Lifting the Lid on a baby boomer´s memory box E-Book

Bob Perry

• Herausgeber: novum publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 359

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Journey back to the post-war Black Country with Bob Perry as he recalls his childhood in a changing world. Born into a typical estate, Bob's story mirrors that of countless Baby Boomers. From his close-knit community to the bustling town streets, Bob navigates a world rebuilding itself after war. Amid historic events, Bob's narrative intertwines his journey with the broader tapestry of his time, showcasing the events that shaped his generation. As the world evolves, Bob and his peers confront challenges within and beyond their community, navigating uncertainty with resilience. Through Bob Perry's memoir, readers revisit pivotal moments in history, where echoes of the past resonate on every page. This reflection depicts a generation shaped by change and enduring community ties.

Leseprobe

Imprint

All rights of distribution, also through movies, radio and television, photomechanical reproduction, sound carrier, electronic medium and reprinting in excerpts are reserved.

© 2024 novum publishing

ISBN print edition: 978-3-99146-799-1

ISBN e-book: 978-3-99146-800-4

Editor: Chris Beale

Cover image: Maksym Chub | Dreamstime.com

Cover design, layout & typesetting: novum publishing gmbh

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

Acknowledgement

To Steph, Jon, Alex, Caleb and Luca. You mean everything to me. Thanks Tim. I am grateful to enjoy your friendship and I am so glad that you were there to share my boyhood journey. I am also fortunate to have so many good friends. God bless you all.

In loving memory of Don Perry (1925–2007) and Doreen Perry (1931–2020).

An introduction

I love my children and grandchildren and together we share the same world. There is however a big difference between us. While they are natives of this world, I feel like a temporary resident. I am a little out of place, or more accurately, a little out of time. The transformational changes that are so evident in everyday life, like sophisticated technological advances and changing social norms, take some adjusting to. I find myself alternating between being delighted, baffled, or, on occasion, frustrated. Familiar things from my childhood remain but now seem different. For example, factories still operate, and shops are stocked ready for sale. The big change is that things seem to happen with so little human involvement. Goods continue to be produced, and business is still transacted, but now these processes are unfettered by the world’s different time zones and outdated concepts such as ‘normal working hours’. Despite these apparent 24/7 operations, it is sometimes difficult to speak directly to ‘real’ people. When making purchases over the internet, I have myself been asked to confirm that I am not a robot!

Of course, life has been made simpler in many ways by technology, and for those willing to participate, it offers platforms for shopping, banking, and communication. Live news feeds offer immediacy, making the way in which I once received news seem pedestrian. The downside is that live news produces simultaneous comments, some of which may be ill-judged, leading to cyber bullying and unfounded conspiracy theories. The technology itself disregards national borders while drawing together a digital community into a global village of trading and communication. This produces the mixed blessing of denting parochial and nationalistic perspectives of the past, but at the expense of eroding long-held values and local cultures. An exponential change in part driven by technology has taken place within this country in terms of values, attitudes, and expectations from when I was young.

I have inhabited a vastly different world from the present one. I was born into a simpler place and time, an era that pre-dated moon landings, personal computers, mobile phones, and the use of the internet. When I was born not every household owned a car, a telephone landline, or even a refrigerator. I lived in a world that went by in a less complicated, seemingly more innocent way. This was a world where news, business and conversations were slower, more measured but by comparison limited. Friends were fewer, certainly, when compared with the count on Facebook, but they required the commitment of personal interaction. Adults networked by chatting to those around them in a queue, on a bus or waiting in a doctor’s surgery. My early knowledge and views were shaped by listening to conversations in the street, over the dining table, at school, during Sunday school lessons and at the ‘Common’, a patch of greenery at the end of the road.

Growing up you get used to hearing the sage sayings of adults. One was ‘there’s no time like the present’, which was meant to stress the opportunity for taking immediate action. In retrospect, the phrase could have been taken literally, the fifties and sixties were unlike any other period of history. It was a time that now seems quirky, lacking sophistication and dated, yet seismic changes were going on while I went about day-to-day life. Like fellow ‘baby boomers1’, I lived through a unique slice of time. The world I knew as a child was markedly different from anything that had gone before.

