SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 26)

A few of my friends had taken up Tai Chi and I was very keen to try it. It did not always fit in with my variable shifts on the buses but I went whenever I could.
I found that it energised me so much if I practised in the evenings that I struggled to get to sleep. I decided to practice only in the early mornings and that meant doing it in my own back garden alone.

One particular friend, Katie, was a keen swimmer and we went endurance swimming together whenever we could. This would involve swimming at a steady pace for as many lengths as we could cram into one hour at the swimming pool every day. Keeping a regular fitness routine was essential because driving buses is the sort of work that does not encourage physical fitness.
In fact, back problems and beer guts were the effects that I witnessed on my fellow drivers. We would occasionally have an evening out together and pub crawling seemed to be all they wanted to do.
It disgusted me to see drivers turning up for early shifts at 4.30am still absolutely paralytic from a night at the local pubs! Invariably those drivers would be the ones driving the kids school routes between eight and nine in the morning. This concerned me greatly and I expressed that concern during trade union meetings. Needless to say, I was shouted down.
'Men!' I thought, 'Never too impressed by the truth.'

My celibacy was hardly difficult to implement during this period of my life.
I was actually indifferent, if not distinctly hostile, to anything in trousers.
I was accused of being a lesbian once, but countered that with a very sharp response:
"No, I hate women too!"

It was true at that time. My experiences until then were so awful that I had no respect for anyone over the age of fifteen or under sixty-five. On the other hand, I loved the customers on my bus routes, especially the kids and the elderly, but I rejected all overtures from men, as if they were all horribly diseased or obscenely deformed.

Meanwhile, at home, I was collecting kids like they were on sale in a pet shop.
Firstly one of Dan's friends, Richard, a child I have mentioned before in this autobiography, had run away from a local Children's Home where he had found himself, after his mother had died in an alcoholic stupor. He found us easily and I provided him with somewhere to sleep and food in his belly. He provided me with whatever he could shoplift and unfortunately, he taught my son, Dan, his amazing abilities.

Then Dean, another friend of Dan's, was returning to the UK after having lived in Italy for a year or so. He needed a home too, so I had three teenagers living at my expense for quite some time. Dean had not wanted to stay in Italy because, if he had done so, he would have been eligible for conscription into the armed forces and that seemed like the worst possible future to him. Dean was extremely tall and skinny. No amount of food ever fattened him up, despite my every effort. Dan and I swapped bedrooms so that he and his two friends had the larger room with access to the loft room. They frequently had other teenagers visiting too. The atmosphere at our home was chaotic but joyful. I couldn’t give them much beyond basic sustenance but they were always very respectful and grateful. We never had a cross word.

Everything seemed fine at home until Dan and Richard were suddenly arrested and the Police gave me a full understanding of what was going on behind my back, while I was working such difficult shifts. Apparently, the boys were sneaking out in the early hours of the mornings and breaking into cars! Ninety six cars, the police said, solemnly. I was stunned. Richard was taken into custody immediately and presumably sadly returned to the Children's Home. Dan came home with me and faced the music.
"Why?" was all I could ask as soon as we were alone.
"You couldn't afford to keep us all Mum!" Dan stated in all honesty. "We broke into cars, stole whatever we could and sold it to a fence that Richard knew." he went on, "Then we would put maybe twenty quid into your purse when you weren't looking!" This explained the odd moments when I seemed to have more money than I should have in my purse. I had always assumed that I had miscalculated or failed to pay for something. It had never crossed my mind that teenagers would be adding money to the housekeeping rather than subtracting it! Worse still, the ‘fence’ was a guy I knew and frequently spoke to! Sneakiness was all around me, it seemed.

Dan faced a court case and was sentenced to a year of probation and a small fine which he paid himself. With the luck of the little devil that he was, within a couple of weeks he agreed to do some software repair work on the police computer and, as a result of fixing their problems, he was released from attending the rest of the probation!
A very charming and very senior police inspector visited us to ask Dan to consider joining the police force as soon as he was old enough, but Dan, looking a bit horrified, politely declined. The officer asked him, "How does a young man like yourself rebel against a mother like yours?" to which Dan, quick as a flash, responded, "By either joining the Army or becoming an advertising executive!" We all laughed.
My son certainly had the measure of me!

The only answer to the problem of supervising the boys was to give up my wonderful job of driving buses, if I possibly could. I had to find a nine-to-five job so that I would be eating, sleeping and awake at normal hours. I did not trust Dan to keep his word and his sticky fingers out of other people's property. These were considerable skills he had acquired and I knew exactly where he had learned them too. Dan worked on Saturdays with his Uncle Pete, the mechanic. Breaking into any make of car was a skill he had learned from Pete.
In that context it was a useful thing, given that lots of customers lost keys or locked them into their cars, but outside of the workplace, this skill would lead to a life of crime and I certainly did not want that!

