t you bleeding well talk to me like that or you’ll
get this bleeding frying pan on yer ’ead,’ screeched a female voice.
Finally, he reached number 40 on the top floor. He gave a rat-a-tat-tat with the brightly polished knocker.
Mam came to the door and gazed at him uncom- prehendingly.
‘Yes?’ she said. Then she recognised him.
‘It’s our Billy. What in the name of God are you doing here? You should be in Blackpool.’
‘Well, I’m here now,’ he said. ‘I’ll just bring my bike in and I’ll tell you all about it.’
Once inside, and after a breakfast of bacon and dried- egg omelette, Billy said:
‘Many of the boys are coming back from Blackpool now that you’re not getting as many air raids. Not since Hitler’s been kept busy in Russia. We can’t see the point in being evacuated any more.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘But it’s a bit sudden, like, isn’t it? I mean, why didn’t you write and tell us you was coming?’
‘I couldn’t,’ he said, continuing the lie. ‘Me and me pals decided to come back to start the new term in Manchester. Half of Damian College is still here, remember. You’ll have to get Steve Keenan to write a letter to the school explaining how I’m needed at home.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, I just hope you and your pals know what you’re doing.’
‘What about this terrible place we’ve come to, Mam? It’s worse than the dwellings in Collyhurst. The Priestleys got themselves a nice house in Wythenshawe.’
‘I know, they was lucky. We didn’t have no choice after being bombed out. We was just told to take it or leave it. So we had to take it. It’s a bit small, I know, but we do have a little bathroom and we’ve got hot water for the first time in our lives.’
‘But what a rotten district! And who was that funny girl I met coming in?’
‘Oh, that would be Annie. She’s bit simple, like, but harmless enough.’
‘Then there were those lads playing cards in the next hovel. They looked a right pair.’
‘That’ll be Mick Scully and Vinny Buckley. You’d better keep well away from them two or you’ll have your father after you.’
‘Why, what’s wrong with ’em?’
‘They’ve both been away in Borstal for the last three years - that’s what’s wrong with ’em. They’ve only just come back.’
‘Planning their next job, I suppose. WTiat about that couple underneath us? He’s bawling his head off and she’s screeching like a lunatic. Her voice is worse than Auntie Cissie’s.’
‘That’s Mr and Mrs Pitts, and she is a lunatic. They’re alius at it - fighting like cat and dog all the time. She’s either screeching at him or the kids or both. It’s worst on Friday nights when he’s had a drop too many. But not all the neighbours are as bad as that, thank God. On the bottom floor there’s a very nice family - the Weinbergs.’
‘That explains the smell of pickled herrings I got a whiff of as I came up. But you know, Mam, we’re back where we started in Collyhurst. And there at least we had a view of the Cut and the railway. Here, from that veranda, we’re just looking at another block of flats.’
‘There’s alius the view at the back.’
‘Oh, aye, a great view of the Smedley Shirt Factory.’
‘Well, our Billy, we’ll just have to grin and bear it, won’t we?’
‘We’ll bear it, but it doesn’t mean we have to grin about it as well.’
Billy Hopkins
★ ★ ★
After a year of bearing it, the family became resigned to their lot and to their wretched existence in the squalid tenement block. How they looked back wistfully to those wonderful days in Honeypot Street before the war when, despite the lack of bathroom and hot water, they had had space and privacy.
‘Life is like a game of snakes and ladders, Mam,’ said Billy. ‘Just as you think you’re getting somewhere, down a snake you go.’
‘But then there are always ladders just around the corner,’ she said.
‘That’s not what I’ve found up to now. You go down one snake only to find it leads to an even longer one.’
‘You are an old grumps.’
Misery makes strange bedfellows, and the occupants of the Gardenia Court block were a miscellaneous set of people ranging from the respectable to the criminal, the reasonable to the insane. The one thing they all had in common was their joylessness.
If anything, though, when it came to misery, the Weinbergs on the ground floor were in a class of their own, for not only were they poor, they were Jewish into the bargain. This combination made life intolerable for them. Successful Jews had long since moved on to the affluent northern suburbs of Manchester, such as Heaton Park or Prestwich. To make matters worse, the Weinbergs had three daughters they had to find husbands for. The girls were pretty enough, but in their straitened circumstances, how were they going to capture nice Jewish boys with well-paid jobs if they couldn’t offer a decent dowry? The whole family went about with permanently melancholy expressions and they rarely spoke to or even acknowledged the existence of anyone else on the block.