1 A baby boomer is someone born between the end of the Second World War and the mid nineteen sixties.

This was a period of huge change and achievement, with much to celebrate. As a society we had harnessed the potential of electricity, acquired clean water, benefitted from penicillin and other medicines, and established the National Health Service (NHS). Rationing was finally being shaken off. The First World War, 1914–1918, was meant to be a war to end all wars. Such optimism was not well placed as another world war was being fought against the same enemy a little over twenty years later. Emerging from these conflicts on the winning side there was a new opportunity for lasting peace. To this end, a Western European alliance of nations, now known as the European Union (EU), offered potential for not only security but also trade2. Crime rates were down, housebuilding by both the public and private sectors was a reality, and successive governments were committed to a general policy of full employment. Despite high personal taxation, there was an undeniable truth in the words of a Prime Minister of the period that, as a nation, we had ‘never had it so good’3. A step change in technological advancement was taking place and consumerism was starting to take hold. For the right price new types of appliances for the home could make cooking, cleaning, and washing less of a chore. The cinema and theatre as sources of entertainment could, for a fee, be supplemented by ownership of a radio or television set. For those whose pockets were not deep enough, there was credit in the form of the hire purchase (HP) agreements. The ‘never, never’ promised jam today and the maxim of ‘never a lender or borrower be’ belonged to an earlier generation. For the first time ever there was widespread ownership of a revolutionary form of personal transport, the motor car.

2 Although Britain did not join the six founding countries until 1973 before voting to leave in 2016.

3 Harold Macmillan who was Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. 

Life however was not lived under permanent blue skies, there was something of a permanent, sinister shadow, some might say a very dark cloud. A ‘Cold War’ between two rival political ideologies, capitalism and communism, was raging. Far from being just a noisy disagreement, there was a deep mutual distrust and a real fear of the threat of mass nuclear destruction. As well as stockpiling weapons, the Cold War also spawned intriguing tales of spy networks and secret agents. A space race between the two sides got underway unofficially to confirm which ‘ism’ had superiority.

Aside from a fear that the nuclear button might be pressed there was much for the nation to wrestle with. Britain may have emerged from the Second World War victorious a decade earlier, but it was nearly bankrupt. The Americans were owed billions of pounds and were now calling in their debts. Any sort of economic progress was inevitably impeded by this burden, indeed, governments feared real hardship and secret plans to avoid starvation were considered necessary. The magnitude of our indebtedness meant that the country was by necessity politically tied to its transatlantic paymaster. Then there was the legacy of once being a colonial power. At its peak, one in four of the world’s population belonged to the British Empire. (A huge map on the wall of my classroom evidenced as much with great swathes of countries coloured pink.) Running an empire came at a cost both financial and moral. Now immigration from the Commonwealth was becoming a source of social tension in some parts of the country.

These are some of the headlines from the world of ‘then’. I lived through it all in a kindly subculture on a new suburban Black Country estate. Experiences of childhood, early relationships, family and how you are raised all help shape your moral code, what you believe and ultimately who you are. Societies are built on stories such as mine. Reflecting on these stories helps me make sense of my place in a world I once lived in and how today’s world has been shaped by the past. It was a Danish philosopher of a century earlier who observed that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards4.

4 Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).

Certain trivial items and customs have faded completely from use over the years. I can rememberSmithscrisps being sold as unsalted, but packets came with a small blue packet of salt inside. Then there were toys that were just plain dangerous, including lead soldiers,Meccanoconstruction kits with sharp metal edges and toy cannons that fired match sticks with far too much power. Children’s toothpaste was different.Gibbstoothpaste was sold in a round metal tin and had the texture of brittle boot polish, and significantly came in a choice of pink and lime green colours. The big autumn event for children was always November fifth, when the thwarting of the 1605 gunpowder plot to blow up parliament was celebrated. In addition to the sale of fireworks, bonfires were lit, and this tradition carries on normally in back gardens, rarely at organised events. We often went to a distant cousin’s home whose daughter Wendy celebrated her birthday on that day. No bonfire was complete without a scarecrow-type effigy of Guy Fawkes (one of the gunpowder plotters) being placed on the top of the bonfire pile. In the run up to the big night, children would lay their guys on the floor in prominent places such as street corners and outside pubs and ask passers by, ‘A penny for the guy?’. Coins and loose change could be exchanged for fireworks for the big night. This practice seems to have died out completely, being replaced by the American imports of trick-or-treat and Halloween celebrations. I could recount many more examples; I am just illustrating the fact that I lived in a world that is now fast disappearing.