I set about making enquiries about returning to secretarial work but the pay rates locally were still the lowest imaginable, there would be no way that I could pay the mortgage, keep the boys honest and survive. A good friend recommended that I got in touch with an agency called Top Job and try temporary office work in Colchester, which is a short train journey away from Clacton. The pay rates that were on offer there were more or less equal to my bus driving salary, so I decided to get myself sacked from the buses.

This was very easy to do. I had already had one official warning. I had driven my bus off route, during a really bad snow storm, to deliver an elderly passenger right to her front door.
I had then left my driving seat and I had helped her carry her shopping to the house.
Nothing would have come of this, if the dear old lady hadn't written in gratitude to the bus company to say that the "lovely bus driver with very long hair had been so wonderfully helpful".
The Union representative was mortified when I admitted that I had knowingly broken the rules and would be quite likely to do it again, given similar circumstances.
It was explained to me that the bus ceases to be insured if it is not on the bus route and that I should not have left the vehicle, complete with the day's takings for anyone to help themselves.

My next misdemeanour opportunity came late one night, during a particularly heavy storm. I was on the regular bus route out of Clacton to Walton on the Naze. Crossing the bleak and featureless marshes between Clacton and Frinton there were no bus-stops at all. There, in the beating rain, was a lone guy struggling to walk on the rough grassy verge. I stopped the bus, opened the door and shouted to him, "Hey, want a lift?" and he climbed on board creating an instant puddle.
"I don't have any money for the fare!" He stated apologetically and I smilingly replied, "Not to worry, I can't leave you out there in this!" I had committed two "naughties" in one! I was most satisfied. Stopping anywhere on a route, other than at a bus stop is against the rules and giving someone a free ride was likely to guarantee my dismissal.
The poor guy was intending to walk all the way to Walton on the Naze and it would have taken him a couple of hours at least. He was very grateful, but I could see a few of the passengers were not impressed with the fact that I had waived his fare. Naturally, someone reported me and I was summarily dismissed, neatly avoiding having to give a whole month of notice! Result!

My disappointed boss was completely confused that I was quite happy about my fate. I didn’t want to tell him that I had engineered this event deliberately. Bless him, he was such a lovely guy that he gave me a glowing reference, highlighting my empathetic ‘people skills’ and his reluctance to ‘let me go’.

Within a day, I was working for Top Job and they certainly gave me some very strange assignments. The first was as a secretary to a small team of mental health professionals and this involved typing reports about clients, letters to GPs and lots of chasing files. All very interesting but I was struck by the extremely judgemental attitude that these people employed in their language about their clients.

The report that Top Job received about my work was faultless apparently and so I was asked to help with a micro-fiching assignment at a local residential Mental Health Hospital which was closing down. Again, the work was very interesting but also revealed some hard to swallow realities that had hitherto escaped my attention.
I was organising files that went back to the turn of the 20th century, written by illegible hand a lot of the time. I became familiar with terms such as "imbecile", "immoral" and "deranged" applied to single mothers who had been unfortunate enough to get pregnant even up until the 1930s. This alone had apparently been enough to incarcerate these girls for life, their babies were instantly adopted away from them and they were treated with some of the worst so-called medical procedures I had ever heard of. If they were sane when they went in, I doubt that they remained that way for long.
There were times when, upon reading a file, I was unable to see for the tears I was shedding. There were men who had broken down during long hard shifts of work and been deemed mentally unstable. There were children who had been disruptive in class and thrown into the hospital, described as "unruly" or "depraved".

Poor people, in general, before the NHS started in 1948, were treated as if they were some sort of lesser species and, although the work was boring and repetitive, I learned a great deal about the history of British medicine in respect of the mentally ill. It was such an ugly picture and so terribly unjust that I was reinforcing my very negative opinion about the British upper classes on a daily basis.
Innocent people had been sterilised because they were considered "morally deficient" by these class obsessed so-called Doctors and Psychiatrists.
It made my blood run cold.

When that assignment came to an end, I was placed into a packaging company that had it's offices very close to Colchester train station. This suited me very well, cutting my travelling time down quite a bit. The company was collating parts for, and factory assembling, the game Trivial Pursuit which was very new on the market at that time.
My first job there was as a lowly invoice clerk, but within a few weeks I had impressed the bosses by spotting and querying errors in French and Spanish invoices.
We were, at this time, producing Genus One of the game in several languages and so, by proof reading the new print samples, I became a valuable asset to the company.
I was soon offered a full-time job with a great salary as the Managing Director's PA with additional responsibilities to the purchasing team.
I was absolutely thrilled. My agent at Top Job was disappointed that I had been snapped up so quickly, but told me to give her a call if it all went pear-shaped in the future.