OUR KID
During that first year, Billy spent much of his time looking out from the veranda at the flats opposite and the people walking below.
One afternoon, he saw Vinny Buckley and Mick Scully sitting on a wall opposite the flats.
‘Hey, Billy,’ called Vinny Buckley. ‘Come down here. We wanna talk to you.’
Having nothing better to do, and being a little curious, Billy went down and joined them.
‘There’s bugger-all to do round ’ere,’ said Mick Scully. ‘If you get bored just looking out from your veranda, why don’t you come out on a job with us? We’ll show you how to have a good time round ’ere.’
‘Yeah, it’s dead belting,’ said Vinny Buckley. ‘Anything for a bit of excitement.’
‘Better not,’ said Billy. ‘I don’t want no trouble with the coppers.’
‘Neither do we,’ said Mick Scully. ‘We just make sure we don’t get caught.’
Billy’s dad was going past on his way back from work.
‘Billy,’ he shouted, waiting at the foot of the stairway, ‘come over here quick.’
Billy did as he was told.
‘Get upstairs,’ Dad said. ‘And don’t let me see you talking to them two again, d’you hear? They’re both up to no good and they’ll drag you down with ’em if they can. You think on what I’ve said.’
But Billy was thoroughly dejected at the cramped conditions they had to put up with and the dismal district which surrounded them and hemmed them in. Nobody seemed happy. Nobody smiled. To while away the time, he took to spitting out the stones of the beautiful, plump plums his father had so abundantly supplied, to hit marked objects on the pavement three floors below. Like
the game of‘Bombers over Berlin’ on the Cleveleys beach, he pretended to be on a raiding mission with the RAF over a German city:
‘Left a little, skipper. Now a little more. Steady-y-y. Bombs gone!’
Then he spat with deadly accuracy.
When feeling particularly fed up, he generously tried to share his despondency with the neighbours below by hitting the tops of their heads with the odd plum stone, and then withdrawing his own head inside quickly so that they were never sure where it had come from. On one occasion, when the Weinberg sisters were looking especially glum and down in the dumps, he tried to cheer them up by unselfishly releasing a large, succulent Victoria, which landed plumb on target. The bombing diversion had to stop, though, when Mrs Weinberg complained to his mam.
‘I’m not kidding, our Billy, you must be going off your chump dropping plums on the poor people underneath. It’s time you grew up.’
‘It was only a bit of fun.’
‘And talking of growing up, it’s time you got out of them short trousers and into long pants. You’re beginning to look like a big scoutmaster. And another thing - I think I can see a few hairs on your chin. It’s time you tried having a shave.’
‘Me? Shave?’
‘Yes, you! Ask your dad tonight if you can borrow his razor.’
‘What! You shave!’ Dad exclaimed that evening. ‘I didn’t think you were that grown-up. But aye, you can borrow me razor. D’you know what to do?’
‘I think so, Dad. You work up a lather with your brush and your shaving stick and then you scrape it off with that Gillette thing.’
OUR KID
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘A good lather is half the shave. Should come off easy. That there fuzz on your face is only bum-fluff.’
Billy went into the bathroom and carried out the whole operation meticulously. He manufactured a great mountain of soapy lather, which he then worked into his face with his dad’s shaving brush. He scraped off the foam very carefully and dried his face. The fuzz was still there! He repeated the whole operation, applying even more soap the second time. Again he scraped. No joy! He went out of the bathroom.
‘Dad, this razor of yours doesn’t work. Look, the fuzz is still there.’
‘That’s funny,’ Dad said, examining the razor. ‘Wait a minute, though, you little daft bugger. You’ve forgotten to put a blade in the holder.’
Early in 1942, Les was called up into the army.
‘Everyone seems to be in uniform except me,’ said Billy to his mam one day.
‘If this war goes on, you’ll be called up as well - just like our Les. Anyroad, what do you want to be in uniform for?’
‘I want to do my bit for the war effort.’
‘I think it’s the girls you’re thinking of. I suppose you think you’ll have ’em all running after you.’
As usual. Mam was right. The following week Billy joined the Air Training Corps and was given a uniform.