This is my story of an unremarkable upbringing in Britain of the nineteen fifties and sixties. My reminiscences might be considered overly personal, nostalgic, or sentimental. They are, however genuine and echo everyone’s story who lived through this period of history. For those much younger it is an opportunity to open the lid on a time capsule or open a door into another world. This is my attempt to sketch a ghost before it disappears from the room5.

5 An expression I have borrowed from author Daniel Gray.

THE BACK STORY

Chapter One

No place like home

There is a place where a meandering Cherry Tree Avenue joins Maple Drive and Greenside Way. Almond Avenue and Lilac Avenue dissect the lazy loop of the road like tributaries to a mighty river. Road names such as these may conjure an image of a rural idyll, a quiet, green hamlet festooned with multiple varieties of trees. The reality is different. These roads form part of Yew Tree Estate, a community of some twelve thousand souls. Despite the naming policy, when it was first built the Estate was devoid of trees apart from a few on the common ground at the end of the road. Instead of tree-lined pavements, residents looked out on tar-encrusted telegraph poles and lampposts of concrete. This is where I was born and grew up.

Long ago there was a sliver of time where everything changed forever, a period when the physical and social landscape of the nation was indelibly redrawn. Sometime in the eighteenth century, a heady combination of imagination, innovation and inventions combined to herald in an era now known as the Industrial Revolution. The capital of entrepreneurs and the creative insight of inventors may have driven industrialisation, but it was powered by the exploitation of the potential of steam power, fossil fuel reserves and the labour of ordinary working people. Rural, agricultural life and homemade wares gave way to the efficiencies of dark factories. The revolution brought with it immense wealth for factory owners, mass-produced textiles and metal products, and crowded towns. Even today, eight out of ten people in England live in an urban environment. The Yew Tree Estate I once knew was neither country nor was it urban. It was in fact a purpose-built suburbia where the Black Country conurbations of Walsall and Sandwell touch.

Nothing could point to, highlight, underline, and double-underline Britain’s industrial heritage more than the Black Country6. The area was already long known for its metalworking industries and rich seams of coal and limestone. Advances in manufacturing technology, and the capability of new machinery offered the potential for exponential growth in these and other activities. The first commercially useful steam engine7was built in the area, but there was still a need for the country’s most landlocked region to get products to market. The answer lay in the development of an efficient canal network that offered unhindered transport of goods and materials. The breakthrough happened in 1769 when canal engineering genius James Brindley’s vision for linking Birmingham city centre with the coalfields of the Black Country was realised. Bypassing the frustratingly slow and expensive delivery by horses on unreliable roads, the canal offered the brass, iron, and tool makers of Birmingham access to cheap and efficiently delivered consignments. The price of coal plummeted, and the Black County had a shot in the arm with a direct link to a hungry market. The extent of the network joining Wolverhampton and the eastern part of the Black Country to Birmingham to the south eventually grew to 174 miles of navigable water8. By the nineteenth century, the Black Country had become known as the ‘workshop of the world’, with the region’s products being exported to every corner of the globe.

6 There is some dispute over the exact geographical coverage of the Black Country. I favour the interpretation that it is defined by the extent of the black coal field centred on the towns of Walsall, West Bromwich, Dudley, and the City of Wolverhampton.

7 More properly, Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engine was built in the Black Country in 1712.

8 Comparison is frequently drawn to Venice which has a modest twenty-six miles of canal. A more meaningful comparison would be the entire Norfolk broads which has 120 miles of navigable waterways.

At its height, the sheer scale and intensity of industrial activity in this area was captured in a famous description of the landscape being ‘black by day and red by night’9. It was not just mass production, there was a rich diversity of products, and certain towns became associated with world-class excellence in certain items. Brierley, for instance, boasted fine-cut glass crystal while Walsall had a thriving leather trade that included luxury items; it was also where the world’s first readymade riding saddle was produced10.

