Sink or Swim

How was your first day at the Muni? Were you as disappointed as me not to get homework straight away? What a shock after primary school, where the 11-plus was referred to as ‘the General Exam’. We’d have some coaching and filled in forms for secondary schools. The results came on a Saturday morning. I was disappointed not to get into the Boys’ Grammar like my brother. A brown uniform so drab in comparison with their smart red and black. And no Cadet Corps. He had been a lance-corporal with a marksman’s badge and spent every Tuesday evening with Brasso and Blanco. He loathed everything about it but I saw only the glory. I wanted to be a soldier when I grew up and as soon as I was 18, joined the Territorial Army at the drill hall next to the school playing field, soon learning to loathe it too.

My parents went to the induction evening at the school. Children weren’t invited. They brought home a long list of uniform items. How uncomfortable the new clothes were with that strange smell of post-war fabric. I did not know what a gym-slip was. But it was on the list. My mother’s reassurances did nothing to dispel my unease when I didn’t get one. On the first day, I could not understand how many fellow pupils had new bikes, satchels and other extravagant rewards for passing. All I got was my brother’s old satchel, already in need of new stitching in all the seams. These days it would be cool or retro - dirty and battered. But in 1958 it just shouted “poor”. I was so fat I looked like Tweedledum in my short trousers. Within a year I had to move into long ones and as we hadn’t asked permission, I fretted that the Muni authorities would haul me in for questioning. It didn’t happen. Encouraged, in year two, I dumped the awful brown blazer and turned up in my brother’s threadbare black one with a WMGS badge on it. You weren’t supposed to wear a black blazer until the 4th form but several of us got away with it. Warm, tolerant teachers like Mr Thompson, Mr Steel, Mr Dudley, Miss Outlaw, Miss Witts and Mr Chapman probably understood and didn’t shop those of us from the poorer parts of town.

picture of steve and father at seaside

The author, his father and a fire-engine, Rhyl 1950


In 1958 my father died from stomach cancer. He was 51, I was 12. My mother had a tough two years nursing him, looking after two boys and a part-time job. Cancer was a word avoided in those days, overheard only in adults’ whispers. We left our condemned terrace house for a council maisonette. Dad praised its mod-cons: a bathroom, heating and a fridge. Only the two-bar electric fire drew his wry complaint that you couldn’t spit into it. Visitors came from his factory, union and the Labour Party. He told Mr. Mash, another Labour activist who died soon after “With your stomach and my heart, Cyril, they could shake us in a bag and get a good ‘un”. Cyril had found me a second-hand bike for £4. His wife Cissie knitted me a black and yellow bobble-hat. I was so grateful I didn’t mention old gold.

Eventually my mother sat me down, knelt beside me and told me he was about to die and I tried not to cry . As he faded I was put on guard by his bed, unsure of my responsibilities and passing time with the Observer Book of Flags. He wanted to buy me a new bike to replace the wreck I had saved so hard for. It was for my 13th birthday, still months away, which he knew he would never see. . My brother took me up to Fenwick’s in town and we chose a blue and white Hopper Lincoln Imp with five grown-up derailleur gears. It cost an astounding £26. I dared to ask for the hitherto unaffordable Biggles Omnibus too, which he inscribed “To Stephen on ‘is 13th birthday”. The missing ‘h’ mortified me and I altered it in matching black ink. But my handwriting was so bad I made a mess of it. My Muni report book, today archived in our garage with the Biggles book, was filled with complaints about bad writing and untidiness by every teacher apart from Mr Jones.

I asked not to go to the funeral. Losing your father might draw unwanted attention. There was enough to worry about at school where very thick glasses and a serious weight problem prompted hurtful comments and names. I knew no other boys and only Rosie Abbott among the girls. Everyone else seemed to know each other already. As my brother had warned me, having been a big fish at Graiseley Primary, I was now a very small one in the Muni pond.

What jumbled emotions arise as we recall our half-formed selves. And how influential the legacy of grainy prints like the 1950 snap of Dad at Rhyl with me peering at the street photographer. Only four years later did a teacher notice I could not see the blackboard. This brought NHS glasses and a new world to look at. Maculopathy hit me thirty years later. It’s not uncommon in a ‘High Myope’. Nobody told me I was one of those. The optician in Chapel Ash used to show me like a freak to visiting students when I collected new glasses. You went on your own in those days if both your parents were working.

But to be more positive, at that age, you don’t know anything else and you adapt . Adversity probably helps you become more resilient. Several friends who as teenagers were sporting heroes or popular with the opposite sex have had problems with depression in later life as their stardom wanes. Our form Master in 1A was the charming Mr Blackham. All blue eyes and red curly hair. Full of fun. My classmates were a delight. He taught us maths and deferred my train-crash with the subject until Miss Bishop in 2A. Learning French seemed exotic. General Science had the theatrical Mr Darby and those plastic stencils for drawing diagrams. Memories of my father are all positive too. Better than my brother’s who grew up in the war and spent even less time with him than I did. VE Day, for example, began badly. He was abandoned with a bottle of Vimto outside the Fox on the corner of Pitt Street and Worcester Street, sadly demolished in 1963 to accommodate the Ring Road. Much more fun was to be had that night when a large bonfire was lit in the middle of Upper Zoar Street, melting the tarmac. My abiding image of Dad are of a small figure in a mac and brown ‘cow-gown’, coming home from work about 6 o’clock, approaching our entry along Penn Street. I must have been over 7 as I had the spectacles to see that far. On Saturdays he’d be coming back from Molineux and I’d run to hear the score, though often the roars and groans to be heard from that direction had already given a strong hint. He’d take me to watch him play at the Oaklands Bowling Club, just off Lea Road. My boredom was relieved by finding earwigs in discarded matchboxes in the boundary ditch, waiting for woods to collide as two games were played simultaneously across the crown green, and Tizer and crisps afterwards in the wooden clubhouse.

Around the age of 9 he took me to the Central Baths in the evening and a work-mate of his tried to teach me to swim. I can see them now - pale flesh in the black woollen trunks men wore in those days. Afterwards, ravenous, we would stop at the chip shop at the town end of Brickkiln Street. We called it ‘Bricklin Street’. It still looks odd to me - many words and names learned by ear are a surprise when eventually see written down. My mother was convinced until her death at 89 that ‘drather’ was a verb. As in “I drather have tea; you drather have tea” and so on.

Dad took me to Molineux but I was bored, not being good at sport, always the last one picked for a side when we played in the street and relegated to the rejects at primary school. It would take my terrifying initiation as a front row forward at the Muni and innate contrariness to fire an enduring passion for football. But his introduction to Wolves, bowls and swimming eventually paid off. I started to go regularly to Molineux just after he died and played until I was over 50. At 14, recalling what I’d learned years earlier, I taught myself to swim. This year, I’m Vice President of a Nottingham bowls club. His efforts belatedly rewarded. Had he foreseen the big pond at the Muni and the oceans yet to come?


Stephen Brazier (1958-1965)