Feeling somewhat self-conscious in his blue tunic, he set off one evening. On his way he passed Buckley and Scully at the foot of the stairway.
‘Don’t forget what we told you, Billy. Any time you want to join us, just let us know. We’ll show you the ropes. You’ll find it a bit more exciting than playing at soldiers or whatever you do at that ATC rubbish.’
‘Better not,’ answered Billy, hurrying off. ‘I’ve got to get to the Training Corps parade.’
A couple of weeks after donning his uniform, he got a girlfriend by the name of Phyllis Hood. She was an extremely tall girl with a figure like a broomstick, but she had the most beautiful, doll-like face. For hour after hour he stood with her at the bottom of her hovel, talking, romancing and serenading her, though in order to reach her lips for a kiss, he had to stand on a higher step. The affair came to an end after a month when she found another boy who didn’t have to stand on the step.
Apart from the uniform, Billy enjoyed his time in the ATC. How proud he felt when their commanding officer called out, ‘Squa-a-a-dron. . . ’Shun!’ It was almost like the real thing. Training involved parades, march-pasts, visits to airfields and, on one memorable occasion, a flight over Cheshire in an Avro Anson. There were also aeronautical studies - Morse code, radio technology and, most important, navigation. It was in this last subject that Billy acquired a deep interest and a fairly high level of competence. He learned to calculate precise latitude and longitude on a map, magnetic north, angles of deviation, wind speeds, and how to plot a flight path.
‘I hope this war lasts long enough for me to get into it,’ he said. ‘I’d like to be a navigator in a bomber.’
‘Well, I hope it doesn’t,’ Mam said. ‘Anyroad, you’ve done enough bombing with them Victoria plums on the Weinberg girls.’
Not long after Billy had joined the ATC, Jim was given his honourable discharge from the navy. At first he was cheerful and happy at the idea of being back in Civvy Street, but as the weeks went by, he became more and more restless.
‘I miss the navy and the sea,’ he said one day. ‘If ever
OUR KID
you get the chance, Billy, when the war’s over, you should join the navy. You’d love it.’
‘I want to be a navigator in the RAF. It’s always struck me as a miracle the way our bombers set off in the dark and arrive over their target - Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Berlin - right on time. I want to be the navigator who gets them there.’
‘Better to be a navigator aboard a ship. If you were really good and got all your qualifications, you could end up as captain of your own vessel. Imagine that!’
‘How would I get to be ship’s navigator then?’
‘You’d have to study very hard at a college of navigation to get your Board of Trade certificate. There’s a college at Southampton and one at Liverpool.’
‘You make it sound really great. Maybe after I’ve finished at Damian College, I could go to one of them.’
For the umpteenth time in his life, Billy knew what he wanted to do and what he wanted to be.
‘Right now,’ said Jim, ‘I miss the adventure and the excitement, but most of all I miss my ship-mates.’
‘Why not join the Merchant Navy, like you said some time ago?’
‘That’s exactly what I have done. I’ve signed on, but it’s not easy to get a berth.’
‘But I always thought the Merchant Navy was crying out for men.’
‘Yeah, but the best berths on the best ships are snapped up by the old hands who are well in with the masters. I can always get a place on a tanker, though.’
‘Why is that?’
‘See, it’s like this. In a convoy, the tankers are the most dangerous ships to be on, ’cos the U-boats pick ’em out for special treatment. If they get torpedoed when they’re fully loaded, they go up in flames like a Roman candle.’
‘Best to avoid them then.’
‘I’ll say. I’d have to be pretty desperate to sign on for one of those. Anyway, I’ve managed to get some work on a coal boat that’s sailing from Liverpool to Cardiff tomorrow. It’s a pretty dirty job but it’s better than just hanging around the house all day long.’
He was away for nearly a fortnight. When he returned, he was black with coal dust from head to foot.
‘Just look at the state of you,’ Mam said. ‘I’m not kidding, anyone’d think you’d been down the mines, never mind on a coal boat. Get all them clothes off, our Jim, and I’ll give ’em a good scrubbing. If you wasn’t so big. I’d give you one and all. You used to be so particular when you were in the Royal Navy. No wonder that Jean Priestley found another fella. Why did you go on a coal boat?’