9 These colours have more recently been incorporated into the Black Country logo.

10 Thomas Newton produced the world’s first readymade riding saddle in Walsall in the 1830s.

It is tempting to romanticise the period as a golden age where the country prospered, and solid working-class people were able to earn an honest living. The reality was that, for the majority, times were hard and life was a grind. Indentured workers were, in some cases, little better than slave labour. There was a poor standard of housing and dangerous working conditions, where hours were long, and men, women and even children were mercilessly exploited. In addition, a toxic combination of coal mines, iron foundries, glass factories, brickworks, and steel mills made for high levels of air pollution, leading to illness and shortened life expectancies. The grimy landscape itself was scarred by abandoned mines that had become exhausted or unprofitable. The unsightliness of the landscape led the author J. R.R. Tolkien, who lived in nearby Birmingham, to include a fictional place called Mordor in his books. Mordor was a black land, a place of shadows. Legend has it that the curtains on Queen Victoria’s rail carriage were closed while the train passed through the area. The eyes of a blue blood royal were averted from the endeavour of blue-collar existence. Heaven forbid that the Queen’s eyes should be sullied by the sight of where her people laboured, loved, and lived.

By the time the Victorian period ended in 1901, canals were less significant. The development of road and rail produced an improved transport infrastructure, and the whole region was connected by public transport. In addition, individuals found the liberation of increased mobility through bicycles, while the few motor cars that were about were the preserve of rich enthusiasts. Telephones were still in their infancy and gas-powered lighting dominated.

One feature of the Black Country was the growth of workers’ dwellings quite close to factories, meaning that housing and industry coexisted cheek by jowl. The few thousand dwellings that grew up on Yew Tree Estate fifty years later were different. West Bromwich County Borough Council had created a modern solution to the housing crisis. This was suburbia, a commuter satellite for the aspirational. Young couples (married, of course), could escape house sharing with in-laws. With hard work to meet monthly mortgage or weekly rent obligations, they could raise 2.4 children together and live happily ever after. At least that was the dream. In the process, children born on the estate escaped a traditional Black Country environment but still became encultured by a shared heritage, sense of humour and dialect. Within this diaspora, there was a coming together of two tribes, Walsall people, and West Bromwich people. Some looked towards Walsall town centre when planning a shopping trip, while others favoured equidistant West Bromwich. Ours was a Walsall household, and the delivery of the broadsheet-sized weekly newspaper, the ‘Walsall Observer’, on Fridays confirmed as much.

By the time of my birth in 1956, the Black Country was coming to terms with deindustrialisation while starting to shake off some of its industrial blackness. The passing of the Clean Air Act in the same year forced the use of smokeless sources of heat and energy. Coal as a pollutant may have declined, but now there were petrol and diesel exhaust fumes to contend with thanks to the growth in ownership of far from green motorcars and motorcycles. Across the country large-scale building projects were underway to replace the half a million homes destroyed by German bombing during the War. Then there was the cramped back-to-back housing to deal with. One MP bluntly described them as ‘lice ridden: rat ridden lost hell holes’11.

11 Bessie Braddock, a Liverpool MP, when making her maiden speech in 1945.

Home ownership was increasing, and although an average house price of £1,891 may seem modest by today’s prices, it should be set alongside the fact that an average worker took home a mere ten pounds a week. On the outskirts of towns, brand new estates, such as Yew Tree, sprung up. My house, like many on the estate, was a modest semi-detached redbrick building. I was blindsided to the harshness of the unimaginative uniform houses facing one another, but it was for its time a good, modern home with three bedrooms, gas, and electricity. In a class-conscious society, the professional classes raised the deposit required and committed to monthly mortgage payments to set up a home they could call their own. On the other side of the estate, manual workers stumped up the council rent every week for new semi-detached municipal homes. Housing solutions of the period also included high-rise flats and prefabricated houses (prefabs).

My Estate incorporated what proved to be a short-lived experiment in multi-storey housing. I had a school friend who lived in two-storey Bermuda Mansions, which was neither a piece of a Caribbean paradise nor was it a mansion. There were also a few high-rise blocks (overhyped as ‘palaces in the sky’). One spectacular example towered threateningly over the nearby school. It was an ugly pink and grey structure and gloried under the name of ‘Churchill Towers’. The building gave all the appearance of an East European architect’s idea of combining psychedelia with functionality while using giant Lego blocks.