When my UK Tax P45 document arrived from Top Job, the accounts staff at my new company found that I had been paying far too much tax for several months and my first pay packet with that company included a huge tax rebate!
When I got home that night I asked Dan, "What will it be, a holiday abroad or do we decorate the house?" and he did not hesitate for a second. "Holiday!" he decided.

We checked out the local travel agent and brought home a bundle of brochures to muse through. We agreed that the Greek island of Corfu was within our price range during the coming October and would be suitably hot. That holiday wasn’t Dan's first trip abroad, he had been to France with his Scottish school, but it was his first time flying. He was very excited. He had a superbly fashionable haircut done and we bought ourselves a few beach wear essentials.

When we arrived in Corfu the heat hit us like a wall. We were shocked and sweaty by the time we were transported to our beach side hotel. It was great to share a holiday with someone who was not going to embarrass me by getting drunk and disorderly. Dan was fifteen and a half at the time and all he wanted to do was hire motorbikes so that we could explore the island, rather than hang around the hotel.

We presented ourselves at the local motorbike rental lock-up, the owner asked us for our passports and took down all the details. He said that Dan was 16, wasn't he? He winked at me when he said it. So kind! I think that we were his only customers that day, it being out of season so he was happy to break the rules a little.
He asked Dan which motorbike took his fancy and Dan wandered slowly all through the dark lock-up, finally coming to rest, right at the very back, saying "This one!" He had picked a Japanese Kawasaki, drop handle bar, 50cc machine shaped similarly to the one Steve McQueen rides in the film The Great Escape.

The old Greek chuckled and said, "Ride it and let me see how you go!" Of course, with friends like the local Hells Angels, we were very familiar with motorbikes and Dan had already mastered the art, thanks to the patience and tolerance of The Filthy Few.
Dan pulled the bike out into the light and leapt on board.
He fired it up and shot off, did a skidded turn in the gravel road and roared back to us.
"Ah!" said the salesman to me, above the throaty engine noise, "You didn't tell me he was an expert!"
'Well!' I was thinking, 'How could I? I didn't know!' but I smiled sweetly as if I was being demure, while I shot Dan a look which conveyed, "I will be asking you about this later!"

The Greek man selected a nice simple comfortable machine for me and, taking our money, he disappeared into his house, leaving Dan to teach me how to ride the thing.
Teach me? Did I say?
Well, not exactly.
He gave me a run down of all the controls at the fastest pace he could manage, immediately jumped back onto his Steve McQueen ride and vanished in a cloud of dust! I had no choice but to settle onto this strange piece of kit and get on with it or he would have been halfway across the island and out of sight if I had hesitated for a minute longer.

Within half an hour I had the measure of the thing and it was definitely the very best way to see Corfu. The heat was not so suffocating while we were whizzing along and there were hardly any proper tarmac roads on Corfu at that time. We bought a map, which proved to be very inaccurate, but at least it gave us some idea of where we were.

We found some of the tightest hairpin bends I have ever seen and some of the steepest rough finished inclines as we headed inland. We stopped to look at the derelict remains of a house which still had its front door intact, but when we opened it we found a sheer drop beyond. The rest of the house was hundreds of feet below crumbling away in the valley. We found it strange that they had left the front wall like that, but Corfu was full of similar oddities.

We stopped for lunch at a tiny village where a makeshift patio on the front of a house advertised "Coca Cola". The people there treated us like superstars and the food was simply delicious. While we were consuming an array of completely unknown Greek recipes, a few German tourists got out of a hired car and came to the patio to occupy another table.
At first the proprietor completely ignored them, which we found rather odd.
He had been all over us like a rash when we arrived, asking if he spoke English.
Eventually, and rather sulkily, he asked them for their order and fetched them some beers, which he delivered by hand and not on the ornamental lace covered tray that he had used to serve us.
We were so busy munching that we barely noticed that the Germans drank up, paid and left very quickly. The proprietor sighed with relief and explained that nobody on Corfu liked Germans. Nosey Parker me was quick to ask, "Oh, why is that?" and immediately regretted it. The proprietor explained that many of the islanders had been shot by the Germans during WW2. He described starvation and curfews. He painted a very dark and dire picture for Dan and I. Then he described the day that the British soldiers had arrived. The penny was dropping. We were treated with this same respect everywhere we went on Corfu, in October of 1987.
Except for one brief unusual encounter.

