Eric Sykes - If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will

I don’t wish to sound disloyal, but the bell-ringers cocooned in their sheltered belfry do not get the full benefits of their efforts. I’ve never mentioned this observation to a soul and to all campanologists, in spite of my uneducated criticism; and in fact I would never ever swap the bell-ringers for the soul-less chimes of a press-button carillon. As I was writing this I heard a loud grinding noise: it could have been my poor father turning over in his grave…

Vernon and I were in the old St Mary’s Parish Church choir and John joined us when he was eight years old. Also in the choir was Dad’s older sister, Aunt Mag, and an alto Aunt Marie, Dad’s younger sister, who was the first lady bell-ringer in England. Mother was exempt because she was cooking the dinner. How’s that for a family record? We almost outnumbered the congregation. While Dad and Aunt Marie were bouncing up and down on their ropes, Vernon, John and I were making our way to the church to bring joy and hallelujah to the faithful and this journey by Robin Hill Baths, up Barker Street, and through the Tommyfield market was at times an eerie experience. Every Sunday morning Oldham was a ghost town; it was as if the whole population had been spirited away to a distant planet.

Apart from the battle of the bells, the occasional distant cockcrow and the clacking of our footsteps, all was silent. Walking through a deserted Tommyfield was a depressing experience. The whole area was littered with the detritus of a hectic Saturday night—cardboard boxes, straw, wrapping paper, chip paper—disturbed from time to time by a marauding wind, but on days when it was really blowing the predominant noise was the flapping of the stall coverings, like the sails of a three-master crossing the Bay of Biscay in a force nine. This was bend-forward-and-hold-your-cap weather, which we preferred to the malignant calm as we made our way to church.

As for Saturday night, the market was a cacophony of voices, laughter and the constant shuffle of hundreds of feet tramping through the stalls lit garishly with single electric light bulbs or lamps, blue smoke busily curling through the lights from a chippy or a hot dog stand, candy floss machines for young and old. No two stalls were alike—clothing, footwear, crockery, herbal remedies, cheap jewellery; in fact that little world of Tommyfield market catered for almost everything, and if money was tight many people just shuffled round to enjoy the quick-fire repartee of the vendors. Strange as it may seem, the crockery stall invariably drew the biggest audience. A fat jolly man held a dozen dinner plates, slapping them as he announced, ‘I am not going to ask you five shillings…I’m not even going to ask you four bob,’ and then with a triumphant slap he would launch his punchline, ‘Half-a-crown the lot.’ There was a stirring in the crowd, and after a slight pause there was a surge forward, hands outstretched proffering half-crowns while two assistants busily wrapped dozens of plates in old newspaper. Most of the crowd would not even have house room for a dozen dinner plates, but it was Saturday night and what a bargain! There was more crockery to be had, more people to be had and above all there was entertainment. And now as the dawn of Sunday morning creeps silently over Tommyfield, what a contrast to the night before!

I was getting older by the day; in fact in a couple of years I’d be in double figures, so I should have known better…but my friend Richard and I were up to our old shenanigans after nightfall. It wasn’t brilliant, it wasn’t even funny, but you have to remember that in those days we didn’t have wireless, let alone television. Here’s what we did. We’d reach up and rat-a-tat the door knocker of a house in Ward Street, and then scoot across the cart road, flinging ourselves on the darkness of the Mucky Broos to watch the developments. Someone would invariably open the door, and look up and down the street, only to find it deserted. Then they’d close the door, wondering if they had imagined the whole thing. As I said, it wasn’t brilliant, but when did a bit of mischief deter a child? We took it in turns to rat-a-tat another door and another until the game palled.

It couldn’t possibly go on unchallenged and the more doors we knocked on the closer we were to discovery—and so it was on one particular night. It was my turn to rat-a-tat, which I did peremptorily, but there was no time to cross the street, as the door was opened immediately by a young athletic man. I was almost paralysed, scared out of my wits, and I ran panic-stricken for the corner of the street. Richard was already safe in the anonymity of the dark Broos. My little legs were no match for the confident stride of an angry man, and as I rounded the corner his heavy hand grasped my collar and lifted me off my feet, and I am sure he was about to do me serious damage when a deep Irish voice from the darkness shouted ‘Oi!’. I was petrified, and more so when I recognised Constable Matty Lally. I could have survived a blow but not a custodial sentence. I wasn’t too relieved when Matty Lally advised the man to go back home and leave it to the law. The man went off muttering—no one argued with the law—and when he’d gone I tensed for the well-deserved official wallop; but the policeman bent down to me and whispered, ‘How many motor-car numbers did you get?’ I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about but it was a great let-off.

It wasn’t until I was well tucked up in bed that I connected Constable Lally’s ‘How many motor-car numbers did you get?’ to my motor-car spotting day on Featherstall Road—and I lay there wondering what a remarkable memory he had to recall an incident that must have taken place years ago. It was my last thought before sleep took over and sadly that was the last time I saw my new-found friend Constable Matty Lally.

Dad’s hobby was mending pocket watches. Well-to-do men sported pocket watches chained across the front of their waistcoats—wrist watches were, as yet, an unknown in the cotton towns of the northwest—and so to see Dad bending over a backless watch, eyepiece screwed into his eye socket, was a fairly regular occurrence. But on one particular day he was immersed in a larger contraption with dials along the front. He was peering into the innards of the thing with such concentration that he didn’t notice me. In fact if the house had fallen down he would still have been bent over his work, standing on the foundations. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds because he was insulated from his surroundings by a large pair of earphones clamped round his head.

‘It’s a wireless set,’ he said, answering my enquiry. ‘A cat’s whisker,’ he added, which left me no wiser—what had all the wires and valves got to do with our Tiddles? ‘There’s something there but I can’t make out what it is.’

‘Can’t you make it louder?’ I said helpfully.

He took off his earphones and pointed through the window at the house opposite, in whose backyard was a tall mast as high again as the house. As far as I was concerned it had always been there, but I had assumed that it was a flag pole, although on Remembrance or Empire Days I’d never seen a Union Jack fluttering from it. ‘He can get signals from all over the world with that: it’s a wireless mast.’

Then he stared into his own little contraption and I noticed one of the valves flashing a feeble light nervously, like a child attempting its first step. Quickly Dad slipped on his earphones and listened excitedly for a few moments; then he took off his headphones and transferred them to my head.

I listened intently, and then with a shriek I yelled, ‘It’s a band, it’s a band.’

A moment of history marking the day I heard magic from the airwaves.

I don’t know how, or from whom, or what day I learned that the one I thought was Mother was not my mother at all, and that in fact my real mother had died when I was born. I couldn’t absorb it at first, and when I did it wasn’t earth-shattering: I took it in my stride. It wasn’t a catastrophe—after all, a catastrophe to a little boy is when he puts his hand in his pants pocket and finds a hole where his hard-earned penny should have been, so the news of my real mother was hardly a tremor on the Richter scale. However, a few days later when Dad and I were alone in the kitchen—it must have been Sunday morning because Dad was shaving at the sink, towel tucked into the top of his trousers as he stropped his razor and then pinched his nose to shave his top lip—taking the bull by the horns, I blurted, ‘Dad, what was my real mother’s name?’