Mom’s parents lived in a bungalow-style prefab a short walk away across the Common. It was a place I visited many times. The popularity of prefabs lay in the fact that they were a swift and effective solution to the housing crisis. The standard sections for each dwelling could be mass-produced off-site, and once delivered assembly could take place with as little as forty hours of labour. Some of the earliest builds used the labour of German prisoners of war. Ironically, for captured air crews this also meant some reparation for the damage they had caused. Nan and Grandad’s single-storey prefab had an indoor toilet and a purpose-built bathroom, which were improvements on their previous dwelling. There must have been twenty or so pre-fabs grouped into two small cul-de-sacs, and my grandparents had the home nearest the road. They now had hot water, an electric fire, insulated floors and roof, and a small garden. Grandad resolutely ignored the garden except for growing some rhubarb under an old metal bucket and putting the dog outside when the need arose. I now know that the pre-fab’s insulation was problematic, as it included the now-banned substance asbestos, which could not have helped Nan’s long-term lung and breathing problems. Despite this, Nan lived into her nineties.

Yew Tree Estate offered dreamy street names, solid housing, street lighting, a GP surgery, two primary schools12, and a Walsall postal address. For those who could afford a telephone landline, a unique four-digit number was allocated. Households paid their council rates (taxes) to West Bromwich and had the opportunity to vote for their choice of parliamentary candidate to represent West Bromwich East. The new build estate offered residents an opportunity to forge their own society. The main downside was most evident on hot summer afternoons when the wind was in a certain direction as the smell of Bescot sewerage works two miles away drifted over the estate. There is no place like home. There was no place like my home.

12 Consistent with the Estate’s naming policy the schools were Yew Tree junior and infant school and Fir Tree junior and infant school.

Chapter Two

Washerwomen and home births

The middle of the twentieth century was a particularly neurotic time. The most powerful nations on earth were in a tussle to reshape life in the aftermath of a brutal world war. The ideological differences between both sides meant that world politics became reduced to a dangerous board game. You needed to mobilise and then retain support for ‘your’ ideas as you faced an opponent whose power and support you wished to undermine. On one side of the board were the Americans and their allies representing the West, capitalism , and the rights of the individual. On the other side, Soviet Russia and its allies representing the East and promoting communism, including a controlled economy and collectivism. The game was called the Cold War, and any rules that appeared to be in place were there to be broken. The end game was winning at almost any cost. Both sides used precious resources, ingenuity, and technology to produce better and more powerful weaponry. Then there was a need for espionage to see what the other side was up to. Missiles were in the main unused but threateningly stockpiled. The message was that here was the capability of obliterating whole populations and environments. The underlying belief was that a fragile peace could only be achieved through the destructive power each party held. Triggering a nuclear strike by one side would bring swift retaliation and what became known as MAD ‘mutually assured destruction’. MAD became a fitting title for the game that was being played.

Significant in the West/East power game was Egypt. Strategically and geographically, it represented a neutral area in the Middle East. Egypt had once been a mighty nation and had survived and prospered over time as far back as ancient times, not so much due to its alliances with others but due to its biggest natural resource, the river Nile. The Nile has been described as the breadbasket of the nation, compensating for the chronic lack of rainfall with annual floods that produce fertile agricultural land. It is impossible to overstate the significance of the Nile. Some Egyptians view it as sacred and the lifeblood of the country. Ancient historians revered it, believing that the country itself was a gift of the Nile. As far back as 8,000 years ago the river enabled farming to take place along its banks. Centres of civilization grew over time around the Nile Delta. In a valley extending 4,000 miles through a country deprived of rainfall the Nile had represented the country’s only source of water. The annual floods irrigated the land, which was enriched by the rich dark waters, ensuring vital crops were possible. In addition, the mighty river offered fish as a source of food and a ready-made waterway as a source of transport. Materials and labour were transported by water to build pyramids and other impressive structures evocative of the powerful ancient Egyptian culture. If this was not enough, reeds growing naturally alongside the river were utilised as materials to build boats and produce papyrus, an early writing material.

Every asset needs investment from time to time, and the Nile was no different. In January 1956, the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser believed he had funding in place to do just that. Britain, hanging onto the coat tails of America, agreed to jointly provide the significant funds needed to help build a huge dam at Aswan. The project meant that for the first-time annual floods and consequent irrigation of the land could be controlled. Enormous amounts of hydroelectric power could also be generated. Furthermore, navigation routes through the mighty river would be enhanced. The vision, once realised, would produce enormous benefits and completely revitalise Egypt’s economy. This was going to be significant.