We had taken up the habit of packing a lunch from the breakfast bar at the hotel.
Rolls, ham, salami and cheeses. Fruit and greek yoghurt. We were riding through an expansive olive grove as the sun became too relentless to go on. We parked under an ancient olive tree and spread out our food in the shade.
We were just beginning to eat when a young man of about twenty five years appeared from among the trees and asked to share our food. We agreed and he sat with us on our blanket. He spoke English with a strange accent that I could not place so I asked him where he was from.
"Palestine." he said and looked at me to see how that would register with me. I gulped and stared at him. He was wiry of build and had nervous darting eyes, as if he was expecting to be jumped upon at any moment.
My knowledge of Palestine was horribly limited by the British press, who focused entirely on the operations of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and favoured the establishment of Israel.
His story had Dan and I fascinated. He had been driven from his home village and away from his family. He had walked into Lebanon and from there he had stowed away on a boat to Greece. He was working in the olive groves and living rough. I could see that from the state of his clothes and shoes. He said he had no papers nor identification and therefore could only do cash in hand work. Leaving him to wander back among the trees gave me a terrible sensation of being lucky to have been born British. I had never really appreciated it before that day.

We remounted our bikes and soon arrived at a very Italian influenced resort on the other side of the island. We treated ourselves to some real Italian ice cream and settled on the beach to eat it. While we were sitting there a young couple caught our attention. She was a gorgeous, perfect young woman of about twenty years of age and he was a little older, also very fit looking. They were both very tanned and beautifully dressed in posh swimwear with lots of gold jewellery.
The guy was trying to pose on a surf board in about six inches of water but he repeatedly lost his balance and insisted that she wait to photograph him.
She started to giggle.
We started to giggle and, before long, the entire beach was watching this poser attempting to look really cool, but failing miserably. He became typically Italian in his frustration and punched the water as he landed flat on his face for the fifth or sixth time. He raged at his girlfriend and glared at us. We were crying, hugging our sides and spitting ice cream everywhere.
I will never forget that moment.
It was just the most priceless, pure comedy.

One night, we booked to attend a belly dancing event that was held at a special nightclub inland. We joined other holidaymakers in a specially arranged coach and arrived at the venue to find lots of wine already laid out on the tables. We were sat in the very front row and, when the performances began, Dan was astounded not only by the beauty of the girls but by their very provocative dancing. One of them came right up to him and he went the most intense crimson I had ever seen as she wriggled about under his nose. She smelled gorgeous and she winked at me as she gave poor Dan the benefit of her undulations. He was so embarrassed, poor love, I had to laugh.

That night on the way back to the hotel, I disgraced myself by yanking the speaker out of the ceiling of the coach because I did not like the music that was being played.
It was that awful song "Band of Gold" which reminded me of my 12 year long, waste-of-time marriage to Dan's father.

One of our holiday day trips involved taking a ride to Antipaxos, on an island hopper boat from which Dan dived off the side to reach the shore. I called to him to ask how the water was and he didn't answer me. He just started swimming for the shore. I dived in after him and nearly died of shock. The water was so extremely icy that it took my breath away and I struck out after Dan as fast as I could go!
When we finally got onto the beach I asked Dan, "Why didn't you tell me it was freezing?" He was very breathless and simply shook his head with his hands on his knees heaving for his next breath. "I couldn't speak!" he finally spluttered out and we both fell about laughing!
We explored the tiny island and loved the colours. Everything was azure blue, darkest green and purest white and there were flowers of every colour everywhere. There were a few small tourist shops and several old houses, all painted perfectly white. It was a heavenly little island.

On the return journey we passed quite close to the Albanian coastline and were shocked to see military men with guns patrolling between gun turrets on the beach. No holiday makers to be seen anywhere, just an atmosphere of dread and threat.
We asked what was going on there and the Captain explained that Albania was not the most welcoming country in the world.
Again, I had no idea of the history or the troubles being experienced there at the time and regretted that I had been so caught up with my own affairs that I had not been paying enough attention to current affairs.

During a party night at the hotel, towards the end of our holiday, I was asked to marry an elderly gentleman who seemed to be at least ninety, if he was a day! I declined very politely and his son tried everything to persuade me that his father was completely sincere and a very wealthy landowner on the island.
Dan and I drank far too much Ouzo that night and returned to our room in a very sorry state. Dan got up during the night and walked into the patio doors at full speed, thinking he was intending to head for the bathroom. I was too spaced out to be of any help. All I could do was fall out of bed laughing!

When we arrived back in the UK we took the underground tube to Liverpool Street and from there we returned to Clacton on the train, shivering and looking like a pair of glum faced brown berries. The many shades of grey that was Essex in the early stages of winter was a very sobering sight.

I had never thought of England as colourless and dull until that day.