‘Finding a ship isn’t easy,’ said Jim. ‘You have to take what you can get. As for Jean, I haven’t seen much of her since they moved to Wythenshawe. Might be as well - she was getting too serious for my liking.’
‘But she was such a nice girl.’
‘I’m not denying that. But the family’s very religious. One brother training to be a priest; a sister training to be a nun. And Jean was that holy, I felt as if I was going out with a saint.’
It was two days after Jim’s return that everyone started scratching. Under the arms, around the groin and, most especially, between the fingers.
‘I think this itching is gonna drive me up the wall,’ said Mam, scratching madly at her stomach.
‘It’s that bloody Jim that’s brought this into the house,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve got them bloody red spots all round the top of me legs, and when I’m at work in the market I can’t even reach down there for a scratch or all the other porters’ll think I’m bloody well playing with meself.’
OUR KID
‘It’s in between my fingers where I find it’s worst,’ said Billy. ‘You can even see the little mites in the tiny white lines where they’ve burrowed in.’
At the surgery, the doctor took one look between Billy’s fingers.
‘Scabies,’ he announced. ‘Your whole family, Mrs Hopkins, will have to go to the Infectious Diseases Hospital at Monsall to be treated.’
‘Even me husband?’ asked Mam anxiously.
‘I said the whole family,’ said the doctor. ‘Furthermore, all your bedding and clothes will have to be disinfected.’
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Mam said. ‘He’s not gonna like this.’
The treatment at the hospital involved first a very hot bath, after which a nurse, wearing rubber gloves and a rubber apron, covered them from head to foot with a foul-smelling sulphur ointment. Billy’s dad moaned all the way there and all the way back.
‘He’s picked up these bleeding bugs aboard that bleeding coal boat and passed them on to us. I tell you, Kate, I’m not gonna stand for it. He’ll have to go.’
‘Give the lad a chance, Tommy. It’s not his fault. It could’ve happened to anyone.’
That night, Jim came home with a shipmate at two o’clock in the morning after a night’s revelry in the town.
Billy was awakened by the sound of voices being raised.
‘What the bleeding hell d’you think you’re doing, cooking chips at two o’clock in the morning?’ he heard his dad yell.
‘I’ve just come back with an old shipmate and we were hungry - that’s all.’
‘Listen, Jim, I’ve just about had enough of you. You sit round the house all day making us all miserable, then you give us all bleeding scabies, and now you’re waking up
the whole bloody house, making chips. Don’t you know I’ve got to be up at four in the bleeding morning to go to work. It’s hardly worth me going back to bed.’
‘You’ve been at my bloody throat ever since I came back from the navy, turning your back on me and making those bloody hissing noises,’ Jim shouted back.
‘Listen, if you can’t keep decent hours like other people, you can bleeding well sling your hook.’
‘I’d better go,’ said Jim’s nautical friend. ‘I’m not bothered about any chips. Be seeing you, Champ.’
‘Wait,’ said Jim. ‘I’ll come with you. I’m not stopping in this dump.’
Jim went into the bedroom and switched on the light.
‘Sorry to disturb you, our kid, but I want to pack a few things and then I’m off.’
‘Don’t go, Jim,’ said Billy. ‘Stay. He’ll get over it. He always does.’
‘Nah, not this time,’ Jim replied. ‘Anyway, come on, give me one of your bear-hugs before I go.’
Billy held him in a strong clinch, at the same time patting his back.
‘I wish you’d stay. What am I gonna do when you’ve gone?’
‘You’ll be OK, and anyway, even if I did stay, it wouldn’t be for long. I’ve got myself a ship.’
‘That’s great news, Jim. What’s its name?’
‘Empire Light.'
‘What kind of ship?’
‘A tanker,’ he said. ‘I got fed up waiting.’
Billy’s heart froze.
‘For God’s sake look after yourself, Jim.’
‘The same goes for you, our kid. Be seeing you. Right, Judd.’ He turned to his pal. ‘Let’s go. Sorry to leave on this note, Dad. Hope you get to work on time. Ta-ra.’
OUR KID
Billy heard the front door pulled to and Jim was gone.
He never forgot that Tuesday when he came home from school. He turned the key in the lock., and the moment he entered the flat he sensed that something was wrong. There was usually somebody talking or the wireless was on, but today it was ominously quiet. He opened the living-room door and took in the scene.