Several degrees cooler and 4,000 miles away, Councillor Perry was for once absent for the meeting of West Bromwich Council’s General Purposes Committee. He was elsewhere. The reason was that his first child, Robert, was being born in the back bedroom of number 26 Lilac Avenue, Yew Tree Estate, at 4.15 p.m. one January afternoon. Home births of this period were the norm. I am pretty sure that Dad was not in the same room at the time – this was not really the territory for men, even if it was happening in the next room. Along with the midwife who arrived in time by cycling there, Mrs Skinner from next door but one was also in attendance to support Mom. So, I became a first-generation NHS baby. My birth was announced in both the Walsall Observer and the Midland Chronicle. The town’s Mayor (on headed notepaper proudly proclaiming ‘telephone West Bromwich 0721, 10 lines’) offered warm congratulations on behalf of members to Councillor and Mrs Perry.

Winter gave way to spring and by the July summertime came along. I was just another healthy baby on the Yew Tree estate, experiencing new things from the comfort of a substantial pram. Things like new faces peering into the pram, bright sunshine, and fresh air dependent upon the operations at Bescot sewerage works and the wind direction. My development was going well and the nice young couple at number 26 now had their own family.

Meanwhile, in Egypt matters had taken an unexpected turn. Elements within the US administration had become distrustful of Egypt’s supposed dalliances with the Soviet Union and had decided to withdraw their support. This about-face put the UK in a difficult position. The government had no reason to alienate the Egyptian government but, as a very junior partner in the Western alliance, it felt a need to fall in line. Besides, it could not afford to cover the funding itself. Britain followed the US lead.

The scheme was too important to shelve, so Nasser devised a plan B. The busy Suez Canal ran through Egypt. An important route, its 101 miles linked the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea and allowed easier travel between Europe and Asia without going around Africa. Declaring martial law in the area, Nasser seized control of the Suez Canal Company and its canal, calculating that the tolls collected would help finance the building of the dam. The canal carried, amongst other things, vital shipments of oil to Western Europe and significantly was, up until this point, controlled by French and … British interests. When the canal was dug in 1869, Britain initially opposed its construction. Not because it had been dug by forced labour, but because of the impact it would have on its established trade routes. Then the opportunity for investment came along, which was seized upon. Now there was a major problem.

With diplomatic efforts to settle the crisis faltering, Britain and France prepared for military action to regain control of the canal and, if possible, remove Nasser as leader. Interests and a supply of oil to Europe via the canal were all important. In October 1956, an initial bombing exercise was followed by British troops joining with invading French and Israeli forces hoping to reclaim the canal. The initiative was roundly condemned both at home and amongst the international community, with many claiming the actions to be ‘illegal’. Even the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, for once had an issue they could agree on. The ‘Suez crisis’ was in full swing, and the world held its breath. The Soviets seized the opportunity of a distracted West to invade Hungary and reassert Soviet rule. (A student-led protest in Budapest had sparked a nationwide uprising against the Hungarian rulers and Soviet-imposed policies.)

The British government’s belief in the justification for a military build-up was not shared by opposition parties. On 4th. November a major demonstration through London was organised by the Labour Party under the banner of ‘Law Not War’. Labour councillors in West Bromwich decided to make their protest by walking out of the next council meeting after a few minutes. There was, however, one dissenting voice within the Labour ranks. Cllr Donald Perry strongly disagreed with the action, making clear he would take no part. (I am not sure whether he thought the action too trivial and futile or whether he supported the Government’s handling of the crisis.)

The warmth and goodwill extended to Don Perry a few months earlier was in short supply when the town’s weekly newspaper hit the local newsstands. It was reported on the front cover that Cllr Perry felt that his colleagues were acting like ‘a bunch of washer women’. I am not sure how washer women act, but I am pretty sure that by today’s standards the comment would be decried as sexist. What I am sure of is that it was not meant as a complimentary term.

In the absence of wider significant international support, with the Americans against the actions and with the country split on the issue, a humiliating withdrawal took place in early 1957. The Suez affair had a lasting significance. Britain’s lack of political and military muscle was laid bare, something that needed acknowledging and coming to terms with. Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden resigned, humiliated, in January 1957. The ruling Conservative party rang the changes in their own way. Eden (ex-Eton College and Oxford University) was replaced by Harold Macmillan (ex-Eton College and Oxford University). For the US, relations with the Middle East were significantly damaged and would take decades of diplomacy to repair. Egypt now had in Nasser a hero who had stood up to and defeated the bullying ambitions of Britain and France, something all other Arab nations applauded.

