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

In fact I was the only one in the school to be offered a scholarship to the Oldham College of Art, but that would have meant an extra two years of schooling, which was out of the question, as we couldn’t afford the luxury. But it didn’t bother me in the least. When I left Ward Street Central School at the age of fourteen I was eagerly looking forward to bringing home a wage packet earned manually in a workman’s overalls.

In 1937 I walked through the gates of Ward Street Central School for the last time, fully equipped to make my contribution to the national debt. It was the same year that Aunt Marie and Uncle Stan were blessed with a child, a daughter Beryl. Our tribe was growing, and apart from my brother Vernon and my half-brother John I now had a beautiful baby cousin.

Having left school, I still had no idea of what I wanted to do or how I should go about attaining an interview. It was the normal practice in those days for a father in a good steady job to recommend his son to the foreman, or even the manager, so as to ensure that the son followed in his father’s footsteps. They could then make their way together to and from their place of employment and have their tea at the same time when they got home. However, no self-respecting father would push his son into a cotton mill and Dad was no exception. He had better plans for me, in short to put in an application for employment in the Post Office.

I greeted this suggestion in a lukewarm fashion. I’d often chided Vernon because he worked somewhere in an office. Polished shoes, collar and tie—that wasn’t my idea of a workman. I wanted to work in overalls, sweep the streets, the chimneys, clean windows, anything as long as I could come home weary and dirty with a good day’s work behind me. But the Post Office—I would go to work clean and tidy and come home in the same state, and I didn’t consider selling stamps a proper job. However, my attitude changed when my father came home with a bit of newspaper he’d picked up on the tram and he smoothed it out to show me an advertisement urging school leavers to apply to the Post Office for positions of telegraph boys. My face lit up. The main argument in favour of the Post Office to Dad was a job for life, but for me, I was already sold on a uniform with a stiff peaked cap, a black belt and a pouch—all this and a bicycle too. Excitedly, I sent in two applications, both of which were ignored. Bitterly, I thought, ‘It’s typical of the Post Office—neither of them have been delivered.’

Meanwhile, not far from the top of Featherstall Road was Emmanuel Whittaker’s Timber Merchant’s, and I have no idea how it happened or who did what but all I know is that on Monday next I was to start work as a timber merchant. I had no inkling of what I was expected to do, but no doubt they’d tell me when I arrived.

So it was with outward calm and inward trepidation that I made my way up Featherstall Road, thrilled by my overalls washed many, many times to a faded blue, bought possibly from a sale at a second-hand or even a pawn shop. Had my overalls been new I would have looked like a raw beginner, if only I was old enough to shave. I crossed Featherstall Road at the exact spot where seven years ago I had attempted a career as a car number collector. There were other people making their way to work, some of them overalled like me; women were bound for offices or shops, and there was a man at the tram stop, in bowler hat, collar and tie, eyeing me as if he was superior. I tried to spit in order to make a point, but it wasn’t too successful: it didn’t go anywhere but just dribbled down my chin. I brushed it away, too late, and he was sniggering when he boarded the tram. Rounding the corner of Featherstall Road, I stopped suddenly as if I’d just walked into a brick wall. There on the other side of Oldham Road was the formidable office building of Emmanuel Whittaker’s, and to the right the heavy iron entrance gates to a yard which housed countless orderly stacks of wood, some covered by huge tarpaulins. A daunting prospect loomed before me and it took all my willpower to approach this man’s world.

Undecided, I was standing outside the gates, all courage gone, when two or three young bucks and one older, laughing at some joke or other, walked through the gates. The older one stopped and looked at me, and said, ‘Hurry up, lad, or you’ll be late.’ All fears dispelled, I joined him and we walked in together.

My benefactor turned out to be my number one. He was on the cross-cutting bench. The wood on rollers moved towards him, he pulled the large circular saw through them, and then he pushed them along his bench to me. I hoisted these three-foot-long battens on to a large leather pad on my shoulder and carried them through to another shed, where two elderly men were nailing battens together to make crates, which would then be lorried down to the cotton mills to hold the cops—a cop being a cone of cotton thread wound on to a spindle. These two men rarely spoke—they couldn’t, as I never saw either of them without a mouth full of nails—but by golly they could knock up a crate in the time it took me to bring another batch of battens. So for the next few loads I was striding out as if I was dropping back in a marathon and as the pile of battens began to get larger I was falling behind. Sweat was rolling down everywhere when my mate switched off his cross-cutting saw, helped to load me up and said, ‘Now take it easy, otherwise by dinnertime we’ll be having a whip-round for your parents.’ It was kindly meant, but I was determined to earn my wages. However, when I got home that night I fell asleep in the middle of my baked beans on toast.

A few days later I learned a little dodge, which was the beginning of my indoctrination into the shady world of the working man. Rather than being sent to an early grave with a pile of battens on my leather pad, I was assigned to another job. This entailed going round the carpenters’ shop to take their orders for dinner, which was usually a hot meat pie with a dollop of mash on top. My mouth watered at the thought of it but as it was sixpence it was out of my price range, and in any case I lived close enough to go home for midday meals.

As I wrote down their orders I also collected the money, and this is where my trade union education began. When I returned from the shop at dinnertime with an armful of sustenance I was met at the gates by my new mate on the cross-cutter.

He said, ‘Did you get any change from the shop?’

I said, ‘Yes, eight pence.’

Quickly looking over his shoulder to see if we were being observed, he folded my hand over the coins and hissed, ‘Stick it in your pocket, lad.’

Perplexed, I looked at him. ‘It doesn’t belong to me,’ I said guilelessly.

He shook his head sadly. ‘Listen, lad,’ he said. ‘You’re not the first to collect dinner money and you’re not the first to get change from the shop but you will definitely be the first to hand over the money to that lot.’ He jerked his thumb to the joiner’s shop. I was about to object when he carried on, ‘Some of the lads who collected dinner money before you are still working here.’ I still couldn’t get my head round the gist of his words. This must have been obvious from the blank look I gave him, for he sighed, ‘If you start giving change back to them you’ll be putting a noose round the heads of all the dinner lads before you.’

‘But it would be dishonest.’

‘Go ahead, then: sell your mates down the river. I give up.’ And shaking his head, he strode away.

It didn’t take me long to decide which path to go down and that night I went home eight pence richer, which was almost ten bob a week, but some of the blinkers had been taken from my eyes. I realised now that the working class I’d been so proud to join was not as far along the road to Jerusalem as I’d first imagined and secretly, and a little shamefaced, I accepted my corruption as my entrance fee to the world.