Dad sat at the table, chin in hand, the picture of misery, and Billy could see that he had been crying. Before him there was a mug of cold tea - untouched. Mam sat bowed before the electric fire, weeping silently. Billy felt a tightening of his stomach and his throat, and his hair seemed to stand on end.
‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Please. Not that. Not Jim.’
‘We’ve had a telegram,’ Dad managed to say between sobs. ‘The Empire Light has been sunk. Jim’s missing.’
It was a Sunday afternoon in March when the Empire Light had been torpedoed. The captain wrote Mam and Dad a lovely letter explaining how the tanker had got it in mid-Atlantic on the way across to America. The sea had been rough and choppy and, as the ship had started to sink, most of the crew had got into the lifeboat which, for some reason or other, had broken away and was unable to get back to the ship. The captain and another officer had searched the ship for injured survivors but there were none. A destroyer had broken away from the convoy and had come as close to the ship as it dared, and the two officers had managed to jump on to its deck. RAF Coastal Command had scoured the sea for many hundreds of square miles but no trace of the lifeboat or any survivors had been seen.
‘It is with the deepest regret ,’ concluded the captain, ‘ that I have to tell you that your son, James, must he presumed to be lost'
A few days later they received another letter, this time from the King.
BUCKINGHAM PALACE The Queen and I offer you our heartfelt sympathy in your great sorrow. We pray that your country’s gratitude for a life so nobly given in its service may bring you some measure of consolation. GEORGE RI
‘I can’t believe he’s dead,’ said Mam. ‘I could accept it better if they’d found a body. But we’ll never know what really happened to him at the end.’
‘It’s best not to think about it, Kate,’ said Dad. ‘I only wish I’d never had that bloody row with him, all over such a daft thing as cooking chips late at night.’
‘Maybe he’s not dead,’ said Billy. ‘P’raps he’s landed on some desert island and he’s not been able to contact us.’
‘No,’ said Dad, his voice flat and final. ‘He’s dead all right. We may as well face up to it.’
Eyes overflowing, Mam began going through Jim’s things in the wardrobe.
‘Remember this green suit,Tommy?The one that drove us round the bend,’ she sobbed. ‘I only wish he were here now to wear it again.’
‘Stop punishing yourself, Kate,’ Dad said, very near to tears himself.
‘And here’s his boxing gloves and all his boxing things,’ she grieved. ‘You may as well have ’em now, Billy.’
‘I don’t want ’em, Mam. He might want ’em himself when he comes back.’
But in his heart of hearts, Billy knew Jim wasn’t coming back. Jim, his beloved brother, was at the bottom of the sea.
OUR KID
As he lay in bed that night, he wept silently and sorrowfully at the thought of Jim dying in an open boat somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. He had seen Noel Coward’s film, In Which We Serve , and he wished that he hadn’t, for only too graphically had it painted the picture of what could happen to men lost in an open boat at sea. Possibly a slow, agonising death from hunger, thirst and exposure. How long had it taken for them to die? How long had they waited to be rescued? How long had it been before they had lost all hope? He prayed that death had come to Jim and his mates with merciful swiftness.
Then his mood changed from sorrow to anger as he thought about the deaths in his lifetime and all that had happened since Chamberlain had made that fateful speech in 1939. Young Teddy Smith - drowned in the Cut. His pal, Henry - dead. His hero brother - dead. Their Honeypot Street home - gone. Steve and Pauline’s happiness - gone. The world was an evil place with people like Mrs Mossop, Kevin the airman and Brother Dorian in it.
What a rotten, rotten, rotten world we live in, he raged silently. Very well, God, if there is a God, if it’s part of your plan that I spend my life in this lousy, filthy hole here in Crumpsall, if I am to live in a slum with the mad and the criminal, I’m gonna start acting like ’em. Up to now, God, I’ve taken everything you’ve thrown at me with no complaints. But tomorrow I begin getting my own back. So watch out, God! Bugger the war! Bugger Hitler! Bugger Churchill! Bugger Damian College! Bugger the ATC! Bugger navigation colleges! Bugger the savage, heartless sea! Bugger everything and bugger everybody! Tomorrow morning, I’ll go and see Vinny Buckley and Mick Scully and see what they have in mind.