The dam itself was finally completed in 1970. Its huge main reservoir, which was the third largest in the world, was named Lake Nasser. Nasser died the same year as the dam’s completion, and there was a genuine outpouring of grief across the whole Arab world, with five million people paying their respects at his funeral in Cairo. Nasser’s courage had meant progress towards social justice, Arab unity, and modernisation of his country. His name would be long remembered, and parents approving of his anti-imperialist stance named their sons after him. The name of Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister responsible for the Suez debacle, would not be remembered in the same way. Little did Eden know that forty-three years after the crisis, England’s cricket team would be captained by someone named Nasser Hussain. A final posthumous insult.

Chapter Three

My parents

Doreen’s story

The red brick semi-detached houses stood to attention in two straight lines in Lilac Avenue. The unyielding uniformity of housing screamed out for some individuality. Some of the residents responded by painting their front doors in eye-catching colours. Number 26 had a tangerine-coloured door. Not only that, it also had a curious name. A wooden plaque announced to the world that this house was called DONRODOR. The couple in this home had certain shared dreams and ambitions, some of which they had already realised. Meet someone and settle down, tick. Find a place of your own, tick. Start a family, not yet.

Doreen was a loving person with a keen sense of right and wrong. Born in Palfrey, Walsall in 1931 and raised during the hardship of the Great Depression, a time of extraordinary global economic downturn when there were no safety nets or welfare systems. During her formative years, and with no siblings for company, she saw as highlights ‘get togethers’ with extended families. These gatherings involved everyone giving a performance, maybe singing, reciting a poem, or clowning about. Doreen learned to play the piano. If these gatherings offered entertainment, then excitement came in the form of spending evenings in the air raid shelter at the bottom of her Gran’s garden during bombing raids between 1940 and 1944. Thousands of Anderson air raid shelters were issued free to poorer families such as Doreen’s13. Walsall was an obvious target as the variety and volume of its manufactured products were vital to the war effort. Although the town did suffer some bomb damage it thankfully escaped quite lightly. The nearest it came to widespread damage was when the German Luftwaffe dropped a bomb on Pleck gas works, one and a half miles away from where Doreen lived. Thankfully the bomb failed to explode.

13 Any family earning less than £250 a year or approximately £16,500 today.

Doreen, like many of her peers, left school aged fourteen so that she could start work and bring some money into the house. She got a job in the office of a garage in Walsall. As she got older, she began going to local dances with her friends and, at one, met her future husband, who was on leave from the army. The war was ending while Donald (who was six years her senior) was completing his training with the Royal Engineers at Pickering, North Yorkshire. Soon he found himself stationed in Klagenfurt, Austria, as part of a peacekeeping and reconstruction effort. In an era predating email, mobiles and social media communication was difficult and far from instantaneous. Nevertheless, a daily routine of writing inky letters and posting them to one another followed. Naturally, responses in a time-lapsed fashion made for fractured conversations, but despite this, the long-distance romance thrived.

At the time food and sweets were still rationed. Doreen’s father suggested that as they were already saving the money and ration coupons to enable her to enjoy a good coming-of-age birthday celebration, she might as well get married. It may not have been romantic, but it was practical. So it was that Doreen proposed to Don, not even face to face but by letter. She had to wait for a return post some days later before getting the answer ‘yes, yes, yes, yes, yes’ written on a single sheet of note paper14.

14 As their son I cannot consider the possibility that this was in a ‘Harry met Sally’ way.

The marriage took place on Doreen’s twenty-first birthday at St. John’s Church of England church in the Pleck, just along from the gas works that had miraculously survived during the war. There were several challenges in staging the event successfully. First there was the concerted endeavour required to collect enough food ration tokens to put on a decent spread. Then there were the last-minute changes to the flowers for the bouquet. The wedding date happened to fall the day after the funeral of King George VI, and Mom’s choice of red roses for her big day was frustrated as florists had redirected all available stems to St. George’s Chapel on the Windsor Castle estate15. Then there was the biting cold February weather which made it uncomfortable hanging about for photographs. Everything, despite these challenges, seemed to be going well until, as the day wore on, it became evident to Doreen that her new husband had not bought her either a present or card to mark her milestone birthday. He had simply forgotten or not bothered. He would be reminded of this oversight several times over the fifty-five years of marriage that followed. Many men would be embarrassed by such a blunder or attempt to rectify it afterward. Donald was not one of those men.

15 Following the death of her father George, from lung cancer, Queen Elizabeth II had her Coronation sixteen months later. She went on to become the country’s longest serving monarch ever.

Early married life together involved the challenge of doing as most married couples of the period did, living in the same home as their parents while waiting for a council house ‘to come up’. (Once married, couples would apply for a council house and then join a lengthy waiting list.) Doreen’s parents lived in a small, prefabricated house, so it meant sharing a home with Don’s family, which included a father-in-law and two sisters-in-law, one with a husband and young children.

One Sunday afternoon the newlyweds paid a visit to Doreen’s parents and offered to take the dog for a walk. They had not gone far when they saw that construction work was going on just the other side of Delves Common. The start of a housing estate. If only they could save the deposit, they could get a mortgage and get a place of their own. This was a shared dream that became a reality, and they became the first residents of number 26 Lilac Avenue on a fledgling estate in 1953.

They determined to start a family. More than that, they would first have a boy whose name was going to be Robert. This was a time when anything seemed possible, and so confident were they that their plans would come to fruition that they hung a sign bearing the name DONRODOR (a Donald, Robert, Doreen combination) over the front door. Every time they walked through the door it was there as a reminder of the next stage on their shared life plan. It must have been a terrible blow when Doreen had a miscarriage in 1954. Now things were going according to plan once more, and the National Health Service (NHS) would help remove the worry of a problematic birth.

Some think it curious that Winston Churchill led the country through a world war, but he and his party were then rejected at the first election in peacetime. The reason was that the opposition Labour Party had the most convincing vision for a much-needed reconstruction of the country. The new government’s vision embraced extensive nationalisation16 and the creation of the NHS. By the time I was born the service was still bedding in after its earlier introduction by the then Health Secretary, Nye Bevan on 5 July 1948. The government heralded the service as the ‘envy of the world’ at a time when few countries had or even dreamt of a universal health system. The scheme involved drawing together the work of hospitals, pharmacists, opticians, and dentists into a unified service. The radical change was that these services were provided free at the point of delivery to everyone ‘from cradle to grave’. Although derided by its opponents, it proved in time to be successful and popular, a jewel in the crown of Clement Attlee’s Labour Government. Much later, marking seventy years of service, the Guardian described it as ‘an institution that is not just the country’s most vital public service but also an embodiment of an inspiring set of shared values … civilised, compassionate Britain in action, 24/7’.

16 Nationalisation included the Bank of England, railways and the coal, gas, and the electricity industries. The US administration were appalled by such socialist policies and called in its considerable war time debts, so creating a financial pinch that necessitated the need for rationing to continue into the 1950s.

Don’s story

So here he was, Donald Perry, the proud owner of 26 Lilac Avenue. (Technically he faced 25 years of mortgage repayments to Walsall Mutual Building Society before he owned it legally.) He had overcome adversity to get his own piece of normality. No longer just a son and brother, he was a husband and now a father. Things were on the up.

Born in Sedgley, but raised in Walsall, Don was an entirely different kettle of fish to his wife Doreen. His early life was rather different to hers. His downtrodden mother died when he was only fourteen years old. His father, Job, was a hardworking, hard-drinking veteran of the First World War who had little interest in family life and offered little in the way of praise or encouragement to his three children. Don’s older sister, Daisy, who was named after her mother, took on the vacated maternal role by caring for her younger siblings. She was a kindly, unassuming sort who suffered with her nerves.

So, the teenage Don shared a family home with his wayward father, a sometimes difficult younger sister, Margaret, the long-suffering Daisy, as well as Len, Daisy’s husband, and their young children Roy and Pat. He was keen to swap this life for another and volunteered for the armed forces as soon as he could and before he was conscripted. This turned out to be a masterstroke, as he found himself a new home and a life he loved. The forces offered him new experiences, travel overseas, and, more importantly, structure, purpose, and the potential for self-development. Fellow soldiers as conscripts were slightly poorer paid than volunteers. Repeated jibes of ‘regular soldier, regular bastard’ were water off a duck’s back to Don. He had found a place of belonging. Seizing the opportunities available, he trained and qualified as a draughtsman with an engineering background and earned his stripes to become a sergeant. He probably would have signed on for a further term in the army had it not been for meeting Doreen and that letter.